Struggle for a Small Blue Planet

by Warwick Gibson

  The camel riders were taking hits now, as the troops responded with rifle fire, but they seemed to shrug the bullets off. Izem had brought in bullet-proof vests with the German weapons, and these were hidden under the men's desert robes. It was more of Don's tactics to confuse and distract.

  The riders wheeled away, and re-loaded as they dropped into a dip that took them out of sight. Then they appeared again, racing across the front of the troops. When they lowered their muskets, there was a universal scramble for cover.

  Once again the ragged volley seemed to have a miraculous effect, as the German rifles fired in unison. But this time the return fire was more immediate. Two of the camels went down, and one of the riders slumped forward over the neck of his mount.

  Another rider came in and picked up the wounded man, and then the camels made haste out of firing range. Some of the animals had been hit as well, and there was much loud complaining as the hardy animals were forced to keep up a gallop.

  Don focused his binoculars on the two riders on the ground. The first was a young man who was not moving. The second was one of the old men who had been eager to join the fighting. He had fallen in a sheltered position behind his camel, and Don thought he saw him move.

  The troops regained their feet and spread out, to make less of a target, and advanced more cautiously. A few shots peppered the old man, to make sure he was dead. Don saw cloth flick up as bullets grazed his arm and hit him in the side and leg. Then the front line was on him, and he flung both arms wide as two small, round projectiles flew out out of his hands on either side.

  His body danced as scores of bullets cut through his flesh, and then the grenades went off. Don could hear the sounds of the wounded and the dying from his position two hundred metres away.

  He shook his head. The old Imazighen had been tough. He was the first of many heroes his people would tell stories about in the evenings, once this was all over.

  The riders had been given one grenade each, and told to use it well or bring it home. The grenades were too precious to waste. The old man had somehow managed to get hold of two of them. Perhaps he had known something of his fate.

  36

  Imazighen village

  Atlas Mountains, North-west Africa

  Three men on horses cantered forward from the rear company of troops. Don focused his binoculars, and saw enough colour on their shoulders and peaked hats to know these were senior officers. They were turning in the saddle as they passed different sections of men, pointing things out, and presumably giving orders.

  The rear company halted, as did the camel trains in the middle section. The handlers of one camel train began to unload their animals. That will be mortars, thought Don. Something to soften up the defenses ahead of the first company. He was prepared for that.

  The officers cantered to a stop behind the leading troops, and a dozen men dropped back toward them. Sergeants and lieutenants, figured Don, ready to receive orders. There was much hand waving and pointing, and the tall man was able to get an idea of their plans.

  The officers wanted the men to take the higher ground on their left. The rise, in fact, where Don had taken up a position under the cliff. It was the obvious spot for an observation post. He smiled. He had anticipated that move also.

  Men from the tail section of the first company came forward to fill out the depleted ranks of the head section. Then they formed up in two ranks, and advanced up the slope on their left. The first rank split into groups that sprawled in the sand and gravel to give covering fire if needed, and the second rank advanced between them. After thirty metres they swopped roles. Don approved. They were showing some discipline.

  When the Tinghir troops were halfway to the top of the rise, they came upon a series of wind-blown ridges in the sandy ground. None of the ridges were more than half a metre above the surrounding slope, and they looked like they'd been there forever.

  When the troops were almost upon the ridges, and Don was worried the Berbers might have left it too late, two dozen villagers dropped their weapons over the tops of the ridges and let loose with everything they had. The German rifles joined in from the cliffs, but it wasn't a withering fire.

  Don's team were on the other side of the valley, waiting for their turn, so the barrage was limited to old WW2 rifles, small-calibre hunting weapons, and several shotguns. The sort of weapons the villagers had stashed away in barns and woodsheds.

  The Berbers had been told to empty their weapons as fast as they could, and get the hell out of there. The shooting petered out as the first group slid back and dropped into a trench behind them. From there it was a foot race to a tunnel further back, and through that to positions at the village.

  There was a furious reply from the troops. Tired of being outwitted, confused by the Imazighen tactics, and smarting from the loss of so many men, they blasted the low ridges apart. Then came the low arc of grenades.

  The air filled with death, but the last of the villagers had already left, collapsing the tunnel behind them. Don would have liked to booby-trap the tunnel, but there were too few explosives available.

  The mortars from the camel train joined in, pasting the area. It pleased Don to see so much enemy ordnance wasted this early on. Grenades and mortar rounds were getting scarce everywhere as munitions depots were emptied. No one was making any more now the citadels had destroyed the factories.

  Then Graham edged up the rise, keeping to the shelter of the cliffs, and dropped into the shallow depression beside Don.

  "Izem says to tell you his men will open up on the mortars soon," said the SAS man. "But I have to say, it's been an elegant piece of chicanery so far. Worthy of the Roman general Africanus, possibly even the great Hannibal himself."

  "Knock it off, Graham," said Don, "and speak English will you?"

  Graham smiled. "Only reason I do this job is to watch you at work," he said.

  The German rifles began a suppressing fire further along the cliff. Two of the mortars were soon abandoned, men sprawled beside them, but the last one was uprooted and dragged behind an outcrop of rocks.

  Don swore, and then they heard a low whump as the last mortar got back into action. The old 60mm weapon, United States vintage from WW2, had an outstanding range even by today's standards. Uphill like this it would be 1600m or more.

  The first round landed close to the village, the second on the other side of the rise not far from Don. The mortar crew was firing blind, trying to make it harder for the Berbers to organise defences before the next assault.

  Graham lifted himself into a crouch, ready to crawl back to the cliff face. Then a mortar round hit the rock face directly above them. Don looked up to see tonnes of sandstone already in motion from the overhang. He was scrambling to his feet when Graham lifted him bodily by his combat jacket and threw him the short distance to the base of the cliff. That was the last thing Don remembered.

  The sound of the rockfall echoed round the cliffs, and a huge cloud of dust billowed out from the site. Mosha stood transfixed as he watched the devastation from the other side of the valley. The mortar crew hadn't seen Don at the top of the rise, he was sure of that. But sometimes a man couldn't escape his fate. Sometimes your number was up.

  Then Mosha re-focused his mind, dismissing thoughts of his friend. If Don was dead, he would mourn him later. Right now, he had a job to do, and his boss would want him to finish it.

  The Tinghir troops had continued up the rise, but they stopped short of the unstable rockfall at the base of the cliff. From there they could see across the valley to the village, and the green fields of crops beyond that. Nothing moved, and they waved the tail section up the centre of the valley. Moments later the tail section began to move into the valley proper.

  The Berbers with the German version of the moukalla muskets now had their field of fire partly blocked by the rockfall. Emboldened, the mortar crews reclaimed the two tubes that had been abandoned, and then all three mortars were hidden behind the outcrop of rocks. They
needed a direct line of sight to drop rounds onto the village, and if they manhandled the tubes up the side of the valley now sheltered from fire, they would soon have that. Don's plan was beginning to unravel.

  Mosha glanced at Bull and Jo on one side, and Izem with Udad and two more men on the other. They were hiding in a shallow gully close to the village. There were seven of them, well equipped with modern weapons and body armour, and well trained. They were the shock troops, and they were waiting for Mosha's orders.

  He lifted one hand with a finger extended, for silent travel, and Izem disappeared down a covered trench that angled in toward the centre of the valley. The others followed.

  37

  Lake Adelaide

  Southern Alps, New Zealand

  The cavern under the mountains was huge. Cathy hadn't known such things existed, and she decided most of it had been excavated. The sprawling, rounded building at one end spread enough of a heat signature around that the infra-red scopes worked well. She took a deep breath. The air seemed richer, more invigorating, with a certain metallic tanginess.

  The team's entry into the cavern so far had been easy, which was unnerving. The citadel had closed down Sullivan's tunnel hard and fast, if the old stories were to be believed. It must have been the massive vibrations coming from the boring machine.

  There was a sudden flare of light and heat to their left, and the team flattened themselves into the grit and dust of their elevated position. The flare slowly faded, but it was there long enough to show another cavern in the distance. The other end of the moat below them disappeared through a cathedral-like archway into it.

  The long, elongated alien vehicle she had noticed was now passing below them. It followed the track until it came to a mining site beside a tunnel that drained the moat. The track looked like it had been carved out of bedrock, and then sealed with a dark substance that looked organic. Some system kept it clear of the dust and grit that covered everything else in the cavern.

  The mining site was much wider than it was high, and had been carved several metres into the rock of the cavern wall. It looked like the workings were following a vein of some sort.

  "What do you think they're after?" whispered Eileen, glancing toward Brun, who had the most geological knowledge. Tomas decided to let the whisper pass. If he assumed the citadel had high-tech systems in place for every sound and movement, they would end up achieving nothing. This was an information-gathering mission, and they had to take risks.

  "Well, the citadel won't be after the elements we take for granted," said Brun quietly, "like iron, copper and gold. Our scientists are already experimenting with the lanthanide series – the rare earth elements – and I bet this technology uses rare earths the way we use the common elements of our era."

  Tomas went to say something, but Brun hurried on, like a professor anticipating questions from students.

  "The rare earths are not especially rare, but they are hard to find in a concentrated form, and they're hard to extract from aggregate. You might have heard of Yttrium, but probably not the rest. There are fifteen of them, though some people include more.

  "The Southern Alps is uplifted sedimentary, not a common place for rare earths, but this is an old riverbed that must have concentrated them in one place, same as the alluvial gold sometimes found here. See how the mining site looks like a river bed along the bottom, with sandbars and shallows along the top?"

  Cathy saw it at once. An ancient river bed, long buried by the uplifts and erosion of the mountains. It was strange to see it in cross-section like that.

  "Look at the mining site," hissed Brun, catching sight of something. "The whole damn face is moving!"

  It took Cathy a while to make it out. She worked the controls on the infra-red imaging, and then she saw it. A sea of something like centipedes was working across the mining face, then scurrying over to central points where giant sea slugs had anchored themselves to the rock. After a while the slugs moved slowly off the face and down to a benched area by the moat. They jettisoned something brown and crumbly, and as she watched a part of the bench slid into the moat and was carried away.

  Then the slugs moved on to a shelf beside the long slater-like vehicle, and unloaded something there too. After that it was back to the work face.

  "I bet the centipedes are farming teams of nanobots," said Eileen quietly. "A tiny workforce stripping out individual molecules of ore. And the whole thing is completely automated. Amazing!"

  "Shh," said Tomas softly. "Watch."

  By the time Cathy realised what he meant, the back of the long alien vehicle was almost fully open. It had split down the middle and slowly raised the two halves to become sides, bending round at the ends to complete the process. The material within, a dark terracotta colour with streaks of bluish purple, began to churn. Before long it filled all the space between the sides, individual cells of movement whirling past each other as they spun.

  Then there was an explosion of light. The goggles overloaded, and the sensitive reading plates took a while to come back on line. When they were working again, she could see the sides of the long vehicle closing, seams of bright metal glowing within it.

  "My God!" hissed Brun. "They're using super-catalysts, maybe a lattice structure to make it exothermic. The oxides have been completely burned off. I've never seen anything like it!"

  "Don't get seduced by the technology, Brun," said Tomas, his voice low and hard. "These bastards think nothing of killing our people. What you're seeing are just beads for trading, let's not give up our birthright for them."

  There was an uncomfortable silence. After a moment Brun nodded. Then he turned away to look toward the rounded building in the distance.

  Understanding the process made Cathy think. The extra oxygen would explain the heady richness of the air down here, and the slight metallic taste in her mouth would be minute concentrations of nitrates and sulphides.

  The carrier vehicle started its journey back to the rounded building in the distance, and Tomas prepared his team to move out. If they could see how the machine got into the building, they might be able to find a way in for themselves.

  "So they came all this way to steal our minerals?" whispered Cathy, as they walked through a moonscape of drifted grit and smaller boulders at the side of the cavern. It wasn't hard to keep pace with the slow-moving vehicle.

  Tomas looked at her sharply, finding her comment shallow, but then his face softened. She was new to the team, and he would cut the new chum some slack. He had also told Jeannie he would look after her, back at Waiouru.

  "I don't think so," he said. "They need those materials to get established, and build the citadel, and prepare for the next step of their plan.

  "But that's all. The problem for us is working out what their long-term goal is. It will be something big, something strange to our way of thinking, and born out of some instinct I'll bet they're not even aware of themselves. Territory, resources, population growth or dominance. Humans, as a species, are no different."

  She chewed over his words for a long time.

  As they got closer to the sprawling building at the end of the cavern, they could see that part of it was higher than the rest. It also had more ornamentation on it, things whose purpose they could only guess at, and indentations that might be doorways. It was a safe bet this was the control centre.

  The track from the workings eventually left the moat, and then switchbacked twice to make its way up the slope. They waited while the carrier drew level with them once again. It was close now, and some prehistoric instinct kept them very still until it had gone past.

  The carrier initiated a recognition sequence as it approached the end of the track. Tomas watched his meters closely. A few lights flashed between a point above the door and the carrier, but most of the activity was in the electromagnetic spectrum, well into the ultra-high frequency end.

  Cathy didn't think the exchange with the carrier was an anti-personnel measure – not inside a sealed spa
ce like the cavern – so it was probably a mining record of weights and purities. Still, it meant they wouldn't be able to walk straight into the complex.

  That's when it dawned on her what sort of plan Tomas must be thinking up. They were going to hijack one of the carriers and ride it in.

  A machine that had a habit of turning whatever was inside it into glowing metal at dangerously high temperatures. She took a deep breath. She'd known this job came with risks.

  38

  Imazighen village

  Atlas Mountains, North-west Africa

  Mosha's patrol emerged behind an old camel pen. From the middle of the valley it looked like a low rise with half-eaten bushes and an old thorn barricade along the top. In front of it were the stakes and lines that held the camels when they were waiting to move out as a camel train.

  There was an ample supply of dung scattered around, with some fresh manure added to make the area more unsavoury. Dust pits where the camels rolled pushed traffic toward pathways that led to the village.

  Mosha looked out through the low scrub and approved. No one would give the area a second glance. They were following one of the basic rules of survival training – misdirection. Their position was so obvious it could not be seen.

  The troops coming into the valley were now midway between the camel pen and the rockslide on the other side of the valley. The bulk of the first section were settled near the top of the rise, ready to give covering fire to their comrades. Numbers had been greatly reduced by the early ambushes, and those advancing amounted to no more than twenty.

  Don's plan called for a crossfire between the German rifles, firing from the cliffs, and Mosha's forces at the camel pen. Unfortunately, the plan also called for the mortars to be out of action. Instead, the mortar crews were advancing up the side of the valley while sheltered by the rockfall.