Chapter 20
Mission North
Dock on the Agla River
March 15, 1008 CE
Michael Anderle put the Peterbilt in its lowest, slowest reverse gear and inched backward across the heavy wooden dock.
Melanie was on the barge, watching and guiding him as he carefully brought the Peterbilt across the dock, down the ramp, and onto the barge.
The ramp was heavy wood and built into the barge.
The barge had come together surprisingly well. It was big, twenty feet wide and sixty long. After a fair amount of discussion, it was equipped with its own steam engine rather than trying to get power directly from the Peterbilt. Partly that was because of the complexities involved, but mostly it was because Michael didn’t want people messing with the drivetrain of his truck.
Melanie waved and Michael adjusted and continued to back as Melanie walked backward, guiding him. The front of the barge sank a bit into the mud as the weight of the Peterbilt pushed it down, then as the Peterbilt moved back toward the middle of the barge, it balanced and the front lifted out of the mud.
It was working.
After the Peterbilt was centered and tied down using hemp straps, they spent the rest of the day loading fuel and supplies. They loaded both diesel for the Peterbilt and charcoal for the steam engine, as well as dried meat, beans, corn, and some trade goods.
Talak River
March 16, 1008 CE
Michael touched his phone in the stand next to his seat on the Peterbilt. It rang and Jerry Jefferson answered.
“So where are you?”
“In the middle of the Talak, passing Hocha now,” Michael said. “Do you have a bearing?”
“Yes, I make it three hundred forty degrees.”
They’d been taking regular readings, measuring angles and distance from the river to points along its banks and using math that went back to Pythagoras to measure how far they’d gone and where they were, relative to the dock they’d left from. In the process they had made a detailed map of the Talak River from the mouth of the Alba to Hocha. Using that data and the new data that Jerry had just sent, Michael pulled up the modified mapping software on the Peterbilt and looked at his location. They were just over forty miles straight-line distance from Fort Peterbilt and they’d traveled just over sixty-four miles to get here.
“Are you going to land?” Jerry asked just as a rocket was launched from Hocha. The rocket started out straight, but it then veered off to the right and landed closer to Hocha than the Peterbilt.
“Hocha just shot a rocket at us. I suspect they will claim it’s a warning shot, but it wasn’t. They just don’t have the accuracy to hit the broadside of a barn at this distance.”
“Prudence would counsel to just ignore them and steam on upriver. The closer you get, the more accurate their rockets.”
“‘Never tell me the odds!’” Michael quoted Han Solo from Star Wars, then with a laugh he continued. “This is a show-the-flag mission, Jerry. We can’t be seen to be timid.”
“It’s your call, Michael,” Jerry said doubtfully.
Michael hung up, and then hit the horn. Two short, followed by a long.
* * *
In the pilot house of the barge, which was located just over the steam engine, Achanu turned the wheel, pointing the barge at the eastern shore of the Talak. He looked over at Akvan, who was now his executive officer. “You have been here before. Where is the ground solid enough to take the weight of the Peterbilt?”
The location of Hocha was a minor puzzle to the archaeologists in the twenty-first century, just one of many. It was just a location where there was an abundance of floodplain. Lots and lots of land that flooded on a semi-regular basis, land that was easy to plant in, but not, as a rule, all that firm. But the river people had built roads, including an elevated causeway that was wide enough to take the Peterbilt.
Akvan pointed and Achanu steered for the shore. That was apparently not the response that the Pharisees had been looking for. There were shouts, and then more rockets.
None of them came all that close, but they were starting to get closer as the barge reached the shore.
More rockets were launched as the front of the barge pushed up against the shore of the Talak and the ramp came down like a drawbridge. Then Melanie climbed aboard and Michael drove down the ramp onto the shore. He drove slowly and carefully for the first couple of minutes until they got to one of the roads. Then, once the truck was on the raised earthen road, he started to pick up speed. He slowed at a corner, then there was a long straight road that went to and through Hocha.
There were wooden gates on either side of the city. Michael looked over at Melanie and said, “Ready, hon?”
She took his right hand in her left and squeezed, then gave it back to him, took a deep breath and said, “Do it!”
The Peterbilt picked up speed as for the first time in a long time Michael brought it up to respectable speed. It still wasn’t fast, not compared to doing eighty along an interstate in the twentieth century. But it was doing a respectable forty miles an hour when it hit the north gate of Hocha. It barely slowed at all as the gate shattered.
Then they drove through the city and out the closed gate on the south side. Having done that, they turned around and went back through the broken gates. Then, when they reached the center of Hocha, they stopped and blew a long blast on the air horn. And then they played the recording.
Neither Michael nor Melanie were fluent enough in the language of Hocha to make such a speech, but Fazel spoke it fluently. He’d made the speech and it had been recorded to be played if an opportunity presented itself.
“Talak doesn’t require your daughters to bring the rains that flood her and make the ground ready for new crops. It is only the false priests who demand it as proof of their power over you. They will kill you all, and all your children, before they will give up that power.
“But that power is just another lie!
“They have no power at all. Some have skills, but those skills aren’t unique. There is nothing they can make that you can’t learn to make. Nothing they can do that you can’t do or learn to do. You no longer have to sacrifice your children for the rains. The rains will come anyway, and even if they don’t, we can make canals to move the water to the fields, even use the Talak’s strength to lift the water to feed those canals.
“You are free now. If you send your daughters to them now, it is you who do it, not Talak. Jesus the Cross God will never ask you to sacrifice a child to him.”
The recording ended and Michael blew the air horn again, and drove the Peterbilt out the north gate and back to the shore of the Talak.
He drove back up onto the barge, and then out toward the back of the barge, so that the weight of the Peterbilt wasn’t close to the shore, and the front of the barge lifted a little. Then the ramp was pulled up and the barge backed away from the shore.
Talak River, north of Hocha
March 16, 1008 CE
The sun was setting and the anchor was dropped into the Talak.
“I hope it works,” Melanie said. They were sitting in locally made lawn chairs on the barge with a folding table between them. There was stew on the table, and they all had bowls and corn tortillas.
“It was great,” Achanu insisted, holding up a tortilla.
“Still worried about the whole Caudine Forks thing?” Michael asked.
“Yes, I am, and the Third Reich, Vietnam and Afghanistan, and the fact that while the Peterbilt, especially with the extra armor that we attached to the front bumper, is really good at knocking down walls, it can’t be everywhere it needs to be.”
“It was the chief’s council’s decision,” Akvan said. The chief’s council of the United Clans had consulted with Jerry, and had used Jerry to consult with the library that had been sent back from the twenty-first century and come up with this plan. This was a “hearts and minds” war. It was about convincing the outlying villages that the Pharisees of Hocha didn’t speak for the gods.
Which meant it was all about image.
When the forces from Hocha attacked Sofaf, it was an announcement that they could do what the Peterbilt people could do, and they were “stronger,” more vicious than the Peterbilt people.
The purpose of the trip to Hocha by the Peterbilt was to say, “No, you can’t, and no one has to follow you.” To say to the people of Hocha “No, they can’t, and you don’t have to follow them.”
“That was the reason for the recording,” Akvan insisted. He was a good kid, a bit older than Achanu, but not the natural leader that the younger man was. He was a man who needed rules.
“I just hope it had some effect,” Melanie said.
Hocha
March 16, 1008 CE
Holaka rolled the corn dough out into tortillas and put them on the copper griddle. She was sixteen years old. She was the daughter of a coppersmith and she was terrified. She used a copper spatula to flip a tortilla. She wasn’t afraid she would be selected to be a sacrifice, not exactly. That possibility had always been a part of her life. As a small girl she had even played at being the sacrifice and waking up in Talak’s house. No, what was eating into her guts was the fear that if she was sacrificed to Talak, she wouldn’t wake in Talak’s house, but would just be dead. Or, maybe, wake up in the cross god’s hell because she’d worshipped false gods.
Over the last two years and more, the world had changed. The teachings of Jesus Christ Superstar had slipped into Hocha and brought everything into question. Her parents insisted that it was all lies and that the Superstar god wasn’t real. Only Talak and the other gods were. That if the sacrifices weren’t made, the river would dry up and everyone would starve. She flipped another tortilla with the copper spatula, noting in the back of her mind that the copper griddle and copper spatula were both new since the Peterbilt people arrived.
There were several new things that her father made or used in his shop that came from the Peterbilt people. And if those things were real and good, how could their god be false and bad?
As it happened, she hadn’t been in the square when the demon Peterbilt stopped and declared that the sacrifices didn’t do anything. That Talak was just a river, not a god, and that the priests of the temple were lying to everyone. And the priests were unable to stop it, kill it, or capture it.
* * *
In many other houses much of the same questioning was going on. Some people had seen the Peterbilt break through the gates and stop in the middle of town to berate the priests and insist that the priests were liars. The priests had insisted that the demon Peterbilt had been scared off by Talak.
The fact that they’d driven through Hocha, then turned around and driven back into Hocha, made their announcement, then left, made that a rather hard sell, but they were trying.
Fort Peterbilt
March 17, 1008 CE
Jerry waved his hands in the air. At least that’s what it looked like to anyone not wearing his heads-up-display glasses. To Jerry it was different.
He was looking at an augmented reality world. He could see the world around him, but overlaid were translucent boxes that opened into files of data and readings from the computer system that controlled the various radio transmitters and receivers built into the capsule and since attached to copper-wire antennas. Some of the transmitters were directional and some were networked with other antennas located in Jabir, Kallabi, and half a dozen other villages in the United Clans.
Over the more than a quarter century that Jerry had spent working to get sent back to this time, more than just him getting older had happened. Technology had gone right on expanding and improving. The transmitters in the capsule were excellent by late twenty-first-century standards. And late twenty-first-century made early and even mid-twenty-first century suck by comparison. The control and data transmittal rates would make a radio station from the late twentieth century bow its antenna in shame. But there were still limits to how far away they could send a digital signal, and even greater limits to how far away he could receive such a signal from the relatively speaking primitive transmitter in the Peterbilt.
They weren’t out of range yet, but if they didn’t set up a repeater station somewhere, they were going to be out of range soon. He sent them an email to that effect.
Talak River, north of Hocha
March 17, 1008 CE
“We are now on the Missouri River. Or we would be, if we were still in the future,” Melanie Anderle told her husband.
“That doesn’t help us find a good spot for the repeater station Jerry wants,” Michael Anderle answered grumpily. He was looking out the cab at the south bank of the Talak and seeing forest. Great for hunting, but no good at all for driving a Peterbilt through.
What they needed was someplace that wouldn’t be easy for the Pharisees or their followers to reach. Because a radio station would be a target for the Pharisees even more than the steam tractor was. And the last thing that Michael wanted to do was call down another raid like the one on Sofaf.
Lisyuk, south bank of Talak River
March 17, 1008 CE
Kalmak checked the guards; they were alert but bored. Lisyuk was upriver of Sofaf, or of where Sofaf had been. They were, or had been, sister villages with a lot of trade and intermarriage between them. Now Sofaf was ashes and Kalmak had lost seven close kin and many more friends and more distant kin.
There were those in Lisyuk who blamed Kalmak for the loss of Sofaf, arguing that if he’d not pushed for the alliance with the demon people, the Pharisees wouldn’t have attacked Sofaf. And Kalmak wondered the same thing. Some nights he woke up in a cold sweat after being visited by his dead relatives who condemned him for defying the gods. Or dreaming of an attack on Lisyuk that ended like that one, with his family murdered by the Pharisees.
He was still up on the wall when there was a shout from the fields and someone blew on a fire basket, a small container of coals that smoldered until it was blown on, then put out a red glow for a few moments. It was harder to carry, but easier to use than flint.
“Hello in Lisyuk!” shouted the figure holding the fire basket.
“Who are you?” shouted the guard.
“Kazal of the Shulik.”
The Shulik were not among the clans of the river people. They were hunters, specifically buffalo hunters, who lived to the south and west of Sofaf for part of the year. In the spring, they moved west into the plains and hunted buffalo. Then, in the fall, they moved back east to winter in the hills. They traded buffalo products for corn, beans, squash, and other goods.
“What are you doing here in the middle of the night?” Kalmak demanded.
“We went to Sofaf to trade for corn, but Sofaf isn’t there anymore. What happened?”
“Come ahead,” Kalmak shouted, and three men walked forward. Kalmak went down to meet the men.
* * *
Twenty minutes later, Kalmak and the three men were seated in his house with its new chimney and its new steel plate on the top of the fire pit. There were lamps to give light. They were bowls filled with tallow, with hemp to act as a wick.
The Shulik were a hard people, but they didn’t like the gods of the river people. And before the Peterbilt people came, trade with them was illegal, but it was also quite common.
Kalmak found himself telling Kazal and his companions about what had happened to the village of Sofaf. When he was finished, Kazal was not overly sympathetic.
“You never should have listened to those crazy people in the mound place.”
Kalmak mostly agreed, but he didn’t much like hearing it from this savage. But what could he say?
Kazal shook his head, and said, “Tell me more about the Peterbilt people?”
“Better. I’ll show you.” Kalmak led them to the new forge and showed them the steel knives, axes, and arrowheads. Then he showed them the stoneware jugs and the small glass diamonds that were knit together with lead to make windows in the huts. The quality of the glass wasn’t good enough to look through, but they let light through. By the time the tour was wrapping up, the sun was coming up.
Kazal stayed in Lisyuk, sending one of the men with him back to his tribe to let them know what had happened to Sofaf and to let them know that Lisyuk had food and more to trade for buffalo and other goods of the great plains.
They were still in Lisyuk when the Peterbilt arrived.
Fort Peterbilt
March 21, 1008 CE
The downriver mission was just about ready, and Jerry wasn’t really happy about that. He was going to be stuck here manning the computer system while Alyssa and Shane would be the Peterbilt people going with the mission south. The kids, over their strong objections, would be staying here in what was by now a full city, at least by eleventh-century standards. There were almost ten thousand people here, about half in Fort Peterbilt and the rest spread out between Fort Peterbilt and Jabir. With the Peterbilt and the pickup to do the plowing, this spring’s planting would cover twice the ground that last year’s had covered. There was going to be plenty of food this fall, even for the expanded population.
The computer beeped in his ear. They were getting a message from the Peterbilt. At this distance, voice or video were not an option, and even text was taking a long time.
Jerry called up the email and read. “Reached Lisyuk. There are plains natives here. If these guys had horses, they’d be Apache.”
It wasn’t accurate. Jerry snorted. Michael wasn’t always as politically sensitive as he might be. It was unlikely that the people he was dealing with were the ancestors of the Apache. They were mostly further south, in the area of Arizona. But that location was based on evidence from six hundred years or so from now. For all Jerry or anyone knew, these might be the ancestors of the Apache. The truth was, no one knew about the way the people of the Americas moved about in the centuries before the Europeans arrived.
“Bows and arrows. They hunt buffalo using traps and stampeding them. They also hunt other animals and they want to trade with us.”
Jerry considered. Missouri was on the east end of the great plains, and a lot of it was forested hill country, more of it now than in the twenty-first century. The buffalo were on the west side of the state.
He pulled up his virtual keyboard and typed. “Are they willing to move east, or do they know a tribe that lives closer to the southern Talak? We are going to need repeater stations if we are going to set up a radio and weather network.”
One of the things in the capsule was a lot of integrated circuits. Most of them could be used to produce radio repeater stations, what amounted to cell towers if they were connected to the right locally made hardware. They could also be hooked up to locally made pressure and temperature gauges, as well as wind speed and rain gauges, so that a weather station could be built using the same chips as its centerpiece.
They’d loaded him up with equipment as flexible as they could think of because they hadn’t known what he was going to be landing in. Fortunately, computer chips can be exceedingly flexible and the capsule came with a ROM writer so he could program the chips with read-only memory so that they wouldn’t lose their programs if they lost power.
“Program” was probably overstating it. He’d been equipped with preprogrammed black boxes that could be loaded onto the molecular chips to make the chip into a phone, a repeater station, a weather station, a genetic analysis computer, or a host of other things. Jerry didn’t know how the black boxes worked, but he did know that they’d been carefully designed so that they wouldn’t interfere with each other.
He could use the chips he’d brought along and a steam power generator, lead acid batteries, and some other locally made components to build a repeater station that would also be a weather station, extending the range of the main computer system. But he only had a limited stock of chips and considering what had happened to Sofaf, putting one in a village that might be raided by the Pharisees’ army struck him as a bad idea. Some place distant from the rivers that were the main means of transportation for the river people struck him as a useful option.
Lisyuk, south bank of Talak River
March 21, 1008 CE
Michael looked up from the computer in the cab of the Peterbilt. He’d been trading emails with Jerry Jefferson for the last hour while consulting with Kalmak and Kazal about what the “Wild Injuns” would be willing to do.
Melanie had muttered about that as they were driving the Peterbilt up onto the shore next to Lisyuk. Achanu had heard her, and knew the term from the movies that Jerry Jefferson had brought back with him. They weren’t all educational. There were old movies too. He’d told Kazal and after having the “derogatory term” explained to him, he’d taken it as his own. His people were quite proud of being untamed. A wild people, unlike the settled river people.
“What do you think, Kazal? Will your people be willing to set up a radio weather station in the hills if we show you how?”
“It would be better to have some of the river people run the station, but we will guard it and make sure they are warned. Show me that map again.”
“It’s not going to be that accurate. We know that the Talak has changed its course in the thousand years between now and when we come from. It’s stayed in the same river valley, but the specific track has changed a lot.”
“I know and it doesn’t make a great deal of sense to me anyway. But I know this land and my people know this land. We know where the river people villages are. If you send a group to Takiso, we can guide them through the forest to a high hill where they can set up their repeater.” He pointed at the map on the screen in the Peterbilt’s cab. “It will be around there, I think.” He was pointing at an area about forty miles west-southwest from Takiso.
Michael pulled up the height map and found a hill there that was fifteen hundred feet above sea level, whereas Fort Peterbilt was only a bit over four hundred feet above sea level. A repeater station located on that hilltop would give them a lot of range and being on a hilltop would probably be pretty defensible, assuming they could find a good water supply, and keep it supplied.