Far Side Two
Copyright© 2025 by Gina Marie Wylie
Chapter 9
I
The next day Glaive invited General Harcour to a communication session with the War Leader’s deputy. Glaive smiled when the War Leader herself was going to respond.
The radioman was the senior who had been at dinner and started reading what the War Leader sent. “She says we made a mistake. We sent a message in the new code first thing this morning, She doesn’t pretend to understand it a 100 percent at this point. But she wishes your new deputy well. And, she reminds Viceroy Glaive that our machines need no sleep. She repeats the message, with the exception of the code words on the extended pages and says they can tell from context what are names and other words not in The History of Tengri. She named the book.”
“By the hallowed ancestors of the Tengri, we are all dead!” the general exclaimed. “How long ago did you send the message?”
“Two hours, General. I keep telling everyone that the War Leader is very smart, and the codes her people use are hundreds of years newer than what we use. And ... wait a bit, she’s sending again.”
He was busy writing for a good five minutes. “The War Leader’s deputy told the War Leader, who I suspect is tender about killing, that we might be in trouble. She says they asked the B’Lugi what are the favorite books of the Tengri. Guess what book headed the list? The B’Lugi gave her a copy, they read it into their machines and...” he clapped his hands loudly. “Out came the message except for the supplemental words, but most of those they can guess from the context.”
“The War Leader is tender about killing? She killed a dozen men in front of me!” Glaive responded.
“Lord Viceroy, they had refused to negotiate. Then they shot at her. As you’ve said, she appears to be very intelligent. What do you do to people shooting at you? You shoot back. She has better weapons and is brave enough.”
“You verge on insolence!” the general threatened.
Glaive swung to face the general. “Have a care, unless you want to die. We have an explanation of how they broke the code so fast. You say the Emperor is a clever young man; surely he is clever enough to know that the enemy is striving against us? We win some, they win some. Lately we aren’t doing very well. We need to get our heads on straight, focusing on our goals, or face the end of the Tengri.”
The radioman spoke again, as he’d been writing furiously while Glaive and the general were talking.
“The War Leader says that about now, you should realize how things will end if we don’t change our ways. Stop attacking our neighbors. Stop taking slaves, and free the ones we have. Do you wonder how our enemies keep pace with us? Slavery has huge costs. It’s true that slaves produce things that can be sold, but they dog the work, they spoil some of it. They work slow. We have to feed and shelter them, clothe them, take care of their wellness. A million things. Freemen have to buy their own resources or starve. And we have to pay them, but their pay is a paltry fraction of what a slave costs.
“Sire, these are her words not mine. She goes on,” the radioman said.
“She will stop attacking us if we stop taking slaves and stop attacking our neighbors. We can talk about a permanent peace if we free all the slaves. She says that we need to think about how much money we spend on this war. Think about what all that money could do invested in research? In new factories? In her world her nation was left alone for a century. They had slavery, but there was much resistance to it. Slavery ended and her nation shot ahead of all the others who keep fighting war after war. A civil war devastated her people, but in the end slavery was gone and that allowed them to grow fantastically. Fifty years later they were the equal to any of the other nations, and twenty years later they were stronger than any other. Now they are considered a super-power, the only one on her planet.”
“Send ‘No’,” said Glaive.
The short message was sent and the radioman started reporting on the reply. “Maybe you should let the Emperor decide. Maybe you should wait a few weeks until the handwriting on the wall is clear. But, in any case, a scout of the enemy south of us just found another of your ships. This one, it sounds like, a hundred guns. Only a scout, and your ship is far away. Still, it’s traveling north, towards you. As soon as it gets dark, they should make a course change towards Imperium, not you. If they can’t lose the scout, the next flight will get there at the end of the second day. There will be two thousand of the predators, Viceroy. Your ship will surely die if it continues the way it is going. The predators on your island are slowly reinforcing, but you hurt them badly the first time they came. Now you have solid doors so they plan on picking off work parties outdoors. If you can’t farm the land, you will never make a go of it. You all take care now. War Leader Andie, out.”
“That ship is the Emperor Herdan,” the general said. “More than five hundred men!”
Glaive was contemptuous. “We warned the Emperor about what ships should do to be safe. We lost one anyway. There is no way to fire a cannon at aerial attackers. The only way to fight them is to get below decks and attack them piecemeal.”
“Should I send the warning in the clear?” the radioman asked.
“Yes, then send that the Starmen broke the new code in less than two hours. They asked the B’Lugi what the most popular book in the Imperium was.”
“Get an obscure book,” the general advised.
“The Starmen will start raiding our radio stations in the next few days,” Glaive answered him. “They will scoop up every book in sight. We will have to change our message formats. No more from and to blocks, no more time and date blocks; they know those come first and in what order and that gives them a clue to breaking the code. If the War Leader is telling the truth, they have machines that look at all possible combinations of letters and numbers, and when they find words, they use the ones they know to learn the ones they don’t. She says we could do the same thing, if we could spare a million literate slaves to write all possible combinations of letters and words.”
“And we don’t have a million slaves doing nothing. Particularly literate slaves,” General Harcour said.
“It seems there is no way to win,” the general said, sounding frustrated, listening the radioman send the message.
The radioman looked at Glaive. “I warned them about Emperor Herdan, waited until they acknowledged and said they were sending the warning. Now, I will send the news about the new code.”
Glaive grimaced but knew it was a good tactic. The radioman sighed deeply. “They are waking the Emperor.”
A half hour later they Emperor sent a message. “Are the Starmen likely to betray the Emperor Herdan’s course change?”
Glaive spoke instantly when he heard the message. “No. They fear the predators more than they fear the Tengri.”
The radioman had transmitted the message as he heard it. Everyone in the room swallowed. Emperors were famously notional.
The Emperor was personally at the Imperium radio room and replied at once. “General Harcour, can your ships load everyone and return to Imperium?”
“Abandon the base?” the general asked.
The radioman promptly sent the question, even if the general was sputtering for him to stop.
The Emperor replied, “It would be logical for the predators to attack our farmers and resource gatherers. Have you had any signs of that?”
“We had one attack on woodcutters. The woodcutters killed the attacker and escaped without losing lives or equipment. However if there is more than one attacker it becomes problematical,” Glaive said.
“By command of the Emperor withdraw from the forward outpost as soon as practical.” The radioman looked up. “They have sent a side message. At dusk last night, unknowns, thought to be Starmen, raided a slave pen in the Southern Tengri lands. The slaves were all taken and the guards who tried to fight back were all killed. The trail led into the hills, and the slave catchers hurried to catch up. They too were all killed. So far as is known the Starmen had no casualties. Tengri casualties were six hundred and twenty.”
“And now we know why the Emperor wants us back,” Glaive said. Glaive addressed the radioman and said send this message: “My Emperor, we have learned in our wars that land, once taken by an enemy, is hard to take back. We have one crop nearly ready to harvest. It was my plan to do the work at night, with fires to throw light on the activity. Please, by your leave, may we try? It is your decision to land or turn back the people who have been sent. Guide me, my Emperor.”
The reply came relatively quickly. “You have my permission to try. You are right, land once lost is devilishly hard to regain. Land the reinforcements, by the order of the Emperor.”
General Harcour paused. “Viceroy, I am deeply sorry that I was so willing to abandon what you have fought so hard to keep. Sire, I have omitted some details from my report.”
Glaive raised an eyebrow. “What sort of details?”
“You know I brought four ships with a seven hundred and fifty additional soldiers, workers and slaves. The three ships other than the flagship hold two hundred and fifty each. The flagship could have held that many too, but remember we were dispatched as soon as we knew you were on the western continent, thus the flagship held two gun crews for each cannon, because the flagship mounted two hundred guns, only half of which could fire.
“Still we worked the crews on the hundred guns for two hours twice a day, dry firing. The powder magazine was packed to the rafters with powder, and there were more than twice the balls as she normally carries. It was intended to give your fort a hundred guns, and most of the powder. The flagship would have returned nearly empty of powder and shot and only a hundred guns. And the additional gun crews would come to you, nearly three hundred men.
“When we heard of the Glaive’s loss we assumed we would send another warship to our new base and send the three transports back with my ship.
“One other important detail. The transport hauling the slaves normally houses 450 slaves. The slave master of the ship told us that if he had a full load, a third would die on a voyage as long as this one was, and perhaps as many as half. If he shipped 400 a quarter would die ... in general, the women and children. The survivors would be restive and would have bad attitudes. He said he could still expect losses shipping 300, so we shipped 250. The extra space was filled with half food and half tools, and the same with the artisans and other colonists. The soldier’s equipment was heavy, and we only shipped food with them.
“Viceroy, if we tried to return we would have needed more food and water. As I understand it, you barely have enough until the harvest.”
“Fetch Yourel, Harcour,” Glaive commanded.
Yourel presented himself so quickly that Glaive thought he had to have been lurking close to the radio room. “Yourel, I remember you telling me how many squares we had planted and how many were being cleared for the next planting. The harvest is in ten days?”
“We have already started planting the newly cleared squares. Lord Viceroy, the current crop was badly damaged by the storm. We lost about two-thirds, Viceroy.”
“And the birds?”
“One of the woodworkers was an overseer at an agricultural domain, he suggested that we do the planting at night and during the eclipses. There is a great deal of motivation among the soldiers and the artisans. They hold torches, the artisans and the soldiers have their muskets, but there have been no attacks at night. The woodcutters say a torch isn’t enough light, so that was why a party was out during the day.
“Now, the woodcutters are making do.”
Glaive took a step forward, reached out and clasped Yourel’s arm in the old warrior’s salute. Yourel was startled.
“Yourel, the Emperor ordered me to ‘abandon the forward outpost’ if there were any predator attacks on the work parties. I told them there had been one, but no damage was done.”
Yourel’s throat worked. “Your family. My family. Are those and all the others for naught?”
“I asked the Emperor to leave it to my decision. He agreed. Now, my friend, you are going to have work out new work schedules for nearly a thousand new colonists and soldiers. No to mention, a hundred gun teams.”
“Those guns are as useless as breasts on a male.”
“We’d give the barbarians something to think about if they come to attack. Come, everyone.”
He led the party, except the radioman to the roof of the fort. “As hard as it to imagine, but I think that storm we had ten days ago was weaker than the one that drove us here. The War Leader told me that the barbarians had lost their entire colony here.”
He pointed to a rise about two miles away. “I walked that terrace before we were attacked. There are about 2000 squares up there, mostly tabletop smooth. I’m certain that some of the piles of stones are former Builders’ buildings. Look, all of you out to sea.”
Everyone craned to look. “There is a quite definite line where the storm surge reached. It’s past the gates of the other fortress, nearly to the gates of this one. And that storm was weaker than the first one we experienced. This fortress is a death trap for any who seek shelter here in a larger storm. I feared for this fortress at the height of the storm, because the one that wrecked my fleet was much larger, I think.
“Yourel, you will schedule heavy wood cutting parties. If not enough woodcutters are present, train masons to the work; tell them it will be temporary. Set other parties to tearing down what remains of the second fort and salvaging any of the stone from it. Have the slaves working on a berm five hundred feet on a side, with two gates on the next higher terrace. They are to dig the dirt down here on this terrace, and haul it up the hill. They are to do the work at night or during an eclipse.
“We will build a standard fortress framework, with double buttresses, then sheath it in stone. People are to quarry the outcrop of limestone on the far side of the terrace. We’ll use it to make mortar for the stones. It will mean we will all have to work nights, except for the day guards and they will only need to be atop the fortress. Warn everyone that if they are outside when it gets light, their odds of survival will nearly vanish.”
“We will have to teach the new soldiers carefully,” Harcour the younger said. “I was like most of my fellows. We laughed at the idea that ‘birds’ could be dangerous. The civilians and the slaves paid more attention.”
II
Bootsmann Gregor Peiper sat strapped into his position as helmsman of the U-37. He wished he could see what the others could see, but the only voice he heard was Frigattenkapitain Freidrich’s dry, tense voice giving him steerage directions and the only things he saw was his instruments and the helm. Kapitain Freidich’s voice came of the intercom to all of them. “We are aligned properly and will make the transition in a half minute. You will feel nothing! Ignore any incidental bumps if we contact the sides of the door. Stand by!”
He felt only the lightest of touches and was proud of his ability. His eye’s dropped to the compass. The Kapitain had been right! It wasn’t spinning wildly, but it was moving rapidly ... more rapidly than he’d ever seen in their sharpest turn.
“Bootsmann Peiper ... has the compass reset?” his captain asked.
“Yes, sir,” Gregor responded.
“Reset navigation directions to local. We will stay on this bearing for ten minutes. Sonar, are we active?”
“Yes, Captain! Depth is 90 meters and getting deeper. The bottom appears to be mainly sloping sharply to the east.”
“Turn to port, come to 180 magnetic. Navigator, have all the changes been input to the instruments?”
The navigator sitting next to Gregor reported that they had completed the checklist and verified it.
“Anything in front of us less than 40 meters?”
“Captain, there is nothing in front of us less than a hundred meters.”
“Clear the conning tower, prepare to dive.”
The chief of the boat reported all was green when the captain was at the conn. “Dive! Dive! Down planes fifteen degrees! Make our depth 30 meters.”
They had done this back in the Baltic Sea hundreds of times without mishap, and there were no mishaps now.
After about five minutes at three knots the sonar operator spoke, “There appears to be a spit of land jutting into the sea about a kilometer ahead. Recommend we come starboard six degrees.”
“Helm, one eight seven degrees on the compass.”
“Just now there was a splash behind us, I think that was U-38 in the water,” the sonarman reported.
The captain spoke into the hydrophone, “How was the ride, Walter?”
“Clean, we never hit the door. Are you clear?”
“About a kilometer to your south, we are skirting a jut of land then we will turn out to sea for two kilometers, and come back and approach the dock. To be honest, I never before used a wooden dock and I’ve always had tugs. I am determined not to smash the dock.”
“They have special lines for us, with a bridle to fit over a pier and we tie to a clear one. Not the usual way.”
“Turning east now,” Oskar told his friend. “Helm, steer 270 magnetic.”
“Helm, 270 magnetic, aye, aye, sir.”
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