The Tank Lords by David Drake

Only the tears responded.

The dazzling sun could not sear away Juma’s disquiet as he walked past the guard and the barricading truck. Something was wrong with the day, with the very silence. Though all things were with the Lord.

The jeep’s inspection ports had been latched shut. The techs had set a pair of skimmers up on their sides as the next project. The civilian smiled. “Think she’ll float now?” he asked the trooper who had grabbed ben Khedda. “Let’s see if I remember how to put one of these through her paces. You can’t trust a fix, you see, till you’ve run her under full load.”

There was a silence broken by the whine of ben Khedda’s turbine firing. Juma managed a brief prayer that the Kabyle would find a Way open to him—knowing as he prayed that the impulse to do so was from his mind and not at all from his heart.

“Juma, ah,” Bog Muller was trying to say. “Ah, look, this isn’t—isn’t our idea, it’s the job, you know. But the captain—” none of the four techs were looking anywhere near the civilian— “he ordered that you not go anywhere today until, until . . . it was clear.”

The silence from the Bordj was a cloak that smothered Juma and squeezed all the blood from his face. “Not that you’re a prisoner, but, ah, your brother thought it’d be better for both of you if you didn’t see him or call him till—after.”

“I see,” said the civilian, listening to his own voice as if a third party were speaking. “Until after he’s killed my friends, I suppose . . . yes.” He began walking back to his house, his sandaled feet moving without being consciously directed. “Juma—” called Muller, but the tech thought better of the words or found he had none to say.

Ben Khedda had left the door ajar. It was only by habit that Juma himself closed it behind him. The dim coolness within was no balm to the fire that skipped across the surface of his mind. Kneeling, the Kikuyu unlatched and opened wide the panels of his altar piece. It was his one conscious affectation, a copy of a triptych painted over a millennium before by the Master of Hell, Hieronymus Bosch. Atop a haywain rode a couple. Their innocence was beset by every form of temptation in the world, the World. Where would their Way take them? No doubt where it took all Mankind, saving the Lord’s grace, to Hell and the grave—good intentions be damned, hope be damned, innocence be damned. . . . Obscurely glad of the harshness of the tiles on which he knelt, Juma prayed for his brother and for the souls of those who would shortly die in flames as like to those of Hell as man could create. He prayed for himself as well, for he was damned to endure what he had not changed. They were all travelers together on the Way.

After a time, Juma sighed and raised his head. A demon faced him on the triptych; it capered and piped through its own blue snout. Not for the first time, Juma thought of how pleasant it would be to personify his own weakness and urgings. Then he could pretend that they were somehow apart from the true Juma Mboya, who remained whole and incorruptible.

The lower of the two drawers beneath the altar was not fully closed.

Even as he drew it open, Juma knew from the lack of resistance that the drawer was empty. The heavy-barreled powergun had rested within when ben Khedda had accompanied the search team. It was there no longer.

Striding swiftly and with the dignity of a leopard, Mboya al-Habashi crossed the room and his courtyard. He appeared around the end of the truck barricade so suddenly that Bog Muller jumped. The Kikuyu pointed his index finger with the deliberation of a pistol barrel. “Bog,” he said very clearly, “I need to call my brother at once or something terrible will happen.”

“Via, man,” said the technician, looking away, “you know how I feel about it, but it’s not my option. You don’t leave here, and you don’t call, Juma—or it’s my ass.”