On the Oceans of Eternity (66 page)

A ball gouged a cut out of the mainmast, neat as a cookie cutter, except that a cookie cutter would not have left a dozen sailors down with splinters through thighs and bellies and chests. No more than a hundred yards now, an endless bellowing roar, smoke stinking of burned sulfur, the copper-iron metallic taint of blood, shot crashing home like the tattoo of hail on a roof magnified to Brobdingagian size.

The two lines of battle were at their death-grapple, ton-weights of iron flung back and forth to smash metal and wood and human flesh in a chaos of fallen spars and sails and cordage like the nets of giant spiders. Through the gunsmoke she could see the two foremost Tartessian vessels. The forward one was a shambles, several gunports beaten into one, her forward mast gone above the top, blood running in thin trickles from her scuppers. But still steering, and the one behind was far less hard-hit; it yawed its bows away for a moment and raked the
Chamberlain
on its port quarter, vanishing for a moment behind a cloud of their own smoke. She could feel the heavy shot strike home, steady deliberate fire and well aimed, smashing into the left rear of the frigate and carrying across the decks below; for a moment the screams of the wounded overrode the noise of battle and the ship’s fire tailed off. Then it started up again, nearly as fast, and the rudder still answered the helm. Relief felt like weakness; she forced it down.

“Ready,” she said. “Two broadsides with grape and then board the leader in the smoke. Ensign Glidden. The signal now, please.”

The young officer loaded his flare pistol and raised it.
Fu
dump. The shell arched skyward and burst with a pop, bright crimson against the blue sky. She turned her binoculars to starboard, saw the answering blossom of sail among the transports, nodded satisfaction.

That was also the signal to the rest of the fleet, and to their own gunners. There were still two Gatling guns functional along the rail, their crews lying flat on the deck, waiting until the enemy were fully committed. Now they bounced erect, tore the covers off their weapons and began to fire.
Braaaaap. Braaaaap.
Long bursts as the Marine corporals worked the cranks, traversing the six-barreled weapons along the enemy ship’s rail, across the line of gunports. They added nearly as much smoke as the cannon, but the red blade of the firing was continuous. Each had a gun-shield that turned rifle bullets with trails of sparks, leaving smears of lead across the shields. More sparks ran in trails along the line of the enemy’s hull, where the thin iron plates hadn’t been hammered off by the cannonade; many more must be plunging through the ports and the gaps knocked by
Chamberlain’s
guns, and she could see the scything fire hit the bulwarks and the men beyond.

Then the Gatlings in the tops opened up, two plunging fire right into the crowded deck below, another raking the enemy’s tops and the riflemen and swivel guns there. A dying hand triggered one of the swivels, and some malignant chance put the one-pound shot into the barrels of the foretop Gatling and turned them into twisted wreckage.

“Ready at the helm—order will be to port the helm, hard a‘port,” Oxton said in a quarterdeck bellow, trained to cut through the roar of white noise. “Boarders to your stations, crews ready to follow. Starbolines to board at the peak, larbolines at the quarterdeck.” In a more normal voice: “Perhaps I should lead the quarterdeck boarding party, ma’am?”

“By no means, Mr. Oxton,” Alston said, grinning like a shark.

The companionways up from the gun deck grew crowded as the boarders ran from their stations by the guns. Swindapa came back, a pre-Event pump-action shotgun in either hand. She handed one to Alston, together with a bandolier of new Seahaven-made cartridges.

“The schooners report they’re having trouble keeping the galleys back,” she said soberly.
“Douglass
is badly damaged and the
Tubman
is sinking. They’ll buy us all the time they can.”

Alston nodded. Grief was a luxury she couldn’t afford right now, any more than she could pay attention to physical pain. Closer, and the leading enemy ship’s gunfire had fallen off, a slow halting drumroll now. The
Chamberlain’s
crew fired two more broadsides, but these had a malignant multiple wasp-buzz under the thunder of discharge—thousands of marble-sized iron balls blasting through the ten yards left between the ships, aimed slightly upward to sweep the decks already savaged by the Gatlings. You could pack a lot of grapeshot into the maw of an eight-inch gun ...

“Port your helm, hard a’port!”

A crunching and grating as the flanks of the ships kissed; grapnels flew, a lurch that made everyone clutch for something to steady themselves by, rope or rail or deck; hands ran out along the yards to lash them tight to those of the enemy. She glanced over her shoulder, and saw the next Tartessian ship turning to starboard, to come alongside the
Chamberlain’s
unengaged side and flood her with men—or so they thought.

The Gatlings in the tops swiveled and began to rake the other Tartessian. Cable and line whipped free under the cutting stream of bullets; the topsail yard fell all the way to the deck, and the foretopmast toppled off to the side as the shrouds and stays were cut.

The two rail Gatlings went by Alston, each carried by six sweating, swearing Marines; they slapped their burdens down on undamaged sections of the rail and spun the clamps to seat it firmly. The gunner and assistant lowered a big five-hundred-round magazine onto its receiving rails, worked the crank a quarter turn backward, then opened fire again. The endless rippling roar merged with those from the maintop and mizzen, and bright brass shells cataracted down into the canvas bags slung beneath the mechanism as the six barrels spun.

That will keep them busy,
Alston thought grimly. Aloud: “Mr. Oxton, that Tartessian will try to range up alongside and board. Have the remaining crew lie flat when she does, and give her the starboard broadside at point-blank range. I’ll leave you enough personnel for that.” A deep breath, and:

A roaring cheer, bass male bellows and female hawk-shrieks, and the boarding parties swarmed forward. She racked the slide of the shotgun and leaped, first to the quarterdeck rail and then downward to the lower rail of the enemy ship. Landing, crouching to regain her balance, boot soles slipping a little before she recovered; a man came up with his face streaming with blood, drawing back for a cut with his cutlass. Rising, she lashed out with one foot, a sweeping straight-legged kick that ended with the steel-capped toe of her boot under the point of his chin. Bone crumbled and he flipped backward. Alston ignored the savage twinge of pain in her wounded side and jumped from the rail to the deck.

Her partner landed beside her, cat-steady;
Swindapa
meant Deer
dancer
in the Old Tongue, and it had been given her for good reason; ten years of training in karate and
iajutsu
helped, too.

Dead and wounded were piled thick all along the Tartessian’s decks, slippery with blood and fluids and brains, piles that still heaved and screamed in places. There were still some on their feet, and more were pouring up out of the hatchways—they must have packed the holds with men, even down in the orlop and cargo spaces. With no need to carry provisions or water that was possible—

The thought took less than a second. She and her partner went to cover behind a shattered spar still tangled in its sail and raised their weapons, set their teeth and began to fire. The heavy buckshot slammed out at waist level, a rapid
thump-thump-thump-thump-thump,
twelve rounds in as many seconds. Men went down, their torsos and faces chewed to ruin, and the survivors wavered until the rush behind them pushed them on. By then Islanders by the dozen were dropping down around the leaders, firing double-barreled shotguns or Werder rifles, throwing grenades into the packed mass before them. Marian took an instant to thumb fat shotgun shells from her bandolier into the gate in front of the trigger guard and look back.

From here she could see the masts of the other Tartessian ship coming up on the starboard side of the
Chamberlain.
Then there was the roar of a broadside and the masts pitched and shivered. Alston nodded with grim satisfaction; the frigate’s guns would be firing at point-blank range, their muzzles pitched up to maximum elevation—the heavy shot going through the sides and then blasting up through the decking under the feet of the enemy boarding parties in an eruption of splinters and iron. The masts pivoted away as the Tartessian paid off to get away from those gaping maws, with no way of knowing that they couldn’t be reloaded.

The firing died down, almost completely from the enemy side—their weapons were slower to load. Aware of that, they rose up and charged once more instead, calling on their Gods. Behind them others were fighting the Islanders pouring onto the forecastle, and the locked ships turned into a single great sprawling brawl, blows given and received breast to breast, pistols fired with their muzzles jammed into flesh, blades short-gripped and stabbing upward.

“Up and at ’em!”
she shouted.

 

“No, Brigadier Hollard,” Doreen said, pouring the cocoa.

Kenneth Hollard looked up sharply as he reached for the cup; they were usually on first-name terms, in private, and this upper room of the Arnsteins’ villa was as private as it got. The windows were closed, the lamplight soft on the vivid colors of the rugs and hangings, on books and chess set and the radio in the corner. Doreen Arnstein sat behind her desk, and her face was a polite implacable mask, her hands resting on the blotter.

“No, I don’t think Ian is dead,” she said judiciously. Then, before he could ask, “The Foreign Affairs department has its sources.”

“Ah ... ma’am, with Mr. Arnstein in enemy hands, they’d be compromised.”

“Credit us with some intelligence, Brigadier,” she said crisply. “Half the network was always my responsibility, and we had all summer to alert the others—there was always a risk that this might happen.”

Her lips pressed together; Hollard nodded slightly. She’d been after Ian to get out of Troy since just before the siege began. Perhaps the Councilor for Foreign Affairs had discounted his assistant’s advice as prejudiced. Perhaps it was some sort of survivor guilt, a need to stay at the sharp end of things and share the risks of the people he had to send into harm’s way.

Keeping Troy fighting was real important,
Hollard thought.
If Ian hadn’t pinned down the bulk of Walker’s army—not to mention his shipping capacity—there
,
God knows where we’d be now. Was that worth risking one of our top leadership cadre?

“Any information of that sort that Ian had is thoroughly obsolete,” Doreen went on. “Some valuable data on our strategy and capacity, yes, but not anything that would shut down our programs.”

Hollard looked at her appraisingly. He’d always admired her brains; nobody could work with Doreen Arnstein and doubt that she had enough raw brainpower to melt titanium, and a hell of a lot of information to process with it. He’d never doubted that she’d show guts at a pinch, either.

But I didn’t expect her to be quite this . . . is tough the word?
he thought.

“Ma’am ... it might be
better
if the councilor were dead. All things considered.”

Doreen shook her head. “The problem with death is that it’s sort of permanent,” she went on. “Don’t waste that chocolate, by the way.”

Hollard sipped obediently.

“If Hong were ...” Doreen stopped for a few seconds, face absolutely still, before continuing: “If Hong were ... torturing ... Ian, she’d boast about it. She’d send us parts of him, or photographs. It would be an opportunity to inflict anguish on us, and she’s incapable of acting otherwise.”

Ken nodded. “I agree,” he said gently. “But doesn’t that argue that he is dead? Major Chong’s report was pretty circumstantial.”

She shook her head again. “No. Because then
Walker
would be boasting about it. He’d have Ian’s ... he’d have Ian’s head on display.
He’s
incapable of acting otherwise.”

“Well, that’s logical,” Hollard said.
Not that I have an infinite faith in logic to predict how people operate.
“But Ms. Arnstein, if they
haven’t
killed him and they’re
not...
interrogating... him, what do you think they’re doing, and why?”

“I don’t know exactly,” Doreen said. “I won’t until I get reports—you’d be surprised at some of our agents-in-place. At a guess ... I’d say Walker likes to keep his options open as long as he can.”

“To hedge his bets,” Hollard agreed. “I’ve studied the Alban War. He had a fallback strategy in place before the Battle of the Downs. Trouble is, he might have
won
the Battle of the Downs if he’d thrown everything into it.”

Doreen gestured agreement. “And he’s... a solipsist,” she said. “Other people aren’t really emotionally real to him; they’re bundles of traits to be manipulated, which is one reason he can do it so well, be so objective about it. I think that’s especially true of locals; they’re toys he uses in his game—that may have been what pushed him over the edge into acting out his power fantasies after the Event, that and opportunity. I think—if
he
thinks he can get away with it—he’d keep Ian around so he’d have someone more, mmmm, more
real
to crow over and boast to.

“Now,” she went on briskly. “I have a report from Commodore Alston and the Fleet ...”

Damn, that is one tough broad,
Hollard thought as he walked out into the corridor an hour later. He was lost enough in thought that he nearly ran into the Arnsteins’ son.

“Hi, David!” he said a little awkwardly.

He’d met the boy often enough; the whole native-born Islander community in the Middle East was only a few hundred people, the top leaders far fewer. But this was the first time since the fall of Troy a few days ago...