by Tom Kratman
"No, no," Robinson began. "I was only . . . "
Masood kicked him, hard, in the kidney.
"We've captured enough evidence and documents in the cave complex to know better," Carrera said. "You were coming to use a nuke on my people at our camp." This, too, was not a question.
"They made me," Robinson tried to explain, with a begging, pleading quality to his voice.
"What did they threaten? Torture? You'll soon learn a lot about torture."
Carrera looked at the cell phone-like device. It had a button on it that said, in tiny letters, "Call." He pushed it and was immediately rewarded with, "UEPF Spirit of Peace. How can we help you, High Admiral?"
"Give me Marguerite," Carrera said.
Carrera waited only moments before a familiar voice came back, "Captain Wallenstein, High Admiral." The voice sounded terribly fearful.
"It's not your High Admiral, Captain; it's me."
"Duque Carrera!" One could hear the fear washing away. "How grand to hear from you. May I infer you have been successful?"
"You may. I wondered if you might like to speak to your High Admiral."
"Why that would be a great pleasure, Duque. Thank you."
Carrera bent at the waist and held the communication device down to Robinson's ear.
"Marguerite, get us out of here," Robinson ordered, though the panic, even terror, in his voice robbed the order of all authority. "Offer them anything, give them anything, but don't leave us to die like this."
Wallenstein laughed. "Why would I do that, Admiral? After all, you're just an 'adequate officer, but no more than that.' You weren't much of a lay, either. And as for the marchioness . . . " She let the words hang.
Carrera took the communicator back and held it to the side of his face. "Nice chatting with you, Captain. Don't worry about your High Admiral. He'll be well taken care of. Perhaps we can do business again, sometime."
"My pleasure, Duque."
19/8/469 AC
His troops had built a series of great bonfires around the scene of execution. More wood stood by each to light this night and the next. Two of the great, roaring fires flanked Carrera closely, their radiance keeping away the chill of the evening and early morning. The fires lit well a scene from Hell, yet were far enough away that they lent none of their warmth to the denizens of that Hell.
A bottle of scotch sat on one arm of the thronelike chair his troops had also constructed for him. On the other was a glass, frequently consulted and frequently refilled. Despite the fatigue, such a tiredness as ordinary rest could never touch, Carrera refused to sleep.
Is this justice? he asked himself. Is it justice for my family, for my men? Left to me, I'd leave them alive to suffer for much longer. But my crucified men deserve justice no less than I do. This, one hundred for one, is justice to them. My justice will have to wait.
He glared out at the suffering men and thought, This is what you would inflict on the world. This is the law you claimed to want. Does it please you so much now, I wonder, now when you are its victims?
Was it justice to turn your women and girls over to my Pashtun as slaves? No matter, it was your law. "Slavery is a part of jihad and jihad is a part of Islam; thus, slavery is a part of Islam." Isn't that what one of your high clerics said? Well, we have both been in a jihad and you have lost. Thus, by your law, are your women and girls enslaved.
Of course, my Pashtun are good Moslems, most of them. They know it would have been adultery—expressly forbidden—to have screwed your wives while you yet lived. Except that those wives became slaves and a master has a right to his slaves even if they are married. More justice, I think.
For myself, I think those most deserving of slavery are those who want it for others.
Have I even paid you back? I have been suffering for four thousand days. You will all, collectively, suffer for about twelve hundred. It hardly seems fair. It hardly seems enough. Yet it is the best I can do. On the other hand, perhaps if I incinerate your holy city, Makkah al Jedidah, perhaps then we will be even.
And I can incinerate it, with as little warning as my dead wife and children had. If I kill a million for one, then, maybe then, we'll be even.
Carrera leaned forward on his rude wooden chair. He lifted his glass and sipped at it, then sipped again. He put it down to refill it from the amber bottle. The light of the bonfires reflected on the glass. Refilled glass in hand he sat back and simply watched the life leak away from his enemies like the runny shit that drained down their legs.
20/8/469 AC
The wind blew sere down the high mountain pass. It carried on it the sound and stench of four hundred men, each slowly dying in excruciating agony. That was, after all, the source of the word "excruciating;" to suffer death on the cross.
This was only the second day after the crucifixions. For a few, it would be the last. Still others would last a day or two more. If they didn't already, the living would soon envy the dead.
To the low hill from which Carrera watched came a continuous sea of moans, cresting like waves and subsiding like the tides. One man in a corner would begin moaning, then three more wretches half out of their minds with pain would pick it up. The moans would then travel from one side of the cross-studded field, reach the other and begin to bounce back. Alternatively, a shriek might begin somewhere in the middle and be picked up and transmitted to the edges before coming back to center, not unlike the rippling of a pond when a stone is tossed to its center.
* * *
Abdul Aziz felt agony in the center of his chest. He felt it, too, in the wrists and hands and feet he knew were dead and blackening from lack of blood flow.
He was also tired beyond tired. Never in his life had he gone so long without sleep. Yet the art of the cross, a part of it, was that it permitted no sleep, no rest. He had tried to sleep, oh, many times. But each time he nodded off the inability to exhale sent him gasping for air, wide awake and pushing upward with his legs, in minutes. He was hungry, too, and thirsty. He'd begged a passing Pashtun Scout for water and been rewarded with spit on his face.
That was the key to crucifixion, the thing that made it the most horrible of deaths. Even a slow hanging choked off the windpipe so that, while the dying might dance a hornpipe beneath the gallows, trying desperately to find purchase for his feet and live, at least he was not able to beg. Crucifixion allowed begging, and pleading, and all manner of personal disgraces. Indeed, it required them. Worse than being slowly killed, for Abdul Aziz, was being quickly ashamed . . . and by his own words and deeds.
He tried to let his legs go, to make himself suffocate quickly. He could not. When the air in his lungs went foul he always pushed up to breathe, to live, if only to live in order to suffer. Others, he saw, also tried and also failed. They, like he, wept bitterly, their manhood stolen. Worse, in some ways, was that their illusions about being willing martyrs to the cause were stolen from them, as well. Believe as they might that a glorious future at the hand of God awaited them, still, in their weakness, they struggled to live. That theft of faith made them weep all the more.
* * *
Mustafa, of course, was not on a cross. Instead, he was "privileged," so some might say, to watch and listen as his followers died, to hear the cries coming from the Pashtun camp as his wives and daughters, and those of his followers, were forced to perform for their captors.
Shame, shame, all is shame, he mourned. All my honor is lost with my women turned to slaves and whores.
For Carrera had been cruel to Mustafa. He had had him brought and forced to watch the bidding as the Pashtun Scouts sold off the women and girls excess to their immediate needs to the whoremasters of Yamato and Doha. The bidding had been fierce at times as they were stripped and shown off on the rude auction block set up to one side of the mass of crosses.
Even the souls of my youngest children are forfeit as they will be converted into Nazrani. I've lost everything.
Mustafa glared his hate at Carrera, sitting there smug
and apparently cheerful as he quaffed his sinful drink. Carrera noticed Mustafa's glare and raised his glass in salute.
"You might have won, you know, old boy," Carrera taunted, loudly enough for the Salafi to hear. "The margin of victory for the Federated States in Sumer was that close, close enough that without my legion added to the mix they probably would have lost or given up in war-weariness. You saved them from that by freeing me to help them. Congratulations on earning your place in history."
Mustafa had learned enough about Carrera's personal history to understand that this might be so. It made him sick to his stomach to think that he had caused all this himself.
Even so, he still could not see that he had created Carrera, or freed the monster within him, at any rate. Cause and effect were confused within his mind. At a purely emotional level—and in this, at least, Mustafa was intensely human—all the harm that had been done to him existed in one part of his mind as if it had always been there, while the harm he had done, in turn, seemed very small and very late. And only just.
You don't really understand do you? Carrera asked silently, looking intently into Mustafa's face for some sign of comprehension. He found none. Oh, well; it's the common lot of humanity and always has been. In the mid to late twentieth century on Old Earth, Japanese deeply resented the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They forgot their own previous attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, and the murders of guiltless prisoners. Conversely, Americans remembered that attack, would continue to remember it for centuries, and justified the nuking of two cities by it. The Americans, in their own turn, forgot that they had been in the process of turning Japan back to the stone age, prior to Pearl Harbor, when the Japanese had struck. The Japanese remembered the embargo, the freezing of credit, and the threat. They invariably forgot the brutal murdering, raping and thieving sojourn in China which well predated the American embargoes.
Carrera understood, even if Mustafa did not. This was mankind's way from times immemorial. People measured right and wrong, typically, as a function of whose ox was being gored, and when. What our side did was good and justifiable and therefore what the other side did was evil and reprehensible. Salafis, even on Terra Nova, still harked back to the loss of Spain to the Reconquista. They rarely if ever remembered that they had stolen Spain in the first place. It was a form of Orwellian double think, but one that required no party Pravda to bring about.
21/8/469 AC
The sun stood up just over the mountains to the east. At Carrera's nod, Masood sent his men around with heavy steel bars. In groups of two, forty Pashtun scouts walked the lines of burdened crosses. At each they stopped just long enough to take one or sometimes two swings with the steel bars, breaking the shins of the condemned. Half the men on the crosses were too far gone to so much as scream when their bones were splintered. The loudest sound was often the grunt of exertion followed by the dull thud of heavy steel on thin flesh and thick bone.
"Never underestimate the benefits of a classical education," Carrera quipped, half drunkenly, to Mustafa.
Thereafter, all that stood between the victims and death was whatever strength remained in their weakened arms. For most, this was little enough. They hung down freely, the position of their arms forcing their chests out to where exhalation was almost impossible. Within an hour and a half all were dead and cooling. The Pashtun went around, prodding the bodies with bayonets to ensure they were indeed dead. Once satisfied, they took the corpses down and carried them to a mass grave.
With each thud, and then with each body removed, Carrera felt himself weakening: Click . . . click . . . click . . . click . . . . click. Soon he was almost as drained of life and energy as his victims had been. His chin slumped down on his chest. His breathing became labored. His eyes closed and he dreamt.
* * *
He found himself in the same chair. Now though, all the crosses were emptied. The Pashtun were removing them from the earth and stacking them in bundles. Distantly he heard helicopters coming. He thought it must be to remove the last of his troops and the few prisoners they'd kept alive.
Carrera stiffened at feeling a too-long-absent hand on his shoulder. He heard a voice say, "Don't turn around, Patricio, my beloved."
"Linda?" he asked. "What will . . . "
"Shshsh," she answered. "It's almost over now. Soon, no more war for you, not for a while, anyway. Go home, home to Balboa. Enjoy your new family. Live your new life. When the time comes, we will be waiting for you."
He shook his head and answered, "I have done awful things, Linda, here not least. How can I . . . "
"You did what you were required to do. That part is done now. You will not be well for some time, but you will recover. In time, you will come to join us. We will be waiting."
"There is one more thing to do," Carrera said. "A terrible thing."
"We know."
A second hand came to rest on the other shoulder, along with the sensation of six smaller and lighter ones . . . . and, too light to be sure, maybe a seventh and eighth. Then Carrera felt a gentle kiss on the top of his head and . . . they were gone.
Interlude
5/32/435 AC, Headquarters, Project Themistocles, Federated States of Columbia, Terra Nova
Deep, deep in a huge bunker buried far under the granite of the Dragonback Mountains, uniformed men and woman bent over radar screens, control panels, and communications nodes.
A woman announced, "We have liftoff . . . . identified as a Class Two robotic courier vessel . . . leaving Atlantis now."
"Mark as target one," ordered a two star general of the Federated States Air Force. "Alert Launch Pad Seven to be prepared to fire."
"Target marked," said the woman. From a different section of the bunker a man relayed, "Launch Pad Seven has the target and is prepared to unmask and fire."
The two star nodded at that. So far; so good. "Pass on to all Themistocles assets to prepare to unmask and paint the enemy fleet."
"Target One is approaching optimum engagement range," the woman said. "Optimum engagement range in . . . four minutes."
"Commence countdown."
"General, stations one through two-hundred and forty-nine, except station twenty-nine and one-five-two, report ready to unmask and paint."
"What's wrong with twenty-nine and one-five-two?"
"Cooling leak in the missile on twenty nine . . . telemetry error on one-five-two."
"Fuck." Well, it doesn't matter. We have plenty still.
It would not do to demonstrate the ability to take out just one Earthpig asset. The Federated States needed to at least imply the ability to take out many and to scour Atlantis base free of life. The nukes they had, of course.
A screen on one wall came to life. It showed the President of the Federated States at his desk. The President looked as frightened as any man might, on the verge of possibly plunging his world into nuclear holocaust. Behind him, ranged in an arc, were all of his chief advisors. They looked, if anything, more frightened still.
"Mr. President," the general said.
"General Rogers," the President returned with a slight bow of his head. "I have a message for you, General."
"I am prepared to receive, sir."
From his desk the President lifted a piece of paper. From it he read:
"By oppression's woes and pains,
By our sons in servile chains,
We shall drain our dearest veins."
The general nodded and answered, "I understand, sir. 'But they shall be free,' Mr. President."
"People! You heard the man. ICBMs, unmask. Submarines, up to launch depth. Project Themistocles, unmask and paint that alien fleet," Rogers snarled.
Then, finally, "And clear that courier ship out of our space."
UEPF Spirit of Peace
Where the uniformed woman under the Dragonbacks had seemed preternaturally calm and determined, the woman in uniform aboard the starship went instantly white. Her voice was full of panic as she called out, "Admiral? High Admiral
? We've got radar and lidar illuminating us from the surface . . . dozens . . . no hundreds of emitters. And—oh, shit—we've got a launch. It appears that the target is robot courier 117."
The High Admiral, Martin Robinson's predecessor, went as white as his crewwoman. "Red alert."
Almost immediately, red lights began flashing not only aboard the flagship, but also aboard every other ship in the fleet. Klaxons added to the sense of panic. The United Earth Peace Fleet was never really intended to fight a war. None of its crews ever really thought a war that could directly affect them was even possible.
"Message from below, High Admiral," said the communications officer. "The chief of the FSC wants to talk to you."