At that juncture, Dr. Sternheimer ordered the inland base completely stripped and abandoned, withdrawing all surviving folk to the main Center complex or to another base on the much-shrunken and almost uninhabited island of Cuba, to the south.
Not for two centuries did they try to establish another base to the north, and when at last they did, it was in a very different way. Choosing a particular small tribe of the distant descendants of Americans in an isolated area of the Southern Mountains, they sent in a cadre to teach these illiterate near savages, who were scratching a bare subsistence out of the rocky soil while fighting off attacks by wild beasts and stronger neighbors. Within a couple of generations, thanks to more and better foods, carefully monitored and controlled reproduction, improved housing, sanitation and medical care, and the subsequent decline in deaths and impairment due to disease, the stunted, brutish primitives became a tribe of tall, strong, well-proportioned men and women, most of them clearly possessed of a high degree of native intelligence.
It had been then that Dr. Sternheimer had had schools begun to teach young and old alike elementary subjects, advancing those who seemed to own the potential into more involved education. When he felt the time to be ripe, the Director brought in Major Jay Corbett—one of the original, many-times-transferred minds—from his previous assignment and set him to molding the men and boys of Broomtown into a body of well-trained, disciplined soldiers. For Sternheimer knew that sooner or later he would likely have real need of a corps of dependable troops, units capable of moving fast and striking hard. For the Center and its plans were now faced by several minor threats and a single major one.
The seismic disturbances of centuries past had not only shaken and reformed lands and lakes and seas, but they had shaken apart and destroyed states and governments and all existing order.
Of what had been before, only Kehnooryos Mahkedohnya— the northernmost Greek-speaking state was still more or less the same, with few of its high, rocky coasts submerged and its people still ruled by an aristocracy.
The neighboring Black Kingdoms had mostly ceased to exist; almost all had been swallowed up by the present Caliphate of Zahrtohgah, which occupied almost all of New York State not now underwater. The handful of smaller, weaker Black Kingdoms that were still extant were so only by the sufferance of the Caliphate.
The vast Middle Kingdom, with large areas of its eastern lands now submerged or, at best, become salt fens, now consisted of three large states and scores of smaller ones, constantly shifting alliances and consequently constantly warring.
The even vaster kingdom of the southern Greek-speakers had likewise sundered, though not so thoroughly as had the Middle Kingdom. Despite multitudinous rebellions, invasions by the indigenous mountaineers and war bands from the southerly portions of the Middle Kingdom, and the simultaneous outbreak of a hot, deadly and involved dynastic squabble, the ruling house of the Southern Greek-speakers had managed to hold on to something over a sixth of their former lands, all just south of the Middle Kingdom lands.
Of the rest of the former kingdom, the northeastern portion had become the Kingdom of Karaleenos, while the southeast and southwest had called themselves by the name of the formerly united state, the Kingdom of Kehnooryos Ehlahs, briefly. Then they decided upon the Kingdom of the South, though they were not truly a kingdom under any name, merely a loose confederation of powerful noblemen—thoheeksee, or dukes—who customarily chose one of themselves to be king for life, or until he displeased enough of them to be violently deposed and replaced. David Stemheimer had slowly, over the years, decades and centuries, worked his agents— each always in a body of whatever race and class was appropriate—into sensitive positions and had been gradually jockeying the internal and external relations of the various states toward a position or alignment that might eventually be favorable to a takeover by the Center of the entire Eastern Seaboard, either covertly or overtly.
Then his painstakingly constructed house of cards had been dramatically tumbled. The wild card that effected this destruction was a human mutant, Milo Morai, who had led a horde of horse nomads on a two-decade trek from the high plains of the west to the east coast, where they quickly conquered both of the south-central Greek-speaking states— Kehnooryos Ehlahs and Karaleenos. Fifty-odd years later, this Morai and his forces had halted—if not actually defeated—a huge army of Southern Greeks led, supposedly, by their king, Zastros, but actually led by Dr. Lillian Landor, from the Center.
Dr. Landor had been killed, but not by Morai; however, he had slain several of Sternheimer’s agents—colleagues and friends—torturing most of them to death or near death. On the single occasion when the two had spoken—on a transceiver captured from Dr. Landor—Morai had flatly refused to cooperate in any way with the Center or its patriotic aims and had served notice that he would kill any Center personnel who entered lands ruled by him and his fellow mutants.
Not that this threat had stopped Stemheimer from implanting his agents in Morai’s Confederation or from continuing his attempts to disrupt and weaken the newer and the older states and principalities. When, a few years after the death of Dr. Landor, Morai had commenced a campaign which ended in generally discrediting the Greek church and weakening its hold on its former adherents, the Director thought that he had seen a way to strike this Confederation hard enough to possibly fragment it.
Gradually, over a period of years, Center agents had worked their way up in the hierarchy of the weakened, impoverished and much-demoralized church. From the still-faithful laity, they had carefully earmarked the fanatics, the perpetual malcontents, the manageable lunatics, rabble-rousers, incurable romantics and violence-prone elements.
From this societal flotsam and jetsam, agent-clerics in certain carefully chosen areas had formed sinister and highly secret societies, the announced purpose of which was to kill, drive out or bring to the True Faith all men and women of the Confederation, as well as to return ownership of all land to the descendants of the original Greek-speakers. Once sworn by terrible oaths, the members were sent out to prostelytize amongst all classes.
In most places they had been highly successful in their efforts, and the plan might well have created considerable havoc had it been carried out as planned, but it was not. A single small city in southern Karaleenos had, for reasons unknown and now forever unknowable, risen and butchered most of the ruling nobility, but then had fallen to Confederation forces, with most of its leaders—including the Center’s agent—taken alive. Apparently, this agent had been tortured into revealing most of the plot, for when the two western Karaleenos duchies arose more or less on schedule—their successes were to trigger all other risings—Confederation troops were ready and waiting within easy marching distance to crush the second before it had well started and to then march against and so bottle up the first that those waiting elsewhere for the word never received it at all.
Two more Center agents were captured and carted off to the Confederation capital to have additional details of the Center’s plans agonizingly wrung from their suffering bodies by Morai’s skillful and dedicated torturers. One of the nuggets of information had been a second facet of Sternheimer’s plan.
One of the largest and fiercest tribes in the mountains to the west of Karaleenos was the Ahrmehnee—descendants of Americans of Armenian extraction. Formerly resident in the foothills rather than the mountains, they had conducted bloody and productive raids against the Greeks for hundreds of years. When the Greeks were mostly displaced by the horse nomads, the like was practiced upon them until Morai came with his armies and drove them off their ancestral hills and up into the mountains. Though they still raided after that, they suffered much for those raids, finding the Horseclansmen and their get as tough and feisty as any Ahrmehnee.