Read Online Carnifex by Tom Kratman - Free Book Online

plant and animal, were either native to Terra Nova, or had been transplanted from some other world or worlds by the Noahs, or were even the product of genetic manipulation. Some of these appeared to have been created expressly to prevent the rise of intelligent life on Terra Nova. The septic mouthed, winged reptiles called "antaniae," or moonbats, were one example. More sinister still was the fruit of the tranzitree. Very sweet, tranzitree fruit contained a toxin that was deadly to beings with highly developed brains. Moreover, the toxin built up in the flesh of food animals. Eat a steak from a cow that had been eating of the tranzitree fruit, or its kin the bolshiberry and progressivine; die in shrieking agony, brain inflamed and swelling until it seemed it would burst from your skull.

    These were clever traps and might have been sufficient, on their own, to prevent the rise of intelligent life on Terra Nova. They had proved generally ineffective against colonization by intelligent life, however.
    * * *

    The archaeopteryx ate greedily, beak scraping on a metal tray on the floor. Carrera continued to pat it while looking out the glass door. Off in the distance, he saw a mid-sized airship winding gracefully through the air on its way from somewhere in Colombia del Norte down to Southern Columbia. An airship had been the instrument of the murder of his Linda and their children, so he always looked at the things with feelings, at best, mixed.

    Every feeling I have, he thought, with a sigh, is mixed these last seven years.

    He stood, leaving the trixie to eat, and walked the few steps to the window that overlooked the solar chimney. Am I doing right, he wondered, trying to bring Balboa into the fifth century. After all, the Oil Yithrabis have been spending money right and left to try to do the same there, while keeping the culture of thirteenth century Old Earth. Hasn't worked for them for beans.

    The difference , he thought, between Balboa and, say, Sumer or Pashtia . . . or even Yithrab, isn't one merely of religion, but also one of degree. The Arabs and Pashtun put family above all except religion . . . so do the Balboans, and only to a somewhat lesser degree. Breaking them of that . . . well . . . difficult. I have not succeeded yet, and I may never entirely succeed. Even in the Legion . . . 

    Even in the Legion there were connections that mattered. He'd combated that, or tried to, in a number of ways. It was perhaps the only armed force on the planet that insisted on a complete family tree for four generations back before enlistment, and that only to organize cousins out of the same units to prevent them from taking care of each other to the detriment of the organization as a whole. He'd had leaders turned out and even shot for preferring cousins and brothers over better, but unrelated, men. Even then, it still popped up, this preference for family, or amoral familism. And even the appearance of it was dangerous.

    More dangerous is that even I am infected with it , he thought . My only saving grace is that the number of people whom I will favor for familial relation is very small: Lourdes, and the children. Of course, I was infected with it as a boy, when my parents and their friends tried to turn me into a cosmopolitan, too.

    Which helped explain his bad mood and his need for the cows to calm him. Lourdes, his second wife and arguably the reason he retained as much sanity as he had, had spoken to him the night prior to try to get him to help a member of her extended family. Her cousin, Marqueli—Carrera had met the girl once, beautiful little thing—was married to one of his soldiers. That soldier was on the medically retired list which, in the Legion, only meant that he was given some other duty out of his normal regiment. In Marqueli Mendoza's husband's case, those duties for the last several years had been going to school, at Legion expense, at the university to earn his