Shadows of Annihilation

by S. M. Stirling

  In two years of slaughter and destruction they’d made a fair start on wiping out the painfully achieved progress of the thirty-two-year reign of Porfirio Díaz.

  “Huerta’s men versus Villistas, basically—this was just a few weeks before the Intervention, and . . . well, all the stock had been looted and the workers dead or fled and the fields were growing up in weeds by the time we bought it.”

  “That was back in January of ’14, wasn’t it? Quite a declaration of faith!” Luz said, remembering vividly what that month and year had been like.

  “Who has faith in the future, makes the future; who makes the future takes the future,” Julie said piously, quoting yet another Party slogan. “And it paid off handsomely; the previous owners being men of little faith, so we got it for a song and they took the dollars and ran for it. It being Laredo, Texas, and living there is just the punishment the cowards deserved. Now it’s worth five or ten times as much as we paid, even without counting improvements.”

  “How much land?” Luz said.

  Luz had been very busy personally and professionally for the last year, not to mention out of the country for long periods, and the two friends’ abbreviated dealings had been heavily focused on the Chamber’s work or on Julie’s children. She’d been vaguely aware the Duráns had bought property but not the details. Though from the letters she hadn’t thought it was a small vacation place acquired just for the countryside quiet and space for little Alice’s pets, but she still blinked when Julie said:

  “Twenty thousand acres to start with. Fourteen after we deeded six thousand to the Protectorate.”

  Serious acreage! Luz thought.

  “You gave away a third of it, Mrs. . . . ah, Julie?” Ciara asked in surprise.

  “Not precisely gave. It’s called the one-third ranchero program,” Julie replied. “The Protectorate gives big landowners a really generous line of credit at low interest to modernize their operations provided they donate a third or so of their land, and then divides that into good-sized family farms, which are . . . were . . . thin on the ground here. Twenty to thirty farms eventually from what we gave them, for example. Mexican hacendados are, um, strongly encouraged to participate . . .”

  “If they ever want to get contracts from the government or credit from any bank that wants to stay on the government’s good side ever again,” Luz said, defining encouragement. “Plus the revolution scared a lot of them into seeing that giving up something is better than losing everything, not to mention avoiding getting killed, and the smart ones lean on the dinosaurs so they don’t get the benefits without paying the costs.”

  “But it’s pretty much compulsory for Americans with large properties here,” Julie added.

  “Very Progressive!” Ciara said with a smile of approval.

  She had a typically Irish dislike of landlordism, and was obviously imagining sturdy independent farmsteads with neat kitchen gardens and healthy children around well-stocked dinner tables and cats drowsing on the windowsill . . . though being four generations away from the land herself via Dublin and South Boston, probably not the sodden sweat and calluses and ground-in barnyard stinks that went with the lives of working countryfolk, even ones who owned their own land and made a decent living.

  Luz was also imagining twenty to thirty more families each with a rifle over the mantel and a deep, visceral reason to be ready to fight for the new order, which was a strong policy point.

  Henrietta nodded vigorously too—her father had been a customs clerk, but probably a fair number of her relatives were sharecroppers and no better off than the peones here.

  “And the line of credit was very helpful,” Julie said. “We can use every penny of it, and what our families sent us, and we’re working on getting more loans from the bank; we’re just starting to get some real returns out of the place this year. They reap wheat with sickles here! Oxen! Oxcarts with two solid wheels! Oxen pulling wooden plows and turning norias to lift water! It’s . . . it isn’t even medieval . . . it’s biblical and Old Testament at that; I keep expecting to meet the Prophet Ezekiel, or Judge Deborah. We took one look and ordered a dozen tractors and a dozen Ford motor trucks and a well-drilling rig and a bunch of wind pumps, just for starters.”

  “Works-and-days, back-to-the-land, Julie?” Luz said, amused.

  Roberto Durán had been raised as the third son of a genuine if very affluent working rancher, but his wife seemed to have a convert’s enthusiasm.

  “It’s catching, particularly when you have children, and we think we can make a very good thing of it, using modern, efficient Progressive methods.”

  Luz chuckled. “A client of my father’s near Santa Barbara once told him—he’d just commissioned an irrigation system—that it was very simple to make a small fortune as a gentleman farmer.”

  “How?” Ciara said, interested.

  “You start with a large fortune, buy land, and shovel the rest of the money into a farm-shaped hole in the ground.”

  Julie made a rude gesture involving thumb, nose, and waggling fingers and continued:

  “The casa grande has good bones, eighteenth-century, and I’ve been overseeing the renovations while Bob’s away. They have plenty of fine stonemasons and carpenters here. You two must come and visit when you have time.”

  “And perhaps some interesting people could be there at the same time,” Luz said, and added to herself:

  That our cover identities need an excuse to meet.

  “Hmmm . . . yes,” Julie said, glancing upward slightly.

  She’d had the same thought, of course. They’d always been able to fill in the blanks with each other.

  The station chief went on: “Jerez is worth a look for the architecture, and it’s pretty country, very much like northern New Mexico but not as dry or rocky, lots of interesting rides, and we have good horses. There are orchards, and we’re putting in a vineyard; the area has produced wine for a long time. Not very good wine, but Bob thinks we can do better, and we’ve gotten a French vintner. And the hunting’s good up in the mountains just west of there.”

  “Too good, ma’am,” her secretary said.

  Luz cocked an eyebrow, and the younger woman—she was still short of twenty-two, within a month of Ciara’s age—went on:

  “We had a report of a contact with bandits in those mountains today.”

  It was official policy to refer to all guerillas, rebels, and other opponents of the Progressive project down here as bandits; the context made it clear they weren’t talking about ordinary rural thieves.

  Julie Durán frowned, and then shrugged. “A flight of four Falcons flying . . . try saying that really fast ten times . . . out of the air base near there spotted movement in the interdicted area . . . a pack mule . . . and shot it up. Then someone on the ground shot at them, they did a bombing run, and many someones shot swiftly . . . try saying that . . .”

  “Naughty! Papá Noel doesn’t bring sweets for los niños traviesos!” Luz said.

  Falcons were bombers or two-seat fighting scouts depending on the mission, fast and heavily armed. Shooting at a Mk. V Falcon with a rifle while it did an attack run was rather like a field-mouse making an obscene gesture with the middle digit at the very last owl it ever saw; it might relieve the luckless rodent’s feelings a little in the painful, violent concluding moments of its life, but wouldn’t accomplish much else.

  “Oh, Santa brought the naughty children presents—green cross and yellow cross bombs, firebombs, high explosive, and then machine-gun fire . . . that sort of present,” Julie said.

  “Even better than coal in the stocking,” Luz said approvingly. “As el jefe says, if you’re going to hit at all, hit hard, not soft. Follow-up?”

  Air surveillance and air power were wonderful things, fruits of the new Progressive age, but there was still no substitute for close-range work on the ground.

  �
��We have some of the 2nd Philippine Rangers in Jerez just now—their A Company. They’re Bugkalot.”

  The Ranger regiments, American and Filipino, were the military partners of choice that the Black Chamber called on when it needed muscle beyond what its own operatives could furnish. The Federal Bureau of Security had its own in-house Intervention Battalions, which Luz considered wasteful and inefficient . . . and which the U.S. Army viewed the same way a bad-tempered bull mastiff did a stranger dog it found peeing on its fence line. Not entirely by coincidence, the Army liked the Black Chamber much better than it did the FBS.

  “They sent a platoon to do a ground check,” Julie said, and explained to Ciara:

  “The Philippine Rangers are recruited from mountaineer clans like the Bugkalot back in the Philippines, pagans, from remote areas the Spanish never really got in hand. The Army is the only way they can earn much cash, and they like to travel, so we have regiments of them here in the Protectorate. Worth their weight in gold for small-scale work in rough country.”

  “Luz has mentioned that they’re very hardy and brave,” Ciara said. “And good trackers.”

  Luz chuckled reminiscently. “Also, headhunting is their national sport, and they find life boring now that we insist on them not waging blood feuds with their neighbors or raiding the lowlands. Collecting heads was how their young bucks impressed the girls. And paid their brideprice, too. They weren’t slave raiders like the Moros, they just wanted household decorations as tokens of social worth . . . rather like lace curtains and a piano in the parlor, only with them it’s human heads hanging in nets from the thatch over the fire pit instead.”

  “Does that give many problems, Julie?” Ciara asked the station chief. “That headhunting business?”

  “Not as long as we let them pack the heads in salt here and send them home parcel post for free to impress the neighbors,” Julie said cheerfully. “That really helps with recruitment back in the islands; the Army get a new rush of volunteers every time there’s a mail delivery.”

  Ciara started to laugh, and then stopped when she realized none of the others were treating it as a joke except Julie; Henrietta was quietly rolling her eyes with the air of someone well used to the station chief’s sense of humor. Luz sighed and gave a small nod of confirmation; that description was essentially the truth, though Julie was being a bit more blunt and showing a lot more levity than was usually considered politic when talking about it.

  “Well, our ancestors were headhunters once too, querida,” Luz said. “In the Táin, the Cattle Raid of Cooley, Cú Chulainn is always whacking off heads and tying them to the rail of his chariot by their hair or nailing them over the door or leaving them at river crossings for the heads’ friends and relatives to find and be peeved at.”

  Ciara nodded, since that was true enough—and her Fenian household had been brought up on the old Irish hero-cycles. She was looking very slightly green at having the Iron Age epic poetry translated into modern life, though.

  Julie chuckled. “Our ancestors?” she said. “Speak for your Cubana-Celtic self, Luz. My ancestors were much more reserved and dignified and pious: They sacrificed their enemies to Wotan by hanging them . . . from ash trees, mostly . . . and then spearing them. Or drowned them in a sacred lake for the goddess Nerthus.”

  “Mine built the pyramids and invented medicine and astronomy,” Henrietta said, and they all laughed.

  “Funny, you don’t look Nubian,” Julie added.

  Ciara’s eyes widened, and Luz gave the young Negro woman a quick glance, but Henrietta was laughing harder still. She and the station chief were evidently on joking-teasing terms . . .

  And that is one very attractive young lady, person and personality both . . .

  Luz caught her old friend’s eye and then flicked hers sideways at the secretary, raising a brow. Julie replied with a narrowing of her eyes and a brush of her left thumb over her wedding ring, conveying:

  No! Emphatically, no!

  Luz shrugged slightly—just asking—and touched her pledge ring with the same gesture, to say she shared that opinion of the virtues of monogamy. The whole exchange took around one and a half seconds and passed unnoticed by the others.

  Julie has changed. Well, we all do with age and responsibilities, I suppose.

  The station chief went on smoothly aloud: “The Rangers counted either ten, eleven, or twelve bodies . . . Hundred-pound bombs, well . . .”

  Luz nodded; if one of those burst right next to a human being, the liquefied results got sprayed over half an acre along with bone chips and sticky bits of sinew and connective tissue and the odd booted foot. You ended up having to count toes or teeth if you wanted forensic detail.

  “And about a dozen dead mules . . . that was the gas and machine- guns, mostly . . . and the loads from the pack saddles, evidently mostly corn and beans and chilies and dried fruit and jerky and salt.”

  “Weapons?” Luz asked. “Ammunition?”

  Guerillas always tried as hard as they could to salvage those from their dead. How much they left behind was a good marker for how fast they’d run away, which was an excellent proxy for how badly you’d hurt them and how frightened they were. Depending, of course, on how determined they’d been to begin with, but the few Mexicans still in the field against the Protectorate in the summer of 1917 were likely to be genuine chicos rudos, the local idiom for tough guys. Or to have burned their bridges behind them beyond possibility of forgiveness by anyone whatsoever, or both.

  “Four Winchesters, six old Mexican Army 7 mm Mausers, and a Colt .45 single-action revolver, model ’73. That one was probably used by Wild Bill Hickok before he got shot in the back in Deadwood—somebody had filed off the foresight and cut away the trigger guard. Around twenty rounds per weapon counting spent brass, plus enough assorted cutlery to start a pawnshop. No ground contact yet, so no live prisoners, and the spent cartridges all fit the weapons captured. Except for one variety we haven’t identified yet—we only got them this afternoon. Plenty of them, though, about as many as the others together.”

  She inclined her head; Henrietta fetched a small brown paper bag, folded and held with a rubber band, spread out a clean handkerchief from a stack kept in her desk, and carefully shook out over a dozen spent brass cartridge cases.

  “We’re going to forward these to Mexico City . . . Lecumberri . . . for the Technical Section detail there to look at,” the secretary said. “The closest match I could find in the catalog was Japanese, of all things. Arisaka 6.5 by 50 mm semi-rimmed. But surely that can’t be right? They’re not semi-rimmed, fo’ . . . for one thing. And the book says Japan doesn’t do headstamps on their cartridge bases and these have them, see?”

  She flicked one of the cases around with a pencil and pointed with the tip; on the brass disk surrounding the dimpled primer was stamped S/L/01/E17.

  “Japanese? That’s almost right,” Luz said. “If you’re consulting last year’s catalog.”

  Luz took a pencil herself from the holder on the table, inserted it into the empty mouth of the cartridge, and lifted the shell. Bringing it to her nose brought the sharp scent of nitro powder, and a strong smell like mustard and horseradish as well, one that made her move it away sharply.

  “Mustard gas,” she said, and got her hankie out just in time as she sneezed.

  “Perdóneme. Not enough to be dangerous, but I wouldn’t lick this if I were you, Miss Colmer, and I’d wash my hands if I touched it. Which shows why nobody was going to linger to police it up. It is the Arisaka round you mentioned, but made in Germany and modified to be rimless as of January. They use it in their new machine rifle . . . the Sturmgewehr, they call it,” Luz said.

  “Assault rifle,” Julie said; she was almost as fluent in German as Luz. “I suspect that’s the usage that will catch on.”

  “Ah!” Henrietta said, and Ciara made a similar sound.

  Luz nod
ded, remembering the peening hammer of rounds on the ragged stone of the ruined farmhouse above her head, pinning her down like a whole battery of Maxims. Everyone who’d been following the war news in detail had heard about the Sturmgewehr; one more nasty surprise in the first major war of the modern industrial-scientific era.

  And the Great War has had as many nasty surprises as there were pieces of roasted peanut in Mima’s turrónes de maní at Christmas, Luz thought.

  Many of the surprises were almost as lurid as the ones writers like Wells and Burroughs dreamed up—in fact, some of them were the same surprises, translated from wild fiction to reality, like Wells’s The Land Ironclads, which had prefigured the tank. Though it should be past tense for Wells—he had almost certainly died in the horror-gas attack on London, which was ironic, because he’d predicted that too, with his The War in the Air.

  “The stamp would be L for Lindener Zündhütchen-und Tonwarenfabrik, they’re in Hanover,” Luz went on, with Ciara nodding beside her; this was an area where their talents overlapped. “S for Spitzgeschoss, pointed bullet; 01/E17 is the date—made this January.”

  “Yes, now that you point it out,” Julie said, with a resigned sigh; she could do at least half of that herself if she tried, and perhaps all of it. “Oh . . . that’s . . . really unfortunate. Because now we know that Germans were involved, but we don’t know how many, or if they’re still alive. The bodies not being very recognizable, and I doubt they were in Feldgrau to start with.”

  “It’s amazing how similar people of different nationalities are when they’ve been blown to bits,” Luz said, which produced startled laughs from Ciara and Henrietta and a rather different one from Julie.

  “Not the usual argument for the Brotherhood of Mankind, but cogent,” the station chief said.