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[RVM45]

Chapter Twenty-Nine






   I came back from the shadow realm to find out that all my people had been kicked out of Macersville. The enclave where the village had been was totally destroyed. There wasn’t even a hole or featureless void in the fabric of reality to show where the enclave had once been. I couldn’t find a gate or portal to Macersville to voice my displeasure. I couldn’t find my way to the Cherokee lands to ask for asylum for my people either.

   I’m reasonably sure that I could have found my way to either of the hidden worlds eventually, but I hadn’t the time to spare.

   There were several thousand refugees and many of them had no ID, work history or even a proof of existence that would satisfy the state. Not only that, but they had little idea how to deport themselves in the great wide open. 

   Macersville had kept me well supplied with gold. The flow had been shut off rather abruptly but I’ve never been a trusting sort of person. I like to think of myself—in some contexts—as a squirrel who remembers winter—a squirrel that compulsively hoards nuts. The squirrel is also too cautious to put all his baskets around one egg—or acorn.

   Locking the horse after the barn door has already been stolen serves no useful purpose.

   I had an embarrassment of riches but now it wasn’t an ever-replenishing flow. Instead it was an important fixed and largely irreplaceable resource.

   Ecclesiastes says:

   “A feast is made for laughter, and wine maketh merry: but money answereth all things.”

   Well you know where Jesus says that love of money is the root of all evil? A more accurate translation would say that love of money is the root of all sorts of evil. David didn’t lust after Bathsheba because he was a miser nor was that what motivated the men of Sodom to try to rape God’s angels.

   In the same vein, money is no longer the answer to all things—not when there are tax collectors who would put the obsessive compulsive Pharisee calculating his tithe on his mint, anise and cummin to shame. And in addition to the taxman, big brother just likes to label and track folks every moment from cradle to grave—from womb to tomb.

   Nonetheless, it is better to have money than not to have it—even when it is not the answer to everything. Come to think of it though—paying hackers to create fake ID along with a built in backstory is an example of money taking care of someone—as is paying someone a hefty tariff to take cash and not ask too many questions.

   But we just had far too many people to hide and they were all in one place. There is a limit to how much stuff you can hide or camouflage or render obscure. Then The Powers That Be had their antennae and feelers out for people like us.

      I decided that my first move would be to get the government off our asses.

   *************** ********************* *****************************

   We had a few people who’d gotten so good at the stealth thingy that they were all but invisible. It is harder to be undetectable by most electronic sensors but it can be done.

   One night both the president and the vice-president had a late night caller. They weren’t alone. All one hundred senators, eighty-five representatives and seven supreme court justices also had late night callers.

   I felt that it was important to get as many as possible at one time since one very immediate response might be to jack up security to the maximum possible. They might be able to make the president all but unreachable. I didn’t think that they could protect all the members of congress unless they meant to adopt the “Strategic Hamlet” concept and herd all the Congress critters into high security fenced-in enclosures.

   I sent one of my spawns after the president. I was different since I’d lost and regained my powers. I no longer had a number of different kahunas on call nor did I throw spawn in layers or waves. I could simply throw between one hundred and a hundred and forty spawn depending on how strong I was at the moment.

   They were strong—well above 6.0—and they had a number of powerful techniques at their disposal but they were all pretty much identical. Of course I could hold some back and recycle unspent chi from popped spawn just as before but the whole process felt noticeably different.

    My dry spawn had about fifty percent longer life expectancies and they were proportionately more powerful and harder to destroy. The maximum number that I could deploy at one time was down fifteen or twenty percent though.

   Black rats could go undetected where a man could not. I had a couple dozen rats on loan from Cary and I could sense their surroundings and thoughts as well as I could read my birds.

   Once I had my route down pat I sent a flock of crows—they were marginally better for stealth than ravens since they were a bit smaller.

   The crows came together and became me just out of sight of the two secret service agents standing outside the entrance to the first family’s living quarters. My hands darted out—one to each head. I downloaded scads of interesting and potentially useful data both about how government VIPs were protected, the disposition of secret service agents in the Whitehouse and miscellaneous nuggets of info about what went on behind the scenes in Washington.

   I left them both unconscious in the midst of a powerful and very realistic nightmare. They’d both wake up in twelve to sixteen hours with no lingering physical effects.

   What? They were just doing their job? “Just doing one’s job” is far worse justification than merely being conscientiously evil. At any rate all I did was give their very bland and colorless psyches some contrast.

   The prez and the first lady shared a king-sized bed. I put her into a deep nightmare haunted sleep identical to the trance the agents were not enjoying. I didn’t download anywhere near as much data as I had from the agents. I’d get all that I needed from her husband. Also, as a fully heterosexual man many of the images I get from a woman are disturbing. And no, all of the data downloads itself in a braided and even snarled manner. You can’t pick and choose very much.

   “Wake up Mister President,” I said to him.

   His first thought awakening to find a man with a big Kukri knife to his throat was to scream. I’d already taken over his body and I nullified his attempt to scream. I relaxed a few muscles and let him wet and soil himself in retaliation for trying to scream.

   “Do you ever watch ninja or kung fu movies? Anime? Ever read Manga or
Manwha? You don’t? Okay. That will be your first assignment when you wake up. Spend about five hundred hours diligently researching your opposition via fiction,” I said.

   “Let me break it to you gently dumbass. You have over two dozen secret societies right here in the US of A with powers similar to the Manga ninja—and that’s not counting operatives from groups based overseas,” I continued.

   I caught a sense of honest shock and bewilderment coming off of him. I stood behind him but I knew that his eyes were bugged out from reading his moment-to-moment sensory inputs.

   I sheathed my Kukri since I had no intention of killing him—at least not today.

   “I see that no one has seen fit to read you in. If I were you, I’d call in the top officers from the FBI, Homeland Security, the CIA and the military Joint Chiefs of Staff and demand an accounting—but that’s just me. My name is ‘Spoil’ and I’m the head of a group of Adepts known as ‘The Outfit’. We’re homeless at the moment and a bit vulnerable,” I said.

   That might be new info to him but it wasn’t unknown to The Powers That Be—the puppeteers behind things. So there was no sense beating around the bush.

      “You are going to call your running dogs off of my people—including our allied dojos and biker gangs and militias. Because if you don’t I will come calling again late some night and I won’t leave anyone in your family alive,” I said.

   The terror was falling off the man in waves that could almost be seen.

   “When you awake this won’t seem anywhere near this real and compelling to you, so I have to leave some lasting mark on you. Should I castrate you? Should I gouge out your eyes? Cut your fingers off?”

   His heart rate was racing now. I had to reach inside his autonomous nervous system and pull him back from the brink.

   “I’m not that type of fellow but you should look at some of the things that the Russian mobs do to people to make them examples—not to mention your own interrogators. This will hurt a bit but it is largely cosmetic and quite remediable by a good plastic surgeon. I’m going to take your ears. You won’t be the only one. When you see a senator or a representative with gauze around his head you’ll know that he’s had a late night visit just like you.”

   I added almost as an afterthought—though of course everything about my visit was carefully calculated:

   “Here are the first three of my books. I’ve signed them for you. You can order hard copies or read the others online,” I said.

   Once I had his wounds sewn up and a gauze bandage around his head I put him to sleep. I tripped every alarm in the place at one time. A score of armed men rushed into the president’s bedroom and pointed firearms at me.

   They gave me the bum’s rush trying to pile up on me like it was a rugby scrum. I waited till a couple hands touched me and then I turned into a column of crows flying every which way.

   “I’m over here dumbasses!” I said.

   Then just as they caught sight of me I did the crow trick again and this time I waited until I was well outside the Whitehouse grounds to reconstitute. Once I was solid, I immediately popped my cork.

   Within a few days later we visited a number of Governors and Chief Law Enforcement Officers in several Southeastern states. Most of them were far more tractable to reason than the feds so we used less stick and far more carrot. It is eye opening to see how much benign neglect that a few million dollars in small non-sequential dollar bills will buy.

   *************  ******************* ************************

   So who has been wondering about the single kinjutsu in the book Padraig left me?

   It was a jutsu to create—if “Create” is the right word—the enclaves like the one that Macersville inhabits and the enclave that once contained the village. I was the only human in living memory with enough chi and the hubris to attempt the difficult jutsu.

   How to explain? There is a limited amount of “Stuff” on hand. Science says that the combined total of matter and energy must always remain the same. However Quantum Mechanics seems to say that an electron can travel to the far ends of the universe far faster than light—very briefly—as long as it gets back before anyone or anything could possibly have missed it or noted its absence.

   I don’t want to lean too hard on science though. Much of the tradecraft functions outside and even in violation of Scientific Principles.

   If you want to create a universe simply borrow this one for the smallest possible instant—for one chronon if there is such a thing. Time is relative. Your borrowed universe’s time won’t be the same as time here. Your new universe can go through a big bang and all the untold eons it takes for everything to run down and fall apart…

   And you can return all the borrowed “Stuff” exactly one micro-minuscule unit of time later before it could be missed—even in principle.

   Remember Relativity though. Someone living in the Rho Universe would think that our universe had been borrowed from Rho for one very brief chronon.

   If our universe is a huge irregular multi-dimensional soap bubble then creating another universe is akin to getting a piece of the bubble to break completely free. It is technically simple to create another universe but the power required would be astronomical—and even with the most ambitious human or even haint’s lifespan one couldn’t really do much with a whole universe if he did sculpt one.

   Creating pocket enclaves that reach back to the earliest days of life on Earth and extend eons into the future—pockets that stand largely apart but never go on their separate ways…

   That takes far less raw power but it also takes orders of magnitude more understanding, skill and subtlety to accomplish.

   

[RVM45]

**************** ******************* ***************************

   “How big can you make the enclave?” Panic asked me.

   “Big enough, why?” I responded.

   “I you could make it…O say the size of Indiana or Kentucky—I could exist there instead of the outer void,” Panic said.

   “That would be an ungodly big land Panic,” I said. “It would want to undulate, fold-in, crumple and destroy itself.”

   “Not if you bent it into something rigid—like a sphere,” Panic said.

   “A sphere with the surface area of Kentucky—that would be a sphere with a diameter of about one hundred and fifteen miles and a circumference of about three hundred and sixty miles. What would I do for gravity? I can warp space so that everyone on a flat surface feels a pull straight down. I don’t know how I’d get everyone to stick to the surface of a sphere,” I said.

   “If you’ll put everything inside the sphere there is a way to warp space in such a way that there seems to be a force pulling towards the outer surface of the sphere,” Panic argued and broadcast a complex multi-dimensional image into my mind.

   “Damned nation! That is convoluted. Do you think that I can manage that?”

   “I’m sure of it,” Panic said. “It is your destiny.”

   ************** ********************** ****************************

   The government surprised me with their response.

   They declared that it was an act of terrorism to own any of my books or the books of kinjutsu—either on paper or on a hard drive. They didn’t need a warrant to kick your door in and toss the place while looking for kinjutsu. Someone could be detained indefinitely without trial or access to an attorney for practicing jutsu, having books of tradecraft or even being under suspicion of having the books.

   They attacked people all over Northern Georgia, Eastern Kentucky and Tennessee and Western Virginia who they thought just might be Adepts.

   Poppy had owned a pizzeria in the village. He was a perpetually happy man who welcomed each of his customers with heartfelt hospitality. He had three teenaged daughters and a couple Great Danes. They killed Poppy and his whole family—including the dogs—executing a no-knock warrant. The sole bright spot was that Poppy and his daughters took three of the hobnails down with them.

   Tom was a teenaged son of a baker. He died in a crossfire while they were attempting to arrest someone else altogether. Six senior citizens—the youngest was well over seventy—were killed in a nursing home shootout.

   There were others—a couple dozen—as well as a score of outsiders killed just for being at the wrong place at the wrong time.

   It was time to strike back.

   ************* ***************** **************************

   Norman sat and guarded the trailers from hiding. Word had leaked out than a large family of Adepts were living in three trailers and a couple shanties so far up the mountain that there was no electricity or running water.

    Almost a hundred black-clad government henchmen arrived in a score of black Humvees and SUVs. They took up their positions all around the trailers and buildings.

   Norman was surprised when the black-clad troopers set up three belt-fed machine guns and two 60mm mortars. They never demanded surrender. Instead they all opened fire on a pre-arranged signal. They hosed the small compound with everything that they had for ninety seconds. Then there was a cease-fire while five teams converged on trailers and buildings to check for survivors.

   They used grenades quite liberally both before entering the building or trailer and as a prelude to each room clearing as well. When each structure was found vacant, generous amounts of plastique was placed to turn everything to toothpicks and shredded sheet metal.

   People who don’t take prisoners can’t very well complain when the opposition adopts a “No Prisoners” policy too.

   Norman had been a “One Trick Pony” when he’d defected to Macersville. The senseis at his new home stressed overall development and strengthening weak areas relentlessly.

   He’d been able to wobble back and forth across the sound barrier when he’d fought the bikers. Sometimes he’d wobble two or three times in a step or two. He’d only been able to throw a single rather weak spawn back then.

   Now he could throw five spawn and all of them were twenty-five to thirty miles-per-hour faster—fast enough to keep them super sonic at all times. His original was sixty or seventy miles-per-hour faster and Norman’s strength, stamina and recovery had all increased both noticeably and usefully.

   Norman sent four spawn to fight the storm troopers while he held a single spawn in reserve and kept himself well hidden.

   Norman’s first spawn had a fair sized shoulder bag full of thermite grenades. The grenades had little to no explosive effect but they molten iron would quickly eat through the hood of the vehicles and pour into the engines underneath ruining them. He only meant to leave one survivor and he meant to do that deliberately—not as a result of happenstance.

   He placed a three-gallon plastic container of gasoline cantilevered atop the thermite grenade on the first and last vehicle. He had moved twenty yards beyond the last vehicle and had taken a couple heads when the first bomb exploded.

   It wasn’t easy to design a blade that could collide with targets while moving faster than sound and not bend, dull or shatter. The armorers had done a very good workmanlike job of forging Norman a pair of extra heavy-duty custom Kukris with seventeen-inch blades but the quality was degraded when he spawned.

   Norman helped both by sheathing the blades in heavy-duty chi and in cutting down any wobble or torqueing force to the minimum.

   When his body was moving faster than sound there was little need to add velocity to the blade by swinging it. Instead he focused on holding the blade out perpendicular to the surface he meant to chop and trying hard to keep the blade from wavering or wobbling in the cut. He simply walked past each client at over eight hundred miles-per-hour while holding his blade out.

   He’d already taken three heads with that spawn before the first thermite/gasoline bomb exploded. Of course the three other spawn that hadn’t taken time off to destroy the vehicles had higher kill specs.

   He couldn’t hear the blast. His chi shielded him from most of the effects of being exposed to the air at such a high velocity but his vision was a bit blurred and all that he could hear was a roaring in his ears.

   Norman picked the trooper he meant to spare. Norman dropped out of hyper-speed behind the law. He seized him in a naked strangle and quickly put the man down.

   Norman worked quickly but without using his super-speed. He took the man’s ears and then disinfected and bandaged them. The man wouldn’t be down for long from a choke-out and Norman applied small injections of Novocain to make the area completely numb.

   He gave the trooper an IV injection that contained a modest amount of amphetamine along with a very generous dose of psilocybin piggy-backed on an even larger dose of LSD-25.

   Folks came out of the woods from every direction. They quickly picked up all of the fallen heads and dropped weapons—except for the trooper Norman had spared. They left his weapons—partially disassembled—and without any ammunition.

   “Tell your superiors what happens to people that waste men, women, children and pets without cause or reason,” Norman told him.

   Everyone else had cleared out when Norman’s spawn took a half a dozen burn phones out of their foil wrappers. He dialed “911” on each phone and then set it gently on the ground. On the last phone he paused until the operator answered.

   “There’s a slew of hobnailed storm troopers lying dead and one injured,” Norman said.

   Then he set that phone on the ground with the other five and then popped his cork.

   ************** ********************* ****************************

   The layers of protection around the president intercepted each of the packages addressed to him in the Whitehouse of course, but they’d told him about them. When the third box was delivered he insisted on examining it himself, so after much poking and prodding they brought one of the packages to him.


   It was an extra big three-gallon jar with an extra big mouth. Inside there was a head of a government law floating in a vinegar and salt solution with plenty of dill seeds, onion pieces, garlic buds and other spices.

   The eyelids including the eyebrows had been removed. The hair was removed. The tongue was dropped down between the jawbones.

   “You say the brains were removed? Why?” the president asked.

   “Either they had a use for them or it suited their purpose somehow,” a high-ranking law said.

   A lower ranking law started to say something and then stifled himself.


   “If you know something, speak up,” the president told him.

   “They’re prepared much like pickled pigs’ feet. I never heard of anyone pickling a pig’s head—but if I were to try it I’d worry if the brains would spoil in spite of the pickling,” the younger law said.

   “This came with it,” the senior law said while handing the president a note protected by the clear plastic bag enclosing it.

   The president read it aloud much to the senior law’s annoyance.

   “If you don’t quit killing or arresting and torturing non-Adepts, families and other noncombatants in my second phase I’m going to target your law’s families and loved ones. If you’re the only one committing atrocities people will get the idea that you’re kinder and more just than us. I can’t have that,” the president read aloud.

   The message was signed “Spoil Airgetlám AKA  Spoil O Warren”.

   “I believe that he means it. Tell your men to step down,” the president commanded.

   “You don’t run things around here,” the senior law said.

   ************ *************** *****************************

   The junior law finished his shift and tried to act nonchalant. When he got home he told his wife to pack as little as they could get by with and not to plan on ever coming back.
   
   He laid his badge and ID on his desk where it would be easy to find when they came looking for him. After a moment’s hesitation he laid his government issue Glock on the desk along with all of its magazines and holsters.

   He donned a .45 caliber 1911A1 and a 2” Smith and Wesson .38 Special and a Walther PP .32. He felt whole and complete again for the first time in years.

   He’d bought a small—one hundred and sixty-eight acre—farm in Kentucky a bit North and East of Hopkinsville. He’d used the ID of a cousin who’d died as a teen. He even had a carry permit in his cousin’s name. It wasn’t hard for a Civil Master like he’d been with huge computer skills. His hacking and computer expertise was something that he’d kept hidden from his employers and even his wife.

   If the Adepts were threatening noncombatants and the Federal Agencies were threatening the president with a coup, it was time to get out while the getting was good. It was very kind of his ex-employers to shield him from facts like those He hoped that one day he could return the favor—but the odds of that happening were minuscule.




.....RVM45

[RVM45]

Chapter Thirty






   The secret service agent who’d resigned had the surname “Jason” though he was no longer using it since he’d went to ground.

   There was a knock on the door of his farmhouse at 4:00am. When Jason peered out the peephole he was horrified to see his old section chief standing at the door.

   “Open the door Jason. I know that it’s you inside,” the chief said.

   Jason opened the door with a long barreled .44 Magnum in one hand. He was rather surprised to see that the chief had civilians with him—a black woman and three children. The oldest was no taller than the woman’s sternum.

   “I need a favor Jason,” Chief said. “I was aware of your hidey-hole. I watched you build your exit strategy with interest—though I thought at the time that you were a bit paranoid. At any rate, I didn’t emulate you. I’m flashing on a shit storm ahead. Would you shelter my wife and children for me?”

   Jason absorbed a number of surprising bits of data with a poker face.

   “Come in. There’s no sense in prolonging your exposure. I would think that someone coming to ask a favor would use my first name instead of my last—but never mind. I’m not using either anymore. Call me ‘Truitt’,” Jason said.

   “I want to stress, I’m not blackmailing you. I’ll keep your secret even if you refuse sanctuary for my family,” Chief said.

   Jason sat a moment in silent contemplation. Chief’s generosity was a clever gambit. Jason taking in Chief’s family under duress was far less desirable than having him do it willingly. Under the circumstances it was hard to feel good about saying “No’’.

   “I’m surprised that you have a black wife,” Jason said.

   “Are you a racist?” Chief’s wife asked a bit sharply.

   “Of course, everyone is racist—even those who try to deny it,” Jason said.

   Then he paused to shout, “Rolanda, get decent and come to the front room please.”

   Rolanda was noticeably darker than Chief’s wife.

   “Although I believe that every interpersonal relationship must needs include largely subliminal considerations of race, I don’t bear your race any ill will. This isn’t a coincidence though—is it?”

   “You aren’t the only federal agent with a hidey-hole, but my wife and children will be a much less jarring dissonance here with you,” Chief said. “I had access to your personnel file and so I wasn’t even a little surprised at your wife’s ethnicity,” Chief said.

   “Of course my wife’s cousins—no, her sister and her nieces and nephews—are welcome to stay with us while she’s estranged from her husband. What is he? O yeah, he’s a broker in New York who’s heavily stressed over the downturn in the economy,” Jason said.

   “You will go to Hell for lying so much,” Rolanda said to Jason.

   “I make no excuses for lies and liars, but lies of necessity aren’t the same as ‘Bearing False Witness’,” Jason said. “But I am willing to stand at the Judgment Throne and answer for telling the occasional whopper. It will be far from the most grievous of offenses that I’ll be taken to task for.”

   **************** ******************** *************************

   Creating an enclave—a relatively small eddy or vortex in the multi-dimensional flow of existence…

   What can I compare it to? It is like any other endeavor where you strain and push for a prolonged period of time with all of your might and nothing happens—then all at once—things move!

   “We have an enclave once more. It is noticeably larger and will be even harder for outsiders to find and enter—but it will be about seven weeks until it is ready to access,” I told my wards.

   We had to put our people somewhere. With the black BDU wearing feds nipping at every soft belly exposed it made sense to gather the folks together in one place where we could all protect them. We’d bought and consolidated about four thousand acres in the foothills of the Appalachians in Northern Georgia and we’d hunkered down to wait.

   Ten days before we could have opened The Outfit’s new enclave, huge numbers of the black clad hobnails surrounded our compound. They brought tanks, armored personnel carriers along with SWAT vehicles specialized for breaching barricades.

   They stood back and shelled our compound with mortar and artillery shells. Then they even called in an airstrike with slow moving aircraft armed with mini-guns and 35mm chainguns.

   Why did we need over four thousand acres to house about seven thousand people? I mean this wasn’t Woodstock.

   I will tell you. We needed room to put in a fair number of decoy structures and Potemkin villages to draw fire while our folks huddled in hastily built and crowded bunkers.

   On the third day I went outside bearing a white flag of truce.

   A black BDU wearing trooper ran a wand over me.

   “He’s an original,” the trooper told the commander.

   “Dude it is like: what will it take to get you to go away?” I asked him.

   “Open your compound and surrender your fellow cult members into custody,” the commander said. “This can’t end any other way.”

   I stood bemused for a moment.

   “You have nice white teeth. They will look good on a bracelet or necklace,” I said. “Try not to get those pretty teeth broken or destroyed. I’m going back and tell everyone that you are an uncompromising turd-gargler,” I said.

   “You aren’t going anywhere,” the commander said.

   Just then one of the guards interrupted our gavoreet by escortind three rail-thin hollow-eyed hillbillies into the command tent. One of the hillbillies was in a wheelchair.

   “We represent the Northeast Georgia Volunteers,” the man in the wheelchair said.

   “Militias have been declared illegal and the Northeast Georgia Volunteers was one of the groups specifically ordered to disband. At any rate, how formidable a militia can yours be if it includes cripples and the emaciated in their ranks?” Commander scoffed.

   “I was in a mining accident. My brothers both have emphysema and antibiotic resistant tuberculosis. Even a small militia needs clerks, dispatchers and someone to do occasional ‘Paul Reveres’—mostly electronically nowadays. You’d know that if you weren’t a fool. Right now we have eight hundred sharpshooters with scoped high-powered rifles surrounding y’all. My brothers and I were considered expendable if you choose to violate our flag of truce,” the brave man in the wheelchair said.

   “Fornicate your flag of truce!” Commander shouted.

   He had a nicer word for ‘’Fornicate”. He slapped the man in the wheelchair hard enough to cause him to spit blood.

   “Arrest all of them!” Commander shouted.

   I remember in one of Robert E Howard’s stories, Conan is called into court as a material witness. When Conan refuses to snitch the judge orders him thrown into gaol for contempt of court. Conan concludes his account by saying:

   “Then seeing as they were all insane I drew my sword and slayed them.”

   Seeing the dude in the wheelchair slapped by the commander put me in the same frame of mind as Conan. Since they were all insane—and evil—there was scant recourse but to slay them.

   I threw a hundred and fifty spawn. Way on the outer fringes were three little kahunas and each one threw five spawn of his own to add to the general confusion and tumult. What a nice surprise!

   “I am Spoil Airgetlám. Fall to your knees and tremble in terror!” I shouted my challenge.

   I ran my fist through the commander and ripped his heart out. A moment later I had my two enchanted swords in hand. Since they were both artifacts they spawned any number of times with perfect fidelity.

   I grabbed up the man in the wheelchair and extended my feathered cloak around him and his brothers.

   Once I had the brothers safely inside the compound, I popped my cork to let my chi flow back to the battle.

   When they realized that the truce was broken, several of my Adepts assayed their own sorties for diversions.

   Fifteen Duncan spawn along with a dozen Saul spawn jumped the fence and attacked without caution, strategy or subtlety. There were about thirty albino Geralds, five Normans moving faster than sound, twenty Ladonnas throwing so many of the toy Kunai that you’d think she’d found a way to make them belt fed.

   Large packs of black cats and black rats attacked troopers. James and Chandra had spawn firing high power semi-automatic weapons and then doing a shot range teleport to another firing point to fire another high firepower volley.

   The purpose of that exercise was simply to get the three militiamen and me back behind the barricades. Even if we wiped out every single law they’d soon have reinforcements back on the scene. The best strategy was to pull our heads in and try to survive long enough to open our enclave and vanish. We needed to think “Tortoise” and “Porcupine”. There was little point in exhausting ourselves in flashy sorties outside.

   I didn’t take into account the eight hundred Georgia Militia Sharpshooters. I don’t think there has ever been that big a concentration of snipers raining well-aimed shots at largely unprotected clients at less than three hundred yards.

   It was only moments later though it must have seemed like hours to many of those involved.

   The black BDU clad federal forces beat a hasty retreat.

   Less than an hour later a large force of troopers wearing brown camo BDUs in a pattern that I’d never seen before arrived. They had platoons of marching infantry but they also had many tanks and ten times as many supply and support vehicles.

   They stayed on the road in a column and drove right up to our gate bearing a white flag of truce.

   “Bring me the top four ranking men. I’m not going outside again to parley with them,” I ordered.

   The brown camouflaged man with the Brigadier General’s stars stood at attention and saluted me.

   “Brigadier General Partisan Brown placing myself and my command at your service,” he said.

   “Your name is ‘Partisan’? Your father was as creative with names as mine. I mean no disrespect friend, but I’m incapable of returning your salute since I’m not in uniform. Please be seated,” I said. “What’s this about?”

   “I’m sure that you’re aware that the each side’s Guard was originally a force at command of the individual governors and state. We’ve been working secretly and quietly to turn the Georgia Guard into a force capable of defending Georgia from threats and coercion by Washington,” General Brown said.

   “I beg your pardon,” I said. “My position and the situation require me to be skeptical. I’ll need to touch each of you and do a reading. Is that alright?”

   After I’d contact read General Brown and his three subordinates I keyed my intercom.

   “I need six to eight contact readers. I want them to go outside. I want each of them to read at least a dozen randomly selected troopers and check for any sign of duplicity. Be creative in your selection and eclectic. Read everyone from buck privates up to colonels,” I said.

   **************** ******************** ***********************************

   Most of the Guardsmen concentrated on building another outer ring around our compound. They rapidly dug in and enfiladed their tanks and gun bearing armored troop transports. They also built bunkers for their men.

   Men can and have built bunkers with nothing but picks and entrenching tools. That can drag one’s beat when time is of the essence though. The Georgia Guard was ahead of the curve there though. They’d brought plenty of OD brown painted backhoes. The backhoes did most of the digging while the men squared up and crumbed the resulting ditches and shoveled the spoil into synthetic fabric bags to make sandbag walls and overhead protection.

   They also set up plenty of concertina, land mines and claymore arrays set to go off in strategic volleys.

   Some of the militiamen came down to help the Guard dig in while others looked for better vantage points, cut branches or whatever to better conceal their sniper posts as well as setting up a number of unobtrusive distance markers.

   Since the militiamen were on their own hook many of them drove off to the nearest grocery or convenience store to lay in supplies.

   *************** ********************** ***************************

   Five days later the federal forces arrived with a vengeance. There must have been fifteen or sixteen black clad federal infantrymen for every brown camo clad guardsmen.

   The federals had been gearing up for war for some time. They thought that their main opponents would be lightly armed civilians. They had many armored assault vehicles but the armor was light and they were armed with weapons like a single .308  minigun, a 25mm chaingun, twin .50 caliber machineguns, water cannons and a few flamethrowers. More than a few of the tracked vehicles were armed with nothing but an M-60 and a steel battering ram.

   There were twenty-five federal tracked vehicles for every one of the Georgia Guard’s. The Georgia vehicles were enfiladed—buried up to the turret—and they had some tank-killing guns on many of their vehicles.

   “You men are involved in unlawful insurrection against the government of the United States. You are ordered to drop your weapons and stand down,” came from a set of four giant microphone horns mounted on a black truck.

   The sniper who was using a .375 Magnum wrecked one speaker after another.

   “We are here at the command of our governor and we constitute the sole legal authority inside of Georgia. You are commanded to break off hostilities and leave the state of Georgia by the fastest most expeditious rout possible,” many speakers mounted both inside and outside the compound carried Brigadier Brown’s reply.

   Scores of black helicopters appeared on the horizon to the North. They were in formation to make multiple strafing passes against the compound and the guardsmen. Meanwhile, since their threats weren’t working the federal troops started leaving the road on each side intending to surround their clients.

   First, the first wave of tanks started getting stuck in the hastily dug and concealed tank pits while others hit a landmine and lost a tread. The snipers opened fire and cut down many infantry and anyone who tried to exit the stuck tanks.

   David had built a large number of small microchip piloted rockets and now the Guardsmen had given him a large quantity of plastic explosive to play with. Each rocket targeted a helicopter and when it collided with a helicopter is set off a shaped charge with over a half-pound of plastique.

   Helicopters fell from the sky like black hailstones.

   The federals pulled well back from the beaten zone to rest and regroup. They paused in disarray for a day and a half when the complexion of the whole battle changed with the arrival of thousands of Regular Army complete with real heavily armored tanks.

   “I don’t intend to surrender under any circumstance,” I told my lieutenants and several Georgia Guard officers. “Anyone who wants to surrender should leave immediately. The rest of you—remember the Alamo.”

   ************ **************** ****************************

   During The War of Northern Aggression federal troops had flooded into Kentucky making a referendum on whether they should join the Confederacy impossible. Thus they sat out the war uncomfortably as a neutral state.

   The there was West Virginia—the traitor state that betrayed the Confederacy—and caused many natives to feel shame for the acts of their forefathers almost two hundred years later.

   The federal government had walked on the Constitution of The United States for decades. The blatant violations of tens and hundreds of thousands peoples’ rights in their pursuit of Adepts and kinjutsu—and even just plain jutsu—was more analogous to using the revered document for toilet paper…

   Kentucky and West Virginia were the very first states to state in no uncertain terms that the federals would cease and desist or they intended to secede from the Union.

   Of course Georgia had stepped into the breach and started a hot war without any formal declaration. Mississippi and Alabama were anxious not to be outdone by Georgia and they mobilized their guard and militia units as well.

   Florida had too many Yankee immigrants to be wholesale for the secession, but neither were they against it. Florida was divided county by county and even block by block which side they supported.

   Indiana was divided as well. One could draw a concave line between Terre Haute and Richmond dipping Southward. The areas to the South were Confederates mot folks up North—while they weren’t enthusiastic supporters of the federal government—were intent on preserving their present state of misery. 

   Tennessee folk—like Indiana folk—liked to poke fun at the Kentuckians. When Kentucky stepped into harms way though the people of Tennessee reacted as if a brother was in danger and they joined the movement.

   ************* ************** ***************************

   Within hours of the almost instant insurrection the Regular Army had surrounded the governors’ mansions or bunkers and laid siege. The only reason that they didn’t attack in overwhelming force was political rather than tactical.

   The governor in Frankfort looked at the troops surrounding his residence gloomily. He should have gotten out sooner but events had raced ahead of strategy though. Eventually they would starve him out if nothing else, but it galled a man’s pride to go down without striking a single blow.

   He was beyond any reasonable hope but something stronger than hope compelled him to hang on even largely against his own will.

   

 

......RVM45

[RVM45]

Friends,

I put off writing this chapter for several days.

Then I realized that it was time to close it up and I hated to do that because I was really enjoying this. Still any more would wax repetitious.

I'm going to sharpen my pencil and edit for typos, verb agreements as well as smoothing the occasional awkward sentence...

And I'm going to publish this one and "River Bottoms" as a partial prequel on Kindle. Hopefully it will catch on and blaze brightly.

I'm not holding my breath.


Chapter Thirty-One






   I don’t follow military affairs much—especially since being put in charge of other Adepts. I remember Jeff Cooper was really impressed by the M-1 Abrams tank. It was expensive and far from simple to make or maintain, but it offered enough positive advantages to make all the high tech stuff worth it in this instance.

   I imagine that the M-1 Abrams was way out of date in the modern world but whether the tanks that came after it were as superior to anything else in the field as the Abrams or whether they only increased the complexity where it would give a corresponding large increase in efficacy—that I don’t know—or care much.

   Anyway, mere hours away from our enclave opening up to us there came tank after tank after tank from Fort Benning along with platoon after platoon of combat infantry.

   They stopped at the black clad trooper’s outer perimeter and raised a huge flag of truce.

   I went out to meet with them. As I said—we were hours from being able to jump down the groundhog hole and being able top pull the hole in after us. Every minute that I could gain taking was protein for us. I went in my own original—maybe I should say “Beta” self since this body had once been a big kahuna. I took a platoon of various spawn—even spawn from my former kahunas who’d gone independent.

   No sooner had I walked into the tent than a black uniformed major shot me with another pair of silver spikes.

   “That doesn’t work on me anymore dumbass, but here’s something for the thought,” I said as I rammed my fist through his hard body armor, the soft body armor that he wore under that and through his torso and out through the two layers of armor in the rear.

   I dropped the still beating heart on the ground behind him. The chi shield kept me from even getting any blood on my hand or arm.

   Several pistols were drawn along with a couple more of the Taser-like devices.

   “Everyone stand down!” A lieutenant general with three silver stars on his desert camo BDUs shouted.

   “Now, as the officer in charge of Fort Benning along with both associated and unassociated reserve units, I have decided that this siege and the pogrom against those suspected of being so-called ‘Adepts’ is unconstitutional and I’m ordering you men to lay down your arms. You are under suspicion of treason and may face charges,” the three star general said.

   “Dudes, if it was me—I’d rather go down fighting than lay down my arms,” I told the federals.

   “Your comment is not helpful,” the general said in irritation.

   “No, it may not be helpful to either your or my aims. Nonetheless it is true,” I said.

   ************* **************** ****************************

   “May I speak to you for a moment,” the lieutenant general asked me as we prepared to go back to our compound.

   The portals would be opening any moment.

   “What do you need?” I asked him when we were alone.

   “When this is over, I’d very much like to visit your town. I think that maybe it would be a good place to retire and raise my grandchildren,” the general said.

   **************** ******************* ******************************

   At the last moment a gate that hadn’t quite stabilized opened outside our barricades among the black clad federals and over eleven hundred of them entered our land.

   They immediately raised a flag of truce.

   “We wish to apply for political asylum,” the captain that had been selected to represent them told me.

   “How do you figure?” I asked somewhat amused at her audacity.

   “Isn’t this a sovereign territory? And isn’t whether or not to obey an order or to refuse it largely a matter of politics? Either choice can turn out to be the wrong one—depending on who wins,” she said.

   “Surrender your weapons. I hate to say that to anyone—even y’all. You have my word that once the confusion dies down and we can get you some clothing that isn’t an incitement to riot that you will have the run of the place and that I’ll return your weapons,” I said.

   ************** ********************* ***********************************

   Ever hear of an “Arcology”? It’s either a small city or a humongous building depending on how you define it.

   I think that the original plan called for a building a mile wide, a mile thick and one hundred stories tall. Hundred story buildings are a fait accompli. There are no problems building it as wide as you’d like—so long as you have the cash on hand.

   Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven wrote a novel about an Arcology that was two miles on a side.

   An Arcology is fearsomely easy to heat or cool since its surface area is so small compared to its volume. It can house apartments, condominiums, factories and schools. It can even have parks with big oak trees growing—you just have to combine several floors in a few places to allow headroom.

   It saves huge amounts of fuel since everything is close to you.

   No one will ever build an Arcology in the outside world because it has far too high a start-up cost.

   When we entered our new enclave there was a huge Arcology built for us. It is a little over 2.25 miles on a side and one hundred and thirty-seven stories tall—not counting beaucoup levels of basements and a thirty-seven-story extension that went on for more than another mile in every direction.

   God knows how a relatively blunt instrument like the enclave building jutsu built something as sophisticated as an Arcology. It almost certainly wouldn’t have come about if I hadn’t been exposed to the concept along with variations.

   Lets put this into perspective. 2.25 squared gives just a wee bit more than five square miles. Five square miles multiplied by one hundred and thirty-seven stories gives just a little over six hundred square miles. Rhode Island only has one thousand square miles.

   There are bank after bank of full-spectrum lights that never seem to burn out. There are a half a dozen Thorium Reactors with their bases resting on the floor of the lowest sub-basement. One of them would put out more than enough power for three or four Arcologies like ours. They come complete with blueprints and beaucoup operating and maintenance manuals. Scientists and engineers come from all over the world to study our Thorium reactors.

   The top few floors are given over to a recreation of our old village. Two and a half square miles would more than suffice, but several stories were needed to accommodate the trees. Also, the village has been expanded a bit—for instance there were more than enough dorms or barracks to house the federal “Political Refugees” and the influx of students determined to learn tradecraft here.

   My old room is in a dorm on one of the top floor village simulations—Just as I left it decades ago when I sealed it.

   There are trees in the parks that seem to have been growing there for a hundred and fifty—maybe two hundred years or more. There are hydroponic and aereoponic gardens adequate to feed most of the American Southwest housed in our tower.

   There is also an arms factory capable of arming the whole world were that ever to become necessary.

   There is a second replica of the village beside the tower for people who just can’t cotton to living in a building.

   Panic wanted an enclave as big as Indiana or Kentucky. I got carried away a bit. This enclave is as big as Indiana and Kentucky combined and throw in Vermont for good measure. And just like in the tower, the land is filled with huge stands of virgin hardwood timber that would have taken two or three hundred years to stabilize.

   I don’t think that there are any other towers or other artifacts in our enclave but who knows?

   People flock here. Many of the militia and guardsmen who stood shoulder-to-shoulder with us have relocated here. For some reason the enclave is a popular place to immigrate to among the Japanese and the Taiwanese.

   And still there are large areas that probably won’t feel the tread of human feet for a generation or two—maybe three.

   ************ ***************** ***************************

   The Montana skinheads with their sacrifices of dogs and their ki-lobotomised motorcycle storm troopers really dragged my beat. I stomped most of them out with an expedition in force.

   A few of the ringleaders got away. I expect that we will have to deal with them once more as soon as they recruit and regroup.

   Most Montanans aren’t skinheads or demon worshippers of course. I had enough petitions that I opened three enclaves there as well as one in Northern Idaho.

   I opened any number of enclaves for allied Adept groups—but none of them were much bigger than—O, say Kentucky and with bit extra—say the size of Vermont or New Hampshire thrown in. The enclaves came with their own long-standing hardwood forests and the Northern ones somehow contrived have a much warmer climate than the outside world that they connected to. None of them had high tech artifacts either—at least, not to the best of my knowledge.

   With one notable exception—well two, but we’ll get to the second momentarily.

   My grandmother’s people come from the countryside near Huntingburg Indiana. My father liked to tell how he despaired of ever getting out of the river bottoms when he let his (and my grandmother’s) “river-bottom-billy” cousins talk him into going coon-hunting one night.

   I outdid myself there. I threw an enclave about ten percent larger than The Outfit’s—and yes, it was chock-full of artifacts.

   Interestingly enough, no one asked me for that one. I created it “Just because”. I steered plenty of sympathetic folk there afterward. It was too big and potentially power-balance threatening to leave empty waiting for whoever or whatever to come along.

   

[RVM45]

************** ***************** ******************************

   Morgan came to see me. He’d dropped the Snuffy Smith attire and he had a woman with him.

   “What do you want Morgan? I’m not exactly filled with the milk of human kindness toward you. You kicked out my people when their asses were hanging in the breeze,” I said.

   “Do you remember Wizard’s tale? I am the old man who told Wizard about Pale Ladies. This is my mother. Wizard is my father. Those particular timelines are highly convoluted.

   “We had to kick your people out at that particular juncture. The moment was structured that way.

   “Macersville has always existed and it always will—but nonetheless it had to be created. That falls to you. It will be a far harder thing than you have ever attempted. We know that you succeed. We do not know if you survive. We rather doubt it.”

   “One more thing: you are the first owner of the Claidheamh Soluis. Someday you or your descendants will present it to Nuada Airgetlám. That silver arm of yours will be his one day as well,” Morgan said.

   “You are a lying sack of whore’s spit,” I told him. “You told me that The Pale Lady was your cousin.”

   “I am his cousin as well as his mother,” The Pale Lady spoke for the first time.

   “Isn’t the child of your cousin also your cousin? So if two cousins marry wouldn’t the child be a cousin to his mother via his father? Wizard and I aren’t related but there are many first and second cousin marriages in my family tree,” The Pale Lady said.

   “What about Wizard? You’ve been tormenting him for decades. It isn’t right,” I spat.

   “If Wizard hadn’t been to Saturnalia and claimed the Satyr’s penis and testicles how would you have gotten your powers back?” she asked.

   “It is vulgar to use Latin names for body parts—unless you’re some sort of health care professional. There are ample euphemisms without dragging Latin into it,” I said although while my comment was true enough I was being querulous.

   “I am a doctor with far better understanding and therapeutic modalities at my disposal than your witch doctors could ever begin to understand, but I will honor your distaste for Latin terminology,” she said.

   “Wizard will rejoin me in Macersville. He still needs to sire Morgan and his many brothers and sisters in his own timeline. In fact an older Wizard awaits my return. I would have brought him with me but…” She started.

   “But this moment isn’t structured that way,” I finished for her.

   “Spoil, we know that you will create the enclave for us. The fact that we’re here proves that. It is also hard to imagine even you surviving such a huge outpouring of mana. But never let it be said that we tricked you into doing something. You have mastered your internal chi to the point that you could survive in your prime for centuries. Know what we’re asking you to wager,” The Pale Lady said.

   ************ ******************** *****************************

   I had put a lot of thought into reconciling free will with predestination—at least what the Bible means when it uses the term commonly translated as “Predestination” or “Predestinate”.

   In the world of man there are events that are demonstrably deterministic and yet contain far too many variables for man to compute. Presumably God could calculate even the most chaotic deterministic event. His power of calculation should be infinite.

   However from man’s worm’s eye view of the subject only some relatively simple deterministic events can be calculated with dead certainty. The fact is though, the only results that men can determine with certainty are deterministic.

   Some proponents of “Open Theism”—most notably Jed Smock AKA “Brother Jed” believe that not even God can foretell events that aren’t constrained at some level to necessity.

   The circular logic goes around and around:

   “If it can be foretold it must needs be predetermined because only predetermined events can be foretold with absolute certainty.”

   What if we have free will and are free to chose in many cases but yet God—not limited by mortal limitations—can foretell the end event with perfect fidelity?

   Sure it is a contradiction. There are many contradictions inherent in the concept of an Omnipotent Being.

   That means that Omnipotence is LOGICALLY impossible…

   But who says that God is limited to mortal Logic?

   Time travel and/or tangled world lines involve the same sort of conundrums. Someone tells you:

   “You will do this because you must do this. My foreknowledge compels you.”

   Not necessarily. I have to decide. Your foreknowledge simply lets you predict the unpredictable.

   I think that’s one very good reason that the Bible sometimes gives Prophetic warnings but forbids fortune telling on one’s own hook.

   I pondered the question of whether or not to create the giant burl in space-time that was the Macersville enclave.

   Since it was inevitable that I weave the enclave, why not live long and live well and create the enclave when on my deathbed. If I had chosen that course, if I were that weak and cowardly—perhaps Macersville would never have been.

   I wasn’t one to want to carry on with such a weighty task facing me.

   Cowards theorize with the goal of surviving firmly in mind.

   I went far from the new village in case destructive energies were released.

   Just as I was about to begin I found that I’d been followed.

   Ladonna had followed me. Albino Gerald was with her along with Cary the rat runner and David the genius. Gina the cat girl was there. James and Chandra, Duncan the Sumo, Saul the hellhound and Norman the super-sonic came. Jae the Korean mind reader came. Even Coach Brown and Coach O’Brian—both very old men now—chose to come. Thomas the Cherokee and Panic the dragon brought up the rear.

   “Friends, I’m honored but this is pretty much a suicide mission. I have no great hopes of surviving. If you all perish with me then who is left to mind the village and The Outfit?” I said solemnly.

   “You have left a very well organized cadre and the lines of succession are perfectly clear. The Outfit is perfectly capable of carrying on without us,” David said.

   “The amount of chi required as well as the limited data processing of the human mind are what makes this jutsu so problematic,” Ladonna said.

   She took out a suede drawstring bag and extracted five of the chi-saturated gumdrops. She popped all of them into her mouth at once and gulped them down after a few chews. Then she started chewing three more.

      Everyone else was snarfing large quantities of the chi drops. Duncan was throwing softball-sized paper bags full of chi drops into Panic’s open mouth.

   They couldn’t survive such a reckless and imprudent act unless some way to discharge the chi came to hand before they exploded. Creating Macersville was the only possible remedy to such a huge chi overdose.

   That’s why The Pale Lady and Morgan were almost certain that I’d perish. They couldn’t imagine that over twelve of my closest friends—no that’s wrong—over a dozen of my closest kin would contrive to aid me.

   We survived of course or I couldn’t tell the tale. There are no words to describe what it is like to create a hyper-dimensional enclave but the manual telling the procedure is freely available to all. If you’re satisfied with an “E” Book you can download it for free.

   Be warned—there isn’t one in a million who can pull it off and survive.

   As a fringe benefit everyone who helped me create the Macersville enclave are now perfectly capable of creating small enclaves—say the size of South Carolina. They have been invited all over the world to do just that.

   ************** ********************* ***************************

   “You are well over one hundred years old and you don’t look a day over twenty-four,” Ladonna said. “Have you ever reconsidered asking me for a date?”

   “I once told you that would never happen while I had even a small measure of sanity or restraint left to me. Somewhere over the years and after many mind-bending experiences, I seem to have lost both,” I was forced in all honesty to say.

   ************* **************** *********************

   For awhile there was a great many reforms in the American government. There was also a great deal of attention focused on the freshly re-revealed Adepts.

   One by one the new legal protections have been amended and rationalized away over the decades.

   There is no such thing as “Society”. Society is a pagan god invoked to justify attacks on individuals…

   But if there was such a thing as “Society” I’d say that he was trying hard to forget and rationalize away the existence of Adepts and enclaves. That’s all to the good.

   Macersville?

   Once again, you can’t get there from here. I hope that someday Wizard can contrive to visit.

   Maybe he can make it to my two-hundredth birthday party in a couple months.

   One more thing puzzles me. Where was the city of Findias where Nuada Airgetlám’s sword came from? Is that an alias for Macersville or The Outfit’s enclave?

   What about all the tales of The Tuatha de Danann and the faerie lands where people sometimes disappeared? Maybe The Tuatha de Danann were Adepts. That bit about just spending days only to find out that years or decades had passed in the outside world…

   Yeah, enclaves that are very old can get kinda out of sync with the outside timestream without expert maintenance and knob twiddling.

        I'm kinda saddened. I'm mayor, king or whatever you want to call it of The Outfit's enclave and I've lived several human lifetimes but somewhere I lost the happy-go-lucky underachiever who liked to wander through the village drinking cokes, sketching scenes and people and just grooving on being fit and free.

      I'm still free but I am no longer unencumbered by responsibilities.

      I remind myself daily that nothing of lasting value ever results from haste and letting oneself feel under pressure or driven is the root of many evils--and no good.

      Its a little harder to walk that walk when you're at the top.


 

.....RVM45

[UncleMorgan]

Wow.

I read that epic story in pretty much a single sitting.

It was utterly impossible, improbable, and entertaining.

What a great read.

I can't wait for the movie.

I (and all my Spawns) give it two thumbs up.

[Texican]

RVM,

Good read....   

Stayed up till 4:32 last night and finish this evening....

Thanks for the story....

Texican....
A Proud Deplorable....