Shadows of Annihilation

by S. M. Stirling

  “I am Pablo Ramírez, señor. My cousins Diego and Alejandro and I are looking for work,” he said quietly. “Our village is . . . was . . . near Calvillo, in Aguascalientes. It was burned in the fighting, and we lost everything.”

  Pablo had told them Calvillo was a region a bit south of there known for its guava orchards and hot springs, and also for having more fair-skinned men than most places.

  “Since then we have moved about, trying to find food and a place, as our documents show, Your Excellency. We have heard there is much work in Zacatecas and Jerez; work and a roof and food is all we seek.”

  “Cousins?” the policeman said, going over their faces.

  All showed the tracks of violence in their different ways.

  “They don’t look much like you, they’re even uglier. And less indio.”

  Pablo sighed and scratched his head. “Well, sir, my aunt . . . the majordomo of the hacienda was a cruel man who took what he wanted . . . you know how it is for a poor defenseless girl of the people . . .”

  The rural laughed. “So your mother and your aunt were whores,” he said. “Those ugly cripples don’t look like they can work. We’ve got enough useless beggars around here already, whining and stealing and taking up space an honest goat could get some use out of. And then you can eat the goat.”

  “Alejandro is big as you can see, and he is still very strong, señor,” Pablo said. “For many tasks he does not need his eyes, and Diego can help him . . . Diego does not speak well now, and he has bad dreams, but together they manage, with what help I can give.”

  The policeman reached out and pushed up Horst’s bandage, grunted at the scars over the empty gaping eye socket, then took a pull at his cigarette and blew smoke up into his face. Horst carefully kept his remaining eye’s stare blank, blinking only when the smoke stung slightly.

  “That was a bullet, right enough. And your crazy chueco bastard brother there got his wits blown out by artillery, I know the look. Who did you fight for?” he said.

  Röhm gobbled and stuttered convincingly. “Eh . . . Eh . . . El General, El General . . . wuh . . . wuh . . .”

  “General Huerta, sir,” Horst said, still staring ahead.

  Pablo went on: “Oh, yes, for General Huerta, señor. For the forces of order and respectability against Villa’s evil bandits. We all went home with our wounds before the gringos . . . that is, before the Americanos came.”

  The policeman bellowed mocking laughter. “Do you guava-sucking hidrocálidos know how many men I’ve asked that question? Hundreds, by the Virgin! Thousands! And do you know how many said they fought for Villa? Or Zapata? Or for the PNR anarquistas? Not one! And just one said he was Carranza’s man, a constitucionalista. If I believed that pack of lies, even Villa and Zapata wouldn’t have fought for themselves!”

  He took another pull on the cigarette. “And I’ve seen thousands of war cripples. You know how many admitted they’d been jodidos by the Americans? None! It’s amazing—the gringos killed three hundred thousand men or more, but from what people tell me they’re such good shots that there isn’t a single güey still crawling around who was just crippled by them. Even their artillery killed every cabrón it was aimed at, if I believed what I was told. So only we dumb Mexicans just fuck someone up for life instead of killing him outright, eh?”

  “I am only a poor and ignorant man, señor, and know nothing of such things,” Pablo said, his voice still soft.

  I wouldn’t like to be that policeman if Pablo ever caught him alone, Horst thought.

  “Now me,” the rural said, “I fought for Félix Díaz, the old man’s nephew. Don Porfirio ruled for thirty-two years and gave us peace at home and built railroads and bridges, and he kept the foreigners quiet. Madero and Villa and Zapata and Carranza all talked big and made big promises that fools believed, and what did we get from any of them? Bullets up the ass and a sky raining shit!”

  Pablo spoke again: “Excuse me, señor, but what did you do before the war?”

  The policeman grinned. “Me? I was a rural!” He slapped the automatic weapon slung across his body. “Whoever sits in the palaces, there’s always work for men like me!”

  The mocking amiability dropped off the man’s face like water off greased iron. He gave Horst and Röhm another long look, obviously feeling a mental itch he couldn’t scratch. Horst put on an ingratiating smile to go with his blind stare over the policeman’s head.

  “Just work, señor,” he said softly. “Work and food.”

  The rural’s eyes flicked to the young American lieutenant studying the map on the hood of the Guvvie, and equally obviously thought: Not worth the trouble of talking to the damned mallate and making sense of his bad Spanish.

  “Now get going!” he said instead. “And pray to the Virgin and your saints that you never see me again.”

  As they trudged away there was a crack of thunder, and it began to rain again. Horst sighed quietly, but soldiers were at least as accustomed to working through rain as peasants were.

  “At least that fucking traitor gets wet too,” Pablo said, shrugging his serape across his shoulders and keeping his head down as they trudged through the storm. “And the mallates.”

  EIGHT

  City of Zacatecas

  State of Zacatecas

  United States Protectorate of México

  JUNE 19TH, 1917, 1917(B)

  Your idea about the airships was inspired, Luz,” Julie Durán said. “Results almost immediately—and thanks to them, the Rangers got back quickly, too, so the information’s available.”

  Luz looked at the contact report. “This isn’t very detailed,” she said.

  “You should be able to quiz the commander of the detachment at my soiree tomorrow,” Julie replied. “It would be next week if he’d had to walk out. And on a personal note, and speaking of hunting, thank you so much for those superb Purdey side-by-sides you gave us for Christmas, Luz—Bob loved his and promised me an African safari after things settle down. Though the way it’s going, by then we may both be drooling in bath chairs pushed around by our great-grandchildren.”

  She nodded to a rack behind the desk, which held a very practical Thompson, a cut-down Remington assault shotgun, a number of hunting weapons, a scope-sighted Springfield sharpshooter, and a pair of gleaming double-barreled big-game rifles from the famous English gunsmiths, their high-polished walnut stocks discreetly inlaid with ivory and mother-of-pearl, chambered to Luz’s order for the new .338 cartridge that fired a 250-grain bullet at nearly three thousand feet per second. Purdey & Sons wouldn’t be making any more of those bespoke masterpieces, since their shop had been in central London.

  The desk also had a wooden rest with a strip of brass of the sort usually used for nameplates, engraved instead with a saying old Porfirio Díaz had made famous in the three decades of his rule in Mexico:

  Cogidos en flagrante, mátalos en caliente y después averiguamos.

  That meant more or less:

  When you catch them in the act, kill them on the spot and get the details later.

  Cheerful maxims of that sort were a tradition; Luz had heard of one station chief in southern Mindanao who had a polished skull on a mahogany base on his desk, one with a neat .30-06 hole above the left eye, most of the bone at the back raggedly missing, and a plate with:

  Here lies a Moro who wouldn’t do what I told him to do. Sic transit Gloria mundi.

  “Where is Bob, if you’re allowed to say?” Luz said. “I know the Director likes to use him as a mobile troubleshooter since you took over as station chief here.”

  “Officially, he’s in New York. Unofficially, but not really secretly, he’s in Algiers getting our operation there going and cooperating with the French. If and when they’ll cooperate, he says they’re very touchy. Foch even more than Lyautey, who’s the smoother one on their Committee of National Salvation. An unde
rstandable attitude given what’s happened to . . . is happening to . . . France. It’s delicate work.”

  There was pardonable pride in her voice; that was a very significant job indeed, since Algiers was obviously going to be an important listening post and forward base for Chamber operations in German-ruled Europe and points south and east. Over the next few years at least and probably for longer.

  “Oh, and he gave me an unofficial and extremely tantalizing message for you from one of their brighter intelligence people: Traveling Chilean feminists? I can’t believe I fell for that. Congratulations!”

  Luz grinned, or at least showed her teeth, remembering the disconcertingly sharp dark eyes in that customs shed in Tunis.

  “Another milestone in our European theatrical careers,” she said cryptically, sharing a glance with Ciara.

  Julie snorted. “And the rest went: We know it was you in Amsterdam and on the train, but all is more or less forgiven.”

  “That’s nice,” Luz said calmly.

  In fact she was irked; the survivors from that skirmish must have put two and two together with annoying intelligence—starting with the fact that someone in a skirt was shooting and throwing grenades and escaping with two Germans in one of their hijacked cars. They’d probably also figured out since then that she was somehow involved with thwarting the Breath of Loki attacks on the United States . . . but not the simultaneous one that had destroyed Paris and broken the Western Front.

  Julie’s raised eyebrow prompted Luz to review what could be said and she explained . . . somewhat.

  “I had a bit of a run-in with the Deuxième Bureau—”

  The Second Bureau of the General Staff was the French intelligence and covert-operations organization.

  “—on my next-to-last trip to Europe in ’16. That was before the 6th, before everything went to hell. I was deep undercover . . . penetrating an enemy operation . . . and their people on the spot thought I was a German asset and I could scarcely explain it to them, now could I? Unfortunate things occurred, errors in judgment, hasty and poorly considered actions. There were misunderstandings that produced hard feelings on both sides.”

  Those hard feelings would have gotten us both unpleasantly killed . . . much more unpleasantly than most uses of the word killed imply . . . if they’d made us in Tunis in November. Things are different now; they don’t dare get the Director’s goat that way anymore, or Uncle Teddy’s.

  Durán laughed, a quick hard chuckle. “How many of them did you kill in . . . Amsterdam, was it, Luz?” she said. “And on a train . . . probably a train to Germany?”

  Between six and eight, depending on whether any of the ones I pitched the grenade at lived, Luz thought. Fortunately they’re not a sentimental people, the French, particularly their spies. But I will be very careful around them for the rest of my life.

  Aloud she said quellingly:

  “Well, that’s water under the bridge now, Julie. Best not to dwell on old, unhappy things. The spirit of Progressive Americanism under the New Nationalism means a unified, disciplined focus on the future.”

  “Imitating Secretary of Public Information Croly now, are you?”

  “Oh, that’s just low!”

  She was naming, and insulting, Herbert Croly, Secretary of the Department of Public Information—overseer of the press and propaganda—and the Progressive Republican Party’s chief ideologist, as well as the author of the shatteringly dull and turgid Party bible, The Promise of American Life, a much-bought, little-read book in which the phrase the New Nationalism had been coined and struck Uncle Teddy’s attention like a thunderbolt about eight years ago. It wasn’t surprising he liked the book, which had used him as an exemplar of a new type of leader who embodied the popular will and the national destiny.

  Sometimes Luz thought Croly must feel like the sorcerer’s apprentice, but her sympathy was underwhelming.

  Julie’s smile grew wider and she winked at Ciara: “The opposition here used to call her Santa Muerte, and they swore she could see in the dark, turn herself invisible, and walk through walls,” she said.

  “So does Colonel Nicolai of Abteilung IIIb these days,” Luz said with resignation.

  Julie’s on a tear.

  “And I hear they called her Mictēcacihuātl too, sometimes, down in Morelos,” Julie said. “There are more people who speak Nahuatl . . . that’s the old Aztec language . . . down there.”

  “Mictēcacihuātl?” Ciara said, butchering the Nahua word even more than Julie had.

  “The Skull Goddess,” Julie said. “The Swallower of Stars, Lady of the Land of Bones. Queen of Hell and Death in the old religion, basically.”

  Luz made a dismissive gesture. “That was my fault for being too flamboyant,” she said. “What can I say? We were young, and our souls were on fire.”

  In fact she’d played up to that identification with the old Aztec monster-goddess, leaving little Day of the Dead sugar-paste skulls behind as a trademark and calling card.

  “We were young?” Henrietta chuckled, and looked ostentatiously around the table. “Don’t see many gray hairs here even now, ladies.”

  “A little flamboyance was a small price to pay for youthful energy and flexibility,” Luz said.

  “Nobody had much experience at what we were doing with the Chamber, anyway. We got that on the job. Or died. And we took a lot of our ideas out of books,” Durán added.

  “There were manuals then?” Ciara asked, puzzled because she’d read all the current ones and memorized them, including their publication dates.

  “No, from adventure fiction. Things like Kim and Richard Harding Davis’s stories.”

  Luz nodded at Ciara’s Is this real glance and went into detail:

  “And they often worked. Sinister gestures were useful to keep the enemy nervous and looking over their shoulders, for instance,” she said. “Style is important here. It’s a lot like advertising or popular fiction in some ways—manipulating people’s conceptions. For example, you don’t have to have spies everywhere and that’s impossible anyway. You just have to make people believe you do.”

  The station chief’s elegant blond brow arched a little further as she ignored the subject-changing. “And both of you getting the Order of the Black Eagle!” she said. “Nonposthumously! And I notice you’re an executive field operative now, Luz.”

  “We earned it. I credit enormous talent, Ciara’s magnificent bravery, and lots of luck,” Luz said.

  Their eyes met in an instant of perfect understanding. Julie would have guessed that the medals had something to do with thwarting the horror-gas attacks, and that the details were in the Most Secret files and would stay there for a long long time. So would their subsequent excursion to Berlin to penetrate the secrets of the Telemobiloscope, the revolutionary German radio-range-finding apparatus.

  Though rumors had inevitably spread about the final bit, which had involved escaping the capital of Germany by hijacking a German Navy semirigid airship . . . equipped with the Telemobiloscope. And the role of then-Colonel and now-Brigadier Ted Roosevelt Jr. in the final rescue—a man they both knew socially as well as professionally—that had captured it intact.

  And who, if he lives, may well be president someday.

  “How’s Algiers otherwise?”

  “Bob’s sent me some really magnificent little French objets d’art, which are going cheap there if you can pay in dollars.”

  Luz sighed heavily; there were times when Julie could wear on you.

  Particularly with her clothes on, which is why it didn’t last; that isn’t enough, she thought, and went on aloud:

  “We were through part of French North Africa not long ago, a little after the 6th that time, and it was already . . . rather bad.”

  “While traveling as Chilean feminists? It got much worse, Bob hints cryptically. That made me do a little research—ca
ll in some favors for information—and apparently it’s the Entente’s very own Armenia, though we’re not supposed to say so.”

  “I suspected it would be something like that,” Luz said with a sigh, and Ciara grimaced slightly and looked aside.

  “Well, you did ask,” Julie pointed out.

  Shoving thirty-odd million refugees into an area that only produced a modest food surplus for its twelve million or so natives and million French colons even in years of peace and good weather was something that just didn’t have any possible pleasant outcomes. Not with food short or just not there at all everywhere from Normandy to China. And shipping even more so, what with the U-boat packs and conflicting priorities.

  Julie shrugged and went on: “Though the French have their news blackout clamped tight and it’s mostly working, which is more than the Turks ever managed. No photographs, and I suspect no internal documentation that isn’t burned as soon as possible. Our very own Public Information is helping, of course, lest excessive truthfulness confuse the public.”

  Julie added: “Their new public slogan is Ce sont les Français qui font le sol français, pas le sol les gens.”

  “‘It is the French people who make the ground France, not the ground the people,’” Luz murmured. “Fair enough.”

  “The Great War is Moloch the Devourer come again,” Ciara said with a sigh and a troubled look, which was indisputably true. “It destroys everything it touches.”

  “It’s a long ways from the first time,” Henrietta said.

  When they all looked at her she quoted softly from the Book of Joshua, her eyes distant:

  “‘So Joshua smote all the country of the hills, and of the south, and of the vale, and of the springs, and all their kings and peoples; he left none remaining, but slew all that breathed . . . the young and the old, the male and the female, and the ox and the ass and the sheep, with the edge of the sword, as the Lord God of Israel commanded.’”