Against the Tide of Years (7 page)

 

 

T
he scream was high and shrill, a wail of agony and helpless rage. Marian Alston-Kurlelo sat bolt upright in bed, then turned to shake the figure beside her gently on the shoulder.

“Wake up,” she said firmly. “Wake up, ’dapa.”

The Fiernan woman tossed, opened her eyes. They were blank for a moment, before awareness returned; then she seized Alston in a grip of bruising strength.

“I was—the Burning Snake had me, the Dream Eater,” she gasped. “I was the Sun People’s prisoner again, but
you didn’t come
. . .”

Alston returned the embrace, crooning comfort and stroking the long blond hair.
Had my own nightmares about that,
she thought. Presumably in the original history—if “original” meant anything—Swindapa
had
died among the Iraiina. Her whole people had vanished, overrun and swallowed up.
And I went on alone, back up in the twentieth.
The room was very dark; an internal clock developed by a lifetime at sea told her it was the end of the midnight watch, around three in the morning.

She felt tears dropping on her shoulder and tenderly wiped them away. “There, there, sugar,” she whispered. “I
did
come.”

Rescuing Swindapa had been sort of a side effect; they were there to trade for stock and seed-grain, that first month after the Event. She certainly hadn’t expected them to end up together.
In fact, ’dapa had to pretty well drag me into bed, after months of my dithering—all those years in the closet made me timid. Christ, was I stupid.

The rest of the Guard House was quiet; evidently the children hadn’t woken. Alston waited until her companion’s shuddering died down into quiet sobbing, then turned up the lamp on the bedside table. The period-piece splendors of the house were a bit faded now, eight years after the Event, but with a squared-away neatness that was solely hers.

Swindapa wiped her eyes and blew her nose on a handkerchief from the dresser. Marian smiled a little, remembering teaching her to do that with something besides her fingers. The blue eyes were clear now, with the mercurial mood shifts she’d come to know since the Event.
The only thing reliable about ’dapa is ’dapa,
she thought with a rush of tenderness. Odd that they got on so well.

“What were you thinking?” the Fiernan said. “I could feel your eyes touch me.”

“That you’re my other half,” Marian said. “And about that night down in the Olmec country.”

She remembered
that;
one hand went to her left thigh, touching the dusty-white scar. Remembering the darkness and the wet heat, mud under her boots, the light of the flares and the burning temples of San Lorenzo breaking in shatters of brightness off the obsidian edges of the Olmec warriors’ spears and club-swords. The quetzal feathers of their harnesses, the paint and precious stones and snarling faces. The cold sting of the spearhead in her leg; at the time all she felt was an enormous frustration that her body wouldn’t obey her; that they might not get out with Martha Cofflin after all. And then Swindapa, sword flashing as she stood screaming over her fallen lover.

The Fiernan nodded. “Moon Woman has woven the light of our souls together,” she said.

“And I was thinking that you’re cute as hell,” Marian added, grinning.

That’s God’s truth as well,
the black woman thought. Swindapa was her own five-foot-nine almost to an inch, slender and long-limbed. There had still been a bit of adolescent gangliness when they first met, but it had gone with the years between. The oval straight-nosed face looked firmer now too, tanned to a honey color and framed by the long fall of wheat-colored hair.

“Woof!” Alson said, as the Fiernan’s leap and embrace took the air out of her lungs.

“And you are as beautiful as the night sky with stars,” Swindapa murmured down at her; that was as strong as compliments came, in the Fiernan Bohulugi tongue. It sounded pretty good in English, too. “Let’s share pleasure. I want—”

Marian stopped her with another kiss; loving someone didn’t make them more like you, and she was
still
embarrassed by Fiernan bluntness at times.

 

“Thanks,” Vicki Cofflin said, taking the thick mug of sassafras tea. The warmth was welcome in her hands; the early morning was chill enough to make her wool-and-leather flight uniform only a little too heavy.

“Well, this is it,” Alex Stoddard said, looking up at the huge structure that creaked above them, secured by a dozen mooring ropes along either side. Its blunt head was pointed into the southwest wind, and it surged occasionally against the restraining lines, as if eager to be gone.

She nodded, feeling the excitement hit her gut with a chill that counterbalanced the warm, astringent taste of the tea.
Scary, too,
she thought. She’d had her share of risky business over the past eight years, with the expeditionary force in Alba—she’d carried a crossbow to the Battle of the Downs—and bad weather at sea. This was a little different. The design studies said the
Emancipator
would work; she’d helped crank up one of the mothballed computer workstations to run the stress calculations for the frame and worked on the design phase as well as the construction. She knew it
should
work, but trusting yourself to this flying whale made out of birch plywood and cloth was still a bit nerve-racking.

“Especially when I was going to fly shuttles,” she muttered wryly, then shook her head when Alex looked up from his checklist. “Let’s get on with it,” she said aloud.

The
Emancipator
did look a little like a whale, like an orca; some wag had wanted her named
Free Willy,
but the Commodore had stomped on that good and hard. Vicki did one more careful walk-around; checking everything one last time was something that was drilled into you at Fort Brandt OCS very thoroughly, and even more as a middie on a Guard ship. The strong smell of the doping compound on the fabric skin filled the air about her, and the scents of glue and birchwood.

The immense presence of the airship was a bit intimidating too. She knew objectively that it was light and fragile, but it felt formidably solid looming above her like this. And it was
big,
bigger than the
Eagle,
which was the largest mobile object in the world, this Year 8 After the Event.

“I hope you get the command,” Alex said behind her. She concealed a slight start. He was a tall young man—six gangling feet—but he moved quietly. “You deserve it.”

“The Commodore will appoint whoever she thinks can do the job best,” Vicki said, then grinned. “Thanks for the thought, though, Ensign Stoddard. I’m supposed to have dinner with the Chief and the Commodore on Harvest Night, so we’ll see.”

The
Emancipator
’s gondola was a hundred feet long, a narrow swelling built into the airship’s frame. When it was grounded, the craft rested on outriggers, wooden skis much like a helicopter’s skids. The rear ramp flexed and creased a little beneath their rubber-soled boots as they walked up; everything on board was built as light as possible. Beneath their feet were the tanks for water ballast and liquid fuel and the compartments for cargo—or, under other circumstances, Leaton’s hundred-pounder cast-iron bombs. Three tall wheels stood along each side, with a member of the crew at each. Another came climbing down a ladder that stretched up into the hull above, access to the gasbags.

“Captain on deck!”

“As you were,” she said, feeling a spurt of pride.

Captain for at least a day.
The crew relaxed and went back to the preflight checkpoint. The Commodore’s idea of discipline was strictly functional; ceremony had its place, but that wasn’t getting in the way. Another good thing about working for her was that if she thought you were competent enough to do a job, she didn’t stand over you or joggle your elbow.

Just deal with it competently, quickly and without unnecessary fuss,
Vicki thought.
So let’s get on with it.

She walked forward, past the engine stations, the folded-up bunks, the tiny galley with its electric hot plate—no exposed flames on
this
craft, by God!—the map boards and the big, clunky spark-gap radio and smaller, smoother-looking pre-Event shortwave set. There was a swivel chair at the point where the decking came to an end, with the sloping windows that filled the curved nose of the gondola surrounding it on three sides. Low consoles surrounded it as well, mostly pre-Event instruments adapted to their new tasks; air speed, pressure, fuel, temperature gauges. The windows looked down on a shadowed section of the Nantucket Airport runway, mostly deserted in the predawn light. The whole project wasn’t exactly clandestine, but it had been kept on the QT.

And I’m supposed to leave by dawn and come back by sunset, barring emergencies,
she reminded herself, running an eye over the instruments. Everything still nominal.

“All hands to stations,” she said. “Raise the ramp.”

“All hands,” Alex echoed. “Ramp up!”

Vicki Cofflin turned and looked down the long space. Engine crew, buoyancy control, ballast control, radio, navigation—that was Alex’s department, as well as being XO; and vertical and lateral helms just behind her.
Good crew,
she thought. Fourteen in all, enough for watch-and-watch. Only the radioman was older than she, a ham operator back before the Event. Only five Albans, and they’d all come to the island as teenagers, Alex’s age or younger, enough to get the basic education required.

“All right, people,” she said. “We’ve all worked long and hard getting the boat ready. Now we’re going to take her up and see what she can do.”

Nobody
on Nantucket had any lighter-than-air experience, if you discounted people who’d been up on rides in Goodyear blimps, which included Ian Arnstein, oddly enough. They’d all read everything they could find, but there was no substitute for hands-on experience.

She slapped the back of the chair. “
Emancipator
’s going to give us some surprises, unless she’s completely unlike any vehicle human beings have ever made. So stay alert.”

“Aye, aye, ma’am!”

Vicki nodded, took off her peaked cap, and sat. “Let’s go.”

 

“Sleepin’ like babies,” Marian whispered in the predawn darkness, moving carefully so that the armor wouldn’t rattle.

“They
are
babies,” Swindapa answered softly, giving her hand a squeeze.

The nursery down the corridor from their room held two beds, each with a girl and a stuffed animal—Lucy had a blue snake, and Heather a koala bear. The redhead was lying on her back, snoring almost daintily; the dark girl curled on her side, as if protecting her goggle-eyed serpent. More stuffed toys stood on shelves, along with dolls, blocks, puzzles, picture books, a dollhouse Jared Cofflin had made and Martha painted for a birthday last year, wooden horses carved in Alba, a fanciful model ship on wheels from Alston’s own hands. The girls were seven almost to a day; they’d both been newborns, orphaned by the Alban War.

Well, Lucy’s father is probably still alive,
Alston thought meticulously. He’d been the only black with Walker, and they hadn’t found his body. Her mother had died in childbirth and been left behind when Walker and his gang ran for it.
Alive until I catch him.
The big black ex-cadet from Tennessee hadn’t gone over to Walker for wealth or power; it had been his damned fetish about the imaginary Black Egyptians, and Walker’s promise to send him there with the secret of gunpowder and whatnot to protect them against the Ice People White Devils. That didn’t make him any less of a traitor in her eyes. It was actions that mattered, not intentions.

“Let’s go,” she said quietly.

They padded down the stairs, the wood creaking sometimes, and into the big kitchen at the back of the house, flanked by the sunroom that overlooked the rear garden. For a moment they busied themselves with preparations for tonight’s dinner, seeing that the wood stove was fed and bringing out the suckling pig from the pantry. Alston chuckled at that; two women in Samurai-style steel armor with long swords across their backs, feeding the nineteenth-century wood stove in a house last remodeled by a California investment banker in the dying years of the twentieth century.

The breakfast oatmeal was bubbling quietly in an iron pot atop the stove, but it wouldn’t be ready for another hour and a half. They cut themselves chunks of bread and washed it down with whole milk from the jug in the icebox, then fastened their boots and took the wooden practice swords in their hands as they let themselves out. Nantucket was cool in the predawn blackness even in late summer, the air damp and smelling of salt, fish, whale oil from the streetlamps, woodsmoke from early risers. The two women crossed over to the north side of Main Street, turned onto Easy Street and then South Beach and began their run, bodies moving with smooth economy to the rattle and clank of the armor, hands pumping in rhythm.

“Better you than me!” a wagoneer called to them, yawning at the reins.

Marian recognized him and gave a wave; he’d been with the Expeditionary Force in Alba.
Odd. So many got killed, and instead of throwing stuff at me, the survivors
like
me.

“Easy day,” she said to her companion. “Only an hour”—running out to Jetties Beach, down the sand cliffs, some
kata
on the wet sand, then back—“and we’ll have to head in to start dinner.”

“It is a holiday,” Swindapa answered, then sprinted ahead, laughing in sheer exuberance at the day and at being alive.

Very much alive,
Marian thought.
And that makes me feel like livin’ too.

 

“I never thought I’d be
nostalgic
about living in fear of starving to death,” Jared Cofflin said.