Chapter 8

Several of the raiders were sorely disappointed when they found out that they would not be taking one of the monster 8-wheeled wagons back to Mesa. They thought that the statement that the road up the side of the mountain was too narrow was a pretty lame excuse, but they finally had to capitulate.

They made the trip back to Mesa in 6 days. There were plenty of wagons and draft animals, and everybody got a chance to ride, as least the part of the time that they weren't on guard duty. They were even able to take the useful tools for the manufacture of wagons; nothing of value was left behind. Aelinor and Brad wondered what the Glaxoi would make of the complete disappearance of a whole town.

It took a bit longer than expected to get everybody settled in, partly because some of the people moved from Zindar were so sick that it took a lot of work by a lot of people to care for them. All of the new citizens of Mesa were thrilled to be there and were anxious to get their new homes built. They had some problem in finding enough logs conveniently located to build all of the houses and ancillary buildings that they needed. Fortunately, they had a lot of people familiar with working with wood.

It wasn't all work, they did have some fun ambushing caravans. It was sad to know that some women would not be rescued this time around and would have to serve their time in the brothels, but Mesa was now too crowded to accept any more citizens. They desperately needed expansion room!

Armor flew Aelinor around to try to find other places for settlements, and they were able to locate enough to accept more people. John Oxley was invaluable in organizing the early stages of Mesa, and he agreed to manage the next town they started. It took a lot of work, but Aelinor finally found a place she was satisfied with to use for the site of the next town. It was also located in the same mountain range as Mesa and close enough to each other that Armor was able to build some radios to use for communication between the two towns. The problem was selecting the best frequency to use for both day and night time contact. At least, the Glaxoi no longer had radios, so they were not able to tap in on the conversations between towns.

The preliminary work was done on the new town they called Mountain View, so they were ready to collect a new batch of "colonists." They couldn't find a town in quite the dire straits that Zindar had been in, but they did find one pretty nearly that bad. This was a trading town, so it was a different kind of problem in many ways from Zindar. For one thing, there was a sturdy city wall that they had to get through before they could attack the important targets inside the wall surrounding the town called Integ.

The Glaxoi appeared to consider Integ to be an important town, because there were 96 soldiers there, including the officers and NCOs. The question was how to proceed. There were enough soldiers within Integ that the rebels were going to have to enter with their entire force of 138 fighting men (there were 13 women fighting among the men, but that was a detail not important to this narrative).

Armor suggested that they were eventually going to have to learn the use of siege engines, so this was a good opportunity to start. The wall around Integ was reasonably strong, but not well designed to prevent breaching by the proper tools. The wall was a simple vertical structure about 15 feet tall and 6 feet thick. The basic flaws in its design was that its outer wall was vertical, not sloping, and it was solid, cemented masonry all the way through. This combination produced a wall that would not deflect missiles and would have to carry the entire impact force through the structure. They only needed to bombard the wall with heavy stones for a short time to knock a big hole through it. Then, the rebel army could march in and eliminate the Glaxoi and their hangers on.

Armor wanted the attack on Integ to be a prototype attack and a learning experience for the rebels. The first thing the rebel army had to do was to learn how to build and service siege engines, specifically the trebuchet. He also wanted them to build siege towers so that they could shoot down on anybody fighting from the top of the wall. This would not be much of a problem in this battle, because the enemy would not have any of their own missile weapons, but they could expect that to change as the war wore on.

Joe was given overall responsibility for constructing the trebuchets and siege towers from plans supplied by Armor. Armor wanted prefabricated sub assemblies that could be put together after they were taken to Integ by wagon. The people who had wanted to salvage an 8-wheeled wagon from Zindar now had the last laugh, because it was necessary to build three to carry all of the parts of the weapons to Integ. The individual parts of the wagons were built on the top of Mesa and flown down by Aelinor to the base of the mountain for final assembly.

It took over two months of intense activity to get ready for the attack, what with the construction of the weapons and the training in their use. So much effort had gone into the preparation for the attack that Aelinor was afraid that the attack itself would be an anticlimax. She needn't have worried on that score.

Several spies had been airlifted into Integ, and Aelinor had flown over the town enough so that they had detailed maps available which showed all of the strong points within the town and on the wall, so they had little trouble determining the best segment of the wall to attack. Integ was built on a plain with no real regard for defense, except against occasional bandit attacks. The wall was adequate defense against that sort of attack; the troops were more intended for keeping the population in line.

When everything was finally ready, Brad figured that they still had at least 6 weeks before the onset of bad weather—plenty of time. It was a good thing that the Glaxoi had no air surveillance, since the rebel army made quite a sight as they took their three massive wagons and dozens of smaller wagons on the trek from Mesa to Integ. A big consideration had been ammunition for the trebuchet. Aelinor found a site for a quarry and used her fire weapon to cut stones for the ammunition. They were in the 250-pound range, as closely matched as she could manage. Perfection of weight or shape was not necessary, since the wall made a big target. and they didn't expect any return fire.

The rebel army arrived at Integ and didn't bother with demanding a surrender, since they knew that it wouldn't happen. They were met with some consternation, since they did no harm to civilians, but ferociously attacked any soldiers who even looked curiously at the rebel camp. They picked a location only 150 yards from the wall as the location for their trebuchet firing position and installed the pair of siege towers at about 50 yards from the wall. It took only one day to assemble the three weapons, since they had practiced before leaving Mesa.

The next day saw the opening round of the siege with the firing of ranging shots at the wall. It took 5 tries before the first hit was made just at the desired point, about 5 feet from the ground. The settings were locked in, and the second round began.

The wall began to show marked damage by the time the third missile had struck. The trebuchet was well out of range of any weapon the defenders had, so their only hope was an attack over the open ground. It wasn't until that afternoon that the first defending soldiers appeared to make their attack on the rock launcher. They lined up as a phalanx 20 soldiers wide and three deep and started to march toward the rebels.

There were 15 crossbowmen at the top of each siege tower with an unobstructed shooting line to the pikemen marching toward them. Seventy crossbowmen formed ranks on the ground in front of the marching phalanx, and the rest of the crossbowmen formed up to be flanking attackers when the phalanx got close enough.