Union Forever

by William R. Forstchen

  It was hard to imagine these skeletal outlines as ships rowing into a possible battle.

  "Well, Admiral Marcus Licinius Graca, there's your fleet," Andrew said, trying to sound cheerful.

  Marcus nodded approvingly.

  "I'll be like our father gods," he said, his eyes aglow. Andrew tried to let his enthusiasm build. After all, for a history professor this was like some grand experiment to recreate the fleets of the ancient world. He looked over to where a corvus, the famed Roman ship's drawbridge, which had helped them to win the First Punic war against the superior sailors of Carthage, was set up in the bow of one of the outline ships. The weapon had apparently been forgotten on this world, but at his own suggestion it would be incorporated into every ship.

  The long plank, with a spike on the end, was upright, held in position by a single post driven into the ground. The men behind it were still rowing at battle speed. The commander shouted and a crew of men released the pulley holding the corvus, which slammed down into the earth, the metal spike burying itself in the turf.

  The artillery crew at the front simulated the firing of their four-pounder while the men behind them dropped their oars, the Rus soldiers picking up their muskets from under the benches, the Roum militia drawing knives and daggers. The front ranks leaped upon the corvus, racing across, the rear ranks crowding in behind them.

  The commander, seeing Marcus and Andrew, raised his sword in salute and then went back to shouting at his men, kicking and pushing them, sorting out the confusion in the back.

  To Andrew it looked like a godawful mess, but he could see the excitement in Marcus's eyes.

  Angling his mount up the ridgeline, he reined in at the top, stood in the stirrups, and looked northwestward. The plumes of smoke were now visible across the distant plain.

  "How far to go, John?"

  "Ahead of schedule there at least—two days to go."

  Andrew nodded approvingly. He had been up there yesterday, and John was working a minor miracle. The four-mile-long procession of trains was steadily inching along the Appian Way. Nearly sixty miles of track, along with thousands of crossties, were piled aboard the overloaded trains. As the last car of the last train passed, labor crews ripped up the track and then carried it four miles forward, laying it down ahead of the first locomotive. Ferguson had been quick to point out that by this method, nearly eight miles of track and ties would actually be manhandled all the way into Roum, providing the additional space aboard the locomotives to bring down the stockpile of rations and the machine shop equipment of Hispania so desperately needed when it came time to install the locomotive engines in the boats. Over ten thousand men were engaged in this job alone, and supplying them with food and water was taking up nearly every wagon in Roum along with an additional thousand laborers.

  "Let's get down to the dockyards," Andrew said, swinging Mercury about and leading him down the hill and back into the city.

  Going through the shattered main gate, Andrew and his entourage edged their way through the swirling confusion in the streets. A long line of ox-drawn carts clogged the artery, piled high with food, heading out to the railhead. Reaching the forum, he could not help but look over at the flame-scorched ruins of the palace. The three crosses still hung there, the bloated bodies of the Merki raising such a stench that he pulled out a handkerchief to cover his nose.

  The old battlefield smell, he thought grimly. It had hung like that over Suzdal for weeks, and in the trenches before Petersburg, and the hospitals of Gettysburg. It was a smell he felt he'd never be able to wash out of his life. It would cling to him, from war to endless war.

  A cold thought struck him. Would he wind up like that someday, hung before a Merki tent as a trophy, or would they clamor around to devour his flesh and fashion a drinking cup from his skull, the dreaded Yankee dead at last?

  He could see the advantage of what Marcus had done. Every person who passed through the forum could see the reason that their lives had been turned upside down in this day and night labor.

  Passing the Senate building, they rode down the hill and out to the dockyards. The river was a swarm of activity. A raft was moving slowly down with the current, piled high with fresh-cut timbers. Along the shoreline on either side staked areas had been marked out for each of the eighty ships. Crews of laborers were busy at their respective sites.

  A fifteen-foot-high tower of lashed logs, surmounted by a canopy, stood in the middle of the dockyard, and riding over, Andrew dismounted and looked up. Taking a deep breath, he awkwardly started to climb up the ladder. Gaining the top, he smiled as Mina's staff turned to face him and saluted.

  Glad to be under the shade of the canopy, Andrew walked over to the long table that lined one end of the tower and looked down on the rough plans spread out before him.

  Mina came up beside him, with Marcus and Emil in his wake.

  "There have been some kinks in the line, sir, but it's actually starting to work," Ferguson announced.

  "What number are we at?"

  "All the keels are down, rib parts ten through twenty are up, and twenty-one through twenty-four are being dropped off now by the raft."

  Ferguson pointed to a swarm of laborers working off the side of the raft, hauling out identically cut sections of wood, carrying them up the muddy beach, and dropping them alongside one of the work areas.

  Ferguson nodded proudly.

  "We're finally getting the system down now," he announced. "I thought we'd just simply assign a couple of hundred men to each ship and have them build it up from scratch, but John's idea was a hell of a lot better."

  "What are we doing differently?" Andrew asked.

  "Well, sir, while you were up checking the rail line," John said, "Chuck and I here had an argument, and I won."

  "I'm willing to admit it when I'm wrong," Chuck said, "since it usually only happens maybe once or twice a year."

  "I started to think about our job here," John continued, ignoring Chuck, "and it got me to thinking.

  "As we took that Cartha ship apart, I changed some things. It's not going to have the sweeping curve fore and aft. The damn thing's simply going to be a straight-sided box, with an angled-in bow and a flat stem. To design that I simply took the middle section of ribs and planking and made them the same all the way down the length of the ship. All the ribs except for the first three and the last one will be identical. The same now stands true for all the planking, which will be cut in ten-foot lengths."

  "Sounds logical enough," Andrew said.

  "It makes building these things a hell of a lot simpler. Well, that kept my thinking going. If nearly everything is identical for a fair part of each ship, why not have the labor identical for each man? Every part is numbered now. Rather than having eighty teams working on eighty different ships, I have ten teams working on eight ships each. As each part comes in, the team installs it on ship one, then goes to ship two and installs the same part again, and so on up the line.

  "Behind them comes an inspector to double-check the job, along with a team to correct mistakes, then come caulkers and tarrers, and then another inspector."

  "It's working, too," Chuck interjected. "The problem is that we're actually outpacing the sawmills. I just thank God we had that lumber stockpiled to be cut into crossties and for bridging material or we'd be sunk before we even started."

  "The gunboats?"

  "That's a lot tougher now," Chuck said, reaching under the table and pulling up another set of drawings.

  "No two of those grain ships are alike, so each one's a custom job. The biggest one, Bullfinch tells me, draws over seven hundred tons, and the smallest we'll use draws about two hundred and fifty. The others we're tearing apart for the wood. The decks are being cut down and reinforced. We're taking the sterns apart, rebuilding half for stem wheels, the other half for propellers."

  "Can you make it on time?" Andrew asked.

  Chuck looked over at John.

  "Too many unknowns for that one," John s
aid evenly.

  "How about the guns?"

  "There's a balancing act there," John said. "We're making the molds right now, and letting them dry. If there's even a hint of moisture in them when we start the pourings, the whole damn thing will explode. Andrew, there's a hell of a difference between casting a four-pounder and casting a seventy-five-pounder."

  "Cromwell did it."

  "He had over a year. He might have made mistakes, had molds blow apart—he had all the time in the world, and we don't. The fact we're going with carronades makes it easier— pouring two tons per mold is a hell of lot easier than ten tons. Some of the guns will be bronze. We're collecting every scrap of bronze in the city. It's a lot easier to work, with a far lower temperature—that'll give us a chance to make our goal by making a couple of extra bronze furnaces."

  "What about shot and powder?"

  "The shot's the easier part. I've cast up some molds for the balls, and they're being turned out right now. I wish we had some exploding shells as he does, but I don't have the equipment or time to turn them out. But I've also got a little improvement Cromwell won't have. I'm trying an experiment that might involve a little risk, but I think the advantages will outweigh it. I've made some molds for wrought-iron bolts rather than round shot."

  "What's the advantage?" Andrew asked.

  "O'Donald would love them. Wrought iron's a lot tougher and a bit heavier. When our cast-iron round shot hits his armor, it might punch through, it might not—in fact, the rounds might even shatter.

  "The bolts are simply that—they look like rifle shells but are solid and made of wrought iron. They'll weigh out at nearly one hundred pounds. The trade-off is that our guns might burst from the strain of firing them. What I want to try is this. Once we get some rails in and the tools from the Hispania rail yard to work with, we're going to heat some rails up red-hot and hammer them into sheets. After the guns come out of the molds, we're going to take the sheets and wrap them around the breech. As the metal cools it'll shrink and compress in, reinforcing the gun. Remember, we've got a lot of ironworkers here who know their trade."

  "Like a Parrot rifle," Vincent interjected.

  "Exactly."

  "This wasn't part of the plan, though," Andrew said cautiously.

  "Sir, we're making this up as we go along. We'll test a gun, and if it blows, well, we've lost a gun. If it doesn't, we might have an edge."

  "I guess we're doing everything we can," Andrew said quietly.

  Andrew walked away from the group and looked back westward.

  There were too many unknowns in all of this, and his senses rebelled at that fact. Warfare on land he understood perfectly—he had had two and a half bloody years of schooling in that craft before coming here. But in this game, Cromwell had all the advantages. He understood his ships, what went into them, how they were to be sailed and fought. On his side, all he had was a young lieutenant, and the Roum, who had been driven from the Inland Sea by the Carthas centuries before he had arrived. Cromwell also knew where all the parts of this vast puzzle were laid. The only thing he could hope for so far was that his plans for this fleet were unknown. The key trick was to keep convincing Cromwell he was trying to move back by rail, that he was still thinking like an infantry officer rather than like a sailor.

  A shudder ran through the train, bringing Tim Kindred to his feet. An instant later the high-pitched scream of escaping steam and a deafening explosion washed over him. The windows on the car shattered, spraying the corridor with shards.

  A wash of steam eddied past the car. A rifle shot snapped out, and then a ragged volley.

  He looked over at the frightened corporal by his side.

  "Come on, outside now, they've got to see you!"

  Tim grabbed the shaking soldier by the shoulder, pushing him forward, shoving him through the door first.

  "Now act your part, dammit!"

  "They're shooting!"

  "Don't you think I know that?" Tim roared.

  Trembling, the corporal climbed down the steps, Kindred following in his wake.

  Hot steam washed around them, and already he could feel the rapid change in the air, throwing an alarm signal straight into his lungs.

  "Come on, boy, out into the open, and for God's sake try to look brave."

  Kindred pushed his way through the hot fog and out into the sunlight. The engine ahead had been blown, the rush of steam still swirling straight up and billowing outward.

  "Artillery piece, sir!" shouted a soldier running past Kindred and pointing up to the ridge.

  A concussion snapped past him as the artillery inside the armored car sent off a volley. On the low ridge less than two hundred yards away he saw a flurry of activity, a horseman galloping away. There was another puff of smoke, and a brief fraction of a second later the shot slammed into the car he had just left.

  A ragged volley swept along the ridge, bullets slapping into the car. The corporal started to duck.

  "Goddammit, boy, stand up straight and don't move a muscle or I'll shoot you myself."

  The corporal looked over at him fearfully and came to attention.

  "That's better. Now just stand there."

  "Skirmish line forward!" Kindred shouted.

  From out of the boxcars soldiers started to pour out, hitting the ground, firing back at the puffs of smoke. A bugle sounded, and from the train behind a dozen mounted soldiers leaped their mounts off the flatcars and started to gallop up the hill, swinging out to take the enemy in the flank.

  Intently, Kindred watched the enemy line. The firing had already stopped. Raising his field glasses, he was shocked to see a soldier with a telescope looking straight back at him.

  "Don't move," Kindred hissed.

  The soldier turned and disappeared down behind the slope.

  The skirmish line started forward at the run, sweeping up the side of the hill. He had to press them hard, but inwardly he was praying for something else.

  The men crested the hill, while from the next ridgeline over he saw thirty or more horsemen riding hard silhouetted for a moment and then disappearing from view.

  "Sound recall," Kindred shouted.

  Wheezing heavily, he walked down the length of the car and stopped in front of the locomotive now wreathed in flames. Two torn and bloodied bodies lay in the cab. Looking at them for but a second, he was grateful for their sakes that it had been quick. Death by scalding was something he did not like to contemplate.

  One of the skirmishers came running back down the hill and, panting hard, drew up and saluted.

  "They had one of our four-pounders up there, sir. It must have hit the engine and blown it open."

  Kindred merely nodded, looking down the track. The handcar which had been running a couple of hundred yards ahead of them, looking for breaks, was still intact, the four men aboard hunkered down behind it, peering up cautiously now that the shooting had stopped

  "Get the work crews started," Kindred said, looking over to his staff, his voice barely above a whisper. "Push this engine off the track. Have the locomotive behind us push our cars up. Detail off the next unit of a hundred for security right here, and have them start making a sod fortress like the others."

  Stepping away from the track, he looked back down the line. Now there were only four locomotives. They had encountered the first cut in the line nearly a hundred miles back, derailing a train. It had taken five days to move up the last stretch to this point forty miles east of the bridge. In the beginning it had just been a track shoe pulled loose, or the connector between two rails unbolted, or an entire rail gone, hidden away in the high grass.

  He had laid out nearly five thousand men as security behind him, most of them terrified Roum militia, each group of a hundred beefed up with twenty Suzdalian regulars. It was still far too thin, only fifty men per mile, and every night someone had slipped in to at least cut the telegraph wire they were stringing back out.

  It simply amazed him. Three, maybe four hundred men at most co
uld play absolute hell with a rail line, tying down ten times their own number.

  Training his field glasses westward, he could see the thin speck of the wrecked train that had been jumped thirty miles this side of the Kennebec. It would be there that the total destruction of the rail line had begun.

  Maybe by the end of the day they'd reach it and he could settle down to the task of pushing rail up. Andrew might think this was nothing more than a feint, but by damn it wasn't to him. A slow rage had been building with this guerrilla warfare, and before it was done he would relish the chance to catch those bastards by the throat and see them hanging from the nearest telegraph pole.

  "Excuse me, sir."

  Kindred looked up and saw the corporal still standing at attention.

  "Can I stand at ease?"

  "Go on inside, boy. Get that jacket off and stretch your arm."

  Kindred started to laugh as the six-and-a-half-foot-tall soldier climbed back into the bullet-pocked car. Now that was a touch he had thought up on his own. Finding a Suzdalian soldier as tall as Andrew had taken some doing. The poor lad had suffered the torments of hell, his left arm stuck inside an officer's jacket, waiting for days for some sort of action against the raiders, just so he could stand out in the open and be seen and shot at.

  Kindred looked back up at the crest of the hill. A fit of coughing took hold, doubling him over as he gasped for breath. Damn this asthma, it'll be the death of me yet, he thought. His hat tumbled down in front of him, and as he picked it up he saw the neat bullet hole in the crown.

  Smiling, he put the hat back on.

  Maybe I'll get lucky yet, he thought with a sad smile. A death by a bullet beats asthma any day.

  Jubadi looked up coldly as Muzta Qar Qarth of the Tugar horde entered his tent.

  "I thought you would be on the frontier of the Roum," Jubadi said darkly, dropping all pretense of the formalities of hospitality.