Caliphate

Flight Seven Nine Three, 24 Muharram,

1538 AH (4 November, 2113)

"Come this way, children!" Retief shouted over the crying and the roar of air rushing through shattered viewports. "Come to the center. It will be safer there. If someone's hurt, help them. Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!"

He was surprised by how well they followed his orders. Maybe, he thought, just maybe, when you're born a slave you simply learn very young to accept the bad part of life and deal with it. Whatever the benefits now, it's still shitty.

Retief arranged the kids as best he could on the deck of the lounge. They covered an area of perhaps twenty by thirty feet. He thought about moving the tables around them but, No way; they're bolted down. The chairs he could move, though, and he began to.

Without a word, Matheson, seeing what the Boer was doing, dragged himself over and lay on his side along one edge of the layer of children. His body, he thought, would be better than nothing for protection from fragment.

Retief nodded in approval. Now there's a good man, he thought.

He was dragging a brace of the chairs from the side to the center when he saw a sudden fireball in the night, the light reflecting off the waters of the lake, now below, to the clouds, above.

Wide-eyed, Retief asked, "What the . . . ?"

"Seven Nine Three? Swiss Airspace Control. We have been ordered to defend you. If you have any self-defense capability, go to weapons tight immediately."

"Switzerland this is Seven Nine Three. We've got nothing. What's your ETA?"

"Look behind you, Seven Nine Three. Hell, look around you."

The pilot saw nothing initially, then a sudden burst of light from somewhere behind lit up the world. In that light he caught a glimpse of a brace of fighters. He thought he saw a large red cross painted on each fighter's tail. Down below he was certain he saw several armed patrol boats leaving for the deeper water. Those definitely came from the Swiss side of the lake.

Lee, still in Ling's voice, said, "Switzerland . . . Seven Nine Three. Honey, for that I would consider changing my sexual polarity."

On the other end, a female Swiss Armed Forces radio operator looked at a microphone in considerable confusion, before answering, "If you're a girl, Seven Nine Three, and are as sexy as you sound, you'll do just fine."

"We'll talk," Lee/Ling said. "Later."