Ice, Iron and Gold Read online

  Inside, she had expected something sleek and NASA-futuristic. Instead, there were banks of ornate brass meters, scaffolds, blue-coated attendants dragging wheeled carts full of cabbage-sized vacuum tubes, power lines snaking over flagstones. All it needs, she thought, is Bela Lugosi. Or Gene Wilder. The thought was a first break of light through the gray clouds that seemed to have settled on her mind.

  Of course, there was some modern equipment; she recognized the company names: Sony, I.B.M., Texas Instruments . . .

  The technician showed Marylou and the colonel to a chalked circle on the floor. Alertness returning, Marylou felt a strange professional note of admiration for the faultless cover of the other woman's dress-for-success business outfit, slightly worn attaché case, and copy of the Financial Times.

  The colonel handed her the .32, the last part of her original clothing. The technician noted something on a clipboard.

  "Right, then, ma'am," he said. "You know about the effect of displacement in transit? Cheerio, then, Colonel."

  A crackling scent of ozone filled the air. Marylou stood looking at the weapon in her hand.

  "I hope you're not considering shooting me with that," Valentina said with amusement.

  "Oh, no," Marylou said calmly. "But you forgot one thing."

  "Whatever could it be?"

  "That guns can shoot something else besides people," Marylou answered.

  Even as she spoke, the Imperial agent was turning, lashing out with a bladed palm. But Marylou had already raised the pistol and begun firing into the towering banks of equipment. A giant hand seized them, and the world rippled and twisted apart.

  Not having been moving during transition, Marylou awoke first. She used the time well; the colonel awoke with her hands cuffed behind her.

  "You stupid blackamoor bitch!" she said. "You imbecilic—"

  Marylou interrupted her with a hearty kick to the stomach. "You should have conditioned me against hitting you, too," she said.

  "That would have been too limiting, wouldn't it?" she replied sardonically.

  Marylou kicked her again, then restrained herself with an effort. Above them, above the canopy of the prune orchard they had found themselves awakened in, a jet went by high overhead.

  "Nearer my line than yours," Marylou said. The colonel opened her mouth, hesitated, decided to concentrate on moving, which is not easy over uneven ground with hands linked behind the back.

  "I'm sure the authorities will be interested in your story," she continued, prodding the other ahead of her toward the verge of the orchard.

  They walked for half an hour before they came to the building. It was a schoolhouse, reassuringly ordinary in whitewashed cinderblock. There were children playing noisily in the yard, and a group surrounding a cluster of teachers at the flagpole. For a moment, Marylou closed her eyes in pure relief.

  And then she heard Colonel Valentina laughing, vengeful and triumphant, and opened her eyes to see the tall blonde woman staggering against a tree and shouting with mirth, as the blue and white and crimson flag of the Confederate States fluttered gaily in the bright California sun.

  Roachstompers

  ABILENE, TEXAS

  October 1, 1998

  POST #72, FEDERAL IMMIGRATION CONTROL

  "Scramble! Scramble!"

  "Oh, shit," the captain of the reaction company said with deep disgust. It was the first time Laura Hunter had gotten past level 17 on this game. "Save and logoff."

  She snatched the helmet from the monitor and stamped to settle her boots, wheeled to her feet, and walked out of the one-time Phys-Ed teacher's office. One hand adjusted the helmet, flipping up the nightsight visor and plugging the commlink into the jack on her back-and-breast; the other snatched the H&K assault rifle from the improvised rack beside the door. Words murmured into her ears, telling the usual tale of disaster.

  "All right," the senior sergeant bellowed into the echoing darkness of the disused auditorium they were using as a barracks. The amplified voice seemed to strike her like a club of air as she crossed the threshold. "Drop your cocks 'n grab your socks!"

  It was traditional, but she still winced; inappropriate too, this was officially a police unit and thoroughly coed. "As you were, Kowalski," she said. The Rangers were tumbling out of their cots, scrambling cursing into uniforms and body-armor, checking their personal weapons. None of that Regular Army empty-rifle crap here. Her troopies were rolling out of their blankets ready to rock and roll, and fuck safety; the occasional accident was cheap compared to getting caught half-hard when the cucuroaches came over the wire.

  Fleetingly, she was aware of how the boards creaked beneath their feet, still taped with the outlines of vanished basketball games. The room smelled of ancient adolescent sweat overlaid with the heavier gun-oil and body odors of soldiers in the field. No more dances and proms here, she thought with a brief sadness. Then data-central began coming through her earphones. She cleared her throat:

  "Listen up, people. A and B companies scramble for major illegal intro in the Valley; Heavy Support to follow and interdict. Officers to me. The rest of you on your birds; briefing in flight. Move it!"

  The six lieutenants and the senior NCOs gathered round the display table under the basketball hoop. They were short two, B Company was missing its CO . . . no time for that.

  "Jennings," she said. A slim good-looking black from Detroit, field-promoted, looked at her coolly; her cop's instinct said danger. "You're top hat for B while Sinclair's down. Here's the gridref and the grief from Intelligence; total illigs in the 20,000 range, seventy klicks from Presidio.

  The schematic blinked with symbols, broad arrows thrusting across the sensor-fences and minefields along the Rio Grande. Light sparkled around strongpoints, energy-release monitored by the surveillance platforms circling at 200,000 feet. Not serious, just enough to keep the weekend-warrior Guard garrisons pinned down. The illigs were trying to make it through the cordon into the wild Big Bend country. The fighters to join the guerrilla bands, the others to scatter and find enough to feed their children, even if it meant selling themselves as indentured quasi-slaves to the plains 'nesters.

  "Shitfire," Jennings murmured. "Ma'am. Who is it this time?"

  "Santierist Sonoran Liberation Army," she said. "The combatants, at least. We'll do a standard stomp-and-envelopment. Here's the landing-zone distribution. Fire-prep from the platforms, and this time be careful, McMurty. There are two thousand with small arms, mortars, automatic weapons, light AA, possible wire-guided antitank and ground-to-air heat-seekers."

  "And their little dogs too," McMurty muttered, pushing limp blonde hair back from her sleep-crusted eyes. "Presidio's in Post 72's territory, what're they—" She looked over the captain's shoulder. "—sorry, sir."

  Laura Hunter saluted smartly along with the rest; Major Forrest was ex-Marine and Annapolis. Not too happy about mandatory transfer to the paramilitary branch, still less happy about the mixed bag of National Guard and retread police officers that made up his subordinates.

  "At ease, Captain, gentlemen. Ladies." Square pug face, traces of the Kentucky hills under the Academy diction, pale blue eyes. "And Post 72 is containing a major outbreak in El Paso. For which C and D companies are to stand by as reserve reinforcement."

  "What about the RACs? Sir," Jennings added. Forrest nodded, letting the "Regular Army Clowns" pass: the black was more his type of soldier, and the corps had always shared that opinion anyway.

  "This is classified," he said. "The 82nd is being pulled out of Dallas-Fort Worth."

  "Where?" Hunter asked. Her hand stroked the long scar that put a kink in her nose and continued across one cheek. That was a souvenir of the days when she had been driving a patrol car in D.C.

  No more 82nd . . . It was not that the twin cities were that bad; their own Guard units could probably keep the lid on . . . but the airborne division was the ultimate reserve for the whole Border as far west as Nogales.

  The major made a considered pause.
"They're staging through Sicily, for starters." Which could mean only one thing; the Rapid Deployment Force was heading for the Gulf. Hunter felt a sudden hot weakness down near the pit of her stomach, different and worse than the usual pre-combat tension.

  Somebody whistled. "The Russian thing?" Even on the Border they had had time to watch the satellite pictures of the Caliphist uprisings in Soviet Asia; they had been as bloody as anything in the Valley, and the retaliatory invasion worse.

  "COMSOUTH has authorized . . . President Barusci has issued an ultimatum demanding withdrawal of the Soviet forces from northern Iran and a UN investigation into charges of genocide."

  "Sweet Jesus," Jennings said. Hunter glanced over at him sharply; it sounded more like a prayer than profanity.

  "Wait a minute, sir," Hunter said. "Look . . . that means the RDF divisions are moving out, right?" All three of them, and that was most of the strategic reserve in the continental U.S. "Mobilization"? He nodded. "But the army reserve and the first-line Guard units are going straight to Europe? With respect, sir, the cucuroache—the people to the south aren't fools and they have satellite links too. Who the hell is supposed to hold the Border?"

  The commander's grin showed the skull beneath his face. "We are, Captain Hunter. We are."

  The noise in the courtyard was already enough to make the audio pickups cut in, shouts and pounding feet and scores of PFH airjets powering up. Pole-mounted glare-lights banished the early-morning stars, cast black shadows around the bulky figures of the troopers in their olive-and-sand camouflage. The air smelt of scorched metal and dust. Hunter paused in the side-door of the Kestrel assault-transport, looking back over the other vehicles. All the latest, nothing too good for the Rangers—and they were small enough to re-equip totally on the first PFH-powered models out of the factories. Mostly Kestrels, flattened ovals of Kevlar -composite and reactive-armor panel, with stub wings for the rocket pods and chin-turrets mounting chain guns. Bigger boxy transports for the follow-on squads; little one-trooper eggs for the Shrike airscouts; the bristling saucer-shapes of the heavy weapons platforms.

  She swung up into the troop compartment of her Kestrel, giving a glance of automatic hatred to the black rectangles of the PFH units on either side of the ceiling. "Pons, Fleischmann, and Hagelstein," she muttered. "Our modern trinity." The bulkhead was a familiar pressure through the thick flexibility of her armor. "Status, transport."

  "All green and go," the voice in her earphones said. "Units up, all within tolerances, cores fully saturated."

  The headquarters squad were all in place. "Let's do it, then," she said. "Kestrel-1, lift."

  The side ramps slid up with hydraulic smoothness, and the noise vanished with a soughing ching-chunk. Those were thick doors; aircraft did not need to be lightly built, not with fusion-powered boost. Light vanished as well, leaving only the dim glow of the riding lamps. There was a muted rising wail as air was drawn in through the intakes, rammed through the heaters and down through the swiveljets beneath the Rangers' feet. There were fifteen troopers back-to-back on the padded crash-bench in the Kestrel's troop-compartment. One of them reached up wonderingly to touch a power unit. It was a newbie, Finali, the company commlink hacker. Clerk on the TOE, but carrying a rifle like the rest of them; the data-crunching was handled by the armored box on his back.

  Hunter leaned forward, her thin olive-brown face framed by the helmet and the bill brow of the flipped-up visor. "Don't—touch—that," she said coldly as his fingers brushed the housing of the fusion unit.

  "Yes, ma'am." Finali was nearly as naive as his freckle-faced teenage looks, but he had been with A Company long enough to listen to a few stories about the captain. "Ahh, ma'am, is it safe?"

  "Well, son, they say it's safe." The boy was obviously sweating the trip to his first hot LZ, and needed distraction.

  The transport sprang skyward on six columns of superheated air, and the soldiers within braced themselves against the thrust, then shifted as the big vents at the rear opened. The Kestrel accelerated smoothly toward its Mach 1.5 cruising speed, no need for high-stress maneuvers. Hunter lit a cigarette, safe enough on aircraft with no volatiles aboard.

  "And it probably is safe. Of course, it's one of the doped-titanium anode models, you know? Saves on palladium. They kick out more neutrons than I'm comfortable with, though. Hell, we're probably not going to live long enough to breed mutants, anyway."

  She blew smoke at the PFH units, and a few of the troopers laughed sourly.

  "Captain?" It was Finali again. "Ah, can I ask a question?"

  "Ask away," she said. I need distraction too. The tac-update was not enough, no unexpected developments . . . and fiddling with deployments on the way in was a good way to screw it up.

  "I know . . . well, the depression and Mexico and everything is because of the PFH, but . . . I mean, I didn't even see one of them until I enlisted. It's going to be years before people have them for cars and home heating. How can it . . . how can it mess things up so bad now?"

  Kowalski laughed contemptuously, the Texas twang strong in his voice. "Peckerwood, how much yew goin' to pay for a horse ever'one knows is fixin' to die next month?"

  Finali flushed, and Hunter gave him a wry smile and a slap on the shoulder. "Don't feel too bad, trooper; there were economists with twenty degrees who didn't do much better." She took another drag on the cigarette, and reminded herself to go in for another cancer antiviral. If we make it. Shut up about that.

  "Sure, there aren't many PFHs around, but we know they're going to be common as dirt; the Taiwanese are starting to ship out 10-megawatt units like they did VCRs, in the old days. Shit, even the Mindanao pirates've managed to get hold of some. See, they're so simple . . . not much more difficult to make than a diesel engine, once Hagelstein figured out the theory. And you can do anything with them; heavy water in, heat or electricity or laser beams out. Build them any scale, right down to camp-stove size.

  "Too fucking good, my lad. So all those people who've been sitting on pools of oil knew they'd be worthless in ten, fifteen years. So they pumped every barrel they could, to sell while it was still worth something. Which made it practically worthless right away, and they went bust. Likewise all the people with tankers, refineries, coal mines . . . all the people who made things for anybody in those businesses, or who sold things to the people, or who lent them money, or . . ."

  She shrugged. The Texan with the improbable name laughed again. "Me'n my pappy were roustabouts from way back. But who needs a driller now?"

  "Could be worse," the gunner in the forward compartment cut in. "You could be a cucuroach."

  That was for certain-sure. Hunter flipped her visor down, and the compartment brightened to green-tinted clarity. Mexico had been desperate before the discoveries, when petroleum was still worth something; when oil dropped to fifty cents a barrel, two hundred billion dollars in debts had become wastepaper. And depression north of the Border meant collapse for the export industries that depended on those markets, no more tourists . . . breadlines in the U.S., raw starvation to the south. Anarchy, warlords, eighty million pairs of eyes turned north at the Colossus whose scientists had shattered their country like a man kicking in an egg carton.

  Fuck it, she thought. Uncle Sugar lets the chips fall where they lie and gives us a munificent 20% bonus on the minimum wage for sweeping the consequences back into the slaughterhouse.

  The northern cities were recovering, all but the lumpenproletariat of the cores; controlled fusion had leapfrogged the technoaristocracy two generations in half a decade. Damn few of the sleek middle classes here, down where the doody plopped into the pot. Blue-collar kids, farm boys, blacks; not many Chicanos either. D.C. had just enough sense not to send them to shoot their cousins and the ACLU could scream any way they wanted; the taxpayers had seen the Anglo bodies dangling from the lampposts of Brownsville, seen it in their very own living rooms . . .

  Without us, the cucuroaches would be all over their shiny PFH-powered
suburbs like a brown tide, she thought, not for the first time. Strange how she had come to identify so totally with the troops.

  "But as long as these stay scarce, we've got an edge," she said, jerking the faceless curve of her helmet toward the PFH. "Chivalric."

  "Chivalric?" Finali frowned.

  "Sure, son. Like a knight's armor and his castle; with that, we protect the few against the many." She pressed a finger against her temple. "Pilot, we are coming up on Austin?"

  "Thirty seconds, Captain."

  "Take her down to the dirt, cut speed to point five Mach and evasive. Everybody sync." The cucuroach illigs could probably patch into the commercial satellite network—might have hackers good enough to tap the PFH-powered robot platforms hovering in the stratosphere. Knowing the Rangers were coming and being able to do anything about it were two separate things, though. As long as they were careful to avoid giving the war-surplus Stingers and Blowpipes a handy target.

  The transport swooped and fell, a sickening express-elevator feeling. Hunter brought her H&K up across her lap and checked it again, a nervous tick. It too was the very latest, Reunited German issue; the Regulars were still making do with M16s. Caseless ammunition and a 50-round cassette, the rifle just a featureless plastic box with a pistol-grip below and optical sight above. They were talking about PFH-powered personal weapons, lasers and slugthrowers. Not yet, thank God . . .

  "Thirty minutes ETA to the LZ," the pilot announced. Hunter keyed the command circuit.

  "Rangers, listen up. Remember what we're here for; take out their command-and-control right at the beginning. That's why we're dropping on their HQs. Without that and their heavy weapons they're just a mob; the support people can sweep them back. We're not here to fight them on even terms; this is a roach stomp, not a battle." A final, distasteful chore. Her voice went dry: