Carnifex

by Tom Kratman

  Esterhazy contemplated that. He had good reason to trust Carrera's military judgment. He had no reason to trust his financial instincts, however.

  "Patricio, if you are that certain of a renewed contract, why not take the greater chance on the PMCs?"

  Carrera's eyes narrowed as he glared at Esterhazy. "Sneaky fucking Magyar."

  "With Magyars for friends you don't need enemies," Esterhazy quoted. "Still, I am your friend and this would be a tremendous opportunity."

  "You want to put ten billion FSD into metals? Ten billion?"

  "Patricio, I can use that much and triple it."

  Carrera sighed, deeply. Yes, he was that sure of a new contract for Pashtia. He just couldn't be quite sure of exactly when.

  "Two and a half billion now," he offered. "I'll double that in six months if it's working out. When I get a contract for Pashtia I'll go for the rest. Fair enough?"

  Esterhazy nodded, shallowly. If it wasn't quite fair or quite smart, he could still work with it.

  "Good. Do it. By the way, when's your flight back to the FS?"

  "Tomorrow morning. Airship from Herrera Airport direct to First Landing."

  "Excellent. Dinner with my family, then, tonight. Say . . . nineteen hundred."

  "I'd be honored, Patricio," Esterhazy answered. "By the way, who did you leave minding the shop back in Sumer?"

  "Sada."

  "You trusted an Arab to be in charge?"

  "Matthias, everybody trusts Sada," Carrera answered warmly. "He's as reliable as the moons and as strong as the sun. Has he got his own agenda? Sure; he wants to run the country. And, to the extent I can, I intend to help him do just that. If everyone over there were like him—"

  Esterhazy didn't know Sada very well. They'd only met a few times, those rare occasions when Carrera sent Sam Cheatham on leave and let the Sachsen-Magyar come out and fill the duties of legionary chief engineer. He did, however, know Carrera very well.

  You need Sada, Esterhazy thought, don't you? Not just because he's a fine soldier and a better politician than you. You need him because he's your proof to yourself that you haven't gone all the way over the edge, that you're not a genocidal maniac, that you can humanly and humanely distinguish between enemies and those who just share some form of a religion.

  "Speaking of being over there," Esterhazy said, "what do I have to do to get the fuck out of First Landing and do another tour?"

  Carrera thought on that. At length, he answered, "I don't think you do, not in Sumer anyway. I do have some things I need a competent engineer to look at for me in Pashtia, though."

  27/8/466 AC, Sharan, Pashtia

  With the relative positions they were in, Terra Nova's three moons cast shadowless light. Cautiously, not least because of the lack of shadow, Noorzad the one-eyed crept forward. Another man might have been nervous. Another man's heart might have pounded. Noorzad was ice.

  He was followed by seventy-seven of his men, most of them, unlike their chief, at least apprehensive. This was only a large fraction of the force Noorzad commanded. The rest of his company had stayed behind, guarding the pass through which the group would escape after completing their mission. That pass led to theoretically enemy—but, at least along the tribal lands by the border, in fact, allied—Kashmir, a state caught up in internal conflict between Salafism, more moderate versions of Islam, secular democracy and secular fascism.

  In some ways, and while it certainly irked Noorzad and his followers to have only half-hearted support from Kashmir, and even that only from certain elements acting unofficially, overall the arrangement had this much going for it: the boundlessly evil infidel, the despised Federated States of Columbia and their Tauran lackeys and Balboan mercenaries, were content with Kashmir's shadowy status and never crossed over the border openly in order to avoid embarrassing their "allies."

  The infiltrating guerillas of the Salafi Ikhwan—based, trained and supplied from the Kashmiri side of the border—felt no such restraint.

  "Restraint," Noorzad muttered, as softly as a butterfly landing on silk. "We'll show them some restraint."

  A regular army unit would probably not have had its leader on point. Sometimes, too, Noorzad felt comfortable ordering one of his platoons to lead out. In action, though, a leader of the Pashtun in war had little choice but to go first, and to leave last. There was no other way to gain and keep the respect of the men who followed him. They were, after all, Pashtun, the freest men on this world. Even the Arabs in the company, volunteers from far-off lands, were no different in that. They followed where they would, and no one could make them do otherwise.

  There were a lot more Arabs, Noorzad knew, ever since the war to free their lands had gone so badly against the faithful in Sumer. Their fighters killed, their support chains betrayed; the Arabs no longer even had a decent way into Sumer, let alone a way to prosper and succeed there. So instead they came—eyes all aglow with the hope and expectation of martyrdom—to where there was still a chance, to where their brethren still fought with some success. They came to Kashmir and then to Pashtia, or sometimes to Pashtia directly.

  There was a glow ahead, as if from a small fire. Noorzad stiffened, his eyes searching and his keen nose sniffing for signs of the enemy. Satisfied that the enemy were neither dangerously close nor expecting him, he continued forward to a low, rock-strewn ridge between the source of the glow and the column he led. The guerilla leader stooped lower as he closed on the ridge. A few meters from it he got to his belly and crawled forward, still as soft and silent as a kitten's breath.

  It had been a fire, wonder of wonders. In similar circumstances Noorzad's men would have gone cold, eaten cold food, rather than reveal their positions like that. The Tauran troops—he could see they had Tauran vehicles in the glow from the fire—had been spoiled, it seemed, by no contact this far into Pashtia in years.

  That was about to change.

  Carefully, Noorzad counted his enemies. Six vehicles, all soft skinned. Thirty-eight men, near enough . . . soft hearted and weak as are all the Tauran infidels. Fools do not even keep their weapons to hand. Am I some soft woman that they should not fear me? As carefully as he had counted the enemy, he marked firing and assault positions in his mind.

  Still careful, still as quiet as a cat, the guerrilla leader backed off from the ridge and, in hushed tones, issued last minute instructions to his chief subordinates.

  Noorzad pointed with a finger at a tall, aesthetic-looking fighter. "Suleiman, take your RGLs"—rocket grenade launchers—"that way. There's a rock outcropping and some low bushes. They're progressivines, I think." The progressivines were one of those few species, like the tranzitree, the bolshiberry, and the septic-mouthed antania, or moonbat, that the Noahs, the unknown others who had seeded Terra Nova with life from Old Earth, had set down, possibly to interfere with the development of intelligent life on the new world.

  "You can engage the whole encampment from there," Noorzad continued. "Remember, concentrate on the vehicle with the most antennae first. We don't want them calling for artillery or air support. Your signal to open fire will be when I fire. The signal that the assault is beginning is 'Allahu Akbar.'"

  Suleiman nodded—he rarely spoke much—and turned to collect his seventeen men and eight RGLs. These were every one that the company owned. Noorzad waited until that part of his column was underway before laying a hand on the shoulder of his next subordinate, Malakzay. To this one, in charge of all three of the company's machine guns, he gave similar instructions, differing only in that the low ridge Noorzad had just vacated was to be their firing position.

  As Malakzay and his gunners and their assistants began to creep forward as quietly as their chief had crept back, Noorzad went and picked up the remainder of his organization, the forty-four rifleman that we would lead personally. He led them back, then down into a draw that led almost to the enemy encampment. From there the men crept forward in single file, behind their leader. No sentry barred the way.

  Sti
nking amateurs, Noorzad cursed. Hardly worth the bother of killing.

  At what he judged was a distance of about one hundred and twenty meters from the edge of the encampment, Noorzad halted. There was a substantial boulder, half the height of a man, perched precariously on the lip of the draw. It was this, as much as the nearness of the enemy, which caused the guerilla to stop. From there he sent half his men left, the other half right. They, like their leader, crept on cat feet.

  Noorzad himself stayed in the draw until the last of the men had gone out to form the assault line and the word, "Ready," had come whispered back. Then he, too, silently scrambled up and posted himself, crouched low, behind the boulder.

  Risking a peek out, Noorzad saw that his enemy had heard and seen nothing. Just pitiful, he subvocalized. Tsk. He gave a last look left and right, just to confirm that his men really were ready. Then he drew his own rifle to his shoulder, drew a bead on a silhouette outlined by the fire and began to squeeze the trigger.

  The shot came as a surprise, as most good shots do. Noorzad's surprise was as nothing though, compared to the surprise of the Taurans when eight rockets streaked from the darkness and caused three of their wheeled vehicles, including the command vehicle, to explode in flame. To this surprise was added the shock of several score, then several hundred, tracers ranging through their camp as the guerilla machine guns joined in within half a second after the first rocket.

  Watching from his boulder, Noorzad saw the enemy knocked on their asses by exploding RGL rounds and sliced down by the searching machine guns. One target, in particular, drew a smile from the way it danced as two guns chopped at it from slightly different directions.

  Satisfied after a minute's steady firing, and by the lack of any return fire, Noorzad stood and in a voice that carried even over machine guns and rocket launchers shouted "Allahu Akbar! Kill the infidels!"

  On command his men stood up and began running forward, firing from the hip as their fathers and uncles had learned to do during the Volgan invasion and occupation of their land almost a generation before. Still there was no return fire. Indeed, as Noorzad drew closer he heard the wailing of women, infidel women he was certain, coming from the enemy camp.

  His men must have heard it, too, as they slowed their fire and picked up the pace.

  The camp's denizens were not soldiers. Rather, they appeared to be civilians, about two thirds men and the remainder women. Nor were they all dead. Many screamed and moaned. A few seemed to be begging for help. The pleas cut off one by one as Noorzad's followers killed the men. They seemed less eager to kill the women, though some of those were shot as well.

  Malakzay arrived at the burning encampment leading his band of gunners. "What do we do with them?" he asked. "What were they?"

  "Non-Governmental Organization types, I think," answered Noorzad. "Hand wringers and bleeding hearts. Kill the men; they're just infidel dogs. As to what we do with the women?" He smiled. "Fuck 'em. Then kill the ones who look like they won't make the march back. The rest we can sell back in Kashmir. Might raise enough to get a few more heavy weapons."

  "But first we can fuck them?" Malakzay asked again, the eagerness in his voice palpable.

  In answer, Noorzad raised his voice to carry to all his band. "As the Prophet commanded, 'Go and take a slave girl.' These women are your fields; plow them as you will."

  34/8/466 AC, Isla Real, Balboa

  At first, and for some years, the Legion had raised its own beef on the island. Little by little, though, the cattle fields had given way to casernes and training areas. They still kept cattle, but only in small numbers and only for dairy. Carrera watched the dairy cows at work through the glass door that led from his office to a railed, tiled and partially shedded roof. The orientation of the roof was at ninety degrees from the window facing the solar chimney. Much like watching tropical fish in a tank, the cattle gave a sense of calm. This was important to a man with great responsibilities who also happened to be in a very bad mood.

  There was a tapping on the glass below. Carrera looked down and saw Jinfeng, his late wife's pet trixie tapping impatiently. He'd brought the bird out some years prior, leaving her in his current wife's, Lourdes', care. Trixies were smart though, as smart as a gray parrot, and Jinfeng had quickly learned the way to his office. She showed up most mornings that he was actually on the island, rather than in Sumer, looking for a handout, or just to be skritched atop her head.

  Carrera and the bird had never been more than tolerably friendly before Linda's death. Afterwards, when the bird had no one else, she'd warmed considerably. As soon as Carrera opened the door, she gave a loud screech and stepped into the office, boney tail scraping the stone floor and claws from her partially reversed big toes click-clacking as she walked.

  Carrera bent to pat the proto-bird, raising a more contented call. He then walked to the intercom on his desk. "Do we have any—"

  "I'll bring it right in, sir," his aide answered. Jinfeng and her appetite had become well known at the headquarters.

  * * *

  Terra Novan ecology was a very mixed up thing, courtesy of the Noahs—aliens about whom nothing was known and whose very existence was only inferred, albeit very strongly inferred. After all, someone, something had to have brought to the planet the life forms from Old Earth, sometime in the impenetrable mists of prehistory. Jinfeng and her increasingly rare kind were but one example of what the aliens had brought. Besides the trixies, archaeopteryxes, in the air, there were carcharodon megalodons at sea, the great carnivorous birds, phorohacos, on land, and thousands upon thousands of other terrestrial species, most long extinct on the home world.

  There had once been more species but, man being man, many of those which had been saved by the Noahs and gone extinct on Old Earth tended to be driven to extinction on the new once man put down roots.

  Besides those living relics of Old Earth, other species, plant and animal, were either native to Terra Nova, or had been transplanted from some other world or worlds by the Noahs, or were even the product of genetic manipulation. Some of these appeared to have been created expressly to prevent the rise of intelligent life on Terra Nova. The septic mouthed, winged reptiles called "antaniae," or moonbats, were one example. More sinister still was the fruit of the tranzitree. Very sweet, tranzitree fruit contained a toxin that was deadly to beings with highly developed brains. Moreover, the toxin built up in the flesh of food animals. Eat a steak from a cow that had been eating of the tranzitree fruit, or its kin the bolshiberry and progressivine; die in shrieking agony, brain inflamed and swelling until it seemed it would burst from your skull.

  These were clever traps and might have been sufficient, on their own, to prevent the rise of intelligent life on Terra Nova. They had proved generally ineffective against colonization by intelligent life, however.

  * * *

  The archaeopteryx ate greedily, beak scraping on a metal tray on the floor. Carrera continued to pat it while looking out the glass door. Off in the distance, he saw a mid-sized airship winding gracefully through the air on its way from somewhere in Colombia del Norte down to Southern Columbia. An airship had been the instrument of the murder of his Linda and their children, so he always looked at the things with feelings, at best, mixed.

  Every feeling I have, he thought, with a sigh, is mixed these last seven years.

  He stood, leaving the trixie to eat, and walked the few steps to the window that overlooked the solar chimney. Am I doing right, he wondered, trying to bring Balboa into the fifth century. After all, the Oil Yithrabis have been spending money right and left to try to do the same there, while keeping the culture of thirteenth century Old Earth. Hasn't worked for them for beans.

  The difference, he thought, between Balboa and, say, Sumer or Pashtia . . . or even Yithrab, isn't one merely of religion, but also one of degree. The Arabs and Pashtun put family above all except religion . . . so do the Balboans, and only to a somewhat lesser degree. Breaking them of that . . . well . . . difficul
t. I have not succeeded yet, and I may never entirely succeed. Even in the Legion . . .

  Even in the Legion there were connections that mattered. He'd combated that, or tried to, in a number of ways. It was perhaps the only armed force on the planet that insisted on a complete family tree for four generations back before enlistment, and that only to organize cousins out of the same units to prevent them from taking care of each other to the detriment of the organization as a whole. He'd had leaders turned out and even shot for preferring cousins and brothers over better, but unrelated, men. Even then, it still popped up, this preference for family, or amoral familism. And even the appearance of it was dangerous.

  More dangerous is that even I am infected with it, he thought. My only saving grace is that the number of people whom I will favor for familial relation is very small: Lourdes, and the children. Of course, I was infected with it as a boy, when my parents and their friends tried to turn me into a cosmopolitan, too.

  Which helped explain his bad mood and his need for the cows to calm him. Lourdes, his second wife and arguably the reason he retained as much sanity as he had, had spoken to him the night prior to try to get him to help a member of her extended family. Her cousin, Marqueli—Carrera had met the girl once, beautiful little thing—was married to one of his soldiers. That soldier was on the medically retired list which, in the Legion, only meant that he was given some other duty out of his normal regiment. In Marqueli Mendoza's husband's case, those duties for the last several years had been going to school, at Legion expense, at the university to earn his baccalaureate.