Conquistador

by S. M. Stirling

  The Colletta shrugged again. “Hey, we didn’t cry when all the local Injuns dropped dead of flu and measles and menin-whatsis, did we? This is just another accident, only from China instead of FirstSide.”

  Rolfe bit back, No, we didn’t cry. And we didn’t infect them deliberately, either. Back in the 1940s he’d been vaguely aware from high school history classes that European diseases had wrought havoc in the New World, but nobody had suspected just how much havoc.

  I don’t pretend to be a humanitarian, but there are limits, he thought. I’m perfectly prepared to take advantage of the plagues, but not to start them with intent. I don’t think there’s anything that Salvatore wouldn’t do, just for the sake of convenience.

  Saying that aloud would mean an irreparable break between the two Families, which would endanger the stability of the whole Commonwealth. He’d need solid evidence to challenge the Colletta or impose any sanctions on the Family. As Chairman, he could order an investigation… on the other hand, there would also be hell to pay politically if he put Gate Security onto the matter, unless he came up with damned solid proof. There was always a little murmuring among the other Families about the Rolfes’ dominant position.

  And if I know anything about Salvatore Colletta, I know he wouldn’t leave evidence lying around. Salvo isn’t the only one who knows how to pick his fights.

  He looked at young Abraham Pearlmutter. “What are the effects in Hawaii likely to be?”

  The young man spread his hands. “From what I’ve read of similar virgin-field outbreaks in FirstSide history, and from the photographs and notes from Hawaii, we can expect at least a fifty percent die-off there. Probably more; this is hemorrhagic smallpox, the type with the highest mortality. It seems there was a simultaneous outbreak of chicken pox spread by contact with some crewman with shingles, and if so then the die-off in Hawaii could be as high as ninety percent. That’s including the usual secondary effects, lack of nursing because so many are sick, unburied bodies producing other diseases, disruption of the food supply, and so forth.”

  “Unfortunate,” Rolfe murmured, then went on: “And here?”

  “Well, sir, there’s one hundred percent smallpox vaccination among the New Virginian population, of course. We managed to contain the spread among the nahua workers here by quarantine, and my people are vaccinating them all right now. A few hundred are dead or dying. But some of them managed to steal horses and run before we could identify all the infected individuals, and if any of the wild tribes take them in”—another shrug—“it could run all the way from the Pacific to the Atlantic and bounce back from the Arctic down to South America, the way the earlier plagues did. The native population is very much thinner on the ground now than it was back in the forties, of course, which might interrupt transmission. But this is a very nasty and persistent pathogen; it can sit for years on a blanket or piece of leather. And these days a lot of the inland Indians have horses, which lets them move around faster, and trade blankets, so infected individuals and things they’ve touched spread the virus further before they die. It’ll probably kill at least half of any previously unexposed population, and more likely up to nine-tenths. Small groups might be wiped out altogether as they fall below the minimum numbers for viability.”

  His father winced visibly. The best estimates were that the native populations of the Americas had already gone down by more than three quarters in the twenty-odd years since the Gate opened; by over ninety percent here on the West Coast, where fresh pathogens kept seeping through the Gate despite decontamination. There had been epidemics of everything from measles to malaria to viral meningitis, and a fresh variety of flu every couple of years. Old World childhood diseases and minor maladies were mass killers here in the Americas and the isolated Pacific islands, just as they had been in FirstSide history after Columbus. The Pearlmutter Family had pushed for medical missions, once the scale of the thing became obvious, but that had been a drop in a bucket. You couldn’t vaccinate a thousand tiny bands of nomads, most of whom ran at the first sight of a New Virginian.

  Rolfe tapped his VMI class ring against the smooth mahogany of the table, a habit of his when he’d made up his mind.

  “Very well,” he said. “No use crying over spilt milk. That leaves the question of Hawaii. The probable depopulation does make annexation a simple matter, since we don’t have to consider a policy change. As the Colletta has pointed out, the islands would be useful as a base for trade in the Pacific, and to produce tropical staples like coffee and sugar we’re currently using valuable Gate transit to import.”

  Salvatore Colletta’s eyes narrowed again. He might not have much formal education, but Rolfe had found he had an instinctive grasp of small-group conspiratorial politics—particularly when someone was about to put the shaft in.

  “But,” the head of the committee went on, “since we’re all anxious to avoid any appearance of impropriety, and in recognition of the burden the Collettas have borne so far, I think we should declare the Hawaiian islands to be Commission properties, governed directly as common land, like Rolfeston and the gold-mining districts. Subsidiary landed properties and development franchises on the islands to be granted on the usual investment and lottery basis for those Families who wish to apply; and with reservation of some choice areas to the Collettas, as recompense for their patriotic willingness to open up this new territory. And we should certainly look favorably on the Colletta’s request for a grant in the Owens Valley by way of compensation.”

  “I second the Rolfe’s motion,” the Pearlmutter said quickly.

  The Colletta opened his mouth. Rolfe cut in smoothly, “Of course, if the committee doesn’t have a consensus, we could refer the matter to the House of Burgesses.”

  Salvo looked as if he’d just swallowed a green persimmon, rather than been reminded of a mistake. He had been loudly against establishing a representative body at all, however limited its powers, and that had cost him badly in the elections. His own affiliates had voted for his candidates, of course, but few others. The Rolfes had a bigger affiliation and had done much better among the unaffiliated free-agent Settlers, which in turn gave them more clout on the committee. And it was highly unlikely that Salvo would want to set a precedent for giving the Burgesses more authority. He subsided, visibly relaxing back into his chair.

  “Motion has been seconded,” the clerk droned—he was a young scion of the Kimmels; nobody but members of the Thirty Families attended Central Committee meetings. “All in favor? Carried by acclamation. Let the will of the Commission be recorded as…”

  Salvatore Colletta lingered after the other Family heads and their scions had left; John gave his son an imperceptible nod, and the younger Rolfe followed Colletta’s heir out the door. The two older men looked at each other for a moment, and then Rolfe shrugged.

  “Fine boy… young man… you have there, Salvo.”

  The Colletta was wearing one of his Milanese silk suits today, and Rolfe had to admit that he carried it off well; he’d gained a good deal of smoothness over the years that had put a sprinkling of gray in his raven-black hair.

  “And the same for yours, Cap’n,” he said.

  Their eyes met, and said much more than either of them intended to lay out in words. But then, we always understood each other well, even back in Baker Company, Rolfe thought. We haven’t necessarily liked each other, but we certainly knew how the other man’s mind worked. Which is a commentary on one or the other of us, or possibly both. Aloud, he went on: “They do seem a bit… quieter than we were at their ages.”

  “Hey, Cap’n, we was condotierri, at their ages,” Salvo said, with that charming grin he’d always had at hand when he needed it. “Running mule-trains upcountry and fighting off wild Injuns an’ icing big shots and bosses on FirstSide who tried to muscle in on our action. These boys, they’re studying to step into our shoes. They’re civile, not wild men like us.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  San Francisco

  June 2
009

  FirstSide

  “Well, at least this isn’t as ugly as that asshole-of-the-universe part of LA,” Tom Christiansen muttered, looking at the shuttered windows and locked doors of the building across the street. “Crowded, but the crowds are friendlier. And it isn’t so hot.”

  Mark Twain had once said that the coldest winter he ever lived through was a summer in San Francisco. This June day was a little on the cool side of warm, with the sun high and bright in a sky that was clear but slightly hazy. It might have been March or November just as easily as June. There was a strong wind from the Pacific, too.

  “Yeah, and we fit in so fucking well,” Roy Tully replied. “Or at least you do, Kemosabe.”

  Not here in the Mission district, I don’t, Tom thought.

  Of course, six-foot-three blonds with shoulders a yard across weren’t exactly inconspicuous most other places, unless he wanted to confine his career to the upper Midwest and/or Scandinavia. They stood out even more in the heart of San Francisco’s traditional Latino district. It could have been worse, though. The action could have been in Chinatown.

  Tully’s shorter and dark, but he’s not stylish enough to be a real San Franciscan, I suppose.

  They weren’t really on a stakeout; they were just checking that nobody was at the other location owned by the people who were supposed to be at the first location… and he felt even more useless than that suggested. This operation was FBI, with the SFPD handling backup and supplying manpower. The Fish and Game men were embarrassingly superfluous. If Special Operations had gotten any sort of a handle on where the local varieties of contraband were coming from, they might be contributing something valuable to the investigation. As it was they were tagalongs, and if this went on they were also going to look like completely incompetent tagalongs.

  And I know things about RM&M and the Oakland angle, the problem is, so far they’ve been completely useless.

  “Well, let’s be good little tagalongs,” he said. “Obviously, nobody’s here. Plan B—we go play with the big boys and girls.”

  He pulled out his phone and keyed Sarah Perkins’s number. “Yo,” he said. “Minding the store? This one’s definitely not open for business.”

  “This one is. We’re going shopping in twenty minutes,” she replied. “You’re welcome to come along. This time it’s tasteful merchandise, not that garish LA stuff.”

  “Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” Tom replied. To his partner, he went on: “They’re going in—discreetly, not with a SWAT team.”

  Tully nodded. “Well, this is the town of refinement, not LA Brutal. I’m surprised they don’t send a scented notification card, so nobody’s feelings will be hurt when they bust ’em.”

  They turned up Twenty-fourth and onto a side street near Balmy Alley, past bakeries with mouthwatering scents, little produce stores spilling over with vegetables and fruits—some of them he couldn’t recognize—and butcher shops and thrift stores…. Salsa poured out of music stores and slow-moving cars, and the crowds surged around him, past an amazing variety of colorful murals and more taquerías than he could count.

  It occurred to him that if he’d really been sight-seeing here, it would be quite enjoyable—for a day or two. If he had to live here, he’d soon run screaming for Golden Gate Park and dash around waving his arms in the air and babbling for a while before he went over a cliff and into the ocean. Where the waves would burst into steam as they touched his brain. It was just too completely, classically urban for him to tolerate for long.

  The taquerías prompted a thought: “Let’s at least look like tourists and not cops trying to blend in and failing,” he said, looking at his watch. It was 10:10 exactly, and time to be moving.

  Plus the Mission district has the best burritos in the world, he added to himself. All others are a pale imitation. And one of their burritos makes a pretty good lunch.

  They stopped and bought two: rice, beans, strips of grilled beef, salsa, guacamole and sour cream wrapped in a flour tortilla, and that in aluminum foil, which kept it warm and less messy. He chatted with the server in Spanish—although the Tejano accent he’d picked up from a girlfriend during his first year in the army struck the Guatemalan lady serving the takeout as hilarious—and then they strolled along taking in the sights as they ate. Two friends eating burritos were a lot less suspicious than two empty-handed Fish and Game agents. He took his first bite with real enjoyment; the rice was flavorful and not mushy, the beans had a hint of a tang to them, and the salsa was appropriately nuclear, soothed by the richness of the meat and the soft coolness of the sour cream. There was nothing like the competition in the burrito capital of the world to keep the vendors honest.

  “Who do you figure blew up the warehouse in LA?” Tully said around a mouthful of his own.

  “I think the Viets had it right,” Tom replied after a swallow. “Some sort of internal power struggle going on in the Russian Mafia. Maybe a policy disagreement; say some of them want to get into the endangered-animal smuggling, and some think it’s too dangerous and want to stick with nose candy, horse, selling girls and generalized racketeering… or even going respectable, the way the Italians eventually did. That’s pretty standard gang stuff; you always get a conservative faction squabbling with a fangs-out-and-hair-on-fire bunch. The wild men are the ones who probably linked up with the dirty group among RM and M’s employees.”

  “Pretty skanky that their ‘conservative’ bunch got to the warehouse just when we did,” Tully observed. “Of course, once is coincidence.”

  “Twice is happenstance, and the third time proves it was enemy action all along and you were a dummy for not seeing it the first time,” Tom said. “Yup, there’s a leak somewhere from police sources. Probably more than one. There’s serious money involved.”

  “The sort that could get Spider-man to smuggle shit across the border,” Roy said as they wadded up the foil wrappers of the burritos and threw them into a waste container along with the napkins they used to wipe their mouths. “And here we are.”

  Indrasul Pan-Pacific Exports occupied a tiny storefront in a twenties-vintage three-story building, flanked on one side by a recycled-clothing store and on the other by a dusty-looking shop window filled with an amazing mixture of junky used furniture and real curios—everything from glass net-floaters to flamboyantly colored Balinese dancers’ masks. If he’d been on his own time, he could have spent a couple of enjoyable hours there, and he made a note to come back.

  Hell, I could come here with Adrienne, he thought, and then shoved it aside—a nice notion, but too distracting right now.

  Sarah Perkins was across the street from it, leaning her butt against a car and reading a paper with her face away from the target; she was also wearing glasses to conceal an ear mike for feed from various survelliance cameras.

  Tom and his partner walked across the street and looked in the shopfront.

  “We’re go at eleven P.M. exactly,” she said casually, shaking the paper flat and turning a page. “Targets went in at nine this morning and haven’t come out; one visitor, unidentified Caucasian male, mid-twenties, left about half an hour ago. We’ve had full surveillance since a little after that. Everything looks exactly the way the anonymous Vietnamese-American good citizen said it would. Any news on your weird condor?”

  “Nada,” Tom said. “He still sits in solitary glory in San Diego, being prepared for life as stud of the captive flock.”

  He turned and leaned his own shoulder against the building; from that position he could look across the street without appearing to stare. Sure enough, he could see a man’s head and shoulders over the back of an office chair.

  “Uh-oh,” Roy said. “Awful crick in the neck there for Mr. Stationary.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Tom said under his breath. That position would be extremely painful if you kept it for more than a few seconds. “Sarah?”

  “Shit!” she said crisply, throwing down the paper and turning to stare at the window. “Give me a
magnification on the subject… switch to thermal… shit, he’s room-temperature. Go!”

  All three of them were sprinting across the street with their guns out before Sarah’s paper finished hitting the ground. Tom had been a running back in high school—and attracted the notice of several football talent scouts before he decided to join the army; he was halfway across the street and dodging a car that came to a screeching, cursing halt just short of his hips as he twisted aside like a matador. Tully and Perkins were six very long strides behind, and they had to scramble around the automobile. That might have saved them injury when the windows of the second-story office blew out in a spectacular flash of light, blue-white and then orange.

  Tom caught the first flicker with a subliminal alertness common to those who’d survived being shelled. He dove forward onto the sidewalk, thankful for the body armor under his T-shirt; an elbow abraded painfully, but the sensation was distant. A quick look over his shoulder showed half a dozen people injured, but none of the wounds looked serious; a lot more were screaming and running—the war had been over for a while, but after those years people in the United States took bombs extremely seriously. Flames were shooting out of the shattered windows above his head, hot enough to instantly darken the stucco around them and with only a little smoke. That meant a fairly small explosive charge—Semtex to kill, and incendiaries to cover up the evidence with a fire hot enough to make steel burn.

  He shoved himself off the ground and catapulted forward, through the open door and up the flight of stairs that ran up from it—the ground-floor shop was already empty and the door at its rear still swung. Halfway up the stairs he could feel the heat blasting out through the half-open doors, and he stripped off his shirt as he ran, winding it around his left arm. Tom sheltered his face with that as he kicked the door open, holding a fold of cloth across his mouth with his teeth as he peered squint-eyed into the offices—an outer receptionists’, and the inner sanctum whose window he’d seen from the street. They were already an inferno, fire running in sheets up the walls and flaring out along the ceiling and spreading among a chaos of shattered desks and doors, tumbled filing cabinets and their contents and scattered computer components. The paper was smoking, nearing its ignition heat, and so was every piece of wood not actually on fire. Squinting, he could make out a body lying on the floor with its feet still up on the toppled swivel chair; the once-white shirt showed where four bullets had been pumped into the man’s chest, grouped rather neatly around the middle of the breastbone.