Conquistador

by S. M. Stirling

  “Can’t be over too soon for me, Adri,” Heinrich said. “If I owned this place and hell, I’d live in hell and rent it out. They say our area is hot and flat!” He slapped at a mosquito and cursed as it squashed against his neck in a smear of blood and sweat. “Jim and his boys did all the work. All we’ve done is sit and stare at dust-devils and the occasional pronghorn and listen to our frying skin crackle and pop.”

  “You might as well get packed, then. Sorry I don’t have time for the social amenities, Heinrich, but this is Gate Security business, and I have to wrap it up fast. Then you can get your men back to civilization and cold beer.”

  The soldier nodded, shrugged, slapped another mosquito and walked off toward his troops, calling orders. There was a chorus of cheers, and they began striking camp with commendable enthusiasm.

  The Frontier Scout laughed as they walked toward the cages; he was about her height, with sunstreaked brown hair, a close-cropped gingery beard and blue eyes startling in his tanned countenance. His broad-brimmed hat had a leopard-skin band, and old sweat had left rings of salt stain on his jacket, still visible beneath the new ones despite multiple washings; a leather thong around his neck bore grizzly-bear teeth and lion claws.

  “What were they thinking of, sending that bunch of farm boys and clerks’ sons?” Simmons said. “We don’t need soldiers, and I doubt many of them have been twenty miles east of the Coast Range before. My oath! Half of them aren’t old enough to shave. A couple of Frontier Scouts are all that’s necessary for a job like this; the condors don’t have artillery, after all.”

  “The Old Man is fond of saying that few operations fail because too much force is used. The troops are just for insurance; and they’re not from Rolfeston, you’ll note.”

  “Operation? What operation?” Simmons said, taking off his hat and waving it at the flat, heat-shimmering circle of the horizon while he wiped a sleeve across his forehead. “This isn’t the 1980s, for sweet suffering Jesus’ sake. This valley’s nearly as pacified as the good lieutenant von Traupitz’s ancestral acres back northside of the delta. Most of the natives died off in the first epidemics in the forties and the smallpox got the rest—the nearest wild tribe of any size is up in the Sierras.”

  “There are still some renegades and hostiles in the lakes and swamps,” Adrienne pointed out. “At least a hundred, worst case a thousand—there are lots of little islands in there, and plenty of fish and game. A few of them have stolen guns, too. They’d like to get their hands on our weapons and gear. Very, very much. Plus they’re not really fond of New Virginians, which is understandable from their point of view.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t want to camp out alone around here, or set up house, or try to graze stock,” Simmons agreed. “But they’ve learned better than to come out in the daytime, or in any numbers. I doubt they’re going to attack a party of mounted Scouts, either.”

  “They’re even less likely to attack a platoon and an armored car,” Adrienne said. “Trust the Old Man’s judgment. He knew you’re someone who could be trusted to produce twenty closely related condors on short notice without shooting them, for example.”

  “Wasn’t hard,” Jim said. “The Valley isn’t half as challenging as things were when we were back in Kenya during the Mau Mau.”

  The remark was made with malice aforethought; the British-African immigrants were popularly and unflatteringly known as when-wes. He dropped into a semi-British clipped accent as he spoke. Normally apart from an occasional turn of phrase his voice had the same slight New Virginian drawl as hers or Heinrich’s, the legacy of many languages and generations of linguistic drift in relative isolation.

  Adrienne snorted. “Jim, you were born in the Commonwealth and you’ve never been back. Your father was born in New Virginia and never went FirstSide in his life either. Your grandparents came from Kenya in ’sixty-three.”

  “That skipped my mind,” he teased, grinning.

  The other two Frontier Scouts waited by the cages; they were cut from much the same cloth as Simmons—in fact, one was his younger brother and one his maternal aunt’s son; New Virginia ran on nepotism, and not only in the Thirty Families. The wire containers were in a double row, eighteen of them, with an awning rigged above. Inside the cages huge vulturelike birds perched and stank and brooded, their naked yellow heads twisting on the ends of long scabby necks to cast a baleful eye on the movements of their captors. With their wings folded, the distinguishing white patches underneath were invisible, and they looked like huge ill-tempered bundles of feathers with claws. A condor high above was a sight of heart-catching grace and beauty, but close quarters were something else again. Occasionally one would utter a disconsolate, croaking squawk or engage in a feather-ruffling, beak-stabbing dispute with its neighbors.

  “Well, there the bloody things are,” Simmons replied. “Bugger-all explanation I got; just a message from your father to go get them, countersigned by the Old Man no less, at which I genuflected, salaamed, saluted and got on my way… and I was due to go up to Fort Tahoe Station, which I will remind you has a much better climate than this. What’s going on—is there a barbecue planned at Rolfe Manor?”

  Adrienne grinned at his plaintive expression. “Well, they do weigh in about the same as a turkey, and I suppose with some chipotle rub and a sage-and-herb stuffing, maybe a little garlic…”

  The birds all looked healthy, and they all had a dish of water and a gobbet of fly-swarming meat that stank even worse than they did, a gourmet meal for what the biologists called an obligate scavenger, which meant carrion eater in plain English. She nodded in satisfaction, and sipped from a tin cup of strong camp coffee someone put in her hand.

  “Good work, though, and quick,” she said. There were thousands of condors in the Commonwealth, but that didn’t mean you could walk around scooping them up with a butterfly net, particularly when they had to be unharmed. “I’m impressed; I’ll tell my father and the Old Man so, too.”

  Simmons swept off his hat and gave her a mock-courtly bow. “That glad-dens the cockles of my heart.” His expression was sly. “Is the lady impressed enough to sweep me off my feet, take me away from this piece of refried hell, make an honest man of me and elevate my lowly but roguishly charming Settler self to the demiparadise of collateral Family status among the august Rolfes?”

  Adrienne punched his shoulder; it felt like striking a board. “You’d go toes-up in a month, living in Rolfeston, or even on an estate in Napa,” she said. “And working a regular job inside the frontier would drive you to suicide. You’re a wilderness man through and through.”

  “True… true… how about a brief, meaningless affair, then?”

  “You’re incorrigible!”

  “No, the name’s Simmons…. Right then; how about charming you into telling me what this is about?”

  “Sorry. Gate Security business.”

  His eyebrows went up. “Gate Security requires twenty condors? Half of which have to be fed one lead shotgun pellet, and the rest a package of mysterious powders flown out at vast expense?”

  “Yes,” she said, and laughed with good-natured schadenfreude at his frustration.

  “Adrienne, do you have any idea of what it’s like making a condor eat something? They have projectile vomiting down to a science. I deserve to know!”

  “Really, I can’t tell you; not only that, you’re supposed to keep quiet about it too. Any prospect of getting the last two soon?”

  “We shot bait all along a front north and south of here,” Simmons said. “Mostly wild cattle, some antelope, and a few feral camels. The cars would spook the birds, so we ride out when—Ah, here he is.”

  A lone figure came trotting out of the northeast, where the marsh made a green line on the horizon, which meant a considerable distance hereabouts. There was an old joke that when your dog ran away in this part of the Commonwealth, you could stand on a chair and watch it going for three days. Adrienne wore a monocular in a case on her belt; she snapped it open and
put it to her right eye. A man was approaching, barefoot and clad only in a deer-hide breechclout. His long black hair hung to his shoulders beneath a headband, and his body seemed to be comprised exclusively of bone, gristle, jerky and sinew sheathed in dark brown hide. He moved at an effortless smooth trot through the calf-high plain of yellow-white dried grass, the short bow in his left hand pumping as he ran. A quiver was slung across his back; his belt bore a steel knife, hatchet, militia-issue canteen, and a bag that probably contained most of his other possessions. His broad high-cheeked face was flatly impassive, and he was hardly even sweating in the vicious heat.

  “Ah, that’s one of your tame Yokut trackers, right?” Adrienne said.

  “Kolomusnim, or Kolo for short. He’s not particularly tame, but he’s a bloody good tracker. Good man, when he can keep away from the booze.”

  “Most can’t, judging by the specimens I’ve seen around your Frontier Scout stations,” Adrienne said.

  “I’d be tempted to drown my sorrows myself, in their position,” Simmons said, surprising her. “Let’s to business, then.”

  Kolomusnim came up at the same swinging trot, stopping and sinking to his heels in front of the Frontier Scout, who squatted likewise to watch as the Indian drew in the white dust and spoke in a mixture of his native tongue and garbled English; after a moment she could follow the latter, at least.

  “Three?” Simmons said.

  “Three something-something,” Kolomusnim replied, holding up that many fingers. The unintelligible word had far too many consonants, and probably meant condor. “And man-sign. Mebbe two days, mebbe right after shoot. Belly cut, liver, kidney, tongue, haunches gone, loin—good meat. No man sign after that.”

  “Hmmm.” Simmons thought, elbows on his knees; the squatting posture looked nearly as natural to him as to the Indian. “Probably some little band of holdouts scavenging the edge of the marsh.”

  He rose. “There are three condors feeding on some camels we shot. You can wait here, Adrienne. I’ll have the birds netted inside a couple of hours, and then you can come in with the cars.”

  She had been looking over his horse lines; there were twelve mounts, not counting two pack-mules. Sensibly, he’d been using the Land Rovers as a base to carry fodder and water, and then ranging out to check his baits with the less noisy horses. That would minimize the chances of scaring off any feeding condors.

  “To hell with that, Jim,” she said. “I’m the Bad Girl of the Rolfes, remember? I’ll ride in with you, and we can have the chopper pick the birds up, bring them back here, load the rest and be back at the Gate before sunset.”

  He hesitated for a moment, and then nodded. “All right,” he said. “Never could stand to be left out of the boys’ games, eh?”

  She shrugged. “I’m not Little Miss Cindy Lou Magnoliablossom,” she said dryly, patting the FN FiveseveN automatic holstered high on her right hip.

  There are some advantages to FirstSide, she thought. The extinctions there fortunately include a lot of Cindy Lou-ism.

  “I noticed; Alf, saddle an extra horse.”

  Until then Schalk and Piet had been silent as boulders. Now Piet stirred.

  “Nie, nie, miss,” he said. “We go too.” At her frown, he raised a massive hand and went on. “Miss, if something happened to you and we weren’t there, your oupa would have our bliddy ba… our bliddy heads.”

  His face had taken on a mulish look she recognized; she shrugged and said, “The more the merrier. It’s only a couple of miles, right?”

  “About ten,” Simmons said in a resigned voice. “Alf, saddle three extras; you’ll be staying with the birds here. Jake, run over to the lieutenant and borrow three spare rifles.” He turned to the Afrikaners. “You do know how to handle a standard O’Brien rifle, I suppose?”

  “It’s a bliddy gun, isn’t it?” Schalk said, taking the semiauto weapon and checking the action with businesslike competence before slapping in a twenty-round magazine. “Your bushman any good?”

  Kolomusnim looked up. “Better than lard-ass white man needs horse go ten miles,” he said, and grinned as Schalk’s complexion turned mottled with fury.

  Then the tracker looked at Adrienne, glanced over to Simmons and spoke in his own language.

  “He says what do we need a woman along for? If we’re not hunting for game that has to be skinned and cooked,” Simmons said, suppressing a smile.

  “Ha. Ha. Ha,” Adrienne said, pronouncing each syllable separately, as if she were reading it from a page.

  The horses were good mixed hunter blood; the Commission had never imported anything but the best, and she trusted Jim Simmons to choose his working stock carefully. Schalk and Piet Botha picked two bays of about seventeen hands that looked capable of handling their weight; they rode reasonably well, although she knew they’d both been city born and raised, Johannesburg and Cape Town respectively. Either they’d picked it up here, or had been well taught FirstSide; she seemed to remember reading somewhere that the old South African government had used mounted infantry for patrol work, and Botha had a farm down in the south country. She chose a fifteen-hand dappled-gray mare that had a good deal of Arab in its bloodlines, to judge from the rather small and elegantly wedge-shaped head, and the arch of neck and tail. It snorted slightly as she checked the girths, slid her own rifle into the scabbard that slanted back under the flap on the right side, put her foot in the stirrup and swung into the saddle. That was the lightened Western type the Frontier Scouts used; there was a machete and a canvas chuggle of water strapped to the left side, with jerky and biscuit and raisins in the saddlebags, plus the various items regulations required.

  Kolomusnim turned without another word and began trotting back the way he’d come. They fell naturally into a column behind him; she rode beside Simmons, with the two Gate Security operatives behind her and the other Scout bringing up the rear, leading two pack-mules; one carried an empty condor cage on either side of its panniers, the other a large folded net and a spare field radio.

  Adrienne took a deep breath of the hot air, full of the dusty scent of the dry grasslands, horse sweat, and a hint of the marshes. There were insects aplenty in the air, and the horse twitched its ears and various parts of its skin as she squeezed her calves against its barrel and brought it up to a round trot. She realized that, for some reason, she was intensely happy.

  And I’d really like to be able to show all this to Tom, she thought wistfully. Not likely. If he ever gets to our beloved Commonwealth of New Virginia, he’s not likely to be feeling very good about me. Since that would happen only if he stumbled on the Gate secret, in which case he’d be shanghaied here as an Involuntary Settler and could never go back.

  “Can’t your Yokut learn to ride?” she asked Simmons.

  The Indian had been dropping back occasionally to run gripping the Scout’s stirrup with his right hand, then loping ahead again.

  Simmons chuckled. “Kolo rides quite well. He also thinks horses are for girly-boys and white men, if there’s a difference. We could beat him to the bait if we galloped, but the horses would be blown and he’d be ready to go on running all day. He covered fifty miles in twenty hours once, on a bet, when we were shepherding a bunch of Collettas and Morrisons on safari east of the Sierras.”

  They rode quickly, alternating between a trot and a quick walk. The reeds grew nearer, and the mosquitoes more persistent, along with buzzing horseflies and half a dozen other types of noisy insects. In the abstract, Adrienne knew that marshes were vital to the food chain, nurseries for fish and wildfowl and any number of other good things. In the concrete here-and-now, she found this one seriously interfering with her good mood.

  Simmons reined in well away from the edge of the marsh, throwing up a hand to halt the others. The verge was scalloped here, a tongue of very slightly higher land running inward to make an egg-shaped embayment of dry ground about a thousand yards deep and half that across at the mouth, with the fat end toward the swamp. Two dead camels lay nea
r the bottom of the egg, and the stink was formidable even at this distance; they must have been caught coming back from grazing on the reeds at the edge. The three condors crawled over the carrion like greater versions of the insects that swarmed about the feast in a glittering cloud.

  “Dropped both camels with head shots from right here,” Simmons confirmed; he was a little vain of his marksmanship, and the rifle in his saddle scabbard had a telescopic sight attached. “The condors’ll be heavy and sleepy, ought to be slow to take off—not that they’re hummingbirds at the best of times.”

  The big birds were feeding; one had its head deep in the feral camel’s body cavity. It pulled it out, looking curiously around, and returned to its meal. Adrienne didn’t consider herself squeamish; she’d been reared in the country, had watched livestock slaughtered since she was barely six, and had gutted and skinned plenty of game herself, starting not much later. She still had to swallow slightly as she surveyed the scene with her monocular.

  Condors were spectacularly messy feeders, and the camels were extremely ripe after days in this heat.

  “Keep it quiet,” Simmons said—quietly. “Dismount, spread out, and don’t get too close. Jake, get the net. Kolo, you’re our backup.”

  Condors had never been hunted in New Virginia; they were a protected species, which could be taken only with an authorization from the Central Committee or the Chairman. They wouldn’t be very wary of human beings, but their dim little instinct-machine minds would associate anything large and alive with danger if it was close enough.

  The party all swung down from the saddle, drew their rifles from the saddle scabbards and slung them over their backs, moving cautiously and with minimal noise; it was very quiet, nothing louder than the sough of wind through the tule reeds and the buzz of insects, punctuated by an occasional clatter of harness and clop of hooves as the horses shifted position. Simmons’s cousin Jake drove in a tethering stake and tied the pack-mule’s leading reins to it before he unlimbered the net and hurried up to join his relative at the front of the party. Adrienne and her two assistant-bodyguards followed on foot as well, leading their mounts; she admired the smooth way Simmons and his cousin deployed the net between them, stooping carefully to reduce their height and visual signal to their prey. Kolomusnim waited farther back, the cages at his feet and the reins of the two white men’s horses draped over his arm.