“Paper? No one said anything about papers,” said I.
“Remove your weapons and drop them on the ground, now,” said the soldier. So much for all my good intentions. I reached down, heaved the gate up, and threw it at them, then I drew my laser. They all went down in an ungainly heap under the heavy gate. One Optek discharged its box into the sky. Gurt stepped past me and burnt a hole through the Yoruba’s face.
“Leave one alive,” I said, holstering my weapon again. Gurt stamped hard on the chest of one of the remaining bushmen then burnt a hole through the throat of the other. The fair-skinned one had by then scrabbled out from under the gate and was reaching for the pistol in his belt. Gurt kicked his legs out from under him, swatted him on the side of his head with the flat of his hand, then removed the pistol from his slack grip. I’d been worried about Gurt getting hurt. I’d forgotten how he had performed in the forest.
“Check that,” I said to him, gesturing to the outpost. He nodded and trotted towards the building. I hauled the unconscious soldier upright and dragged him back to the tank. By the time I had him propped up against one of the tracks, Gurt was on his way back and the building was in flames. Gurt had two companions with him: two women wearing nothing but neck yokes and chains. When they reached the dead guards Gurt stopped them for a moment. One of the women pointed to my captive. I guessed what was required and rifled his pockets. By the time Gurt and the two women reached me I had the key to the yokes. Gurt set about freeing these slaves. I left him to it and methodically slapped my captive to consciousness. Finally I got his attention.
“Now,” I said, remembering conversations I’d had like this before, “if you want to live you’ll answer my questions. Now, which of the Families is providing your lot with weapons?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
I believed him. He looked scared enough.
“Okay, who will know?”
“I don’t know,” he said again, sticking to a trusted formula. This time I knew he was lying. Some people just can’t help looking shifty when they do it. I reached down and took hold of his hand.
“I’ll ask you again, and each time you say ‘I don’t know’ I’ll break one of your fingers. It’s a tedious process but it always gets results.”
“The Bishop knows and the upper Clergy. Soldiers are not told,” he said quickly.
That figured.
“Where will I find the Bishop or members of the upper Clergy?”
“In Christoford,” he said.
“How do I get. . . no, I think I’ll bring you along. You can give me directions.”
I hauled him to his feet then looked round at Gurt and the two women.
“What about them?” I asked.
Gurt shrugged.
One of them, a Masai beauty with coal-black skin, looked at me very directly.
“You don’t need him.” She pointed at the soldier and there was contempt in her expression. “We can lead you there.”
“Very well,” I said.
I didn’t mind. There was seating in the tank for twenty people and room for a lot more. Still holding onto my captive I turned to the tank, then turned back when one of the two women ran back to the dead soldiers and collected their weapons and ammo. Gurt looked on and nodded his approval.
“Please don’t kill me,” said the soldier. I had almost forgotten I was holding on to him. I released him and he staggered away. He looked at all of us and began backing off. Gurt started to reach for his pistol but desisted when I looked at him and shook my head. He looked puzzled until I directed his attention to the Masai woman. She had dropped all of her load but for one Optek. The soldier turned and ran for the scrub. The Optek stuttered out half its thirty-round box. The soldier went head-first into the bushes with one arm and half his back blown away. I climbed onto one of the tank’s treads and stepped inside. Gurt followed.
The women’s reaction was one of awe. All the screens were on so to them it must have appeared as if the bulkheads and ceilings had disappeared as soon as they got inside. The Masai woman gave me that direct look again.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“The Collector,” I told her.
She burst out laughing, but her Asiatic companion seemed not to find the situation so amusing.
“And your names?” I asked.
“I am Bella,” said the Masai.
“Vinber,” said her companion. Both these women were beautiful. It did not take much thought to figure out their function at the guard post.
“Pleased to meet you. My companion is Gurt. Say hello, Gurt.”
Gurt grinned at them with his spiky teeth. Neither of them showed adverse reaction to that. I supposed that they had seen worse things recently. I suspected Gurt now had an addition to his agenda of killing God soldiers and filling his stomach. I directed Bella to the first seat behind Gurt, who was back in the driver’s seat. I took my position at the weapons console and kept an eye on the detectors. Vinber sat in one of the many rear seats, with the weapons piled beside her. She was attempting to conceal her nakedness with her hands. I pointed to one of the side lockers.
“You’ll find an overall in there,” I said, then to Bella, “Where do we go?”
Bella pointed down the track.
“You just follow this for now,” she said.
“Is there a more direct route?” I asked.
“Only through the scrub and across the river,” she said.
“What direction?”
She pointed. “Southeast,” she said.
How was it, I wondered, that people always seemed to know what direction to go? Until she had pointed I’d thought the southeast behind us.
“Get us going,” I said to Gurt.
With another grin Gurt rolled the tank forwards until it was atop the dead soldiers—there he turned it so that like a giant bootheel it ground them into the dirt, then he headed it off into the scrubland. While he was about this I set up a program to run the antipersonnel guns. It was a nasty program, but I thought it appropriate.
* * *
By the middle of the night the two women were asleep and Gurt got so weary he knocked over a baobab at least two centuries old and nearly succeeded in tipping us over. No mean feat for a vehicle weighing upwards of thirty tonnes. I called a halt after that and left the three of them bedded down while I went outside and sat on the missile launcher. I sleep occasionally, but it’s more psychological thing than a physiological one. I sat on the launcher feeling only a slight need for sleep as I reviewed my long memories. I thought about the two women inside and how they certainly weren’t the standard type. When I first came to Africa, fleeing the ice along with many other Europeans, there had been a huge diversity of races on the continent. Over the ensuing centuries those races had mixed in the melting pot of song and the result was those chocolate-coloured people by the score. Sometimes there were throwbacks and they were often considered beautiful in their uniqueness. Bella looked pure Masai, and Vinber had the look of a Japanese. Gurt, of course, was something entirely unique and not entirely human. Later, I listened to them inside—to Gurt’s gruntings and the moans of the women as he had them one after the other, and wondered what would be the result of this mating. I then closed my eyes and switched my mind to rest mode for a couple of hours.
When I woke, the three of them were soundly asleep. I entered the tank and crept past them to the driving seat. Gurt woke momentarily, watched me, then went back to sleep, the women snuggled in each side of him. I shut off sound to the outside and kept the tank rolling on through the scrub. I was heading down-slope towards a river and the sun was rising above a stand of cycads to my left by the time the three woke.
“How far?” I asked Bella, as she stood behind me stretching.
“About twenty kilometres beyond the river,” she said, then went to get a share of the food Gurt was unpacking.
I brought the tank to the edge of the river then ran us in. There was a sucking sound as all the seals aut
omatically closed. Soon we were surrounded by a muddy aquarium.
“Jesu!” said Vinber.
Huge perch nosed the tank’s armour and a single crocodile sculled across above us. The tank rolled on and sank deeper and deeper into mud until we were completely submerged in it. I only knew we were on our way out when the tank tilted up at forty-five degrees and began to climb. In a couple of minutes we were out of mud and finger-lings swarmed about us, gobbling up the creatures we’d uprooted. I brought the tank out of the river through reed beds. Great clumps of tangled reeds and mud clung to the tank, and a huge constrictor slid off the back of of it, evidently bewildered. The mud and reeds were soon scraped away when I took us straight through a bamboo thicket into an area scattered with flowering groundsels and the jewelled glitter of sun birds, then back into acacia scrub. Here I drew the tank to a halt and bade Gurt to take over. It was only minutes after he had taken over that we came out of the scrub and went through a fence into a corn field.
“That is where they kept me,” said Bella, pointing to a stockade directly ahead of us. I noted the guard towers and the glint of sunlight on silver helmets. Beside the stockade was a scattering of barrack buildings. I doubted that any of the Clergy I wanted would be here and for a moment considered telling Gurt to go round it, then bullets began to ping off the armour and my three companions looked at me expectantly. What the hell.
“Take us into that barracks area and stop,” I said. While Gurt did this I initiated the program I’d sorted out earlier.
At one time the problem with automatic guns had been that they automatically shot anyone. Weapons manufacturers overcame this by using increasingly sophisticated recognition programs so the guns could identify friends and not shoot them. Obviously there were problems with this when foes dressed up as friends, but then any common soldier faced the same problems. The weapons computer I used was the latest development and could be programmed to recognise all sort of subtle nuances. In this case I had no need to be subtle. Earlier I’d taken an image of one of the mirrored helmets these God soldiers wore and fed it into the program. As soon as I ran the program the guns simply searched for and shot anyone wearing those helmets.
Gurt took the tank straight through a barracks building, demolishing it and flattening a couple of soldiers who had been a bit tardy of rising. He stopped the tank in the middle of the barracks area then turned to me.
“We kill them now?” he asked. He always seemed to lapse back into this mode of speech when he was excited. I held up my hand.
“It’ll start any moment now,” I said.
With all the screens on, we had a perfect view. The autoguns appeared as if in thin air above us, turned, fired: single shots, occasional burst of fire. At their elevation I wondered for a moment what they were shooting at, that is until a long burst of fire disintegrated a guard tower and two silver-helmeted corpses fell to the ground. To the right someone fired from a window. It was not until his helmet momentarily showed that the right autogun swivelled and shot him through the wooden wall. Two soldiers ran between buildings, firing their Optekson full automatic. One short burst cut them in half. Another soldier ran out with some sort of grenade and never got to throw it. It blew up in what remained of his body. And so it went. I saw a group of four soldiers running through the corn. The guns let them go, as they were without helmets. It took about half an hour before the remaining soldiers got the idea and ran for it. Those without helmets made it. Those with did not.
When there was no return fire and the autoguns were lazily putting extra bullets in the bloody helmets scattered on the ground, I shut off the program.
“Time to go and liberate some people, I guess,” I said, and looked at Gurt. He turned the tank around and drove it towards the stockade. I called up the laser in the carousel and had it log the gate. Gurt drove the tank in over the pile of wood and brought it to a halt.
The more I found out about this Army of God, the more I found a total lack of regret for my actions. There were about a hundred slaves yoked and chained around the edge of the stockade. Some of them were fly-blown corpses, the others skeletally thin but still alive. In the centre of the stockade was the remains of a fire over which had been suspended a cylindrical steel cage. Someone’s charred remains clung to the bars. Gurt was first out through the hatch, Bella and Vinber shortly after him. I sat looking at the cage and considered my options. In a moment I decided I would do more than just find out which Family had armed these people and attacked me. When I followed the others out of the tank to free the slaves, I approached Bella.
“How many of these stockades are there?” I asked.
“There are many,” she replied.
The free men collected weapons, though on my instruction they left the few undamaged helmets where they found them. I searched the barracks until I found a room something like an office. In there I found a map of Cuberland. It wasn’t a big place. There were about eight villages scattered around the central town of Christoford. I betted, correctly as it happens, that each of those villages would have a slave stockade. The free men went with their weapons into the fields and the other three rejoined me in the tank while I studied the map.
“Head east, and when you hit a river valley, follow it north,” I told Gurt.
“That’s not the way to Christoford,” said Bella.
“I’m aware of that,” I replied. It was five days later, with the tank standing in the wreckage of the eighth stockade, and some five hundred free men camped on the slopes below, when I told Gurt to take us in to Christoford.
* * *
Christoford was a sprawling settlement in another of those river valleys. As we came onto the slope above it there was an immediate flash of purple in the night and the tank’s ionic shield went up to absorb APW fire. I had Gurt reverse us at high speed back into the thick jungle we had just come through.
“Thought so,” I said, then to Gurt and Bella—Vinber had long since abandoned us and joined the other freed slaves—”I want a member of the upper Clergy or the Bishop himself, alive. Can you do that for me?”
“Certainly, Collector,” said Bella.
“Course,” said Gurt.
“No mistakes. It’s going to get bloody down there.”
Bella and Gurt took an APW each and quickly got out of the tank. In the jungle all around, my army awaited instructions from General Gurt. I was the first strike. I got into the driving seat and slaved the weapons console to the one before me. First I got the autogun program running, then I got going.
APW fire hit as soon as I came out of the jungle. The shield kept going up on auto and the power drain slowed the tank each time. On the targeting screen I selected anything that looked like a barracks and fired off missiles. Slaves would be killed by this action, but there was no way of avoiding this—war is never clean. The APW fire ceased on about the third missile. The autogun opened up as soon as I hit the main drag and God Soldiers came out shooting. Ahead of me an armoured car swerved round the corner and someone opened up with a belt-fed machine gun. None of the soldiers in the car were wearing the mirrored helms—rather they wore uniform caps. I napalmed them, and while they screamed and burned I rode my tank straight over the car, crushing it completely. After that there were two more armoured cars to which I did the same, then I came to a compound where row upon row of them were parked. Here then was just the place to use the main weapon. I swung the turret, with its two pulsed-energy cannons, round and opened up on the rows of vehicles. The huge injection of energy vaporised metal and caused fuel tanks to explode instantaneously. The armoured fire-filled shells of the cars leapt into the air one after another. Others blew completely apart. Just one strafing rendered them all useless. If they weren’t completely wrecked they were buried in wreckage.
Small arms fire, which had been impacting on my tank up to that point, suddenly ceased. I guess a lot of soldiers suddenly realised the futility of what they were doing, and that whatever cover they had was not enough. I halted t
he tank there before the burning cars and let the U-charger catch up. By now Gurt was leading his small army in to mop up anything I’d left behind. While I waited, APW fire hit my tank again. I traced the source and released a missile in that direction. A three-storey concrete building fell into ruin. Something exploded against the side of the tank and I traced the source of that to another concrete building. On the roof two soldiers were operating some sort of grenade launcher. I selected a flack gun from the carousel and dropped a shell on that roof. The shell exploded to release a hundred miniature flack bombs. This had the effect of covering the roof with small explosions and thousands of needle-sized flinders of metal. The men and their launcher disappeared in a haze of red and flame. When things were a bit quieter I concentrated my attention on the detectors. There was still no sign of any Family gun ships, and I guessed that whichever Family was involved had considered it prudent to keep their heads down for the present.
By the time I was satisfied with the charge in the batteries there were the sounds of gunfire and explosions from the rear. I moved on, taking streets at random, blowing barracks buildings and killing anyone I discovered in uniform. Any time I started to feel sympathy I remembered the list of punishments I had found in the soldier’s pack at the beginning of all this. I remembered those impaled down the sides of the roads, and the burnt corpse clinging to the side of that cylindrical steel cage. It was at the cathedral that I saw the first of the Clergy. They wore robes and tricorn hats and they ran and hid as soon as they could.
The cathedral, as it had been called, was more the size of a medieval church. Wooden frameworks had been erected as a support and guide for mortared blocks of stone. There were no people here, but to one side there was a large slave stockade. I napalmed the building then drove straight at the gate to the stockade. My autoguns took out the soldiers in the two watch towers, then turned their attention to a whole troop of God soldiers who were attacking from behind. I knocked the gate flat and drove on top of it. There must have been two hundred slaves in there, all of them chained and yoked. My autoguns were now spitting only the occasional shot. Behind were the bodies of about a hundred God soldiers strewn across the street. Five thousand of them, that first soldier had told me. I wondered how many I had accounted for and how many were running. I drove on into the stockade and with the laser I targeted the wall mounts for the chains. After I’d hit about three, the slaves got the idea and started feeding the chains through the loops on their yokes. Once I’d hit every mount I got out of my seat and got out of my tank.