Shadows of Annihilation

by S. M. Stirling

  The clothes suited their covers as Protectorate upper civil servants with good Party connections too, specifically a roving inspector looking for new places to put all-female technical training institutes and her assistant. Their youth was credible enough; the civil service hadn’t expanded quite as fast as the military since the change of regime in ’12, but it was close—and closer still here down in the Protectorate, where Plenipotentiary Lodge had had to start from scratch. Promotions came fast and seniority meant very little, since nobody actually had any relevant experience.

  That cover gave them good and legitimate reasons to meet with anyone, including government officials, and to wander around being inquisitive and asking people questions, whether local or gringo. People might suspect they were government secret agents, but they’d suspect that of any newcomer anyway. As an added bonus the clothes were comfortable, gave very good freedom of movement even by modern standards, and made it easy to conceal bits of gear, especially with some subtle modifications.

  In Luz’s case the gear included a chamois leather sap filled with fine lead shot, a wire garrote with cocobolo-wood handles, a set of lockpicks, a miniature camera in the handle of her purse, a .380 Browning FN automatic pistol her father had given her as a twelfth-birthday present, and a beautiful, authentic, and viciously effective six-inch folding navaja with a Toledo-steel blade in the classic sevillana style.

  She’d learned to use that semiclandestinely in her childhood from an ancient and very disreputable retainer-coachman-bodyguard of her mother’s known as Pedro El Andaluz, who’d told her once that she was the sort of girl who’d need it very badly someday. She gave a reminiscent smile at the memory of the evil old baratero, whom she’d loved like a cross between a grandfather and an accomplice, and then shouting caught her attention.

  A score or so of young men were huddled off in one corner of the station’s platform, none older than her own mid-twenties. They were Mexicans, ordinary local mestizo peasants from their looks, their loose off-white clothing, the colorful fringed serapes they wore cloak-style against the chill, the sandals or less on their battered feet, and the tall-crowned, broad-brimmed, and often ragged straw sombreros on their heads. All of them had small bundles of possessions tied up with cord on the ground beside them, so they must be traveling as a group. They were staring at—and some of them were starting to mutter resentfully back at—an American soldier who was waving his arms and pointing to a clipboard in one hand while he used loud fragments of what he thought was Spanish over and over again to tell them they had to wait; for a train, for dinner, or simply wait in general. The repetitions got more confusing as he went on, and they’d started out badly.

  “Just a second, querida,” Luz said.

  The tall lanky soldier had sergeant’s stripes on the loose-cut and infinitely drab brownish-gray-green modern U.S. Army field uniform, a color designed to blend into nearly anything except snow, and a Thompson gun with a fifty-round drum slung over his back. He also had a Deep South low-country gumbo accent, a flushed sun-red cracker complexion, and sandy hair cropped close under a turtle-shaped oblong steel helmet with a few raindrops running down its dull grit-finished rustproof surface. His Spanish wasn’t nearly as good as he obviously thought it was, and what he did have sounded as if . . .

  As if he’d learned it from someone in the Yucatán. ¡Madre de Dios!, he said pibil instead of horno for oven . . . make that he learned Spanish in the Yucatán from someone whose own first language was Mayan! And he’s saying . . . I think he’s saying . . . it go in oven-ing big long long time instead of just wait because it’s cooking now. It’s like a Russian peasant trying to talk to farmers from Maine in bits of English that he learned from a Chinaman in the Bronx.

  Nor did yelling make you more comprehensible, despite the fact that people the world over seemed to think so by instinct.

  Luz sighed. Besides being a good deed, stepping in was entirely in concert with her cover role; Party functionaries usually loved setting situations . . . and people . . . to rights with a brisk efficiency that sometimes slopped over into what unkind souls called being bossy self-righteous finger-wagging scolds. Their much-delayed dinner would have to wait a little longer.

  “Sergeant?” she said, stepping close.

  And with an effort of will she dropped back into her native Californian-style general American English, crisply leavened by European finishing schools and Bryn Mawr. She and Ciara had been talking mostly Spanish and German for months, to improve the younger agent’s skills.

  Then a little louder: “Sergeant!”

  The man wheeled on her, face and fists clenched with anger and frustration and eyes red with a long day that had probably started before dawn, obviously trembling on the brink of telling her to go mind her own business, with embellishments.

  She gave him the Bellamy salute—coming to attention with the right hand placed over the heart, then the arm extended at a forty-five-degree angle with the palm up. It had started as the gesture used by children and teachers during the Pledge of Allegiance each morning at school, and had more recently become commonplace for civilian adults at patriotic occasions: during the national anthem or a flag-raising or a parade on a public holiday and at official speeches and the like. Here she was technically saluting the American flag patch on his shoulder.

  It wasn’t officially a thing only Party zealots did in an everyday one-on-one encounter like this, but that was the way to bet. He straightened as he took the gesture in, that and her clothing and a manner that also reeked of upper-middle-class status and probable connections to powerful people who could start a chain of chewings-out that would end in the painful gnawing of his very own personal buttocks.

  “Ma’am?” he said tightly.

  “I don’t think they understand you, Sergeant.”

  Tactfully, she added with a friendly smile: “I can hear you were stationed in the Yucatán. Spanish here is different from what you’re used to—it’s like the different ways people talk in Alabama and in Massachusetts.”

  His brow cleared; evidently he hadn’t thought of it that way, but he’d certainly have had experience with regional dialects of his own language in the Army.

  “I’ll translate, if you tell me what the problem is. What’s going on here?”

  “They’re Army recruits, ma’am,” he replied. “Fo’ this-here new Mexican voluntary enlistment program.”

  She nodded and smiled encouragingly; it was very new, and it promised Mexicans enlisting in the U.S. armed forces citizenship for themselves and their immediate families and a land grant of a hundred sixty acres after four years or the duration of the war, with help to stock it.

  Luz suspected it was going to be very popular, too. The dollar-fifty daily wage of a buck private in the U.S. Army was four or five times what a peon, a country laborer, made here, not to mention the separation allowance for dependents, and the rest of the package was very attractive indeed. That was enough land to make you someone of considerable substance in these parts, a man of respect, what their neighbors would call el gran ranchero de por aquí. Those were a class the Protectorate administration wanted to expand and tie to the new regime and the United States, which would be a useful by-product of the Army getting more raw material.

  And the Army’s used to dealing with rustic young men who don’t speak much English, she thought.

  The machine took them all—Norski farmboys and Finnish lumberjacks from the Upper Midwest, Lithuanian Jews in the pushcart-and-tenement sweatshop warrens of the Lower East Side, Sicilian fishermen in San Francisco, anything you could imagine—and turned out a standardized crop-haired, shoulder-braced product at the other end, able to read, write, and speak the national language well, understand a map or written orders, handle machinery, swear with vivid obscenity and scatology in good Anglo-Saxon fashion, make a neat cot in barracks, and brush their teeth American-style after chowing down for years on t
he bland abundance and vaguely Midwestern-cum-Southern uniformity of mess-hall food.

  Same principle here. It worked for the Romans, no reason it shouldn’t work for us.

  “I’m tryin’ to tell these-here gre—”

  He checked himself. Using the word greaser was against regulations, on the principle that it was better to expend a little courtesy than a lot of ammunition; a safe enough rule to break among his own kind, but not here with some prim censorious Party functionary on hand.

  “. . . ah, these here boys, the train north is delayed, and they’ll get fed when the vittles I spent the expense money on get delivered, ma’am,” the sergeant said. “And then they got all upset. Hellfire, they’re supposed to want to be so’jers! Late for dinner? Ain’t nothin’ nohow t’ what they-all be getting.”

  “It’s not that; they’re used to being hungry. I think they thought you were telling them they had to go and find their own dinner if they wanted to eat at all, Sergeant.”

  Meaning they thought you’d pocketed the money that was supposed to feed them—which if you grew up poor in Mexico is the first reason that would naturally come to mind dealing with anyone in authority.

  “Let me help,” she added.

  “Uhh . . . thank y’kindly, ma’am,” he said.

  “You’re serving America, Sergeant, so I’m just helping the country,” she replied.

  Realization showed on his face as if a lightbulb had gone on over his head; now he wasn’t going to have to explain a screw-up to an officer after all, or admit that he didn’t have the command of the language he’d claimed. For obvious reasons soldiers stationed in the Protectorate got substantial bonuses for being bilingual, especially ones on detached duty.

  She turned to the men and switched back to Spanish, using the clipped Mexico City variety she’d learned there at private schools and social engagements in her teens, different from the lively bounce of her mother’s Cuban dialect and even more so compared to abuelo Pedro’s d-dropping Andalusian drawl.

  “Señores, be calm!” she said, making a soothing palm-down gesture with both hands. “There has been a misunderstanding here. Let me explain.”

  Those crisp tones would be familiar here in the central highlands, and sounding like a great landowner’s daughter down from the capital would be all to the good, giving her authority. Languages had always come easily to her, and their variations and varieties.

  The peones straightened up too, as they would for the lady of their patrón back home; just because a man was illiterate and spoke only one language didn’t mean he was stupid, or couldn’t pick up on the clues of dress and accent or notice the respectful way the American sergeant had talked to her. Their square brown faces relaxed in relief as she made the message clear. As she’d said, hunger was as familiar to them as daylight; their anger was at the thought of being cheated.

  One of them removed his hat and held it before him in both callused hands as he gave her a little bow.

  “Thank you very much, Doña,” he said, using the formal usted and the word for lady that paralleled the respectful male Don, as he tried to be as polite as he knew how.

  It was the careful courtesy of a proud man who had nothing else to give in return for a favor.

  “You speak most excellent Spanish, Doña,” he added.

  Unlike that noisy gringo went unspoken in the flick of his eyes to the noncom.

  Luz gave a very slight nod in return, maintaining a cool de-haut-en-bas distance toward strange men not of her family or social circle, in accord with local custom. What Americans considered ordinary friendliness could be badly misunderstood here.

  “Good Spanish? How not, when Spanish was the language sung to me in my cradle, the tongue of my own dear mother?” she said, crossed herself, and added:

  “Que Dios la tenga en su Gloria.”

  Which was the local equivalent of saying: May God rest her soul.

  That brought broad smiles, and most echoed the pious gesture; they probably thought she meant her mother was Mexican.

  It was perfectly plausible, and she’d often passed for a local on undercover missions south of what used to be the border; her long-limbed build was from her father, but otherwise her looks favored the Aróstegui side of the family, who were criollo Cuban-Spanish. With an unadmitted but inevitable dash of Taino Indian and God-knew-what, almost certainly including the odd quadroon, all picked up in the three and a half centuries since they’d moved from Santander in the Basque country to Santiago de Cuba and started accumulating sugar plantations. She had a smoothly olive complexion that darkened quickly to light wheat-toast brown in the sun, straight silky hair of raven-wing black, eyes that were very dark save for narrow blue streaks near the pupils, and a face that was a little high in the cheekbones, straight-nosed and full-lipped above a small but square and slightly cleft chin.

  It was a set of features that could pass unnoticed save for unusual comeliness in most places from the Rio Grande all the way to southern Chile, or for that matter anywhere around the shores of the Mediterranean, north or south.

  Several of the men whispered to the one who’d spoken and nudged him. He moistened his lips and went on:

  “Doña, with all respect, may I ask you a question?”

  She nodded, and he went on:

  “These promises that el Presidente Teodoro makes, can they be trusted? Will the gringos treat us honestly?”

  Luz thought for a moment and decided that even for a spy sometimes honesty was the best policy. Occasionally, at least, and especially when nobody was in hearing range except men who’d all be a thousand miles away getting yelled at by drill instructors in a day or two.

  “That is two different questions, señor, and requires two different answers. As to el Presidente, yes. He is a hard man with a hard hand if you stand against him—”

  There were nods at her short punching gesture with a clenched fist; nobody who’d lived through the Mexican Intervention was going to doubt that.

  “—but he is a good friend, a good jefe. He was a brave soldier himself in the American war with Spain when we were children, one who always led his men from the front into the teeth of the bullets and the steel. Afterward he defied his own superiors to get care for them when they were sick or hungry. When he rose to great power, those who had fought by his side were never turned away from his door, however poor they were or whether they were Anglo or Indio or of Mexican blood. Above all things he respects and honors brave and loyal men, and he does not forget those who followed him and supported him, whoever they are. You will get the pay you were promised, and the land and tools and animals, and the citizenship papers. Or quite likely death in battle, but you know that, eh?”

  That got a chorus of smiles and nods and instant understanding; the bonds between a patron-boss, a jefe, and the clients who supported him in return for protection and favors were something people here absorbed through their skin in childhood. And nobody who’d ever fought Mexicans really thought they lacked sheer guts. She went on:

  “As to your second question, some of the gringos will deal fairly with you if you do your best. Others will despise you and treat you badly from spite, or will insult you because they do not know or care about your customs. May you meet few such, but you will meet some and they will give you trouble.”

  The nods were sober this time, though they weren’t surprised. If any group of people on the whole round Earth knew what it was like to be stuck at the bottom of the social sewer pipe where everything nasty eventually fell on your head, it was Mexican peones.

  “Thank you for your honesty with us, Doña,” the man said.

  The sergeant was looking at his watch and over his shoulder, obviously wondering fretfully where the hell the food he’d ordered was but unwilling to go look himself lest the situation unravel in his absence. Luz made an instant decision and spoke to him:

 
“I’m going into a bit more detail, Sergeant.”

  Then to the recruits: “Let me tell you a little story, señores,” she said, and they watched her intently, a few squatting on their heels and lighting hoarded cigarettes. “My father’s grandfather came to America . . . to a city named Boston . . . seventy years ago, fleeing from a famine that killed most of his village.”

  Grave nods at that; they all knew what a time of hard want was like, and had felt it in their own bellies and seen it the faces of gaunt children when war and drought passed over these lands.

  “He was like you, a campesino, a peasant who had always labored on the lands of others for nothing but scraps and kicks. He was Catholic, spoke not one word of English, and he could not write even his own name. The people of Boston were all Protestants then, and all of English blood. They looked down on those like him, spat on them, mocked their holy things, called them stupid apes and dirty drunken savages fit only to live like pigs and work like mules. He did work, at first carrying a hod of mortar up ladders, then learning to lay the bricks himself; and he taught himself English and his letters in the evenings after long days of toil. He saved pennies for years, and bought a horse and wagon, and by the end of his life had his own little house on his own patch of land, and a few men and boys working for him and beside him. He saw that his son attended school.”

  She made a gesture with both hands palm up and slowly rising.

  “That son did better, and became a man of property in a small way, and his son, my father, went to a great university with the children of the ricos and outdid them by wits and hard work. He became an educated man, an engineer who designed and built mills and railways and canals that gave food and work to thousands. You have chosen a dangerous road, señores, but one that may lead to a good place if you do your best and have some luck. And may God and His Mother and your patron saints watch over you.”