The Texas Front: Salient

by Jonathan Cresswell

  de Gama bowed. “At once.”

  “However,” put in Gorman, “on a practical note, we are not equipped to round up cattle. That is not a safe activity without horses.”

  “Could you manage to round up sheep?”

  “Sheep? Here?”

  “Millions. Many died off in the drought of 1894, but they are still an industry in this part of Texas.”

  “Really?” said Gorman. “I dare say there is a great deal that I do not know about Texas. I shall require a native guide. I trust you have walking shoes?”

  Chapter 11

  April 1912, Mexico City, Mexico

  Lieutenant Henri Gamelin halted along with the small group of Mexican fighters in the shade of a building’s corner. While two of them carefully peered around it in both directions down the wide street, he unobtrusively unhooked his canteen and drank from it. The webbing belt he replaced it onto had been borrowed from a French infantryman; his naval uniform was not designed for inland expeditions. It was already thickly coated with pale dust after their ten-mile march into the southern sector of Mexico City. So was his throat; but he’d kept up well enough.

  The outskirts had seemed almost normal, although deserted. Here in the city proper, though, the stench of smoke was everywhere, and every gaping window seemed to have a fan of soot above it. Many buildings had collapsed into the streets in heaps of bricks, burnt timbers, and debris. Here and there lay human or equine skeletons. Mexico City had been in the hands of the Martians for two and a half years.

  Many unpaved areas had been colonized by an unfamiliar weed, a sort of raggedly woven mat, deep red in color. He’d heard that it had come with the Martians. Perhaps it was like tobacco or cotton – something a conqueror cultivated – but it seemed too haphazard for that. But as with anything to do with the Martians, trying to guess why they did it was bound to be as fruitless as the weed itself.

  Manuel Palafox exchanged a few quiet words with the two scouts, then rejoined Henri. “All seems clear. We go underground from here on, not to give away their position.”

  One of his men – a giant of a fellow – levered up a sewer grating and grandly waved the others in while holding it up one-handed. Henri followed them, clutching the bricks at the opening’s edge and dropping into the dim tunnel. The grating clashed into place a moment later. Once his eyes adjusted, he could follow along easily enough from one patch of light to another, stepping over the worst of the muck on the tunnel’s stone floor. It didn’t seem that bad; but of course, this was not a living city any more. Two rainy seasons had scoured the effluvia of half a million citizens. He walked on the city’s dry bones.

  A mile’s slow progress ended at a wooden ladder. They clambered up to an arched brick gallery, still below ground at this point. This had been swept clean; light filtered down from barred openings onto several wooden doors laid on trestles. Henri was surprised to note a radio set and its chemical cells arranged on one – a German Telefunken. Nearby, maps and documents were laid out neatly along several more of the salvaged doors. Several men surrounded them, conferring. All wore the same stained, off-white caminos and pants that Henri’s group did, with a few wrapped puttees. It was obvious by the way all the men looked at the one figure in their midst who the man was that Henri had come to see.

  Emiliano Zapata dropped a sheaf of papers onto the table, turned, and came up to Henri, offering a hand. Henri shook it.

  “Welcome!” Zapata stood a little taller than Henri’s height with a powerful build – and grasp. His face was seamed and weathered from a life outdoors; the brown eyes were very hard. He waved to the group. “Everyone! The French Navy has sent us an emissary. He is here to see what we do. Let’s not disappoint him. Who will show him our ways?”

  Zapata’s accent was unfamiliar to Henri; the mutters behind him even less so. He caught slang he didn’t recognize. Catrin? It probably wasn’t flattering.

  “Come, now. Casta! How about you?”

  “I could show him our navy,” said the short, grizzled man he addressed, “but it’s all run aground. Very strange.”

  “Bah. Jefe Casta is joking with you, Señor Gamelin. He will be delighted to take you along on a patrol to the power plant zone. It will be good exercise for him, and I have not heard much from there in too long.”

  “Are these all your chiefs, then?” asked Henri.

  “All but three out in the eastern district. Some of this city belongs to the diablos, some belongs to us, and much is disputed. Few looters bother with what is left any more. It is us and them.”

  “But the federal army must have regained some territory when they attacked.”

  A few men chuckled grimly at that; one spat. “The federales made a brave show, it’s true. Especially General Diaz, the president’s favored nephew, with his gallant charge up the Zocalo plaza. How strange that he was not supported by any other troops at that critical moment. But, I am a simple farmer... We did manage to retrieve some of their artillery pieces that were not melted. They are useful, although we have only handfuls of shells. Perhaps you can arrange for more to be sent to us?”

  “That’s why I am here,” agreed Henri. “But there is much I need to study. Lines of supply. How open the streets are – or how blocked. And – forgive me – who might follow the example of the federales, and choose not to support one another.”

  That earned him some glares, but Zapata nodded equably. “Of course. The city, the people, all are to be open to you. It is horrible, what has happened here, but there has been a certain... purifying, as well.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Everything that can burn, has burned. Nothing remains but stone. And so it is with my men – all those who are afraid have left, and the ones who remain I can trust absolutely.” He gestured. “Casta will show you. And, Manuel, can you go as well?” Palafox nodded. “Casta, when is your next patrol?”

  “Now,” said the chief.

  Henri held his eye, conscious of his own fatigue but refusing to admit it. He had remembered what catrin meant – ‘dandy’. “Let us waste no time, then,” he said.

  “Excellent! Try not to let him die, Casta.” Zapata waved them on.

  They formed up in an adjoining chamber: Casta, Palafox, and six men, one of them being the huge man who’d opened the grating; he slung a sledgehammer in a rope loop over his back that must have weighed forty pounds. “Mouse-holing,” explained Palafox. “We go through walls when doors are not wise.”

  Two others picked up rifles of a kind Henri had not seen in years: beautifully engraved double-barreled guns, with shells the size of saltshakers. Elephant guns. “Pretty, eh?” offered one man, holding it for him to look over. “Four-bore. A rich man’s toy from a haciendo in the uplands. The armor is thinner on the tops of the diablos. Sometimes, these can pierce it from a rooftop.”

  “Sometimes,” agreed the other gunman. “The good part is, the recoil throws you back to enjoy your headache in safety!”

  Others gathered bundles of dynamite and detonators, and one picked up an infantry rifle; then the patrol headed out, going back through the sewer tunnel but turning in a different direction, then another. Henri was quickly lost. When they emerged again to street level, the midday sun threw so little shadow that he couldn’t orient; but the street grid was obvious, and the patrol headed down a side lane, picking their way over rubble when necessary and stopping at breaks in cover to look and listen.

  “The diablos have no use for this city,” said Palafox as they walked. “But they loot it. The power plant was stripped last year for its metals. Then the cables leading from it, streetcar wires, tracks. Sometimes they pick up automobiles and carry them off. They must come further south all the time.” He tapped the side of his mouth. “If they want my fillings, they must come get them.”

  “Can you predict where they go, then? Ambush them?”

  “At first, yes. They grew wiser. Now they may leave a car lying in an intersection for months, but strip wire a mile away,
and they do not use a route too often. There have been more of them lately – and some of our patrols have not come back. We send reports of what activity we see, if they may be useful. You may get to see a show, Señor Gamelin, but we have learned to be very patient.”

  Henri ducked under a beam, trying to ignore the skeleton curled tightly into a gap beside it as casually as Palafox did. “Do you send reports on that German radio?”

  Palafox smiled. “Yours is not the only arrangement we are making. But the Germans are tight-fisted. I hope your nation will be more–”

  Ahead, a scout pulled sharply back from a corner. Palafox’s smiled vanished. “Stay close, my friend.” The group converged; Casta waved them into the adjoining building through a ground-floor window frame.

  “You are lucky, Lieutenant,” he said to Henri. “We may be able to show you something interesting. But you must be very quiet, and do exactly as any one of us says to do. Understood?”

  “Yes, jefe.”

  “Come along.” They moved slowly through what proved to be the lobby of a hotel, avoiding anything in the strewn debris that might make noise when trod upon, and proceeded up the wide, gilded staircase. Keeping low and well back from the shattered windows, they crept to the end of the mezzanine. Despite Zapata’s grim claim, at least this building had not been consumed by fire.

  Behind a marble-topped bar, a hole had been battered through the wall. Three layers of brick showed as Henri ducked through it.

  The next building was a warehouse; here, only a few small windows opened onto the street. Casta beckoned silently to Henri and pointed. Henri edged up, careful not to expose his movement. He found his heart was hammering, but he moved steadily enough...

  In the street, a Martian tripod stood, braced squarely on all three limbs. It was pulling down overhead wires with its tentacles; the creak and snap seemed too loud in a city that was otherwise eerily silent. Henri was nearly level with the bulbous central section, and he studied the joints in the metal surfaces closely. At Tampico, the tripod that wrecked his ship had been a terrifying blur in the darkness; now he looked for weak points.

  He watched it work for a few moments longer; then when the others began to move along the floor, he backed away and caught up with them.

  “You’ve brought us luck,” whispered Palafox. “We have an ambush site close by. Just stay close.”

  They climbed through a hole chopped in the floor and down a ladder nailed to the warehouse’s wall, and another into the basement. A service tunnel crossed under the street; Henri groped through the dusty blackness and emerged through another improvised exit into what he recognized as a department store. Up a flight of stairs again. Along another floor –

  “Here is some of our work,” said Casta with obvious pride. He gestured at the ‘mousehole’. Henri approached and peered through it.

  This structure had been a dry-goods store in its day, but with a storage level on the second floor. Only a few tiny windows and an open loading door gave light. Parts of the second floor had been cut away and many crates dumped below. An antique field gun rested on the remaining timbers, tucked hard against the wall. Hawsers dangled to it from purchases at several points in the roof trusses.

  “I said we had no navy,” murmured Casta. “But this building is like an old man-of-war. It has a broadside.”

  Henri climbed through the mousehole and approached the gun. Its muzzle was bowsed up tight against the wall, facing a small... well, gunport... for it to fire through.

  “There are other openings there, and there.” Casta pointed. “If they approach along any lane, and we have time, we can shift the gun.”

  The gun was painted a warm pale grey with varnished wooden wheels. “That is a Mondragón 75mm piece,” marveled Henri. “It weighs over a ton with that carriage. How did you...?”

  Casta punched the big sledgehammer-man beside him in the arm. “Enrico carried it up there. Didn’t you?” The man beamed; then Casta clicked his fingers and the men burst to activity. Some loaded and manned the gun, others laid out dynamite bombs, the gunmen checked their weapons.

  Henri stayed clear by Palafox. “Shouldn’t they go topside?”

  “This roof is too exposed. They might get a shot from the windows, though.”

  Once everyone was in place, time seemed to get terribly slow. Men watched carefully at the small windows; Casta was poised at the gun’s lanyard. From outside, the whine and clunk of the moving tripod grew closer...

  A clattering sounded from the rooftop. Palafox looked up in surprise. “What –”

  Roof tiles banged loose and fell to the street outside. The noise progressed along the roof. Men spun, looking upward.

  A mechanical nightmare swung itself into the building through the loading door.

  It stopped, framed in the doorway – a much smaller version of a tripod, a gleaming metal ovoid, a central red eye; some of its metal limbs clutched at the roof edge and others were planted on the floor. Men and machine seemed to stare at one another for an instant.

  Then it fired a heat ray and one of the gunmen vanished in a flare of incinerating light.

  Others broke from their trance and ducked for cover. Casta was grappling with another man about to throw his dynamite bomb. The machine did not fire again; instead it shifted forward in a fluid scrabble of its limbs and struck out with some of them like steel whips, smashing men aside left and right. The second gunman collided with a post; his weapon tumbled below to the ground floor.

  Henri shook himself from his terror and threw himself to the floor, clutching at the jagged wood edges of one of the openings. He levered his body over the edge and dropped heavily to the ground floor, sprawling and twisting upright. Screams and an ordinary rifle shot came from above. Henri spotted the dropped elephant gun nearby, dashed to it, and picked it up. He crouched low and banged the weapon’s butt onto the floor, peered upward at the mayhem unfolding above, aimed the barrels at the moving gleam of metal as best he could, and pulled both triggers.

  The black-powder explosion nearly knocked him over despite his bracing the gun. Smoke blinded him. Thuds and crashes from above; the machine’s central mass fell through the smoke cloud to crash onto the ground floor, smashing crates to splinters, limbs flailing. Henri was sledged aside by one. He rolled over, gasping in pain, and began to crawl away, coughing.

  A steel whip coiled about his leg and dragged him back along the floor.

  Henri had lost all capacity for thought. His hand clutched a broken plank; he twisted as the machine pulled him close to it and flailed at the metallic carapace with his improvised club. The wood banged harmlessly off the alien metal. The enormous red eye glared emptily at him; another limb grappled his chest and began to squeeze, crushing the breath from him. The world dimmed to a dying red glow.

  More gunshots sounded, then two heavy blasts. Something swung in a blur beside him; a clank, and the limb crushing him went slack. Henri dragged in a breath; his vision cleared. Enrico stepped over him, bringing around the sledgehammer in a swinging arc. He shouted “Viva Zapata!” and smashed it into the red eye. As he drew back, Henri glimpsed Casta snapping the elephant gun closed. He stepped onto the machine’s back and fired downward once, twice, ignoring the brutal recoil that staggered him.

  Enrico hammered a few more times at what was now a wreck, then stumbled back, gasping. The eye’s red glow faded. Others pulled the limp metal serpent away from Henri and dragged him upright. He swayed on his feet, his left leg spasming. It didn’t seem broken, but his chest blazed with spikes of pain.

  “Back to the south door!” cried Casta. He threw the gun to the man beside him and grabbed a bomb from another, holding it in his left hand. His right arm dangled at his side, but he waved on his men with the dynamite bundle.

  The tripod in the street fired its far more powerful heat ray into the building, fanning it about and dissolving the interior with its shriek. The upper levels burst into flame instantly. The men scrambled through the door to the lan
eway. Henri gasped a breath of clean air after the sudden inferno of the store’s interior and stumbled; one of the men grabbed his arm and pulled him along. Casta turned and flung his bomb back inside, then sprinted after them. Before they’d reached the opposite building, the crash of its explosion punched a cloud of smoke out of the doorway. Other crashes immediately followed, then the roar of the collapsing building. Henri thought he heard the 75mm go off, but it was difficult to tell. He could still barely breathe, let alone run, but he kept up as they fled into a portico and through the building toward the next mousehole.

  Casta came up and wrapped his good arm under Henri’s other side. Ahead, Enrico was carrying another man, limp as a sack.

  “What was that machine?” gasped Henri.

  “I have never seen anything like it. This is bad, very bad. It can get inside buildings as we can... I think it was watching us before we set up our ambush. We must get back to report this to Zapata.” His scowl cleared for a moment. “You did well, catrin. That was a dandy shot! But try to keep up. I am not supposed to let you die.”

  Chapter 12

  April, 1912, West of Hebbronville, Texas

  Emmet Smith reined in his horse to allow the others to catch up. The morning sun struck green and gold highlights along the wide horizon. The scent of mesquite was everywhere; decades of stock overgrazing had killed the rolling grasslands of much of South Texas in favor of tough scrub brush and the blocky-grained trees that supplied so many fences and structures.

  He’d seen none of the scorched areas he’d expected during their patrols from the camp south of Seven Sisters, other than a few old wildfire remnants; even crossing over the railway line further to the south hadn’t revealed any evidence of Martian destruction. Two tripod sightings in the past week; both times they’d easily slipped away with no pursuit. For invaders, these Martians sure kept to themselves. IX Corps was brewing up an attack from the eastward side, he’d heard, but it was eerily quiet in these parts.