"I don't understand why we work so hard after we do the housework," Petra said, despairingly. "I mean . . . you go to school while I work all day. Then you come home and Ishmael escorts us so we can do outside work for pay. Then we spend most every night while you try to drum some education through my dense skull into my stupid brain. It's too much."
"Your skull isn't dense and you're
not
stupid," Besma corrected.
Besma bit her lower lip, uncertain whether she should tell Petra the reasons. Finally, she decided that, yes, the slave girl who was also her best friend was old enough to know.
"I'm fourteen now," she began. "Within a year, two years at the most, my father will arrange a marriage for me. Ordinarily, I'd ask for you to be part of my dowry so I could free you. But I
know
my stepmother won't permit that so she can keep a hold over me even after I'm married."
Petra suddenly looked sick at the thought of her only real friend going away. Indeed, she felt sick, so much so that she almost missed the next sentence.
"We're working so we can make enough money to buy you from my father or, if he won't sell to me, to let you buy your own freedom which, as a pious man, he is certain to permit. Either way, you'll be free."
"Free," Petra echoed, wistfully. "I can't even imagine . . . "
Besma smiled, ruefully. While she was not, technically, a slave, she would never be free and she knew it.
The airship moved nearly silently over the shoreline. From the officers' lounge in the lower stern, Hamilton could see the white- capped waves buffeting that shoreline and the vague outline of the once magnificent mansions which had stood guard over equally ostentatious yachts. As the airship progressed, the shore fell away and the ruins of Los Angeles began to come into view.
Los Angeles had never been rebuilt. With each forward mile more and more ruins came into view. It was
much
worse than Kansas City had been. Most of the dead in L.A. had never been found.
Hollywood had never recovered, either. What the blast hadn't done the purges had. This was so much true that Australia (an allied state, neither a protectorate nor an imperially ruled province) provided the bulk of films shown in the contiguous fifty-seven states plus the imperial provinces of Ontario and Quebec. What didn't come from Australia, feature-length film-wise, tended to be Indian in origin, that, or Japanese.
IDI exercised very tight control over which films were permitted to be shown in public theaters.
Hamilton hadn't been home since Hodge's funeral. That had been miserable enough—virtually her entire hometown grieving as one— that for a time he'd doubted he'd ever go home again. Instead, he'd taken his leaves and R&Rs (Rest and Recreation periods, also called I&I, Intercourse and Intoxication) around the Pacific, drinking heavily and screwing whatever was available. That is, he'd screwed whatever was available for a while, right up until he'd realized that none of them—Anglo girls from Australia, delicate and graceful Japanese, superbly-legged and almond-eyed Thais, or smoky-dark Hindus—made him miss Laurie a jot less. With that realization his on-leave drinking had gone up even as his sexual escapades dropped to nothing.
He sipped at a scotch now, a product of the Province of Scotland imported through the allied Kingdom of England, even as the crumbling ruins of Los Angeles passed below.
Thompson was gone, not killed but promoted out of command over his vociferous and bitter objections. Fitzgerald, on the other hand,
had
been killed, victim of a five hundred pound bomb buried in a village square and command detonated by a
Moro
who was likewise killed.
The company was Miles' now and Hamilton was Miles' exec. After two years of combat and forcible resettlement operations, Miles had gone from beefy to thin and Hamilton—despite the calories from the drinking—from thin to almost skeletal.
The tall, now thin, newly promoted black captain signaled the bartender in the lounge for a beer and sat beside Hamilton.
"Pretty awful, isn't it?" Miles said, gesturing towards the destruction spreading out below.
"Worse than any village or town we cleared out for Christian settlement," Hamilton agreed, taking another sip at his scotch. "Though those were bad enough."
Miles nodded agreement. After a time—once they'd realized that they weren't going to win; they weren't going to hold; and the combined Imperial and Philippine forces
were
going to drive them completely out of their homeland—the Moros
'
fighting had grown desperate, even suicidal. And, in the long run, it had made no difference to the outcome. They were gone from the Philippines, their fields and homes now the property of the settlers who came after.
"I had relatives down there, so say the family legends," Miles sighed. "Must have been awful."
"Yeah . . . at least we left alive those Moros who wanted to live . . . most of them anyway." Hamilton sounded perhaps a bit bitter.
"It did get old after a while," Miles agreed.
"Where are we going next, do you think?" Hamilton asked. "I mean after refit and retraining at Stewart."
"Nobody knows," Miles said. "The PI campaign is over. Class Two statehood for them within two years." Class Two Statehood was like normal statehood excepting only that the state had but one senator, and representation in the House operated under the new three-fifths rule. In was one way of centering control of the empire in the original fifty states. "The Canadian rebels—"
"'There are no 'Canadian' rebels," Hamilton parroted. "There are Americans. Then there are imperial subjects. There are also rebels, allies—'"
"'—and enemies.
No
Canadians, however.'" Miles shrugged. "Yes, John, I know the Pravda. In any case, the rebels in the frozen north have been quiet for a while now. And with the Latin provinces being admitted to Class Two, slowly but surely, troubles down that way are dropping, too. Basically, we've got the world pretty much the way we want it."
Not entirely,
Hamilton thought.
Not entirely the way
I
want it. If it were, I'd still have Laurie.
"I hear Charlie Company is opening up and the colonel's thinking of putting you in command," Miles said.
"I heard the same rumors," Hamilton agreed. He shook his head in negation, "I'm really not interested. I've had it with burned villages and resettlement and feeling like some kind of monster. Thompson had it right; you've got to find a reason to sleep at night and I never did. What's worse, I deliberately never looked for one. After Laurie was killed . . ."
There was, after all, a reason the colonel was considering putting Hamilton in command of Company C. For the last two years he'd been the most unflagging butcher of Moros in the battalion. There was also a reason the colonel hadn't yet put Hamilton in command. In those two years he'd lost something of his soul, or "whatever it is that keeps a man on two legs instead of four."
Miles shrugged again. "I know. You still thinking of punching out? You've got two years to go, you know."
"There's a way around that. The Office of Strategic Intelligence"— this was the successor to the old Central Intelligence Agency which had been renamed following the purges—"can get two years waived— even three, actually, though I don't need three—for people who sign up with them. As to whether I want to or not . . . I'll listen to them. I've an appointment with their recruiter at Kevin Barry's in Savannah when we get back."
"I have a hard time seeing you as a spook, even if you're thinner than a corpse."
"Just something I've been thinking about. I don't know myself. I know something though."
"What's that?"
"If I keep up at this
Einsatzgruppen
shit, I'll go crazier than I am."
"They do dirty shit, too," Miles said.
"Dirtier than us? Not possible."
"Never know what the future holds," Miles observed.
Al Khalifa was thinking about the future.
My first husband wants nothing to do with our son, preferring to lavish his substance on his Christian slave girl's bastard. If I am to secure my son's position for the future, it can only be by having Abdul Mohsem make him his heir. But he fawns on his bitch of a daughter so, spoiling the little tramp rotten.
She glanced up, to where twelve-year-old Petra scrubbed a hallway floor on her hands and knees. Al Khalifa snarled, thinking,
Nazrani bitch! And soon enough Besma will be married off and I'll lose control of her unless I can keep this little twat under my control. I
know
they've been plotting to get the Christian girl her freedom. Bah! As if a Christian is worthy of freedom.
Then again, if I can't keep control of the Nazrani, and lose my power over Besma, perhaps I can make it so that Besma infuriates her father enough that he cuts her off from her inheritance? She's hot tempered; that will help. Maybe if . . .
I must consult the law,
was al Khalifa's thought.
And then, if the law supports what I have in mind, I must consult with my son . . . and he with his friends.
The strains of ancient music wafted up the stairs, seeping under the door of a small, green-painted room. Hamilton and another man— he'd given his name as "Caruthers"—sat at a wooden table covered by a checked tablecloth. Between them sat a bottle of Irish whiskey, two glasses, and a small metallic box the size and shape of a pack of cigarettes.
"All clear," announced a metallic voice, emanating from the small box.
Caruthers, a deliberately nondescript, middle-aged black man, with a receding hairline and clothed lightly against the city's oppressive late spring; He said, "It had best be all clear, Atkinson, or you will be canned. By that I mean—"
"—that I will be ground up, melted down, and stamped out into cat food cans. Yes, sir, I know. The room
is
clear."
Hamilton raised one eyebrow. "I've never before met a machine with personality. Atkinson?"
Caruthers chuckled slightly and said, "Atkinson was an intelligence warrant and the stupidest human being I've ever met, so I named the machine for him. It doesn't have a personality, but then neither did the real Atkinson. I programmed a certain number of smart-ass answers into the thing because, frankly, my job permits me minimal human interaction. And since the original Atkinson was barely human, and a smart ass, it sort of fits."
How does a recruiter have "minimal human interaction"?
Hamilton wondered.
"Even recruiting," Caruthers continued, "isn't really human interaction. To me you're just a file, Lieutenant Hamilton, a block to check. Don't take that personally; if I allowed myself to think of my recruits as human it might bother me when they fail to return from a job."
Ah, wise, very wise. If we can avoid thinking of our losses as people then the pain is much less.
Caruthers said, "Atkinson, you moron, pull up Lieutenant Hamilton's file." Immediately a hologram mimicking a brown file appeared above the table. Caruthers didn't pretend to study it, nor even order the machine to open it.
"You were well regarded in your battalion, I see," the recruiter said.
Hamilton pursed his lips and shook his head slightly. "I think they felt sorry for me."
"Yes, perhaps," Caruthers agreed. "A pity about young Lieutenant Hodge; we always have openings for husband-wife teams. They draw much less suspicion and are about three times more effective— synergy, don't you know; that and teamwork—than two single operatives or artificial couples. Never mind that; we see you as more the lone operative at this point.
"Atkinson, you dolt: linguistic scores."
The holographic file opened to an equally insubstantial sheet documenting, among other things, Hamilton's Defense Language Aptitude Test, or DLAT, which was used not only by the military, but by State and OSI as well.
"We could teach you any language or combination of languages," Caruthers said, admiringly. "This would make you useful anywhere. Do you already speak any languages beyond English, Spanish, and French?"