The Tank Lords by David Drake

He stepped shining from the stall, no longer pretending detachment or that he and his brother were merely chatting. “I visited the siege lines then,” Juma rumbled, wholly a preacher and wholly a man, “and I begged the men from Ain Chelia to come home while there was time. To make peace, or if they would not choose peace then at least to choose life—to lie low in the hills till the money ran out and the Slammers were off on somebody else’s contract, killing somebody else’s enemies. But my friends would stand with their brothers . . . and so they did, and they died with their brothers, too many of them, when the tanks came through their encirclement like knives through a goat-skin.” His smile crooked and his voice dropped. “And the rest came home and told me they should have listened before.”

“They’ll listen to you now,” said Esa, “if you tell them to come out of the Bordj without their weapons and surrender.”

Juma began drying himself on a towel of coarse local cotton. “Will they?” he replied without looking up.

Squeezing his fingers against the bands of porcelain armor over his stomach, Esa said, “The Re-education Camps outside al-Madinah aren’t a rest cure, but there’s too many journalists in the city to let them be too bad. Even if the hold-outs are willing to die, they surely don’t want their whole families wiped out. And if we have to clear the Bordj ourselves—well, there won’t be any prisoners, you know that. . . . There wouldn’t be even if we wanted them, not after we blast and gas the tunnels, one by one.”

“Yes, I gathered the Re-education Camps aren’t too bad,” the civilian agreed, walking past his brother to don a light jellaba of softer weave than his work garment. “I gather they’re not very full, either. A—a cynic, say, might guess that most of the trouble-makers don’t make it to al-Madinah where journalists can see them. That they die in the desert after they’ve surrendered. Or they don’t surrender, of course. I don’t think Ali ben Cheriff and the others in the Bordj are going to surrender, for instance.”

“Damn you!” the soldier shouted, “The choice is certain death, isn’t it? Any chance is better than that!”

“Well, you see,” said Juma, watching the knuckles of his right hand twist against the palm of his left, “they know as well as I do that the only transport you arrived with was the minimum to haul your own supplies. There’s no way you could carry over a hundred prisoners back to the capital. No way in . . . Hell.”

Esa slammed the wall with his fist. Neither the concrete nor his raging expression showed any reaction to the loud impact. “I could be planning to put them in commandeered ore haulers, couldn’t I?” he said. “Some of them must be operable!”

Juma stepped to the younger man and took him by the wrists as gently as a shepherd touching a newborn lamb. “Little brother,” he said, “swear to me that you’ll turn anyone who surrenders over to the authorities in al-Madinah, and I’ll do whatever I can to get them to surrender.”

The soldier snatched his hands away. He said, “Do you think I wouldn’t lie to you because we’re brothers? Then you’re a fool!”

“What I think, what anyone thinks, is between him and the Lord,” Juma said. He started to move toward his brother again but caught the motion and turned it into a swaying only. “If you will swear to me to deliver them unharmed, I’ll carry your message into the Bordj.”

Esa swung open the massive door. On the threshold he paused and turned to his brother. “Every one of my boys who doesn’t make it,” he said in a venomous whisper. “His blood’s on your head.”

Captain Mboya did not try to slam the door this time. He left it standing open as he strode through the courtyard. “Scratchard!” he roared to the sergeant with an anger not meant for the man on whom it fell. “Round up ben Khedda!” Mboya threw himself down on his skimmer and flicked the fans to life. Over their whine he added, “Get him up to me at the command dugout. Now!”

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