Carnifex

war.'

Robinson nodded agreement. Even as he did so, though, he started to chuckle.

'What's so funny?'

'I was just thinking about an individual who is waging a global war. Perhaps he'll teach Mustafa.'

9/3/463 AC, the Base, Kashmir Tribal Trust Territory, Terra Nova

Under the light of two moons, a tall and slender, bearded and swarthy man, Mustafa ibn Mohamed ibn Salah, min Sa'ana, purified himself with water, for water was plentiful here, though the desert began not far away. With the last drop of water Mustafa felt the last and least of his sins wash away as well. He then faced to the northeast toward Makkah al Jedidah. He uttered the words, 'I take refuge in God against Satan the accursed,' then knelt upon his small and austere prayer rug, and abased himself before his God.

Allah, Mustafa prayed, thou art my God. None is your equal, none is your peer. Help me, Your humble servant, to do Your work. Aid me in Your righteous vengeance. Guide my hand, steel my heart, preserve my soul.

Allah, this world is a place of wickedness, as You know well. Unclean men, who lie with men, prosper. Women, whom you created to be under men, assert their equality. Men, whom You created to be under You, make laws as they will, defying Your will. Forbid it, O Allah. Punish it, O Mighty One.

Though you permit to your followers the ownership of those under our right hands, the slaves, wicked men, knowing not your wisdom, would prohibit it. Though you have set the law for which women we may and may not know, women flout it and men permit that. It is an abomination.

I am but a man, O Allah, yet I am Your man. Other, likewise Your men, follow me. Use us. Help us. Smite the wicked. Crush the infidel. Destroy above all the Jews, as You promised us you would do.

Mustafa felt a sudden sharp pain emanating from his kidneys. They'd been getting progressively worse over the last several years. He added to his prayer, O Allah, let me live only long enough to see your cause through to victory.

Prayer finished, Mustafa again tapped his head multiple times to the prayer rug. Then he arose, and looked skyward. He had the eyes of an eagle, so said his followers. With those eyes he spotted, dimly and distantly, one of the spaceships of the Earth infidels.

Mustafa nodded and added to his prayers, aloud, 'Smite them too, O Lord, but not before we have full use of them.

Interlude

Shuttle 11, USSS Harriet Tubman, Cape Canaveral, Florida, 23 February, 2075

The first major colonization ship had been built, unsurprisingly, in the United States. Also, unsurprisingly, it had been built by private firms to government specifications. While the European Union was still struggling to apportion widget production between England, Scotland, France, and Germany, and struggling with how much of it to have done in China to make up for the inflated wages demanded by European trade unions (which was another way of saying how much would eventually show up in government revenues, of course, given Europe's confiscatory levels of taxation), America simply acted.

Curiously, no one in the EU screamed, 'Unilateralism.' They had their reasons for wanting America to be first with practical, large scale, colonization capability.

'Large scale,' in this case, meant twenty-five thousand colonists in cryogenic suspension or 'deep sleep.' Future ships would be larger, approximately twice as large, but—give the imperialist, revanchionist, capitalist, war-mongering, fascist American beasts their due—twenty-five thousand was a nice start. Besides, since the ship was going to be available for lease long before any Euro ship could be expected to be, the bureaucrats who ran the EU had every expectation that it could be, and would be, used to eliminate some of their excess and unwanted population.

* * *

Oliver Rogers' flintlock was safely stowed with the baggage. There were better weapons available for those leaving Earth, but none that he could be sure of feeding with ammunition or keeping in repair, on the new world. His animals—one bull, three heifers, two horses, five goats, seven sheep, half a dozen domesticated turkeys, two dozen chickens and a rooster, and two hundred and fourteen embryos, not counting eggs—had already gone up and been put under. Spare arms were up there too, for when his sons grew to manhood.

Rogers' three wives, two of them officially unofficial, and eleven children would go up with him. Perhaps more importantly, from the point of view of the charity that had paid for Rogers' rather extended family's extended trip, along with all those goats and chickens and whatnot would go an eventual fifteen conservative voters (more, really, as all three wives were quite young and very fertile). It was a bargain, from some points of view, even counting shipping their minimal household goods from Idaho to Florida.

'Oh, God, I'm scared, Ollie,' said wife number one, Gertrude, as she leaned against her shared husband's arm. 'I've never even flown before and now—'

'I know, Gertie,' Rogers said, 'I know. It's not easy to pick up and leave our roots. But our ancestors have been doing just that for four hundred years or more. A lot more if you count how they got to Europe in the first place, before they came here. It's worked out well enough, so far. And God will watch over his own.'

'They used to say that God watches out for fools, drunkards and the United States, too,' Gertie objected. 'But he's turned his back on the USA.'

'And so are we,' said Rogers. 'Especially since the Senate ratified the Gag Treaty and the President signed it. That was when the United States turned its back on us.'

Whatever Gertie was about to say in reply was drowned out by the scream of Shuttle 11 coming in for a landing to board the colonists and take them to a new world and a new life.

Chapter Two

Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains . . .

—Kipling, The Young British Soldier

24/8/466 AC, Isla Real, Republic of Balboa, Terra Nova

A solar chimney dominated the island's skyline, rising several hundred meters above its highest elevation, the otherwise unnamed Hill 287. From the base of that chimney, a thick tube of reinforced concrete, ran an extension northward, toward the equator, along the side of the hill. This ended at one of the three largest greenhouses on the planet, the other two also being the foundations for solar chimneys. Fixed mirrors, sighted to reflect the maximum amount of sunlight into the greenhouse with the least expense and for the least effort, sparkled on the hillside.

The greenhouse contained air heated by the local sun. The air escaped along the tube that ran along the ground and up the hill before making its final exit at the top of the chimney. Along the way, the wind thus created turned turbines that produced the electricity needed for the island's twenty-one thousand legionary personnel and their families plus those of the thirteen thousand legionaries deployed to the war. Intended, eventually, to provide electricity almost twice that many, the chimney operated at less than half capacity.

There was probably money to be made in connecting the island's own electrical grid to the larger grid of the host country, the Republic of Balboa. Moreover, there had in the past been murmurings from the mainland about forcing the owners of the island, the Legion del Cid, to do just that. The response of the Legion, having several times the coercive power of the Republic, to the idea of being forced into anything was silence containing a heavy admixture of wry contempt.

Still, in a spirit of 'one enemy at a time,'