Shadows of Annihilation

by S. M. Stirling

  “Well, no,” Julie said. “Still, they definitely brought these bombs—”

  She flicked a fingernail against the casing.

  “—with malice aforethought.”

  “But how? That’s the question. I keep trying to imagine how and my mind keeps boggling. Fifty bandits carrying these big steel bombs—”

  Luz mimed a kick at the broken crate; it would have relieved her feelings to do it, though probably it would have hurt her foot.

  “—through the 32nd defensive perimeter on stretchers while pretending to be a troupe of folk dancers? Smuggling it in with an oxcart under a load of cornstalks? Building a very large catapult? Using a circus cannon? What are we missing?”

  “Have I told you how much I do not appreciate your arriving to dispel the rural quietude of this district?” Julie asked ironically.

  “De nada, mi amiga.”

  “Oh, and you’re certain that this Horst fellow is here?” Julie said. At Luz’s affirmative sound she went on: “Since we’re alone, there is something I’d wanted to ask about the delicious, dashing baron . . .”

  Luz sighed. “Beautiful in a very masculine way, rather like a blond Apollo or a Thoroughbred racehorse.”

  “Well, I’m all for beauty, but sheer looks only go so far. Unless you’re a male yourself, and they have low standards above the eyebrows, bless them. Erotic arousal turns off the post-ape-man part of their brains . . . shortage of blood, I suppose.”

  Luz nodded: “He’s also intelligent, well-read, even a good conversationalist, reasonable sense of humor even if a bit full of himself . . . like another of my inamoratas . . .”

  “Oh, ouch!”

  “If the shoe fits . . . The mutual stalking was great fun, even leaving aside my ulterior motives and that extra little thrill of risk. But once his clothes came off . . . all the stamina in the world, but no imagination at all. Rather boring, in fact. Well enough briefly, but it might have become a trial after more than a few days if it weren’t under false pretenses, even if I hadn’t fallen into something so much better.”

  FIFTEEN

  City of Zacatecas

  State of Zacatecas

  United States Protectorate of México

  JUNE 22ND, 1917, 1917(B)

  The tables of Madame Teffeau’s Café y Panadería Francesa weren’t very busy at ten to eleven—this wasn’t an hour when Mexicans usually ate—but even the open courtyard’s fresh bright air was full of the scent of the morning baking, which Luz inhaled along with that of the—excellent—coffee, and the flowers that also flavored the mild warmth of the highland day. They’d avoided the breakfast rush and the Dakota Project workers stopping in on their way to the plant site east of town to pick something fancy up for lunch. So far all the customers had bought and left with their booty, or left orders to be sent around today or tomorrow, often via notes in the hands of servants who’d have the next day off in whole or part. The orders had Madame Teffeau beaming with their massiveness, since tomorrow would be a fiesta day, and kept her grandson busy on his motorized delivery tricycle . . .

  The tarte Normande the two of them were sharing was a simple dish, at least by French standards: a porously tender pastry crust, some slivered almonds, a custard of eggs and sweetened heavy cream and creamed butter and a little Calvados, some subtle spices, a spiral of thin-cut apple slices, and an apricot glaze topping slightly caramelized in the oven as it baked.

  But as with anything else, it’s all in the execution.

  Ciara made a muffled sound of appreciation, swallowed, and said:

  “I see why you made us such a light breakfast, darling!”

  “A little fruit and toast is the ideal prelude to this.”

  “Or Kellogg’s Shredded Wheat.”

  “Yes, but chewing on dry grass is much cheaper.”

  “Snobbery!”

  “Taste. It’s nice to see a bit of France surviving, too, querida,” Luz replied, wielding her fork and taking a bite herself. “Any more thoughts on you-know-what?”

  “It’s definitely structural, somehow,” Ciara said.

  She often came up with ideas early, but after the time when her morning stupor had worn off; by now the fruits of yesterday’s long labors over the bomb at the hacienda would have had time to ferment. Luz smiled to herself. There were times when Ciara went to places completely beyond her, and that made her feel . . .

  As if I’m mated to a very strange eagle, and have to watch her flying into the sun. But I know she’ll always return.

  “It’s designed to be incorporated in something, not just carried in it—it was meant to act as part of a framework bolted together, with subassemblies attached to that. That engineering officer Major Dicot found us, Captain Jones, agreed, and he seems quite clever. Once he got over being so shy. I felt like an absolute ogre at first, pushing at him.”

  Luz nodded and sipped at coffee that was wonderful if you liked the European style, which she did. The engineering officer had looked desperate and tongue-tied, until one of Ciara’s observations prodded his professional pride and they were off into technicalities she couldn’t follow.

  Though to be fair, being too chatty with a young white woman might well have gotten the man killed, back where he grew up, which from his voice was a long way from Boston, or California for that matter. I imagine it’s a hard habit to break. Many are the marvels, but none more marvelous than man and his idiocies.

  Luz thought and then spoke. “Let’s break this down into steps from the enemy’s point of view. Working backward from the explosion they want at the crucial point in the factory.”

  Ciara nodded enthusiastically, and Luz went on:

  “They want to get explosives to a target. The target is heavily guarded. They probably can’t get explosives through the perimeter . . . but over it? Could it be designed to fit in an aeroplane?”

  That was the modern, Progressive answer to obstacles: Go over if you couldn’t go through, which was one reason why everyone was mad for airships and aeroplanes these days, not to mention using them constantly as metaphors . . . and in Luz’s opinion, losing sight of the essential distinction between the literal and metaphorical all too often.

  Unfortunately, or sometimes not, Germans were just about as modern as Americans that way.

  Ciara sighed. “I thought of an aircraft, but it’s definitely not intended to be dropped, you see, it’s meant to be built into a structure . . . meant to be part of a structure, load-bearing. I think the Germans could get a disassembled aircraft into the country by the cargo U-boats. But what would be the point of an aeroplane that couldn’t drop a bomb without falling apart in midair? It would have to crash to explode! And bombing from the air is so inaccurate unless the aircraft gets dangerously close anyway. Those pilots we talked to at the air base were only a few hundred feet up in the attack they told us about!”

  Luz blinked and touched a forefinger to her lips as that image ran through her mind. Germans were just as patriotic as Americans or just as crazy or both, if there was a difference. For a really high-priority target, if you tried you could find . . .

  “You could get a volunteer to crash—” Luz began to say, working out the thought aloud.

  Her eyes went wide at the thought; it made far too much sense, given what they’d found so far. Moro Juramentado fanatics in the Philippines had been a bad problem in Uncle Teddy’s first administrations, even with only a yard of razor-sharp kampilan to take as many infidels with them as they could. Here in Mexico individuals had occasionally done something similar with dynamite under their coats, and you couldn’t even deter them by burying them chopped up and stuffed into a gutted pig carcass.

  They were infernally hard to stop, or at least to stop before they could inflict losses on your guards and security details; fortunately they were rare, even in a grudge match like the Intervention at its worst. Someone like tha
t in an airplane and riding a giant bomb . . . which would be functionally the same as a bomb that could see and react on its own . . .

  “Wait!” she said.

  She walked quickly back into the shop room of the bakery, dropping into French:

  “Madame Teffeau? Could I so greatly impose upon you as to request the use of your telephone?”

  The pâtissière wasn’t handing out any more free pastries—French shopkeepers were rarely that sentimental—but Luz’s effortless Parisian still got her a smile:

  “But of course! Mademoiselle may use the one in my office,” the Frenchwoman said, as she hoisted baskets of crusty loaves onto shelves with easy flexes of her muscular arms, and smiled as Luz took an instant to enjoy the smell and the slight crackle of the crusts.

  “Just for a moment, madame.”

  “Feel free, my dear mademoiselle.”

  The office was a room giving off the arched portal that surrounded the building’s main courtyard . . . which in turn enabled any occupant to keep a close eye on what was going on in said courtyard with its tables, while being discreetly hidden if they chose to draw the curtains. Inside it was neatly organized, with shelves for ledgers, file cabinets of the latest variety—the type with hanging folders in drawers stacked one above the other, something that big American businesses had only started to adopt when she was a child, and small French ones much later—and a modern telephone on the desk. Everything had been bought secondhand, but it was neat as a pin and functional as a knife blade.

  The personal touch was a dozen photo portraits; most showed a family resemblance, and all of them had a black mourning border except one of a much younger Madame and Monsieur Teffeau in wedding garb. The groom had a round, plump, cheerful face, but judging from his absence from dealing with the public, he’d probably suffered physical or mental damage in his family’s escape from the destruction of Paris and the ongoing apocalypse that had followed for mainland France.

  Luz made a mental note to advise Julie to cultivate Madame Teffeau; she could be very useful and was probably well-disposed to the regime since she’d ended up here rather than in the National Redoubt of Overseas France in North Africa. Probably chance had played a role in that, but there must have been an element of deliberate choice and very hard effort, too. And judging by the pictures, as long as the United States had Germany for an enemy, it would have the Teffeau family as friends.

  Julie’s very keen but she does tend to be a bit snobbish sometimes. Teffeau doesn’t have the sort of direct pull and clout here the de Moncadas do, say, but . . . Más vale maña que fuerza. Sometimes smart beats strong.

  The office at Universal Imports came through loud and clear once she’d dialed the number; the new rotary phones still weren’t all that common yet even in the United States proper, but the local telephone network in Zacatecas was as good as any medium-sized American city these days. There were advantages to being late off the mark, and Bell-Western had been strongly encouraged to start fresh with the best in its extensions in the Protectorate. Being allowed the effective national monopoly meant you listened to encouragement of that sort, these days.

  Zacatecas had special priority now with the Project, too, of course.

  “Durán here,” Julie said. “Luz?”

  “Sí. We need a standing air patrol over Zacatecas city and the Dakota Project plant, Julie,” Luz said. “Soonest. And tell Dicot to tell General Young that all those antiaircraft assets he was considering mothballing should be packed around the Dakota Project plant right away and told to keep their eyes peeled.”

  “An air attack?” she said wonderingly. “Here?”

  “Probably not but possibly yes,” Luz said, and explained. “In this war . . .”

  “The bizarre is normal, yes,” Julie said. “And frogs grow hair. And here I thought calling fighting-scout pilots suicidal was just a metaphor!”

  “Sometimes a metaphor will bite you in a sensitive place . . . why not in the air, when we’ve seen it with people attacking us on land?”

  “Hopefully not too often. We’ve been processing that prisoner you brought us—”

  A type of processing that had something in common with the one that turned pigs into strings of sausages and tins of leaf lard in an Armour & Co. plant in Chicago.

  “—and he seems to have been some sort of bandit muleteer. He met what sounds like your old flame Horst up in the Sierra the day of the air attack, still pining for you—”

  Do not say that in front of Ciara, Julie, Luz thought. Do not, do not, do not.

  “Together with another German, more recently arrived, a soldier with really spectacular facial scars, whom you’ve also met.”

  “I have?” Luz said, scanning back through her memories.

  “Construing shooting at you from some distance as equivalent to a social introduction. In that little tiff of yours in France last December. His name’s Ernst Röhm, Major, formerly of the Bavarian part of the Imperial army and more recently of the Stoßtruppen before he became one of Colonel Nicolai’s prize hatchet men. Since you kicked the previous one in the head and . . . the real atrocity . . . sent him to live in El Paso.”

  “I thought it was Stoßtruppen in France in December, from the tactics. And the weapons. We had the dubious privilege of being on the receiving end of their first field use of the assault rifles, too.”

  “Lucky you; incidentally, Röhm had a couple of the assault rifles with him—that was where the spent cartridge cases came from; he was giving a demonstration when our Falcons crashed the party . . . or bombed, gassed, and machine-gunned the party. I had Henrietta make a call to HQ and they identified Röhm by a cross-check—a couple of European newspapers we monitor published pictures of him last summer, which was useful, and the word in the German Army was that he . . . and your beau Horst, by the way, they’re actually named after him . . . were responsible for the assault rifles. But there were definitely four Germans in that warehouse shortly before we arrived, preparing a cozy Gemütlichkeit welcome for us.”

  “But not in a positive way,” Luz said aloud. “No impromptu beer garden and chorus from The Student Prince.”

  “Too right, just a heaping helping of bombe surprise. And your boy Horst has his hair dyed black now, the Byronic image to go with the eye patch you gave him—everything but a dark cloak billowing in the wind as he stands on a precipice and contemplates roiling clouds below.”

  “Better—”

  “Correct the shoot on sight posters, yes, that’s being done. From what he’s said, I think the other two Germans are technical specialists on transfer from the German army.”

  “Why?”

  “Because your boyfriend and Major Röhm both scared him—absolute killer chingones, he says—but the other two . . . he keeps babbling about smart-ass sissies.”

  “Ah. And they wouldn’t send men who needed protection unless . . .”

  “Unless they had some other overriding usefulness. One of the Mexicans they’re traveling with seems to be a rogue named Pablo, originally Pablo Escobar, a bandit leader of sorts who’s been giving us problems for years. We have his prints on file locally and they match with ones from the warehouse. He’s not one of the dead ones, either. Dammit. I’d really like to have caught him; we could learn a great deal from him when we put him on the disassembly line.”

  “Well, that’s all nice to know, or at least things it’s better to know than not,” Luz said. “Nothing absolutely crucial, though.”

  “The technicians might be a very substantial clue. The surprise is going to be a technical surprise. They wouldn’t need specialists just to blow something up; that’s not a rare set of skills and there are plenty of fighting men who can double in demolitions.”

  “Possibly a point, and they do have a long list of cackling Herr Doktor Professor types with mad schemes for mass slaughter and world domination through applied sc
ience, as we’ve found out to our cost. And whatever they do, they’re going to be doing it soon. They know we’re on their tracks and we’ll kill them or scoop them up within the next week or two if they linger. So . . . soon, Julie, soon.”

  There was motion through the window. “Got to go, it’s a source,” Luz said. “Hopefully. Potentially.”

  “I’ll get on to getting us . . . air cover,” Julie said, her tone conveying how she was shaking her head in wonderment. “German air attacks in Zacatecas!”

  * * *

  —

  María Luisa Muñoz Herrera had been the one at the gathering of altar cloth repairers most disturbed and thoughtful about the V-gas attack on Paris. Now she was too distracted to enjoy the slice of mille-feuille she was toying with.

  Though her much older, darker, and stouter maidservant—it was of course impossible for a young woman of her respectability to go out alone, and even just a maid was a little daring—was off in a corner happily and methodically stuffing her face with pieces torn off a loaf of bread and smeared with strawberry jam and knocking back hot cocoa. Both were much cheaper than pastries but still well above her usual pay grade, since normally she’d be eating corn tortillas in the kitchen, with the luxury of risen wheat bread reserved for her social superiors except on holidays.

  Luz thought Luisa’s preoccupation was a pity; the three alternating layers of puff pastry and vanilla-fragrant crème pâtissière topped with cracked hazelnuts and fresh raspberries in a matrix of thick whipped cream were really too good to be pushed around a plate by an indifferent fork.

  All what you’re used to, Luz thought, taking another forkful of her tarte Normande and giving it full attention. I don’t suppose she’s had many occasions to discuss terrorist attacks with people she must at least slightly suspect are American spies themselves.

  She could sense Ciara about to speak and nudged her ankle gently under the table.

  A little while ago Ciara had tried to explain the daring new theories of some Jewish physicist from Switzerland to Luz, one of which was that gravity was things like planets and stars making a downward dimple in space. Rather like a cannonball on a sheet of rubber, and everything rolled down the slope it made toward it. Silence could function that way in human affairs; it was something a lot of people found intolerable, and eventually they spoke compulsively to fill it up.