Coil The Adept (Flywheels II)
Jan 20, 2016 12:50:45 GMT -6
kaijafon, jdavidboyd, and 1 more like this
Post by rvm45 on Jan 20, 2016 12:50:45 GMT -6
Chapter Seventeen
I didn’t feel much like engaging the giant cyborgs in witty repartee. They were pretty much mindless and the human parts hadn’t chosen to follow that path.
“Fall to your knees and tremble in terror!” I shouted.
I swung my jumbo oni-sized kanabo and struck the lead giant’s ankle inward just before he’d put his weight on it. The effect was much like a foot sweep. He wobbled ponderously and then fell with a huge crash.
I’d thought such a huge, slow and ungainly creature would be unsteady on its feet. An octopod built lower to the ground would have been far better tactically.
I crushed its head as it floundered around gracelessly like a tortoise on its back.
As I turned toward the second monster two of Vee’s spawn were hosing it in a crossfire of super hot flaming napalm streams. Just as number-two collapsed inward having been reduced to a smoldering hulk the headless first cyborg climbed drunkenly to its feet.
Yeah, the head had some eyes and high gain microphones but all the human parts and the thing’s silicone brain was housed in the mid-section. It also had a number of heretofore redundant eyes and ears facing both front and back.
One Vee was dry. The other Vee sprayed a desultory stream of napalm at the infernal contraption.
I was supposed to be saving every bit of lightening jutsu possible—but damned nation!
I struck the headless giant robot with one thunderbolt after another. I wasted five lightening bolts where one or at most two would have sufficed simply because the wreck hadn’t had enough time to fall to the ground yet.
*************** ***************** ************************
It was time to do the “Escape and Evade” thingy. There were a number of drawbacks. We had far more people this time. We had farther to transport many of them and we had far less rolling stock.
I mean with three concentration camps almost within Kunai throwing distance of each other folks would catch on if we started stealing school busses in large numbers once more.
We loaded those who couldn’t walk onto open flat-bedded semi trailers. Seeing the loved ones would help stiffen the reserve of the walkers. The trailers also served to carry the refugee’s pitiful belongings. Many of them were loathe to leave their issue blankets for instance and I quite understood. For many, those two military surplus wool blankets were all that they had left.
There were also a few semis carrying food along with more weapons and ammo for the troops.
So within a couple of hours the federal troops were hot on our trail.
Wind jutsu is. I cannot do it, but it is nonetheless. We had some strong wind jutsu practitioners that we’d been force-feeding chi for two or three weeks.
An F-6 tornado formed at the rear of our column. I’m not sure that such a mighty tornado had ever come about naturally in the history of the Earth. Jutsu is one thing but we’d waited for prime tornado season and weather to give our wind Adepts the strongest possible foundation to build on.
A jacked-up super tornado is one thing. A super tornado guided by an intelligent and malevolent hand is something else again—especially with my spawn surfing the gale force peripheral winds on spawned giant ravens raining down lightening bolts on anything the F-6 hadn’t completely trashed.
Once the F-6 had pretty well trashed the pursuit our Adepts kept up a steady procession of F-5 tornados to screen our flanks and our rear. There was no cause for unseemly haste.
************** ****************** ******************************
When we arrived at the closest newly created enclave I saw how the Indians spelled relief to thousands of homeless refugees—teepees. I mean: no excrement Sherlock.
In the old days teepees were made of buffalo skin but even many Indians had switched to canvas before they were all confined to reservations. Tent grade canvas works just about as well and even has some advantages. You need fifteen or sixteen sixteen-foot-long poles and a quantity of canvas. The true teepee was more than a mere conical shell. There was also an inner wall that increased the insulation considerably.
The old traditional teepees had a small fire pit in the center. Each of the Oklahoman teepees had one of those wood stoves made from two 55 gallon barrels stacked one atop the other.
It was a sight well worth seeing—all those mostly white teepees arrayed in row after row. It brought to mind the old Western movies or television shows that were so common at one time. The movies seemed to imply that in the old west, that just over any hill might be an Indian village with a population in the tens of thousands—like South American Army Ants—or Uncles—or some such.
************** ***************** *************************
“Well I think that y’all have things under control here,” I told Crow and Two Rabbits.
“Feel free to send folks to our Adept academy until you have enough Adepts to start your own school. Let me know if you need food, weapons, advice or any other help that I can give you,” I said.
“I want to go with you to study at your Adept academy,” The boy with an extra right arm said.
“Don’t you want to stay and try to get rid of that extra right arm first?” I asked him.
“Why? The extra arm works and it is all that I have left of my brother. I want to try to fit an advanced prosthetic on this,” he said.
He pulled up the smock that they’d given him. He had more remaining on the left side than I’d thought at first glance. There was the entire upper arm and a good four-inch stump below the elbow.
“They will long rue the day that they strengthened my hand to be used against them,” he said.
“What’s your name?” I asked him.
“They call me ‘Lefty’,” he said.
*************** ****************** ***************************
Chi pills continued to sell well but the market was becoming semi-saturated and we couldn’t continue to sell them at the same price per carat as gem quality emeralds. Our farmers continued to sell impossibly high quality foodstuffs to the outsiders in our area. Our artists and craftsmen did a booming trade.
When the government outlawed virtually all firearms it opened a large market for our small arms factories.
One must understand something about the arms trade. Weapons that are well maintained and fired a judicious number of rounds can last for a century or two. One isn’t likely to fire many hundreds of rounds per week in the face of black market ammunition prices.
Ammunition is both consumable and perishable—though stored in a cool and dry place it can be perfectly good after fifty years or more.
Lead bullets are easy to cast. Even swaged and jacketed bullets aren’t beyond the determined home armorer. Hand jacked or hydraulically driven presses can swage brass cartridge cases. Failing that, cases can be laboriously turned by hand on a lathe.
Powder is an order of magnitude harder to manufacture but a man can make a modest amount of black powder for his family and for himself. Nitrocellulose can even be extruded into gun cotton—though this results in the less desirable “Single Base” gunpowder. Double base powder requires nitroglycerine—something most prudent folks would sooner avoid fooling with.
Primers are the bottleneck. Priming compound—well I don’t like to say that something is flat out “Impossible”—but safe manufacture of priming compound in a small home workshop is exceedingly difficult. I’ve never seen a recipe that looked good enough to risk my eyes and fingers to experiment with.
Someone is thinking: “Yeah but…”
Sure places like DuPont and Remington turn out primers by the million. Yeah and they have invested millions of dollars to build factories that turn primer manufacture into something sane people are willing to labor at.
We not only had millions of dollars to invest in a primer-manufacturing factory and we could employ spawn to do anything risky.
High quality primers packed a thousand rounds per brick didn’t sell for an equal weight of gold but they did sell for almost an equivalent weight of silver.
There were other requirements. We produced and sold high quality reloading equipment at a very modest profit to create a market for our primers. We created and sold bullet molds and sizers along with swaging equipment.
We sold brass cases and loaded ammunition. We sold books that showed how to manufacture black powder and nitrocellulose/gun cotton. We sold books showing how to draw brass into cartridge cases. We even sold books on primer manufacture thinking that would cause many to throw up their hands and resolve to buy our primers ahead of all other expenditures.
If someone used our forbidden techniques to go into competition with us—hey, that was cool too. The most important desideratum was that men be armed. Earning an honest profit by helping men achieve that virtuous objective was secondary.
That’s not to say that we didn’t make guns…
We made beaucoup very fine guns.
Long before the government had decided to limit most of their ammunition use to 9mm, .40 S&W, .223 and 12 Gauge. There was some special use of .22 LR—mostly for silenced weapons, and something like the 7mm Magnum for snipers/sharpshooters…
Chitinous body armor was. It would stop any and all pistol rounds except for the hard-kicking and special purpose modern armor-piercing rounds. The armor would also stop many rifle rounds. Laws went into battle with almost as much body coverage as knights of old. Meanwhile the chitin body armor was forbidden to “civilians.”
Even the local laws went about their business with a breastplate, backplate and football uniform sized thigh-protectors. The thigh protectors didn’t give the thigh one hundred percent coverage but it made shooting for the thighs a very uncertain method of dropping a law.
Past experience had shown that laws on patrol simply wouldn’t wear a protective helmet day in and day out. So the higher-ups compromised by making the helmet available when the law felt he was going into harm’s way. When the hypothetical law may or may not be wearing a chitin helmet practicing headshots becomes less than a cure all.
The best protection that most “civilians” could come up with would be a level IIIA vest—perhaps with trauma plate and side panels. IIIA armor is bulky and uncomfortable as well as expensive. Few “civilians” even had IIIA armor—though the lighter level IIA and level II vests were somewhat more common.
The hypothetical insurgent would be going up against opposition that was largely immune to small arms fire at the torso. There was just enough armor on head and thighs to rule out that being the stand-up go-to point of aim.
Some hard core activists went into street-level confrontations armed with medieval type armor-busters—bearded axes, war hammers with a long spike on the backside, maces even kanabo. Meanwhile the government—that could have simply stayed back and used nerve gas or called in an airstrike—felt for some reason that it was necessary to engage the protestors man-to-man.
Be all that as it may. Laws were well enough armored that it wasn’t worth the trouble to worry if they might be “Out-Gunned.”
We turned out quite a few Enfield-style bolt-action rifles with under-folding stocks. No, the Enfield’s lock-up was somewhat weak. It was the stock that was two-piece like the old Enfield. With a folding stock and a fourteen-inch barrel the rifle was reasonably concealable under a jacket or carried in a briefcase or whatever.
The under-folding stock was reasonably fast to open and it locked up tight enough for reasonable accuracy. Chambered in our proprietary 7mm-08 Caliber Armor-Buster ammo it was a reliable vest penetrator.
The government wasn’t the only opposition that folks faced. Urban gangs and roving rural brigands were an increasing problem and for whatever reason the state didn’t expend much effort targeting the gangs. For one thing, they were far more interested in rooting out dissidents and people trying to practice tradecraft. It also seemed that the actions of the gangs generally aided the state’s aims The gangs gave the state more excuse to crank down and made the victims more complaisant.
Some folks didn’t groove on being victims though. Some folk’s resolve to avoid becoming helpless victims approaches being a mania.
Hey dude! If you got a craving for weapons let me help you scratch your itch!
So we also did a brisk trade in “gang-busting” firearms. We had a couple of submachine-guns in .30 Carbine. There was a fairly good copy of the Sten fitted with our 32-round .30 Carbine magazines. The other gun was a PPSh-41. The PPSh used the same 32-round magazines as the Sten but it could also accept an 88 round drum.
Our proprietary .30 Carbine rounds were nickel-plated, used large primers and were loudly advertised as unsafe for the old .30 M1 Carbines that might still be around—though no one had produced a .30 M1 in over 120 years.
Our loads got a wee-bit more velocity from the 13” barrels of the sub-guns than the old .30 Carbine loads obtained from an 18” barrel—and they screamed out of the muzzle like a Banshee being raped by a Sasquatch.
We also produced any number of semi-automatic pistols as well as beaucoup single and double-action revolvers in myriad calibers and myriad styles.
Standardize calibers and actions? Why? For many folks, collecting beautiful firearms is what makes life worthwhile. Who wants to go into his secret gunroom and look at three-score parkerized 9mm as well as two-score .40 S&Ws—all with exactly the same action, barrel length, black plastic stocks etcetera?
As Castaneda had Don Juan say once:
“Your resolutions injure the spirit.”
Where we really made money though was selling drugs.
Get your mind out of the gutter. Some street drugs can have some beneficial effects and it is annoying to have to have to search for them on the street when and if you feel the urge. If you get right down to it—much of the undesirable effects of chronic drug use is caused by the black-market culture rather than drug use per se…
Nonetheless drugs in combination with the black-market subculture ruin many folk’s life and I didn’t feel comfortable contributing.
But Yippie-Ki-Ay dudes!
Can you say: “Socialized Medicine”?
Can you say: “Rationed Health Care”?
Can you say: “Black-Market Health Care”?
My enclave produced Penicillin, Amoxicillan, Streptomycin, Tetracycline and several Sulfonamides. We produced Aspirin, Dextropropoxyphene (the old Darvon), Pethidine (Demerol). We manufactured Procaine (Novacaine) and Lidocaine (Xylocain). We also made Ketamine, Benzedrine and Valium.
We turned out beautiful surgery kits with the old style reusable scalpels. We made autoclaves and dozens of other gadgets that would come in handy for the black-market physician or surgeon to set up a secondary—or primary—place of practice that was off-the-record.
The aim was to sell the medical drugs and equipment for minimal profit. I stuck by my rule that if there was no profit to be made then there was a minimal need for that product or service.
The way that medical gear and drugs flew off our proverbial shelves convinced me that there was a booming demand for those products.
There is no equitable distribution system that cannot be abused. However throughout history the best equitable distribution system that has ever been conceived of is the Free Market. It may seem cold and cruel to sell life-saving drugs to the highest bidder. On the other hand, why give them to the lowest bidder?
At least with the Free Market, high prices alert potential investors that there is a profit to be made.
An investor may be a thoroughly rotten human being, but if he makes Penicillin and sells it cheaply enough to outsell the competition then he benefits many Penicillin users. Eventually Penicillin becomes cheap enough that most people in need can obtain it at a price that they can afford.
No, nothing is ever one hundred percent efficient. But social utility isn’t the main justification for Capitalism. The best justification is moral:
A man owns himself and the products of his labor.
Thou shalt not Steal.
Thou shalt not Covet.
If God choses to bless a man abundantly and that man choses to be a miser and hoard his wealth rather than being a good steward, then that is between him and God. Anyway, the Bible says that the evil rich man is industriously laying up treasures that will eventually be inherited by the righteous.
Sometimes it takes a few generations and since history is an ongoing process there will always be some rotten greed-heads laying up treasures. You simply must leave some things up to God. We weren’t put on this Earth to play Robin Hood or to be flyswatters.
Having said all that, even though we increased our production of medical equipment and drugs dramatically, the street level price continued to grow precipitously as word got around.
And yes, I did donate some quantities of healthcare supplies to folks that I felt were poor but deserving. No, that isn’t a violation of my Capitalistic principles. I can do anything that I want to with my property. If I choose to flush one hundred dollar bills down the toilet—that too is my prerogative.
I just earnestly felt that the best thing that I could do was to sell at least ninety-five percent of my output on the open market. Certainly I couldn’t have afforded to double and triple our drug output year after year without the generous funds provided via the free market.
************* ***************** ****************************
Things had settled in for the long haul. I received several requests to create more enclaves.
Some Adepts or even mundane freedom fighters raided a few more concentration camps. Our enclave as well as the Oklahoma group sent along tornado creating Adepts. Adept created tornadoes lack a certain “Oomph!” outside of Tornado Alley and/or out of season. Nonetheless even comparatively feeble F-4s or even F-3s were more than enough to thoroughly discourage pursuit by forces that weren’t dedicated enough to risk life and limb to apprehend fugitives.
Then the government tumbled wise. They fitted the detention centers with suicide switches that could flood the camps with neurotoxins on short notice. There is no point in rescuing corpses.
I read once that back in the 1800s the British started executing ten Irish civilians for every British soldier slain by the IRA. The IRA replied by proclaiming that for every civilian executed in retaliation that one hundred British civilians would be executed. I’m not sure, but I think that halted the retaliation against civilians before it ever got started. If not, it quickly brought it to a halt.
My people weren’t involved but a number of aggrieved Adepts and even non-Adepts retaliated against the extended family of detention center guards all the way down to second cousins for the mass executions.
We had become almost totally self-sufficient in our enclave and I had hopes that our enclave and most of the other enclaves could largely set this wave of repression out on the sidelines much like Switzerland sat out WWI and WWII.
Maybe we could have…
Except that folks set up a busy underground railroad to move dissidents to the nearest enclave. Yeah, and supplying the guerillas with weapons, ammunition, explosives and how-to manuals didn’t set well with them.
They already had a few government-sponsored Adepts and a rudimentary ability to find and breach enclaves. The ongoing hostilities led them to take their enclave busting to a whole other level.
.....RVM45
I didn’t feel much like engaging the giant cyborgs in witty repartee. They were pretty much mindless and the human parts hadn’t chosen to follow that path.
“Fall to your knees and tremble in terror!” I shouted.
I swung my jumbo oni-sized kanabo and struck the lead giant’s ankle inward just before he’d put his weight on it. The effect was much like a foot sweep. He wobbled ponderously and then fell with a huge crash.
I’d thought such a huge, slow and ungainly creature would be unsteady on its feet. An octopod built lower to the ground would have been far better tactically.
I crushed its head as it floundered around gracelessly like a tortoise on its back.
As I turned toward the second monster two of Vee’s spawn were hosing it in a crossfire of super hot flaming napalm streams. Just as number-two collapsed inward having been reduced to a smoldering hulk the headless first cyborg climbed drunkenly to its feet.
Yeah, the head had some eyes and high gain microphones but all the human parts and the thing’s silicone brain was housed in the mid-section. It also had a number of heretofore redundant eyes and ears facing both front and back.
One Vee was dry. The other Vee sprayed a desultory stream of napalm at the infernal contraption.
I was supposed to be saving every bit of lightening jutsu possible—but damned nation!
I struck the headless giant robot with one thunderbolt after another. I wasted five lightening bolts where one or at most two would have sufficed simply because the wreck hadn’t had enough time to fall to the ground yet.
*************** ***************** ************************
It was time to do the “Escape and Evade” thingy. There were a number of drawbacks. We had far more people this time. We had farther to transport many of them and we had far less rolling stock.
I mean with three concentration camps almost within Kunai throwing distance of each other folks would catch on if we started stealing school busses in large numbers once more.
We loaded those who couldn’t walk onto open flat-bedded semi trailers. Seeing the loved ones would help stiffen the reserve of the walkers. The trailers also served to carry the refugee’s pitiful belongings. Many of them were loathe to leave their issue blankets for instance and I quite understood. For many, those two military surplus wool blankets were all that they had left.
There were also a few semis carrying food along with more weapons and ammo for the troops.
So within a couple of hours the federal troops were hot on our trail.
Wind jutsu is. I cannot do it, but it is nonetheless. We had some strong wind jutsu practitioners that we’d been force-feeding chi for two or three weeks.
An F-6 tornado formed at the rear of our column. I’m not sure that such a mighty tornado had ever come about naturally in the history of the Earth. Jutsu is one thing but we’d waited for prime tornado season and weather to give our wind Adepts the strongest possible foundation to build on.
A jacked-up super tornado is one thing. A super tornado guided by an intelligent and malevolent hand is something else again—especially with my spawn surfing the gale force peripheral winds on spawned giant ravens raining down lightening bolts on anything the F-6 hadn’t completely trashed.
Once the F-6 had pretty well trashed the pursuit our Adepts kept up a steady procession of F-5 tornados to screen our flanks and our rear. There was no cause for unseemly haste.
************** ****************** ******************************
When we arrived at the closest newly created enclave I saw how the Indians spelled relief to thousands of homeless refugees—teepees. I mean: no excrement Sherlock.
In the old days teepees were made of buffalo skin but even many Indians had switched to canvas before they were all confined to reservations. Tent grade canvas works just about as well and even has some advantages. You need fifteen or sixteen sixteen-foot-long poles and a quantity of canvas. The true teepee was more than a mere conical shell. There was also an inner wall that increased the insulation considerably.
The old traditional teepees had a small fire pit in the center. Each of the Oklahoman teepees had one of those wood stoves made from two 55 gallon barrels stacked one atop the other.
It was a sight well worth seeing—all those mostly white teepees arrayed in row after row. It brought to mind the old Western movies or television shows that were so common at one time. The movies seemed to imply that in the old west, that just over any hill might be an Indian village with a population in the tens of thousands—like South American Army Ants—or Uncles—or some such.
************** ***************** *************************
“Well I think that y’all have things under control here,” I told Crow and Two Rabbits.
“Feel free to send folks to our Adept academy until you have enough Adepts to start your own school. Let me know if you need food, weapons, advice or any other help that I can give you,” I said.
“I want to go with you to study at your Adept academy,” The boy with an extra right arm said.
“Don’t you want to stay and try to get rid of that extra right arm first?” I asked him.
“Why? The extra arm works and it is all that I have left of my brother. I want to try to fit an advanced prosthetic on this,” he said.
He pulled up the smock that they’d given him. He had more remaining on the left side than I’d thought at first glance. There was the entire upper arm and a good four-inch stump below the elbow.
“They will long rue the day that they strengthened my hand to be used against them,” he said.
“What’s your name?” I asked him.
“They call me ‘Lefty’,” he said.
*************** ****************** ***************************
Chi pills continued to sell well but the market was becoming semi-saturated and we couldn’t continue to sell them at the same price per carat as gem quality emeralds. Our farmers continued to sell impossibly high quality foodstuffs to the outsiders in our area. Our artists and craftsmen did a booming trade.
When the government outlawed virtually all firearms it opened a large market for our small arms factories.
One must understand something about the arms trade. Weapons that are well maintained and fired a judicious number of rounds can last for a century or two. One isn’t likely to fire many hundreds of rounds per week in the face of black market ammunition prices.
Ammunition is both consumable and perishable—though stored in a cool and dry place it can be perfectly good after fifty years or more.
Lead bullets are easy to cast. Even swaged and jacketed bullets aren’t beyond the determined home armorer. Hand jacked or hydraulically driven presses can swage brass cartridge cases. Failing that, cases can be laboriously turned by hand on a lathe.
Powder is an order of magnitude harder to manufacture but a man can make a modest amount of black powder for his family and for himself. Nitrocellulose can even be extruded into gun cotton—though this results in the less desirable “Single Base” gunpowder. Double base powder requires nitroglycerine—something most prudent folks would sooner avoid fooling with.
Primers are the bottleneck. Priming compound—well I don’t like to say that something is flat out “Impossible”—but safe manufacture of priming compound in a small home workshop is exceedingly difficult. I’ve never seen a recipe that looked good enough to risk my eyes and fingers to experiment with.
Someone is thinking: “Yeah but…”
Sure places like DuPont and Remington turn out primers by the million. Yeah and they have invested millions of dollars to build factories that turn primer manufacture into something sane people are willing to labor at.
We not only had millions of dollars to invest in a primer-manufacturing factory and we could employ spawn to do anything risky.
High quality primers packed a thousand rounds per brick didn’t sell for an equal weight of gold but they did sell for almost an equivalent weight of silver.
There were other requirements. We produced and sold high quality reloading equipment at a very modest profit to create a market for our primers. We created and sold bullet molds and sizers along with swaging equipment.
We sold brass cases and loaded ammunition. We sold books that showed how to manufacture black powder and nitrocellulose/gun cotton. We sold books showing how to draw brass into cartridge cases. We even sold books on primer manufacture thinking that would cause many to throw up their hands and resolve to buy our primers ahead of all other expenditures.
If someone used our forbidden techniques to go into competition with us—hey, that was cool too. The most important desideratum was that men be armed. Earning an honest profit by helping men achieve that virtuous objective was secondary.
That’s not to say that we didn’t make guns…
We made beaucoup very fine guns.
Long before the government had decided to limit most of their ammunition use to 9mm, .40 S&W, .223 and 12 Gauge. There was some special use of .22 LR—mostly for silenced weapons, and something like the 7mm Magnum for snipers/sharpshooters…
Chitinous body armor was. It would stop any and all pistol rounds except for the hard-kicking and special purpose modern armor-piercing rounds. The armor would also stop many rifle rounds. Laws went into battle with almost as much body coverage as knights of old. Meanwhile the chitin body armor was forbidden to “civilians.”
Even the local laws went about their business with a breastplate, backplate and football uniform sized thigh-protectors. The thigh protectors didn’t give the thigh one hundred percent coverage but it made shooting for the thighs a very uncertain method of dropping a law.
Past experience had shown that laws on patrol simply wouldn’t wear a protective helmet day in and day out. So the higher-ups compromised by making the helmet available when the law felt he was going into harm’s way. When the hypothetical law may or may not be wearing a chitin helmet practicing headshots becomes less than a cure all.
The best protection that most “civilians” could come up with would be a level IIIA vest—perhaps with trauma plate and side panels. IIIA armor is bulky and uncomfortable as well as expensive. Few “civilians” even had IIIA armor—though the lighter level IIA and level II vests were somewhat more common.
The hypothetical insurgent would be going up against opposition that was largely immune to small arms fire at the torso. There was just enough armor on head and thighs to rule out that being the stand-up go-to point of aim.
Some hard core activists went into street-level confrontations armed with medieval type armor-busters—bearded axes, war hammers with a long spike on the backside, maces even kanabo. Meanwhile the government—that could have simply stayed back and used nerve gas or called in an airstrike—felt for some reason that it was necessary to engage the protestors man-to-man.
Be all that as it may. Laws were well enough armored that it wasn’t worth the trouble to worry if they might be “Out-Gunned.”
We turned out quite a few Enfield-style bolt-action rifles with under-folding stocks. No, the Enfield’s lock-up was somewhat weak. It was the stock that was two-piece like the old Enfield. With a folding stock and a fourteen-inch barrel the rifle was reasonably concealable under a jacket or carried in a briefcase or whatever.
The under-folding stock was reasonably fast to open and it locked up tight enough for reasonable accuracy. Chambered in our proprietary 7mm-08 Caliber Armor-Buster ammo it was a reliable vest penetrator.
The government wasn’t the only opposition that folks faced. Urban gangs and roving rural brigands were an increasing problem and for whatever reason the state didn’t expend much effort targeting the gangs. For one thing, they were far more interested in rooting out dissidents and people trying to practice tradecraft. It also seemed that the actions of the gangs generally aided the state’s aims The gangs gave the state more excuse to crank down and made the victims more complaisant.
Some folks didn’t groove on being victims though. Some folk’s resolve to avoid becoming helpless victims approaches being a mania.
Hey dude! If you got a craving for weapons let me help you scratch your itch!
So we also did a brisk trade in “gang-busting” firearms. We had a couple of submachine-guns in .30 Carbine. There was a fairly good copy of the Sten fitted with our 32-round .30 Carbine magazines. The other gun was a PPSh-41. The PPSh used the same 32-round magazines as the Sten but it could also accept an 88 round drum.
Our proprietary .30 Carbine rounds were nickel-plated, used large primers and were loudly advertised as unsafe for the old .30 M1 Carbines that might still be around—though no one had produced a .30 M1 in over 120 years.
Our loads got a wee-bit more velocity from the 13” barrels of the sub-guns than the old .30 Carbine loads obtained from an 18” barrel—and they screamed out of the muzzle like a Banshee being raped by a Sasquatch.
We also produced any number of semi-automatic pistols as well as beaucoup single and double-action revolvers in myriad calibers and myriad styles.
Standardize calibers and actions? Why? For many folks, collecting beautiful firearms is what makes life worthwhile. Who wants to go into his secret gunroom and look at three-score parkerized 9mm as well as two-score .40 S&Ws—all with exactly the same action, barrel length, black plastic stocks etcetera?
As Castaneda had Don Juan say once:
“Your resolutions injure the spirit.”
Where we really made money though was selling drugs.
Get your mind out of the gutter. Some street drugs can have some beneficial effects and it is annoying to have to have to search for them on the street when and if you feel the urge. If you get right down to it—much of the undesirable effects of chronic drug use is caused by the black-market culture rather than drug use per se…
Nonetheless drugs in combination with the black-market subculture ruin many folk’s life and I didn’t feel comfortable contributing.
But Yippie-Ki-Ay dudes!
Can you say: “Socialized Medicine”?
Can you say: “Rationed Health Care”?
Can you say: “Black-Market Health Care”?
My enclave produced Penicillin, Amoxicillan, Streptomycin, Tetracycline and several Sulfonamides. We produced Aspirin, Dextropropoxyphene (the old Darvon), Pethidine (Demerol). We manufactured Procaine (Novacaine) and Lidocaine (Xylocain). We also made Ketamine, Benzedrine and Valium.
We turned out beautiful surgery kits with the old style reusable scalpels. We made autoclaves and dozens of other gadgets that would come in handy for the black-market physician or surgeon to set up a secondary—or primary—place of practice that was off-the-record.
The aim was to sell the medical drugs and equipment for minimal profit. I stuck by my rule that if there was no profit to be made then there was a minimal need for that product or service.
The way that medical gear and drugs flew off our proverbial shelves convinced me that there was a booming demand for those products.
There is no equitable distribution system that cannot be abused. However throughout history the best equitable distribution system that has ever been conceived of is the Free Market. It may seem cold and cruel to sell life-saving drugs to the highest bidder. On the other hand, why give them to the lowest bidder?
At least with the Free Market, high prices alert potential investors that there is a profit to be made.
An investor may be a thoroughly rotten human being, but if he makes Penicillin and sells it cheaply enough to outsell the competition then he benefits many Penicillin users. Eventually Penicillin becomes cheap enough that most people in need can obtain it at a price that they can afford.
No, nothing is ever one hundred percent efficient. But social utility isn’t the main justification for Capitalism. The best justification is moral:
A man owns himself and the products of his labor.
Thou shalt not Steal.
Thou shalt not Covet.
If God choses to bless a man abundantly and that man choses to be a miser and hoard his wealth rather than being a good steward, then that is between him and God. Anyway, the Bible says that the evil rich man is industriously laying up treasures that will eventually be inherited by the righteous.
Sometimes it takes a few generations and since history is an ongoing process there will always be some rotten greed-heads laying up treasures. You simply must leave some things up to God. We weren’t put on this Earth to play Robin Hood or to be flyswatters.
Having said all that, even though we increased our production of medical equipment and drugs dramatically, the street level price continued to grow precipitously as word got around.
And yes, I did donate some quantities of healthcare supplies to folks that I felt were poor but deserving. No, that isn’t a violation of my Capitalistic principles. I can do anything that I want to with my property. If I choose to flush one hundred dollar bills down the toilet—that too is my prerogative.
I just earnestly felt that the best thing that I could do was to sell at least ninety-five percent of my output on the open market. Certainly I couldn’t have afforded to double and triple our drug output year after year without the generous funds provided via the free market.
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Things had settled in for the long haul. I received several requests to create more enclaves.
Some Adepts or even mundane freedom fighters raided a few more concentration camps. Our enclave as well as the Oklahoma group sent along tornado creating Adepts. Adept created tornadoes lack a certain “Oomph!” outside of Tornado Alley and/or out of season. Nonetheless even comparatively feeble F-4s or even F-3s were more than enough to thoroughly discourage pursuit by forces that weren’t dedicated enough to risk life and limb to apprehend fugitives.
Then the government tumbled wise. They fitted the detention centers with suicide switches that could flood the camps with neurotoxins on short notice. There is no point in rescuing corpses.
I read once that back in the 1800s the British started executing ten Irish civilians for every British soldier slain by the IRA. The IRA replied by proclaiming that for every civilian executed in retaliation that one hundred British civilians would be executed. I’m not sure, but I think that halted the retaliation against civilians before it ever got started. If not, it quickly brought it to a halt.
My people weren’t involved but a number of aggrieved Adepts and even non-Adepts retaliated against the extended family of detention center guards all the way down to second cousins for the mass executions.
We had become almost totally self-sufficient in our enclave and I had hopes that our enclave and most of the other enclaves could largely set this wave of repression out on the sidelines much like Switzerland sat out WWI and WWII.
Maybe we could have…
Except that folks set up a busy underground railroad to move dissidents to the nearest enclave. Yeah, and supplying the guerillas with weapons, ammunition, explosives and how-to manuals didn’t set well with them.
They already had a few government-sponsored Adepts and a rudimentary ability to find and breach enclaves. The ongoing hostilities led them to take their enclave busting to a whole other level.
.....RVM45
