Eric Flint - Time spike

Watkins had always thought those bayonets were a little silly-looking.

After watching for a couple of minutes, he changed his mind.

Chapter 42 "Hulbert, look. Can you believe what you're seeing?"

Jerry Bailey's voice was gruff, but filled with humor. Then the man laughed aloud. "Man, oh man, how good can it get?" Confused, Hulbert looked. Bailey was pointing to an area between two of the huts. Ten brown and tan puppies, no longer than a man's palm, squirmed and whimpered as they tried to get their mother to care for them. The mother couldn't. She'd been hit by a bullet during the battle. But the puppies were fine. Alive and well. His brows drew into a frown. The dogs the Spaniards had were vicious creatures trained to maim and kill on command. A number of them had been shot in the battle, several of them while trying to attack the oncoming prison guards. He wanted no part of those dogs. It'd be like trying to keep half-tame wolves. But that was mostly because of the way the dogs had been reared. And these dogs might have belonged to the villagers anyway. They looked like they might be part coyote. Starting with puppies… He thought of Marie Keehn and had to swallow hard in order to control his emotions.

Marie liked dogs. If he could bring her a puppy, she would feel like she had been given a little piece of home. "Come on," he said. "Let's get us a pair of hunting dogs before the women scoop them up for pets." Bailey's grin was as wide as Hulbert's. "The dogs at the prison have all been fixed. I thought that meant the species was probably a gonner." He followed Hulbert, just one step behind. "They won't be as tame as what we're used to." "It doesn't matter what they are, they're close enough to dogs for me. We can always breed out the undesirable characteristics, and work towards the good ones." Rod knelt down in order to get a better look at the pups. Jerry squatted next to him.

"What are we going to call it?" he asked. "Call what?" "What's happening to some of the animals we're running across?" Bailey pointed at the pups. "When the last of something dies out, we say it's gone extinct. But, if something from the future dies out, it's not extinction. It can't be. I mean, how can a species die out before it evolves?" Rod shook his head. "That's Edelman's department. Or Carmichael's, I guess, if you don't believe in evolution." He rolled one of the whimpering pups onto its back and rubbed its belly. "You found them, Jerry. You get pick of litter." It didn't take the C.O. long to choose. The brown and black, chubby little female whimpered then growled when he picked her up, but quickly settled down and sucked and nipped at his pinky finger. "Uh-oh, Hulbert. It looks like we've been spotted. If you want one of these, you better hurry.

Marilyn's headed this way and she looks like a woman on a mission."

Marilyn Traber was wearing the exact same grin Bailey wore. "Don't even think of hogging all of them, guys. I'm warning you. Don't go there." Grin or no grin, she looked downright threatening. "Yeah, sure, Marilyn. Pick whichever one you want. Except-" Quickly, Rod made his choice. Jerry had picked a female, so he'd pick a male. That way, between them, they'd have a breeding pair. "This one." "And now a mystery must be resolved," said Watkins. "Who or what is 'saluki'? "

Andy Blacklock smiled. "Well, it's a little embarrassing. It didn't even occur to me we might need a battle cry. Luckily, somebody improvised. A saluki is a type of dog. More to the point, it's the mascot SIU chose for its sports teams." The Cherokee chief got a long-suffering look on his face. "And who is Essayeyou?" "Oh. Sorry.

It stands for Southern Illinois University. The campus at Carbondale is the closest university to us. Was the closest, anyway. Most of the guards rooted for them." "They dug up roots for them? Why? They were paidthat badly as guards?" Andy got a long-suffering look on his face.

Marilyn Traber found a reed basket inside one of the Indian huts.

The ten small puppies were tucked inside it and covered with a swatch of cloth cut from a cape worn by one of the Spaniards. The pups were very young; not all of them had their eyes open. Traber was not so young. Life had opened her eyes a long time back. And she knew too well that dealing with the horrors of this new world would probably open them a little more. But none of that mattered. Not right this minute. Now, nothing mattered except these ten, warm, squirming fragments of normalcy. She lifted a corner of the improvised blanket and took another peek at them. Looking at them made her feel good. She then flashed a grin at the two C.O.'s standing nearby. Winnfield and Sharps were taking their orders to defend the small creatures seriously. They scanned the forest almost continuously, determined neither man not beast would be allowed to hurt the ten small canines.

Three of the pups were promised out. She, Bailey, and Hulbert had already staked their claims. But the other seven were up for grabs.

There was going to be a lottery when they got back to the prison, and seven lucky winners would become the owners of the seven unclaimed pups. The puppies would survive. She knew there was a case of canned milk at the Cherokee Indian camp. It had been packed in with their other supplies. There was another case of the stuff back at the prison. There was also an eyedropper in Jenny Radford's emergency bag. *** "We did not kill all of the Spaniards," Watkins said "We're not even sure the horseman Lieutenant Hulbert shot was actually de Soto. None of us knows what he looked like." Andy nodded, accepting the Cherokee chief's assessment. He'd never really expected they could kill all of the conquistadores. Not with just one battle. This one had gone as well as you could ask for, but things would get a lot harder from now on. They'd had the huge advantage of catching the Spaniards completely by surprise. De Soto and his men hadn't even known of their existence until the prison guards started firing. Now, they did. And there were still at least two hundred of them alive. Most of them were still armed, too. With swords and halberds, if nothing else. They'd run out of ammunition quickly, though. The Spaniards had abandoned all of their pack mounts and supplies except whatever they were carrying on their persons when they were routed. The one cart they'd had was also now in the possession of Blacklock's people-and it obviously carried most of the expedition's powder and shot. Still, it was going to get hairy. Having a couple of hundred murderers running around loose with swords was bound to get hairy. De Soto finally rallied his men, once they got perhaps a mile and half from the slaughter at the village. "Rallied," at least, in the sense of getting them to stop running. There was no possibility of getting them to return to the battle. The carnage there had been incredible. Whoever those blue-uniformed strangers were, their muskets were deadly beyond belief. De Soto knew, because he'd been able to watch the entire battle from behind shelter. He'd dismounted and gone into the shrubbery to relieve himself, just before the ambush took place. He'd been lucky. If he'd still been on his horse with his top lieutenants, de Soto didn't doubt at all that he'd have been the first one shot instead of Hernandez. Whoever had been the sniper targeting the expedition's commanders, his marksmanship was satanic. Moscoso was dead, too. De Soto was sure of that, even though he hadn't seen him killed. He'd sent Moscoso to bring order to one of the companies of his army, and that had been the company that received the worst casualties. Only a handful of the men in that company had come out alive, and Luis had not been one of them. At least de Soto had kept his horse. He was now one of only three men in his expedition still on horseback. He glared down at his men. They glared right back at him.