by Tom Kratman
"Crap!" he said aloud.
The sergeant then turned to the main gate where stood the same gate guard who had admitted Hans just a little earlier. Ignoring the guard, the sergeant picked up the phone and punched in the number for the corbasi's command post at af-Fridhav. Modular mine packs were going off around the perimeter. The sergeant had to assume all the mines were armed and live, now. Shit.
"Headquarters," came the answer.
The sergeant's voice was frantic. "This is Castle Honsvang, Sergeant of the Guard Bozkurt. We're under attack. The odabasi is in there. I don't know if he's alive or dead."
af-Fridhav, Province of Baya, 24 Muharram,
1538 AH (4 November, 2113)
"Calm down, sergeant," said the colonel. "I'll be along immediately with reinforcements. The important thing is not to let the enemy escape. . . . Sergeant? Sergeant?" The line was dead.
"Bloodyfuckinghell!" the colonel exclaimed, before shouting out, "Alert company . . . boots and saddles . . . im-fucking-mediately!"
Thinking about what he'd told the sergeant, about how the critical thing was to keep the enemy from escaping, the colonel realized that the enemy was most likely going to try to escape by air. How, he didn't know, but Switzerland was close and those brazen bastards were likely to be in on this. The colonel then began to dial for air support. Though Allah knows how long it will take those idiots to get out of bed, let alone get a couple of planes in the air.
The Caliphate's Air Force was filled with the lazy sons of rich, connected, powerful men. All the janissaries had contempt for them.
Briefly, the colonel considered delaying long enough for the men to draw heavy weapons and the ammunition for them. Ultimately, he decided that there just wasn't time, that a faster response was better than a more powerful one.
Castle Honsvang, Province of Baya, 24 Muharram,
1538 AH (4 November, 2113)
Sergeant Bozkurt heard the tone on the line change from his living colonel's voice to absolutely dead. Shit. What the hell do I do now? Gotta think . . . gotta think. What do I know and what don't I know?
One: I know there are enemies inside and that their numbers are great enough to take down one hundred and seventy or more guards, most asleep but probably some of them alert. Okay, so myself and my fourteen men are outnumbered. Bad, bad, very bad.
Two: They might be a suicide mission but probably are not. If they were, they would have blown the castle sky high already rather than screwing around with retail work. So they intend to escape.
Three: If they intend to escape, they'll have some means, ground or air. I can't do squat about the air at the moment, since if it's coming it isn't here yet, but I can keep them from getting away by ground. And I can try to counterattack.
"Corporals! Corporals of the Guard! Report!"
While those were assembling, the sergeant said to the gate guard, the only man outside the perimeter of mines, "I relieve you. Run like the wind to the other castle and bring the baseski and the others. Run, son, RUN!"
"Hans? Hans report!"
"This is Hans . . . ready room is taken down and the guards dead . . . exterior doors are bolted and the mine and mine packs activated. I'm . . . not in such good shape."
"Communications?" Hamilton asked.
"Cut . . . but not before they could have gotten word out. Petra?"
"I'm listening, Brother."
"Get ready. There will probably be a column coming from af- Fridhav soon."
Petra sounded more cold than nervous to Hamilton when she answered, "I'm ready."
Hamilton's goggled gaze swept the room full of corpses. He knew that the cyanide would pass through his skin if he stayed around long enough. He began to back out, careful not to trip over any of the sprawled bodies. "Hans, I'm finished here. We've got to get control of the scientists."
"Understood. They'll probably have heard or felt the blast. I suspect they'll head to the lab to try to ensure the survival of their work."
"Good thought. I'll clear their rooms, to make sure, and join you there."
Hamilton pulled several bodies away from the door, then exited and shut it behind him. No sense in letting the gas escape.
Claude O. Meara, Guillaume Sands, and John Johnston the Fourth met on the broad landing outside their suites of rooms. Meara, as was often the case, had a young boy on a leash. Sands and Johnston held flashlights.
"What the fuck is going on?" Sands asked.
"Explosion," Johnston said. "Felt like it came from the direction of the lab."
"Merde!" Sands exclaimed. "We must save our work!" He and Johnston ran for the broad staircase that led below, ever so slowly followed by the waddling Meara, tugging on his play toy's leash.
The night vision goggles on his head were not nearly as good as what Hamilton had become used to in the Imperial Army. Even so, they were better than the predecessor to that army had had up until about the year 2014. They still gave no depth perception, but that was something inherent in the very idea. The picture was a bit grainier than he was used to, but that could be lived with. They were sufficient for him to see by, to vault obstacles with, and to find his way to the three renegades' doors based on his memory of the diagrams Hans had drawn over a week earlier.
Open. They're gone. Now where to? Probably the lab, just as Hans thought they would. Feets, don't fail me now.
On his way down, Hamilton heard some pounding at the heavy wooden door that stood between two tall towers at the front of the castle. The door barely seemed to notice yet, so it seemed to him, Even so, given enough time even a soft pounding might cause the door to come off its heavy hinges. He checked his downward progress and made his way to the leftmost of the two towers that flanked the door. Looking down he saw two men holding up one end of a log. He estimated there might be enough space for another four that he couldn't see.
Wish I had some grenades, Hamilton mused. Oh, well, no sense crying for what wasn't available.
He turned a crank to slightly open a window, then pushed the muzzle of his submachine gun out the crack. Taking aim, Hamilton squeezed off two bursts—pffft . . . pffft—that sent the two men he could see sprawling in pools of blood. The pounding from down below stopped immediately. One other janissary, brave or stupid, showed himself as he tried to drag the bodies behind cover. Pffft.
May not stop 'em but it will slow them down.
Hamilton turned from the window and continued his progress to the cellar and the lab.
Hans, stunned or not, still beat the renegades to the lab area. He found a seat which he pushed off to one side. He then waited for them to arrive. He heard them, two of them anyway, long before he saw them. His submachine gun was already reloaded by the time Sands and Johnston arrived.
"Freeze, swine!" Hans said once the two were in his sights. When they had, he amended, "Get on your bellies, filth! Where's the grotesquely fat one?"
Meara stopped when he heard the voice. He stopped so suddenly, in fact, that the play toy bumped into his overly ample rump in the dark.
My God, Meara thought. They've come to get me.
His universe had always been centered on himself. He couldn't imagine any attack on the castle that did not have him as its prime target. They'll put me in prison. I'll be beaten . . . people will be mean to me. I've got to get out of here. And to hell with the others.
In his panic, Meara dropped the leash. The play toy wasn't important and would only slow him down. As fast as his lard encased legs would carry him, he began to waddle back the way he had come. Perhaps there would be time to get at his funds, or at least at his Swiss bankbook, before he made his escape.
It was a great surprise to Meara when an open palm slammed into his face, knocking him on his overstuffed rear to the cold floor. There, stunned, he lay quivering like the product of a Jell-O mold. Meara began to weep.
"I don't think so, you piece of rat-filth," said Hamilton.
Interlude
Nuremberg, Federal Republic of Germany,<
br />
17 October, 2021
In 2006 there had been just over three million Muslims in Germany. By 2016 this had grown to five, even as the number of Germans in the country had dropped and the average age of those who remained had increased. By 2019, with the massive influx of refugees from the radioactive ruins of the Islamic world, there were ten million Muslims in Germany or roughly thirteen percent of the population. Their average age was younger. Worse, the percentage of those that could be considered radical had grown enormously, partly as a result of the American atrocities against them, but equally because of their second class status in Germany.
Then again, there were those who claimed that Muslims would be radicalized by any social order that didn't place them on top and everyone else beneath them, as the Holy Koran called for.
Gabi didn't, couldn't, believe that. Fascist, racist nonsense, she thought. People are just people and will act well unless the iniquities and inequalities of society are too much to bear.
Muslim society in Germany was also highly urbanized. In the largest cities, some of them, they even made up a majority of the population. Even where they didn't, they often had the numbers where young and belligerent males were concerned. Street fights had become common. Nor were Germans generally coming out on top, except in the case of those who sided with the Muslim street brawlers, such as Anti-Fascist Action, a German derivative of a Swedish movement with origins in the British Isles. As in Sweden and parts of France twenty years prior, there were places in Germany now where the police simply would not go.
In an effort to placate the Muslims and stem the violence, Germany had established Sharia courts under Islamic scholars for Muslim communities. Moreover, acting under orders from the Supreme Court, itself under the European Court of Justice (itself having taken in and taken over the personnel and duties of the European Court of Human Rights), local German courts had taken to using Sharia in cases involving only Muslims within Germany.
If this did anything to stem the outrage of Muslim residents, though, it was tolerably hard to see.
In Nuremberg, however, things were not so bad. Of the city's population of about half a million, fewer than twenty-five thousand were Islamic. There were neighborhoods Gabi and Amal dared not go, of course, as there were in virtually every European city. But they were few, small, and generally avoidable.
Too, Gabi avoided thinking about the implications of there being places within her own country that she and her child dared not go.
The Christkindlmarkt hadn't opened in several years. The last time it had, even Nuremberg's comparatively few Muslims had been able to shut it down . . . violently. This had, as in many parts of Europe, led to an expansion of Muslim representation in the Polizei. The practical effect of that, however, had merely been to give the imams and mullahs their own, state-funded, enforcement arms. If it produced greater peace within and around the Muslim community it was only because, having no place else to turn, moderate Muslims knuckled under to the rule of the mullahs.
Before Europe betrayed itself, it first made sure to betray those outsiders who truly wanted to become European.
The practice of French Muslims, to the extent that that wasn't a contradiction in terms, of engaging in gang rape of both European girls and Muslim girls who failed to dress the part—tournante, or taking one's turn, in French—had spread, too. But with the courts and police only interested in keeping the peace—as well as they were able, at least, within the German community—girls had little recourse. Germany's thirteen percent Muslims accounted for about eighty-eight percent of all rapes in Germany. This was perhaps not such a bad record. In Sweden, twenty years prior, they'd been credited with as much as eighty-five percent of all rapes, and that from a much smaller percentage of the population. Some argued that this showed that Germany was doing a better job of assimilation. It may even have been true.
Gabi refused to listen to those figures, too.
Chapter Seventeen
And even more honor is due to them
when they foresee (as many do foresee)
that Ephialtis will turn up in the end,
that the Medes will break through after all.
—C.P. Cavafy, "Thermopylae"
Castle Noisvastei, Province of Baya, 24 Muharram,
1538 AH (4 November, 2113)
The gate guard from Castle Honsvang, breathless from his long uphill run, pounded on the great gates outside the castle until his hands began to bleed.
"All right, all RIGHT! I'm coming," shouted Latif from a window overlooking the near side of the gate. He muttered, too, "Where did the damned gate guard go? I'll have the skin off that lazy bastard's back for this."
In fact, the brothel's gate guard beat Latif to the gate by some seconds. All full of apologies, he insisted he'd only left to relieve himself. Latif said he'd take that under consideration, "Just before I have you beaten half to death and sold to a eunuch factory."
That sent the gate guard to his knees, begging for mercy and forgiveness, until Latif, realizing he couldn't open the gate on his own, said, "Never mind. Just stop blubbering and help me with this Allah- be-damned bar."
Together the two men lifted it, the gate guard doing most of the work, and admitted the breathless corporal.
"The men . . . from the security . . . company . . . you've got to rouse them . . . we are . . . attacked."
"Shit!"
Flight Seven Nine Three, 24 Muharram,
1538 AH (4 November, 2113)
"Shit," exclaimed Lee/Ling. The eyes opened wide with shock and fear. "They've made us. Shanghai tells me there are two fighters lifting from ar-Ramstei even as we speak."
"Fuck," agreed Matheson, "what can we do?"
"Can't outrun them," Lee answered. "Can't fight them at all. Can't surrender."
"Set her down?" suggested Retief, a member of the team since Matheson had been able to get agreement—"from the highest authorities"—that his family would be traded for from the Boer Republic. "How good's their radar?"
Lee shook Ling's head. "Second rate. What they make for themselves is poor. What we and the tsar sell them isn't great either. Good enough to see us in the air, yes. But good enough to catch us on the ground? Maybe not. The problem is that if I set down, some one of the locals will see us. And, given that, they might report it to the authorities. And there's no place around here that doesn't have some little town or other within view."
"Report us to the authorities?" Matheson mused. "Let me see the map."
Looking it over, Matheson saw one town a bit more isolated than the others in the area. "Set us down right next to that," he said. "I have an idea." He turned to one of the ex-cargo slaves and ordered, "Get me a couple of sheets . . . no . . . ah . . . three of them . . . and three checked tablecloths from the galley . . . and . . . ummm . . . a piece of rope or heavy string . . . say . . . ten feet worth. And bring me a sharp knife."
"Does this thing have a public address set?"
Matheson watched the ex-slave scurry off. And that's what I'm counting on; that slaves don't usually ask—lack the self confidence to ask, really—too many questions of those who seem to be in authority.
Castle Honsvang, Province of Baya, 24 Muharram,
1538 AH (4 November, 2113)
The sergeant of the guard was neither a coward nor a fool. He'd been at the front of the battering ram, on the theory that fire, if any, would most likely come from inside once the door was down. When his men grasping the rear were cut down, he'd waited to see if any more fire came their way. When it didn't, he said a small prayer and walked out into the open, onto the blood-stained stones that marked where the enemy could fire, if he was still there.
Apparently, he's not. Still, if I pull more men off the perimeter and some kind of aircraft shows up, as I expect it will, the enemy might be able to get away.
Fuck.
Highway 310, Northwest of ar-Rebchel, Province of Baya, 24 Muharram,
1538 AH (4 November, 2113)
The lights shone through the trees. Even before seeing the lights, though, Petra had heard the sound of the engines. With each meter closer, with each increase in the noise, with each glimpse of the headlights through the trees, the pounding in her chest grew.
For a moment she wanted to run into the little place inside herself where she'd hid during her rape, the same place that sheltered her during all the other abuses that had followed. And yet . . .