When other young officers went whoring or seeking girlfriends in the indigenie populations, Kassad would remain on base or take long walks through strange cities. He kept his obsession with Mystery secret, knowing full well how it would read on a psych report. Sometimes, on bivouac under multiple moons or in the womblike zero-g of a troop transport hold, Kassad would realize how insane his love affair with a phantom truly was. But then he would recall the small mole under her left breast which he had kissed one night, feeling her heartbeat under his lips as the ground itself shook from the firing of the big guns near Verdun. He would remember the impatient gesture with which she brushed back her hair as her cheek rested on his thigh. And the young officers would go to town or to the huts near the base, and Fedmahn Kassad would read another history book or jog along the perimeter or run tactical strategies on his comlog.
It was not long before Kassad came to the attention of his superiors.
During the undeclared war with the Free Miners in the Lambert Ring Territories, it was Lieutenant Kassad who led the surviving infantry troops and Marine guards in cutting through the bottom of the old asteroid bore shaft on Peregrine to evacuate the Hegemony consulate staff and citizens.
But it was during the short reign of the New Prophet on Qom-Riyadh that Captain Fedmahn Kassad came to the attention of the entire Web.
The FORCE:space captain of the only Hegemony ship within two leap years of the colony world had been paying a courtesy call when the New Prophet chose to lead thirty million New Order Shi’ites against two continents of Suni shopkeepers and ninety thousand resident Hegemony infidels. The ship’s captain and five of his executive officers were taken prisoner. Urgent fatline messages from Tau Ceti Center demanded that the ranking officer aboard the orbiting HS Denieve settle the situation on Qom-Riyadh, free all hostages, and depose the New Prophet … without resorting to the use of nuclear weapons within the planet’s atmosphere. The Denieve was an aging orbital defense picket. It carried no nuclear weapons that could be used within an atmosphere. The ranking officer on board was FORCE:combined Captain Fedmahn Kassad.
On the third day of the revolution, Kassad landed the Denieve’s single assault boat in the main courtyard of the Grand Mosque at Mashhad. He and the other thirty-four FORCE troopers watched as the mob grew to three hundred thousand militants kept at bay only by the boat’s containment field and the lack of an order to attack by the New Prophet. The New Prophet himself was no longer in the Grand Mosque; he had flown to the northern hemisphere of Riyadh to join in the victory celebrations there.
Two hours after he landed, Captain Kassad stepped out of his ship and broadcast a short announcement. He said that he had been raised as a Muslim. He also announced that interpretation of the Koran since the Shi’ites’ seedship days had definitely shown that the God of Islam would neither condone nor allow the slaughter of the innocent, no matter how many jihads were proclaimed by tinhorn heretics like the New Prophet. Captain Kassad gave the leaders of the thirty million zealots three hours to surrender their hostages and return to their homes on the desert continent of Qom.
In the first three days of the revolution the armies of the New Prophet had occupied most of the cities on two continents and had taken more than twenty-seven thousand Hegemony hostages. Firing squads had been busy day and night settling ancient theological disputes and it was estimated that at least a quarter of a million Sunis had been slaughtered in the first two days of the New Prophet’s occupation. In response to Kassad’s ultimatum, the New Prophet announced that all of the infidels would be put to death immediately following his live television address that evening. He also ordered an attack on Kassad’s assault boat.
Avoiding high explosives because of the Grand Mosque, the Revolutionary Guard used automatic weapons, crude energy cannon, plasma charges, and human wave attacks. The containment field held.
The New Prophet’s televised address began fifteen minutes before Kassad’s ultimatum ran out. The New Prophet agreed with Kassad’s statement that Allah would horribly punish heretics but announced that it was the Hegemony infidels who would be so punished. It was the only time the New Prophet ever had been seen to lose his temper on camera. Screaming, saliva flying, he ordered the human wave attacks to be renewed on the grounded assault boat. He announced that at that moment a dozen fission bombs were being assembled at the occupied Power for Peace reactor in Ali. With these, the forces of Allah would be carried into space itself. The first fission bomb, he explained, would be used on the infidel Kassad’s satanic assault boat that very afternoon. The New Prophet then began to explain exactly how the Hegemony hostages would be executed, but at that moment Kassad’s deadline ran out.
Qom-Riyadh was, by its own choice and the accident of its distant location, a technically primitive world. But the inhabitants were not so primitive that they did not have an active datasphere. Nor were the revolutionary mullahs who had led the invasion so opposed to the “Great Satan of Hegemony Science” that they refused to tie into the global data net with their personal comlogs.
The HS Denieve had seeded enough spysats so that by 1729 hours Qom-Riyadh Central Time, the datasphere had been tapped to the point that the Hegemony ship had identified sixteen thousand eight hundred and thirty revolutionary mullahs by their access codes. At 1729:30 hours the spysats began feeding their real-time targeting data to the twenty-one perimeter defense sats which Kassad’s assault boat had left in low orbit. These orbital defense weapons were so old that the Denieve’s mission had been to return them to the Web for safe destruction. Kassad had suggested another use for them.
At precisely 1730 hours, nineteen of the small satellites detonated their fusion cores. In the nanoseconds before their self-destruction, the resulting X rays were focused, aimed, and released in sixteen thousand eight hundred and thirty invisible but very coherent beams. The ancient defense sats were not designed for atmospheric use and had an effective destructive radius of less than a millimeter. Luckily, that was all that was needed. Not all of the targeting beams penetrated whatever stood between the mullahs and the sky. Fifteen thousand seven hundred and eighty-four did.
The effect was immediate and dramatic. In each case the target’s brain and cerebral fluid boiled, turned to vapor, and blew the encasing skull to bits. The New Prophet was in the middle of his live, planetwide broadcast—literally in the middle of pronouncing the word “heretic”—when 1730 hours arrived.
For almost two minutes the TV screens and walls around the planet carried the image of the New Prophet’s headless body slumped over the microphone. Then Fedmahn Kassad cut in on all bands to announce that his next deadline was one hour away and that any actions against the hostages would be met with a more dramatic demonstration of Allah’s displeasure.
There were no reprisals.
That night, in orbit around Qom-Riyadh, Mystery visited Kassad for the first time since his cadet days. He was asleep but the visit was more than a dream and less than the alternative reality of the OCS:HTN sims. The woman and he were lying together under a light blanket beneath a broken roof. Her skin was warm and electric, her face little more than a pale outline against nighttime darkness. Overhead the stars had just begun to fade into the false light of predawn. Kassad realized that she was trying to speak to him; her soft lips formed words which were just below the threshold of Kassad’s hearing. He pulled back a second in order to see her face better and, in so doing, lost contact completely. He awoke in his sleep webbing with moisture on his cheeks and the hum of the ship’s systems sounding as strange to him as the breathing of some half-awakened beast.