Council War - There Will Be Dragons - Council War - There will be Dragons Part 25
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Council War - There will be Dragons Part 25

"Ma'am I am not . . ."

"At liberty to disclose that information?"

"No, ma'am. But I have known Lord Talbot for most of my life."

"Well, I've never heard of you. And he's not called 'Lord Talbot.' "

The new recruit didn't seem to have much to say about that for a moment then he cleared his throat.

"He doesn't talk about me much, ma'am."

"Can't imagine why. Very well, if you exit to your left when we are done, at the end of the street is a quartering tent; they will tell you where you stay. You need a token," which she handed him, "for that.

You get three meals a day. You can check in at the quartering tent each morning for your meal chits.

That is all you get and what is served is what is served. We're short on food, shelter and everything else.

Take only what you can eat, eat everything that you take."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Later on you'll be told where to go for orientation." She looked up at him and shook her head with a smile. "Welcome to Raven's Mill."

"Thank you, ma'am," he said, scooping up the quartering token and his gear. "Somehow I'm starting to feel right at home. May the Bull God bless and keep you."

"And may the Warrior keep you, Mr. Rutherford," she said as he marched out of the tent.

Gunny did not turn towards the barracks, as he thought of them, but towards the house on the hill.

There was a group of guards on the road up, if you could call them guards. A bunch of reenactor punks with rusty halberds was another way to describe them.

He was polite, though, and determined from them that Edmund was not at the house but probably in town at the town hall.

The town hall was another new building with another set of useless guards. They were both leaning on their spears when he walked up and asked to speak to Mr. Talbot.

"He's busy," the guard on the left growled. "Too busy for any old reenactor to just barge in on him."

"I am not surprised that he is busy," Gunny said coldly. "What are your standing orders in the event that someone states that they are a close personal friend and have business with him?"

"What?" the guard on the right asked.

"Okay," Gunny growled as patiently as he possibly could. "What areany of your standing orders?"

"We just got told to keep people out that don't have business in here," the intellectual on the leftsaid uneasily. "I don't know about any standing orders."

"Right, get me the sergeant of the guard," Gunny snapped, losing patience.

"Who's that?"

"WHO'S THAT?" he shouted. "YOU WILL STAND AT ATTENTION WHEN YOU ADDRESS ME YOU PIMPLE ON A REAL GUARD'S ASS! OTHERWISE I'LL TAKE THAT.

PIG-STICKER AWAY FROM YOU AND SHOVE IT UP YOUR ASS SIDEWAYS! LOOK AT.

THIS THING!" he continued, snatching the spear out of the surprised guard's hands and submitting it to a minute inspection. "IS THIS DRY ROT THAT I SEE ON THIS SHAFT? THIS THING IS A PIECE OF CRAP EVEN WORSE THAN YOU." He broke the spear, which was in fact in lousy shape, across his knee and threw half of it on the ground, using the other half as a pointer to emphasize his words. "YOU TWO ARE, WITHOUT A DOUBT THE LOUSIEST EXAMPLE OF GUARDS IT HAS EVER BEEN MY DISPLEASURE TO SEE IN ALL MY BORN DAYS AND I HAVE SEEN.

PLENTY OF SHIT ASS GUARDS IN MYDAY !".

Edmund looked up from his paperwork and gave Myron a relieved glance.

"Ah, unless I'm much mistaken Gunny has arrived."

"I've been busy with other things," Edmund said with a shrug. The two guards had been relieved to go clean their weapons up, and to get their shattered nerves back together if truth be told, and Edmund had brought Gunny into his office, where he was explaining some of the facts of life. "I haven't been able to train the troops the way they need to be. Not the way that I know they should be and you know they should be. We're back in the bad and the scary, Miles."

"You're the king," Gunny growled. "That's not your job."

"I'm not the king," Edmund stated. "I have no plan to be the king. If nominated, I will not run, if elected I will not serve. Monarchy is a great place to play in but you wouldn't want to build a society on it. I'm going to turn this place into a constitutional democracy if it breaks my heart."

The NCO nodded and gestured out the window with his chin. "So what do you want me to do?"

"Train 'em."

"Who? How? What technique?"

"I was thinking pike."

"Legions."

"Gunny, we've had this argument before . . ."

"Pike's nothing but phalanx without the armor. Legion beat phalanx. They will if they have any control of the terrain at all. On perfectly flat, level ground, phalanxmight beat legion. But, there, you can beat phalanx with chariots. Legions can beat them both."

"Projectile weapons?" Edmund asked.

"Bow. Crossbow or self, take your pick. Lightweight spears for the legionnaires, what else. Find somebody else to train the bow-pussies. And they'd better be able to maneuver with us."

"I will. It will be longbow. There are trainers available and if they're not in town we'll find them."

"Legionnaires. Again. Can't wait." After a moment, though, he sighed tiredly.

"What?"

"I'm not sure it's possible," the NCO admitted. "There's a . . . belief system that these guys ain't got.

The Romans, the Norau Marines, the Britic Redcoats, all of them came from a society that understood the concept of discipline. These young pukes . . ."

"The Gaels made damned good redcoats," Edmund pointed out. "They built the Britic empire."

"The Gaels were more disciplined than they were made out to be," Gunny growled. "And they trusted the Gaels that fought by their side. They might be from a different clan, but they were allGaels .

You can'tteach something like that; it's learned with the mother's milk!""We've had this discussion before," Edmund added dryly. "The point is that ithas to be done."

"It's all in the heart, boss," Gunny said after a long pause. "It's all in the soul. We have to come up with something that will give these boys the intestinal fortitude to stick it out when the shit hits the fan.

Until the Fall, they never cared about nothing in life except nanadrugs, women and going to parties.

They'll need something to keep them going when everyone is dying around them. So that they will give their lives, carefully, precisely and creating the maximum possible honor guard, but so that they will not turn and run fromanything . That comes down to leadership, yeah, but it also comes down to tradition.

Keeping true to your comrades and true to your salt. And we ain't got no tradition.

"With a little polishing they'll make decent legionnaires on the surface. But the legions fought for the people and the Senate of Rome. And anything that we wave at them will have exactly the same gut message as saying that they're fighting for Rome. They need something, something . . . special. And special just ain't my meteor."

"I think I have an idea," Edmund said after a few moment's musing. "At least, something that will help. We're going to need good troops, Gunny. The best. Better than ever. This is going to be a long, big war. We need Rome built in a day."

"The difficult we do immediately . . ." Gunny said with a grimace.

"The impossible takes a little longer. I'll give you six months."

"Aye, aye," the NCO said, moving his shoulders as if settling a weight. "We'll just do that little thing, my lord."

The world seemed to swirl around her as Sheida studied the energy flow diagram. She had finally taken Edmund's advice and started thinking strategically, letting her sentient avatars drift out to handle the moment-to-moment crises that were cropping up everywhere.

But here was the crux of the Freedom Coalition's problem; there wasn't enough energy. Each side had about the same "base" energy due to their seizure of power plants. But the New Destiny Alliance was finding more from somewhere.

Since they hadn't been able to even determine where the "somewhere" was, thus making it impossible to attack, the Coalition had to find some way of either raising more power or hobbling their enemy's use. Ishtar and Ungphakorn were working on the issue of finding new sources, she and Aikawa were working on ways of hobbling the enemy. There didn't seem to be much chance directly. Paul was using the energy flows from his plants efficiently and they were mainly going to hold down the Coalition's power use. The "extra" seemed to be coming from nowhere and it was that he was using, abusing in her opinion, for all his other attacks and . . . uses.

More information had come, this time through refugees, about the changes that Paul was making and she had to admit that if those were his worldwide plans, this was the ultimate "just" war.

She considered the "improvements" that had been made and thought, not for the first time but perhaps for the first time in a concentrated fashion,how they had been made. The obvious answer was "Change protocols" but that begged the question, what wentinto a Change protocol.

Becoming a council member meant far more than just being able to split your personality and survive. The first requirement of a member is that they have some fundamentalunderstanding of the Net and she kicked herself for forgetting that simple piece of information residing entirely within herself. She had been studying the politics of the Council and information and power management for so long, she had forgotten that it all rested on the back of a series of programs and protocols. Change was the Net, upon a simple command "change thus" bringing up various resources and managing the Change. She called up a theoretical Change program similar to what Celine was apparently doing and then had the full process open up its detailed list of subprograms and requirements. Frankly, it was not as power intensive as she would have thought, especially if you drew spare power from the human body itself.

That program was buried in the mix, a medical program for reducing epileptic side effects from botched Change. There hadn't been such in a thousand years, but the program was still out there, hanging around.She studied the detail of the process for more than thirty minutes and then smiled, sending a mental message out to her allied council members and summoning avatars for a meeting.

"Ithink I have a way to put a stick in Paul's wheels," she said with a smile.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN.

Celine looked up in annoyance as Chansa entered her lab without permission.

"I'm working on a very delicate experiment," she said, irritably, her hands continuing to shape the form before her. "Couldn't this have waited?"

Chansa glanced at the humanoid figure in the hologram and grimaced; it was all hair and fangs with odd, floppy, patches of skin in places. "No, not if you want to be able to actuallymake a monster like that. All of the Change stations are reporting that the Changes have failed."

"What?" she asked, waving at the design program to halt. As she did it flickered and then died.

"That wasn't supposed to happen," she muttered, waving at the spot where the hologram had stood.

"Genie, reactivate design program."

"Unable to comply," the genie said, forming. "Program unavailable."

"What in the . . ."

"That's what's going on at the Change stations as well," Chansa said, smiling at her discomfiture.

"Genie, diagnostic, design program," she said then watched as the box unfolded. Four of the subroutines of the programmed were in red, indicating unavailability. As she watched, another turned red. "Genie, override lockouts."

"Authorization required."

"I'm a council member! I'm all the authorization you need!"

"Override, Celine Reinshafen. Set password. Minimum fifteen characters. Password required for each lockout. Authorization council members only unless further authorizations distributed."

"Genie, this is stupid. Full override."

"Unable to comply. Security implemented by five member Council vote."

"Damn them!" Celine shouted. "Those . . ."

"What's happening?" Chansa asked.

Paul looked thin and worn as the meeting members appeared, but for the first time in days his eyes were alive; the challenge presented seemed to have woken him up from whatever dark place his mind had been traveling.

"So the rebels are locking out subroutines," he mused. "Two can play at that game."

"They can't touch teleportation or communications," Celine said, fury in her voice. "But they're locking out everything else. And they can't lock out groups, they're having to go through routine after routine. But they're shutting down my research!"

"You can override," the Demon rumbled.

"Yes, but it's a pain. I have to . . . chant damned passwords over and over again!"

"Can we override the overrides?" Chansa asked.