On the Oceans of Eternity

She shifted her attention to the countryside 'round about. Not very Sicilian, she thought.

Eagle had been through the Mediterranean several times before the Event, on training-show-the-flag voyages; a tall ship made great PR. Central Sicily in the twentieth was a wasteland of rock, scrubby maquis and scraggly crops, and the tumbled remains of worked-out mines. Makers of spaghetti Westerns used it as a good stand-in for Arizona, and it was full of crumbling gray villages where the only living things were ancient crones in black tottering along under huge bundles of brushwood. Or sitting and staring at you with hooded, bitter eyes.

Here it was a sea of branches, oak and hazelnut and pine shaggy on the sides of the hills, giving way to sava

"Sulfur mine," she said. "And see the collection of crosses around it?"

"Surely do," McClintock said tightly. "So the miners came up here and hit the fort after they'd finished off the overseers?"

"Overran the latifundia there first; probably a lot of the slaves from there joined them, and then they came helling up the road and tried to do the same here. The Achaeans were waiting for them, by then. Probably they were drunk… or just drunk on the prospect of getting their own back."

McClintock nodded tightly. Under Walker, the Achaeans had done their best to turn the whole island into a giant plantation, with gangs of slaves pumping out wheat and wool and cotton, sulfur and asphalt and timber for his projects. The process was far from complete, he'd had only a little more than half a decade, but it had gone a long way. They'd overrun a couple of labor camps that made even the mines look good.

"That fort would be expensive," he said after a moment. "Even with a good road, we'll have trouble getting enough artillery here and in range. They've got some of those… what are they called…"

"It's a rip-off of a French weapon called the Montigny Miltrailleuse-from the 1860s. A bunch of barrels clamped together, bullets in a plate you slide into the breech and fire with a crank. The Achaean word translates as quickshooter."

"Those, yeah, in those bunkers around the perimeter. Mortars in the courtyards-see the craters on the hill slopes? No dead ground around here. Rocket launchers… Ma'am, it'll take a regular siege. I'd need at least a battalion, and, oh, six of the five-inch rifles… take a couple of weeks."

Marian nodded. "The problem is there are dozens of forts like this. That's why they built them in the first place, to nail down the countryside."

For that matter, there were a couple of pretty large areas where the Achaean settlers had come out on top against the slaves and natives, even with the Islanders providing weapons and backup. And Syracuse was still holding out.

So we can't sit down and blast the enemy out of every fortlet.

Not if we're going to pitch in and help the expeditionary force in the Middle East anytime soon.

"Well, what do we do, then, ma'am?"

She smiled grimly. The Islanders hadn't exactly taken over Great Achaea's Sicilian colony by landing and proclaiming liberation. They had turned it into a three-cornered exercise in massacre and countermassacre, as natives and slaves and Achaeans fought each other like crabs in a bucket. It reminded her of what she'd read about Haiti during the slave uprising there in the 1790s, years of terror and madness. However discouraging the Nantucketers' problems looked, she didn't think the other factions felt particularly victorious, either.

"I'm a hammer," she said. "I see problems as nails-even big, badass nails like that." A jerk of her chin at the fort. "The chief has a different approach. That's what I'm going to Syracuse for, to give it a try. And to see what they've been doing with the Fleet in my absence."

"I'm sorry, ma'am," Hiller said.

The longboat pitched easily, the crew leaning on their oars. The Great Harbor of Syracuse stretched around them, most of the shore swampy and noisy with duck and flamingos and spoonbills, adding a silty smell of marsh to the clean salt breeze. Water shone blue-purple, shading to emerald over shoal and sandbank. The Islander fleet was further away from the enemy guns, anchored in neat rows with a busy commerce of small craft and rafts shuttling back and forth to shore.

"We hit a mine, that's all I can say," Hiller went on. "Hit a couple, but the first two were duds. The third wasn't, and it blew a hole just back from the bows you could drive an oxcart through. It's a miracle we got most of the engine-room gang out."

Marian nodded; she knew what the words hid. The sudden inrush of water, like a wet avalanche down a hull with no interior bulkheads. The crew struggling up the ladders in darkness, with the roar of water and the toning sounds of the boilers' self-destruction all around them as cold sea met hot steel…

"Lucky it was shallow and not many of their guns bore on it," he said.

"Not really luck; that's why they put the mines there."

In another history, during the eighth century before Christ, settlers from Corinth would have landed on the island they called Ortygia, and founded the city later known as Syracuse. Here it had been the seat of a local chief, until William Walker led Achaeans spearheaded by his rifle-armed troops here to conquer. The fortifications had probably started right away, and judging by the piles of stone were still going on. As she watched a ripple of smoke puffs ran along one of the slanting walls. Seconds later the dull flat booommm of heavy ca

"Eleven-inch Dalghrens," Killer said. "We get ammunition and supplies to the Eades at night in small boats, and volunteers, and bring others out for rest. So far she's given as good as she's got, but eventually they'll pound her to pieces, since she can't move. Quicker, if they get that damned heavy mortar moved…"

Alston's eyes went to the civilian settlement around the head of the causeway. That was fortified as well, excellent low-slung works behind a deep moat and glacis. The Islander artillery on the heights of Epipolai beyond still bore on the city below, the distant slamming-door sound of its firing echoing across the water. Then came the long whistling fall, and another tall billow of pulverized adobe, timber, stone, and people. They were densely packed in there, too; Achaean colonists had fled here from all the province around. Crowds of Sicel natives and slave rebels sprawled near the orderly tent-rows and earthworks of the Republic's Marines.

"Not a problem, if… there," Alston said, looking down at her watch.

A rocket went up from the fortress on Ortygia, bursting green. The same signal came up from the Islander works ashore, and from the bridge of the Farragut, where she patrolled off the line of anchored frigates and transports.