The Macedonian Hazard

by Eric Flint

  That fifteen minutes was plenty long for Adrian to see the attack that Lysimachus had launched and to place the enemy in his mind. Long enough for him to realize that if they could get far enough in, they would place themselves on the enemy’s flank in a position to fire all the way down the enemy’s line. Adrian knew there was a term for that sort of fire—a French word. Enfilade, if he remembered right.

  “Commodore,” said Captain Andrew Ramage, “we’re coming into shallows.” He pointed at the depth gauge.

  The ATB Reliance had a sonar depth finder in the tug and another in the bow of the barge. It was standard safety equipment and Royal Cruise Lines had been picky about that sort of thing. For which Adrian was exceedingly grateful. Now the computer screen showed the seabed shoaling up. The Reliance had a draft that varied by as much as three meters, depending on load. And while the tanks were mostly empty, the cargo stacked on the deck had them low in the water.

  The seabed was coming up on four meters and that was close to the keel. Adrian considered. They were at ebb tide, or close to it. He tapped keys himself. Even if they grounded, the high tide should lift them off the shore. He checked another datapoint for the sonar. The seabed was a bit rocky, but mostly silt. Then he looked at the battle along the walls of Abdera. The angle was still wrong, but it was getting closer.

  “Keep going, Captain. I’ll risk the grounding. These sons of bitches need a lesson.”

  Thirty seconds later, still not quite in position, the hull of the barge grounded on silt. There were some rocks down there too. Adrian could hear them scraping the hull. The Reliance was probably going to need a new paint job below the waterline, not a trivial endeavor.

  “All portside guns, open fire.”

  Outside Abdera

  Lysimachus would have liked to be in the assault of the Reliance, but he simply had too much to do. Moving an army to attack a walled city isn’t all that complicated, but it’s not easy.

  You have to be able to get your men to charge up to a wall where they know they are going to be stopped while they place scaling ladders. When they know that even after the scaling ladders are in place, they are going to be going very slowly because only one man can start up a ladder at a time, and climbing a ladder with armor on and carrying a sword is not easy. All the while, the bastards on top of the wall are going to be dropping everything from flaming arrows to buckets of boiling pitch down on their heads.

  It takes a powerful combination of threats and promises. And if your army is made up, in large part, of the sort of men who didn’t follow Alexander’s standard, it’s even harder. More threats, more promises, and, very important, the commander needs to be right there with them, sharing the risk.

  So Lysimachus was right there with the men, riding his horse, wearing his bronze armor, and giving orders as the army approached the walls of Abdera. And he was busy. So busy that he didn’t notice the Reliance moving up on the far side of the breakwater until he heard the thunder.

  He looked around and in a flash of insight knew that he had tried to have intimate relations with a crocodile. And the crocodile wasn’t pleased. He wanted to run then, but he didn’t.

  Whatever else you could say about Lysimachus—and there was a lot you could say—he wasn’t a coward. He held it together in the face of disaster and started giving orders to save as much of his army as he could.

  The thunder came again and he saw the smoke from the guns on the Reliance. He also saw the sudden gaps through his army, as though a great sword wielded by Zeus himself had cut them. He kept giving orders.

  They were, as it happened, the wrong orders, but that wasn’t really Lysimachus’ fault. He had seen engines of war before, trebuchets, catapults, and the like…but nothing like this. The best orders he could have given were probably just “run for your lives!” But there really wasn’t any way for him to know that. Instead, he tried to hold his army together and make an orderly retreat.

  All that did was keep the army in a nice tight mass, so the cannons had a nice big target that they couldn’t miss.

  Then Lysimachus’ army got a stroke of very good luck. The black powder guns were firing balls now, since the range had gotten too great for canister. One of the four-pound balls hit a rock and bounced, spraying rock fragments around. One of the larger fragments struck the throat of Lysimachus’ horse. The horse went down and landed on Lysimachus’ right leg, pinning him to the ground. Meanwhile, another rock fragment hit the shoulder of the mount of one of Lysimachus’ bodyguards. That horse reared and spun and its left front hoof came down on Lysimachus’ chest.

  It took Lysimachus almost five minutes to die, but he wasn’t paying any attention as his army—suddenly without the glue of his presence—shattered into thousands of individual panicked men. Lysimachus didn’t think of much of anything for the last five minutes of consciousness, except for the pain washing through him.

  CHAPTER 19

  Gods and Science

  Abdera walls

  August 3, 319 BCE

  Briarus stood on the wall of Abdera and looked out at the army. Well, no. He looked out at the fleeing mob that wasn’t an army anymore. And though the individual men might be soldiers again someday, this army was gone. He didn’t blame those men a bit. Not the least tiny dash. If those blasts of death had been aimed at him, he’d be running too.

  He wanted to run right now. Briarus was an experienced commander. He’d fought for half his life and more. He’d seen swords spill out men’s intestines and been splashed with the gore.

  But he had never in his life been as frightened as he was right now, even though he wasn’t in the least danger. He looked over at the ship sitting quietly on the far side of the breakwater and no longer firing its cannon, and remembered the not quite contempt, but certainly not respect, that he had felt for Adrian Scott…and his balls tried to climb into his gut.

  He turned to an aide. “Hold the walls, but make no sally. I need to go talk to the”—he stopped and swallowed a lump in his throat—“them.” He pointed at the Reliance.

  * * *

  On the trip through the town and along the breakwater to approach the Reliance, Briarus tried to decide what aspect of the Reliance’s actions had so frightened him. Part of it was clearly that it was new. He knew death and war, but this was a new sort of death and a new sort of war. But that wasn’t all of it. It wasn’t lack of discrimination. A flight of arrows or a boulder tossed by a catapult is indiscriminate too. But a man could understand a bow or a catapult just by looking at it.

  He groped for a word that would describe what horrified him and couldn’t find it. He couldn’t find it, because the word didn’t exist in any language he spoke.

  The word was “mechanical,” but in the twenty-first-century sense of the word with its connotations of uncaring power. Different from the “deus ex machina” he was familiar with. Just as powerful, but without the moral focus. As though the gods stepped in, but then stomped on the army without caring who got crushed. He didn’t get it worked out by the time he reached a point where he could wave to call a boat. He still didn’t have it worked out as he climbed out of the boat and up the rope ladder to the deck of the Reliance. But at least by then he had himself under control.

  He saluted Commodore Scott with a firm fist to chest. And thanked him for his aid without any noticeable quaver in his voice.

  Commodore Scott looked out at the battlefield, then looked back at Briarus. “I was angered by the attack on my ship, General. I’m afraid that caused me to be a bit less than fully circumspect in handling the Reliance. It shouldn’t be much of a problem, though. When the tide comes in, we should be able to get off the shore well enough.”

  Briarus noted that the commodore didn’t even mention the enemy army or the use of the cannons. As though such things were without any importance at all. He asked for permission to use the radio room, and that boon was granted. He neither asked Commodore Scott to stay or to leave, but the commodore left him in the room with the r
adio tech.

  There was no delay. The radio tech was already making reports and Eumenes was in the radio room in Amphipolis. Once the radio man knew that he wouldn’t touch anything, he too left so that Briarus could give his report in private.

  He did. He told Eumenes all of it. What had happened. What he thought it meant. And he found himself telling Eumenes how he felt. “They are like gods, but gods in hiding. They go along, seeming like ordinary people, and then they sweep away an army like a child sweeping away straw.”

  “They are ordinary people, Briarus,” said Eumenes’ voice over the radio. The radio that had seemed only a useful toy yesterday, but now seemed somehow to be more. “It is simply that they have tools we don’t understand. But we will understand them, and that understanding will come sooner than we might prefer. What matters for now is that Lysimachus’ army is broken. Send messengers to Seuthes and coordinate with him. He is the king of Thrace and Abdera is part of his kingdom. You’re a guest there.”

  They talked then about the rights of the federal government as they contrasted with those of the satrapies and the states. The federal government had the right to move troops through any state, but if they did any unreasonable damage, the federal government could be held liable by the courts. Briarus listened and asked questions, and it sounded silly and convoluted—the next best thing to idiotic. The sort of silliness that the ship people were prone to.

  Briarus swallowed again. And he wondered if there might be a connection between the silliness of a court that was separate from the legislature and the executive and the cannons that could rip an army to shreds. And a commodore who could defeat an army with just a single ship.

  In point of fact, there was such a connection although it was not direct. The sort of industrial society that could produce a ship like the Reliance also tended to produce democratic governments. Even the worst dictatorships it produced were much more egalitarian and merit-based than the hereditary autocracies that Briarus was familiar with. You didn’t need to be of noble blood to rise high in Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s Russia.

  But the immediate cause of Lysimachus’ army being routed was much simpler. It wasn’t even the disparity in weapons so much as the disparity in experience with those weapons. A Napoleonic-era army would not have been routed by the sort of carnage produced by the Reliance. Those soldiers were accustomed to standing up to twelve-pounder field guns, not the piddly four-pounders being used by the Reliance. But they were accustomed to cannon fire. To the men in Lysimachus’ army, the gunfire had been purely terrifying.

  Amphipolis

  The spy sat in the inn drinking sour wine and listening to the soldiers less than an hour later. He was a wine merchant, but he rounded out his income, and insured his continued prosperity, by providing Cassander with information. In this case, he would have to sneak out once the sun went down.

  He went to the tavern that was frequented by the ship people radio operators and by their local support staff, and listened. It wasn’t hard.

  Once the sun went down, he bribed a guard and was let out a sally port, then made his way across the field to Cassander’s camp.

  Cassander’s camp, outside Amphipolis

  Cassander sat on the camp stool and listened to the spy carefully. The oil lamps, newly designed with glass tubes on top, filled the tent with a ruddy golden light.

  He tried to believe the man’s report, but it wasn’t easy. He thought back to the demonstration that the Queen of the Sea made when they dropped off the radio crew. He tried to imagine what those steam cannon would do to an army, and couldn’t. He knew it would not be good, but he honestly couldn’t imagine what it would actually feel like to have that rain of death falling on him.

  What was quite clear was that whatever it was like, it was more than Lysimachus could handle. He found that both surprising and disappointing. Cassander had never liked Lysimachus, but the man was brave. “You have done well to bring me this news. You have your king’s thanks.” He gave the man a purse and waved him away. His bodyguards and companions started talking as soon as the man was gone.

  “It’s a trick,” his brother Philip Lípos didn’t quite shout. “They bribed your spy or tricked him.”

  Others chimed in, agreeing with Philip Lípos, or disputing his statement. Cassander listened and considered. He was always careful with these men. They were either the most prominent nobles in Macedonia or their sons. He needed them and the retainers they could bring to battle. Personally, Cassander was confident that his spy wasn’t betraying him, and rather less confident that he had not been fooled. The question that bothered him now was what to do about it.

  He got up from the camp chair, another innovation of the ship people. It was a chair made of sticks with a cloth bottom and back. It was both lighter and more comfortable than the wooden camp stools he was used to. It also folded up for easy transport. He looked at that chair and realized he needed a way to sink the Reliance, not to take it. Two tries had proven that was impossible, but to sink it, to remove it from the game entirely…That might be done. A large enough charge of the black powder that even now powered the rockets that he sent over Amphipolis to burn its buildings. But until he could do that, he needed to be out of the range of Reliance’s guns. That meant ceding the coast to Eumenes and Eurydice.

  Then he looked back at his staff and knew that he couldn’t do that. They wouldn’t stand for it. “Coward” was a word all too often used to describe Cassander, son of Antipater. It limited his options in a way that Alexander’s had never been. And even, in a way, that Eumenes’ options weren’t. Eumenes might never have killed a boar, but he had killed men, even generals, in single combat. No one truly doubted his courage, even if they disapproved of his lineage.

  That left Cassander with a very large problem. He needed to retreat from the siege of Amphipolis and he needed to do it without seeming to retreat. And as he framed the question, he had the answer. When is a retreat not a retreat? When you’re just moving to attack elsewhere. He felt a smile twitch his lips at that thought. But only a twitch, because whatever mask he put in front of the matter, behind the mask he was facing a war that he’d been winning yesterday but was losing today.

  He would need to send a message to Thessalonike and have her start working on a bomb big enough to sink the Reliance. The Cabeiri might help with that. They were skilled in magic and were rapidly learning the magic of the ship people as well. But they had no love for the ship people.

  Pella, Royal Compound

  August 6, 319 BCE

  Thessalonike read the bundle of sheets, and as she read she began to wonder if she had bet on the wrong horse when she married Cassander. The USSE Constitution still didn’t seem to her to be a workable system. But Eumenes kept winning and satrapies kept going over to the USSE. She would send messages to the Cabeiri, for such a bomb might well be of use anyway. But she would also send messages to Cleopatra and Olympias, begging their forgiveness, and asking their aid and opinion.

  Her situation was complicated by the fact that she was three months pregnant. She felt her belly, even though there was nothing to feel yet. So far this had been an uncomplicated pregnancy. She suffered morning sickness, but as bad as it felt, her midwife insisted it was mild. She could abort the child. Her fellow initiates in the Cabeiri knew the drugs, but those drugs were not safe. They sometimes left the woman barren and, more rarely, killed her. More importantly, if Cassander discovered she had aborted his child, he might well have her killed himself. And the chance of Cassander finding out was much too great. Sometimes Thessalonike thought the ship people’s insistence on using devices instead of slaves might be wisdom instead of softness.

  She went to her desk and began to write letters in her own hand. Then she stopped. Her desk was a Greek table with modifications based on ship people ideas. It had a set of niches across the top where documents could be rolled into scrolls and placed. It was inlaid with mother of pearl and onyx. There, before her, three slots from the
left, was the letter she received from the present high priestess of the Cabeiri on the subject of Calix.

  She remembered what it said.

  Calix is a despicable little toad, but he’s skilled and he is not so insane as Olympias. The last word we have from him is that he was working for Antigonus. We would prefer that his employment not be passed on to Olympias. The Cabeiri are a religious order. We follow the teachings of the goddess and her consort, and we protect the privacy of our members, just as we expect our members, especially those of high station, to protect the order.

  Thessalonike had gotten the hint. She was told because she was the queen of Macedonia. Olympias wasn’t the queen of anything anymore. She’d respected that call for silence until now, not responding to Olympias’ repeated requests and telling Cleopatra that the order was being reticent. But now…Now it seemed that the women on the Queen of the Sea might be her only hope. She wrote:

  I have finally gotten word from one of my contacts in the Cabeiri. Calix is considered a skilled poisoner and spy. My contact says that he worked for Antigonus at one time, but my contact doesn’t know who he is working for now, or even if he is still active as a poisoner and a spy.

  Queen of the Sea, Persian Gulf, Tiz

  August 8, 319 BCE

  Lars Floden looked out at the small town on the northern shore of the gulf. They were about two hundred knots east of the narrows where the Persian Gulf turned into the Gulf of Oman, about where Chabahar was on Google Maps. In the here and now, Tiz was an important port, and while not the capital of Carmania, was its largest port.