Shadows of Annihilation

by S. M. Stirling

  They’d all had time to change into breeches for this operation, except Dora, who this time was in a conventional shirtwaist to keep Efraín’s family from being too scandalized and distracted by the horror of a woman’s legs in close company. The junior operative swept up the cards and put a finger to her lips to the children; their mother and aunt moved in to sit on the bench amid them and put arms around shoulders.

  “Look at this!” Ciara said, from the sound remembering to say it in Spanish just in time. “Look!”

  She shoved the paper in front of his face, and he blinked blearily. With a sound like an overheated teakettle she grabbed him by the back of the head and moved his gaze to the paper.

  “Look! Is that—”

  Luz saw the change in his face before Ciara noticed it. She did when he tore himself loose and backed up, pointing as the chair fell over with a crack on the stained concrete, gibbering wordlessly and then squealing:

  “How . . . how . . . how do you know everything!”

  Even so, Ciara was back at the table completing the drawing before Julie and Luz arrived to look over her shoulders. What Luz saw was like an aeroplane with a single high wing supported by struts bolted to its midsection, and a pusher propeller at the rear, mounted on something like an upward-curved ramp, and with no wheels or pilot or cockpit for one, just . . .

  “It’s like wings on a torpedo,” Luz said in wonderment.

  “That’s exactly what it must be!” Ciara said, her voice high with a mixture of technical interest and horror. “An . . . aerial torpedo! A sky torpedo! See—”

  She sketched in a power cord. “This is why he heard it whining! A Sperry automatic control system with an electromechanical gyroscopic feedback system, they must have been spinning it up to test it—”

  “You’ve lost me,” Julie said sharply.

  “A man named Sperry invented the system in 1911 and made one for aeroplanes in 1912—it uses gyroscopes to maintain a constant heading in an aircraft or ship automatically through hydraulic control mechanisms . . . it’s still experimental . . . and if you know the range to the target, the engine could cut out, you’d use a revolutions counter for that, and it would dive down. Just like a torpedo! But it wouldn’t be very accurate at a long distance.”

  The torpedo had something on its nose; a thin metal cross in the shape of an X, with a long spike pointing forward from the end of each arm.

  “But this, this is different,” Ciara said, stabbing her pencil at it. “This is a receiver for wireless transmissions—radio. It would be . . . you could . . . it would sort of, of home in on the transmitter, if you—”

  She looked at them, obviously unendurably frustrated by their not seeing the implications:

  “But you wouldn’t need daylight for any of this. You could just set it up and start a timer—like they did on the U-boats for the Breath of Loki—and leave!”

  “¡Ay!” Luz said in alarm.

  The standing air patrol they’d been counting on had just been rendered completely useless.

  “If you could hide the transmitter just where you wanted the air torpedo to land . . .”

  “Then it would be quite accurate, yes. We could . . . you could jam the transmission, perhaps—”

  And we sat here all day with our thumbs up our . . .

  “No time!” Luz barked aloud.

  Julie was already diving for the Army field telephone set up on one end of the table and spinning the crank.

  “Now!” she shouted into it.

  Outside a man applied a match to touchpaper. Rockets shot skyward, and a pattern of silver and crimson stars appeared high in the sky. Through the half-open doors they could hear, faintly, the cheering from the crowded streets of Zacatecas to the west over the ridge of ground, where it was taken as a signal for the start of the fiesta’s fireworks.

  Several miles northeastward, Field Operative Lee would see it, where he was lying up with several assistants, ready to start interdicting—killing—anyone trying to get in or out of the de Moncada grazing property Efraín had revealed to be the place the conspirators had picked. It was a good choice from their point of view, a stretch of thin grassland used as summer grazing for stock from other properties rather than a real hacienda, no casa grande and not much in the way of a village, just pens and quarters for the shepherds, shearing sheds and wool sheds . . . and the mayordomo’s quarters, nothing much for the very junior man in charge of a minor operation . . .

  Julie turned and her finger shot out like a spear. “Henrietta! You go with Luz—she’ll need to deal with Major Dicot. Call Dicot now on this phone. Captain York! Captain Julius! We’re going now, now!”

  They won’t find much, Luz thought, as the station chief ran for her Guvvie and the engines blatted and the troops scrambled for their transport.

  “Like the U-boats for the Breath of Loki,” Ciara said again, as their eyes met, echoing the thought with words. “The crews put them on the bottom and evacuated them and those electromechanical instruction machines were set to launch the rocket-mortars.”

  “My family weren’t even killed by people,” Henrietta said with quiet bitterness as she lifted the phone. “They sent a machine to do it.”

  “And I’ll give you any odds they did the same thing here,” Luz said. “But the radio homing transmitter . . . they’ll have to have set that by hand at the target. And just before the attack, because the whole plant’s inspected regularly. Ciara, where will they put it, on the storage tanks? They’re doing the first production run right now.”

  Ciara had the plans of the Dakota Project plant open before her.

  “No,” she said. “Not from these and what I saw on the tour. They’re underground and the construction is really heavy and the bomb will have lots of explosive but not much velocity—the explosion will . . . will sort of bounce its blast force off something like that, you see? No, the maximum damage would be here, just where the pipelines run. Damage here will spill the largest possible amount—it’s liquid, remember, not all that volatile—and then vaporize as much of it as possible and scatter it, depending on the direction of the wind.”

  Which is from the east, right now!

  Luz looked where Ciara’s finger was resting. In the background, Henrietta’s voice was talking on the field telephone and she heard Major Dicot’s name.

  “Goddammit to hell!” the young woman from Savannah swore, the first time Luz had heard her use blasphemy.

  She looked up. “An American major with one eye and papers that are perfect except that they don’t check on the expected-arrivals list got into the plant an hour ago! Andre just got the report! Nobody’s seen this major since!”

  “Tell him to meet us at block C-17 of the plant,” Luz called over to her; she checked her pistol, snapped the magazine back in, and holstered it. Then she touched the hooked hilt of her navaja with one finger.

  “Let’s go.”

  * * *

  —

  It’s sort of ironic how many people involved with horror-gas end up dying of it themselves—like Herr Doktor von Bülow,” Ciara said, sounding commendably calm as they drove toward possible death. “And he invented it.”

  “He did?” Henrietta said, coming out of her brown study in the passenger seat as the Guvvie sped through the night behind the light spears of its headlamps.

  The road was good, and ahead the bright floodlights and perimeter searchlights of the Dakota Project works loomed.

  “Yes,” Luz said from the backseat. “Not our doing—not Ciara’s and mine personally—but we were in Staaken when it happened. He was killed when the Chamber sabotaged the German works last December. And we’d met him before that, in the course of . . . work.”

  Henrietta knew better than to ask for the details, though she obviously burned to do so.

  “Good!” was all she said, but there was a savage satisf
action in it.

  Fair enough, though he wasn’t a bad old abuelo, for someone behind the greatest single massacre in human history. He just thought it was necessary for the Greater Good, or at least for Greater Germany, which was pretty much the same thing to him.

  “Horst von Dückler worked closely with him, developing the strike plans for the American part of the Breath of Loki,” Luz said. “I can tell you that much.”

  Major Andre Dicot met them at the nearest main gate instead of block C-17, and he was cursing quietly to himself in South Louisiana French, crossed with the standard Parisian variety, just a hint of the Creole accent in the almost-w sound of the r’s. Luz’s mind absently noted the confirmation of her initial guess. She stood as Ciara brought them to a halt, swaying with her hand on the overhead bar that supported the canvas roof when it was up, and jumped down with a lithe hop, walking over to him and shaking his hand.

  The entranceway was flanked by two octagonal concrete pillboxes, with the muzzles of twin Brownings just visible within in the sharp blue-white light of the floods; there was a squad of infantry on hand, gaping a little at the woman in breeches with a pistol on her hip in a high-set cutaway holster exchanging greetings with an officer of the 32nd.

  The gates were double frames of stout wood and steel pipe, laced with barbed wire, one rolling to the left and the other to the right to let the roadway be used. The perimeter stretched off to either side in the darkness, coils of barbed wire clamped at intervals to angle-iron posts that hadn’t even had time to get rusty yet, then a good graveled perimeter roadway constantly patrolled, then a wire fence fifteen feet high with more pillboxes just behind it. Guard towers with searchlights and yet more machine-guns stood at intervals, and behind it the tangle of tanks and piping and blocky buildings that made up the factory of death.

  “C-17’s blacked out, Field Operative,” he said as the gates opened; he and Henrietta exchanged a glance, shy and quick, but nothing more. “It happened after I got your message and sent a reaction squad toward the location you indicated—someone must have been watching. I’ve put troops on the perimeter around C-17, but I pulled the men out. A firefight in there . . .”

  Luz bared her teeth; part of that was the scorched-metal-and-ozone scent of the chemical plant that stretched away behind the fencing, and partly . . .

  Dicot probably didn’t really think that she was laughing, but his look was freighted with the anxiety that had struck him so suddenly.

  “Something amuses?” he said, harassed enough that his birth tongue bled over into his usually faultless English diction.

  Luz suspected that Dicot’s roots were in an old family of gens de couleur libres in New Orleans, free and well-educated even before the Civil War; that tradition of schooling and a home familiar with the world of culture and books would have eased his rise through the ranks after the General Staff decided several years ago that men of color should be commissioned in larger numbers for the Negro divisions.

  “It’s just that everything here reminds me strongly of the German V-gas plant in Staaken last year . . . including the abundance of guards and wire, and how little it helps sometimes, but now from the other side. So that I feel as if I’m stamping elle ne sait rien faire de ses dix doigts, celui-là on my own identity card.”

  That meant feeling completely useless; not entirely accurate, but enough so that it wasn’t a lie, and it helped Dicot override his own sense of startled inadequacy. And it reminded him that the Black Chamber were experts in sabotage from both angles.

  She showed him Ciara’s sketch of the German weapon and he swore again, his head whipping up. The sky was quiet now with the fighting scouts back at base—though there were still fireworks exploding from the direction of Zacatecas—but she supposed they might hear the air torpedoes coming.

  “So if we find this transmitter, they won’t hit?” he asked.

  Ciara spoke up: “They’ll still hit somewhere, Major. In the general area, with the gyro-guidance system. But with the transmitter . . .”

  Dicot winced; there weren’t many good places for a heavy load of explosives to come down in a chemical plant dedicated to making poisons, though some were much worse than others.

  “What we need to do is find the transmitter, and then take it somewhere else . . . quickly!” Ciara said. “While it’s still working. If we can do that we can make things safe, not just safer.”

  “I hope the strike force keeps them from launching, but it’s not the way to bet,” Luz said. “A sniper probably isn’t going to be able to interdict them in the dark, either. We’re going in now. There’s no time to waste and this is our specialty. Keep the gate open,” she added. “And keep working on getting the lights back on—darkness is the saboteur’s friend.”

  “At least they didn’t smuggle explosives past us,” he said.

  “They weren’t stupid enough to try; that would be obvious,” she replied grimly.

  I wish I could have brought some of the Rangers, she thought as she swung back to her seat and they drove through; the Bugkalot were just the people for night work. Better them than me! But there wasn’t time to alter plans . . . air torpedoes! And I thought Burroughs was fanciful!

  Three long breaths, and she touched Ciara briefly on the shoulder.

  And I really wish mi amor weren’t here . . .

  The breaths pushed the thought out of her head, all thought, leaving only readiness and wariness as they drove through the gate, turned left toward big concrete tanks set low in the ground, and then into the darkened area. It wasn’t pitch-black; enough glow came from the arc lights elsewhere to produce a twilight full of shadows.

  “Slow down,” she said.

  Ciara did; the Guvvie came down to walking pace, its headlights piercing the gloom. The road ran beside a long line of twin pipes supported at about head-height on widely spaced concrete supports, welded steel that looked odd without the rivets you usually saw in this type of construction. Not far away the pipes ran through a set of bulbous valves and control wheels before continuing on the other side, and those did have rivets. Everything was pale, painted with some aluminum-based coating, nothing to hint at the death of millions that the pipe contained except a faint high-pitched hissing.

  Hissing like the Midgard serpent, Luz thought. The Devourer of Worlds.

  She hopped lithely out of the Guvvie and walked alongside it crouched, invisible in her dark clothing to anyone beyond arm’s reach. Henrietta did the same, but stumbled; Luz grabbed the back of her jacket for a moment and the younger operative steadied, using the same instinctive crouch, her pistol in her hand.

  “You are definitely getting a transfer to Field Operations, Miss Colmer,” Luz said quietly, and Henrietta broke off a startled giggle and walked more smoothly.

  “Close,” Ciara said tightly.

  She could read this wilderness of pipes and retorts and pumps with its sounds of rushing and hissing and muted distant clanks and whirrs as easily as Luz could a forest or a crowded street.

  “The next set of control valves would be the optimum target.”

  “Be ready,” Luz warned.

  A box rested just beyond the valves; it showed clearly because there were glowing spots on its surface illuminating dials and switches, and stiff wires stretched out to either side, four of them, turning upward through spring-mounted elbow joints and stirring in the darkness with the slight wind, a near-invisible crown of thorns.

  That’s it! Luz thought, restraining an impulse to shoot it.

  Electronic equipment, something easy—relatively easy—to get past guards if you had a plausible cover story because so few people knew them as anything but powerful mysteries, unlike the dynamite or blocks of gelignite everyone looked for . . .

  “Stop now!”

  Ciara did, and killed the lights. Almost in the same instant there was a CRACK, the distinctive snapping boom of a .4
5 automatic, and a crash and tinkle of glass as the round punched through the windscreen.

  Fred Foreman’s military-surplus Guvvie is back at its old trade, some distant part of her mind jibed. Just like me.

  Ciara rolled out of the other side of the Guvvie, landing with a muffled ooof!

  “Cover me when I stop firing,” Luz said quietly, and came to one knee with the pistol flowing into her hand.

  Crack! Crack! Crack . . .

  She emptied the twelve-round magazine in the direction of the muzzle flash, not expecting to hit anything, just covering fire. As the brass from the last round spun out and the receiver locked back she was already dropping flat and rolling for the other side of the road, the magazine dropping out and another slapping into the well and the click of the slide moving forward as she rolled into the ditch—the stagnant smell and the cold of dampness soaking through her clothes telling her as much as anything.

  Henrietta came to a knee as Luz began to move, and Ciara braced her pistol hand on the hood of the Guvvie.

  Crack! Crack! Crack!

  The muzzle flashes showed Henrietta and Ciara in silhouette as Luz crawled forward. Then there was another CRACK! from ahead, and Ciara spun to the ground with a cry of pain.

  “¡Mierda!” Luz snarled under her breath and came up again, bracing a knee against the neatly cambered side of the ditch and emptying another magazine at the area of the flash and where she thought the shooter would displace.

  Silence fell, with only the hissing of the death pipe and the muted ticking of hot metal in the Guvvie’s engine to break the almost-quiet of the night. You didn’t hear by straining in a place and time like this, you heard by paying attention. Not to the rapid panting of Ciara’s breath—that was a good sign. For the thing that broke the pattern of noises, the thing that didn’t fit . . .

  Horst would be stalking her through the darkness, a tiger with the mind of a man, with weapons and hands that could pluck her apart once they closed on her. Horst and a confederate, and Horst wouldn’t have picked just anyone to come along on a job like this. She was in a darkness full of hungry animals and teeth, and she bared her own in an instinctive snarl of defiance. The rest of her floated on a calm that was balanced, not relaxed, forces in equipoise and ready to move. Ciara would be bleeding . . . but they were all going to die unless she settled this.