“Sergeant,” Mboya said quietly, “you’re in charge of the search. If you need me, I’ll be in here.”
“Sir,” Scratchard agreed with a nod. “Well, get the lead out, daisies!” he snarled to the troopers, gesturing them to the street. “We got forty copping houses to run yet!”
As ben Khedda passed him, the captain saw the villager’s control slip to uncover his glee. The sergeant was the last man out of the room; Mboya latched the street door after him. Only then did he meet the householder’s eyes again. “Hello, Juma,” he said in the Kabyle he had sleep-learned rather than the Kikuyu they had both probably forgotten by now. “Brothers shouldn’t have to meet this way, should we?”
Juma smiled in mad irony rather than humor. Then his mouth slumped out of that bitter rictus and he said sadly, “No, we shouldn’t, that’s right.” Looking at his altar and not the soldier, he added, “I knew there’d be a—a unit sent around, of course. But I didn’t expect you’d be leading the one that came here, where I was.”
“Look, I didn’t volunteer for Operation Feirefitz,” Esa blazed. “And Via, how was I supposed to know where you where anyway? We didn’t exactly part kissing each other’s cheeks ten years ago, did we? And here you’ve gone and changed your name even—how was I supposed to keep from stumbling over you?”
Juma’s face softened. He stepped to his brother, taking the other’s wrists in his hands. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Of course that was unfair. The—what’s going to happen disturbs me.” He managed a genuine smile. “I didn’t really change my name, you know. ‘Al-Habashi’ just means ‘the Black’, and it’s what everybody on this planet was going to call me whatever I wanted. We aren’t very common on Dar al-B’heed, you know. Any more than we were in the Slammers.”
“Well, there’s one fewer black in the Slammers than before you opted out,” Esa said bitterly; but he took the civilian’s wrists in turn and squeezed them. As the men stood linked, the clerical collar that Juma wore beneath an ordinary jellaba caught the soldier’s eye. Without the harshness of a moment before, Esa asked, “Do they all call you ‘Father’?”
The civilian laughed and stepped away. “No, only the hypocrites like Youssef,” he said. “Oh, Ain Chelia is just as Islamic as the capital, as al-Madinah, never doubt. I have a small congregation here… and I have the respect of the rest of the community, I think. I’m head of equipment maintenance at the mine, which doesn’t mean assigning work to other people, not here.” He spread his hands, palms down. The fingernails were short and the grit beneath their ends a true black and no mere skin tone. “But I think I’d want to do that anyway, even if I didn’t need to eat to live. I’ve guided more folk to the Way by showing them how to balance a turbine than I do when I mumble about peace.”
Captain Mboya walked to the table on top of which stood an altar triptych, now closed. Two drawers were set between the table legs. He opened the top one. In it were the altar vessels, chased brasswork of local manufacture. They were beautiful both in sum and in detail, but they had not tripped a detector set to locate tool steel and iridium.
The lower drawer held a powergun.
Juma watched without expression as his brother raised the weapon, checked the full magazine, and ran a fingertip over the manufacturer’s stampings. “Heuvelmans of Friesland,” Esa said conversationally. “Past couple contracts have been let on Terra, good products… but I always preferred the one I was issued when they assigned me to a tribarrel and I rated a sidearm.” He drew his own pistol from its flap holster and compared it to the weapon from the drawer. “Right, consecutive serial numbers,” the soldier said. He laid Juma’s pistol back where it came from. “Not the sort of souvenir we’re supposed to take with us when we resign from the Slammers, of course.”
Very carefully, and with his eyes on the wall as if searching for flaws in its thick, plastered concrete, Juma said, “I hadn’t really… thought of it being here. I suppose that’s grounds for carrying me back to the re-education camp in al-Madinah, isn’t it?”
His brother’s fist slammed the table. The triptych jumped and the vessels in the upper drawer rang like Poe’s brazen bells. “Re-education? It’s grounds for being burned at the stake if I say so! Listen, the reporters are back in the capital, not here. My orders from the District Governor are to pacify this region, not coddle it!” Esa’s face melted from anger to grief as suddenly as he had swung his fist a moment before. “Via, elder brother, why’d you have to leave? There wasn’t a man in the Regiment could handle a tribarrel the way you could.”
“That was a long time ago,” said Juma, facing the soldier again.
“I remember at Sphakteria,” continued Esa as if Juma had not spoken, “when they popped the ambush and killed your gunner the first shot. You cut ’em apart like they weren’t shooting at you too. And then you led the whole platoon clear, driving the jeep with the wick all the way up and working the gun yourself with your right hand. Nobody else could’ve done it.”
“Do you remember,” said Juma, his voice dropping into a dreamy caress as had his brother’s by the time he finished speaking, “the night we left Nairobi? You led the Service of Farewell yourself, there in the starport, with everyone in the terminal joining in. The faith we’d been raised in was just words to me before then, but you made the Way as real as the tiles I was standing on. And I thought ‘Why is he going off to be a soldier? If ever a man was born to lead other men to peace, it was Esa.’ And in time, you did lead me to peace, little brother.”
Esa shook himself, standing like a centipede in his body armor. “I got that out of my system,” he said.
Juma walked over to the altar. “As I got the Slammers out of my system,” he said, and he closed the drawer over the powergun within.
Neither man spoke for moments that seemed longer. At last Juma said, “Will you have a beer?”
“What?” said the soldier in surprise. “That’s permitted on Dar al-B’heed?”
Juma chuckled as he walked into his kitchen. “Oh yes,” he said as he opened a trapdoor in the floor, “though of course not everyone drinks it.” He raised two corked bottles from their cool recess and walked back to the central room. “There are some Arab notions that never sat very well with Kabyles, you know. Many of the notions about women, veils and the like. Youssef ben Khedda’s wife wore a veil until the revolt… then she took it off and walked around the streets like the other women of Ain Chelia. I suspect that since your troops swept in, she has her veil on again.”
“That one,” said the captain with a snort that threatened to spray beer. “I can’t imagine why nobody had the sense to throttle him—at least before they went off to their damned fortress.”
Juma gestured his brother to one of the room’s simple chairs and took another for himself. “Not everyone has seen as many traitors as we have, little brother,” he said. “Besides, his own father was one of the martyrs whose death ignited the revolt. He was caught in al-Madinah with hypnocubes of Kabyle language instruction. The government called that treason and executed him.”
Esa snorted again. “And didn’t anybody here wonder who shopped the old man to the security police? Via! But I shouldn’t complain—he makes my job easier.” He swallowed the last of his beer, paused a moment, and then pointed the mouth of the bottle at Juma as if it would shoot. “What about you?” the soldier demanded harshly. “Where do you stand?”
“For peace,” said Juma simply, “for the Way. As I always have since I left the Regiment. But… my closest friends in the village are dug into the sides of the mine pit now, waiting for you. Or they’re dead already outside al-Madinah.”
The soldier’s hand tightened on the bottle, his fingers darker than the clear brown glass. With a conscious effort of will he set the container down on the terrazzo floor beside his chair. “They’re dead either way,” he said as he stood up. He put his hand on the door latch before he added, pausing but not turning around, “Listen, elder brother. I told you I didn’t ask to be a
ssigned to this mop-up operation; and if I’d known I’d find you here, I’d have taken leave or a transfer. But I’m here now, and I’ll do my duty, do you hear?”
“As the Lord wills,” said Juma from behind him.
The walls of Juma’s house, like those of all the houses in Ain Chelia, were cast fifty centimeters thick to resist the heat of the sun. The front door was a scale with the walls, close-fitting and too massive to slam. To captain Mboya, it was the last frustration of the interview that he could elicit no more than a satisfied thump from the door as he stamped into the street.
The ballistic crack of the bullet was all the louder for the stillness of the plateau an instant before. Captain Mboya ducked beneath the lip of the headquarters dugout. The report of the sniper’s weapon was lost in the fire of the powerguns and mortars that answered it. “Via, Captain!” snarled Sergeant Scratchard from the parked commo jeep. “Trying to get yourself killed?”
“Via!” Esa wheezed. He had bruised his chin and was thankful for it, the way a child is thankful for any punishment less than the one imagined. He accepted Scratchard’s silent offer of a fiber-optics periscope. Carefully, the Captain raised it to scan what had been the Chelia Mine and was now the Bordj—the Fortress—holding approximately one hundred and forty Kabyle rebels with enough supplies to last a year.
Satellite photographs showed the mine as a series of neatly-stepped terraces in the center of a plateau. From the plateau’s surface, nothing of significance could be seen until a flash discovered the position of a sniper the moment before he dodged to fire again.
“It’d be easy,” Sergeant Scratchard said, “if they’d just tried to use the pit as a big foxhole… Have Central pop a couple anti-personnel rounds overhead and then we go in and count bodies. But they’ve got tunnels and spider holes—and command-detonated mines—laced out from the pit like a giant worm-farm. This one’s going to cost, Esa.”
“Blood and martyrs,” the captain said under his breath. When he had received the Ain Chelia assignment, Mboya had first studied reconnaissance coverage of the village and the mine three kilometers away. It was now a month and a half since the rebel disaster at al-Madinah. The Slammers had raised the siege of the capital in a pitched battle that no one in the human universe was better equipped to fight. Surviving rebels had scattered to their homes to make what preparations they could against the white terror they knew would sweep in the wake of the government’s victory. At Ain Chelia, the preparations had been damned effective. The recce showed clearly that several thousand cubic yards of rubble had been dumped into the central pit of the mine, the waste of burrowings from all around its five kilometer circumference.
“We can drop penetrators all year,” Mboya said, aloud but more to himself than the non-com beside him. “Blow the budget for the whole operation, and even then I wouldn’t bet they couldn’t tunnel ahead of the shelling faster than we broke rock on top of them.”
“If we storm the place,” said Sergeant Scratchard, “and then go down the tunnels after the holdouts, we’ll have thirty per cent casualties if we lose a man.”
A rifle flashed from the pit edge. Almost simultaneously, one of the company’s three-barreled automatic weapons slashed the edge of the rebel gun pit. The trooper must have sighted in his weapon earlier when a sniper had popped from the pit, knowing the site would be reused eventually. Now the air shook as the powergun detonated a bandolier of grenades charged with industrial explosives. The sniper’s rifle glittered as it spun into the air; her head was by contrast a ragged blur, its long hair uncoiling and snapping outward with the thrust of the explosion.
“Get that gunner’s name,” Mboya snapped to his first sergeant. “He’s earned a week’s leave as soon as we stand down. But to get all the rest of them…” and the officer’s voice was the more stark for the fact it was so controlled, “we’re going to need something better. I think we’re going to have to talk them out.”
“Via, Captain,” said Scratchard in real surprise, “why would they want to come out? They saw at al-Madinah what happens when they faced us in the field. And nobody surrenders when they know all prisoners’re going to be shot.”
“Don’t say nobody,” said Esa Mboya in a voice as crisp as the gunfire bursting anew from the Bordj. “Because that’s just what you’re going to see this lot do.”
The dead end of Juma’s street had been blocked and turned into the company maintenance park between the time Esa left to observe the Bordj and his return to his brother’s house. Skimmers, trucks, and a gun jeep with an intermittent short in its front fan had been pulled into the cul-de-sac. They were walled on three sides by the courtyards of the houses beyond Juma’s.
Sergeant Scratchard halted the jeep with the bulky commo equipment in the open street, but Mboya swung his own skimmer around the supply truck that formed a makeshift fourth wall for the park. A guard saluted. “Muller!” Esa shouted, even before the skirts of his one-man vehicle touched the pavement. “What in the name of heaven d’ye think you’re about! I told you to set up in the main square!”
Bog Muller stood up beside a skimmer raised on edge. He was a bulky Technician with twenty years service in the Slammers. A good administrator, but his khakis were clean. Operation Feirefitz had required the company to move fast and long, and there was no way Muller’s three half-trained subordinates could have coped with the consequent rash of equipment failures. “Ah, well, Captain,” Muller temporized, his eyes apparently focused on the row of wall spikes over Esa’s head, “we ran into Juma and he said—
“He what!” Mboya shouted.
“I said,” said Juma, rising from behind the skimmer himself, “that security in the middle of the village would be more of a problem than anybody needed. We’ve got some hot-heads; I don’t want any of them to get the notion of stealing a jeep, for instance. The two households there—” he pointed to the entrances now blocked by vehicles, using the grease gun in his right hand for the gesture—”have both been evacuated to the Bordj.” The half-smile he gave his brother could have been meant for either what he had just said or for the words he added, raising both the grease gun and the wire brush he held in his left hand: “Besides, what with the mine closed, I’d get rusty myself with no equipment to work on.”
“After all,” said Muller in what was more explanation that defense, “I knew Juma back when.”
Esa took in his brother’s smile, took in as well the admiring glances of the three Tech I’s who had been watching the civilian work. “All right,” he said to Muller, “but the next time clear it with me. And you,” he said, pointing to Juma, “come on inside for now. We need to talk.”
“Yes, little brother,” the civilian said with a bow as submissive as his tone.
In the surprising cool of his house, Juma stripped off the gritty jellaba he had worn while working. He began washing with a waterless cleaner, rubbing it on with smooth strokes of his palms. On a chain around his neck glittered a tiny silver crucifix, normally hidden by his clothing.
“You didn’t do much of a job persuading your friends to your Way of Peace,” Esa said with an anger he had not intended to display.
“No, I’m afraid I didn’t,” the civilian answered mildly. “They were polite enough, even the Kaid, Ali ben Cheriff. But they pointed out that the Arabizers in al-Madinah intended to stamp out all traces of Kabyle culture as soon as possible… which of course was true. And we did have our own martyr here in Ain Chelia, as you know. I couldn’t—” Juma looked up at his brother, his dark skin glistening beneath the lather—”argue with their military estimate, after all, either. The Way doesn’t require that its followers lie about reality in order to change it—but I don’t have to tell you that.”
“Go on,” said the captain. His hand touched the catches of his body armor. He did not release them, however, even though the hardsuit was not at the moment protection against any physical threat.
“Well, the National Army was outnumbered ten to one by the troops we co
uld field from the backlands,” Juma continued as he stepped into the shower. “That’s without defections, too. And weapons aren’t much of a problem. Out there, any jack-leg mechanic can turn out a truck piston in his back room. The tolerances aren’t any closer on a machine gun. But what we didn’t expect—” he raised his deep voice only enough to override the hiss of the shower—”was that all six of the other planets of the al-Ittihad al-Arabi—” for Arab Union Juma used the Arabic words, and they rasped in his throat like a file on bars—”would club together and help the sanctimonious butchers in al-Madinah hire the Slammers.”
He stepped shining from the stall, no longer pretending detachment or that he and his brother were merely chatting. “I visited the siege lines then,” Juma rumbled, wholly a preacher and wholly a man, “and I begged the men from Ain Chelia to come home while there was time. To make peace, or if they would not choose peace then at least to choose life—to lie low in the hills till the money ran out and the Slammers were off on somebody else’s contract, killing somebody else’s enemies. But my friends would stand with their brothers… and so they did, and they died with their brothers, too many of them, when the tanks came through their encirclement like knives through a goatskin.” His smile crooked and his voice dropped. “And the rest came home and told me they should have listened before.”
“They’ll listen to you now,” said Esa, “if you tell them to come out of the Bordj without their weapons and surrender.”
Juma began drying himself on a towel of coarse local cotton. “Will they?” he replied without looking up.
Squeezing his fingers against the bands of porcelain armor over his stomach, Esa said, “The Re-education Camps outside al-Madinah aren’t a rest cure, but there’s too many journalists in the city to let them be too bad. Even if the holdouts are willing to die, they surely don’t want their whole families wiped out. And if we have to clear the Bordj ourselves—well, there won’t be any prisoners, you know that… There wouldn’t be even if we wanted them, not after we blast and gas the tunnels, one by one.”
There Will Be War Volume II Page 32