On the Oceans of Eternity

"Well, a lot of people tell me stuff," Martins said proudly. "I mean, like heavy industrial shit, man-smiths stick together, and I trained a lot of the hot-pounders Walker used right back in the begi

"Wait a minute," Arnstein said slowly. "You mean to tell me that Odikweos knows you're an agent for Nantucket?"

Martins's long sheeplike face blushed under the weathered tan. "He, like, sort of figured it out," he said. "I don't know how-Mittler, Walker's tame Nasty-

"Nazi," Arnstein correct absently.

"No, he's more like a Stalin type, seriously heavy authoritarian power trip, but he's plenty nasty, you know? Anyway, he's sniffed around, but he couldn't pin anything on me that the Man would listen to. He wanted to off me a long time ago, that guy."

Suddenly Martins's vague good humor collapsed; his face fell in on itself, looking every year of his age for once.

"Oh, man, you don't know what it's like, living here, you got no idea. I want out, man, I want to get Barbs and the kids and blow this place. Rilly, rilly bad. It's, like, Mordor here, just don't look as bad on the surface, but it's worse down deep. Rivendell, it's like an island in a sea of shit, man. I want to go home."

"I don't blame you," Arnstein said. "But…" His mind worked furiously. "I think we've got things to do first."

Well, keeping fit is a duty, Marian Alston thought, as she stripped off the armor and the sweat-sodden padding underneath. I need the endurance and ability to think clearly under stress. Plus the ability to use a sword with skill was a real military asset here and now. No law saying I can't enjoy it.

The practice yard bustled, shouts and kia and the thump and clatter of practice with bokken or the Empty Hand, perso

McClintock says they're about as ready as they'll be without going through Camp Grant, she mused. Oh, well, needs must when the devil drives.

A lot of them had also stood around green with envy as the raiding party lined up to take the first installment of their prize money off the drumheads-part simple greed, part the prestige, status, keuthes of victory and plunder. Many of the Marines and Guard crewfolk felt that way, too; she'd seen one in line in a wheelchair with his leg in a cast, pushed by a friend with her arm in a sling, and they'd both been gri

She doubted that any of the native-born Islanders would have been that cheerful. It's not that they're any braver than Americans, Alston thought. They're… tougher? Harder-grained? They're certainly less likely to be… shocked… when bad things happen to them. Maybe fatalistic is the word I'm looking for.

"What's on the agenda?" she asked Swindapa as the exercise-yard orderlies collected their armor, bokken, and sodden undergarments, handing them towels and harsh gray ration-issue bars of soap.

"It's 0545 now," the Fiernan said. "At 0700 you're supposed to meet those people Captain Reedy got out of the swamp. Then-

"Fill me in while we walk, sugar."

The beach was blinding-white sand; it and the small wavelets were tinged pink by the sun rising over the water to the east, and the pine forest and marshland of the mainland beyond. The air smelled chill, damp, salt, and very fresh despite the thousands encamped near here. The doctors said the deep wells were producing abundant fresh water, and the composting latrines wouldn't contaminate it. More than enough water for freshwater showers, and some had been rigged here.

Not far away a long U-shape of prefabricated timbers ran down into the water, with smooth steel rollers inset. The Farragut was hauled out on it, kept upright with tree trunks braced against her upper sides, swarming with workers the way a dropped banana would with ants. Most of the copper sheathing had come off her planks. Caulking hammers rang as oakum was pounded between her seams; new sections of planks showed yellow-brown against the weathered gray paint of the rest; tar heated pungent in buckets.

Gary Trudeau was there himself with his officers and chief engineer and the Seahaven people, directing the crews that had the damaged paddle bared to the bright new sun. With the protecting frame of timbers and metal gone you could see what the point-blank ca

"What's the word, Commander?"

"Well, the slipway works-no shifting now that the cradle arms are braced on the piles," Trudeau said. "Be a real calisse de tabernac if they moved with that much weight on 'em!"

Alston nodded soberly. The Merrimac was a lot heavier, and it was good in a way that they had a trial run first. A vagrant thought struck her: did the younger man swear in patois because it felt better, or to remind himself of the lost world of Aroostock County, Maine, and its expatriate Quebecoisl There probably weren't a dozen other people in this whole world who'd grown up speaking French, and in another generation there wouldn't be a single one.

"The good news," the young officer went on, "is that there's nothing major wrong with her. No hull frames cracked, the diagonal bracing held. The bedding for the boilers and furnace is a lot better than I thought it might be."

He pointed to where a clangor of hammers sounded, like a legion of dwarves in a steel bucket.

"The fu

"The bad news?"

"Ma'am, there are a lot of medium and small things wrong- we're going to have to replace all the blades on the port paddle, retrue the cams and rods, patch a quarter of the hull… a week."

"Fast as you can," Alston said. "I want that ca