by Eric Flint
“Lípos has been sighted. He will be here by the end of the day,” Hristos, their Silver Shield and translator, said. “The holy brother here says that you must get the antenna up as soon as possible. It must be seen by the Macedonians that we have ship people radio and ship people here.”
* * *
Charles sat up. Unlike Alice, he went from asleep to awake in nothing flat. One of the men standing around their bed was Mucapor, the high priest of Sabazios. “Come on, Hristos. You know that we won’t be able to whistle up cannons, even if we get the radio up and running. And just getting the radio tower set up won’t get the radio working.” Their radio was a tube job, built on the Queen of the Sea post-Event, with some of its innards cannibalized from pre-Event components. To make it work better, they strung a set of long wires as high as they could get them, which was standard practice and known all over the Med these days. The wooden towers to hold them were locally made.
“Don’t matter. As long as the wires are up on the tower, it will work.”
“What will work?” Alice asked, beating Charles to the punch by half a breath.
“It will frighten Lípos. The auguries have shown it.”
From the sound of it, Charles wasn’t sure whether Hristos believed that or not. But he was pretty sure that Mucapor did believe it, and he was in no mood to start a religious war when only he and Alice were Christian, and he wasn’t all that sure of Alice.
“Fine. Let us get dressed.”
Some talking in what was probably Thracian. Then, Hristos said, “Hurry up.”
They were left alone. Charles got up and started getting dressed, talking all the while to let Alice know that today wasn’t going to be a sleep-in day no matter how much she wanted it to be.
By the time he was dressed, Alice was sitting up, looking flamethrowers at him. He tossed her some clothes from their pack and made a hasty retreat.
* * *
The roof of Seuthes’ palace was flat and a triangle of logs was being put up under Charles’ direction by the time Alice climbed the ladder to the trapdoor leading to the roof. “You need me for any of that, Charles?”
“No. Set up the computer and do a systems check.”
The lead-acid batteries, except for one, were with Seuthes’ army, which was supposed to be behind them, and so was the pedal-powered low-voltage generator used to charge them. What they had with them was the computer, the radio, and the antenna wire and one battery. The system would run for about two hours without the other batteries and the generator.
Alice was turning to go back down into the palace when Charles said, “Before you go, have a look.” He pointed west. There was a column of men in armor carrying the long spears of the Silver Shields, and beside it were two columns of cavalry. There must be five thousand men, Alice thought. Not that she knew crap about estimating military strength.
* * *
On the walls of Seuthopolis, Mucapor watched the army, hoping desperately that he was reading the auguries correctly. Priest King Seuthes had sent him instructions, and he knew the stories about the ship people, but Mucapor was not the priest king. He was just a senior priest, and King Seuthes’ seneschal, and the ship people were throwing all the world into chaos and uncertainty. He turned away from the approaching army and looked at the palace. Already the wooden tower was rising. It would be visible from outside the walls before Lípos’ army had the city surrounded. All he had to do was hold Lípos here for a few days, until Seuthes brought the army to their rescue.
Lípos’ army, outside Seuthopolis
November 19, 319 BCE
Lípos looked at Seuthopolis with relief. Finally!
Then one of his officers rode up beside him and pointed. At first he couldn’t make out what it was, then he remembered the tower in Pella. A radio. How did they get a radio here?
Radios meant ship people. And Lípos knew what would happen if any harm came to those ship people. It was made perfectly clear in the agreements. Besides, Dag Jakobsen had killed a dozen men by himself, with just a small ball of ship people magic, when he made his escape from Tyre. Everyone knew what a radio meant.
But there couldn’t be one here. Couldn’t be.
He called his bodyguards and rode ahead to within shouting distance of the walls.
* * *
Hristos watched the party of riders approach the wall. He thought that was Lípos. He pointed and asked Mucapor if he recognized the rider.
“I don’t know. He could be Philip Lípos. I know he’s not Cassander.”
“Cassander stayed in Pella. At least according to the radio message we got,” Hristos said. Then he shouted, “Where’s your brother, Lípos?”
There was no answer, and Hristos wondered if he were wrong about who was out there.
* * *
Lípos was wondering too. Not about where Cassander was, but about how they could fail to know if they really had a radio. He started to think that the tower might be a ruse. A ploy. The product of a messenger rider and a pouch of instructions.
“You tell me!” he shouted back. “Get on your radio and call him.”
“He’s in Pella, too afraid to come himself,” came the snarling reply.
“You’re guessing. You don’t have a radio. There are no ship people here.”
“Come and see for yourself. Or are you the same kind of coward as your brother?”
“I’m not the sort of fool to trust a Thracian dog,” Lípos shouted.
“Wait there, then,” came another voice with a strong Thracian accent.
* * *
A few minutes later a single man on a black stallion rode out the northwest gate and straight toward him. The horse was black as night, with a white flash over its left eye and white socks. It was also overfed and groomed. It had to be one of the holy herd, as the sanctuary of Sabazios maintained. Sabazios was, after all, often depicted as a rider on horseback. Besides, the rider was wearing the robes of a senior priest of Sabazios.
He rode all the way to Lípos, then said, “In the name of Sabazios, I guarantee your safety. Come and see the radio and the ship people who operate it.”
Lípos considered. He had grown up in politics and knew that the priests of the various gods lied as often as anyone else, but that they were careful about lying in the name of their gods. He also knew that his brother Cassander was afraid of the ship people. He looked the priest in the eye and couldn’t tell. “I will discuss it with my officers,” he said as haughtily as he could manage.
He jerked his horse’s head around and kicked it in the side. It tried to rear and he had to rein it hard to keep it under control. Then he rode back to his lines, followed by his bodyguards.
He couldn’t attack if the ship people had an operational radio. If they had an operational radio they probably had rockets. And who knew, maybe even the cannons that struck like lightning.
* * *
Mucapor, with effort, kept his face bland until he was halfway back to the walls. Then he couldn’t help it. He started laughing. He stayed on his horse, laughing hysterically all the way back into Seuthopolis.
“It went well then?” Dryas, captain of the city guard, asked from the gate house on the wall.
Getting himself under some control, Mucapor shouted back, “He’s going to consult with his staff! That buys us an hour at the least.” Mucapor looked at the sun in the southwest. “They won’t attack today.”
“That much is good,” Dryas said, not nearly as pleased as Mucapor.
Mucapor’s smile weakened in the face of Dryas’ obvious concern. “Surely Seuthes will be here by tomorrow.”
“Don’t depend on that, Eminence,” Dryas said. “The ship people and their guards made good time and a small group can always travel faster than a large one. I doubt King Seuthes’ army will make more than twenty-five miles a day, and they will average less.”
“That’s still only two more days.”
Dryas looked down at him and shook his head. Mucapor knew what Dry
as meant. They had discussed it in private, and it needed no airing in public. They had less than five hundred men at arms. And if Seuthopolis was crowded with refugees from the surrounding villages and vineyards, they were good for growing grapes, not for fighting wars.
He went to see the ship people.
* * *
Charles and Alice Blevins listened as Mucapor told Hristos what was coming. Then, as Histros, in a combination of broken English and Greek, told them what he’d said.
“It’s not that Cassander’s army will target you,” Histros finished. “But when an army takes a town, the troops are likely to get out of hand. Much better for all of us if they don’t attack. Is there anything you can suggest?”
Alice curled her straight graying hair around one finger as she thought. She wished she had her guitar. She always thought better with it in hand, but it was at home in Arizona, twenty-four hundred years away. She looked over at Charles.
“The only thing I can think of is the trick some rebel general pulled on McClellan in the Civil War,” said her husband. “He marched his troops around in a circle, hidden part of the time, so that it looked like he had a much larger army. McClellan believed it, and refused to attack. I don’t remember for sure, but I think that was when Lincoln fired off the telegraph message saying that if McClellan wasn’t going to use the army, he would like to borrow it.”
Alice laughed while Histros looked confused.
Then Charles got a funny look in his eyes as he looked at Alice. “The other thing I remember was the rebel officer was into amateur theatrics. Sounds right up your alley, Alice.” Then, as Histros was looking even more confused, he said, “When we met, Alice was the guitarist and lead singer for The Dulcets.” At the blank looks he added, “A band.” Then, “A group of musicians who play together.” Finally getting nods of understanding, he continued. “And every year she gets at least one part in some play or another at the community theater, when she’s not doing set dressing.” Then he had to explain that.
While he was explaining, Alice tried to think, but she drew a blank. It was Mucapor who gave them the idea.
“Can’t you make the rockets we have heard about?”
Now Alice had it, and so did Charles from the grin on his face. It took them an hour to explain and some of the papyrus that the temple had to make the drawings that the craftsmen would use to make and paint the wooden mockups of launchers and rockets.
Then, for much of the night, they helped as wood was cut on wood lathes and painted with charcoal and grapeseed-oil paint to make them look like iron. The question of how accurate they had to be came up. And the answer was, they weren’t sure. Who knew if there might be veterans in Lípos’ army who had seen Eumenes’ rockets and rocket launchers?
Even so, at the end of a night’s labor, they had a total of ten “rocket launchers” and fifteen “rockets.” Not enough for one salvo, even if they were real. Then it was the time for the McClellan trick. As each rocket was carried up to the roof of a building, it would be lowered back down to the street out of sight of Lípos and his men, then carried around the corner into view to be hauled up again.
Lípos’ army, outside the walls of Seuthopolis
November 20, 319 BCE
The sun was well up when Lípos mounted his horse, looked around at his companions, and led them to the gate in the northwest wall. They rode slowly, careful of their dignity, up the hill, through recently abandoned houses to the opening gate. They were met by the same priest, who was called Mucapor. Looking down the street, Lípos saw men with ropes lifting some sort of contraption onto the roof of a building. It looked a little like the frame for a ballista without the ballista, but that was all Lípos could tell. He pointed it out to his companions, and Mucapor rushed them on.
They rode all the way to the palace and were led to a room on the second floor where a table was set up with a strange device and a woman in front of it, and a man leaning over her, looking at the same part of the device. The device glowed with an image. They were introduced and an old man introduced himself as Hristos and claimed to be the translator for the ship people. They were dressed oddly enough, if richly. The woman wore blue pants that fit her body so tightly that for a moment Lípos thought she was painted like some northern barbarian. She was also wearing a shirt of many colors in a complex pattern and a brown leather vest and beads. She was wearing a silver crown with polished blue kálaïs and rings on several of her fingers. The style of it all was strange, but strangest of all were the large clear lenses she wore on her face.
The man was older, pudgy, with pants of the same sort as the woman but looser. His shirt was much the same as hers, but he wore pointed-toed riding boots and clearly he was of lesser rank. He wore no crown, but a felt hat of a strange shape.
Lípos couldn’t tell anything from their names. Alice and Charles might mean anything. He asked about sending a message to Cassander.
Hristos spoke to the ship people and they talked together, then spoke to Hristos again.
“Certainly,” Hristos said to Lípos. “If you will write it out or tell it to me, I can write it for you. They will send it to Pella. He is at Pella, isn’t he?”
Lípos cursed himself for a fool. He had a codebook back at camp, but he hadn’t brought it with him. Nor did he have a pre-written message ready. “I will send one to you by messenger.” Lípos looked back at the device and the image on it. The image was familiar somehow, but he couldn’t quite place it. He pointed. “What is that?”
All of a sudden there was discussion back and forth in that strange language of theirs. What appeared to be arguing. Then the woman said something final. The man shrugged. So did Hristos. Hristos turned back to him and said, “That is a tube for launching rockets.”
Now Lípos had it. The framework being lifted onto the roof that looked sort of like a stand for a ballista, but different. It was that. They had rockets.
He had to get out of here.
* * *
Lípos watched the side streets as they approached the gate. It was hard to tell from this angle but he was pretty sure that the rockets were in place on several roofs. They would still be well hidden by the northwest wall. Seuthopolis was on a hill with the Tonzor and Golyama Varovite rivers protecting three sides, with only the northwest wall without a river protecting it. He would be leading his army up that hill when he attacked. He wouldn’t even be able to see the launchers that killed his men. They were still lifting the rockets to the roofs as he rode out the gate. They must have been doing it all the time he was at the palace. They must have thousands of the cursed things.
Radio room, Royal Palace, Seuthopolis
Two hours later
Charles Blevins tightened the screw that connected the radio to the battery then flipped the switch to turn it on. It was already hooked up to the laptop. He waited as the tubes warmed up and the readouts reached their targets, then signaled Alice. She clicked the icon and hooked up the computer to the radio by way of the ethernet cable, then called up the radio program. She clicked an icon telling all the stations in range that they were online. They got back a link from Pella that was clear and had no need of any enhancements. They also got replies from around the Med, including the Reliance, which was just the other side of the Pillars of Hercules, but for those they needed a fair amount of bit checking and retransmittal of garbled code. It was handled by the computer and mostly transparent to the user. Thank God, Alice thought.
Alice pulled up the mail queue and sent off the messages to Cassander and Eumenes. Eumenes wouldn’t get his until Tacaran Bayot and Erica Mirzadeh set up their radio when the army made camp for the night.
CHAPTER 25
Spy vs. Spy
Royal Palace, Pella
November 20, 319 BCE
Malcolm Tanada handed the radio message to Cassander, who read the message, then looked at Malcolm with a furious expression on his face. “How did you find out?” he demanded.
“Find out what?” Malc
olm asked, shocked at Cassander’s tone.
“How did you find out that Lípos was going to Seuthopolis?”
“Lípos is in Seuthopolis?” Malcolm asked. “Then how did he send you a message?”
“The Abdera radio has been moved to Seuthopolis.” Cassander sat forward in his throne, his hands gripping the armrests like claws. “How did it get there?”
“Got me. It’s been offline the last few days. Technical stuff, not my area.” As soon as he said that, Malcolm realized that Rico must have known what was up or he would have been a lot more worried than he seemed to be.
Rico knew, and didn’t tell him. Rico’s girlfriend… Malcolm looked at Thessalonike, who sat in the throne near Cassander’s. Not on purpose, but as he put what was happening together, he realized that she must know what was going on and he sure as hell didn’t.
Cassander followed his glance, then looked at Thessalonike, who was trying to look as shocked as Malcolm actually was. She almost carried it off. Malcolm was sure that Rico would be fooled, but he wasn’t. And he was pretty sure that Cassander wasn’t either. For a frozen eternity of perhaps three seconds, everyone was staring at Thessalonike. Then Cassander turned back to Malcolm. “My apologies, Mr. Tanada. Would you please try to find out when the radio team left Abdera for Seuthopolis?”
“I can ask, Your Majesty, but I can’t make them answer unless they choose to.”
“I understand, and thank you. But do please ask,” Cassander said in a tone of voice so oily you could lube your car with it.
Cassander waved his hand, and Malcolm happily made his escape.
* * *
On Malcolm’s way back to the radio room, he stopped by police headquarters to talk to Daniel Lang.
“You didn’t know Lípos was headed for Seuthopolis?” Daniel asked, clearly surprised. “I had a drunk in here four days ago telling the sergeant that. He was pissed that they weren’t going to Abdera. I’m surprised that Eumenes figured out what was up in time to get reinforcements to Seuthopolis before Lípos got there.”