Carnifex

The Base

Oh, Annan, yes, thought Arbeit, this is exciting.

The bomb sat to one side of the deep cavern. Mustafa ran his hands over it lovingly. Lost in his visions of an entire infidel city turned to a smoking charnel house, he barely heard the words of the High Admiral.

"Broadly speaking," Robinson said, "if you continue to carry on the way you are, you are going to lose. Moreover, you'll lose in the worst possible way from both our points of view." Unconsciously, the High Admiral reached up to stroke his right breast pocket. Yes, the detonation device is still there. The way Mustafa is looking at that bomb it's a damned good thing, too.

He spoke in a dimly lit cavern attached to a deep tunnel by a narrow, roughly hewn rock side tunnel. This far below the ground no sound penetrated from above. The air was uncomfortably cool and, despite an attempt to pump in fresh air, rather stuffy.

Nur al-Deen objected, "Every day new fighters, some in groups, come to join the struggle. Our strength is growing, not weakening. The enemy, the Great Demon called the Federated States, is weakening!"

"Not enough," Robinson countered. "Their use of mercenaries is not only keeping the financial costs of their war down, it is keeping the casualties down below critical mass as well. And there does not appear to be a practical limit to how many mercenaries they can field.

"Alternatively," he continued, "the mercenaries' unproven but obvious penchant for targeting families even in the Yithrabi Peninsula, Southern Uhuru, Taurus and the Federated States, itself, has slowly reduced your available recruiting pool to the ignorant children of your madrassas. Their murders of sympathetic media types hurt you as badly. You are losing.

"That is why I want you to use one of the weapons I have brought here on Balboa. That's the breeding and training ground for the Legion. Rather, I want you to emplace one there, in order to threaten the Legion out of any further cooperation with the FSC."

"And that's another thing," al-Deen objected. "You have brought us twelve nuclear weapons. This is enough to do incredible damage to the FS, damage from which they will never recover."

Robinson scoffed. "On the contrary, they will recover. Look at Taurus and Yamato and the number of cities they saw erased during the Great Global War. You can't even tell anymore that the war happened. On the other hand, if you use these weapons more than once the FSC will obliterate you and your religion. You are the most urbanized population on this planet. The contents of just one of their nuclear missile carrying submarines would be sufficient to kill one third of you outright, and leave another third to die slowly of starvation and disease. And they would probably not stop there. Don't you recall what they did in the GGW when we hit two of their cities to stop their use of nuclear weapons against Yamato? They imposed a blockade that killed a third of that country's people by slow starvation. They would hate you more and do more to you." Robinson left unsaid, and they're quite likely to obliterate my fleet while they're at it, if I even suggested trying to prevent it.

Mustafa stood back from the bomb, removing his caressing hands with regret, and paced the cavern for a few moments, head outthrust and hands clasped behind his back. "Sadly," he said, pointing at Robinson, "this infidel is right. But that doesn't mean he is completely right. The Blue Jinn and his people must pay."

"I want the control of three bombs."

"One," the High Admiral answered.

"Three," Mustafa insisted. "One in the FS which will be used. One on Balboa which will be used. And one on Anglia with another in reserve."

Robinson considered this. One used and one threatened knocks Balboa and the mercenaries out of the war. Two in Anglia, one used and one as a threat, probably prevents them from retaliating. That leaves eight for the FS, one used and seven threatened. Maybe . . .

Robinson looked at Arbeit. Although only her eyes showed through the burkha her head nodded deeply. "Done," he answered.