Chapter 14

Never let anyone misinform you that 'violence never solves anything!' Violence solves a great many problems, especially when there are hundreds of people in your way all armed to the teeth with firearms and the willingness to use them upon you. Gleefully, and with all of the ammunition they can carry!

I had to admit that the road block in front of us at Elk Mountain looked scary, but looks can occasionally be deceiving. They had arrayed lots of heavy armor units out in front and spread out to keep us from flanking, but not much defense in depth and not nearly enough infantry in front of them to offer much protection from our superior range advantage. I let Miranda snipe the field clean for us, and seeing that not much of anything was in reserve behind them in town, I just floored the 'Prissy Pig', our nominated name for our battle tested veteran and told the gals to keep their heads down, and they mostly did. Janice picked up some more scratches from wildly shrapnel but nothing she couldn't deal with and she remained at her post. Frankly, none of us considered any of our other refugees of much use, especially for gunnery replacements.

The five captives had had it hard since their capture ... and not just in the breeding pit either. They collectively flinched at every loud sound and they remained constantly huddled together for moral comfort. Each had been a witch or Adept back home. Four of the ladies were US witches and the other gal was a GWA Adept from California, caught nearly right from the start of her military service a few months ago. They'd all been on drugs for some time to eliminate their ability to use magic and none of them were even remotely up to scratch yet, let along capable of helping out in a magical fight. The stress of our long running battle while escaping hadn't helped their nerves one little bit either. Miranda made a token effort to encourage the gals to become a little more helpful but soon gave it up as a lost cause. They were too stressed, too cold, too hungry and too frightened to now do anything other than complain. Even Bel and Janice were about on their last nerves now too and were shivering uncontrollably from the cold mountain air in just their single blankets. Only Miranda was close to fully dressed, with my mangled and shredded suit just barely holding together as well. Spare clothing for our other females continued to evade our quick searching efforts and they remained naked underneath their blankets.

When we stopped to replace power cells about 20 miles out of Laramie, Bel realized that her lover Janice had stopped shivering entirely, and this was bad. Second stage hypothermia had kicked in from being naked except for a single blanket for the last thirty-six hours of so. A quick check of Bel indicated that she wasn't really doing that much better either and her teeth were chattering now so much that it was hard to understand anything she was saying.

Miranda, ever now the dependable one of our trio, slammed down her gunner's helmet and armor rig and laid down the law to her elders. Both Bel and Janice were to join the other five ladies in their wrap of blankets, huddling together underneath for warmth. Through hell or high water, Miranda was determined that she would man that center chain gun alone and all by herself shoot our way through the main battle line at the front.

Bold and scary stuff, but amazingly it wasn't quite necessary. The actual final advance through Laramie and across into US lines was almost anticlimactic. There were no further roadblocks and the grav-levitation propulsion of our 'Prissy Pig' made crossing a couple of miles of open mine fields almost trivial. The local Deseret infantry here was fairly loosely scattered with defensive in depth and for the most part they assumed our BattleCar was 'theirs' and almost none of them actually fired at us.

As for the US front lines, if we actually had been the enemy we could have routed several companies at minimum. The dispirited US troops would fire a bullet round or two at us and then throw down their weapons and either try to surrender or else just run. If anything, it was worse than that old joke about the British Army – 100,000 rifles for sale, never been fired and only dropped once!

Now within friendly lines, more or less, this was no time to suffer any unfortunate accidents. I told Miranda keep her head down even more and not make any grand sweeping movements with her chain gun to avoid provoking any more incoming small arms fire. By the time we reached the rear of the friendly lines the US soldiers had mostly stopped shooting at us at all and when we drove up right into the middle of their battalion HQ it was disconcerting and severely depressing just how quickly everyone surrounded to the 'Prissy Pig' and one lone seventeen year old girl and her big plasma chain gun.

The Deseret R&D officers had been spot-on right. Even a dozen of these BattleCars at the very point of an offensive could and would have cleared out all resistance in hours, and in time (and with enough ArcCell batteries) would have swept the entire US army all the way to the Mississippi River. By stealing their only prototype, perhaps this forthcoming spring offensive would be delayed and I now had to hope that with some forewarning that at least one US general could take this new threat seriously and prepare for it.

The light colonel commanding this particular battalion of infantry was certainly not a suitable candidate. As the Pig pulled up to a halt right in front of the HQ he and his officers came out to greet us with their hands up and eager to surrender. Miranda was just pissed off enough at the lot of them that she ran the laser sight back and forth across their chests and muttered (mostly) under her breath about how she wanted to purge the army of this lot of cowards and do everyone a favor.

"What are your terms for honorable surrender?" The Lt. Colonel asked, who was getting increasing nervous at staring down the barrel of Miranda's chain gun. I was struggling to get out of my driver's seat harness and climb up to talk, but my young assistant was doing just fine on her own. The only thing she needed for her rough image was a cigar to chomp upon.

"For starters you craven worms, you can show some proper military respect for the great GWA wizard from the Republic of Texas, the Zyphyr, and commander of this BattleCar. So get on your knees you cowardly swine and show some deference to your betters!" She barked, and they most certainly did. By the time I made up top to look down upon our 'captives', the colonel and his staff were quite upon their knees and giving me an entirely adequate bow. In just my mangled and scorched old suit I probably didn't look much like a great GWA wizard, until I climbed up upon the front bonnet of the BattleCar and gave the lily-livered officers a good look at my Texas cowboy boots.

"You can rise gentlemen and stand at ease. We're allies remember? First of all, let's try to avoid any more confusion in your ranks. Your men at front lines are running like frightened deer and at least three companies of troops have left their forward positions. Please go fix that minor problem now before the Deseret fucktards realize your position has been left wide open." The colonel turned pale and nodded at a major kneeling next to him to go off and rally up the retreating troops. He'd need a horsewhip to do it and if it were my battalion, I'd be replacing a few lieutenants and captains shortly afterwards.

"Next," I added, once I had the Battalion commander's attention again. "I need you to get me down that US flag flying over your command tent and hand it over to my lovely and rather trigger happy assistant. People keep shooting at us and us Texas folks find that a mighty unfriendly act. With a flag, maybe your undisciplined troops might think twice the next time. Then I need directions to your nearest medical facility, I've got some rescued young ladies of quality that have been out in cold for much too long that need hot food and some even hotter baths. Oh, and a couple of cigars and bottle of something stimulating would also do, if you can manage those!" He could. The whisky was Canadian but entirely adequate and I let Miranda have a swig (and one of the cigars) and I took two swigs before leaving the rest to Sean.

One of the staff captains climbed on-board and after having a nice gawk at our bevy of disturbingly under-clad female cargo, directed us around to the back side of a nearby hill where the local hospital tents had been set up. Chomping our stogies for dramatic effect, Miranda and I discharged our half-frozen ladies into the hands of some Army nurses only to discover that hardly a drop of hot water was available at all!

My first thought was to just find a few 55-gallon drums of water and using a little fire magic warm them right up, but not even any of these were immediately available. The unit was getting their water from a local river, and probably also the start of cholera or some other foul water disease soon. I knew the US was backwards, but this was disgraceful!

I still hadn't worked out of my system even half of the rage I'd felt yesterday and I decided it was time for the 'Great and Terrible Zyphyr' to publically express his anger and might. The Army doctor in charge of this field hospital didn't seem to realize just how pissed I was with him at not having a proper and secure water supply and the rest of these Army idiots didn't seem to be nearly afraid enough of me enough to leap and obey my instructions, but this could be easily corrected.

"Major," I snapped to the chief medical officer, "is this open field to the north of the hospital of any particular importance? If not, I'm going to adjust it to better suit our present needs, so get everyone clear of this area now!" This wasn't really a polite request.

If you're going to go through the time and trouble of scaring the piss out of people just to get their attention properly, you might as well make it memorable enough so that a repeat demonstration later on isn't necessary. In this case, I had a little bit of everything I magically needed relatively close at hand, so I could afford to be subtle, and perform a little stage presentation.

"Behold! Now let the earth now bend to my will!" I cried, with a bit of an evil magician 'mwuhahaha!' thrown in just for the creepy effect. Down about a thousand yards deep into the earth there was a lovely geothermal pocket with some lovely hot water just ready to come bubbling to the surface to bath my ladies. Well, after I'd created a suitable pond to contain it. With far more dramatic hand waving than was necessary, the earth moved and shaped itself to suit the new hot water lake that would soon fill it and if the vast earth-moving wasn't enough to impress everyone, the water ballet that followed certainly did the trick.

Grunting with unnecessary strain, I lifted my arms high and shouted upon the heavens "Bring forth the boiling waters from the depths of the earth!" And they came. The water was a bit too mineral over-rich for tasty drinking, with a bit too much sulfur, but it would soon be just right for bathing purposes.

I gave the chief medical officer a pointed glare and then turned my baleful glare against the head nurse, who did look quite properly terrified.

"Soup's up!" I calmly stated. "Now I assume I won't hear anything more about no hot water being available. Are there any other minor issues that would prevent those seven women from being in a hot bath within the next five minutes? No? Good ... I didn't think so. Now you will let me know if you have any more little problems that you can't resolve on your own, won't you?" The head nurse was already fleeing away from me and shouting order to her staff. Bel, Janice and the others were in big canvas portable bathtubs soaking in steaming hot water in well under my five minute deadline, and orderlies were being given instructions to find each of them clean warm clothes for later.

Since my bullying presence wasn't needed around the hospital for awhile, Miranda and I decided that it was time to give the mess hall staff a crack at my displeasure and we trotted over to see if we could get an early hot lunch. Word of our arrival had already spread and no one even thought about giving us any lip service, but we never got to enjoy a bite of the hot chow. Our disruption of the US front lines had been finally noticed by the Deseret field commanders and the nearly empty salient was now being filled by Deseret infantry.

We drove the Pig back to Battalion HQ and quickly got an update on the situation. The three companies that had fled and retreated from the line at the sight of the BattleCar were only now just halting and getting reorganized for a return to their trenches. Two flanking US companies were trying to delay the advance of a brigade sized force of Deseret infantry, but had poor expectations of being able to do so for long. No immediate reports of armor, but that could change at any moment. We'd done a decent job the last two days at disrupting the reserve enemy forces behind the lines and it was likely that no overwhelming force could be gathered anytime soon to exploit this salient. Especially if Miranda and I could park the Pig right smack at the sharp end of the assault once more and break up their advance.

Miranda was game for anything, and reluctantly putting aside her chewed up cigar she donned her gunner's helmet and protective gear once more, but we now needed two new gunners. The staff officer captain who had been assisting us agreed to take over one gun and he called over for one of his lieutenants to man the other one. I switched out our very last fully charged ArcCell power module while Miranda give the officers a quick instruction of the workings and reloading of the plasma chain guns. This was way more firepower at their fingertips than they'd ever been trained to handle but they caught on fast. With the laser guidance system for aiming, it was close to idiot proof (even for a pair of US officers), and all they had to do was aim and shoot ... and keep their damned fingers off of the 'Full Auto' switch.

For good measure we grabbed a pair of loitering NCO's to join us to help hump ammo to the gunners. We still had a half-dozen full ammo cases of silver left and lots of Deseret bad guys heading our way.

The formerly retreating US companies were supposed to be now following us in support, but they quickly got left behind and lost to sight in the tree covered hills. The Pig was performing much better now that she wasn't operating dangerously overweight and was handling the uneven ground and small brush and forested landscape of eastern Wyoming with little complaint. Maybe the Deseret ArcTec engineers knew what they were doing after all.

Our new pair of gunners caught on quickly, and within three minutes of heading back west from the Battalion HQ we starting to encounter the advance elements of the enemy infantry force. The braver ones got blasted into oblivion by the squad-full, as the superheated magical plasma turned thick tree and ground cover into instant explosive shrapnel that shredded everyone for dozens of yards around. Neither officer had the aptitude for exuberant wholesale destruction that Miranda had, but both caught on quickly to the demands of their on the job training and upheld their honor. Behind us in our wake we left a trail of destruction that no one could possibly miss, a half-mile or wider trough of wreckage, of shattered trees, smoking craters in the earth and acres of seared and obliterated flesh.

We had one bad moment about thirty minutes into the battle when the Pig started to hiccup while beginning to drain the last reserves of juice from her final charged ArcCell but I was in no mood to stop our advance. Yanking out the drained power module, I trusted to desperation and shoved the fingers of my right hand right into the empty module slot and willed my magic to flow into it. Without even thinking about it, my artifact on right hand began to extrude the left-over silver that I had not fired off a pellets in the battle with the Wizard of the 2^nd Circle, and once again it flowed like liquid quicksilver to make a better connection to the circuitry. Without asking, my weird right arm with its peculiar Inca artifact melded right into the power circuitry and seemed to know just what needed to be done.

This was serious creepy, but darned if it didn't work! The Prissy Pig was once again good to go, and just in time we rejoined the battle and became once again the spearhead of our advance. Not only had we reclaimed the lost ground, but we were advancing well into Deseret held ground now, reclaiming in minute's territory the US had lost the previous year.

Miranda calmly wasted a trio of scout flyvers that each coasted a bit too eagerly above the next hill rise. A company of a dozen light tanks was hunkering down into cover in the forest behind them and my trio of gunners made light work of them, and the six heavies on the next hill behind them. I'm not sure if it was my voice that was laughing at the destruction around us or if it was Miranda ... or if we were both laughing together at the carnage.

At the western edge of the forest about ten miles on the old Deseret side of the former front lines, a ridge with a reinforced concrete bunker and heavy gun emplacement rather suddenly gave us all of the opposition we could handle. A direct hit from their big 107mm anti-tank gun probably would have put us out of action, and one glancing round quite obliterated about half of our left crystalline shielding and over 65% of our left gunnery officer, the unfortunate lieutenant, not to mention spraying Miranda with vaporized bone fragments and blood. Another near miss just over our heads obliterated a huge fur tree and turned it into a hail of sharp wooden shrapnel, seriously wounding then in turn the captain, and giving Miranda a couple more slight wounds. For just a moment she was a normal frightened seventeen year old girl once more, but she set her jaw and began conducting some savage paybacks while I shoved the Pig into reverse to back us up behind some cover. Two more near misses dinged up our front grav-skirts, but we limped out of observation range to lick our wounds. Those anti-tank gunners were good and much too accurate for my taste!

Our two NCO's scrapped up what was left of their lietenant and casually chucked the remaining bottom leg parts of him over the side and applied a tourniquet to the badly wounded captain. The left side chain gun mount was twisted but the weapon was still serviceable, and stoutly the pair of Sergeants readied themselves to take charge of the weapons. We were way out in front of our infantry support, by maybe five miles or so, and a tiny little voice of reason was now knocking inside of my skull wanting to be heard. For once I listened to it.

"Miranda, we've won the US a nice little victory with our counter-attack and we didn't sign on for this ... and we are definitely not getting paid for this sort of fun either. Let's call it a day and leave those bastards in the big bunker for the ground boys to sort out."

"Fuck that shit." She snarled. "I want to waste those fuckers! That could have been Bel or Janice on those two guns! If you can figure out how to use those two front mounted rocket tubes, we could blow that fast bunker before they get us sighted in again."

We sure could ... except that in two separate bouts of fiddling, I couldn't figure out how they worked. They weren't chain guns or other automatic weapons powered externally by the Pig and I hadn't found anything like conventional ammo shells or rockets that would fit inside. Miranda delegated the problem to our NCO's and like good problem solvers they figured out what was wrong. The larger breech-loaded tubes only fired a single shot at a time, but had a similar but larger feed system that turned a larger hunk of silver into plasma blasted down the bigger 4cm bores of the pair of front loaded launchers. With a little searching around we found a small box full of individual quart-sized sacks that would each hold two big handfuls of normal silver ball ammo.

Turned into magical plasma, one launcher would turn an entire hillside into superheated gravel and smoke. I gave the big bunker both barrels just to make sure.

I could aim the big 4cm crystalline tubes right from my driver's station on a little TV screen and both massive rounds of plasma hit right on target and turned the entire hillside in a smoking saddle-backed crater. If I'd figured these two fixed guns out earlier, our tactical problems getting around Fort Steele could have been avoided and the fortified town would have become a smoking maelstrom of fire and glassy rubble.

True, it did take these front two barrels nearly half an hour afterwards to stop glowing cherry red. A second volley taken anytime sooner might have melted the entire front end off of the Pig. Clearly, this was an 'oh shit' weapon of limited use ... and preferably just one barrel at a time, but oh man could it turn tons of rock and reinforced concrete into fingernail sized rubble!

Sitting alone finally at the very edge of Bamforth Forest about fifteen miles northwest of Laramie and nearly completely now out of silver ammo, I coasted the Pig to a stop at the top of the first small hill outside of the forest to inspect our domain, as we were masters of everything that we could survey. In front of us for several miles we could see the shattered remnants of what was perhaps an entire mechanized infantry division and a good deal of smoking armor. The disorganized leftovers of the reserve armor units we'd torn up at Elk Mountain had showed up late and in rather poor defensive array and sacrificed themselves to magical plasma one at a time for the better part of an hour. A few attack helicopters also made rather uncoordinated forays into Miranda's line of sight, a mistake that nearly all of them came to regret within moments. A couple of fixed wing aircraft suffered identical fates. If Miranda could see it, then she could shoot it down.

We were the battle-lords, rulers of this field of carnage and if my feisty young partner had any regrets about slaughtering, not just merely killing, perhaps thousands of people in the last few days, she didn't show any. Like a trooper, she was chewing our last unmangled cigar into oblivion, and scanning the horizon for more things to shoot at. The fact that they didn't have a prayer at shooting back at us didn't make the slightest difference. Her thumbs, sore and swollen as they were, were more than ready to teach the soldiers of Deseret that they weren't at all welcome here, and that she'd just as soon send them all straight to hell where they belonged than just send them packing with their tails between their legs.

Perhaps for the first time in their lives, the bastards had been taught the meaning of fear. And Miranda still had half of one remaining ammo can of silver left to teach any of the slow learners a final lesson! If the US could get its head out of its ass long enough, the entire frontier all the way to Elk Mountain was theirs for the taking, right now! Maybe, perhaps, we'd ignited just enough of a spark to push the local units onwards. But that was now someone else's job now.

I let Miranda pick off one last overly brave scout car about a mile or two ahead of us and I turned the Prissy Pig around to take us back home. I was hungry and wanted a long, long nap ... and was tired of the smell of ionized silver and burned flesh searing my nose. I wanted to check on Bel and Janice and quietly give Miranda a comforting hug. Someday, maybe not today or even right away the enormity of the slaughter we had committed would hit her ... and I wanted, needed ... to be there for her.

Reaching the Battalion HQ, I parked underneath a wide spread of trees as close to the hospital tents as I could manage. Even with Miranda's skillful clearing of the skies earlier, Deseret did have air superiority in this region and when things started to quiet down they'd use to try and find us again. A few gentle hints to the staff gathered up enough troops to gather up enough brush to give the Pig some decent cover.

In my book, the wounded captain had been pretty courageous during our part of leading the spearhead, and I hinted strongly that the crippled officer deserved some significant recognition. He was probably going to lose an arm and his legs didn't look particularly healthy either. I also needed to check on the women and then get some food and sleep, in about that order. Then, after that, I could charge up another pair of power cells to get us safely further east to Fort Cheyenne.

Just five miles from the GWA border of Western Colorado, the US and GWA had set up a training ground at a joint international camp that straddled the border between GWA Western Colorado, and US Eastern Colorado and Wyoming. Once there, I'd find some generals ... especially a GWA or two to hand the keys to the Pig over to.

There was no way in seven hells that I was gifting over this baby to the barbarians on this side of the border. US Arc-Tec was just so lame that it would take them a decade just to figure out how the Pig worked ... and we were going to need either BattleCars of our own, or a host of Pig-killers by early this summer at the very latest. That meant my home team, the GWA and its competent cadre of Arc-Tec wizards ... like me.

Bel and Janice would scream bloody murder, but I didn't give a rat's ass. This was my baby and it was going to be parked in the GWA garage just as fast as I could manage it! Maybe we'd play nice and let our US allies shine up the bumpers or crystalline windscreens, or even play gunner!

It took us three days to make our departure from our camp near Battalion HQ, and during this time it moved further west for three days in a row, although the medical unit stayed put. Eventually, some General did get off of his ass and realized a big chunk of central Wyoming was now available for the taking. Still, in my very definite opinion he'd sat on his hands dithering too long and advanced much too cautiously and eventually massive Deseret reinforcements killed the counter-offensive a good five miles east of Elk Mountain near Medicine Bow. Things returned to a nasty stalemate and battle of attrition and I just gritted my teeth and screamed at any officer who would listen about lost opportunies.

A few did. The 'God-damned Zyphyr' had really stolen all of the military credit for stopping the Deseret attack and turning the tables by leading the spearhead of the counter-attack. The local Division commander, a certified dithering two-star asshole, tried to spin his version of the story but too many actual front line officers and war correspondents soon knew the real story and the name of the 'Zyphyr' started to feature as the shining hero, 'the wizard of wonder from Texas that helped lead the way to US victory', as one national newspaper put it. The morons got most of the facts wrong, as usual, but at least they gave me the credit for being the inspiration for the spirited defense and counter-attack, and more importantly there was zero mention of the Prissy Pig. That was at least one good thing about government censorship!

The women were more or less recovered, warmly clothed now and decently fed. And even slightly back into a better frame of mind, but both Bel and Janice were fairly quiet and subdued. They'd both missed enough of the fun that they both felt like very second-class hangers on to the great and mighty Zyphyr, and even playing my usual Texas 'aw shucks' routine didn't seem to mend that fence.

About an hour before we reached Fort Cheyenne an advance group arrived to greet us bearing a set of nice Texas and GWA flags that soon decked the front of the Pig, and we soon entered the multi-national fort grounds in victorious slender. The gals both disappeared into the waiting arms of the local US magician cadre, which included a relatively senior FMBR civilian official, and they more or less disappeared entirely for the next two days. So be it.

I, in return, handed off my rather scratched and dented 'Prissy Pig' off to a resident group of GWA magical engineering combat team members and they started calling in the nearest big Imperial wizards from Denver to come take my baby away to one of our R&D bases for some serious reverse engineering. For the next two days I told my story repeatedly to groups of increasingly higher ranking GWA officers and wizards, and even a few selected US guests. I kept Miranda as close to my side as possible and let her play both sides of the political fence; to my pals at the GWA she was a US citizen, but to her native officers and wizards she was my legal GWA apprentice. All of the benefits, I hoped – with none of the responsibilities.

That strategy more or less worked. Everyone truth-spelled me until my brain felt like tapioca, but nothing too embarrassing spilled from my mouth that I didn't want revealed ... like Sean.

Mason Probert now started his career as a snitch, and allegedly implicated several higher ranking US federal officials as being at least aware of the weapons smuggling scheme. His capture quite corroborated everything that Bel, Janice and I had to say. The five rescued minor witches and Adepts added their own additional reports of what they'd seen and heard during their captivity and the intelligence services of both countries were going to get more than they could chew on for quite awhile to come.