The Tejano Conflict

by Steve Perry

  The rule was simple: If an enemy wanted something, it was generally best to deny it to them if you could.

  She heard the hum of gyroscopic motors in the ATVs before she heard the sounds of human engineers. They were at the stream, only a few minutes ahead of her, but they would have support infantry. Not too many, since the limits on combatants were strict, but at least a squad or two, maybe a platoon.

  Kay slowed, moved more cautiously, heading for the first-choice spot she had selected on the recon of the area earlier. There were three good vantage points on her side of the stream, and if she could get the first, she would have the best field of fire.

  The enemy had two men in the water swimming when she got to her spot, and those were her first targets.

  She unslung her weapon.

  The unit had computer-assisted-targeting sniper rifles, the CATs were accurate to a thousand meters, and you had to get in its way to miss a human-sized target as far as they could reach. The computer’s cam could spot, ID, and paint a target with a tiny dot of light, and all one had to do was point in the approximate direction; the inbuilt gyros would hold the weapon rock-steady. It could be programmed so that you didn’t even have to trigger it yourself—it would fire automatically as soon as it was lined up. It would seek the nearest target after that and repeat the process until all the targets were down or it ran empty.

  On the other hand, CAT rifles were expensive, heavy, loud, slow, and their tactical choices weren’t always correct. Sometimes the target selection was wrong—the computer didn’t differentiate between a man with a gun pointed in your general direction and one dialed onto your heart.

  Kay was not the best shooter in the unit, but she was certainly adept enough to use a manual weapon at short range effectively, and she trusted her sense of who to deal with better than she did the computer’s. Always her choice when it came to machines. A gun might misfire, a claw was always there.

  Cutter Colonel left it to her, and she had elected to use a lightweight carbine with a suppressor and simple-glass. At 150, it should be more than enough. She had ranged the sights in practice to this distance, it was a dead-on center hold, and the scope was preset for a cold shot at that range.

  The first enemy soldier achieved the near bank of the stream, wading onto the shore, as Kay lay prone and lined up. His armor was minimal—it was hard to swim in Class IV—and even with the suppressor, the restricted hardball should punch through a standard trauma plate. He had his helmet off for the crossing, and she knew the round wouldn’t be slowed much by his skull.

  She lined the crosshairs up right between his eyes and stroked the trigger.

  The sonic boom happened some meters in front of her.

  The target’s head blew apart.

  Even as he fell, she swung the sights to cover the second swimmer, but he was quick and smart. He submerged, still five meters from the bank, leaving ripples in the slow-moving stream.

  Kay adjusted the carbine. She knew which way the water flowed, and she had measured the speed. She reasoned that he wouldn’t keep swimming toward her, and swimming against the current would take more energy and oxygen, so it made more sense for him to go downstream. He would want to get as far away as possible before he had to come up for air, then he would expose as little of himself as possible. Were it she, she would roll onto her back as she rose and put no more than her nose above the surface. She would have already exhaled, so all she’d have to do would be suck in a fast breath and backstroke herself down again, less than a second, and at best, that would be a nearly impossible shot for an expert. Taking off a nose wouldn’t be useful in any event.

  Shooting at a target underwater at this shallow an angle was a waste of ammunition. The bullet would skip across the water like a thrown stone.

  The soldiers on the other side of the stream began making a lot of noise as they realized their swimmer had been shot. They would be seeking cover, but that didn’t matter; from where they were, they weren’t a threat unless they knew her position, and they didn’t yet . . .

  The second swimmer came up, and his mistake was that he didn’t roll onto his back but stuck most of his face up.

  Kay was almost exactly on target, a couple of centimeters off. She fired again, and immediately rolled to her left, five quick revolutions. She crawled quickly forward, then angled farther to her left.

  Either they spotted the suppressed muzzle flash or backwalked it with spotting computer because her former position was raked with full-auto fire. The bullets chewed up the ground and bushes, but she was eight meters away and moving toward her second-choice location.

  She didn’t have to hit any more of them now, only make them keep their heads down and stop trying to build their bridge.

  As she crawled toward the cover of a tree, she glanced at the water.

  The second swimmer’s body floated downstream.

  Enemy troops were dug in.

  She toggled her com on. No worry about them knowing she was out here now.

  “On-station,” she said. “Enemy advance delayed.”

  – – – – – –

  “Park it behind that stone wall, right here,” Jo ordered.

  “Sah.”

  A meter-and-a-half-high wall of natural rock surrounded one of the larger houses, a two-story monstrosity that had boarded-up windows and part of the roof on one end collapsed. Somebody had tacked a gray tarp over the sunken section of roof, and there was a small garden planted to the rear of the place, rows of assorted plants, some of which bore green and red fruits or vegetables.

  Stone wouldn’t stop big artillery, but there wasn’t going to be any big artillery, and it would keep small arms and machine-gun rounds at bay.

  Singh parked the cart.

  The other vehicles moved into their assigned locations, and within a minute, everybody had exited.

  The grenadiers scrambled to their positions, and the two mortar teams hurried to set up.

  Jo saw the enemy column approaching on the road from the other direction. They were moving fast but by now must know they were beaten. Jo saw several drones crisscrossing the sky over the enemy convoy, some of them theirs, some hers. As she watched, the drones fired at each other, and some shot at the vehicles below. Probably those were hers, but you never knew. Friendly fire—an oxymoron—was always a danger once the war went hot. Excited troops would sometimes shoot at anything that moved without worrying if it was their own.

  “Mo?”

  “Dialed in, Cap,” came the mortar-crew chief’s vox.

  The weapons had been preset to hit at a certain distance, and the flight time for the shells calculated in. In theory, as soon as the lead vehicle reached a predetermined spot, there would be an explosion waiting for it . . .

  As she watched, however, the dozen vehicles on the road below began to split. Several of the smaller ones veered off the road and began evasive maneuvers across the flat dirt, kicking up clouds of dust. The leading vehicles stopped.

  “Recalibrating,” the mortar CC said.

  That would have been too easy, wouldn’t it? That they would have just driven right into the hard rain . . .

  On com, Jo said: “Who is running our drones?”

  “Why, that would be me,” Gramps came back.

  “I wouldn’t be upset if you stitched that lead APC some before it gets to those oak trees.”

  “Your wish is my command.”

  He was dozens of klicks away, but that didn’t matter; you could run a drone from halfway around the planet and then some—hardly any appreciable time lag at such short ranges.

  Jo watched one of the drones bank and zoom to follow the APC bouncing across the scrub toward a grove of pin oak trees nine hundred meters south of the hill.

  A second friendly drone peeled away from the air-to-air shooting to circle around from the opposite direction.
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br />   The lead drone’s light machine guns blinked, the sound arriving a few seconds later, and the bullets thunked and spanged off the vehicle’s top armor. It kept going.

  “Help if you would hit the sucker,” Gunny said.

  “I am hitting it, open your ears! It’s the crappy low-powered ammo.”

  The second drone came in from the front and opened up, and either clouded the windshield or busted it. The APC slewed to a stop in a mushroom of reddish dust.

  “Gotcha!” Gramps said.

  The drone went into a hover and continued to fire for a couple of seconds, but then a thin tracer line arced up from the ground below and connected with the drone, which blew up in a spew of fire and pieces.

  “G2A,” Gunny said. “Under the size limit.”

  “Big enough,” Jo said.

  “Might want to hose ’em before they get the other one,” Gunny said.

  “Teach your grandfather how to use a fork,” Gramps said.

  The second drone chattered.

  Jo accessed the drone’s feed on her heads-up. The troops were out of the carrier and moving under the cover of the dust though the drone’s IR saw them just fine. Eighteen, twenty, still on their feet. They were shooting at the drone with carbines, and another G2A rocket went up—

  “You’ll want to move your aircraft—” Jo began.

  Too late. Even as Gramps banked the drone, it blew into incandescent smithereens.

  “Well, shit,” Gramps said. “Hope Rags doesn’t take that out of my pay.”

  “Gunny?”

  “Ah’m already on the way.”

  – – – – – –

  Gunny led two squads a short jaunt to the viewpoint. She had twelve riflemen, one light machine gun, a rocket launcher, and two grenadiers. Somebody had put a steel bench there, on a carved-flat section of ground next to the path that wound down the hill. A place to sit and rest, watch the sunrise, maybe. Probably they never figured it would be used by an army to cover enemy infantry coming up the side . . .

  “Make some noise,” Gunny said.

  The grenadiers unshipped their launchers, 6x40mm Milkor M9s. Built like old-fashioned revolvers, they were reliable, cheap, and accurate, effective to four hundred meters with the ammo they were being allowed.

  They started shooting, multiple small explosions followed, and anybody down there who thought they were just going to storm the hill and kick ass had a fast change of heart.

  “Gunny?”

  “Ain’t nobody coming up unannounced, Cap.”

  “You need any help?”

  “Sheeit.”

  Gunny raised her carbine, spotted somebody a hundred meters down who poked his head up. Bad move on his part.

  She didn’t smile as he fell, but she felt pretty good. The war had begun, and this was what she did. They had this under control. This was why she got up in the morning.

  – – – – – –

  Jo shook her head. This was not a com she was happy to hear.

  “A hurricane?”

  Gramps said, “Yep. Churning along in the Gulf of Mexico and all of a sudden headed right in our direction.”

  “I don’t recall seeing that in our background briefing.”

  “Because it wasn’t. Our field of battle is just over 160 from the Gulf, and even storms that move directly this way tend to fall apart when they hit land. Generally, this results in some breezes and a lot of rain dumping in a short time, nothing an anchored spray-frame igloo can’t handle.”

  “But . . . ?”

  “But the bad weather that was heading south of here took a turn in our direction. They give them names here, and Hurricane Bruce is a Category 5 storm, which means it is as big and bad as they get. At the moment, there are winds gusting to 275 kilometers an hour near the center, and if it continues on its present course, it will start raining and blowing here in twenty-four hours. It will slow as it reaches land, but it will have enough momentum to pack a hefty punch by the time the eye reaches us. Sustained winds of 150 kph, gusts to 185 or so. Plus the odd tornado spun off there and there.”

  “Wonderful. Whatever happened to the promise of weather control?”

  “Well, they managed to halt global warming but not reverse it, and the technology for preventing these kinds of storms is iffy at best. Sometimes it works, sometimes not. Once a hurricane or typhoon gets this well organized, it is, pardon the expression, pissing into the wind to try and break it up. Too much power to stop.”

  She didn’t say anything to that.

  “Hey, it’s not my fault, I didn’t do it. When we got here, it was a tropical depression two thousand klicks away; nobody knew it was going to do what it did. The predictions were wrong.”

  She shook her head. “Crap.”

  “Well, the rain falleth on the just and unjust alike.”

  She nodded. That was true. Whatever problems it caused them, it would also cause the enemy; still, bad weather could be worse than anything the other side could throw at you.

  “Are these houses up here structurally safe?”

  “For the weather coming at us? In a word, no.”

  “Okay. We’ll set up the igloos.”

  TEN

  The heat of the day was little abated by darkness; near midnight, and still hovering around body temperature, plus the humidity must have been near 90 percent. Hot and muggy, and the threatened rain that might have cooled things off passed well north of them. Gunny saw the flashes in the distance, but the thunder didn’t reach this far.

  Of course, there was more rain on the way, according to Gramps. Big rain. Come the morrow, the field of battle was going to get soggy.

  She’d held off eating until her watch was over. Field rats were never a reason to look forward to supper.

  Her choices had been soy-chicken à la king, saitan beefsteak, or pasta with red sauce. Or the classic favorite, mock-tuna potpie. She had gone with the saitan. It wasn’t the tastiest faux-meat in the galaxy, but it had a real texture.

  She came off her watch to find Singh tucking into his own field rations, eating as if it was the best thing he’d ever tasted.

  “You like that shit?”

  He smiled around a mouthful of something not quite recognizable. “Sah. When I was in the army at home, the joke was that if the choice was between our field meals and our boots, the boots would cook faster and taste better. Compared to that? This is a gourmet dinner.”

  Gunny laughed.

  Jo drifted over.

  “Hey, Cap. You want a bite of delicious fake steak?”

  “Thank you, no. My pasta is still deciding if it is going to send me to the latrine with the FR runs. What Rags buys for us to eat is probably surplus from that war for the Alamo, back in the day. I think there was some dinosaur in mine.”

  The house turned out to be in pretty good shape. Whoever had squatted there had taken good care of it. The interior walls had been painted in the last couple of years, the floors were clean, no trash piled up. There wasn’t any running water, nor electricity, but the outhouse out back wasn’t too bad. Except for the one section of collapsed roof covered with a tarp that kept the rain out, it seemed sound. But the air circulation was for crap. Even with all the boarded windows and doors swung open, it was like an oven in there.

  They could have rigged one of the vehicle ACs to pump cold air into the house, make it easier to sleep, maybe, but that would take a lot of fuel, and that wouldn’t solve the problem of walking outside and getting hit in the face with the heat. Better to acclimate yourself to the climate and live with it. Moving from a cool building into a hot summer and back was bad for the respiratory system. Contributed to lung and sinus problems, least that’s what Wink said.

  Of course, so was breathing gun smoke and fuel exhaust. Plus the storm coming in would get here tomorrow and start cooling
things off. Assuming they were still here.

  Jo said, “Remind me again of why we do this?” She waved at the hot night.

  Gunny grinned. The insect repeller’s hum was low and constant, but it did keep the mosquitoes at bay, mostly. Step outside the repeller’s field, and the little vampires would be all over you, even with the confuse ’em patches. You would think somebody here in the cradle of human civilization would have figured out how to get rid of mosquitoes by now, but apparently no matter what they tried, there were always bugs that didn’t get the memo. Mate with that sterile male? No, thank you, I don’t like his looks. Death hormone in the DNA? We’ll evolve our own. Poison? Yum! Now and then, one got past the repellers, too. Too stupid to die out . . .

  Gunny said, “The glory, the adventure, the chance to travel the galaxy and meet exotic people and aliens!”

  Jo laughed. “I remember that recruiting earworm. Always a new batch of young and ignorant cannon fodder stepping up. The road to victory is paved with newbs.”

  Gunny chewed on a bite of the meat substitute. This particular delight had a consistency somewhat like warm rubber, but with half the taste. She set the FR plate on the foldout bench next to her, drank tepid, but pure, water from the vacon bottle. Now there was a useful, and mostly workable piece of technology, and one that performed all the better for the high humidity. It condensed pure water from the vapor in air, and would fill itself to capacity here in twenty or thirty minutes. In a desert, it would take an hour or longer to do the same, but as long as there was any moisture in the atmosphere at all, it would work. Solar and motion powered a rechargeable e-cell battery good for what, thirty years? And the failure rate on the things was near zero.

  Drink it dry and pretty soon, you’d have a fresh liter of water anywhere you went, long as you didn’t lose the sucker. One of the first things you learned to do was keep track of your water bottle. Drink, stick it back into the belt holder. Whoever invented this must have made a fortune. Gunny took another sip and raised her bottle in a silent salute. Then she holstered the flask.