Caliphate

Slave Pen Number Five, KHR House Holding Facility, Cape Town, South Africa,

19 October, 2113

One wall of the children's pen opened up with an echoing clatter of wheels, chains and gears. Black and colored security personnel in KHR House livery immediately entered the pen and began prodding the children out, forcing them through the newly opened wall and into two waiting cattle cars. Though the children were quiet enough, the mothers set up an awful wail as their babies were herded away. Their hands scraped helplessly at the clear plastic barriers holding them. Some cursed; others fainted; not a few wept to God for deliverance. Most of the children kept turning around, until forced onward, for a last glimpse of mothers they never expected to see again.

Hamilton's face was a cold stone mask, a fact that pleased Bongo. Perhaps the boy's learning.

Hamilton was reasonably certain he could not have maintained the stone mask if he hadn't determined that he was not going to let these kids be sold. Of course, even if I can save the kids, the mothers left behind I will not be able to save. I will not be able to reunite the families. Still, I must and will do what I can, save what I can. Now if I could only figure out how.

The cattle trucks backed up to the looming bulk of the airship scheduled for the northern flight to am-Munch, in the Caliphate's province of Baya. Liveried guards formed up to either side, with two more guards between the pair of cattle trucks. The drivers dismounted and unlocked the back gates, turning cranks to allow the gates to descend from lower pivots to form ramps. Some of the children, most of them, really, came out willingly enough when the drivers beckoned them. Not all did, however, until the drivers set off shrieking alarms inside the cargo sections. These drove the remaining boys and girls out, most of them wailing in terror.

Cargo slaves assigned to the airship stood inside to guide the children to their pen on the cargo deck. Whatever the cargo crew's feelings on the subject, their faces remained stone masks.

Hamilton's face mirrored those of the cargo slaves. He wondered, Okay, let's assume I can somehow free them. How do I then get them out of the Caliphate without returning them to South Africa? Little kids are not going to be doing any forced marching. And there are too many to put in one truck, even if I could drive them out through every checkpoint between am-Munch and the Channel or the Adriatic. How then? An airship? I can't fly an airship.

Fuck.

The Great Rift Valley spread below as Hamilton knocked on the cockpit of the airship. A small closed circuit camera emerged from the wall and proceeded to look him over, head to shoes. A door opened and one of the flight crew emerged asking, "Can I help you, Mineer De Wet?"

"I've never been in the cockpit of an airship," Hamilton said. "I was wondering if you good volk might be willing to give me a little tour, show me the ropes. Never know when it might be useful in my business."

The crewman shrugged and called out over one shoulder to his captain.

"Sure," the captain said. "Always glad to show hospitality to a member of KHR. C'mon in, mineer. Klaas, get up and give Mineer De Wet your seat."

No, way, Hamilton thought, after two hours of instruction and the captain of the ship even allowing him to take the controls. No way I can fly this thing except on autopilot and then only to one of the programmed airship ports. Which would mean predictability which would mean the kids and I would be shot down within minutes. No way to land the thing either, except under the same circumstances. Fuck.

The captain says he or his copilot, or any experienced pilot, could do all that alone in a pinch . . . but I am not, nor will I be, an experienced pilot. Again, fuck.

Take a crew hostage and force them to fly me? That's a thought. But then, how do I arrange to have the crew waiting? And even if I do, what keeps the caliph's Air Force from shooting us down anyway?

"They do build them pretty, no?" said the flight engineer to Hamilton, pointing as he spoke out a porthole towards another airship heading in the opposite direction. Hamilton read the name, "Retief," on the engineer's uniform.

"Who builds them pretty?" Hamilton asked. To him, all airships looked pretty much alike, differing only in size and, at unknown distances, not even in that.

"The Chinks," the flight engineer answered. "That's one of theirs, an Admiral Cheng Ho class, if I'm not mistaken . . . that, or a Long March. They differ only in size, not in shape. The Long March class carries about five- or six hundred tons more."

"Well," Hamilton said, "all airships are pretty. What makes that so special?"

"The lines of the thing." Retief shook his head, saying, "You don't see it, do you?"

"I confess not."

"Oh, well." The engineer sighed. "I suppose the Parthenon wouldn't have been pretty to the Maya, either. Just trust me, though, that is one beautiful ship."

"If you say so," Hamilton half-agreed.

"The other thing is," Retief added, "the Chinks don't use theirs much to carry slaves."

"You don't approve of the slave trade?" Hamilton asked, stone mask descending once again.

"No insult intended," the engineer answered, "but no, I don't. But I've got a family back in Pretoria and they have to eat, so I do my job and mind my own business. It's still disgusting."

You give me a little hope for humanity, friend, Hamilton thought, even as he made himself turn on his heels and walk away as if angry. He had to walk away; the temptation to ask the flight engineer for help in freeing the children was too great to trust himself had he stayed.

* * *

The Austrian Alps, rugged, forbidding and ice-capped, showed out the side windows. Switzerland was somewhere off to the west. The airships never crossed Swiss airspace unless they were planning on landing in Switzerland or had authorized passage through. Unauthorized crossings would invite the immediate attention of the Swiss Air Force, at which point the choices were landing or being shot down. Since slavery was illegal in Switzerland, the only western European state not subsumed in the Caliphate, ships like this one were well advised to avoid the country's airspace entirely.

"How do you live with yourself, Bongo?" Hamilton asked, in the privacy of their shared quarters. "How do you deal with the things you do?"

"You might as well know," Bongo said, "my real name is Bernard Matheson. And, yes, I'm from the Bronx. As for how I live with it, with myself . . . well . . . about a century ago four million of our countrymen were murdered because there was a mindset that wouldn't do bad things even to prevent worse ones. That allowed another mindset to arise, the kind that would do horrible things to prevent bad ones. For me, I'm content to take the middle road, and do bad things to prevent horrible ones. Yeah, it bothers me. Yeah, sometimes I sleep badly. But the fact remains, because of the bad things I do, a lot of much worse things are prevented."

Hamilton sighed, thinking of the PI campaign. And there, the evil—he thought there was no other word for the ethnic cleansing campaign he'd been a part of—was justified only by the prospect that, once the Moros were moved out, there would be a modicum of peace and an end to the endemic mutual massacre that had plagued the islands for centuries.

"Yeah . . . I understand. Been there; done that."

"You've done well, by the way, hiding how you feel about this," Bongo said. "I overheard the flight engineer worrying about his job because he might have offended you. You know they never pay any attention to us kaffirs, so they speak freely in front of us. Even the good ones do that."

Bongo frowned. "I almost forgot." He reached into a pocket and drew out a small computer memory card. "This message came in last night. I took the liberty of looking it over. At least you're not going to have to watch the kids auctioned off. Someone bought the whole lot, sight unseen. We have to deliver them to the town of Honsvang after we land. I've already arranged ground transportation from am- Munch."