On the Oceans of Eternity

Well, Stavrand took me at my word, she thought, blinking and shaking her head. Just then the pontoon bridge lit up, a poca-poca-poca-poca of small explosions sending sheets of poor man's napalm-benzene and kerosene with soap flakes-in every direction; the wood was damp and green but it caught at once, and sent a wall of flame and black smoke up across the river. Squads were moving among the piles of cargo on the wharves, sloshing kerosene about and setting yet more fires; once they danced back yelling from a pile of barrels that turned out to be full olive oil. That poured like a sluggish river of red lava down the streets as it burned…

"Go, go, go!" Marian said to the others. The Marines went, and the Intelligence officer stumbled in their wake.

Swindapa had the baby on the desk, efficiently rewrapping it in a shawl and a section of tapestry. Without looking up she spoke:

"Before you ask what I'm doing, I'm saving the baby."

' 'Dapa… we just killed his parents…"

"Yes, and we're going to blow this place up in a minute," she said. "That just means he needs someone to look after him, doesn't he?" She jerked her tight-braided blond head at the window, and the Walpurgisnacht of explosions and fire and cold rain outside. "And we can't leave him in that, either, can we?"

"When you put it that way…" Marian sighed. She flicked the cylinder of her Python open, spilled the spent brass and reloaded. "Let's go."

Down the stairs, past the combat engineers setting the demolition charges and backing away, unreeling fuse from a spool they held between them. Out into the rain, Swindapa loping beside her with the squalling infant in the crook of her left arm I and her pistol in her right hand. Chaos on the docks, towering pyramids of flame with scraps of tarpaulin floating up into the rainy smoke cutting the visibility even beyond what nature occluded. The bitter stink of things not meant to burn choked her until she coughed. She blinked watering eyes, wiped the back of her hand across them; the barge-trains were pulling away from the dock, the wind was light but in the proper direction, and they were operating with the current, thank God. Troops were pouring back to the wharf and over the retaining wall into boats and barges; some came laughing, smoke smut on their faces, alight with the thoughtless pleasures of destruction. Others limped, or staggered with comrades' arms over their shoulders, or were carried on folding stretchers. Another came gri

She felt her face go grimmer, thinking of the labor that had gone into making all this, pushing plows and swinging hammers and working the heddles of looms.

Not many Islanders hurt-surprisingly few, with an operation this size. She looked at her watch again. The glowing dials of the self-winding radium face showed 0230 hours. Less than half an hour, by God. The Tartessians were recovering, though: pretty soon they'd…

Schooonk. Dozens of heads whipped up at the all-too-familiar sound.

"Medium mortar," she said quietly.

There were thousands of things the Islanders knew how to do but couldn't because the materials were too hard to find, or the tools too complicated to build. On the other end of the curve were smoothbore mortars firing fi

Shuddump!

Dimly, half-seen, a fountain of water leaped up out of the river, hung, fell in shattered spray. "All right, people, let's get out of here before they start hitting things."

They trotted on, taking reports from the officers of various units as they went; and from the noncoms who counted off the individuals-in a few cases the dog tags of bodies-as they returned, then waiting by the boat for the final word. Once again she blessed Swindapa's faultless memory; keeping exact count of everything and everybody in a battalion-sized night raid was trivial to someone who'd been through the Grandmothers' course. They made a good team… although she doubted the Fiernan system would last more than another generation. When you could write things down, it was just too much damned trouble to spend a decade learning to retrieve all the data yourself.

Very damned useful right now, though. Too God-damned easy for someone to get missed in this confusion and darkness.

Marian stood with her hands behind her back on the edge of the dock; Swindapa beside her, looking out over the river because that put her body between the baby and the most likely source of high-velocity metal. There was enough light from burning supply dumps and buildings to make Alston feel horribly exposed; she relaxed stomach muscles that were drawing themselves up in anticipation of a bullet or mortar shell, forced her breath to come slow and deep and shoulders to ease. One of her elbows was aching a little, fruit of overextension past…

She remembered a joke current in a dojo she'd attended, long before the Event-back in her late 'teens, when she was first getting seriously interested in the Way of the Empty Hand, the real jujutsu variety and not the de-rated sport schools that were mostly safe:

"By the time I'm forty, I'll be the most dangerous cripple in the whole wide world," she quoted softly to herself.

But I'm a little nearer fifty than forty now, and all those years of pushing the body to ten-tenths of capacity begin to take their toll. I hurt when I've got to do things like this, and experience only compensates to a certain point.

"Uh… ma'am?" the head of the Marine detail said.

She looked over at him; rain-streaked soot and speckled blood ran down his face with trails of sweat. Painfully young; there was something of a gap in the age profile on the Island, a good many young adults had been on the mainland at college when the Event occurred.

He did very well indeed, there at the commandatura, she thought. Wasn't afraid to backtalk me, either. Aggressive, but not crazy.

"Ma'am, the brigadier will keelhaul me if I don't bring you back in one piece. As a matter of fact, he told me that if I stuck him with your job, he'd be really, really upset. Would you mind stepping into the boat now, ma'am? Lieutenant^ Commander?"

And let me do my job, she finished for him.

"When we're through," she said aloud. "Remember Frozen Chosin. We're taking everyone back, Lieutenant."

"Yes ma'am," he said.

A few murmurs came from the darkened figures at the oars;

"Hard Corps."

"fuckin' A."

Did I do the right thing, to let the Marine Corps vets who started our ground-troop training program put so much emphasis on their own traditions? Probably. Almost certainly. Fighting was an emotional thing. They'd used what they knew would work because it had worked on their own younger selves. "A rational army would run away," and Montinesque was right about that. Do Jesus, I surely do feel like ru