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"One minute fifteen seconds for our first gun to repeat," Swindapa said.
That was excellent time, far better than the enemy was managing; they had heavy crews but not the long practice that gave speed and accuracy.
A gun that fires twice as fast is as good as two, she thought.
The lines of ships were less than a thousand yards apart now, ca
Only part of her attention was necessary for the business of the moment, the long waiting as the fleets ran together and hammered each other as they came. Part of her was spectator; part remembering-do Jesus, there are a lot of things I want to live to do again…
Watch an iceberg heel in the Roaring Forties, as the surf of a storm lashing around the planet broke on it in waves mountain-high, seething gray and white and green. Sea-turtles crawling up a Caribbean beach turned silver under the full moon, looking like an endless field of living boulders; or a sky-full of condors over the towering painted pyramid of Sechin Alto in Peru. Hear wolves howling in the Berkshire hills on a hunting trip, with night falling and the rich yeasty smell of damp autumn leaves. Smell the clean milky scent of a baby and watch its broad toothless idiot smile as it reached for her… Heather and Lucy's kids. Take the pan out of the oven and feel the earthy joy of knowing she'd made a really perfect beaten biscuit. Sit in front of a fire at home with Swindapa on a winter's night, hearing the snow beat feather-paws against the windows, their arms around each other's shoulders and a book of Flecker propped open on their knees.
Crack. There was a cold shock in the small of her back, cold fire scoring across her flank. She spun, staggered, put a hand to her right side below the last rib. Hot wetness and torn cloth. Breath hissed out between her teeth.
Swindapa grabbed her, pushed her into the shelter of the helm barricade, knelt. A rip of cloth and cold air hit the wound.
"It needs stitches," she said.
"Can't take the time," she said, and craned her head to look. A line of red… not too deep, mostly in the thin layer of subcutaneous fat, not clipping the fibers of the muscle much…
"Bandage it," she said. "That'll have to do. No time for anything else and stitches would just rip out if I have to move."
The pain had begun, and the fire turned hot as the antiseptic powder went into the wound. A lot easier than havin' a baby, she told herself. Her partner wound the bandage around her waist like a sash, tying it off tight to hold the pad over the torn flesh, then tugging the jacket down over it again. She walked out, testing herself-not much loss of function just yet.
Damn, I'm getting' to be held together by bandages. There were two priceless pre-Event elastic ones on her knees as a precaution against extension injuries.
"Flesh wound," she said to Oxton's worried glance.
A ball gouged a cut out of the mainmast, neat as a cookie cutter, except that a cookie cutter would not have left a dozen sailors down with splinters through thighs and bellies and chests. No more than a hundred yards now, an endless bellowing roar, smoke stinking of burned sulfur, the copper-iron metallic taint of blood, shot crashing home like the tattoo of hail on a roof magnified to Brobdingagian size.
The two lines of battle were at their death-grapple, ton-weights of iron flung back and forth to smash metal and wood and human flesh in a chaos of fallen spars and sails and cordage like the nets of giant spiders. Through the gunsmoke she could see the two foremost Tartessian vessels. The forward one was a shambles, several gunports beaten into one, her forward mast gone above the top, blood ru
"Ready," she said. "Two broadsides with grape and then board the leader in the smoke. Ensign Glidden. The signal now, please."
The young officer loaded his flare pistol and raised it. Fu-dump. The shell arched skyward and burst with a pop, bright crimson against the blue sky. She turned her binoculars to starboard, saw the answering blossom of sail among the transports, nodded satisfaction.
That was also the signal to the rest of the fleet, and to their own gu
Then the Gatlings in the tops opened up, two plunging fire right into the crowded deck below, another raking the enemy's tops and the riflemen and swivel guns there. A dying hand triggered one of the swivels, and some malignant chance put the one-pound shot into the barrels of the foretop Gatling and turned them into twisted wreckage.
"Ready at the helm-order will be to port the helm, hard a'port," Oxton said in a quarterdeck bellow, trained to cut through the roar of white noise. "Boarders to your stations, crews ready to follow. Starbolines to board at the peak, larbolines at the quarterdeck." In a more normal voice: "Perhaps I should lead the quarterdeck boarding party, ma'am?"
"By no means, Mr. Oxton," Alston said, gri
The companionways up from the gun deck grew crowded as the boarders ran from their stations by the guns. Swindapa came back, a pre-Event pump-action shotgun in either hand. She handed one to Alston, together with a bandolier of new Seahaven-made cartridges.
"The schooners report they're having trouble keeping the galleys back," she said soberly. "Douglass is badly damaged and the Tubman is sinking. They'll buy us all the time they can."
Alston nodded. Grief was a luxury she couldn't afford right now, any more than she could pay attention to physical pain. Closer, and the leading enemy ship's gunfire had fallen off, a slow halting drumroll now. The Chamberlain's crew fired two more broadsides, but these had a malignant multiple wasp-buzz under the thunder of discharge-thousands of marble-sized iron balls blasting through the ten yards left between the ships, aimed slightly upward to sweep the decks already savaged by the Gatlings. You could pack a lot of grapeshot into the maw of an eight-inch gun…