Caliphate

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'A lot of the pictures are of people . . . and animals. We can't draw those. The mutawa would cut your skilled hand off if you tried. And even for having them . . . ' Besma shuddered.

'What?' Petra asked. 'What's wrong? And what are the mutawa?'

'You don't see them out of the Moslem towns and cities. The mutawa are the police for the prevention of vice and the promotion of virtue. Nobody controls them. My father says that they're lunatics who push everything Allah commanded to the point their rules sicken Allah. For having pictures of living things they'll beat you within an inch of your life. For having pictures like some of the ones drawn in this book they might kill us.' Besma suddenly looked shamefaced. 'I'm sorry,' she apologized. 'I looked in the book on the way back from your family's . . . house.'

'Show me,' Petra said.

Private Rodger W. Young Range, Fort Benning, Georgia,

10 November, 2106

'Dressed to kill,' Hamilton judged as he inspected Hodge's suit. She, and he, and the other two-hundred-and- ten members of the class, were in full up armor. This meant that, besides the close-fitting helmet and facial armor cum thermal imager, the neck was protected by a circular guard augmented by woven, silica-impregnated aramid cloth. The torso was covered front and back with four-millimeter liquid metal alloy, below which was a bell-shaped hip-and-groin guard, while greaves and thigh protectors curved from the back of the exoskeleton to encompass those appendages. On the back was worn the pack that provided power, filtered air, cooled or heated the suit wearer, and held the computer that maintained life support and controlled the suit based on physical and verbal commands given by the wearer. Over all were attached various packs and pouches, weapons and sensors.

It had been sixty years since the first practical suit had been developed. In the intervening time some improvements had been made, notably to endurance and coordination, without substantially changing the layout and structure of the suit.

Hamilton inspected digitally, visually and physically. 'You're getting a subnominal reading on your left femoral forward pluscle, Laurie. Have the armorer check it after the exercise.' He checked in part by having Hodge have her suit do certain things—'Eyes left . . . Eyes right . . . good . . . Deep knee bends . . . good . . . Left arm pushup . . . good . . . Right arm pushup . . . good . . . Jump . . . Jump . . . Jump . . . good . . . Run in place . . . good . . . good . . . hmmm . . . Have the armorer calibrate the gyro . . . seems a little off . . . .' Beyond that, he ran an analysis cable from his own suit, already checked by the platoon leader for the exercise, to hers.

'I feel more like I'm dressed for a funeral, and wearing the coffin,' Hodge said.

'Coffin' was a pretty apt description, and not your cheap pine coffin, either. No, no; this coffin was the deluxe solid bronze job. All told, between the exoskeleton itself (one hundred and forty-seven pounds, including plastic musculature, or pluscle), the armor (one hundred and twenty-three pounds), power and control pack (sixty- two pounds), weapons, ammunition, communications gear, imaging gear, sensors . . . all in all, it came to just about a quarter of a ton. Add in the one hundred and fifteen pound woman (from eating upwards of ten-thousand calories a day she'd put back most of the twenty-five pounds she'd lost in Ranger School by this time, and even managed to reinflate her breasts) and it amounted to quite a weight. Fortunately, the suit was modular and no single piece (except for the Exo, itself, which could be moved by attaching oneself to it) was so heavy that two fit women couldn't lift and attach it.

And that was for a size small suit. Hamilton's weighed almost a hundred pounds more, having larger pluscles and power pack, and more, but not thicker, armor.

Hamilton checked one last item on his heads-up display and announced, 'You can inflate now, Laurie.'

Hodge nodded, then made herself go stock still as she said, 'Suit . . . inflate shock cushions.' From a pump in the back with the power pack the suit began to fill up—to overpressurize, actually—several sets of inflatable cushions. These came in two types and served two purposes. One was to cushion against the shock on direct fire hits, shrapnel and concussion. These were the ones inflating now. The others, however, had already been inflated. It was changes to the pressure in these 'cushions' that, once detected by the computer, caused it to apply power to the exoskeletal pluscles that made some of them contract until pressure was equalized. After many different attempts, this had been found to be the most practical for military purposes.

'I read inflation as good,' Hamilton announced, thinking and that's not even counting your tits, 'annnd . . . you're up.'

Kitznen, Province of Affrankon, 13 Duh'l-Qa'dah,

1530 AH (10 November, 2106)

Petra recited from a children's book Besma had saved:

' . . . I is for Infidel, burning in Hellfire.

'J is for Jew . . . Besma, what's a Jew?'

The Moslem girl shrugged and shook her head. 'I don't know. Demons, I guess. I think there aren't any, anymore. Or at least none near here.'

'Okay.

'J is for Jew, whom even the rocks hate.

'K is for Kaffir, enslaved in the jihad.

'L is for liar . . .'

Petra suddenly stopped reading. Her face grew very sad. 'That's what the man said who took me from my family, that I was enslaved under jihad since my father couldn't pay the tax that allowed us to be dhimmis.'

'That's just so wrong. I'm sorry, Petra.'

'It's all right. It wasn't your fault.'

'Let's start over at the beginning,' Besma suggested, thinking to get Petra's mind away from thoughts of jihad and slavery.

The girl thumbed the pages back and started over:

'A is for Americans, devils incarnate . . . Why are the Americans devils, Petra?'

Besma shuddered. 'Because they tried to exterminate us.'

Private Rodger W. Young Range, Fort Benning, Georgia,

10 November, 2106

'Kill 'em quick, before they get away!'

Hamilton didn't know whose voice it had been, shouting over the comm system. He thought it sounded like Hodge but, if so, her voice had never been quite so full of passion, not even in bed. He checked his heads-up display to find her position, then looked over to where she stood above a trench, pouring fire down into it. The bullets, all tracers, looked like some alien weapon from a movie about the future.

The range (rather, the range which bore the name) had seen many uses over the years and had once been in a different place. One major use, in the other place, had been as a close assault course. In the original version of this, machine guns had fired at about waist level over the heads of troops crawling forward. Later on, this was deemed too unsafe and the guns were fixed to fire well over the heads of even the tallest man. That this had totally destroyed the already limited moral training value of the range was deemed acceptable by those more concerned with safety statistics than with victory on the battlefield.

They didn't do that anymore, for Suited Heavy Infantry, at least. Now rifles and machine guns, the same kinds as favored by the Moslem enemy across the globe, were aimed by remote control and fired to hit. Since with full-up armor the suits were more or less invulnerable to those rifles and machine guns, it was still a very safe