Carnifex

Quarters Number One

Lourdes hummed the wedding march softly to herself as she crossed the hundred and twenty meters from her old home, Number Two, to Number One. Having Mac and Arti as next door neighbors was going to be great; she just knew it.

And, better still, when they thump the bed against the wall all night, I won't be able to hear it. Besides, it reminds me of what I am missing when Patricio is away.

Entering by the front door, Lourdes took one look at McNamara and Artemisia—coming down the stairs arm and arm, he looking guilty and she like the cat who fell into the vat of cream—and she started laughing again. She ran to the nearest room, her husband's library, to hide her discomposure. She closed the door behind her and covered her mouth again to try to stifle her laughter.

"What's so funny, Mama?" little Hamilcar asked, looking up from one of his father's books.

"I'll tell you when you're older," Lourdes answered. Curious, she walked over to the desk and picked up the book that her son had been reading. That he was reading was no surprise; the child had been literate for almost two years. The title, however, she found worrisome; The Battle of Kuantan by Tadeo Kurita.

Can it be genetic, somehow? she wondered, suddenly growing utterly serious and seriously worried. Did my son inherit his father's taste for battle? God, please don't take my baby from me. He's not even five yet.

* * *

After his mother had left, Hamilcar returned to his reading. Kurita's dry account of the exchange between his battlecruiser and the Federated States Navy's superdreadnought, Andrew Jackson, soon had the boy quivering with excitement and a wordless longing to be there, to trade shot for shot and blow for blow. Never mind that he was, half ways, from the Federated States, nor that his other half had had little involvement in the Great Global War. It was the battle, itself, that drew him. And, he already knew, it always would.

He knew, too, that he already understood things that were forever barred to most human beings, at any age. He understood, instinctively, without Kurita explaining it, what it meant to cross the Jackson's T and why Kurita had accepted a couple of bad hits to get his own ship in position to do that. Hamilcar understood, without anyone explaining it, the logistic and time-space factors that had dictated why the Battle of Kuantan had happened where it had and when it had.

In short, Hamilcar Carrera-Nuñez already knew, at age four, that he had the knack.

He closed the book, sighing, and thought, Mama and I need to have a long talk.