Conquistador

by S. M. Stirling

  Piet Botha was crouched on his hams beside his son, both hands—his huge, scarred hands—on the stock of the rifle that rested with its butt between his knees. His brutal face was as impassive as ever; for an instant one hand reached out and touched the younger man’s hair.

  “Nie.” he sighed. “Let there be no foolishness or waste of time.”

  His chin jerked out toward the darkness. Not far away the Indians were holding some sort of ceremony over their dead, doubtless preparatory to coming after revenge. Their howls came out of the star-bright night and echoed up from the canyon, more chilling than wolves because they weren’t mindless.

  “We must have a rearguard,” he said. “Or the rest will never break free. Schalk can still fight from cover. I also, of course. And one more fit man able to move about.”

  The dark somber eyes flicked across their faces. I can’t believe what I’m going to say, Tom thought as he opened his mouth.

  “Man, I cannot believe that I’m doing this,” Henry Villers said, pulling the Bren gun from its carrying rack behind his saddle. “And with these two. OK, you mothers don’t give me any shit, now. I’m a machine gunner, and I’m the oldest man here after big brother Boer. So we’ll hold them as long as we can, then pull up into those rocks. Tully, my man, you get me some of that Semtex and some detonators, right? And plenty of ammunition. See y’all later.”

  Meaning in the afterlife, if any, Tom thought.

  He shook hands with each of the men and silently walked toward his horse; so did Tully and Simmons. Adrienne paused for a second to speak quietly to each; Henry handed her a sealed letter he’d written days ago. Her face might have been carved from ivory as it passed him; Sandra was weeping quietly, wiping at her eyes with the backs of her hands.

  “Hail and farewell,” Tom murmured to himself as he swung into the saddle. The desert sky above was an arch of hoarfrost, and the rocks glimmered to the northward.

  “Let’s go,” Adrienne said, reining her mount’s head around. “If we push, we can make Jackhammer Gap by dawn.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Mohave/Owens Valley

  July-August 2009

  The Commonwealth of New Virginia

  “Damn the Akaka for running us so far off course,” Adrienne said, looking up from the map. “We’ve been zigzagging so much we’ve ridden more miles east and west than south to north.”

  Westward the peaks of the southern Sierras towered, close now and looking closer in late afternoon; the snow-topped heights farther north were ethereally lovely, but they also made Tom think of iced drinks. The desert had sloped up for a week of hard night travel now, and Tom’s inner ear told him they were at well over a thousand feet. It was perceptibly cooler in daytime—just very hot, not a brutal wringing that made your eyes bulge as if someone were tightening a steel cable around your temples. The nights were positively cool, which made traveling a pleasure—particularly since they’d shaken the last of the Akaka warriors in the canyons of the Randburg mountains to the southeast. After that they’d seen an occasional dust plume or the wink of sunlight on steel, but nothing closer.

  “The problem is Owens Lake,” Jim Simmons said, pointing. “It plugs the base of the valley like a cork. If we want to get to Cerro Gordo in the Inyos, we have to backtrack from here. That’s bad country, and we may run into more of Swift Lance’s men, too.”

  “Whatever the Colletta is paying them, it isn’t enough,” Adrienne said. “Goddamned persistent bunch.”

  Tom looked at the map, shaking his head. The basic geography of the area they were heading for was the same, a north-south trench between the eastern Sierras and the White-Inyo range. But back FirstSide, the Owens Lake area at its southern end was a waterless expanse of salts, empty since the 1920s. LA’s insatiable thirst had sucked the valley dry like a giant mosquito with a proboscis two hundred and fifty miles long.

  Here the dry bed he knew was a real lake, over a hundred square miles of it—mostly shallow, salty as the ocean, but indubitably wet.

  “Short of going even farther west and then climbing over one of the Sierra passes, I don’t think we’ve got any choice but this,” he said, pointing with one long strong finger.

  He traced a route up along the flank of the mountains. “Up here, between the Sierras and the Coso mountains—through the Rose Valley. We go around the western shore of the lake, and once we’re past the narrows at Little Lake and the Haiwee reservoir—”

  “Haiwee Meadows, here,” Simmons said. “Flat grassy area, with some marsh.”

  “Haiwee Meadows, then, we can keep the Alabama Hills between us and Lone Pine.”

  “The Colletta hunting lodge,” Adrienne corrected him absently. “Where the river meets a seasonal creek coming out of the Alabama Hills, just north of the lake. Officially”—she traced a circle on the map—“that and the mine are all there is.”

  “When we get there, we can take a peek and see what’s what,” he said. “If they’re actually training troops, there’ll be indications of where. I suspect up east in the Inyos, the Cerrro Gordo site. It’s big enough, and out of the way, and they can explain away activity there as mining if anyone notices. We can swing east across the valley floor to the north of the lodge—it’s only five miles wide.”

  “We’d better stick close to the mountains on the way north and keep an eye on a local canyon,” Tully put in. “Because we may need to do the Run away! Run away! thing really quick. The Owens is long, but it’s narrow. And the sides are nearly straight up and down—twelve thousand feet up and down; it’s like God’s bathtub. If the Bad Guys have somewhere near a battalion training there…”

  “Yah, you betcha,” Tom said. “More crowded, so we’re a lot more likely to bump into someone.”

  They finished their evening meal-cum-breakfast of roast rabbit, hardtack, and dried fruit and got under way; it wasn’t dark yet, strictly speaking, but the summer nights were short and they had to take some chances. Simmons and Kolo spread out to the front; the other four rode in a loose line abreast, someone swerving out now and then to keep their little herd of remounts and pack horses from scattering or spending too much time grazing. Tom noticed that he rode with utter naturalness now; his body adjusted to the motions of the horse as easily as it did walking, and controlled it without much more effort. That left his mind and senses free, the swaying and the hollow thudding sound of hooves on dirt like the beat of blood in his ears.

  Of course, he thought with an inward chuckle, I’ve also learned to ignore the way I smell. Ah, well, that’s living in the field for you. At least we don’t have cooties. Yet.

  The open land northward narrowed as the sky darkened; off to the right were piles of dark lava, rising into patterned columns farther north in a cliff eerily reminiscent of a giant rattlesnake lying on its side. The canyons to the left were familiar from the times he’d driven up U.S. 395….

  No, they’re not, he thought suddenly. They don’t have the siphons for the LA Aqueduct crossing them.

  Their path was still through desert except where a seasonal watercourse ran by. This lowland had about the same vegetation as the Mohave proper: creosote, silver-gray sagebrush, screwbean mesquite, clumps of pale yellow grass now and then. There was just a lot more of it for every square foot, and of other life in proportion. The mountains to the west were getting steadily higher and steeper, not the sheer wall they would be farther north around Mount Whitney, but pretty formidable; every couple of miles a canyon slashed back into the granite fortresses, U-shaped if cut by ancient glaciers, V-formed if made by streams that were trickles or dry now, in July.

  The wildlife was changing, too. There was game, not an occasional beast but whole herds of browsers heading up into the Sierras for the summer, to feed off the mountain meadows. A mob of impala trotted by; occasionally one would pronk, leaping straight up a dozen feet or more as if they were propelled by springs, apparently just for the hell of it; the sight gave him a brief flash of melancholy about Piet Botha,
something he’d never have believed when the man was alive. One canyon up—he thought it was Nine-Mile Canyon, which had a road over to the Kern River country on FirstSide—the game was pronghorn, moving along slowly. The pronghorn were nervous, flicking their tails and raising their heads. A forest of funny-looking little horns with backward-sloping tips bobbed as they looked around.

  “Hey,” Tully said from behind him. “Lookit—they’re doing that searchlight-ass thing.”

  That was an alarm gesture, making the white patch on their rumps bristle, visible for miles. A split second later they were all running westward for their lives—literally, because a golden-brown streak was after them from a jumping-off point behind a mesquite bush.

  Cheetah! Tom thought; they all soothed their horses’ natural start of alarm at the sight and scent of an attacking carnivore.

  Cat and antelope ignored them. The cheetah was accelerating as if it had rocket assist, its great hind paws landing as far forward as its ears, the long slender body flexing in a series of huge bounding leaps. The antelope were a little slower off the mark, but their top speed was a bit better than the cheetah’s—about seventy miles per hour as opposed to sixty-five—and they could keep it up a lot longer. One of the rearmost pronghorns nearly ran into the beast ahead of it, dodged to get around it, skidded sideways in a cloud of dust and thrashing of limbs, recovered…

  …but not quite fast enough.

  Got him! Tom thought.

  The slender-limbed hunting cat rammed into the antelope, knocking it over in another puff of dust, then diving through the murk to clamp its jaws on its prey’s throat. Cheetahs killed by bunting their prey off its feet and then choking it; their doglike claws were too blunt to grip the way a lion’s did. By the time the riders went by, fifty or sixty yards to the east, the pronghorn’s limbs had stopped twitching, and the cheetah was settling in to feed. It raised its head and flattened its ears at the sound of the horses’ hooves but didn’t stir from its meal. Tom was slightly surprised; in his experience, predators were a lot more nervous around human beings.

  “Cheetahs only got taken off the reserved list… oh, ten years ago,” Adrienne said, giving the little drama a glance. “They don’t breed as successfully as the other big cats—frankly, they’re too stupid to live. Inbred, and overspecialized.”

  Tom chuckled. “Still, that one’s pretty calm with six people this close.”

  “I don’t think the Collettas came hunting all that often, either, and there haven’t been any Indians to speak of around here for a generation or more. The game’s not man-wary.”

  Tom nodded but didn’t speak; the sun was just dropping behind the Sierras, leaving the tremendous tawny granite cliff a few miles away in darkening purple, tinged with pink at the saw-edge ridge that topped it; night rolled over the valley floor toward them like a wall of shadow. He’d always found this the most magical time of day, tinged with an inexplicable sadness. It was getting cooler, too. He’d been riding in his T-shirt; now he pulled his bush jacket out of a saddlebag and put it on. That was more complicated than it sounded, since he had to undo his combat harness, adjust it, and put it on again over the heavier garment.

  When he looked up he saw Kolo trotting in from the north, on foot. That raised his brows a little… and knotted his stomach a trifle, too. The main reason to travel by foot was to avoid kicking up conspicuous dust, which a horse did when you pushed the gait.

  The Indian stopped in front of them; that let him address the air between Tom and Adrienne. He knew full well that the woman was in command, but it preserved his self-respect if he could pretend he was reporting to the Strong One, which was how he’d referred to Tom since the canyon fight.

  “Camp—old camp, by lake. Many”—he opened and closed his hands several times—“men. On foot.”

  “Better look into that,” Adrienne said.

  Little Lake was a sickle-shaped piece of water with the blunt horns pointing westward, about half a mile long and a few hundred yards across; it was full dark by the time they arrived, with starlight glittering on the still surface of the water. Trees and grass surrounded it; water came from seasonal creeks flowing down from what he knew as Sequoia National Park to the west, and from springs that flowed year-round. Those were sweet water, cold and with only a pleasant mineral tang. Eastward were high volcanic hills, columns of black basalt solidified in a devil’s-pipe-organ pattern.

  If they hadn’t found the campfires, Tom would have proposed a swim—the grime and crusted sweat of the Mohave was still thick on his skin. As it was…

  “The Commonwealth militia use a twelve-man infantry squad, right?” he said.

  “Yes,” Adrienne said. “Two fire teams of six—four riflemen, a Bren gunner, and his assistant—the assistant totes a machine pistol. Why?”

  “This was a military marching camp, about platoon size,” Tom said. “Some mules…”

  “Six,” Sandra put in. “And one horse, from the sign.”

  Simmons nodded. “That’s standard, for an infantry platoon in unroaded country. Mules carry the heavy gear, and the horse’s for the officer or a messenger.”

  Tom pointed out where the tents had been. “Those are about the size of your standard militia item, too, aren’t they?”

  He indicated the other features—the regular spacing of the campfires, the sanitary slit trench filled in not far away. While he spoke, Simmons was quartering the grass, and Kolo crouched by one of the dead fires. They’d been put out with water and buried with a couple of shovelfuls of earth, standard practice. He sniffed, picked up a pinch of the ashes, tasted them.

  “Cold for one day,” he said. “No more.” Then he held up a fragment of bone. “Deer.”

  Simmons gave a little grunt of satisfaction and picked something up from the dirt. He flicked it up with his thumb like a man tossing a coin as he walked back to join the others, then held it out on an extended palm; an empty brass cartridge case.

  “Thirty-aught-six,” Tom said.

  He handed it to Adrienne. “Rolfeston Armory mark,” she said. “Couldn’t have been Colletta household troops. Not this many, this far from the lodge. A squad or two around their Prime, just in case—the desert tribes could raid here, if they were stupid enough to invite retaliation. But not a third of the whole guard company, fossicking around nowhere in particular…”

  “It’s not legal proof I’m concerned with,” Tom said grimly. “Kolo, where did they come from? And where did they go?”

  The Indian pointed northwest. “From there. Yesterday, leave this morning.” He pointed northeast. “Go that way at sunrise.”

  “And no sign of them south of here,” Tom said. “At a guess, this the southern limit of the area they routinely patrol. Probably for training, mostly.”

  Just then Tully grunted and straightened up. “Kemosabe,” he said, holding out a palm. “Take a look.”

  Tom did; it was a rind of some kind of flat bread, about as long as his hand. The surface was brown and had bubbles, and it was stiff—not merely stale, but textured rather like a thin cracker. He took it and tasted an edge; the nutty flavor and grainy feel were unmistakable.

  Corn tortilla. In fact, it’s exactly the sort that Dolorez used to make, back when I was stationed at Fort Hood, he thought—seized for a moment by nostalgia, for a young soldier away from home for the first time, bursting with excitement at the world opening up for him.

  Adrienne touched him on the arm. “Tom?” she said.

  “Ah,” he said, starting. And this is a lot wilder than anything I could imagine then! “It’s a tortilla. Who here eats ’em?”

  “None of the local Indians,” she said. “Not west of the Pueblo tribes. The nahua do, of course—ah.”

  “Yup, you betcha,” he said, tossing it away. “That style of cooking cornmeal is a lot older than Columbus. These soldiers weren’t New Virginians; from the look, they were armed and equipped and organized just the way the household troops of your Families are, but they’re Me
xican. Mesoamerican. Nahua. Whatever.”

  “Thank you,” she said, quietly but with a warmth underneath it. From her glance he knew that she’d just quietly thanked God he was there.

  Then she went on briskly: “All right, we know where they’re going—I’d give odds it’ll be up the foot of the hills to the east, then around the east side of Owens Lake.” She looked at Tom and the others. “Suggestions?”

  Tom tapped thumb and forefinger on his chin. “Well, why don’t we follow ’em a while to make sure? They won’t be moving at night, probably; too inconvenient when they don’t have night-sight equipment. Once we’re sure they’re going the way we think, then we can cut west like we planned.”

  “Let’s do it,” she said, and glanced up. “We’ve got about another five hours of full dark. We’ll have to be careful not to actually run into them.”

  “Whoa,” Tom said softly.

  With night goggles, the track of the patrol was plain enough, and he’d been taking it at a slow canter. Now there was something else there. His horse caught the scent a few seconds after he saw the motionless lump, and sun-fished; Tom dismounted and walked over to it, leading the beast by the reins.

  The lump was a man, spread-eagled, with his arms and legs lashed by rawhide thongs to wooden pegs driven deep into the ground. A short stocky muscular man, naked, and showing the marks of a bad beating—swollen eyes and lips, crusted blood, other bruises on his torso. His black hair was shaven to a bristle-cut of uniform length all over, and his dry tongue showed between his lips. If he’d been left here all day in the summer heat he’d be very thirsty, and very lucky—lucky that some enterprising predator hadn’t happened by and started chewing off bits. As it was, the ant bites were like a rash over most of his torso. His glazed eyes cleared a bit as he heard the hooves thudding near him—Tom and the others would be no more than looming shapes in the dark. The teeth that showed in a snarl of terrified defiance were even and white, although a few were missing. He looked more frightened still when Tom was close enough to see more details. Evidently his experiences with big white men in this uniform weren’t all that pleasant.