Chapter 38

At least thirty of our people raced in. I could not see what was happening and I only hoped that I got some prisoners.

Ammo trucks arrived and ammunition for the field guns was passed out. Now it was used to shoot through the portal. The flamethrower reversed even more and some brave souls ran to it carrying fifty calibre ammo boxes. One was hit by an Anguy bullet but continued to pull her box to the safety of the truck.

With the dome down, the first field gun changed position. It was pushed by members of the seven woman team. When it started to fire the second field gun moved.

Behind the wreck, I saw people dragging or carrying the priests and the Anguy away. A truck raced up and the prisoners were thrown in. In just a minute it left. The field guns continued to send out punishment to the Anguy on the other side of the portal. The portal closed abruptly and one of our shells passed through where it was and went into the trees a kilometre away.

More orders were yelled into the radio and we moved further from the gas.

We pulled back enough that we did not have to shoot much. When our own people started to get the scent of the gas, we pulled back even faster all down the line. Not everybody died from the gas as the attack in the Tokyo subway proved.

A second drone arrived and the area was policed better. In about an hour, when it looked like the gas had passed, the surviving Anguy dug in even more.

A portal opened in their midst and we used artillery and long range mortars to strike this location. The Anguy were happy to leave but few of them made it through the barrage to get through the small portal.

The portal finally closed and we moved in to tighten the ring around the survivors. There were not enough of them to hold a wide perimeter and they were pushed back.

Mantoya and the rest of us were tired but he reluctantly came to me and said, "Do you still want to take some alive?"

"I have to, Mantoya. I kill when I must but I would hate myself for not trying."

"It's going to cause death on our side."

"I have to risk it."

The refuelled flamethrowers advanced as a pair and the APCs were placed between and in advance of them. The Anguy fled south. Teargas canisters had been placed in this area before they arrived. Our mortars assisted in moving the diehards but it was the fire that stimulated them the most. We funnelled them into a valley with young fruit trees and very little cover. When the majority of them were congregated the canisters up wind of them went off and dense clouds of white gas was expelled. The wind was coming from the southwest this time and the Anguy fled in the opposite direction. Teargas went off in front of them and to both flanks and finally within their ranks.

We stayed back and used a mortar to add more gas where it was needed. Those coming out were usually without weapons. If they had them they were not used. Capturing them was not too difficult and few of our people were hurt.

Troops had come in by portal from other areas and assisted in finding the remainder of the Anguy. Most were wounded but it was difficult to take these people without teargas or the threat of a portable flamethrower.

The area took six days to clean out and a few weeks to bury the dead. Mass graves were the rule and our own were buried the same way. I planned on granite markers to be put up some day to mark the fallen.

This battle, like all the rest, was discussed. We had the videos to go by to jog our memories. While most of this was going on I checked on the priests and the few Anguy found with them.

Jonna had arrived and with the physicians had operated to remove any foreign objects hidden in their bodies. Drugs were administered to keep them asleep while Osston, Jonna, and I worked to make them slaves.

We went by the clothes they were photographed in when captured. This classification was usually the same as age. The youngest one was a few years older than Osston and it was difficult to remove his conditioning.

Stofan took four hours to complete. Three of those hours were in removing the Church's tinkering. After he rested, it was another hour to fit our conditioning in its place. I found if we used the convoluted way the Church used but now substituted me as the object to be venerated the process worked better.

Mokka was near thirty and we had to work as a team to get the conditioning removed. It took nearly six hours just to do this. His brain seemed to have hidden layers after I removed a compulsion, it was replaced by a copy of a hidden command from another place in his brain. At least the time to put in new commands took only an hour.

The next priest, Jossup, looked to be in his mid forties. We worked on him for a day with no success. Stofan and Mokka were called the next day to assist. We tried harder the next time but we must have triggered some sort of mental self-destruct and the man's intellect left.

We rested and tried with the rest but had no better success. Only the Anguy could be processed and they were just a little more controlled than the regular Church soldier.

Stofan was much like Osston. He had not done anything to warrant an improvement but had bettered himself through study and mental exercises. I figured he was young enough to adapt and put him in the hands of his new students.

Mokka was about my age. He had a minor improvement to increase his intelligence. His memory improved with the treatment. He got the same amount of conditioning but did not act quite as servile. I could not find a reason for this but endeavoured to keep him close in an attempt to find one.

Both men were compelled to tell us of their rise through the Church and provide some information on the Church history. This was compared against what Osston had told us and so far there was very little that was different.

Mokka almost drooled when he first saw the trunk. I said, "What can you tell me about this?"

"I was told that you had made a major discovery. That's what we were after. I was not told how to open the container."

I showed him what we had taken from the trunk and he caressed everything with his mind. He would not touch them unless ordered.

"What can you tell me about each of these articles?"

"I can look but I have not been allowed to learn any of the higher mysteries."

Mokka was told to pick up each of the silver articles and he gave us more information than Osston and Stofan had been able to read. None of it was immediately useful or informative.

The maps were brought out and he said, "They are very old."

"What point would you place it in Church history?"

"We believe that the Church has been in existence for twenty thousand years in one form or another. The Church in its present form only started six to seven thousand years ago. This map would have represented what this world was like in that first thousand years. So this would mean that it is five to six thousand years old."

"What brings you to that conclusion?"

"This city has not existed for thousands of years but is on the map. I do not know the exact figure. Some cities of more importance are marked differently and over time this ranking has changed many times. The map reflects this fact."

"Can you read any of the words?"

"Only a few."

This got all of us interested. "Tell us what you know of the language."

"The language is not ours at all but a form of written communication used between us and other beings. It is supposed to be very structured to make understanding easy. To do this there are many shadings of meanings and each has their own word. I regrettably only know a few words or I was told the translation of some passages."

"What can you read on the map?"

Mokka looked on the map and sounded out some of the words. The tiny notes on the map needed a magnifying glass and he talked about cities as if this were part of a diary. It seemed to relate to what side of an argument the particular leaders were on.

The computer was brought in and Mokka went through our collection of this script. The notes were just who wrote the book but, even here, Mokka was not very good.

In the next few days he wrote out all the characters he knew but our collection was longer. He had no understanding of why this was so. Particular letter groupings were chosen and he gave the pronunciation and the meaning to the best of his ability.

He scanned all of our text and picked out only a few words that he knew. He had only a dozen more and these were added to our collection. Grammar must have been very structured because I surmised that this was a constructed language like Esperanto. He told us what he knew and a little about what he guessed along with some words that he guessed at.

The books from the chest were where we found the additional characters. We did not feel that this was a second language because it was intermixed with the other characters.

Mokka was given access to a disk, coin and headband but could not find a way to open the chest. He seemed to be able to do better than everybody else at looking in. He was thrilled to see the generator but could not tell us anything about it that we didn't already know.

He was quizzed on all our icons but added little to what we had found out. When I told him about the configuration I used to transport vehicles to this world, he was amazed.

"I have never heard of that. We are very precise in what we do. There have been many accidents over the millennia. We have learned a lot but the experimentation is left to the experts."

I was interested in the personal shields and the large one that protected the priests. Here, again, is where we needed to experiment to find out how it worked. I watched each of my new slaves carefully when they answered about how this functioned. Neither priest knew that much but they did know the icons. They had listened when one of the now comatose priests had discussed this information openly. I was sceptical about this.

We left Shreff and went to one of the hills we had prepared. This was one that had a silver tunnel beneath it. Stofan walked to the top and slipped the two bands on his wrists and brought them up as if doing a chin-up. He worked alone to create the shield. He couldn't get the icons to work when he tried though we gave him lots of time.

Mokka walked up the hill and tried next. He had a shield form ten minutes later but it suddenly collapsed. Mokka was turned to jelly and the shield disappeared. None of us moved for a minute.

Jonna had stayed near me and whispered verbally for a change, "How did you know?"

"I didn't. Priests don't give out information like that in public. It had to be a trap."

Mantoya heard my reply and said, "I would think that you would have been near the man just so you could control the shield. It would have killed you. This had to be a way to kill you."

"It might have been at that and they sacrificed thousands of men to do it. But I think it was more like a possibility that they were covering."

"So the commands the priest gave were just enough to open the shield and then collapse it violently?"

"That's what I think."

"What did you find out about the personal shields?"

"The medallions they wore provided this protection after they went through a chain gate. It's funny, but neither man knew how to activate this feature."

Stofan was upset as were the rest of us. I said to him, "The priest gave you enough information to set a trap for me. If you had been able to produce the shield this way, you would now be as dead as Mokka."

"I feel that you're right, Master. The Church is very devious."

"Talk to Osston and Loca about what you had to do to open the shield. Some of the instructions had to be true to initiate the process. I do not want you to try this though. Work on the medallions that provide personal protection first. Keep in mind that there are different levels of protection. The stigga can be killed by stone and other projectiles but the Anguy did not have this problem."

"I will do so, Master."

I recovered the icons while I looked closely at what happened. I felt bad about this because Mokka was my slave and I had commanded him to take on this dangerous task. Mokka's bones were not all broken but he had been collapsed to fill in any empty space that had been in him. The shoulders and hips were broken as if to make a shield that was more of a cylinder. The only thing good about the trap was that the death was relatively quick.

On the battlefield, we recovered a lot of weapons including the ammunition. The Russian howitzers were, for the most part, repairable. There had been twenty four that we were supposed to see and three more that were laying in wait for us if we attacked. We replicated thousands of shells. They were nearly the max size the portal could make.

As a test I fed back the same material I was taking from the system to replenish the stock. Even I was surprised when half of the steel and copper disappeared each time it went through the system. Whether this worked or not would only be known when something did not get replicated or did not get replicated properly.

The explosives took a lot of materials from the system and I put back nitrate fertiliser along with common carbohydrates like wood. The lead azide and the lead for bullets required a lot of this basic metal. Scrap steel went in and mortar tubes came out. We tried to make sure we put in as much as we took.

All of the smaller silver articles were duplicated many times and stored in silver boxes. If the priests managed to make off with some of them we would have spares.

I made lots of silver chains and combined them to make large loops. Some were so large and heavy that they could pass a battleship or an aircraft carrier through in one piece. Whether it had enough power to do this or not was a different matter and I planned on having the chest near if not connected. In case this was not possible, I used shorter sections of chain so that I had more silver boxes in a given loop. I hoped these were just to store power but I had no proof one way of the other. We tried other chain with no boxes and these worked but not for as long. Even smaller chains found other uses.

The small silver ants were turned loose on the chains I made before and the recent ones to get them as perfect as possible before they were replicated. Coins and headbands came next and we ran regular classes in them for our soldiers. Everybody had a complete set to fool around with. This may come back to haunt me but I felt that it was the proper thing to do at this time.

Jonna disassembled one of the type of missile used to knock out the howitzers and replicated the individual parts. She and the trainees made thousands of them and then flew them with dummy loads. One was given a copy of Loca's disk as well as a coin. We did not have the expertise to remove the transmitter and camera without rendering the system useless. These would be our main offensive weapon in the coming engagement.

The war never stopped, it just paused in one area or another. The girls tried a new type of sniping by using the missiles. There was only one command station and this had to be guarded very well. Our first target was the ammo dump we had been planning on taking a while ago.

Lauren straightened my clothing and said, "You look ready."

I did not feel that way but I said, "We can do this."

"I know we can, Honey. Now go get Tiffany going. She's always worried before a battle."

"I hope it will just be a one sided battle."

Mantoya and other groups were ready too. Osston, Stofan, and Loca set up a series of portals in a wide crescent that covered eight hundred klicks. At each terminus was a large portal set up and beside it some waiting troops. At the designated time they opened the main portal they were at and proceeded to the next. Our troops surged forward and no doubt rang a lot of alarms.

The family and I went through about the mid way point of the cycle and immediately began to set up our launcher. Our own security followed us and just patrolled the area. We were the only one to not start an attack on an Anguy encampment. In six minutes we had our first missile in the air. We could handle twelve at a time and that is what we launched. Instead of taking out the bunkers first, we went for the homes of the priests.

Buildings exploded all over the large base. As soon as a missile was destroyed, a new one flew out of the launcher. Anything that looked like something related to officers took a beating and more. When all the targets were hit we went back and pounded the areas that looked to house the priests one more time. It was an hour and a half later that we fired on the bunkers themselves. We came in through the main doors when we could.

Throughout all of this fighting we had silver foil and silver parts replacing some made of aluminum. The result was many thousands of silver shreds scattered all over the place. There was now no way that a priest could find one particular silver piece.

The drones had been disassembled and replicated. They watched the destruction for us. Major explosions were seen but we still hit the remains to cause as much damage as much as possible. A drone would drop a coin near the bunkers when the time was ripe.

As soon as we finished, we decamped quickly and returned to our station.

We had missiles left and Mantoya directed us to where we could use them best. This was usually where our people were in trouble. We went from hot spot to hot spot and used up nearly all of our two thousand missiles taking out every major weapon we could find. We also found that there were a lot more Anguy and Adchek preparing for an offensive.