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The circle of officers nodded, silent for a second. Marian felt her soul wince slightly, remembering the rowers screaming as the steel-plated bows of the steam ram crashed into the side of a galley and rode it under in a single wallowing rush. The severed halves had each risen like broken pencils sticking out of the ocean for a moment before they plunged, and in the same instant the ram caught another of the lightly built craft with charges of canister, leaving her riddled and sinking in water that turned red…
If it hadn't been for one making a suicide run to fire its Dahlgrens into the port paddle wheels, not a single Tartessian galley would have escaped. She also remembered the sheer enormous feeling of relief as a tactical draw and strategic defeat turned into an unambiguous victory.
Mmm-hmmm, she mused. As it is, they got most of their galleys back, and four of their sail warcraft. Must have lost better than fifteen hundred men killed and wounded, though, and we took a thousand prisoners. That's got to hurt.
The Islander losses had been a little over a tenth of that number, and they certainly hurt… And we took all those ca
"Well, there's no reason for the enemy to know that Farraguts out of commission for a while," she said meditatively. "We'll set up manual pumps… no, by God, what we'll do is put one of the stationary engines on a raft and float it out. Ms. Kurlelo-Alston, see to it." Swindapa nodded and made a note on her clipboard.
"The engines are coming ashore later today. Commodore," the blond officer said, using the clipboard to point eastward. "Captain Trudeau, I'll have to borrow your chief engineer?"
"Gladly, Ms. Kurlelo-Alston," he said.
The five surviving frigates were anchored as well; working parties were swarming over them, setting up masts and rigging from the stores-ships, repairing the upperworks, pumping hard; they'd haul them ashore one at a time to do permanent patches on the holes below the waterline, and in a week or so they'd be good as new. There were five schooners as well, but two of them would need extensive overhauls out of the water.
"Captain Galen, you'll take Sherman up to La Coruna and escort the Merrimac and the collier south," she said, picking the commander of the least damaged large warship. "On the next tide; transfer powder and shot from the other frigates' magazines to save time, and enough people to bring you up to full complement. We can keep a schooner on picket duty off Tartessos, and ultralights of course. Mr. Haddon."
The commander of the transports stepped forward and saluted, looking a little self-conscious. He was a reservist, a stocky man in his mid-forties with a gray-shot beard, a yachtsman before the Event and a merchant skipper on the Baltic run in peacetime. He'd brought his ship in to relieve the Chamberlain without a moment's hesitation, though.
"Ma'am?"
She returned the gesture. "Mr. Haddon, as soon as the troops and stores are disembarked, I want the troop-transports to make sail for home; except for four-all over two hundred and fifty tons-who'll be dispatched to Westhaven for another supply run. How soon?"
"Ah… two days, ma'am. We're really very well found now, for the most part. Four ships… that's more than enough."
The old custom of Marque and Reprisal had been revived with a vengeance for this war, and wherever Islander merchantmen met Tartessian, they fought. There weren't any major enemy warships abroad, though, so four big Nantucketer ships ought to be fairly safe.
"Good." She tapped two fingers on her chin; putting hands behind her back hurt, given the wounds she'd picked up. Let's see…
In her birth-century and for a mille
Now it was an instant town of thousands, streets of tents and open squares piled high with supplies. Some of the tents were huge-the field hospital had gone up first, complete with pre-fabricated board floors. Thousands labored, digging ditches and pit-latrines, throwing up the ramparts of earth-and-timber forts, and a steep berm and ditch around the whole camp. Others were setting up the drill that would punch deep tube wells as soon as the engine came ashore. A pontoon wharf extending out into the harbor was nearly ready, and when it was the freighters could unload directly onto handcarts and wagons; the first heavy cargo to come ashore would be steam-haulers. Off to the west she could hear the dull heavy thudump! of a blasting charge, shattering rock to be used to gravel the roadways, and out on the narrow cha
Alston turned her gaze to the captured Tartessian ships. Two of them were beached, drawn up ashore on the sandy mud to keep them from sinking. The others were serving as floating POW pens, their own surviving crews repairing superficial damage and working the pumps under guard until something more regular could be arranged.
"What's the status on those?" she asked.
Swindapa flipped two pages on her clipboard, but she was speaking before her eyes hit the print. "The two we ran ashore are… shattered was the word CPO Zelukelo used. The others are essentially sound, but they'll all need to be hauled up for work on their hulls before they're fully functional again."
She looked up. "Really very good ships-well built, fine seasoned wood. Composite masts, though-bound with heat-shrunk iron hoops."
The Republic used single trunks for masts, but it had access to the white pine of New England. Swindapa went on:
"We have forty-eight Dahlgrens from them, cold-core cast steel work. The armory marks read Walkeropolis and Neayoruk, which fits with the Foreign Affairs reports, and Cuddyston, which doesn't but I think it's up in, what's the name, Istria, where we heard they were opening coal mines. The guns are about ten percent heavier than ours, and the machining cruder-particularly on the exteriors. But they'll throw a ball nearly as far and hard as ours, and nearly as accurately."
"Too fucking right, they will," one of the XOs muttered. "Sorry, ma'am," he went on at the Commodore's quelling look.
"Then we'll break up the two on the beach for timber," Alston went on. "That'll give us eight-hundred-odd tons of seasoned plank and beam, more than enough for our repairs and useful for construction, too. Brigadier McClintock, I want to get an accelerated training program for the auxiliaries going, starting tomorrow. We'll-
"Is that a railroad?" Ian Arnstein asked incredulously.
It certainly looked like one, snaking north up the valley of the Eurotas, parallel to the two-lane asphalt road from Neayoruk. Wooden crossties in a bed of gravel, and rails on them, shining in the sun that had emerged from the clouds at last.