Caliphate (51 page)

Hans smiled, a last smile.
That
was warming. He then stood, fired once, twice, and a third time. His vision had narrowed under the stress. Whether he actually hit anyone he didn't know and, perhaps, at that point, didn't much care. He flung the empty submachine gun at a janissary aiming his weapon at him, causing the janissary to duck. Hans then pulled the dagger from its sheath, screamed "
Deus vult!
"— God wills it—and charged like a berserker, a force of nature in himself, right over the table.

Down in the lab the stone walls began to glow. Mortar, old and solid, likewise crumbled from in between set stones. Under the floor, the twin tanks of oxygenated LPG boiled and frothed furiously, albeit unseen. In the crematorium, the flames jutting from the burners were like flamethrowers pretending they were crossed swords. A mass of flame poured from the crematorium's open portal.

As the flames poured forth and the liquid volume inside the tanks dropped, the pressure on the tanks' walls increased. The tanks had a finite strength, and that strength was lessened by the heat. A small fissure appeared in the wall of one tank. Gas escaped, dropping the pressure suddenly. Under the lower pressure, and at the temperature the liquid was at, the boil became a storm. A massive quantity of the liquid suddenly flashed to a gaseous state, bursting the tank apart explosively. Gas and oxygen raced to fill every nook and cranny.

Some neared the flame pouring out of the crematorium's wide open door.

Even within the night vision goggles, vision was tunneled down to nearly nothing. Still, Hans could see a janissary rise before him. He knocked the soldier down and jumped on his chest, pushing his dagger into the gap around the neck and bringing forth a furious spurt of blood.

Booted feet stood before him. Hans began to rise. He felt a blow, then another and a third. His armor kept them out, not least because the bullets were still unstable and did not hit point on.

Sig fired at the madman to his front without effect, so far as he could tell. In the unlit foyer he could make out no more than the silhouette of the body, except in the strobelike flashing of the muzzles of the combatants.

He saw rise before him something instinct told him was a monster. Sig was an old soldier, though, and was not ruled by instinct. A more careful look caused his heart to sink. "Is it really you, my
odabasi
?" he whispered.

There was no sense in denying it. Sig knew. He adjusted his aiming point upwards and fired.

Gas touched the flames. Boom.

The children were the first to notice. Their collective gasp and pointing fingers directed Hamilton's attention to the rear of the airship, toward Castle Honsvang.

What the children and Hamilton saw, initially, was a bright glow, originating at the lower levels and shining through the windows there. The glow spread upward. By the time the upper stories shone, it had expanded past the lower windows, engulfing the castle's base in flame. Inside that flame, one could not see. Yet above it, one saw the towers, the crenellations, the roof, all begin to rise in slow motion. The fireball, traveling faster, overtook most of that, reached apogee, and began to recede. As it did, roof and walls and crenellations and towers all began to return to Earth, following the fireball down. Some pieces continued upward, even so.

By the time the fireball was gone, and the rest fallen, there was nothing to see of Castle Honsvang from the airship. Nor was there anyone on the ground nearby left alive to see.

Amal didn't have to wear a veil at home. She wore it anyway because every time her mother looked at her face, Gabi broke down in tears.

They'd moved to Grosslangheim for protection. The boys had been caught early, but the judge, an Islamic judge, had released them on bail. About this the police could do exactly nothing except to advise Gabi to take her daughter someplace else for safety until the trial.

Not that there was going to be a trial. The boys had no sooner been released on bail then they'd fled, taking advantage of both the informal network of blood relations in Germany and the fact that German police had retreated from the Muslim neighborhoods, leaving them in the charge of German-funded Islamic police who were, in effect, an arm of the very mullahs and imams who counseled that the responsibility for rape fell entirely upon the female.

The police had warned Gabi this would happen and warned her, too, that despite the boys' practical immunity from prosecution, they would still kill her daughter, if they could, as a matter of "principle."

She'd thought of returning to her home town of Kitzingen but that, the police had also advised, was large enough and had enough of a

Muslim community now that she and the girl would be in danger there as well.

"Better a small town," they'd advised. "One where there are none but Germans. You'll find a lot of us are abandoning the cities as they turn into foreign enclaves. No one will find you and Amal too remarkable. It will be better in a small town, too, since the welfare benefits are being slashed all over."

The welfare payments had become more important, too, as Gabi had found herself unable to sell much of her art. She, after all, concentrated on the human form and selling pictures of people had become a rather dangerous, as being against the
Sharia
, activity. Though she'd never encountered it, she'd had friends who had had their stalls and galleries ransacked by Islamic mobs.

In the end, she'd decided she must emigrate and take Amal with her.

After the retaliatory nukings, only Switzerland, in all of Western Europe, had maintained diplomatic relations with the United States— now, since the occupation of Canada, rapidly morphing into the American Empire. Thus, it had been to Switzerland Gabi had had to go to apply for a visa to immigrate into the U.S.

She took her number, and waited impatiently for it to be called. Her initial application had been submitted months before, shortly after she'd realized that no place in continental Europe was going to be safe.

Once her number was called, Gabi proceeded to a private office where a consular officer invited her to sit while perusing her file.

"I'm sorry, Ms. von Minden," the official had said. "Your application has been disapproved."

"But . . . but
why
?"

In answer, the official began taking from the file documents and photographs, sliding them across the desk. Gabi saw herself in the photographs, standing on rostra while speaking to crowds, standing in crowds while carrying signs, signing petitions while being photographed.

She didn't understand. Her face said as much.

"We still take some immigrants from Old Europe," the consular explained. "But we don't really need them. We get plenty of high quality applicants from Latin America, India, Japan, China, Vietnam . . . all over. We not only don't need Europeans anymore, we don't really want them.

"I'm sorry to have to say it this way but . . . you're diseased, you see . . . politically diseased. You're in the process of losing your own homeland. You brought it on yourselves and it's become irreversible now. So ask yourself: Why should we accept into our country people with a history of destroying the country they live in?

"You're diseased, Ms. von Minden, and you're contagious. We had a long bout with the disease that's afflicted Europe, and it killed millions of us. Why should we allow any more contamination?

"Europe abandoned its future for a short period of comfort in the present, and you . . . you
personally
"—the consular's hand waved towards the pictures and documents on the desk—"encouraged this. Europe stopped having children, who
are
the future—because it was too uncomfortable, too inconvenient. Europe began taxing the future to buy comfort in the present. Europe let in millions of inassimilable, and therefore inherently hostile, foreigners to do the work that the children which you did not have could not do. And thus you have no future—you
sold
it—but only a past. Why should we let you take away our future? What do we owe you that we should risk that?"

"But my daughter? Her father was an American citizen!"

"We know. But he was not a citizen until well after your daughter was born. Thus, she is not a citizen. Worse, you raised her and she probably carries the same political disease you do. We don't want her either.

"For whatever it's worth, I'm sorry for you both."

The grandchild, far from being incidental, is decisive. Civilization persists when there is a widespread sense of an ethical obligation on the part of the present generation for the well-being of the third generation —their own grandchildren. A society where this feeling is not widespread may last as a civilization for some time—indeed, for one or two generations it might thrive spectacularly. But inevitably, a society acknowledging no transgenerational commitment to the future will decay and decline from within.

—Lee Harris, "The Future of Tradition"

The first thing Hamilton noticed when he entered the cockpit and stood beside the pilot was that Ling (he knew, at some level, that Ling was being teleoperated but still thought of the body as Ling's) was crying, tears coursing down her cheeks in an endless flood. Retief was sitting next to the pilot in the copilot's chair.

"I'm sorry if—"

—"I need you to set me down," Hamilton answered. "There's one of our team still on the ground, at an-Nessang."

"Not going to happen," the pilot answered. "I've lost so much lift that it's—no pun intended—up in the air as to whether I'll be able to make it across the lake to Switzerland. If I waste the altitude I've got I
won't
make it across."

"Fuck!" Hamilton exclaimed. "Parachutes?"

"Civilian airliners don't carry chutes," Retief answered. "Bad for passenger morale, don't you know."

"I've
got
to get on the ground," Hamilton insisted. "If things had gone according to plan I'd have driven away from the castle—"

"Things never do," the pilot said.

Retief thought about that for a moment, then said, "There
is
a way but—"

"What is it, man?"

"We've got the winches to hold the ship down when it's landed and the winds are high. But they don't have much cable to them."

"How much is 'not much'? Can they reach to the ground?"

"What's our altitude over ground?" Retief asked the pilot.

"About three hundred feet. It's staying pretty stable for now, since the ground is descending slightly."

"Not enough," Retief answered. "Can you make a thirty or forty foot jump?"

Shit, my knees.

"Not a lot of choice," Hamilton answered.

"Not a lot of time, either," The pilot commented, looking at the map on his navigation screen. "I'm having to balance lift from speed with loss of buoyancy from air pressure forcing lifting gas out. It's a
bitch
! Then again, I
am
the best. An-Nessang in . . . call it . . . oh, about five minutes . . . a little less."

"Fuck it," Hamilton said to Retief. "Let's do it."

"Any particular direction from the town you want to be dropped off?" the pilot asked, as Hamilton and Retief exited the cockpit.

"Right over it, if you can," Hamilton answered over his shoulder. "Maybe I'll luck out and find a soft roof about twenty feet below."

"Stand on the hook," Retief said.

Hamilton looked at the thing dubiously. Not that the hook didn't look strong; it was huge and solid. Rather, he was thinking of what it would do to his head if it ever connected on a free swing. Still, it was the only way down. Hamilton took off his armor—he was going to hit with more than enough kinetic energy as was; to allow that piece's weight to add to it was borderline suicidal—and passed it over to Retief. He then stepped off of the deck, placing one foot, and then another, on the hook. His hands wrapped around the cable. The cable was so thick that his fingers didn't touch his thumbs.

Hamilton threw his head back, then slammed his chin down to his chest, knocking the night vision goggles over his eyes.