It took several hours to get the charge and all the microphones in place. The microphones were hooked up by way of long wires, so they could be placed at a considerable distance. But as with the charge, Jeff wanted them put on rock whenever possible and there wasn’t a lot of exposed rock here. They were in what the government was calling a forest, but what Robert thought of as a jungle. There were vines everywhere and all manner of trees. Robert could barely see the sky, and the area was densely wooded, except right next to the oil seeps. Even there, there were dead trees. Apparently they were fairly recent seeps.
The howler monkeys were screaming in the trees and a bird about twice the size of a turkey was making its call in the distance.
Finally, they were ready, and Jeff waved. Sean lit the fuse on the charge and took off running. Everyone except Pelio ducked. Pelio was looking at them in confusion when the charge went off. He ducked then, went flat to the ground and when everyone got up, he started screaming something.
Robert didn’t have a clue what Pelio was screaming about, except he was gesturing for them to get gone and right now. He kept pointing to the south and waving for them to move. “Hey, Sean, Pelio seems upset and he knows the area. You think maybe we don’t have permission to be here?”
“Maybe not,” Sean said, holding up his crossbow, “but what are they going to do about it?”
Robert wasn’t so sure. “The kid seems really upset.”
“Don’t worry, kid,” Sean said. “As soon as we’ve gathered up Jeff’s gear, we’ll be out of here.”
They gathered up the gear and started back for the shore. Pelio was getting more and more agitated as they did, and it was rubbing off on Robert. He scanned the jungle as they went back and he saw Jeff, with the little dart sticking out of his neck. There was another sticking out of Jeff’s shirt and Robert couldn’t tell if it had broken the skin beneath the shirt. What he did know was that Pelio didn’t have a shirt on and he saw someone, a movement in the jungle, who seemed to be pointing at the kid. It was all happening way too fast for Robert to think about but he jumped forward to protect the kid. In the process, he knocked Pelio down and got hit with three of the darts.
Robert Waters felt a cramp in his neck and it spread. All his muscles cramped and it was agony. But it didn’t last long. His heart cramped too. It contracted and stayed contracted. He was dead in minutes.
The poison dart frog found on Trinidad was purple with blue spots, but it was about as poisonous as the golden poison frog of the Pacific coast in Central America. They were a different subspecies and in the original timeline would have been killed off in another three hundred years. Along with the Koksy, whose lifestyle didn’t endear them to their neighbors. The Koksy were actually a very pleasant people, open and gracious, but they didn’t count a male a full adult until he had killed another adult male. There was constant low-level fighting between the various Koksy villages, and they accepted the death of other tribe’s male members as proof of virility. The Pleck, a coastal fishing tribe, were often their victims, and the male Pleck stayed out of the wood. There was a prohibition among the Koksy against killing women, so the Pleck women often gathered plants and foods in the Koksy jungles, and even traded with them. Occasionally, one of the women was taken as a wife, but that was less common. The Koksy wanted to keep the trade open for the addition fish and turtles made to their diet.
The Koksy heard the bang of the charge used for the sonar, and came to investigate. They found the party, and the young Koksy in the hunting party simply couldn’t resist the opportunity. Six men in their forest. Pelio was of the Koksy, but not of their village and shouldn’t be here either.
They attacked in a group and got four of the men in the first salvo. Then they started arguing over who had killed who. Sean Little was hit by three darts, one in the backpack, one hung in the sleeve of his shirt, and one in the leg of his pants. That one actually nicked the skin, but most of the poison had been rubbed off by the camouflage fatigue pants that were something of a fashion statement for Sean. They were also very comfortable. And in this case, between the fabric wiping much of the poison from the dart and the bagginess of the pants slowing the dart so it nicked but barely penetrated the skin, Sean’s leg cramped, but the poison didn’t stop his heart or his breathing.
The others, except for the kid, were dead.
☆ ☆ ☆
Faskly, the leader of the hunting party, hadn’t taken part in the slaughter. He had already killed his man. In fact, he had killed several over the years, mostly in retaliatory raids on other Koksy villages. He knew about the big boat and had not wanted this fight.
Pelio was shouting that they would be sorry when the ship people came and killed their whole village. Tokis pulled out a stone knife to silence him, but Faskly shouted, “Stop! We need to know what they were doing on our land.”
Pelio shut up then, apparently realizing that once they found out what they needed to know from him, they wouldn’t need him anymore.
Faskly was mildly impressed by the fast-thinking youth. He looked around and cursed under his breath. This was supposed to be a training hunt, before they heard the bang. The boys were mostly too young to be going on raids. They had spoiled each other’s kills and probably none of the kills would be counted by the tribal elders, because how could they tell whose dart killed a stranger, when the stranger was hit by three darts.
☆ ☆ ☆
Another of the kids started to pull a knife and Faskly shouted at him to stop.
“But he’s still alive,” Topkady complained. “I—”
“You can be dead,” Faskly shouted and lifted his pipe almost to his lips. All the boys were staring at him now. This was a dangerous time for young men, after they stopped being children, but before they had killed their man. It wasn’t unheard of for elders to be killed by boys on a rampage. It meant that Faskly had to get control back, but he couldn’t push too hard before they got back to the village where the other elders would be able to support him. “You just settle down. We have to get all of them back to the village for the elders to question. And the elders haven’t decided that the new people are fair hunting yet.”
“They are in our jungle,” Topkady insisted.
“So they are. But this is the border lands. It’s possible that Pelio’s village has an agreement with them.”
☆ ☆ ☆
Sean was in agony. His right leg was curled up, his muscles were contracting like to break his bones, and he couldn’t move it at all. For that matter, his butt was contracted and his left leg was twitchy. His heart was stuttering and he wasn’t sure whether it was from the poison or the fear. It was hard to breathe, and this kid who couldn’t be more than fourteen grabbed him by the hair and jerked his head up like he was going to cut his throat. Then the old guy shouted and he got dropped again. Being very careful, with shaking hands, Sean checked himself for more darts and pulled two that didn’t reach him through the clothing. And suddenly he knew just how these people could be defeated. Their little darts were light. Very light. A bit of light cloth held away from the skin would be very effective armor.
It was strange, the stuff you thought about when you were scared out of your mind.
The older guy got two of the kids to carry Sean and another couple to guard Pelio. Sean’s first thought was that Pelio had led them into an ambush, but that didn’t fit with the way the other natives were acting.
The poison was still there and he was still feeling it, but he was better able to think now. He waited as they were dragged back through the jungle and to a small village.
☆ ☆ ☆
The village was a set of the roofed, but not sided, huts that were common on the island. All the villagers used them, even the traders like Lacula. Sean was dropped in a hut and left. He managed to pull out his phone and call the ship. He reported the attack and mentioned his thoughts on the defense against blow darts. Both Reliance and the Queen picked up the signal and the two directional reports gave a goo
d location for the village, 10 12' 18" N by 61 5' 47" W.
As Sean looked around, he started to realize some things. There were something like three women to every man, and while everyone was dressed in islander standard—a loincloth and not much else—these people also wore paint. The men wore it in jagged patterns with sharp points, the women wore theirs in curved lines that often emphasized breast and hip. They weren’t, to Sean’s modern western eyes, a particularly attractive people.
One of the older women came over and examined Sean, then she went out again and started giving orders. People ran off to obey her instructions, and a half hour or so later, she came back. Using a stone knife, she cut his leg just where the dart had cut him and pushed a paste into the wound. It hurt, but an hour after that the cramping started to ease a little.
President’s Office, Fort Plymouth
February 18
“We have to go get them,” Allen Wiley said, “and we are going to have to make an example.”
“If you had—” Captain Floden started, but Al cut him off.
“Captain, this is a New U.S. decision. And, to be frank, your presence in this meeting is strictly a courtesy.” Floden had made his lack of responsibility for the New U.S. quite clear, even while helping set up the colony. Al knew why that was. Floden didn’t want the Queen held responsible for any action the colony might make. But there was another side to that. If Floden didn’t have responsibility, he didn’t have authority either.
Floden shut up, and Al hoped he hadn’t soured relations between the colony and the ship too much.
“You do indeed have to go get them, and the example should be the eradication of the Koksy,” Roxane said. “And before you point out that I am here by courtesy, remember it’s probably going to be my Silver Shields who are going to be the ones who go get your Sean Little and the bodies of the rest of your survey party.”
Which nicely expressed Al’s biggest problem in administering the colony. He was the President of New America, as they’d decided to call their nation. “New United States” had been suggested also, and that had been Al’s own preference. But the objection had been raised that there was only one “state” to begin with so how could it be “united with itself”—and then some people started muttering that it was all a plot to let illegal aliens become citizens so they could set up new states of their own…
Al had dropped the issue, at that point. Not that he hadn’t been tempted to point out to the conspiracy-mongering cretins that of course they were going to have to accept immigrants because the breeding stock that had arrived on the ship was way too small, on average much too old—and the majority of the ones who were still young enough to have children weren’t U.S. citizens to begin with.
But Wiley was a firm adherent to the Biblical saws, among them Jesus’ advice in the Sermon on the Mount that sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. He’d fight the issue of who could and could not become a citizen at some point in the future. So, New America the new country became.
All twenty-five or so square miles of it. But there were other power groups that weren’t under his authority. The Queen of the Sea was owned by the crew now, and most of the passengers had sold their share in the ship in exchange for its aid in setting up the colony. The Reliance was owned jointly by the Queen of the Sea and the colony. Roxane was not a citizen of New America, but the recognized ambassador for the Empire of Alexander the Great, and her Silver Shields were an allied force. Not part of Al’s army. Al’s army was a hundred guys with crossbows and three breech-loading black powder cannons on the walls of Fort Plymouth. They could hold the fort against anything on the island, but to go out in the forest hunting native tribes, they were going to need the Silver Shields. And Roxane was going to want some concessions for that.
It took hours to work out, but the Silver Shields—in mosquito-netting armor—would be the striking force. The ship people had arrived at the end of the wet season, and no one had known what diseases the local mosquitoes might be carrying. One of the first things they did was produce a tight-weave net, or very loose-weave cheesecloth that was dyed black to put on windows and doors to keep the mosquitoes and other insects out while letting the breezes in. Everyone wanted it, and it was a lot easier to produce than either metal screens or glass windows. Now it was one of their local export products, along with the pottery and the steel.
Approaching Kaland Koksy Village, Trinidad
February 20
The Silver Shields were wearing the netting over their armor and the little sticks that held it out away from their skins, but they weren’t happy about it. What they were happy about were the crossbows. Each Silver Shield was equipped with a crossbow, and between the modified phalanx formation and the four ranks, they could fire volley after volley of crossbow bolts. It was a new technique, developed between Evgenij, Dag, and Carey Chilcote, a sixty-five-year-old man who had been playing war games and studying the history of warfare for the better part of forty years. He had read of Alexander and his hoplites, but also of Napoleon and his Imperial Guard. The two men worked out a formation that would allow the use of crossbows, but not seem too weird to the hoplites, who were used to fighting in a tight mass.
Carey pointed out that against something like the ship’s steam cannon or the fort’s cannon, the formation was mass suicide, but “against wild injuns with blowguns, it ought to work all right.”
Evgenij smiled at the memory of the conversation as they approached the clearing. Then the air was full of little darts, and Evgenij was a lot more happy about the netting than he had been a moment ago. A two-inch long bamboo needle with a feathery back got hung in the net just short of his cheek.
“Hold your line!” he shouted as an automatic reflex. It was probably unnecessary. All his men were veterans, but it was automatic to shout that. Besides, this was a new formation, even if they had practiced it. And they were in amongst trees, not out in the open as they would have been back in Europe. “Anyone see them?”
“I have some, Captain,” shouted one of the men. He pointed with his crossbow. Evgenij followed the gesture and saw a flash of red body paint disappear behind a tree.
☆ ☆ ☆
Faskly ducked behind the tree and cursed the day those boys were born. The darts had always worked in fighting the enemies they hunted. Those enemies wore almost no clothing. Even when Sean Little survived the darts, Faskly hadn’t thought about the connection. Now, though, he realized that it didn’t take much to stop a blow dart. He made Pelio explain how the crossbows worked and was impressed by the force, but he hadn’t thought about what that might mean. Now, in an instant of terror, it was all perfectly clear.
They were going to die. All of them. Because those idiot boys jumped in too fast.
He put a dart between his lips, put his pipe to his lips, and stepped out looking for a target. But all he saw was the strange nets. Then it was too late. Three quarrels ripped into his body—chest, belly, and thigh. There was no poison on the quarrels, but they didn’t need it. They ripped gaping holes in his body. The one in his chest opened a lung. The one in his belly ripped open his lower intestine in two places. The one in his thigh wouldn’t have been deadly, just debilitating. But that didn’t really matter.
The Silver Shields marched on, and the natives melted before them. Some standing and dying, most running into the jungle.
☆ ☆ ☆
They caught the villagers packing to leave, and the men folk ran off. Some of the women did too. Others, though, knelt on the ground and were left alone by the Shields. Mostly left alone…by Macedonian standards of “left alone.” And even that was fairly restrained. The Macedonians hadn’t lost anyone. Not one dead Macedonian, which was good luck as well as good planning. Even the net armor didn’t cover everything. All it would have taken was one dart getting through to kill a Silver Shield, and things might have gotten ugly. Or perhaps not. Dag Jakobsen was here. He hadn’t given any orders, just been with them, but he was their new command
er and they all knew the ship people had delicate sensibilities. And they respected those delicate sensibilities, because they went with hand grenades and handguns.
As it was, between Sean Little calling for calm and the easy acquiescence of the village women, a massacre didn’t happen. But all the women and children were collected up and brought back as spoils of war.
Which led to a conflict with the New American government, as said government didn’t allow the taking of slaves.
Evgenij and the rest of the Shields were expecting it, knowing the attitudes of the ship people. That attitude had lost them their slaves. And they were expecting to lose these slaves too. But they weren’t going to give them up without compensation. Roxane was actively planning for it. The prisoners would not be slaves, but concubines. When that didn’t work, she would pay the Shields a bounty. Not buy the prisoners. Pay a bounty for prisoners, and get the government of New America to reimburse her for the bounty. Then let the New U.S. figure out what to do with them.
Dag didn’t exactly sympathize with the Silver Shields’ viewpoint, but he did understand it. This had been part of their pay in all the years that they had served with King Philip II and Alexander the Great. Now their new commanders were denying it to them, and they were giving it up. Just not without compensation.
Wiley wasn’t happy with that, but Roxane—and to an extent, Dag—were finding it easy to live with his displeasure.
There was no official end to the Koksy war, but within days of the fight, word was all over the island. Over the next couple of weeks, they learned that the men of that village had not fared well. They were mostly killed by other Koksy fighters and the consensus among the Koksy was that fighting the ship people was not a good idea.
In fact, a negotiating party from Pelio’s village showed up to work out drilling rights in their newly acquired hunting ground. In exchange for several steel knives and certain other goods, ship people and workers of the oil company would be considered off limits. They would be expected to wear a symbol, a cloth badge on their hats. The badge was a black oil rig on a white field.