Carnifex

Clichy-sous-Bois, France, 6 June, 2100

The immigrants had served their purpose. They had bought time for the populations to be regularized. They could go now. According to the papers, they should have gone ten years prior.

Spain and Italy were Islamic now, except for the Vatican in the latter. And the Vatican's independence was merely formal. The imposition of sharia law had allowed the central and important European powers, the core of the EU, to cast those southern Latin states out. Both sides were happy enough with that, though the dethroned Pope, residing in a dank dungeon beneath Saint Peter's while awaiting his ritual burning at the stake, was not.

Give the people in charge their due, though; this was not to be a racist pogrom. Former Moslems who had cast off their worn shackles and joined the secular humanist majority of Europe were welcome to stay. It was only these, these wretches still resident in the cramped and filthy banlieues of France, or the slums of England and Germany, who had to go.

Moslem Spain and Italy would not take any. They were poor enough and growing poorer still by the day. There was no room within either of them, or both together, for the forty or fifty million disenfranchised Moslems of the central powers. Switzerland, perhaps the premier military power of the Continent, had said, "Nein," and massed its troops on the borders.

That left only one outlet . . .

* * *

While French troops went to England, mostly via Calais, for the great clearing out, and English Guards regiments landed at Bremen before marching to surround the Moslem quarters of Berlin and Stuttgart and Frankfurt; German troops, a full corps of them, had rolled to Paris on a mission that the EU called, "Human Hygiene." It was believed that the troops—German, French, or British—would be as harsh as necessary only if they did not share a language with the bulk of the people they were to uproot. The Scandinavians and the Benelux had likewise exchanged troops for the same reasons.

Gendarmes waved—well, not all the French were always sorry to see the Germans roll into Paris, after all—as the grenadiers and pioneers of Second Panzer Division relieved them of responsibility for securing that portion of the electrified wire perimeter. While grenadiers climbed ladders, and others stood by their armored vehicles, the pioneers cut a portion of the wire fence for the rest to pour through.

From loudspeakers mounted atop heavy vehicles came the command, "Kanacken . . . RAUS."