Against the Tide of Years (67 page)

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 range 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.

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.

Sotto voce she muttered, “We could have had another frigate for the price of this place.”

He nodded, more an acknowledgment of what she’d said than agreement. They’d needed a new place for the Town Meeting, too.

Especially today. There were going on three thousand crowded in here, jammed onto benches that normally seated around two-thirds that, and sitting in the aisles as well. The rustle and murmur filled the shadows under the great beams of the roof, and there was a faint tang of animal rage in their scent.

Prelate Gomez walked to the podium and said a brief prayer. That got them quiet, and he went on, “ Now we will have a minute of silence for those who fell defending their homes, families, and children.”

Silence absolute and complete, except for a quickly hushed baby or two. Ninety-seven people had died during the long day of invasion, heavy losses for a community their size. That over a thousand Tartessians and their mercenaries had also died was very little consolation.

“O Lord God, let Thy wisdom descend on this gathering today, as Your Holy Spirit descended upon the apostles. Let us deliberate with that wisdom, and with humility and lovingkindness; banish fear and hatred from our hearts, that we may seek only what is best and pleasing in Thy sight. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.”

Amen,
Cofflin thought, as the same murmur ran through the citizens packed on the benches.
But I’d bet we’re going to have a fair bit of hate and fear here today.

He gave the stout little Portuguese American cleric a nod as they passed. Even if he hadn’t liked the man, he’d have made an effort to be polite. In theory the constitution mandated a strict separation of church and state. In practice, with about nine-tenths of the believers in a single denomination, its head necessarily had substantial influence. Believers in God, that was, and not counting followers of Moon Woman and Diawas Pithair.

“Citizens of the Republic,” he began. “The first item on the Warrant is a declaration of war against the Kingdoms of Tartessos and Mycenae and any allies they may have. Is the wish of the Sovereign People that a state of war exist between those two kingdoms and the Republic of Nantucket? ”

The answer was a storming wall of sound that made him wish he could flatten his ears like a horse, or at least take a step backward. He let it run its course, waiting until it was dying of its own accord before raising a hand.

“ Passed by acclamation,” he said.

And that’ll make a number of things simpler,
he thought. The constitution also gave the chief executive officer a good deal more authority in wartime; he could mobilize the militia, for instance; commandeer ships and other property for another.