On the Oceans of Eternity

by S. M. Stirling

  The open grassy valley below was on the northern side of the Dark Mountains, near the fringe of his tribe's traditional ranges, though not those of his own Ridge Runner clan. Now it was all that they had. The mountains directly to the south were high, with no passes that any but a Real Man could walk; that had kept the Taratuz away, for they were creatures of the flatlands. But one of their cursed-of-the-Bull roads was not far away to the east, with one of their twice-cursed stinking forts to guard it. The Taratuz could not find the Real Men in the hills, but the thrice-cursed Adirak to the north, who licked their piss, could, and would if bribed with weapons and meat.

  I will eat the heart and testicles of their chief, the Bull hear me, he swore to himself.

  Hetkdar looked around. Even he could see few of his men, which meant that no outlander could see any of them. Twenty-two, from the Ridge Runners, the Boulder Leapers, and one from the dead clan of the Spear Tossers-they had all been caught in a Taratuz ambush three years ago, and those who did not die went for slaves.

  He shifted his grip on the Taratuz rifle that was his proudest possession-only three other men in the clan had one-and turned to glare at the ex-captive. The man was still dressed in a ragged Taratuz tunic of cloth, although he no longer had the fine curved steel sword he'd carried, of course; that rested safely at Hetktdar's side. He looked indecently well fed, too.

  "Soon, my chief," the man said. "By the Bull I swear it."

  Man? Hetkdar thought. Eunuch. Woman. No real man would let the Taratuz lead him away captive, to work in their fields and mines.

  Then the captive pointed. "There! There! Did I not swear it?"

  A buzzing drone came from the south, over the snowcapped tops of the mountains, echoing down the great slopes. The sun flashed on something there, bird-tiny. But it grew, and grew, until it was a fish-shape floating through the air, like a log in water. Hetkdar bared his teeth in hatred. So many new things, and all of them hurt the Real Men.

  The great fish-shape came to a halt, hovering still. No wings beat about it. His eyes went wide as he saw men moving behind openings below the long hull; it was longer than long spearcast! The balloons of the Taratuz were nothing compared to this, for it moved like a boat in water, obedient to command. As he watched, ropes fell from its belly and men slid down those ropes. They knelt, in a posture he recognized from Taratuz war bands, their rifles ready. Hetkdar's eyes narrowed as he saw something protruding from the long house that ran beneath the belly of the airboat.

  A cannon? he thought. No, for it seemed to be made up of smaller barrels, like a rifle-six of them, in a circle. A weapon, though.

  He stood and walked toward the foreigners on the ground, the captive dogging his heels. The thing in the airboat moved a little. A weapon, he thought again. The strangers were properly wary; that was good. And if they had powers greater than the Taratuz…

  He smiled broadly as the foreign chief squatted and held out a piece of smoked meat-proper manners, at least. The foreigner looked strange, with close-cut hair of a peculiar reddish-brown color; he was dressed all over in clothes the color of dry earth. That was good-perhaps the strangers had some notion of how to hide.

  The stranger spoke. "He asks, do you fight the Taratuz?" the captive translated.

  Hetkdar squatted in his turn, leaning on his grounded rifle as he would have on a spear.

  "We fight the Taratuz?" he said scornfully. "As a hunter fights deer. They are blind; they are clumsy; they are deaf and fat and slow. Before they got the rifles we took their sheep, their cattle, their grain-food and bronze, their women, raiding almost to the walls of Tartessos City."

  The foreigner nodded. "We have heard of this," he said. "We fight the Taratuz also. We have a gift for the Real Men."

  Hetkdar leaned forward, quiveringly eager. The stranger smelled odd-almost like flowers. But…

  "Rifles?" he said.

  "Rifles," the stranger replied; Hetkdar needed no interpreter for that, since the word was much like the Taratuz one. "Rifles for all the warriors of your tribe. Plenty of ammunition, too."

  "And in payment?" Hetkdar said, holding himself in.

  "We want you to kill Taratuz."

  A net came down from the airboat this time. In it were many long narrow boxes, and many small square ones. The chief of the Real Men leaped to his feet and howled, dancing and brandishing his rifle aloft. On the hillside his warriors stood likewise; the stranger blinked, and Hetkdar smiled at his astonishment.

  The Real Men, with rifles, would kill many Taratuz.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  April, 11 A.E.-Feather River Valley, California

  December, 10 A.E.-Black Mountains, southern Iberia

  January, 11 A.E.-Hattusas, Kingdom of Hatti-land

  December, 10 A.E.-Cadiz Base, southern Iberia

  December, 10 A.E.-Great River, southern Iberia

  December, 10 A.E.-Off Tartessos City, southern Iberia

  April, 11 A.E.-Feather River Valley, California

  Cheers were coming from the riverside wall of the Hidden Fort. Dermentol son of Allakenal craned his neck to see what the fuss was about, over on the other side of town. He was bored with watch on the wall, and wished the regulars were back to do it.

  All the men of the Hidden Fort were supposed to be fighting-men as well, but his work was with the engine of steam. He loved the machine, loved the smooth power of it, and the way it was predictable. With the eyes of his mind he could see the steam traveling through the pipes and pushing. None of the others understood it the way he did, and he was anxious for it. It was so powerful, but so vulnerable if the wrong thing was done.

  Sometimes his wife complained that he loved it more than his children of flesh.

  "I wonder what that is?" he said, and leaned over the parapet of the tower on which he stood.

  "It's the ship from Homeland," someone shouted up from below. "It's come up the river, right up to us!"

  Dermentol's eyes went wide. That would be tricky navigation for a keel so deep. He shook his head and peered eastward again.

  An arm went around his throat, reaching from behind and to the right. For a moment he was too shocked to do anything, and in that moment the arm clamped his larynx in the crook of an elbow and squeezed it shut with brutal, unbearable force. Another hand came from the left and gripped his skull.

  A voice hissed in his ear, in the Eagle People tongue: "You shouldn't have hurt my dog, motherfucker."

  The arms scissored across. He heard a crackling sound like a green stick breaking, and then heard nothing, ever again.

  Peter Giernas lowered the body to the ground, ignoring the death stink, and looked casually behind him as a bored sentry might. Eddie Vergeraxsson climbed over the wall, then pulled up the long rope and unhitched the lariat-loop from the point of the palisade log. He was also in Tartessian military garb, and made a marginally more convincing Iberian than Giernas. Peter had shaved off his bright orange-yellow beard, but he couldn't do anything about his height, or the color of his eyes, or the short straight nose and general Baltic cast of his features.

  They both went to the doorway on the top of the gate-tower. The sentry on the other side of the gateway had noticed them; he shouted something and waved. Giernas shouted something back and waved himself; it was just a little too far to see a man's face clearly if you looked down a bit.

  "By the Blood Hag, I hope this works," Eddie said. "We'd never get away with it if their real fighting-men weren't mostly away chasing moonbeams."

  Peter picked up the cloth satchel his fellow ranger handed him, and reached inside until he felt the toggle of the friction-primer. "I just hope Sue and Jaddi are okay."

  The green winter landscape of the Guadalquivir Valley rolled by at twenty-five miles an hour; north and ahead lay the forested slopes of the Sierra Morena, the Black Mountains-white with snow on the summits, looking like shaggy white fur where it rested on the trees. Down here in the rolling plains it was much like a spring day back on Nantucket
. just cold enough to make their sweaters-military pullovers with leather patches at the shoulders and elbows-comfortable.

  It had been nearly a year since Marian Alston-Kurlelo had ridden in a motor-driven vehicle; more than ten years since she'd done so very often. She'd remembered how convenient and fast they were. The scent of burned hydrocarbons wasn't too bad when you'd grown accustomed to bilgewater at sea and streets that smelled of horse piss and dung by land, no matter how often they were swept and cleaned.

  What she found she'd subliminally forgotten was how loud internal combustion engines could be, in a way that even iron horseshoes on granite cobbles didn't quite match.

  This one was louder than a car, of course. Most of it had started out as a gravel-hauling truck working for a Nantucket contractor. Leaton and his people had been working on it off and on as time allowed ever since; often as not adding wonderful gadgets and ingenious weapons that Marian then told them to strip off.

  It had been like whacking puppies… but she'd yet to meet a Seahaven R amp;D type who really understood down in his gut why KISS, Keep It Simple, Stupid, was a governing principle.

  Marian rode with her head and shoulders out of a hatch. The inch or so of camouflage-painted steel armor around the machine didn't make her feel invulnerable. It would stop rifle bullets or shrapnel. Cannonballs maybe; rocket warheads probably not. And if it went up, it would burn.

  Swindapa's head came out of a nearby hatch, long hair blowing between the straps of a radio headset. "The ultralight reports-

  The little craft buzzed overhead, a plywood teardrop below a Rogallo fabric wing, with a tricycle of wire-spoked wheels beneath and a pusher-prop behind. Stub wings on either side held six-tube pods for light rockets; they were empty, and had a scorched look. The pilot waved, sunlight glinting on his goggles and crash helmet, scarf fluttering in the wind.

  "-that they took out four more heliograph towers. The line's definitely broken in half a dozen places between here and Crossing, and between there and Tartessos."

  Marian nodded. The chain of wooden towers flashing Morse-code light signals were almost as fast as telegraphs. Luckily, they were about as easy to cut, too.

  "My congratulations, and then orders to refuel and keep company," she said.

  The pilot didn't need to come here to report; that was reflex of a life where the only way to talk to someone was to get within shouting distance. And it was a valuable reminder that giving someone a uniform and a haircut, or even a lot of training, didn't make them over into a twentieth-century American.

  Not that I should need a reminder, seeing as I sleep with the evidence every night. God knows I love her, but even after all these years, she's still weird sometimes.

  "Halt," she said aloud.

  The armored car slowed and came to a stop by the side of the road, engine ticking. The popping whine of heavy tires on the crushed rock of the roadway died out and left a silence loud by comparison. The two smaller Jeep Cherokees that'd been ranging ahead rolled to a stop as well, each to an opposite side of the road; they had armor panels, and Gatlings mounted on pintles. The gunners scanned outward, across rolling fields of grass and young wheat and dry corn stalks and occasional orchards or olive groves or copses of holm oak. Ahead-northward-there was a hamlet and a scatter of isolated houses with farm compounds around them.

  The houses and village ahead had the dead quiet air of abandonment. Behind them, columns of smoke stained the sky, and scores of the huge black-winged Iberian vultures made circles that marked herds of slaughtered livestock. Swindapa winced slightly as her eyes followed Marian's.

  Yeah, I know, sugar, the black woman thought. Doing scorched-earth hurts, especially in country as pretty as this. But Isketerol can stop it anytime he wants. We're not here to conquer his country. We couldn't if we wanted to. All we want is for him to get out of our way.

  The crew of the car popped various hatches and came out, enjoying the fresh air and space; someone produced one of the foraged local hams and cut slabs of it to hand 'round. Marian took one and put it on a piece of dog biscuit, gnawing and taking an occasional swig from her canteen as she studied the map and waited. The earthy, salty taste of the acorn-fed and smoke-cured ham was so good that you forgot how vile hardtack was.

  The rest of the Mechanized Battalion came up behind at last. The name was only partly ironic. After all, bicycles were mechanical transport… and about four times faster than foot infantry, on these fine roads the Tartessians had been kind enough to build. Watching seven hundred helmets bobbing along with rifles over their shoulders still brought a narrowing of the eyes that someone familiar with Marian knew for a smile. Another scatter of Cherokees and Hondas drew a brace of rifled siege cannon, heavy mortars, and trailers of fuel and supplies.

  She fought down fierce envy for the two genuine Humvees she'd attached to Brigadier McClintock's HQ. Fair is fair. There were only three of those left in all the world.

  "Major Stavrand," she said to the officer in charge.

  "Commodore," he replied. "This is it, eh?"

  He grinned enthusiastically. His white-blond hair, long narrow face and elongated build made him look like something out of one of the gloomier Ingmar Bergman films. The Nordic Death effect was spoiled only by his glasses, and the elastic cord he wore to keep them on.

  "Right over that ridge, and I think we've outpaced the news of ouah arrival," Alston said. "Ride with me."

  The troops put their bicycles on the kickstands and fanned out, skirmishers moving forward until the thick bar of human figures became a scattering across the rolling land. Stavrand fastened his ten-speed to the rear deck of the car with a bungee cord and perched on the turret, holding on to one of the welded brackets and looking like a Stockholm-gargoyle rendering of Alfred Nobel, or possibly the patron saint of demolitions.

  The ultralights went by overhead with an insectile drone, keeping an eye on the target and the countryside round about. Marian waited until a signal flare went up before waving the armored car forward. They crested the rise and halted.

  Mmmm-hmmmm, she thought, as they halted in a vineyard whose gnarled branches rose up from the earth like arthritic black fingers. Yellow mustard flowers starred the grass between the vines.

  Now for another bit of legal vandalism. Christ, but I hate this business.

  The town lay in a valley that ran back up into the low mountains beyond; patches of woods thickened into outright forest not far north of it. An earth-fill dam held back a considerable lake north of the town, glinting blue with dead trees sticking out of the water in spots. There were about three or four thousand people living inside the walls, she thought. It was all rawly new, a gridwork of dusty streets and whitewashed adobe, save where tall brick smokestacks marked smelters and forges. This was a major center by Tartessian standards, their equivalent of Irondale, working the minerals of the mountains behind and forwarding the products to their capital.

  "Major, I don't suppose…?"

  "I'm afraid not, Commodore," Stavrand said regretfully. "See how the river runs? The flood'll go right past the town when we blow it. Of course, that'll cut off their water… mostly for waterpower, see how they ran the canal along the contour to preserve the head? Quite well done."

  An ultralight went by overhead, then turned into the wind that blew out of the north and came in to land on the roadway. Offhand skill flared the wing up to shed speed, and it came to a rolling halt only ten yards from touchdown. The pilot vaulted out and came running over, pushing back the goggles that kept eyes from freezing or drying out and pulling off her helmet. She was small and slight-there was a 120-pound weight limit for pilots-and brown-skinned, with a broad face and a dense cap of raven hair so dark it had blue highlights.

  Mmmmm-hmmmm, Alston remembered. Lekkansu-born. From one of the bands virtually annihilated by some uptime virus back in the Year 1; a few children had been bereft of even distant relatives to take them in, and ended up adopted on-Island.

  "Ma'am, sir," she sai
d, vaulting lightly up despite the heavy sheepskin flying suit and joining them on the deck of the turret. A glance at the map, and:

  "Yeah, they've got fallback earthworks going up inside the gates, and they've just started putting up a berm to back the wall. Looks real crowded in there-lots of refugees, tents, and brushwood shelters in the streets and open spaces, ma'am."

  "Thank you, Ensign Walters," Marian said.

  "Ah, youth," Swindapa observed as the flyer bounded back to her little craft and vaulted one-handed into her seat; a couple of Marines swung it 'round into the wind.

  Marian snorted. This from someone who occasionally turns cartwheels in the street just for the fun of it?

  "Wait 'till you hit forty, 'dapa." She scanned the defenses. "Let's see…"

  Curtain-wall of mud brick on a mound, wet moat, field of lilies.

  Those were metal-tipped punji-sticks, a nasty low-tech version of barbed wire. It would be expensive to assault, but it was designed to keep out hillbilly raiders with clubs and bronze-headed spears. Nothing like the massive works around Tartessos City or some of their forts elsewhere; Isketerol had had too much to do to put that sort of thing around every town. Absurdly, there were still ducks swimming about the ring-ditch, occasionally dipping their heads and leaving twitching tails in the air as they fed.

  "Right, let's give them a demonstration," Marian said.

  The siege guns and mortars were ready within minutes, crews swarming antlike around them. The rocket launchers took a little longer, but the two-wheeled mounts were light enough to be towed by bicycle and manhandled around. The operators loaded six long, finned cylinders in each launcher's bundle of tubes and backed away, unreeling wire behind them.

  "Driver, take us in to a thousand yards," she said.

  The diesel pig-grunted in a cloud of black coal-oil fumes, and

  I the car rolled forward again. The works that had been easy to dismiss through the binoculars grew larger as they neared. A cannon fired from the low square tower next to the gates, visible only by the flash and smoke.