Maybe it wasn’t killing bugs, but there were lots of bugs out there. More than enough to go around. Plenty left for him and the rest of Dawn Group to kill. They could spare a few hours for an act of charity.
Still, Loe Sebeng had their SBs fully armed and loaded and in top shape. “Never know what you might find out there,” Sebeng had muttered, shaking her head. “Never know. Too damned much garbage around this place anyway. Want to dump some garbage while you’re out?”
“We might be on routine,” he protested. “But we’re not the garbage scow.”
Sebeng had given him one of her rare smiles. “Well, you’re armed as far as I can make you. The only ammunition you’re not carrying is what won’t fit.”
Hassan had been pleased by that much, but resigned to one more routine patrol. If they found a place for the Gersons, well and good. If not, well, there were plenty of bogers to go around.
Which was why the convoy out here was such a surprise. No one had anticipated it. And Astronomy should have been able to pick up on all that leaky radiation from primitive drives. They should have spotted this from the other side of the big black donut it was so bright. And he and Dawn Group had just blundered into it.
A single scout group shouldn’t be alone with a four-freighter enemy convoy. No, a destroyer should be out in this mess, sweeping up handfuls of those little Ichton fighters that protected the big ships, sweeping them up and cracking them open. Even the Ickies couldn’t live in hard vacuum.
Why wasn’t there any cover? Why hadn’t Astronomy picked up that bright red-hot trail when they did the survey routine? The questions flew through Hassan’s mind and he dismissed them. No time to think about that now. Just time to do what was necessary. Get the four survivors back to the Hawking. Better to let the brass know about the little convoy over in this sector, ready to pull out and invade disputed space. Which by Ichton standards wasn’t disputed at all. They didn’t believe in disputed space, weren’t genetically capable of recognizing any claims other than their own.
“Break hard around the rock, kids,” Hassan said. The casual ease of his voice masked his tension. The tiny moon ahead of them was really no more than a glorified asteroid caught in orbit around an inhospitable planet. Puny for a moon, but big enough to give the Dawn Group a little shelter. They split, two elements going in opposite directions and jinking hard against their expected trajectories. That would confuse anything but a real smart-read missile, and would be hard to follow even if it could be read.
The moon seemed enormous this close. Hassan skimmed his SB down so close he could feel the drag of the flying lunar dust, barely a meter above the surface. Let them follow that, he thought in fury. His signature IR should be lost in the background reflection of the surface itself. Even a smart missile couldn’t take him there.
As he rounded the lunar curve, his stomach clenched again. There was a moment of terror, thinking that the rest of the group had not made it. And then he saw them, each one planing the horizon and appearing in the shadow of the only shelter they had.
“No one followed us, boss,” said Dawn Breaker. That would be Solange des Salles. There was a question at the edge of her voice that came through even on the private line.
“There seems to be a pattern here,” Hassan said. “Did any of you note when pursuit dropped off?”
“At about two klicks from their destroyer, looked like to me,” Martin Hong answered. “But that’s an approximate, boss. I was too busy taking care of business to get their exact address, if you know what I mean.”
Hassan thanked him and sighed. Marty always did manage to embellish even a simple report. But Hong’s observation coincided with his own, and with Bradley in Dawn Tiger and des Salles again. So. That should mean they were safe enough behind this rock for the time being, until they could slip away after the convoy had passed.
Hassan was not about to bet that there wasn’t going to be any pursuit at all. Good Muslims didn’t gamble, and a serious stint in Tactical School had shown him why. So far, it was the one taboo he hadn’t broken. Yet. Besides which, he didn’t like the idea of sitting still like a convenient target while there were enemy nearby. It made his skin crawl.
Part of Hassan Ibn Abdullah wanted to stay, to keep on blasting ammunition until the entire load Sebeng had stocked was gone. He knew better. They needed some bigger guns out here. More important, Intelligence had to know about these movements. There was something brewing in the Ickie strategy that they had not anticipated, and it was worth all their lives, let alone their kill ratios, to get the news back.
“So it’s time for all good Dawn Riders to get back to Mama,” he muttered. Then his voice became louder and more distinct. “Let’s take it in slow formation, ride this shadow down, and use the radiation background cover of the planet to slip atound. Then we can head straight home. Those Ickies are going in the other direction, and they’ll be there when we get back with some reinforcements.”
“Ah, boss, c’mon,” Marty Hong half teased and half pleaded. “You wanna share all the glory? I could win my Silver Cluster out there.”
“You think the taxpayers got nothing better to do than buy you new boats?” Hassan clipped him short. “Let’s get back to base and tell the tech toys all about this convoy.”
One by one, in a stepped formation, the Dawn Group departed. Their single SBs drifted down toward the dead planet below and disappeared against the background radiation. Which was very high. This place had more radioactive elements than the Hawking’s drive. It would be a major find for whoever could exploit it, but deadly to live on. Even the Ichtons, it seemed, had decided to pass it by.
Hassan, in Dawn Leader, came around last. On the far side of the planet the team regrouped for their jump back to the Hawking. Far enough from any gravity well to slip free, they disappeared into speed where the enemy could not follow.
But Hassan Ibn Abdullah did not feel any relief even when he saw the battlestation before them, larger than the moon he had used as a shield. Which made no sense. Here he was safe. The enemy possessed nothing, nothing at all that could damage the battlestation. It was like trying to blow a minor star. The great docking bays around the north pole were cavernous black, beckoning. He herded in his little group, smaller by two than when they had gone out. But the sense of well-being, the break in tension that had always signaled homecoming before, did not touch Hassan. Not even when the airlock had cycled through and he was standing on solid deck in his “indoor” blues.
“We weren’t expecting a convoy out in this direction,” Hassan said, debriefing to the tack officer of the watch. “We were just on an exploratory patrol since this wasn’t a sector we’d done more than survey. We were under orders from the Science section, to be honest. But after we took a look at the rock, which would be real interesting to a merchant and absolutely no good to resettle our Gerson survivors, we came around to take a quick peek at the rest of the system. And we ran into what had to be a major column movement. I didn’t see anything I could identify as an egg ship, so I don’t think they were moving to take possession of a new place. At least not right now. But there may well be another population under attack out there that we don’t know about.”
The tack officer’s face remained completely unreadable. “Thank you, Group Leader,” the tack officer said. “You can go now.”
Hassan knew better than to try to make his case more strongly. Instead he rose and left the debriefing room with all its glow maps and screen charts. The misery that pressed down on him didn’t leave, even though he was off duty now for twelve hours.
Solange des Salles had waited for him outside the briefing room. She settled into a long stride that matched his as they moved away from the offices. “Tanya and Lee are on duty now,” she said casually, naming her roommates. “My place?”
Hassan grinned. “How about a little later?” he asked. “It was a stretch. I want to unwind a little first.”
Solange nodded, shrugged, and left. Much as he and de
s Salles had a useful arrangement, he already had other plans. He had a serious date with the rack.
But even as exhausted as he was, Hassan couldn’t sleep. Instead he lay awake in the dark haunted by his last year at home, the year he had made the decision to join the Fleet. To become a warrior, a protector, one of God’s Chosen.
A warrior earned Paradise, if he fought in defense of Muslim people and for God. There was no reason to worry about death, though Hassan had worried often before formulating his application on his father’s ornate writing desk. His worries had been normal boy fears. What if he died in a fire, or crossing a street, or got kicked in the head in a soccer game like Sa’ad Ibn Ibrahim? Then he would surely go to Hell, since God saw into his heart and knew all the times he had missed prayers and had broken fast during Ramadan. All the times he had the opportunity to give charity but passed them by, or, worse, did not even recognize them. No matter how many times Mr. Ali in Religion class tried to quiet their fears and remind them of how God had promised Muhammad to count each believer’s good deeds as ten and each of his sins as one, Hassan was quite sure that his total was in danger.
There had been only the normal boy things until Rashid’s older brother Farid had been killed in the vacuum accident. Farid had been a fixture in Hassan’s life, the counterpoint to Mr. Ali. Farid had taught them all to be bad.
Farid had been out working on the communications software, doing the overhaul that Sho-Co promised would bring in all the new Omni transmissions on full-time broadcast. Al-Shabir was on its way to becoming one of the mainline worlds, not a secondary franchise consumer. So when the stress points on the ancient Maktab orbiter went critical during a crew visit, there was very little left to bury. Sho-Co took the blame and paid indemnities to all the families. It controlled the Omni in seventy-three systems
Hassan had gone out with Rashid and his brother Farid the week before Farid had died. He was the first young person Hassan had known who had died, excepting Sa’ad in the soccer game. But Sa’ad had been seven years old and the imam had assured everyone in school that he was in Paradise now and didn’t have to study quadratics or memorize the Koran anymore. Farid was different. Hassan was older and be knew that Farid had been very far from Paradise.
Farid Ibn Salah had enjoyed what he could in his short life, and what he enjoyed most was horrifying his elders. He had done a good job of it, introducing Rashid and Hassan to home-brewed whiskey and “hard” tobacco in the bubble pipe. He never said his prayers, even proclaimed himself an atheist. Though once he did say to Rashid that he wasn’t, really. Just that he was young and he thought the mullahs didn’t understand that and hated all the techs who didn’t adhere to the old ways. That was all. And after all, Farid was young. He could make up for all the mistakes later, when he was older. Once he had made his point.
He hadn’t gotten the chance. Hassan had heard about the accident and gone to Rashid’s home, miserable and afraid. That Farid could die and go to Hell, Farid who was always so full of life, so ready with a joke, that frightened him. It had frightened Rashid, too, and the two friends had finished off the last of Farid’s imported stash of Johnnie Walker. The next morning, hung over, he couldn’t go to school. He could barely move. At least his parents believed it was only grief over Farid’s tragedy and let him stay home from school while they went to work. He had turned on the Omni and there had been the ad screens.
They had said that the Fleet was once again looking for young fighters to seek out the evildoers who would annihilate sentient species. The Fleet was the defender of all humanity, and so by extension was the defender of the Holy Places and the Peoples of the Book. There had been marching music in the background and holos of great warrior heroes from the earliest days of Islam, Abu Bakr and Ali, Akbar the Great and Salah-El-Din. There were glittering machines and uniforms glittering even more from decorations.
Despite the splitting headache of his hangover, Hassan Ibn Abdullah had immediately gone to the interactive and requested the application and filled it out then and there. His father would be proud of him he was sure. And his mother would not be too disappointed about his not graduating from Caliph Umar University and sitting in the Majlis. She would understand that he would have a better chance to get elected if he was a war hero, and she would be sad but not object.
The acceptance had come by the next morning. And Hassan Ibn Abdullah was duly inducted into the defense of Mankind, and incidentally his own hope of salvation.
He had never questioned the rightness of that decision. Indeed, as he had progressed through training, winning more opportunities to advance, to become a fighter and then a group leader, he had only had his first impression confirmed. This was where he belonged. God had placed him in this Fleet for a true purpose.
And it had been easy for him, too. There was something poetic and whole about the way groups moved in combat, patterns of victory and defeat that came as clear before his eyes as the fanciful flowers and birds on the carpets in his parents’ home. He had enjoyed the physical training, more demanding than soccer practice. And most of all he had loved learning to fly.
Piloting an SB was like becoming a bird, one of the great hunting hawks his grandfather had showed him when he was small. He felt like them, strong and fast and utterly unafraid, swooping and skimming over the surface of a planet, free and utterly alive in space.
Talent, his instructors had called it. He had been promoted and given more opportunities to take classes and advance. Things that were never taught at home became his daily work. And people who were not like those at home became his closest friends.
It was not that he left the faith of his people. It was merely that he wanted to be liked by these people, his new peers. He wanted to spend time with them, to fit in. He had been very young and felt very alone. There wasn’t anyone else from Al-Shabir in his training group. He wasn’t sure if there was anyone else from Al-Shabir in the entire Fleet.
And certain of the restrictions wore down slowly. After refusing too many times he couldn’t stand being alone anymore and had joined the rest of his group in the bar. And he really hadn’t intended to drink alcohol, truly he hadn’t. The image of Farid in Hell haunted him. But when the group ordered pitchers and Solange des Salles had poured him out a glass and put it down in front of him with a wink, he hadn’t wanted to refuse. Al-Shabir seemed very far away, and these people were his group. It wasn’t like he had never drunk alcohol before. It wasn’t like anyone else he knew was worried about going to Hell. After a few times it seemed very silly, very old-fashioned, to stand off from his friends. He couldn’t deny it.
Not the beer, not the wink either. He hadn’t been wrong. And while Solange was too strong, too insolent, too independent to be the kind of girl he had dreamed about, she had thick blond hair and a wide engaging smile and freckles on her nose. She was exotic, tempting, drunk.
Being a bad Muslim didn’t mean that he didn’t believe. It only meant that he knew he had guaranteed his own safe conduct after death. He didn’t have to worry anymore and he wanted to enjoy all the advantages. He never doubted that war was the one path he had to salvation.
As he had never doubted victory. There was no other possibility. A believer was always victorious. He had been raised on the history of the Battle of Badr and the conquest of North Africa. The only time they failed was when they fought those who were also People of the Book whose faith was stronger, who were more committed in their duty and their prayers.
Hassan Ibn Abdullah had always thought that obvious. And working with the men and women of the Fleet, with his group and even the Marines on board, he had never had a moment of doubt. That the Ichtons were completely godless was a proven fact. And if many of his colleagues and associates were not of the best moral character, there were plenty of others who made up for them. Among the Muslims aboard the Hawking, the small chapel was always filled to capacity and many worshipers were stuck in the hallway during the Friday noon service.
There were b
etter Muslims than Hassan on the Hawking. But Hassan Ibn Abdullah of Al-Shabir had never minded. They weren’t warriors. They weren’t guaranteed. Some of them weren’t with the Fleet at all. One of the civilian technicians, Ahmed Al-Dookhi, had seen him going into the Emerald Isle with Solange des Salles and Marty Hong and the rest of his group, and had tried to talk him out of it. Reminded him of his obligations and what was forbidden.
It didn’t matter that things were forbidden. They were the Elect, there was no question in his mind. So he spent more time with Solange, sampling other pleasures that were normally outside the realm permitted on Al-Shabir. After beer came the whiskey and the rum, which he never really liked.
Solange introduced him to the sausages she enjoyed from her own home, not telling him at first they were made from pig. He had been horrified when he discovered it and Solange had laughed. She had been sitting naked on his bed, glasses of wine balanced on the floor, a plate of cheese and crackers and sausages between them.
“Really, this is so much worse than all the rest?” she had asked in honest confusion.
And Hassan, after careful consideration, had to agree that it was not. And that he didn’t belong to Al-Shabir properly anymore. He was all Fleet now. Just like the others, his friends, his lover. He told himself that again and again over the next days until he didn’t have to say it anymore. The words appeared in his head along with the beer and the sausage and Solange.
But in the dark, trying to sleep, Hassan Ibn Abdullah found the source of his unease. The idea of that convoy, so far from the fronts, disturbed him on more than a professional level. He could see them, imagine all the space between the millions of stars, all fdled with the Ichton swarm. Nothing stopped them, nothing could turn them from their purpose. And their purpose was an evil one.
The legion of Shaitan advanced through the darkness a planet at a time. There were billions of them who had no part in the fighting, who didn’t even know or care it was going on. The devil had won. And Hassan’s faith was shaken down to the core.
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