War World X: Takeover (45 page)

He was quiet while we ate. When we were done, he called three squad leaders over. “I’m going to hold most of us here,” he told them, “and send your squads out to explore, to see if you can find where the livestock is.

“Frank, I’m sending Carl here with you.” He put his hand on my shoulder. “Carl is Chippewa, adopted into the Mescalero, but he talks good Navajo. He’s reservation raised, in Minnesota. And he knows things about this world; he read a lot about it, back on Earth. He knows when the sun will come up. And he has a gun, a pistol, in case you run into trouble.”

Frank nodded. Frank Begay was the only man in the raiding party who was older than me. He’d been a medicine chief. Too bad I would never get to know him well.

“Take another ration each,” Nelson said, “but leave your bedrolls here. I want you back when it’s time to sleep again. At the latest.”

One squad went along near the rim toward the west, another to the east. Frank’s squad, eleven with myself, went straight inland. When Cat’s Eye is only a crescent, dimday isn’t a good time for long distance seeing, but if there were sheep around, we’d hear them farther than we could see them anyway. We’d hiked for nearly an hour and a half when we came to another pool. It looked shallow, but was about a hundred meters across and around it were lots of tracks that looked like sheep tracks. As we walked around looking, we found pony tracks, too, and tracks as big as cow tracks, but longer and narrower, like young moose. I told Frank about muskylope, and that some people on Haven had learned to ride them and use them as pack animals.

We looked at the trail where it left the pool. Frank Begay had worked sheep all his life, and he said it looked like a big band—about two thousand. They were going east. We didn’t see any dog tracks with them. Frank decided to split the squad. He’d take five men with him and follow the sheep. The rest of us would backtrack the sheep and find where they came from. We were to keep going till we either found the place, or for five hours, whichever came first. If we found it, we would learn as much as we could about it and then come back to the big pool. If both halves weren’t back in twelve hours, the half that was back could go to Nelson Tsinajini and report.

He put me in charge of the half squad I was with. He said we were all Dinneh now, that the government had made us all one. And that Tom and Nelson both had confidence in me. One young Navajo didn’t want to be under me, so Frank changed him to his half and gave me Cody George. Then we left.

I’d set my watch to zero on the stop watch mode and we backtracked the sheep trail for almost four hours when we saw up ahead what looked like a long wall or fence. By then it was lighter; Cat’s Eye was still a crescent, but it was getting thicker. So we got down on our hands and knees and crawled; the low shrubs would make us hard to see.

What we’d seen was a fence made by uprooting and piling the big thorn bushes. On the other side of it were shaggy cattle. I remembered reading that the Kazakh colonists were going to take yaks with them. Yaks from the Tibetan Plateau, that could stand severe cold and thin oxygen. We followed the fence in more or less the direction we’d been going before, west, and pretty soon we could hear someone yelling up ahead, not an alarm, but as if he was yelling at the cattle. Closer up, I could see what looked and sounded like a young boy. He had a grub hoe, and seemed to be chopping some kind of plant out of the pasture. There was a gap in the fence, with only one big thorn shrub in it to block it, and when a cow would get close to the gap, the boy would yell and chase her away.

It wasn’t just yelling; it was words. I was pretty sure it wasn’t Kazakh. Kazakh is a Turkic language. This one sounded Indo-European to me. It reminded me of what Lieutenant Toloconnicov had said about the Kazakhs using slaves, and something I’d read about Balt and Armenian indentured laborers being shipped to Haven. If he was a Balt or Armenian, he d probably learned Russian and English in school, so I could talk to him. He’d also probably not feel any loyalty to the Kazakhs.

I told my men to stay where they were and lie low, then moved to the gap in the fence and crawled through past the shrub that blocked it. Mostly the herd boy’s back was toward it, so I crawled to him on hands and knees, slowly, easily, making no quick movements. When I got closer, I could hear him talking to himself, as if he was angry. The hoe was a kind of grub hoe and looked too heavy to be a good weapon, unless he was really strong.

When I was about forty feet away and he still hadn’t seen me, I rose up and started for him in a crouch, still quietly, only rushing the last few feet. I don’t think he knew I was there till I was on him. Then I hit him from behind, throwing him down and landing on him.

He didn’t really struggle; I was surprised at how thin he was inside his cape.

“Don’t yell,” I told him, in slow, distinct English. “If you’re quiet, nothing will happen to you.”

He didn’t make a sound.

“Come to the fence with me,” I said. “I want you to answer questions about your masters.” Then I let go my hold on his head and got off him.

He half turned over so he could look at me. And stared. “Are you—American?” he asked.

“I’m an American Indian,” I told him, and watched his eyes get round. He must have seen old American movies back on Earth. “We don’t have slaves,” I added. “Those we admire, we adopt into the tribe as warriors.”

I’d seen some of those movies too. Sometimes they weren’t even all nonsense. He nodded, then picked up his hoe, and together we trotted to the fence, he kept looking back over his left shoulder as if for somebody coming. I looked too, and saw something I hadn’t noticed before. I should have. By the light of dimday, I saw low buildings humped in the distance. They looked like a large set of buildings.

Crouching by the fence, I asked him, “What were you watching for?”

“Amud,” he said. “It is his shift to keep watch on the herd. He just went to the—ranch, for tea. He’ll be back soon, and if I’m not chopping puke bush, he’ll beat me.”

“We’ll watch for him then,” I said, and began to ask about the ranch and the people there. His eyes were gray and looked too big for his thin face, but they flashed with anger, and once I got him started, he talked without urging. All I had to do was steer. His name was Janis, he said. Most of the Kazakhs had left two truedays earlier—maybe 120 hours as I figured it. They had taken the sheep to summer pastures. The lambs were now old enough to be out during the cold of truenight.

Sometimes there was no truenight between truedays; there was just day, then dimday, then day again. Sometimes there’d be a short truenight, with dimday before or after. But now and then there’d be a long truenight and even in summer it would freeze hard then, the waterholes would freeze over and wet places would freeze on top like concrete.

There were fifty or sixty Kazakhs with this ranch. Fifteen or sixteen of them were still here at their year-round headquarters. There were also eight indentured laborers—seven Latvians and a Russian—whose contracts the Kazakhs had bought from the Bureau of Relocation. Indentured laborers were the same as slaves. Three of the Latvians were women or girls, and two of them were pregnant by Kazakhs. Their babies would die because the air was so thin, Janis said, and maybe the mothers. The Kazakhs didn’t care enough about them to take them to Shangri-La for birthing. Besides, Kazakh women were supposed to arrive from Earth, later in the year, brides for the stockmen.

Of the Kazakhs still at the headquarters, three tended the cattle here in the pasture, one on a shift. Six tended the horse herd. The rest looked after the headquarters. Those not on duty would be sleeping or loafing.

And yes, they were always armed. They carried a short, curved sword and a pistol. Those out tending herds, like Amud, also carried a whip and a rifle.

That was as far as Janis had gotten when I saw someone riding out from the buildings. “He’s coming,” I said to Janis. Stay here. Pretend you’re napping. When he comes over to beat you, I’ll kill him. I have warriors with me. We’ll kill the rest of the Kazakh, take their cattle and horses, and free your people. You can come with us if you want.”

Then I crawled back past the gate bush and hid myself behind the hedge, to wait where I could see Janis through the gap. Two minutes earlier I’d felt confident. Now my guts felt tight and hot; it all seemed like a terrible mistake. Nelson had told us to scout; we were to learn, come back and report. What I was planning to do was kill fifteen or sixteen armed Kazakhs and steal their cattle and horses. With five men, a boy, and only one gun—three guns if we got Amud’s. Maybe I could still change my mind, sneak away and go to the main force.

But Amud would whip Janis, and Janis would probably tell; he would feel betrayed. And—Did the Kazakhs have radios? Could they call in the crews from their outstations? Or police from somewhere, or Marines?

The Kazakh rode up on his shaggy pony and uncoiled his whip to wake Janis. I shot him in the chest, and he fell off his horse like a sack. The pony was well trained; he hardly moved.

I waved to bring my five men to me and we crawled through the gap. The sight of his dead ex-master didn’t bother Janis; he looked excited. The Kazakh was armed, as Janis had said. I gave the boy the sword, gave the Kazakh’s military rifle to a Navajo named Arnold and the pistol to Cody George. Then I told all of them what I wanted them to do, and nobody argued. They all looked as if they thought I knew what I was doing. After I’d put on the Kazakh’s sheepskin cloak and cap, I got on the pony, helped Cody get on behind me, and told Janis to follow alongside. The others went back through the gap to do what I’d told them.

The ranch buildings were low and mostly oblong and their roofs were rounded. They were made of construction flex, but riding up to them, you couldn’t tell, because thick outer walls of sods had been built around them for insulation, and thick sod pads had been laid on the roofs. Their windows were small and there weren’t very many. Besides the finished buildings, there was almost a village of small round buildings nearby that weren’t finished yet, for when the Kazakh brides arrived. The flex walls were up and there were piles of turf waiting to be set.

Janis was skinny but tough and used to the thin air. He’d jogged alongside me and had had breath enough to talk and answer questions. There was no radio at the headquarters, he’d said. That was hard to believe of volunteer colonists and I still half expected to see an antenna on a roof, but all I saw was a windmill. The breeze had died and the windmill wasn’t moving. As we rode up, there was a smell I would come to know as the smell of dung fires. Somewhere a compressor was thudding; probably they had a power pump for water when there was no wind. I drove the pony with my left hand and kept my right inside my cloak, holding my revolver, in case anyone came out and saw that something was wrong.

As I rode in among the buildings, I could see a building with a lean-to on one side. A corner of the building was in the way, but I could hear a hammer clanging on iron; it had to be the smithy. The smith was Russian, Janis had told me, an indentured laborer whom the Kazakhs had given privileges. Janis didn’t like him, perhaps because he had privileges, or maybe because he was Russian.

Janis pointed at one of the largest building, next to the windmill. “That’s where the Kazakhs live,” he said. Then he pointed at another: “And that is the horse stable.” He started toward it, as I’d instructed him. His hand was inside his long cape, holding Amud’s short curved sword; his job was to kill the stable boss, a Kazakh with an arthritic hip, and get his gun and sword.

A Kazakh came out of an outbuilding and crossed to another, not fifty meters away. He never paid any attention to Cody and me; I suppose he was used to everything being all right. Janis saw him too, and pretended he was going to another long building, maybe a lambing shed. Cody and I got off the pony just outside the door of the Kazakh bunkhouse and I looped the reins around a hitching rail there. Then we walked in.

The door opened into a fairly wide, shallow room with pegs around the wall for cloaks and wet boots. It would keep cold air from rushing into the rest of the house when the door was open. Then we went through the inner door, my eyes sweeping around. It opened into the main part of the house, which was mostly one big room with sleeping robes around the sides, and at one end a kitchen not separated by a wall. There were men sleeping, and three men around a blanket in the middle of the floor, playing some game. We started shooting at once, first at the men gambling, then at others as they rolled to their feet from their beds. The two women working in the kitchen were screaming. There were six men there, and we shot them all, right away.

“Cody,” I said, “go outside and see if anyone’s coming.” I hoped no one had heard the shooting through the thick walls. While I reloaded my pistol, I walked over to the women, talking Russian at them the best I could. They’d already quieted. Both of them were naked—the Kazakhs kept them that way—and one looked about six months pregnant; I don’t think she was sixteen yet. I’d read the Koran; these Kazakh settlers weren’t very good Muslims.

“Where do they keep their rifles?” I asked.

Both women began talking at once, then the young one quieted. The older woman was pointing toward a corner of the building. In that room, she told me, also in Russian. One of the men we’d shot would have the key on his belt. Carrying a butcher knife, she went with me to look for the key. After we looked at a Kazakh, she would slash his throat, even if he looked dead. She was a little bit crazy.

We checked out the three by the blanket without finding the key. I took the holstered pistol from one of them and put it on my belt as a spare. Then I heard two shots outside, not loud at all through the sod walls, and I ran over and opened the outer door, just enough to see out. Cody was crawling out from under a big man in shirt sleeves, and there was a hammer lying on the ground. The blacksmith, I decided. Cody was having trouble getting free; it looked like one of his arms might be broken. Then a Kazakh came running around the corner of a building, and I shot at him and missed. He ducked back out of sight. Cody didn’t come to the bunkhouse like I thought he would. Instead he ran into the building across the way, which would let him find targets of his own. There was more shooting, I couldn’t see where.