Against the Tide of Years

by S. M. Stirling

  It was part of her duty to see that junior officers learned. Jenkins was a fine sailor, but not quite enough of a fighter yet.

  “True enough, Lieutenant,” she said. “But we’re not beating off a pirate raid. This is war. I don’t want to drive the Tartessian fleet away, I want to crush them, to wipe this force off the gameboard and then concentrate on doing the same in their home waters.”

  “ Yes, ma’am,” he said, nodding thoughtfully.

  The ship had an odd, choppy roll under tow and pitched even more as Farragut turned east of north, to round Great Point and move south. She licked salt spindrift off her lips and thought: Everything’s ready. Full crews—enough to fight both sides on the Chamberlain, the Lincoln, and the Sheridan, plus the smaller ships and schooners. Most of them knew what to do, as well.

  “Message to the flotilla,” she said, looking out over a sea of gray-blue, infinitely dappled with the rain. “The Republic expects every citizen to do his or her duty. Cast off, make sail, and take stations.”

  “Cast off!” Jenkins echoed her call through his speaking-trumpet.

  “Sail stations, sail stations, on the fore, on the main, all hands to stations! Lay aloft and loose all sail!”

  Hands took up the lines on deck, and crewfolk swarmed aloft on the wet, swaying ratlines. A sudden thought struck her; when she’d been skipper of the Eagle, before the Event, she’d have been gut-anxious right now, afraid that someone would slip. The thought brought a slight smile. How times change when the time changes.

  “ Let fall!”

  She looked up, squinting against the rain. The yards were studded with figures in yellow oilskins, putting the sails in gear. That had to be done in perfect synchronization with a following wind like this; otherwise the sail could hang up on an unloosed gasket, half on and half off, possibly ripping. Flax canvas just wasn’t as strong as Dacron, no two ways about it. There was a thump above as the sails were pushed forward to hang below the yards.

  “Gear manned and ready!” came the call from the decks.

  “Sheet home the lower topsail! Belay!”

  Order and response across the swimming deck, with the wind blowing streamers of water off the waves and over the rail behind her. Jenkins looked at the wind, and to the starboard at the ships nearer the distant white line of breakers on the beaches.

  “Haul around on the weather tack and lee sheet! Tend the lee tack and weather sheet!”

  She nodded approval as sail blossomed from the bottoms of the masts toward the tops. The Chamberlain heeled sharply to starboard as the wind took her, and her motion became a purposeful swoop diagonally across the waves marching out of the north.

  “On deck, there!” The commodore looked up sharply at the lookout’s hail. “Enemy in sight off the starboard bow—many sail!”

  “I’m taking a look,” she said. “Lieutenant Commander Swindapa has the deck.”

  “Ms. Swindapa has the deck, aye!”

  She took the stairs to the main deck in three bounds, then jumped to the rail and grasped the wet, tarred rope of the ratlines in her hands. A quick swarming climb, and she was past the tops, up to the swaying junction of mast and topsail yard. There she braced herself and took out her binoculars one-handed, ignoring the long swoop . . . swoop motion of the mast as it traced a great oval in the sky, putting her over rushing gray water more often than the narrow deck.

  The Tartessians. And they were making sail too, putting distance between themselves and the beach. Even with the rain there were fires there; she could see mortar shells bursting amid the wreckage of the beachhead, and further north the bright stab of Gatling fire through the gloom. She cased the binoculars and leaned out, gripped a backstay and braced her feet against the ribbed surface of the line to control her descent, then slid down to the quarterdeck in a long gliding flight.

  She landed and caught Swindapa’s quirked eyebrow. All right, so I enjoy being able to do that, Alston thought.

  “ Lieutenant Commander, message to the fleet. Enemy bearing”—she gave the direction and number. “All ships will follow flagship’s lead en echelon; I intend to force a general engagement.” Which she could, with the weather gauge and the Farragut.

  Alston stepped over to the wheels and gave the course as Swindapa ducked into the radio shack. The four crewfolk heaved at the double wheels, and the Chamberlain lay further over, shipping foam on her starboard rail. Down below, the gun crews would be hanging on in the swaying dark, lit only by the dim glow of the battle lanterns, waiting.

  Not long now, she thought, as the enemy’s sails loomed higher and Nantucket sank astern. Not long at all.

  The Chamberlain was leading the flotilla, heading south and east to put herself between the wind and the Tartessians and trap them against a lee shore. The enemy weren’t cooperating, of course, cutting at right angles across the wind and nearly due east. That put the two fleets on an intersecting course, like the two sides of a triangle about to come to a point. As always at sea, after the long waiting the closing came with a sudden rush.

  “Signal to the Farragut,” she said. “Signal is You may proceed.”

  The steamer turned out of line, giving a long, melancholy scream from its whistle that cut through the creak and thrum of a sailing ship under way. Its axe-bow butted a huge spray into the air, steel gray and ice white.

  It’s fairly rough, she thought. Their gun decks are closer to the surface than the ones in these frigates. That will give them problems.

  The ram drew away with shocking speed, lunging across the waves. It had picked the fourth in line of the Tartessian vessels, to cut that one and the ships behind off from the foremost division. Alston watched the gunports on the port side of the Tartessian vessel fly open and the muzzles run out. Almost immediately the deep booming of cannon fire cut through the hiss of the rain.

  “ Too soon,” she said. “ They should have waited another minute.”

  Flying iron threw gouts of spray into the air a hundred yards in front of the Farragut; few of the balls skipped along the surface in today’s weather. Thunder rumbled across the waves as well, like a huge series of doors thudding shut. Ten guns, she thought. Twelve-pounders. She and Swindapa and Jenkins were all looking at their watches. One minute ten seconds later the first cannon of the second broadside fired, and the rest within fifteen seconds more. Not bad. Not as good as ours, though. If you limited “ours” to the Guard frigates and schooners; God alone knew about the dozen civilian Reserve ragtag-and-bobtail following behind.

  Black smoke was pouring up from the Farragut’s stack. One more broadside landed; then the paddle wheels thrashed into reverse, just before the steel-plated bow struck. It hit at a slight angle to the perpendicular, with the momentum of two six-hundred-ton bulks moving together at a combined speed of nearly thirty miles an hour.

  The Tartessian ship shivered and pitched, stopping as if it had hit a reef. The foremast whipped forward and then snapped. Sails and mast fell down across the bows of the ship, and the rest of her rigging quivered and shook. And all that was nothing beside the brief glimpse of the damage to her hull as the Farragut reversed. Ribs had been smashed and the oak stringers stripped off the side of the ship in a swath fifteen feet long. The Tartessian war craft rolled back to port as the ram released her, and the sea poured in at once. The remaining two masts developed a list, and the open gunports were pointing down toward the sea.

  The Farragut backed off. The next in line of the Tartessian fleet had yawed, turning further from the wind to bring her guns to bear. They lashed the steamship and the water around it, but that necessarily presented her flank to the ram. With a dolorous whistle of steam, the Farragut began to pick up speed.

  Alston turned her attention back to the four ships ahead. The Chamberlain was closing in on the first, no more than fifteen hundred yards now, less every second.

  “Jenkins,” she said, “we’ll range up and give the leader a couple of broadsides at . . . mmmm, nine hundred yards.” Fairly long r
ange for the Tartessians.

  “ Then we’ll touch up, cut across his stern, rake him—and give the ship following our starboard a broadside at the same time—range alongside, hit him another time or two, and board. Lieutenant Commander, convey my intentions to the rest of the flotilla. Marine sharpshooters to the fighting tops, action stations all.”

  The drum began to beat, a long, hoarse, rolling call. There was little to do, though, except for the Marines to scramble up the ratlines and take their places in the triangular platforms from which they would rake the enemy deck. Below, all was in readiness as it had been since they’d left port, decks clear, fearnought screens rigged and damped, corpsmen standing by for the casualties. The two Gatling guns clamped to the rails swung, loaders ready with more cylindrical drums of ammunition, gunners’ hands on the cranks.

  The enemy ship—probably the flagship—grew closer. It was a three-masted bark-rigged vessel; she counted twelve gunports and lighter weapons on deck. The same number of muzzles as her vessel, but surely a lighter weight of metal. The decks were black with men, though, and the rigging thick with them too—heavy crew.

  Closer. Closer. Below: “Out tampions! Run out your guns!”

  Drumming thunder below, squeal of carriages, and to her right the black port lids flipping up to show thick muzzles.

  “Ready . . .”

  “ Fire as you bear!”

  The two ships were running parallel, just under a thousand yards apart, their sails braced hard to starboard and the wind on their port. BOOOOMMMMM, a roaring world of sound as the twelve heavy cannon spoke as one, the Chamberlain heeling under their thrust, long blades of flame and clouds of smoke. Jenkins cast a quick look and then turned his eyes back to sail and helm; Alston noticed and felt a quick stab of approval.

  “Thus, thus,” he said to the helmsmen. “Don’t close her—Zenarusson, keep your eye on your work! Thus!”

  Her own attention was focused on the results. One ball raised a geyser of foam in the enemy’s wake. The others all struck, solid smashing impacts on deck or hull. Then the Tartessian’s cannon ran out, each muzzle seeming to point straight at her. She forced herself to objective appraisal; eighteen-pounders, probably.

  BADUMMPF.

  One gunport wasn’t firing, the cannon dismounted, perhaps. The others snarled flame and disappeared backward, recoil hurling the great weights of metal back against the lines and tackle. Three paces in front of her, an iron cannonball cut a seaman in half, blood and matter spraying out in all directions. Alston wiped sticky wetness from her face, knowing that she’d feel it again, in her sleep. Her mind was a calculating machine right now. Two solid hits, from the thumping beneath her feet; a couple of misses, from the splashes in between.

  Wounded crewfolk being hurried down the companionways, headed for the surgeon’s station. A rattle of lines and blocks on the splinter nets overhead, cut by the passing shot. Bosun and petty officers and riggers swarming upward, knotting and splicing; no major sails down or uncontrollable, a quick flurry of hauling on deck to correct the yawing produced by a severed buntline.

  As the guns spoke again, individually this time, the crews completed their leaping dance of reloading and ran them out again. A glance at her watch; ninety seconds, very fast. A slow crackle of rifle fire came from the tops above, snipers with scope-sighted weapons trying their luck. A staysail went flying loose, flapping and entangling. The Tartessian’s head started to turn away from the wind, then came back.

  Thumped them hard, Alston thought, as the enemy’s guns answered. This time there was a screaming from the gun deck, dying away quickly. An eighteen-pounder ball clipped the mainmast, gouging a bite out of the white pine as neatly as a giant’s teeth.

  Again and again. Her eyes combed the Tartessian vessel, looking for hints . . .

  “ Brennan,” she said to a middie. “ To the gun captains; we’re going to rake her.”

  A quick glance backward: the Lincoln was lying in the Chamberlain ’s wake, trading broadsides with the next Tartessian in line. Back at her own opponent: outer and flying jibs down and a thin stream of blood flowing out of her scuppers.

  “And the one behind her; we’ll fire both broadsides. Then port guns reload with canister; we’ll range in, sweep her decks, then board. Boarders and starbolins ready.”

  The youngster sprang off. She turned to Jenkins. “ Now, Mr. Jenkins, if you please.”

  “ Thus, thus!” he said. And “Haul all port, handsomely port!”

  The bosun’s calls and pipes repeated the call across the deck. The Chamberlain spun on her heel, taking the wind on her port quarter now, running before it to cut the Tartessian’s wake. She held her breath . . .

  “ Yes!”

  The enemy were too badly damaged to react quickly. The Islander frigate closed the distance with a lunging swiftness, throwing rooster-tails of salt water from her sharp bows. An almighty roar from astern distracted her for an instant; her head whipped around. Fire and a black swelling rising, bits and pieces of timber and probably of people . . . one of the Tartessian ships had blown up.

  Back to her own work. Another grumble-rumble, as the portside guns ran out as well.

  “ Fire as you bear!”

  Thudding reports ran back along both sides of the ship from the bows, smoke overwhelming sight for an instant, then blowing on in a mass ahead southward. The Chamberlain’s broadside had swept down the Tartessian’s gun deck unopposed for a hundred and twenty feet. Even from here she could hear the screaming and could well imagine what damage had been done in those crowded quarters.

  “Ready about!” she called.

  “Ready . . . come about!” Jenkin’s voice replied.

  The wheels spun, and the deck teams heaved again at their lines. The Chamberlain turned, running east once more. Alston’s legs moved automatically to meet the changing slope of the deck, going from horizontal to starboard-down. Close enough to the enemy to toss a ship’s biscuit onto their bloody decks—still crowded with men, fighting forward toward the rails, a few even swinging grapnels. Now the Gatling teams spun the clamp-wheels that held their weapons to the starboard rail, lifted the heavy weapons free and rushed them across the deck, set up in a dance of trained hands, and opened fire in a stream that cut men down and sliced lines like a giant’s sickle. The port guns ran out again, fired a point-blank wave of grapeshot, crews cheering.

  “ Boarders!” Alston roared through the smoke. “ Boarders!”

  The sides of the ships slammed together; grapnels flew, and crewfolk ran out along the spars to lash them together. Armed Guard crew were spilling out of the gun deck, and a column of Marines with their bayonets glittering.

  “ Boarders away!” Alston shouted. “ Follow me!” Then she was on the rail, leaping, the slamming punch of impact through her boot soles as she came down on the lower deck of the Tartessian. A shambles, running with blood, dead and wounded everywhere, but more live ones coming at her. Another thud beside her—Swindapa, stumbling slightly on the slippery planks and going down to one knee. A Tartessian sailor lunged at her with a boarding pike, its long steel head a cold glitter in the rain.

  Alston pulled the .40 Python from her right hip and shot him in the face at three pace’s distance; he fell backward with a round red hole in the bridge of his nose, the back blown out of his skull. One man down, two, another, a miss, and the weapon clicked empty. She threw it into the face of the next and her hands went over her left shoulder and swept out her katana, cutting down with the same motion. Ruin flopped at her feet.

  Swindapa had done likewise, lunging with a shriek. More Chamberlains were all around her, a tangled, tumbling melee for an instant, and then the enemy were down. She walked over to the shattered wheel, cut the line that held the Tartessian colors, and a crewman ran the Stars and Stripes up to the mizzen. A Tartessian lying with one hand pressed over a seeping redness on his stomach was holding out his sword to her in the other.

  “Sur-r-ender,” he gasped. “Not kill . . .
any more . . . my people . . .”

  Alston nodded; their eyes met, and for a moment she felt a kindred grief touch hers.

  “Surrender!” she called, and the wounded man added his croak, calling loud enough to bring a grimace of pain.

  Fighting died down and ceased. Middies and petty officers got the enemy rounded up and below, sent parties to secure the magazine. Alston looked westward, to where the sun was inclining behind the gray scudding wrack of cloud. The next Tartessian ship had struck as well, the flag of the Republic fluttering from the maintop and the Lincoln fast alongside. The one behind was rolling mastless as the Sheridan fired another broadside into her at point-blank range.

  She took a deep breath. “ Let’s go finish this mess up,” she said.

  “In the name of the Council and People of the Republic of Nantucket, this Town Meeting will now come to order.”

  Jared Cofflin cleared his throat. Ian and Doreen had talked him into that one, then laughed every time they heard it. So had Martha, and so had Marian. Swindapa and I were the only ones left out of the joke. Eventually they’d looked it up. Senatus Populusquae Roma—SPQR, the letters on the standards of the Roman Republic, “the Senate and the People of Rome.” Very funny.

  The new Town Meeting hall was a lot bigger than the high school auditorium where they’d met for the first few years after the Event. It needed to be. Besides the increase in the population, attendance was way up. The issues decided here were a lot more important these days.

  The new hall was out Madaket Road, west of town, not far from the old animal hospital, which given the occasionally zoo-like features of a Meeting, wasn’t entirely out of place. It was a huge, timber-framed, barnlike structure, oak and white pine on a poured-slab foundation; the interior was unadorned save for the lovely curly maple of the bleacher-type seating that surrounded the semicircular stage on three sides.

  Behind the speaker’s podium were more benches, where councilors and their staffs sat; behind them, covering the wall and as large as a medium-sized topsail, was Old Glory. Martha was sitting beside him on the foremost bench, and Marian Alston on the other, stiffly, with her billed cap on her knees.