The Far Side (50 page)

“All it would take would be one person fiddling around with a quartz crystal during a lightning storm to notice that you can “hear” lightning bolts that way,” Linda told them.

“But, as serious as that is, those ships are far and away the worst possible news, sir.”

“How do you mean, Linda?”

“The small one has fourteen rectangles along the side we can see.  The really big ship has a shit pot full of those rectangles, on three different levels.  Sir, the technical name for those rectangles, I’m pretty sure, is ‘gun port.’”

Oliver glanced at his wife who stared stonily back at him.  Linda, not able to see Oliver’s reaction, continued on.  “We have here a three-decker, the classic age-of-sail ship-of-the-line, the battleship of its day.  The other looks like a frigate.  Andie said it in her note, but we just never put it together.

“The people here were a few survivors of a civilization and didn’t number very many.  Rome was founded like that, but there were all sorts of other people around, and they were adjacent to the Med.  Here, they were alone, evidently, on this continent.  From what Andie said, they thought the people here were about where the Romans were, and for the last fifteen hundred of our years, they’ve been cut off from the ones they left behind.  They had a low population base to begin with and had to fight the environment and then storms.  You need a lot of people farming to support a technical base in that sort of society.

“Europe was filled with people, relatively speaking, and while not everyone was moving ahead at once, some were, and they could trade knowledge, so that even in the so-called ‘dark ages’ things continued to move forward.

“Andie describes these people as they are now, and they sound more like the later Middle Ages, with longbows and all that sort of thing.  It wouldn’t be a surprise to see that the lands to the east had made progress faster than they did here.  If the Arvalan civilization had been about where Rome was, add fifteen hundred years and we had Columbus sailing the ocean blue.

“And if these Tengri people have cannon, that almost certainly means individual firearms.  Remember Cortez?  The Aztecs weren’t as advanced as the people here, but the Tengri probably have a lot of resources back to the east, just like the conquistadors had.  These people here are in deep shit.”

“Can you see if the whites are actually slaves?” Helen asked.

Kurt came right back.  “We’d have to go out, and while I’d like to think we could do it and come back undetected, if we screw up, it could mean the end of this project, Oliver.  I will if I have to, but first we need to take it slow.

“The fact is, we don’t see any of the blacks working -- just the whites.”

Oliver mentally grimaced.  All he had was a few thousand word essay from Andie about what was going on and some mediocre video footage.

“I hate to ask this, Kurt, but this isn’t my field of expertise.  Do you have any suggestions?”

“Well, if they are hostile, Ezra, Kris and Andie are likely to get in trouble if they try to return here.  Even if they avoid disaster, they are going to have a hard time getting here.  I don’t know what these guys are up to.”

“Suggestions, Kurt?” Oliver said, letting his impatience get away from him.

“I understand, Ollie.  Jacob here wants to wade out there with a company of Rangers and wipe the bastards out.  I’m uncomfortable with being that kind of a cowboy -- there is too much chance of making a mistake.

“Not to mention that the cow pies in the government are going to wet their pants.  We need to think about this and maybe run up a trial balloon with the public.  There’s too much chance of a mistake if we rush, Oliver.”

Oliver nodded.  “I know.  I just wish...”  He let his voice fade away.

“Let me speak to the rest of my guys,” Kurt asked.

“I’m not going to shit you, guys,” Kurt told them once they were assembled.  “This is not looking like the walk in the park we had hoped for.  The boneheads who built this place were stupid -- if someone stumbled on their emergency entrance they were screwed.  In our case, if we have a couple of guys on duty at the watch post to check the area around the main entrance, and more covering the secret tunnel, odds are we could break free and back through the Far Side Door.

“The problem is, unless it’s open, we’d still be screwed.  Linda, how long can we keep it open?”

Linda smiled slightly for the camera.  “Longer than thirty-eight minutes.  Still, Andie’s first fusor failed after four hours of intermittent operation.  We have a couple of them now that have been running steadily for a week.  The answer is, I don’t know.  Jo Christiansen is my backup back there on Earth, and we have a complete spare, ready to install, and she knows how to do it.  The door might be closed for a few minutes or an hour if something simple fails.  If the vacuum fails, it could be twelve to sixteen hours.  In short, I have no idea.”

“Couldn’t you have the vacuum ready in the back up?” someone asked.

“The fusor chamber is three feet in diameter and is thick Pyrex glass.  Pumped down to vacuum it is under fifteen PSI over its entire surface.  If it fails, it would be like a shrapnel grenade going off.  Anyone around would be sliced to ribbons,” Linda told him.

“I can say that we’ll be fairly secure and not out of contact with Earth for more than half day.  I don’t know how effective your weapons would be against guys with early gunpowder weapons, but could a dozen of you hold off that many for that long?”

Kurt glanced at Jacob and they looked around the cave, imagining the narrow passage.  “Yeah, we could do that.  The problem will be if there’s a lot of smoke.  That would suck.”

“Gas masks,” Jacob told him.  “They’d smoke themselves out faster than they would us.”

“As long as the door is open,” Linda told him, “we’re pumping air from Earth in here.  Not very fast, just a few ounces per square inch instead of pounds.  Andie said that she was sure that without the Far Side door being open, air flowed through here and into the next big chamber.  The fire ring vents outside naturally, as does the one in the next room.  They would have a tough time smoking us out.”

Oliver finally stirred.  “Kurt, I’ll send the rest of your people through if they’re willing, but I want it firmly clear -- you are not, unless there is no other way, to get into a fight over there.  Our President is a moron, but he’s still the President and Congress is still the Congress.  Congress gets to declare war on whomever the President wants them to.  It’s not up to us to start the First Interstellar War.”

“Send them through, have them hump another six cases of ammo per man.  Fifty magazines to a case, about fifteen thousand rounds each.  That’ll dissuade most anyone.”

Jacob frowned.  “We fire anything like a quarter million rounds in here, and we’ll smoke ourselves out.  If they have black powder weapons, we’ll have an advantage with gas masks and infrared sights.  Half of the men have IR, half have night sights.  The four of us here have both, and Linda has a little shotgun and a pistol.”

“I’ll get them going,” Oliver promised, “and I’ll see what I can get from the government.”

* * *

Collum sank wearily into his blankets, having stayed awake much later than most of the men around him, buried in the details of running a column of three hundred men.

It had been a dangerous gamble, but he, Melek, Ezra, Kris, and Andie had talked about it before he’d left.  He had only five crossbows and two thousand quarrels for them when he’d started south.  Whatever Andie had done to motivate the workmen of the city, it had been a wonder, because a wagon with a hundred crossbows and another five thousand quarrels had left the third morning after his departure and caught up with him four days later.  It had seemed like a desperate thing, but the drivers reported it had been surprisingly easy to have three teams of drivers and a man walking alongside the lead draft animals with a lighted torch to guide them.

The draft animals and the men had taken four days to catch them, and while the draft animals were nearly done in, the men were in good shape.  They unhitched the wagon and hitched the team to one of the empty wagons that had gone south with Collum and they were ready to go within a half hour.

Now, four days later, a second and final wagon had arrived, with another hundred crossbows and another five thousand quarrels.  With two hundred weapons and twelve thousand quarrels he thought he was in good shape, plus the men all had longbows and crates and crates of thousands of arrows.

It seemed like he’d barely gotten his eyes closed when someone was shaking him.  It was Kissom, who’d led the scouts ahead.  “Sachem!  Sachem!”

“What is it, Corporal.”

“The south swarms with Tengri!  We have lost almost all of the scouts!  Sachem!  They have many thunder rods!”

That brought him wide awake in a flash.  “How many Tengri did you see?”

“We were at the top of the ridge, and we could see two more ships where they were before.  We turned to come back with the news, and they were lying in wait!  Four of us were killed in the first instant.  I survived by finding a hollow where I could crawl away.  I escaped and continued north, only to see the patrol that attacked us was following my trail.  There are about thirty of them.”

“Thunder rods?” the young lieutenant mumbled in the darkness.  “How can we fight thunder rods?”

Collum sighed.  “Andie and Kris held off ten times their number!  Only half our men had crossbows!”  He hoped no one would mention that Kris and Andie had their smaller thunder rods or that at the end, Andie was firing three crossbows, and Kris two, because the four men who’d carried them before were dead or wounded.

“We’ll rouse before the sun rises, and if they are indeed following you, we’ll give them a surprise, thunder rods or not,” he continued, sounding confident.

In fact, he remembered a place a few miles back that would be a perfect spot for an ambush!

Men had trouble sleeping as the word spread through the camp, and well before dawn men were awake and eating, getting ready for the day.  They marched the few miles quickly, and Collum gathered together the men.

“Below us is a small lake, left over from the rains.  We are on top of a small hill, shaped here like a child’s bow, drawn too far.  We will put some wagons on top of this hill and about twenty men.  At sunset, they will light a cooking fire and go about their business.  With luck, the Tengri will come at first light, thinking their thunder rods will make short work of us!

“Most of us will be behind the two flanks of the hill.  When they start shooting, we will let them fire a volley, then step up to the top of the hill, shoot quickly, and then go back to reload the crossbows.  Bowmen, get a picture of what lies below and start firing volleys over the top of hill, to land among them.

“You men by the wagons, don’t be in a rush to get up!  As soon as we see them coming, we’ll pass the word.  Hide behind the wagons and fire some arrows in their direction and then get down and stay down.”

Collum smiled.  “And, in case this is a bad mistake, I’ll see you all in a week in Arvala!  If we have to run, run!  Don’t wait on anything else!  You know what mercy they show to those who fight them!”

Aye, they chopped off their heads with axes.  Why bother to surrender to the Tengri?  It wasn’t as though they were going to let you live.

Collum wasn’t terribly upset that the lieutenant refused to countenance Collum being one of those in the camp, placing him on the left instead.  The Tengri, if defeated, would have to withdraw east first, before going around the long thin, lake.  He would lead the men south and see if they could kill a few more of them.

These things never work out like you plan.  Everything was going well, with Collum lying under a thick bush when the Tengri fired their thunder rods.  He kicked himself for forgetting that part of what others had reported!  The billows of smoke completely obscured the men who’d fired.  He signed for everyone to stay down.

Kissom, sharper than most had his men up and ready to shoot, but most of them realized that there was nothing to shoot at, and then realized that Collum’s men were still in hiding.  Two men fired bolts which was something he was sure Kissom would fix quickly.  Kissom’s men also vanished behind the hill.

Seeing nothing but a mass of smoke, the men on the hilltop started firing arrows at random into the mess, knowing that they wouldn’t hit anything, but at the same time, making their enemies wary.

A minute later the wind cleared the smoke and Collum could see that few men stood with their thunder rods ready, most were busy with them.  He called for his men to rise and shoot then.

The volley took the Tengri by surprise, and a few turned towards them and fired.  Kissom had seen what he’d done and had his men shoot as well a few moments after Collum’s men did.  There wasn’t nearly as much smoke, and even more of the Tengri went down.  Worse for the Tengri, their officers had called attention to Collum’s force, and had their men face that threat, letting Kissom’s men hit them with an unanswered volley.

Shots came from the mass of smoke, one at a time, as men got ready.  Archers train from the time they are boys, and the men with Collum were some of the finest archers from Arvala, and new weapons or not, they remembered their training.  “Front rank!  Advance and fire!”

Half the men stepped forward and fired, and after a long thirty count, he had the second half fire.  There were only a few Tengri left, now under intermittent arrow shot from the hill, and repeated volleys from the flanks.  They stayed longer than Collum thought they would, but from the way they milled around, Collum thought it was because there was no one left to give the order to withdraw.  Finally the half dozen survivors turned and ran.