Conquistador

by S. M. Stirling

  He paused, stroked his jaw as if in thought, then spoke: “I have it, man! Even if there are only a few thousand of us, we could use the kaffirs in our factories. Of course, we’d have to teach them to read, wouldn’t we, to make them useful? Hand out Bibles, hey? And we’d give them modern medicine so all their children survived….”

  Botha spoke with heavy sarcasm: “Haven’t I seen this film before, someplace, jong? You know, it started well, but I didn’t like the ending!”

  Schalk flushed. “It would be different this time. We could keep the kaffirs in order without any outsiders telling us—”

  “Ja, it would be different—for a while. Maybe a long while. Maybe not. Schalk, if you really want to do something for the volk, you should find a girl, get married and have a dozen children. That would help.”

  The door behind them opened.

  “It’s ready; come in to dinner,” Botha’s wife said, and then called to the children. When they had been sent off to wash their hands, she went on: “And stop talking foolishness about going back, on either side of the Gate, Schalk. If I never see one of them again, it’ll be too soon.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Oakland Gate Complex, California

  June 2009

  FirstSide/Commonwealth of New Virginia

  Perkins went out on a stretcher; the bodies of the dead were dumped unceremoniously into a big metal crate. Men were scrubbing at red stains on the gallery floor outside, presumably where the departing Vietnamese had departed much more permanently than they anticipated. Industrial-strength cleaning machines foamed and whirred—and their users wore overalls with the name of a well-known janitorial company. Others moved about scanning with eyes and instruments for any sign of the firefight. He saw one group extract a bullet from the plaster of a wall and begin repairs immediately, grouting and plaster and quick-drying paint. The heavy smell of the cleansing chemicals overrode the feces-and-blood stinks of violent death; in half an hour, even a forensics team would have trouble proving anything untoward had happened here.

  “That’s the cleanup squad, I presume?” Tully said. “Impressive.”

  Adrienne started slightly, brought out of a brown study. “Yes. We’ve managed to keep one of the biggest secrets in human history for sixty-three years now. We didn’t do it by being incompetent.”

  “Impressive,” Tully said again, his voice full of enthusiasm. “Say, you don’t really need to keep the cuffs on us—”

  Adrienne looked at him, snorted, and walked faster.

  Tom whispered to his partner: “Brilliant. Short, but brilliant.”

  An ambulance was parked outside, and a Ford Windstar van, as well as a truck with the logo of the cleaning company supposedly at work within—or for all he knew, RM and M actually did own the firm. It would certainly be a good way to hide a cleanup squad. As he watched, two men got into Christiansen’s own vehicle across the street and drove away. The pseudo-paramedics loaded Perkins into the ambulance and did likewise. The big metal box with the bodies came down on a dolly and went up on a hydraulic lift into the truck with the company name.

  Bet all the other evidence goes the same way, he thought. Then, with a hint of eeriness: And it’ll all also go where we’re going—somewhere literally out of this world. Maybe it isn’t quite so crazy that they’ve been able to keep the secret. When you can throw evidence away and know it’ll never come back…

  Adrienne stopped at the rear of the Windstar. “Are you up to handling them, Botha?” she asked sharply.

  “Ja,” he said, and shook himself like a bear. “Yes, miss. It’s… I didn’t think anyone could buy Schalk. He was a good man, not slim, not clever, but a good soldier.”

  “I don’t think anyone could buy him either,” Adrienne said, and put a hand on his shoulder in a moment’s odd gentleness. She looked about to make sure that nobody was within earshot. “Not with money. This is political; that’s why you’ve got to keep quiet about how it happened. As far as the official debrief is concerned, he was killed in the firefight. Now let’s get going.”

  With their hands cuffed behind their backs, Tom and Tully needed help as they climbed awkwardly into the back of the van; the big Afrikaner’s hand had the impersonal strength of a mechanical grab. Tom evaluated him objectively as they passed close.

  I could take him, he decided. He’s about my weight and plenty strong, experienced too, or I miss my guess, but I’m a decade younger at least and I’m not carrying any fat.

  Of course, that was in anything like a fair fight. Being woozy from a dose of tear-and-puke gas, and having your hands fastened behind your back, did not count as “fair” under reasonable definition. As it was, Botha could crush his skull with a couple of blows of his massive fist.

  The van had seats around the interior, with storage bins beneath them. It also had two wheelchairs fastened to the floor, facing backward and equipped with restraints on the legs and arms, the sort they used for violent patients in mental hospitals. Adrienne stayed on the road between the doors until they were secured, one hand under her suit jacket. Not many people could draw and shoot accurately in conditions like these; he was willing to bet she was one. Botha put Tully in his chair first, then Tom, working from behind the wheelchair, then took up a position behind them as the doors slammed shut and locked.

  “There’s redundancy for you,” Tully said, and Tom snorted a bitter chuckle.

  Yes; four-point tie-down on these chairs, a human-gorilla hybrid behind with a gun on us, and all of it all inside a locked vehicle.

  “Shut up,” Botha said, and prodded him painfully in the back of the head with the muzzle of his pistol.

  There was a spell of mixed boredom and rising tension; they couldn’t see much through the small dark-tinted windows in the back of the van. Roads, then alleyways between tall buildings, occasional halts. Then brilliant light. The doors were thrown open and the wheelchairs unfastened and rolled down a ramp by silent armed guards in standard rent-a-cop outfits. They were inside a building’s loading dock; then they were pushed down corridors of blank pastel, lit by overhead fluorescents. The place had the cold, deserted, silent feel of a facility where only the night shift was on duty.

  Well, it is three-fifteen in the morning, Tom thought.

  They stopped in a set of rooms that had the unmistakable cold, astringent smell of a hospital or clinic. A checkin desk was labeled DECON AND CONTAINMENT.

  Tom’s ears perked up when a nurse in a white coat looked up from the desk and spoke; she had the same accent as Bosco and Adrienne. Rather stronger, if anything, as if she wasn’t trying to tone it down. She did not, he was interested to notice, have one of the platinum-and-gold thumb rings on her left hand.

  “This clinic is under continual surveillance,” she said, indicating the cameras in the corners. “If you cause any trouble, the guards will be back here in seconds. The exterior doors are locked, and won’t open for anyone without the right retina and palmprint. Are you going to make trouble?”

  “Ma’am, we wouldn’t dream of it,” Tom said.

  “Good,” she said, getting up and undoing their restraints. “This is FirstSide Decon. You’ll be checked here, and then given sleeping space until the next available transit, which is scheduled for”—she glanced at a computer screen on her desk—“seven tomorrow.”

  A shower followed, in hot water that contained some sharp-smelling antiseptic, and a few minutes in a chamber with UV lamps all around. The medical exam was thorough, and used all the latest equipment. They were shown to a small cubicle with a thick locked door, a single toilet and sink, and two bunks; he took the lower and sank into unconsciousness with a swiftness the thin lumpy pallet didn’t deserve.

  “Kemosabe.” Tully’s voice brought him awake and sitting upright on the bunk. “Thought you’d want to cut the beauty sleep short.”

  Tom shook his head and stretched. They’d lost their watches along with everything else, but his internal clock, not to mention his stomach, said he’d
slept at least twelve hours. After the stress of the past twenty-four, that was only to be expected. Possibly shoving them in here buck naked was supposed to keep them subdued, which might have worked with ordinary civilians.

  Not that the state of our morale makes much difference in a bare concrete cubicle with a steel door, he thought. And doubtless under constant remote surveillance.

  “Anything in the way of food show up?” he said carefully.

  “Couple of ration bars, sort of like pressed granola,” Tully said, and threw him one. “Being the sweet guy I am, I didn’t eat both. Also some munificent toiletries and fancy duds via the dumbwaiter there.” He jerked a thumb at the swivel-box arrangement in the plain steel door.

  There were plain dark sweat suits, underwear, socks and sneakers, all smelling both new and cheap. Disposable razors, soap, toothpaste and brushes came with them, along with one plastic comb. After he cleaned up as best he could there was nothing to do but sit on the bunks and make desultory conversation, of the type you didn’t mind being overheard. Doubtless the boredom, without even a variation in the light or a distracting sound, was also intended to shake inmates. Neither of them had a problem with it; both police work and military service were good training for waiting. In the long spells of silence, he found his thoughts returning to Adrienne—humiliation at the thought of how he’d been duped, and an obsessive replay of each word and action since the fiasco at the meet.

  Could I have played it better? he thought. Dozens of methods occurred to him, each crazier than the last; when he found himself doing the if-only-things-had-been-different daydream game and imagining she’d really been the dewy innocent he’d first assumed, he wrenched his mind away with a concentrated effort of will and did calisthenics instead, mostly isometric types, the sort you could do lying down on a narrow bunk.

  When the guards came with the wheelchairs, it was almost a relief. Another stretch of corridor led to an echoing metal-box building with the look of a warehouse—most of the floor was great stacks of boxed goods on pallets, with forklifts whining about and the prickly ozone smell of heavy-duty electric motors. A people mover stood waiting, and Adrienne and Piet Botha stood beside it.

  He looked as before, save for a rumpled and red-eyed look that argued sleeplessness. She was wearing a tight black uniform, cloth and gleaming leather, pistol and dagger at belt, and the stylized letters GSF on the shoulder. Despite himself, he looked her up and down and quirked an eyebrow.

  “Don’t blame me,” she said with a shrug. “Sturmbanführer Otto von Traupitz had a big hand in designing the uniform—nobody else paid attention until it was too late to change things without offending him, and he had done a lot of the gruntwork setting up Gate Security.”

  Then she turned one leg. “You’ll have to admit we have really, really spiffy boots, though.”

  Tully chuckled openly. Tom gave a snort and looked away. His stomach was beginning to clench; he knew what was coming, and it was starting to feel real. The people mover slid forward, to where tall metal doors gave on to another warehouselike building. Armed guards waited at the junction; one covered them while another shone a handheld retina scanner into their eyes.

  “What have we here?” the guard with the machine carbine said, looking at the men in the restraints.

  “Couple of IS,” Adrienne said. “Off to help build our beloved Commonwealth.”

  “Haven’t seen any Involuntaries in a while, Miss Rolfe,” the man said.

  “Do you have much longer on your tour?” she said.

  “A month, miss. I will be so glad to get back to the real world. I understand why furloughs home aren’t practical, but it gets pretty boring never leaving these buildings… pass, then.”

  Tom looked up; the metal-stringer ceiling above was frosted with lights, surveillance cameras and an occasional guard platform. Below was an expanse of concrete, bare except for notional roadways outlined in yellow paint; everything converged at the far wall, where a big glass-walled control room hung from the ceiling, and below it a long paved ramp. Trains of flatbed trolleys drawn by electric carts waited or moved to the promptings of the control room, loaded with boxed computers, digitally controlled machine tools, diesel engines, knocked-down cars and trucks, tires, ball bearings, tractors, carboys of industrial chemicals, flats of designer clothing and French perfume, DVDs, MRI scanners….

  Everything necessary to keep a civilization going, he thought, fascinated despite himself. Imperious beeps brought trains forward, down the ramp and out of sight—and then others emerged upward, loaded with gleaming stacks of gold and silver ingots, small steel boxes of diamonds or emeralds or tanzanite, rare earths….

  “At least we smell better than we did before the shower,” Tully muttered.

  It sounded as if the situation was getting to him, at least a little. Tom felt alert enough; very thirsty, and his bladder was painfully full again, but he could take in his surroundings.

  “That’s us,” Adrienne said, as a green light flashed and a beep-beep-beep sounded from the dashboard of the electric cart.

  He licked dry lips as it whined into motion. It was one thing to read about a gate between worlds, or talk about it, or even reluctantly believe in one. Seeing one was something else. And this…

  As they came to the bottom of the ramp it looked like a basement, of all things. There was steel tracking laid down over synthetic sheeting over flagstones, running straight to—

  “What’s that?”he burst out involuntarily, at the sight of the rectangle of silvery light.

  Adrienne grinned. “That, my friends, is nothing less than the Gate.” Her voice put the italics in the word; she added quotation marks with her fingers. “The Gate to the Commonwealth of New Virginia.” The capitals came across well too.

  The big dark Afrikaner gunsel smiled unpleasantly. “Take a good look at the Gate Chamber, jong, because this is the last time you see it.”

  He ignored the possible threat and did as he was told; he intended to see it again, in his official capacity, and the information might be valuable in getting that done. The wall opposite the… Gate… was solid and smooth; sandwich armor lifted from a M1 tank, from the look of it. Blisters mounted heavy machine guns and a flamethrower, and compact unmanned armored turrets with video pickups and more machine guns peered in from four spots around the ceiling. A clear plastic enclosure in one corner held a wooden table, with some archaic-looking electronic equipment on it.

  Adrienne saw where his eyes fell. “That’s what started it all,” she said. “As of April 17, 1946. It’s just what it looks like; a modified forties shortwave set. How does it do what it does? We have thousands of guesses—some by physicists—and not one goddamned shred of proof. All we know is that if everything connected to the circuit is kept connected and in roughly the same relative and absolute positions, it goes on happening. The Commission bought up the factories that made all the components, just so we could get identical replacement parts. Interrupt the circuit or move things more than a couple of inches, and the Gate closes… and someday I’ll tell you about the panic that’s caused, the times it’s happened. For a week once, after the ’eighty-nine quake. Ah, here we go. Don’t worry—you won’t feel a thing. I’ve done the trip to the Commonwealth and back hundreds of times.”

  The people mover jerked forward. Tom’s mind accepted the reassurance, but his gut lurched involuntarily. Passage through the sheet of rippling silver turned out to be exactly as advertised. One instant he was here; the next he was there, wherever the Commonwealth was. The first glimpse turned out to be fairly boring; it was pretty much like the place he’d just come from, although he didn’t think it was underground. A glance upward showed frosted-glass skylights. Another showed that the four corners of the huge room were armor-and-concrete pillboxes mounting General Electric six-barreled Gatling miniguns, and that the overhead gridwork included a complete net of surveillance equipment.

  The people mover scooted off to the side, out of the path of the
two-way traffic; it stopped before something like an airport security setup crossed with a pillbox—except for the squad in black uniforms that looked as if they covered spider-silk-soft body armor, armed with assault rifles—slab-sided German G36 models, with laser sights plugged into Land Warrior-style helmet computers with VR-display optics over the left eye. You didn’t have to aim with that gear; you just moved the muzzle until the crosshairs in the optic rested on what you wanted to hit.

  Somebody’s been selling Uncle Sam’s latest toys, Tom thought.

  There were a few more of the black uniforms sitting at desks, and those included two women and a stout man in his forties, with a graying mustache. The troopers were all male, all young, all fit, with an arrogance he recognized from his time in the Rangers, that of men who thought themselves the best.

  The sign above their station read:

  INSPECTION AND IDENTIFICATION STATION

  COMMONWEALTH OF NEW VIRGINIA

  BY ORDER OF THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE—GATE CONTROL COMMISSION

  ALL THROUGH-GATE PERSONNEL MUST USE THIS STATION

  ALL NEW IMMIGRANTS MUST USE THIS STATION

  HALT FOR IDENTIFICATION OR BE SHOT

  ATTEMPTED UNAUTHORIZED GATE TRANSIT IS A CAPITAL CRIME

  EXECUTION IS SUMMARY AND WITHOUT TRIAL

  NO EXCEPTIONS

  THIS MEANS YOU

  “Friendly bunch,” he murmured.

  “All sarcasm and most bullets just bounce off Gate Security,” Adrienne said cheerfully. She hopped down as the people mover slowed, undid the restraints on the two Americans, then spoke to the man behind the first desk. “Gate Security Agent Adrienne Rolfe. GS Operative Piet Botha. We’ve been cleared through FirstSide decon. Thomas Christiansen and Roy Tully, Invol-fours, and they should be in the databank. You can skip sending them to the familiarization hostel; I’m taking custody.”