Robert Adams - Bili the Axe

After five years, the director, Dr. David Sternheimer, had unsealed the Center and sent out well-armed patrols into the surrounding areas. Their mission was not only to reconnoiter but, if possible, to bring back prisoners—young, healthy men and women, boys and girls, who had survived the plagues. The teams had met with notable success, and it was into these plague-proof younger bodies that Sternheimer and the rest had transferred their minds, driving out and away from the Center all of the confused or insane consciousnesses now in occupancy of much older bodies which mostly were dying of one or more of the plagues.

As time bore on, Center patrols brought in more and more of the scattered pockets of survivors to settle around the Center, engaging in farming and stock-breeding and unaware that they were, themselves, breeding stock of a sort… not at first, not in the beginning.

Slowly, as their strength of numbers waxed, as their shops and small manufactories repaired or refurbished garnered firearms, fabricated ammunition and explosives, the folk of the Center were able to vastly expand their holdings of land and to bring many more subjects under their suzerainty. Within less than two hundred years, Sternheimer and his fellows felt that they were strong enough to push on northward and eastward into the rich agricultural lands of what had been the state of Georgia.

And they had done so, not moving as rapidly as they might have done with their disciplined troops and superior arms and the coordination of long-distance communications, preferring rather to consolidate their gains as they advanced, which was the method proved through their earlier, Florida conquests.

Their way took time, a great deal of time. Cities, towns, hamlets, even the larger farms, when once conquered or taken over had to be carefully searched for still-usable artifacts, for books of any description, for the thousands of minutiae for want of which the Center industries might one day grind to a halt. Once found, these items must be sifted by experts, packed and sent back south along with the hostages. For their hostages, they took as first choices skilled craftsmen and/or persons capable of reading and writing. Sometimes they removed entire populations to Florida, replacing them with an equal number of folk whose preceding generations had all lived and died under the sway of the Center.

For this reason, they had not advanced far when the invaders—thousands of them—landed at points all along the Atlantic Seaboard, established strong beachheads and began to fight their way inland. Where possible, the aliens pro-ceeded up rivers, supported and supplied by their shallow-draft ships and boats.

Although the invaders were no better armed than their indigenous opponents and, in the beginning, suffered from a complete dearth of mounted troops, they were all veteran warriors, well organized and with a firm, mutual purpose. Moreover, they often benefited from the more than willing help of certain of their erstwhile opponents.

This last factor—the fact that many of the Americans hated and despised their own American kin with far more venom and vehemence than they did the foreign invaders—was what gave victory after victory to the aliens, as well as adding to their numbers. Forces which had consisted of no more than two or three thousand warriors upon landing often had tripled or quadrupled or even quintupled their strength by the time they were compelled to leave their boats at the fall line and move out of the tidewater lands and into the rich piedmont.

It was also another facet of this situation that defeated the forces of the Center when finally they came face to face with a sizable number of the invaders and their indigenous allies. Thanks to their firepower, the battalion-sized force wreaked bloody havoc in the initial stages of the contest, but then the ammunition ran low and radio contact with the bases within the newly conquered areas ceased to exist.

Not until the tattered, battered survivors of that doomed battalion had fought their way back to the environs of the very Center itself did they become fully aware of just how great a calamity had occurred in the areas to their immediate rear. Not until then had anyone realized just how deep and strong ran the hatred of the conquered for the Center conquerors.

In town after town, village and hamlet and farm, the people rose up to butcher Center personnel and the native satraps, smashing into ruin anything that smacked of the Center, burning buildings and vehicles. Nor had the risings been confined solely to the new-conquered, for Georgian areas now populated principally by folk brought from Florida had joined in the rising as wholeheartedly as their new neighbors. And these former Floridians it was who had coined the hate-filled battle-cry of the risen people—“Witchmen!”

Within bare weeks of the first contact between Center forces and the oncoming invaders, risings within Florida had shrunken the holdings of the Center to a mere shadow of its former glory; and these few remaining square miles were under constant and heavy siege by former subjects now allied with the invaders. But that siege never succeeded, and eventually the besiegers gave it up as a useless waste of time and wandered back home to fight among themselves.

More time rolled on. Generations were born and lived and died. The horrifying stories of the Witchmen to the south devolved from memory to legend to mere myth, believed by the few—the very young or the very superstitious—but doubted by most. Few adults would have believed that these deathless creatures, these Witchmen, moved among them… but they did.

The processes of mind transference had been vastly refined over the centuries, so that machinery, equipment, even a laboratory environment no longer were necessary to a man or woman experienced in the techniques. Witchmen and Witch-women inhabiting the bodies of well-known locals made the very best, the least detectable spies, and within a century or so their slender network stretched out north and east and west throughout almost all of what had once been the eastern half of the United States of America.

The Greek-speaking invaders had interbred with the native Americans and had slowly coalesced into a good-sized state comprising most of what had once been New England and parts of eastern Canada, in the north. To their immediate south lay the sprawling ruins of New York City, virtually deserted, but a veritable treasure trove of metals and other valuable loot and therefore hotly and frequently fought over by the invaders. Then there were several small but exceedingly aggressive black states scattered along the banks of the Hudson, and the huge and acquisitive Kingdom of Pennsylvania—which comprised all of Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Maryland along with parts of West Virginia, Virginia, Delaware, Ohio and New York State.

And the only thing which had checked the southerly expansion of the mighty kingdom was an even larger and more populous kingdom, this one another Greek-speaking state, the Kingdom of Kehnooryos Ehlas—or, in English, New Greece. This kingdom stretched from coast through tidewater and piedmont and highlands and, in places, into the mountains of what had been the states of Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and part of Louisiana, plus a generous scoop of northern and eastern Florida, along with almost all of the northwestern panhandle of that former state.

But years and generations of comparative peac£ and relatively easy living had served to dull the cutting edges of the former invaders, to dim their martial fires. They were no longer expanding their territories in most places, and many of their borders were held by hired mercenaries who, quite naturally for their ilk, fought as little as possible and then only when forced to it.