by Eric Flint
Seuthes listened with only half an ear after that. He had met Eumenes and Eumenes most certainly was not an idiot. Overly careful, perhaps, but never an idiot. There had to be a reason, a good reason, for Eumenes to take Amphipolis. But what?
Seluca’s “possibility” penetrated his thoughts.
Could it be? Would Eumenes make such a move to give me an opportunity?
Seuthes felt a pang of guilt. After Cotys fell, Seuthes had retreated to his stronghold and sulked. Blamed Eumenes and Eurydice for the death of his son. He contributed nothing to freeing Thrace after that. Eumenes had every reason to be angry with him. Every reason to abandon him as he’d abandoned them.
“With Lysimachus pulling everything out of Thrace to concentrate on Amphipolis, we can sally. Move down the Black Sea coast to the Bosphorus, link up with the troops that Eumenes left there, and then move east. If Eumenes holds out long enough, we might even be able to hit Lysimachus from the rear,” Seluca was saying.
It had to be, Seuthes thought. Eumenes did it on purpose to give me an opportunity, like a swordsman shifting his position in a battle so his mate could get a shot at the enemy’s back. It might not be the stuff of legends, but it won wars. Seuthes felt his lips twitch in a smile. “You’ve convinced me, Seluca. But what makes you…” Seuthes stopped. Eumenes hadn’t said that was what he was doing. No courier had arrived. Why not? Perhaps it was best not to voice his guesses. “Why do you think that Cassander and Lysimachus will be able to crush him?”
“They will have better than two-to-one odds, Sire.”
“And Eumenes will have walls, and rockets to defend his walls.” Seuthes waved a hand. “Never mind. Time will tell. Prepare the army. I want to be moving as soon as we can.”
En route to Amphipolis from Pella
July 26, 319 BCE
Cassander pulled up his horse, stood in his stirrups and rubbed his butt. Four days on the march, and we are still less than halfway there. With the Companion Cavalry spending more time arguing precedence than riding. He hated this. The new saddles were a great improvement and he was using one, if half his cavalry refused them. Carefully, he lowered back into the saddle and winced. As good as the new saddles were, he needed more padding. Maybe a sheep skin? he wondered. But no. The Companion Cavalry followed him, but they laughed behind their hands at his use of the new design for a saddle.
His mind wandered back to the real question. Why had Eumenes fucked the goat again? First the loss of his whole supply of rockets because he didn’t take the time to put out scouts. Now this? It made no sense to take Amphipolis. Amphipolis was the wrong place.
He turned, wincing a little as his bum rubbed on the saddle, and looked at his army. It was a strung-out mess with little cohesion even within the units. The infantry was better than the cavalry, but not much. The rocketeers were a bunch of scholars he had collected, and half of them were slaves. They walked along beside their carts. And the rest of the army had taken to calling them “the Eumenes brigade” or “the carter’s brigade.”
* * *
Paulus was from southern Italy. He’d gone to Athens to study and been drafted into a levy sent to fight Antipater, where he was captured and sold. He could read and write in Greek and Latin. That had gotten him sold to Cassander for use in the rocket company, and he really didn’t want to be here. Paulus remembered what happened when the black powder in the warhead ignited early, and didn’t want to be anywhere near a rocket.
One of the Greeks rode by and spat on him. Paulus didn’t do anything or say anything. He was afraid. He looked down at the ground and tried not to breathe any more than he had to. The air was full of dust raised by hooves, wagons, and marching feet. He wondered what they would see when they finally got to Amphipolis.
Amphipolis
July 26, 319 BCE
Everywhere Philip looked, people smiled at him. The men and a lot of the women made gestures and laughed. He sort of liked it, even if he didn’t know how to respond. He just nodded and went on. He climbed up onto the wall and looked along it. In his mind’s eye he saw its shape and how the shape fit with the shape of the earth around it. It was a curtain wall, or it had been six days ago. Now wheelbarrows full of earth were being dumped along its outer surface to give it some depth, in case Cassander had cannon. Rockets weren’t that much threat to the walls, but even a small cannon would take down the sort of thin curtain walls that Amphipolis had.
Cassander could have cannon. The bellmaker’s art already existed, and the same process used to make a bell could make a cannon. The issue was the expense. At least, that was what Eurydice and Eumenes said. It didn’t make sense to Philip. He still wasn’t good at guessing what things were worth. He looked over at the gate and saw a weakness. He turned to the stairs that led down the wall and went quickly down, then made his way to Dymnos, Eumenes’ chief engineer.
Dymnos didn’t smile at him. He rolled his eyes. Which Philip saw out of the corner of his eye as he looked at the wall. “There is a weakness…” Philip went on to explain why the posts of a join would likely fail if a rocket hit that spot and how the earthen ramp made it even more likely.
“You’re right, but only if the rocket or cannon ball hits just the right place. We don’t have time to fix everything. Cassander will be here any day now, and Lysimachus will be here almost as soon.”
“No. Lysimachus is still concentrating his forces. He hasn’t even started the march yet.”
Dymnos moved around so he was in front of Philip’s eyes. Philip looked away. He couldn’t help it.
“How do you know?” Dymnos asked.
“Ships left Abdera yesterday and arrived this morning,” Philip said to the wall. “Briarus says that Lysimachus had fifteen thousand men and is waiting for another five thousand.”
Dymnos whistled. “How many men does Briarus have?”
“Seven thousand, mostly militia, but he has a good store of rockets and he has three cannons.”
“Why does Abdera get cannon?” Dymnos complained.
“Because they only have seven thousand men. If Lysimachus decides to attack, he has to be broken before he reaches the walls. This is where we are concentrating the enemy.”
“Why? That’s what I don’t understand,” Dymnos said. “Why here, where we are going to have to face both Cassander and Lysimachus?”
Philip looked at the wall, then he looked at the joist in the ramp that went up to the top of the wall, then he looked at the paving stones. He didn’t say anything because he didn’t know, and not knowing made Philip intensely uncomfortable.
Amphipolis, Royal Residence
“I hate not telling him,” Eurydice said.
Eumenes looked up at the sad expression on the young woman’s face. Usually the eighteen-year-old wore an expression that wandered between certain and belligerent. Now it was pensive. “You know that Philip doesn’t understand about secrets.”
“I know, but he hates not knowing things.”
It was true. Certainly, Philip knew a very great deal, but his understanding was often lacking, especially in matters of human interaction. Philip knew quite well that there were almost certainly spies for Cassander in their ranks. But he would fail to make the connection between spy and “don’t talk to them about secrets.”
Still, that look on Eurydice’s face worried him. Eurydice had always cared for Philip. Even come to love him in a way, like you might love a horse or a dog. But with the change in their relationship, she had changed the way she thought of Philip. “Philip has made a great deal of progress, Eurydice. But he still has a long way to go before he can be trusted with state secrets. Now come over here and look at these plot lines. I want to be sure the rockets are properly placed.”
“I don’t know why you’re fussing,” Eurydice complained. “Philip approved them and the fire plan has been vetted by experts in Fort Plymouth.”
Fort Plymouth, New America
July 26, 319 BCE
Paul Howard sipped the cocoamat and
read the sheet. He couldn’t bring food or drink into the computer room of the Fort Plymouth Library and Bookstore. No one could, and there were armed guards at the door who checked people to make sure they didn’t have anything to eat, drink, or smoke when they went in. So Paul sat out here in the dining/reading room where you could eat, drink, smoke, and read through the printouts and make notes. Never in his life had Paul imagined he would find himself as a military adviser to generals in two nations.
Paul set the cocoamat down and scratched his beard. What he was looking at was the design for a fort that would be the main defensive center of Caracas. They were using the modern name. The local tribe had joined New America only a few months ago and not everyone had agreed.
In general, the tensions between not so much the ship people and the locals, but between the locals supporting the ship people and the locals opposing the ship people, were getting more intense as the legal sovereignty shifted from this or that tribe to New America. And those disagreements were getting more and more belligerent as the locals learned about smelting iron and steel and making gunpowder. The “ship people magic” was becoming less magical, and some of the locals were intent on regaining their god-given right to cut each other’s hearts out. Hence Fort Caracas, with earthwork defenses and rocket carts, an underground powder magazine, and a two-hundred-man militia.
Paul wasn’t the designer. He was a consultant, using his memory of forts and cities real and imagined to help inform the choices. He didn’t have the final say about how the fort would be built, but he was making a decent living making notes and suggestions that would be acted on higher up the political food chain.
Fort Plymouth, Capitol Building Plaza
General Leo Holland, Jr. stood on the steps of the capitol building and watched as the sergeants ordered the men through their paces. Leo was a Marine master sergeant fallen on hard times. After twenty years in the Corps, he was reduced to being an army puke and—worse—an officer.
He wasn’t the only one from the military who had been on the cruise. There were officers, even, and quite a few army pukes. But in the organization of New America’s military after The Event, he’d ended up with the job, mostly because the real officers had all—as a unit—taken one step back.
“Attention!”
The men snapped to attention, their rifles on their shoulders. The rifles were new and of a new design. Leo thought of them as rifled slug-throwing shotguns. They broke open to load like a shotgun but they had a narrower bore, forty-five caliber. They fired a copper-coated lead slug using black powder in a waxed-paper cartridge with a brass cap. Basically a shotgun shell, because paper shells were way easier to make than brass, and cost a lot less. Brass was expensive in the here and now.
“Ground arms!” A hundred and twenty steel buttplates hit the flagstone plaza.
Leo started down the steps as the sergeant, a Silver Shield who had done twenty years with Alexander the Great, shouted, “Parade rest!”
His army had many of the structures of the USMC, but it was also influenced by such diverse services as Greek Silver Shields and Native American warriors. It was Leo’s job to integrate those traditions to form the core of the military tradition of New America. Drill and ceremony was an important part of the new tradition.
The shotguns were long barreled, about as long as a Kentucky longrifle, and they had three-foot bayonets on the ends. In part because a Silver Shield felt naked without a long stick with a point on the end.
Leo reached the bottom step and started his inspection. His men wore boots, like it or not, and a lot of them didn’t. They wore long pants in camouflage colors whether the brass liked it or not, and a lot of them didn’t. Tie-dyed green and brown was expensive. They were an elite professional service. One that had started out with rank inflation.
“Well, Kepko,” Leo said to the Native American third in line, “I see you got your stripe back.” Kepko had a strong preference for whisky and a tendency to become belligerent on drinking it.
“Sir, yes, sir,” Kepko said, keeping his face straight and his eyes straight ahead. The left one was a little swollen, but it was still steady. Kepko was a corporal, not a lance corporal. In normal circumstances he would act as a private, but in an emergency, when the citizen soldiers swelled the army’s ranks, he became a squad leader. It could be hard on a man to be bounced up and down in effective rank depending on circumstance. But President Wiley was intent that the army be both a professional service and an army of citizen soldiers, “so that the citizens would know what was on the line in war.” Personally, Leo thought it was really because the idea of a citizen soldier was part of the American tradition. Well, it was part of Leo’s tradition too. So the New America Army was both an army and a cadre for a much larger army that could be called up quickly.
Next came an exception. A ship person, Nathan Corbier’s family had served in the US military for every generation since the first buffalo soldier right after the Civil War. He’d turned eighteen since The Event and if he couldn’t be in the US Army, he would be in the New American Army. Out of over four thousand passengers and crew on the Queen of the Sea there were less than one hundred in the military, and a total of seven who were not officers or senior NCOs. Not because they were lacking in courage or patriotism to the new nation they were building here, but because there were too many more important jobs that they could be doing. The same was true of Nathan Corbier. He had a 3.2 GPA at Roosevelt High back in the world. What he ought to be doing was reading Wiki articles in the computer center of the library and helping to design machines or chemical processes. Not grunting on the confidence course or standing in formation.
And that was what the kid was going to be doing, like it or not. As soon as he finished Advanced Infantry Training, he was going to be transferred to the weapons development board. It might be a very good thing to have a man who’d been trained with locals adding his input to the geegaws those old fogies were coming up with.
* * *
John Little, the leader of those old fogies, was at that very moment cursing the input from locals. John was a practical man and an experienced businessman. Back in the world, he had run a restaurant in Philly, a bar in San Antonio, a shoe store in Atlanta, and a clothing factory in Yonkers. In New America, he had a factory that made gardening and farming supplies. He knew how to run a business and a production line. So did the damn Greeks, or at least they thought they did. Unfortunately, their notion of how to increase production had a lot to do with more hands and almost nothing to do with better equipment. Better equipment, which they insisted would cost a lot of money, take time to build, and more time to train the operators. Better equipment that they insisted they didn’t have either the time or the money for.
“All I want is an electric boring machine,” he muttered to himself as he went over the notes on yet another proposal to hire more people and use the hand-powered boring tool and guide that were well-established innovations that worked. The most irritating thing about it was that they weren’t entirely wrong. A power borer was an expensive piece of equipment that would take months to build and could be easily broken by misuse. As any number of mid-twentieth-century devices they had built already had been. It had lots of power and trying to drive the boring tool in too quickly could burn out the handmade electrical motor before an inexperienced operator knew there was a problem. But using hand tools was a dead end. It meant that a rifle would take at least a hundred hours to bore. And just using more workers would, in the long run, be more expensive even if the new minimum wage law didn’t pass over Al Wiley’s veto, which it very well might.
Fort Plymouth, President’s Office
“Damn it, Yolanda. I thought I would have your support on this,” Al Wiley said.
“I’m sorry, Mr. President, but the deals some of these companies are getting people to sign amount to slavery.” Yolanda held up a hand to stop the President from interrupting. “I know it’s only a band-aid, and I know that minimum wage laws ar
e an invitation to cooking the books. I honestly don’t like them much more than you do. But there is a bleeding wound in our economy and if a band-aid is all I’ve got, I’m going to use it.”
“All you’re going to accomplish is to start an inflationary cycle,” Al said, but he didn’t say it with much heat. That argument had raged back and forth for decades in the universe they’d come from, and while he’d always faithfully expounded the Republican Party line, he’d privately had his doubts. After all, the minimum wage had been raised plenty of times and he’d never seen where any great disaster had ensued.
The real issue in the here and now was slavery. Not slavery in New America—not even the indentured servitude they had been forced to accept to get the needed workers from Europe. The threat was the slavery in Greece, Carthage, Rome, and the rest of the Med. Also slavery from Mexico to Brazil among the native tribes. Slavery that produced goods that competed with the goods produced by paid workers in New America. And, in New America, even the indentured servants got some salary.
So far the advantage of New America in industrialization had kept the balance of productive capability tilted on the New America side, but the Carthaginians were copying the advanced tools and machines, then using slaves to operate them. Al was worried this new minimum wage law was going to make it easier for places like Carthage to undersell them. Especially in Europe, where they had lower transport costs.
He’d like to believe the arguments advanced by the proponents of establishing a minimum wage, that it would boost productivity rapidly enough to keep offsetting the cost advantage of using slave labor. They pointed to the experience in the old USA where the northern states had kept industrially outpacing the southern ones—in large part because the higher wages in the north kept drawing immigrants. But…