Patton's Spaceship (The Timeline Wars, 1)

by John Barnes

  That left me two holes in the defense; I couldn’t very well dig pits in the airfield, but I got a bunch of proficient snipers trained to cover it. At least there was always plenty of small-arms ammunition, and we had enough people from the Himalayan fringe to ensure us all the sharpshooters we could want. I could make them very sorry they landed there, make it impossible to set up the artillery, and the airfield was away from the launching pads by some margin.

  Part of the problem I was facing, too, was that if they came in overland, infiltrating from some more distant landing site (our radar fence just wasn’t good enough to cover against that possibility), I needed to have patrols out, but if they landed in the middle, I needed forces concentrated. Moreover, I had to figure the enemy were likely to all be half-crazed, since there was no way they could expect to be extracted once they hit the ground, and thus this was a one-way trip to prison or the grave for them.

  At dinner with von Braun, I was talking about all of this. He had kind of an abstract, distant stare, and then suddenly he said, “Did you ever continue our experiment with the SHAKK?”

  “Gee, no,” I said, feeling stupid because of course it was a far better weapon than the Colt automatic I was still lugging around.

  “There’s something I’d very much like to see about it. If it’s in your quarters, do you suppose we could conduct an experiment or two more before we call it a night?”

  “Happy to oblige.” We got the SHAKK from my bunk, and then went back to the Materials Science Lab.

  This was a much better place to work than the back of an autogyro; we were even able to figure out just what the rare earths were, and soon we had all the percentages moving up toward 100.

  “Now let me try my experiment,” he said.

  Although copper was already at 100 percent, the next thing he put in the drawer was a coil of pure copper wire. There was a brief humming noise, and from the base of the grip—where the magazine slid in on my .45—a tube extended, and pellets of copper dribbled out. When the copper stopped coming, the tube slid back into place, and a cover slid across it.

  “Amazing,” he said. “You realize that to reshape it that way takes a lot of energy—and yet the SHAKR isn’t warm anywhere, which means it somehow put out all the energy it needed without producing any waste heat at all. Now watch closely … next trick …”

  This time it was copper sulfate with which he filled the drawer. Again the tube extended, and this time it spit out pellets of sulfur, followed by pellets of copper. “I suppose the oxygen in the sulfate just goes out to the air,” he said quietly. “It’s a large favor, but could I possibly borrow this for—oh, a week at most? I can’t promise it will be unharmed, but I’m not planning to do anything to harm it.”

  I agreed, he borrowed it, the next week he brought it back, and that was as much thought as I gave it. At the time Bigeard and I were busy with figuring out where to dig holes.

  It did occur to me that evening to try a few experiments of my own. I discovered that plain dirt, some local stone, fistfuls of hardware, and a bit of charcoal seemed to be a workable mixture; there were excesses of a few things that rolled out the tube. Then I got curious about what the drawer next to the “firing chamber”—if this thing had a firing chamber—might do, so I opened that up.

  There were tiny transparent pellets in there, smaller than BB shot and looking like nothing so much as cheap caviar. They were arranged in neat rows. I touched one gingerly and it rolled onto my hand; it felt light there. I could see what appeared to be nozzles on every surface, and the inside had a strange, complicated pattern, visible by holding it up to the light, that resembled nothing so much as a microscope photo of a nerve cell.

  The drawer had been empty before; I figured this must be the ammo.

  I tried to return it to its place, but it wouldn’t stick; a thought hit me and I pulled out a bunch more of them, closed the ammo drawer, and checked; sure enough, it said it was “93% loaded” rather than the 100 percent it had been before.

  Then I took the extra shot and fed it into the raw materials hopper; in just an instant, the SHAKK display changed back to 100 percent. Now I understood what the loading powder Harry Skena had used had been—it was just the right chemical mix to produce shot without any waste. And I also knew how I could store up a lot more than the two thousand rounds the contraption held in ready. All I had to do was make pellets, in quantity, and have a few buckets of them handy. It was so simple that I did it that night; from then on I had four galvanized iron buckets of SHAKK shot always in my office.

  A few experiments showed the SHAKK shots would go right through the system to become usable as ammunition again in a second or less, even while the SHAKK was also firing full auto. (Ever try to find a good backstop for hypersonic ammunition that likes to loop around inside whatever it hits? I finally found that an empty, rusted water tank filled with sand worked pretty well.) That meant, I estimated, that me and my four buckets had just over 300,000 rounds available.

  I was pretty sure that if I could get to a good place with those buckets fast enough, I could make hash out of anything coming in. The trouble was, the outer range on the SHAKK was about six miles, and that didn’t allow me to cover all the drop zones, quite, let alone all the launchpads and control bunkers. So I rigged up a centrally located tower that would give me a clear view of as much as I could cover, and kept my kids digging holes and stringing wire. (One clever little bastard who was good at catching poisonous snakes started “farming” them in the holes of one drop zone—I figured that ought to surprise the occasional SS man.)

  The day the tower was done, I decided to move my buckets of spare ammo up there, and some impulse or other made me fill up two more. I now had 450,000 rounds, give or take, for the SHAKK. I couldn’t be sure it would be enough, but any more would start to take up floor space I had to have on my “flagpole,” as General Minh dubbed it.

  He had his own hassles—a series of long-range patrols in the back country had run into occasional Japanese infiltration, and although we had the advantage of having the peasants mostly on our side, we still had to get men out there to catch the bastards, and in operations at that distance it wasn’t easy.

  It turned into sort of a party, for Bigeard showed up with wine, and then of all people von Braun dropped by. Minh’s patrols had reported some success, so his mood was a bit better than usual; Bigeard had been given some secret mission he was ecstatic about; I had my tower, and von Braun was all but glowing.

  “I do wish I could tell you,” he said. “Oh, god, how I wish I could tell you. By late tonight you’ll know anyway. And in an odd way, Mr. Strang, we owe a lot of it to you. It will all be much clearer when—”

  There was a roar and rattle of trucks approaching the village on Highway 41; it sounded like as many as a hundred. Von Braun raised his glass, drained it, and said, “Gentlemen, when next we speak—well, you’ll find out!”

  It occurred to me as he dashed away, that blue-eyed blond muscular German, that he looked like every stereotypical Aryan in every Nazi poster. His sense of humor, though, was pure twelve-year-old; what do you expect from a man who wants to go to Mars, the basic dream of so many twelve-year-old boys? I suppose it was a lesson about judging by appearances …

  The truck convoy swung immediately into the secure compound, the area south of the village where the top secret work was done, mostly in underground bunkers. Men were running there from all over, so whatever this was, it was big.

  Bigeard sighed. “Not that this is particularly fine wine, you understand, but it’s the last of the Australian, and there are no good places left for grapes in the Free Zone. I suppose I shall have to kill it all myself—”

  “Happy to help you,” I said, and Minh smiled and extended his glass.

  “I hate to see a party break up too soon,” Bigeard said. We all toasted the afternoon, the minor successes of the day, and the fact that there was still some hope in the world.

  There was so much commo
tion from the secure compound that at first I didn’t realize a distant siren had sounded; by the time I was scrambling to my feet, there were sirens everywhere. Minh was on his feet, hollering for his jeep and driver, and an instant later Bigeard was forming up his battalion to get a perimeter thrown around the secure compound. The raid we were waiting for had come.

  15

  I climbed my tower, SHAKK in hand, and phoned central radar.

  “What’s up?”

  “Planes coming in low from the north. Lot of big ones. Bombers or transports. Air Def Com says they’ve got fighters on the way.” He hung up; I don’t think he’d heard my question, I think he just knew that the answer would be the same for everyone.

  I lifted my binoculars and looked; it was a minute or so, and then tiny dots swam in over the mountains.

  I got the SHAKK into my hand while I watched, and the planes swept down toward the village. It was still too soon to tell bombers from transports—the Germans tended to use the same body shape for either—but it seemed odd for an attack to be led by big, slow planes unless it was paratroops.

  It was. As soon as the first one was in range, I gave him four hex bursts, moved to the next one, moved to the next one, but now there were more than a hundred coming, and I couldn’t sight or pull the trigger that fast. Dimly, I was aware that the ones I had shot had started to fall out of the sky, wings and engines dropping off, troops blocked by their mates trying to get out the door with their chutes. The first transport hit hard enough to blow her fuel tanks, and in the last fifty feet or so she dropped three paratroopers with no room for chutes to deploy; they hit the dirt and lay still, streams of silk billowing behind them.

  I looked away in haste. The sky was beginning to fill with chutes, and I carefully swung the SHAKK from body to body under them, squeezing the trigger precisely each time. High above, the bodies pitched hard once as their brains were torn to pieces, and then hung still on the end of the line.

  I could work the SHAKK fast enough to keep up with this wave, but not fast enough to hit the planes, too. I crouched, grabbed a fistful of shot, popped the drawer on the SHAKK, shoved it in, and was up shooting again; a couple of paratroopers had made it to the ground on the airfield by then, though.

  I heard the rattle of rifle fire and knew my sharpshooters would keep them busy; meanwhile I concentrated on getting caught up at hitting them before they touched down.

  You would think it would be like pointing your finger, but the reality was that the SHAKK round went exactly where you pointed it. I took to firing short bursts across each paratrooper, which sped the process up, and probably nine out of every ten of them arrived dead. What that must have been like for the ones who were alive on the ground is something I avoid thinking about.

  Not that I’m squeamish. Whatever compassion I ever had was cut out of my heart by Blade of the Most Merciful; I had never made a secret of the fact that my favorite thing about being a bodyguard was having a license to hurt people and a good excuse for it as well. But even I, when I think of a man finding himself landing in a firefight, in a tangle of pits and wire that he can’t safely move in, trying to make his way through while the bullets are pecking in at him … and finding only his dead buddies, with their heads exploded, shrouded by their chutes … well, I have to hope that the sharpshooters at least got them pretty quickly.

  The first wave had obviously been intended to secure the airfield and the area north of town; it was just as obviously a failure. What came in next, I assume, was supposed to be close air support for the invading force of corpses laid out in front of us.

  That was a lot worse. The jets came in very fast, and I sprayed at them with full auto, but I didn’t have much luck—only two of the ten or so augured into the empty fields behind us without releasing their weapons loads. Another let go his bombs and then blew up, which was satisfying only from the standpoint of revenge.

  Bombs crashed into the village, and there I was, up on that silly “flagpole”—the shock waves made it bounce around in a way that was completely terrifying. I nearly lost my balance, and one bucket of SHAKK shot did fall off.

  When I stood back up everything was in chaos—buildings on fire, walls blown down, frantic rescue efforts in progress everywhere, and I could hear more transports coming in.

  If they had been intending to drop on the airfield, as the first wave had, they might have taken it then, for the wind was blowing the smoke north and I couldn’t see. But their target was the secure compound, and that meant they all passed directly over me as they began their drops. I pointed the SHAKK upward and sprayed two full magazines into the sky; some rounds hit the few paratroopers who were already out the door, most rose harmlessly to a height of more than ten miles and floated back to Earth to become marbles for the next generation of kids, and maybe half of one percent of them found their way into the transports.

  But that was what really counted. It helped that the few paratroopers who landed arrived dead, but it helped more that rounds found their way in through the door, or through the fuselage itself, and slaughtered them inside the transports before they could ever step out. It helped that wings fell off, engines sheared away, and the planes themselves disintegrated.

  Again, I’m just as glad I know nothing of the experience of anyone who wasn’t killed in the air or in the plane, for what it must have been like to be surrounded by all of your suddenly dead friends, in an airplane falling to pieces and catching fire around you—well, if I really knew, I might pity them, and I feel no desire to pity Nazis.

  I reloaded again and turned back to fire at the oncoming wave of close air support; this time I was luckier, because I had a slightly longer time to aim, and four ships fell apart on their approach, decorating the hillsides behind me. I tried laying a curtain of fire between the dropping bombs and the village, but there were only two early explosions—and one water buffalo, peaceably watching us humans kill each other, fell dead in the street. I had let my hand jump a bit as I fired.

  There was a rattle of rifle fire from the other side of the cloud of smoke that now kept me from seeing what was happening on the airfield and in the northern drop zone. There was nothing for it—I would have to leave the tower and take my chances that there were no more coming in from any other side.

  I grabbed the phone and asked for a status report. Fighters were to be there in twenty minutes, which wasn’t bad, but we needed them now. There was another wave behind this one, closing in fast at higher altitude.

  It didn’t necessarily look like the good guys were going to win. I jumped down the ladder, one bucket of SHAKK ammo still in my fist, and ran through the village—most of the civilians and dependents had headed straight down into the shelters at the first sign of trouble, but it was still a Vietnamese country village, and so after the first bombs had hit the streets had filled up with panicked chickens, ducks, goats, dogs, and practically everything except water buffalo; they were there, too, but they weren’t particularly panicked, just wandering around as if it was too much work to wonder what the noise was all about.

  The smoke was thick, sharp, and bitter, for the village was mostly palm and bamboo, and in the dry season there’s not much to keep it from turning into tinder. For some reason that made me angrier than ever—the thought of all these people losing everything they owned in the fires—and it seemed to put wings on my feet.

  I burst from the smoke to see that there were a hundred of them on the landing field, now, taking cover behind two wrecked Gooney birds. The sharpshooters had them surrounded and were plinking away at them, but the SS men had submachine guns and could spray enough bullets to make our guys keep their heads down, and it was clear they were about to get organized to make a break for it. If they did, the line was thin enough that they might well carry forward into the village.

  I leveled the SHAKK at the underside of the nearer DC-3, set it for hex bursts, and began pumping the trigger as fast as I could. In about ten seconds, the plane began to fall apart; f
irst a landing strut fell off, then parts of the fuselage came down, and finally with a great rending crash the whole thing fell into small bits. The SS men behind it tried to run for the cover of the remaining plane, but the conventional fire pouring through the gap got some, and SHAKK rounds eliminated the others. I turned my attention on the other plane, and it, too, went to pieces, but before I had completed the job I was out of ammo. I tossed fistfuls of slugs into the drawer, as I crouched there behind a stone wall at the edge of the field, but the SHAKK did take a second to turn each fistful into ammo.

  I had just thrown in the third and final handful when a German leaped over the wall, his submachine gun at ready.

  My hand fell onto my Colt, the automatic flicked onto the target, and I turned out to have faster reflexes than he did. I squeezed the trigger four times in all, and the first two rounds went in right above his eyes. He was dead before he hit the ground.

  There are things to be said for low-tech, too.

  The interruption had given the SHAKK time to get fully ready, so I popped up and hosed down the ten SS men now running directly toward my position; they fell dead on the pavement, and I climbed the wall, hearing more fighter planes coming in.

  The fighters were jets, moving very fast at the outside edge of my range, orbiting a perimeter around the village, but I fired a hex burst at each one as it passed by, and I was happy to see that by the time they had circled twice, I, or ground fire, or just the perverse nature of mechanical things, had caused two of them to have engine flameouts and to disappear over the hills trailing smoke.

  There was a field telephone nearby and I used it; the man said it looked like the last wave of troop transports in this flight would be coming in on the southern side, probably trying to land below the secure compound. In a way that was good news—the secure compound was well defended and getting more so—but it sounded like I could be most effective in that direction, so I snatched up my bucket of ammo, ran back through the smoke—the village was beginning to get firefighting under way—and stopped for an instant at the tower to throw a few handfuls from the spilled bucket into my still-almost-full one.