Caliphate полностью

"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."

USAF TCA (Troop Carrier Airship) Retaliation, over the ruins of central Kansas City, Missouri, 19 May, 2107

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."

Kitznen, Province of Affrankon, 26 Jumahdi I, 1531 AH (19 May, 2107)

"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.