Caliphate

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?"

"Softhearted, I guess," Thompson shrugged. "Besides, it was within my discretion. You object?"

Actually, that was the first remotely human response Hamilton had ever seen from his commander. He answered, "No, sir, it just surprised me. It's a . . . weakness. I didn't think you had any."

"I'm human enough, I assure you," Thompson said with a grim smile. "Those kids will be sent to a Christian orphanage," he explained. "There, they'll have the religion knocked out of them. Rather, they'll have their religion knocked out of them and ours, one of ours, substituted. In time, they'll become assets."

Hamilton raised one eyebrow doubtfully. "That's not why you saved them."

Thompson shook his head. "No . . . no, I saved them to sleep better at night. If you stay with the Army, young lieutenant, I suggest you find ways to help yourself sleep better at night, too."

"I haven't done anything yet that bothers my conscience," Hamilton said.

"No? You will."

The captain directed his gaze out to sea where a dozen large amphibious craft were bringing in new, Christian, settlers to occupy the area just cleared of Moslems. The landing craft, under escort, of course, would be used to cart off the remaining original inhabitants— even now moving under guard to the shoreline—and dump them on the Malaysian or Indonesian coasts. The villagers hadn't been driven off with nothing; they still had their eyes to weep with.

"All this would have been unthinkable, you know," the captain said, gesturing with one armored hand at the surrounding destruction, and not neglecting the long lines of Moros being ushered into tents where courts-martial were being held by the Army of the Philippines. "Even a century ago it would have been unthinkable, though a century and a half ago it was all too common.

"The old law of war, you see, was a fragile thing, easily broken. And when the enemy ignored it and some of our own people tried to mold it to do too much, it broke. Now there's no law except for who is fastest, who is best armed and trained, who is most ruthless. And when the enemy demonstrated that the planet wasn't big enough for both of us and we demonstrated that it didn't necessarily have to contain both of us? That's when—"

The captain's words were interrupted by a massive burst of weapons fire as the Filipino troops working with the company shot the first dozen of those villagers convicted of war crimes into the ditch they had themselves been forced to dig.

By the fire, unbothered by the shootings, the troopers sang:

"In that land of dopey dreams

Happy peaceful Philippines . . . "