The Caravan was one hell of a ss. Polyclitus got as many of the wagons as could easily move off the road and into a camp. Stretchers were made and the wounded were collected and laid out in neat rows. So were the dead.
No official census of the wagon train existed. The Nimu company counted the wagons, and took no responsibility for the lives in those wagons. Mazelton had privately put the population of the caravan at between one thousand two hundred and one thousand six hundred. Attrition had taken so fifty people since the start of the journey, which was considered a bit better than average, but everyone knew the mortality curve would only get steeper the further west they went.
So one hundred and twenty souls returned to the earth before the guns went quiet. Another hundred were wounded, the huge tal slugs leaving shocking wounds. Mazelton picked one up off the ground. The slug was a coarse cylinder of steel, about as long and as wide around as the last two knuckles of his pinky finger. No propellants, no real deformation, no concession made to aerodynamics. Just a chunk of tal that tore people apart. The technology rang a bell, but he couldn’t really place it. Not from this epoch. He pocketed it, and went back to cleaning up the battlefield. Not traditionally the Polisher’s job, but he got the distinct impression that if he did try and do his traditional job, he would be killed on the spot.
He stayed far, far away from the wounded and dead.
The screaming of the auroch was terrible. The animals had no understanding of what had happened, or why. They just hurt. The screams sawed into his ears and tore things inside Mazelton. He could rember how the heart tastes, the feeling of trying to saw through the arteries and veins, his hands slipping and fumbling with numb horror. He didn’t want to be the one to kill the Aurochs. Not again.
Mazelton didn’t throw up. Or look up. He just kept his eyes on the ground, picking up the spilled boxes of food and beans and seeds. Picking up the detritus of a hard life to co. An aspirational hard life. Hah. Work hard and stake your life for twenty years and you too can be a subsistence farr in the ass end of nowhere, a spike for the flag in the map planted by the Collective. Living the dream.
The screaming didn’t stop. The teamsters had their hands full with the living aurochs, who were not taking the screaming calmly. Mazelton went and found Polyclitus, who was frowning mightily as he tried to keep his people together.
“Polyclitus. The wounded Aurochs. I’m sure so can be saved, but the others. I can bring them peace.” Mazelton ground out the words. The screaming was paralyzing, awful. He just wanted to run away. He wanted the screaming to stop. He had to make it stop.
Polyclitus jerked to a stop, and swung to face Mazelton. He gave him a long stare.
“It’s an ugly job, Mazelton, and not in your contract. You work with livestock, you get pretty used to putting down sick animals. Nobody likes it, but it is just… part of our duty to them. You don’t have to carry that weight. Though I might ask you to harvest their cores.”
“I’m already carrying the weight.”
Polyclitus gave him another long stare. The weathered stump of a man kept his face empty, but Mazelton had been a Hurricane Lily. He could read him like a core- with his eyes closed. You don’t know what to make of . You are scared, not of , but for the caravan. This is sothing new, and you can only rely on what you know. You know everybody needs a job right now, sothing to focus on, instead of the horror of what just happened. Putting down the Aurochs is an awful job, and you would rather soone you don’t really care about do it instead of you or your teamsters.
And sure enough-
“Duane. Take Mazelton around. Check the wounded Auroch. Any that can’t be saved, let him put them down.”
Duane looked stricken, then nodded. He offered Mazelton a mallet from the back of a wagon. Mazelton just shook his head and pulled out a small box.
“It will be instant and painless. I can promise that.”
They went from animal to animal. The process was usually fast- an auroch with its leg near twisted off was beyond saving, as was one with a dinner bowl sized hole in it’s ribs. It was astonishing how many of the auroch had been shot by the emigrants in the chaos of the battle.
“I an, there was only one target, and it wasn’t like it was in the middle of the caravan. Why? Just why?”
Mazelton knew he was talking to distract himself and Duane. Duane had the unfortunate job of trying to steady the auroch so Mazelton could make the kill clean. The steadier the head, the faster they went down. Not a nice job.
“Fear.”
“Yeah. Fear.”
Mazelton lined up his little box on the auroch’s forehead. He ntally drew an x from the left eye to the right ear, right eye to the left ear and put the box at the intersection, angled down. Then triggered the core inside. It wasn’t a weapon, exactly. Sotis you just needed a controllable, focused burst of heat, and the box with it’s barely polished core let you do that. The auroch’s eyes went glassy, and three thousand pounds of pain and fear went away. Only at was left behind. And the core. The butchery, if there was any, would co later.
“You ever seen anything like that?” Mazelton asked, as they walked to the next victim. Duane just shook his head.
“ either. I can’t place it. Most of the stuff we have co across has been Swabian, which makes sense as they are all empires from this epoch. But Swabia never developed that way. What was the motto… it was in the book of Leibowitz?”
Duane shrugged and gave Mazelton a look.
“Right, right. Oh! “The flesh inspires, the machine defiles.” That was it. Yeah, they were big into fleshcrafting, communications, roads, all that. Their weapon systems were mostly muscle powered until they developed heat weapons. Which they figured out way ahead of most, this epoch. Great Clans not withstanding.”
They got to the next auroch, and Duane shook his head. There was a deep, angry gash on the side of the auroch, at one point Mazelton could probably have sunk his finger to the second knuckle into the weeping red flesh of the shoulder. But that was the extent of it. Nothing crucial was damaged. A teamster had already packed the wound with ointnt and boiled cotton rag. On to the next victim.
“So it’s more than an epoch old. But why is it still active, and what the fuck was it doing hiding in a tree? How was the tree alive with sothing that big inside of it?!”
Duane looked irritated.
“Fake tree. Cores.”
Mazelton stopped a second.
“Ok, fake tree makes the most sense. It raises so worrying “Why?” and “How?” questions, but it makes sense. Cores… um. I will need to check the creature. Cores can last a long, long ti, but they only put out useful amounts of power for a pretty short ti, as these things go. Like, a few decades or centuries, not more than that. Ten thousand years for a really big chunk of sothing really, really, insanely, hot. Unless they get a hell of a lot of very advanced processing. And even then…”
Mazelton shook his head. He tried to focus on the job without thinking about the job. It was a mixed success.
The Leoinida veterans had set guards over the remains of the creature. The guards were not too welcoming of Mazelton, and especially not welcoming of the notion of him poking at the creature to see what made it tick. Mazelton just shook his head and ignored whatever they were saying. He didn't speak their language. Besides, the thing was radiating heat like crazy. Mazelton set up with a few heat sponges around him. A wasteful child is a beaten child, and all that.
The creature had a crude exterior. The three segnts looked superficially similar, though only the mid section seed to have the… weapons. For the life of him he couldn’t place them. They looked like so kind of slug thrower, but they didn’t sll of burnt powder. They didn’t sll of much of anything, or nothing he could recognize. Sort of a… spiky sort of sll? Nothing natural. He didn’t feel any heat coming off of them, but the hairs on the back of his hand rose when he reached towards them. Sothing about the device, and particularly the little cylinders sticking out of the bottom… like hearing a hiss even if you don’t see anything near you.
He turned away from the weapons and started examining the creature’s hide. Sheets of tal, apparently, protecting the insides like a crab. So welds, but most of the pieces were on the large side and held together with screws or bolts. It wasn’t too hard to take the thing apart.
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The insides were beyond Mazelton. It was a slave machine, as pretty much everyone had guessed. All wires and etched glass boards. So of the boards were even made from manufactured diamonds, if he rembered correctly. All riddled with poison and super-fine bits of wire. And… stuff. He was stuck at stuff. Little tubes the size of tiny beads held in place on green glass boards with bright copper wire for… so reason. Because it was stuff and stuff did the thing. Probably. Yeah, on to the power system.
Father Sun, did anyone really understand that stuff? Mazelton shook his head. Most of the really thick wires were sheathed in so sort of polyr. No idea what it was, but they all ultimately lead back to a big black box in the middle of each segnt. The segnt with the weapon had the biggest black box, so he started with that. He reached over to lift the latch, when he could feel his father smacking his ear and screaming at him for being a moron.
Mazelton stacked his sponges in a line in front of him, and made a hundred centiter dirt wall behind them. The guards were looking very puzzled and worried, but clearly decided that standing further away was more important than answers. Smart guards.
He rigged the latch with a bit of string attached to a long stick. He got behind his little barricade, and yanked the box open. A wave of heat slamd out, but it wasn’t too bad. Manageable, for a polisher. He stood up and walked over towards the guards.
“Good news and bad news. Good news is that it is pretty certainly dead. Bad news is that it is radiating a ton of heat. I am going to use…” looking around “Sticks as markers.” He jamd a stick into the ground. “It might help if you tie a bit of cloth or sothing around it. Just… keep back of the sticks and you should be fine. I’m setting up sponges and will make it safe, but it’s not safe for now. Understood?”
They boggled at him.
Right. Maybe they didn’t speak Swabian. Speak loudly and slowly? Nah- pictures. Pictures are the answer here. Ah right, it’s grass under us. Hard to draw on grass. Fuck it. If they die, they die.
He jabbed more sticks into the ground a few paces apart, making a little half circle. If the guards got too close, he would just shout “NO!” and point to the far side of the sticks. It worked.
The case was a load of wires holding a can with big, milled tal parts attached to it. Clearly the big milled tal parts were converting the heat into sothing else, sothing that could drive the slave machine. Oh hell, what was it called again? Almost every epoch used it at so point. Probably people sowhere in this epoch using it right now.
Electricity! That’s what it was. So things didn’t work well if you tried to run them off of pure heat and there was no good way to make them work with core carvings, so you found so way to generate electricity. Which can do other stuff, apparently. You can make it with cores, sohow, and with the sun? No, that didn’t sound right. Waves?
Point was that this thing was made to generate electricity, the slave machine ran on electricty, and the thing was, from the look of it, broken but still trying to generate electricity. And electricity hates… sticks? It always wants to go through tal and water, and down through air. So for electricity things, you poke them with wood. Wait that was dumb. But he didn’t have a better idea. The wires were this thing’s blood vessels, the little tal can thing it’s heart. And he needed to sever those vessels. Which looked like they just plugged into the heart and weren’t welded in place or anything.
It took a depressing amount of flailing around with a stick, but he eventually got the wires out. Mazelton used the stick to knock the case closed, then removed it from the corpse of the creature. He then repeated the operation with the other electricity-heart things, and set the cases to one side. The heart boxes all had the sa things stamped on them- the black trifolium, so Ixtili looking letters that weren’t actually Ixtili, and an enormous feline head.
He recognized the feline head stamp. This was another ti where five plus expletives all tried to escape at once, resulting in obscene, heartfelt, gibberish. He went off to look for Polyclitus, leaving everything in place. Sponges very much included. He was going to spend a lot of ti tonight clearing out heat from his flesh. But his core would get a shiny new layer, so that was nice. Everything else, not so much.
Polyclitus had convened a cluster of the more influential mbers of the caravan. Not a full congress, everyone was still too busy for that, more a sort of informal eting to keep everyone in the loop. ndiluze was there, as was Humble Bissette and a dozen others. Mazelton hovered around the edges, until he was called in by Policlitus.
“Everyone is going to hear what you tell soon enough, so you might as well tell now. What did you find?”
“Like everyone figured, a slave machine. Dating it is troubleso, but that’s going to be its own separate point. The key things are this- it is now dead. I don’t think it is completely safe to handle, as there is still significant remnant heat trapped in the tal, and sothing about the weapons still worries , though I can’t explain why. Just… like a wasp that only looks dead but still has one sting left in it.”
Mazelton shook his head and got back to the point.
“Still worth salvaging with care, as I suspect a lot of it can be made to work again by an expert, and at the very least, the Sea People will want to take a look at it. A bigger power,” he looked over at ndiluze, “may want it to recover the technology. I don’t know, not my field. But I would bet that way.”
“What technology, exactly?” ndiluze asked.
“That leads back to the dating issue, and it’s a pretty tricky issue. Remnant tech, even if very well preserved, feels old. I have handled tech from previous epochs and they all look worn. Even the ones that lay untouched for tens of millennia still look worn down. This stuff doesn't, everything is crisp and sharp and clean. It looks a few years old. A decade, tops. The cores are very potent, the hottest I have ever seen for sothing that small. Call that Problem One. Problem two- it was hidden in a tree. Now, I figured that it was an artificial tree of so kind, because… what else would it be? But that was only partially true. So bright spark figured out how to make the tree grow on, and around, this thing’s storage chamber. So it was deliberately put there for long term cover. Why? I don’t know.”
By now people were muttering to each other, the mood nervous. Mazelton took a deep breath, having put off the really bad news.
“So, if this is a remnant tech, it is one that has either been almost impossibly well preserved where it was… unnoticed for thousands of years next to a major road... or it is a tech that has been rediscovered, and put there for reasons I don’t want to guess at. BUT. On the cases that the cores are stored in is the Tiger Head totem.”
This drew blank looks. Polyclitus coughed.
“For those of us without a big city education, what’s the significance of that?”
Mazelton looked around for a mont to gather himself.
“Ah. Tigers are mythical animals, two Smoots tall at the shoulder.” He waived his hand above his head.
“They could turn sort of invisible; more like they could camouflage themselves really well, and liked to eat humans. They would eat any animal, but humans were their favorite. The only person who could scare them off was the Two Faced Woman, a woman with two faces on either side of her head. The significance of all this is that in the last epoch, the last great power on this continent before the collapse was the Nacon civilization, who believed that their god, a giant warlike bird with a long, stabbing beak, transford into a Tiger when it was sleeping. So their two totems are a bird with knifelike wings and a long stabbing beak, and a Tiger.”
The group digested this for a mont.
“So it is remnant tech from the Nacon civilization? That is valuable.” ndiluze said with a frown.
“Right. Except it can’t be. The Nacon civilization went down in the last Grand Collapse, sa as everyone else. Usual story there- tech base was lost in a generation, two tops. Which ans that there has been approximately ten thousand years or so since the last people who knew how to make this stuff died, and this stuff looks to be no more than a decade old. Call it Problem Three.” Mazelton showed his teeth.
“I should add that the whole thing runs on electricity, and while I can’t identify what part of it is the brain, it is a slave machine so there is a dry brain in there sowhere. I don’t have the faintest idea how that works, and neither does anyone else in the Ma clan, or any of the great clans on this continent, so far as I know. The Swabians never figured it out either.”
“Could it be that soone rediscovered a cache of the technology, and started making new slave machines? Just… kept the totem?” Soone asked.
Mazelton nodded. “That is actually the most reasonable guess. They might even be using machines that are still designed to stamp that totem on various parts. It does happen sotis. Although that does raise a few more problems and so very unpleasant questions.”
“Like Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How?” ndiluze crossed his arms. “How did it die? I couldn’t see any bullet holes, but sothing killed it.”
Mazelton looked surprised at that, then laughed silently.
“Sorry, laughing at myself. Yes, no reason you would have seen what happened, as there was nothing to see or hear, really. Basically we got a bit lucky. These machines are not completely armored against heat, but they are all quite heat tolerant. The tal casing thoroughly blocks most kinds of heat, and the really high energy stuff is rare, even in late epoch civilizations. Just too dangerous and not nearly cost effective to issue on a wide scale.”
“So?”
“So I shot it with a high energy heat weapon. I aid at where I felt the heat coming from, as I figured that’s where it’s heart was. I missed, but I did manage to kill off so parts of its brain and heart. That started the fires which wrecked enough of the machine to basically kill it.” Mazelton spread his hands helplessly.
“So the guns did nothing?” ndiluze asked.
“Not nothing, it was moving worse before it died. Just… not enough. You would need better armor penetration for them to be useful. Sorry.”
“Can you make more heat weapons?”
“Not that can be used by non-polishers, no. Not being difficult, I just don’t know how. I can, however, make detectors that will pick up high levels of heat. This thing wasn’t hostile until we shot it and blew its cover. It was clearly ant to be there for a long, long ti. We haven’t seen any other signs of battle around here, at least. So… we send out people with detectors and we make sure we stay away from places with higher than usual heat levels.”
Mazelton shrugged. “Best I can do. Maybe soone else has a better idea?” Nobody did, but that didn't stop them from yelling.
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