Depression by cmsix

Chapter 39

Jaycee would have made a lousy General in real life. She did too much of the work herself. For the next six days she trained, taught, shouted, and bullied her troops toward the modern day ways of killing from a distance.

It was useless trying to convince her that she was taking too much on herself. When I broached the subject, she let me know how the cow ate the cabbage.

"Real generals tell colonels and majors to have captains and lieutenants make sergeants do all the damned training. I don't have any colonels or majors to boss around. Shit, I don't even have any sergeants. Nobody here and now knows one fucking thing about our weapons, how to use them, or what kind of tactics will work.

"You know more about it than they can, even if you got all your information from John Wayne movies. These men don't know anything about small-unit tactics; they don't have small-units. They're used to lining their armies up facing each other and slugging it out with glorified pointed sticks.

"We just have to make do until I get someone trained to do something, hell, anything. It sucks, but that's the way it is and the way it's gonna be until I get at least a few of them educated," she said.

And that's just the way it was. She did all the training she could in the time she had available.

She wasn't much of an archer herself, but she found a couple that were pretty good with their own weapons and set them to figuring out how to deal death with the new models that we had. That little trick was easy to say and turned out to be hell to accomplish.

Mastering a bow and then changing to a different type is a lot more complicated than it seems, especially since the bows we had were so different. The difficulty wasn't caused by the modern mechanism; it was mainly that the arrow's trajectories were so completely different.

In our original timeline, using a bow had become a leisure sport and all types of sights and gadgets were available to help. That kind of folderol couldn't be had in our here and now, and wouldn't have been practical for a fighting weapon anyway.

Archers of this time were able to hit where they aimed using skill and familiarity they'd developed over years of practice. Asking them to switch to a bow that was so much more powerful and had such a significantly flatter trajectory caused them grief. As it stood right now, we did have archers, and they were using the modern compound bows, but they were well behind the curve with their accuracy. It would come, but it would take a lot of time.

Damien and Percy received their own tuneup, in the hope they could train a few hundred men with the alien improved M1s. Jaycee took over a group of a few more than a hundred to get them proficient with the Barretts.

It is a hell of a lot easier to get a rifleman accustomed to looking through a scope or across a set of iron sights to aim than it is to switch weapons for archers and fair progress was made in this direction. We didn't manufacture experts overnight but the riflemen were able to manage effectiveness much more easily.

Somehow Jaycee also found time to unlimber one of the wide, mortar equipped, Bradleys. She parked it just outside the main gate and spent a whole afternoon with practice rounds, getting herself familiar with the range and coordinating the use of the small remote control observer helicopters with the firing station in the Bradley.

In her spare time she kept up with what was going on between where we were and Paris. The aerial scouting had let us know that someone there must be really pissed off at us.

We were watching when the naked men reached the city and they'd been hustled off to visit the King, or his Regent, or someone; hustled off quickly too. Apparently the disappearances of the residences that were now with us had been noticed.

Two days after the nude ones showed up, a small army headed our way. I don't guess you could really call it an army though. There were only about fifteen hundred men.

They had around five hundred mounted knights and probably the same number of mounted archers. Most of the others were foot soldiers. About three quarters of those were armed with pikes. I don't know how they thought they'd use pikes against our walls. Maybe they thought we'd be stupid enough to come out to fight them.

I was more than a little surprised that there only seemed to be a very few men armed with firearms. I knew that they couldn't have anything that would be significant against us, but I knew for certain that they should have some type. Maybe we weren't important enough to rate wasting lead and powder on.

Thinking about it, I knew they must not have been planning on meeting real resistance. Since I now had the combined troops of Pierre, Jacques, and Searlus I actually had a larger force than the one coming toward me. They were probably just dropping by to "show the flag," even if they didn't call it that yet. Fair was fair though and I was going to show them a little something too.

We'd just finished a big breakfast and moved to my study for a few gallons of coffee. Jaycee had made sure that Geron was present. He seemed nervous about it and I wondered why. Maybe he didn't want to be put on the spot. He tried to start in with news of the upcoming difficulties right away, but Jaycee asked Fawne to translate for her and Fawne agreed.

"Geron, cut out that babbling," Jaycee said, and Fawne laughed instead of translating, finally she got it done.

"We are going to have our coffee and that dirty old man," she said, pointing at me, "is going to foul the air with one of those cigars. After he's done we'll go take a look at what's coming.

Geron got quiet after that, and they even talked him into coffee and a few pastries while I did my best to look like a chimney.

Finally it was time to take a look at our approaching guests.

In the information center Jaycee brought up the video. She switched views until we had one from her closest observer. The mini-army was coming right down the road as if nothing in the world could bother them.

Hell, they were on a mission for their king, in the middle of his country, I guess they had a right to assume that no one would give them any shit. That's one of the troubles with assumptions though; sometimes you assume the wrong thing.

Jaycee jockeyed her view from the leaders all the way to the end of the line. Thankfully their band of camp followers had already fallen far behind. She intended to start her trouble at the rear and then work her way toward the front, and we'd worried about hurting non-combatants.

"They must have moved out soon after first light. They aren't more than a couple miles from here," Jaycee said, then she picked up a handset from her control panel and started talking to someone.

It was Percy on the other end; he'd left early too. He and Damien had taken their newly trained riflemen out to seal the back door. Normally five hundred men would be hard pressed to contain fifteen hundred. Of course, normally the five hundred men wouldn't be armed with semi-automatic weapons. I didn't think they would have any real trouble.

"Shit," Jaycee said, after a few minutes. "I need to get my ass down to the Bradley. They'll be here before long. Cécile, do you think you can keep the birds flying?"

She had been trying to train Cécile to fly the observation helicopters in her spare time, and apparently Cécile had caught on fast.

"I can do it now, I'm sure."

They handed off and Jaycee left. She wasn't gone ten seconds before a window popped onto the screen that showed a view of the Bradley parked outside. It seemed that Jaycee was doing a whale of a job all around with her training.

"We should be able to see her get in," Cécile said, laughing.

This whole scene was a little surreal. We had basically a front row seat for the carnage that was about to come. It was a little like watching a train wreck, as they say. We seemed almost compelled to stare at the screen.

Sure enough we got to watch Jaycee enter the Bradley and then we could see her tending to the mortar. Another window on the screen showed approximately what she could see coming down the dirt path. Cécile even zoomed to show us close-ups of the leading men. They seemed very confident.

Jaycee hadn't planned on letting them send out anyone to parley this time. When they got into range she was going to cut loose on their noble French asses.

Her plan called for about a dozen flashbangs behind the troops and in front of the followers. If they split up like she wanted them too, Percy, Damien, and the riflemen would corral the camp followers and serve as a plug in the stopper in case any of the actual troops tried to retreat.

Normally, no battle plan survives contact with the enemy. Jaycee must be an excellent planner. When the time came she fired off the flashbangs and all hell broke loose, but it did go according to plan, sorta.

The camp followers stopped in their tracks with the first explosion and then turned around and headed the way they'd come. Percy and Damien's men appeared as if from out of the ground and got them under control within minutes.

Meanwhile, Jaycee kept up the noise for twelve rounds. The main body tried to stop once, but when they did, the next round fell very close to the end of the line, and it started moving again at once. Even normal soldiers can tell when the explosions are coming closer. The foot soldiers forced the mounted men to keep moving toward our gate.

After the rounds stopped falling Jaycee gave them some time to get organized again. The leaders were turned facing their troops and even though we couldn't hear what they were saying it was obvious that a lot of cursing was going on in French.

After letting them get really into the yelling and screaming, Jaycee signaled a group of the ten best shots she'd been able to train. All of her snipers in training were at the top of the wall and each was using one of the firing positions in the crenels, but only the ten best were supposed to open the ball.

I already knew that they had orders to start with the highest ranking men and work their way down until someone offered surrender or the men became so disorganized that the rout was on. Jaycee was waiting in the Bradley with fragmentation rounds ready. If the riflemen couldn't encourage surrender, she could, at least for the few that would remain after she got to a stopping point.

The French leaders seemed about to get things organized again when Jaycee gave the signal for her marksmen to start firing. I know they had planned it that way, but it still seemed like luck when the top man fell to the first shot.

Now, at last, the plan collapsed, kinda.

Men with the fanciest clothes and armor started dropping off their horses. Of course they could hear the Barretts firing but it had to be one hell of a surprise to find out that they could hit accurately from nearly five hundred yards. Probably fifteen or twenty of the highest-ranking men were down before the others realized that no matter how far from the firing they were, it wasn't far enough.

In my infinite wisdom, I had thought they would flee at once. Jaycee had even agreed that they might. They didn't do any such thing.

Apparently they all were smart enough to figure out that the funny looking wagon, the Bradley, was producing the explosions that had caused the trouble to start, and I'm sure they thought it was easy meat because it couldn't leave. How could it possibly move since there was no team of horses to pull it anywhere?

Even though they'd seemed disorganized and near panic, the falling leaders galvanized the men of lower rank. Faster than I'd have thought possible they formed up, as best they could under the circumstances, and the mounted knights charged, with the mounted archers hot on their heels, intending to get close enough to do what archers were supposed to do.

The drawback to using a mortar is that you are necessarily exposed when firing it. Being a lot smarter than your average general, Jaycee abandoned her post, dropped into the Bradley, and closed the hatch.

Even though they were now galloping their mounts, some of the knights must have noticed Jaycee's movement. No doubt they thought they had their tormentor dead to rights, and about fifty of them changed direction slightly - heading straight for the Bradley.

Meanwhile, all the rifles on the walls opened up, but by now the accuracy of the fire was greatly reduced, and I do mean greatly. It's not that hard to teach a man to fire a scoped rifle at a stationary target. Especially when you know ahead of time the approximate range to target and can have the sights adjusted for that range.

It is a hell of a lot harder to hit a fast moving target with the range constantly decreasing. Unfortunately there hadn't been time to train the new sharpshooters in all the fine points. By now, if they hit anything it was usually the ground.

I was about to panic. In my mind's eye I could see them surrounding the Bradley and building a fire around it to roast Jaycee out. Thankfully it must have occurred to her that things might not go as I'd expected.

I saw black smoke belch from the Bradley's exhaust and realized that the engine had just started. I expected it to leave the scene rapidly and I was all for that action.

Wrong again. I don't know exactly why the engine was started but it wasn't to allow them to run away. The band of knights heading for it suddenly started being ripped off their mounts, at best, and having their mounts shredded under them at worst, by the fifty-caliber machine gun mount. The rounds even had some tracers mixed in and we could see exactly where they were going. That bunch was a mass of screaming men and horses after two medium-length bursts.

The main body was still charging toward the closed gate for some reason of their own, and since the immediate threat of the group approaching her had been dealt with, Jaycee showed me why she'd started the engine. The Bradley pivoted on a track and faced the oncoming main body's flank at a shallow angle, and the burst this time was considerably longer.

The result was much the same, though on a larger scale. Saddles were emptied, horses were shot out from under riders, and since she started near the head of the line, the ones that fell were soon overrun by those coming behind. After four long bursts there were less than a hundred men still mounted and the fight was finally out of them.

The archers had pulled up probably a hundred and fifty yards back and now arrows started raining onto the Bradley. They were no threat, but I guess Jaycee decided it was the principle of the thing that mattered. The Bradley pivoted back and she cut loose on the archers.

Smarter than the average knight, or knowing what had happened before, the archers didn't take very long at all to stop firing and start retreating, as in hauling their asses as fast as their mounts could carry them. They abused the horses so that they passed the pikemen who were no longer approaching but using common sense and making their own retreat.

It seemed fitting somehow that the archers were the first to come into range of Percy, Damien, and the five hundred riflemen they had with them. These men had spread out a few of their number to move the camp followers farther back and the remainder had gone to ground for less exposure and the more stable prone firing position.

When the retreating archers came as close as Percy or Damien wanted them, probably a hundred and fifty yards, the riflemen opened up. Then the archers went down. Jaycee had thinned their ranks to about half with her antics and after three or four shots from each of the five hundred M1s the archers were almost all down.

The pikemen had been left almost completely out of all the fun and glory. Doubtless more than a few of them were glad of it. After the archers ran past them and then started dropping in wholesale lots the pikemen had stopped. Apparently someone in charge had stumbled onto a lucid thought.

Meanwhile, Jaycee and the Bradley had not been idle. Her shooting was pretty much over when the archers ran off, but she hadn't let that stop her. The Bradley had taken off after them but slowly. I knew it was capable of outracing a horse easily but that wasn't what she did. She seemed to be following at a respectable distance as if to keep a good eye on things.

The pikemen had been watching the archers meet their fate and weren't paying any attention to the wagon that had no horses. Someone must have heard it approaching after the rifle fire died out. They started turning around to face it and dammed if they didn't form up and lower their pikes to start advancing on it.

Suddenly a voice rumbled from what must have been speakers in the Bradley. It was speaking French and I wondered who in the hell it was since I thought Jaycee was the only one in there. It was a male voice and it carried an unmistakable tone of command.

"What's he saying, Fawne?" I asked.

"He is telling them to lay down their arms or die," she said.

The pikemen believed him I guess, because one of them shouted an order and then pikes were dropping and soon after that sword belts started hitting the ground.

Suddenly the door at the back of the Bradley opened and two M1 armed men stepped out. As the door closed again they headed over to take charge of the pikemen. Another view on our big screen showed me that Percy, Damien, and most of their men were moving among the fallen archers apparently trying to render aid where they could.

The Bradley turned about and headed back toward the front gate, stopping when it reached the main body of what was left of the knights to shout more French from the loudspeaker and then release three armed men this time. Then Jaycee spoke out of the speaker, it was even in French, and whatever she said caused someone to open the front gate.

Women with white clothing poured out of the gate, each carrying a small bag, and they began trying to help the wounded. Hot on their heels were dozens of men, also in white clothing, pushing more of the rough terrain gurneys and carrying assorted bags and boxes of medical supplies.

Since the show was basically over for now, those of us in the information center headed out to see the aftermath in person, except Cécile, she stayed in her place to keep the scouts going.