The Protectors war

"Beaut!" Nobbes said decisively. "I can't tell you how comforting it is to have a bloke who really understands this garbage."

Nigel went on: "And more concretely, Alleyne and I have both had experience at sea. Small-boat training before the Change, and on sail since; we can both shoot the sun and lay a course. Sergeant Hordle: well, he can hand, reef and steer, and if you're in the habit of sending shore parties into danger, then you could travel about the globe twice before finding as good a man of his hands as Little John Hordle. Crack shot, too; he's been rated Archer Instructor for the Guard these three years now."

Nobbes's eyes lit. "Now, all that will be immediately useful. I lost my second and third lieutenants in a job-up with pirates off Diego Garcia this spring, and it's been a bloody nightmare with only myself and the XO as watchkeepers. Let's do a tour, shall we?"

The deck of the Pride was a long clear sweep, fore and aft, one hundred eighty feet of decking with only a slight raised coaming before the wheel, and another forward of the mainmast that led down to the forecastle. Two launches lay keel-up on either side of the mainmast, and another hung in its davits over the stern. Under tarpaulins five catapults crouched with shrouded menace, two on either side and one abaft the wheel. Nigel strolled forward to the mainmast, returning cheerful smiles and nods-the crew had evidently taken to them after that little brush at the Wash.

"That went rather well," Nigel said, after the captain had left, as his son and John Hordle joined him.

Hordle still had a chunk of bread in one hand and a chicken leg in the other, not being afflicted with seasickness, and his hazel eyes shone with contentment. They leaned on the railing and watched the dark blue-green waters of the North Sea rushing past in a long foam-tipped curve down the gray steel hull of the schooner; the wind was out of the west where the low coast of East Anglia showed in the distance, and the deck's smooth yellow huon pine planking was canted like a low-pitched roof as the ship leaned away with her sails swelling in taut beige curves. Bursts of spray sped back along the deck as the bowsprit pitched up at the top of every swell, tasting cold and salt on the lips.

"Positions on the Pride, and asylum and probably land if we want it at the other end," Nigel went on. " Tasmania 's well beyond the king's reach-or the queen's, more to the point."

Just then a voice rang out from the masthead a hundred and twenty feet above their heads: "Sail ho!"

The three Englishmen tensed. Beside the wheel the vessel's executive officer turned her head up and raised the speaking-trumpet in her hand; long strands of black hair flew out from under her billed officer's cap as she called, "Where away? What rig?"

"Nor' nor'east, ma'am! Barque-rigged, three-master."

"What colors?"

"I can't see: wait a bit! Well, fuck me! It's a jumbuck holding a flag, on their flag!"

The three relaxed. Nigel frowned as well; the Australian concept of discipline had never appealed to him, and this troop of merry-andrews made the pre-Change Australian military look like the Grenadier Guards. Still, they got things done: And he knew who used a sheep holding a ba

"Lieutenant Flandry!" Nigel called. "That's the Visby arms. She'll be a Norlander, a Swede out of the island of Gotland, probably heading for Dover with paper salvaged from their mills."

Dominique Flandry nodded. "Thank you, Sir Nigel. I remember that briefing paper you had done up for us when we made Southampton."

That had been back before his arrest; he'd done up an appreciation from the survey reports-some of them from survey parties he'd led in person. The Tasmanians had naturally wanted to know the state of Europe. That was extremely simple for most areas west of the Vistula : Everyone died. There were exceptions, of course. Born-holm and some of the other Baltic islands like Gotland and Oland and the Alands were among them, analogous to the Isle of Wight as opposed to mainland Britain. And a fair-sized clump of towns in northern Norway had made it through the Change, courtesy of isolation and a huge NATO ration dump they'd discovered, along with villages in the more remote parts of Sweden. That came to a quarter million in total, and lately they'd cobbled together a loose federation called Norland under a scion of the Norwegian royal house, to resettle the empty death zones of southern Scandinavia. They claimed adjacent Germany as well, and there wasn't anyone to say them no, except for a few thousand neo-savages.

"Nothing to worry about this time," Alleyne said. "But."

Hordle tossed the fleshless chicken bone over the side and wiped the dark red furze on the back of one of his hands across his mouth.

"Right you are, sir. But. Twenty people knew what we were pla

"Somewhere between twenty to one against and zero, Sergeant," Nigel said crisply. "For that matter, the Pride's course will look dashed odd, given that she was supposed to be heading for the Americas ."

They looked at each other. "It depends on what the king decides to do," Hordle said. "He could just decide to forget about us, I suppose. Even though we've made him look a right burke."

"And the queen. You'd be closer to the truth if you said it depends on what she talks him around to doing," Alleyne replied. "Having met the woman, I'd say that's pretty well anything, given time. And she's spiteful."

"Perhaps I shouldn't have lost my temper with her in public," Nigel admitted, remembering eyes gray as a glacier. "And I should have remembered her namesake, and that her people's literature is entirely concerned with blood feuds and revenge."

They all looked at each other again, and then out to the English coast. "Not time to relax just yet," Hordle said with a sigh.

"I think we'd best acquaint ourselves with our duties on this ship," Nigel said. "And leave the matter of pursuit to the evil day."

Because there's damn all we can do about it, he thought.

John Hordle sucked at a barked knuckle as they slid down the ropes to the waiting longboats. Above them the side of the Kobayashi Maru reared in a rust-streaked iron wall. The big tanker had been listing hard to port when the Pride's lookout spotted it, with an oil slick behind it a hundred miles long. Even as the boarding party left you could see how she'd begun to settle as water flooded into her spaces from the open scuttlin-cocks. For a moment he wondered idly where the crew had ended up. According to the log they'd rigged the ship's lifeboats with improvised masts and sails ten days after the Change, meaning to try for the coast of Argentina and then come back with help.

Must 'ave been a bit of a shocker if they made land, and found out the truth, he thought. Then he shrugged-if they'd survived at all, they'd done better than most of the human race.

It was a hot late-August day on the Atlantic; they were standing off the Portuguese coast, with land out of sight on the eastern horizon. The water stretched like hammered blue-green metal around them, riffled by a mild breeze and a long low swell out of the west. Like many of the crew, he had a bandana tied about his head; like all of them he wore loose blue trousers and bloused shirt, belt with a sailor's knife, and bare feet. Most of them were Tasmanians, with Kiwis second and Aussies from the mainland third; a few were wildly varied, picked up all over the world on the Pride's great survey voyage.

Sir Nigel and his son wore the same outfit as Hordle, but with shoes and peaked caps-officer's garb. That had caused a few minor problems-the elder Loring was no martinet, but the Ozlander conception of rank was still a little too casual for someone who'd started in the Blues and Royals. Also, he didn't regard "She'll be right, mate" as an appropriate attitude to problems.