Ice, Iron and Gold

by S. M. Stirling

  "And under the terms of the Emergency Regulations Act of 1995, I must remind you this is a police action. All hostiles are to be given warning and opportunity to surrender unless a clear and present danger exists."

  "And I'm King Charles V of bloody England," someone muttered.

  "Yeah, tell us another fairy story."

  "Silence on the air!" Top sergeant's voice.

  Her mind sketched in the cities below, ghostly and silent in the night, empty save for the National Guard patrols and the lurking predators and the ever-present rats. Paper rustling down deserted streets, past shattered Arby's and Chicken Delights . . . out past the fortress suburbs, out to the refugee camps where the guards kicked the rations through the wire for the illig detainees to scramble for.

  There would be no prisoners.

  Very softly, someone asked: "Tell us about the island, Cap?"

  What am I, the CO or a den mother? she thought. Then, What the hell, this isn't an Army unit. Which was lucky for her; the American military still kept women out of front-line service, at least in theory. The Rangers were a police unit under the Department of the Interior—also in theory. And not many of the troopies ever had a chance at a vacation in Bali.

  Hunter turned and looked over the low bulkhead into the control cabin of the transport. Her mouth had a dry feeling, as if it had been wallpapered with Kleenex; they were right down on the deck and going fast. Kestrels had phased-array radar and AI designed for nape-of-the-earth fighters. Supposed to be reliable as all hell, but the sagebrush and hills outside were going past in a streaking blur. She brought her knees up and braced them against the seat, looking down at the central display screen. It was slaved to the swarm of tiny remote-piloted reconnaissance drones circling the LZ, segmented like an insect's eye to show the multiple viewpoints, with pulsing light-dots to mark the Ranger aircraft.

  The Santierist guerrillas were using an abandoned ranch house as their CP. She could see their heavy weapons dug in around it, covered in camouflage netting. Useless, just patterned cloth, open as daylight to modern sensors . . . on the other hand, there weren't many of those in Mexico these days. Then she looked more closely. There were mules down there, with ammunition boxes on their backs. It was enough to make you expect Pancho Villa. A Santierist altar in the courtyard, with a few hacked and discarded bodies already thrown carelessly aside . . . Voodoo-Marxist, she thought. Communal ownership of the spirit world. Time to tickle them.

  "Code Able-Zulu four," she said. Something in her helmet clicked as the AI rerouted her commlink. "Position?"

  "Comin' up on line-of-sight," McMurty said. Weapons Section counted as a platoon, four of the heavy lifters with six troopers each.

  There were lights scattered across the overgrown scrub of the abandoned fields beyond the ranch house, the numberless campfires of the refugees who had followed through the gap the Santierists had punched in the Border deathzone. Some of them might make it back, if they ran as soon as the firefight began.

  Hunter reached out to touch half a dozen spots on the screen before her; they glowed electric-blue against the silvery negative images. "Copy?"

  "Copy, can-do."

  "Execute."

  Another voice cut in faintly, the battalion AI prompter. "ETA five minutes."

  "Executing firemission," the platform said.

  The gamma-ray lasers were invisible pathways of energy through the night, invisible except where a luckless owl vanished into a puff of carbon-vapor. Where they struck the soil the earth exploded into plasma for a meter down. It wasn't an explosion, technically. Just a lot of vaporized matter trying to disperse really, really fast. Fire gouted into the night across the cucuroach encampment, expanding outward in pulse-waves of shock and blast. She could hear the thunder of it with the ears of mind; on the ground it would be loud enough to stun and kill. The surviving AA weapons were hammering into the night, futile stabbing flickers of light, and . . .

  "Hit, God, we're hit!" McMurty's voice, tightly controlled panic. The weapons platform was three miles away and six thousand feet up. Nothing should be able to touch it even if the cucuroaches had sensors that good. "Evasive—Christ, it hit us again, loss of system integrity I'm trying to—"

  The voice blurred into a static blast. "Comm override, all Ranger units, down, out of line-of-sight, that was a zapper!"

  The transport lurched and dove; points of green light on the screen scattered out of their orderly formation into a bee-swarm of panic. Hunter gripped the crashbars and barked instructions at the machine until a fanpath of probable sites mapped out the possible locations of the zapper.

  "Override, override," she said. "Jennings, drop the secondary targets and alternate with me on the main HQ. Weapons?"

  "Yes ma'am." McMurty's second, voice firm.

  "Keep it low, Sergeant; follow us in. Support with indirect-fire systems only." The weapons platforms had magneto-powered automatic bomb-throwers as well as their energy weapons.

  "Override," she continued. "General circuit. Listen up, everyone. The cucuroaches have a zapper, at least one. I want Santierist prisoners; you can recognize them by the fingerbone necklaces. Jennings, detach your first platoon for a dustoff on McMurty."

  "Ma'am—"

  "That's a direct order, Lieutenant."

  A grunt of confirmation. Her lips tightened; nobody could say Jennings didn't have the will to combat, and he led from the front. Fine for a platoon leader, but a company commander had to realize there were other factors in maintaining morale, such as the knowledge you wouldn't be abandoned just because everyone was in a hurry. Furthermore, Jennings just did not like her much. The feeling was mutual; he reminded her too strongly of the perps she had spent most of the early '90s busting off the D.C. streets and sending up for hard time.

  "Coming up on the arroyo, Captain," the pilot said.

  "Ready!" she replied.

  The piloting screens in the forward compartment were directly linked to the vision-blocks in the Kestrel's nose; she could see the mesquite and rock of the West Texas countryside rushing up to meet them, colorless against the blinking blue and green of the control-panel's heads-up displays. The pilot was good, and there was nothing but the huge, soft hand of deceleration pressing them down on the benches as he swung the transport nearly perpendicular to the ground, killed forward velocity with a blast of the lift-off jets, and then swung them back level for a soft landing. The sides of the Kestrel clanged open, turning to ramps. Outside the night was full of hulking dark shapes and the soughing of PFH drives.

  "Go!" Hunter shouted, slapping their shoulders as the headquarters team raced past. Getting troops out of armored vehicles is always a problem, but designing them so the sides fell out simplified it drastically. Cold high-desert air rushed in, probing with fingers that turned patches of sweat to ice, laden with dry spicy scents and the sharp aromatics of dry-land plants crushed beneath tons of metal and synthetic.

  She trotted down the ramp herself and felt the dry, gravelly soil crunch beneath her feet. The squad was deployed in a star around her, commlink and display screen positioned for her use. The transports were lifting off, backing and shifting into position for their secondary gunship role as A Company fanned out into the bush to establish a temporary perimeter. Hunter knelt beside the screen, watching the pinpoints that represented her command fanning out along two sides of the low slope with the ranch house at its apex.

  "Shit, Captain," Kowalski said, going down on one knee and leaning on his H&K. She could hear the low whisper, and there was no radio echo, he must have his comm off. "That zapper's one bad mother to face."

  She nodded. Landing right on top of an opponent gave you a powerful advantage, and having the weapons platforms cruising overhead was an even bigger one. The zapper changed the rules; it was one of the more difficult applications of PFH technology, but it made line-of-sight approach in even the most heavily armored aircraft suicidal. Heavy zappers were supposed to be a monopoly of the Sovs and the U.S., having
one fall into the hands of any sort of cucuroach was bad news. The Voodoo-Marxists . . . She shuddered.

  Particularly if they had good guidance systems. Finali was trying to attract her attention, but she waved him to silence. "Too right, Tops. We'll just have to rush their perimeter before they can gather on the mountain."

  SSNLF guerrillas were good at dispersing, which was essential in the face of superior heavy weapons. On the other hand, this time it kept them scattered . . . .

  "Command circuit," she said. There was a subaudible click as the unit AI put her on general push. "Up and at 'em, children. Watch it, they've had a few hours to lay surprises."

  There was little noise as the Rangers spread out into the spare chest-high scrub, an occasional slither of boot on rock, a click or equipment. That would be enough, once they covered the first half-kilometer. Shapes flitted through the darkness made daybright by her visor, advancing by leapfrogging squad rushes. Almost like a dance, five helmeted heads appearing among the bushes as if they were dolphins broaching, dodging forward until they were lost among the rocks and brush. Throwing themselves down and the next squad rising on their heels . . .

  "Weapons," she whispered. "Goose it."

  "Seekers away," the calm voice answered her.

  A loud multiple whipping sound came from behind them, the air-slap of the magnetic mortar launch. A long whistling arc above, and the sharp crackcrackcrack of explosions. Mostly out of sight over the lip of the ravine ahead of them, indirect flashes against the deep black of the western sky. Stars clustered thick above, strange and beautiful to eyes bred among the shielding city lights. Then a brief gout of flame rising over the near horizon, a secondary explosion. Teeth showed beneath her visor. The seeker-bombs were homing on infrared sources: moving humans, or machinery; too much to hope they'd take out the zapper.

  Time to move. She rose and crouch-scrambled up the low slope ahead of her. The open rise beyond was brighter, and she felt suddenly exposed amid the huge rolling distances. It took an effort of the will to remember that this was night, and the cucuroaches were seeing nothing but moonless black. Unless they got nightsight equipment from the same sources as the laser—She pushed the thought away.

  "Mines." The voice was hoarse with strain and pitched low, but she recognized 2nd platoon's leader, Vigerson.

  "Punch it," she replied, pausing in her cautious skitter.

  A picture appeared in the center of the display screen, the silvery glint of a wire stretched across the clear space between a boulder and a mesquite bush. Jiggling as the hand-held wire-eye followed the metal thread to the V-shaped Claymore concealed behind a screen of grass, waiting to spew its load of jagged steel pellets into the first trooper whose boot touched it. Wire and mine both glowed with a faint nimbus, the machine-vision's indication of excess heat. Very recently planted, then, after being kept close to a heat-source for hours.

  "Flag and bypass." Shit, I hate mines, she thought. No escaping them. The gangers had started using them in D.C. before she transferred. Bad enough worrying about a decapitating piano-wire at neck height when you chased a perp into an alley—but toward the end you couldn't go on a bust without wondering whether the door had a grenade cinched to the latch. That was how her husband had—Another flight of magmortar shells went by overhead; the weapons platform was timing it nicely.

  Think about the mines, not why she had transferred. Not about the chewed stump of—Think about mines. Half a klick with forty pounds on her back, not counting the armor. No matter how she tried to keep the individual loads down, more essentials crept in. Fusion-powered transports, and they still ended up humping the stuff up to the sharp end the way Caesar's knifemen had. A motion in the corner of her eye, and the H&K swept up; an act of will froze her finger as the cottontail zigzagged out of sight. Shit, this can't last much longer, she thought with tight control. They were close enough to catch the fireglow and billowing heat-columns from the refugee encampment beyond the guerrilla HQ, close enough to hear the huge murmur of their voices. Nobody was still asleep after what had already come down; they must be hopping-tight in there.

  Four hundred yards. The point-men must be on their wire by now, if the Santierists had had time to dig in a perimeter at all. For total wackos they usually had pretty good sense about things like that and this time there had been plenty of—

  "Down!" somebody shouted. One of hers, the radio caught it first. Fire stabbed out from the low rise ahead of them, green tracer; she heard the thudding detonation of a chemical mortar, and the guerrilla shell-burst behind her sent shrapnel and stone-splinters flying with a sound that had the malice of bees in it.

  The Rangers hit the stony dirt with trained reflex, reflex that betrayed them. Three separate explosions fountained up as troopers landed on hidden detonators, and there was an instant's tooth-grating scream before the AI cut out a mutilated soldier's anguish.

  "Medic, medic," someone called. Two troopers rushed by with the casualty in a fireman's carry, back down to where the medevac waited. Hunter bit down on a cold anger as she toiled up the slope along the trail of blood-drops, black against the white dust. The Santierists were worse than enemies, they were . . . cop-killers.

  "Calibrate," she rasped, "that mortar."

  "On the way." A stick of seekers keened by overhead; proximity fused, they burst somewhere ahead with a simultaneous whump. Glass-fiber shrapnel, and anything underneath it would be dogmeat. Fire flicked by, Kalashnikovs from the sound of it, then the deeper ripping sound of heavy machine-guns. As always, she fought the impulse to bob and weave. Useless, and undignified to boot.

  "Designators," she said over the unit push. "Get on to it."

  This time all the magmortars cut loose at once, as selected troopers switched their sights to guidance. Normally the little red dot showed where the bullets would go, but it could be adjusted to bathe any target a Ranger could see; the silicon kamikaze brains of the magmortar bombs sought, selected, dove.

  "Come on!" she shouted, as the Santierist firing line, hidden among the tumbled slabs of sandstone and thorn-bush ahead of them, erupted into precisely grouped flashes and smoke. "Now, goddamit!" Fainter, she could hear the lieutenants and NCOs echoing her command.

  The rock sloped down from here, down toward the ranch house and the overgrown, once-irrigated fields beyond, down toward the river and the Border. She leapt a slit-trench where a half-dozen cucuroaches sprawled sightless about the undamaged shape of an ancient M60 machine-gun; glass fragments glittered on the wet red of their faces and the cool metal of the gun. Then she was through into the open area beyond and the ruins of a barn, everything moving with glacial slowness. Running figures that seemed to lean into an invisible wind, placing each foot in dark honey. Shadows from the burning ruins of the farmhouse, crushed vehicles around it, her visor flaring a hotspot on the ground ahead of her and she turned her run into a dancing sideways skip to avoid it.

  The spot erupted when she was almost past, and something struck her a stunning blow in the stomach. Air whoofed out of her nose and mouth with a sound halfway between a belch and a scream, and she fell to her knees as her diaphragm locked. Paralyzed, she could see the Claymore pellet falling away from her belly-armor, the front burnished by the impact that had flattened it. Then earth erupted before her as the mine's operator surged to his feet and leveled an AK-47, and that would penetrate her vest at pointblank range. He was less than a dozen yards away, a thin dark-brown young man with a bushy mustache and a headband, scrawny torso naked to the waist and covered in sweat-streaked dirt.

  Two dots of red light blossomed on his chest. Fractions of a second later two H&K rifles fired from behind her, at a cyclic rate of 2,000 rounds a minute. Muzzle blast slapped the back of her helmet, and the cucuroach's torso vanished in a haze as the prefragmented rounds shattered into so many miniature buzzsaws.

  "Thanks," she wheezed, as Finali and Kowalski lifted her by the elbows. "Lucky. Just winded." There would be a bruise covering everything between ri
bs and pelvis, but she would have felt it if there was internal hemorrhaging. A wet trickle down her leg, but bladder control was not something to worry about under the circumstances. She grabbed for the display screen, keyed to bring the drones down. The green dots of her command were swarming over the little plateau, and the vast bulk of the illigs further downslope showed no purposeful movement. Only to be expected, the Santierists were using them as camouflage and cover. Which left only the problem of the—

  Zap. Gamma-ray lasers could not be seen in clear air, but you could hear them well enough; the atmosphere absorbed enough energy for that. The Rangers threw themselves flat in a single unconscious movement; Hunter cursed the savage wave of pain from bruised muscle and then ignored it.

  "Get a fix, get a fix on it!" she called. Then she saw it herself, a matte-black pillar rising out of the ground like the periscope of a buried submarine, two hundred yards away amid artful piles of rock. Shit, no way is a magmortar going to take that out, she thought. It was too well buried, and the molecular-flux mirrors inside the armored and stealthed shaft could focus the beam anywhere within line-of-sight.

  Zap. Half a mile away a boulder exploded into sand and gas, and the crashing sound of the detonation rolled back in slapping echoes. "Mark." Her finger hit the display screens. "Kestrel and Shrike units, thumper attack, repeat, thumper attack." The transports and airscouts would come in with bunkerbuster rockets. And a lot of them would die; as a ground weapon that zapper was clumsy, but it did fine against air targets . . . .

  "Damn, damn, damn!" she muttered, pounding a fist against the dirt. Another zap and the stink of ozone, and this time the gout of flame was closer, only a hundred yards behind them. Rocks pattered down, mixed with ash and clinker; back there someone was shouting for a medic, and there was a taste like vomit at the back of her throat. She groped for a thermite grenade—