A Desert Called Peace cl-1

by Tom Kratman

  It was surprising, then, that neither her looks nor her character did any good at all with her husband's family.

  Linda sighed. Patricio's family has never liked or accepted me. I suppose they never will. No, that's not quite fair, she amended. With the exception of this one cousin, they despise me. But Annie is always friendly. These trips would be a lot more difficult than they are but for her. Linda smiled at her husband's cousin, seated opposite her in the crowded First Landing restaurant.

  Annie Hennessey was taller than Linda by almost half a foot. Where Linda was dark with midnight hair, Annie was pale white and dark blond. Not as pretty-well, few were-she was still quite an attractive, and exceptionally well built, woman in her own right. She felt none of the common jealousy at Linda's uncommon looks.

  Linda sighed again. "Why don't they like me?" she asked.

  "Like you?" Annie asked. "Honey, everyone likes you… oh, you mean the family. Well… they're just assholes." Leaning forward across the table to be heard over the hubbub of the crowd, Annie said, "The thing is, Linda, dear, that you make them feel inferior. After all, what is my family but a bunch of broken down farmers who grafted themselves onto some down and out families of WASPs? Well, and a few well-to-do Jews, too, of course.

  "But you on the other hand? When the first major colonization ship to this part of the world made its final approach orbit you had ancestors to wave to it from below. When they put up their first building, you had ancestors that said, 'There goes the neighborhood.' You even come from old money. Oh, not so much as we have, I know-not nearly-but it's older. And that counts, my dear.

  "You make Uncle Bob's skin crawl, because everything he has clawed his way to, everything his father and his grandfather and his great-grandfather clawed their way up from, you came by naturally."

  Annie stopped speaking and sawed and speared a bit of steak from her plate for emphasis.

  "Is that why he insists on seeing me and the children at his office? Surrounded by his tokens and triumphs?" Linda asked.

  "That… yes," Annie responded, slowly. "Other things too. You see, our family has been in decline for more than forty years. Not in money, but in people. We lost about half when the UEPF bombed Botulph. After that, few of the women wanted children. Of those few, some couldn't have any. Bob's wife never had any, for example. And when you subtract the couple of gay boys and the occasional girl who will never have children… nope, we are in decline."

  Annie paused and leaned back in her chair, looking back across the veil of years. "I remember when I was a little girl everyone setting so much store by Pat. It used to kill me the way he was doted on. Yes, even us girl cousins… we all spoiled him rotten. He seemed to have something the rest of us had lost; a certain, oh, spark, I guess. Uncle Bob in particular expected him to grow up to take over the business."

  Linda snorted. "Patricio? Business? He despises business."

  "Oh, I know," Annie agreed. "He always did. Me, too. So I don't do it; I just live off the trust fund."

  Annie sipped at her drink, sipped again… again. "I always understood him better than the others did. If I had been a man, I'd have joined the army too, to make my own escape."

  She continued, "So, anyway, when he ran off to join the army at age eighteen, it just infuriated Bob. And enlisting rather than going to one of the military academies? Well, we haven't had an enlisted man in our family since Great-great-great-uncle Bill with the 12th Wichita Infantry in the Formation War. Then, when Pat insisted on staying in the army… well… it took the heart right out of Uncle Bob at first. That was when he cut Pat off, you know. It wasn't anything to do with you."

  "Well, here I have one son and two daughters," Linda said. "They carry the name, they've even got your family's color rather than mine. And the women of my family insist on having children… lots of them. Speaking of which…"

  "Yes?" Annie asked, expectantly.

  Linda just smiled and held up three fingers, then slowly raised her little finger to make a fourth.

  Cochea,

  10/7/459 AC

  As Linda and Annie dined in First Landing, in the Federated States, Hennessey, Parilla and Jimenez pored over maps from the Federated States invasion of Balboa, in 447, called "Operation Green Fork." Hennessey was working on a history of that invasion-something neutral and objective to balance the often propaganda- distorted works already in print. He had to work on something to keep busy and to feel useful, not having a job to call his own anymore. Indeed, he had several projects going at any given time. One of them was a translation into Balboan Spanish of a novel by an Old Earth writer he knew only as R.A.H.

  Jimenez pointed a long, thin finger at the map. "Right there, Patricio. Right on that damned corner was where the war started."

  Hennessey straightened up from the maps. "Tell me about it, Xavier."

  As Jimenez spoke, Hennessey went to his computer and began to type, fingers blurring over the keyboard.

  Zabol, Pashtia, 10/7/459 AC

  Some miles from the center of the city of Zabol a bearded man hunched over a keyboard. Very slender and tall, as were most of his people, the man had to hunch deeply, uncomfortably, to perform his task. In the dim light the glow of the computer monitor illuminated his face to the semblance of a demon, though in daylight his face was quite decent and even handsome. Distantly, an electrical generator groaned, the sound traveling down damp, narrow hallways. The generator brought light and heat, and powered the fans that brought fresh air to this elaborate complex of caves and tunnels painstakingly carved and blasted from the living rock. The complex was one of several, not all of them in Pashtia.

  Abdul Aziz Ibn Kalb brought up a free e-mail service, Firestarter, and then typed a sign-in name-"islandsrfrdude"-and a password. The screen changed to reveal an account with nothing but spam in the inbox, and no messages sent. He began to compose a meaningless message.

  Composition completed, Aziz attached a photo as a jpeg file. The photo, properly processed, contained a message, simply, "CA39, Desperation Bay, Execute, 11/7."

  Aziz saved the message to his draft folder, which was actually physically located on a server far, far away. He then closed the account. When it was opened later in the day, in Yithrab, it would be copied to a different account and saved into yet another draft folder and server. From there it would be opened in Lancaster in Anglia and copied yet again to a different account. Finally, when opened in the rebuilt city of Botulph, in the Federated States, it would never actually have been sent. There would be no easy trace to Zabol or to Abdul Aziz.

  That task completed, Aziz typed into the computer, "Wahoo. sig."

  Botulph, Federated States, 10/7/459 AC

  "The orders are received. We go tomorrow."

  " Allahu akbar. Allahu akbar, " the swarthy men congratulated each other, shaking hands and slapping backs in unconstrained joy. God is great; God is great. Now, finally, they were chosen to strike a great blow against their greatest enemy. Now, at last, they would bring home to the Great Demon the meaning of war. Could there be any doubt of their coming success, their cause being just and the Most High being on their side?

  "Shall we rehearse again?" asked the youngest member of the team.

  The leader smiled indulgently and answered, "No need, Samadi. We have rehearsed so many times any one of us could cut a throat in our sleep. Go out. Have a good time. Just be asleep before midnight and remember that tomorrow night you will be feasting among the houris of Paradise."

  Samadi simply shook his head in the negative and went to his room to study his flight manuals.

  Yusef, the convert, likewise didn't go out. Instead he pulled out the guitar that he loved and began to play and sing something of his own composition:

  "I've been dreamin' fait'f'ly

  Dreamin' about the jihad to come…"

  Interlude

  21 January, 2037 to 14 March, 2040

  … to emerge, unknown to Mission Control, somewhere… else.

  The robot
didn't know where it was; the star and constellations matched nothing in the catalogue. It didn't know how it got there. Most disconcertingly, it had lost touch with Mission Control. It blared out a distress signal. It blared in vain.

  This was where good programming came in. While this precise turn of events had definitely not been foreseen-no one on Earth remotely suspected the existence of such a flaw in space-other emergencies which that have required a certain amount of independent judgment on the part of the ship had.

  The robot did know it was still functioning. It did know there was a star ahead. It could sense that planets orbited that star. It knew that it had a mission. And it had a star map of the stars as it emerged in the new system, which map was updated over. With this, and what could be gleaned of the solar system in which it found itself, the robot got to work.

  Having a star ahead was important, for without photons to brake its flight the robot-ship had little choice but to continue on to wherever the solar winds or inertia might take it. Its own maneuvering capability was quite limited.

  Accordingly, the ship began furling the sail, pumping out the gas that held it erect and reeling in the filaments that connected it to the ship. When this was done, the entire assembly was rotated using some of the small amount of conventional fuel carried, to where the robot decided the sail was best suited to braking. It was then unfurled. The light from the sun was not sufficient to fully brake, however, if the ship followed a purely straight path. The robot began calculating an orbital path that would allow it to come very close to the light and heat of the foreign sun, thereby chopping its velocity to something it could work with.

  This took several months, months well spent in analyzing the system. It found, for example, that the fourth world was in the right range to support life. It found further that the other five planets spinning about the local sun were not, being either far too hot or far too cold. There was no asteroid belt.

  The fourth world, further, showed an oxygen nitrogen atmosphere, had an albedo indicating that it was about seventy percent covered in water and thirty percent in land, and had polar icecaps and some seasonal variation, though less than Earth's. It had small moons, three of them, which were certain to produce tides, though of lesser intensity than did Earth's sole companion, Luna. Spectral analysis showed plant life in profusion and limited volcanic activity. The closer the robot-ship came to the world its programming had settled on, the more it saw weather, as well.

  The robot-ship was never designed to land upon any world, whether of its origin, its intended target, or this new and unknown place. It was equipped to explore, nonetheless, if a found world had an atmosphere. In the last half of its cylinder, carefully cradled, rested two parachute landers and two high altitude gliders. It released one of each over the fourth world as it passed close by.

  The glider was never intended to come to a rest and did not. Released from the ship at low velocity relative to its target and with wings folded, it simply went ballistic until reaching the first thin traces of gas in the fourth planet's troposphere. At that point it deployed its wings. Solar powered itself, with a small propeller for propulsion and control surfaces for minor adjustments, it fought for control against the wind that threatened to rip it apart and the gravity that sought it in a deadly embrace. It was touch and go for a while but-to give NASA's executives their due; when they take a bribe to buy a Japanese-built gliding drone for interstellar exploration work, they at least make sure the drone can do the work before cashing the check-the glider skipped along, its microminiaturized camera and radar mapping the surface.

  The gliding drone lasted quite some time. Not so the first parachute lander. It actually had a much easier time of it, initially, surviving entry into the planet's atmosphere and coming to rest lightly under its deployed parachute. It even managed to release its parachute precisely as it touched down, the wind carrying the 'chute off and allowing the lander to use its cameras and other sensors unobstructed. Sadly, however, as it was sending a continuous stream of video information to the Cristobal Colon, said stream showing a number of very large and tusked herbivores, one of the herbivores stepped on it, crushing it completely. The ship had to wait several months before it was in position to deploy another, and that came down on a different part of the planet.

  The other glider-drone, too, was eventually deployed, thus cutting the mapping time down considerably. After all, there was a limited amount of time left to complete the mission and the Cristobal Colon, while it was never bright enough to actually understand what had happened to it, was certainly intelligent enough to follow its programming and retrace its steps.

  Chapter Three

  My sons were faithful… and they fought. -Padraic Pearse, The Mother

  Cochea, 10/7/459 AC

  Hennessey leaned back from his keyboard, blanking his mind of distractions as he tried to match what he remembered from the invasion of a dozen years before with the sequence of events as related by Jimenez. That was, in fact, the entire purpose of the exercise, to construct an objective history of the 447 invasion by testing it against both sides.

  And besides, Hennessey thought, my side had all the histories written by ourselves. What will happen to the memory of good men who fought and died on the other side if Jimenez and I don't write down their story?

  For himself, he remembered his mechanized infantry company standing by on radio listening silence from just after sundown until the order came to roll. The armored personnel carriers-or "tracks," boxy M-224s-he had pulled into hide positions off the main road that led from Fort Muddville to Ciudad Balboa, paralleling the Transitway. The engines he'd ordered to be left idling-an armored vehicle once stopped could not be guaranteed to start again-while he and his subordinates went over the plans and contingencies for the umpteenth time.

  Hennessey remembered, too, the mix of excitement and eagerness, on the one hand, and regret that his company's target for the attack was also the responsibility of his best friend, on the other, to defend. Although it hadn't been his first action (it had been his first official action… but there was that letter of reprimand over his taking "leave" in San Vincente, after all), he remembered being nervous.

  When he'd first been told, he had asked to be given a different mission, any different mission. The battalion commander, however, had very reasonably pointed out that the Federated States wished to keep even enemy casualties low.

  "And, Captain Hennessey," the colonel had emphasized, "since Captain Jimenez of the overstuffed and underarmed brigade we call the Balboa Defense Corps is your friend, since you command the most powerful ground striking force in the country and since the fall of Jimenez's charge, the Estado Mayor, can reasonably be expected to cause the rest of the BDC to fold, there is a) some chance that you might be able to induce him to surrender and b) no chance that anyone else could."

  "No, sir, not a chance, sir," had been Hennessey's answer. "Zip, zilch, zero, none, nada. You don't know him like I do. Jimenez is first rate all the way. His mother could ask and he'd tell her to fuck off, the same as he will me."

  "Do it anyway," the colonel insisted.

  Hennessey's reminiscences were suddenly interrupted as the rain promised by the afternoon's darkened skies came down in a deluge. Its heavy pounding on the tiles of the roof and the stones of the courtyard returned him to the present.

  Even as it did so, Jimenez remembered, It rained that night, too…

  The rain had come quickly, taking in its wake the trash and the smell, and even covering briefly the sounds of the city under its soft hammering. People scrambled for shelter or ignored the downpour as the mood took them; for this was Balboa City, on the closing end of its long wet season, and the only possible weather forecasts were "it is going to rain" or "it may stop raining soon."

  The deluge passed as quickly as it had come. From his sheltered vantage on an upper floor of one of the many buildings of Balboa's Estado Mayor, or general staff, complex, Xavier Jimenez, Captain, Balboa Defense
Corps, sighed as he watched the streets nearby fill again with people.

  Jimenez missed the rain as soon as it passed, missed the feeling of solitude, of peace, of being subsumed in nature. Balboa was the rain; the rain was Balboa. Jimenez loved both very dearly.

  Casting a wary glance skyward, Jimenez was pleased to see the clouds still blocking the stars above. He said softly, and only to himself, "Not tonight. They won't hit us tonight. Not with the clouds so low and thick."

  He did not say it aloud, but whispered the words, "But they will hit us. I wonder if it will be Patricio who comes for us here. We're important; he's the best. I think it must be. I'm so screwed." Another sigh escaped him, this time for things that could not be helped, things as inevitable as the rain.

  Dozens of automobiles passed by the Estado Mayor every minute. Had any looked up, they would have seen Jimenez smiling, white teeth sparkling in an angular, coffee-dark face. They would not have seen his hands as they clenched and unclenched to no perceivable rhythm.

  Pushing the sight and sound of the automobiles from his mind, twisting his head to look directly at the corridor leading to the office of his country's "Supreme Leader," General Antonio Pina, Jimenez's smile grew even broader. "Son of a bitch," he muttered under his breath. He could have spoken aloud, since that same dictator was either passed out drunk, or, if he retained some semblance of consciousness, certainly engaged in fornication with one or another of his bevy of mistresses.

  The smile closed, a sneer taking its place. Some things were just too disgusting to maintain a smile over, even for him. Jimenez turned his gaze back to the street below, watching the passing cars as one might watch fish in an aquarium, relaxing, vicarious, mindless existence… like watching the rain.