Carnifex (77 page)

"That's one possibility, Lucretia," Robinson said. "It's also possible, and for us much better, that the Salafis should dominate the planet."

Arbeit shrugged. To her, it really didn't matter.

"When?" Wallenstein asked, weakly.

"A couple of weeks," Robinson answered. "The Salafis are making a place where we can shelter a shuttle for the delivery. Making it by
hand
, as a matter of fact, the yokels," Robinson sneered. "They'll all be better off once we're in charge. Only the Class Ones have the wisdom to run a world properly, let alone two of them."

Reminded, she began to ask, hesitantly, "Have you . . . "

"Have I put you up for Class One yet?"

"Yes, that."

"Of course. Speaking of which, Marguerite, I'll want you personally to see to my security down there." Robinson smiled and continued, "In the interim, I have other uses for you. Get your uniform off and get on all fours."

"And get your lovely head over here," Arbeit ordered, sliding her posterior toward the edge of her seat.

Afterwards, Wallenstein lay on her side in the High Admiral's bed, sandwiched between the two of them. She kept two knuckles in her mouth on which she bit down. Normally, Robinson was content to use her mouth or vagina. This time he'd wanted her ass and it had hurt. It still hurt.

It will all be worth it,
she consoled herself,
when he and Lucretia sponsor me for Class One. Everything will be worth it then. All the perks . . . all the lower castes having to kowtow to me rather than me to the high caste. The best living arrangements. Servants. Proles to use as I've been used all my life. Respect.

Arbeit slept silently. The High Admiral snored. He'd fallen asleep as soon as he'd finished using her body, she thought, but the snore meant he was truly asleep. Still naked, she gently slithered out from between them and over to the computer the High Admiral had inadvertently left running while he'd turned his attention to her.

Must see how their recommendation reads.

A captain had access to everything in his or her ship's computer files, ordinarily. She knew the Admiral had sequestered some files concerning the operations to influence the planet below. Hopefully he would not have thought to sequester the report on her.

She typed carefully, quietly. There it was, in the recent files section, a report labeled "Wallenstein." She pulled up the file and began to read.

As an officer Marguerite Wallenstein is adequate, but no more than that,
she read. Skipping ahead, feeling nauseous, she saw further,
While she has a obsession with reaching Class One status, nothing in her background and breeding suggests she would be a suitable candidate. She has too many lower caste and even prole attitudes to entrust any portion of the direction of a world to her marginal capabilities. On the plus side, she uses her mouth well and will gladly and even eagerly do anything in bed her superiors direct her to do. I earnestly recommend a tour as military aid to a high ranking Class One, male or female as the captain does not discriminate, followed by retirement as soon as she becomes tiresome.

The report was countersigned by the IG, Arbeit.

Feeling
wounded,
as near to raped as she ever had in her life, Wallenstein returned to bed.

By the next morning Wallenstein had herself under full control. She awakened before either of her partners from the night before, then showered, dressed, and went to her own cabin prior to ascending to the bridge. On the bridge she took the morning report and gave a few orders to the bridge crew. After that, she turned control over to her executive officer and withdrew to her day cabin.

When Robinson showed up, she greeted him with her usual sweet smile and said, "I have had a complete sensor search done of the Salafi base area and there is nothing unusual to report, Martin. I've also put your personal shuttle into maintenance to make sure it is ready."

This was all true. It was even the whole truth . . . so far.

The truth was that the Salafis were fairly rotten soldiers, as the term "soldier" was understood over most of the globe. Hopeless marksmen, most of them, their rifles were ordinarily little more than noisemakers. Hopeless, they were too, on the battle line. A culture that values family above all things in this life cannot produce military units where nonblood-related men must generally trust in, even love, one another enough to make them risk death for their comrades. And it took a very rare leader—Mohammad had been one such; to a lesser degree Sada, back in Sumer, was another—to get them to rise above that.

On the other hand, unlike any number of military skills and values, patrolling was something that did come more or less naturally to most of the Salafis. Oh, the softly raised city boys of Kashmir and Yithrab were fairly hopeless, at first (even
they
could be taught, eventually, though). But the desert
Bedu
and the hill runners of Pashtia?
They
grew up with the possibility of having their little encampments raided at any time for livestock and women.
They
grew up, from earliest boyhood, with the idea of walking around outside their camp's perimeter at night to catch any such raid, or scouts for a raid.

Those
Salafis went out every night through gaps in the wire and mines around the camp to make sure there were no unfriendly strangers waiting in the darkness. Some of them even stayed out days at a time, carefully and nervously walking the hills and valleys around the base.

Perhaps they'd grown a little slack, what with all the months and years in the Base and never a sign of the enemy nearby. But a "little slack," for a
Bedu
or a Pashtun securing his immediate home, wasn't really all that slack. It might have been slack enough, for example, to miss a small hide, well camouflaged, on a hillside. To miss men entering and exiting that hide? To miss men exiting that hide
every night?

Sevilla was both furious and frightened. The idiot signifer was out again, having taken three men with him this time. What the young fool expected to find out there was beyond the sergeant. Briefly, he considered sending a burst message to higher to get someone to order the signifer to stay put. This seemed disloyal, though, and the Legion stressed loyalty to immediate higher authority.

The sergeant stiffened when he heard the rustle of rock below. Hands tightening on his rifle, a standard model, he flipped down his monocle and used the rifle to peer out from the hide. He relaxed again, as much as one could relax on a long range detached mission in enemy territory with an
idjit
for a leader, anyway, when he made out Somoza's familiar shape in the darkness.

Muttering a curse under his breath, Sevilla lifted the overhead net carefully and only enough to allow the patrol to re-enter the hide. In a whisper the signifer passed on what they had found. This was, as the sergeant expected, precisely nothing.

I'm getting too old for this shit
, thought the twenty-seven year old Sevilla.
Maybe it's time to go back to my home
tercio
, the Third Infantry. They might—probably
would—
stick me in the recon platoon and have me doing the same basic shit, but at least I wouldn't be out here eighty fucking miles from help. Besides, line cohort recon platoons are almost always led by centurions. Better,
way
better, than having my balls in a shavetail's hands.

The overhead net rustled suddenly as something hit it from above. Sevilla looked up for an instant, saw a glowing spark, and pulled his head down under his protecting hands while shouting, "Grenade!"

Grenades were fairly high tech items, pricey and of limited shelf life, to boot. There were some in the Base's deep bunkers, of course, even many. But they were rarely issued, the
mujahadin
preferring to make their own. One typical "grenade" consisted of a one pound block of TNT, dipped in glue and then rolled in small ball bearings, BBs, repeatedly until a decent amount of shrapnel had been built up. Into the fuse well of the TNT was placed a non-electric blasting cap with a short bit of fuse, the fuse connected to a pull igniter, and the whole thing heavily duct-taped to keep it both together and waterproof. Some of the grenades were fitted with a piece of rope tied around to allow a much longer toss. In a pinch, and much like an industrially made hand grenade, the thing could be turned into a booby trap or mine with minimal effort.

Of course, such an assembly was heavier than a grenade, a
lot
heavier. On the other hand, what with having many times the explosive and shrapnel it was just the thing for taking out a bunker or trench.

Or a hide.

The leader of the
mujahadin
patrol hadn't been certain, at first, that it even
was
enemy. After so long without a contact he'd begun to believe that the crusaders and their mercenaries had given up on the Base. Who could be out here, then? Probably it was only another patrol like his own. Or maybe some herders got lost. Or . . . 

"No . . . it's the infidels," he whispered to his men once he caught sight of the distinctive silhouette of a Helvetian-style helmet. "Come. We'll follow."

They almost lost sight of the crusaders several times. The mujahadin were confused by the fact that the hide was nowhere one would reasonably expect an observation post to be, thus the route the infidels followed was nothing like the route they would have expected. They were persistent, however, and their persistence was rewarded when, unexpectedly, one of the enemy stood a little too high before crouching down to slither into the hillside.

The leader of the patrol had no idea how many men might have gone below. He only had five of his own with him.
Best to be safe then.

Spreading his men out in a line above the hide, he took from a small bag slung around his neck one of the homemade grenades. He motioned two of his men to do likewise. Each unwound the roughly meter-long cord tied around their devices.

"All together now," the leader whispered. "Pull together, spin together, throw together. Ready . . . . pull."

There was the small sound of three spring-driven firing pins being released and the only slightly louder pops of the pins hitting the primers. All three fuses caught immediately. The men whirled their charges by the cords and released them at about the same time. They sailed through the air silently to land either in or around the spot where the crusaders had been seen to enter the earth.

All three grenadiers hurled themselves to the ground and waited for the explosions. There was only one brief cry from the enemy before the bombs went off. The five men of the
mujahadin
patrol began to fire as soon as the last of the home-made grenades had exploded, then charged forward still spraying the ground to their front. There was no return fire.

It was critical, Wallenstein knew, that she not only continue in obsequious pleasantness to the High Admiral and the IG, but that she also continue to eagerly seek out opportunities to make her body available to them. This was no problem; she could feign passion while reading a book. She did so now, while plotting both revenge and her own advancement.

"Unh!"
I am senior in the fleet, after Robinson. Arbeit has civil rank but not line rank.
"Oh!"
If anything were to . . . 
"Mmm."
happen to them
 . . . "Ahhh."
command would devolve on me. Screw this
 . . . "Ung"
I can think better with his cock in my mouth than with him laying on me.

Impatiently, she pushed him off her and bent over to take him in her mouth. Her head motions were thoughtless, automatic, the result of many decades of practice.

He's
got
to be operating on sealed orders. The Security Council must have given them to him before we left Earth. They're probably locked in his computer in a way even I can't get to. But I have records enough of his orders to date to make a good case for
thinking
there were sealed orders and carrying through with them, even if there were not. Plus, Arbeit's going along with him makes my case even better.

Automatically, she pulled her mouth away to run her tongue under the shaft a few times before she returned to her sucking-on-autopilot.

Besides, the Governing Council, even if they knew nothing of the state of Terra Nova today, would certainly approve of initiative shown in eliminating a threat. There's probably no better way, no better way left to me, to reach Class One then to eliminate such a threat.

Robinson began to moan and writhe under her ministrations. Now she did concentrate, moving her head and mouth briskly up and down to get the business over with. She still had much thinking to do, and could do without further distractions.

Bashir looked up from his digging, distracted by the apparition of five bound and bloodied men being led into camp by ropes tied around their necks. He recognized the uniforms, despite the blood, and had a sinking feeling that his sole contact with the foreign infidels had just been lost. With it, quite possibly, his family was also lost.

He managed to keep the despair from his face, to feign mere curiosity. When Noorzad invited all the men excavating to come and witness the punishment, he even managed to look cheerful as he walked over, still carrying a heavy sledge hammer in his hands.

A substantial crowd had gathered by the time Nur al-Deen, Mustafa's lieutenant, emerged from a cave to stand on a rock overlooking the scene. He looked down upon the captives and spat, eloquently. Then he began to speak in Misrani-accented Arabic. The Arabs among the crowd understood perfectly well. The Pashtun and Kashmiris were totally lost, most of them.

"He says their punishment in written in Sura Five of the Koran," one of the men standing near Bashir announced. 'Thus be it to all,' he says, 'who bring disorder to the world, who fight against the Prophet,' peace be upon him."