Against the Tide of Years (71 page)

Walker indicated the rifle that lay on his desk, acquired at enormous expense via the Tartessian intelligence service in Nantucket.

“ That doesn’t look too complicated.”

“ No, boss, it ain’t. It’s a fucking masterpiece of simplicity; Martins could make one of these by hand, filing it—parts wouldn’t be interchangeable, but it’d work. So, yeah, I can make the rifle, no sweat. It’ll cut into our Westley-Richards output, total production’ll go down for six months, maybe a year—but not all that bad. Besides the loading mechanism and ammo, it’s pretty much the same gun—bit better ballistic performance, is all.”

“ You’re telling me you can, and then you can’t? ” Suddenly Walker smiled, an open, friendly grin, and thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand. “Oh, wait a minute—it’s the ammo, right? ”

He spun a brass cartridge on the table next to the rifle; the polished metal caught the sun that came through the French doors and spilled flickering shadows across furniture inlaid in ivory, silver, and lapis lazuli.

“Yeah, boss. Look, I could turn out small quantities, yessir. Machining rounds from solid bar stock, maybe—but that’ll eat materials, and Christ, it’ll tie up an entire lathe all day to turn out a couple of hundred! The drawing and annealing plant to turn out
millions
of those fuckers—no way. Not in less than three, four years—and to do that, I’d have to pull all my best people off other stuff,
and
off teaching. I mean, Jesus fucking Christ, boss, I just don’t have the range of machine tools that Leaton does, or electric power sources or—and he doesn’t have to teach all his trainees to goddam
read
first!”

“Okay,” Walker said grudgingly. “God
damn.
This is going to hurt morale—the men aren’t used to the other side having more firepower.” A wry smile. “And I’m used to having you pull miracles out of your hat.”

The smile didn’t reach all the way to the eyes; Cuddy felt himself beginning to sweat again. “ Well, yeah, we can’t do
that
ammo yet, but I’ve had an idea.”

“Oh? ” Cool interest this time, complete focus.

“Yeah. Actually I was busting my ass trying to figure out how we were going to do what Leaton did, and it occurred to me—why not do an end run instead? So I looked up some stuff I remembered from that book you’ve got, the one by the dude called Myatt, some Limey Major or something . . .”

“The
Illustrated History of Nineteenth-Century Firearms
?” Walker said, nodding unsurprised. They’d already gotten a
lot
of use out of that one.

“Yup. So I thought, they must have had a lot of problems with drawn-brass stuff to begin with, maybe they had something else? Something that didn’t work quite as smooth but that still did the job? ”

Walker nodded again; that was also something they had a lot of experience with.

“So here it is.”

He reached down into the leather briefcase at his side and handed over a round of ammunition. Walker took it and turned it over in his hands. It was made a little like a shotgun shell, built up of iron and brass and cardboard.

“The thing like the iron top hat, that’s the base,” Cuddy said. “Primer we can do—I’ve been dicking around with mercury fulminate for nine years now; you should crucify me if I hadn’t made
some
progress. Percussion cap in the base, then you
wrap
a strip of thin brass around that, and then that holds the cardboard tube with the bullet and powder.”

The lynx eyes speared him. “ Tell me the disadvantages.”

“ It’s not as strong as the regular type. Not completely waterproof, either. And the brass, when the chamber’s
real
hot, it may glue itself to the walls and jam, or tear apart when the extractor hits. But it’ll
work,
boss. I can duplicate this rifle, all it needs changed is the shape of the chamber, and I can turn out this ammo in quantity—simple stamping and rolling, and then handwork assembly-line style.”

“Cuddy, you’re a fucking genius!” Walker leaned back in his swivel chair, a dreamy smile on his face. “ You say it would have screwed us if I’d ordered you to go ahead on duplicating the ammo? ”

“Up the
ass,
boss, totally. Not just losing production, but it would have dicked up our expansion program by tying up my people.”

A harsh chuckle from his overlord. “One gets you ten, that’s
exactly
what they planned!” His hand struck the desktop with a gunshot crack. “ That bitch Alston thinks she has me typed—and she’s smart, I
nearly
did that.”

Cuddy swallowed and looked away. Alston was the only thing that could make Walker’s eyes look, for a moment, entirely too much like Alice Hong’s for comfort.

Walker went on, “ What about the Gatlings? ”

Cuddy shook his head again. “No way, bossman. The ammo isn’t strong enough to be hopper- or clip-fed.” His grin went wider. “ But.”

“ But? ”

“But the same book had an idea the Frogs used, back around Gatling’s time. You take a whole bundle of rifle barrels, say seventy-five of them, and clamp them together. You load them with plates in a frame—the plates hold the ammo. Load a plate in, wham, hit the trigger, take the plate out, put in another one.” He held up a hand. “ Yeah, heavier and slower than a Gatling, but it’ll work.”

“Cuddy, you are my
main man
! Get right onto both of them. Top priority.”

Cuddy rose, nodding; he paused to greet Helmuth Mittler on the way out. He and the head of Section One weren’t all that close—the ex-Stasi agent reminded him too much of cops who’d busted him in the past, those pale eyes with the I’ve-got-the-goods-on-you look. Still, the former East German did good work . . . and it was just as well to keep on the good side of him, he was important at court too.

Maybe I’m not sorry I listened to Will after all,
Cuddy thought. His bodyguard fell in around him as he walked down the corridor.
Tonight I’ll celebrate. Susie. Yeah, Susie.

Susie—her own name was unpronounceable—was the most enthusiastic girl he’d picked up here; like a demented anaconda in bed and she worshiped him like a god.

Of course, I did win her off Hong,
he thought.
Probably quite a contrast.

It was all a matter of contrasts. He’d felt hard-done by, that first six months after the Event; now things were fine. Susie felt her life had taken a turn for the better when he won her from Hong . . . all a matter of contrasts, and of being adaptable.

 

“Guys, this is crazy,” Peter Girenas said.

The tall redheaded man shrugged, smiling. “Pete, crossing North America in the Year 8—9, now—that’s crazy. Staying where we like it, that’s sensible.”

The bluff where the Islanders and their newfound friends had wintered looked better now that spring had melted the last of the snow and green grass covered the mud in fresh growth. The row of log cabins had their doors and windows open to air; they’d been crowded but not impossibly so. Now most of the Cloud Shadow People were back in hide tents; there were plenty of hides, with more pinned to the logs to dry.

Henry Morris was still limping, very slightly; he probably would for the rest of his life. His wife, Raven Feather, stood beside him, smiling, with their baby in her arms. Henry was dressed for the hunt in leggings and long leather shirt; so were the two young men beside him, but they carried bows, rather than atlatls and darts. Bows they’d made themselves, under Morris’s skilled direction.

“Dekkomosu. . . .” Giernas began.

The Lekkansu—
former Lekkansu, now a Cloud Shadow warrior,
Girenas thought—smiled and shook his head.

“My heart’s full of love for you, brother,” he said softly. “But not for your people. I’ll stay here, where I don’t have to meet them soon. And where I can help these people who’ve taken me in.”

“Look, Henry, it’s okay now . . . but what if you decide you’ve made a mistake? What if you get sick? ”

“If I get sick, I’ll heal or I’ll die,” Morris said. “And if I decide I’m making a mistake, well, I’m closer to the Island than you are, aren’t I? ”

“Okay, okay,” Girenas said. “So, that’s fair; we leave you your share of the gear and all the mares in foal, and one of the stallions. Good enough?”

“Good enough,” Morris said. He advanced and shook Girenas’s hand, embraced Sue Chau, thumped Eddie Vergeraxsson on the shoulder.

Girenas swung into the saddle. Their six packhorses and remounts were ready. So was Eddie, of course, and Sue. Beside her Spring Indigo rode, their child across the saddlebow in a carrying cradle he’d made overwinter himself. Girenas turned his horse’s head to the west. Ahead the spring prairie waved in a rippling immensity of green, starred with flowers, loud with birdsong.

“Let’s get going,” he said to his party. “Long way to California. Hell—” he turned in the saddle and looked back at Morris. “You’ll never find out what happens!”

Morris waved, laughing. “ I’ll know what happens here,” he called. “And that’s as much as any man can know!”

 

 

“H
e should have called off the ceremony,” Clemens said desperately. “He could not,” Azzu-ena said. “A king who does not celebrate the New Year is no king, or so the people think.”

He turned away from the beds. There were twenty in this room, but only ten were occupied—the only patients he was absolutely sure were going to recover. There were over a hundred in the wards now, and the guardsmen were bringing in dozens more every day. Twenty
deaths
a day, that he was sure of—he was also sure that more victims were being hidden by their relatives.

He bent over one and drained a pustule into the little ceramic dish. Then he scrubbed down, shed gown and mask, and moved into another chamber, where a long line of palace servitors and royal guardsmen waited. A couple of Kathryn Hollard’s New Troops were there too, to keep order and make sure nobody bolted.

“Bare your arms,” he said to those waiting, ignoring the fear and the hopeless resignation.

God damn this inoculation,
he thought as the first of them shuffled forward. Apart from the small percentage who would develop the full-blown disease, everyone he inoculated would be contagious for at least a week, which meant they had to be kept in strict isolation. Which meant they’d be useless until then, and he needed immune people for a hundred different tasks.

“At least the king agreed to detain all the people from other cities,” Azzu-ena pointed out, taking up a roughening scraper and small scalpel beside him. “And make them take the inoculation before they are allowed to depart.”

“ That’s something,” he said grudgingly.

Unless some of them are asymptomatic carriers,
he thought.
Christ, have mercy.

The line shuffled forward, and Justin Clemens forced himself to remember that he was saving ninety-nine lives for each human being he killed.

 

“Release!” the ground-crew officer barked.

The hundred and fifty of the New Troops detailed to the landing crew let go of the ropes, and the
Emancipator
bounded up from the temenos of the great temple—the only open space in Babylon big enough to moor it. The crowd gathered to watch was small, for fear and illness kept most away. The dirigible rose, a cloud of dust whipping across the stone pavement; Kenneth Hollard threw up a hand and squinted to save his eyes. It circled as it fought for altitude, and artificial raindrops fell as some hand released ballast. Then it was up and rising, its silvery-gray hull catching the light and making the red Guard slash stand out even more vividly.

He turned away, shaking his head. “Must be really heavily laden,” he said. “Vicki Cofflin told me she hates to valve ballast like that.”

“ Well, they’ve got a long way to go—it’s nearly six hundred miles to Hattusas,” his sister said in turn.

Kashtiliash shook his head. “And all that distance in an afternoon and a night,” he said softly. “Great gods, to command such power!” He moved a hand through the air. “Strange, for air to carry such weight.”

They watched for a few minutes, until the
Emancipator
had dwindled to a dot in the northwestern sky.

“ What’s the news on the smallpox? ” Hollard asked.

“Not good,” Kat said grimly, and the prince nodded. “Clemens says the isolation policy isn’t working, or it’s just slowing the spread from prairie-fire to forest-fire speed.”

“The only good thing is that we have no news of outbreaks elsewhere, which there would be if the
contagion
”—Kashtiliash used the English term—“had escaped from the city. Nobody is allowed out of the city without fourteen days in the
quarantine camps
.”

“At which people are not happy,” Kat added.

Kashtiliash nodded. “ Plague is a sign of the anger of the gods,” he said, rubbing a hand over the back of his head. “I
think
that I understand what your
asu
says of the small animals that cause disease. I have seen them through the
microscope
with my own eyes—and I trust you Nantuktar.

“ That is, my thoughts believe. My liver trembles and yearns to appease the gods. I fear that there are only a handful who are convinced even in their thoughts. More who fear your magic worse than the plague, or are loyal to the throne despite their terror. But the priesthoods, many of them—”

Kashtiliash looked up and frowned, then continued in a different tone. “ What is this? ”

The crowd hadn’t dispersed. Instead they were gathering into clumps, staring and muttering. The prince turned to command an aide and waited impatiently while the man trotted away; he kept a hand clenched on the hilt of his sword, the other resting on the butt of the revolver that he’d been presented as part of the New Year ceremonies.

“ Lord Prince,” the aide said, panting—moving fast in bronze scale armor was never easy, and the day was growing warm—“there is unrest.”