Caliphate

he announced.

In Hamilton's ear there was a beep, followed by, 'Hamilton, this is Bongo. Come in Hamilton.'

'Hamilton here, Bernie. We've just uncovered the mines. Fucking things look heavy. It's going to be a while.'

'Right. We're just getting ready here.'

Flight Seven Nine Three, am-Munch to Slo, 23 Muharram,

1538 AH (3 November, 2113)

Watching Lee apply makeup to Ling's face struck Bongo as both odd and unsettling. 'What the fuck are you doing?'

'Getting ready to seduce a member of the crew, to take him out of play,' Lee answered through Ling's mouth. 'It will work a little better, you'll agree, if I look seductive.'

'Did they give you a female makeup course for this mission?'

The Chinese laughed. 'No.' He laughed some more. 'Dude, you haven't figured it out yet, have you?'

'Figured what out?'

'I'm gay. When I say 'seduce,' I mean seduce.'

'Fuck.'

'Only if necessary.' The Chinese reached into Ling's small handbag and, smiling, produced a tube of lubricant. 'But if necessary . . . '

Highway 310, Northwest of ar-Rebchel, Province of Baya, 23 Muharram,

1538 AH (3 November, 2113)

Petra stood over Hans, her submachine gun held in both hands. Not knowing any way to help, she felt both useless and frustrated. She said as much.

'Sis, you don't have to help,' Hans assured her, as he lay behind one of the cylindrical mines aiming it precisely at a point in the road. 'These things have to be set just right. Even Hamilton—and he's used to weapons—doesn't know how to aim them. He's doing the most he can just by lugging them to the firing positions.'

'If you say so,' Petra said dubiously. 'But I'd feel a lot better if I could help.'

'Fair enough,' Hans agreed. 'So tell me again how it's going to happen.'

'Okay,' Petra agreed. 'One: once they're all set up and wired together, with the detonators in the hole, I go to the hole and wait. If I get tired, I take one of the pills Bernie gave each of us. Two: after you tell me the assault on the castle and lab is underway, I wait some more until . . . Three: when the column comes from af-Fridhav I wait until the lead truck is right there'—her finger pointed at a boulder on the other side of the road—'and squeeze the first detonator. Four: even if that works, I press the second one anyway. I do it until the explosions begin. Five: I don't stick around, but crawl and then run toward an- Nessang. Six: there'll be a sedan waiting for me by the place John showed me. I get in back, lie on the floor, hold the bolt cutters to my chest, and cover myself with a blanket. Seven: you or John will come for me.'

'Good girl! There's something else you can do, too.'

'What's that?'

Hans handed her a reel of electrical field wire and said, 'Run this back to your hole.'

Flight Seven Nine Three, 23 Muharram,

1538 AH (3 November, 2113)

The city lights of an-Nurber, fewer and fainter now than they'd been a century prior, spread out below the ship to the port side. The crewman being blown by Lee in Ling's body barely noticed. Arching his back and groaning with the orgasm, he held the woman's head and pumped into her mouth like a bull.

You son of a bitch, Ling's consciousness thought at Lee. I'm a houri; I'm not a slut.

Quiet, Lee answered. This is for the mission.

My ass . . . and thank the ancestors you haven't given one of the crewman that yet . . .

Yet . . .

The crewman stopped pumping, then half stumbled back onto the narrow bed in Ling's cabin. 'Whew,' he gasped. 'That was great!'

'Lie down,' Lee said. 'Relax. I'm not done with you yet.'

Obediently—who knew what delights this trim exotic body might hold—the crewman did, closing his eyes as he stretched out on the cot. Lee, meanwhile, rifled through Ling's bag as if for a condom, muttering, 'Now where did I put that?'

What Lee withdrew, however, was not a condom but a syringe, an autoinjector containing a serious muscle relaxer. Removing the cap and placing it on the upper part of the syringe to arm it, he struck the thing into the crewman's thigh. The crewman barely got a yelp out, and that a yelp not inconsistent with sex, before relaxing completely.

'One down,' Lee said aloud.

Slut, Ling thought.

Nothing wrong with mixing pleasure and business.

Deftly, Lee flipped the crewman over on his belly, then took a roll of high strength tape from the bag. With this he taped the crewman's hands together and behind him, taped the feet together, and then taped the mouth shut. Lastly, Lee ran the tape around the crewman's neck, then to the head of the bed.

'That should hold you.'

Before leaving, Lee took the trouble to reapply Ling's smeared lipstick. She knocked on Bongo's door and, when it was opened, said, 'Cockpit next.'

Lee scratched at the cockpit door like a cat asking to be let in. Retief opened the door.

'May I help you, miss?'

'You may,' Ling's sultry, breathy, desperate-sounding voice answered. 'I haven't seen my master in two days. He'd kill me if I had sex with a kaffir. And the kaffir is too loyal, he'd report me if I tried. But I'm one of those with the kind of chip that makes me want to have it, to need to have it, every day. Won't one of you or . . . better still all of you, please, please help me?'

'Let the poor girl in, Retief,' the unseen captain said. 'We can surely help her in her hour of need.'

God, Retief thought, what a shitty world when we do things like this to beautiful women. Hell, what a shitty world when things like this are done to anybody.

Bongo looked in on Ling's cabin to make sure the crewman was still alive. Force of habit and training had made Lee hook the needle of the autoinjector through the crewman's shirt.

One won't kill him, the agent thought. Probably. That was the only guard on this deck, too. Time to go down and check on the ship's own loading crew. Better said, time to go recruit.

The loading crew were colored slaves. As such, they didn't automatically rise and bow with deference when Bongo made his appearance in their cramped cabin. They seemed startled, though, when he spoke to them not with the pidgin such people usually learned, but with as clear a diction as any baas. That surprise was as nothing, though, beside what they felt when they noticed the silenced submachine gun in his hand and the pistol strapped to his hip.

'Gentlemen,' Bongo began, 'please sit and listen. I'd like to tell you a story about a man who died several hundred miles to the south of here, not quite two thousand and two hundred years ago.

'His name was Spartacus . . .'

Lee heard a mental laugh from Ling. Okay, you're a slut. But it just occurred to me that if these Boers knew what the sex was of the mind controlling my body, they'd all try to crawl out of their own skins with disgust.