Down to the Sea (31 page)

Bullfinch settled back slightly. His features were still red, though, so that it looked like he was barely containing his temper.

“You better pray for war, Lieutenant,” he said, his voice low, “and pray damn hard, because if it doesn’t come, I’ll have you shoveling shit in the most godforsaken outpost I can find, and remember, sir, you owe the Republic eight years service for your education, so you can’t resign and get away from me.”

“Sir, I will pray for exactly that to happen. I’d rather shovel shit for the next eight years than see my comrades blown out of the water.”

Bullfinch, taken aback by the reply, looked at him with obvious surprise, and Richard decided to press in.

“And they will be blown out of the water, Admiral, if we go at them in a ship-of-the-line fight, trading broadsides at three thousand yards. As I told you before, the
Gettysburg
lasted barely ten minutes against one of their lightest ships. You asked for an opinion, sir, and that is it, and it is the opinion of the president and the Naval Design Board as well.”

There was the slightest flicker of a smile on Bullfinch’s face, but his gaze was still hard, features red.

“Damn you, Cromwell,” he said. “At least I’ll say this, unlike your father, you have some guts.”

Richard sensed his control slipping. He lowered his eyes, and that triggered even more anger within, knowing that Bullfinch would see the action as a backing down.

“Sir.” He took a deep breath, struggling to maintain his composure. “The issue here is my report and the response from Suzdal. I’d prefer if any allegations you might have about my father remain outside this conversation.”

Bullfinch blinked and, if possible, his features reddened to the point that it seemed as if he would explode. He exhaled noisily and then sat back.

“I’ll be damned if a lieutenant tells me what I can and cannot discuss in my own office.”

“As a commander in the service of the Republic,” he replied, unable to contain being called lieutenant one more time, “I believe I have every right to object to a personal insult, sir, as long as that objection is done in a professional manner.”

Bullfinch reached up, rubbing the ugly scars that creased his right cheek and forehead. “I’ll be damned, sir. Now you are quoting the rules of the service to me, no less.”

Richard was tempted to add that Bullfinch had helped to write them, but he was back in control of himself again. Getting into a shouting match with an admiral at a time like this served no useful purpose, either to the navy or to himself, or to the memory of his father, a man whom he had never even known.

Bullfinch cleared his throat, opened the topmost envelope on his desk, and slowly read through the first few pages.

He finally looked back up, acting as if Cromwell had not been standing there waiting patiently for him to continue.

“Insane,” Bullfinch sighed, and he almost seemed to collapse as if all wind had been taken out of his sails. “This whole thing is insane.”

Richard remained silent.

“Do you know what they are ordering us to do?”

- “No, sir, not officially, but I had a sense of it. I attended three meetings with the president and two with the Design Board before being detailed back here.”

“And you actually saw these ships, these Kazan battleships, as they are called here?”

“Yes, sir. Eight of them were anchored in the harbor at Kazan, as was most of the rest of the emperor’s fleet.”

“I hope to God you weren’t behind the mad scheme to tear
Shiloh
and her sister ships apart, because if so, orders or no orders”—he tapped the papers on his desk—“you will most definitely be handed that shit shovel before you get out of this office.”

“No, sir. I was at the meeting at the dockyard when Professor Ferguson raised the subject.”

“Did you influence that woman at all?”

Richard hesitated. “Sir, she asked my opinion, sir.”

“And that was?”

“
Shiloh
would go to the bottom inside of ten minutes once their battleships got within range. If we had thirty, forty ships like
Shiloh
, maybe enough would survive to close in and make a kill, but twenty thousand men under your command would die doing it.”

Bullfinch looked back at the papers, picked them up, and riffled through them again.

“I’ll say this at least,” he announced slowly, “she has saved our asses more than once.” He looked up again at Cromwell. “You didn’t know her husband. I did. He was a damn good friend, even if he was strange. His mind always seemed to be off somewhere else even when you talked with him. But good God, when you got into things technical, he just exploded with ideas and plans that, damn me, always seemed to work. If he hadn’t disobeyed Andrew with that rocket scheme, we’d have lost the war at Hispania, and that’s a fact.” He smiled wistfully, the tension gone for a moment as he remembered things past.

“Varinnia was a real beauty, she was, tragic what happened in that fire. But maybe it was a blessing for us all. Ferguson had the strength and moral character few men have to look beyond the flesh, to see and discover a mind as brilliant as his own beneath. No, perhaps even more brilliant because she was a perfect match, a mind that could organize and bring to completion all his mad schemes.

“And when he died, Lord, how we were terrified. He’d always been our ace up the sleeve. But he had unleashed something within her. In those last months when he knew he was dying, he crammed in years of training, and after he was gone she took off like a blazing comet. She was able to find others like herself, train them, point them in the right direction, and let them loose.”

He sighed again and then seemed to be embarrassed with his mental wandering. “Still, even if it came straight from her, I’d tell her right to her face that this time she is out of control. She’s trying to do in days what should take months. Hell, that inane decking on
Shiloh
will raise the center of gravity a good three feet. The ship will be so top-heavy she’ll roll in the first good gale.”

“She knows that, sir, and the response is, don’t sail into a gale.”

Bullfinch laughed. “In another month the cyclones start.”

“In a cyclone even our best armored cruisers have gone under.”

The admiral slammed an open palm on the papers. “The president orders and I obey, but by heavens, Andrew Lawrence Keane was an infantry officer before he became president. He and that Design Board, and even the damned secretary of the navy, who couldn’t figure out which railing to piss over when the wind is up, don’t know what it is to fight a battle at sea, and I do.”

“Sir, that was conveyed to me quite clearly by the president just before I left. What you have in those files”— Cromwell pointed at the papers on the desk—“are undoubtedly recommendations and proposals for ship changes, transfers of command such as the air corps, and overall strategic suggestions. The president told me to inform you that you have his full confidence, and how the battle is to be fought is under your control, not his.”

“Well, thank you very much, Cromwell,” Bullfinch responded, his voice edged with sarcasm. “I was beginning to think that-all I was supposed to do is push these papers around and sit behind this desk.”

Richard did not reply, but even a blind man could have seen that there was more that he wanted to say.

“Go on, out with it,” Bullfinch growled.

“Sir, when I first came in here, you asked for my opinion.”

“And now you’re going to give it.”

“With your permission.”

“Then do it, damn you.”

He stepped closer, trying to assume a more relaxed position, eyes not fixed on Bullfinch, but instead on one of the papers scattered about the desk: a sketch of a Kazan battleship. He pointed at the drawing.

“Sir, what is coming at us is unlike anything we ever imagined in our worst nightmares. For the last fifteen years the Kazan have deceived us. The ships they assigned to patrol their outer waters were derelict wrecks from fifty years past. All the time they were watching, observing, gathering information while they fought amongst themselves to settle their own differences.”

“Wish the hell they’d slaughtered one another.”

“The paradox is that the fighting amongst themselves created the threat that exists now. Their fleet has a generation of battle experience behind it.

“I regret having to say this, but we must assume that Lieutenant O’Donald has told them everything he knows about us, technical and political. The Kazan will come armed with that knowledge.”

“And these Shiv?” Bullfinch asked.

Cromwell visibly shuddered. “Terrifying, sir. They view us the same way a tiger would look at a kitten. They’ve been bred for two hundred years by the Order. Why the emperor tolerates the Order’s existence is beyond me, other than the fact that he must fear them and their power.

“That, sir, is part of the reason for this war. I suspect it is an excuse to divert the emperor.”

“But you told me that their leader, Hazard . .

“Hazin, sir.”

“This Hazin is cunning.”

Richard nodded. “The most cunning mind I have ever met.”

Bullfinch looked at him closely. “I sense an admiration in you, Cromwell.”

Richard reluctantly nodded. “I must confess I was intrigued. I thought he would be like a leader of the Hordes. I was a slave, sir, for the first six years of my life. I remember their cruelty, their rage. Hazin was educated, with knowledge that is beyond us. He could cite ancient poets and philosophers, then ever so subtly shift, pulling out your most hidden thoughts. He is a match for the emperor. In fact, I believe that before this is done, the emperor will be dead and Hazin will control all.”

“You liked him, didn’t you?”

Richard lowered his eyes. “He is our enemy.”

“But personally?”

Richard looked Bullfinch straight in the eye. “No sir, he is our enemy.”

Long ago he had learned to read lies, to catch the ever so subtle shift in voice, the momentary flicker in the eyes and tensing of features. It came from searching the faces of his cruel childhood masters. He wondered if Bullfinch could read that now.

Yes, he did like Hazin, and in a different world he might consider him a friend, no matter how loathsome his dreams, morality, and obsession with power. He had never met a mind like his, or a personality that could be so frightfully engaging and controlling.

He knew Hazin had seduced him, had seen him as but one more pawn in a game of power. And yet it was Hazin who had granted him his life.

Bullfinch nodded. “That is all, Lieuten—Commander Cromwell.”

“Yes, sir.” He stiffened to attention.

“Your own personal orders I assume the president told you.”

“Yes, sir, he did. He said I was the most qualified to lead the section, though he preferred that I accept a staff assignment with you instead.”

“My staff?” Bullfinch laughed. “Hardly likely.”

“I assumed you would prefer it this way, sir.”

“You at least guessed right on that one, Cromwell. We have a million square miles of ocean to watch. As the air corps moves down here, you will serve as liaison to them and for training. You’ll do more flying in the next month than you did in the last four years. Try not to get yourself killed doing it, Cromwell.”

“I plan to be here for the fight, sir.”

Bullfinch shook his head. “What we have here,” he sighed, pointing at the papers and then looking back up, “scares the living hell out of me, Cromwell. I hope my threat to send you on that shit-shoveling detail comes to pass, for all our sakes.”

“I hope so, too, Admiral, but I can tell you, unless we pull off a miracle, we’ll all be in hell before you can hand that shovel to me.”

“Lieutenant Keane, over here!”

Abe urged his exhausted mount to a loping gallop, leaning forward in the saddle as they zigzagged up the face of a low butte, following an ancient mammoth trail. Sergeant Togo, the troop’s lead scout, was crouched low on the crest, horse concealed just below the lip of the rise, and Abe swung out of his saddle, slipped to the ground, and took the precaution of unslinging his carbine and bringing it along. As he scrambled up the last few feet of rocky ground, the scout extended his hand, motioning for him to keep low.

He crawled up over the edge of the rise.

“Careful, sir, don’t kick up any dust.”

The sergeant pointed over at the next butte a couple of miles to the east.

Abe raised his field glasses and within seconds spotted more than a dozen Bantags, dismounted at the base of the butte, watering their mounts along the far banks of a muddy stream. They were out in the open, clearly visible, one of them carrying a red pennant, signifying a commander of a thousand.

The low summer grass covering the open ground between the butte and the stream was burnt brown with the heat, and crisscrossed with hundreds of tracks, crushed flat in some spaces across the width of a hundred yards or more.

“We’re on a main column here,” the sergeant announced. “Hard to tell at this distance, but the mounts look dun-colored, Betalga’s clan. Damn, he is one mean bastard.”

“Wish we had a flyer,” Abe sighed. “I haven’t seen or heard one all day.”

“A million square miles and twenty-four flyers.” The sergeant shook his head.

“Look at the water and the far bank, sir.”

Abe carefully looked at the ground, which shimmered in the summer heat, not sure for a moment what he was looking for. Then he realized that the river above the crossing was still fairly clear, while for several miles below it, the water was churned a dark, muddy brown. The far bank looked wet, rutted with deep tracks.

“They’ve crossed here.”

“Thousands of them. I bet the tail end of their column of yurts isn’t a mile or more around that next butte. Remember, we crossed that same ford coming back.”

Abe wasn’t sure if he remembered and said nothing. “This group was camped north of where we were. They’re swinging in behind Jurak’s main column, covering his withdrawal.”

Abe looked back down over the side of the butte he had just climbed. Five companies of the 3rd Cavalry were strung out in columns, weaving their way up a dried ravine. In the lead troop, his unit, the men had dismounted, a few relieving themselves, others sprawling on the ground, munching on hardtack, drinking cold coffee from canteens while Togo scouted forward.