On the Oceans of Eternity (95 page)

Sue and her fellow ranger went in along the wall of the gate-tunnel, trying to force their way through the packed mass without getting caught up in it, kicking and shoving and using their rifle butts. A Tartessian saw her out of the corner of his eye and whipped his short broad chopping blade around in a reflex cut at someone obviously not of his people. Sue caught it on the stock of her rifle, grunting as the thick-shouldered power of the cut drove her into a half crouch; Jaditwara shot him in the face through the space Sue had vacated.

The report was deafening in the confined space, even over the snarling brabble of voices, screams of pain, clatter of metal and stone on each other and on wood. Sue dropped the damaged firearm and snatched out her blades, shouldering aside the falling body as she rose; stabbed another Iberian in the groin, and whipped the hammer end of her tomahawk down on a man’s arm and felt the bones crack. The muzzle of Jaditwara’s rifle came past her cheek again, and she ducked in reflex.

The Tartessian soldiers still on their feet held the whole struggling mass of humanity in the gateway like a cork in a bottle. But they were too mixed with their enemies and friends to keep it plugged for long. Like a champagne cork when thumbs have weakened it just enough, this one popped out all of a sudden. It spilled out into the open space that ran just inside the walls-and the Tartessians were suddenly in even more trouble than they had been a minute before. There were four or five Indians for each Iberian, and in the open they could take advantage of it.

Good, Sue thought, as the tribesmen poured into the fort-town and spread howling through the streets.

The more trouble they’ve got, the less attention they’ll pay to two Islanders in buckskin.
She stooped, picked up a dead man’s rifle, and knelt in a corner between two buildings to load it while Jaditwara covered her.

“Let’s go,” she said. “Market square.”

They moved out, trotting along the streets pressed as close to one side as they could, where the roofs—hopefully—hid them from the sight of anyone on the walls or defensive towers.

“H
igh tide in twenty minutes,” Swindapa said quietly. “It’s not going to get any deeper.”

Marian nodded, looking out through the forward slit of the Eades’s bridge. The view was strange, a lot closer to the water than she was used to, but with no masts or spars to limit vision; merely the smooth gray-green slope of the casement’s front section and the equally featureless front deck, awash whenever the knife bows dug in a little. The foam surged right up to the foot of the casement about every tenth wave, green and white against the painted steel, looking incongruously cool and refreshing in the stifling heat of the ship’s interior.

“All ahead slow,” she said. “Helm, mark your head.”

“Two-seven-five, ma’am,” the helmsman said.

“Keep her so,” Marian replied.

Light and air came through the hatchway above; they had a deck lookout working. She waited patiently as the low shoreline came in sight, tasting the sweat on her lips.
Clear sky, steady good weather ... it had better be.
No more Tartessian balloons, the ultralights had taken them down ...

“Ms. Kurlelo-Alston, aerial scout reports?”

“Galleys massing just inside the harbor mouth,” Swindapa replied. “No attempt to loft more balloons ... wait. Launch trails reported!”

The lookout above cried out in the next instant, and came tumbling down the hatchway. The thick hatch itself fell with a doomsday
clung
next and then a
chunk
as it was dogged shut. The slit ahead seemed bright in the sudden gloom, and then a rippling cloud of red fire raced along the low sandy shoreline ahead. Trails of smoke climbed skyward ...

“Incoming! All hands prepare for impact!” she called in a clear carrying voice.

Others took it up and repeated it. She found herself calling off the seconds as she waited,
one-one-thousand, two-one-thousand.
She’d gotten to six when the shrieking overhead turned to a whistling moan. The bridge crew slammed the covers on the vision slits closed and the last sunlight vanished, leaving only a lamplit gloom. The steady chuffing of the engine was the only sound before ...

The big ship shivered a little as the first rocket struck and burst, like a sharp blow with a hammer on a steel bucket. Then another hit, and another, building like a hailstorm on a tin roof, a roar of white noise that made her wince with its intensity. Hundreds more were landing in the water around, the dull heavy sounds of the explosions thudding against the ironclad’s hull.

Let too many come too close, and they might stave the planking; let a couple come right down the funnel, blowing their way through the wire baffles ...

Silence fell, hard to realize for an instant while her ears still rang.

“Report by divisions!” she snapped, signaling the yeomen to open the vision slits. Fresh sea air came through like a hint of heaven to the damned.

“Three inches in the well—tight and dry, Commodore.”

“Full steam, ma’am.”

She hid a smile as cheers rang through the casement, and faintly up from the engine deck. Swindapa made a slight
phew!
face and mimed wiping her forehead, which made
gravitas
even harder.

“Silence fore and aft!” Marian called instead, and heard it echo down the chain of command.

The low shore was much closer now, the great drifting fogbank left by the rockets’ passage drifting away to the westward. An explosion pockmarked it as she watched—some of the missiles hanging fire and then going off together, propellant and bursting charges together.

I
thought we’d be okay, she mused. The rockets carried simple gunpowder bombs, not shaped-charge warheads designed to punch a finger of superhot vapor through steel. They would have torn any wooden ship to burning splinters in seconds, but this lumbering knight-in-armor was relatively immune....
On the other hand, I didn’t know we’d be okay. Do Jesus, but I hate moments like that.

She focused her binoculars. The entrance to the bay of Tartessos was fairly narrow, divided into two channels by a long narrow island. She could see the massive low-slung forts there now, scaling the land on either side like a dragon’s armor. And the Tartessians had thoughtfully taken up the buoys that marked deeper water.

“Let’s get down to it,” she said.

Swindapa brought over the map and pinned it to the cork-board beside the wheel and compass binnacle. Hiller stayed glued to the vision slit, watching for the shading off of blue to green that would mark shoals—the
Eades
drew twenty-three feet. Marian focused all her attention on the task at hand.

She’d ignore the galleys coming out to defend their harbor as long as she could. They weren’t as much threat as a mudbank, and what happened when those frail pine rowing boats met the ironclad would be unpleasant enough without dwelling on it beforehand.

 

The distant thud of ship’s cannon boomed through the warm air, over toward the Feather River side of the Tartessian fort-town. Peter Giernas’s lips skinned back from his teeth. A couple of the enemy were walking toward him along the fighting platform below the points of the palisade logs. looking over their shoulders in puzzlement.

“Go for it,” he said.

Eddie reached over from his side of the door into the tower and pulled it open; it was a massive piece of carpentry, baulks pinned together and strapped with iron. A voice asked a question from within; Giernas jerked the toggle of the fuse free, waited until he heard the confirming hiss, then tossed the leather satchel in.

His partner slammed the door shut again. Giernas dropped a wooden wedge to the planks of the floor, heeled it home, then secured it with a stroke of his musket butt. The oncoming Tartessians
were
alarmed now, as the two men plastered themselves to the log wall on either side of the door and threw protective arms over their eyes. Then—

The door blasted out from between them, hinges ripped free, and pinwheeled through the approaching soldiers. Smoke and a red flash punched out after it, and erupted through the narrow firing slits that surrounded this level of the tower.

“Go, go, go!” Giernas shouted.

The two rangers plunged through into the interior, eyes watering and lungs coughing at the harsh reek of gunpowder. The trapdoor to the ground floor below was open, but the ladder was gone ... too slow anyway. Giernas leaped upward, dropped through it, let his long legs absorb the impact as he was driven into a crouch, rolled forward with his rifle clutched to his stomach, and came up to one knee. The weapon came to his shoulder in the same movement, and he shot the stout gray-bearded man trying to open the door of the sally port between the shoulder blades. The Tartessian pitched forward against the wood and slid down it.

Lighter, Eddie bounced erect and kicked upward, his heel slamming into the chin of a Tartessian who’d come half-erect. Bone splintered; then they were both at the crank of the mechanism that raised the bar across these gates. Another couple of hundred Indian warriors were waiting, but they couldn’t get in unless the portals opened.

Eddie jittered about. Pete studied it, Fimbulwinter-cold and methodical; Spring Indigo’s fate depended on her man keeping a cool head, and so did his son’s.

“Right,” he said, pulling back an iron bar and tripping a pawl-catch. “Lay into it!”

They grabbed the bar and heaved; it was made for four men, and inertia fought them for long seconds. Giernas sucked air into his lungs, planted his feet, and pulled with all the strength that was in him—but carefully, carefully, how all the devils in Hell would laugh if he put his back out now!

A long moment when red throbbed before his eyes, and the mechanism went around with a
clank
...
clank
...
clankclankclank,
spinning smoothly and easily as the counterweight swept up to the vertical and the gates swung open. Then he took up the bar, considered again, struck three wrecking blows, and jammed it deep through a shattered gear. Anyone who wanted to lower the gate now would have to cut cables and then
pull
it down past the tipping point.

“Let’s go,” Giernas said again. They shoved open the door leading inward into the settlement’s perimeter street, darted out.

He didn’t think the Tartessians around the gate would be paying much attention. Not when Indians in the guise of tribute-bearers brought out the weapons concealed in cloak and bundle and basket and attacked; nor when the ones skulking in field and grove ran howling to join them. He didn’t think they could get the gate closed and barred again by unaided pushing, not before the warriors of the local tribes were inside ... and from the sound of it, things weren’t going well for them at the riverside gate either.

He and his comrade loped into the little settlement; they stopped for an instant to tear off their Tartessian jerkins and tunics and don buckskin. Getting stabbed in the back by a local who couldn’t tell them from an Iberian was a worse risk than being shot by one of Isketerol’s men who recognized an Islander.

“Jesus, Chaos and Old Night’re loose here.” he shouted, as they broke into the main square.

Awnings and goods lay tumbled and trampled; even now a few locals, some slaves and not a few warriors as well, were snatching things up. Their pen ripped apart, a herd of sheep ran about baaaing witlessly, adding a last touch of madness. The big blocky building with the tower seemed to be in Tartessian hands, someone getting them organized. and riflemen were shooting from the windows. Giernas filled his lungs:

“Indigo!” he shouted. Eddie took it up in unison with him. “Indigo!”
Christ, how are we going to find her in this?

He saw a blond head across the square—Jaditwara, and Sue with her; they were shouting as well. His eyes flickered back and forth, eliminating the milling tumble and open only for the clue he sought, as he might blank out the forest for the outline of a deer’s antlers.

A striped awning lay collapsed across a heap of vegetables, cabbages ... It stirred, and a small brown form rose. She was naked to the waist, dressed in a local deerskin wrap ... a baby slung behind her ...

“Indigo!”
he bawled.

Eddie clutched at his shoulder. “Take it smart, Pete!”

The other ranger brought his rifle to his shoulder and fired at the headquarters building. The two rangers across the square did so, too; the situation was shifting—he remembered school days, and a drop into a beaker that made crystals grow with dreamlike speed. Civilians caught in the attack fled; Indians went to ground behind tumbled wheelbarrows and carts or the corners of buildings. A few fired captured rifles at their foes, with scant hope of hitting anything; more waited.

Giernas left his rifle leaning against an adobe wall and sprinted out, jinking and turning, leaping tumbled goods. Spring Indigo ran to meet him, young Jared’s head swaying by hers. He met her, swept an arm around her, half carried her along with his body between hers and the enemy. Bullets chipped divots out of the ground at their feet.

Something struck him like a sledgehammer. He swung half around, and Spring Indigo cried out as much of his weight bore down on her. She staggered, then rallied and held him up; they hobbled back to safety, around the corner, where Eddie gave covering fire and the overhang of a roof sheltered them from the top of the tower.