Carnifex

coming, he thought.

'The Scouts? All paths east and west?'

'Sealed tighter than a houri's hole, sir.'

'Very good. I want as many prisoners as possible. Rewards are offered.'

'Yes, sir. So my men have been told.'

* * *

In the much colder air above the high pass breath gathered to frost a gray-shot beard. Hard they came, those puffs of air, pumped from struggling, bellowing lungs. They burst outward to form little horizontal pines before settling to and disappearing against the ubiquitous ice and snow.

Hard pumped the heart beneath the lungs, forcing warmth to freezing limbs, forcing blood to a brain straining to make sense of disaster.

Close to the ground, seeking to make himself invisible—one with the snow and the ice—the fugitive Abdul Aziz huddled. His eyes and ears quested for some route of escape, some way to survive to carry on the fight and avenge his family and his cause. Nothing looked very promising. Nothing sounded so, either.

In the cold, still air sound carried very well. The fugitive's ears caught easily the irregular sound of shots and screams. The fugitive cursed his enemies, then let fall a single tear which froze on his face before it had descended much more than an inch.

Ahead, the steady whop-whop-whop of helicopters told of escape routes being systematically cut off. Unseen, far above, the harsh drone of the Shturmoviks and the cursed infidels' gunships swept along, hunting for any who might have escaped the camp. Behind, the baying of dogs, hunting dogs with the sharpest of noses, told of other fugitives being tracked through the snow, ice and rock. From all around, at odd times, came shouts of triumph as some mercenary, apostate Pashtun Scout dragged a cowering man, woman, or child from a hiding place.

Despair crowded the fugitive's heart and mind; despair at loss, despair at ruin.

The thought of his own wife and children, now forever lost, was almost more than he could bear. 'They'll pay. By the ninety-nine beautiful names of Allah, I swear they will pay for this,' muttered the fugitive to himself.

The pitiless ice made no answer.

* * *

Havaldar Mohammad Kamal didn't answer either; though he heard. He pointed to one of his grinning men, then to another, and made a slight finger motion in the direction from which the sound had come.

The scouts glanced at each other. A wordless plan formed between them. Carrera would pay bounties for live prisoners. They'd take this one alive if they could.

Silently the two designated scouts began to creep forward and around. The military arts their prey had learned only partially, they had grown up with.

Interlude

11/6/409 AC, Botulph, Federated States of Columbia, Terra Nova

Robert Hennessey, Senior, sat quietly on a bench in the central park of this great metropolitan city on the Federated States West Coast. In the sun Hennessey read his newspaper. More especially, Hennessey read for word of the fighting in the Mar Furioso, the great sea of Terra Nova, where his son, Lieutenant Robert Hennessey, Junior, led a platoon of Federated States Marines in the long, slow, bloody drive across the sea. The sooner the war was over, the sooner young Bob was safe, the better, as far as the old man was concerned.

After all, I'm not getting any younger and I need the boy to take over the chair of the firm.

There was grounds for hope now, despite the obscenely long casualty lists posted every day from the fighting across central Taurus and on the islands of the Furioso. Just a few days before the papers had blared out of a second Yamatan city blasted to cinders by some new weapon developed in secret.

Whatever it takes to get the Yamatans to surrender short of invading the home islands, Robert Senior thought.

There was hardly a family in the entire country to be found that hadn't lost a son or a husband. Hennessey heard weeping and looked over to where a woman, formerly playing with her children on the grass, had broken down in tears.

Whatever it takes.

He heard a familiar horn beep. Folding his paper, Hennessey arose from the park bench to walk to where his chauffeur was exiting the limousine to hold open the door. He gave himself this one break, one hour every morning, to relax in the central park away from his responsibilities. The hour never seemed to last long enough.

From the corner of one eye Hennessey thought he saw a bright streak across the sky. He glanced up just as the streak became a flash that consumed him, his city, the young, weeping woman, her children, trees and buildings and park benches . . . everything.

UEPF Spirit of Peace

'Target One . . . destroyed, High Admiral . . . . Target Two . . . . destroyed.'

Silently, High Admiral Laurence Napier, nodded his head. If ever a man looked spiritually crushed, that man was he, for he had just given the order and overseen the extinction of over one million people.

What choice had I, though? My orders from the Consensus were clear; they allowed no room for maneuver. 'Any detonation of a nuclear weapon for purposes of advancing a war effort on Terra Nova is to be met by an equivalent or greater response from the United Earth Peace Fleet.' I picked the two smallest cities in the Federated States for that . . . the two smallest that had a chance of working, in any case, San Fernando and Botulph. What else could I do?

Suddenly, Napier felt the overwhelming urge to vomit. Without another word he arose from his command chair and raced for his own quarters. Halfway to his quarters he found he could not restrain himself, emptying the contents of his stomach for some nameless prole to clean up. Still heaving, Napier continued on to his quarters.

There he sat in silent horror at the oceans of blood on his hands. He imagined it all, the young children playing on the grass, the old men reading their morning papers, the flash, the fireball . . .

In the end, the imagining was too much. Napier removed a pistol from his desk, made sure it was loaded, placed the muzzle to the roof of his mouth, and pulled the trigger.

This left another mess for the proles to clean up.

Chapter Twenty-six

Strong winds, strong winds

Many dead tonight, it could be you

—Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Homeless

Jebel Ansar, 18/8/469

They called Carrera 'the Blue Jinn.' He took a small and perverse pride in the title. Blue jinni were evil jinni. That his enemies thought him evil was . . . pleasant. Even more pleasant was the sight of his enemies, beaten and bleeding, captive and bound.

Carrera, the Jinn, looked over those enemies in the late afternoon sun. Sinking in the west, the sun's light was carved by the mountains to cast long, sharp shadows across the ground. Much of that ground was covered with the head-bowed, broken prisoners.

One of those captives, Abdul Aziz ibn Kalb, held his bleeding head upright. Abdul Aziz glared hate at his captors. These were a mix of Pashtun mercenaries—tall and light eyed; light skinned they would have been, too, had the sun not burned them red-brown—and shorter, darker men. All were heavily armed, bearing wicked looking rifles with shiny steel blades affixed. All sneered back the hate Abdul Aziz felt, mixing with that hate a full measure of disgust and contempt.

Aziz's hate