On the Oceans of Eternity (85 page)

Cost of doing business,
she thought.
Which is why I hate this business. Leave out the waste, filth, misery, wounds, pain, and death, and war would be a glorious thing.

Swindapa snapped her sword aside with a wrist movement that flicked off excess blood, cleaned and sheathed the steel over her shoulder in a single fluid motion, and went to one knee beside the child.

“A boy,” she said after an instant, an infinite tenderness in her tone. “Not hurt, just needs changing.”

That’s a relief,
Alston thought, her shoulders relaxing.
Do Jesus, I’ve got enough on my conscience.

The Intelligence specialist had fallen on the desk and filing cabinets, eyes gleaming behind his spectacles; he looked like a rabbit on pure crystal meths, giving little mewing cries of astonishment as he worked. First he stuffed his satchel full, and then he dragged Marines over by their webbing harness, cramming more files into their knapsacks.

He was literally wringing his hands when they were full; this time he reminded her of a big dog she’d seen at a barbeque once, its stomach distended like a ball and a pile of bones under its front paws. It had looked at them mournfully, moaning, longing to eat and unable to find space for another bite....

She went to the window. The firing in the streets was picking up; a glance at her watch....
Do Jesus, only fifteen minutes?
But at some point the Tartessians were going to get organized, even with their commander dead.

“Ortiz!” she said into the handset, and looking down toward the dockside. There were buildings burning now, and the light grew by the minute. “Report.”

“Ma’am, the barges’re moored with a thick chain running around the outermost train and linked to iron bollards but—”

Crack!
A flash of red fire and a cheer she could hear clearly even hundreds of yards away.

“—but that’s got it!” She could hear him turn his head, the voice fading a bit as he yelled: “Lay aloft there, get those sails sheeted home—Johnstone to the tiller!”

“Carry on.” A switch of frequencies; Lord Jesus, but they were going to miss these things when they wore out! The post-Event equivalents were barely man-transportable, and ludicrously unreliable. “Major Stavrand.”

“On schedule, ma’am! Target-rich environment here. I feel like a kid in Sweet Inspirations with a sack of gold!”

“Get it done, Mr. Stavrand,” she said. “Soon.”

The artillery officer liked blowing things up, which was why he doubled as a demolitions expert. He was also very good at it.
And he grew up after the Event
—
otherwise he’d have said “a credit card.
” So the twentieth century vanished, bit by bit.

She began to turn, then staggered and threw up her hand as the tower quaked beneath her and adobe dust smoked out of the walls. One of the squat mud-brick warehouses vanished in a gout of flame and pillar of smoke, and wreckage came pattering out of the sky for a thousand yards in every direction. Much of it was burning, and no doubt it would set more fires despite the rain.

Well, Stavrand took me at my word,
she thought, blinking and shaking her head. Just then the pontoon bridge lit up, a
poca-poca-poca-poca
of small explosions sending sheets of poor man’s napalm—benzene and kerosene with soap flakes—in every direction; the wood was damp and green but it caught at once, and sent a wall of flame and black smoke up across the river. Squads were moving among the piles of cargo on the wharves, sloshing kerosene about and setting yet more fires; once they danced back yelling from a pile of barrels that turned out to be full olive oil.
That
poured like a sluggish river of red lava down the streets as it burned....

“Go, go, go!” Marian said to the others. The Marines went, and the Intelligence officer stumbled in their wake.

Swindapa had the baby on the desk, efficiently rewrapping it in a shawl and a section of tapestry. Without looking up she spoke:

“Before you ask what I’m doing, I’m saving the baby.”

“‘Dapa . . . we just killed his parents . . .”

“Yes, and we’re going to blow this place up in a minute,” she said. “That just means he needs someone to look after him, doesn’t he?” She jerked her tight-braided blond head at the window, and the
Walpurgisnacht
of explosions and fire and cold rain outside. “And we can’t leave him in
that,
either, can we?”

“When you put it that way ...” Marian sighed. She flicked the cylinder of her Python open, spilled the spent brass and reloaded. “Let’s go.”

Down the stairs, past the combat engineers setting the demolition charges and backing away, unreeling fuse from a spool they held between them. Out into the rain, Swindapa loping beside her with the squalling infant in the crook of her left arm and her pistol in her right hand. Chaos on the docks, towering pyramids of flame with scraps of tarpaulin floating up into the rainy smoke cutting the visibility even beyond what nature occluded. The bitter stink of things not meant to burn choked her until she coughed. She blinked watering eyes, wiped the back of her hand across them; the barge-trains were pulling away from the dock, the wind was light but in the proper direction, and they were operating
with
the current, thank God. Troops were pouring back to the wharf and over the retaining wall into boats and barges; some came laughing, smoke smut on their faces, alight with the thoughtless pleasures of destruction. Others limped, or staggered with comrades’ arms over their shoulders, or were carried on folding stretchers. Another came grinning with a butchered lamb carcass from some Tartessian pantry under one arm and a field dressing across the side of his face.

She felt her face go grimmer, thinking of the labor that had gone into making all this, pushing plows and swinging hammers and working the heddles of looms.

Not many Islanders hurt—surprisingly few, with an operation this size. She looked at her watch again. The glowing dials of the self-winding radium face showed 0230 hours.
Less than half an hour, by God.
The Tartessians were recovering, though: pretty soon they’d . . .

Schooonk.
Dozens of heads whipped up at the all-too-familiar sound.

“Medium mortar,” she said quietly.

There were thousands of things the Islanders knew how to do but couldn’t because the materials were too hard to find, or the tools too complicated to build. On the other end of the curve were smoothbore mortars firing finned bombs; one of those simple ideas like the stirrup or the rudder that weren’t thought of until long after the technology to produce them was available. The eighteenth-century level Tartessos had achieved was more than ample . . .

Dimly, half-seen, a fountain of water leaped up out of the river, hung, fell in shattered spray. “All right, people, let’s get out of here before they start hitting things.”

They trotted on, taking reports from the officers of various units as they went; and from the noncoms who counted off the individuals—in a few cases the dog tags of bodies—as they returned, then waiting by the boat for the final word. Once again she blessed Swindapa’s faultless memory; keeping exact count of everything and everybody in a battalion-sized night raid was trivial to someone who’d been through the Grandmothers’ course. They made a good team . . . although she doubted the Fiernan system would last more than another generation. When you could write things down, it was just too much damned trouble to spend a decade learning to retrieve all the data yourself.

Marian stood with her hands behind her back on the edge of the dock; Swindapa beside her, looking out over the river because that put her body between the baby and the most likely source of high-velocity metal. There was enough light from burning supply dumps and buildings to make Alston feel horribly exposed; she relaxed stomach muscles that were drawing themselves up in anticipation of a bullet or mortar shell, forced her breath to come slow and deep and shoulders to ease. One of her elbows was aching a little, fruit of overextension past ...

She remembered a joke current in a dojo she’d attended, long before the Event—back in her late ’teens, when she was first getting seriously interested in the Way of the Empty Hand, the real
bujutsu
variety and not the de-rated sport schools that were mostly safe:

“By the time I’m forty, I’ll be the most dangerous cripple in
the whole wide world,” she quoted softly to herself.

“Uh ... ma’am?” the head of the Marine detail said.

She looked over at him; rain-streaked soot and speckled blood ran down his face with trails of sweat. Painfully young; there was something of a gap in the age profile on the Island, a good many young adults had been on the mainland at college when the Event occurred.

He did very well indeed, there at the commandatura,
she thought.
Wasn’t afraid to backtalk me, either. Aggressive, but not crazy.

“Ma‘am, the brigadier will keelhaul me if I don’t bring you back in one piece. As a matter of fact, he told me that if I stuck him with your job, he’d be really, really upset. Would you mind stepping into the boat now, ma’am? Lieutenant Commander?”

And let me do my job,
she finished for him.

“When we’re through,” she said aloud. “Remember Frozen Chosin. We’re taking everyone back, Lieutenant.”

“Yes ma’am,” he said.

A few murmurs came from the darkened figures at the oars; “Hard Corps,” “fuckin’ A.”

Did I do the right thing, to let the Marine Corps vets who started our ground-troop training program put so much emphasis on their own traditions?
Probably. Almost certainly. Fighting was an emotional thing. They’d used what they knew would work because it had worked on their own younger selves.
“A rational army would run away
,”
and Montinesque was right about that. Do Jesus, I surely do feel like running away. Could have been worse, though-I could have had to work with Foreign Legion types.
“You have joined the Legion to die, and now I will send you where men die.”
There’s a certain bracing honesty to it, but in the long run, this is better.

A runner came panting up. “We found them, ma’am-they got pinned when a door collapsed,” he said.

“That’s the last,” Swindapa said crisply. “All accounted for.”

“Lieutenant, you get your wish,” Alston said, hopping down into the boat. Swindapa handed her down the child, and she cuddled it to her as her partner swung expertly in beside her at the prow of the launch. The formless baby face looked up at Alston dubiously, still alarmed but tired of crying for his mother, and then stuck his hand in his mouth and began to gum it in a worried fashion.

“Hell of a way to come back from a raid,” she grumbled to herself. “You do need to be changed, little’un.”

Then she looked at the river as the crew began to pull away into the central current, bright-lit through the rain by the wavery blurs of huge fires on both banks. The barge-trains were ahead of her, with the raiding force’s boats around them like sculling centipedes.
Safer to have burned the barges in place,
she thought. But better for morale to take them; the troops were mostly from cultures that thought “victory” and “plunder” were the same thing. It wouldn’t hurt the whole expedition’s logistics if there was useful stuff in them, too.

Alston put the handset to her face with her free hand: “Commander Ortiz.”

“Here, ma’am. No trouble so far.”

“None on this end either,” Alston said. A warbling went through the sky, and a muffled
whuddump
raised a plume of shocked white water a hundred yards behind. Spray fell across her, and the baby began to cry again, a thin reedy wailing.

“Ah ... ma’am?” Ortiz said, bewilderment in his tone at the sound. Not at all the sort of cry you expected with a rear guard on a fire-lashed shore.

“Don’t ask, Commander.” She cleared her throat. “They’re lobbing mortar shells into the river, but they’re firing blind. I doubt they’ll get any observers forward before we’re out of range.”

“Now all we have to do is run the guns of the fort, ma’am,” Ortiz said, cheerfully deadpan.

 

Kenneth Hollard listened and swore.
God-damn fighting in a snowstorm. Hell of a way to spend the week before Christmas.

Something was going wrong out here on the northern flank of the allied host. The firing was still heavy, but it was dying down, which meant that the Achaeans were pushing through the narrow defile and around the edge of his command.

The snow, however,
wasn’t
dying down, and he strained his eyes through it and cursed, and cursed the falling light.

The horse beneath him stumbled again, on a rock that turned beneath its hoof under the concealing white. He reined in and swung out of the saddle. The thunder ahead was louder than that to the south now; fewer cannon, but closer, and echoing back from the sharp cliff faces and steep rocky slopes.

“O’Rourke!” he shouted.

“Sir?”

“Officers on foot, except for couriers,” he said. “Chargers to the gun carriages as spares. And the troops to the double-quick.”

“Sir,” the other man said, looking back at the column.

It was only thirty feet away, but still a dark indistinct mass through snow and shadow, stumbling forward into the wind with helmets bent to take the bite. The thudding clatter of boots and hooves on stone and wet earth came muffled, as if they watched an army of ghosts condemned to march forever.