Against the Tide of Years (65 page)

Rockets fired from the stumpy second wings on either side of the bullet-shaped body; two, four, spraying forward in paths of red fire and gray smoke. The crews shouted with fear and anger—many of the mercenaries had laid under Tartessian rocket barrages when their homelands were overrun.

At least they won’t simply choke with fear,
Zeurkenol thought.

And then—marvelous, his heart sang!—the attacking aircraft nosed over and hit the water, became sinking debris. A savage cheer went up from the crew, in the instant before the rockets arrived.

One of the rockets twisted away, struck the water and burst in a club shape of spray. Another corkscrewed through the air, running through the rigging of the flagship, but by a whim of the Jester not striking anything. Two hit the ship, up near the bows, in a blast of fire and lethal splinters. There was a crash, and Zeurkenol heard the high screaming of wounded men as he picked himself up and looked about.

The flagship’s skipper was an able man. Well drilled, the crew responded to the fire with water and sand. As he watched, smoke billowed up, and then steam.

He genuflected toward the idol of Arucuttag of the Sea that stood by the compass binnacle; the damage-control teams had caught the fires before they spread to sails and rigging, which would have been certain death for the ship. Then he called out praise to them; they cheered him back.

A quick glance around showed yet more of the craft of the sky attacking his fleet; the air was full of smoke from the counterfire, loud with the crackle of guns, screams, and explosions. One went down burning as he watched, ignited by its own rockets; he sent up a silent promise of a sacrifice to Arucuttag. Another jerked and wobbled in the air; he was close enough to see the man steering it start and slump. By some freak of chance—he felt like beating Arucuttag’s edolion with a stick, or cursing the Jester (neither advisable)—it flew straight on, rising slightly, until it crashed right into the rigging of a ship and exploded in a globe of flame.

Lady, spare us!
That was the
Thunder Walker,
the main ammunition ship for the fleet!

Zeurkenol dove for the deck.

 

“Alston heah,” she said, noting with a corner of her mind that the Gullah accent was creeping back. “ We’re at Quidnet.”

The Cherokee Battalion drew up on the beach.
All twelve jeeps, not counting this command car,
Alston thought. About a platoon’s worth of people in the crews.
Pretentious damned name.

Everything was silence here, save for the ticking of engines; waves crashed gray-blue on the beach, gulls flew, curlews piped.
This would have been illegal before the Event, driving on the beach.
Southward from here was Sconset, where the invaders laired now. At this distance all she could see was smoke, and all she could hear was the distant
pop-pop
of firearms.

“Roger that, Commodore. Major McClintock reports he’s pinned the main enemy advance along Milestone Road east of Gibbs, but they’re feeling for his flanks—so far he’s managed to block them, with
Eagle Eye
’s help. Enemy numbers are well over four thousand and they’re putting more men into the fight, plus he reports mortars and light field artillery. He’s going to try an attack now. Oh, and he says we need more Gatling guns.”

Alston nodded. “Roger. Tell him I’m going to try and ease some of the pressure on him, and I’ll tell Mr. Leaton about the Gatlings tomorrow.” She looked up; the clouds were thickening.
Please. It rains here half the time anyway, why not today?
“What about the
Farragut
? ”

“On schedule so far, Commodore. The other ships will be ready to sail as per.”

“Keep it coming, Sandy. Over.”

“Over, and good luck, Commodore.”

Swindapa was chanting softly as she stood at the grips of the Gatling; there was a curious serenity to her face, a calm that helped Marian control the griping feeling in her stomach.

“ Let’s go.”

With the tide going out, the sand was mostly hard-packed, good enough going for four-wheel-drive vehicles, even with the extra weight. Alston let the commander of the Cherokees take the lead in the first gun-car; he was a tall, lanky ex-ranger of some sort from Oklahoma, who actually
was
part Cherokee and had been over on the mainland for most of the time since the Event. He whooped and waved a hat with a feather stuck in the band as he passed, showing his teeth in what her daddy would have called a shit-eating grin.

“ Watch it, cowboy,” she muttered, as her driver fell in behind him; there were six other gun-jeeps behind
her,
and the others pulling the heavy mortars behind them in turn.

Swindapa’s eyes stayed on the bluff to their right; much of it was covered with scrub, or twisted little Japanese pine stunted by the eternal winds and salt spray. Wisps of her hair escaped the braid and helmet lining, flaring bright when the sun broke through the cloud.

Alston watched her map and the odometer.

“ There!” Swindapa shouted.

She twisted the Gatling to the right, squeezing the trigger. The little electric engine whined, and smoke and flame spurted as Swindapa walked the burst toward what she had seen.

The fire was only a second too late. A line of fire lanced out from the brush fifty yards away, ending on the side of Captain Sander’s jeep. A hollow
boom
followed, and the vehicle blew up in a spectacular globe of fire. The driver of Alston’s car shouted and wrenched the wheel. Alston threw up an arm to shield her face; heat slammed across her like a soft, heavy club, and then they were through. The wheels on the right side thumped down on the wet sand, and more sand rooster-tailed forward as the driver slammed on the brakes.

Braaaappp. Braaaaaaap.
More black-powder smoke, and a shining stream of .40 cartridge cases fountained across her. The other gun-jeeps had opened up as well, muzzle flashes like red knives through the smoke. Alston saw a man jump upright and run, a stream of bullets licking at his heels. He was wearing a pack-frame on his back, loaded with bullet-shaped rockets that had multiple fins at their rear; when the bullets hit him they exploded in a red flash that left a shallow crater in the sand where he had stood.

Another man came up to his knees, a green-bronze cylinder with flared ends over his shoulder. He pointed it at Alston’s gun-jeep; he was only fifteen yards away, close enough for her to see his snarl of concentration. A man behind him flicked an alcohol-wick lighter, touched it to the dangling fuse of a rocket in the tube.

A bazooka,
Alston thought, feeling her mouth start to drop open.
I’m about to be killed by a God-damned sheet-bronze bazooka.

The
braaaaappp,
and a burst walked its way up the sand and into his torso. The tube kicked upward as he convulsed; it fired, and the backwash turned the loader into a shrieking torch that dashed seaward and collapsed in the waves. The rocket soared upward in a long arc and crashed into the water twenty yards offshore.

Riflemen were firing at her. After the rocket launchers, they didn’t seem particularly dangerous—an illusion, but a comforting one. The gun-jeeps raked the inland slope with bursts, shredding the low scrub until the fire stopped, and then some, but no more of the Tartessians appeared.

“Forward,” Alston said. Then she switched frequencies. “Major McClintock, come in. Commodore Alston here.”

The headphones clicked. “McClintock here, over.”

“Major, the enemy have some form of portable rocket launcher. We just ran into an ambush party using them.”

“So did we, ma’am, just now,” McClintock said grimly. “They’re pushing us hard, Commodore.”

“ I’m moving forward to take some of the pressure off, Major,” she said. Something cold struck the back of her hand—a raindrop. Her smile was equally cold. “And I think the Gray Lady is giving us some help at last.”

 

“ Fall back!”

Garrett Hopkins ignored the rifle butt striking his bruised shoulder. The Tartessians were close now.

“And they’re not stopping for shit,” he said aloud. His voice sounded a little tinny and faint in his ears after the battering they’d taken.

The enemy went to ground again; the one-time field of oats was all trampled now, sodden to the point of being muck with the blood that had poured out on it. He’d never realized how
much
blood a human body had in it before.

“ Fall back!”

This time the words penetrated the fog of methodical purpose that filled Hopkins’s brain. He loaded once more and looked around. Off to his right Evelyn fired a last shot, reloaded, braced her shoulders against the rear of her foxhole, and began walking her feet up the side in front of her so that she could wiggle out on her back and then roll over to crawl until the ridge slope protected her.

Now that’s smart,
Hopkins thought.
You don’t have to wave your ass in the air crawling out that way.
He began to do likewise but then heard a distant
shooonk
sound, repeated over and over again.

“Oh, sweet
Jesus,
” he whimpered and collapsed into the hole, hands holding his helmet down. He’d learned what
that
meant today.

The first mortar shell landed ten yards away. Someone screamed on a single high note for a few seconds, then stopped as if the sound had been cut off by a knife. He heard the whistle of the next coming, coming right for his foxhole.

“Oh, shi—”

Blackness.

When he awoke, the pain was there, strong but somehow distant. He blinked for a moment before he realized that it was rain that was striking his face and that he was lying half out of the collapsed foxhole, his legs buried to the knee. A few seconds later he realized that what was soaking him below the waist was blood-his own.

I’m dying,
he thought, looking down at what was left of himself. Somewhere he knew he should be screaming, or fainting, but at that instant it just seemed another fact.
It’s raining. I’m dying.
He knew, in the same abstracted way, that he was very lucky that the shock had hit him this way, and that it wasn’t likely to last.

There was a noise to his right. He rolled his head; that took considerable effort, but he was curious.

Three Tartessians—one had a bandage around his head—were pulling Evelyn Grant out of her foxhole. She was alive, but her face was bloodied and her eyes were wandering with concussion from the near miss. One of the mercenaries raised his head and looked around, then said something in a fast-sounding language.

If Hopkins had been able to understand that remote ancestor of the Berber tongue, he would have heard the mercenary say, “ No officers here—the Tartessian swine is dead.”

The enemy soldiers pulled curved knives out of their belts and began cutting off the Islander’s clothes.
I should do something,
Hopkins thought and moved a hand around. His rifle was gone.

Of course,
he thought.
They overran our position. They took the rifles.
Evelyn had waked up enough to struggle a little, and a Tartessian hit her on the side of the head. Then two of them grabbed her legs and pulled them back until her knees were nearly by her shoulders. The other laughed, kneeling and lifting the hem of his tunic.

“Ah,” Hopkins muttered. “Got this.”

The grenade seemed very heavy, and getting the pin out was difficult. He couldn’t throw it.

He
could
let it roll out of his hand, onto the canvas bandolier of grenades the sergeant had given him this morning. There were still six of them left . . .

 

Alston leveled her binoculars, scanning the Tartessian position and then out to sea.
Eight warships,
she decided; visibility had closed in a little, gray sky over gray ocean. One was out of commission, masts down and firefighters abandoning the ship as she watched. The rest were keeping station, wearing into the strengthening north wind; they’d have to drop anchor or move off, if it got any stronger. There were twenty-five or so transports, some beached. The rest
were
anchored, and making heavy weather of it as the wind picked up.

Ashore . . . hundreds of men, on the beach or moving inland; some tents set up, probably headquarters, stores, and hospital, and a couple of temporary plank roads laid over the sand and up into Sconset itself, with traffic heavy. An artillery park, swarming with effort now, trying to bring some of the guns there to bear on her.

“Here,” she said, and the gun-jeeps ahead of her fanned out, jouncing up the low slope to her right until a line of them commanded the ground between the ocean and Sesachacha Pond with interlocking fields of fire. Behind them the mortar haulers and unmodified models pulling tire-wheeled carts full of ammunition halted as well.

Their commander—commander of this whole force now that Sanders was toast—trotted up to the side of Alston’s vehicle. Marian offered him a hand, and Captain Stavrand climbed up to stand beside her—a pale young man with large post-Event glasses in wire frames secured by a strap behind his close-cropped white-blond head.

“ What a target, ma’am!” he said.

“Well, that’s why we’re here,” Alston said with cold satisfaction. “ Your heavy mortars outrange anything they’ve got on shore, and the Gatlings should be able to keep their infantry off. They can’t beat up northward in this wind, so you’re safe from their warships; and unless they can walk on water, they can’t get over Sesachacha Pond. If they try to embark men in launches and row up to flank you . . . well, the mortars will work in that direction too.”

“ We can handle it from here, ma’am,” he said confidently.

Alston might have smiled at the unspoken subtext:
So will you go away and let me do my job?
Under other circumstances, of course. Right now she simply nodded and looked over the Tartessian ships once more.