Carnifex

held them until the guidon had passed. Once the two leaders had dropped their own salutes, the maniple commander ordered, 'READY . . . FRONT.' Immediately, salutes dropped, right hands returned to rifle slings, left arms lowered to the sides to swing normally and eyes returned to the front. From that point, it was only a question of marching off, and meeting the families. There was no need to turn in individual weapons; in the legions, soldiers were trusted to keep their weapons at home or in the barracks. This was so despite a few suicides and a couple of unfortunate incidents where a legionary had come home to find out his wife had not been all that lonely in his absence.

* * *

Cruz's mind was just beginning to dwell upon unpleasant possibilities when he felt a light and gentle tap on his shoulder. He turned around and . . .

Holy shit!

Cara was there. So were the children. So were two women he didn't recognize. The two unknown women, however, were with a couple of men he did recognize.

'Senores!' he said, bracing to attention and saluting.

Both Carrera and Parilla returned the salute; then Carrera reached over and took Cruz's rifle from his shoulder.

Smiling, Carrera said, 'See to your family, Centurion. I think Duque Parilla and I are competent to watch your rifle for you for a while. I'll have my driver drop it by your quarters this evening.'

* * *

Later—much later—in bed, Cruz asked Cara, 'Where did you meet Parilla and Carrera?'

Cara snuggled into his shoulder and answered, 'Actually I'd never met them before today. But the day you went off to the war the first time, when I saw you off at the airport, Lourdes Carrera—well, actually her name was Nunez-Cordoba back then—and Mrs. Parilla were nearby when I started to cry. They came over to comfort me and we all ended up crying together. They saw me and the kids outside the reviewing stand and invited us up. That's where I met the duques.'

'Oh.'

The couple lay silently for a long time, neither sleeping but both enjoying the warm feeling of being together again; that, and the afterglow from making love. Admittedly, this separation had been much shorter than most. Still, Cruz had been away at the war for two and a half of the last six years and had spent more than half the remainder training in the field. More than three quarters separation in the first six years of marriage would have done—indeed, had done—for many marriages. That theirs had lasted so well so far was mostly attributable to Caridad. Even so . . .

'Ricardo?'

'Si, mi amor.'

'When this enlistment is up . . . ' She hesitated, nervously, before continuing, 'when this enlistment is up, could you consider getting out?'

'I'll have to think about it, corazon. I'm forty percent of the way to earliest retirement. That would be a lot of money to throw away.'

'You can't spend it when you're dead, Ricardo.' Count on a woman to come up with a reasonable answer. Dammit.

14/2/467 AC, Puerto Lindo, Balboa

Carrera could be pretty damned unreasonable. He had given Fosa, Dos Lindas' skipper and commander of the classis, eighty-seven days, from commissioning to first sailing. This would probably have been impossible except that Fosa had begun training nearly four months prior to commissioning and for certain elements, pilots and maintenance crews, three months before that.

It would be another three months, too, before the ship was expected to be fully operational. Oh, yes, each of the parts worked. The pilots could take off and land from the short, narrow and pitching deck. The aircraft maintenance personnel were fully capable of keeping the planes serviceable. The deck crews could recover the planes and strike them below; or refuel them and rearm them on deck. The navigators could navigate; the cooks could cook; the black gang could oversee and keep up the reactor and the generators. Intel was getting fairly deft at incepting radio and cell phone transmissions, along with the more routine intelligence gathering skills. The demi-battalion of Cazadors was perhaps the most ready of the ship's divisions, as there was really nothing important aboard ship that changed things when they got to the land: load helicopters, fly, dismount; then spot, capture or kill; then reload and go home.

Simulators and training exercises aboard ship helped, of course. And there was one simulator for every third aircraft except the remotely piloted ones. For those, their normal control stations with a simulator program loaded were sufficient. Moreover, all the simulators were linked onto the ship's main computer so that entire exercises could be run without ever leaving port.

The Cazadors could not be fully linked into that simulation system, though the leaders could, after a fashion. Instead, every fourth or fifth night for the last month, they'd launched from the stationary ship via helicopter to raid some or another spot ashore. Most of the rest of the time, when not spent planning a raid, the Cazadors trained on the limited training facilities of the Academia Militar Sargento Juan Malvegui; there or at Fort Tecumseh, on the other side of the Transitway to the east.

Underway replenishment, or UNREP, had not been practiced. The nearest the Dos Lindas' skipper could come was to force resupply through the means that would be available at sea; via air and from ship to ship. This was a substantially different undertaking, though, in the calm waters of Puerto Lindo, than it would have been in a Force Twelve hurricane. (Actually, nobody tried doing UNREP in Force Twelve. Fosa intended to give it a shot, though.)

In any case, none of it could yet be said to work together properly, under exactly realistic conditions. They'd not yet really tried.

Tonight, with almost no moonlight and bay lit only by the lights of town, the shipyard, and the military academy, that would change.

It began to change as soon as Dos Lindas' skipper, Roderigo Fosa, turned to his executive officer and ordered, 'Take her out, Tribune.'

19/2/467 AC, High Admiral's Quarters, Atlantis Base

In the end, Mustafa had refused to travel unless the UEPF sent a shuttle for him. Even a private charter was impossible, especially so as—whatever their other failings, national security-wise were concerned—the FSC's Progressive administration was even more fanatically dedicated to getting him than even the Federalists had been. Mustafa didn't know that the Progressives were so determined to get him precisely so they could have an excuse to call off the war. There had been days when, had he known this, he might just have turned himself in, if only in order to take pressure off of his movement to allow it to rebuild from the twin disasters of Pashtia in 460, Sumer beginning in 461, and continuing on to the current day.

The shuttle, a pumpkin-seed shape, had come almost silently in the night, to a spot Mustafa had picked that would be safe from prying eyes. There he had boarded through the lit rectangle of the hatch, been strapped in by the crew chief—an act Mustafa felt deep down to be highly impious—and then been flown at a very high speed to the UEPF's base colony on the island of Atlantis, in the middle of the Mar Furioso. A darkened limousine bought by the UEPF from Sachsen had picked him up at the landing field and whisked him briskly to the High Admiral's quarters.

Most Salafis, most Arabs or Moslems of whatever sect, would have sent anywhere from hours to days in small talk, beating around the bush, before getting to the point. Mustafa was not like that. Perhaps it was his nature, perhaps merely because he was not a well man and felt he might have little enough time left. Whatever the case; when Robinson went directly to the point Mustafa picked right up without further waste of time.

'You've got to stop this decentralized mayhem, to assert real control over your movement, and to begin to seriously plan, not just leave everything up to the will of your god,' Robinson began, after the usual, but curt, greetings.

'I know,' Mustafa said, and then lit a cigarette.

'You've got to begin a campaign of finan . . . what did you say?'

'I said that I know. The Nazrani have taught me; Allah helps those who also help themselves. Faith is still key, of course. Yet the Maker of Universes would not have allowed us to fall as low as we have, despite our perfect faith, unless He also wanted us to think, work and plan for our own good, and His.'

'Oh . . . ' Robinson was momentarily nonplussed. 'Well in that case, we can begin to plan and fight a war, together.'

'Before that, infidel, tell me why. Why are you willing to help us?' Mustafa