Conquistador

by S. M. Stirling

  Starlight glinted on the surface of the water moving through the pass; the river was low, shallow enough to walk across without much trouble, but the sill of rock beneath the narrows forced the vast underground flow to the surface here, even in the dry summers when there wasn’t any surface runoff; the valley sat on a huge underground lake.

  The watchers had dug in cunningly. The post below him was a shallow bowl; no disturbed earth showed, so they must have shoveled it out onto a canvas sheet to be hauled away and disposed of elsewhere. A framework of thin rods held a low roof of earth-colored cloth over the pit; more earth had been thrown on top of it, plus some rocks and vegetation; it gave an excellent view down over the track that ran along the river and the slopes, and an adequate one all around. Luckily, there probably wouldn’t be much in the way of sophisticated scanners, the sort that he’d used during the war to give the shaheeds conniption-fits. The Commission kept those under tight control.

  And now, right on the schedule Kolo had described, someone was riding a horse down from the western end of the pass. The hollow clock-clock… clock-clock of hooves came clearly through the cooling night air; the man stopped, dismounted, tied his mount to a sapling and climbed up the slope with what looked like a square bucket or box in each hand. He had a rifle across his back, but he wasn’t making any attempt at silence, and he called up to the post. A little closer, and Tom could see he was younger than Schalk Botha—a fresh-faced kid with slightly shaggy, sunstreaked yellow hair, reminding the ex-Ranger of the way his brother Lars had looked as a teenager. He was grinning as he called up to the men above him, and they shouted angrily. Tom couldn’t follow it, despite a haunting sense of pseudofamiliarity; English and the simplified form of bastard Dutch spoken in South Africa were close cousins.

  Goddamn, but I hate this business, Tom thought. And I’d hoped I was out of this business.

  He made a quiet chittering noise between his teeth. Kolomusnim replied with the same from his left, eastward, and Tully to his right. They began to move forward. Simmons and Botha and Adrienne would be going for the other position; she and the Afrikaner were used to working together, and so were he and Tully.

  The rebel Afrikaners knew their business, but they’d probably been at this watching long enough to lose their edge, boredom and exhaustion taking their toll; Kolo had said the camp looked like it had been there for a week. And they might have been soldiers once, but they’d been farmers and clerks for a decade now.

  Tom dropped to his belly a hundred yards from the observation post and began to leopard-crawl. He moved carefully, almost silently; he could barely hear Tully making the same slow approach. Despite the goggles and knowing exactly where he was, he couldn’t see Kolo moving at all, and any sounds were lost in the background buzz and chir and chirp of insects and birds and small animals, and the slow chuckle of the river below. Sweat dropped down his face and ran under the edge of the goggles, stinging his eyes, salt on his lips. He kept his breath slow and even, ignoring the occasional mosquitoes and something unnamed but insectile that bit him sharply on the back of the neck.

  He had a P90 slung across his back, but he wouldn’t be using it unless there was no alternative at all. The wounds were unmistakable; Mohave raiders captured the odd militia rifle, but not cutting-edge Belgian submachine guns limited to Gate Security use.

  Damn. Hand-to-hand. I hate hand-to-hand fighting.

  Closer now. The men in the post weren’t arguing loudly anymore, and someone laughed. He caught the scent of meat and some sort of hot sauce, overriding the stale-socks-and-sweat odor of men who’d been in the field for a while; evidently the kid had brought some barbecue. Probably he was here like Schalk Botha, helping out his father or elder brother.

  The thought was distant. Tom was acting on reflex now, the time and place lost in a dozen others, only the headgear and accents of the targets different.

  One of the men sitting in the shallow depression ripped a mouthful of meat from a rib and then looked up, chewing. Tom was close enough to see him frown, and see the bald pate shining under the floppy hat pushed to the back of his head.

  The man swallowed and looked upslope, then flicked the bone aside and reached for his rifle—not moving quickly, more out of a long-set habit of suspicion than any urgency.

  “Wie’s daar?” the man called sharply.

  Tom had one knee up under his chest. He was springing off it even as the flat smack of a bowstring sounded. A whistling, then a wet slapping sound of metal cleaving flesh, and the man was staggering back with an arrow halfway through his throat, head and fletching jerking as he convulsed and arched backward; blood shot out of his mouth and nose.

  “Die bosemen! Skiet hulle dood!” someone else shouted, and fired into the darkness, squeezing off half a magazine.

  A couple of the bullets cracked past Tom unpleasantly close as he drove forward, long legs pumping and body almost parallel with the ground—but that was accidental. Firing off blind into the dark like that just destroyed your own night vision, if you weren’t wearing goggles, and gave away your position even if you were. They’d be blind; he could see quite well, about like an overcast winter afternoon. The goggles adjusted automatically to keep the muzzle blasts from dazzling his eyes.

  Ten long strides put him at the earth berm that ran around the shallow pit. Without pause his hands slapped down on it, and his body pivoted forward around the fulcrum of his palms, one leg drawn back. The shooter saw him out of the corner of his eye and pivoted, fast but not quite fast enough; he triggered off a round into the inside of the observation pit just as Tom’s boot smashed into his face like a hydraulic piston—with the full strength of the long muscular leg behind it, and the momentum of better than two hundred pounds of dense bone and muscle.

  The impact crunched up through Tom’s boot sole and into back and gut, killing his forward motion—and the Afrikaner, who was thrown back with a broken neck and his jaw torn three-quarters off, dangling by a shred of cartilage. Tom jackknifed in midair, coming down in a crouch with his great hands ready to strike or grab.

  The third rebel was occupied; he was wrestling with Roy Tully and letting his Uzi submachine gun bounce between them on its sling as he struggled to keep control of Tully’s right wrist, the one with the long knife gleaming in it. Even as Tom set himself the man doubled over in uncontrollable reflex; Tully had driven a knee into his crotch. A second later Tom hammered the bladed palm of his right hand into the back of the man’s neck; he could feel bone shatter, and there was a sound like a green branch snapping with a crunch, hideously familiar.

  “Where’s number four?” Tully asked, panting and glaring around, the knife moving in little unconscious circles.

  “Running,” Tom said, drawing deep shuddering breaths. “But not for long.”

  The fourth man—the youngster who’d brought his elders their last meal—was halfway down the slope to his horse. Not running in blind panic, either; he was keeping quiet and keeping on his feet, obviously set to ride out for help.

  Kolomusnim was behind him, gaining fast, a silent streak of brown motion through the blackness of the night. He leaped with tiger speed; starlight flashed on the steel in his hand as he landed on the yellow-haired youth’s back. They rolled downslope, and there was a scream, then a long bubbling shriek of agony, and another.

  Tom winced slightly, but there was no time to linger. Not that anyone would want to, among the corpses twitching with the last motions of the dead, the death stink mingling nauseatingly with the smell of blood and food and cordite. He and Tully went out of the observation pit with almost identical vaulting leaps, moving eastward up the pass toward the next position.

  He went nearly limp with relief when Adrienne rose short of it. “No problems,” she said. “Piet talked to them, and then…”

  Tom looked past her into the pit. One man had a huge diagonal slash across his neck, from the collarbone on the right side to slightly past the middle on the left, opening the jugular and windp
ipe. Adrienne was pouring water from her canteen over her right hand, and the sopping cuff of her bush jacket above it. As for the rest… one had the side of his skull dished in, and the other looked as if someone very strong had put one hand behind his head, the other on his face, and turned his head around until it looked between his shoulder blades.

  Ecch, Tom thought.

  He could do that himself, but the method said something about the man. The disgust was welcome. A little cold observer at the back of his mind reminded him that he’d just missed getting a hollow-point bullet through the gut. Missed by about six inches of random chance; disliking Botha helped push the knowledge further down.

  Jim Simmons was a dozen yards on, covering the entrance to the pass with his scope-sighted rifle. Botha was using a walkie-talkie he’d found in the observation post, his square dark face even more unreadable than ever, between the dimness and the night-sight goggles.

  “Told them that young Johannes thought a bear was an Indian and shot it up,” he said when he’d clicked off the set. “And to save some dishes ready for him to clean to teach him fire discipline.” He nodded toward the man with the slit throat; he’d been big, red-haired where he wasn’t grizzled. “Andries there had a voice like mine—we both came from the Cape, too. When we go after the rest of them at the camp we can use our guns; if these had been overrun by Indians, the boseman would have taken their guns.”

  Adrienne nodded, with a slight grimace at the stinking destruction. “We’ll have to take everything useful, and the scalps as well,” she said. “Make this look like an Indian raid.”

  Simmons came back. “Kolo will take care of that,” he said.

  Tom looked at him. “Kolo really doesn’t like white men much, does he?” he asked quietly.

  Simmons shrugged. “No, with a few individual exceptions,” he said. “In his position… would you?”

  “Why’s he working with you New Virginians, then?” Tully said, looking behind them.

  The Indian came trotting up; both his arms were red to the elbows, and he was smiling. A string of scalps hung in a dripping bag from his waist.

  “Because it’s the best way to protect his wife and kids, I suppose,” Simmons said. He sighed. “And because it’s always better to be on the winning side. Let’s get going.”

  Henry Villers tied the horses in the mouth of the pass below the second observation post and scrambled up. The others were crouched a few yards below it, except for Kolo still at his grim work. Villers gave it a single glance, then shook his head and joined the others.

  “Man, that dude has some serious anger-management problems,” he observed.

  “Yes,” Tom said soberly. The bodies have to be mutilated. The Mohave always do that. “Try not to let it get to you.”

  To his surprise, Villers laughed. “It don’t bother me none,” he said. “Warden Tom, you’ve got to remember what these Boer mo’fo’s had in mind, why they’re helping this essence-of-putrescence capital-E e-vile plot. And man, it had to start on the top of the evil tree and hit every branch on the way down to get me risking my precious one-and-only black ass to pull John Rolfe’s chestnuts out of the fire! Personal considerations aside—and it’s hard to put you and your family getting killed aside—can you imagine what these trek boys would do over in Africa, with the Collettas and Batyushkovs running the Commission and shipping them all the modern conveniences, like for starters napalm and automatic weapons, to use on my alternate-world spear-chuckin’ cousins? Maybe the people they conquered would rise up eventually, but that might take centuries, and can you imagine what they’d do till then?”

  Tom nodded, feeling his gloom lift. Tully came up with the Bren gun. “Ready to handle this?” he asked Villers.

  “Hell, yes,” Villers said cheerfully. “Good gun. The melancholy Dane’s been brooding at me here.”

  “I know how you feel,” Tully said. “Sweet Christ, do I know how you feel.”

  “He does the Hamlet with you too?” Villers asked.

  “Oh, incessantly. Gloom, guilt, silences, despair. Well, you know Danes.”

  “How do you stand it?”

  “I keep refusing to marry him, for starters,” Tully said seriously. “You know how it is—you can’t really change someone that way, no matter what they promise.”

  “Sociopaths,” Tom said, grinning. “Both of you. And it’s Norway my folks came from, not Denmark. Hamlet was probably half Swedish. Danes are too goddamned hygge to brood.”

  “What’s that?” Villers asked curiously. “Hi-ge? Huggy? Some Scandinavian brand of kink?”

  “H-Y-double-G-E. Sort of like ‘cute’ or ‘cozy,’ but not so sternly unyielding, and without the harsh overtones. Did you think it was an accident Denmark’s greatest contributions to world culture were Tuborg, a sweet fruit pastry and the Little Fucking Mermaid?”

  Adrienne was a little way off, sitting behind a bush and looking down into the valley with the high-tech binoculars, her elbows on her knees. Botha sat beside her, making notes on a map. She spoke, raising her voice without taking her eyes from the glasses. “If you three have finished with the male-bonding thing, could you come over here for a moment?” she said dryly.

  They did, crouching low. West and north the valley floor opened out, silvery in the moonlight even without their night-sight goggles. Save for the area along the river and some of the washes that came down from the south, there was little of the dense growth that covered much of the coastlands. It was replaced by a savanna of knee-length grass, scattered with big round-topped oaks, sagebrush and cactus on dry sandy spots, and the odd walnut tree. A mile away a campfire flickered in the night—the rebels were keeping up the pretense of being an innocent hunting party.

  “Now, one of them was a blond, you say?” she said.

  “Yes,” Tom replied. “Teenager.”

  “Johann Lang,” Botha confirmed. “Just turned nineteen.”

  “All right,” Adrienne said. “Tom’s Ranger stunt went off like clockwork.”

  Even then he felt a small glow of pride at the pride in her eyes.

  “But I think this calls for real sneakiness, which is my specialty,” she went on.

  “Where’s Johann?” Frikkie Lang said. “He should be back by now.”

  “Probably still getting his dues from Oom Andries,” Dirk van Deventer said, poking at the fire.

  He’d built the fire up a bit since they’d finished cooking; you needed a bed of low coals for that. They both kept their voices down; they were about Johann’s age, and along on sufferance. Johann’s father and Pik van Deventer were not ones to tolerate what they considered idle chatter or disrespect among the younger generation, particularly not on an important mission like this, vital to the future of the volk. Pik was sitting in a camp chair near one of the big tents, with a hurricane lantern hanging over him from its frontal awning, reading his Bible.

  “Serves him right, and now we don’t have to do kaffir work cleaning up for a week,” Frikkie said. “Pretty soon we’ll all have kaffir to do the kaffir work.”

  Dirk lowered his voice and smiled as he leaned close to his friend—both the older men with them were straitlaced.

  “Not to mention kaffir meids to work on their backs. I hear they—”

  They could have discussed that subject for hours, both being teenage males, but the sound of a horse’s hooves interrupted them. Both of them were farm-born and -raised; they could tell it was a single mount, ridden at a slow walk. The sound came from the east toward the pass.

  “Johann!” the boy’s father shouted. “Get your lazy backside over here.”

  The two young men rose, looking away from the fire and slitting their eyes to get their night vision back with the automatic gesture of those who’d hunted since they were twelve. That let them see what was coming: an Indian with bowed head and hands tied behind his back, walking in front of a lone horseman who held his rifle with the butt resting on his right thigh. It had to be Johann; they recognized his horse,
and the bright hair that caught the edge of the firelight.

  “Prisoner!” the horseman shouted, his voice high and shrill with excitement. “Prisoner!”

  “You sklem!” Frikkie shouted joyfully, running out. “It wasn’t a bear after all!” The others were all on their feet as well; Dirk ran after him, and the two older men stood to watch. Frikkie had just enough time to realize that the horseman was a woman when the Indian’s arms came out from behind his back. The right hand flashed, and as the young man began to bring up his rifle something struck him a massive blow beneath the chin. He never saw the tomahawk that split his throat, only felt a huge wetness when he tried to draw breath, saw darkness, heard a distant fusillade of shots and the stuttering rattle of a machine gun.

  Then nothing, ever again.

  “Well, that was easy enough,” Adrienne said.

  “It usually is, when you’ve got surprise on your side,” Tom replied.

  The party’s own horses and mules had come up; they were some distance from the camp of the dead. Botha had insisted on that; it turned out several of the younger rebels had been friends of his son.

  “There are things a man should not see too young,” he said.

  Adrienne and Tom both looked after the big man as he walked off to help with loading the plunder on the captured horses—all the things Indian raiders would have taken, the cloth and tools and weapons and liquor. Kolomusnim had found some of that, and was now resting with his belly over a horse’s saddle.

  “I wouldn’t have thought Piet had it in him,” Adrienne said quietly. “Granted he was never quite as bad as Schalk, but…”

  “It all depends on who you consider human,” Tom said. “I suspect Botha has a fairly narrow definition, but he’s quite human himself within those limits.”

  Their hands intertwined. “And I was scared spitless when you went in like that,” he said, his voice husky for a moment.

  “You didn’t say anything,” she pointed out.