Carnifex (15 page)

"IG, there are no other reasons to train; everything we do in training must advance these causes.

"To the rest of you: if I discover you have not listened carefully, if I discover that you are not developing the mental and moral faculties of your units and your men, if I discover that you
ever
let training become routine, standardized and, in a phrase, mentally dulling, I will not only fire you, I will set you to turning large rocks into small ones, until you are old and gray."

"That's all."

The Moslems had not, as many feared and others hoped for, ever become a majority within the European Union. For one thing, the United States and Australia, along with the Republic of Western Canada, had, after a time (and only for a time), refused to take more than a pittance in culturally Christian but politically social-democrat European immigrants. Moreover, the EU itself began to institute border and emigration controls that even Stalin and Castro would have approved of. For another, the unsustainable social democratic state had not, in fact, been sustained. When elderly German or French citizens went hungry, the Moslems were bound to be starved.

This, of course, resulted in violence. But the Euros, always with that mix of bloodthirsty fanaticism lurking beneath the soft exterior, had traditions for dealing with inassimilable foreigners who caused trouble.

The Army and Foreign Legion trucks and buses, bearing two battalions of paras, three of infantry, one of engineers, and a
lot
of building material, showed up before dawn. In an operation well planned and well rehearsed, the Moslem ghetto of Clichy-sous-Bois was surrounded, and the beginnings of a barbed wire fence put up, before the sun was much above the horizon.

The welfare state required lots of young people and lots of taxes to support it. Unfortunately, both the ethos of the welfare state—which could have been called "Maximum License"—and the taxes which made raising a large family highly problematic, ensured that there could never be enough babies born to keep up that tax base.

There was a solution, of course, major immigration of young workers from elsewhere. This was a solution not without its problems, however. Those problems eventually became highly pressing, as when a group of Moslem "youths" burned down a few government buildings in Paris on Bastille Day.

And then someone remembered that foreign workers did not necessarily have to be
free
to be useful.

"Live with the new reality, Imam," said the legionnaire officer to the senior cleric in the
banlieue
. "You're people will be fed,
if
they work. But you have abused our hospitality too much for us to allow you the freedom of our country any longer."

Nearby, more Army and Legion trucks and buses, joined now by police vehicles, dropped off Moslems by the hundreds who had been seized in the great sweep up.

"We will riot," answered the imam, huffily. "We will—"

The legionnaire cut him off. "You will maintain control or we will cut off your water, your heat, your food. There will be no riots."

"The conscience of the world—"

"Means nothing. You forgot, I think, that when we banned speech that might offend you and yours, we also took upon ourselves the power to ban any speech we desired to ban. Every silver lining has its cloud, Imam."

"War is pusillanimously carried on in this degenerate age; quarter is given; towns are taken and people spared; even in a storm, a woman can hardly hope for the benefit of a rape."

—Philip Dormer Stanhope,
Fourth Earl of Chesterfield

Carrera had extended his leave to spend local Christmas with his family. And he'd felt like a rat, too, camp-sick the whole time for his army and guilty that all those deployed couldn't be home with
their
families.

Patricio Carrera,
Dux
, in Latin, or
Duque
, in Spanish, commander of the deployed portion of the
Legion del Cid
, drummed his fingers with irritation while watching the projection screen set up in the main room of the club.

"What are you going to do if you win, Adnan?" Carrera asked of the Sumeri, Adnan Sada, seated to his right.

"To answer that question, Patricio, you have to answer the question of why the people would have voted for me."

"Because here, in Ninewa and over in Pumbadeta provinces we've got relative peace?"

Sada laughed, slightly and cynically. "That's a part of it, too, of course. But the real reason, only somewhat related to that, is that I am not a nut, either tribalist, sectarian, fascist or leftist, that I am not really a democrat, and that I am ruthless enough to hold things together. If they vote for me, they're voting to hold the country together, whatever it takes. They're also voting to get rid of this experiment in parliamentary democracy which scares the living shit out of most of them."

"You mean they
want
to have 'one man, one vote, once'?"

"Pretty much," Sada agreed, then amended, "or rather, they
don't
want there to be a chance for the rise of the sort of lunatics democracy tends to throw up in this kind of society. They also want their traditions and their tribes respected. They want someone able to keep the Farsi at bay; yes, even the ones who share sect with the Farsi would prefer being a majority in a non-sectarian Sumer to being an Arab minority in a non-Arab state."

"Are you planning on de-socializing?"

"There's no way to," Sada answered, definitively, "not entirely. It's the curse of a single-resource economy. When someone tells me how to divide up the oil without just pouring money into corrupt hands . . . "

Sada's face suddenly looked grim as his voice acquired a hint of despair.

"Most Arabs, you know, think Allah gave us the oil as a special gift because he loves us. I suspect he gave it to us as a trap because he hates us."

Carrera looked down, thinking,
Balboa, too, is something of a single resource country, the Transitway. The other major income producer, the Legion, is not, strictly speaking, a part of the economy. How would Balboa divide the Transitway? When they've tried it just meant huge bribes for private profit.

Sada continued, "I
am
of a mind to de-socialize most of those things the previous government took control of; agriculture, construction, liquor distilling. Who knows, maybe I'll be able to buy a decent local beer and whiskey someday, rather than having to rely on the Legion's unofficial imports."

Sada was not one of those Moslems who took the proscription against alcohol too very seriously.

"In any case," Sada finished, "I will deliberately wreck this doomed-to-fail, absolutely impossible experiment in parliamentarianism and work to create what can work, a federation of the tribes with a national army. And, after all, what the hell difference what kind of government we have provided it doesn't try to govern
much
? I will
never
be able to eradicate corruption so I'll just have to work with it, even to regularize it."

That sparked a thought for Carrera.
When the day comes, as it will, when the government of Balboa has to go, how will Parilla and I organize the country? Around the provinces that, outside of
Valle de la Luna,
don't mean much? Around the
tercios
of the legions? It's something to think on. Of course, first we'll have to fight the Taurans who are only in Balboa to ensure we can't get rid of the government.

Carrera's thoughts were interrupted by a loud cheer and some warbling from the female serving staff at the club, which included several dozen Sumeri hookers, war widows mostly, that the Legion had taken under its wing. He looked up and saw that the main screen showed election returns from Pumbadeta and its environs; a sweep for Sada.

"
They
appreciate that, as far as they can tell, I saved them from
you
," Sada commented, with a grin.

It was true enough. Without Sada's personal example and intervention Carrera
had
been determined to kill every Pumbadetan male capable of sprouting a beard. And they'd known it.

Nice to see they pay their debts
, Carrera thought
.

There was another cheer, and more female warbling, as the results for Ninewa were shown on the screen. It was rather more subdued, though. There had never been any doubt of how the base province for Sada's own force, now a near mirror image of Carrera's, would vote.

"Babel is the real question," Sada observed. "It's going to be close."

The officers and senior non-coms—centurions, sergeants-major, signifers, tribunes, and legates—couldn't have been more interested in watching the election results on the main room's four meter projection screen than they would have been if the election had been held in their base country of Balboa. After all, it was
their
man,
their
ally, Adnan Sada, running for the highest office in the Republic of Sumer.

Surrounded by the others, Carrera's and Sada's fingers continued to drum. Watching the numbers shift was as nerve wracking as any battle.

No,
thought Carrera.
It's
more
nerve-wracking than a battle. For in battle I have control, a control I know how to use to good effect. Here, with this election, I have little.
Unconsciously, he stopped the drumming with his right hand, moving the thumbnail to his teeth to nibble.

Sitting to Carrera's left, Sergeant Major McNamara noticed the nervous biting and, thinking to kill two birds with one stone, poured a fresh drink into the crystal glass on the arm rest between them. The whiskey made tinkling sounds as it splashed over the ice.

Thank God
, John McNamara thought,
that he's cut down on the drinking since seven years ago.

Still unconsciously, Carrera stopped his nail gnawing to pick up the glass. Unseen by Carrera, Sergeant Major McNamara smiled slightly at the Sumeri, Qabaash, seated behind Sada. Qabaash rarely smiled outside of battle. He did offer his glass behind Carrera's back to McNamara for a refill.

"Heretic," Carrera whispered when he turned saw the drink in Qabaash's hand.

"It's not what you
Nazrani
would call a mortal sin,
sayidi
," Qabaash answered. "Besides, Allah is the all merciful, the all-forgiving, despite what some Salafi assholes would have you believe. And He knows I need the bloody drink now, if ever I did."

Carrera nodded, then replaced his own drink on the arm rest. Re-fixing his attention on the screen he went back to his gnawing. This time McNamara gave off an "ahem" to remind his chief of the proper decorum.

"Well, dammit," Carrera answered, "this election decides the war. If we win it, we'll have won. If Sada loses . . . "

"Civil war," Qabaash supplied. "There is no one else to hold the country together, just a bunch of corrupt tribal and sectarian idiots who'll pull us apart. And no, I don't mean random terrorism; I mean civil
war
."

Carrera and McNamara tactfully refrained from mentioning that civil war in Sumer was potentially just another employment opportunity for the
Legion del Cid
. Besides, they really did want to win the war in Sumer. It wasn't as if there would be a lack of other employment opportunities, after all, not in the long run.

"
Il hamdu l'illah!"
exclaimed Qabaash. To God be the praise.

Carrera looked back at the screen. The precincts for Babel had begun to report in. The few initial reports quickly became a cascade. Mentally echoing Qabaash, he thought,
Thank you, God or Allah, or whatever name You prefer to go by.

Turning to Sada, Carrera offered his hand. "Congratulations, Mr. President."

The hookers' warbling grew to a torrent of sound to compete with the thunder of slapped backs and smashed crystal.

James K. Malcolm should have been President. Everything he'd ever done in his life, from serving in the armed forces, to taking initially unpopular anti-war and progressive stands, to his series of marriages to increasingly wealthy and connected women, to being photographed windsurfing off the coast of Botulph;
everything
had been geared to one sole end, that he should rest his feet on the presidential desk and guide the country to his version of a progressive future.

But it had not yet come. He'd had his chance and blown it almost three and a half decades before he'd made his runs. Twice he'd tried. The second time he'd even failed of nomination, despite his latest wife's money and even a substantial portion of his own. He'd been offered the vice-presidential slot and turned it down, instead taking the job of secretary of war, an infinitely more important job than Vice President as long as the country was at war. He had one more chance at the office of President, and SecWar seemed the best place to spend his time before he took that chance.

And to do that, I need to be remembered as the man who ended the war in Sumer. Moreover, I need the extreme Progressives to see me as the man who surrendered. I also need to be seen as the man who disengaged favorably by the Independents. And I need to do that without at the same time
looking
like I surrendered to the Federalists.

I also need to be the one who oversees final victory in Pashtia. For that is what will be remembered in eight years.

After having been announced via intercom by the receptionist, Malcolm politely knocked at the door to the President's office, then waited patiently to be asked in. When he entered he affected not to notice that the President was rearranging his trousers even as a female intern was reapplying her lipstick.

After a second's more fussing with his belt line the President stood and advanced, offering his hand. The intern slipped out a side door.