The gap year, p.37
The Gap Year, page 37
“Thanks for letting me know what’s going on.” Anna’s voice was bleak. “And I hope it doesn’t come to a war.” But she knew that it already had.
64
Anna and Indy walked the rest of the way back to the school and through its halls with agonizing casualness, not wanting to make anyone curious enough that they’d be followed to the hidden door in the storage room. They had to wait until they were through their secret passage and secure in their underground quarters before they could pull up a map and see the full extent of the oncoming disaster.
“It looks like Echetlus is right to be worried.” Indy studied the map on the big monitor in their shared workroom. “In our original history, after Xerxes beat the Spartans and Athenians at Thermopylae—look, that’s only thirty miles from where we’re sitting!—the Persians took over all of Boeotia and went on to destroy Athens.” She scrolled around on the map to get a better view. “The Greeks finally kicked the Persians back out after a year or so of fighting. Then it sounds like there will be another war where the Greeks try to take the fight back to the Persians.”
Anna glared at the map. “I can’t believe we didn’t figure this out before.”
“Well, to be fair to us, we didn’t know exactly what year it was on the future’s calendar until just now.” Indy scratched briefly at her ear with a front paw. “And our data on this time period is pretty thin. If the battle of Thermopylae hadn’t been mentioned in so many little quotes embedded in later works, we wouldn’t even have as much information about it as we do.”
“I still feel like an idiot,” Anna said. “We’ve been making up plans and bumbling along, but we should’ve put more thought into what was going to happen next.” She blew out a breath. “I guess I’m just not used to thinking of the future as a known thing.”
“Indeed. Our world certainly didn’t work that way.” Indy paused in thought. “And this world may not work that way either. At least not for much longer. If we do manage to change things, for the better or the worse, this new history will diverge from ours. It probably already has, to some extent, due to penicillin and our school. Soon we’ll be flying blind again.”
“Okay, so speaking of blind,” Anna said. “Let’s get some drones moving and see what’s going on. What have we got available?”
Indy’s collar lights flashed, and a list scrolled onto their shared screen. “Our long-range fleet is still tiny. The one large carrier-drone can only travel about five miles one-way without a recharge, and our recharging drones along the route to Athens are too weighed down with disguised solar cells to travel with any speed. Plus, they can’t move with their cells unfolded.” She scrolled further down the list. “We have three long-range drones that are solar-powered, but their solar cells had to be small to keep them inconspicuous, so they can only gather enough power to operate for part of each day. Right now, we’ve got them all out upgrading our maps in other parts of the country, but we can refocus them to the north.”
“How long will it take to find Xerxes’ army?” Anna asked.
“Ironically, now that we’re looking for them, large armies and navies should be easy to spot.” Indy’s collar lights flashed as she looked something up. “Our best information says that the ancient Greeks and Persians have to pull their ships up on shore at night, so we can just trace the shorelines north until we find them.”
Her collar lights twinkled again, and the icons representing their three long-range drones flashed to indicate their status. “Two of our drones are pretty far south, so it’ll take them a few days to get back up here on their pre-programmed paths before they’re close enough to receive new orders. But the third one is just north of here, and it’s been charging all day.” Indy flashed her teeth in a grin. “And these new spy-drones still may not have much power density, but they’ve got optics like you wouldn’t believe. It’s a clear day, so we’ll wait until we’re almost out of sunlight, then we’ll send the drone straight up a few miles and scan the coast long-distance. It’ll be poor quality, but worst-case we should see Xerxes in a couple of hours.”
“Might as well get an early dinner then.” Anna stepped back from their screen. “There’s no point standing here watching until it’s time.” Anna tapped at her phone. “The drone’ll send us a ping when it sees something.”
The two friends adjourned to the kitchen for a tense dinner. Anna ordered a ham sandwich, but munched at it numbly, barely tasting it.
Indy stepped up to the fab and popped the door, revealing the usual plate of mini-burgers. “Are you sure you don’t want some chips, at least?” she asked Anna. “There’s never a point in a dull dinner.”
“Sure.” Anna brightened. “The jalapeño ranch ones, please.”
Indy flashed her collar again, and the fab dinged a few moments later. Anna reached in and took out a bag of chips, pulled it open, and dumped them out on the plate with her sandwich. She looked thoughtful, then brought out her phone and entered another order. After another ding! she withdrew a small bowl of steaming queso.
“Ugh.” Indy stuck out her tongue mockingly. “Queso on ranch-flavored chips?”
“I thought you said that true canines are always hungry!”
“That’s true.” Indy dropped her jaw in a grin. “But there are some limits of good taste, even for us. And why do you fab those chips in a bag, anyway? Why not just fab them right on the plate?”
“The bag is half the fun.” Anna opened and closed the empty bag mockingly, sending ranch seasoning crumbs flying. “Maybe even three quarters.” She grabbed a triangular chip, defiantly poked one corner into her queso, and crunched it down. Then she pulled her phone out again and ordered some iced tea. “The chips do need some washing down, though.”
The two friends sat together eating, mostly lost in thought. They had dumped the dishes back into the fab for recycling and were pondering what to do next when Anna’s phone buzzed. Indy’s collar lit up at the same moment.
They ran back to the lab without a word, Indy’s nails sliding as she went around the corner at speed. As they went, Indy sent commands ahead through her collar, so when they ran up to the big screen, a new picture was already in front of them.
It took Anna a few moments to make sense out of what was being displayed. Then she gasped involuntarily. “Xerxes’ navy is huge!”
The image on the display was tinted subtly red in places, to mark where it was being enhanced to make up for the extreme distance and bad viewing conditions. But what it showed was clear enough. Dozens of narrow war galleys were pulled up onto a sandy beach, bristling with oars from multiple decks. Every one of them had another warship tied to its stern, and more were tied to their sterns, forming long lines out into the water, and keeping the mass of ships from colliding at close quarters. Icons on the screen showed where the drone had already surveyed many more landing sites in the last few minutes, with more coming into view as the drone swept its camera north along the coast. The drone’s viewpoint was from miles aloft and was moving quickly, but the enormous number of men camped on shore was all too apparent. Campfires were being lit as the sun set, leaving a fiery trail for miles along the coast.
“Bringing up a summary.” Indy’s collar flashed, and numbers sprang up on the screen, showing an increasing total of ships and men that the drone had counted. “Four hundred ships so far.”
“Four hundred!”
“Make that four hundred and fifty.” Indy’s voice was tense. “We’re still counting. And that’s just what we can see. There are mountains and hills blocking parts of the coast from our drone’s point of view.”
The two of them stood mutely as the totals increased. Within a few minutes the numbers stood at over seven hundred ships.
“Our estimate of their numbers is still uncertain,” Indy said slowly. “But given what we know about this time period, there could be up to two hundred oarsmen and marines on each ship.”
Anna thought for a moment. “That’s a hundred and forty thousand men! And we haven’t even seen the army yet!”
“They should be nearby.” Indy searched the map. “Supposedly their army and navy advanced in parallel to support each other.” As she spoke, another icon lit up on the map, this time inland of the others. “There, the drone has them.” Her collar flashed, and a second inset window opened, showing the recorded video from the sweep of the inland site. The screen crawled with a confusion of men and beasts, each group seemingly wearing different clothing and weapons from the next.
“Look at all those maniacs,” Anna breathed. “Marchers, camel-riders… oops, and camels don’t seem to like those horse chariots at all.” She paused, watching a near-collision on their screen. “Those poor animals didn’t ask to get dragged into this.” She moved her head, trying to get a better angle. “Ooo, those guys have helmets that look like foxes’ heads. What don’t they have in this army?” She took out her phone and poked at it. “Ah, they’re from all over the Persian empire. That must be why they look so different from each other.” She looked back at their screen. “Whoa! What’s with the super-tall spear-guys, red on the left and white on the right? Best uniforms so far!”
“It looks like their bodies are painted that way, actually.” Indy peered closer. “And those spears might be tipped with some kind of sharpened animal horn? But I’m hardly an expert on ancient militaries. And at this range, these images are highly interpolated by our nets, so some of the details may not be right until we get more data.” She settled back on her haunches. “We might as well get comfortable. It could take a while to finish the survey, depending on how spread out they are.”
“I know this sounds horrible,” Anna said. “But a spectacle like this? I could use some popcorn.”
Indy looked at her archly, then laughed. “I’m always hungry, remember? Bring a second bowl.”
Anna walked off to the kitchen again, and returned to the lab a few minutes later with two steaming bowls of popcorn. The two friends sat and watched as their high-altitude drone tallied up their doom, crunching kernels as they looked up the odd bit of information on phone and collar. After another thirty minutes, the sun had set, and the totals finally stopped rising on the display.
“Well, that’s all of them that we can see, anyway,” Anna said. “A hundred and thirty thousand on land, and more than that on the boats. Er, galleys, whatever they’re called. But that’s almost a quarter of a million men! How do they even feed that many?”
Indy rose and nudged her empty popcorn bowl aside. “Remember what Echetlus told us back in town, about the Macedonian king Alexander supplying the Persians?” Her collar flashed, and their map pulled out to show a bigger picture. “From what we can tell, the Persian empire controls an enormous area, starting about one hundred miles north of here in Macedonia, and wrapping all the way around the Mediterranean clockwise, through Turkey and down past Egypt, ending to the south of us.”
“It’s like Greece is surrounded.” Anna’s after-dinner snack suddenly sat like a stone in her belly, and she set aside her popcorn bowl, guilty.
“All the land right up to Greece’s doorstep is controlled by the Persians.” Indy licked some leftover salt off her narrow black lips. “So they’ve had ample opportunity to ship non-perishable food and supplies ahead and stockpile them in friendly territory over the last several years.”
“So that’s what Echetlus meant,” Anna said.
“Exactly,” Indy said. “The Persians can field an army much bigger than you could supply by forage or pillage, because they’ve got the resources of a whole empire behind them, including Egypt, where much of the grain comes from.” She stood up on all fours and began to pace around. “We’d better start preparing to hide. The safest option is probably to close down the school for a couple of years until the worst of the fighting has passed us by and the Greeks are back on the offensive.” She looked at Anna sadly. “We may have to live shut up here in the tunnels for a while. It’s probably best if people think we’re gone, so we don’t attract any more attention than we need to.”
“But what about all the Greeks?” Anna asked.
Indy stopped pacing as she queried her collar. “It sounds like many of the Athenians evacuate and let their city get burned.” Her voice was bleak. “Here in Boeotia, they’ll probably just have to stand aside and let the Persians through, since otherwise they’d be crushed.” She sighed. “I’m afraid the people here are in for a difficult few years. Even if their cities aren’t burned, the countryside will be eaten bare, and they’ll be forced to pay tribute to the invaders at the same time.”
“There must be something we can do,” Anna said.
“I wish there were,” Indy said. “But look at how limited our resources are! We can build beetle-drones and small-scale toys like personal shields, but we’re a long way from being able to make large defensive weapons.” Her ears swiveled forward in thought. “Though there were some offensive weapons on our doomsday list that we could fab now if we wanted to. Biological weapons, nano-weapons, things like that.”
“I don’t want to kill the Persians.” Anna spoke firmly. “I just don’t want them to destroy our new home. Things were just starting to go right, for a change.” She thought for a moment as she prodded her phone’s screen. “What if we make a bunch of tiny drones, then sneak them into the Persians’ food supply to spoil it? If they see that they’re going to run short of food, they’ll have to pull out, if Greece really can’t feed them all.”
“It’s an interesting thought, though we still can’t make tiny drones that can fly that far on their own,” Indy said. “But think of the consequences of that many soldiers, trapped in a foreign land, when they suddenly realize their supplies are running short. They’ll seize everything edible and leave, and the Greeks will starve behind them.” Indy sat back down again. “It might kill fewer people overall if we hit the Persians with something terrible enough that they’re forced to run for their lives.” At Anna’s shocked look, she added, “Not that I’m advocating that, mind you. Unleashing biological weapons against the Persians would put us into war-crimes territory. But even if we just hide out and do nothing, we’ll still be letting many thousands of Greeks die in the invasion. Though at least we wouldn’t be directly responsible for their deaths.” Her ears lay back against her head. “It’s unfortunate. But sometimes even with great power, there’s nothing you can do that won’t make things worse.”
Anna stood and paced. “I can’t accept that!” She slowed, looking at the map again. “But a quarter of a million Persians. That’s…” Her face twisted with worry. “That’s really a lot.”
“It might be all we can do just to survive this.” Indy’s face mirrored her friend’s concern. “But before we can decide anything, we need to know a lot more about how the Greeks are going to respond.” Her ears swiveled forward confidently. “And I think I know how we can find out.”
65
Indy’s idea had been simply to ask Neleos’ parents Timais and Nephele if they knew about any Greek plans for resisting the Persian invasion, since they seemed well-connected. But it paid off better than they could have hoped. Two days of hurried preparation later, Anna and Indy set off to Corinth with Timais, Nephele, and eight more Lebadeian delegates to an upcoming congress of allied city-states.
The first day of the trip was familiar, the same route through Haliartos and south of Thebes that they had passed along on their way to Athens. But on the second day they turned south instead of east, crossing from Boeotia into Attica near the fortified town of Eleutherai. They trekked along narrow footpaths through the low, wooded mountains of the Megaris region, where they camped for the night under spreading fir trees on the isthmus leading to the southern peninsula that the Greeks called the Peloponnesos.
The third day saw them down out of the mountains, skirting the capital city of Megara before joining the main road that ran down the east coast of the isthmus. They passed the Corinthian region-marker along a road hemmed in by rocky hills marching right down to the seashore. To their left, out in the waters of the gulf, cargo ships plied the waters, the voices of the crews and sounds of the oars coming to their ears intermittently on the sea breeze. At the end of the third day they camped early, retreating off the road and up into the wooded foothills of the mountains to find a bit of privacy from other travelers.
Anna laid her pack aside near Timais and Nephele. Then, as she had during the previous two nights of camping, she unclipped Indy’s saddlebags and gave her coat a quick brushing.
“Ah, much better.” Indy walked away a few steps before shaking out her coat briefly and rejoining them. “Saddlebags are convenient, but my sides start getting hot after a few hours.”
Nephele started a little as Indy spoke, then relaxed with an apologetic smile. “Sorry, I keep forgetting you can talk.” She laughed. “You’d think I’d be used to it by now!”
“I wish everyone was as accepting as you and Timais,” Anna said more quietly. “A couple of these folks have been giving us the eye for the whole trip, it feels like.” She tilted her head back slightly to indicate one of their party some yards away, a man with a thin, pinched expression wearing clothes inappropriately hot for their long journey.
Indy looked across at the man as she spoke, her voice clearly audible across the camp. “Not everyone has the mental flexibility to adapt to new things.” The man looked away, busying himself with his bags and speaking under his breath to his companion. Indy panted a laugh as she turned back to Anna and Nephele. “Let them look.”
