Caliphate

by Tom Kratman

  "Where did he ever learn to be such a bastard?" Hodge asked, over a cold meal from a pouch. She, all fastidious, was trying very hard to eat the meal without at the same time eating the bugs that swarmed it.

  Both Miles and the XO, Fitzgerald, laughed. Miles added, "A bastard? You think so? You ain't seen nothin' yet."

  "Look, Laurie," Fitzgerald added. "He's got another three weeks to prep us for combat. It wouldn't be so bad if we'd kept our old platoons, Miles with First and me in Third, with the adjutant leading Second. But the personnel shuffle before we deployed wrecked all that. In point of fact the Army might need you someday, but the company doesn't. It would do as well or better with the platoon sergeants running the show and no lieutenants rather than still wet-behind-the-ears ones.

  But Thompson's stuck with you and making the best of it in the time he has."

  "Is that why he dumped Ken Parker?" Hamilton asked. "Is he going to try to get rid of Laurie and me, too?"

  "No," Miles said. "Or at least I don't think so. Parker was incompetent, an embarrassment to me as an American, and a worse one because we're both black. If the CO had wanted to get rid of you, he would have, but Parker had to go."

  "But he's just so mean about it," Hodge said.

  Fitzgerald shrugged. "The man's short on tact, I'll grant you. Hell, the last battalion commander was actually afraid of him, he's such a tactless bastard. But he's long on tactics and that matters more."

  "Pretty good loggie, too," Miles added.

  Al Harv Kaserne, Province of Affrankon, 8 Jumahdi II, 1531 AH (31 May, 2107)

  Hans was heartily sick of the religious instruction. Sure, they provided some snacks to supplement the otherwise bland diet. Sure, the bearded imam—a Sunni—in charge was an interesting, at least an enthusiastic, speaker and teacher. Sure, and best of all, no one was torturing his body to prepare it for future use as a janissary.

  None of that made up for the consistent, and concerted attacks on Hans' most cherished beliefs, learned from earliest age at his mother's knee, and in school.

  "To say that man is born into a state of original sin," said the imam scornfully, "means that the very handiwork of Allah Himself must be flawed. Yet this cannot be; Allah is perfect, in all he does. We do not worship mere power, boys, but perfection. Indeed, every child born is born into a state without sin, a state of purity."

  Hans was pretty certain, based on his dealings with other children, that they were no such thing.

  "Thus, there cannot have been a need for Jesus, Peace be upon Him, who was a prophet and no son of Allah except in the sense that all of mankind are His sons and daughters . . . there was no need for him to die on the cross to redeem that which Allah had—in His infinite mercy—already long since forgiven. This is perhaps the greatest of lies the Nazrani tell."

  It was tempting to think and yet . . .

  If Christ suffered and died for our sins, it is greater proof of His love for us than if he merely forgave us those sins.

  "Now there are some who think," the imam—no slouch as either a theologian or a teacher of young boys—continued, "that this alleged crucifixion of Christ is greater proof of Allah's love for man. Nothing could be further from the truth; for Allah's forgiveness alone is perfect and sufficient. The alleged crucifixion is superfluous."

  The imam must have noticed Hans' facial expression.

  "Yes, young eagle," he said, with a warm and friendly smile, "I can read your thoughts." The imam laughed. "No, I can't. But I've seen young reverted boys like you balk at that statement so many times I've come to expect it, and to note the signs of it. You have a question; I can see."

  Hans bowed his head respectfully. "Yes, sir. How do we know Allah did not have a son, as the Nazrani teach? He can, after all, do whatever he wishes."

  "Ah, but why would He want to?" the imam answered. "We have sons to carry on after us, because we all must grow old and die. But Allah is eternal and unchanging. He needs no son and His having one would be, again, superfluous. Worse, it is a form of polytheism, no different, in principle, from the beliefs of the old pagans. Even the accursed Jews never fell into this trap, though they fell into or created many others."

  "But Jesus, in both texts, performed miracles," Hans objected.

  The imam nodded, his face serious. "In both texts, indeed. Note, though, that even the Nazrani texts tend to agree that Jesus made few or no miracles on his own word, but always invoked the name of Allah. A son, one who was begotten by a father and thus like unto the father, would have needed no help."

  Hans nodded, not as if he agreed but as if he had no counter- argument. The imam saw this.

  "I know it is hard to give up the beliefs in which you were raised," he said, still smiling. The smile, if anything, grew self-deprecating. "Instant miracles are Allah's purview, not mine. There is time for you to come to the truth, boy. And the longer and harder the road, the more forcefully will you hold on to the truth once you reach it."

  Interlude

  Kitzingen, Federal Republic of Germany,

  16 January, 2004

  Gabrielle shook all the way home from the mosque. She'd torn her burka off and thrown it in the gutter scant steps after passing the mosque door. "They hate us that much? I can't believe it," she said, over and over.

  "Believe it, Gabi," Mahmoud said. "They despise everything about you . . . and about me, since I love you."

  She missed that admission. Hands waving widely, she said, "But surely those . . . those . . . lunatics are a tiny minority. Mahmoud, I know Muslim people who are nothing like that."

  "You think you know them," he corrected. "But you do not know that you know them. We have no problem lying to or hiding our beliefs from the 'infidels' when necessary . . . or just useful."

  Gabi shook her head. "But most of our Moslems come from Turkey, which is secular. A lot of them, too, come from the Balkans which didn't take religion seriously anyway."

  "And why do you suppose they left, then, some of them? Maybe because secularism and indifference to religion were not very comfortable to them, hmmm?"

  "But we're even more secular than Turkey and more indifferent than Bosnians."

  "That's true," he admitted, slowly shaking his head in quasi- agreement. "For now, it's true. Yet the Turkish army stands as a bulwark against mixing church and state, if only to preserve its own power. Does your army? As for the Bosnians . . . well, being Moslem there was a decidedly dangerous thing. Little wonder some of them left. And then, too, several thousand Germans convert to Islam annually."

  Gabrielle stopped walking and turned to face him. "You keep speaking as if religion mattered. I don't understand that. It doesn't matter to you."

  "Just because I'm not devout doesn't mean I'm an atheist, Gabi." He held his hands up defensively. "Yes, yes, I know you claim to be— something I hope to talk you out of, someday, by the way. Yet I've seen you clasp your hands sometimes in what looks to the casual outside observer to be much like prayer. You say things like, 'God help us,' and 'God damn them'—usually with regards to the Americans, of course."

  "Childhood conditioning with no faith behind it," she insisted.

  "Of course," Mahmoud said dryly.

  Ignoring the sarcasm, Gabi turned and began walking again, quietly at first. When she resumed speaking, she said, "It's all because we treat them as second class people here. No wonder they hate us when they see the fat and idle rich drive by in their Benzes. No wonder they hate us when we relegate them to jobs we think are beneath us. They have a right to hate us when we deprive them of the vote, even though they pay taxes, and refuse to let them become full citizens."

  "Well," Mahmoud said, in a deliberately neutral voice, "you've changed the law to do that."

  "Yes," she hissed, "but with such unfair restrictions that only a few can qualify. What? Fifty-six thousand Turks allowed to join our blessed Reich last year? Fewer, so they say, this year. Out of almost three million?"

  "Ah, so you would prefer to be more like
the Americans," he chided.

  She started to answer and then stopped, mouth half open. When she did speak it was only to say, "Fuck you, Mahmoud."

  At that he nodded vigorously. "Excellent idea. Your apartment or mine? And while we're on the subject, why are we still paying for two apartments?"

  It was only at that point that she realized what he had said earlier: "since I love you."

  Chapter Five

  I was never so enthusiastically proud of the flag till now!

  —Mark Twain, Incident in the Philippines

  Mindanao, Philippine Islands, 29 June, 2107

  The mosque burned with a greasy, sooty smoke. No wonder in that; there were bodies still inside. Around the mosque, likewise burned houses, stores, government buildings. From many of those, too, the smoke carried the savor of long pig.

  Hamilton watched Captain Thompson with interest. The captain himself watched several attached Filipino Military Police sweeping the clothing of the prisoners with chemical-sensitive wands. Those who failed the test were pushed off by Suited Heavy Infantry troopers to where others like them were engaged in digging a great ditch with hands and hand tools. Thompson raised a hand as the troopers began herding off a group of children, aged perhaps eight through eleven.

  "Put them with the other group, the monks' group," the captain ordered, causing Hamilton to breathe a sigh of relief.

  "But, Captain—" one of the MPs began to protest, a protest cut short by a snarl and a flash of eye.

  "They are just children, not responsible for being used as they were. Put them in the other group."

  "I don't see the frigging point," one of the MPs muttered under his breath. "What will the kids do with their parents dead? Besides, nits make lice."

  Hodge escorted a film group from IDI, the Imperial Department of Information, as they recorded scenes of the village. The group was arranging corpses. Rather, Hodge's platoon did the arranging, under IDI direction.

  IDI had, of course, closely monitored the approach to and fighting for the place, all recorded by satellite and lower-flying recon drones. They had some pretty good shots, she knew, of the few casualties taken in the assault: one man's suit utterly destroyed by a large, command-detonated mine, two more killed by shaped-charge grenades carried on rockets, one man whose suit was disabled and whom the Moros had de-suited and then hacked to bits. There had also been several each killed and wounded by large caliber rifle fire.

  Where the heavy caliber rifles had come from was a matter of some conjecture. The likeliest possibility, likely enough to call it a "probability," was that they had been smuggled across the sea by sympathizers in Moslem Malaysia and Indonesia. Already, airships were being loaded with massive quantities of aerial ordnance to level the coastal Malaysian and Indonesian cities from which the rifles had probably come. At other fields, fighter escorts and electronic warfare planes were likewise being readied to support and protect the airships. For that matter, given their size and carrying capacity, the airships packed an impressive defensive suite of their own, to include four fighters each.

  In a way, it was a waste. The ruins of the cities of the Caliphate of Islam, Triumphant, produced no technology able to stand up to the Empire's aerial juggernaut. What little they had was purchased, at ruinous expense, from the Chinese of the Celestial Kingdom of the Han.

  And if the Malaysians and Indonesians hadn't shipped the arms? Well, so what? It wasn't as if the Malaysians and Indonesians weren't numbered among the enemy, after all.

  Imperial casualties the locals would never be permitted to see, lest it give them hope, in the case of the Moros, or doubt in the case of the Christian Filipinos. Instead, they would see the results of the assault on the Moros themselves, a one-sided slaughter.

  Folks back home, on the other hand, would see the full story. It would just be highly edited to show the iniquity of the enemy; that, and the dire punishment meted out to him. IDI had had decades to perfect the art of the propaganda film, the masterful skill of the consummate liar. Michael Moore (despite his having been hanged in 2020) and Leni Riefenstahl were the unofficial heroes of the department.

  Around a fire a group of the troops were singing a song they'd rediscovered from a happier and simpler day and then modified to suit:

  "Damn, damn, damn the stinking Mor-or-ros,

  Cross-eyed, kakiak ladrones.

  Underneath the starry flag

  Christianize 'em with a Slag

  Then return us to our own beloved homes . . . "

  "You're a bona fide hero now, Hamilton," Thompson kidded, once the sorting had begun and the war crimes trials had commenced.

  The captain was joking, obviously enough, and so Hamilton didn't respond directly. Instead, he asked, "Why did you save those kids, sir?"

  "Softhearted, I guess," Thompson shrugged. "Besides, it was within my discretion. You object?"

  Actually, that was the first remotely human response Hamilton had ever seen from his commander. He answered, "No, sir, it just surprised me. It's a . . . weakness. I didn't think you had any."

  "I'm human enough, I assure you," Thompson said with a grim smile. "Those kids will be sent to a Christian orphanage," he explained. "There, they'll have the religion knocked out of them. Rather, they'll have their religion knocked out of them and ours, one of ours, substituted. In time, they'll become assets."

  Hamilton raised one eyebrow doubtfully. "That's not why you saved them."

  Thompson shook his head. "No . . . no, I saved them to sleep better at night. If you stay with the Army, young lieutenant, I suggest you find ways to help yourself sleep better at night, too."

  "I haven't done anything yet that bothers my conscience," Hamilton said.

  "No? You will."

  The captain directed his gaze out to sea where a dozen large amphibious craft were bringing in new, Christian, settlers to occupy the area just cleared of Moslems. The landing craft, under escort, of course, would be used to cart off the remaining original inhabitants— even now moving under guard to the shoreline—and dump them on the Malaysian or Indonesian coasts. The villagers hadn't been driven off with nothing; they still had their eyes to weep with.

  "All this would have been unthinkable, you know," the captain said, gesturing with one armored hand at the surrounding destruction, and not neglecting the long lines of Moros being ushered into tents where courts-martial were being held by the Army of the Philippines. "Even a century ago it would have been unthinkable, though a century and a half ago it was all too common.

  "The old law of war, you see, was a fragile thing, easily broken. And when the enemy ignored it and some of our own people tried to mold it to do too much, it broke. Now there's no law except for who is fastest, who is best armed and trained, who is most ruthless. And when the enemy demonstrated that the planet wasn't big enough for both of us and we demonstrated that it didn't necessarily have to contain both of us? That's when—"

  The captain's words were interrupted by a massive burst of weapons fire as the Filipino troops working with the company shot the first dozen of those villagers convicted of war crimes into the ditch they had themselves been forced to dig.

  By the fire, unbothered by the shootings, the troopers sang:

  "In that land of dopey dreams

  Happy peaceful Philippines . . . "

  Al Harv Barracks, Province of Affrankon, 10 Rajab,

  1531 AH (1 July, 2107)

  They started the boys off with light rifles, .22 caliber repeaters. Nazrani were barred from owning or holding arms by law. Yet the boys were no longer Nazrani and so they all—being, after all, boys— were simply thrilled. Here was power. Here was delight in destruction.

  The paper targets being destroyed would not have been thrilled, had they been anything other than paper targets. The one hare who bumbled onto the rifle range was definitely not thrilled. That hare had had too many close calls with death already in the last few years.

  Fortunately for the hare, the boys had not learne
d yet to be nearly as proficient with the rifles as falcons are born to be with their talons. Though little devils of dust burst all around the hare wherever the bullets struck, none of them struck the hare. A few hops and it was lost in the grass, trembling.

  The tent shuddered as its flap billowed in the midsummer's evening breeze. Within the tent, by the flaring light of a gas lantern, the instructors for the new recruits gathered to discuss their charges over coffee and tea. The senior drill instructor of the company, Abdul Rahman, held forth a number of names, Hans' among them, of recruits for whom it might be well to give advanced training in marksmanship, in time, and perhaps even in leadership.