CALIPHATE(35)

—Sermon recorded in a Bavarian mosque, Early 21st Century





Kitznen, Province of Affrankon, 12 Jumadah II, 1533 AH

(13 May, 2109)


"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.





USAF Airship Prince Eugene, 15 May, 2109


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.