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She and Hendricksson went out the front, returning the salutes of the Marine sentries, then up the brick staircase to the gateside bastions and above that to the grass-grown roof of the gun gallery and the small paved stand around the flagpole; the Stars and Stripes flapped above them in the brisk onshore breeze. Fort Pentagon's walls were sloping turf above a brick retaining wall and dry moat, and the fall wildflowers that starred them contrasted oddly with the black snouts of the ca
From here she could see the whole stretch of the docks along the Avon's south bank, a dozen long rectangles stretching out into the river. Low tide left a stretch of smelly black mud between the corniche roadway with its log seawall and the deeper water where the ships rested. It also left the great timbers of the wharf exposed, black with pitch and trailing disconsolate green weed, overgrown with mussels and barnacles. Gull-wings made a white storm out over the blue-green water, stooping and diving; one let an oyster fall not far away, then flapped down to plunder the broken shell. Some of the ships were only the tips of masts over the oak planking of the warehouses stretching upstream; the wood was weathered brown near here, rawly fresh further away. Oats poured in a yellow-white stream from a grain elevator into the hold of an Islander barque as they watched, and workers with kerchiefs across their faces toiled knee-deep in the flood to spread it evenly with long-handled rakes.
"It's like watching a stop-motion film, every time we visit here," Alston said quietly.
"Damned right, Commodore," Greta said. "Even living here, it's almost like that for me-like waking up in the woods and finding a fairy ring of mushrooms."
Out in the blue-green waters was a lighthouse on a rocky little island, built of concrete at vast expense. A big metal windmill whirled atop it, doing duty as a wind sock and charging banks of lead-acid batteries in the structure below, handmade copies of pre-Event models from trucks. Inland from the docks was a checkerboard of tree-lined streets and squares with small green parks, shading out quickly into truck gardens and farms and round huts; she'd based the design on the original street plan of Sava
Form followed function; between them Bronze Age peasants and late-twentieth-century Americans had managed to spontaneously re-create most of the features of a classic North Atlantic port town.
Alston chuckled quietly at a memory; those functional features included a fair number of hookers. Until she actually went up and asked one of them, Swindapa had thought her partner was pulling her leg about that. Like most Fiernans, she found the whole concept of prostitution weirdly fu
All in all Marian Alston-Kurlelo liked Westhaven, though, more than any of the other outports of the Republic. Fogarty's Cove, for instance, tended to be a little too consciously the haunt of bold pioneers, given to hitching their belts, spitting, and noting the crops look purty good this year, ayup. The older ones were probably modeling themselves on secondhand memories of Last of the Mohicans and Frontierland, and it was contagious.
"How's morale?" she said. "The civilian population, particularly." Westhaven was under Islander law and had a Town Meeting of its own, but the situation was a bit irregular, constitutionally speaking.
"Excellent, so far," Hendricksson replied. "Those posters Arnstein's Foreign Affairs people sent over really whipped up feeling. I had to have our resident Tartessians put under guard for their own protection."
Alston nodded impassively, hiding an inward wince. There were times when she felt… not exactly guilty… more like uneasy… about some of the things they'd been forced to introduce to this era.
Potatoes are fine, antiseptic childbirth is wonderful, democracy and womens' rights are excellent. I'm not so sure about the levee en masse, the Supreme General Staff and systematic propaganda, she thought.
"I'm surprised they were quite so effective," Hendricksson mused. "I mean, yah, yah, they were all true, but it was pretty blatant stuff. Maybe because they didn't grow up with TV commercials?"
"Mmmm-hmmmm. People here aren't… immunized," Alston said.
It wasn't that the folk of this era were inherently gentler than those of the twentieth; what they didn't have was the accumulated experience and examples and recorded thought of…
Sun Tzu, Caesar Augustus, Han Fei-Tze and the Legalists, Frederick II, Machiavelli, Elizabeth I, Maurice of Nassau, Shaka Senzagakhona of the Zulu, Timur-I-Leng, Catherine the Great, Napoleon, Marx, Mao, Bismarck, Nguyen Giap, Lenin… and a lot more, Alston thought. War and politics are technologies, too. They evolve, in their Lamarckian fashion.
She remembered how amazed she'd been to find that the Romans had no real concept of intelligence work-it just didn't occur to them to keep contact with an enemy, or set up a network of scouts and spies and information analysts. There were a thousand examples like that…
"Good," she said aloud, putting a hand on Hendricksson's shoulder for a moment. "Gerta, this whole campaign depends on Westhaven. I can't operate in the Straits of Gibraltar with a logistics train stretching all the way back to Nantucket Town.
Portsmouth Base doesn't have the facilities or the hinterland to supply the fleet."
Hendricksson nodded in her turn. "The salt beef and dog biscuit will keep coming, Commodore, and the powder and shot." Then she shrugged. "Everything takes longer and costs more, yah?"
"You said it, woman." Alston smiled crookedly. The makeshifts they had to use were so damned frustrating at times. On the other hand, she thought snidely, the squids always got the fancy stuff up in the twentieth; the Coast Guard got used to hand-me-downs and making do.
"We'll manage here," Hendricksson repeated.
"Excellent, but keep alert." Their eyes both went up for a moment to the orca shape of the observation balloon that floated over the town on the end of its long tether. "Isketerol isn't afraid to gamble. That attack on Nantucket in the spring was a bold one… and just between me 'n' thee, Greta, it came far too close to success for comfort. A little less warning, or if we hadn't had the Farragut nearly ready to go, or if the weather hadn't turned wet and drenched their flintlocks-it would have hurt us much more badly. I wouldn't put it past him to try something else, particularly if he's desperate."
"We'll manage here," Hendricksson repeated, her face taking on a bulldog look as she glanced around the town whose building had been her lifework. Marian recognized it; people got attached to what they made themselves.
She sighed; now she had to go tell the captain of the Merrimac what they had in mind for his ship. "Speaking of which, now I've got to go and give Mr. Clammp the bad news."