On the Oceans of Eternity (35 page)

Alston’s belly clenched. The steam ram, a collier, and their secret weapon... and nearly two hundred souls.

Swindapa went on: “We’re still trying for—”

A rating from the radio shack ran up. “Ma‘am!” he said, thrusting a paper at her. “Ma’am!”

“Report from the
Merrimac!”
Swindapa said.

A sound something like a cheer went up from some of the middies and hands on the quarterdeck, and the officers smiled. Alston allowed herself a slight curve of the lips as well, as she took the transcript.

It didn’t quite die as she read it.
Nearly doomed
wasn’t as bad as
actually dead
. Or so she thought until they came in sight of the stricken vessel ...

“Damn,” she said mildly, lowering the binoculars.

“Right on the mark,” Jenkins said, impressed. “Where you said the winds and current would throw them.”

The maintop was a little crowded, with captain, commodore, and a couple of other officers standing on the little triangular railed platform; the usual lookout was out on the yard.

“From the description, it could only be these shores,” Alston said absently. “
They
certainly didn’t have much idea where they were. The only good thing about it is that we’re here now—and that there’s deep water all the way to the cliffs.”

She raised the binoculars again. The storm had died down, there were streaks of blue overhead, but the enormous swells still came pounding in from the west, out of the deep reaches of the Atlantic that ran landless from here to the Carolinas. There was already white on the tops of some of the mountains landward; down from there the land ran steep, densely green forest below the moors, then dropped sheer into the sea battering it from the northwest. No sign of human habitation, although she’d give odds that eyes were fixed on her ships from somewhere up there. The wind had shifted to a steady westerly, strong enough to make the rigging drone a steady bass note, and to send the
Chamberlain
slanting southeast with her port rail nearly under, white foam breaking from her bows. The mast swayed out, over the rushing gray water, back over the narrow oval of deck, out again in a wide warped circle. She ignored it as she focused on the wounded ship to leeward.

“
Merrimac,
all right,” she said. “Badly beat up.”

Nearly destroyed might have been a better way of putting it. All three masts were gone by the board, the foremast nearly at deck level, the main about twenty feet up; the mizzen was still there about to the mizzentops. Standing rigging hung in great swaths and tangles; the deck looked as if there was scarcely a foothold free of fallen cordage and spars and sails. The pumps were going, a steady stream of water over both rails, and a set of pathetic jury-rigged sails were up, triangular swatches that looked as if a bunch of small sailboats were sitting on the big Down Easter’s decks.

“I wonder Clammp hasn’t got his boats out towing,” Jenkins said.

“Take a look at her stem davits,” Marian said grimly. A boat was dangling there, or at least the rear third of one. “Ms. Kurlelo-Alston, what boats do we have with the frigates still sound? Six-oared or better.”

“Eight, ma’am,” Swindapa said instantly. “Three more under repair and ready within a few hours.”

“Good ... all right. Those boats to the
Merrimac.
Ship’s doctor from the
Chamberlain,
medical supplies, stretchers, cordage. Portable pumps, four of ’em. She’ll need hands... besides the boat crews, fifteen hands and a middie, ensign, or lieutenant from each—good riggers, sailmakers. And ship’s carpenters with their mates and kit from, hmmm-mmm,
Lincoln
and
Sheridan
.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Swindapa repeated the order and leaned out, grabbed a backstay, and slid the hundred feet to the quarterdeck with her feet braced against the hard ribbing of the hemp cable to control her speed.

“A tow, Commodore?” Jenkins asked quietly.

Marian Alston looked beyond the laboring hulk of the
Merrimac
. Close, far too close, the great swells surged and roared against sheer rock, throwing foam mast high. Even across several miles of sea she could hear the sound, and through the binoculars see the grinding snarl where the huge mass of water pushed eastward by the long storm met the immovable object of the Cantabrian Mountains, where the Pyrenees slid down into the Atlantic. There was clear water beyond that last finger of granite reaching out to sea...

... and the
Merrimac
wasn’t going to make it, not under that miserable jury-rig; if she was doing two knots, it was a miracle. The swell and drift eastward would cut her off long before; she was making a yard eastward for every one she made south.
Close
, but no cigar. Anything that hitched on would be dragged to leeward as well by fourteen hundred tons of dead-in-the-water inertia.

“No, Commander Jenkins. I’m going to save that cargo if I can, but I’m not going to lose any more people for it. Rig for a tow, by all means, ready when and if we can get her far enough out. I’m going over to supervise recovery operations myself.”

The deck had already been busy, repairs still going forward on the rigging; now it was doubly so, with lashings being untied and davits swung out. More than a few of the crew exchanged glances; launching a boat in seas this rough was gambling with a dunking at the very least, or possibly with injury and death if something went wrong halfway down. There was a scramble of orders and bosun’s whistles, and deck crews formed on the lines. Jenkins murmured to his sailing master, and the voice rang out:

“Clew up!”

“Heave ...
ho
!” The rhythmic chorus rang out, and the square sails spilled wind as the lines hauled them up like a theater curtain. The ship slowed almost instantly, swaying more toward the upright. Also rolling more, but you couldn’t have everything.

The bosun’s mate in charge of the boats wasn’t hesitating. “Boat crew of the day to the commodore’s barge! Falls tenders! Frapping line tenders!”

The commands ran on smoothly. Swindapa came up beside her. “Anything else?” she said softly, trying not to disrupt Alston’s train of thought.

“Yes,” she replied. “Have Captain Jenkins and... who’s got the most left in the way of large spars?”

“Of the frigates,
Sheridan,”
Swindapa said. The stores-ships were too far out to be useful just now. “Full set—didn’t lose anything.”

She wouldn’t, with Tom Hiller as her skipper,
Alston thought. He’d been sailing master of the Eagle and taught Alston herself most of what she knew of handling big square-riggers. Aloud:

“... and the
Sheridan
make a bundle of some spare spars—main and foresail—and get ready to put them overside rigged for tow.” Luckily the spars were buoyant, being varnished white pine.

Fatigue and anxiety. had vanished. She had a job to do; it might well be an impossible one, but all she could do was make the best possible decisions. Focus left her coldly alert, impersonal, and intensely alive.

The bosun’s mate had the line team ready, and he scrambled up on the davits to give it a final visual check. A sailor brought her a life jacket; she strapped in absently, eyes still narrowed and gazing at the
Merrimac.
Swindapa came up beside her, and they both settled their billed Coast Guard caps more firmly on their heads—as usual, a few wispy strands of fine blond hair were floating free from their braid, like streamers to windward since they were both facing the port rail. Alston blinked, felt a fleeting, familiar moment of absurdly intense tenderness, a desire to smooth the strands back. Their eyes met, and spoke
later
without word or expression.

“Denniston, lay into the boat,” the bosun’s mate barked. A sailor climbed into it, undoing more lashings, running a final check, then gave a thumbs-up. “Cast off the gripe... cast off the preventers ...” A clank as the sailor in the boat tripped the pelican hooks. “Boat crew lay into the boat!”

This time ten sailors climbed into the boat—technically the commodore’s barge—in careful pairs. Two picked up oars and made ready to fend the boat off from the side of the ship; the rest of them and Denniston the coxswain grabbed the manropes that dangled from above, taking as much of their weight as possible off the tackle that held the boat.

Denniston looked over to the bosun’s mate. “Ready in the boat.”

The bosun’s mate turned. “Ready on deck, ma’am,” he said to the OOD, and received a nod. Then he went on: “On the falls!” The teams on deck took up the lines that ran to both ends of the boat, ready to control the descent. The bosun’s mate took position near the rail, hands outstretched to either side. “Ready forward and aft?”

“Ready aye ready!”

“Lower away together!” A clink, and the boat sank with smooth speed. “Lively aft—easy forward—easy forward,
handsomely there, God-damn you
—”

The
Chamberlain
heeled a little more and the swell rose to meet her. The boat touched, skipped, began to throw a bow wave of its own.

“Let fall!” the bosun’s mate said, stepping back; the coxswain in the boat was in charge now. From below came her call:

“Unhook aft—passengers to the line!”

Alston came to with an inward start. There was something hypnotically soothing about a well-executed maneuver like this and the Chamberlains were a well worked-up lot; the flagship naturally stayed in full commission more than the other Guard frigates, spent less time shuttling cargo to new or remote bases, and hence less time cut back to a sailing rather than a full fighting crew. A hand was holding the line for her, and as she came up she could see one of the boat’s crew below doing the same. She leaned out, took a bight of the line around her right forearm, gripped it lower between crossed feet, and slid down at just short of rope-burn speed. Two of the sailors caught her and she stepped forward to a place in the bows of the boat, grabbing a thwart.

Seen from the surface the swell was like the surge of a giant’s muscle beneath them, infinite power enclosed in a silk-smooth skin, dangerous and beautiful. The bitter kiss of foam blew onto her face, and she could feel the living heave of the ocean through the thin inch of oak that made up the cutter’s planks. Swindapa came down the line next, then the rest of the hands being sent across, while the tools and cordage and sailcloth came down on whiplines.

“Let go forward!” Denniston said.

The coxswain was a short woman, thickset and muscular, with cropped black hair and bright green eyes, in her early twenties. Alban, from an eastern tribe, but she’d taken an Immigration Office name. Some of the Sun People tribes had sent in fairly bitter complaints about girls running off for this reason or that—being married to suitors they didn’t like was the most common—and their fathers having to repay the bridewealth and swallow public shame.

If they don’t like it, they can change their God-damned customs
.

“Fend off,” the coxswain said. Oars pushed the longboat away from the heaving wooden cliff of the
Chamberlain’s
side; other boats were being lowered even as they moved. “Out oars and stroke... stroke... stroke ...”

That was awkward in the crowded barge; it was even more so when they stopped to raise the mast, step, and brace it. That gave her something to do; she shifted over to the windward rail, along with everyone else except the coxswain at the tiller, sitting on it to fight the heel and make the boat stiffer as it raced across the wind toward the stricken
Merrimac.

Under the urgent focus on the task ahead ran the sheer exuberant satisfaction of the cutter’s racing speed, the sea hissing past six inches away—less when they crested one of the huge waves and white water burst around them. She fought down an urge to whoop and grin as the bow went up ... up ... up; then the great jerk of acceleration on the crest as the sail caught the full force of the stiff wind and cracked taut. And the long roller-coaster swoop down the skin of the gray-blue swell, with goose-wings of spray flying higher than her head from the boat’s bows and the curving wake racing aft.

For a moment she was a skinny black girl in faded cutoffs and a T-shirt again, dancing with excitement in a little dinghy as it tossed in a yachtsman’s wake off Prince Island.

Swindapa did whoop, and the coxswain gave an exultant tribal screech, half-standing at the crest to get another sight of the
Merrimac’s
sails, leaning expertly into the tiller and calling directions to the hands at the lines. Soon enough they could see the mountain peaks ahead to the southeast, and then the stumpy tops of the ship’s mutilated masts.

“Ready to let go!” Denniston called. The hull came up beside them, looming a dozen feet overhead. There were plenty of ropes overside, and a few of the
Merrimac
’s hands waving and calling. “Ready to fend ... let go the sail!”

The cutter turned up alongside the ship, and the sail rattled down. Alston moved to take one of the ropes and secure the bows with a running bowline knot. “Denniston, I’m going to rig for tow,” she said crisply. “When I do, tail on to the line and haul away; I want her head about five points up and as much way as you can.”

“Yes, ma‘am.” A hesitation. “Ma’am, we’re not going to tow this bitch free—not even with all the boats.”

“I’m aware of that, Petty Officer Denniston.” Alston said. “Every bit helps, though.”

“Ma‘am. Aye, aye, ma’am!”

She nodded, gripped the rope, braced her feet against the slick heaving planks of the ship’s side, and swarmed up hand over hand. The others followed, and the gear; she was looking about, taking in the details. Not much was recognizable of the trim, neat new ship she’d boarded in Westhaven.
Hmmm. Wheel’s still functional
.

“Where’s Captain Clammp?” she said, striding over to a young man she recognized as one of his officers. “I need a report on the status of the ship.”