Conrad's Last Campaign (23 page)

“Alright, I’ll take my personal troops and accompany you as far as the waiting area. We’ll wait there as a ready reserve. I’m sure as hell not going to sit in my tent waiting to hear if we won a battle!”

Shortly after moonset, the entire group moved out as quietly as possible. It was very dark and slow. With the moon gone, we moved by starlight. It would have been impossible without the superior vision of the Big People. We never saw the advance party waiting crouched in the darkness, but the Big People let us know when it was time to stop. In a world without machines, noise carries a long way, so we stopped well over two miles from the ambush site. I didn’t even see the night fighters dismount and walk into the night, led by two Big People with better vision. There was a rustle, the sound of padded hooves for a few seconds and then silence -– and darkness.

In the darkness, time is eternal. The only light was the stars overhead and the only measure of time was their slow movement across the sky. The silence stretched on forever. Like everyone else, I dozed in my saddle and waited, resisting an overwhelming urge to strike a light and look at my clock. I must have slept for an hour because I looked up to see the slightest hint of false dawn in the Eastern sky. It was the ideal time to strike and still we heard nothing.

Suddenly, there was the sound of Sten guns. Bright flares arced up from both hilltops. Moments later, the first illumination flares jumped up from the valley floor. The battle was on. Beside me, two companies of Wolves galloped off to battle. They would crest the hills in less than four minutes and be in battle in less than five, while I had to steady Silver and sit and wait.

I waited until I could hear that the battle was much more intense on the right side hill before I told Silver to charge. Screw the feelings of the other commanders. I was the boss and I wasn’t going to miss this.

The flares were giving us enough light to charge up the hill at full gallop. When we went over the top I saw that the Wolves had penetrated to the main camp and were in heavy fighting. Between me and the edge of the cannon emplacements, there were a few individual fights going on, but they didn’t need help. The Mounted Infantry had set up their machine guns, one on each flank and at the center, but they couldn’t use them because the Wolves were still mixed in with the Mongols.

As we galloped past the machine guns, I could see that Sir Grzegorz was going sword to sword with a Mongol standing on the ground. That’s when I realized that I was holding my own sword, and quickly changed to my Sten. I blasted two Mongol troops on the way to Sir Grzegorz and shouted at him, “The machine guns are in place! It’s time to go! Get out and let them work!”

“Bullshit! We’ve got ’em on the run!”

“Get the hell out and let the machine guns run them into their graves!”

For a minute, I thought he was going to refuse the order, but he gave me a disgusted look and signaled
follow me
and led his men back. Two Big People picked up their fallen riders by their belts and carried them back in their mouths. One Big Person was down and probably dead and her rider was picked up by another trooper. As we passed the machine gun line, they opened up on the remaining Mongols.

The bullets tore through every standing tent, smashed the supply wagons, and dimpled every inch of the campgrounds. Big People delivered more ammo twice. As Sir Grzegorz and I watched the battle from our saddles, we had a few minutes to talk. He told me, “The commander was better than most. He had a second line of lookouts around the camp. By the time we charged, he already had his men in a skirmish line. We lucked out because they fired too soon and we were still out of range. By the time they reloaded, we were in among them. A few of them got off second shots, and those damned guns are dangerous close up. Lost a few men…”

I told him, “When the machine guns have killed everything moving, take your men in a finish them off.” I turned to leave, and then turned back again, “I know that you are an honorable and brave warrior, but this is not a game. There are no extra points for nobility and the rewards for doing things the hard way are written on tombstones. If we are going to win this campaign, we must all remember that.” Then I rode over to the other side of the valley without saying what was really on my mind, what I really wanted to say, “You disobey my orders one more damned time and I’ll bust you to dishwasher!” I held my temper instead.

On the other hill, things had gone closer to plan. The Mongols were more careless there, and the Wolves were able to make an easy pass through the camp, killing anyone in sight and keeping them busy while the machine guns were set up.

As soon as the guns were set up, Krol split his men into two columns and rode back at full speed through the firing line. They hadn’t lost a single man in the charge and had only two Big People wounded. He left one column to reinforce the machine gun line and sent the other column back into the cannon emplacements to help the night fighters.

I never saw any of his men draw a blade that night. He was more in tune with the future that either myself or Sir Grzegorz.

Overall, we had done amazingly well, but not because of my brilliant planning. Apparently the Mongol commander was convinced that his trap was still undetected and he had ordered that no campfires be lit for fear of giving himself away. Our night fighters crept into a totally dark camp where even the guards were having a hard time staying awake. If the camp had been normally lit, they would have had a real fight, but, as it was, half of the Chinese died before they even knew they were under attack.

There were about a thousand Chinese foot soldiers and engineers manning the cannon and most of them had the good grace to die quickly and easily. Hand-to-hand was not their field, and the best they could do was to wound a few of the night fighters.

There were also over a thousand Mongol troops in the two camps. We killed about half of them before the other half got to their horses and escaped down the canyon or just stumbled away hidden by the darkness.

They were alert fighters, and as the Wolves quickly learned, their rifles could penetrate our armor close up. We even lost two Wolves to sword thrusts through the joints in their armor. We lost about fifteen killed and more than twenty seriously wounded.

When full morning broke, we spent a few hours destroying the Mongol weapons and disabling the cannon. For a big heavy piece of metal, a muzzle-loading cannon is amazingly easy to destroy. The vent hole where the power is ignited enlarges over time, causing the cannon to lose power. To counter this, the vents are removable and replaceable. If you blast or pry the vent out and then enlarge the vent hole with a chisel, the gun will never fire right again.

I had planned to ambush the relief column when they came down the canyon, but the escaping Mongols would certainly have blown that chance for me. When the rest of the column caught up with us a few hours after dawn we moved out down the pass.

I rode near my radio cart and asked the operator to contact
Wanderlust
. It turned out that she was over the other end of the pass and in visual range of the Mongol relief column. They reported that the Mongols were moving back toward the Mongolian plateau. They must have found out that the ambush failed and decided wait for a better time for battle. It made sense. To cover all of the possible routes that we could have taken, they would have had to split their forces. Once the ambush failed, the best strategy would be to avoid battle until they could consolidate their forces.

I suspected that our vacation was nearly over. The loss of most of their horses, assuming that we had successfully killed them, would explain the eerie calm over the winter, but the months of winter would also give them time to replenish their stocks by importing horses from China. It would take months to import and train them, but they had months while we sat hunkered down in sod huts. Thinking back, I realized that allowing for draft animals for the cannon, the Mongols only had about the same number of horses in the camp as there were soldiers. Since the Mongol warriors normally took four of five horses with them on campaign, they may not be up to full strength yet.

Soon, we would find out if I was right, but for now we had at least fifty miles of clear road ahead.

We are now at the twenty year mark on our project, and we continue to change the world.

Progress has hastened since our Emperor established partial dominance over the Song Dynasty border lands. Even though the Song still hold their positions there and live in their palaces, they answer to Mongol overlords for every important decision and send half of their tax revenue to my masters.

The additional income has paid for a new capital city, huge new palaces for the Emperors relatives and thousands of miles of railways hosting hundreds of the new mobile steam engines.

My own reward has been considerable. I now live in a small palace surrounded by a hundred acres of fruit trees and gardens, and my wife now spends her time directing dozens of servants and household workers. She insisted that I take a second wife and chose a particularly attractive young woman of noble Chinese birth to, “Keep me relaxed and able to concentrate on my work.”

The empire has grown richer and the fast communications provided by the railways have enabled the Emperor to have much firmer control over his dominions. In an emergency, no major point in the empire is now more than five days away from the capitol.

Once the peasants and even the regional governors would say, “As the sun is high in the heavens, so the Emperor is far away,” but now the Emperor’s mail box and his troops are next door.

As a bonus we learned who the Polish genius was. The Emperor of Song had trade relations with Europeans who brought with them a book of knowledge purported to be written by a Polish genius. Except for the fact that he is of very advanced age, we do not have his real name or description. We know that he uses the grandiose pseudonym that translates
Conrad, Protector of the Heavens
or
Conrad, Guardian of the Stars
. Of course, the name could designate either an individual or a group of engineers and scholars.

The book is divided into thirty-five topics, each shorter than the usual textbook. Some of the passages are arcane because they were originally written in Polish then translated to Latin or Greek by church scholars and finally translated into Mandarin by Chinese merchants who traded with the Romans and Italians. It is sometimes difficult to know if some terms apply to new concepts or are simply garbled because the translator did not know the term in the new language.

It took awhile before we realized that the math was garbled. Some of the terms were in base twelve, which means that
Conrad
either was polydactyl and counted on his fingers, or just had a wicked sense of humor.

The quality of the chapters varies widely. There is nothing on pharmacology or math and very little on alchemy. The book on bridge building is interesting, but smaller than the one I wrote before joining imperial service and it is missing basic fundamentals. You could not build a good stone bridge with it.

There are several chapters related to invisible
lightning
power. Each chapter seems simple, but it will take years before we understand it enough to use it.

On the other hand, the chapters on steam power, production tools, steel production, and optics have saved us years of research. We cut fuel consumption and startup time dramatically in new steam engines by adopting the tube boiler shown in the book, and the section on steel production will allow us to triple the production of high quality steel within a few years.

Our independent efforts have also born more fruit. The stationary steam engines have cut the cost of machining dramatically and allowed us to build more of the Polish rifles and shells. Every city now mounts at least a few of them on its walls. Hand crafting the ammunition is still expensive, but with the stamping process and hydraulic press shown in Conrad’s book, ammunition should soon be cheap enough to make it a common weapon.

As the weapons we have are sufficient to dominate all of our enemies, there has not been great incentive to improve them, but one of my teams has produced a practical breech-loading rifle for the troops.

He did it by cutting the barrel into two pieces. The shooter uses a lever that runs along the right side of the barrel to pull back a short breech section, just long enough for a charge of powder and a bullet, and swivel it up. He pulls the lever back slightly to release the breech from the main part of the barrel, pushes down to swing it up, drops the charge into it, pushes up on the handle to lower the breech. When breech is aligned, he moves the lever forward and down into a strong clip to clamp the joint tight.

Sometimes there is a very slight leakage, but the gun will fire ten rounds a minute through a rifled barrel, and it is cheap enough to give one to every soldier.

In truth, my lord Kublai has lost some of his drive for conquest as a result of our progress. He now controls the richest and most powerful nation in the known world and has real wealth beyond imagining. He still plans to consolidate his conquest of the Song Empire, still battles with the Koreans, and occasionally sends small raiding parties south and west, but the returns from such ventures are small compared to the taxes he now collects. He battles now only for honor and glory, not for profit.

As we learn more about
Europe from the Song traders, he has also lost some of his concern about the Polish army. We now know that the entire population of Poland would fit into one of our larger cities and leave room for the population of a small town to visit. They may be wealthy and powerful, but there are just too few of them to be a serious threat. He is content to leave the Kipchak Khanate, the Golden Horde, as a sufficient buffer between us.