CHAPTER 6 – PATROLING THE AMERICAS
Pink: Mayan Classical Period (250 CE – 900 CE). Orange: Aztec Empire (1325 CE – 1519 CE). Green: Inca Empire (late 1400s CE – 1532 CE). Teotihuacan (100 CE – 650 CE). Chichen Itza (end 7th C. CE – 1200 CE). Tikal (300 BCE – 870 CE). Uxmal (750 CE – 1000 CE). Tiahuanaco (100 CE – 1000 CE). Tenochtitlan (1300 CE – 1521 CE). Tula (800 CE- 1160 CE).
09:35 (American Eastern Time)
Wednesday, January 25, 862 C.E.
Cockpit of Interceptor AC 3027, overflying the southern tip of Greenland
North Atlantic area, close to the Arctic Circle
‘’Still no ships or boats detected in the Atlantic up to a range of 400 kilometers, Robert.’’
‘’Thanks, Sylvia!’’ replied Robert Busson, the pilot and commander of the interceptor AC 3027. ‘’Time for us to do a turn towards the West and do a reconnaissance flight along the American land mass. Anybody else in the air over the Americas at this time?’’
‘’Only two game hunting and culling teams operating around respectively the Labrador region and the central prairies and one tree harvesting team operating near the southern portion of the Hudson Bay. Once south of the Great Lakes, we will be the only Human Expansion presence over the continent.’’
‘’Then, I believe that we can do this patrol at leisure, at our own pace. After all, we have no other task for this day.’’
‘’Sound fine with me.’’ said Sylvia Morgan, the sensors officer of the interceptor. The AC 3027 was a mean-looking ship measuring some 110 meters-long and shaped like an elongated egg flanked in cruciform fashion by four large weapons pods armed with heavy disintegrator cannons, high-power lasers, electro-magnetic rail guns and missile launch tubes. It had been designed mostly for battle fleet actions but was also used a lot for reconnaissance, a role in which its extensive sensors suite made it excel. A hundred such interceptors had traveled to Earth from Alpha Centauri as part of the MARCO POLO’s fleet, embarked either on the MARCO POLO or on one of the six battleships of the evacuation fleet, and they constituted a redoubtable strike force, something the Viking armies ravaging Europe four months ago had learned the hard way.
Turning his interceptor towards the South, Robert Busson accelerated his ship to hypersonic speed, heading towards the main continental landmass of North America. It didn’t take them long before reaching the Arctic coast of Labrador, a vast region covered with frozen tundra in the North and dense forests in the South and teeming with animal life. This was their first American patrol and he personally didn’t know much about the Humans populating it in this century which, for most people from the 41st Century, was a very old and obscure period of history. The one thing that he knew about the Americas of the early Middle Ages was that the civilizations of Central America at this time, the Toltecs and the Mayans, practiced human sacrifices, something another interceptor’s crew had confirmed during a previous patrol. That had engendered reactions of horror and revulsion in New Auckland and had prompted in turn a strong new policy concerning such human sacrifices: to stop them by killing from a distance the priests and executioners caught in the act. The Mayans and the Toltecs had already had a taste of that new policy in a few of their cities but there was still a lot left to be done in order to eliminate such barbaric customs. Robert then spoke again to Sylvia.
‘’Sylvia, review our historical files on the North American human populations in this century and tell me what we know about them.’’
‘’Well, I already had that info up on one of my computer screens and it isn’t much, to be frank. The various people occupying North America are mostly nomadic or semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers and fishermen. They are not yet fully sub-divided into the numerous tribes present on the arrival of the first Europeans and can be best described as small, independent sub-groups belonging to their local regional culture. In the case of the people of Labrador and of Northern Canada, there are only a few tens of thousands of nomadic hunter-gatherers split into small groups belonging to the Subarctic Culture. They mostly live off hunting and, along the coasts, fishing and shellfish gathering. The people living in the region we are about to overfly will eventually become the Naskapi, in Labrador, and the Cree, in the Prairies. Back in Newfoundland, we have the Beothuk, the indigenous people with which the first group of Norsemen to reach North America around the year 1000 will clash, forcing the Norsemen to eventually reembark and leave. Presently, the population density in these regions is still very low, with groups of a few dozen people at most widely dispersed around and moving frequently their campsites in order to follow the herds of caribous on which they feed. Our hunting/culling and wood-cutting teams operate here because of this low population density and also because the resources here are so abundant that controlled and reasonable exploitation can be done without endangering the ecosystem.’’
‘’Thanks, Sylvia! That was very helpful. Let’s go visit first our hunting/culling team in Labrador.’’
Using the radar beacon of that hunting/culling team to fly towards its present position, Robert was careful to stay at high altitude, where his interceptor would be more difficult to spot from the ground once he would slow down to subsonic speeds, when the directed-gravity propulsion of the ship, by pushing forward the air surrounding the interceptor, would prevent the formation of a telltale condensation trail. Some twenty minutes later, Robert slowed down his interceptor to a speed of only 600 kilometers per hour as they approached the location of the hunting/culling team.
Human cultures in North and Central America, prior to the arrival of the Europeans.
‘’Sylvia, do a thermal search of the ground area around our team, to see if some natives are close by.’’
‘’On it!’’ replied the pretty sensors officer of the interceptor. She got back to Robert after about a minute.
‘’No human presence within a good ten kilometers from our team, which is presently on the surface and loading up a few caribous in their shuttle.’’
‘’Excellent! Let’s call them, to see if they need anything.’’
Switching to the operational radio frequency of the day for the area of the Americas, Robert soon had the face of a mature man wearing a graying beard appear on a side viewing screen, making him grin.
‘’Eh, isn’t it that old bastard of Jack Fleming down there!’’
‘’That old bastard will send you off to do something if you go on like this, Robert. How is your patrol going, to date?’’
‘’Very uneventful up to now, Jack. So, how do you like going native like you do now?’’
‘’I love it, truly! This job is just what I wanted. On top of helping to provide meat to our citizens, it allows me to get back close to nature and live in the true sense of it.’’
‘’And how is your hunting going up to now?’’
‘’Very well indeed. In the last four days alone, we stunned and captured a complete caribou extended family of one alpha male, fifteen female caribous and nine young ones. We then sent that extended caribou family to New Zealand, where it will augment our steadily growing herds of free-roaming cattle and game animals. Presently, we are busy collecting a few male caribous soon destined for slaughter and butchering.’’
‘’And the remaining caribou herds here in Labrador, are they in any danger of tinning out and disappearing?’’
‘’Are you kidding, Robert? The herd from which we culled those caribous still counts about a quarter of a million animals. Since we kill mostly the old males and with the very low number of nomadic hunters present in this area, that herd will in fact continue to grow steadily until it becomes too big to sustain itself. By culling only a few beasts every day, we are simply preventing the herd to become too big for its own good. The same goes with Stinson’s team in the prairies, which is busy culling buffalos according to the same rules as we follow. The big difference between my team and his team is the amount of meat they collect on each of their buffalos: those beasts are huge and their meat is excellent.’’
‘’Have you or Stinson encountered some local nomads up to now?’’
‘’No, and we are doing our best to avoid that. That’s why we mostly hunt and work at night, to avoid attracting the locals’ attention.’’
‘’And if you do meet some of them, what are your orders? Couldn’t they become angry at seeing some foreigners hunt what they consider to be their designated preys?’’
‘’We are very conscious about that and so are the food program managers in New Auckland, which is why we do our best to stay under the radar. However, in the case of a surprise encounter, we have with us a number of gift items, like steel knives and tools, dear skins, frozen meat and some fresh fruits, enough to make them accept our presence here.’’
‘’That sounds like a good policy to me. Steel knives should be like real treasures for them.’’
‘’Oh, I don’t know about that, Robert: those silex points and blades they use can be surprisingly sharp and durable.’’
‘’I see! Well, we will leave your team free to continue its work here. I will now go see how Stinson’s team is doing. Don’t hesitate to call if you need anything from me.’’
‘’I will! Have a nice patrol. Hunter Team One, out!’’
With that conversation concluded, Robert accelerated again to hypersonic speed, heading West towards the Canadian Prairies. However, he first slowed down again after half an hour in order to check on the woodcutting team operating south of the Hudson Bay. There, amidst immense forests of pines, firs and birch trees, a few forest management technicians directing a robotic work team were cutting and collecting individual trees, using a highly dispersed collection plan. The oldest, biggest and best trees were first selected and marked by the managers, with a minimum distance of a hundred meters between the selected trees, then flying lumberjack robots descended on each selected tree, with one robot first cutting off the branches of that tree and with another robot taking hold of the denuded trunk. A robot armed with a huge chainsaw then cut the trunk very close to the ground. As the flying robotic crane lifted off the cut tree to place it into a flying transport sled, the chainsaw robot did more cuts, these ones at near vertical into the ground, in order to free and extract the root of the tree, leaving a small, shallow crater in the ground. Both the massive central root and the cut branches were then collected and carried away, in order to eventually produce with them plywood sheets used in small buildings’ construction or to use the cellulose to produce synthetic materials. Before leaving each cut tree location, the team planted a young tree in the clearing just created, to ensure the continued renewal of the forest. With the whole tree harvesting program carefully planned by computer and based on aerial survey maps, the authorities in New Auckland were able to harvest tens of thousands of trees per month, and this without endangering the forest habitats of the planet.
The visit to the bison hunting/culling team in the Prairies equally went in a routine manner, with Stinson’s team in the process of preparing to return to their base in New Zealand. That left Robert free to switch to another phase of his patrol. He however consulted Sylvia Morgan again before heading in a new direction.
‘’So, Sylvia, what is there of interest to check on before we go pay a visit to the Central America and Caribbean areas?’’
‘’To be frank: not much, unless you are interested in observing the hunting methods of nomadic hunter-gatherers across North America. The only group of interest would be the Mississippian Cultures of the American Southeast. They have just switched to fixed habitat centers and to an agrarian economy centered on the culture of corn, beans and squash. However, little info on them can be found in our datafiles.’’
‘’Is there a specific location in their zone of occupation that would be worth a look, Sylvia?’’
‘’Yes! One of their main known historical centers is Cahokia, in Missouri. I am now sending you a map with its historical location.’’
‘’Thanks!’’ Cahokia, here we come!’’
Reconstitution of the Mississippian Culture site of Cahokia, as it was around 1000 CE.
Mississippian Culture areas (700 CE – 17th Century CE). Cahokia is southwest of the Great Lakes, near the future site of St-Louis and was part of the Middle Mississippian Culture.
11:43 (America Eastern Time)
Interceptor AC 3027, 15,000 meters above Cahokia
Area of future St-Louis, Missouri, American Southeast
Stopping his interceptor and making it float stationary at high altitude, Robert looked down at Sylvia Morgan’s sensors station, situated slightly below and to the right of his pilot’s station.
‘’Alright, Sylvia! It’s now all yours!’’
‘’Thanks, Robert! I will first initiate a detailed mapping of this local area via our mapping radar and cameras, then will check the activity on the ground with the help of our high-resolution telescope.’’
‘’Sounds fine with me.’’
Programming a cartography coverage of the area they were overflying, including the culture fields surrounding Cahokia, Sylvia then coupled their high-definition observation telescope with a thermal camera, with the goal of being able to count later on the number of inhabitants living in Cahokia. It didn’t take long before she noticed something unusual.
‘’That’s strange: it seems that about everybody in Cahokia is presently assembled around what appears at first to be an earth mound under construction.’’
‘’Well, since they don’t have any machinery, I would guess that it would take a lot of manual labor to build such mounds, no?’’ suggested the weapons officer, Jorge Canseco.
‘’Could be! I…’’
Sylvia’s prolonged silence after that made Robert twist his head to look at her.
‘’What? Do you see something special, Sylvia?’’
When it came, her response was made in a voice filling with anger and disgust.
‘’THESE BASTARDS ARE IN THE PROCESS OF EXECUTING PEOPLE! I can see fourteen bodies already lying in a freshly dug trench.’’
‘’WHAT?’’ nearly shouted Robert before switching one of his display screens to the view given by their telescope. Passing in normal visible light mode, he then went to maximum magnification. With a trench effectively half filled with the bodies of fourteen half naked women now evident on his screen, he saw a man wearing some kind of ceremonial head covering strike a kneeling woman with what appeared to be a stone object. The woman then collapsed on the ground, to be then pushed into the trench, where two other men grabbed her body and carried it a few meters before putting her down next to another dead woman. That scene both revolted Robert and made him slam a fist on the left armrest of his pilot’s seat.
‘’WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH ALL THESE PEOPLE IN AMERICA MAKING HUMAN SACRIFICES? FIRST, IT WAS THE TOLTECS IN TULA, THEN THE MAYANS IN TIKAL, NOW THESE PEOPLE TOO? JORGE, I WANT PRECISION TARGETTING WITH OUR LASERS ON THOSE PRIESTS AND THEIR AIDES DOING THE KILLING! DYY, I WANT YOU TO SEND DOWN A SMALL RECONNAISSANCE DRONE, SO THAT WE COULD GET A CLOSE-UP VIEW OF WHAT EXACTLY IS HAPPENING DOWN THERE.’’
‘’Setting up the launch of a drone now.’’ replied Dyy Jonan, the Centaurian female flight engineer of the interceptor. ‘’Drone launched! It should be down near the surface in seven minutes.’’
‘’Good! I will use that time to alert our base in New Auckland about this and transmit to them what we see. Jorge, make it quick with your lasers: every extra minute will mean another dead woman.’’
‘’Targeting sequence programmed, with five individuals selected and designated. Firing now!’’
Firing in the ultra-violet spectrum, which was invisible to the naked eye, the five-megawatt laser beams from the interceptor’s three high-power laser batteries having a field of fire that covered Cahokia instantly heated the air they went through, the same way a lightning bolt would, creating loud thunderclaps.
Ritual mass human sacrifice of 53 native women in Cahokia.
On the ground next to the trench, 22-year-old Makita, wearing only a short skirt and kneeling in the dirt, closed her eyes tight, trembling with fear as the priest next to her raised his stone mace to strike her on the head and kill her. She thus didn’t see the priest’s head and the right half of his body being incinerated in an instant, but she certainly heard the thunderclap of the laser beam when it struck both the priest and the ground under him. She jumped with fright at the ear-splitting ‘CRACK’ and opened her eyes, in time to see the incinerated remains of the priest collapse on the ground next to her. Four more thunderclaps then resonated in quick succession and the remaining priest and three assistant executioners were also incinerated into cinders. Makita, like the rest of the assembled population of Cahokia, could only look on at the fuming bodies for long seconds, unable to comprehend what had just happened. King Nookat, who had ordered the sacrificial ceremony in order to ‘honor’ his deceased younger brother, also starred with disbelief at the bodies while sitting on his ceremonial chair, which had been put down next to the trench containing the bodies of the women already executed. Stupefaction in Makita then turned quickly into a mix of new hope and resentment. Hope, for it appeared that she would now be able to live on. Resentment at King Nookat for having designated Makita to be one of the women to be sacrificed, and this as a punishment for Makita’s husband attempt at refusing to give away half of the produce from his field to the King. Nookat had then ordered her husband killed as a punishment, with her to be sacrificed at the next offering to the Serpent God. Pointing an accusing finger at the King, she shouted out at the top of her lungs.
‘’THE GODS ARE DISPLEASED WITH THE KING AND HIS PRIESTS! LET’S KILL HIM!’’
Giving the example herself, Makita grabbed the stone mace dropped by the dead priest and ran towards Nookat while screaming her thirst for revenge. The few royal guards forming a thin cordon meant to contain the crowd watching the ceremony were quickly submerged and overrun by the vindictive inhabitants, who had been enduring for years the excesses of King Nookat. The latter, with dozens of his people also joining Makita in running at him, tried his best to run away but his intricate ceremonial robe hindered him, cutting his speed by nearly half. An enraged Makita was the first to reach him, slashing his back with her stone mace as soon as she was within arms reach of him. Nookat screamed out in pain and slowed down for a moment, allowing Makita to get close enough to hit him on the back of his head. Half knocked out, the King tripped and fell on the ground. Before he could get back up, Makita was on top of him, delivering savage blows with her stone mace. Half a dozen men then joined her in turning Nookat into a bloody pulp.
Aboard the interceptor, Robert and his crew watched on the death of the king with undisguised satisfaction, with Jorge Canseco then making a comment.
‘’That little woman who just escaped execution seems to be quite a firebrand. I wonder what she said to the crowd.’’
‘’Probably something like ‘LET’S KILL THE FUCKER!’’’ replied Sylvia, a smirk on her face. Dyy Jonan, ever the most level-headed one in the crew, looked at Robert.
‘’What do we do now? Should we leave and let these people manage along without their priests and king?’’
‘’Our directives about first contact with local natives in the Americas are strict, Dyy. We should avoid such contacts in order to prevent the transmission of diseases to which those natives possess no biological immunity. We also want to avoid showing ourselves in person, in order not to fuel new beliefs about more gods.’’
‘’These damn religions!’’ said in turn Sylvia. ‘’They all do only one thing: bring power and control over others to the ones advocating those religions.’’
Robert could only nod his head at that. What Ann Shelton and her assistant administrators were encountering in Europe was also heavily tainted by the scourge of religious abuse and intolerance, minus the human sacrifices practiced in Central America and Mexico. He then had to correct himself: in Europe they did not make human sacrifices but they burned heretics, sorcerers and witches at the stake.
‘’Sylvia, have our drone take close up pictures and facial scans of that young woman we saved, so that we could recognize and find her in the future: she looks like a good prospect to become one of our designated local translators.’’
Sylvia nodded at that and sent commands to the drone she had sent down to Cahokia. To circumvent the fact that many of the languages and dialects spoken on 9th Century Earth were not recorded into the linguistic data banks used to teach new languages via mnemotronic techniques, Ann Shelton had the idea that they could recruit local volunteers who would then be made to assimilate via mnemotron Modern English. Once fluent in speaking, reading and writing English, those local translators could then start helping to progressively build a new language dictionary, on top of serving as interpreters in face-to-face encounter situations. That method had already proved most practical in providing quickly the capability to understand and converse with many people and races who would otherwise be unintelligible to the citizens of the Human Expansion. Sylvia was able to report to Robert a few minutes later.
‘’That young woman’s physical profile is now recorded. From the conversations she is having with other people of Cahokia, her name seems to be ‘Makita’.’’
‘’Hum, Makita… Nice name actually. Well, time to see if those Mayans have learned their lessons in Tikal. However, it is now time for lunch, so we will first eat in rotation while flying high at subsonic speed towards Mexico. Sylvia, Jorge, you go eat first.’’
12:06 (Mexico Time)
Bridge of interceptor AC 3027
Overflying the Mayan city of Tikal
Yucatan Peninsula (in modern Guatemalan territory)
Parts of the ruins of Tikal in modern times. At right is Temple 1, 47 meter-high. Tikal had up to 92,000 inhabitants at its peak in the 8th Century CE. The last monument was built in Tikal in 869 CE, with the city abandoned a few years afterwards, mostly due to prolonged droughts.
All four crewmembers of the interceptor were back at their posts by the time their ship arrived over the Mayan city of Tikal, still flying at high altitude and low subsonic speed in order to be hard to spot from the ground. While Sylvia used the interceptor’s high-definition telescope to survey the city, Jorge and Robert used the close-up views provided by a spy drone sent down to low altitude.
‘’Hum, I see nothing out of the ordinary up to now, folks.’’ said Robert after some fifteen minutes of observation. Sylvia however did notice something a minute later.
‘’Look at the farming fields around the city: they look about as dry as bones. This would concord with the historical archives, which said that the region suffered severe, repeated periods of drought in this decade and the next ones. Maybe they were trying to implore their gods for some rain when the AC 3268 caught them doing human sacrifices.’’
‘’Maybe, but that still wouldn’t excuse them for sacrificing human beings, Sylvia. They have only themselves to blame if they overexploited their natural resources, especially if done mostly to satisfy the fancy of their royal families and of their priests. I believe that we shouldn’t waste more time on them and go further south to check on the Incas in Peru.’’
‘’WRONG!’’ exclaimed at once Sylvia in a facetious tone, attracting a dubious look from Robert.
‘’What? Why did you ding me like that?’’
‘’Because you were in the wrong century…and in the wrong millennium, Robert.’’ replied Sylvia, a grin on her face. ‘’The Inca civilization appeared around the year 1,300 C.E. You were thus off by a good 400 years. Presently, you have in South America, along the west coast and the Andes, three main cultures: the Tiwanaku Culture, established in the southern half of the Andes; the Sican Culture, situated along the coast of Northern Peru; and the Huari Culture, established along most of the coast of Peru.’’
‘’And is there something worth looking at there, apart from local farmers and fishermen?’’
‘’Of course, Robert! You may not have the Incas there yet, but Tiahuanaco is presently the largest city in South America, with around 100,000 people living in it.’’
‘’Then, Tiahuanaco it will be, Sylvia.’’