On the Oceans of Eternity (65 page)

Everyone was looking northward with alert curiosity, a few faces pale and drawn. The first ball struck the water two hundred yards short of the
Chamberlain’s
bow and skipped twice like a giant’s flung stone. Alston felt her teeth clench.
That’s too far and too hard.

The next two went right into a wave and vanished; the fourth skipped and struck forward, hitting the flukes of the portside anchor with a discordant metallic
clungggg
that sent shivers into the back teeth of every jaw on board as it ran up from the deck through feet to head. Numbers five and six came aboard, one with a deep wet
thunk
into the hull timbers, the last after two skips into the hammock-netting not far from where she stood. It was nearly spent, its energy wasted on the water it had grazed, but it still sent splinters and ripped canvas flying, thudded into the mizzenmast and went trundling across the deck with crewfolk hopping and cursing to avoid it.

Clunng.
It struck the barricade around the wheel and compass and finally came to a halt, rolling with the pitch of the deck rather than walking itself with the gyroscopic force of rapid spin. Alston looked down at it wide-eyed as it rolled not two feet from the toes of her boots.

An expert’s eye judged size and weight effortlessly. Eight-inch diameter, sixty-eight pounder. Almost identical to those the Republic’s frigates used for the main armament, save that the surface was slightly pebbled rather than machined smooth. No ship of the Tartessians’ size could carry a conventional gun large enough to fire that shot; it had to come from something cold-core-cast and carefully shaped by a knowledge of internal pressures. Almost certainly cast in steel, not stiff brittle cast iron.

Like the Dahlgrens on the
Chamberlain’s
gun deck, Civil War models improved by Leaton’s superior steels.

Walker shipped them in,
she realized.
Recently enough that our agents didn’t pick it up.

How and why didn’t matter now. What did matter was that their range advantage was gone or mostly gone—that would depend on how well worked-up their crews were with their new weapons—and that their edge in weight of metal had just been cut in half. She could feel her brain working the numbers, as if she were watching some machine in Leaton’s shops whirring and stretching, steel sliding on oiled steel.

“Belay firing,” she said calmly. “Left to two-seven-zero. Fleet to conform. Inform all captains that the enemy mounts eight-inch Dahlgrens and repeat it. Advise schooners to employ caution.”

Because at anything like close range those guns will throw a ball in one side of you and out the other,
she thought, as Swindapa dashed to the radio shack.

Jenkins gave her a single startled glance, but he was already barking orders.
Chamberlain
had been sailing east on a reach, with the wind broad on the starboard quarter. Now she turned on her heel to run before the wind a little east of north, the sailors spinning the wheel and deck crews running to heave sails around from their port brace, putting the yards more nearly horizontal to the hull.

A chorus of
heave-
ho! ran across the deck, line teams bending to it with a will, sweat running down their naked backs or plastering T-shirts to skin. The change in course turned the bow toward the enemy, cutting off the gun crews’ view; she could hear a muted chorus of groans from sailors who’d been ready for the crash of their first broadside. A glance behind showed the whole string of frigates turning as if they were attached to the flagship with invisible rods, heeling over to starboard as momentum pressed them down, then steadying on the new course.

The whole Tartessian line disappeared in smoke as the Islander fleet turned toward them—and therefore turned their own deadly broadsides away, cannon pointed impotently at each other or empty sea, while every gun on the enemy decks still bore right down their throats. Alston gripped her hands together behind her back; they’d have to take two broadsides without being able to reply, maybe three ...

Iron lashed the water ahead of them; the enemy were firing at a narrower target now, perhaps a little slow to correct their aim. There was a rending crash forward, and the sound of screaming. Blocks and lines fell on the splinter netting overhead, and something came all along the deck and whirred past her close enough to whip her around like a top with the wind of its passage. That let her see Jenkins staring down incredulously at the stump where his left hand had been, and a body beyond him falling—one of the lieutenants, beheaded as neatly as a giant guillotine could have done.

She stepped forward, whipping off the lanyard from the breast pocket of her uniform jacket and throwing the loop around his arm just above the ragged stump, pulling it taut with a hard jerk. He was going gray with shock, eyes wandering.

“You, you, get him below,” she said, and they lifted the captain of the
Chamberlain
between them and dashed for the companionway. “‘Dapa, pass the word for Mr. Oxton. Ensign, give me a hand.”

She was standing in a spreading pool of blood; smashing the head off lets everything out very quickly, and there are many gallons of blood in a human body. This one was that of a fairly slight woman, and they heaved it over the rail with a single convulsive movement.

“Ma’am?” Oxton said, his face set, a little pale, lips compressed, green eyes steady and level.

Good, she thought. Aloud: “Mr. Oxton, you’re in command of this ship; Captain Jenkins is disabled,” she said. “Keep her so.”

“One minute fifty seconds,” Swindapa said at her side, looking at her watch. “Two minutes ... and ten ...”

“Keep her so ... dyce, do you hear?” from Oxton near the helm.

A middy came panting up from the gun deck, looked for Jenkins, ran to Oxton’s side, and reported in a slightly shrill voice that number-one starboard had been dismounted, was secured, two crew dead and four wounded. There was blood spattered across the chalk-white freckled face, clotted in the short dark-red hair, and a little running from a cut over one eye.

“Very well,” Oxton said. “Steady there, Mr. Telukelo.”

“Yessir.” He visibly took a deep breath. “The master gunner says the gun can be remounted but it’ll take twenty minutes. Have to mount new ringbolts.”

“Leave it secured,” Oxton said. “Carry on.”

“Sir!”

“Two minutes twenty seconds ...” Swindapa said.

This time the lead Tartessian ship’s guns went off in a rippling volley rather than a simultaneous broadside, firing from forward to aft with the long jets of flame raking through the fogbank of powder smoke streaming back northward across her decks.

A sailor fell out of the rigging with a long scream, one of the bosun’s crew crawling aloft repairing cut lines and stays. The shriek was cut short as the man bounced off a shroud and hit the deck hard and unevenly. The Chamberlain shuddered and started to fall away to port as the foretopsail yard sagged, smashed clean through near the partners. More crew swarmed aloft and others went to the lines; the ship steadied as the hands at the helm wrestled with the wheel.

“Sir,” someone panted. “Sir, Chips says we’re hulled three places on the port bow near the waterline. He’s working to plug it, two feet in the hold.”

“Acknowledge. Hands to the pumps, there.”

“One minute thirty seconds ...”

Alston nodded, feeling for the right moment, eyes slitted. “Fleet to conform,” she said. “Message to the transports—execute contingency C. Mr. Oxton, bring her right to three-two-zero; guns to fire as they bear.”

“Right fifty degrees rudder! Haul all port, lively port!”

She raised her binoculars again as the long bowsprit swung eastward, a part of her hearing the roaring cheer from the gun deck as the crews got the order, and the cry of
silence fore and aft!
that followed it.

They were much closer now; she could easily see the Tartessian deck crews heaving to clew up the foresail and lower foretopsail to check their ship’s way, taking some speed off her so their line wouldn’t outrun hers and leave itself vulnerable to being broken in the middle. A hint of a bleak smile bent her full lips as the second Iberian ship was late about following suit and nearly ran its leader aboard at the stern; men were yelling at each other and waving their arms there.

Chamberlain
was coming about, not to lie parallel with the enemy but to approach them at the sharpest angle that would allow her to use all her broadside guns. The Tartessians were taking the challenge, keeping their course rather than slacking off to the north to maintain their distance.

Mmmm-hmmmm.
Probably they intend to let us each get tangled up with one ship, then range
up
and take us on the other side with the unengaged vessels.
That was the rational way to use their advantage in hulls and numbers; they had about the same number of guns but twice as many ships. That made their firepower more mobile, but also more diffuse at any one point.

BAAAAMMM.
The first of the
Chamberlain’s
big Dahlgrens cut loose in a spear of red fire and a cloud of smoke; the wind swept it northward like a young fogbank.
BAAAAMMM.
A steady rippling fire, each gun waiting until the turn of the ship brought the target into its sights, the gun captain shouting clear! and jerking the lanyard, curving his body aside like a matador to let the cannon slam backward with the recoil. Then the reloading, the swabber pushing wet sponges down the barrel with a long
sssshhhhhh
of steam to quench sparks, the powder-bag and wad, two loaders tipping the heavy steel ball in like a giant ball bearing, the rammer pushing it down, the crew hauling on the tackle to run the gun forward again and the captain slamming in a new friction-fuse, glaring over the barrel, heaving on a handspike, spinning the elevation screw and making hand signals to the crew to push the breech around and bring the gun to bear. Then
clear!
—

Brutal manual labor of the hardest kind in the stifling smoke-filled gun deck, darkness and scorching-hot cannon recoiling like the pistons of a forging hammer and as able to crush a limb or skull if one step went wrong; yet skilled labor, too, a teamwork choreographed as precisely as any dance. Automatic, endless, ignoring the heat and fatigue and dry wooden tongues, the knowledge that enemy shot could smash through the oak timbers at any second.

“One minute fifteen seconds for our first gun to repeat,” Swindapa said.

That was excellent time, far better than the enemy was managing; they had heavy crews but not the long practice that gave speed and accuracy.

A gun that fires twice as fast is as good as two,
she thought.

The lines of ships were less than a thousand yards apart now, cannon a continous bellowing roar, smoke choking-thick. A crackle came from the tops above her; she glanced up and saw a Marine sharpshooter leaning over the piled hammocks along the railings of the maintop, firing, slipping a new shell into the breech, picking a target, correcting her aim, firing again. The enemy were doing likewise. A young deckhand running with a bucket of sand to throw on a fire dropped and lay motionless, blood leaking from under him: another checked the body, shook her head, and helped drag it to the side and put it over. Something went
crack
overhead, hit the plates around the wheel, bounced and went off
whirrt-whirrt-whirrt,
a lethal lead Frisbee.

Only part of her attention was necessary for the business of the moment, the long waiting as the fleets ran together and hammered each other as they came. Part of her was spectator; part remembering—
do Jesus, there are a lot of things I want to live to do again
...

Watch an iceberg heel in the Roaring Forties, as the surf of a storm lashing around the planet broke on it in waves mountain-high, seething gray and white and green. Sea-turtles crawling up a Carribean beach turned silver under the full moon, looking like an endless field of living boulders; or a sky-full of condors over the towering painted pyramid of Sechin Alto in Peru. Hear wolves howling in the Berkshire hills on a hunting trip, with night falling and the rich yeasty smell of damp autumn leaves. Smell the clean milky scent of a baby and watch its broad toothless idiot smile as it reached for her ... Heather and Lucy’s kids. Take the pan out of the oven and feel the earthy joy of knowing she’d made a really
perfect
beaten biscuit. Sit in front of a fire at home with Swindapa on a winter’s night, hearing the snow beat feather-paws against the windows, their arms around each other’s shoulders and a book of Flecker propped open on their knees.

Crack.
There was a cold shock in the small of her back, cold fire scoring across her flank. She spun, staggered, put a hand to her right side below the last rib. Hot wetness and torn cloth. Breath hissed out between her teeth.

Swindapa grabbed her, pushed her into the shelter of the helm barricade, knelt. A rip of cloth and cold air hit the wound.

“It needs stitches,” she said.

“Can’t take the time,” she said, and craned her head to look. A line of red ... not too deep, mostly in the thin layer of subcutaneous fat, not clipping the fibers of the muscle much ...

“Bandage it,” she said. “That’ll have to do. No time for anything else and stitches would just rip out if I have to move.”

The pain had begun, and the fire turned hot as the antiseptic powder went into the wound.
A lot easier than havin’ a baby,
she told herself. Her partner wound the bandage around her waist like a sash, tying it off tight to hold the pad over the torn flesh, then tugging the jacket down over it again. She walked out, testing herself—not much loss of function just yet.

Damn
,
I’m getting’ to be held together by bandages.
There were two priceless pre-Event elastic ones on her knees as a precaution against extension injuries.

“Flesh wound,” she said to Oxton’s worried glance.