Shadows of Falling Night

by S. M. Stirling

  “I could get used to all this,” he said. “It’s not exactly what I’d have if I could have whatever I wanted, but it’s fun. And honest.”

  “So, your family, what did they do? Mine were campesinos, farmers. From always, and then when my father died my mother and I sold baskets to tourists in Tlacotalpan.”

  He leaned back in the chair and looked out at the moon-washed mountainscape, tilting the beer back again. The conversation required a little backing and filling and dropping in and out of Spanish and English:

  “My grandfathers both had little ranchos and a few sheep, sometimes my mother’s father worked in the mines and my father’s father on the railroads, and they were soldiers in the time of Vietnam. My grandmothers worked in the gardens and around the house, the chickens, that sort of thing.”

  Cheba nodded; it was all obviously fairly familiar to her, the outline if not the details.

  “My father had a garage…fixed cars, did fancy work on them sometimes, restored old cars, classics, for rich people. Before then he was in the Suck, the Marine Corps, in the first war in Iraq. He died years ago, cancer, when I was still young.”

  “You were a soldier too, no? Before you were a policeman?”

  “Soldier, hell. Marine! I enlisted out of high school and stayed in until I made sergeant and got a correspondence degree from UNM in Criminal Justice, then came back here. My sister is married to a dentist named Anderson—pretty decent guy but we don’t have much in common.”

  “Because he is a gringo?”

  “Nah, because he’s a civilian who thinks the world is a nice place; sort of like a big Labrador retriever puppy with glasses, you don’t get to think that way if you’re in a war. Or working as a cop, sometimes that’s harder ’cause you don’t expect it to end. But he’s good to Alvara and the kids and I get a cut on my dental work. The police work was why Julia…my wife…took off. Said she couldn’t stand being married to my job.”

  “No children?” she said.

  It was a bit of an interrogation, but he found he didn’t mind. “Nah, Julia said she wanted to wait.”

  They sat in silence for a while the movie murmured from the arched entrance to the living room. Both of them watched the cold moonlight move on the slopes. He grinned, then laughed like a coyote, the furry kind.

  “What is funny? I would like to hear something funny.”

  “New Mexico looks a lot like Afghanistan, the parts I was mostly in. Other sections are more like Arizona, but this is a dead ringer for some places along the Paki border. Dry, scrubby, rocky, cold in winter, like you said. Even the houses look a lot alike, at least like the old ones. Even the people, except for the clothes and stuff. More like me than you.”

  He blinked, blinked again, his hand tightening on the fading coolness of the beer bottle.

  Helicopter blades beat through the night in his mind, thupthupthupthup.

  Puffs of white dust over the ridge just before the Apaches topped it and banked against the full moon and slid down smooth and hard and low, their black skins tight as sharks with malign intent. Rockets trailing incandescent light and smoke like dirty cotton candy from the pods under their stub wings. Lines of fire snapping down and broken adobe flying back up in black gouts with red blinks in their centers.

  Whatever-it-was creeping under his body armor stopped driving him crazy as everything turned to crystal ice and he pushed himself up a little on his elbows. He reached up with one hand and snapped down his PVS-9 and the world went from dark night to pale green overcast day with blooms of light where fire billowed as he snuggled the butt into his shoulder. Noise in the dry rustling corn across the irrigation ditch as the explosions died away, feet pounding the hard clay. Stalks waving like banners despite no wind. Baylor’s voice rasping in his earbud from the other wing of the L-shaped ambush, that burring Louisiana coonass accent:

  “Top, we got movement on your twelve! Mouj, mouj!”

  Figures, glowing a little through the cornstalks as the thermal sensors in the goggles caught them against the colder background. Dozens, maybe thirty. Running fast away from the tunnels and spider holes in the village, no idea at all they’d been drone-tracked for days and were being herded into the killing ground, just trying to get out from the lash of the rockets and the chain-guns that swiveled under the gunships’ bellies like the stingers of great malignant wasps sparkling the night with muzzle flashes.

  “Smoke ’em, bitches!” he snapped through the throat mike.

  And brought the M-4 up and brought the laser on target and started to squeeze off crisp three-round bursts, the bullets hitting the baggy tunics, dust flying up as the men danced like jointed puppets on strings and the shattered cornstalks fell on their bodies, choonk…choonk as one of his squad cut loose with his grenade launcher, the mouj screaming Allahu Akbar and spraying the night with AK rounds, or just screaming in fear and pain, everything would be darkness and chaos and strobing lights to them, green tracer going wild far overhead, swap out the magazine…

  “Eric!”

  Cheba was staring at him, concern on her face. He brought his mind and the expression on his face back from a place many years and thousands of miles away.

  “Ah, sorry,” he said, and went back to the kitchen; he washed out the bottles and set them to drain and got two more before he returned to the darkened table. “Thinking too hard.”

  “You liked Afghanistan, because it was like your home?”

  “No, that made me hate it even more. And now I’m back home, and goddamn if I’m not feeling the same way I did when we were doing night patrol. Except there’s beer.”

  He raised the bottle towards his lips, then set it down on the table, his eyes going wide.

  Fuck me, he thought. It feels exactly like that. Like bugs are crawling over me.

  Leon came through the arched opening from the living room, just after the sound of the screen rolling up.

  “A bad man is coming,” he said solemnly, eyes a little wide with controlled fright. “Leila says so too.”

  “Go!” Eric shouted at Cheba.

  She came out of the chair as if she was on springs, snatched a machete with a silvered blade out of its sheath where it lay on the polished granite countertop between the kitchen and dining room, then dashed through grabbing Leon as she did. Eric passed her as if she were standing still, stopped by running into the wall, whipped the shotgun from the rack, broke it open and jammed in the shells.

  “Down, down, down!” he shouted as he snapped the action back.

  This house was built like a fort, except for the windows over a sheer cliff. There was a lever he could hit to drop grills over the windows, but he couldn’t reach it without crossing the room. So—

  Something flitted through the night, swelling towards him. Cheba dropped the machete, set her foot on it and went down with the children squealing beneath her. A rock the size of his head slammed into the glass of the great window at interstate speed and shattered it. Eric ducked his head for an instant to shield his eyes.

  The forty-pound eagle came through just as fast in the wake of the stone it had released thousands of feet up, talons like four-inch curved daggers outstretched to grab his face and rip it off in passing. The moa-eater, the human-killing pouakai of Maori legend.

  “Eat this, motherfucker!”

  He let go with both barrels. A cloud of silvered double-ought buck exploded at the onrushing bird. It had started to twist violently even before his finger tightened on the trigger—fighting precognition just wasn’t fair. It slammed into the arch over the dining room entrance, pinwheeled—

  —Sparkled—

  —and was a naked man, brown and muscular, blood streaming from his face and chest, leaping at him with a snarl—

  —And Cheba was between them, shrieking and swinging roundhouse at his throat with the machete—

  —and the man went under the swipe of the blade with a smooth duck and hit her backhanded under the ribs with the edge of his palm. In the same in
stant he shouted something in a language that made the hairs on Eric’s forearms crinkle and slammed his other hand forward in a crook-fingered gesture. The shotgun slipped out of Eric’s hands and blood burst out of his nose and his eyes were like spikes of dry pain as the amulet around his neck turned hot—

  —and Leon and Leila were standing between him and the man. They stood with their arms around each other’s shoulders, the other hands pointing at the attacker, their faces stark and huge-eyed.

  The man who’d been an eagle seemed to ram into an invisible wall in the air. Cheba came up again, bent over and gasping where she held her left hand to her side, but the blade wavering in her right as she wound up for a cut at the back of his leg. The Shadowspawn turned with another snarl and dove out through the broken window into the night and the long drop to the ground below. A whump came from the darkness, as if giant wings had struck the air.

  “Go!” Eric wheezed again.

  He ignored the shotgun; the action had broken open and the barrels were out of alignment with the breech, some freak crystallization of the metal making it snap. There were plenty of weapons where he was headed, anyway. Cheba hobbled quickly through the door into Adrian Brézé’s bedroom. The door of what looked like a big walk-in closet hissed open, sliding sideways to reveal its thickness. They all tumbled in to a small square room that was utterly featureless except for its lining of brown-and-orange cocobolo wood.

  “Down!” Eric snarled.

  The elevator dropped, fast; it was a special type, one that didn’t use cables. He didn’t really need to say anything, the Wreakings and control circuits just sensed his intention and identified him as someone on the list of permitted guests, but it helped to focus. Something went thud up above, felt through the floor, and Cheba looked up at him from her corner.

  “Blocking doors across the shaft,” he said. “Glyphs and silver and really thick steel and all that good…stuff.”

  He wiped at the blood on his mouth with the back of his hand, grimacing at the taste. The children were looking at him with sudden interest, then politely glanced away.

  God, they can be creepy at times, he thought. They’re not bad kids, but they’re odd. Sometimes they’re playing like my nieces and nephews, and sometimes they’re not fucking human at all.

  The elevator halted and the door slid silently open a thousand feet below the surface. Beyond was a corridor, with white walls that had a layer of Redondo tile along the bottom and above a high groin-arched ceiling carved from the native rock and smoothly plastered. The floor was pale marble, with a strip of sisal carpet down the center dyed in vivid geometric shapes. Indirect LED lighting gave it a pleasant brightness; the arrival of the elevator turned it on the system throughout the underground refuge.

  He’d had the tour within; there were bedrooms, kitchens, library, armory and workshops, a video room the size of a small movie theater, data servers, supplies enough to keep you in pickled artichoke hearts and foie gras for years, and an industrial-strength fuel-cell power system fed by a trickle of natural gas from far below. There was even a swimming pool and a gym with sunlamps, everything but a monologuing bad guy with a Nehru jacket and a cat. The place could shelter dozens and survive anything up to and including a low-end apocalypse or a near miss with a fusion bomb. You probably wouldn’t even go crazy.

  Not at first.

  Eric helped Cheba hobble with him to the infirmary. As they treated each other’s injuries and he checked that she didn’t have a popped rib or internal hemorrhage, she glanced up at him. “They cannot walk through the walls?”

  “Nope. Too thick, they’d be like a man swimming underwater for too long. And it’s low-grade silver ore all around us.”

  “Plata?” she said, and then bit her lip and gasped as he probed.

  Just a bad bruise, he thought with relief. Must not have had the leverage to hit her really hard. You can lose a kidney from that one if it hits just right. Must hurt like a bitch, though. Still, she didn’t lose dinner.

  He went on aloud to distract her as he stripped the plastic off a hypo of local anesthetic.

  “Sí, that’s why Mr. Stone Arrogant Bastard bought this land. It would be like walking through boiling water to them. We’re safe…until we try to get out.”

  The children ran off; they loved the place, the way they would a tree-house.

  “Should we try and escape?” she said levelly.

  There were also money, clothes, and documents including a wide assortment of passports, and hidden tunnels…and contingency plans for this.

  “Oh, hell yes. I’m not going to sit tight and wait for them to come to me. Adrian left a couple of alternate ways to get out of here if it got too hot.”

  You…idiot. Adrienne’s mental voice was like a lash of chilled steel, even with the low bandwidth imposed by long-distance telepathy. You…moron. Izidingidwane! Baka tare! Èrbˇaiwˇu! I…am…surrounded…by…morons!

  The exchange became wordless for a moment, like a chorus of shrill hissing snarls, before she changed the thought-stream to words again. Dale Shadowblade could feel the background around her, gilt and pale stone and minds like walking razors.

  I…told…you…to…wait…and…watch…not…endanger…my…children, she thought.

  Back…off, Dale replied. I…saw/felt/sensed…a…nexus…and…went…for…it…to…bust…them…out.

  A mental snarl. Of…course…but…my…children…are…so…high…on…the…Albermann…scale…even…still…latent…they…distort…the…world…lines! There…was…no…way…to…tell…if…it…was…black-path…for…us…or not! Their…future…a…thousand…years…from…now…could…be…bleeding…backward…to…protect…itself!

  I’m…here…you…ain’t…so…get…off…my…case…bossbitch.

  There was a long pause. Then: Watch…and…keep…me…informed…we…don’t…need…additional…random…factors…before…Tbilisi.

  I…grovel…and…obey…so…fucking…much.

  He opened his eyes and snarled as the pain hit. Three of the shot had struck despite his dodge, and while the actual damage didn’t transfer across when you returned to the body, the hurting sure as shit did. Something deep down believed that it was your flesh arm and shoulder and face that had stopped the high-velocity metal—if they were silvered. Going impalpable was an elementary trick, you could just let ordinary lead pass through the aetheric form, but silver plowed right in. Hurt you the way ordinary stuff would your meat-body.

  It was one reason silver jewelry was popular around here. They’d known about Big Owl and Rock Monster Eagle and that the skinwalkers were among them back before the white-eyes came with their versions. Sometimes he wished the Brézés and the Council hadn’t taught his great-grandparents about genes and let their descendants become more than common-or-garden ’áńt’įįzhį, getting by on low-level curses and a little friendly incest and catching the occasional tourist out in the badlands and skinning them alive…but it was like anything else, you had to move with the times.

  Kai was waiting when he sat upright. He lunged his mouth against her throat and fed, and the pain and weakness receded, beaten back by the wind within. The thin pale-skinned girl with the spiked black hair crawled away to the fire when he finished, whimpering, and brought him a bowl. He squatted by low coals and spooned up the deer-and-corn stew and ate chunks of the frybread while she drank Gatorade. He could do the fancy restaurant thing, but there were times you wanted to eat the way you were raised.

  “Good,” he said. “Keep your electrolytes up.”

  She grinned nervously at him as he tossed her the bowl.

  “Eat. We’ll be moving out unless the Mex decides to hide. And that’s not how I read him. The bosslady is sending Dmitri to give me a hand.”

  He’d picked her up at a music festival years ago, and hadn’t killed her because she had enough of the Power to be useful with a little training, but not enough to be a threat even if she weren’t his whipped bitch. Hadn’t killed
her in the flesh; it was somewhere around forty times inside, soul-carrying. He’d also never met anyone who liked dying as much.

  “We going somewhere, Dale?”

  “Yeah. We’re following bossbitch’s brats and that roach her brother’s got shepherding them.”

  Kai grimaced. “I don’t like her. Why are you looking out for her kids?”

  “Nobody likes her except her” Dale grinned; he was feeling better. “But she really loves her. We need her until Tbilisi goes down and then the plague. Your real beef is that she thinks you’re low rent. She wouldn’t drink your blood if you were both alone in the middle of the Sahara Desert.”

  “Yeah, Madame Brézé likes blonds with big ta-tas and elegant Euro-trash guys with monogram cuff links and they all gotta be intellectual giants…I mean, she’s gonna fuck ’em and bleed ’em and then do them and they have to have degrees and talk about art?” Kai grumbled.

  “Her lucies thought you should be scraped off a shoe too.”

  “I wouldn’t touch her twat with a Taser. Or theirs.” Something flickered in her eyes and aura. “Maybe with some pliers, yeah, or a lit cigarette.”

  Dale laughed and rolled one, lighting it with a twig. Then he closed his eyes for a moment and slipped into a semi-trance, seeing the world without past or present, as a web of potential.

  “Yup, I can see what she meant,” he said dreamily, coming back to the moment. “Looks like we’re going to be traveling if we can’t clear this up here soon. There are gaps in the lines, too much Power sloshing around and something…something odd and spooky. But I see…Europe. It’s coming together like rocks rolling downhill.”

  “Cool!” Kai said. “Like, Paris and shit?”