Conquistador

by S. M. Stirling

  Besides…

  Crack.

  The shot came from behind him, and the tall blond man in the beret a hundred yards ahead staggered, clutching at his arm.

  Tom could have placed the location of the shooter easily from the sound alone, but he was expecting it. Everyone else was staring off toward the tent camp, and the chorus of screams and shouts there. And the high shrill whoops, and the flat banging of muskets. Some of the Russian officers and noncoms marching toward the transport aircraft with their Zapotec trainees had hit the ground and had their personal arms out, and they were bellowing at their charges to do the same. Tom was worried about their reflexes; they’d been there when it hit the fan before.

  Less worried about the Colletta household troops manning the armor or lining the road. This was their first taste of the devil’s stew, mostly.

  Crack.

  The blond went down with limp finality, but the smaller man beside him had hit the dirt with commendable speed.

  Good girl, Tom thought; she’d gotten one definitely at least.

  “Good girl!” Tully said. “Didn’t freeze, and kept on thinking.”

  The armored car loomed up, massive and shadowed—most of the light was coming from the landing lights of the airstrip behind him, and they were placed low and pointed straight up. The commander was still out of the turret hatch, his head cocked as he listened to something on the headphones he held in one hand rather than wearing. Now he was looking back a little, at the group of figures in gray field uniforms approaching him, but the light welling up out of the turret would make them indistinct. It made him very clear to Tom, down to the Colletta flash on his shoulder.

  Tom began shouting: in Russian, keeping his voice deliberately blurred. The commander of the Catamount probably didn’t know Russian very well, and wouldn’t expect to understand what this tall blond man was shouting. He would recognize the sound of the language and immediately assume it was one of his lord’s Batyushkov allies.

  Five yards from the vehicle, Tom began to run. Adrienne and Tully were both at his heels, but he left them behind; people were usually surprised at how suddenly Tom Christiansen could accelerate, although not those who’d seen him as a running back at Ironwood High. His legs were long enough that he walked quickly even without taking fast strides, and when he did…

  Three paces, and he was moving fast enough to leap, reaching for one of the U-brackets welded to the car’s hull. The commander started to drop down into the turret; unfortunately, he also tried to reach for the pintle-mounted machine gun beside the hatch and to shout something into his throat mike, all at the same time. The net result was that he did nothing for a crucial second and a half.

  Tom’s hand clamped on the bracket. His shoulder muscles crackled as he heaved, combining with the thrust of his legs to throw him up onto the flat deck of the fighting vehicle in a single six-foot bound. The muzzle of the machine gun swung toward him; there was nothing wrong with the other man’s instincts, although he wasn’t going to acquire the experience he needed to use them properly. Tom grabbed the gun in his left hand and wrenched it brutally away; that turned the weapon into a long lever at the end of Tom’s even longer arm, a combination that slammed the man holding it into the side of the hatchway with enormous force. He gave an agonized wheeze as it rammed into his body just below the ribs like a blunt axe, but his hand scrabbled at his belt and the holstered .45 anyway.

  The determination was admirable, but futile. Tom’s right hand closed on his throat and rammed his head sideways into the upright hatch cover. Bone hit steel with a sound like heavy dense wood splintering under an iron maul. Wetness spattered Tom’s wrist; he ignored it and surged the man’s body up in a straight lift and threw it aside. It tumbled limply on to the rear deck of the Catamount, then slid over the side like something made of jelly.

  Adrienne was right behind him. As the body cleared the hatchway she went into it head first… except that her right hand went before it, with the FN FiveSeveN pistol, and her left to brace her against something in the interior. Tom caught her by the rear loop of her webbing harness, taking some of the weight.

  The little weapon yapped shrilly, three times, hard to hear amid the growing clamor—the burble of the idling diesel would have been enough to cover it. He was profoundly glad it was her doing this part and not him; he was anything but a pistol artist, particularly not in the strait confines of an AFV’s turret.

  “Clear!” she called, and wiggled backward.

  He helped, then popped the gunner’s hatch, reached in and pulled out the body of the man who’d occupied that position; it required a bit of shoving and shaking, as well as strength, to prevent the limp weight from catching on things. The dead gunner had a hole in the back of his neck. Most of the front of it missing in a ragged hole that was still pumping out blood, and the body dripped fluids as it came free. Tom threw the corpse away with unnecessary violence.

  While he did, Tully was running around to the front of the armored car and leaping up the slope of the wedge-shaped glacis plate. The hatch over the driver’s compartment was open, and the central window was spattered with brains and bits of matter. Tully dragged the body out; using both hands and his back, but not taking too much time about it. He was five-six and scrawny, but his strength in a tight spot was surprising.

  The whole business had taken perhaps forty-five seconds from the moment Tom made his move.

  Now he slid into the hatchway himself, feet first. It was well enough lit inside, and the surfaces were mostly painted or enameled white for better visibility anyway. And it was more spacious than any APC he’d ever ridden in, too. The Commonwealth didn’t need to design its fighting vehicles to resist modern weaponry, only small arms at most. This was essentially a big overpowered cross-country amphibious truck with a turret on top. Tom took the gunner’s position to the left of the breech of the Bofors gun and the big carousel of ammunition beneath it, ignoring the tackiness and the smell, and wiping off the control surfaces with a handkerchief and the sleeve of his tunic until they were clean enough for government work.

  Adrienne had given him a rundown on the fighting machine, and a glance was enough to fix the needful details in his mind’s eye. Most of the middle of the turret was taken up with the cannon’s workings; an automatic loader cycled rounds up to the breech, presenting the five-round clips to the action; the spent casings ejected out a port in the side of the turret. The gunner’s couch-style seat was leather cushioned, with a screen and control yoke before it—there was a backup set of optical sights, and manual wheels for elevation and traverse, but New Virginia had bought state of the art otherwise. Everything stabilized, and a laser rangefinder tied into the sighting screen with feedback through the ballistic computer. The screen showed everything out front, a compressed 180-degree display from a wide-lens pickup right over the gun’s barrel and two more at either front corner of the turret; in the center of it was a circle with diagonal arms just touching its perimeter. Place the pipper over the target, and the gun would automatically adjust so the shells hit right there. Another circle, smaller and to the left, gave the point of impact for the coaxial machine gun. The controls were computerized simplicity, a horizontal bar with upright handgrips at each end. Twist left like you did with a bicycle’s handlebars and the turret rotated left; twist right for the other direction. Pull back and the gun went up; push forward and it depressed; button under the left thumb for the co-ax, and a foot pedal for firing the main gun. Dial on the control panel to select type of ammunition and fusing.

  The screen had magnification up to twelve times, too, and full light amplification. The scene outside was as clear as an overcast noon.

  He pulled on the intercom headset as he ran through the controls once more, touching everything so his hands and feet would know what to do. That wouldn’t make him an expert, but he didn’t have to refight the Battle of 73 Easting , either.

  “I’ve got the unit push for the Colletta troops,” Adrienne’s
voice said in his ear. “Tully, you’ve got the closest thing to the local accent, male variety. I’m switching you live. Sound hysterical.”

  “No problemo,” Tully said.

  “Switching… now.”

  He went on with a thickening of his native Arkansas, in a voice shrill with fear and excitement:

  “We’re under attack! The Injuns are attacking! The strike force are joining them! They’re breaking into the bunkers and taking the ammuntion. I say again, we’re under attack! Open fire on any strike force or Indians you see!”

  He repeated himself and then squealed: “No! God, no! Help—” and then let loose a bone-chilling scream of agony, dying off in a gurgle and a click as the exterior link was cut. Then a hoot of laughter… Roy had a rather gruesome sense of humor, when you came right down to it.

  As Tully spoke, Tom settled his big hands on the control yoke and felt the quiver of the feedback. A twist, and the lower pip of the screen slid over the dirt road, still full of the startled mercenaries. His left thumb jabbed down again and again, and a streak of tracer lashed out like a finger of red arching fire as the co-ax stuttered long bursts into the packed rows of men. Adrienne was firing the pintle-mounted gun above, standing in the commander’s position with her head and shoulders out of the turret.

  “Yes!” Tom shouted.

  The rest of the Colletta troopers were firing at the mass of Zapotecs and their Russian cadre too!

  And the Russians, at least, were shooting back. With empty weapons their students just hugged the ground, or less wisely jumped up and ran and were cut down. Both the lighter armored cars were firing as well; just then the landing lights on the airstrip went out, and the light level outside fell to something approaching full night. It didn’t affect the armored car’s screens at all, save for an imperceptible flicker as the intensification went up; probably someone at the Colletta HQ wanted to put the Zapotecs at a disadvantage. Behind them the control shack for the airstrip went up in a blast that flung its plank walls away as black confetti in front of orange-red flame.

  “Good show, Jim!” Adrienne called, and whooped.

  Tom ignored that, and the Indian mercenaries. The ones left on the ground were doomed anyway, and he didn’t much like shooting at effectively unarmed men. Instead he lifted his thumb and kept the turret swinging; it had a nice fast traverse. A few seconds later the main sighting pip slid onto the side of the Cheetah on his right. That was lashing the road with both weapons, a heavy machine gun and a belt-fed grenade launcher beside it… and both of those would rip the thin armor that surrounded him the way a machete would open up a soda can. The grenades arched out almost slowly enough to see, bursting with bright snaps in rows like firecrackers.

  The Cheetah spurted forward onto the dirt road, its turret whickering spiteful flames in the darkness. Tom’s foot came down on the firing pedal.

  BADUMP! BADUMP! BADUMP!

  The 40mm automatic cannon cycled through three rounds as it pistoned back and forth, and a massive blade-shaped muzzle flash belled out from its muzzle. The twelve-ton weight of the Catamount surged back on its suspension as the massive recoil was transmitted through the trunnions to the turret and hull, like three hard punches in succession.

  Those shells were fused for contact; each punched into the little vehicle and exploded, one in the turret, one in the fighting compartment and one in the fuel tank between the engine and the turret basket. That was enough to rip the Cheetah apart along the seams of its welds; fractional seconds later the belts of grenade ammuntion went off; the contents of the tank sprayed out into a finely divided mist of hydrocarbon mixed with air and then they exploded—the original meaning of a fuel-air bomb. Tom grunted as the big armored car rocked back on its wheels, and Adrienne yipped in involuntary alarm; the Cheetah’s turret went flipping up into the air like a steel tiddlywink. Most of the rest of it was converted into the equivalent of fragments from an enormous grenade. Some of them went pting! off the hull of the Catamount.

  He didn’t think they’d have to worry about the Colletta riflemen between them and the armored car, much.

  “Goose it, Tully!” he called, reversing the controls and swinging the turret northwest with a wrenching suddenness that made the servos whine in protest.

  Jesus, I was a Ranger, not a tanker—

  The armored car was moving before the first syllable was out of his mouth; Tully threw it into reverse and swung the wheel hard right. All four of the first two pair of wheels were steerable; the Catamount had a tighter turning radius than many much smaller civilian vehicles. That turned the bow back toward the remaining Cheetah at the other end of the line considerably faster than the turret could have done alone.

  Someone there had realized what was happening. The little car was scooting away, its turret reversed to fire behind it and the twin bars of tracer swiveling toward him. They were throwing .50 caliber hardpoint bullets, each the size of a thumb and moving at better than three thousand feet per second. If they hit the thin armor of the Catamount, they’d be moving at least half that when they went through him, or Adrienne or Tully.

  But driving straight away from him was a bad idea. Zero-deflection shot… His foot came down on the firing pedal.

  BADUMP! BADUMP! BADUMP!

  “Tom, the transports!” Adrienne called urgently from where she rode with her head and shoulders out of the commander’s hatch.

  As she spoke he heard thumps on the roof of the turret, and the gunner’s hatch popped open. He looked up, and saw Sandra Margolin’s pale, strained face; she climbed down across him—which would have been interesting, under other circumstances—and then dropped to crouch on the floor of the turret basket. She even muttered an apology as she did it. He checked quickly to see that she wasn’t in a position were she’d be in the path of the gun breech or loader.

  Adrienne went on sharply: “Tully, Sandra’s here. Get us out on the runway. Now.”

  Tully did, straightening the wheels and hitting the accelerator. The engine was a three-hundred horsepower turbocharged diesel, and the twelve-ton vehicle had acceleration like a jeep. It had a lot more inertia, though, and Tom braced himself with a foot and a hand as it bounced over the ditch on the side of the road, over several bumpy objects—he resolutely didn’t think of them as human bodies, probably still alive until a dozen tons rolled over them—and across the strip of dirt. The fence beside the runway was chain-link, with barbed wire on top.

  “Close the hatch!” he called to Adrienne as the fence loomed up in the field of the gun screen; you could get decapitated by something like that, if you weren’t careful.

  She dropped down, pulling the hatch after her; the Catamount lurched as they struck the wire. Some of it broke in a shower of sparks; one of the thick timber posts snapped across and tumbled out over the dirt runway, dragging open a section like a huge door. The Catamount swayed to one side as Tully cut a sharp turn—he wasn’t used to driving something this heavy or overpowered either, but Jesus, Odhinn and Almighty Thor witness he was doing a good job!—and hit the gas. The Catamount surged forward like its namesake, going after the sixth transport. The big plane had its ramp up, and the rising scream of its engines came even through the closed hatch.

  Tom Christiansen had ridden in a lot of C-130 transports, a couple of them into places where they thought there might be hostiles waiting near the landing fields with heat-seeking missiles. He could imagine exactly the fear and confusion aboard the big aircraft, the dim light and crowding and the mind-numbing noise.

  And he could imagine exactly what the hundred-odd men packed into it cheek to jowl were about to experience.

  The aiming pip slid across the flat rear of the Hercules, eight hundred yards away to the west. It tilted as the nose left the ground…. And Tom’s foot hit the firing pedal.

  BADUMP! BADUMP! BADUMP! The first burst of three rounds hit the thin aluminum of the closed ramp like a giant blade. The ramp dropped open as the shells cut the couplings, shedding great rooster
tails of sparks as it dragged on the ground.

  BADUMP! BADUMP! BADUMP! Flashes as the shells exploded in the troop compartment. Tom’s lips writhed back from his teeth in a grimace of horror.

  BADUMP! BADUMP! BADUMP!

  He hit something vital this time, the control cabin or the hydraulics. The huge aircraft stopped accelerating away; it tried to turn sharply left while it was traveling faster than a race car, and then pitched over onto one wing as it overbalanced. There was an explosion of sparks, probably from one of the props beating itself to death against the ground, then a real explosion—vaporized kerosene from one of the wing tanks hitting something white-hot. Tom flung his hand up in a reflex action, even though there was nearly a thousand yards of space and a quarter-inch of armor plate between him and the holocaust that followed. A towering ball of flame enveloped the Hercules, and engines and part of a wing flipped out of it. The armored car rocked back, harder than it had from the recoil of its own weapon, then surged forward as Tully hit the brakes. The frame of the C-130 showed again for a moment, and then the stored munitions on board went off; bits and pieces flew into the air, trailing fire and white smoke through the night.

  “Jesus,” Tom whispered. “A hundred and thirty men. Jesus!”

  “Tom!” Adrienne said sharply.

  “Yah,” he replied, scrubbing a hand across his face.

  Tully gave a rebel yell and swung the car around in a tight leaning circle—not quite on one side’s wheels—and they raced back down the airstrip. Tom turned the turret ninety degrees, waiting as the motion dragged the sighting pip across the remaining five C-130s. Those were empty of troops, and probably abandoned by their three-man crews at this point. It wasn’t necessary to destroy them either, just to put a couple of shells into their noses. They wouldn’t be going anywhere after that.

  BADUMP! BADUMP! BADUMP!