Carnifex

change.

'No,' Jimenez admitted. 'Why should I? It's your house and your Legion; you get to decide.'

It does make a certain sense, Carrera admitted to himself. I get to billet my best friends and number one and two subordinates right next door where I can harass them mercilessly. Mac gets a house to go with the wife he's getting. Artemisia—God, she's achingly good to look at, isn't she?—gets the house she probably deserves. Probably? No probably about it. She makes my sergeant major happy and she deserves whatever I can give her.

Jimenez continued, 'Besides, Pat, Mac's living in the senior centurion's bachelor quarters. That's no place to raise a family and if you want your sergeant major happy you had better make his wife happy . . . and Arti wants a family. Soon. As soon as possible.'

Jimenez smiled and then began to give off a most unmilitary giggle.

'What's so funny?'

With some difficulty, Xavier got control of himself and answered, 'I was just thinking about how badly Arti wants to bear Mac's children. It isn't like they didn't start work on that months ago.'

So much for Lourdes giving them the use of a room for privacy, Carrera thought, drily, looking over at his wife. She, too, was laughing, even while she tried hiding her face with her hand.

'Well, Patricio, I tried,' she said.

'What about when you get married?' Carrera asked.

Jimenez snorted. 'What sane woman would marry me? Not an issue, Patricio; it's never going to happen. Besides, I'm married to the Fourth and that's bitch enough for me—no offense, Lourdes. No . . . I'll be just fine as a sometime guest here.'

Carrera shrugged, thinking, No . . . actually you won't be a sometime guest here, since we're going to be moving the legions to the mainland over the next year. So . . . I suppose . . . why not?

'Yeah . . . okay,' he conceded. 'Mac and Arti can have Number Two. Now that she's about to be married at least the young signifers and tribunes will stop trying to serenade her under her window.'

'Tell me about it,' Jimenez said. 'I mean, it wouldn't be so bad if they could sing.'

Quarters Number One

Lourdes hummed the wedding march softly to herself as she crossed the hundred and twenty meters from her old home, Number Two, to Number One. Having Mac and Arti as next door neighbors was going to be great; she just knew it.

And, better still, when they thump the bed against the wall all night, I won't be able to hear it. Besides, it reminds me of what I am missing when Patricio is away.

Entering by the front door, Lourdes took one look at McNamara and Artemisia—coming down the stairs arm and arm, he looking guilty and she like the cat who fell into the vat of cream—and she started laughing again. She ran to the nearest room, her husband's library, to hide her discomposure. She closed the door behind her and covered her mouth again to try to stifle her laughter.

'What's so funny, Mama?' little Hamilcar asked, looking up from one of his father's books.

'I'll tell you when you're older,' Lourdes answered. Curious, she walked over to the desk and picked up the book that her son had been reading. That he was reading was no surprise; the child had been literate for almost two years. The title, however, she found worrisome; The Battle of Kuantan by Tadeo Kurita.

Can it be genetic, somehow? she wondered, suddenly growing utterly serious and seriously worried. Did my son inherit his father's taste for battle? God, please don't take my baby from me. He's not even five yet.

* * *

After his mother had left, Hamilcar returned to his reading. Kurita's dry account of the exchange between his battlecruiser and the Federated States Navy's superdreadnought, Andrew Jackson, soon had the boy quivering with excitement and a wordless longing to be there, to trade shot for shot and blow for blow. Never mind that he was, half ways, from the Federated States, nor that his other half had had little involvement in the Great Global War. It was the battle, itself, that drew him. And, he already knew, it always would.

He knew, too, that he already understood things that were forever barred to most human beings, at any age. He understood, instinctively, without Kurita explaining it, what it meant to cross the Jackson's T and why Kurita had accepted a couple of bad hits to get his own ship in position to do that. Hamilcar understood, without anyone explaining it, the logistic and time-space factors that had dictated why the Battle of Kuantan had happened where it had and when it had.

In short, Hamilcar Carrera-Nunez already knew, at age four, that he had the knack.

He closed the book, sighing, and thought, Mama and I need to have a long talk.

4/7/468 AC, Main Parade Field, Isla Real

'I've seen you under fire, Sergeant Major, and I've never seen you look nervous like today.'

'Sir . . . fuck you, sir,' McNamara answered. 'T'isn't every day a man gets married. And it's almost never a man marries a woman like Artemisia. If I'm nervous . . . '

'You have a right to be, Mac,' Carrera answered, gently. 'I just like pulling your leg and needling you. Because, you know, if I didn't know you were watching me, there's a half dozen times, over the years, that I'd have been gibbering. By God, I've a right to needle you. If only for the goddamned bed thumping that's kept me up every night but the last few.'

To that McNamara had no answer, but only a sort of a question. 'It worries me, sir, you know? I'm pushing sixty. She's less t'an half my age. I've got to, you know . . . get the gettin' while the gettin's good. T'e day's not long off . . . '

'My ass.'

* * *

A white tent sat not far from where McNamara and Carrera traded jibes and worries. In the tent Lourdes and a bevy of bridesmaids fussed and fluttered around Artemisia Jimenez, fluffing, primping, and generally polishing. She looked amazing.

'Does my ass look fat in this, Lourdes?' Artemisia asked, worriedly.

Lourdes looked. I should have such an ass, she thought. Then she looked again. 'No, Arti, your rear end is not fat. But unless I'm much mistaken you've grown a bra cup size. How many months along are you.'

Artemisia smiled wickedly. 'Six weeks. I had to, don't you see? He might have backed out.'

'Does Mac know?'

'I was going to tell him tonight. Otherwise, he'll be so worried about me . . . hell, this is John McNamara we're talking about; he'd be so embarrassed at our being caught jumping the gun; he'd probably blow his lines. And those, he must get right.'

'And besides,' Lourdes said, drily, 'if he screws this up enough to delay the wedding, you'll need a new dress, won't you?'

Artemisia dimpled. 'So you see my point in not upsetting him, right?'

* * *

'You've upset the signifers and some of the tribunes,' Carrera said, pointing with his chin at two sets of bleachers filled to overflowing with sixty or more junior officers, all in dress whites and every man wearing a black armband.

'Young punks,' McNamara said, when he saw.

'It's a compliment, Sergeant Major. Take it that way.'

'I suppose so,' he admitted, with bad grace. 'T'ough if t'ey t'tought about it, t'ey'd realize t'eir lives are about to get a lot more pleasant when I have somet'ing to do besides ride t'eir asses.'

'That's one way to look at it,' Carrera agreed. 'They really ought—' He hushed suddenly, even as the crowd did (for ringing the field there were thousands of legionaries, plus their families, who had come to watch).

Artemisia, escorted by her uncle, Xavier, brilliant in his dress whites, had emerged from the tent. Lourdes followed, as did another eleven girls, about half and half Arti's close in-laws and the girls she had competed against for Miss Balboa. In the bleachers, sixty signifers and junior tribunes looked at the procession and suddenly had the same thought: Well . . . there are some other opportunities out there.

'You are such a lucky bastard, Top. I believe that's the only woman I've ever seen to match my Linda.'

The band