Conquistador (21 page)

“Can't your Yokut learn to ride?” she asked Simmons.

The Indian had been dropping back occasionally to run gripping the Scout's stirrup with his right hand, then loping ahead again.

Simmons chuckled. “Kolo rides quite well. He also thinks horses are for girly-boys and white men, if there's a difference. We could beat him to the bait if we galloped, but the horses would be blown and he'd be ready to go on running all day. He covered fifty miles in twenty hours once, on a bet, when we were shepherding a bunch of Collettas and Morrisons on safari east of the Sierras.”

They rode quickly, alternating between a trot and a quick walk. The reeds grew nearer, and the mosquitoes more persistent, along with buzzing horseflies and half a dozen other types of noisy insects. In the abstract, Adrienne knew that marshes were vital to the food chain, nurseries for fish and wildfowl and any number of other good things. In the concrete here-and-now, she found this one seriously interfering with her good mood.

Simmons reined in well away from the edge of the marsh, throwing up a hand to halt the others. The verge was scalloped here, a tongue of very slightly higher land running inward to make an egg-shaped embayment of dry ground about a thousand yards deep and half that across at the mouth, with the fat end toward the swamp. Two dead camels lay near the bottom of the egg, and the stink was formidable even at this distance; they must have been caught coming back from grazing on the reeds at the edge. The three condors crawled over the carrion like greater versions of the insects that swarmed about the feast in a glittering cloud.

“Dropped both camels with head shots from right here,” Simmons confirmed; he was a little vain of his marksmanship, and the rifle in his saddle scabbard had a telescopic sight attached. “The condors'll be heavy and sleepy, ought to be slow to take off—not that they're hummingbirds at the best of times.”

The big birds were feeding; one had its head deep in the feral camel's body cavity. It pulled it out, looking curiously around, and returned to its meal. Adrienne didn't consider herself squeamish; she'd been reared in the country, had watched livestock slaughtered since she was barely six, and had gutted and skinned plenty of game herself, starting not much later. She still had to swallow slightly as she surveyed the scene with her monocular.

Condors were
spectacularly
messy feeders, and the camels were extremely ripe after days in this heat.

“Keep it quiet,” Simmons said—quietly. “Dismount, spread out, and don't get too close. Jake, get the net. Kolo, you're our backup.”

Condors had never been hunted in New Virginia; they were a protected species, which could be taken only with an authorization from the Central Committee or the Chairman. They wouldn't be very wary of human beings, but their dim little instinct-machine minds would associate anything large and alive with danger if it was close enough.

The party all swung down from the saddle, drew their rifles from the saddle scabbards and slung them over their backs, moving cautiously and with minimal noise; it was very quiet, nothing louder than the sough of wind through the tule reeds and the buzz of insects, punctuated by an occasional clatter of harness and clop of hooves as the horses shifted position. Simmons's cousin Jake drove in a tethering stake and tied the pack-mule's leading reins to it before he unlimbered the net and hurried up to join his relative at the front of the party. Adrienne and her two assistant-bodyguards followed on foot as well, leading their mounts; she admired the smooth way Simmons and his cousin deployed the net between them, stooping carefully to reduce their height and visual signal to their prey. Kolomusnim waited farther back, the cages at his feet and the reins of the two white men's horses draped over his arm.

The Scouts came closer and closer to the carcasses, moving more and more slowly, until there was a pause of several seconds between steps and a freeze every time the condors seemed to pay attention. The birds looked, ruffled their feathers and then quieted again, looked and ruffled. . . .

“Go!”
she heard Simmons whisper, when the condors didn't seem to quiet down at all after the last advance.

He and the other Scout sprinted forward at a dead run. The birds croak-squawked their alarm, turning and running awkwardly away with their wings spread out to their full ten-foot span, trying to build up enough momentum to take a leap into the air and thrash themselves upward—condors spent most of their time soaring on thermals, and they weren't very efficient at getting off flat ground quickly. That let the men get within casting distance; Jake let go the net at another command, and Simmons whirled it in a circle over his head before he let fly.

It glinted in the harsh sunlight as the lead weights along the edge spun it open into a perfect circle, pausing for a moment at the top of its trajectory and then dropping like a swift-stooping eagle. One of the panic-stricken condors made its escape, hoisting itself into the air with desperate strokes of its great wings and banking out over the swamp, turning and circling to gain altitude and escape. Its cries drifted down through the hot still air. The others were a heaving, squawking chaos under the net, their flapping terror serving only to tangle them more securely. Simmons and his assistant waded in, cautious of the beaks and strong snaky necks. They used the net to throw the birds down; then Jake immobilized each in turn while Simmons slid a loose sock over its head. That quieted the big scavengers enough for a swift but gentle trussing.

Adrienne smiled to herself; it was always enjoyable to watch experts at work, and Jim Simmons's boyish pride in his skills was entertaining in its own right. She watched Kolomusnim bend to pick up the two wire cages . . . and then freeze and come erect slowly, his head swiveling back and forth toward the walls of tule reeds on either hand. Then everything seemed to happen at once, yet in slow motion.

An instant before the Yokut called out a warning, Simmons came erect as well, reaching for the rifle slung over his back. Jake looked at him, puzzled, and then the expression went blank. The crack of a rifle followed instantly; she could distinctly see his body jerk, then a spot on the front of his khaki jacket blow out in a shower of red.

Another rifle spoke as the Scout fell, and a horse screamed; her head whipped around to see Schalk's mount collapsing, thrashing with a broken foreleg. Then more shots, a fast rapid
crack-crack-crack:
two rifles at least, and used with more skill than Indians could generally achieve with pilfered ammunition and stolen weapons they didn't know how to maintain. Of course, the shooters could be renegades; occasionally criminals or malcontents from New Virginian settlements ran off to live with any tribe that would take them in. They usually ran farther than this, though. . . .

The thought ran through her head as she tried to get her horse under control and the rifle off her back. Then there was a sudden
shhhhhwhup—shhhhhwhup —shhhhhwhup
sound, and the saddle sprouted an arrow. The head made an ugly whacking sound as it stuck in the leather and wood, standing there with the shaft humming like an angry bee. Two more went into the animal's rump with wet, meaty sounds, and the horse went wild—screaming and squealing as it reared and then went into a twisting buck.

“That's torn it,” she said in a snarl, then took a step back, drew her FiveseveN automatic and shot the horse three times, the last one striking right behind an ear, not without a slight wince; the poor beast hadn't done anything but what she asked of it. It hadn't asked to be born in the Commonwealth, either; this wasn't its fight.

The horse fell with a limp thud and she cast herself down behind it; the little 5.7mm bullets were high-velocity and armor piercing, but composed of some dense plastic that deformed and gave up all its kinetic energy when it struck soft tissue. This one had drilled through the horse's skull and turned its brain into jelly; she had the pistol back in its holster before her mount's final reflex kick, and the rifle out across the flank she huddled behind for cover. The smell of blood and offal from the horses was added to the stink of the rotting camels, and the ground was turning to mud underneath her as the animal bled out, but the knot of tension under her breastbone made all those things details she could ignore easily enough.

This isn't the first time I've been shot at, exactly, but it's certainly the most serious,
she thought grimly. The other occasions had all been short, for starters.
This one looks like it could spoil my entire day.

Simmons was down on the ground, leopard-crawling toward Jake with his rifle across the crook of his elbows. Three Indians were out of the reeds, their bodies striped in horizontal bands of white, black and ochre; they were howling like wolves and loosing arrows as they ran toward Kolomusnim. The Yokut shot one in the chest with the arrow on his bow; Adrienne carefully led the last and dropped him at a hundred and twenty paces. The militia battle rifle kicked against her shoulder, a quick hard punch, and the brass of the empty .30-06 round spun off to the right, glinting in the sun and then tinkling on some metal part of the horse's bridle. More arrows came
whupp-whupp-whupp
out of the reeds and she had to duck, curling under the barrel of the horse as they plunged down at her from out of the sky, dropping like mortar rounds. From that angle and past the head of her former mount she could see the third Indian and Kolomusnim go over in a tangle of brown limbs. Then the tracker rose on top, his hatchet in his hand, smashing it downward over and over again in a quick hard flurry of blows accompanied by sickening cleaving thuds.

A quick glance behind her. Schalk and Piet were alive, but their horses weren't; one of the mules was down too, and the other had pulled the tethering stake loose and was dragging it behind as it fled westward, braying hysterically. The two Afrikaners and she formed a rough triangle about a hundred feet on a side, each crouched down behind the carcass of a dead horse.

The ambushers must have shot to kill the mounts first, which showed lamentably good tactical sense. Horses were free to whoever could catch them—there were uncounted thousands in the feral herds in the Central Valley and the foothills, and more swarmed all the way to the Mississippi these days—but saddle tack was something they'd have trouble getting their hands on, and rifles and ammunition were beyond price. Not to mention the opportunity to kill a few of the hated New Virginians, the evil wizards whose touch was death, the destroyers of worlds.

Another arrow went
thunk
into the body of her ex-mount. She looked around; Kolomusnim had finished off his opponent, then leaped to the back of one of the horses he'd been holding for Simmons; the other was down. He pulled its head around and raced for the open mouth of the pocket of dry land; arrows went after him, and bullets—she thought something struck him, but he might have been hugging the horse's neck to present a smaller target. The hooves of the galloping horse went past her, throwing up clods of earth, a thudding she could feel through her belly as she lay on the hard clay ground.

“So much for the bliddy tame bushman!” Schalk yelled, and turned the muzzle of his rifle after the fleeing tracker.
“Jou hol bobbejan!”

“Schalk! Eyes on the swamp!” Adrienne shouted, and the Afrikaner reluctantly obeyed.

They wouldn't be missed for hours. The radio would have brought support in a few minutes, but it was quite thoroughly crushed under the side of Simmons's horse that had hit the ground—even good solid-state milspec field electronics rarely survived eleven hundred pounds of horse landing on it. There were two spares, of course: one with the horse Kolomusnim had ridden out, and the third in the pack-saddle of the mule that had fled westward and was probably at the Coast Range by now. . . .

Simmons had reached his cousin. “He's a goner!” he called, as he drew his knife and cut the sling of the dead man's rifle so that he could drag it away.

“Covering fire!” Adrienne called.

The Scout began to crawl rapidly toward the dead horse that marked the spot where Kolomusnim had stood; there was a dead Indian beside it, his face chopped into red ruin by the tracker's hatchet, and another lying where her bullet had punched through his body just above the hipbones; he was still twitching a little, but effectively dead for all that. The hollow-point rounds would have plowed a hole about the size of a child's fist right through and out the other side.

The problem with giving Simmons covering fire was that there wasn't much to see or shoot at. And the Indians could fire their arrows upward, from several yards within the tule reeds; they'd know the safe paths through them. She took out the monocular and scanned along the edge nearest Simmons's crawling passage.

The rifleman in there was firing slowly; every ten seconds or so a puff of dust would pock the surface of the clay where Simmons was crawling toward cover.
That
shooter would have to come close to the edge of the reeds, so . . . a glimpse of brown skin . . .

“Standing figure, my left, two-fifty yards,” she called; probably the two men had seen the same thing, but someone had to coordinate for best effect. “Jim, get ready to run for it.”

All three rifles shifted; there was a moment's hesitation as the men picked out the target, or what they thought might be it. Adrienne breathed out slowly, letting her finger tighten gradually on the trigger in a gentle stroking motion, the way Uncle Andy had taught her. . . .

Crack,
and another
ting
of cartridge on metal. The shadowy glimpse of the target vanished, if it had been anything more than a trick of the light in the reeds. She squeezed off half a dozen rounds into the same patch of reeds, and the two men did the same.