Chapter 25

Author’s note: [ and ] delineate mind-to-mind dialog.

The Persian and Athenian fleets met in the open sea. I do not know who this gave the advantage to, but the Athenians were very skillful in sailing their ships, whereas the Persians were more inexperienced and tended to do things “by the book.” The Persians did not know about the ballistas with the Zeus Javelins, so they were only concerned with keeping the Athenians from ramming them.

This definitely worked to the advantage of the Athenians and confused the shit out of the Persions. The techniques of setting up a ramming attack were well known to all navies, and the Athenians were just not doing what they were supposed to do! Instead, they were standing off about 100-200 yards and firing their Zeus Javelins at the Persian ships.

The Persian fighting ships were generally able to dodge the Zeus Javelins, though some did explode close enough to the Persian ships to cause them to sink. Even though the javelin warhead exploded upon hitting the surface of the sea, the pressure wave from one pound of exploding blasting powder was enough to cave in the side of the ship. But even if that did not happen, the rowers were frightened and confused by the explosion enough to lose their rhythm. The result often was that the ship became dead in the water and was a sitting duck for the next shot from the attacking Athenians.

On the other hand, the troopships were too ponderous to move quickly and were usually easy targets for the ballistas. Most of the time, the Zeus Javelin landed very close to the middle of the troopship and killed many soldiers when the charge exploded. This one shot was also usually enough to break the ship in two, or, at least, cave in enough of the hull that the weight of all the men or horses on board were enough to cause the damaged ship to sink.

As it turned out, the actual fight took place closer to Greece than to Persia. Therefore, the Persian ships made a run for Athens as they tried to escape from the Athenian fighting ships. The reasoning here was that they had no chance of safely returning to Persian waters, but they might be able to unload enough troops to overwhelm the lightly regarded Athenian Army. The Persian elite soldiers known as the Immortals might be able to defeat the Athenians if they could just get to dry land.

With this in mind, the captains of the troopships put a maximum effort to run as fast as possible toward Athens. They would even run aground if necessary if they could just get close enough to Athens while doing it. Of course, Athens, like the other major Greek cities was not located directly on the coast but had a smaller city that was the harbor for Athens. This might give the Persians a little cushion when it came to landing their soldiers.

However, this eventuality had been allowed for when planning the defense of Athens. All of the Athenian troops who were not with the fleet were now at Piraeus, along with the two Big Boys. If Piraeus could be defended, then the city of Athens would be kept safe by the massive walls that surrounded the city and provided the main thoroughfare between Piraeus and Athens.

A few of the Persian troopships made it to Piraeus, but they came under attack from the two Big Boys as soon as they were spotted. To the relief of every Greek, the Zeus Javelins fired by the Big Boys destroyed all of the troopships that came within range. Hopefully, this debacle would quell Emperor Darix’s ambitions in Greece. It would be years before the Persian Empire recovered militarily from this defeat.

As we expected and could not prevent from happening, the Athenians stole several of the Zeus Javelins in an effort to reverse engineer them. Of course they were completely unsuccessful. None of their people had the slightest concept of gun powder, and the science of analytical chemistry was nowhere advanced enough to analyze the components of the blasting powder, much less work out its proportions of the active ingrediants.

It took about six months for the Athenians to throw up their hands and ask to purchase the Zeus Javelins from us. We refused to sell them any of the missiles, and it looked for a little while like Athens was going to attack us in an effort to obtain Zeus Javelins. However, Hippolyte made it clear that there was only one way that they would receive Zeus Javelins.

Well, Athens never gave up. They posted a magnificent reward for anybody who could tell them how to make the blasting powder. At this point, I was the only one who knew all of the details of how to manufacture blasting powder, and I did not exist as far as the rest of humanity was concerned. The result was a lot of frustration in Athens, but they never got the secrets of making the stuff.

Strangely, Sparta did not seem to care. They believed that they were so superior to everybody else that they did not need Zeus Javelins to win any war they got involved in. That was fine with us, but it was easily noticeable that Sparta never got too pushy with Coronis.

We never again supplied Zeus Javelins to any of the major city-states, but we did help several of the smaller cities when they were threatened by Athens, Sparta, etc. Usually, we only sent training advisers for the troops using the Zeus Javelins. It was very rare for us to send soldiers. For one thing, we were now policing the entire road from Corinth to Sparta, so we needed all of our people for that job.

During this time, Coronis never grew to be as important in Greek politics as were Athens, Sparta, Corinth, or Thebes. We were happy to remain a small, but very significant, cog in the gears of Greece. Our main interest was in keeping down the state of war that existed somewhere in Greece at any time. As long as a couple of cities were contesting among themselves for the control of a bit of territory, we did not interfere, but we did act if we felt that a city was being bullied. Our action of simply offering to supply Zeus Javelins to the underdog was usually enough to bring the aggression to a halt.

When that was not enough, we sold a few Zeus Javalins to the ones who needed them and sent a squad of “advisers” to teach some of the receiving army how to use the Zeus Javelins to the best advantage. Generally, only one engagement in which the Zeus Javelins were used was enough to cause the war to be settled very quickly. Those Zeus Javelins were damned intimidating!

Everything was going along fine until we got pulled into a war with Sparta. They had a new king who wanted to show his machismo at home by pushing around some of the smaller cities near us. I’m not sure how it happened, but the Spartans somehow got the idea that they needed to attack Coronis to prove that they were the top dogs in our part of Greece. Actually, I doubt that anyone who paid attention to the politics of the region had any reason to doubt Sparta’s position at the top, but the Spartan’s would not listen to reason.

Well, they decided to hit us where it would hurt the most—an attack directly on our fort. We had not bothered to rebuild our outer wall that had been burned away a few years earlier, so all we had to defend against a close approach to the fort was our dry moat. The Spartans must have figured that we would be a pushover, because they only sent a fraction of their army for the initial attack.

Of course, we learned of the attack as soon as the Spartans began their march toward us. Damon took some of his cavalry brigade to scout the advancing Spartans, and he sent back a report that there were about one thousand troops headed toward us, but not at a very fast pace. The reason for that was that they were bringing with them two siege towers about 50 feet tall. The siege towers were actually knocked down into several parts that could be reassembled on site; namely, Coronis.