The Far Side

by Wylie, Gina Marie

  “We’d been here less than a day when we ran into some of the local people. I hope Mrs. Boyle and the other scientists won’t freak out, but while this isn’t the Star Gate universe, the people here are people. Erect, bipedal mammals, with male external genitalia and breasts on the females. Good luck figuring out how that’s possible!

  “I might add, no matter how much I like Star Gate, the TV show, everyone speaking English was just too much to swallow. The people here speak something very different, and I don’t think Daniel Jackson or anyone else would recognize it.

  “And, speaking of recognition, we have some video tape for you on the rock with this. The shot we made of the night sky isn’t as good as Kris hoped it would be, but there is one important fact: there is no Milky Way here -- so this might be Oz, but it’s not Kansas.

  “Okay, we met some people and invited them over to the cave. This caused a little consternation among the locals. They didn’t know the cave complex existed, but they recognized the components of its history.

  “Before you go outside, make sure you never forget to check the sky in all directions every few minutes. Dinosaurs never died out on this planet, and there is an aerial predator that stands about eight feet tall and has a wingspan of fourteen or sixteen feet. They also have a mouth that’s two or three feet long and lined with razor-sharp teeth...”

  Andie’s report was a dry dissertation of events ending with their impending evacuation of the ancient rookery. There were final reminders about the possibility of hostile natives just outside the door and her early analysis of Chain Breakers, Dralka, and the other fighting groups.

  Of course, the information opened up another can of worms. Half the government experts were wetting their pants about “first contact situations undertaken by amateurs,” others were panicked about “cultural contamination” as much as they’d earlier worried about bacterial contamination.

  Oliver could only sigh. He had contributed a fair degree to the current paralysis of decision-making at the Federal level. The President was facing an imminent investigation by a joint committee of the Senate and House of Representatives about his money dealings with various entities. Everyone knew that the representatives in the House were bringing the action in a hurry in an attempt to escape similar scrutiny themselves. Senators were threatening filibusters, personal holds -- every tactic that the Senate had devised in a long and devious history of such tactics, to slow any action on anything, particularly on its own members who couldn’t withstand the scrutiny.

  However, government or not, they had to deal with Linda Walsh, who had become the Scarlet Pimpernel of the 21st Century. Conversations of senior politicians started showing up posted online. The NSA spent thousands of man hours looking for bugs, and almost uniformly didn’t find any. The few they found were older and not the ones doing the damage.

  One thing that Oliver had learned early in the movie business was that if something is working, doing what you want, don’t try to tinker with it. Sometimes just calling attention to it was enough to make it break, so he let Linda have her head.

  Much faster than he thought would be possible, the government appointed Paul Tobias, a minor NASA engineer who also had a degree in political science, as a representative of the government who would advise the intrepid explorers on the Far Side.

  To put it mildly, that didn’t work well. Oliver could see the man was pale and trembling, and as he went through the decontamination process he was barely able to walk. When he was handed a P90, he promptly wet his pants. Kurt patted him on the shoulder and gave the fellow over to the medics to sedate.

  Linda just laughed and turned on the door, then five of them moved pallets of food, water, gear, and an entire pallet of ammunition for the P90’s through.

  The additional eight men were alert and geared up, waiting only the word to go through. Oliver had asked one of the men earlier, tall and blonde, good looking and appearing confident, if he was scared. The man had laughed. “Hey, think about it! Which would you rather do: go out the ass end of a C-130 at thirty-two thousand feet in the dark over Indian country? Or go into a teenage girl’s walk-in closet in the early light of dawn? Knowing her father isn’t home?”

  The absurdity of the comparison had brought a smile to Oliver’s lips and laughter to the other men of the teams.

  Then Kurt and Jacob moved ahead in front, with Linda bringing up the rear, with radios and a camera with a direct feed through the door.

  The explorers went into the larger room beyond the Far Side Gate Room and looked around. “I see the secondary exit,” Kurt said, shining his light upwards. It was hard for Oliver to see much except shadows, but he accepted the information.

  They went into the main room, and it too was deserted. Still, the camera dwelled on the fire ring and then on the barracks room and the prisoner’s quarters. Oliver snorted. The media were already exercising political correctness on the story. The people held in that room hadn’t been slaves and had suddenly become mixed genders, even though Andie had said that they’d have all been women. Nope, according to the newspapers and TV nightly news, prisoners -- men and women -- had been held there. It was insane!

  Only Kurt went forward to explore the main entrance, and he returned after five minutes. “It’s still sealed, and the stone with the white dot is still facing the outside of the cave, so it looks to have been undisturbed. I’m going up to the OP to see what I can see.”

  Linda followed him across the main chamber, and both Kurt and Jacob scrambled up the ropes much more quickly than Oliver ever could have. A moment later Kurt was back down. “We’ve got trouble in River City, Oliver. Andie said about ninety of them, and one wrecked ship that they were breaking up for shelters.

  “Well, there are two large ships offshore now, and there are a couple of hundred people on the beach. Ummm... about two-thirds of them fit that physical description of the Tengri that Andie gave us.”

  That is, they were tall and black. Color had been dropped in the news reports and the height and weight had been changed to “slim and above average in height.”

  “Oliver, if those guys are really hostile, the only way we can get more than one or two people past them will be to shoot our way through -- we’re talking a hundred or two hundred people. There is certain to be collateral damage as a result.”

  “Could you go back up and use the camera,” Linda asked. “So we can let people see what it is we’re facing?”

  Kurt agreed, and he and Jacob went back to the spy holes. It must have been difficult for Linda, standing alone in the dark, only being able to hear Kurt’s description, and would only be able to view the pictures later. For Oliver it was exploration as history would never have imagined it.

  It was impossible to tell how far away the people outside were, but it looked like several miles. There were a lot of people working on something on the ground, something that Oliver had no clue what it could be.

  The two ships anchored offshore looked like typical 18th or 19th century ships, each with three masts and, at the moment, bare of sails. One was significantly larger than the other, and Oliver had no idea how many people it could carry. Certainly there were a lot of people on the beach.

  And, as Kurt had described earlier, a lot of them were willowy-tall and black, while most of the people doing the work were white. He idly wondered how the NAACP would react to black people holding white folks in bondage.

  After ten minutes, Kurt and Jacob returned to where Linda was waiting. This time it was hard for Oliver, who could only hear Linda, Kurt and Jacob talking on the radio and couldn’t see the pictures.

  Finally, Linda started talking to everyone directly again.

  “I didn’t want to say anything, because who am I? A math nerd from Caltech. You guys are supposed to be the experts. When I heard Kurt describe two ships here, I was curious. Now I’m more than curious -- I’m concerned. Mr. Boyle, you’re going to make sure we have a couple of broadband shortwave receivers with the next group th
at comes through.”

  “Shortwave?” Oliver asked, mystified.

  “Yeah, I mean we take it for granted, so maybe it’s not the surprise for you as it is to me, and maybe you don’t understand the implications for Andie, Kris, and Ezra. The question I had to ask myself was how did those ships get here? The description of the first party was that they were castaways, their ship badly damaged and being salvaged for firewood and shelter.

  “That map said the peninsula is four hundred miles long -- if those ships were blown here by a storm, how would they have known where to find each other? More importantly, how would they know to look for the third ship? I think they have radio.”

  Oliver frowned. “Sailing ships and radios?”

  “All it would take would be one person fiddling around with a quartz crystal during a lightning storm to notice that you can “hear” lightning bolts that way,” Linda told them.

  “But, as serious as that is, those ships are far and away the worst possible news, sir.”

  “How do you mean, Linda?”

  “The small one has fourteen rectangles along the side we can see. The really big ship has a shit pot full of those rectangles, on three different levels. Sir, the technical name for those rectangles, I’m pretty sure, is ‘gun port.’”

  Oliver glanced at his wife who stared stonily back at him. Linda, not able to see Oliver’s reaction, continued on. “We have here a three-decker, the classic age-of-sail ship-of-the-line, the battleship of its day. The other looks like a frigate. Andie said it in her note, but we just never put it together.

  “The people here were a few survivors of a civilization and didn’t number very many. Rome was founded like that, but there were all sorts of other people around, and they were adjacent to the Med. Here, they were alone, evidently, on this continent. From what Andie said, they thought the people here were about where the Romans were, and for the last fifteen hundred of our years, they’ve been cut off from the ones they left behind. They had a low population base to begin with and had to fight the environment and then storms. You need a lot of people farming to support a technical base in that sort of society.

  “Europe was filled with people, relatively speaking, and while not everyone was moving ahead at once, some were, and they could trade knowledge, so that even in the so-called ‘dark ages’ things continued to move forward.

  “Andie describes these people as they are now, and they sound more like the later Middle Ages, with longbows and all that sort of thing. It wouldn’t be a surprise to see that the lands to the east had made progress faster than they did here. If the Arvalan civilization had been about where Rome was, add fifteen hundred years and we had Columbus sailing the ocean blue.

  “And if these Tengri people have cannon, that almost certainly means individual firearms. Remember Cortez? The Aztecs weren’t as advanced as the people here, but the Tengri probably have a lot of resources back to the east, just like the conquistadors had. These people here are in deep shit.”

  “Can you see if the whites are actually slaves?” Helen asked.

  Kurt came right back. “We’d have to go out, and while I’d like to think we could do it and come back undetected, if we screw up, it could mean the end of this project, Oliver. I will if I have to, but first we need to take it slow.

  “The fact is, we don’t see any of the blacks working -- just the whites.”

  Oliver mentally grimaced. All he had was a few thousand word essay from Andie about what was going on and some mediocre video footage.

  “I hate to ask this, Kurt, but this isn’t my field of expertise. Do you have any suggestions?”

  “Well, if they are hostile, Ezra, Kris and Andie are likely to get in trouble if they try to return here. Even if they avoid disaster, they are going to have a hard time getting here. I don’t know what these guys are up to.”

  “Suggestions, Kurt?” Oliver said, letting his impatience get away from him.

  “I understand, Ollie. Jacob here wants to wade out there with a company of Rangers and wipe the bastards out. I’m uncomfortable with being that kind of a cowboy -- there is too much chance of making a mistake.

  “Not to mention that the cow pies in the government are going to wet their pants. We need to think about this and maybe run up a trial balloon with the public. There’s too much chance of a mistake if we rush, Oliver.”

  Oliver nodded. “I know. I just wish...” He let his voice fade away.

  “Let me speak to the rest of my guys,” Kurt asked.

  “I’m not going to shit you, guys,” Kurt told them once they were assembled. “This is not looking like the walk in the park we had hoped for. The boneheads who built this place were stupid -- if someone stumbled on their emergency entrance they were screwed. In our case, if we have a couple of guys on duty at the watch post to check the area around the main entrance, and more covering the secret tunnel, odds are we could break free and back through the Far Side Door.

  “The problem is, unless it’s open, we’d still be screwed. Linda, how long can we keep it open?”

  Linda smiled slightly for the camera. “Longer than thirty-eight minutes. Still, Andie’s first fusor failed after four hours of intermittent operation. We have a couple of them now that have been running steadily for a week. The answer is, I don’t know. Jo Christiansen is my backup back there on Earth, and we have a complete spare, ready to install, and she knows how to do it. The door might be closed for a few minutes or an hour if something simple fails. If the vacuum fails, it could be twelve to sixteen hours. In short, I have no idea.”

  “Couldn’t you have the vacuum ready in the back up?” someone asked.

  “The fusor chamber is three feet in diameter and is thick Pyrex glass. Pumped down to vacuum it is under fifteen PSI over its entire surface. If it fails, it would be like a shrapnel grenade going off. Anyone around would be sliced to ribbons,” Linda told him.

  “I can say that we’ll be fairly secure and not out of contact with Earth for more than half day. I don’t know how effective your weapons would be against guys with early gunpowder weapons, but could a dozen of you hold off that many for that long?”

  Kurt glanced at Jacob and they looked around the cave, imagining the narrow passage. “Yeah, we could do that. The problem will be if there’s a lot of smoke. That would suck.”

  “Gas masks,” Jacob told him. “They’d smoke themselves out faster than they would us.”

  “As long as the door is open,” Linda told him, “we’re pumping air from Earth in here. Not very fast, just a few ounces per square inch instead of pounds. Andie said that she was sure that without the Far Side door being open, air flowed through here and into the next big chamber. The fire ring vents outside naturally, as does the one in the next room. They would have a tough time smoking us out.”

  Oliver finally stirred. “Kurt, I’ll send the rest of your people through if they’re willing, but I want it firmly clear -- you are not, unless there is no other way, to get into a fight over there. Our President is a moron, but he’s still the President and Congress is still the Congress. Congress gets to declare war on whomever the President wants them to. It’s not up to us to start the First Interstellar War.”

  “Send them through, have them hump another six cases of ammo per man. Fifty magazines to a case, about fifteen thousand rounds each. That’ll dissuade most anyone.”

  Jacob frowned. “We fire anything like a quarter million rounds in here, and we’ll smoke ourselves out. If they have black powder weapons, we’ll have an advantage with gas masks and infrared sights. Half of the men have IR, half have night sights. The four of us here have both, and Linda has a little shotgun and a pistol.”

  “I’ll get them going,” Oliver promised, “and I’ll see what I can get from the government.”

  * * *

  Collum sank wearily into his blankets, having stayed awake much later than most of the men around him, buried in the details of running a column of three hundred men.

&nbs
p; It had been a dangerous gamble, but he, Melek, Ezra, Kris, and Andie had talked about it before he’d left. He had only five crossbows and two thousand quarrels for them when he’d started south. Whatever Andie had done to motivate the workmen of the city, it had been a wonder, because a wagon with a hundred crossbows and another five thousand quarrels had left the third morning after his departure and caught up with him four days later. It had seemed like a desperate thing, but the drivers reported it had been surprisingly easy to have three teams of drivers and a man walking alongside the lead draft animals with a lighted torch to guide them.

  The draft animals and the men had taken four days to catch them, and while the draft animals were nearly done in, the men were in good shape. They unhitched the wagon and hitched the team to one of the empty wagons that had gone south with Collum and they were ready to go within a half hour.

  Now, four days later, a second and final wagon had arrived, with another hundred crossbows and another five thousand quarrels. With two hundred weapons and twelve thousand quarrels he thought he was in good shape, plus the men all had longbows and crates and crates of thousands of arrows.

  It seemed like he’d barely gotten his eyes closed when someone was shaking him. It was Kissom, who’d led the scouts ahead. “Sachem! Sachem!”

  “What is it, Corporal.”

  “The south swarms with Tengri! We have lost almost all of the scouts! Sachem! They have many thunder rods!”

  That brought him wide awake in a flash. “How many Tengri did you see?”

  “We were at the top of the ridge, and we could see two more ships where they were before. We turned to come back with the news, and they were lying in wait! Four of us were killed in the first instant. I survived by finding a hollow where I could crawl away. I escaped and continued north, only to see the patrol that attacked us was following my trail. There are about thirty of them.”