On the Oceans of Eternity (62 page)

“The corpsmen say the water’s safe,” Vaukel said.

“Ah, good!” she said, dipping up a cup that didn’t have the unpleasant mineral taste of the purifying powder.

The she tossed her uniform over a branch and made for her rucksack, to fetch out a scrap of soap and half a dozen pairs of underwear and socks. A chance to clean them and herself; if she propped them on sticks by the embers of the fire they’d probably dry overnight, and if they didn’t they’d be close enough to pack, or wear. When she came back the tent was up, and her squadmates were unrolling their bedding inside, and her legs were starting to tell her their tale of cooling, stiffening muscle.

“Ah, I’m getting to be a crone,” she said as she slumped down.

“Legs stiff?” Vaukel said beside her. “Should I loosen them?”

“Thanks, Vauk,” she said; Fiemans had a knack for that, healing magic in their fingers.

She sighed as he kneaded the knots and tension out of one leg, then another, finishing by stretching her ankles, rubbing the soles of her feet and drumming the edges of his hands up and down from heel to buttocks.
Ahh, that does feel better.
When he’d finished she looked up and caught his hopeful unspoken question, not to mention the rampant evidence of it.

“Sure,” she said, with a drowsy chuckle.

A glance sideways showed the camp settling down for the night, the sun only a faint rim of light in the west. “But none of that Fiernan fancy work this time,” she said, rolling onto her back. The Earth Folk could turn something as simple as fucking into something as elaborate as one of their dancing ceremonies. “I need my sleep.”

Later, yawning and on the verge of slumber, she listened to a sentry’s boots going past at the perimeter not far away, a wolf howling somewhere, a rustle of chill wind through the tree whose branches spread over the tent. The squad’s fire was banked with earth on its outer side, to throw the warmth of the fire into the open flap of the tent. The stars were many and bright, promising dry weather ... and dry socks, tomorrow.

War’s a fine trade, she thought happily.

Even in the field like this the living was no rougher than the damp chill huts of home, parents and siblings and cousins and the livestock all sleeping in the same straw. Nor was the work harder than a croft-born girl’s endless round of butter-churning and grain-grinding, cooking and weaving, walking miles under a weight of water buckets or bundled firewood; in barracks it was a good deal softer all ’round, and the company was better either way. More freedom, too; and in the uniform of the Corps nobody dared or cared to scorn you.

Then her belly tightened a little as she remembered the hissing roar of the Ringapi surging against the barricade, or the moaning scream of a mortar round from out of the sky overhead. She moved a little closer to the broad warm strength of Vaukel’s back, comforted by the snores and sighs and body heat of the rest of the squad beyond as well.

 

“This was as close as the ultralights could get,” Marian Alston said, spreading the photographs on the table. The captains crowded around, balancing instinctively against the sway of a ship under way. “The enemy have taken considerable countermeasures against airborne reconnaisance. Particularly at low altitudes.”

Light cannon on counterbalanced yoke mounts designed to shoot upward, balloons with heavy pivot-rifles mounted in their gondolas and platforms on top of the gasbags, rockets. All of them crude and inaccurate, but the little motorized hang gliders weren’t all that sophisticated either.

Dammit, if only we had real aircraft!
Of course, while she was at it she could wish for missile boats and a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier ... She glanced out the stern gallery windows, at the frigates following the flagship in a line that extended for miles, one ruler-straight millrace wake white across the blue of the ocean.
We’ll make do.

Still, the shots of Tartessos the City from above were fairly clear, a digital videocamera in the ultralight, run through the PC in
Chamberlain’s
radio shack and its inkjet printer.

They lay next to the maps compiled by the Department of Foreign Affairs. Both showed what would become the junction of the Odiel and Tinto Rivers in the twentieth century—
would
have become, she thought with a mental stutter so familiar she hardly noticed it now. This was considerably different from what the uptime maps recorded. The great bay was larger, the peninsula of land down its middle far narrower, and there was less in the way of swamp and marsh around its fringes. Three thousand years of human beings cutting trees in the mountains, freeing soil to erode away downstream and rivers to drop the silt on the ocean shore; three thousand years of plowed fields doing likewise. Those could change the very contours of the land.

The city itself stood roughly where Huelva would have, in a history that included a nation called Espana. Columbus had sailed from here, at the beginning of those fateful years when the folk of Europe broke out into the world ocean, armed with cannon and galleons, smallpox and the joint-stock company. Here it had been a glorified village barely a decade ago, mud-walled houses clinging to a few steep hills at the end of the peninsula.

Now it was a city, bigger than Nantucket. Someone whistled softly.

“Been a busy little bee, hasn’t he?”

Alston nodded. “As you can see, the harbor mouth is narrow and nearly blocked by this island,” she said. Her finger pointed to a long islet that divided the entrance in two. “Heavy fortifications here, here, and here—multiple cross fires. Earthwork forts with massive stone retaining walls and revetments, bomb-proof magazines, underground ways to the bastions. The landward defenses of the forts on both sides are formidable, and fronted by marsh.”

“A nightmare,” McClintock said. “Impossible to storm. I’m surprised Isketerol came up with it, even with the reference books.”

Alston nodded again. “Heavy guns, at least forty-two pounders, with overhead protection. Rocket batteries as well.
I
suspect Walker or one of his people was consulting engineer—there’s a Mycenaean look to some of that stonework. Ms. Kurlelo-Alston.”

Swindapa leaned forward and pressed a control. The VCR below the TV set they’d mounted on the tabletop whirred, and images flickered across its screen, jerking and jinking as the ultralight dodged ground fire. They saw a dragon’s spittle-spray of rockets rising in a sea of flame from multiple tubes mounted on wagons, soaring skyward in arches of smoke, and plunging downward toward the slender shape of a Guard scouting schooner. The white wake of the ship showed how it curved away from the coast, sailing reach at a good twelve knots.

The commander of that craft lifted her billed cap and shook her head. “They don’t have as much range as the guns,” she said. “Less than our rockets. More misfires, too.” Some of the trails of smoke corkscrewed, or ended in ragged clouds of off-white vapor that drifted downwind to the south. “But they could swamp anyone who got close, tear a ship apart.” On the screen, the rockets landed short of the ship and sent gouts of shattered water flying skyward, some close enough to throw spray on its decks. “It was ... alarming, ma’am. I’d say seven-or eight-pound bursting charges,” she finished, as Swindapa turned the machine off.

The faces stayed impassive, but Alston could feel their inner wince. So far, neither side had started using explosive shells in ship-to-ship actions. Both powers had the capacity, and some of those shells waited in the magazines of her fleet.

That presented a problem, though. The problem was ...

She sincerely hoped the situation would result in the sort of de facto restraint that had kept both sides from using poison gas in World War II. For ship-to-ship actions, at least. Certainly nobody was going to show any restraint when an earth-and-stone fort shot at wooden hulls.

“So, running the harbor mouth’s out,” someone said in a dry tone. That brought a general chuckle.

“Ms. Kurlelo-Alston?” Marian said.

“Ma’am.” Swindapa put an enlargement of a picture on an easel. “Gentlemen, ladies, as you can see the city is also strongly fortified.”

And much
bigger
than it was, too,
Alston thought. There must be around twenty thousand people in it now, a sevenfold increase since Isketerol came home. The old town on the rocky hills had been largely replaced by a fortified palace complex; landward of the new city’s grid of streets a Vauban-style sunken wall with bastions and deep moat ran from river to river.

A disconcerting number of buildings showed tall brick chimneys or other evidence of being manufacturies.
Gardens, too. Looks like a good sanitation system
...
that’s a waterworks there in the northeast corner ... shipyards and drydocks on the northern side of the city . . .

Swindapa moved her pointer along that shore, out toward the end of the land. “Here’s the naval docks. We count twelve warcraft of five hundred tons or more.”

Lips tightened. Not as powerful as the Guard’s frigates, but a lot more of them.

“They’re comparable to the ones we fought off Nantucket in the spring ... but see, the number of gunports is less on each. They’re probably carrying fewer cannon than they did then, but heavier metal. Certainly large shore-based crews.”

Nods; operating close to your harbor you could cram in far more men than you could if you had to feed them and find them room to sleep. That would make their broadsides come faster, and give them plenty of men for boarding.

“What’s this?” Thomas Hiller said, peering close at one of the sheets on the table. “They’re fitting them out with some sort of ... are those shields?”

“We think they’re wrought-iron plates,” Swindapa said quietly. “Not enough to give much protection from cannon shot, but useful against small arms.”

“Damn,” Hiller said mildly ; he was a gray-bearded man, once sailing master on the
Eagle,
come out of a teaching position at Fort Brandt OCS to command
Sheridan,
the newest of the frigates. “That’ll be inconvenient ... though it might make them top-heavy in a blow?”

Alston shook her head. “Home-team advantage,” she said. “They only have to be able to carry it off right outside their own harbor, and in good weather. Next is something really new. We think the Tartessians got the design from Walker. The flier took a risk for a closer shot.”

Swindapa put up another enlargement. It showed a long snake-slim ship walking like a centipede across the harbor. “A galley,” she said. “Three-man oars, twenty-two to a side. No mast—it’s probably dismountable—with this ramming beak and two heavy guns forward and two more guns aft. They’re covered with tarpaulins to keep us from getting the details on the weapons. These galleys are lightly built, mostly from pine, so they can make a lot of them. And they are very fast. With those huge crews they can’t operate far from shore, but from the look of it the rowers are also armed with cutlases.”

An additional hundred and sixy armed men, when the galley was fast to another ship’s side. That could be very nasty in a boarding action.

“We estimate they have about thirty of them,” Swindapa said. “Then there are another forty or so smaller vessels, no threat as gunships, but able to carry warriors out to a melee.”

Alston leaned forward and rested her fingers on the table. “There are two options. First, they refuse to engage; then we proceed to Cadiz. Second, they come out and fight; we break their fleet, blockade the harbor mouth, and
then
proceed to Cadiz.”

“What if they beat us?” the captain of the
Lincoln
said.

“Defeat is not an option, Victor,” Alson said. She looked around the circle of faces. “We’ll be coming up level with Tartessos’s location early tomorrow,” she said. “I doubt they’ll try anything before sunrise—Isketerol knows we still have night-vision devices. It’ll be then, or never.”

 

Jared Cofflin woke in the darkness. He’d noticed himself sleeping more lightly, in recent years—had to visit the jakes more often, too, of course; and this was a strange bed. There was a pair of great homed owls here around the Hollard farmstead, probably nesting in the barn; their deep feathered basso: Whoo,
whoo-oo, whoo, whoo
... and the answering
Whoo, whoo-oo-oo, whoo-oo, whoo-oo
seemed to go on interminably.

Some folks found it soothing. It made his thoughts turn to shotguns. He could feel that it was very late; the night had the dead stillness of the hours before dawn, the air a slight chill.

It wasn’t the owls this time, at least. For a long moment he wasn’t quite sure what had woken him. Martha was just stirring beside him in the big feather bed in the Hollards’ guest bedroom—it was a sign of their hosts’ prosperity that they could afford one, with a household that included eight adults and all those children. He yawned; Jane had brought out a fiddle after dinner, Martha her guitar, and they’d all spent some time making the night hideous with attempts at song ... well, that wasn’t quite fair, Jane and Tanaswada were really good, and Saucarn knew a huge fund of hunting and drinking songs he’d mostly translated into English, and Tom had a collection of old-time tunes, real folk material, that his mother had passed on to him.

“Uncle Jared?” a small voice said in the darkness; he could just see the outline of the speaker against the faint starglow through the curtained window.

“Just a minute.” He sighed, and reached out to flick on his lighter, touch it to the wick of the kerosene lantern, turn it up, and put the glass chimney back on. It opened up a circle of light, showing the simple beauty of polished wood, the intricate carving on the posts of the bed, the colorful throw rugs on the plank floor.