War World X: Takeover (47 page)
The other Latvian, the one who had tried to stay with us, fell off her horse. I saw her trying to get up as I passed; it looked as if she was injured. For a minute I thought of circling back and picking her up, but my horse would slow too much, carrying two, and I was needed. I felt guilty anyway. I slowed a little and looked back. She had turned, lying on her belly looking back down the trail. Her rifle was un-slung; she was ready for the Kazakhs. I speeded up again.
Soon the cattle began to slow. They were tiring. I told myself that I should have tried to rescue the Latvian woman after all, but by then she was a kilometer back. So I rode out to the side again, away from our dust, to see how close our pursuers had gotten. It wasn’t as bad as I’d feared; their horses had been running longer than ours. But even so, they were more than a dust cloud now; they were objects. Soon, even by dimday, they would appear as men on horseback. I decided to stay to the side. If it seemed they would catch the herd, I would fall back and begin shooting at them from the flank. Perhaps I could lead some of them away.
But not yet. We still might reach Nelson Tsinajini before we were caught, and some of his men would have guns by then and be on horseback.
There were more shots, but they lasted only seconds. They’d come to the Latvian woman. Not long after that they began to shoot at us, just a short burst now and then. They could hardly be aimed, that far away in dimday, and there was little chance they’d hit one of us. It would be a waste of bullets to shoot back, and I’d have to stop. Or else shoot backwards, twisted in the saddle. I looked forward then, past the herd, and saw men coming on horseback. We were getting close; these had to be some of Nelson’s men coming to help us. We closed fast and in two minutes they were passing us, four of them, with more in sight ahead. Almost at once the four began to shoot at the Kazakhs, veering off to both sides. The Kazakhs would either have to stop, or split up, or run a gauntlet of rifle fire.
Then I felt my pony flinch, stumble a little, and begin to limp. I didn’t know if he’d been hit, stepped in a hole, or what. I reined him to a halt and jumped off. He stayed, obedient to his training, so I ran from him, throwing myself down behind some dwarf shrubs for cover.
The Kazakhs were coming up, maybe a dozen of them. Most would pass a hundred meters away, but one veered off toward my horse. He must have known I’d be somewhere near it. I shot at him almost face on, but his horse’s head must have gotten in the way. It went down, and its rider unloaded from it even as it fell, landing on his feet but unable to keep them. He tumbled, rolling, and then I couldn’t see him anymore. The others passed, paying no attention. I shot at the two hindmost, and one of them went down too, horse and rider crashing.
I started crawling to get farther away from my horse.
Three more of the people were coming. Of the four who’d already come, I could see none, only three horses standing, moving in little circles. The Kazakhs swerved toward those who were coming. There was a lot of shooting, and when it was over, those three of the people were gone too, shot off their horses. There were nine or ten Kazakhs left. It seemed as if they shot more accurately from a running horse than we did.
I had crawled some more. Now the Kazakhs looked as if they weren’t going to chase the people anymore. They gathered in a loose group two or three hundred meters away, as if talking to one another. Then they separated, and went to round up the horses they could see standing around. I started crawling on my belly again, till I came to a couple of thorn shrubs. There I put a fresh magazine in my rifle. If one of the Kazakhs came close, I’d get up and shoot him, then shoot as many more as I could.
I got pretty cold, lying there on the ground. After a little while, when nothing had happened, I got to my knees. I saw the Kazakhs trotting off with some spare horses behind them. My horse was gone, When they were too far to see, I got up and went to look for the one whose horse I’d shot, who’d landed on his feet. I couldn’t find him. I started walking toward where the people should be and the cattle herd.
They had left the small water hole and on horseback and foot were herding the cattle into the head of the small arroyo that grew to become the canyon. I was in time to help them. When all the cattle were in the arroyo, headed downward to where the rest of the people were, the armed men brought up the rear, in case some Kazakhs came. I was with them. Nelson saw me and we talked. He’d heard what had happened, heard enough of it to know I was responsible. He said I was truly one of the Dinneh, a spirit from the old times taken flesh again.
When we got to the main encampment, we kept going, taking the herd down to the desert basin below. The Dinneh followed. Eighty head of cattle were not enough to keep the people; we needed many more. Tom Spotted Horse was still the chief and he chose men to go back and get more livestock. Especially sheep—a big band of sheep that could be distributed to many people. I was one he chose. Half the horses and most of the rifles went with us.
The other horses were used to scout the desert while we were gone, and the people were told to explore, to taste every fruit, every seed, every root, every small animal. Quite a few people got sick and died. That was how we learned what was food and what was not. A few died the first time that truenight lasted forty hours, a night as cold as winter. Over the next few Haven days and nights, those who did not really want to live, died.
We brought almost fourteen hundred sheep down from the plateau. Pretty soon a force of Kazahs came to punish us and take back their livestock. They used the same canyon we had used, but we had left men behind with rifles, to watch from side canyons. When the Kazakhs passed by, they followed them, and when truenight came, they crept into the Kazakh camp from up-canyon. The Kazakhs had sentries out below but not above, so our warriors went in among them and killed some of them in their sleep with knives. Each time they killed one, they put his rifle in the stream.
By the time an alarm was raised, about a dozen of the Kazakhs were dead. The rest left, went back up to the plateau. By then they would have seen that we were many people and wouldn’t know we had only the rifles we’d taken from them. Afterward we took their rifles out of the stream and cleaned them the best we could. The ammunition we had, we hoarded in case the Kazakhs came back.
After that we traveled for quite a while, slowly, driving our herds. Till the weather started to get colder. We wanted to be far from the Kazakhs and perhaps find better land. Meanwhile we learned to make bows and arrows, and spear casters, and bolos, and learned how to use them. We learned to drive muskylope into box canyons, where they were trapped.
Quite a few of the women who gave birth that first year died, and most of the newborn, but that was only part of it. We got so worried about the women that Tom Spotted Horse said only the men should eat unknown things. But that was too late for Marilyn. She died of a poison root. Then Marcel was killed by a tamerlane, and for a time, I wished to die also. In the first long Haven winter, more than half of the Dinneh died from cold and hunger—mostly men. The women were given more food than the men were and each woman was allowed to take more than one husband.
Tom Spotted Horse said we would not butcher more than half our cattle, or more than half our sheep. For the rest of our needs, we had to use what the land had to offer. Some of the Dinneh wanted to have a different chief, but the council said that Tom was right. They said that any group that wanted to leave could leave, and take their share of the livestock with them, but if they left, they could never come back. So no one left.
That was a long time ago. Tom Spotted Horse was killed in a rock fall, and I was named “master sergeant,” which is what the Dinneh had come to call their chief. Me! A Chippewa-Sioux mixed blood, chief of the Dinneh! I have lived through fourteen winters on Haven, and I am old. There aren’t many left of those who came here on the
Makarov
. I think we get old faster here. I remember reading that there are minerals in the water on Haven that gradually poison you. For a time it seemed that the Dinneh might die out, so many died and so few infants lived. But some lived, and the yaks lived, and many of the sheep, which were also Tibetan.
The horses had almost as much trouble birthing as the women, and we learned to ride the muskylope. Now we number eight hundred and seventy-three, last count, which is up again, and our herds and flocks are large. We have found a lower valley where we take our women when their term is near, and mostly they live. Their mothers were ones who lived. The breed grows stronger.
The young people think this world is good. Except for the Kazakhs, years ago, you are the first outsider we’ve seen since the shuttles left us on the mesa. The CoDo Marines have never found us; I don’t think they ever looked; I don’t think they care. We may be here forever.
2074 A.D., Haven
T
homas Erhenfeld Bronson sat in his palatial office in the CoDominium Consul-General’s Building. The CCG Building, also known as the Government House, was the largest and most impressive structure in Castell City; and, in fact, the entire planet since Castell City was the center of civilization—as it were—on Haven.
He had been appointed as Haven’s first Consul-General eight years ago by the CoDominium Colonial Bureau. It hadn’t hurt that his uncle Grand Senator Adrian Bronson had championed his commission. His primary job, as far as the Bronson family was concerned, was to see that Dover Mineral Development kept control of as much of the shimmer stone market as it could corner, as well as developing new mines to compete with Kennicott Metal and Anaconda Mining’s hafnium mining operations on Haven.
Dover had had a good run with the shimmer stone monopoly since it had been a company held secret until 2052, when the shimmer stones were
rediscovered
in the hills outside Redemption by an Earth immigrant named Samuel Cordon. Once the secret of the shimmer stone’s planetary location was revealed, there had been an exodus of miners and ner-do-wells from all over the CoDominium to Haven.
Even after their “discovery,” Dover Development had continued to control the wholesale shimmer stone market until bootleg miners had formed their own association, the Haven Shimmer Stone Cooperative. Wholesale shimmer stone recovery costs had quadrupled since the late 2050s and this had not gone unnoticed at Dover HQ. Unlike ores and most gems, shimmer stones were rarely concentrated in clusters. They were produced by the heat and unfathomable pressures of volcanic eruptions and were rare in even the most productive veins.
The mechanism of gem formation required that a member of the species (now extinct) Giant Drillbit be buried in a burrow by hot lava. The teeth melted and reformed under the influence of an enzyme at the proper hellish temperature and pressure before turning into shimmer stones. This meant that they were rarely concentrated in the same place, and if so only in small numbers.
The best shimmer stone prospectors were diviners, with the same talents as dowsers, who could instinctively
divine
the stones’ presence as they passed over the rocky areas where the shimmer stones were known to hide. Some used thin sticks to “locate” the stones, while others used complicated electronic and magnetic sensors whose design and reliability remained secrets with the diviners, like gamblers with their ‘systems.’
To make things worse, Kennicott Metals had made a deal with the Harmonies that had squeezed Dover out of the southern Shangri-La Valley. Even though Haven was now a CoDominium Protectorate, much of its land was still owned by the Church of New Universal Harmony. After two failures in a row, anyone else—in other words non-family—would have been out on the streets. However, what had saved Erhenfeld’s bacon was the Company’s discovery of the richest known gallite deposit in the CoDominium sphere. Gallium was a rare mineral that was necessary for microwave circuitry, infra-red applications and semiconductors.
As he poured over the latest production report from his Chief Mining Development Officer, Timothy Rice, he noted that gallium production had dropped precipitously. Since the metal melted at temperatures below body temperature it had to be stored in special refrigerated units and handled with care.
He looked up from the report when his intercom buzzed.
“Mr. Rice is here, Consul Bronson.”
“Send him in,” he replied.
Timothy Rice looked like a sheepish school boy reporting to a vice principal in charge of discipline. He had a ruddy face and a shock of brown hair that stuck up in back in a permanent cowlick. He removed his thick glasses and began to rub his eyes, a nervous tic that Erhenfeld had noted at their first meeting.
Rice paused for a moment to take a deep breath of the Earth-normal oxygenated air in Erhenfeld’s office. “Your Excellency, I need to discuss the production slowdown at the Golconda Mines.”
Erhenfeld laced his fingers together before replying. “I hope you’ve got some answers, because if you don’t, heads are going to roll. Corporate’s not happy about the delays.”
“It’s the drought, sir. It’s been going on for three T-years. Its effects have been compounded by the fact that we’re using large amounts of water for gallite mining and refining. Dire Lake, according to our Company Ecologist, is very similar to the Salton Sea in California: briny and, except at the head waters, very shallow with an average depth of ten to twelve meters. Since we began operations at Golconda, the lake has lost a third of its size due to drought and water depletion. If we keep mining operations at their current level, within two years there won’t be enough water to land a splashship anywhere in the lake. That will quadruple our shipping costs to low-earth orbit.”
Erhenfeld nodded. “I got all that from your report. What are your solutions, and I don’t mean stopping the refineries?”