On the Oceans of Eternity (48 page)

Including Fancy; he felt a slight pang of guilt even now at how relieved that made him feel.

“We should get things policed up,” she continued in the same dead voice. “Get some hot food for the troops. Clean weapons. See if we can help some of the enemy wounded, get the bodies buried or at least hauled away, strengthen the walls—they might be back.”

O’Rourke looked around; most of the Marines were slumped into unconsciousness beside their rifles; the one in ten still awake on orders looked at him through red-rimmed eyes that stared out of smoke-blackened faces. He suspected he had the same fixed, flat stare; he also suspected—knew—that what everyone wanted right now was sleep.

“You’re right,” he said, dragging himself upright. Then, softly: “Hell of a shindy,
macushla.
Hell of a shindy, indeed.” A mental shake. “First—”

“Heads up!”
the lookout on the roof of the storehouse called, and then: “By God, it’s the regiment!”

That brought a thin cheer from those awake, and woke some of the sleepers. O’Rourke dragged himself to the rooftop and confirmed the sentry’s sighting; two companies in column of march, mounted scouts out ahead, and some heavy weapons in between. He walked out into the track he’d ridden down ...

“Saints, was it only thirty hours ago?” he whispered to himself. “They must have forced the march.” The base was better than forty miles away, and the roads were terrible.

He blinked in surprise when he saw who was heading up the column, and snapped off a salute. “Brigadier Hollard!” he said. “Last I heard you were in Hattusas.”

“Came out to see to some things,” he said.

O’Rourke looked back at the Marines who’d halted in the roadway. In normal times he’d have said they were clapped out and ready for rest; right now they looked almost indecently fresh.

“With two companies of the First and those heavy weapons, and a day to entrench, we can hold against anything outside the hosts of hell,” he said.

“It looks like you already did, Pat,” Hollard said softly, looking over the battlefield; he removed his helmet and ran a hand over cropped sandy hair. “Christ crucified ... I thought you’d all been massacred, until I saw the flag still flying.”

“Reverend Smith’s hearing confessions right now,” O’Rourke said grimly. Captain Barnes came up while he was speaking. “It didn’t come cheap, I’m telling you that, I am.”

“I could use some extra medics and supplies, sir,” Barnes said.

Hollard shook his long head. “Of course, right away.”

He turned in the saddle and gave the orders, and figures with the winged snake emblem on blue uniforms ran forward. The rest of the column seemed paralyzed, staring at the carnage around the little outpost, some of them gagging when the wind shifted.

“We can hold forever, now. Against the hosts of hell themselves,” O’Rourke went on, conscious that he was repeating himself but too tired to really care.

Hollard swung down from the saddle and gave him a sympathetic slap on the shoulder. “I’m afraid that’s what’s heading this way,” he said. “Troy’s fallen, and Walker’s men are pouring up from the coast—here, and up the Meneander Valley from Miletos. We’re retreating.”

O’Rourke nodded dully. “I’ll need transport for the wounded,” he said.

“Emancipator
is making a run into the regimental HQ and she’ll pick up anyone who can’t march,” Hollard said.

“What about the supplies here. sir?” Barnes asked.

“Take what you can. Burn the rest,” Hollard said, his thin mouth and knob of a chin closing like granite. “Starting now, we don’t let anything fall into Walker’s hands that he can use.
Vastatio.”

“Ah, that’s the way of it, then,” O’Rourke said, nodding mechanically.

“One thing,” Kenneth Hollard said, looking at the barley-sack ramparts, half-visible now under the men who’d died sprawled across them. “Why didn’t you dig a ditch outside the walls—no time?”

“We did dig one, Brigadier sir,” O’Rourke said. “It’s just full.”

Hollard shook his head again. “Colonel,
this is
going to be one for the Corps history books, up there with Chosin and Okinawa.”

O’Rourke hadn’t thought of it in quite that way before ... but it was a notable feat of arms, after all. “I’ll want to see that my lads and lasses get the recognition they deserve for it, too,” he said.
My one regret about that is that I’ll have to recommend Kyle Hook for a medal. And there I was hopin’ to send him to the punishment company.

“And we’ll have to find a name for it.” Hollard’s mouth quirked from its chiseled line. “How about the Battle of O’Rourke’s Ford?”

Even then, they could laugh. Barnes looked at them both as if they were insane ... which, when he thought of it, wasn’t all that far wrong. Plus she’d been barely into her teens at the Event.

“Classical reference,
macushla,”
he said. “Classical reference.”

“M
orning, Jared,” Joseph Starbuck said.

“Morning, Joseph,” Jared Cofflin replied; even in the later months of the Year 10, the government of the Republic of Nantucket remained pleasantly informal.

The Councilor for Finance and the Treasury leaned back in his chair. That was in an office of the Pacific National Bank, which was also the headquarters of the Republic’s departments of finance and taxation. It stood at the junction where Main Street turned southwest and Liberty branched off from it; the redbrick rectangle with its two white pillars in front had been erected in 1818, to finance the Island’s expanding whaling trade in the South Seas.

Nearly two centuries ago, or more than three millennia in the future, but once again Nantucketer ships sailed all the seas of the earth.

“Good of you to drop by; I know it’s supposed to be a holiday for you,” Starbuck said. “But I wanted to catch you before you talked to young Tom Hollard over on Long Island. Might be I could sweeten the meeting ... for him, at least.”

Jared nodded. He could imagine Joseph on his own quarterdeck easily enough, if you ran him back a half a century or so in biological age. In his late seventies, the pouched blue eyes still reflected a mind of flinty practicality, near-perfect for this job.

About two-thirds of any leadership position was knowing how to find the right people to delegate to. The other third was knowing when they were wrong.

Of course, the fourth third is knowing when to let them fail a couple of times because it’s the only way they’ll believe you when you say they’re screwing up. And the fifth third
—

“It’s a busman’s hotiday.” he said aloud. “As for Tom Hollard, well, if you can arrange for the war to be over, and the damned income tax to be abolished, it’ll make things sweet as milk. Otherwise, he’s going to be unhappy. Hell, I’m unhappy, but we need guns and soldiers and ships and pay for the crews.”

The window was open onto Main, letting in bright fall sunlight. They’d had the first frosts, and the cool salt-scented air made him glad enough of the thick raw-wool sweater he wore.

Even this early the sound of iron-shod hooves and wheels on the Main Street cobbles was fairly loud, together with steam whistles from factories and boats down in the harbor.

“I’ve got the estimates,” Starbuck went on. “After you’ve read these, you can surprise him by saying he’s quite right and the taxes won’t be going up any more.”

As he spoke, Starbuck flicked one long bony finger toward the screen of the personal computer on his desk. It was one of the two dozen or so allowed to assist vital functions at any one time; it would be a very long time before the Islanders could make disk drives, or the new Pentium the magazines had been talking about before the Event. Starbuck’s work also rated one of the even more valuable dot-matrix printers, salvaged from an attic. The tapes on those could be replaced with an ink-saturated cotton that did almost as well as the woven nylon originals.

As for toner cartridges for laser printers ...
About the time we get space shuttles.

“End of the story, Jared, is that there’s no more fat to cut into for war production.”

Cofflin took the sheets and looked through them.
Ayup,
he thought. There were times when he disagreed with Starbuck, but he’d never found him to be flat-out wrong yet.

“You’re telling me that to get any more for Peter, we have to rob Paul?” he said. Then, deliberately provocative—Starbuck was one of those people who thought better angry: “I thought war was supposed to get economies going? World War II and all that.”

“Jared, it’s nonsense to think that when you take what people grow and make, lug it to the other side of the world with a lot of sweat and time, and then throw it on a bonfire, it somehow makes you well-off,” Starbuck snapped. “I was a teenager in the tail end of the Depression; after Pearl Harbor, the ones who’d been idle got put to work, so everyone felt richer. That’s how I got my first job.”

Joseph, I happen to know you spent ’44 climbing down boarding nets off very unwelcoming Pacific islands,
Jared thought to himself. Not that he’d ever heard Starbuck talk about Okinawa. Or the fact that he’d lied about his age to enlist ...

The older man spread liver-spotted hands. “Here, though? We were already using every pair of hands, tool, and machine we had
before
the war started. We can’t afford to divert more.”

“We can’t afford to lose the war, either,” Cofflin said.

Starbuck sighed. “I’m not just being cheap, Jared,” he said. “With productivity so low, taxes really hurt. Back up in the twentieth, rich countries could afford ... sort of, for a while ... to pay half their incomes to the government. Half of a great deal is still a fair amount. Half of
just enough is not enough to live on.”

Cofflin ran exasperated fingers through his thinning, grizzled sandy hair; he’d been fighting this particular battle since the Event, off and on.

“I know ... but what’m I supposed to tell Marian and Ken Hollard, Joseph? When they say I’m trading the lives of their troops for money?”

“That we
can’t
do any more except as a temporary last-ditch, all-out burst. Oh, I can switch things around—selling interest-bearing war bonds, things like that—but the bottom line is that we’re using all our surplus. If I fiddle the books, all we’ll get is inflation.”

Cofflin sighed slightly again. “Well, I think we can get our new allies to contribute a bit more, but they
can’t
do a lot of what we’re doing; they don’t have the industry.”

“If they do more of the basics, we can shift around and it’ll lighten the overall burden,” Starbuck said. “And you could cut down on nonessential projects, like that new settlement in Argentina.” He snorted.
“New ’Sconset,
indeed!”

Cofflin smiled, a slight curve of mouth. “Just planning so far, which is cheap. Got to think long-term.” He held up a hand. “Not so much for the direct payoff, though we can always use more food and fiber. But when this war is over, we’re going to be mustering out a lot of troops. A lot of them new citizens who’ll stay here. A land grant is part of the enlistment package.”

“Hmmm.” Starbuck rubbed his short, white beard. “Plenty of places in the Republic to homestead already, without annexing new territory.”

“Not as many as you might think. We’re keeping half of Long Island in wilderness reserve. Mebbe three hundred more farms there. Besides, the Pampas aren’t covered in hundred-foot-tall oak trees laced together with wild grapevines thicker than your leg. It’s tall-grass prairie;. Iowa by the sea, with a better climate.”

“Well, that sort of decision is your department, Jared,” Starbuck said. “I’m here to take the punch bowl away when your parties are half-done. You run the war.”

Cofflin snorted. “At these distances? All I do is look over Marian’s plans, keep the home fires burning, and go around shaking people down to pay for it all.”

He paused for a moment, looking out the door. “Ever think how strange it is, Joseph, that we’re giving orders here ... and on the other side of the world, people we’ve never heard of are killing each other because of it?”

Starbuck snorted. “They’d be going to war anyway, Jared. We’re just giving them a different reason.”

Raupasha’s voice rang out; first in the common Hurrian language, then in the ancient tongue of the
ariammanu,
the founders of the kingdom of Mitanni. Few here could speak it even in her stumbling, hook-learned fashion, but holiness had ensured that the prayers survived in memory:

Raupasha daughter of Shuttarna raised her hands to the sky as the ancient, ancient chant echoed across the upland plain; the smell of the sacrificial blood, the fire that consumed it, the oil and pinewood, lifted her with the smoke of sacrifice to the uttermost heavens. Dawn paled the stars, and she felt as one with them—a singing exultation, like that brought by the
soma
of the oldest tales. Reluctantly she descended from that eagle-aerie of the spirt, down to the common earth of day.