Chapter 39

Jaycee would have made a lousy General in real life. She did too much of the work herself. For the next six days she trained, taught, shouted, and bullied her troops toward the modern day ways of killing from a distance.

It was useless trying to convince her that she was taking too much on herself. When I broached the subject, she let me know how the cow ate the cabbage.

"Real generals tell colonels and majors to have captains and lieutenants make sergeants do all the damned training. I don't have any colonels or majors to boss around. Shit, I don't even have any sergeants. Nobody here and now knows one fucking thing about our weapons, how to use them, or what kind of tactics will work.

"You know more about it than they can, even if you got all your information from John Wayne movies. These men don't know anything about small-unit tactics; they don't have small-units. They're used to lining their armies up facing each other and slugging it out with glorified pointed sticks.

"We just have to make do until I get someone trained to do something, hell, anything. It sucks, but that's the way it is and the way it's gonna be until I get at least a few of them educated," she said.

And that's just the way it was. She did all the training she could in the time she had available.

She wasn't much of an archer herself, but she found a couple that were pretty good with their own weapons and set them to figuring out how to deal death with the new models that we had. That little trick was easy to say and turned out to be hell to accomplish.

Mastering a bow and then changing to a different type is a lot more complicated than it seems, especially since the bows we had were so different. The difficulty wasn't caused by the modern mechanism; it was mainly that the arrow's trajectories were so completely different.

In our original timeline, using a bow had become a leisure sport and all types of sights and gadgets were available to help. That kind of folderol couldn't be had in our here and now, and wouldn't have been practical for a fighting weapon anyway.

Archers of this time were able to hit where they aimed using skill and familiarity they'd developed over years of practice. Asking them to switch to a bow that was so much more powerful and had such a significantly flatter trajectory caused them grief. As it stood right now, we did have archers, and they were using the modern compound bows, but they were well behind the curve with their accuracy. It would come, but it would take a lot of time.

Damien and Percy received their own tuneup, in the hope they could train a few hundred men with the alien improved M1s. Jaycee took over a group of a few more than a hundred to get them proficient with the Barretts.

It is a hell of a lot easier to get a rifleman accustomed to looking through a scope or across a set of iron sights to aim than it is to switch weapons for archers and fair progress was made in this direction. We didn't manufacture experts overnight but the riflemen were able to manage effectiveness much more easily.

Somehow Jaycee also found time to unlimber one of the wide, mortar equipped, Bradleys. She parked it just outside the main gate and spent a whole afternoon with practice rounds, getting herself familiar with the range and coordinating the use of the small remote control observer helicopters with the firing station in the Bradley.

In her spare time she kept up with what was going on between where we were and Paris. The aerial scouting had let us know that someone there must be really pissed off at us.

We were watching when the naked men reached the city and they'd been hustled off to visit the King, or his Regent, or someone; hustled off quickly too. Apparently the disappearances of the residences that were now with us had been noticed.

Two days after the nude ones showed up, a small army headed our way. I don't guess you could really call it an army though. There were only about fifteen hundred men.

They had around five hundred mounted knights and probably the same number of mounted archers. Most of the others were foot soldiers. About three quarters of those were armed with pikes. I don't know how they thought they'd use pikes against our walls. Maybe they thought we'd be stupid enough to come out to fight them.

I was more than a little surprised that there only seemed to be a very few men armed with firearms. I knew that they couldn't have anything that would be significant against us, but I knew for certain that they should have some type. Maybe we weren't important enough to rate wasting lead and powder on.

Thinking about it, I knew they must not have been planning on meeting real resistance. Since I now had the combined troops of Pierre, Jacques, and Searlus I actually had a larger force than the one coming toward me. They were probably just dropping by to "show the flag," even if they didn't call it that yet. Fair was fair though and I was going to show them a little something too.

We'd just finished a big breakfast and moved to my study for a few gallons of coffee. Jaycee had made sure that Geron was present. He seemed nervous about it and I wondered why. Maybe he didn't want to be put on the spot. He tried to start in with news of the upcoming difficulties right away, but Jaycee asked Fawne to translate for her and Fawne agreed.

"Geron, cut out that babbling," Jaycee said, and Fawne laughed instead of translating, finally she got it done.

"We are going to have our coffee and that dirty old man," she said, pointing at me, "is going to foul the air with one of those cigars. After he's done we'll go take a look at what's coming.

Geron got quiet after that, and they even talked him into coffee and a few pastries while I did my best to look like a chimney.

Finally it was time to take a look at our approaching guests.

In the information center Jaycee brought up the video. She switched views until we had one from her closest observer. The mini-army was coming right down the road as if nothing in the world could bother them.

Hell, they were on a mission for their king, in the middle of his country, I guess they had a right to assume that no one would give them any shit. That's one of the troubles with assumptions though; sometimes you assume the wrong thing.

Jaycee jockeyed her view from the leaders all the way to the end of the line. Thankfully their band of camp followers had already fallen far behind. She intended to start her trouble at the rear and then work her way toward the front, and we'd worried about hurting non-combatants.

"They must have moved out soon after first light. They aren't more than a couple miles from here," Jaycee said, then she picked up a handset from her control panel and started talking to someone.

It was Percy on the other end; he'd left early too. He and Damien had taken their newly trained riflemen out to seal the back door. Normally five hundred men would be hard pressed to contain fifteen hundred. Of course, normally the five hundred men wouldn't be armed with semi-automatic weapons. I didn't think they would have any real trouble.

"Shit," Jaycee said, after a few minutes. "I need to get my ass down to the Bradley. They'll be here before long. Cécile, do you think you can keep the birds flying?"

She had been trying to train Cécile to fly the observation helicopters in her spare time, and apparently Cécile had caught on fast.

"I can do it now, I'm sure."

They handed off and Jaycee left. She wasn't gone ten seconds before a window popped onto the screen that showed a view of the Bradley parked outside. It seemed that Jaycee was doing a whale of a job all around with her training.

"We should be able to see her get in," Cécile said, laughing.

This whole scene was a little surreal. We had basically a front row seat for the carnage that was about to come. It was a little like watching a train wreck, as they say. We seemed almost compelled to stare at the screen.

Sure enough we got to watch Jaycee enter the Bradley and then we could see her tending to the mortar. Another window on the screen showed approximately what she could see coming down the dirt path. Cécile even zoomed to show us close-ups of the leading men. They seemed very confident.

Jaycee hadn't planned on letting them send out anyone to parley this time. When they got into range she was going to cut loose on their noble French asses.

Her plan called for about a dozen flashbangs behind the troops and in front of the followers. If they split up like she wanted them too, Percy, Damien, and the riflemen would corral the camp followers and serve as a plug in the stopper in case any of the actual troops tried to retreat.

Normally, no battle plan survives contact with the enemy. Jaycee must be an excellent planner. When the time came she fired off the flashbangs and all hell broke loose, but it did go according to plan, sorta.

The camp followers stopped in their tracks with the first explosion and then turned around and headed the way they'd come. Percy and Damien's men appeared as if from out of the ground and got them under control within minutes.

Meanwhile, Jaycee kept up the noise for twelve rounds. The main body tried to stop once, but when they did, the next round fell very close to the end of the line, and it started moving again at once. Even normal soldiers can tell when the explosions are coming closer. The foot soldiers forced the mounted men to keep moving toward our gate.