Back | Next
Contents

Chapter 24

The Mine


Talak River, 200 miles upriver of Hocha


June 11, 1008 CE


The Peterbilt pulled off the barge onto the flat ground. This was mostly outside the territory claimed by Hocha. The people here, about one hundred and fifty-seven miles east-northeast of Hocha, did some farming, but they lived as much from buffalo as from corn. They were members of the Shulik Confederation, but were a different tribe than Kazal’s. That didn’t mean they were uninterested in what the barge carried. Aside from the Peterbilt, the barge carried knives, axes, arrowheads, pots and pans made of steel and copper. Jerry had brought a wide variety of seeds. Conifers from Europe, as well as modern and heirloom tomatoes, and all sorts of other stuff and the technical know-how to bring the ones that didn’t do it easily to seed, and last year he’d gotten a lot of seeds.

Well, the villagers of Jabir had gotten a lot of seeds, following Jerry and the capsule’s advice. Those seeds were worth their weight in gold if anyone in this part of America had had any gold to trade.

* * *

Melanie and Michael were seated around a campfire in the village, discussing plants and arrowheads, but more importantly, the tools to build the tools.

“Tell me again about this crossbow?” Jaback, the local tribal leader, said. “How do you make them?”

Hunting buffalo wasn’t a safe occupation and hunting them with bows and arrows didn’t make it a lot safer. Spears and atlatls packed more wallop, but you had to get closer and there wasn’t always a handy cliff to stampede them over. So while buffalo hunting was necessary, it had a tendency to “waste” a lot of young hunters. Anything that would let them hunt a buffalo from out of range of the buffalo’s charge appealed greatly.

Michael went through the process. In some ways, crossbows are harder to make than a standard bow, but in other ways easier. Since a crossbow has a channel to send the arrow down, the balance of the bow isn’t as critical as it is in a standard bow. Since the bow is cocked and the bowstring held in place, you can have a stronger pull than you can have in a standard bow. Certainly since a crossbow bolt is shorter than the arrow fired from a bow, it’s easier to make.

Put it all together, and if your goal is to be far enough away from a buffalo to be safe and still kill it, a crossbow is a better tool than a standard bow and arrow.

Even better would be an elephant gun, but though they’d started making steel over two years before, they weren’t up to machining barrels thirty inches long. The only rifles in the world were the ones that had come with the time travelers. Those rifles had ammunition again, reloaded by Alyssa’s chemistry, but for most people, a crossbow was as good as they were going to get.


South Talak River


June 14, 1008 CE


Michael looked at the chief and shook his head. “No. You should use the crossbows. Our guns make a lot of noise.”

Michael and Melanie were out with the several tribal leaders on a buffalo hunt to demonstrate the crossbows. They were outside the danger distance. Melanie cocked the crossbow and loaded the quarrel, then carefully handed the bow to a senior hunter. It wouldn’t be the first time the man had shot a crossbow. They’d spent most of yesterday shooting crossbows at buffalo skins draped over bushes, and learning how much drop they could expect from the bolts at a given range. Heavier bolts dropped faster, but gave more punch at the target.

The hunter carefully went to his belly and took aim, then jerked the trigger. The quarrel missed to the right, which didn’t matter because he underestimated the drop and it buried itself in the earth twenty feet short of the target.

The buffalo looked up, then went back to his grazing.

“Squeeze the trigger, just like yesterday,” Melanie reminded the man.

Cursing, the hunter sat up and reloaded the crossbow.

Then he went back to the prone position, took a deep calming breath, adjusted his aim, and squeezed the trigger. The quarrel hit the buffalo in the top half of its chest. His head came up and he bellowed. The other buffalo looked up, but no one was close to them. The wounded buffalo moved five steps . . . ten . . . then his legs crumpled and he fell to the ground.

Buffalo have only one lung. It’s a rare feature, and it means that when you poke a hole in the lung, the whole respiratory system collapses, not just one air sack. A human or a mountain lion with a hole in one lung can keep operating for several minutes.

Not so a buffalo.

The natives shot two more buffalos, then let Michael and Melanie have their turn. Each of them downed a buffalo, which, by prior agreement, would be theirs to keep. That was a great deal of buffalo meat that would be worth a lot back in Fort Peterbilt.

Melanie went back to the village to get the Peterbilt, and Michael, along with the braves, started slowly approaching the herd, which moved off, leaving their dead behind.

They started to prepare the buffalos for butchering, but Michael suggested they wait.

By now, the Peterbilt was equipped with an electric winch, so when it arrived, all five buffaloes were winched up onto the back of the Peterbilt and carried back to the village whole. That made it easier for the locals to collect things like blood and intestines.

The next morning, the Peterbilt rolled back onto the barge and headed back downriver with orders for the products of Fort Peterbilt and the rest of the United Clans.


Lisyuk


June 15, 1008 CE


They stopped at Lisyuk for the night and the women’s council asked them to plow a field about a mile south of the village. “We’d wait, but you’re here, and if we can get it plowed now, we can plant winter wheat come the fall.”

Melanie agreed. It wouldn’t take long. They’d built a road for the Peterbilt to the field.

That night they ate with the locals, enjoying fish and corn in a thick and savory stew, finished with cantaloupe.

* * *

Lisyuk was solidly in the United Clans, and an overwhelming majority of its population shared that belief. But not everyone.

Susuk had been in training to become a priest of Talak before the Peterbilt people came. And he knew with great certainty that if the gods were abandoned, they, in turn, would abandon humanity. The rains would stop. The river would dry up, and they would all die.

The truth was that Susuk would never have been admitted to the priesthood of Hocha. They had standards, after all, and Susuk wasn’t all that bright. He’d been told the way the world worked as a child, and he wasn’t going to change his mind just because a demon arrived from somewhere, trying to tempt them away from the true faith with lies about how the world worked. Knowing that the demon people were trying to destroy the world, he was going to kill them. But, more importantly, he was going to destroy the demon that had brought them to this world. The priests of Hocha had shown him how.

The electrical wires were buried under the road and ten pounds of the magic powder was also buried. Fifty feet away, a small box with coils of wire and a magnet sat behind a bush. The plan had been carefully thought out by the priests of Hocha and provided to Susuk.

Of course, the Pharisees of Hocha knew what was going to happen to Susuk after the Peterbilt was destroyed, but they didn’t care. They’d told Susuk that once the Peterbilt was destroyed, the spell it had cast would kill his fellows in Lisyuk too.

Susuk believed it because he needed to believe it.

* * *

The Peterbilt moved along the road. It was rather narrow for the big truck, so Melanie was walking backwards in front of the truck, guiding Michael. The front wheels reached the mine and Susuk rammed the plunger home.

Nothing happened.

The Peterbilt continued to roll slowly forward.

Susuk, realizing the demon Peterbilt was keeping the charge from going off, desperately pushed and pulled on the plunger.

* * *

A plunger is, at its core, a simple mechanism. It’s a one-stroke generator. The magnetic core moves through the coil, inducing a current. The faster it moves, the stronger the current. Susuk’s first stroke was firm, but not all that fast. His back-and-forth jerks were rather faster. On the third one, the thin wire in the black powder bomb got hot enough to ignite the powder.

A black powder bomb is also a fairly simple thing, but it’s subject to simple, uncaring laws of physics. Laws that the designers of the bomb didn’t actually understand. Black powder burns very fast, but it burns. As it burns, a small volume of black powder turns into a much larger volume of hot gas. This produces pressure, which will burst the container, causing flow, which has momentum. And which can be directed by things like rocks in the soil and even the placement of the spark that sets it off. This is the basis of shaped charges.

The spark was on the upper end of the charge, toward the direction of the Peterbilt’s front. The explosion traveled at a downward and backward angle, compressing the earth, and then encountering a largish flat stone. Which shattered, but at the same time, redirected the flow up and forward.

This did two things. It absorbed quite a bit of the force of the bomb and, two, redirected the blast so that rather than blowing up, it blew forward and up. And, of course, out. It was an explosion, after all, and it was black powder, not a plastic explosive like C-4.

Rocks blew up, bounced off the undercarriage of the Peterbilt, went down and bounced off the ground, then a piece of rock about an inch across slammed into Melanie’s left leg about two inches above the ankle.

That rock shattered Melanie’s tibia and ripped open her leg. She fell to the ground, but the rest of the blast front was gone before she fell into it. The other rocks ripped holes in the left and right front tires of the Peterbilt.

Several stones and a whole lot of dirt hit the undercarriage of the Peterbilt, but that brought into play something else that the Pharisees didn’t get. They didn’t understand just how tough thick chunks of high carbon steel are. The undercarriage of the Peterbilt was scratched and dented, but not holed.

* * *

In moments Michael was out of the truck, medical kit in hand, and running to the aid of his wife. He saw the injury, and he was back in the ’Stan. He knew what to do.

He started with a pressure bandage to control the bleeding and realized that Melanie was going to need surgery to reconstruct the bone, or she was very likely to lose the foot. The tibia was shattered, but the fibula, the smaller leg bone was still intact. It would, hopefully, hold the foot and ankle in place until they could get her back to Fort Peterbilt, where they could operate.

Michael stopped, frozen. Jerry Jefferson had brought the new computer phones, virtual reality glasses, back from the future to them all. Neither Michael nor Melanie were particularly fond of them, but they had them.

Jerry wasn’t a surgeon. No one in this time was. This sort of surgery would require augmented reality. Someone was going to have to put the glasses on, and then follow along as a recording or a computer-generated cartoon guided them through the motions of reconstructing the shattered tibia.

But Michael couldn’t do it. He could hold himself together long enough to do first aid, but not to do reconstructive surgery on his wife. He’d lose it, and she’d lose her foot.

He looked around, and there was a crowd around him. The whole village had been following along behind to watch the plowing.

When the bomb had gone off, at first they thought it was the Peterbilt, but that hadn’t lasted more than a few moments. They were, by now, familiar with the sound a black powder charge buried in the earth made when it went off.

“Help me get her back to the barge,” Michael shouted. Unfortunately, he shouted it in English. Fortunately, at least one of the people in the crowd knew enough English to understand. The women started giving orders, and Michael picked up his wife and started back to the barge.

“The wooden case next to the passenger seat.” He jerked his chin at the Peterbilt, and again some of the women started giving orders. He kept going.

* * *

Kalmak, the senior chief of the hunters of this village, watched the situation, confused.

The women of the women’s council were trying to figure out what was going on. So were the chiefs. It was all very confusing and it wasn’t supposed to be happening to the Peterbilt people. They didn’t claim to be gods or messengers of the gods, but whatever they claimed, people thought of them as prophets.

Prophets weren’t supposed to have things like this happen to them.

And that was what brought him up short. Jesus Christ the Superstar had had something even worse than this happen to him. He’d been taken by the Pharisees, given to the Romans, and crucified.

He’d known it was coming, maybe. He’d accepted it, maybe. Certainly he hadn’t wanted his followers to interfere at the risk of their lives. Or had he?

“One of you denies me,” Jesus sang in Kalmak’s memory.

“One of you betrays me,

“Peter will deny me in just a few hours.

“Three times will deny me.”

Kalmak wasn’t going to betray them. That was for sure. He shouted for the hunters of the village. “Search! Find the one who betrayed them.”

The men started to run off, but he called three back. An older man and two boys. “You three stay. Guard the angel Peterbilt. Let no one touch it.” Then he rushed back to the village.

* * *

Back at the barge, they opened the carved wooden case that held the seldom used virtual reality glasses, and started to hand a pair to Michael.

“No, not me. I’m barely keeping it together. I can’t do the surgery.”

Kalmak arrived just in time to hear that. And more than he ever had before, he realized Michael Anderle’s true courage. For Kalmak had grown up in the real world, not in a fantasy. He knew from personal experience how dangerous it was to go into something like this with your emotions clouded by love, hate, or fear. He also knew from that same personal experience just how hard it was to step aside and let someone else do it if you were too upset to do it right.

Kalmak spoke, “I will do it. I have treated wounds on hunts. But my English is not good. I will need a translator.”

Michael nodded and the glasses were passed to Kalmak. Virtual reality and augmented reality were just words to Kalmak, barely more than sounds. That changed quickly.

The phone, glasses, computer, had cameras on the frame so that what Kalmak saw was sent to the station in the Peterbilt and from there to the station at Fort Hilltop, then from Fort Hilltop to Fort Peterbilt. All faster than Kalmak could blink his eyes.

Once the images got to the capsule at Fort Peterbilt, they were fed into the massive computer and run through a database of wounds, refined by Jerry Jefferson adding parameters, like “right tibia shattered two inches above the ankle.”

Then the closest ten or so matches showed up, and Jerry grabbed the one that looked the most like what he was seeing from Michael’s glasses.

And suddenly Kalmak could see the drawing of the fractured tibia overlaid over Melanie’s shattered tibia. Jerry was speaking, but after a moment that stopped and a young woman’s voice replaced Jerry’s. She was speaking in Kadlok, which was close enough to Kalmak’s Lomak to be understood.

She was telling him what he was going to need to do. He was going to have to look for ruptured blood vessels, veins and arteries, and use sterilized thread to tie them off, or better, sew them up if he could. Carefully, using the pictures sent to him from the capsule in Fort Peterbilt, Kalmak found himself rebuilding a leg.

Melanie was losing blood, but as they’d known for years, Michael and Melanie shared a blood type. So Kalmak found himself stopping the surgery in order to set up a transfusion from Michael to Melanie. It was amazing what you could do with sterilized intestines. Fortunately, Melanie didn’t have to make the transfusion tube. They had one in the medical kit on the barge.

For the next two hours, in fits and starts, Kalmak rebuilt a human. At least, her leg. And when he was done, and her tatters of skin had been sewn back together, he washed her leg in alcohol, which caused the semiconscious woman to scream and faint. Then, Kalmak wrapped the wound.

* * *

While Kalmak had been doing that, several of the women of the women’s council had also been in contact with Fort Peterbilt. So, after Kalmak wrapped the leg in leather, the women had plaster ready to make a cast.

* * *

Susuk heard Kalmak’s order, and he wanted to run. But if he ran, they would hear him and catch him. He stayed still as they started to search. Then, when one of the hunters noticed the stretch of earthen road that had been disturbed when Susuk had buried the wires and came in his direction, he panicked and started to run.

He made it maybe ten feet before he was tackled.

He fought all the time, screaming that the gods demanded their sacrifices, and if they didn’t get them, the world would end.

He was recognized. His mother was on the women’s council and he was a member of a respected family. In spite of that, some of the warriors wanted to kill him then and there. But cooler heads prevailed. They would question him and turn him over to the women’s council.


Lisyuk


June 17, 1008 CE


Three days of recovery, and two of questioning, had let the village learn a lot. The bomb hadn’t done anything completely irreparable to the Peterbilt. Aside from the several holes in both front tires, there was a hose that had been cut and two that had been pulled loose. The cut tube had been repaired, and the knocked-loose tubes had been reattached.

The tires were going to be a more difficult problem. The Peterbilt carried an industrial grade jack, but new tires were a thousand years away.

They could repair the tires, but such repairs would be difficult and time-consuming. And they were going to need latex soon.

* * *

After questioning by the women’s council, including his mother, Susuk admitted everything and unintentionally identified his contact. The contact was gone. He was a merchant who’d disappeared with his canoe full of stuff the day after Susuk was captured. The radios had been used to let others know who he was and where he was thought to be, but the truth was the whole village had more important things to deal with.

“What about Judas?” Susuk’s mother asked. “He took thirty pieces of silver to turn Jesus over to the Pharisees.”

It was an obvious and fairly desperate ploy to save her son. At the same time, the Christianity of the river people wasn’t the Christianity of Europe. For that matter, it wasn’t the Christianity of twenty-first-century America either. Under the influence of the rock opera, it was a religion that almost demanded that the faith be questioned.

“Judas regretted his actions and hung himself,” another of the women of the council countered, and Melanie saw that many of the women of the women’s council were looking at her.

“I’m not Jesus. I’m not even an evangelical.” She shook her head, and tried to think. Something that wasn’t made any easier by the pain in her right leg. What she wanted to do was beat the little sucker to a pulp, or maybe shoot him dead. At the same time, it was clear from the questioning that he was more than a few bricks shy of a full load.

And almost in spite of herself, she was familiar with the religion these people had made out of Jesus Christ Superstar and the Four Gospels on tape that they’d brought back with them. Oddly enough, Susuk’s mother’s point was well taken. It was also more in line with these peoples’ faith than with the one she’d had before God—or whatever—had dumped her and her family in this time.

And who was she to say their version was wrong?

“I can’t speak to what God wants. All I know is I was here to plow a field and help feed some people. I didn’t force my way here. I was asked to come. If you folks didn’t want me here, all you had to say was goodbye. It seems to me that what he was trying to do wasn’t just attacking me or the Peterbilt, but attacking your right to decide for yourselves.” She looked at the young man. The warriors of his tribe hadn’t been gentle with him, but his face was full of belligerence and a certainty that seemed to be based as much on desperation as anything else.

“Yes, he should be allowed to question and even reject the cross god. But should he be allowed to take away your right to choose differently?”


Back | Next
Framed