by Eric Flint
Larry thought that would be the beginning of a long discussion about oil, and power, and machines, and technology. But the Ishak heard the quick version—that the oil powers the most important machines on their ship and the motorboat—and nodded their understanding and welcomed them to take as much as they liked.
At which Larry had fallen silent. To take “as much as they liked” meant something very different to the Ishak than to Europeans. Although Larry tried to impress on Katkoshyok and Tulak the scope and size of an oil well and its immediate infrastructure, he kept coming away with the impression that he was failing to impart the almost factorylike aspect of industrial resource extraction. He mentioned all the wagons, and the steam pinnaces and barges on the Nezpique and Mermentau, and the processing plant they would probably have to build where the Mermentau first flowed into Big Mud Lake, but to the Ishak, these all seemed like interesting places where they could always visit their new friends, partake of the wonders being built there, and trade stories and goods. And, if Larry read his Native Americans correctly, they might also be imagining them as places to find wives or husbands, since mixing gene pools was a known benefit to almost all tribes, and furthermore, built bonds of alliance and mutual support.
Or such was the case in their world. Treachery within families or bonded groups was not unknown among the Ishak, but was so unusual and reviled that such incidents lived long in memory. Unlike Europe, where backstabbing family members had long ago been raised to an art form that was still in its full flower. Mike Stearns had laid out some pretty principled and firm rules about dealing with the native peoples of the Americas, but even so, Larry wondered if they could really understand what they were agreeing to. On the other hand, to deprive them of the choice to agree—to become their “legal guardians” in a kind of parental caretaking role—would be a disrespectful and demeaning reassertion of the “Great White Father” concept garbed in robes of futile political correctness. At times like these, Larry almost hoped that his expedition’s one enduring and crucial failure—failing to find oil—might persist, even become permanent.
As if to punctuate that thought, Karl Klemm came trudging down the game path from the marsh swards that predominated just inland, which they tentatively identified as being close to the up-time town of Evangeline. “Any luck?” Larry asked.
Karl stared at him, flopped down and accepted a cup of fresh water with a grateful nod.
“I guess that means ‘no’? And where’s Vogel?”
“Herr Vogel is a minute or two behind. Two of our Ishak guards are teaching him about local game tracks.” Karl shook his head. “I am sorry to be so cross, Major, but it is most frustrating. We have excellent information, reasonably good maps, know the specific signs to look for in this oil field, and have only three or four square miles to cover. At most. And yet, we have found nothing. Nothing.” He knocked back the water, stared moodily at the bayou, nodded at one of the Ishak dogs wading out after two small children who were playing “touch the strange red boat”: the most popular game among the tribe’s four- and five-year-olds. It required them to go out to the limit that their parents permitted and indulged their endless fascination with touching and running their hands along the smooth, red sides of the boat. However, the dogs, while not averse to the water, usually did not join in the game, since it did not involve chasing or tugging anything.
Tulak nodded sympathetically. “A small place can seem very big when a man searches for a very, very small thing within it. Do not despair. We shall continue to assist you.”
“Tulak, friend, you are very kind,” Karl replied, swatting at flies. “Perhaps too kind. Your people have better—necessary—things to do other than help us look for these burning gases or slippery sands.”
Katkoshyok smiled. “We do have other things to do. But we are doing them more easily because of how you help us.” He jerked his head in the direction that Larry had heard the shot come from. “It might have taken a day and half a dozen arrows to wound and wear down a bison to the point where it may be killed. My ears tell me that one of your rifles has just killed it at the first ambush.” He stared up through the hanging mosses. “It is not yet midday. The whole of the kill will be here by nightfall. So you save us more time than you cost us. But either way, that is nothing among friends, Karl.”
“Thank you, Katkoshyok.”
Katkoshyok looked at Larry as if to say, “you are all too polite,” just before the dog following the children in the bayou began barking. That surprised one of the children who had been reaching for the side of the boat. The small figure toppled over in the water and disappeared beneath its surface with a gurgling shriek of surprise and panic.
Larry was running toward the weed-choked banks before he was conscious of having risen to his feet. And in between strides, the full mosaic of unfolding disaster became clear.
The barking dog had only been part of the reason the child had stumbled and was now in over its head. The more urgent fact was that the last coil of the mooring line had obviously been lazily laid and, with the persistent, gentle motion of the water, had slipped free. That extra play in the mooring line had allowed the boat to drift three or four feet farther from the shore, where the shelflike apron of mud and sand gave way to a steeper drop-off into five feet of water.
But the dog’s bark had not been a warning of deeper water ahead, but rather, predators inbound. As his long strides carried Larry closer to the edge of the bayou, they also put more of the tunnellike tree canopy behind him. The increased periphery of sightlines showed him what the dog was barking at: a pair of mostly sunken narrow logs drifting downstream in the direction of the children. Except those were not logs.
They were alligators.
“Ciwā’t!” cried Larry in Ishak. “Two of them. Karl, get my gun!”
“What?”
“Get my gun and shoot those gators.”
“What are you doing?”
Jeez, whaddaya think? “I’m getting the kid.” Thereby proving myself to be the stupidest person on this planet. “Just start shooting.” Larry shrugged off his pack, kicked off his shoes.
“But Larry, I’m not very good at—”
“Just fucking shoot, will you?”
And then Larry was into the water. After two steps in the foot-sucking muck, he realized that swimming would be faster. He gulped in air, aimed at the place where the child had gone down, and, as he dove, was almost hysterically glad to hear the roar of the .40-72, along with the ferocious, I’ll-take-on-Godzilla barking of the dog. Gotta love dogs.
Larry was a passable swimmer, but had never planned to go free diving in a zero-visibility mudhole choked with weeds and what looked like coffee grounds. He pushed ahead, heard two dull reports, then muffled screaming. Wondering what the hell he would do if the alligator had already reached the child, he clawed his way back up to the surface.
And found the child screaming straight into his face. She had fortunately resurfaced on her own, but was coughing up brown bayou water in between wild sobs of panic. And she hasn’t even noticed the gators, yet. Best keep it that way. Larry made himself smile at her, hoped she didn’t notice his eyes look over her shoulder to gauge the distance to the gators: about fifteen yards. C’mon Karl, he thought angrily, as he slipped an arm around the child and started to tow her back to shore, start shooting the way I know you can, you god-damned—
The Winchester barked, probably the fourth time, and the lead gator flipped and thrashed in the water. Probably only six feet from toe to tail tip, the predator disappeared under the water, the heavy .40-72 game round having either killed it or, more likely, convinced it to go off somewhere to nurse its very probably mortal wound.
But the second gator was the larger of the two, and was not deterred by the apparent fate of its fellow. It came on with slowly increasing speed. The little girl, who was already flailing against being towed on her back, saw the approaching serpentine back-ridge of the beast and screamed long, loud, and impossibly
shrill.
Larry tried to remember that good swimming form made you fast in the water, while sheer brute force made you flounder, but it was difficult to maintain that discipline, knowing that an alligator was quite literally coming to bite your butt off. He stroked and kicked past the dog, which was barking and snarling and standing its ground with the wild abandon of a canine berserker. Well, given that the adversary is an alligator, more like a kamikaze . . .
And then came the sweetest sound Larry thought he’d ever heard: the sustained and much closer roars of a Winchester .40-72. Between each report was a smooth shk-klak! of the lever being cycled, and the third shot must have hit the gator, which splashed fitfully for a moment, but then bore on, only a few yards behind Larry.
The fourth shot splashed in the water well behind the gator.
Dammit, Karl, I know you don’t want to hit me, but tighten up that aim and lead the son of a—
The fifth shot seemed to hit a grenade. Or at least that’s what it sounded and looked like. The gator, an eight-footer, exploded into a swirling rage of what must have been death throes. Glancing over the girl’s quaking body, he caught only a brief glance of the beast’s head and a front limb slashing back down into the water in something like a desperate fury—right before a second Winchester started firing, sending round after round into the creature.
Larry, not trusting that the two gators he’d seen were the only ones lurking and cruising for prey, stood while he was still in three feet of water and heaved the girl toward the shore in the direction of Katkoshyok, who was already halfway to him. On the riverbank, Karl was hastily reloading his Winchester with smooth, professional efficiency while Vogel, the only one of the Hibernians who had not gone out with the morning’s bison-hunting party, scanned the water for further targets, his rifle up and ready.
Once the girl was on shore and being tended to, Larry called the dog out of the water, just as the two guardian hunters who had been traveling with Vogel and Karl waded in to fetch the carcass of the alligator. Katkoshyok looked into Quinn’s face as he panted toward the shore. “Well,” Larry commented, “that was exciting.”
Katkoshyok’s hand came down on his shoulder. “You have our thanks, Larry Quinn.”
Larry shrugged, then grinned. “What is it with you, Katkoshyok, always saying ‘thank you’?”
Katkoshyok blinked and then laughed. “That is well said. And you, Karl: you are a warrior this day. Not many men slay the ciwā’t, the great monster of these bayous.”
“With respect, Chief Katkoshyok, I was not so much a warrior as I was simply a man with a gun who kept shooting at the alligator until I hit it enough.”
Larry nudged Karl in the ribs. “That’s how we all start, kiddo. Pretty much how we all finish up, too. There’s only one bit of bad news about being a soldier.”
“And what is that?”
“Over time, it’s easier to succeed at the job, but it never gets easier to do it.”
“Which is why I am a scientist, Herr Major.”
“Yeah. So you say. In the New World, I think we’ve all gotta be ready to kill our own gators.” He walked over to where the little girl had begun vomiting spasmodically. Thick black ooze came out along with the water. “Is she going to be all right?”
“Yes,” Tulak answered. “She has just swallowed some river mud.”
Larry looked at the viscous black pool that had collected next to her. “Huh. Closest thing we’ve seen to oil,” he sighed.
Tulak raised an eyebrow, looked at the small black puddle, looked back up at Larry. “That is what oil looks like?”
“Why—yes,” he replied. “Didn’t you know?”
Tulak shook his head. “No. You spoke of strange smells, greasy sands, and fiery gas. You never spoke of black liquid.”
Well, son of a—“Karl?”
Klemm was suddenly very red. “Major, you and I followed the same protocols. We described the findings, and the prior signs, that the Grantville sources indicated were seen by the discoverers of the Jennings oil field.”
“And you didn’t think to give them a physical description of oil itself?”
“No, sir. Er—did you?”
Well, damn it. I guess we were both so busy staying close to the data we had that we shot straight past the obvious. And past the realization that the Ishak have never seen this oil we’re talking about. “Tulak, tell me, have you ever seen a liquid like this, rising up from the ground, perhaps?”
Tulak was frowning at the slick of bottom mud the girl had coughed up. “Not exactly. Although when the bayou here rises and floods into nearby fields, there is a place that sometimes—not often, maybe once or twice in a generation—bleeds like this.”
“‘Bleeds’?” Karl echoed.
“Yes, as though the floodwaters wash away an old scab covering some deep wound in the ground. The blood of that wound is black like this, thick and strong-smelling, as earth blood would be. Might that be the oil you are looking for?”
“It just might be, Tulak,” Larry said before he smiled and punched Karl in the shoulder. “It just might be.”
Chapter 35
Governor’s Palace, Cartagena
Francisco de Murga y Ortiz de Orué, governor of Cartagena, stared glumly out his window at the cerulean perfection of his city’s bay. And it was his city, damnation. Made safe from cimarrones and the excesses of the Inquisition alike since he’d arrived in 1629. Cartagena now had walls that were the envy of even Old-World cities famous for their fortifications.
Soldier and engineer de Murga had not been idle since taking the post at age fifty-nine. “Too old for the job,” they’d scoffed behind his back when he arrived. Well, half of those scoffers were dead from pirates, pestilence, or the pride of thinking themselves indestructible in a wild land that specialized in destroying the overconfident. Whereas he was still here, building walls and defeating Spain’s foes. Which was the topic of today’s business with Captain Gregorio de Castellar y Mantilla and his lieutenant and field engineer, Juan de Somovilla Tejada.
De Murga sat before them sternly, his scowl an intentional reminder of how poorly they’d handled their attempt, last year, to chase the English Puritans off their privateer-harboring colony on New Providence Island, just off the coast of Nicaragua. They were not incompetent men, but nor were they much more than competent, and the English had been innovative and dogged in repulsing the Spanish. So this was a chance for these two hidalgos to redeem themselves. Frankly, de Murga wished he could have sent some of his better, younger men to command the land forces that would soon begin embarking for the mission to Trinidad, but de Castellar was too senior to be passed over. “Well,” de Murga said and then discovered he really didn’t have anything to add. “Well,” he repeated. “Are you quite prepared?”
“Quite ready, sir. All nineteen warships and four transports are in complete readiness and the men in fine spirits.”
“They’d better be. It’s a long trip to windward,” de Murga muttered.
“That is so, sir. But just yesterday, the winds began coming around in our favor. So we are eager to be off.”
“And I shall not hold you. But there will be no last meeting with Captain Contreras. He has sailed ahead of you.”
“To Puerto Cabello?”
“No. I shall not send more ships to Puerto Cabello, not after last year’s disaster.” And it truly had been a disaster. Only one ship lost, but the supplies that had been collected there to support his final push on Trinidad had been sabotaged by, of all possible adversaries, Irish mercenaries who had once served Spain herself. That they had evidently now sided with the Dutch was every bit as strange as their seizure of Trinidad. Unless the reports regarding the oil there were true. In that case—well, the world seemed to be turning to stand on its ear, so why not that too?
Castellar glanced sideways at his silent companion before asking, “If we should face heavy weather or other dangers, may we still make for Puerto Cabello?”
D
e Murga kept himself from uttering a wordless snarl. Just what he did not want to deal with: a completely reasonable and prudent question. “In the event of an emergency, of course. But you are not to lay over there any longer than necessary.” He rubbed his eyes. “It is beyond countenancing that last year’s raid was chance. The saboteurs either had specific report of our fleet being provisioned in that port, or conjectured that we were preparing to respond to the seizure of Trinidad and knew that our protocols name Puerto Cabello as the final staging area. That’s why we built all the warehouses there: to resupply any fleet that must travel all the way to the eastern end of Tierra Firme against its headwinds and contrary currents.”
The two officers were nodding like automatons. Castellar broke out of the repetitious motion first. “Your Excellency, you mentioned that Captain Contreras has already departed, but you did not reveal his destination.”
“Contreras is overseeing the action that will be taken against Curaçao.”
Castellar and Somovilla exchanged long looks. “Governor, did I hear you correctly? Captain Contreras is departed for Curaçao? Already?”
“Yes. Better than a week ago.” Closer to two, actually, but who’s counting? “We have secured the allies and support necessary to deal with the Dutch raiders there. Consequently, you will not need to detach any of your ships to address that problem, thereby preserving your full offensive strength to apply against the usurpers on Trinidad.”
Castellar’s eyes opened a bit wider. “Governor, does this mean that Captain Contreras has succeeded in, er, negotiating successfully with the Brethren of the Coast?”
De Murga suddenly felt queasy. That Contreras, the finest officer he had, was necessarily sent to secure the cooperation of brutes that should have been drawn and quartered in the public square was a deep blemish of shame upon Spanish arms and policies. Too many bribes, too many sinecures for noblemens’ sons, too much opulence, too much self-indulgence, too much embezzlement of funds earmarked for military expenses and maintenance: Spain was getting soft, and so, like Rome in her dotage, she took that fateful step of relying upon mercenaries. Or what was worse, murderers. “Yes, Captain Contreras has made the necessary arrangements. Consequently, even if you should happen to encounter a known pirate upon your journey to Trinidad, do not engage him unless he makes to engage you or other ships flying our flag.”
