"Ah, so you would prefer to be more like the Americans," he chided.
She started to answer and then stopped, mouth half open. When she did speak it was only to say, "Fuck you, Mahmoud."
At that he nodded vigorously. "Excellent idea. Your apartment or mine? And while we're on the subject, why are we still paying for two apartments?"
It was only at that point that she realized what he had said earlier: "since I love you."
Chapter Five
I was never so enthusiastically proud of the flag till now!
—Mark Twain, Incident in the Philippines
Mindanao, Philippine Islands, 29 June, 2107
The mosque burned with a greasy, sooty smoke. No wonder in that; there were bodies still inside. Around the mosque, likewise burned houses, stores, government buildings. From many of those, too, the smoke carried the savor of long pig.
Hamilton watched Captain Thompson with interest. The captain himself watched several attached Filipino Military Police sweeping the clothing of the prisoners with chemical-sensitive wands. Those who failed the test were pushed off by Suited Heavy Infantry troopers to where others like them were engaged in digging a great ditch with hands and hand tools. Thompson raised a hand as the troopers began herding off a group of children, aged perhaps eight through eleven.
"Put them with the other group, the monks' group," the captain ordered, causing Hamilton to breathe a sigh of relief.
"But, Captain—" one of the MPs began to protest, a protest cut short by a snarl and a flash of eye.
"They are just children, not responsible for being used as they were. Put them in the other group."
"I don't see the frigging point," one of the MPs muttered under his breath. "What will the kids do with their parents dead? Besides, nits make lice."
Hodge escorted a film group from IDI, the Imperial Department of Information, as they recorded scenes of the village. The group was arranging corpses. Rather, Hodge's platoon did the arranging, under IDI direction.
IDI had, of course, closely monitored the approach to and fighting for the place, all recorded by satellite and lower-flying recon drones. They had some pretty good shots, she knew, of the few casualties taken in the assault: one man's suit utterly destroyed by a large, command-detonated mine, two more killed by shaped-charge grenades carried on rockets, one man whose suit was disabled and whom the Moros had de-suited and then hacked to bits. There had also been several each killed and wounded by large caliber rifle fire.
Where the heavy caliber rifles had come from was a matter of some conjecture. The likeliest possibility, likely enough to call it a "probability," was that they had been smuggled across the sea by sympathizers in Moslem Malaysia and Indonesia. Already, airships were being loaded with massive quantities of aerial ordnance to level the coastal Malaysian and Indonesian cities from which the rifles had probably come. At other fields, fighter escorts and electronic warfare planes were likewise being readied to support and protect the airships. For that matter, given their size and carrying capacity, the airships packed an impressive defensive suite of their own, to include four fighters each.
In a way, it was a waste. The ruins of the cities of the Caliphate of Islam, Triumphant, produced no technology able to stand up to the Empire's aerial juggernaut. What little they had was purchased, at ruinous expense, from the Chinese of the Celestial Kingdom of the Han.
And if the Malaysians and Indonesians hadn't shipped the arms? Well, so what? It wasn't as if the Malaysians and Indonesians weren't numbered among the enemy, after all.
Imperial casualties the locals would never be permitted to see, lest it give them hope, in the case of the Moros, or doubt in the case of the Christian Filipinos. Instead, they would see the results of the assault on the Moros themselves, a one-sided slaughter.
Folks back home, on the other hand, would see the full story. It would just be highly edited to show the iniquity of the enemy; that, and the dire punishment meted out to him. IDI had had decades to perfect the art of the propaganda film, the masterful skill of the consummate liar. Michael Moore (despite his having been hanged in 2020) and Leni Riefenstahl were the unofficial heroes of the department.
Around a fire a group of the troops were singing a song they'd rediscovered from a happier and simpler day and then modified to suit:
"Damn, damn, damn the stinking Mor-or-ros,
Cross-eyed, kakiak ladrones.
Underneath the starry flag
Christianize 'em with a Slag
Then return us to our own beloved homes . . . "
"You're a bona fide hero now, Hamilton," Thompson kidded, once the sorting had begun and the war crimes trials had commenced.
The captain was joking, obviously enough, and so Hamilton didn't respond directly. Instead, he asked, "Why did you save those kids, sir?"