Chapter 17: To the Shores of Tripoli

“Per Mare, Per Terram” (By Sea, By Land) – Motto of the Royal Marines

York, Great Britain. May 1072

Gretchen carried the latest spy reports through Army Headquarters. They were detailed plans for the Irish attack on Dublin and their plans after Dublin. Today, she was headed to Luke’s office to deliver the reports in person as they were too important to risk falling into enemy hands.

“Does the general have any meetings right now?” Gretchen asked Luke’s secretary.

She looked, “No, ma’am.”

“Good.”

Gretchen went to Luke’s door without saying anything else and let herself in. She was one of the few who could enter Luke’s office without his secretary announcing them. Opening the door, Gretchen began to quietly chuckle because Luke was leaning back in the chair, sound asleep with his mouth hanging open and his feet on his desk. It was too good of an opportunity to pass up, and Gretchen slammed the door shut.

Luke had been trying to catch up on sleep when Gretchen slammed his office door. The sudden sound startled him, and he fell backward, landing on the floor with a crash. Gretchen couldn’t help herself as she doubled over in laughter; the panicked look on Luke’s face was too much. Luke finally scrambled to his knees, using the edge of his desk to pull himself up.

“WHAT THE FUCK, GRETCHEN!” Luke exclaimed when he realized who was in his office. “WHAT’S YOUR GOD-DAMNED BLOODY PROBLEM!” When Luke was pissed, his sensibility about blasphemy disappeared.

“So, that is how the nation’s commanding general spends his day. Asleep at his desk.”

“Shut up, Gretchen,” Luke growled. Gretchen was unperturbed. “Alice kept me up almost all last night, again. Normally, Alice has a horniess rating of roughly 8.5 out of 10, with 10 being an insatiable wildcat and 1 being a cold fish. A pregnant Alice has a horniess rating of somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 on the same ten-point scale. It’s an orgy every night, and I’m exhausted. It wouldn’t be too bad, but Gabby is pregnant too, which reduces her sex drive, so it’s up to Marion and I to keep Alice’s sex drive in check.”

“You do know they know what causes that condition now?” Luke shot Gretchen a dirty look,

“Shut up, Gretchen. So, what’s so important you come to visit mid-day?”

“Aside from having fun at your expense?” Gretchen smiled as Luke scowled. “I have the latest intelligence from Ireland. They plan to attack Dublin with a force in the neighborhood of 40,000 at the first full moon after Beltaine.” Luke looked at the calendar on the wall.

“So, 14 May?”

“Yep.”

“40,000?”

“As near as we can tell. Fortunately, most will be conscripted levies. We figure somewhere around 4,000 professional warriors.”

“Does your intelligence say anything about them suspecting we know or that there’s an entire division in Dublin?”

“None. Everything we see suggests they think we only have about 2,000 troops in Dublin.”

“Good, the 3^rd division is ready to board transports in Portsmouth. If the Irish are going to attack on the 14^th, I’ll give orders for the 3^rd division to leave port on the 10^th. That should give them enough time to get to Dublin and unload at night when they cannot be observed.”

“Really?” Luke nodded. “Damn, you’re not messing around, are you?”

“No, I’m not. In my world, the British could never fully conquer the Irish despite trying for several hundred years. I don’t plan on a repeat.”

“Can we?”

“Can we what?”

“Can we succeed where your world failed?”

“Of course, because we have those lessons to guide us. Plus, we have already crushed the nobility, removing a significant friction source. With that thinking, we can also fail spectacularly.”

“So, you don’t think it will be easy?”

“Of course not, Gretchen. We are dealing with people who have never been under foreign rule and have never really been united. There’s going to be nothing easy about this campaign.”

“So why try?”

“Because if we don’t, they will always be a thorn in our side.”

“Ah. So, when do you want to deal with your mole?”

“If we do it now, I won’t have to keep the paperwork straight, but it might warn the Irish something is wrong. If we wait, there’s more chance the enemy will discover our actual troop disposition. Thoughts?”

“I say we take care of the problem now and take our chances with the Irish figuring things out. Their attack date is close enough that I don’t believe they will be politically able to change their plans based on one of their spies going silent.”

“Very well, let’s go.”

Outside Luke’s office door, his secretary, Lieutenant Arianwen of Gwent, was seething. She was of Irish ancestry, with her ancestors settling in Wales during the 400s AD. While she might have been born in Wales, Arianwen’s family still had strong Irish ties. Once they settled in Wales, her family quickly achieved nobility status and grew in power. That came crashing down once Marion’s English invaded and conquered Wales. Due to their fighting with the English, Arianwen’s family was stripped of their power and most of their land. That land was then sold to the worthless peasants who had worked the land before.

Arianwen used her family’s Irish connections and her position to level the score with Marion. It was no accident that Arianwen ended up as Luke’s secretary. She used every trick in the book to lie, steal, beg, and even kill her way to the position because, as Luke’s secretary, she would have access to almost unlimited amounts of secret information, information that would enable the Irish to beat the British.

Hearing Luke crash to the floor, Arianwen hoped he had been seriously injured, but it was quickly apparent he wasn’t when she heard Luke yell at Gretchen and her laughing. What Arianwen really wanted to do was drive a knife into Luke’s stomach and watch him die. Everything terrible that happened to her family was because of him.

Arianwen heard Luke’s door open and looked up to see Luke and Gretchen step out. They went past her desk, and Arianwen returned to her work. It annoyed her that to spy on Luke, she had to help the British. Soon, Arianwen heard the unmistakable sound of several soldiers moving. At first, she didn’t think anything about it until Luke and Gretchen stopped in front of her desk, and Luke flopped a file down on top of the work Arainwen had been doing.

“Tell me, Lieutenant, does that file look familiar?”

Arainwen opened the file and began reading. As she read, she started to become nervous. The file in front of her was one of the latest files she had passed on to her Irish handler. It was time for Arainwen to lie her arse off.

“No, sir. I cannot say this file looks familiar.”

“Really? Because this file is one you have passed to the Irish who are currently massing to attack Dublin. Don’t bother lying because we know it was you who passed this file on. We know because the file is fake.” Arainwen began to shake as the blood ran from her face. “Gretchen notified me we had a leak, and after narrowing down who handled all the leaked files, you were one of four possibilities. Each of you got a different version of a fake file, and your file was the one Gretchen’s agents sent back from Ireland.” Arainwen looked up and swallowed. She knew she had been caught and didn’t see a way out. “So, I have one question for you: why?”

Arainwen’s face hardened, and she started speaking before she could think. “Your whore of a queen has cost my family dearly.” Luke could barely contain his anger at hearing his wife called a whore. “We used to control large amounts of good land in Wales, but now we have nothing. I would love nothing more than to see her army defeated and her in chains where she belongs!”

“And what makes you think her army will be defeated?” Luke asked.

“You have no idea of the storm on the way,” Arainwen growled.

“I think we do,” replied Gretchen. “The Irish are getting ready to attack with roughly 40,000 troops. To face them, General MacDougall has the 2^nd division in Dublin and the 3^rd ready to board transports in Portsmouth.”

“NO! That’s not true!” screamed Arainwen. “There are only 2,000 British soldiers in Dyflin. I have been tracking the troop movements.” She was caught, so Arainwen saw no need not to reveal what she knew.

Gretchen and Luke looked at each other and smiled. Luke looked over at the guards and nodded. Before they could get handcuffs on Arainwen, though, she tried to draw a handgun. Luke was ready for something like that and gave her desk a mighty shove, which knocked her off balance and messed up her aim. The guards wrestled her to the floor and, after fighting with her, got the cuffs on. She was pulled to her feet and cursed everyone nearby. Luke and Gretchen were amused, especially when Arainwen started chanting, trying to put a curse on Luke.

After the guards dragged Arainwen from the room, Gretchen turned to Luke;

“You believe that shit? She thinks saying some mysterious ancient phrases will do her any good.”

“Never said she was the sharpest tool in the shed.”

“And yet you hired her.”

“Shut up, Gretchen. Just shud up.”

Gretchen smiled and kissed Luke’s cheek before she left. Luke smiled and returned to his office to look through the files of possible replacement secretaries. Orders also had to be sent to Portsmouth for the 3^rd division to load onto their transports. Now that Luke had fixed his spy problem, he didn’t have to send all the fake orders, making his life easier.

By the end of the day, Luke had narrowed down his secretary replacement to only two men and a woman. Instead of just choosing based on what was in their files like he had done with his previous secretary, he would interview them this time before deciding.

When Luke left the base, his mind shifted away from his personnel problems and focused on the mechanical issues he was dealing with in his workshop. In his workshop, Luke was working on a diesel engine. If he could perfect it, it would open the way to many new technologies. Luke’s problem wasn’t in designing the engine; it was in building it. Many of the tolerances required were tighter than he had been using for his steam engines, and some of the materials necessary for seals and fuel lines didn’t exist.

Like any good engineer, Luke broke the large problems into more manageable minor issues and worked to solve those. Luke focused on correcting the tolerance issue since the rest of his metalworking businesses could quickly adopt the solutions. Tighter tolerances would enable more efficient steam engines and more accurate clocks. Being from the future, Luke knew the importance of precise timekeeping. For proof, he had to look no further than Captain Morwenna’s recent trip to China.

When Morwenna returned, Luke discovered the ship’s chronograph was off by ten minutes. That discrepancy could have led to disaster if the vessel had to arrive at a specific point at a particular time. A worse scenario would be navigating treacherous shoals by the charts and being off; this could sink or strand a ship. Precise timekeeping was essential to accurate navigation at sea since finding the ship’s correct longitude depended on the time difference between the ship’s chronograph and local time.

Luke spent a few hours looking through a magnifying glass as he carefully marked his new micrometer. At the rate he was going, the new micrometer would be ready in a week and could measure 10^-5 meters, only one order of magnitude away from his goal.

By the time Luke was done for the evening, he felt like his eyes were crossed, and it took him a few minutes to refocus them. After his vision cleared, Luke headed to the dining room since it was dinner time. As he stepped into the dining room, the children slammed into him, and Luke laughed as he picked up random munchkins and hugged them. If he ever wondered why he fought or worked so hard on industrial devices, the answer was in his arms and around his legs.

Once the children cleared out, Marion walked up to Luke, wearing a standard dress of the time. Luke looked her up and down and whistled.

“Wow, sweetheart. What’s with the dress?”

“I felt like wearing it today. It’s been so long since I wore an everyday dress that I forgot what it felt like.”

“And how does it feel?”

“Really nice.” She leaned in to whisper, “Especially since nothing is covering my pussy. I can feel a breeze up my dress, which has kept me aroused all day.”

“Really?” Luke asked with interest as his pants got tighter, and he had to adjust himself. Marion giggled and laid her hand on the tent in Luke’s pants.

“Really. I should have had you leave me some goo this morning so I could have felt you running down my legs.” Luke whimpered. “Don’t worry, Luke. After dinner, I’ll make sure you are properly drained. Drain you before our little redheaded slut gets ahold of you.” Marion mumbled the last part. Some days, Alice’s increased sex drive could be a pain in the arse for Marion and Luke.

When Alice was extra horny, it was difficult for Luke and Marion to spend time alone. Alice came in just as the family sat down to dinner, and it was immediately clear she was upset. Luke and Marion watched as Alice silently ate and excused herself from the table. When Alice walked back into their bedroom, Luke, Marion, and Gabriella looked at each other with questioning faces. Through silent deliberation, Luke was elected to see what was wrong.

Luke found Alice curled up on the bed, sobbing. She flinched when Luke touched her back, which nearly broke his heart. Luke laid down behind her and curled around her. Eventually, she stopped crying and twisted around to look at Luke.

“I’m sorry, Luke, but today was one of those days.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

Alice took a deep breath, “Not really. It wasn’t so much one bad thing as it was many more minor issues built on one another.”

“Ah.”

“Can you hold me for a little while, please? I know Marion wants to get laid tonight, but can you hold me until she comes in.”

“Of course, darling.”

Alice spun around and wiggled her backside against Luke to get comfortable as he wrapped his arms around her. Within minutes, Alice had fallen asleep, but Luke could tell it wasn’t a good sleep as she constantly twitched. She only stopped once Luke tightened his grip on her.

Eventually, Marion and Gabby came in, and Luke carefully slipped out from behind Alice. While Luke sat in a chair with Marion on his lap, Gabby took a shower and laid down behind Alice once she was done. Luke and Marion replaced Gabby in the shower, where their fun began.

By the time Luke and Marion were done showering, Gabby was sound asleep, but Luke and Marion were not done. To continue their fun, they retired to the library, where there were some comfortable chairs and a sofa. By the time they were done, it was almost 23:00, and they had to get up in the morning.

When Luke walked into his office the following day, he stopped.

“Gretchen, I’m going to put a fucking bell on you if you don’t stop sneaking into my office.”

“I don’t know what you are talking about,” Gretchen said as she stepped out of the corner she had been standing in. “I’ve been here for the last hour. You’re late.” Gretchen crossed her arms, but the smile in her eyes ruined the look.

“I’m the commanding general, and as such, I am never late,” he said in a superior tone. Gretchen giggled, and Luke shook her head. “What do you want?”

“I figured you would want to know what we discovered from the mole.”