Carnifex

Coordination between the lesser, mercenary infidels and the greater infidels in the north of Pashtia had been poor. Noorzad had half expected to be met by yet another ambush as he and the pitiful remnants of his band emerged from the snows of the central mountain range. Instead, there'd been nothing except some sympathetic tribesmen who'd provided camouflage for the guerillas on their way to the nearest city.

Once there, things had improved considerably. Noorzad had acquired a new satellite phone and reported in to Mustafa, seeking guidance and orders. Those had been simple, both to receive and to follow.

'Come home.'

Now he was 'home.' However exhausted Noorzad might have been, he still could hardly wait to rebuild his force and return.

'That will be a while,' Mustafa advised as he poured tea for the both of them with his own hand. 'Our . . . infrastructure was not well rooted in the south of Pashtia. Our defenses were weak. And this enemy is not as weak as the Taurans. Worse, though he doesn't have the firepower of the greater enemy, he makes up for that with a ruthlessness to match our own.'

'The men I left behind?' Noorzad queried.

'It was not your fault,' Mustafa cut him off, insisting, 'You had no other choice. To stand and fight would have meant being slaughtered. But . . . '

The lesser chief raised one eyebrow. 'But?'

'As near as we can tell, they've cleaned out your band completely. And no, we cannot take hostages to trade because these infidels not only won't trade—that much we learned when they were in Sumer—they've already shot or hanged all their prisoners . . . unless they've spared a few for questioning.'

A look of mental agony flashed briefly across Noorzad's face. If he had known, he would have stood and fought rather than run. Not that he'd cared about most of his men, especially the spoiled Yithrabis. But he'd left friends behind.

Mustafa read the look well. 'No,' he said. 'That is, I think, part of their method. They shoot their prisoners precisely to make us want to stand and fight. They may someday sell our women and children as slaves to the same purpose.'

'What now?' Noorzad asked, willing away his feelings of personal failure.

'Now the winter is upon us. The passes are mostly closed. South of the mountains the infidel is continuing to clear out our people and the filthy, decadent Taurans are setting up shop again. In the spring, the mercenaries will surge over the mountains to reinforce the Federated States and Anglia. We cannot stop them, though we can bleed them.'

'Cut their supply?'

'No . . . I think not,' Mustafa answered. The Federated States troops require more in supply per man, even for light infantry, than the Volgans did for their armored troops. They must have their comforts, at least when in base. The lesser infidels seem to require much less. They live . . . . rough.' There was a tone almost of admiration in Mustafa's voice. 'I don't think we can appreciably interdict their supply lines.'

Noorzad sighed sadly. 'Then . . . my men go unavenged?'

'No,' Mustafa smiled. 'No; we have a plan and a means to hurt these infidels in return.'

4/1/468 AC, Xamar Coast, Motor Yacht The Big ?

The Legion del Cid tended to take a somewhat legalistic approach to counterinsurgency and piracy suppression. They could have simply started at one end of the Xamar coast and worked their way to the other, killing everything that lived and making the entire coast uninhabitable. But, much as they never sent someone for serious torture until a duly constituted court had pronounced sentence of death, so they would not destroy a village unless it could be directly linked to the support of piracy.

They had such a village now. Early this morning The Big ? had passed close to some fishing boats to allow the crews to get a look at the awesome mammary display on the forward deck. Then the yacht had sailed directly southward, paralleling the coast and heading generally towards a village suspected of being a pirate haven. Overhead, silently, a small remotely piloted vehicle with a high resolution camera had caught good quality facial shots of the villagers as they'd cheered their own boat out to intercept the infidel yacht. Was this entrapment? Who cared? It wasn't as if the village wasn't predisposed to piracy. It wasn't as if they hadn't had a boat ready.

The Suzy Q had been little more than a field modification. The Big ? was almost purpose built from the keel up by a Sachsen shipbuilder with some long tradition of building clandestine surface raiders. She mounted hidden side-firing machine guns, as had her predecessor, three per side. However, the firing ports on The Big ? were centrally controlled, as were the guns themselves, from an armored fire control station just under the cockpit.

That fire control station also had command over the two main guns. Forward, there was, as with Suzy Q, a rising gun, hydraulically driven. There was also a stern gun mounted to fire through a port that opened under central control. Both were 40mm high velocity pieces, firing from fifty-five round magazines. All the positions, along with the hull itself, were now fairly heavily armored.

More thought had been given to tactics now, too, given the sad end of Suzy Q. The side guns and the forward gun were not to be the primary engagement stations any longer. Instead, when under threat the boat would turn away from any attacker, allowing its rear 40mm to begin the engagement. That station, the entire stern, in fact, was extremely well-armored. Indeed, under the smooth-appearing white hull was not only a three centimeter belt of steel, outside of that steel a complicated matrix of boron carbide resin, ceramic, polyurethane, and tungsten proofed the hull against the largest weapons the pirates had shown so far, the shoulder-fired rocket grenade launcher.

Because of the weight of the stern armor belt, the engines had had to be placed somewhat forward of center. This gave the boat some peculiar handling characteristics, notably a comparatively tight turn radius and a comparatively quick recovery from a tight turn. The engines themselves, twin diesels with an aggregate horsepower of over eight thousand, were capable of pushing the boat at almost the speed of the Santisima Trinidad.

Moreover, except for an excess of fold down bunks in the crew spaces, it looked like a yacht even to a suspicious boarding customs agent. Even the guns were not obvious from inside the yacht, being hidden behind what looked like storage spaces and under fixed bunks.

Though they were crew, as corporals Marta and Jaquelina had a stateroom of their own. Since Marta was a screamer this was less of an advantage than it might have been. In fact, the two slept together but approximately chaste. 'Approximately' because while Marta was a screamer, Jaquie was not and Marta was a very giving girl.

* * *

'Kinda silly, isn't it?' Chu asked Rodriguez.

'Huh?'

'C'mon, Rod, you only have to look at them to see they're in love. Everybody knows it and looks the other way.'

'Oh . . . ' Centurion Rodriguez sighed. 'I told them to cool it before they ever signed on as regulars. I'm a little surprised they took my advice, really.'

'Yeah.'

Chu's eyes scanned the instruments. 'Classis was right. We've got company coming.'

Rodriguez nodded. 'I'll go have the girls put on their act and get my boys standing by.'

As the Cazador left the cockpit, Chu picked up the microphone for the encrypted radio. 'Dos Lindas, this is The Big? We have company coming and we are preparing to engage.'

5/1/468 AC, Combat Information Center, Dos Lindas

Fosa saw that there was a new kill recorded for The Big ? on the operations board down in CIC. Below the Ops board, a chart showed the intercept course between the Dos Lindas and a helicopter chartered by Hartog Shipping, based in Haarlem.

Haarlem still did quite a bit of shipping around the globe. As such, her merchant fleet had suffered more than most from the pirates' depredations both along the Xamar Coast and through the Nicobar Straits. It wasn't really surprising then, that a mid-sized Haarlem company, Hartog, had contacted Nagy and asked about hiring protection from the Legion del Cid. Nagy had entered negotiations, in consultation with both Fosa and the Yamatan representative, Kurita, and hammered out a workable, and sufficiently profitable, deal.

As part of that deal, the Haarlemers had insisted on face-to-face contact with the commander of the flotilla. There had seemed no principled reason to refuse.

The Haarlem registry helicopter had come in with the morning