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Chapter 25

Response


Fort Peterbilt


June 20, 1008 CE


The Peterbilt was still in Lisyuk and so were Michael and Melanie Anderle. Shane was in Fort Peterbilt, and she was asked what she thought about the events in Lisyuk. Shane wasn’t circumspect. Those crazy people in Hocha had gotten another crazy person to try to kill her parents. If they’d been back in the world she might be going through her rebellious stage right now, but that wasn’t how it was working. In the here and now, she was much too busy and had much too much scope to resent her parents much.

Mom and Dad had spent the last three years just trying to help people. And, best Shane could tell, doing a bang-up job of it. So Shane was saying things like, “I’d kill them all if I could!” She didn’t really mean it, but she was fifteen and upset. She was also a Peterbilt person who spoke the local language with very little accent, and who’d helped people to learn to do a bunch of useful stuff in the past three years.

Her opinion carried weight.


Fort Peterbilt


June 23, 1008 CE


The council of chiefs wasn’t the women’s council. It was the council of war leaders from each village and each clan in the United Clans.

Lomhar looked around the council and said, “We should have acted when they killed Roshan in Hocha.” He sighed. “I respect the ways of the cross god. But there comes a time when a man must pick up a club. The old gods don’t respect life. They think it’s theirs and owed to them.”

“The old gods don’t exist,” Hamadi said. “If they did, they wouldn’t have faded away in the thousand years between now and the time the Peterbilt comes from. Real gods don’t die and fade away.”

“How do you know the cross god won’t fade away and be forgotten,” asked a chief of the Lomak.

“I don’t,” Hamadi said with a shrug. “It could be that Jesus Christ is as much of a smoke dream as Xuhpi. But I know there is no Xuhpi. He’s a story that the Pharisees of Hocha use to frighten us, and I’m done with being frightened of them and their lies.”

It was a long meeting, and if they didn’t get complete consensus, finally, the doubters agreed not to protest. And those who would be taking part released their fellow chiefs and went onto a discussion of weapons and tactics.

Lomhar looked around at the chiefs. “Hocha still has more followers than the cross god. Many more, and many of them are concentrated in Hocha. Just as those converted to the cross god come here, those who hold to the old gods retreat to Hocha when their villages come over to our side. Hocha has more people than it did before the cross god came and a lot of those people are warriors. This is not going to be an easy fight.”

Lomhar looked at the map of Hocha. “We won’t be able to breach their walls. Not with the trench they’ve dug out in front of them.”

For quite a while that seemed an insurmountable obstacle, mostly because these men thought in terms of raids. Raids were almost always done as much for profit as to prove a tribe’s prowess or bravery.

But this wasn’t a raid. It wasn’t about bravery or prowess or even loot. It was about putting an end to Hocha and all the Pharisees in the place.

By now they knew perfectly well what had happened to Sofaf, and just about every village in the United Clans had at least a few gunpowder rockets. Put it all together and that was a lot of rockets. And the Peterbilt’s tanker might be getting low on fuel oil, but it was far from out.

At the same time, this was all new to them. This wasn’t the sort of war that they had learned over their lives. It wasn’t exactly uglier. There is very little uglier than bashing a man’s head in and having his blood splash into your face and mouth. But the scope of the thing and the indiscriminate nature of the rockets and catapult bombs was new to them. New enough not to be something they fully understood, but they had that little bit of experience that let them feel how horribly dangerous it could be.

Some hours later, Hamadi looked at the map on which they’d planned their attack, and put what they were all thinking into words. “Even if this works, a lot of people are going to die. And if it doesn’t work . . . If they break out, they will slaughter us to the last man.”


Fort Peterbilt


July 2, 1008 CE


By now, Shane was well practiced with the pickup. And while she wasn’t entirely sure what the chiefs had in mind, she did respect them, and she was still very angry at the Pharisees of Hocha. So when the chiefs came to her wanting the use of the pickup’s barge, she agreed. She also agreed to their use of the fuel oil.

Jerry and Alyssa Jefferson weren’t thrilled, but they hadn’t been consulted. While the Peterbilt people were honored and respected, the government of the United Clans was firmly in the hands of the locals.

It took all of the second of July, all that night, and most of the next day to load all the ceramic warheads with fuel oil and attach them to the rockets that had been collected from over fifty villages. And Hocha would have learned of it, but Hocha didn’t have a radio and it takes time to walk that far. In fact, it takes rather longer than it does for a steam-powered barge to travel that far upriver.


Pickup barge


July 4, 1008 CE


As the barge reached Hocha around noon on the fourth of July, Shane was starting to wonder what she was getting herself into. She’d seen battles before. She’d been there when the raid had been tried before Camp Peterbilt had become Fort Peterbilt, and for the major attack when so many warriors had been turned into roadkill by the Peterbilt, and even more had been made into mincemeat when Alyssa Jefferson’s mines had gone off. She’d even been on the walls, relaying messages to the women manning the catapults.

Finally, they got to the shore, and following Achanu’s directions, she pulled the pickup off the barge onto the flat ground south of Hocha. The back of the pickup was filled with boxes of rockets. The boxes were made of wood and they were set into the truck bed at a carefully calculated angle.

Achanu was holding up a device made of three sticks. He was looking down one stick and judging the wall of Hocha with another, and the angle with a third. The sticks were all fitted together and Achanu was saying, “Get closer . . . closer. . . . There. That’s good. Now straight along the wall.”

Shane directed the pickup along the wall. They were about forty yards away from it and another warrior in the truck bed lit a fuse.

A few seconds later, the first rocket flew into the sky. It arched along and before it had reached the top of its arc, the second rocket was following it. Then the third, and so on, while Achanu kept saying, “A little faster . . . now a little slower.”

The pickup was traveling between twenty-five and thirty miles an hour, and they were firing rockets a measured distance apart. It wasn’t until they’d reached the end and turned around that Shane knew what the rockets were doing.

They were smoke rockets. When they landed next to the trench and wall, they burned sulfur and fuel oil and a few other things that produced a stinky and dense smoke. So stinky and dense that no one on either side could see to aim.

Shane’s first thought was that the war chiefs of the United Clans had made a mistake. Then she remembered. Hocha was a city and the temple mound was a known distance from landmarks that were clearly visible from this side of the smoke, whereas she was driving a truck and the rest of the rockets were on wheeled carts that a single man could pull along at a fair clip.

She drove back to the barge. They loaded up more rockets. Achanu made some adjustments of his stick device. He grinned at her. “It’s not a sextant, not exactly. It’s not nearly as flexible as a true sextant would be, but if you know the locations of two points and you’re going to a known third, it will get you there. And we have excellent maps of Hocha.” He pointed. “That way.”

A few minutes later, he had the pickup where he wanted it and said, “Stop now.” Then he turned and shouted into the back of the pickup. “We’re there.” The young warrior in the back of the pickup looked at his compass, rotated the box of rockets a bit, then lit the fuses. They flew up and disappeared into the smoke.

* * *

On Temple Mount, Ho-Chag Kotep watched the smoke along the walls with increasing frustration. Throwing water on the fires was just adding to the smoke. He ordered blind firing. And the rockets went out, but he couldn’t tell what they were hitting. Then rockets started hitting the temple mound. And they weren’t smoke rockets. They were fire rockets, great, huge Molotov cocktails, filled with fuel oil.

And the buildings of the temple started to burn. Choking from the smoke, and feeling the heat of the fires, Ho-Chag Kotep started running to collect his family and get off the artificial hilltop that separated him and his from the lower people of Hocha.

By the time he had collected his family, there were flames all around the hilltop. And the funnel effect of large fires was starting to come into play. When you have a fire, the air above it gets hot and moves up, sucking in the air around it. Like a funnel funneling water. A big fire, or a lot of fires, magnifies the effect. That’s what made the fire storm at Dresden so devastating in WWII. While it was true that Hocha was much smaller than Dresden, and that the rockets launched weren’t a patch on the incendiary bombs dropped on Dresden, it was also true that Hocha was a city made of wood and thatch. It was just kindling for a fire like that.

The fire sucked away the air and replaced it with dense, acrid and unbreathable smoke. Many more people died of smoke than burned to death, and perhaps that was a mercy.

A small one, anyway.

* * *

Lomhar watched the fires burn. It took several hours for the fire to burn out and long before that happened no one was manning the walls anymore. As soon as the funnel effect was sucking the fire away from the wall, he started sending warriors forward. They crossed the ditch with little opposition and using rope ladders climbed the walls. Those first smoke bombs had been aimed to land just behind the walls or even on them. A few had landed outside the walls. The smoke blinded the enemy, but it also made the walls somewhere between unpleasant and deadly. So most of the Hocha warriors who were manning the walls retreated back into the city, at least a little. Then the fire bombs had started and the funnel effect pulled the smoke away from the walls.

Carefully, Lomhar sent warriors forward to occupy the gates and walls.

* * *

Akvan was in shock as he went over the wall. And it was getting worse with everything he saw. Akvan had grown up in a world of human sacrifice and constant raids and counterraids between villages and clans. Also a world where disease and malnutrition were common killers of the young and the old. Seeing men and women dead wasn’t new to him.

It was the scale. This wasn’t one dead man or one strangled woman. A dead child or old person was fairly common in Hocha.

But this . . . 

There were hundreds of bodies, mostly men, caught in the smoke and fire, dead and smoldering. The smell of cooked and half-cooked human flesh was everywhere. Hundreds of houses were burning or gone.

But worst of all were the mounds. Not just the temple mound where the priest king and his family lived, but the clan mounds where the clan leaders stayed while they were in the city. The flames had flowed up the hillsides like water following a spoon, turning the hilltop residences of the clan leaders into blast furnaces.

There were people alive, even a few who still wanted to fight, though not many of those. Especially not on this side of Hocha. For the fire hadn’t been even. It was concentrated on the southern end of the city. That and the temple mound which had been targeted.

So it had swept north along the city and the people, especially the poor who didn’t live on the mounds, had had time to run.

And run they had.

Later analysis would show that less than a third of the population of Hocha had died. There were still a lot of people living in Hocha, true believers from villages that had gone over to the cross god. There was a whole lot of very good farmland right around Hocha. The city had produced a lot of food.


Pickup barge


July 4, 1008 CE


Back on the barge, Shane was reporting on the battle. She’d gotten used to the glasses computer and was recording a lot of the battle, at least from a distance. She didn’t see the devastation, but she saw enough. Enough that she didn’t want to “study war no more.”

But as the reports from the day came in, she realized that that wasn’t going to be an option. Partly that was because though much of the leadership of Hocha was gone, killed in the fire-bombing, not all of it was. More importantly, the followers of the pantheon on Hocha still believed. They had committed so much to their beliefs that it was truly hard for them to give up the belief. Once you watched and accepted as a priest strangled a young woman so that the rains will come and the harvest will be good, it’s really hard to admit you were wrong in following those people.

It was like Jerry Jefferson said. “Most of the people in Jim Jones’ colony drank the Kool-Aid willingly and fed it to their kids.”

Losing a couple of battles wasn’t going to change that.


Peterbilt barge, Lisyuk


July 6, 1008 CE


It had taken weeks to “repair” the front tires of the Peterbilt. “Jerry-rig” would be a more apt description. The tires still wouldn’t hold air, so instead there was a wooden framework attached to the wheel and the remains of the tires were lashed to that. It wasn’t right, but it let them drive the thing. They went ahead and plowed the fields that Lisyuk had asked them to plow, then carefully pulled the Peterbilt back onto the barge.

Now the barge was pulling away from the dock and they were on their way back home to Fort Peterbilt.

They knew what had happened at Hocha and Melanie was appalled by the locals. How could people she knew, friends of hers, do what had been done at Hocha?

Michael was appalled too, but not surprised. He’d been in the ’Stan and had seen what the Taliban—but not just the Taliban—had done. He knew that the sort of thing that happened in Hocha was frigging inevitable in war. He didn’t like it any more than Melanie, but he and Shane both realized that it wasn’t the last time such a thing was going to happen. He knew that the United Clans’ plan was to expand to fill continental North America. Peacefully, if possible. But peacefully or not, they intended for there to be a united people to face the Europeans when they came.


Fort Peterbilt


August 20, 1008 CE


Jerry finished his report, wondering what the people back in the twenty-first century thought about what was going on here. The harvest was in and stored. Work was progressing on the many projects that were ongoing, the expansion of the fields, the development of more and better steam engines and electronics and on and on.

“Jerry,” Michael demanded, “who has rubber in this time and how do we get it?”

Jerry looked up to see Michael Anderle covered in mud.

“It’s fairly common from Mexico all the way to South America. The word Olmec translates as ‘the rubber people’ after all. As to ‘how do we get it . . . ’” Jerry shrugged. “We don’t. To get it we will need to send a fairly large trading mission to Central America, and we’re all wealthy from the innovations. Well, you guys are wealthy anyway, but not that wealthy.”

Jerry was referring to the fact that when the government of the late twenty-first century had sent all the stuff back in time with him, they had made it very clear that it was to be provided to the locals freely. “We aren’t sending you back to get rich.” There was nothing to enforce that except Jerry’s personal honor, but Jerry came equipped with a full load of the stuff, even if he was a salesman.

The great women’s council had set up a fund to provide for Jerry and the capsule, but it was basically civil servant pay. Not that people weren’t starting to get rich. As industries started, more wealth was created and there actually was a surplus. People started accumulating wealth.

Alyssa, for instance, was quite wealthy already because of the chemistry and engineering. She’d done both, before and after Jerry had brought the capsule.

The Anderles, with the Peterbilt and the pickup, had spent the last three years expanding the cropland and using the profits from that to start other businesses. So they were in no danger of starvation either. They actually owned the steam barges that carried the Peterbilt and pickup across and up and down the Talak River.

But the sort of mega rich “I can build my own rocket ship” that was happening in the twenty-first century didn’t exist yet and wasn’t going to for another twenty years at least. Probably the next hundred. “If you want a mission to the rubber trees in Central and South America, you’re going to have to get the great women’s council to authorize it and provide funds and military support.”

* * *

Hamadi looked over at Etaka. “What do you think?”

“It depends. What about the Pharisees?”

After the fire rockets hit Hocha, the population retreated up the Falast River in the direction of the Great Lakes. With the steel plows, the seeders and other equipment, especially the Peterbilt, the fields around Hocha could be plowed and planted next year with barely a tenth of the people that it took to do the same job without them. There was going to be a lot of food next year, and not just food. They were growing hemp for making cloth, but also cotton and linen that Jerry Jefferson had brought back in his capsule. The question was: were they going to be able to keep it or were the Pharisees of Hocha going to come back next year?

Hamadi considered. He wasn’t the first chief but he was an important chief of the United Clans so he’d been in on the reports and estimations. “I think we are safe for next year, possibly the year after, and we have good relations with the clans down the Talak. Also, aside from rubber, there are potatoes. I know we have the ones Jerry Jefferson brought, but there will be other varieties as well. And, of course, gold, which we are going to need to trade with the Norse in Greenland.”

“You’ve been studying.”

Hamadi grinned at her. “Yes. The capsule is right here. I think we want a catamaran to make the trip, but we should make it near the coast, where the river is deep enough so that an actual ship will be safe from grounding.”


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