Come and Take Them Read online

  Places had been made for each of the boys in the Sergeant Juan Malvegui Military Academy, two in Ham’s company, but not his platoon or section, and three in the next company over. Their bags—one overnighter, each—were stored in the trunks of the armored Phaeton and another sedan. Everything else would be issued at school.

  The girls, Carrera could see, lined both sides of the long driveway that led down from the house to the InterColombiana. Also lined up, in addition to those twelve, were Alena and both of Ham’s sisters. He shot a dirty look at Lourdes who shrugged in return. What can one do against religious faith? Even so, she strode over to first the little one, Linda, then Julia, picking each up by her waistband and carrying them, luggagelike, kicking and weeping, to the house.

  The boys, too, stood in a short line, in front of the open space left between the cars. Solemnly, Carrera walked the line, shaking each boy’s hand and giving a few words of encouragement. Most of them answered to the effect of, “I won’t let you down, father of our lord.”

  Ham just said, “I’m ready, Dad.” He gave a quick look to the door through which his mother had carted off his sisters. “And if you had any doubts about whether this is the right thing, forget it. It is.”

  At a word the boys split up, three to each vehicle. The engines started smoothly and the drivers began easing them down the driveway. Alena shouted a command, in her own language. All thirteen of the females still lining the driveway dropped to their knees, then to all fours, and then placed their faces into the dirt as the car bearing Hamilcar passed. The Moslems among whom Alena’s people lived would have been appalled. She and her people, however, were anything but monotheistic Muslims.

  After the first sedan passed they began to rise, all except Ant, aka Pililak, who, still on her knees, shot Carrera a look: This tyranny will not stand.

  He wondered, I wonder what makes Ant so pigheaded about this? More of a monotheist than the ones who are afraid of me?

  Past that, Carrera ignored the girl, the more so as his digital personal data assistant beeped with a message that, upon checking, he saw was from one of Fernandez’s drops.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The secret of all victory lies in the organization of the non-obvious.

  —Marcus Aurelius

  High Admiral’s Conference Room, UEPF Spirit of Peace, in orbit over Terra Nova

  One of the earlier high admirals, perhaps a hundred years prior, had ordered the conference room paneled in rare Terra Novan silverwood. This material shone iridescently from the walls, reflecting the light of a fixed chandelier mounted above a long conference table of the same material as those walls.

  Around the conference table sat United Earth Peace Force High Admiral Marguerite Wallenstein’s seven subordinate squadron commanders, her own staff, and the frightfully young captain of the flagship, Richard, earl of Care. Richard’s mistress and Marguerite’s lovely, olive-skinned cabin girl, Esmeralda, a freed former slave from Old Earth, stood in the back, pitcher in hand, ready to refill a water glass or, later on, provide more potent comestibles.

  Though a former slave and now just a cabin girl, the sixteen-year-old Esmeralda had grown close to Marguerite on the long journey from Old Earth, through the Rift, to Terra Nova. Esmeralda knew the high admiral cared for her, and probably deeply. The best proof of that, to her mind, was the fact that, though the high admiral liked girls at least as much as boys, and though Esmeralda would have gone to her bed—joylessly, true, but she’d have gone—if asked or ordered, the request never came; the order was never given. That, alone, was so unlike the normal attitude of a Class One . . .

  She loves me, thought Esmeralda, but like a daughter. Or maybe a favored pet. The thought of being a pet sent a shiver through the girl. Even so, she thought, Beats becoming a bowl of chili for the neo-Azteca. Which I almost became. She sent an encouraging smile over the table to her admiral.

  Marguerite Wallenstein, High Admiral of the United Earth Peace Fleet, acknowledged the smile, but only with her eyes. About a century and a half old, she was a leggy, slender—even svelte—Scandinavian-descended Old Earther, with blue eyes that were a bit too small and a nose that was just a trifle too large to qualify her as a true beauty. Even so, she was still a woman who rated a second look; one just wouldn’t be enough.

  Over the rest of her face she maintained a screen, stonelike and detached. It was the best she could do as her fleet maintenance officer went down the list of major deficiencies in her command. She knew them all by heart anyway. Until quite recently nothing had changed with the fleet, except for the worse, in decades. Now, finally, with the old mothballed colonization fleet substantially looted for the parts now being disgorged from the repurposed colonization ship, Jean Monnet, some improvements were being made. With the significant push on the part of the secretary general of the Consensus, United Earth’s governing body, to support the distant Peace Fleet, more should be possible soon.

  Still, with ships that were centuries old, there was a great deal of room for improvement. Even her own flagship, Spirit of Peace, was a century and a quarter old, as were her sisters of the Spirit class.

  Marguerite turned her attention from the fleet maintenance officer to the captain, pro tem, of the Monnet, McFarland. His face was as blank as her own, something she knew that came hard to her former chief engineer. Indeed, it came so hard that if the maintenance wallah had been bullshitting McFarland wouldn’t have been able to hide it.

  Good. It’s going about as well as reported, then.

  Back in Old Earth orbit she’d intended to put someone else in as skipper as soon as she had a replacement trained to take over from McFarland. Instead, time being short and the successful transition of Monnet from the Solar System to Terra Nova so critical, she’d pulled Buthelezi in to serve as Peace’s chief engineer. He was doing well enough in the job for her to wonder if she shouldn’t make it permanent, leaving McFarland in command of Monnet for at least several more supply runs back home.

  Something that requires serious thought, Marguerite reminded herself. Buthelezi is on top of things on a ship that McFarland tuned to a T before transferring completely to Monnet. That doesn’t mean he can handle it as things begin to wear again.

  And if there’s anything that better refutes the core philosophy behind the system on Old Earth, that man’s just malleable clay in the hands of the elites, then I can’t imagine what or who it could be than McFarland. After all, if it were true, that core belief, how is it that the system didn’t ruin him? Or convince him, being only a Class Three, after all, that he just wasn’t up to the job.

  That thought, “Class Three,” scared her suddenly. She spared McFarland another glance, looking over the bald pate fringed with gray, the sagging skin under his chin, and the wrinkles framing eyes and ears. Elder gods, what if he dies on me? He’s only a Three; no really good anti-agathics for him. Note to self: if it takes blowing the SecGen of the Consensus to get Mac raised then I can do that.

  Well, she silently corrected herself, I could if I could go back home before I’ve settled the Terra Novan question. Hmmm . . . maybe I should ship Khan the wife back with McFarland on his next supply run to make an . . . ummm . . . an oral . . . request.

  At that Marguerite did permit herself a small smile. Small as it was it caught the maintenance officer’s attention. “Ma’am?” he asked worriedly.

  “Nothing, Chief,” she answered with a shake of her head. “Keep going.”

  “Yes, High Admiral.”

  The invisible speaker mounted behind Wallenstein beeped, then squawked. A very natural sounding computer-generated voice announced, “Admiral’s barge ready for transport to the surface.”

  Marguerite pointed at McFarland. “Captain, take over the briefing,” she said. “Esma, assuming you’ve finished packing us?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” the Earth-girl replied. “Your bags should already be at the shuttle.”

  “Excellent. Let’s go.”

  For a number of reasons,
not least that the major power on the planet below, the Federated States of Columbia, utterly feared, hated, and despised the United Earth Peace Fleet, and was both capable and prepared to destroy it on fairly minimal provocation, Wallenstein found it wise to go first to the UEPF base on Atlantis Island, in the Mar Furioso, before boarding a more conventional aircraft for the mainland. From there she would fly to the Tauran Union, then to Balboa. The second and third legs of that journey would be in aircraft registered on the planet, and not marked as owned by the Peace Fleet. It might not fool anyone who was looking, but would at least keep casual comment to a minimum. Her final segment, Tauran Union to Balboa, would be on a Gallic Air Force dirigible with several high functionaries of the TU aboard as well. The dirigible would be carrying necessary supplies, too, for partial cover, along with a few hundred replacements.

  Still, the journey of a thousand miles or, in this case, about forty thousand, began with a single . . .

  I hope to hell Buthelezi’s right about this elder gods-damned thing, Marguerite thought as she climbed the three steps from the hangar deck to her shuttle. The steps formed the lower third or so of the shuttle’s main hatch. Behind her the hatch whined shut as she settled herself into her—it had to be admitted—luxurious seat. On the other side, Esmeralda, already seated and strapped in, fidgeted nervously.

  She had reason to worry; they both did. A different shuttle had once nearly killed Marguerite’s immediate predecessor, High Admiral Robinson. She spared a quick glance out her porthole to the pressure indicator. The balloon system some prole had come up with was still in place but, comfortingly, the digital display was working again.

  She felt a metallic vibration through the shuttle’s body, as the clamps were let go, then sensed more than felt a slight rise as it was magnetically pulled upward. Again glancing out the porthole, she saw the hangar deck sliding by as the shuttle was magnetically moved out of the bay. She realized it was just as well that she couldn’t see forward, as the hangar deck spun with the ship and the sight of spinning moons, stars, or planets was an almost guaranteed nausea inducer.

  And then the hangar’s rectangular portal slid past. The pilot waited perhaps half a minute before firing a brace of attitude rockets to aim himself, then another to stop. Marguerite braced herself.

  Whoomf!

  Personally, I prefer a more sedate flight, Marguerite thought. But if I’m going to turn this gaggle of inbred mules into stallions . . . well, a little discomfort is probably required.

  The plane to the mainland was waiting when Marguerite’s shuttle set down. She was quickly hustled out and into a locally produced limousine, Esmeralda trailing behind, watching but not carrying the baggage. The limo then raced to the plane. No sooner were the admiral and her cabin girl strapped in than the thing started its takeoff run. In seconds, it seemed, she was airborne and heading toward Valdivia, in the shadow of the Atacama mountain range, in Colombia del Norte. The UEPF wasn’t precisely popular in Valdivia, which retained a fairly strong alliance with the Federated States, and very friendly relations with the Republic of Balboa, but as long as war wasn’t actually in the offing and there was a peseta to be made, a limited trade—mostly limited by the UEPF’s emphasis on security and secrecy—was kept up. For the most part the trade was by air, but three or four times a local year a ship was allowed in Atlantean waters with heavier and bulkier goods. This was always presented as a case of mere efficiency over shipping goods from Old Earth.

  In truth, though, thought Wallenstein, as her plane lifted wheels up, the fleet couldn’t survive six months without the planet, even with the latifundia on Atlantis Island. Speaking of which, if the locals ever discover how we do our farming even the bloody Gauls will be up in arms over it. But what the hell am I going to do with the slaves and serfs? I can’t free them, not really. Oh, sure, I have the power to, but if I do, they’ll start to leave. No food would be bad enough. But when they start leaving and the locals, especially the Federated States, discover what bad shape we’re still in they’ll nuke us on general principle.

  Fuck, I hate my own system. But I have to tolerate some evil—and I know it’s an evil—for a longer-term good. I have to.

  The plane was supersonic. This didn’t completely eliminate engine noise—it travelled through the material of the hull—but at least reduced it to a tolerable level.

  “Do they have slavery here on Terra Nova, High Admiral?” Esmeralda asked.

  Reluctantly, Wallenstein nodded, adding, “Commonly, in some places and some cultures. The more civilized local states try to stop it, but . . . well . . . even there there’s slavery. Mostly for girls. Mostly for sex.”

  Esmeralda shivered. “You know what happened to me before you freed me at Razona Market? You never asked, but you know?”

  “I know,” admitted the high admiral. “I wish I’d gotten to you sooner. Before . . .”

  The olive skinned cabin girl had no trouble believing that. But would you also have saved my sister whose heart was cut out by the Neo-Azteca on your Ara Pacis? she wondered silently. She had to admit, in fairness, Yes, you likely would have.

  Esmeralda could read, but what had been a more or less vestigial ability was now, under the instruction of her lover, the earl of Care and captain of the Peace, quite polished. And she had read, too. She’d read enough to know that her admiral’s ultimate destination was in the middle of a place settled by her own distant relatives. She knew, too, that the physical layout was very similar. None of the books she had read on screen seemed to explain why, but to her it was obvious. The people—the “Noahs,” they were called—who built or created the transit point, the people with that kind of power, who had also moved populations of Earth animals to the new world, had also simply used their immense power to modify the new Earth to closely match the old. Precisely why they did this she didn’t know.

  The books from which Esmeralda was allowed to read were strictly limited by a system even the high admiral would have found a chore to override. And none of their authors had really cared all that much about the new world. On Terra Nova, on the other hand, where many people were deeply concerned with the planet of their birth, there was, in fact, a cogent theory as to why their world physically matched Old Earth so closely. It had to do with weather or, more properly, with weather and the animals the Noahs had brought, from sabertooth to megalodon to phorohacos.

  Plainly, the Noahs had wanted those animals to live. That required a proper climate, proper seasons, proper winds and rain. And, since weather was largely a function of the layout of a planet’s surface, that had necessitated raising up continents and islands here, moving others there, and perhaps sinking others, still.

  At least, that was the prevailing theory among those who cared.

  Gaul Field, Balboa Transitway Zone, Balboa, Terra Nova

  Both the admiral and the cabin girl had changed out of UEPF blacks into mufti during the second leg of their flight. That way they raised no comment as they made their way from one airport portal to the next in Valdivia, or in Taurus, or here.

  It smells exactly like home, Esmeralda thought, as she and the high admiral walked the short distance from the Tauran dirigible’s hatchway to a waiting helicopter a quarter of a mile away. Well, underneath that funny oily stink it does. Sea salt. Flowers. The jungle.

  The TU’s political and diplomatic crew lagged respectfully behind Wallenstein, who outranked them any way they cared to look at it. Her cabin girl, conversely, stayed by her side. About two hundred meters from the waiting TH-527 helicopter the wind shifted. Esmeralda sniffed again. Even the food . . . it’s all the same.

  Suddenly the girl was overwhelmed by a sense of homesickness and loss. It was all she could do not to break down in tears at the thought, I’ll never see home again.

  Wallenstein hadn’t gotten to be as old as she had without learning to read people. That she and the cabin girl had spent about the last two years in close company helped, too. Gently, she patted Esmeralda. “Yes, chi
ld, you will someday go home. Moreover, you’ll go home free and rich and famous all over. With a nice jump in caste to see you through a long and happy life.”

  And when I hang the last of the Castro-Nyeres—foul brood—you’ll be there to set the ropes. I promise.

  Esmeralda wasn’t as good at reading her admiral as her admiral was at reading her.

  Headquarters, Tauran Union Security Force-Balboa, Building 59, Fort Muddville, Balboa, Terra Nova

  Marguerite had it on very good authority that the TU’s headquarters was an intelligence sieve, that the domestic staff and some of the secretarial staff spied for the other side, that the phones were tapped, and even that some areas were subject to sound amplification via parabolic mirror. She thought that last was paranoia but . . . Never hurts to be a little bit paranoid.

  Indeed, she’d been paranoid enough to force a third of the more senior TU personnel to precede her out of the helicopter, having ordered the Gaul, Janier, to greet them. While all of that folderol was going on, she and Esmeralda escaped into the building via a less obvious door, held open by a short, well-stacked, very damned pretty blonde with very large blue eyes.

  Who, unfortunately, Wallenstein realized in an instant, isn’t remotely interested in girls. Oh, well.

  The blonde’s nametag read “Campbell,” while the rank on her epaulets indicated captain of ground forces.

  “This way, ma’am,” Campbell said, leading Marguerite and Esmeralda down a narrow, brown-painted corridor, up an even narrower flight of steps, then around two corners and into a thick-walled conference room of perhaps four by six meters. The door to the conference room was doubled, with a small chamber between doors, very much like the air lock of a star ship.