On the Oceans of Eternity (19 page)

“You’re a malingerer, a liar, and a thief, Hook,” the doctor said briskly, yanking it free and bringing a yelp from him.

He kept himself meek; if you shaved a gorilla and stuffed it into a blue sailor suit, it would look a lot like the orderly behind the medic.

“Turn your ugly face to the wall, and shut up. How you ever made it through Camp Grant mystifies me. Even the Marines ...”

Because I didn’t have any choice, bitch,
he thought, bracing his hands against the mud brick.

It had been Camp Grant or Inagua Island Detention Center and shoveling salt for five years. He’d thought the Marines would be a better choice, seeing as he was an Islander born; thought he’d be sure of promotion, maybe a commission. But it was always the same story, persecution wherever he turned.
Nearly washed me out to Inagua anyway, the motherfuckers.
He’d had to bust his balls just to end up a rifleman here in the ass-end of nowhere, after a reaming-out full of threats he knew were no bluff. If there hadn’t been a war on, he
would
have ended up shoveling salt.

“Ah,” the doctor said, after a probe brought another yelp out of him. “As I thought, nothing but a boil. Well, I can lance it for you and the fever’ll be down in a day or two.”

“Lance—” he began in alarm, catching the glint of the blade out of the corner of his eye.

“This will hurt you a lot more than it will hurt me,” the doctor said cheerfully. “Hold still.”

He did, while the cold sting of the metal made equally cold sweat start out on his torso.
Call me a thief!
Well, yes, he’d taken things now and then, but he
needed
them. Mother and father dead right after the Event, murder-suicide, foster parents the Town assigned him doddering oldsters busy with four young Alban brats ... what did they expect?
A good dutiful student and then a good dutiful fisherman or potato-grower.
Not Kyle Hook, no indeed. He remembered what life had been like in New York, clung to it when others let themselves forget. His father had told him he’d go to Princeton or Yale one day ... Then the Event had come along and taken away his youth, the best years of his life; nothing but blister-hard work and school and endless boredom left.

He stifled a scream as the wound ointment was irrigated into the opened boil like burning ice over the raw flesh. You couldn’t let something like that show in the Corps; too many Alban bastards who’d despise you if you did, and life would be even more hellish without some respect. Stinking savages, but there were a lot of them—and he had to kennel with them. The doctor applied a dressing and stepped back, wiping her scalpel with disinfectant.

“You’ll be fit for duty in four days, Hook,” she said. “You’d never have been
unfit
if you’d reported that immediately.”

“Well, I couldn’t see it there, could I? Ma’am,” he said reasonably.

A few of the others laughed when the doctor had gone. Hook glared them into silence; he was a big young man, six feet, and strong in a lanky long-muscled fashion; few cared to meet his flat hazel eyes for long. Unarmed combat had been one of his better specialties; that and marksmanship had saved him from washing out after repeated “marginal disciplinaries” on his Recruit Evaluation Forms. When everyone was quiet he swung back onto his pallet and lay on his stomach as he looked out the window again.

“Lucky ... the boil wasn’t on your ass ... Hook,” a voice said from the lower bunk, with a strong choppy Sun People accent. “Then everyone ... would see ... you’re a half-assed ... excuse for a Marine.”

He leaned over, glaring at the sweat-wet face of the sick man below him. “Get off my case, Edraxsson!” he said. “You’ve been biting my ass for a year now, and I’m fucking sick of it, you hear?”

“That’s because you’re ... a disgrace to my beloved ... Corps,” the noncom said. “But I’m going to make a Marine out of you ... yet, Hook,” he said, eyes beginning to wander and then brought back by an effort of will.

“Shut the fuck up, Edraxsson,” Hook barked. “You’re just a useless cripple here, not a fucking noncom, so shut up!”

Edraxsson smirked, despite the fever from his infected foot—a pack mule had stepped on it, and driven filth into the wound while he was out on patrol. Hook felt something spark behind his eyes, like a small white explosion, and reached for his webbing belt where it hung on a wooden peg driven into the adobe wall.

Right across the face,
he thought.
That’ll shut him up, I’ll give him the buckle
—

“Hey, heads up!” one of the other patients said, craning her head to get a better view through the narrow window and the thick mud-brick wall it pierced. “Something going on out there!”

Hook had a better view. The Gatling was crewed up, and the colonel leading it out at a gallop. His eyes went wider; something
was
up. When he heard the crackle of shots and then the ripping-canvas sound of the machine gun in operation, an icy trickle reached up from groin to stomach and cooled the rage there the way salt spray would a candle-flame on deck.

“Something’s going down.”

 

Marian Alston-Kurlelo ate slowly, with conscious pleasure. She loved the sea, but there were things you just couldn’t expect on salt water, and a good ham-and-eggs breakfast was one of them. They were due to leave Westhaven today; touch at Portsmouth Base, and then south with the fleet. At least they’d be sailing out of Alba’s late fall into the Mediterranean’s mild winter....

She ignored the occasional courier who came in to drop off a written message or consult in whispers with her hostess; the last thing a busy subordinate needed was their elbow joggled.

There was even tumeric for the scrambled eggs, and acorn-fed Alban hams were better than anything Smithfield, Virginia, had ever turned out. They were going to be far foreign for a good long while soon, probably eating hardtack—what the enlisted ranks called dog biscuit, with reason—and salt cod.

“What’s the status on the
Merrimac?”
she asked, in a quiet moment.

“The dockside people were working all night in shifts, Commodore,” Commandant Hendricksson said. “They’re putting the finishing touches on stowage now, completing her provisioning.”

That had had to wait until the cargo from Irondale was loaded, since stores needed to go on top to be accessible during the voyage south. Which they wouldn’t, under tons of rolled steel plate, boiler, engine parts, and cannon.

“Talbott and the
Severna Park
finished their loading yesterday, so that’s six hundred tons of coal along with it—yah, should be ample.”

Alston nodded, calculations running through her head. “Plenty, if we whip the coal ashore and send the ships back for a second load as soon as we’re set up,” she said. “Very good work, Greta.”

Hendricksson nodded; she was a tall fair woman, in her late thirties now, built with a matronly solidity and usually showing a calm, stolid reliability. “It may not be spectacular, but we do get things
done
here,” she said.

The commodore inclined her head. The ex-Minnesotan had been an officer on
Eagle
before the Event. She didn’t have quite the touch of the buccaneer you needed for ship command in this era, more of a routiner. Thoroughly brave, of course. She’d been one of the commando of five who went with Alston into the Olmec city-fort of San Lorenzo in the Year 1, when Martha Cofflin had been kidnapped and taken south by Lisketter’s band of Save the Noble Native American imbeciles. At least,
San Lorenzo
was what the archaeologists would have called it, in a history where its lords hadn’t sacrificed most of Lisketter’s crew to the Jaguar God, and where it wasn’t burned and abandoned after the Islander punitive expedition and the unintentional plague of mumps that followed. The jungle was growing back over the temple mounds and giant stone heads now, though the other Olmec centers were flourishing.

She’d done well, though; it was a post that suited a lover of schedules and lists and procedures. Her husband was a civil engineer of like outlook, out since the crack of dawn supervising the laying of a new water main.

“In fact, you’ve been doing a damned good job here overall,” Alston went on, and Hendricksson glowed. The commodore didn’t give praise lightly.

They were breakfasting in the commandant’s residence. Fort Pentagon was garrison and civil headquarters here in Westhaven. The commander’s house was inside it, built around a courtyard of its own, mostly cobbled, but with a small rose garden and a wooden jungle gym set amid grass with trampled bare spots here and there. A groom led a horse by, sparrows hopped about picking oats from the cracks between stones, someone went through the courtyard gate with a basket of laundry on her hip and laughed with a Marine who’d leaned his rifle against a wall to offer her a hand. This kitchen looked over the yard, flooded with light from the big south-facing windows; it had a pleasant austerity of flagstones and scrubbed oak, stone countertops and big cast-iron stove from Irondale. Pans and dishes were racked on the walls, sacks of onions hung from the rafters with bundles of herbs, and the ham stood in carved pink glory near the big black frying pan. The air smelled of sea and cooking.

Swindapa looked up from where she’d been dandling the commandant’s youngest. “I’ll go see about getting our dunnage and files down to the ship, then,” she said. handing the toddler back to the housekeeper; it gurgled and stretched chubby arms at her, and she paused to give it a kiss on the nose. “It won’t be in the way, now. And I can check that the briefing papers are ready, and get the requisition chits from the Pacific Bank people.”

“Thanks, ’dapa,” Marian said. “I had some stuff with the armorer, too—see to it, would you, sugar?”

Her Python, specifically: her
katana
and
wasikashi
she looked after herself, but something had been rattling in the pistol last time she had it on the firing range.
Goin’ to need that,
she thought, with grim resignation. You wanted your tools in good shape when your life depended on them, and Westhaven had a first-rate firearms man, trained at Seahaven Engineering back on the Island.

“Let’s go take a look at things in general.” she went on, throwing down her napkin.

She and Hendricksson went out the front, returning the salutes of the Marine sentries, then up the brick staircase to the gateside bastions and above that to the grass-grown roof of the gun gallery and the small paved stand around the flagpole; the Stars and Stripes flapped above them in the brisk onshore breeze. Fort Pentagon’s walls were sloping turf above a brick retaining wall and dry moat, and the fall wildflowers that starred them contrasted oddly with the black snouts of the cannon. She’d put the fort in on the highest ground available on the south bank, and it gave a good view.

From here she could see the whole stretch of the docks along the Avon’s south bank, a dozen long rectangles stretching out into the river. Low tide left a stretch of smelly black mud between the corniche roadway with its log seawall and the deeper water where the ships rested. It also left the great timbers of the wharf exposed, black with pitch and trailing disconsolate green weed, overgrown with mussels and barnacles. Gull-wings made a white storm out over the blue-green water, stooping and diving; one let an oyster fall not far away, then flapped down to plunder the broken shell. Some of the ships were only the tips of masts over the oak planking of the warehouses stretching upstream; the wood was weathered brown near here, rawly fresh further away. Oats poured in a yellow-white stream from a grain elevator into the hold of an Islander barque as they watched, and workers with kerchiefs across their faces toiled knee-deep in the flood to spread it evenly with long-handled rakes.

“It’s like watching a stop-motion film, every time we visit here,” Alston said quietly.

“Damned right, Commodore,” Greta said. “Even living here, it’s
almost
like that for me—like waking up in the woods and finding a fairy ring of mushrooms.”

Out in the blue-green waters was a lighthouse on a rocky little island, built of concrete at vast expense. A big metal windmill whirled atop it, doing duty as a wind sock and charging banks of lead-acid batteries in the structure below, handmade copies of pre-Event models from trucks. Inland from the docks was a checkerboard of tree-lined streets and squares with small green parks, shading out quickly into truck gardens and farms and round huts; she’d based the design on the original street plan of Savannah, Georgia. The public buildings were grouped around a larger central square, mostly in reddish sandstone or brick; a modest Ecumenical Christian cathedral—this had been the first bishopric off the Island—the Town Hall, half a dozen others. Between there and the docks were workshops, small factories, sailors’ doss-houses and a tangle of service trades.

Form followed function; between them Bronze Age peasants and late-twentieth-century Americans had managed to spontaneously re-create most of the features of a classic North Atlantic port town.

Alston chuckled quietly at a memory; those functional features included a fair number of hookers. Until she actually went up and asked one of them, Swindapa had thought her partner was pulling her leg about that. Like most Fiernans, she found the whole concept of prostitution weirdly funny in a creepy sort of way; as she put it, it was like paying someone to have dinner with you.

All in all Marian Alston-Kurlelo liked Westhaven, though, more than any of the other outports of the Republic. Fogarty’s Cove, for instance, tended to be a little too consciously the haunt of bold pioneers, given to hitching their belts, spitting, and noting
the crops look purty good this year, ayup.
The older ones were probably modeling themselves on secondhand memories of
Last of the Mohicans
and Frontierland, and it was contagious.