Chapter 16

The Bustols were such creatures of habit that it was boring to fight them. It was one of those things like "if we did this, they always did that." We got into a bad rut with our campaign. Step 1 was rescue the Inglets in a base. Step 2 was to bomb the shit out of them. Step 3 was to look for the next place to hit. The only time there was any fun was when we were able to bust up a "harvesting" trip.

We were not able to capture anybody who could give us the schedule for those trips, so we had to do it the hard way. We usually kept a high altitude observer over all of the bases, and went after a convoy whenever we saw one leave. It would have been easier to do the same thing with the TWT viewers, but our pilots were simply getting so bored that Ansa was worried that the edge was wearing off their training and spirit. Therefore, it was good psychological strategy to keep the planes flying. Every once in a while, they scored on a convoy. It was often just enough to keep them interested.

The Bustols were finally wising up. They had reinforced their stone buildings to the point that our Eagles no longer had any real affect with their "bombing" runs. Well, it looked like the infantry and artillery of the ISDF were finally to get their due. The people of TWT were willing to help, but Inglets had to do the grunt work.

I discussed the situation with the people of TWT and decided to try to take out the Bustol structures with RPGs. The RPG was so easy to use that only a few hours of training was required, and most of that was to make it possible to avoid accidents.

The first time we attacked a fortified base was more of an experiment than anything else. TWT cleared the place of potential hostages for us, so that a minimum of innocents would be harmed. The gates through the walls were made of sheet steel, as compared to the meters-thick stone wall surrounding the base. We ran into a surprise with the attack on the gate.

The RPGs with their shaped charges had no trouble burning a hole through the steel door, but that was the problem! It was just a hole. The hole was about two to five centimeters in diameter, and that was not going to do us much good. Anything behind the door was blasted, of course, but that was purely incidental to getting the doors open.

OK, the RPGs did nothing for us with the gates, so let's see what the walls would do. Failure! We could blast chips off the walls, but the RPGs were certainly not the answer to getting through.

Back to square one. It looked to me like nothing but a major explosion was going to budge the gates or the wall, so we needed direct-fire artillery. The first trial was with the Bofors guns mounted on the trucks. Ansa had Hurricanes flying close air support as we drove up with our guns. The caliber of the Bofors was just not large enough to carry a big enough warhead. The steel on the doors was just too great for the Bofors to have much effect, and the same could be said for hits on the stone wall.

Dammit, there had to be some way to breach the fort. It had been done on Earth back in the Middle Ages, so we sure as hell could do it. I asked the TWT people for a book on warfare in the Middle Ages, and there was the answer staring me in the face. The first thing I saw when I opened the book's cover was a picture of a trebuchet. OK, let's see what we can do with one of those monsters.

A panel of engineers was brought in from Arklet to design the kind of machine that I needed. They fiddled and fooled around for a few days, and I admit it—I blew my top! I kicked them out and decided to build a copy of the machine in the picture. Four weeks later, we had a machine that wouldn't work! Apparently, the artist had used some of his artistic license, and had simplified the drawing so that it made a more pleasing appearance artistically.

That was easy to work out, now that we had something to putter around with. It took another two weeks of experimenting, but we had a workable machine and were ready to try it out against the Bustol base.

The people inside the base had spent a lot of time laughing at our futile attempts to attack them, and our trebuchet fared no better in the ridicule department. At least, in the three months that we had been there, no attacks had been made on the surrounding towns to "harvest" women slaves, and I am sure that grated on the criminals behind the whole thing. This operation on Inglet had to be expensive, and no money coming in must have been very painful in the pocketbooks.

We had found a source of rocks for ammunition. At this point, I could not see any great need for spherical shot, since there was no barrel for the rocks to be fired down. The main thing was to produce ammunition of uniform weight, since the trebuchet was nothing more than a duded up teeter-totter. An engineer had calculated for me how much weight the ammunition ought to have to do the most damage, and the number looked reasonable, so we used that as our guide.

The trebuchet was moved into place with the assistance of the TWT transporter, and they moved in the ammunition for us, too. We aimed at the gate, first, and let fly our first shot in this stage of the battle. The damned rock fell short! This produced a lot of amusement among the Bustols standing on the walkway over the gate. They were a bit less amused when the second rock went flying over their heads and landed, somewhat destructively, on the mess hall. Now that the ranging had been done, we let fly the third shot and scored a direct hit on the gate.

There was a terrible CLANG! when the boulder struck the steel door. All of the Bustols on the walkway were deafened by the noise of the impact, and a few of us back at the trebuchet winced at the noise. Examination of the door exhibited a dent, but we were still a long way from breaking it open. Our next two shots missed. In both cases, the shot fell just a bit short.

The problem was that the gate was too small a target for our trebuchet. The rock fell at such a steep angle that it was very difficult to hit an object as small as the gate when it was standing vertically. We quickly concluded that our third shot had been pure luck. Now I knew why the trebuchet had always been aimed at a wall. The wall was a big target and sloped back so that the attack angle was a lot more favorable. Well, that was easy to fix. All we had to do was to shift the trebuchet a few degrees to the right or left, and we would have plenty of wall to shoot at.

The first shot at the new target landed with a dull thud that produced more laughter and taunts from the Bustols. We didn't let this deter us. We pumped in 9 more shots at the wall in approximately the same place, and the taunts and laughter subsided. Now we were making some progress!

We aimed our shots so that they were either right on the wall or slightly over the wall. Any over shots were destructive to the morale of the Bustols, if to nothing else. About two dozen more shots at the wall and it was about to tumble down in a gap width of about six meters. That wasn't enough to allow us an adequate entryway, so we shifted little to the right and pounded on the wall some more.

The first pounding had done a lot to weaken the wall, so we didn't need as many hits to come to the same weakening of the wall as we had achieved with our first bombardment. I sent word to Karak to be ready to fight tomorrow afternoon. Our TWT friends were ready with their transporter so that all our army had to do was to march into the transporter gate and they would be marching out of the local gate we had set up just behind the trebuchet. We got everything ready to pound the wall again tomorrow morning, and we should be ready to invade the Bustol base early tomorrow afternoon.

My plan was to weaken another section of wall, then turn the trebuchet back onto the first section and force a collapse of the wall there. Once that was done, we would turn the trebuchet enough to open the adjacent wall section. Finally, we would pound that third section to produce a gap about 15-20 meters wide that we could storm.