Caliphate (9 page)

"These Germans, these atheists, these Europeans don't shave under their arms and their sweat collects under their hair with a revolting smell and they stink. Hell lives for the infidels! Down with all democracies and all democrats!"

—Imam Sheikh Mohammed Abdullah Al-Amari,
Preaching the Friday sermon in a Berlin Mosque, 2006

It wasn't all, nor even mostly, fun and games and learning to read and shopping. Petra was still a slave, and as such, she had work to do.

The work was easy, not least because Besma, though not at all a slave, was required to do as much or, because she was older, more. Indeed, much of Besma's work involved teaching Petra how to perform domestic duties.

Often, even the work was fun and games. Two girls, who truly care for each other, can turn a broom and dustbin into tools for a game of an odd kind of catch.

"Enough silliness!" Petra felt the switch of Abdul Mohsem's current wife, Al Khalifa, across her back as she lined up the dustbin for Besma to slide a pile of dirt towards. "You're a slave,
Nazrani
slut; act like it."

"Bitch!" Besma whispered after her stepmother had left the room. She had to whisper it. While she was pretty sure the
mutaween
would not molest the daughter of Abdul Mohsem, she knew for a fact that al Khalifa could punish her slave with impunity. She ran and knelt by Petra, who was crying with her face in the dirt. Besma lifted the slave girl's head, pressing it in to the juncture of her own neck and shoulder. "Bitch!" she repeated. "If she's cut you, I swear I'll kill her."

"She . . . didn't," Petra sniffled. "I'm all right."

"Her father had a
Nazrani
slave girl he preferred to her mother," Besma said. "That's why she hates the
Nazrani
. But I think she hates almost everyone. She surely hates me but can't do anything about it."

Besma had a horrible thought.
Except she can get to me through you.
She kept the thought to herself for now.

"What happened to your mother?" Petra asked.

Besma sighed. "She died, giving birth to me. My father said she didn't have to, that if the American devils weren't so cheap with their medicine she could have lived. It's why I hate them; because I never knew my mother. And instead got stuck with that
bitch—
already with a son from a prior marriage to a man who divorced her and wanted nothing to do with their rotter of a child—because my father wanted me to have a mother."

In a world where
energy
is fairly abundant, but easily packaged and transportable fuel much rarer, airships can begin to assume an ascendancy over faster, more convenient, but more fuel-guzzling winged aircraft. This becomes even more true when, as in the case of the
Retaliation
and her several score USAF sisters, the airship itself can become a wing, allowing it to be slightly heavier than air, and thus much more controllable. Add in a pebble bed modular reactor for power and, cost-benefit-wise, the airplane can't even come close.

As important, airships were about seven times faster than wet water ships. This meant that they could make the flight, Fort Stewart to Manila, nearly nine thousand miles, in about two and a half days. Taking the slight detour to show the departing troops the remains of Kansas City didn't add appreciably to that.

Five such—and indeed,
Retaliation
was the lead of the five ships in the lift—are capable of picking up and moving halfway around the globe an entire mixed brigade of Light Infantry, Mechanized Infantry and Suited Heavy Infantry, plus support, and enough in the way of supply to operate for at least a month without further resupply. And why not? The ships were nearly two kilometers long, half that in beam, and about four hundred meters from AAA Deck down to the landing apparatus.

This five-ship lift consisted of the First Brigade of the 24th Infantry Division, the Victory Division, sharing Fort Stewart, Georgia as a home base with the 3rd Infantry Division and the Constabulary Infantry School. The brigade consisted of 2nd Battalion, 21st Infantry (Light); 2nd Battalion, 34th Infantry (Mechanized); 2nd Battalion, 19th Infantry (SHI); 1st Battalion, 52nd Field Artillery (LRB), along with batteries, troops and companies of engineers, operational reconnaissance, aerial reconnaissance, aerial interdiction artillery, heavy-armor direct fire support, tactical airlift (Chinook W), and a whopping headquarters and service support battalion. In all, and even counting some individual replacement for units already committed to the Philippine campaign, it was just over five thousand men and women.

Two of those, one man, one woman, fairly recently assigned as lieutenants to Company B, 2nd Battalion, 19th Infantry, sat in the officers' lounge looking out over the no longer radioactive ruins of one of America's heartland cities.

Everyone staring at the skeletal remains was quiet, eyes jerking back and forth over what was once a vibrant city filled with their countrymen and women. Indeed, the airship itself had grown quiet after the captain made the announcement over the PA system.

Laurie Hodge thought and said, "That's the saddest thing I've ever seen."

Over the PA, the captain countered, "You ain't seen nothing yet, folks. We'll be passing over Los Angeles in a few hours. That's worse."

"But why won't the Americans share their medicine with you, Besma?"

The older girl sighed, "Because we're at war, and it's a war we don't know how to end and they won't until we're all extinct." She thought about it for a minute and then walked to her trunk. From this she removed a textbook which she brought to the other girl.

She opened the book to a map of the globe. "This is what the world looks like. Here's where we are," she said, pointing to a green patch at one end of the largest land mass. That piece, Petra read, was labeled "Caliphate of Europe and Western North Africa." One small section, surrounded by green, was in red and labeled "Switzerland."

Besma's finger traced east, to a large red swatch extending down into the Balkans. "This is the Socialist Empire of the Tsar, Vladimir the Fifth. He's an enemy, too, but he isn't trying to extinguish us." The finger moved down to another section, colored in paler green, that stretched all the way from the upper part of the area labeled "Africa" over to some islands far to the right. "This is the Caliphate of Islam, Triumphant. I understand it's a mess."

Petra noticed that right in the middle of the Caliphate of Islam, Triumphant, on the eastern shore of the middle sea, there was a bare patch unmarked and unnamed. "And this?"

"I don't know," Besma said. "My teachers wouldn't talk about it."

Still farther down, the finger pointed to, "The Boer Free State, which owns most of Africa below the Sahara. A lot of the black slaves come from there. The Boers sell us their surplus population. The only good things about them are that they distrust America, too, and they provide us with a lot of technology we can't make for ourselves."

Moving her finger to the right, Besma marked, "This is the Celestial Kingdom of the Han. They also sell us some things we can't make for ourselves. They are at war with Nihon," the finger touched a large group of islands in the ocean marked "Peaceful." "Nihon is an ally of the American devils."

From there the finger moved southwest to a multicolored patchwork of little states, all crowded into a triangular peninsula. "This used to be a big country, but split into two, then three, then dozens. I don't know why."

"What's all this black?" Petra asked, her own little hand sweeping the two continents of the west, various islands in the sea called "Peaceful," the area south of the Kingdom of the Han, and two large islands off the coast of the Caliphate.

"That's the American devils, places they rule and places so closely allied to them they may as well rule them."

Imperialism not only can come in light-handed and heavy-handed varieties, just how light or heavy those hands feel can depend on whether or not the subject peoples feel the need to have the imperialists around.

The imperial hand laid upon the Philippines was so light that there was talk of statehood, full membership in the Union. Moreover, the need was great, what with the Moros of Mindanao and Cebu. Indeed, it was the remaining presence of so many Moslems in the PSAT that had kept it from statehood, so far.

That's why the 24th Infantry Division had been sent for the
second
time to the islands. The first time had been to help liberate them from the Japanese.

(The Japanese had actually volunteered troops to the ongoing campaign in the Philippines but the Filipinos, with memories that a mere hundred and sixty-odd years could not erase, had said, in effect, "Been there; done that. It wasn't all that much fun the first time. So, thanks, but no thanks.")

Thus, the faces on the troops of the 43rd, 45th and 57th Infantry Regiments of the Army of the Philippines, standing in ranks to welcome the newly arrived 24th Infantry Division, were brightly lit with smiles as the first of the Suited Heavy Infantry debarked from the
Retaliation.
Those Filipinos were all already United States citizens and only looked forward to full joinder in the Empire. Their band, the 12th Infantry Division band, played the song the Filipinos still sometimes thought of as "Caissons." And why not? The song, under that title, had been born at this very base, then known as Fort Stotsenberg, in the Philippines, one hundred and ninety-nine years before.

Though it was tied down and partly sunk into an artificial depression, the airship still shuddered with the impact of hundreds of pairs of armored, powered feet, running in place and in cadence, as the twin side ramps hummed down to the tarmac of the airship port to the east of the airfield.

In their communications system, Hamilton and Hodge heard the voice of their not-too-terribly beloved company commander, Carl Thompson, a medium-sized, overly large brained, relentless and vicious mustang with a bad attitude towards graduates of the Imperial Military Academy. There was something about Thompson that was just plain uncomfortable.

"Bravo Company!"

"Platoon!" echoed the lieutenants Laurie Hodge, John Hamilton, Kennedy Parker and Jerome Miles. Parker's supplemental command was late and hesitant.

"Double time—"

"Double time—"

"March!"

At first, since the only troopers really able to run were right at the loading ramp, the pounding and the shuddering of the airship's deck decreased. Then, as the forward ranks thinned and more and more of the troops were able to actually run, the deck could be seen to visibly vibrate.

Far above, on the bridge of the airship, the ship's captain, Lieutenant Colonel Mike (the) Pike, shuddered, grimaced and cursed through gritted teeth, "I friggin'
hate
when they do that."

The captain—"that asshole Thompson"—was already posted on the tarmac when Hamilton and his platoon emerged from the airship. Hodge, leading her platoon, had slowed to allow the troops to form into a solid mass in four files behind her. Thompson was pointing with his left, armored, hand at the precise spot he wanted her to take. For whatever reason—and rumor control said he'd had a bad experience as a lieutenant in the northern territories when some rebels had compromised the radio net—he was much more inclined to point, where that would do, than to use the radio.

Hamilton likewise slowed down and his boys and girls, quick on the uptake as pretty much all SHI troopers were, began forming from the column of twos they'd been in on the airship into a column of fours to mirror Hodge's 1st Platoon.

Thompson wasn't as precise in signaling to Hamilton as he had been with Hodge; Hamilton should have gotten the general idea of where he belonged from where Hodge was. In fact, he did. Leading his platoon to form up next to Hodge's, as soon as he was aligned with her he raised one arm and changed from a double time to running in place.

Third Platoon and Weapons likewise formed to the left. Only when they were properly lined up did Thompson order, "Company . . . halt. Parade . . . rest," then snap to attention, turn about (which took
practice
in a suit), and come to parade rest himself.

The rest, the welcoming speech by General Miguel Maglalang of the Philippine Army, the pass in review, and the march off to the barracks, was anticlimactic.