Carnifex

joined it and discovered that the army was no better than the people from which it sprang.

And I didn't have the courage to join the Marines. But then, few do.

* * *

Noorzad looked over the baker's dozen prisoners his men had taken. Seven, he saw, were female. One was quite attractive; the others acceptable. They would become slaves. In fact, they already were.

The men were of more interest to Noorzad. Whether women submitted to the Faith or not was more or less irrelevant, so long as they submitted to the rules. A whip was a good enough tool for that. And Mary the Copt had made a perfectly acceptable slave for the Prophet, peace be upon him.

But the men? He'd been toying with the idea, of late, of seeing if any of the prisoners could be converted to the true faith instead of being killed. He'd never before tried but had heard rumors that others had had success with the attempt. It was also said that the fundamental emptiness of Tauran lives made such people truer converts, once they had had the chance to experience the richness and fullness of being in submission to the will of Allah. He thought it worth a try.

After all, they can always be killed later if it doesn't work.

He spoke a few words to his followers. The women were separated and hustled away. Then he spoke to the men, even as the cries and screams elicited by the mass rape of the women began. That the Haarlemers almost always spoke English rather well helped.

'Are any among you here Christians or Jews?' he asked.

All the Haarlemers were afraid to answer affirmatively. There were no Jews and, as a matter of faith, no real Christians among them anyway. Some might have answered that they were, since they went to services on rare occasion. But they were too afraid of being killed as infidels.

'I see,' said Noorzad softly. He'd expected them to be either too faithless or too afraid to announce a faith if they had one. That was part of his plan. More loudly, he announced, 'Then you are all either pagans or atheists and must be killed.' He began to turn away.

'Wait!' pleaded Verdonk.

That, too, was part of Noorzad's plan.

18/5/467 AC, HQ, Legion del Cid, Isla Real

'Gentlemen, I need a plan,' Carrera announced at a special meeting called with certain key staff officers.

This was no big deal; his staff was used to it. They knew, too, that whatever he wanted they could almost certainly deliver on. After all, they'd never failed him yet. His next words, however, were a bit out of the ordinary.

'Rather,' he continued, 'I need a transformation plan, one that converts the legions as they are into a corps. I need to be able to do that without irreparably breaking the system that we have. I further need to be able to transport that corps to the southern border of Pashtia with full supplies for six months' intensive operations. After that takes place—in fact I need it before the deployment takes place—we need to be able to fight our way from Mazari Omar to Chabolo. Following that, we will need a plan to redeploy most of that corps, leaving a standard legion behind for interdiction and counter-insurgency.'

Now that was ambitious. The staff sat silent until Dan Kuralski whispered, 'Holy shit.'

Kuralski looked up, asking, more loudly, 'Do you have any idea what you're asking, Pat? To transform from legions to a full corps, to get those to an inland railhead . . . We'll screw everything up, organizationally. Do you have a contract for this?'

'Not yet. But my family senator tells me that Hamilton, FD, is getting into a panic. The Taurans are crumbling in Pashtia. The Progressive Party administration can't commit more FSC troops without crumbling, too. That leaves us. Harriet is pushing—and, yes, it is costing us, costing me, to have her push—for them to rehire us for Pashtia. By the time they do that the country will be half lost. I could be convinced otherwise but for now I think nothing less than a corps can fight its way to Chabolo and retrieve the effort there. Do you think we could get by with less?'

Kuralski didn't answer that question. Instead he started thinking aloud on what a corps might look like.

'We could take three legions. Then we strip off the mechanized cohorts and the Cazador cohorts—maybe minus one maniple each—to create a brigade of each. For headquarters and support for those brigades we can raid the schoolhouse for cadre, the head of the Armor School and Cazador School and their staffs becoming brigade headquarters. Maybe we should do the same with the air alae from those legions. That leaves the infantry legions with four infantry cohorts, a heavy maniple and a Cazador maniple, the combat support and artillery cohorts, and the service support and headquarters cohorts. Maybe, too, we strip off one maniple of heavy artillery each to form a corps artillery, the Artillery School providing headquarters, as well. We could do something similar with the other combat support branches like engineers, air defense and MPs. We can probably curtail courses for the D echelon legionary cadre to fill in gaps. God, though, that leaves little enough here.'

'I know,' Carrera agreed. 'Assume we'll actually call up some of the reserves for the first time. Assume that we'll leave D echelon to fill up to replace the corps later on. Beyond that, you're chief of staff. So go staff it, chief. I want to see a preliminary OPLAN within . . . oh, two weeks.'

26/5/467 AC, Barco del Legion Dos Lindas, Xamar

'I once wanted to see this sight so badly,' said Kurita, looking out at the steaming Uhuru coast from the bridge of the Dos Lindas. 'Back during the war we tried so hard to get this far. And then the FS Navy caught us in the open, far from land based air support. And they butchered us. My ship escaped, barely, along with half a dozen destroyers and two light cruisers. The rest went down.'

Fosa contemplated how that must have felt, saw in his mind's eyes his own fleet going down in smoke and flame, sailors trapped below decks slowly drowning, some struggling in the oil covered water as the flames lick along the surface to drive them below to death. He shivered, though if Kurita saw it, he affected not to notice.

Instead, Kurita asked, 'What's next, Captain-san?'

Interlude

Finca Carrera, Guayabal, Panama, 5 January, 2091

Belisario Carrera shook with rage. 'This land has been in my family for nearly five hundred years. What the fuck do you mean that the UN is taking half of it?'

The uniformed policemen, local boys all, escorting the executive assistant to the Deputy Special Representative for the Secretary General to the Republic of Panama, looked down at the ground, ashamed and disgusted. They understood that attachment to the land. But what choice had they? They had their own wives and children to think about.

'There is no call for profanity, Mr. Carrera,' said the sweating, suit-clad bureaucrat, stiffly. His accent was strange to Belisario, his Spanish clipped and harsh. 'No call at all. Your democratically elected government has agreed to allow the United Nations to assist it in better apportioning your nation's wealth for the betterment of mankind. That your ancestors stole this land for themselves does not mean, sir, that you own it. It is part of the common heritage of the Family of Man.'

Belisario's thirteen-year-old daughter, Mitzilla, chose that moment to come out of the house to stand beside her father. 'Get off our land, you bastard,' she said.

The bureaucrat looked down at Mitzi's face and then continued on. When his eyes reached her chest they opened wide with surprise and desire. He tore them away, most reluctantly, and returned his attention to her father. He said, 'Perhaps, for a suitable consideration, something can be worked out, Mr. Carrera.'

Belisario said nothing. But he looked at the UN representative in a way that said, without words, You are a dead man.

* * *

It was a UN court that sat in judgment over Belisario. A national court simply could not be trusted to give a proper judgment. In neither case, though, would the sentence have been