Authors: S.M. Stirling,David Drake
John shook his head like a wet dog and grabbed Adams’ shoulder. “Where are the starboard stopcocks?” he said, then screamed it into the man’s ear until the expression of stunned incredulity faded.
“What?”
“The stopcocks! We’ve got to counterflood or she’ll capsize!”
“But if we flood, she’ll fookin’
sink.
”
“There’s only ten feet of water under her keel; we can salvage the cargo and float her later, but if we don’t flood she’ll capsize, man.
Now!
”
He could feel the force of his will penetrate the seaman’s mental fog. “Right,” the mate said, wiping a hand across his face. “This way.”
“I’ll come, sir,” Barrjen said.
“Good man. Let’s go.”
The companionway down from the bridge was steep and slippery with oily soot from the funnels at the best of times. Now it was canted over at thirty degrees, and John went down it in a controlled fall. The hatchway below flapped open, abandoned in the rush to get away from the waters pouring through the rent hull. He dropped through it into water already ankle-deep, bracing himself against the wall with one hand to keep erect on the tilting deck.
“Don’t tell me,” he said as Adams staggered beside him. “The stopcocks are on the other side of the ship.”
“Yessir.”
“No time like the present,” John said grimly, and gave him a boost forward. The trip across the beam of the ship became steadily more like a climb. Adams staggered ahead, pushed from behind by John and the ex-marine. At last they came to a complex of wheels and pipes.
“That one!” Adams shouted, pointing. Then he looked down the side of the ship. “Oh, Jesus, the barnacles are showing—Jesus Son of God, Mary Mother, she’s going to go over.”
“No she isn’t,” John said, fighting off a moments image of drowning in the dark with air only a few unreachable feet away through the hull. He spat on his hands. “Let’s do it.”
The spoked steel wheel was about a yard in diameter, locked by a chain and pin. Adams snatched it out, and John locked his hands on the wheel. It moved a quarter of an inch, stopped, moved again, halted. John braced a foot against the wall and heaved until his muscles crackled and threatened to tear loose from his pelvis.
“Jammed,” Adams said. “Must’ve jammed—shaft torqued by the explosion.”
“Then we’ll unjam it.”
John looked around. Resting in brackets on the side of the central island of the ship were an ax, sledgehammer, and prybar.
“Jam these through the spokes,” he said briskly. “Here and here. Now both of you together,
heave.
”
They strained; there was silence except for grunts of effort and the distant shouts on the dock. Then the ax handle snapped across with a gunshot crack. Barrjen skipped aside with a curse as the axhead whipped past him and bounced off the wall, leaving a streak of shiny metal scraped free of paint on the wall.
“Fuck
this,
” John shouted.
He snatched the sledgehammer from Adams hands, jammed the crowbar firmly in place, and braced himself to strike. That was difficult; the ship was well past its center of gravity now, A few more minutes, and the intakes for the flood valves would be above the surface. That would happen seconds before she went over.
Clung.
The vibrating jolt shivered painfully back up his arms, into his shoulders, starting a pain in the small of his back. He took a deep breath as the sledge swung up again, focused, exhaled in a grunt of total concentration as the hammer came down.
Clung. Clung. Clung.
Adams’ nerve broke and he fled back up the ladder. Two strikes later Barrjen spoke, at first a breathy whisper as he stared at the wheel with sweat running down his face.
“She’s moving.” Then a shout: “The boor’s moving!”
It was; John had to reposition himself as it turned a quarter revolution. Easier now. He flung the sledgehammer aside and pulled the crowbar free, grabbing at the wheel with his hands. Barrjen did likewise on the other side. Both men strained at the reluctant metal, faces red and gasping with the effort, bodies knotted into straining statue-shapes. The wheel jerked, moved, jerked. Then spun, faster and faster.
A new sound came from beneath their feet, a vibrating rumble.
“Either that works, or she’s already too far gone,” John gasped. “Let’s see from the dock.”
There was a crowd waiting. They cheered as John and the stocky ex-Marine jumped from the tilted deck to the wharfside, a score of hands reaching to steady them. John ignored the babbled questions. He did take a proffered flask of brandy, sipping once or twice before handing it back and never taking his eyes from the ship.
“She’s not tilting any further,” Barrjen said.
“And she’s settling fast.”
Four minutes and the decks were awash. Another and they heard a deep rumbling
bong,
a sound felt through the soles of their feet more than through the ears. The funnels, central island and crane-masts of the merchantman trembled through a thirty-degree arc to a position that was nearly vertical as the relatively flat bottom of the ship rolled it nearly upright on the mud of the harbor bottom.
John flexed his hands and took a deep breath. “Right,” he said, when the cheers died down. “Get some small explosive charges here, we’ll want to kill off any sea life.” Scavengers were swarming in. “We’ll need diving suits, air pumps, more ropes. Get moving!”
He looked up into the darkening evening sky, then over towards the castle. He was just in time to see the great bottle-shaped spearhead of flame show over the courtyard walls. The siege howitzers were in action at last. His shoulders tensed as he listened to the whirring, ripping sound of the shell’s passage, toning lower and lower as it approached. The three-hundred-pound projectile came closer, closer . . . then went by overhead. John pivoted on one heel, part of a mass movement that turned the crowd like sunflowers following the sun across the sky. A red gout of flame billowed up from the gun batteries holding the approaches to the harbor. Seconds later the other heavy howitzer in the castle fired, and the high-velocity guns in the batteries were in fixed revetments. They couldn’t be turned to face the castle, and wouldn’t be able to elevate that high if they did. . . .
“I’ll be damned,” John said softly. “The garrison went over to the government side.”
Probably after killing all their officers. The Unionaise regular army was short-service conscript.
Barrjen pounded him on the back. “We won, eh, sir? Goddam.”
John shook his head. “We won some time.” He looked at the celebrating crowd. “Let’s see if we can get the snail-eaters to make some use of it.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
There were no Land dirigibles in the air over the city of Skinrit. Commander Horst Raske felt a little uneasy without the quiver of stamped-aluminum deckplates beneath his feet. Several of the other Air Service captains around him looked as if they felt the same, and everyone in the Chosen party looked unnatural out of uniform—still more as they were in something resembling Unionaise civil dress. Raske kept his horse to a quick walk and spent the time looking around.
“Bad air currents here,” he muttered.
Several of his companions nodded. Skinrit itself was nothing remarkable, a little port about three steps up from a fishing village, smelling of stale water inside the breakwater, and strong stinks from the packing and canning plants that were its main industries—the cold currents down here below the main continent were heavy with sea life. Hundreds of trawlers crowded the quays, and battered-looking tramp steamers to take their cargoes of salted and frozen and canned fish to the north. The area around the town was hilly farmland and pasture; most of the buildings were in the whitewashed Unionaise style and quite new—built since their predecessors were burnt in the Errifean Revolt ten years ago. Around them reared real mountains, ten thousand feet and more, their peaks gleaming salt-white with year-round snow, their sides dark with forests of oak, maple, birch, and pine.
Vicious,
he thought. Convection currents, crosswinds, unpredictable gusts.
Oathtaking is bad, but this will be worse.
None of the crowds in the street seemed to be taking much notice of them, which was all to the good. Most were Unionaise themselves, sailors or settlers here; the remainder Errife in long robes, striped or checked or splotched in the patterns of their clans. Occasionally soldiers would come through, usually walking in pairs with their rifles slung, and always surrounded by an empty bubble of fear-inspired space. They wore the khaki battledress of the Union Legion, and its fore-and-aft peaked cap with a tassel. Raske thought that last a little silly, but there was nothing laughable about the troops themselves; quite respectable, about as tough-looking as Protégé infantry, looking straight ahead as they swung through the crowd.
They moved out of the street into the main plaza of Skinrit, past the legion HQ with its motto in black stone above the door:
Vive le Mart
—Long Live Death. A couple of Errife skulls were nailed to the lintel, with scraps of weathered flesh and their long braided hair still clinging to them. It was a reassuring sight, rather homelike, in fact. . . .
The governor’s palace was large and lumpy, in a Unionaise style long obsolete. Errif had been a Unionaise possession in theory for some time, although they’d held little of the ten thousand square miles of rock, mountain, and forest until a few decades ago. Just enough to stop the pirate raids that had once been the terror of the whole southern coast of the continent; a few Errife corsairs had gotten as far north as the Land, although they’d seldom returned to the islands alive.
Servants showed them into a square room with benches, probably some sort of guard chamber.
“Masquerade’s over,” Raske said.
“Good!” one of his officers said.
She stripped off the Unionaise clothing with venom; back in the Land, only Protégé women wore skirts. They switched into the plain gray uniforms in their packs and holstered their weapons. The lack of those had made them feel considerably more unnatural than the foreign clothing. Gerta Hosten gave him a bland smile.
“You do the talking, Horst,” she said.
He nodded stiffly. It wasn’t his specialty, airships were. On the other hand, a Unionaise general would probably be more comfortable talking to a man, and they needed this Libert . . . for the moment.
“Why on earth didn’t they send an infantry officer?” he asked plaintively.
“
Behfel ist Behfel,
Horst. This is the transport phase. They are going to send an infantry officer, once Libert’s on the ground and we start sending in our own people. “‘Volunteers,’ you know . . .”
“Who’s the lucky man?”
“Heinrich Hosten.”
Horst Raske smiled blandly at the Unionaise officer. General Libert was a short, swarthy, tubby little man with a big nose. He looked slightly ridiculous in the khaki battledress of the Union Legion, down to the scarlet sash around his ample waist under the leather belt and the little tassel on his peaked cap.
The Chosen airman reminded himself that the same tubby little man had restored Union rule here when the Errife war-bands were burning and killing in the outskirts of Skingest itself, and then taken the war into their own mountains and pacified the whole island for the first time. The way he’d put down the miners’ revolt on the mainland had been almost Chosen-like.
Libert abruptly sat behind the broad polished table, signaling to the staff officers and aides behind him. Raske saluted and took the seat opposite; Errife servants in white kaftans laid out coffee. He recognized the taste: Kotenberg blend, relatives of his owned land there.
“We agree,” Libert said after a moments silence.
Raske raised an eyebrow. “That simple?”
“You charge a high price, but after the fiasco at Bassin du Sud, time is pressing.” He frowned. “You would have done better to be more generous; the Land’s interests are not served by an unfriendly government in Unionvil.”
“Nor by a premature war with Santander, which is a distinct risk if we back you fully,” Raske pointed out. “That requires compensation, besides your gratitude.”
Libert allowed himself a small frosty smile, an echo of Raske’s own. They both knew what gratitude was worth in the affairs of nations.
“Very well,” Libert said. He held a hand up, and one of the aides put a pen in it. “Here.” He signed the documents before him.
Raske did likewise when they’d been pushed across the mahogany to him.
“When can we begin loading?” Libert said. “And how quickly?”
“I have twenty-seven
Tiger
-class transports waiting.” Raske said. “One fully equipped infantry battalion each; say, seven hundred infantry with their personal weapons and the organic crew-served machine guns and mortars. Ten hours to Bassin du Sud or vicinity, an hour at each end for turnaround, and an hour for fueling. Say, just under two flights a day; minus the freightage for artillery, ammunition, immediate rations, and ten percent for downtime—which there
will
be. Call it four days to land the thirty thousand troops.”
Libert nodded in satisfaction. “Good. This is crucial; my Legionnaires and Errife regulars are the only reliable force we have in the southern Union. We should be able to get the first flight underway by sundown, don’t you think?”
Raske blinked slightly. Beside him, Gerta Hosten was smiling. It looked as if they’d picked the right mule for this particular journey.
Jeffrey Farr closed his eyes. Everyone else in the room might think it was fatigue—he’d been working for ten hours straight—and he
was
tired. What he wanted, though, was reconnaissance.
As always, the view through his brother’s eyes was a little disconcerting, even after nearly twenty years of practice. The colors were all a little off, from the difference in perceptions. And the way the view moved under someone else’s control was difficult, too. Your own kept trying to linger, or to focus on something different.
At least most of the time. Right now they both had their eyes glued to the view of the dirigible through the binoculars John was holding. A few sprays of pine bough hid a little of it, but the rest was all too plain. Hundreds of soldiers in Union Legion khaki were clinging to ropes that ran to loops along its lower sides, holding it a few yards from the stretch of country road ten miles west of Bassin du Sud. It bobbled and jerked against their hold; he could see the valves on the top centerline opening and closing as it vented hydrogen. The men leaping out of the cargo doors were not in khaki. They wore the long striped and hooded kaftans of Errife warriors. Over each robe was Unionaise standard field harness and pack with canteen, entrenching tool, bayonet and cartridge pouches, but the barbarian mercenaries also tucked the sheaths of their long curved knives through the waistbelts. John swung the glasses to catch a grinning brown hawk-face as one stumbled on landing and picked himself up.
The Errife were happy; their officers had given them orders to do something they’d longed to do for generations: invade the mainland, slaughter the
faranj
, kill, rape, and loot.
How many?
Jeffrey asked.
I think they’ve landed at least three thousand since dawn, maybe five. Hard to tell, they were deploying a perimeter by the time I got here.
Jeffrey thought for a moment. What chance of getting the Unionaise in Bassin du Sud to mount a counterattack on the landing zone?
Somewhere between zip and fucking none,
John thought; the overtones of bitterness came through well in the mental link. They all took two days off to party when the forts in the city surrendered. Plus having a celebratory massacre of anyone they could even imagine having supported the coup.
Don’t worry,
Jeffrey said.
If Libert’s men take the town, there’ll be a slaughter to make that look like a Staff College bun fight. What chance do you have of getting the locals to hold them outside the port?
Somewhere between . . . no, that’s not fair. We’ve finally gotten the ship unloaded, and there’s bad terrain between here and there. Maybe we can make them break their teeth.
Slow them down,
Jeffrey said.
I need time, brother. Buy me time.
He opened his eyes. The space around the map table was crowded and stinging blue with the smoke of the vile tobacco Unionaise preferred. Some of the people there were Unionaise military, both the red armbands on their sleeves and the rank tabs on their collars new. Their predecessors were being tumbled into mass graves outside Unionvil’s suburbs even now. The rest were politicians of various types; there were even a few women. About the only thing everyone had in common was the suspicion with which they looked at each other, and a tendency to shout and wave their fists.
“Gentlemen,” he said. A bit more sharply: “Gentlemen!”
Relative silence fell, and the eyes swung to him.
Christ,
he thought.
I’m a goddamned
foreigner,
for God’s sake.
That’s the point, lad. You’re outside their factions, or most of them. Use it.
“Gentlemen, the situation is grave. We have defeated the uprising here in Unionvil, Borreaux, and Nanes.”
His finger traced from the northwestern coast to the high plateau of the central Union and the provinces to the east along the Santander border.
“But the rebels hold Islvert, Sanmere, Marsai on the southeast coast, and are landing troops from Errife near Bassin du Sud.”
“Are you sure?” His little friend Vincen Deshambres had ended up as a senior member of the Emergency Committee of Public Safety, which wasn’t surprising at all.
“Citizen Comrade Deshambres, I’m dead certain. Troops of the Legion and Errife regulars are being shuttled across from Errif by Land dirigibles. Over ten thousand are ashore now, and they’ll have the equivalent of two divisions by the end of the week.”
The shouting started again; this time it was Vincen who quieted it. “Go on, General Farr.”
Colonel,
Jeffrey thought; but then, Vincen was probably trying to impress the rest of the people around the table. He knew the politics better.
“We hold the center of the country. The enemy hold a block in the northeast and portions of the south coast. They also hold an excellent port, Marsai, situated in a stretch of country that’s strongly clerical and antigovernment, yet instead of shipping their troops from Errif to Marsai, the rebel generals are bringing them in by air to Bassin du Sud. That indicates—”
He traced a line north from Bassin du Sud. There was a railway, and what passed in the Union for a main road, up from the coastal plain and through the Monts du Diable to the central plateau.
“Name of a dog,” Vincen said. “An attack on the capital?”
“It’s the logical move,” Jeffery said. “They’ve got Libert, who’s a competent tactician and a better than competent organizer—”
“A traitor swine!” someone burst out. The anarchist . . . well, not really leader, but something close. De Villers, that was his name.
Jeffrey held up a hand. “I’m describing his abilities, not his morals,” he said. “As I said, they’ve got Libert, Land help with supplies and transport, and thirty to forty thousand first-rate, well-equipped troops in formed units. Which is more than anyone else has at the moment.”
There were glum looks. The Unionaise regular army had never been large, the government’s purge-by-retirement policy had deprived it of most of its senior officers, and most of the remainder had gone over to the rebels in the week since the uprising started. The army as a whole had shattered like a clay crock heated too high.
“What can we do?” Vincen asked.
“Stop them.” Jeffreys finger stabbed down on the rough country north of Bassin du Sud. “Get everything we can out here and stop them. If we can keep their pockets from linking up, we buy time to organize. With time, we can win. But we have to stop Libert from linking up with the rebel pocket around Islvert.”
“An excellent analysis,” Vincen said. “I’m sure the Committee of Public Safety will agree.”
That produced more nervous glances. The Committee was more selective than the mobs who’d been running down rebels, rebel sympathizers, and anyone else they didn’t like. But not much. De Villers glared at him, mouth working like a hound that had just had its bone snatched away.
“And I’m sure there’s only one man to take charge of such a vital task.”
Everyone looked at Jeffrey.
Oh, shit,
he thought.
“What now, mercenary?” De Villers asked, coming up to the staff car and climbing onto the running board.
“Volunteer,” Jeffrey said, standing up in the open-topped car.
It was obvious now why the train was held up. A solid flow of men, carts, mules, and the odd motor vehicle had been moving south down the double-lane gravel road. You
certainly couldn’t call it a march,
he thought. Armies moved with wheeled transport in the center and infantry marching on either verge in column. This bunch sprawled and bunched and straggled, leaving the road to squat behind a bush, to drink water out of ditches—which meant they’d have an epidemic of dysentery within a couple of days—to take a snooze under a tree, to steal chickens and pick half-ripe cherries from the orchards that covered many of the hills. . . .