On the Oceans of Eternity (67 page)

Big dark eyes like his mother’s looked up at the tall blond man. “Uncle Ken,” he said. “Is my dad dead?”

Oh, shit
He went down on one knee to put his face more nearly level with the eight-year-old’s. “Dave, I don’t know. None of us know. But your mother doesn’t think he is, and she’s a very smart lady and she knows a lot.”

The haunted eyes looked straight into his. “Have those bad people hurt him?”

“We just don’t know that either, Dave,” he went on. “We think they’ve got reasons of their own to keep him safe, for now.”

On impulse he hugged the slight form to him. The boy gripped him fiercely around the neck, then stifled a sob and stood back.

“And we’ll get him back if there’s any way to do it,” Kenneth Hollard said solemnly. “I promise you that.”

“Thank you,” the boy said. “I know you will—you and Aunt Kathryn and Princess Raupasha and the King.” A scowl. “And
kill
those bad people. All of them!”

Hollard nodded. “I intend to.”

 

Marian Alston caught the boarding ax on the guard of the
wazikashi
in her left hand, grunting at the heavy impact. The Tartessian sailor grabbed her right hand as she tried to ram the muzzle of her Python into his body, and the shot went astray into the melee on the deck of the second Tartessian ship. Despite that shattering broadside it still carried enough men to be dangerous, and some quick-thinking officer had brought the crippled vessel around to the port side of the other Iberian craft. Reinforcements poured up out of its holds and into the crush.

Do Jesus, he’s strong,
she thought as they swayed in a stamping circle; this sort of straight-out wrestling with men was something she always tried to avoid, and her opponent was a wiry bundle of gristle and bone.
Twenty years younger to boot.
His bare chest ran with sweat and the muscle there rippled as he pushed back her arms.

She couldn’t retreat; Swindapa was lying at her feet, just beginning to pull herself up, shaking her head with her left hand pressed over cheek and eye.

So cheat,
she told herself and whipped up a knee between his thighs.

It impacted painfully on a boiled-leather cup, but the blow was enough to loosen his grip. She tore the wrist that held the empty pistol loose and slammed it twice into the side of his head, even as he hooked a heel behind hers and lunged forward. They fell backward over Swindapa’s body and rolled, snarling; blood was pouring down the side of his face as he surged on top and pinned her legs, grabbed the right wrist again, half rose and used his weight to push the edge of the ax toward her face. Its edge was nicked and red, with shreds of flesh caught in the notched steel. The wound in her side was bleeding again, there was no way to fight without using your back and gut muscles, and the strength flowed out of her. Beyond the Tartessian’s back she saw another poised with a rifle held clubbed by the muzzle, the butt rising over Swindapa’s back.

The shotgun blast smeared the flesh off the face of the enemy sailor who’d been about to smash her partner’s spine. Alston whipped her head aside in the moment’s distraction, letting her left arm go limp and the curved twenty-inch blade of the
wazikashi
snap backward. The ax slid down it with a tooth-grating squeal of steel on steel and thumped into the decking right next to her ear, the shaft impacting painfully against her collarbone. That left the smallsword free; her wrist traversed the point twenty degrees and a heave of shoulder and back rammed it up under the Tartessian’s rib cage. He reared back, mouth open in a soundless O of shock, and more blood poured down to spatter with the rest that soaked the cloth over her torso and hips. A heavy booted foot kicked him the rest of the way clear, and a massive black hand reached down to help her up.

“Thanks,” she wheezed, pressing a hand full of pistol over the wound in her side.

“Sho’ ’nuff mah pleasure,” Brigadier McClintock said, exaggerating his drawl.

He snapped open the double-barreled shotgun and dropped two more shells into the smoking breech, flicking the weapon closed with a quick upward jerk of his wrist. A red-running cutlass was thonged to his right wrist. Alston felt a brief irrational regret for the shotguns she and her partner had carried over the rail, one smashed parrying a boarding ax, another gone God-knew-where. Bit by bit, the pre-Event world vanished, gone down the well of entropy, and what replaced it might be better or worse but was never quite the same....

McClintock helped Swindapa to her feet as well; the left side of her face was swelling where the flat of a rifle butt had punched it, leaving only a slit in the puffy flesh for her eye, but she was conscious and nothing looked to be broken. The fight on the decks of the Tartessian craft was slowing as Marines poured across from the transport grappled to the starboard bow of the
Chamberlain.
Near her an ordered line of bayonets stretched from rail to rail, and from behind it the sea-soldiers poured in volley after volley of Werder bullets. A moment of inner balance she could almost taste, and then the surviving enemy began to throw down their weapons, going to their knees and holding up empty hands for quarter.

“Cease fire! Cease fire!” McClintock bellowed. “Captain Thawekulo, get theose people disarmed and under the hatches!”

Marian went to the rail, limping, supporting Swindapa until the younger woman was able to lean against it.

“God-damn,” Alston whispered.

The four linked ships had turned under the undirected thrust of wind on masts and rigging and what sails remained, spinning slowly a hundred and eighty degrees. From here she could see right down the line of battle, now that the cannon smoke had mostly cleared. Two other frigates were in much the same state as hers, lashed to a pair of Tartessians each with transports grappled to them in turn. Khaki-uniformed Marines and blue-clad sailors and auxiliaries in everything from imitation uniforms to leather kilts to full nudity—a boastful pledge of divine favor—swarmed over them like driver ants. The third frigate,
Lincoln,
was taking its opponents under tow.

The fifth was on fire, flames licking mast high and the enemy ships frantically paying off to get away from her...
God
-damn,
I’ll miss Hiller... no, wait, one of those ships that was fast to
Sheridan
is flying the Stars and Stripes
...

Some substratum of her mind made her throw up a hand and glance away. There was a lightning-bright red flash and a shattering roar; when the ball of smoke and fire and shattered water subsided, what was left of a thousand tons of frigate were slipping beneath the water, or flotsam on the surface or turning and flashing hundreds of feet in the air, falling again like some ghastly burning confetti mixed with parts of human beings.

“
God-damn
,” she whispered again.

From the northward came a line of polished steel beaks and pairs of heavy guns like malevolent black eyes. flanked by the flashing unison of long sweeps; behind them was a pillar of smoke, doubtless a burning ship of hers.

They broke through the schooners,
she thought with heavy finality.
Just a little more time and we’d
. . .
if only
. . .
to hell with that. Let’s save what we can.

She opened her mouth to give the order to retreat; running before the wind the sailing ships could probably escape, most of them at least. Then Ensign Glidden came up, half of an ear gone under a hasty bandage and his left arm strapped to his chest. He was carefully avoiding looking what he stepped on and over, but his voice was clear:

“Ma‘am! Report from the ultralights—the
Farragut,
ma’am, that smudge is the
Farragut’s
smokestack!”

For a moment all she could do was stare. Behind her, Brigadier McClintock began to laugh. After a moment, Swindapa joined in, wincing at the same time but not letting the pain stop her.

“Well, just another rasher,” Jared Cofflin said, wiping his plate with a heel of bread.

Tansawada shook a moa egg the size of a small football, took out the plug that closed a hole in it and poured more into the big iron skillet to scramble a batch. Everyone else was digging in as well, from the younglings in high chairs to the adults shoveling down eggs and sausage and bacon, biscuits and bread and stacks of flapjacks and maple syrup. Farming at this level of technology meant you had to work like a horse, but it was efficient enough that you could eat that way too.

Talk about farmhouse breakfasts... well, I suppose when you’re used to sitting down eighteen to a meal a few more are no hardship...
“I can always fit—”

Hooves pounded up the graveled way outside, amid shouts and a frantic barking of dogs. The sound was clear enough, but the Hollards’ kitchen looked south, over fields and woodlots and the distant blue of water glimpsed through gaps between the trees. Cofflin laid down his spoon, conscious of the looks on him from around the big table, puzzled or anxious.

“‘Scuse me,” he said quickly. “That’s probably a courier.”

He walked out into the hallway; the front door let in on another, sort of an airlock arrangement to keep warm air in in wintertime. Only when he reached for the front door’s carved wooden knob did he realize he still had his checked napkin in hand, and that Martinelli was beside him, pistol inconspicuously drawn and held down by his side.

The young woman on the other side of the wood almost stumbled in as he pulled the door open; she already had the screen door propped open, and she was reaching into the leather satchel slung over one shoulder. Her horse was hitched to the rail out in the graveled driveway, blowing with wide-flared nostrils, streaks of foam on its sweat-wet neck, trying to reach the water trough. The courier might have been in too much of a hurry to walk it cool, but at least it wasn’t let free to drink and founder itself.

“Chief!” the post office courier said in a thick Fiernan accent, dancing from one foot to another with excitement. “Courier message from Fort Brandt... they
flew
it over, Chief! Right over to Fogarty’s Cove!”

The brown paper envelope was crinkly-fresh, the flap sealed with a blob of red wax. He recognized Captain Sandy Rapczewicz’s seal, CO at Brandt Point station and the Republic’s military commander with Marian abroad. She was a levelheaded type, so this
must
be important.

“Ms...”

“Mary Burns, Chief,” the messenger said.

“Ms. Burns, you’d better walk that horse, then water it.”

He broke the seal as she blushed, dithered, and then hurried off to obey. The summary was always right at the top...

He turned, to find he had an audience, some of them still clutching forks or rolls. Heather and Lucy were staring wide-eyed. As they saw his face they began to jump, their squeals an ear-piercing joy.

T
he tule-reed boat felt ...
squishy,
that’s
the word,
Peter Giernas thought. It was more like being on a living thing than a boat, or ... a memory nagged at him, from his childhood. Yes, just after the family had moved to America, three years before the Event, when his father got a job doing plumber’s work with a Nantucket construction company. He’d taken the family to the beach, and the eight-year-old Peter Giernas had gone swimming on a half-inflated rubber mattress. This felt a lot like that, except that the mattress had been smooth rather than prickly.

That was the problem with not speaking the local language; you had to do most of your own scouting, or chance some lethal surprise at the last minute ... like the one they’d nearly had when he saw the masts of the enemy ship rising above the heads of the reeds, and couldn’t make the local behind him understand what
masthead lookout
meant. He’d gotten them under the shadow of the sloughside reeds, at least.

The little craft was inconspicuous, a lot more so than a thirty-foot dugout, and just the thing for eeling through the marshes, sloughs, swamps, and shallows where the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers met to form a huge delta before funneling into the Pacific. Despite his compass and map, Giernas had been thoroughly lost within an hour.

There must be
millions of
acres of this tule swamp here,
he thought. Plus riverbank forest even thicker and more junglelike than upstream on the Sacramento, and islands beyond counting, a demented spiderweb of channels. There was swamp, and islands of grassy prairie covered with stems twelve feet high, and swamp shading into prairie and back into swamp and into forest, dry or with standing water around the trunks of the alders.