Carnifex Read online

  Soult, a senior warrant officer now, as was Mitchell, had stayed on. Most of Carrera's original group, those still alive, had.

  "You're pretty confident, aren't you, boss?"

  "Confident about what?"

  "That we're going to be rehired by the FS. I mean, why else go through the expense of training at this . . . intensity?"

  Carrera adjusted the focus on his binos to key in on a youngish trooper scaling a wall. He spoke as he turned the adjusting wheel.

  "I am somewhat confident, yes, Jamey. But I'd have the troops training like madmen anyway just because I think it's the right thing to do, that it's . . . immoral for soldiers not to spend every possible minute and every dollar, every drop of gas, and every round of ammunition you can spare on it."

  "What's more . . . ah, fuck."

  Soult looked into his binoculars until he saw what had caused his chief's outburst. When he did see it—a climber who'd slipped until he hung by his fingertips from a small rocky outcropping—he repeated, "Fuck."

  * * *

  . . . try to fuck every female I can talk into a horizontal . . . FUCK!

  Cruz felt his lower foot slip vertically. That put excess demands on the other one, which likewise lost its hold on the rock ledge. His left hand hadn't quite found purchase. In much less time than it takes to tell about it he found himself hanging by the fingertips of one hand, and not even all of those. His body slammed the cliff face, almost causing him to lose his death grip on the outcropping. Moreover, while his helmet protected the bulk of his head, in slipping he had managed to scrape the left side of his jaw along the rough rock wall. He felt hot blood drip down his neck.

  His first instinct was, frankly, akin to panic. It lasted milliseconds before training and experience took over. I've been scared witless before and overcome it. I can again.

  As Aristotle had said, "We become brave by performing brave acts." This Cruz had done often enough to deserve the title of "Brave."

  The first thing Cruz's questing fingers found was a tiny little spur of rock. It would never do to support his entire weight but, gripped by two fingers and a thumb, it was just enough to take some weight off of the overstrained fingers of the other hand. His heart began to slow, if only slightly. Ok . . . so I have at least two or three more minutes of life. My fingers will hold that long. A lot can be done in two or three minutes.

  Next, his foot found the previous ledge it had occupied. He was unwilling to take quite the same perch he had had previously. He spent some of his one hundred and twenty to one hundred and eighty seconds feeling around for the best position he could find. When he found it he tested it, spending a few more precious seconds. He then allowed his foot and leg to take some weight from his whitened, tired fingers.

  At last, breathing a little more easily, Cruz found a spot for his other foot and began to rest his fingers in turn.

  * * *

  "I recognize the face, boss, but who is that kid?"

  "I think it's a centurion, junior grade named Cruz," Carrera answered. "Volunteer for the original Legion. Decorated twice . . . mmm, maybe three times; not sure. Two kids. Wife's name is . . . " and here Carrera had to struggle to remember, " . . . mmm . . . Cara or . . . . no; Caridad, I think. Good kid. Going places if he stays with us."

  Unseen by Carrera, Soult smiled. Gotta admire the boss' memory.

  "You actually know his wife? I mean, we've got fifteen hundred officers, twenty-five hundred optios and centurions, maybe a thousand warrants and you know his wife?"

  "Long story," Carrera answered.

  Soult shrugged, then asked, "Hey, boss; does it bother you when . . . you know . . . when you have to meet the wife and kids, or the parents, of somebody who got killed?"

  Carrera was a long time answering. "Jamey, it bothers the hell out of me. But you know what keeps me going?"

  "Revenge?"

  "When we first started, sure, that was all I had. But the fact is, I keep going now for two other reasons. One is that we have to win this war for the sake of our civilization, for our kids and grandkids."

  "And the other?"

  Carrera sighed. "The other is that I love this shit; that I'm addicted to it."

  * * *

  Cruz didn't have time to think any deep thoughts until he reached the top of the cliff and secured and lowered the rope. After that, he thought, Maybe Cara was right. Maybe I should give this shit up.

  If only I didn't love it so.

  10/3/467 AC, UEPF Spirit of Peace

  I love it when a plan comes together, thought High Admiral Robinson, as he watched a distant image of Xamari pirates in half a dozen boats swarm, engage and board a Balboan registry freighter.

  It hadn't been all that easy for Robinson, setting things up as he had. It had helped, though, that nearly half of Terra Nova's global shipping was registered with the Republic of Balboa and most of the rest was with an otherwise insignificant country in Uhuru. The Balboan Government needed merely to be reminded of the World League's discountenancing of privately armed merchant vessels and that, with a large, uncontrolled and potential hostile army inside its borders the government needed whatever friends it could get . . . or should we arrange to pull out the TU troops that are there to safeguard you, Señor Presidente?

  Robertsonia, the other large flag of convenience registry on Terra Nova had needed a bribe that was so low it was pitiful. The Tauran Union had, of course, begun to enforce the World League's edicts. The rest of down below, except for the Zhong, didn't much matter. And to the Zhong, every non Zhong ship seized by the pirates was all to the good.

  While the currently in-power Progressive Party in the FSC also frowned on armed merchant ships, it had a large and powerful surface navy, more powerful in fact than all the other navies combined, to protect its own shipping. A task force of this had been sent off to suppress the piratical scourge along the Xamar coast. It was signally failing to do so. In part this was because Robinson was passing to Abdulahi which ships could be attacked without risking engagement with the FSN; in part because the FSN's Rules of Engagement, or ROE, forbade taking any seriously deterrent action even if they happened to be in a position to engage. The Progressive Party's domestic "mandate" was not so strong that it could afford to alienate any of it constituencies, progressive, pacifist, racial, environmental, or other.

  Neither the World League nor the other—marginally—significant naval powers on the planet were taking any significant action to suppress the pirates.

  Even better; Mustafa's man among the Nicobars is gradually bringing the other pirates under his control.

  11/3/467 AC, Nicobar Straits

  A thick haze floated over the water, reducing visibility to no more than two hundred meters in the daytime. At night, a sailor could, sometimes, see the end of his nose. The haze was not from the weather. Rather, it was mostly smoke from grass and brush fires that raged uncontrolled upwind of the Straits.

  On any given clear day the Straits would have a steady hum as more than one hundred and fifty ships made passage through it. When the haze closed down like this, though, all the ships stopped engines and dropped anchors. Even the risk of pirate attack was better than risking a wreck.

  Parameswara, chieftain of his own band of pirates smiled in the silence. Tonight was not a night for piracy. The ships were safe for the nonce from him and his men.

  I have a better fish to catch tonight, he thought

  * * *

  One remarkable feature of Nicobar piracy was not that it was entirely Islamic, but that it was not entirely Islamic. Indeed, there were Hindu pirates, Sikh pirates, animist pirates, Buddhist pirates . . . even "Christian" pirates. There were Chinese pirates and Tamil pirates. There were white, black, brown, and yellow pirates. In all, there were—and not counting mere part timers—some thirty-three large bands of pirates, plus substantial numbers of small time freelancers, not more than half of either Moslem.

  They all hated each other; that was key.

  It had
taken some time, and considerable intelligence support from Robinson, before Mustafa had determined the solution to his problem. It was really elegant in its conceptual simplicity. Mustafa would help and direct one not terribly large or powerful Moslem group, under the leadership of a fat, middle-aged Malay cutthroat named Parameswara, to take over, one by one, all the non-Moslem pirates. That band would then be large to take on the largest of the Moslem bands. That united band would then be large enough to have little difficulty taking over the rest of the Moslem bands. At that point, there would be enough Moslems under cohesive leadership to exterminate the previously allied non-Moslem pirates.

  That was one elegant concept. More elegant still, so much so that Mustafa nearly shivered when he thought upon it, was that the ultimate targets of the pirates, his ultimate target, the shippers of the industrialized world, would pay to have Parameswara do this.

  In the short term, the Malay would do precisely as he said, suppress piracy. The shippers, like all their ilk, rarely thought in the long term. Short-term returns were what kept them in their cushy jobs. Short-term returns were what got them golden parachute packages. Indeed, that much at least Terra Nova's capitalists shared with its progressives. There was little practical difference between a progressive, or an outright socialist, promising to rape an economy for short-term gain to buy votes from the masses and a capitalist raping a company for short-term gains to buy votes from the stockholders.

  So, at least, Mustafa thought of it. And, in principle, giving money to Parameswara to protect their ships from pirates was not substantially different than paying it to Abdulahi, as an increasing number of shippers were, to keep his merry boys from seizing their ships.

  The part Mustafa had the greatest difficulty in understanding was the failure of the shippers to arrange for their own ships' protection. Is it that we are charging one drachma less than it would cost the shippers to hire mercenaries for protection? Are they really that short-sighted? They must be.

  One form of aid Mustafa had given Parameswara was a company of his own mujahadin. That company had also brought with it modern weapons ranging from rifles to heavy machine guns and rocket grenade launchers, or RGLs, sufficient to arm ten times Parameswara's band. In addition, they had brought money, a doctor, night vision equipment and radios.

  Mostly, they brought expertise. The war to gain control of the pirate factions of the Nicobar Straits would be fought mostly on land.

  * * *

  The engine was killed even as the boat's pilot turned the wheel hard a port, toward the coast. Landfall was a subdued scraping of muck along the lead vessel's bottom, followed by a shuddering stop. There was no sound except the lapping of small waves on the hull of the boat, the sound of feet scraping along a dirty wooden deck and the quiet splashing of men easing themselves over the side to the waist-deep, murky and polluted water.

  Mustafa's man—called, simply, al Naquib—sniffed at the unpleasant smell composed of mixed smoke, salt sea, rotting jungle vegetation, and pollution. It was so unlike his native desert that inside he cringed.

  Still, the mission was important and if al Naquib had to put up with a few esoteric smells to complete it, then so be it. He, too, eased himself over the side and into the foul water. Parameswara followed.

  "Place not far," the Malay bandit advised. He spoke a sort of pidgin Arabic that served as a lingua franca along the Straits.

  "I hope not," al Naquib answered. "My men are not used to the jungle. I am not used to it either."

  "'Not far,'" the Malay repeated, then left to take the lead to guide the mujahadin toward their target.

  * * *

  The village sat on a low promontory above a slow flowing, greenish river. Culturally and ethnically the place was Chinese, part of the diaspora on Old Earth that had been replicated by forcible immigration to the New. The ethnicity could be seen in the architecture, smelled in the aroma of cooking, and heard in the sing-song speech of early-rising women. Boats were tied up to the riverbank, below the village. Most were unpowered. One, however, sitting low and lean and rakish, had a powerful outboard mounted to the stern. This was the boat the men of the village used for their piratical forays.

  Parameswara eyed the boat hungrily. It would make a fine addition to his small fleet. Only let the Yithrabi, Al Naquib, do his job as Mustafa promised me he would.

  In the dank, green jungle surrounding the village, al Naquib was doing just that, positioning the men of his company by squads. The early morning calls of birds covered the sound of his movements, and it did those of his men and Parameswara's, and the few words he spoke. Even without the birds, it is doubtful they would have been heard over the chatter of the village's women.

  * * *

  Yuan Lin was the village chief's senior wife. This didn't protect her from having to rise early, just like any of the other women, to clean and to cook. At most, her position allowed her to drop some of the more onerous duties on the younger women.

  She was doing just that, slapping into submission the chief's newest concubine, a fifteen-year-old Cochinese girl seized from a refugee barge, when armed men began emerging from the steamy jungle surrounding the village. Lin opened her mouth to call out a warning. She stopped and closed it again when she saw just how many fighters were swarming the place and how quickly they were doing it.

  Wide-eyed, Lin stood with a basket of laundry on one hip, her free hand still raised to strike the Cochinese, when a man materialized in front of her and made pushing motions with the rifle held crossways in front of him. She used her free hand to grab the Cochinese by the ear and pulled her in the direction—the center of the village—where the armed man had indicated he wanted them to go.

  The thing that was surprising, perhaps, was that Lin was neither terribly upset nor terribly afraid. She had herself been seized in a raid when she was even younger than the Cochinese. As she'd discovered then, she was a woman, she was not a threat or competitor, and she had value. She might be raped but she'd been through all that before and survived well enough. Nothing worse was likely to happen to her now. As a matter of fact, Lin didn't even necessarily object to being raped as long as she wasn't going to be permanently damaged by the experience.

  * * *

  Al Naquib and Parameswara stood in the village center, watching as the people—men and boys, women and girls—were herded, cattle-like, inward.

  "Fine," al Naquib said, "you have control of the village. Who do you want killed?"

  "Maybe . . . nobody," Parameswara answered. "Dead, they no use . . . me . . . anybody. I see how it fall out."

  Mustafa's man merely shrugged, Up to you.

  Parameswara nodded and walked out into the center of the square.

  "I'm glad you were all so eager to talk to me," he began with a smile, eliciting a nervous chuckle from the villagers. "And I hope you don't mind that I invited a few close friends along." Parameswara's hand swept around, taking in the more than two hundred that accompanied him.

  That earned another mass chuckle, a bit more sincere than the first. After all, why not? He hadn't killed anyone yet and it never hurt to laugh at someone else's jokes. Even Chang Tsai, the chief of the village, joined in the laugh. He, most especially, feared being dead soon. What better reason to try to ingratiate himself with Parameswara?

  The Malay chief had a gift for oratory. He spoke of the rising sun and the setting sun. He talked of the low tide always returning as a new high. He talked of the Prophet and he spoke of the Buddha. He waxed eloquent over the future and the past.

  What he means is, we join him or he kills every man, woman and child in the village, thought Chang Tsai. It would be better to join.

  15/3/467 AC, Kamakura, Yamato

  Yamato had this much difference with the Salafis; whereas the Salafis emigrated to Terra Nova to recreate the seventh century of Old Earth, Yamato had preferred recreating the latter third of the nineteenth and earlier third of the twentieth, with a profound nod of respect to the thirteenth throug
h seventeenth. About the entire Pearl-Harbor-to-the-deck-of-the-USS Missouri fiasco, back on Old Earth, they preferred to forget (though the rebuilt Yasukuni Jinja had some hundreds of thousands of mementos). They were none too interested in delving too deeply into the mistakes of the Great Global War, either.

  That meant, in practice, that the Imperial Court

  still had tremendous power within the country, though the power was almost always expressed subtly. Indeed, it was usually expressed so subtly that no one could really be certain what the Emperor actually meant, most of the time. Some of this was, of course, in the way questions to the Throne were phrased.

  "His Highness said what?" asked Mr. Yamagata of his colleague, Mr. Saito. Each was a representative of a major shipping company. Yamagata's brought in oil; Saito's exported finished goods.

  "I mentioned to His Highness," answered Saito, "that ships bringing oil to our land endured many dangers. He answered, 'Sometimes we must endure the unendurable.'"

  Yamagata took off his bottle-thick glasses and cleaned them with his tie.

  "That is a remarkably forthright answer from Him," he observed. "It seems clear enough, then, as clear as it ever is, that the Imperial Navy is not going to help us. What do we do then?"

  "I came to the same conclusion. As to what we must do, I asked the Emperor, 'Shall not the sons of the Son of Heaven resist tyranny and robbery?' He answered with the questions, 'Does not the law forbid private persons from bearing arms? Has the land not seen untold misery from uncontrolled violence?'"

  "Shit!" exclaimed Yamagata.

  "Shit," echoed Saito more softly. "It was a curious audience. Before I left, His Imperial Highness said, 'Sometimes, we must allow ourselves—like Miyamoto Musashi—to be tossed about by the waves of the sea.'"

  Yamagata's left eyebrow lifted, subtly. "Wave tossed? Ronin?"

  Ronin meant, in Japanese, "wave man," as a masterless samurai was said to be tossed through life on the waves. Many ronin, throughout the history of Japanese culture (which history and culture were largely carried over to Yamato on Terra Nova), became mercenaries. Miyamoto Musashi—old Japan's "sword saint"—had been ronin.