The Tank Lords by David Drake

Mboya gazed again at the long line of prisoners. He was unable not to imagine them as they would look in an hour’s time, after the Bordj had been searched and their existence was no longer a tool against potential hold-outs. He could not have broken with the Way of his childhood, however, had he not replaced it with a sense of duty as uncompromising. Esa Mboya, Captain, G Company, Hammer’s Regiment, would do whatever was required to accomplish the task set him. They had been hired to pacify the district, not just to quiet it down for six months or a year.

Youssef ben Khedda had not left. He was still facing Mboya, as unexpected and unpleasant as a rat on the pantry shelf. He was saying, “No, there is one more thing you must do, as God wills, before you leave Ain Chelia. I do not compel it—” the soldier’s face went blank with fury at the suggestion— “your duty that you talk of compels you. There is one more traitor in the village, a man who did not enter the Bordj because he thought his false god would preserve him.”

“Little man,” said the captain in shock and a genuine attempt to stop the words he knew were about to be said, “don’t—”

“Add the traitor Juma al-Habashi to these,” the civilian cried, pointing to the fluttering jellabas of the prisoners. “Put him there or his whines of justice and other words and his false god will poison the village again like a dead rat stinking in a pool. Take him!”

The two men stood with their feet on a level. The soldier’s helmet and armor increased his advantage in bulk, however, and his wrath lighted his face like a cleansing flame. “Shall I slay my brother for thee, lower-than-a-dog?” he snarled.

Ben Khedda’s face jerked at the verbal slap, but with a wave of his arm he retorted, “Will you now claim to follow the Way yourself? There stand one hundred and thirty-four of your brothers. Make it one more, as your duty commands!”

The absurdity was so complete that the captain trembled between laughter and the feeling that he had gone insane. Carefully, his tone touched more with wonder than with rage until the world should return to focus, the Kikuyu said, “Shall I, Esa Mboya, order the death of Juma Mboya? My brother, flesh of my father and of my mother . . . who held my hand when I toddled my first steps upright?”

Now at last ben Khedda’s confidence squirted out like blood from a slashed carotid. “The name—” he said. “I didn’t know!”

Mboya’s world snapped into place again, its realities clear and neatly dove-tailed. “Get out, filth,” he said harshly, “and wonder what I plan for you when I come down from this hill.”

The civilian stumbled back toward his car as if his body and not his spirit had received the mortal wound. The soldier considered him dispassionately. If ben Khedda stayed in Ain Chelia, he wouldn’t last long. The Slammers would be out among the stars, and the central government a thousand kilometers away in al-Madinah would be no better able to protect a traitor. Youssef ben Khedda would be a reminder of friends and relatives torn by blasts of cyan fire with every step he took on the streets of the village. Those steps would be few enough, one way or the other.

And if in the last fury of his well-earned fear ben Khedda tried to kill Juma—well, Juma had made his bed, his Way . . . he could tread it himself. Esa laughed. Not that the traitor would attempt murder personally. Even in the final corner, rats of ben Khedda’s stripe tried to persuade other rats to bite for them.

“Captain,” murmured Scratchard’s voice over the command channel, “think we’ve waited long enough?”

Instead of answering over the radio, Mboya nodded and began walking the hundred meters to where his sergeant stood near the prisoners. The rebels’ eyes followed him, some with anger, most in only a dull appreciation of the fact that he was the nearest moving object on a static landscape. Troopers had climbed out of their gun pits all around the Bordj. Their dusty khaki blended with the soil, but the sun woke bright reflections from the barrels of their weapons.

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