Against the Tide of Years (3 page)

It all sort of reminded him of Southwestern style, Pueblo-Spanish, like the old Governor’s palace in Santa Fe but gaudier. He’d been raised on a ranch in the Bitterroot country of Montana, but he’d been down that way competing in junior rodeos. It was a little gloomy, since most of the light came through the roof or from the antechamber at one end, but his followers were already putting up oil lamps. The local olive-squeezings weren’t as bright as whale oil, but the still should be operational in a couple of days. Alcohol gave a nice bright light, when you knew enough to use a woven wick and a glass chimney.

Guards stood by the entranceway of bronze-bound wood, his own men from Alba. They wore equipment he’d made up there before the war, iron chain-mail hauberks and conical iron helmets with nasals; they carried steel-headed spears and round shields blazoned with his device, a wolfshead.

Another came and bowed his head, his helmet tucked under one arm. His blond hair was cropped at his ears like Walker’s, and he sported a close-trimmed yellow beard.

“Wehaxpothis,”
he said—“Lord” in the tongue spoken by the Iraiina tribe in remote northwestern Europe, or “chief of he clan.” “The men are settled and we are unpacking the goods. The
rahax
here has sent slaves, with many loads of fine things—cloth, and furniture. The Lady Hong and the Lady Ekhnonpa your wives are directing them.”

“Good, Ohotolarix,” Walker said. “That’s
Wannax
Agamemnon, by the way. You and the others will have to learn Achaean, and quickly. It is needful.”

It shouldn’t be too difficult, either. The proto-whatever that Ohotolarix’s people spoke was only about as different from this archaic Greek as French was from Italian.

“And your handfast man Bill Cuddy wishes to speak with you on the setting up of his
lathes
and of Martins’s
forge,
” the young guard-captain went on.

He managed the English words well; the twenty Americans among Walker’s followers still used the language a fair bit, though he doubted their grandchildren would.
Probably there’ll be a lot of loan words.
Even the civilized languages here lacked a lot of concepts.

“Let’s go,” Walker said, settling the
katana
and pistol at this belt. “We’ll put in a forge, but the rest of the machinery’s going down to Sparta. Oh, and get Alice.”

Alice Hong was a doctor; he’d need to see to sanitation and water supply with her, here and at their other locations. Bad water was
dangerous.
He’d nearly crapped himself to death more than once since the Event. And she could get a start on modernizing the royal textile plant, too. The palace had hundreds of slave women spinning and weaving, but he had models and drawings for spinning jennies and kickpedal looms with flying shuttles; back in Alba they’d gotten them working well. After a lot of experiment, but it was all basic Early Industrial stuff, well within the capacities of a local carpenter. The machines would free up a lot of labor for other work and make the king properly grateful for all the extra wealth.

Hmmm,
he wondered,
how long before we give the King of Men the heave-ho?

Not for quite a while, he decided reluctantly. He’d have to thoroughly understand the politics here and make some allies first.

Walker laughed aloud and slapped his henchman on the shoulder. “Let’s get to work,” he said. “I want to be
ready
before we meet my old skipper again.”

Ohotolarix was a hardy man, born to a warrior people. Nevertheless, he shivered slightly at the sound of his lord’s laughter.

 

“
Got
it,” Lieutenant Vicki Cofflin said, giving the bolt a final turn.

The new carburetor stood out against the pre-Event machining of the aircraft engine. It looked . . . clunkier, somehow.
Just make it easy to replace, make a couple of dozen, and switch as they wear out.

She wiped her hands on a rag and then turned to Ronald Leaton. “You want to do the honors, Ron?”

The tall, lanky engineer shook his head, stepping back. “It’s a Coast Guard project,” he said. “Seahaven’s just the prime contractor. All yours, Lieutenant.”

Vicki nodded. “All right, then,”

She took a deep breath. The converted hangar near Nantucket’s little airport was always cluttered, with parts and workbenches and machine tools. Right now it was even more so, with a big bag of gold-beater’s skin—scraped whale intestine—hanging from the ceiling. A tube ran down from that to the Cessna engine mounted on a timber framework in the middle of the concrete floor. The rest of the team gathered around, in stained blue Coast Guard coveralls or the equally greasy unbleached gray cotton that Seahaven Engineering favored. The hangar smelled of hot whale-oil lubricant, and other things less familiar these days—gasoline fumes and a faint, nose-rasping hint of ozone.

Another deep breath, and she pushed the ignition button. The engine coughed, sputtered, blatted . . . and then settled down to a steady roar. Some of the watchers covered their ears, unused to something Nantucket had heard little of since the Event—an internal combustion engine at full throttle.

“Great!” Vicki shouted. “Let’s take her up and down, and vary the mix. Stand by!”

The engine snarled, coughed again as the mixture of hydrogen from the gasbag and methanol altered.
Four hundred fifty horsepower, or thereabouts.
About what it had put out in its first incarnation as half the engines on a Cessna puddle jumper.

“Get that adjusted!” Vicki said. The tests continued, sweating-hot work on a summer’s day, until at last she tripped the switch and wiped her hands again, smiling fondly as the engine sputtered into silence.

“Damn, you know, I think this is going to work,” she said.

“No reason why it shouldn’t,” Leaton said. “Methanol, hydrogen, gasoline—it’s all an inflammable gas by the time it reaches the piston.”

Vicki chuckled indulgently; she was twenty-seven, nearly two decades younger than Leaton, and she still felt motherly toward him sometimes. One reason was the otherworldly way he had of forgetting
everything
but the task at hand.

“I meant the whole
Emancipator
program, not just the engine,” she said.

“Oh. Oh, yes, that too. All right, people, break for lunch!”

He and Vicki and a young man in Guard fatigues walked over to a sloping table by the concrete-block wall. Plans were pinned to it, showing a tapering teardrop shape five hundred feet long and a hundred and ten wide at its broadest point, with a cruciform set of fins at the rear that looked like, and were, wings from light aircraft. Along the bottom of the forward one-third was a gondola curving down from the hull, with three engines in pods mounted along either side of it. Those looked like cut-down sections of aircraft wing too, and were.

“Never thought I’d be piloting a
dirigible,
of all things,” she muttered to herself, feeling a rush of excitement. It would be her first command in the Guard, period, unless you counted a harbor tug.
If I get it,
she thought. That hadn’t been decided yet.

The younger man—his name was Alex Stoddard, a fourth cousin once removed of the Chief’s wife—looked up from examining the blueprints.

“If you don’t mind me asking, Lieutenant Cofflin, what
did
you think you’d be piloting?” he said.

“F-16s,” she said. “I was going to go to Colorado Springs, the year the Event happened.” At his blank look, she went on: “The Air Force Academy, in Colorado. Up in the twentieth.”

“Oh,” he nodded, polite but somehow . . .
not indifferent. Just as if I was talking about flying to the moon. Real, but not
really
real.

It was amazing what an effect it had—exactly how old you’d been at the Event. Even a couple of years, and the outlook was entirely different.

I was on the cusp,
she thought.
Eighteen. Not quite an adult but not a kid either.
Alex had been sixteen on that memorable day; not a
little
kid, she judged, but unambiguously a
kid.
He had grown up in a world where steam engines were high tech, and schooners and flintlocks everyday realities. He probably didn’t get that occasional feeling of alienation, as if a glass wall had dropped between him and the world.

Vicki ran a hand over her close-cropped reddish-brown hair and turned her attention back to the drawings. The frame of the airship was made up of two long strips that curled from bow to stern, crisscrossing each other in an endless series of elongated diamonds like a stretched-out geodesic dome. Inside that framework was a series of strengthening rings, each braced with spokes reaching in to a central metal hub.

“That wire’s the only metal,” Leaton said, his finger tapping a horizontal view of one of the rings. “Everything else is laminated birchwood and balsa and wicker.” He cleared his throat. “Only steel, rather. The clamps will have to be aluminum.”

Everyone winced slightly. The Republic’s new industries, here on the Island and the mainland and Alba, could turn out steel of a sort, iron, copper, bronze, and brass, but aluminum had to come from pre-Event stockpiles. Leaton had a plan for a small hydropower plant on the mainland to convert Jamaican bauxite; the only unworkable thing about it was it would take the entire national labor force ten years to get it going, in which time they’d all starve to death. Like so much else, it would simply have to wait a generation, or two or three.

“Good thing we can get the engines burning that liquid fuel-hydrogen mix,” Alex said.

“Ayup,” Leaton replied.

Vicki nodded. That way, the reduction in lift would precisely match the lesser weight as the methanol or gasoline or whatever burned, meaning you wouldn’t have to dump gallast or valve gas, which extended range. So did the middle cell of the five cylindrical gasbags inside the hull. The forward and the rear two would be inflated with hydrogen, cracked out of water with a portable generator wherever the airship was based, to give the ship pretty well neutral buoyancy. The middle one was a hot-air balloon.
That
would provide the variable lift, again reducing the need to dump water ballast or release precious hydrogen to rise or fall.

Leaton rested one hand on Vicki’s shoulder and the other on the younger Guard officer’s. “Damned fine piece of work, if I say so myself—couldn’t have done it without you. It’s going to work.” He cleared his throat again; it was a gesture of his, like knocking on wood. “Once we’ve got the bugs out of it, of course.”

“Of course,” Vicki said dryly. Then she snorted. “Commodore Alston was . . . impressed . . . too, when she saw the plans on Monday.”

“She was?” Leaton said, brightening; Alex looked eager as well. “What did she say?”

“She said . . .” Vicki stretched her Yankee vowels to try and match the sea-island Gullah of the Republic’s military leader.
“Do Jesus, ah’m glaaayd ah ain’ goin’ up on that -theah!”

They shared a laugh. “Got to go,” Leaton said. “Washington Street Mills is having problems with their new powerloom, and if they don’t get it fixed the Commodore will flay me—they’ve got a big sailcloth order in for the new frigates.”

The two Guard officers took their boxed lunches and bottles of sassafras tea to a bench outside. It was a warm day, for springtime in Nantucket—seventy-two degrees, according to the thermometer—and the wind in from the south smelled of turned earth from the spring plowing, a rich, not unpleasant odor of fertilizer, and a tang of sea salt under that. The airport no longer looked abandoned, what with the new projects; one huge shed was going up, the frames like giant croquet hoops spanning a stretch of unused runway that furnished a ready-made floor. Besides that, the scout balloon hung high overhead, looking like a miniature inflated version of the
Emancipator
’s plans with a two-person gondola slung underneath, toy-tiny at the top of a thousand feet of cable.

An ultralight was going up too, wheeled out of a hangar with ground crew hanging on to the wingtips as they wrestled it around to face into the wind. The fuselage below was a one-person plywood teardrop, with a little lawn mower-style engine and a ducted-fan propeller behind; stubby pylons extended on either side, bearing a brace of black-powder rockets.

Jesus, I hate those things,
Vicki thought. The electric ignition system for the rockets was
. . . not very sophisticated
—that was a nice, tactful way to put it.

“You know,” Alex said meditatively after a while, “I’m a little surprised that the
Emancipator
got approved. I mean, it’ll be
useful,
having something that can scout way around and carry light cargo—and I’m damned glad I’m getting an opportunity to fly—but is it cost-effective?”

“Not here,” Vicki said gently. “Not on the Island.”

“Not—oh.”

The younger officer nodded. Vicki Cofflin was the daughter of one of the Chief’s sisters, a much closer connection than his to the Secretary of the Council.

“Well, let’s get back to work,” she said. “Don’t you love being on the cutting edge of technical progress?”

“Damned right,” Alex said, nodding.

Jesus,
Vicki thought, as she followed him back into the hanger.
I thought I was joking.

 

 

R
anger Peter Girenas grunted as he lifted the gutted whitetail from the packhorse’s back and brought it to a nearby cache-tree. Two other deer hung from the white-oak branch already, and he quickly ran the dangling leather cord through a slit between the bone and tendon of this carcass’s hind legs.

With one hand braced against the flank, he jerked the crossbow bolt free. Easier than digging out a bullet, and cheaper—it was only in the last couple of years that ammunition had gotten cheap enough to use for hunting.