If we cannot even come up with trucks, what chance have we? Sada fumed.
"We'll be back," the colonel commanding the column assured Sada.
"You'll be back if you aren't blasted to shit on the way," Sada corrected.
Excursus
From: Reconquista, Copyright © Xavier Jimenez IV, 601 AC, Carrera-Balboa Press, Ciudad Balboa
By 155 AC Makkah al Jedidah had only one stream, and that shallow and sluggish. The other had gone to hide below ground. The city still had trees, about as many as it had at the founding. Most of those trees, however, were no longer growing but had been cut for roof beams.
Farther out was sand with a few water holes and oases. Caravans trekked the sand; woe betide anything that grew near the caravan trails. The camels and especially the goats would eat anything found green right down to the roots.
There was little wood by this time, little to burn for fuel. Instead, the people gathered up the droppings of their animals and dried and burned those. Thus, even that little bit of fertilizer never nourished the soil.
As one went farther away from the original center of settlement one would find more greenery. Yet the pattern was clear. The settlement of Salafi Man was spreading fast; the existence of natural flora and fauna disappearing at the same rate or faster. The Salafis fled the desert. But they brought the desert with them, created it, wherever they went.
The nomads' flocks' hooves pounded the soil, compacting it and pulverizing it. This rendered the soil fine enough to be carried off by water and wind. And the trees that might have protected the soil, holding it in place, gathering it from the wind, shading it so that surface water did not evaporate so quickly… these were gone or going. Evaporation, too, brought salt to the surface, killing what plants remained and rendering the soil useless for growing.
Other colonies on the periphery of the Salafis felt the nomads' desperation. Often starving, themselves, the Salafis raided for food. They raided to spread their way of life, their purer faith. They also raided for slaves, especially women slaves. Thus, added to the now forced emigration from Old Earth, the slave women brought new Salafis into the world in continuingly large numbers.
Most of the southern shore of Uhuru, along the Tauranian Lakes, had fallen to them, as had northwestern Taurus and substantial parts of Urania and, once the Salafis took to sea, some islands of the Mar Furioso. This meant more slaves, more women, and more Salafis. And, except where even they could not overcome nature, it also meant more desert.
The other peoples of the new world began, not to strike back, but to defend what was theirs. After what they had endured from the Salafi, mercy was not a concept in common currency.
In Ardeal, five thousand Salafi raiders were impaled at a pass following the defeat of their raiding party. At Turonensis, in Gaul, an amphibious Salafi invasion was defeated by disciplined musketry and its survivors hanged to a man, several thousand Christian slaves being liberated in the process. When a Salafi army pushed north, past the desertified coast of Southern Uhuru, seeking new lands to turn barren, it was met by the Bulala Amalungu- and Bayede Nkhosi -crying, Shosholoza- and Nomathemba -chanting, Amazing Grace – and Onward Christian Soldiers -singing, massed, Christian-Animist impis of the great King Senzangakona III of the Nguni.
Salafi hit and run tactics, on horseback, had proven no match for the Nguni numbers and their urge to close and kill at breakneck pace afoot. The Salafis and their mounts were butchered, despite their extensive use of firearms. It was said among the Nguni that the glittering sheen of their spearheads had been lit by a miraculous glow from the large gilded cross they carried as their king's standard. It was said among the few Salafi survivors, thereafter, that it was almost impossible for a man on horseback to outpace a racing Nguni impi in the long run… and that with the Nguni it was always a long run. Only the desert, creation and ultimate defense of the Salafi, had kept the impis from continuing on to exterminate the threat to their south.
Nor was the resistance limited to non-Moslems. The Salafi were a threat to everyone. Near Babel, in Sumer, disciplined, musket-wielding Sunni and Shia farmers on foot held the mounted Salafis at bay while their own, limited, cavalry swept in behind to trap them. Something not dissimilar happened when the Salafis faced the civilized, Moslem and Christian, Misrani along the banks of the Interu in Southwest Uhuru.
In time, the Salafi immigration from Old Earth ceased. The semistarvation that had driven their expansion on Terra Nova began to reduce their population as, morally ingenious literalists that they were, they avoided the proscription against burying infant girls alive by first either smashing their heads with rocks or leaving them exposed for the desert animals.
And so the Salafi movement began to recede, for a time. It would come again, in the guise of an ideology. As it left, it left behind little but wasteland and corpses, and small detachments of outcast adherents. When it returned, it would be over a carpet of waste and bodies, stepping along the footholds it had left behind like a man crossing a stream on stones.
As the Salafis fell back to their desert fastness, they left little but waste and destruction-physical, moral and intellectual-behind them. Their adherents left behind in the lost lands were outcast and despised. Indeed, they were often killed out of hand, especially in Moslem lands. Heeding the Koran's stricture on how to deal with those who brought disorder to the world, only shortage of wood saved many Salafis from crucifixion. And those lost hands and feet on opposite sides.
Thus Salafism languished for more than two centuries while the new world progressed around them. In fact, while Uhuru, Urania and other continents were carved up by Taurans, Zhong, Yamatans and Columbians, the Salafis of the Yithrab were left in peace. This was neither altruism nor respect but a simple reflection of the fact they had nothing anyone wanted.
The resurgence of radical Salafism can be dated to the discovery of substantial energy deposits, in the form of fossil fuels, in the Yithrab Peninsula and its environs, beginning in the year 348 AC. Having access to Earth's history prior to the end of emigration, the peoples of Terra Nova were never in ignorance of the value of the stuff. Civil war within the Salafi reach erupted within a few years of the discovery, the al Rashid clan eventually emerging triumphant.
Oil revenues were initially more or less trivial to the buyers, though significant to the then-poor Salafis. Especially during the Great Global War, when all civilized constraints of behavior were thrown off, the Salafis were altogether too frightened of conquest to exert the power implicit in control of so vast a reserve of energy.
With time, however, growing awareness of the value of their resource, coupled with the post-GGW nuclear standoff between the Federated States, the Volgan Empire and the UEPF, placed the al Rashid in a position to take control of their own oil and their own destinies. Others, not merely on the periphery but around the globe, followed suit. Fossil fuel prices rose precipitously. In point of fact, they did not stop their continuous rise until the fall of the Volgan Empire freed the Federated States to credibly threaten the use of military force should prices get out of hand.
Oil brought unprecedented wealth. Money received from it went into the creation of welfare states, impressively armed if indifferently effective military and naval forces, and provided obscenely lavish lifestyles for the ruling clans. No small amount, too, went to the spread of Salafism.
Among the Misrani at the edge of Southern Uhuru, to Kashmir, to Sukarno, madrassas sprang up like mushrooms. Providing free room and board, as well as a free-if highly constrained-education, the madrassas were highly popular among the disenfranchised lower classes of the Moslem portions of Terra Nova.