Against the Tide of Years (20 page)

“Decisions, decisions,” Walker laughed thickly. “I think . . . yes, youth should be served first.”

He walked toward the bed.

 

“Reveille, reveille, heave out, trice up, lash and stow, lash and stow! Here I come, with a sharp knife and a clear conscience!”

Alston opened her eyes as the brass bell rang. The big stern cabin of the
Joshua Chamberlain
was filled with light from the windows that formed a curving wall along the rear of the ship. The clipper-frigate creaked and groaned around her, the endless speaking of a big wood-built ship; water slapped at the hull, and the stiff breeze hummed through the rigging. The sound and the long, rolling pitch of the ship beneath filled her with a quiet happiness.

Swindapa stirred. The first voyage together they’d kept to the old no-fraternization-on-board rule, but the new NCMJ (Nantucket Code of Military Justice) allowed married couples and registered domestic partners to bunk together at sea. Above them they could hear the crisp
Sir! Crew turned out!
of the master-at-arms reporting to the officer of the deck. The ship resounded to a thunder of feet as the crew and the hundred-odd Marine troopers aboard raced up the gangways to stow their tight-rolled hammocks along the gunwales of the ship. Then another thunder, this time as water gushed from the pumps onto the immaculate deck planking, and hollystones and “bears”—heavy blocks of sandstone—began to growl as they were pushed over the wood.

“Time to be up and doing,” Alston said.

“You Eagle People—always in a hurry,” Swindapa laughed, rolling out of bed and tossing Alston’s uniform to her.

Alston paused for a second to admire the sleek, graceful nakedness that smiled at her.
Eight years and I still get that catch in my throat,
she thought happily, then sighed and began her morning stretches.
Those
got just a little more difficult every year. The captain’s cabin on the
Liberator
class had room enough, at least. With an eye to impressing foreign potentates, it also had paneling of curly maple, polished and stained to bring out the swirling grain of the wood, and strips of carving along the edges of the yard-wide planks. Even more likely to impress were the two long cast-steel twelve-pounder rifles that served as stern-chasers, bowsed tight in place with double lashings.

Gunnery practice again today,
Alston decided, as she buttoned her jacket and adjusted the billed cap with fouled anchor that was Guard regulation. Drill was a damned nuisance on a ship crowded with passengers, but you had to find
some
time to get the hands used to their lethal tools.

They walked along the central corridor of the poop to the officers’ wardroom, the hollystones loud on the quarterdeck above.

“Good morning, gentlemen, ladies,” she said.

The wardroom table was crowded, since the two Hollards and some of their Marine officers ate with them as a matter of course. Barely two weeks out of home port and two days from the Islander outpost on Barbados they still had abundant fresh provisions. And coffee . . .

She added a filleted flying fish to her plate, anticipating the smooth buttery taste; several dozen had landed on the deck and made a short trip to the cooks. The coffee was harsh-tasting to anyone who could remember the twentieth; it was the offspring of ornamental coffee plants, the only option the Islanders had had available after the Event.
Better than no coffee at all, by a long shot.
Which was what they’d had to put up with for long years afterward, as those first seedlings planted out on Caribbean islands struggled to maturity.

“Damn, but I missed this, the first few years after the Event,” she said, sighing, after the first sip.

“It’s like chewing nettles,” Swindapa replied. “An acquired taste, but why bother to acquire it?”

“Could be worse,” Alston said, looking through the night-watch reports presented to her—water consumption, miles traveled, positions, hourly records of speed, barometer readings—all routine. “Tobacco could have survived too.” Doc Coleman had quietly squashed any attempt to bring
that
particular vice back to life.

“I drank decaf,” Colonel Hollard said, lifting his cup of sassafras.

Alston’s mouth quirked slightly, and she raised an eyebrow. She’d be handing over to Hollard’s generation in time; it was nice to be reminded that they could remember America, the twentieth, as well. There were times she worried that they would disappear into this era like a drop of ink in a bucket of milk—not enough of them to season it.

A middie approached the table and saluted. “Good morning, Captain,” she said. “The officer of the deck reports the approach of eight bells. Permission to strike eight bells on time.”

“My compliments to Mr. Jenkins, and let him make it so,” Alston said.

Swindapa stood with her, only a slight glance out of the corner of her eyes telling her partner what she thought of the Eagle People rituals of military courtesy.
It’s still a bit of a game to her,
Alston mused. She performed it faultlessly, even acknowledged the reasons for it but . . .
deep down, I don’t think she takes it all that seriously.
The Sun People recruits were a far more temperamental and willful bunch than the Fiernans, but when they finally grasped the concept of discipline they often embraced it with a convert’s fanaticism.

There were times when she thought Swindapa’s people were just too damned mentally healthy for their own good.

Up the companionway to the brightness of the deck, the sun now well clear of the horizon.

“Captain on deck!”

“As you were,” she replied. She was acting as captain-aboard of the
Chamberlain,
as well as commodore of the flotilla; the Guard was still short of experienced ship commanders.

“Fair-weather sailin’,” Alston went on.

She looked up; not a cloud in the sky. The deck of the
Joshua Chamberlain
tilted only a little, and she took the long blue swells with a smooth rocking-horse motion under all plain sail, three pyramids of white flax canvas reaching up her masts, a hundred and twenty feet on the main. The sails were braced to starboard, and the ship was moving at nearly right angles to the wind.
We should catch the trades in another few days,
she thought, reaching out to touch the rail. Then they could make better speed, with the wind abaft the beam.

The
Chamberlain
was lead ship in the Islander flotilla; behind her came the
Lincoln;
then the
Eagle,
the main transport, and the schooners
Harriet Tubman
and
Frederick Douglass.
They were in line astern, each separated by a thousand yards like beads on an arrow-straight line ruled across the blue of the ocean in cream-white wakes, their fresh canvas snow-white against the dark gray-blue of the hulls.

As a training ship,
Eagle
had been built for carrying people, not cargo; there had even been proposals to break up the big eighteen-hundred-tonner for her metal, on the theory that she was inefficient compared to wooden craft with proper holds.

Efficient as a troop-transport, though,
she thought, watching the long hull with the red diagonal slash of the Coast Guard.

“Signal,” she said aloud.

Swindapa took out her pad; the ships all had radios salvaged from pleasure craft.
Chamberlain’s
was in a low deckhouse forward of the wheels.

“To
Eagle;
—prepare to drop targets.” Those would be rafts of empty barrels that had held salt provisions, lashed together with poles and flags standing up. “Ships will pass at four hundred yards and then come about,” she said. To the first lieutenant: “Mr. Jenkins, sound to quarters. Fighting sail only.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said crisply and turned.

Orders flowed out and a drum began to beat, a long, hoarse roll of sound. Marines crowded out of the way as parties dashed to rig boarding nets along the sides and splinter-netting overhead. Crewfolk ran up the ratlines, and the ship came more nearly upright as the topsails were clewed up and sea-furled. From below came the sound of partitions being knocked down and struck into the hold. Alston stood quietly, glancing at her watch.

Better,
she thought, as the bosun reported to the quarterdeck, still panting a little.
Ten minutes forty-seven seconds.

Eagle
had been making more sail, pulling ahead of the other ships. Alston felt her lips quirking in a smile as she passed in a sunlit burst of spray, sharp bows slicing the swells. Objectively the new clipper-frigates were even prettier ships, without the clutter of deckhouses on the quarter and around the mainmast, but . . .

I commanded her so long,
she thought. More than ten years now, if you counted the time before the Event.
I’ve seen and done a lot on that deck.
And it was where she’d used a pair of bolt cutters to take the collar off Swindapa.

“Mr. Jenkins, bring us two points to starboard, if you please. And trim, by all means.”

“Yes, ma’am.” A turn: “Helm, two points, thus, thus.” The two hands standing on the benchlike platforms beside the double wheels heaved at the spokes with a precise, economical motion, their eyes on the compass binnacle before them.

Jenkins’s speaking-trumpet went up. “Haul starboard, handsomely starboard, there!”

The rafts splashed free ahead of them, and
Eagle
ran forward a half a mile to be out of harm’s way, heaving to broadside-on to the other ships. Alston and Swindapa walked forward on the quarterdeck, down the steep wooden steps to the main deck, and then down a level further. The main gun deck of the
Chamberlain
was a single great room now, an oval space six times longer than it was wide, tapering to the narrow shape of the bows, lit only by the crosshatched light of the grating-hatchcovers above. It smelled of fresh wood still, and underlying that, brimstone, salt water, sweat, and the cooking scents of breakfast. Twelve eight-inch Dahlgrens crouched on either side, shaped like soda bottles and enmeshed in their cradle of carriage, lines, pulleys, and tackle.

Pity we can’t do many rifled guns yet,
Alston thought. Leaton’s Bessemer steel just didn’t have the consistent quality needed for those pressures, though; and the thought of a burst gun on these crowded decks was enough to make her shudder. There were the chasers, and a few rifled siege cannon struck down in the holds for the expeditionary force to use on land, but most of the Republic’s guns were smoothbores. Good ones, at least, modelled on those of the Civil War era.

The gun teams waited, crouching, hands ready; many were stripped to the waist and had kerchiefs tied around their heads as they prepared for the shattering physical effort of serving the guns.

Or stripped to the waist except for bras,
Alston thought; it wasn’t
quite
the same as down there as on the gun deck of the
Constitution
or
Chesapeake
in the War of 1812. One young woman grinned at her for a second, then turned back and spat on her hands as she braced ready.

“Target’s coming on to bear, ma’am,” a middie said from his position near one division of the guns.

“Very well. Out tompions!”

The red-painted wooden plugs at the muzzles of the guns were whipped out.

“Run out your guns!”

A long drumming, squealing thunder of carriages across decks as the crews threw themselves on the ropes and twelve sets of two-ton weight ground across the oaken planking; sunlight pierced the gloom of the gun deck in rectangular shafts as the gunports rose.

“Fire as you bear!”

Alston took two steps up the companionway ladder; that gave her a good view of the target four hundred-odd yards to starboard as well as the gun deck, with the heel of the ship pitching the rail down.

“Time this, ’dapa,” she said, and Lieutenant Commander Swindapa Alston-Kurlelo put on a grave official face and took out her stopwatch.

The gun captain of Number One, Starboard, spun the elevating screw and heaved at the handspike that moved the rear of the gun as the crew hauled likewise on the tackle that moved the muzzle. He glared over the barrel of his charge a final instant, then:

“Clear!”
he bellowed, giving the lanyard of the friction primer a swift, hard jerk.

A long jet of flame-shot smoke lanced out from the
Chamberlain
’s side. Her eye caught the fall of shot exactly, a grooved splash in the surface of the water ten yards short of the target, and then another beyond it as the ball ricocheted like a flung stone.

Not bad,
she thought, smiling a little behind the expressionless mask of her face.
That would have gone aboard a ship, right enough.

The gun captain pivoted like a matador, arching his body over the massive steel bulk of the gun as it leaped backward up the inclined plane of its carriage with an angry squeal of wooden brake shoes. As it stopped, the rest of the crew went into a precisely choreographed dance around it, readying for the next round.

Meanwhile, the other cannon roared as the rippling broadside went down the gun deck, and the choking sulfur-tinted smoke coiled across the deck and turned it into a thing of fog and menacing shapes. More than eight hundred pounds of high-velocity iron lashed the sea around the target with stunning violence, as water gouted all around the target, and fragments of plank whipped skyward amid spray and froth as direct hits stove barrels.

The first gun fired again. “Two minutes ten seconds!” Swindapa shouted into her ear. A good many of the crew had wads of cloth stuffed into both of theirs; enough of this could damage your hearing.

Alston nodded. Seventy seconds to reload; not bad at all. Her eye sought the next target.

“Sail trimmers!” she called, standing back from the stairs.

The crews shrank as one from each gun ran up the ladders to the deck, taking their place in the sailing crew. Another period of shattering sound, the crews’ bodies running with sweat at the physical exertion and the heat the guns were throwing off. The guns were jumping back harder as the steel soaked up heat, and she could hear grunts and harsh panting at the brutal labor of wearing them around. This time, only half the second broadside could bear on the target, and there was a concentrated move for the scuttlebutts—open-topped casks of water secured to the deck—in the short interval between the second and third targets.