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"… I've got something more concrete to tell you about the news from Tartessos."
"That was quick work," Marian Alston-Kurlelo said, looking at what was left of the Merrimac.
It was one of those mild, brilliant Andulusian winter days that gave her occasional daydreams of wangling a posting here after the war. Wind like spun silk caressed her face, and everything from the ship before her to the flamingos cruising like giant pink butterflies in the marshes had a fine-cut clarity.
"Four weeks and four days from the time we hauled her up on the slipway," the Seahaven supervisor said, wiping her hands on a greasy rag.
The gesture was one of Ron Leaton's trademarks, and engineers all over the Republic copied it, along with his air of abstracted competence. There were worse role models, and most of the mechanics and engineers had come up through Seahaven or its spin-offs.
An entirely forgivable foible, Marian Alston-Kurlelo decided, walking through the construction-yard litter of timber, tools, and gri
The big merchantman had been cut down to the waterline. A sloping three-foot glacis surrounded the hull above that, solid oak beams a yard on a side covered by a bolted carapace of big interlocking steel plates three and a half inches thick. More steel covered the low deck, and a slope-sided central casement at midsection. That had three gunports a side, and a row of them in the cone-sectioned front and rear where a pivot-mounted gun could swivel around. A single thick smokestack rising from an armored collar, a couple of air-scoops and a low octagonal pilothouse with vision slits completed the picture topside, with a big bronze propeller at the stern.
It didn't give her the stab of pure pleasure a good sailing craft did; in fact, she still felt guilty at murdering something beautiful to make this. But it was… solid workmanship, she thought, taking a deep breath and inhaling the scents of drying paint, varnish, tar, timber, brass, iron, and whale-oil lubricating grease. Satisfying. It'll do the job it's designed for.
"Well," Gary Trudeau said. "At last I've seen something less seaworthy than my poor Farragut."
Alston snorted slightly. "Farragut was supposedly designed to handle anything on salt water. This one was not intended for deep-ocean work, Mr. Trudeau," she said.
Victor Ortiz chuckled. "At least we know she can carry the weight; it came out from Alba in her hold."
A deep breath. "All right, let's get on with it."
Bosuns' pipes twittered, the Marine band played, and Swindapa stepped up to hand her a point-bottomed, jug-eared amphora of requisitioned Tartessian wine.
"I christen thee Eades" she said, and threw the amphora.
It shattered on the reinforced ram that projected out just beyond the bows of the ironclad. Wine ran down armorplate and oak, red as blood. Everyone cheered; Marian smiled broadly, in a public display of emotion rather rare for her.
In fact, she was thinking of the original Merrimac, transformed into the ironclad Virginia by the Confederates for its meeting with the Monitor off Hampton Roads. How they'd have hated the thought of black-as-tar Marian Alston commanding something so like her; and how they'd have hated naming her after the engineer who'd designed the Federal gunboat fleets that stormed down the Mississippi and cut the Confederacy in half. Her father would have loved it.
I hope, somewhere, those bukra ghosts can see this. While they roast in hell.
Sledgehammers struck at the wedges and chocks. The timbers holding the Eades against the force of gravity gave way, and the steel rollers of the cradle rumbled and squealed as she began to move. The huge weight started slowly, then accelerated with terrifying speed. Waves of muddy water surged up in twin plumes on either side as the stern slid into the bay, then subsided as the ironclad shot out. A dozen thick cables secured to deep-driven tree trunks paid out and then came twanging-taut; the ship rocked and then settled.
Have to rearrange her ballast a bit, Marian thought, studying her trim with a critical eye.
"All right, let's get her boilers hot and see how she works," she said aloud.
"No," Isketerol of Tartessos said.
"Lord King-
"Yes, they are destroying us bit by bit," Isketerol said.
He looked around at the war-captains and wisemen, their faces shocked or blank or calculating, mottled by the light filtering through the canvas of his tent. They were mostly men who'd come to power under him… and hence men he'd rewarded with grants of land and mines. Men with lands and mines in the provinces now being stripped and sacked by the Amurrukan. The tent stank of acrid sweat loaded with anger and fear; his guards were more than ceremonial, and their tension told it.
He grabbed patience with both hands and ran his finger across the map. "By the time news of their raids comes to us, they are already done," he said. "We used our light-signalers to react faster than the highlanders could. Now the Amurrukan do the same to us."
"Then we must meet their raiding forces with our own- forces larger than theirs."
Isketerol nodded. "Tell me how, Lord Miskelefol," he said. "They see us move by night or day, from the air. From the air their scouts report to their commander. And their forces move more quickly than ours." His fist hit the table. "On our own roads! By the time we react to what they are doing, they have finished it and are doing something else in another place. They lead us by the nose, and we take our marching orders from them! If we send out a column, they can avoid it… or bring together enough of their troops to smash it…'
Everyone winced; that had happened twice. He pointed out through the flap of the tent, to the long ranks of brushwood-and-earth shelters within the earthwork fortifications.
"We are too many for them to attack us here, and by our presence we guard the lands around Tartessos City. They ca
"Then we should march out and crush them in one great battle!"
"Arucuttag… give me strength!" he snarled, making himself stop short of asking the Hungry One to eat his supporter. "Their weapons are too much better than ours. If we attack them, they will slaughter us; that's why our invasion failed last year!"
He sighed. "We can only stand on the defensive; they ca
After so long on sailing ships, the little bridge of the Fades was a stifling closeness; stiflingly hot, too, with the boiler heat captured by thick oak timbers and steel-plate sheathing, and a throat-catching reek of sulfur from coal smoke. Engine throb shivered up through her feet with a slow heavy beat, tolling the movements of the big steam cylinders and the massive crankshaft driving the propeller-quieter than a diesel, beating like a great slow heart. The bridge sat like an octagonal lump at the forward edge of the casement; an eight-sided enclosure from her shoulders up, with vision slits at eye level, and an openwork basket where it protruded into the fighting compartment below. That stretched a hundred feet back, a single great slope-sided room, with only the armored sheath of the fu