Africa Zero (20 page)

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 automatically 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 the 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.