Days of Burning, Days of Wrath

by Tom Kratman

  A third of the way through already. We’re not even slowing them down.

  Two of her own black-clad people sat down instead of proceeding to what was plainly an ad hoc POW holding area. That little knot of prisoners began moving again, and quite briskly, as soon as one of the guards shot both of the sit-down strikers, and without any obvious hesitation.

  Fanatical, ruthless, vicious children. None moreso than his son. Elder gods, what have I created? What have I let loose on the galaxy?

  Wallenstein buzzed her own quarters. “How long until your people arrive on the island?” she asked her lover, the Zhong empress, Xingzhen.

  “There was a delay. I am sorry, baobei; but I believe them when they say they’re moving as fast as they can.”

  Should I call them off? No, if they can grab the island outside of the base it’s a bargaining chip—no, don’t pretend you know things you don’t—it could become a bargaining chip. Let it ride.

  By that time the base was effectively all in the Balboans’ hands. If there were any holdouts, nothing her ship or the skimmers could sense indicated they were doing anything but trying to hide.

  At the same time, from the large collections of noncombatants that had been held outside of the ridge encircling the base from the land, steady streams began moving inward. She watched the progress for perhaps twenty minutes before she identified for a certainty that the civilians—And no, now the prisoners, too —were being marched to the large central park inside the base. She didn’t notice that two small vehicles likewise began moving toward the base’s park. She certainly didn’t have the kind of resolution to see that Hamilcar had likewise shown up at the park.

  Still, she was unsurprised when she asked, “Where’s the communicator I gave to Carrera right this minute?” to receive the answer, “At the central park.”

  “Put me through to him.”

  Atlantis Base

  “Hello, High Admiral. How can I help you this fine day of liberation?”

  Little bastard sounds smug enough.

  “What do you want?”

  Hamilcar glanced over at Irene Temujin, about whom he knew nothing beyond the spiderweb of scars she’d shown him across her back. “After what I’ve seen and been told here, High Admiral, I want your flayed hide nailed to a wall. I will settle, however, for what my father demands: your unconditional surrender and the unconditional surrender of the entire Peace Fleet, your holdings on the planet, your files, your embassies, and all of your personnel.”

  “I think that’s a little ambitious, young man.”

  “Is it? Is it once your crews know that if those ships do not surrender, I will, if necessary, set off one or two large nuclear weapons and kill their families here, in toto?”

  “That’s nons—”

  Impatiently, Ham interrupted with, “Hajar, High Admiral. You know, if anyone does, who destroyed Hajar. You know why. And you know where the nuke we used came from. Lastly, you know we have more.

  “Of course, we’ll only use the nukes if we’re rushed. Hmmm . . . you get visual on this thing, right? Yes, of course you do. Watch this, High Admiral.”

  Ham turned the communicator around to one corner of the park. Two men and one woman had been stripped of their clothing and now lay down atop hastily constructed crosses, bound at the wrists and feet to those crosses. He walked forward, to give the communicator a better angle. Then he focused on the woman as a burly centurion took a hammer in one hand and a large nail in the other.

  The hammer blurred. There was a loud clang of metal on metal. Blood welled up around the nail. A heart-tearing shriek followed instantly, then grew louder—impossibly loud—as the centurion drove the spike in with another half dozen solid hits.

  We have a lot to do, quickly, thought Ham; this is only a part of the play.

  UEPF Spirit of Peace

  Marguerite wanted to wretch as she saw the nail driven into Claudia Castro-Nyere’s right hand, just outward from the wrist joint. She ordered the Kurosawa to silence as she could not bear the sound of the screaming.

  I wanted the evil bitch dead, yes, but not like that.

  “You can be as much of a murdering little barbarian as you think you can get away with, young Carrera, but I still will not surrender and, if my people’s families come to harm, your country will be slagged.”

  “You sound very confident for something we both know is bullshit, High Admiral. Still, I’ll let you stew for a while, contemplating all the worst we can do. And, you know, while you’re stewing, your crews can stew, too. Carrera the Younger, out.”

  What did he mean, “something we both know is bullshit”? What does that little bastard know? And how could he know it?

  “Khan, what did that little monster mean about ‘bullshit’?”

  “I’m guessing that he means we both know the Federated States would go to war, without any restrictions, if we use nukes anywhere on the planet.”

  “But he knows about all the nukes we sent down to the Salafi Ikhwan. We sent them because ours didn’t work.”

  “Sure, High Admiral, but there’s another and more plausible explanation for our sending them nukes from down below: to, again, keep the Federated States from blasting us.”

  “Maybe that’s it,” she tentatively agreed. But I’m not sure of it. Could we have a spy aboard?

  Atlantis Base

  The crowd—half in stunned silence and half weeping—gathering in the central park was on the order of ten thousand or more, between spouses and children, ground crew, grounded pilots on crew rest, administration, etc. It was important to the plan that they be separated out by their connection to the Peace Fleet.

  “Shut the fuck up!” The speaker, an intelligence warrant named Robles, stood with a handheld megaphone atop a hastily piled mass of office furniture. “It is critical, both to our purposes and your own continued good health,” the English-speaking warrant said, “that you be segregated by ship and ground function.” He jerked a thumb at a place behind him where the last of three crosses was being erected, each with an agonized Class One nailed to it.

  “Don’t fuck with us. We don’t care about your special status; you have no special status. You have no rights. You have no privileges. You do what you’re told, when you’re told, and you need not—you and your children—end up on one of those. If you don’t cooperate, however . . .”

  He consulted a clipboard listing the name of every ship in the Peace Fleet. It had never been secret.

  “Very good. Now all people connected in some way to the ship UEPF Spirit of Brotherhood, come forward to me with any bags and children you may have. Quickly now, we don’t have all fucking day . . .”

  UEPF Spirit of Peace

  Shorter than Wallenstein by nearly a foot, Xingzhen was still the dominant one. With Marguerite slumped in a chair, head resting on arms crossed on her desk, the Zhong empress stroked her back and whispered words as soothing as she could come up with. Under the circumstances, these were probably not as soothing as one could have wished for but, for all her flaws, lying was not something Xingzhen generally permitted herself.

  “I’ve asked my general staff back home,” she said. “There is a way to save your people and your base. Yes, we can do this.”

  “How?” Wallenstein asked, without raising her head.

  “I’ve ordered a holdup of the two battalions I was sending. Within two days we will have almost a full division of parachutists assembled on Wellington.”

  “I’m surprised it isn’t a full division.”

  “It was going to be, but some has to be left behind to make room for a special regiment.”

  “Special?”

  “Very special. Our army is huge, and our military personnel very high quality. They’re not as well armed as some, but the quality of the people is still the best.

  “Even with that, though, some are better than others. This special regiment is a little under a thousand men and has the highest quality manpower in the entire Zhong Empire. It
is trained to attack and render useless nuclear facilities: missile silo farms, submarines, air bases; all that kind of thing. The airborne division will land and form up to attack the perimeter of the base. While they are landing, the specials will jump with—do I have to say ‘special’ again?—parachutes that will allow them to glide a long distance. They could go further, I’m told, but they tend to get disorganized and dispersed, so they’ll jump at about sixteen hundred meters and about five kilometers from Atlantis Base. Their jumping will be covered by the mass jump of the airborne division. When the Balboans rush to defend the perimeter, the special regiment will swoop in.”

  “They’ll be seen, won’t they?”

  “Probably not; they’ll go in by night and, yes, before you ask, we expect ten to fifteen percent casualties from the jump and landing alone.”

  “It won’t work,” Marguerite said. “What if they get fighters from somebody? Any fighter aircraft and they’ll smash your planes in the air.”

  “No,” Xingzhen said softly. “No, they won’t. I have ordered the carrier and the remnants of the fleet to abandon our lodgment—abandon the men in our lodgment—and sail for Atlantis at what they call ‘flank speed.’ If fighters show up, they’ll be met by a fighter screen of our own.”

  “But the men in the lodgment . . . ?”

  “That war is lost beyond recovery. I’m going to give them permission to surrender, but if and only if the Balboans forgo their demand for ransom.”

  Slowly Marguerite raised herself. “But . . .” she began to object.

  “I’m not sure you understand,” the Zhong empress said, bending over at the waist to bury her face in Marguerite’s fragrant blond hair. “And I know I haven’t been good at showing it—part of the game we play—but I love you and would do anything in my power for you. I think you’re the only one I’ve ever loved. I would do anything.”

  “Thank you,” whispered Marguerite, before adding, more loudly, “you must know how terribly I love you, too.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The punishment for those who fight God and His Messenger, and strive to spread corruption on earth, is that they be killed, or crucified, or have their hands and feet cut off on opposite sides, or be banished from the land. That is to disgrace them in this life; and in the Hereafter they will have a terrible punishment.

  —Sura 5.33, The Table

  Oppenheim, Sachsen

  It was all very Teutonic, really, the way Alix Speidel was able to suppress her personal feelings in order to save her country. And, to be fair, it doesn’t hurt any that he did in fact save me from another several hours of taking it up the ass, likely to be followed by a short time of bleeding out after they cut my throat. Unless, of course, they’d realized who I was and decided to take their time over it.

  They might, indeed, have taken their time over it.

  “So what now, then?” she asked.

  “Now we have to find your minister,” answered Khalid. “Any ideas?”

  “Not really,” she answered. “He was a Kosmo, so could not normally bear even to say hello to me. I understand he had a wife in the capitol, Potsdam, and a mistress in Leinenfeld.”

  “I don’t believe that,” Khalid said. “Leinenfeld doesn’t even exist. I mean, have you ever been to Leinenfeld? Do you even know anyone from Leinenfeld? Have you ever met this supposed mistress from Leinenfeld?”

  “Aha,” she accused, “so you take this Leinenfeld conspiracy seriously.”

  “No,” Khalid answered, smiling, “but I figured you could use a good laugh.”

  “We Sachsens have no sense of humor,” she answered primly. “It is a well-known fact.”

  And then, remarkably, she began to giggle. The giggle transformed into a single laugh which she tried to suppress. Failing in that, she had to let the next laugh escape. From there, there was no holding it back. She ended up rolling on the floor, repeating, over and over, “Do you even know anybody from Leinenfeld?”

  After rather a long time—and whether it was because the humor had worn out or because her sides began to hurt rather badly—the laughter subsided.

  “Thank you,” she said. “I needed that.”

  “Figured. Now if you were the minister of finance, and you were running for your life, would you run to your wife or your girlfriend?”

  “Well, I, of course, have superb taste in women, so as far as that sort of thing goes, either would do.” This time she was able to kill a fit of laughing before it could take her over.

  A good sign, thought Khalid, that she can crack a joke, too.

  “However,” she continued, “wives are at homes, with known addresses. In his shoes, that is absolutely where I would not want to be. So the mistress’s place, I would think.”

  “How would we find her name and address?”

  She thought back. “Well, let me think; how did I find out about it? Mmmm . . . it was from one of my colleagues and she got it from a scandal sheet. But which one? I can’t recall.”

  “The global net, then,” said Khalid. “But my power won’t last indefinitely. Sure, I have a hand generator to charge it, but that takes time. Let me compose and send a message home.”

  Khalid emerged from his own room chuckling, lightly. “How far does this conspiracy go?” he wondered aloud. “Fernandez answers, ‘Leinenfeld? We don’t think it exists. But we’ll see what we can do. Save your battery. Check back in six hours.’”

  “Wait!” Alix said. “Your own chief of intelligence doubts Leinenfeld exists?”

  “He must be serious, too,” said Fritz. ”If you think Sachsens have no sense of humor, you haven’t seen anything until you’ve seen Fernandez.”

  “Merest truth,” Khalid confirmed. “Maybe Leinenfeld really doesn’t exist.”

  “Oh, of course it does,” said Alix.

  “Have you ever been there?” Khalid asked, again.

  “Do you know anyone from there?” Fritz added.

  “Do you even know anyone who’s been there?” asked the third of the Balboan agents.

  That set Alix to another round of uncontrollable, painfully side-splitting laughter. When she’d recovered a bit, she said, “The chancellor, the Reichskitzler, once said she’d been there.”

  “Ah, but she’s a well-known liar,” said Khalid. “What more proof do you need?”

  “Stop, dammit, stop!” Alix rolled onto her side, her arms gripping her sides, in another fit. “Bastards!”

  At the proper time Khalid rebooted his computer. There was, as promised, a message there. Decoded, it read:

  “The name of the girlfriend is Ann-Marie Maybach, aged twenty-four. Though we still harbor our doubts about the existence of Leinenfeld; if it does exist, there are three women with that name in a certainly forged and fraudulent telephone directory for this town that probably doesn’t exist. One of them is seventy-three. One we do not know the age of. The third is thirty-two. If the last isn’t lying, and what woman of at least twenty-one lies to make herself older, then it’s the second. Her address is Two Brunnenstrasse, Leinenfeld. There is a parking garage across the street and the town’s main theater half a block east. We are arranging on-call transportation—a helicopter, or possibly two, with one to refuel—for a pickup in the swimming pool park six hundred meters southwest. It will not show for at least two and a half hours after you call. Good luck.

  “Further, we have reason to believe the other two agents we sent you are not coming. Act accordingly.

  “PS: If you have the opportunity, please confirm if Leinenfeld University is, in fact, a disguise for a hidden UEPF base.”

  This Fernandez is pulling my leg, thought Alix. He’s got more of a sense of humor than these two give him credit for.

  “And now,” Khalid observed, “the big problem is getting there. All the highways run through or at least close to cities. The cities are where the Moslems are. They will control ingress and egress.”

  He looked very pointedly at Alix. “We have what amount to vouchers and
passes from their local religious leaders. We have guns. We have gold to bribe. The problem is you.”

  “Me, how?”

  “How much do you know about Islam?”

  She shrugged with indifference. “Essentially nothing.”

  “Then you wouldn’t be one of them. A good deal of what they think they know is nonsense, theological balderdash, picked up from barely literate imams who don’t really understand their own holy book. But there are a number of things they’ll agree on: the five pillars of the faith, some of the history, that kind of thing.

  “If you don’t know any of that, and if we’re stopped by a checkpoint and you’re asked, it could get ugly.”

  “Okay, I can see that,” she agreed. “What do you suggest?”

  “Defense in depth,” Khalid replied. “We shall put you in a burka, which will discourage anyone from trying to question you . . .”

  “And?” She wasn’t fond of the idea of being wrapped in a black sack, but she suspected it could be worse. Hell, I know it can be worse.

  “And you will be presented, if necessary, as our slave. Or my slave.”

  “You mean sex slave, right?”

  Khalid looked somewhat embarrassed as he admitted, “Well, all slaves are potentially sex slaves, so yes.”

  “Okay, what do I care what they think?”

  “Well . . .” Khalid hesitated, before continuing, “if you’re a sex slave they may offer to buy you, which I can refuse without suspicion until the price rises to a certain level, when it would be very suspicious if I didn’t sell.”