There Will Be War Volume VIII, page 33
We don’t know who shot John David Wright, but Doc figures it was Jess himself, startled when the kid came out of nowhere without hailing Jess first.
We could probably prove it, if it’s true, but that would only get Jess hanged, and we need him and his farm. Besides, Jess was decent enough to report the body and make sure we’d bury it with proper respect. The poor kid is dead, and we can’t bring him back. Let it lay.
November 28
We all got together and ate as much as we’d put aside for the feast—it turned out to be a fairly good year. All in all, it was a pretty nice Thanksgiving… except the kid’s watch won’t show any numbers anymore, and I can’t make the thing work. I guess the battery or whatever must be dead. That was the best goddamn watch I ever had, even counting the old days. It’s a shame it gave out so soon.
Siege At Tarr-Hostigos, by Roland Green and John F. Carr
Editor’s Introduction
H. Beam Piper could easily be called the Robert Louis Stevenson of science fiction; his stories were strong and his narratives thought-provoking and spare. Piper’s classics—Space Viking, Cosmic Computer, Little Fuzzy, and Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen—still rank among the finest adventure SF novels ever written. John W. Campbell—the great golden-age editor of Astounding/Analog—said, “Space Viking itself is, I think, one of the classics—a yarn that will be cited, years hence, as one of the science fiction classics. It’s got solid philosophy for the mature thinker, and bang-bang-chop-’em-up action for the space pirate fans. As a truly good yarn should have.”
In the Complete Index to Astounding/Analog by Mike Ashley, Piper ranked third in overall cumulative Analytical Lab voting (a regular feature in Campbell’s Astounding/Analog where each month the readers voted for their favorite stories), finishing right behind number one vote getter Robert A. Heinlein and number two, C. L. Moore.
H. Beam Piper’s writing was probably the single greatest influence on my own career and that of my associate, John F. Carr. John is a recognized authority on the life and works of H. Beam Piper; he edited the Piper short story collections: Federation, Empire, Paratime, and The Worlds of H. Beam Piper. I myself was fortunate enough to help Beam work out a few knots on his History of the Future in the last decade of his life.
For these and other reasons, we were both invited to be co-Guests of Honor at the first Hostigos Con; dedicated to the memory and works of H. Beam Piper and put on by the Pennsylvania State College SF Society. This was more than just another convention. Penn State is only eight miles away from Tarr-Hostigos, the center of Piper’s Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen. We were both promised a guided tour of Hostigos (most of Centre and Lycoming counties) and Williamsport, Beam’s last place of residence.
A little background: Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen is one of the most beloved of alternate history yarns. It begins when a Pennsylvania State trooper, named Calvin Morrison, is picked up unwittingly by a passing Paratime conveyer and dropped off accidentally on an alternate time-line. Instead of Indians, Kalvan runs into Indo-Europeans who have migrated across the Aleutian Islands and settled into most of North America. They have developed a fifteenth-century late-Medieval society with both armor and gunpowder weapons.
Only in the Five Kingdoms the manufacture of gunpowder is a religious miracle zealously guarded by Styphon’s House, a nasty theocracy with delusions of grandeur. Kalvan arrives just as Styphon’s allies are about to attack the small princedom of Hostigos; Kalvan meets the Prince’s daughter, falls in love, and decides he has to do something to help these people. Then things begin to get really interesting…
Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen was a strong influence on my own Janissaries series and over the years I’ve reread it many times. The tour of Hostigos began on a lovely Friday morning and, as we traveled across some of America’s most beautiful landscape, it was obvious why Piper had centered his mythical kingdom in this part of Pennsylvania. We passed through Bellefonte (Hostigos Town) and then on to Hostigos Gap, which separates the Bald Eagle Mountains, and where the castle of Tarr-Hostigos rises to guard the pass.
It was easy to see where the castle sat; there were two large kettle-shaped mountains, joining at about 700 feet. The keep would have perched on the lower mountain, with the tower and outer walls atop the higher crown. The mountains were much higher and more massive than I’d ever imagined—or John and Roland, for that matter.
A few years earlier they had written Great Kings’ War, the authorized sequel to Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen. They had been working on the next book in the series and both of them were excited about finally seeing the area they had been writing about for so long. It was probably a good thing.
On Saturday night, Roland was scheduled to do a reading from the new book, Gunpowder God. Unfortunately, due to scheduling problems, Roland didn’t arrive until late Friday afternoon; thus missing the Hostigos tour. Roland read from a section of the book titled “Siege at Tarr-Hostigos.” After the reading I pointed out several factual errors in the description of Tarr-Hostigos and environs. They made the necessary corrections and I’m pleased to be able to offer you this story for your own enjoyment.
Siege at Tarr-Hostigos
Roland Green and John F. Carr
ONE
I
Paratime Police Chief Verkan Vall tried to sort his atypically jumbled thoughts as the transtemporal conveyor carried him toward Fourth Level Aryan-Transpacific, Kalvan Subsector. The civilized Second and Third Levels were behind him now. Once in a while he caught flickering glimpses of Fourth Level—buildings, airports, occasionally a raging battle.
Fourth Level was the high-probability one of the inhabited Paratime Levels. There the human First Colony had come to complete disaster, in the past fifty thousand years losing all knowledge of its Martian origins.
It was the most barbaric level, as well as the biggest. Its cultures ranged from idol worshippers to the technological sophistication and social backwardness of the Europo-American, Hispano-Columbian Subsector.
It was from one of these Europe-American lines that Corporal Calvin Morrison of the Pennsylvania State Police had accidentally traveled in a conveyor to Aryan-Transpacific, Styphon’s House Subsector. Thrust into a ruder and deadlier culture, Calvin (or Kalvan, as the inhabitants of that time-line called him) not only survived, he prospered—until just a few days ago. In less than four years he’d married a princess, founded an empire, broken Styphon’s House’s monopoly of gunpowder, and more than held his own against the worst that band of priestly tyrants could do.
No more. Styphon’s House assembled their Grand Host, and at the Battle of Ardros Field broke the outnumbered army of Hos-Hostigos.
Verkan had been tied to his desk on First Level at that time by piles of routine business and some non-routine schemes by his political enemies. To put it mildly, his conscience was nagging him that he hadn’t been there when his friend needed him. He refused to think about what the Bureau of Psychological Hygiene would say, if they discovered that the top Paracop was suffering from Outtime Identification Syndrome. He already had enough headaches for one day.
The biggest of those headaches was the Dhergabar University Study Team caught in the rout of the Hostigi. Like all outtime researchers, they worked under Paratime Police protection. That might not be enough, on the kind of Fourth Level time-line where civilians were likely to end as part of the body count when a victorious army swept through hostile territory. Too many of the University Team were still unaccounted for; every casualty among them would be a gift to the Opposition Party.
Kalvan would have to fight his own battles for a while, against even longer odds than before. He’d need skill as well as luck to save his own life and Queen Rylla’s, never mind refounding his empire.
Already the Grand Host’s cavalry scouts had raided almost to the outskirts of Hostigos Town. Its main body could hardly be more than a day behind. Kalvan’s father-in-law, Prince Ptosphes, might be able to hold Tarr-Hostigos for a few days. If the Grand Host had to stop and lay siege to the castle, Kalvan still might never rule a kingdom again. He and Rylla might at least escape westward, to sell the services of their army somewhere in the Middle Kingdoms, menaced by barbarians and now by the Mexicotl.
The conveyor dome shimmered into material existence. They had reached Kalvan’s Subsector. Verkan checked his personal equipment and headed for the hatch. Somehow four Paracops reached it before him, all with drawn Fourth Level pistols and palmed First Level sigma-ray needlers.
“Sorry, Chief,” one of them said. He didn’t sound sorry. Verkan looked behind and sighed. The other eight men of his personal guard had closed tightly around him from the rear. Swaddled in bodyguards like a baby in cloth, Verkan stepped out into a large storeroom. The rest of the conveyor-load of Paracops followed, lugging equipment or pushing lifter pallets.
From the outside, the Subsector’s conveyor-head was disguised as one of four large storehouses attached to the Royal Foundry of Hos-Hostigos. The room before them held a desk, some First Level monitoring equipment, racks of muskets, two field-gun carriages, and hundreds of sacks of oats and corn.
No good to anybody except maybe the Grand Host was Verkan’s thought as he strode across the room. Like the other Paracops, he held a flintlock pistol nearly two feet long, loaded and cocked. On his head he wore a high-combed morion helmet; his clothes were a sleeveless buff jack, dark blue breeches, a bright red sash, and thigh-high boots. Nobody from Kalvan’s Subsector would have thought him anything but a Hostigi light cavalry officer.
As he’d expected, the storehouse was empty of anything except mice and rats. He opened the keyed magnetic lock, stepped back, let the four point men go first, then followed at their hand signals of “All clear.”
The door was intact, as he had expected. Under local oak planking, it had a collapsed-nickel core. Nothing local could even dent that, not even a two-hundred-pound stone ball from a siege bombard.
Nothing else in sight had been as lucky. The main Foundry buildings had all burned; some had collapsed. Most of the outer buildings also showed battle scars, and bodies lay everywhere.
Smoke still rose from most of the buildings. That confirmed Verkan’s guess that the attack had come only hours before. The half-dozen survivors of the University Team who’d reached First Level’s Kalvan Subsector Depot had been incoherent with fright, except for Baltov Eldra, who was unconscious from a head wound.
“Too many tourists,” a Paracop said.
Verkan nodded. The University had insisted on doing their own investigation of Kalvan’s time-line. Short of imposing a quarantine, there’d been no way to stop them. For a moment Verkan wished himself back as Chief’s Special Assistant, where he could do the sensible thing without having a dozen political potentates baying at his door.
The Paracops spread out, leapfrogging from building to building, covering one another until they’d reached the edge of the Foundry on all sides. Then they posted sentries, sent a miniature spyball to hover a thousand feet up, and began the grisly task of recovering the bodies.
Verkan turned over the nearest civilian casualty with his sword. It was the Team’s expert on pre-industrial sociology, Professor Lathor Karv. He had a gaping hole in his forehead and several stab wounds in his torso, but no signs of torture.
First good news all day.
No signs of torture meant that none of Archpriest Roxthar’s “Holy” Investigators had ridden with the cavalry. Hypno-mech conditioning or not, it was asking a lot of anyone to resist the kind of torture the Investigators handed out. Not that they were as efficient as the priests of Shpeegar or some Europe-American secret police agencies, but they would improve with time and practice. The Grand Host’s victory had bought them the time, and Roxthar’s fanatical determination to find and extirpate heresy everywhere would guarantee the practice.
Of the fifty-odd bodies in the open, some were here-and-now Foundry workers, the proverbial innocent bystanders. About twenty were mercenaries of various persuasions or undercover Paracops, and the rest members of the University Team.
“Fiasco’’ is a mild term for this was Verkan’s thought. Nobody is going to be happy about it.
“Chief!” the head guard called. He ran up and lowered his voice. “We’ve found Investigator Ranthar Jard.”
Nobody, starting with me.
Ranthar Jard’s dead mouth was twisted into the parody of a smile, but it looked as if he’d fought as well as he’d lived. Five troopers in yellow Harphaxi sashes lay dead and bloody around him.
Verkan cursed out loud. There went an old friend and one of the few Paracops he could still trust absolutely.
The lifter teams started loading bodies for shipment back to First Level, while the rest began the house-to-house (or ruin-to-ruin) search. In spite of the danger from smoldering embers and falling beams, they turned up twelve more Paratimer bodies, three of them Paracops. Seven skeletons too badly burned for field identification made the last load before the conveyor headed back to First Level. Paratime Police Headquarters had a full medtech team on standby, for DNA identification.
Verkan spent most of the time before the conveyor’s return wandering aimlessly among the ruins. Every Paracop on this team knew when to steer clear of the Chief; Verkan knew he was being guarded but so tactfully he couldn’t complain.
One thought dominated Verkan’s mind. He’d thought he had a crisis, with an alliance of Opposition Party chiefs and outtime traders after his scalp over closing Fourth Level Europe-American. He had a case—too many nuclear and chemical weapons in the hands of national governments. However, he and Dalla would live through it even if he couldn’t persuade anyone else.
Kalvan and Rylla were running for their lives, which might not be very long if Ptosphes’s garrison of the lame and the halt couldn’t hold Tarr-Hostigos for at least a few days.
As the day wore on, Verkan began to hope that the Grand Host’s scouts would reappear. It was out of the question to seek the main body and tear it apart with First Level weapons. A few hundred dead cavalry troopers, however, could be labeled “non-contaminating self-defense” in an Incident Report. Their demise would make the Grand Host only a little less strong but a lot more cautious.
Or it might make people genuinely believe that demons fought for Kalvan, and create enthusiastic support for Roxthar’s fifty-times-cursed Investigation! That was the problem with contamination—you couldn’t control how people would interpret your intervention. Good Paracops always remembered that.
Verkan Vall gritted his teeth and decided to be a good Paracop again. He hoped his present set of teeth would survive the experience—
“Vall?”
He started to glare at the interruption, then recognized Kostran Garth, his wife Dalla’s brother-in-law, and another of that handful of good friends and reliable Paracops. The conveyor must have returned with the lab test results—although from the look on Kostran’s face, he was not the bearer of good news.
“I’m sorry, if that helps any,” Kostran said.
“Some. Better security would have helped more. Dralm-dammit, we could have had it!”
“By Xipph’s mandibles, Chief, you did all you could!” He added several more curses from a particularly vile Second Level time-line where spiders and beetles were sacred fetishes. “They sabotaged everything you and Ranthar tried to do.”
“They paid for it, too. But keeping that from happening was ultimately the Chiefs responsibility. My responsibility.” Verkan managed a wry grin. “Wasn’t it Kalvan’s own—‘Great King Truman’—who said, ‘The buck stops here’?”
The grin faded, but Verkan managed not to sigh. “All right. Who did we find?”
“Five locals, Gorath Tran, and Sankar Trav, the Team medic.”
“That leaves Danar Sirna and Aranth Sain unaccounted for.” The two Paracops’ eyes met. If the two missing people were prisoners, they were probably on their way into the hands of the Investigation. Then they’d soon wish they had burned to death instead.
“Danar Sirna. Doctoral candidate in history?”
Kostran nodded. “Right. Tall woman, auburn hair. Great figure too.”
“Let’s wish her better luck in her next incarnation. The soldiers here-and-now have rough-and-ready notions about dealing with enemy civilian women. What about Aranth Sain?”
“He’s ex-Strike Force, one of the few Team people with survival skills. He was their expert on pre-industrial military science.” Kostran hesitated. “I wonder if he was forced to try putting some of his theories into practice?”
“You mean, take an unscheduled field sabbatical?”
“Exactly. His cover is an artillery officer from Hos-Agrys and you can bet he won’t break it by accident. If he catches Phidestros’s eye, he may even be safe from the Investigation!”
It rubbed Verkan the wrong way, to possibly owe anything to the man principally responsible for Kalvan’s defeat. Still, if under the circumstances Aranth had succumbed to the temptation that most outtime workers felt every so often—Verkan could only wish him luck.
Now, to interrogate the surviving Team members thoroughly.
Verkan wasn’t looking forward to the job, but maybe it would turn up some clues. He decided to start with Baltov Eldra, if she was ready; she had the reputation of both a cool head and a keen talent for observation.
II
The climb to the gun platform on top of the north tower of Tarr-Hostigos left Prince Ptosphes unpleasantly short of breath. Old age had been pursuing him for a long time. Now it had finally caught him. Under other circumstances he would have been angry at the prospect of not seeing his grandchildren grow up, but that matter had been taken care of four days ago at Ardros Field.
