John Ringo - There Will Be Dragons

“Game,” Edmund said. “The hell with sending one fellow out with a bow; the woods are teaming with game. Deer, bison, turkey, feral cattle, goats, horses and sheep. Send a hundred refugees out as beaters and drive the damned things off a cliff. This is about gathering food, not sport.”

“Save the domestics,” Myron interjected. “We can redomesticate them. The big cattle bulls we can deball and use as oxen. We’re going to need draft animals. There’s wild horses and even donkeys as well. And the horseflesh on some of them is first rate. Emu, bison, wapiti, all of them can be adequately domesticated. We can rebuild stocks out of the ferals.”

“There’s not much leather around,” Donald Healey said. The cooper used it in various ways and tended to go through a lot. “We’re going to need the skins.”

“Meat’s not all you get,” McGibbon interjected. “Bone, horn, hair, all of it is useful.”

“We can do this,” Lisbet said. “You’re right.”

“Won’t be easy,” Edmund replied. “Easy just ended. But we can do it and we will do it, so help me God.”

“Okay, okay,” Glass said, raising his hands. “I see which way this is going and I’ll even say I agree.”

“We need a vote,” Myron said. “Any other nominations? Edmund, do you accept?”

The smith looked at the ground and to the others. A weight appeared to settle on his shoulders and something old and hard seemed to be in his countenance. But when he looked up his face was clear.

“I do.”

“Any other nominations? No. All in favor say aye.”

“Aye!”

“Opposed?” There was silence. “Passed by acclamation, Mayor Edmund.”

“But no handouts!”

“Well, a bit,” Edmund said, stroking his beard in deep thought. “The refugees that come in are going to be in shock. We can probably last one season with them still in shock but we have to get fields planted, material made. They’ll need to get on their feet and learn skills. But which skills and how? Say we… hmmm…”

“Yah,” McGibbon said. “A training program?”

“But, they don’t have any idea, most of them, how much work all of this is,” Bethan said in exasperation. “And most of them have never worked a day in their lives! It’s hard running a farm, from either side of the kitchen! I mean, just the washing !”

“And we’ll need tools, seed,” Myron shook his head. “We’ll need farmers, Edmund, lots of farmers. And that’s not just sticking seed in the ground.”

“We’ll handle it,” Edmund said definitely. “In this room is probably a thousand years of accumulated experience in how to live in preindustrial conditions. There are people in this room who know things about their skill areas that masters of any other age wouldn’t have dreamed about learning. We’ll feed the new people and teach them until they’re more or less ready to go out on their own.”

“Training program, hmmm…” Tarmac said. The innkeeper looked around in thought. “Break them down in groups, run them through a few days to a week of each of the things that we’ve got skilled craftsmen to teach.”

“Yeah,” Myron replied after a moment. “Have them do the stuff that apprentices would do. Give them at taste of the job.”

“Work them hard but slowly,” Tom Raeburn said. “Build them up to it.”

“And, remember, many of the refugees who come here are going to be Faire goers,” Edmund said with a nod. “Yeah, most of them don’t know a whipple tree from an apple-tree, but they’ve got some experience of living rough. And there are others, guys like Geral Thorson and Suwisa, makers and dealers mostly, who have really useable skills. I don’t know who is going to make it, I don’t know where anyone on Earth was when the power turned off. But some of them are bound to make it. And when they do, we’ll be as ready for them as possible.”

Edmund glanced up as a figure glistened into visibility by his shoulder.

“Edmund, I need some time,” Sheida said, looking around at the crowd. “Myron, Bethan,” she said, nodding.

“Sheida, what’s going on?!” Maria McGibbon shouted.

“Please,” the avatar said, raising her hands. “Please, I don’t have time. I’m… even now we’re fighting and it’s… it’s like fencing mind to mind. They think of a way to attack us, we think of a way to attack them. They’re dropping… rocks, satellites, things like that on Eagle Home at the moment. We’re deflecting them but that’s taking power and that means we can’t attack back.”

“When is the power going to come back?” Myron asked.

“I… I don’t know,” Sheida answered. “Not soon. Edmund, we have to talk.”

“Folks, what I want you to do is break up. Tarmac, you and Lisbet are in charge of figuring out what we need for minimal rations for refugees and where and how to serve them. Get a couple of other people together with you. Robert, you’re in charge of preparing to do large-scale hunting and gathering ferals. Get with Charlie on how to keep them and setting up a mass slaughter program. You’ve run the Faire the last couple. Get to work, people, we don’t have much time. Myron, you’re with me.”

Edmund led Sheida in to the back room of the pub as the conversation exploded behind him. But he could tell from the sound that they were working, not panicking, not spinning their wheels. They were all smart, and experienced and self-starters. All they had needed was a touch of self confidence and a direction to point. With that he could more or less let it run and just make sure it didn’t run out of control.

“You done good, Edmund,” Sheida’s avatar said.

“Thanks,” he replied then looked around. “Are you an avatar or a projection?”

“I’m… I’m an autonomous projection,” Sheida replied.

“That’s proscribed!” Myron snapped.

“So is dropping rocks on my home,” the avatar said with a sigh. “I can only handle about fifteen of these but they can give orders and gather real information while I handle things that only I can do, like give code commands to the Net. Right now, both sides are fighting for controls. We discovered that we could lock out programs and sub-programs and we’ve been doing that as fast as we can. Unfortunately, they noticed and now they’re at it. And it requires direct orders of a council member. So creating full avatars was the only way to get anything else done. Every hour or so I take a break and upload all the data I’ve gained and make any corrections I have to. It’s working. We know that because we’re still alive.”

“Is it that close?” Edmund asked.

“Every few minutes I think they’re going to finally kill me,” she answered with a sigh. “And then sometimes I think we’ve finally come up with the one true thing that is going to wipe the floor with them. And it never does.”

“Bitchin’,” Edmund said with a snort. “You need to back up. This kind of battle never gets won thinking purely tactical. Back up and take a look around for a deep strike.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Sheida asked.

“I don’t know. I don’t understand the nature of the battlefield. But winning a war is not about killing your opponent, it’s about making them give up. To do that you place them in a situation where they believe, whether it is true or not, that they’ve already lost. In the best of all possible worlds, your enemy creates those conditions for you. But that takes an idiot on the other side. I take it that Paul hasn’t shown any signs of tactical idiocy. Let’s hope he’s less capable at strategy. And that is what you should be thinking about.”