Chapter 58

Elsa was there because I had called for her and some help the night before. She had arrived in force during the sea battle while everyone involved was distracted. Those pirates that had been left behind to guard the slaves and prisoners were taken by surprise and while some tried to resist, their efforts had been in vain. Elsa's force overwhelmed the guards and sentries with very little effort and when they were done, they had taken charge of the stockade and sealed it up against anyone trying to get back inside.

The fleeing pirates were brought up short by their discovery and while they hesitated, they died. Archers on the walls of the stockade opened up on them and the archers to my rear dropped more fire arrows into them. It didn't take them long to decide that they were better off surrendering. When that had been accomplished, Elsa opened the gates and she came out to greet me.

"Success?" she asked me after giving me a passionate kiss.

"More or less," I admitted in response. "We took more casualties than I had expected to take and more damage to the Sea Nymph then I would have wished for. We'll need to make some repairs before heading off after Dindraine."

"It happens," Elsa responded trying to reassure me. "The important thing is that you are alive and we've rescued Kessler and his men and all these other people. We found Kessler and the two others alive, but barely and they will need Felicity's undivided attention for a while. That should give you time to see to your ship."

Getting Felicity's undivided attention was another matter. As I stated above, we'd taken heavier casualties than I had expected and Felicity and her team of medical people were very busy. Of the crew of the Sea Nymph we had lost twenty-two men and women dead and forty-one people injured. Thankfully most of the injuries were minor. Some were like the scratches and cuts that Nimue had on her face. Once examined, cleaned, and bandaged there was nothing else that needed doing. Those people were able to go back to work with very little delay. Other injuries were like the blow that Ingrid had taken. While Felicity had reassured me that the woman would live, she was still unconscious. For the sake of comfort I had ordered her to be placed into my cabin and watched. In between these two extremes were people with busted bones and pieces of splintered wood sticking in them like knife blades that needed special attention if they were going to survive and that was only my people. Elsa's people had taken the stockade with overwhelming surprise but they still had suffered a man dead and a couple injured in the process and they needed medical care as well. On top of these injuries there were the survivors amongst the pirates who had been burnt by our barrage of liquid fire. Some had suffered grievously in our attack and they were now lying in shock on the ground outside the stockade where we were standing watch over the prisoners. It was very likely that they would die before anyone got to them to try and save them.

The only plus in the situation was that a couple of volunteers came forward from amongst the slaves and outworld survivors that had been held by the pirates. Amazingly amongst the recently captured outworlders there was one doctor and two nurses. The doctor was a trauma specialist from Germany and she immediately offered up her assistance when she overheard Elsa and me talking in German about the situation. I accepted her assistance and that of the two nurses with gratitude and had them immediately outfitted with translators and emergency medical equipment. It took but a word to Mai Woo to get it done.

I found Kessler, Danton, and Wilson in a hut near the centre of the enclosure. Elsa told me that they had been brought there by her people after they had found the men while taking the stockade. I learned that the pirates had crucified Wilson as an example to the other prisoners about resisting and that they had put Kessler and Danton into sweatboxes. I also learned that none of them had received anything but basic care since their capture and in addition to festering wounds and dehydration they were suffering from infection induced fevers. Thankfully all three of the men were unconscious when I went to see them.

Sarah Williams was dealing with them instead of Felicity. The woman assured me that they would live and eventually recover, but as she explained, they wouldn't be up and about and doing what I had wanted from them for quite a while. Of the three Ike Wilson had sustained the most trauma and he would need months of rest to recover from what had been done to him. I just nodded my acknowledgement on hearing that and then let her get back to doing her job.

"Pissed?" Elsa asked once we were outside the hut and out of earshot.

"Yes," I responded without hesitation. "I'm pissed at Game World and the assholes who live in it and who enjoy doing what we've just seen in there and I'm pissed at the consortium for not telling me that Kessler and his men were in trouble, and more importantly, I'm pissed at myself for thinking that I could make the bastards on the other Earth change. I'm beginning to think that the only way to stop them is to take the fight to them. I swear to you Elsa that if I ever can do it, I'll be taking an army to that other Earth and if I do, I won't stop fighting until every network executive is dead and every politician's head is on a stake."

"Don't forget the corporations that are backing them," Elsa said thoughtfully. "As you've told me, those faceless bastards are behind the other two and they're as much to blame for this mess as the rest."

I didn't argue with Elsa on that point because I knew that she was telling me the truth. Instead I turned my mind towards what I needed to do in the immediate. We had prisoners to deal with and ex-slaves that needed our help and outworlders who really didn't know what was going on around them. I told Elsa this and she nodded her agreement. It was time to get to work.

The pirates were a major problem. Of the thousand odd men who had made up the enclave, roughly three-hundred and seventy were still alive. I had already figured that the most severely burnt men wouldn't survive. Without high-tech facilities and medical equipment there was very little that Felicity and her people could do except to make the burn victims as comfortable as they could so that their passing would be easy. When those men were dead, it would leave me three hundred and five prisoners of who most were in good health if nothing else. They were stunned and dazed and dispirited by the events of the day so they weren't that much of a problem at the moment, but they would become one once they had recovered.

Morally I couldn't just kill them with out just cause. While I was pissed at them and what they had done at Ingrid's Reach, I knew that the deaths there lay at other people's feet, including my own. I also didn't want to send them off to Izmir or Blue Harbour as slaves. I'd done that before without much thought seeing it as a fitting punishment for the crimes the people had been guilty of at the time. Now I was torn between my own actions as of late and the message I wanted to give to the people on the other Earth. Unfortunately these pirates weren't anything like Elsa and her band who had seen the light and who had chosen to join my fight against the networks and anyone who wanted to give Oak Hall grief. These men were hardcore criminals. From what Mai Woo had briefed me the other night, many had been serial criminals back on their own worlds and the networks had plucked them out of prisons there to help spice up things here and as you would have expected, most of them had adapted well to a world where might makes right and where the only law around was the weapon in your own hand. It made dealing with them that much harder.

"You know what I wish?" I said to Elsa as we stood upon the ramparts of the stockade and looked down at the prisoners below us. "I wish that I had access to a genie. With that I would wish these men into a pocket universe where they couldn't hurt anyone but themselves."

"If you had a genie," Elsa muttered in response, "you'd be able to wish an end to all of this and more. You'd be able to right all the wrongs and return everyone back to their own worlds."

"It's a pity that they don't exist," I responded with a heavy sigh. "It would make this task that much easier."

"They do exist, my lord," Mai Woo stated in a soft voice, speaking up from where she had been standing near us, now always in attendance of me when I was up and about. Her words took me by surprise for half a second and then I smiled.

"Are you telling me," I asked looking questioningly in her direction, "that there are alternate Earths that have genies on them?"

"Yes, my lord," Mai Woo replied with a small smile and a nod of her head. "There are several hundred of them in existence with various kinds of genies. Unfortunately there are none on Game World."

"And why is that?" I asked the young woman pointedly.

"Because they are too dangerous, my lord," Mai Woo replied quickly. "As you've noticed before when a network has grabbed some creature from another world and just thrown them at you, the results are usually not what the networks hoped for. In the case of importing a genie, the results would be disastrous. Most of the genies identified by my Earth are so powerful that if they were let loose on Game World they would alter it beyond recognition. As well, there is a risk that the genie might retaliate against my world."

"Now that would really suck, wouldn't it?" Elsa chuckled sarcastically in response to that little piece of news. "Can you just image what an omnipotent magical being would do to your pathetic excuse of a world?"

"I can, my lady," Mai Woo whispered after a moment's hesitation, "and it is not something I would wish upon anyone."

"Fortunately," I decided to interject, "we don't have access to such a being and from the sounds of what Mai has told us it would be wise not to mess with such a being, no matter how good our intents are. Regrettably that still leaves us with what to do with these men."

"I still say the best solution is to send them to Izmir and let Lord Omar deal with them," Elsa stated bluntly. "The man and his advisors complained that we hadn't sent them any slaves from Minos so they could sell them for profit. It didn't matter that the markets in Indigo and elsewhere are flooded with slaves. To them any money gained from selling someone into bondage is profit."

"That is one of the reasons that I don't want to send them there," I stated in reply. "Given the fact that I've been liberating slaves I'm beginning to think that I really shouldn't be making more of them."

"So what are our other options?" Elsa asked. "You're certainly not thinking about releasing them are you?"

"Yes and no," I said in reply, glancing over to her as I did. "I've given it some thought and there is one solution left to me that I haven't tried. Unfortunately, in a manner of speaking, it makes me no different from the networks."

"How so?" Elsa asked me, raising an eyebrow in question.

"I could disperse them all over Game World in locations that are far from any known settlements," I told her. "In essence it would be exactly like what the networks do already. The only difference is that I wouldn't drop them near a pride of hungry cave lions or a band of crazed man-apes who would pound their heads in the first time they made contact. I'd even be nice to them and give them some supplies to make their first days easier. Of course, in the end, the situation would be the same; they'd either survive by their own wits or die very quickly."

"Still it's not a bad idea given the alternatives," Elsa told me after a moments thought. "You don't want them as slaves and you can't trust them as indentured servants and there is no way you're just going to leave them on this island to regroup and take arms once again, so teleporting them to the farthest reaches of Game World might be a good idea."

"Maybe," I said half to Elsa and half to myself. "I'll give it some thought today and let you know by tonight. Until then see to it that they are all watched carefully and make certain that they are fed and given water. A little kindness might make my decision easier."

Dealing with the liberated slaves and the various outworld survivors that made up the rest of the population was an easier situation. Of the slaves ninety percent were men and women who had been taken from wherever the pirates had originally come from. They were a mix of Africans, Middle Eastern, and Asians locals who were now at a loss as to what was about to happen to them. From their perspective they had just traded one master for another. It didn't help that many of them didn't even speak the same language as the person standing next to them. I decided to help things out and have a chat with them.

"All right, listen up to me and pay attention," I said loudly and several times, using the Mediterranean trade dialect first, then the Qui Chin dialect, and then Swahili, and then finally a variant of Arabic. My efforts got everyone's attention.

"My name is Charles Marcus Sextus," I continued, "and as of this moment you have been set free. Now before anyone gets too excited about this, let me have my say. Currently you are on an island in the Spanish Sea. From what I'm told, most of you don't even know where that is in relation to where you were taken from. Now I'm about to give you a few choices and I want you to listen to them carefully. First off I want to tell you that I won't be sending you back home. If I did you would probably end up slaves again and I don't want that to happen. Choice number one is that you can stay here and try and make a life for yourselves on the island. There is food both on the land and in the sea and while it will be a hard life, it could be enjoyable. The second choice is for me to move you to the next closest inhabited island. That place is called Ingrid's Reach and it is ruled by a half decent woman who doesn't believe in slavery. Going there won't be much different from staying here except that if you go, there will be already a community of people in place who can help you get your lives started there. Now your next choice is to be transported to one of two city-states that lie far to the east from here. They're called Blue Harbour and Izmir and they need new people to help settle some unpopulated areas within their territories. These two city-states are part of an alliance with a third city-state called Oak Hall. For your information, I'm the ruler of that territory and for the sake of argument the choice to go to Oak Hall is also on the table. I'll tell you now that Oak Hall has a large population of outworlders and that population is growing even as we speak. It also has a population of Wu Chin from Formosa, so those of the Qui Chin might want to take note of that. My people live in peace and I will not tolerate any ethnic problems. Now I'm going to give you all a chance to think things over and consider the choices I've given you. There will not be any others. In a couple of hours I will be posting signs indicating options one through five in the central courtyard of the enclosure. Once that is done, I want you to stand in front of your choice. When everyone has made their choices, I'll see to it that you get transported to where you want to go, if indeed you chose to leave."