Ice, Iron and Gold

by S. M. Stirling

  The ten UATVs of the light infantry company were parked around the perimeter of the scrubby clearing. They'd all turned off their ceramic diesels, and the loudest noises were the buzzing of insects and the raucous cries of birds. Everyone was looking at her as if she knew a solution to their problems; all seventy-five of the troopers, and the half-dozen or so hangers-on, mostly girls. Everyone looked hungry. They were hungry.

  "There was a road through here," she said to McNaught. "Problem is, I don't think anyone's used it since before either of us was born. Since things started going bad—and they went bad there first."

  "Big Brother can use the route?" Sergeant Jenkins flipped up the faceshield-visor of his helmet. The path behind them was crushed flat and hard; the Bolo pulped hundred-foot trees as if they were stalkes of cane.

  "Oh, sure—but if there isn't enough traffic to keep it open, where are we going to get food or fuel?"

  The Mark III was powered by ionic batteries; it could travel thousands of miles on one charge, and carried acres of monomolecular solar film in one of its dispensers. The UATVs were combustion powered; their ceramic diesels would burn anything from raw petroleum to bathtub gin, but they needed something. So did their passengers.

  The three leaders looked at each other. McNaught had freckles and thinning reddish hair, and a runner's lanky body; Jenkins was the color of eggplant and built like a slab of basalt; Martins was wiry and olive-skinned, with short-cropped black hair and green eyes. All of them had been together through the Glorio war and its aftermath; they could communicate without much need for words. We can't go back. They'd left a hornet's nest behind them, one way and another, and gringos had never been too popular down here. We can't stop. This jungle wouldn't feed a coatimundi, much less ninety human beings.

  "Why do the locals keep fighting us?" McNaught asked.

  Because they're starving themselves, Martins thought irritably, then forced herself to relax. The captain was hurting and pumped full of painkillers. The locals were hurting too; first the worldwide collapse, a slow-motion catastrophe that had gone berserk in the last year. Chaos with that, and the famine that usually followed anarchy, harder than any drought. At that, things seemed to be going down the tube even faster back home. When worst came to worst people around here could go back to being subsistence farmers, and try conclusions with the hordes of cityfolk-turned-bandits. That wasn't much of an option in the USA.

  They were going home because there didn't seem to be much alternative. And they couldn't go forward without something to run on.

  "Hey, Tops," Martins said meditatively. "Doesn't Carmody's squeeze come from around here?"

  The big black man frowned, then grinned. "Now that you mention it, El-Tee, she does. Most recent intelligence we're likely to get."

  "Lord of the Mountain, First Speaker of the Sun People, there is no doubt."

  The cool whitewashed room was empty save for the old man and the messenger. The man who had once been Manuel Obregon leaned back in his chair and examined the youngster who sank to one knee before him, still panting with his run, trim in cotton culottes and sandals. Seven-Deer was one of his best; a steady young man, and reliable.

  "Go on," Obregon said, stroking his chin reflectively.

  Pleasant sounds drifted through the tall arched windows; masons' chisels, the clack of a loom, a woman singing. There were smells of tortillas cooking, flowers, turned earth, and underneath it a faint sulphur reek. He used them to cut free of worry and thought, making his mind a clear pool for the scout's words. He would absorb it, and then analyze.

  "Sixty, perhaps seventy of the yanqui soldiers, and with them some Ladino women from the south. A dozen little trucks with six wheels each, some pulling carts."

  "They are yanqui, beyond doubt? Not government soldiers of San Gabriel, not terrorists of the Glorious Way?"

  "No, Lord of the Mountain, First Speaker of the Sun People." Seven-Deer touched the jade plug in his lower lip for emphasis. "The farmers I spoke with saw them closely and heard them speak English. Also . . ."

  He hesitated, his eyes sliding aside for the first time. "Go on," Obregon said, schooling impatience out of his voice.

  "They said the yanquis had with them a mountain that walked."

  Obregon's age-spotted hands tightened on the arms of his chair. The scout swallowed: "I only repeat—"

  "Yes, yes."

  The old man stood and walked to the window. Across the plaza and the town, over the patchwork fields of the basin, a thin trickle of smoke rose in the air from the notched summit of the Smoker.

  "I saw myself great tracks and crushed jungle," the scout went on, gathering confidence. "Like this." He unfolded a paper.

  So. A tank, Obregon thought, surprised. It had been a very long time since heavy war vehicles came into these remote uplands. Then he caught the neatly drawn scale. Each of the tread-tracks was wider than a man was tall, and there were four of them impossibly close together.

  "A mountain that walks," he said to himself—in Spanish, not Nahuatl. "But does it burn?"

  Seven-Deer's eyes flicked sideways to the sky-pillar of dark smoke that reached upward from the mountain, and he shuddered with awe and fear and worship.

  "Your orders, Lord of the Mountain, First Speaker of the Sun People?"

  "Report to One-Coyote that the Jaguar Knights are to be mobilized, and the border guards strengthened. We cannot allow outsiders to prey upon our people."

  "Lord of the Mountain, First Speaker of the Sun People," Seven-Deer said, greatly daring, "they are only Ladinos beyond the mountain—and perhaps the yanqui will turn aside before the pass."

  Obregon nodded. "Yet they pay us tribute," he said. "And their blood is ours." His own face showed more Europoid genes than the scout's did, or than most of the people in the valley. "In time, they will return to the ways of the Ancestors; as we did, after many years of following the false gods of the Ladinos. This valley is our base, not our prison—we must be ready to expand beyond it. Now go."

  And, Obregon thought, looking up at the darkening sky, Venus is nearing the holy place. The favor of the gods was not bought cheaply. The yanqui troops could be valuable, in their way.

  Outside, the masons shouted cheerfully to each other as they worked on the last level of the stepped pyramid—small, but brilliant with whitewash, gaudy along its base with murals in the ancient style he had reconstructed from books and disks. It would be ready soon.

  And in the end you must go, he thought regretfully, looking at that library. In a way, he would miss the ancient videos more than the anthropological texts. The latter held the voice of the ancient gods, but they would live—live more truly—when they existed only as words spoken among the people. The videos were his only vice; he was not a man who needed much in the way of women or wealth or luxury. In a way, it was sad to think that they must die with him . . . for he too could never really be a part of the world he was bringing to birth.

  He selected his favorite; viewing it would calm him, and it was a minor indulgence, after all.

  "The Wicker Man," he read from the spine, as he slid the chip into its slot and pulled the goggles over his eyes.

  Me and my big mouth, Martins thought. The problem was that she was the best one for the job; her Spanish was better than Jenkins', since she'd grown up in Santa Fe.

  The view through her faceshield was flat and silvery, as the sandwich crystal picked up the starlight and amplified it. The fighting patrol eeled through the undergrowth from tree to tree, their heads turning with lizard quickness as the sensors in their helmets filtered light and sound. These were big trees, bigger than she'd thought survived anywhere in the isthmus. Not too much undergrowth, except where one of the forest giants had fallen and vines and saplings rioted. Not much light either, stray gleams through the upper canopy, but the faceshield could work with very little. The Americans moved quickly; every one of them had survived at least three years in the bad bush, where you learned the right habits or died fast.


  Martins made a hand signal, and the patrol froze. They went to ground and crawled as they neared a clearing. Thick bush along the edges, then scattered irregular orchards of mango and citrus and plantains. She felt saliva spurt over her teeth at the sight, and somewhere a cow mooed—steak on the hoof. And where there were people and food, there would be some sort of slash; distilling was a universal art. The UATVs could run on that.

  "Careful," she whispered on the unit push. "We don't want to off any of the indigs if we can avoid it."

  Not that lifting their stuff was going to make them feel very friendly, but there was no need to put them on a fast burn.

  Planted fields, maize and cassava and upland rice. Then a village, mud-and-wattle huts with thatch roofs. It smelled cleaner than most, less of the chicken-shit-and-pigs aroma you came to expect. Nothing stirring; through the walls she could see the faint IR traces of the sleeping inhabitants. A man stumbled through one door, fumbling with the drawstring of his dingy white-cotton pants. A trooper ghosted up behind him and swung his arm in a short, chopping arc. There was a dull sound—a chamois bag full of lead shot does not make much noise when slapped against a skull—and the indig slumped into waiting arms.

  "Proceeding," she whispered on the unit push. Captain McNaught would be watching through the helmet pickups.

  She wasn't quite sure which was worse: being out here at the sharp end, or being stuck back there helpless with a broken leg. Call-signs came in as the squad-leaders took up position.

  "Right." She raised her M-35 and fired a burst into the air, a short sharp braaap of sound.

  Voices rose; a few at first, enquiring. Then a chorus of screams. Martins sighed and signaled; a flare popped into being high overhead, bathing the village in actinic blue-white light. That was for the benefit of the locals, to let them see the armed soldiers surrounding them.

  "Out, out, everybody out!"

  That and slamming on doors with rifle-butts was enough to get them moving. Martin's mouth twisted with distaste. Robbing peasants wasn't what I joined up for either. There had been altogether too much of that, back in San Gabriel, after the supply lines back to the US broke down.

  Although when it came down to a choice between stealing and starving, there wasn't much of a dispute.

  The noise died down to a resentful babbling as the two hundred or so of the little hamlet's people crowded into the dirt square before the ramshackle church. Very ramshackle; the roof had fallen in, and goats were wandering through the nave. That was a slightly jarring note; mostly the people in this part of the world took churches seriously. And it wasn't one of the areas where everyone had been converted by the Baptists back in the '90s, either.

  Jenkins trotted up, flipping up the faceshield of his helmet. There was a slight frown on his basalt face.

  "Not a single goddamn gun, El-Tee."

  She raised a brow, then remembered to raise her visor in turn. A village without a few AKs was even more unusual than one that let its church fall down.

  "Not just rifles—no shotguns, no pistols, nothing."

  Something coiled beneath her breastbone. They might have hidey-holes for the hardware that would defeat the sonic and microray sensors in the Americans' helmets, even the scanner set Sparky was packing, but they wouldn't have buried every personal gat and hunting shotgun. In fact, since they hadn't known the soldiers were coming, they shouldn't have hidden anything. You keep a gun for emergencies, and a gun buried ten feet deep is a little hard to get to in a hurry.

  She looked at the peasants. Better fed than most she'd seen over the past half-decade, and almost plump compared to what had been coming down recently, with the final collapse of the world economy.

  "If the indigs can't defend themselves, bandits should have been all over them like ugly on an ape," she said meditatively.

  "Right," Jenkins said. Which meant that the locals—or somebody—had been defending this area.

  The locals were murmuring louder, some of them trying to sneak off. She was getting hard stares, and a few spat on the ground. That was wrong too. Far too self-confident . . .

  Well, I can fix that, she thought, keying her helmet.

  "Front and center," she whispered.

  It took a while for the sound to register over the frightened, resentful voices. When it did it was more of a sensation, a trembling felt through the feet and shins. A few screams of earthquake! died away; the ground was shaking, but not in quite that way. Harsh blue-white light shone from the jungle, drawing their eyes. Trees shivered at their tops, then whipped about violently and fell with a squealing, rending crackle. What shouldered the forest giants aside like stems of grass was huge even in relation to the trees. The steel-squeal of its four treads grated like fingernails on a blackboard, crushing a path of pulp stamped harder than rock behind it. The snouts of weapons and antennas bristled . . . .

  Now the villagers were silent. Martins walked up to the huge machine and swung aboard as it slowed, climbing the rungs set into the hull until she stood at its apex. When it halted, she removed her helmet.

  When she spoke, her voice boomed out like the call of a god:

  "BRING ME THE JEFE OF THIS VILLAGE!"

  Best to strike while the iron was hot. Eyes stared at her, wide with terror. A whisper ran across the sea of faces; the mountain that walks.

  "I don't like it."

  Martins also didn't like the way McNaught was punishing the tequila they'd liberated; the bottle wavered as he set it down on the rough plank table beneath them. Liquor splashed onto the boards, sharp-smelling in the tropical night. Big gaudy moths fluttered around the sticklight she'd planted in the ceiling, taking no harm from its cold glow. A few bugs crawled over the remnants of their meal; she loosened the tabs of her armor, feeling it push at her shrunken and now too-full stomach.

  He'd always been a good officer, but the news from the States was hitting him hard. Hitting them all, but McNaught had family, a wife and three children, in New Jersey. The broadcasts of the bread riots—more like battles—had been bad, and one blurred shot of flames from horizon to horizon before the 'casts cut off altogether.

  "Plenty of supplies," he said carelessly. Sweat trickled down his face and stained the t-shirt under his arms, although the upland night wasn't all that hot. "More than we can carry."

  "It's the indigs," Martins said, searching for words. "They're . . . not as scared as they should be. Or maybe not as scared of us. The Mark III sure terrifies the shit out of them."

  McNaught shrugged. "It usually does; whatever works."

  Martins nodded. "Sir." Somebody had to be boss, and her misgivings were formless. "We'd better scout the basin ahead; according to the maps there's a fair-sized town there, San Pablo de Cacaxtla. We won't get much fuel here, but there should be some there even if the town's in ruins."

  McNaught shrugged again. "Do it."

  Six hundred men squatted together in the circular ball-court, ringed by the empty seats, a stone loop at each end where the hard rubber ball would be driven during the sacred game. Now it served as a rallying-ground. They were young men mostly, leanly fit, their hair bound up on their heads in topknots; they wore tight uniforms of cloth spotted like the skin of jaguars. Those and the hair and the jade plugs many wore in lips or ears gave them an archaic cast, but the German-made assault rifles and rocket launchers they carried were quite modern. So was the electronic equipment hung on racks at one end of the enclosure.

  One-Jaguar finished his briefing; he was a stocky-muscular man, dark and hook-nosed, still moving with the stiffness of the professional soldier he had been. He bowed with wholehearted deference as Obregon stood, and gestured to his aides to remove the maps and display-screens from the stone table.

  Obregon was in ceremonial dress this time, feathered cloak, kilt, plumed headdress, pendants of jade and gold. He raised his hands, and absolute silence fell.

  "Warriors of the Sun," he said. The armed men swayed forward, eyes glittering and intent. "When
the mother of our people, the holy Coatlicue, was pregnant with Left-Handed Hummingbird, his four hundred brothers conspired to kill him—but Standing Tree warned him. As Seven-Deer has warned me of the approaching enemy."

  In the front rank of the Jaguar Knights, Seven-Deer looked down at the ground, conscious of the admiring eyes on him.

  Obregon continued: "And Left-Handed Hummingbird—Huitzilopochtl—was born in an instant; his face painted, carrying his weapons of turquoise; he had feathers on the sole of his left foot, and his arms and thighs were striped with blue. He slew the four hundred Southern Warriors, and our people worshipped him, and he made them great."

  A long rolling growl of assent. "That was in the day of the Fifth Sun. Huitzilopochtl showed us how to greet enemies—and made us great. Yet when the new invaders came from the sea, the First Speaker of the Sun People, Montezuma was weak. He didn't take up his weapons and kill them, or send them as Messengers. So the Fifth Sun was destroyed. Now the Sixth Sun has been born here; we have returned to the ways of our ancestors. While all around us is starvation and desolation, we grow strong.

  "Will we follow the word of Left-Handed Hummingbird? Will we kill the invaders?"

  This time the growl grew into a roar, a savage baying that echoed back from the empty seats of the auditorium.

  "Before we go into battle, we must appeal for the help of the gods of our people. Seven-Deer, bring out your beloved son."

  The young scout bowed and walked to the entranceway. His role was symbolic, like the cord that ran from his hand to the prisoner's neck; two priests held the bound captive's arms, their faces invisible behind their carved and plumed masks. The prisoner was a thin brown man with an acne-scarred face, naked and shivering. His eyes darted quickly around the amphitheatre, squeezed shut and then opened again, as if he was willing the scene before him to go away. He was neither old nor young, wiry in a peasant fashion, a farmer from the lowlands driven into banditry by the collapse.