On the Oceans of Eternity

by S. M. Stirling

  Very damned useful right now, though. Too God-damned easy for someone to get missed in this confusion and darkness.

  Marian stood with her hands behind her back on the edge of the dock; Swindapa beside her, looking out over the river because that put her body between the baby and the most likely source of high-velocity metal. There was enough light from burning supply dumps and buildings to make Alston feel horribly exposed; she relaxed stomach muscles that were drawing themselves up in anticipation of a bullet or mortar shell, forced her breath to come slow and deep and shoulders to ease. One of her elbows was aching a little, fruit of overextension past…

  She remembered a joke current in a dojo she'd attended, long before the Event-back in her late 'teens, when she was first getting seriously interested in the Way of the Empty Hand, the real jujutsu variety and not the de-rated sport schools that were mostly safe:

  "By the time I'm forty, I'll be the most dangerous cripple in the whole wide world," she quoted softly to herself.

  But I'm a little nearer fifty than forty now, and all those years of pushing the body to ten-tenths of capacity begin to take their toll. I hurt when I've got to do things like this, and experience only compensates to a certain point.

  "Uh… ma'am?" the head of the Marine detail said.

  She looked over at him; rain-streaked soot and speckled blood ran down his face with trails of sweat. Painfully young; there was something of a gap in the age profile on the Island, a good many young adults had been on the mainland at college when the Event occurred.

  He did very well indeed, there at the commandatura, she thought. Wasn't afraid to backtalk me, either. Aggressive, but not crazy.

  "Ma'am, the brigadier will keelhaul me if I don't bring you back in one piece. As a matter of fact, he told me that if I stuck him with your job, he'd be really, really upset. Would you mind stepping into the boat now, ma'am? Lieutenant^ Commander?"

  And let me do my job, she finished for him.

  "When we're through," she said aloud. "Remember Frozen Chosin. We're taking everyone back, Lieutenant."

  "Yes ma'am," he said.

  A few murmurs came from the darkened figures at the oars;

  "Hard Corps."

  "fuckin' A."

  Did I do the right thing, to let the Marine Corps vets who started our ground-troop training program put so much emphasis on their own traditions? Probably. Almost certainly. Fighting was an emotional thing. They'd used what they knew would work because it had worked on their own younger selves. "A rational army would run away," and Montinesque was right about that. Do Jesus, I surely do feel like running away. Could have been worse, though I could have had to work with Foreign Legion types. "You have joined the Legion to die, and now I will send you where men die." There's a certain bracing honesty to it, but in the long run, this is better.

  A runner came panting up. "We found them, ma'am-they got pinned when a door collapsed," he said.

  "That's the last," Swindapa said crisply. "All accounted for."

  "Lieutenant, you get your wish," Alston said, hopping down into the boat. Swindapa handed her down the child, and she cuddled it to her as her partner swung expertly in beside her at the prow of the launch. The formless baby face looked up at Alston dubiously, still alarmed but tired of crying for his mother, and then stuck his hand in his mouth and began to gum it in a worried fashion.

  "Hell of a way to come back from a raid," she grumbled to herself. "You do need to be changed, little'un."

  Then she looked at the river as the crew began to pull away into the central current, bright-lit through the rain by the wavery blurs of huge fires on both banks. The barge-trains were ahead of her, with the raiding force's boats around them like sculling centipedes. Safer to have burned the barges in place, she thought. But better for morale to take them; the troops were mostly from cultures that thought "victory" and "plunder" were the same thing. It wouldn't hurt the whole expedition's logistics if there was useful stuff in them, too.

  Alston put the handset to her face with her free hand: "Commander Ortiz."

  "Here, ma'am. No trouble so far."

  "None on this end either," Alston said. A warbling went through the sky, and a muffled whuddump raised a plume of shocked white water a hundred yards behind. Spray fell across her, and the baby began to cry again, a thin reedy wailing.

  "Ah… ma'am?" Ortiz said, bewilderment in his tone at the sound. Not at all the sort of cry you expected with a rear guard on a fire-lashed shore.

  "Don't ask, Commander." She cleared her throat. "They're lobbing mortar shells into the river, but they're firing blind. I doubt they'll get any observers forward before we're out of range."

  "Now all we have to do is run the guns of the fort, ma'am," Ortiz said, cheerfully deadpan.

  Kenneth Hollard listened and swore. God-damn fighting in a snowstorm. Hell of a way to spend the week before Christmas.

  Something was going wrong out here on the northern flank of the allied host. The firing was still heavy, but it was dying down, which meant that the Achaeans were pushing through the narrow defile and around the edge of his command.

  The snow, however, wasn't dying down, and he strained his eyes through it and cursed, and cursed the falling light.

  But I shouldn't, he thought. We've held them most of the day. If we can hold them until night, they'll feel it more, out in the open.

  The horse beneath him stumbled again, on a rock that turned beneath its hoof under the concealing white. He reined in and swung out of the saddle. The thunder ahead was louder than that to the south now; fewer cannon, but closer, and echoing back from the sharp cliff faces and steep rocky slopes.

  "O'Rourke!" he shouted.

  "Sir?"

  "Officers on foot, except for couriers," he said. "Chargers to the gun carriages as spares. And the troops to the double-quick."

  "Sir," the other man said, looking back at the column.

  It was only thirty feet away, but still a dark indistinct mass through snow and shadow, stumbling forward into the wind with helmets bent to take the bite. The thudding clatter of boots and hooves on stone and wet earth came muffled, as if they watched an army of ghosts condemned to march forever.

  "Sir," O'Rourke went on. "They're tired. We pulled them right out of the line for this. Another mile and at the double, and they won't have much left."

  Robbing Peter to pay Paul and calling it a reserve, Ken agreed, behind the mask of his face.

  "If we don't get there in time, there won't be anything-at all left," he said. "That's the choke point. Anywhere else and they can flank us and get by."

  "Sir," O'Rourke said, grinning despite the crusted snow on his eyebrows. Individual hairs peeked out, like fire through cloud. "Since you put it that way-

  Hollard walked over to the head of the column; it wound back into the rocky hills, broken here and there by the higher shape of a gun team pulling cannon or Gatlings.

  "All right," he roared, and the front ten rows looked up. Hollard drew his sword; they were good for dramatic gestures, at least. "Up ahead, the Mitannians are dying to block this pass. Back there, the rest of the Corps is going to get buggered good and fair if the enemy get through. At the double-follow me!"

  He turned with the standard-bearer beside him and strode forward. Behind him the whole force stumbled into a trot.

  Whole force, he thought. Four hundred rifles and half a dozen heavy weapons. About all we've got left that isn't hanging on by its teeth.

  He recognized most of the sounds ahead; the crackle of rifles, the sound of the multibarrel quick-firers the Achaeans used because Walker couldn't duplicate Gatlings yet, and the bark of cannon. Rifled three-and-a-half-inch jobs by the sound of it, standard enemy weapons. What he couldn't hear anymore was the thump of mortars, or the braaaaap of the Gatlings. Damn, damn… Closer… Dense snow was certainly the thing if you wanted to surprise somebody; it hid sounds as well as blinding sight.

  "Deploy into line," he said. "Heavy weapons forw
ard as best they can-and be goddamned careful, I don't want any friendly-fire accidents here."

  "Sir!"

  O'Rourke gave orders; the thick column of marching Islanders dissolved, Marines running out to either side. Steel glinted bright gray through the soft dove-gray-white of the snow as bayonets rattled home, and multiple click-clacks sounded as the rifles were loaded. The heavy weapons deployed as well, as best they could, scattered among the infantry wherever the ground looked level enough for hooves and wheels to go forward. He had more confidence in the rocket launchers; this terrain was scattered with little gullies and washes that would stop a cannon cold.

  He drew a deep breath of air cold and damp and full of the scent of wet wool and unwashed soldier and gun oil and powder. Light flickered through the snow ahead… muzzle flashes.

  "Charge!" he shouted, and ran forward.

  Otto Verger came to full alertness when the sounds began to the northward, upriver. Very faint at first, a crackling of small arms. Then several huge soft thuds, like very large doors slamming shut. He turned his head, raised it slightly, strained his eyes to see through the murky dimness.

  Was that a hint of fire, the red war-hawks of the mirutha beating their wings on a Tartessian foeman's thatch? He could hear a whispered chant from his left; it raised his hackles a little, for Rueteklo was invoking Moon Woman-or Her sister of the Barrow, who he suspected was the same as the Blood Hag of Battles. You didn't want to attract Her attention, and the Moon goddess was an unchancy thing… though to be sure, she'd be on his side this time, and wasn't that an odd happenstance? The noise from the north grew louder, and there was definitely a hint of light there…

  "Oh, you sorry bastards are fucked the now," he chuckled again. "The Midnight Mare will leave hoofprints on your grave-mounds-not that you'll get graves, you'll rot unresting, your ghosts wailing in the wind…"

  "Why don't I report you for using something else but English on duty?" Rueteklo said, equally soft, a chuckle in her voice as well.

  "Oh, shut up and get ready," Verger said, switching to that language with a trace of resentment. She spoke it with less accent than he, for all his studying until he thought his head would crack.

  "I wasn't talking, I was cursing the foe," he went on. It was a breach of regulations to talk anything but the Islander tongue when you were working-a fine of four days' pay and four days' KP. Most of the time he even thought in English, but it just wasn't as satisfying for some things, like threatening or cursing. "I'll want, mmmm, one more incendiary after the first. Then HE and frag."

  "You ask, I deliver."

  Gathering tension, silence save for an occasional buzz of insects-thank the Gods it wasn't summer, or they'd be eaten alive. He could feel the spirits of his fathers and their fathers gathering around him, to witness his honor or his shame; his oath-brothers were here, too, and they would see.

  His training whispered at the back of his mind, cooling him. It had a voice very much like Gunnery Sergeant Timothy Welder's savage rasp: Any dumb shit can get dead in a hurry! You're not waving a fucking brass tomahawk now, horse-boy. Vie don't go off half-cocked in the Corps. By the numbers, on the bounce…

  The light around the gunports of the fort had faded Jte the night grew old. The briefings had warned that Tartessians sometimes slept in the afternoon and worked late, but even these had gone to bed by now. Then a bugle blew; not any notes he recognized, but from the voices and shouts the foemen had gotten the word about their camp upstream. Their burning, devastated, plundered camp. Now the whole force would be passing back this way, and they'd need him and his brothers of the war band to shield them against a blow that could kill- him and A Company, the finest unit in the Third Marines, who were the finest warriors in the Corps-nobody outside the

  Corps even counted for comparison's sake, as these Tartessian swine would find out soon enough.

  He forced the quivering eagerness out of his muscles and lay in the muck, eyes pinned to the gunport. Light flared brighter around it, then faded-they were getting ready to open the port, screens rigged behind it to preserve the gunner's night sight and to stop stray sparks that might fall among ammunition.

  "Just about-

  Whistles sounded in the swamp to his rear at the same instant as the rumbling squeal of iron and timber on stone. The gun-ports flipped up, and the long muzzles of the cannon came out.

  "… now!"

  Behind him poles had been fitted together and supporting stakes driven deep into the muck. Now strong hands pushed and pulled the poles upright and lashed them swiftly to the frames that would hold them so. Atop each was a magnesium flare ready to burn, and a hemisphere of focusing mirror right behind it. Cords pulled, primers went pop, and the light speared out hell-bright across the row of gunports in the low squat bulk of the fortress wall ahead of them, painting every detail in stark relief and blinding the gunners as if they stared into the naked sun. Eyes slitted, squinting at the ground for a second to let them adjust, Otto Verger laughed aloud.

  Then he pushed himself up to his knees, wide-spraddled to keep him stable. "Clear!" he shouted. The crosshairs in the sight dropped over the dark square where the cannon's muzzle showed. He squeezed the trigger, heard and felt the catch release and the striker drive down on the percussion cap. Flame spurted into the hollow core of the rocket's propellant rod, and flame spurted to the rear out the venturi…

  "Eat this!" he screamed, under the SSSSSRAAAAWACK!

  For some things, English was satisfying.

  A dozen rockets vomited out of the wrack of brush and felled timber at the edge of the swamp. Despite the damp, reeds caught and burned behind him. He ignored them, and the harsher stink of rocket smoke. His rocket lanced out, rose, descended in a graceful arc. There! It struck the corner of the gunport and exploded, fire belching back out into the night, paled by the light of the flares. And doubtless belching in, washing in a cataract of fire over the wedge-shaped gun position and the men serving the cannon, leaving them wailing and dancing in the agony of burning hair and flesh. Rushing back to spread chaos and terror in the gallery behind the guns…

  "Feed me!" he screamed, exultant.

  "Up, up!"

  "Clear!"

  SSSSSRAAAA WA CK!

  The second rocket followed the first to his target. He ignored the others that were lancing through the air, some through the gunports, others slamming into the wall and blasting craters or dribbling fire down it. Several of the massive guns fired, but they were unaimed, mere bellows of agony like a stricken aurochs when it plunged into a deadfall or met a line of sharp spears. Behind him came a rapid schoonk… schoonk… schoonk as mortars lofted shells into the courtyards of the fortress, keeping heads down there, keeping the Tartessians away from their own high-angle weapons. It was an attack that could never have succeeded in daylight, or if the enemy had had any inkling of what was being prepared for them…

  Another explosion, this one racking back around the barrel of the cannon. The ammunition stacked ready behind it gang-fired, throwing it forward to crash against the stone and iron of the embrasure and point harmlessly down. Like a limp dick, Verger thought triumphantly.

  "Feed me!"

  "Up!"

  "Clear!"

  One more cat-scream of victory from the rocket launcher, and he smashed at another gunport that might threaten his sworn brothers and chief.

  "Frag round! Feed me!"

  "Up!"

  "Clear!"

  Higher this time, at the crenellations atop the wall, where the enemy were getting riflemen into position. Their fire was wild, but it was a threat. He worked his way down it, smashing stone and men with fire and splinters of iron and granite. Body and mind and skill worked together, taking him out of himself as nothing had before, a sweetness of will and intent and action, knowing that he did better than his instructors could ever have dreamed.

  "Feed me!"

  "We're dry-let's get out of here, Otto. Otto, there's the recall-let's go."

 
; He stood, ignoring the waves of heat from the tube of the launcher scorching his hands where they rested on the grips. He would bear it with him, and someday he would put this rocket launcher in a niche and pour out sacrifice before it as the patron spirit of the kindred he would found! He howled, ignoring everything but the wave of exultation that ran through him at the burning, blasting destruction ahead. Wonderful, wonderful destruction. This was what it felt like to be a God!

  Sound burst from his lips, the old war yell: " Ukasha-sa-sa-hau-hau-hau-hau!"

  "You crazy ax-kisser, there's the recall! They'll have your guts for garters!"

  That cut through the red mist before his eyes. He shuddered all over as he might in the embrace of a woman and turned, heading back toward the rubber boats.

  Then he was lying on his side, spitting out swampwater. He shook his head-where had his helmet gone? He tried to stand and fell over with a grunt, clamping his teeth on the scream that tried to force its way out of his mouth. The blaze of pain was hard to locate at first; one hand went reflexively to his crotch, found everything in order, traveled down his right thigh and hesitated at the ripped wetness. Light faded as the flares burned out. He made himself look. No bone ends, but something grated with near-unendurable agony as he clamped hands around the wound; the bone must be broken. Blood was flow-

  Sing, but not spurting or pumping; he fumbled out a field dressing, hissed again as the antiseptic powder struck the savaged flesh, then fastened it on and tied the ends. The effort of that had him panting again.

  Verger shook his head again and looked around. A crater filling with water not far away, light mortar shell probably. Rueteklo had gotten up; she still had her helmet on, but there was blood on the side of her face, and her right arm hung limp.