by Eric Flint
He sighed in relief: the inclinometer was finally, finally, working. The device was tricky, and it had taken Mike McCarthy half a week just to get it to function at all. It was really quite ambitious, too. Two sights, one fixed, the other a “floating element” that was responsive to the roll, pitch, and yaw of the ship. When the system was activated and the two sights were in perfect alignment, a circuit closed. That sent an electric pulse which fired the gun. Instantaneously. Having to read the waves and the chop would be unnecessary. And now, finally, it worked.
However, there was a further challenge: the module that allowed the gunner to quickly adjust the entire sight for different ranges had yet to be added. It was still in its shipping crate and had come with warnings that it was notoriously finicky. But that was another challenge for another day. Right now, Eddie, take the win.
Eddie closed the report, saw Mike’s writing on the cover again. Where would he be now? Eddie checked the down-time pendulum clock that would have long since become the world’s biggest, strangest, most expensive paperweight if his orderly didn’t remember to keep winding and adjusting it.
It showed 1000 hours. Which meant that Mike and Kees should have just about reached the first stop on their weekly tour of the project sites.
* * *
Mike McCarthy’s butt told him that it was going to be a very long day. He knew that because he’d only been on horseback an hour and already he could feel the ache coming on. And if he wasn’t careful, the hemorrhoids would come back. No, please, God; anything but that.
Next to him, Kees Evertsen, who was usually the picture of youthful vigor, wasn’t faring much better. Yes, he was a down-timer and so, had a much greater acquaintance with horses as essential forms of transportation. But he had been a mariner his whole life. Horses hadn’t figured very prominently in his youth and since then, travel meant being on a deck, not in a saddle.
The younger man pointed higher up the rocky bluff as they neared its edge and the sea breeze buffeted their shirts and hair. “We are expected, Michael!”
Mike returned the wave of a lively, agile figure at the crest of the rising road that hadn’t even existed six weeks ago. “Let’s see what he’s done with the guns.” They urged their mounts up the slope.
Usually, Mike didn’t require anyone to hold his horse while he dismounted, but today he felt achy and creaky enough that he didn’t object when the site supervisor put a steadying hand on the mare’s bridle. “Welcome, Don Michael.”
I will never forgive O’Rourke for telling everyone that’s how I prefer to be addressed. “And a good morning to you, Krys. What’s news up here at Loblolly Point?”
“Excellent progress!” answered Krys, who was actually Captain Krzysztof Arciszewski, a Polish soldier and engineer with a legendarily unpronounceable name. He’d been with the Dutch at Recife, and had been a noble back home. However, it seemed as though he had commenced his career as a mercenary just ahead of a murder charge that may or may not have involved a duel or dispute over another nobleman’s wife. The details were not plentiful and it was a certainty that Krys wasn’t going to furnish any himself.
All that aside, Mike had found the captain to be as determined as he was indefatigably optimistic, and if he almost always reported “excellent progress” that was because . . . well, he’d made really excellent progress.
This day was no exception. He led them to the walls that had been built overlooking the mouth of St. John’s Harbor. Kees whistled. “Captain, these are almost finished, no?”
“No,” Krys corrected with a laugh. “We have a good deal of work still ahead. But they’d serve in a pinch. And come see!” He led them to a rectangular pit. “Measured for one of the Spanish forty-two-pounders, but it could rapidly be made optimal for one of the thirty-two-pounders as well.” Workers appeared from over the rim of the new earthworks of the next, more northern battery. They were a mix of crews from one of the Dutch frigates and laborers leased from St. Eustatia’s slaveholders. There were all soaked in sweat. The Dutch seamen looked downtrodden; the bond laborers were animated, energetic.
Kees Evertsen frowned. “Are the African laborers just starting their day?”
Krys raised an eyebrow. “Why?”
“Well, they seem . . . much less exhausted.”
“Ah,” the captain answered. “It is always such. I suspect they find the comparative freedom here—equal food, equal work, equal conditions, equal treatment—extremely invigorating. Frankly, I do not know how you will get them to return to their masters.”
Mike meant to say it soberly, but it came out as a growl. “That’s the idea, actually.”
For a moment, Arciszewski’s wonderful mustaches and wind-and-sun-burnished features were less remarkable than his almost comical look of confusion. Then he smiled. “Ah. I see. Well, Michael, would you like a look at the other battery?”
Mike waved it off. “A little later. How are you set for supplies, tools?”
“All is adequate,” Krys replied. “Although any increase to the water ration would be appreciated. This is strenuous work.”
Mike nodded. “We’re working on that. For everyone, of course, but your fellas are first on my list. This is backbreaking work, up here.”
“It is not the simplest I have overseen, but it is hardly the most taxing, either. There is one other thing I would like to know, however.”
“What’s that?”
“When may we expect receipt of the guns themselves? It would be good to have one or two as models, to make sure we are leaving sufficient margins for safe operation around them.” It was not unusual for excellent engineers to also be excellent artillerists. Krzysztof Arciszewski was one such.
Mike shook his head. “I wish I knew the answer to that myself, Krys. But we’ve got a problem: insufficient draft animals. Almost all the horses here in the New World are for riding, and oxen aren’t plentiful in the Lesser Antilles. We’re waiting on two more. Both were just bought from a plantation owner on St. Christopher. Cost us an arm and a leg, too. They’ll probably be here within the week.”
Krys nodded. “I hope that you may locate more. For if those two and the three we currently have are the only ones available for the work of bringing the guns up these slopes, then I fear they will quickly die from the work. Perhaps before all the cannon can be moved to the various batteries.”
Mike nodded back. He feared the same thing. They had fifty-eight guns, all gigantic Spanish forty-two- and thirty-two-pounders taken at the Battle of Dominikirk. They had to be moved into three batteries guarding the approaches and entry to St. John’s Harbor: twenty-four for James Point across the bay, twenty for Barrington Point a few hundred yards further west, and fourteen for here at Loblolly. Given the size of the guns, that was either going to require a lot of rest days for just five oxen, or it was going to kill them. On the other hand, even if it was never going to have Cartagena’s walls, St. John’s would have some of the most numerous and heavy-hitting shore batteries in the New World. Which reminded him: “Krys, did you get Eddi—the commodore’s note about reserving that little rise behind the Barrington battery?”
“Yes. What use does he intend for it? Observation?”
Mike smiled. “Well, that too, but eventually, we want to mount some naval rifles up there. That would increase our effective threat range by a factor of ten.” Mike began walking back to his horse. Krys fell in beside him, Kees remaining slightly behind the two older men.
When Mike was in the saddle, Krys looked up, imploring, “If I may reemphasize, Michael: any increase in the water ration would be most helpful.”
Mike nodded. “That’s where I’m heading now.” He twitched the reins and headed down the pseudo-road.
* * *
Eddie stared at the folders on his desk. Which one next? Did it matter? Naval work was like the game of whack-a-mole. The moment you whack one job down, another springs up. He frowned. No, creating a naval base from scratch was the advanced version: whack-a-hydra.
Where every time you finish off one job, two more spring up in its place. And from the crowding on his desk, he was not winning this game: not even close. Too many papers, too many reports, too many letters, too much of everything—
Except pictures. No pictures. In every office he’d ever seen as a kid—either the real ones he had occasion to enter, or the innumerable ones he’d seen on TV shows—desks had pictures on them. Pictures of things beloved or special to the desk’s user.
Eddie looked at his desk. No picture of Anne Cathrine. The only thing he would have gladly put on his desk was one of the objects you just couldn’t get down-time. Oh, he could probably commission some micro-painting of her, with the obliging artist wondering the whole time: why so small an image? But that just wouldn’t be the same as an actual photograph of her.
If he closed his eyes though, he could see her. Her smile, her hair, her neck when she laughed, her shoulders when she—
Whoa, and hold on there, Commodore! Those are dangerous waters! He blew out an anxious breath, surprised at how readily that had come to mind. Or maybe not, given how big a change arriving on Antigua had been from a conjugal perspective. It was like going from a feast—hell, a nonstop banquet with mandatory seconds and thirds of every course—to an absolute famine. Why, over the course of that one last night . . .
He stopped himself yet again. Tried to think about something else, noticed his mouth had grown very, very dry. He’d never realized that thinking about your spouse and sex could be thirsty work. He reached out for the clay pitcher on his desk.
It was light. He shook it. No sloshing sound.
He closed his eyes. Once again, he’d already blown past his water ration.
* * *
The ride out across the grassy plain just south of the harbor was a whole lot easier on Mike’s butt. But it kept threatening to start aching again because of the uphill jouncing with which the day had started.
Kees, on the other hand, was demonstrating the enviable and infuriating resilience of youth, sitting his more energetic mount with verve. Three miles south of the harbor, they’d angled up a slope following what looked like a game trail that had been widened by the occasional passage of draft animals. After passing through a mile and a half of mixed rainforest, bushes, and elephant grass, they had to dismount to continue.
They tied the horses in the shade of a wide, spreading tree, under which a lean-to had been thrown together. From there, it was a quarter mile of steep, jungled switchbacks to Antigua’s one constant supply of fresh water: Christian Valley falls. Another label that would carry over from up-time sources since there was no known down-time name for it.
After fifteen minutes, they reached the work site: six men building a sluice from halved and hollowed tree trunks. Given the bugs, the humidity, the growing heat of the day, and the rudimentary tools, Mike and Kees exchanged looks that readily translated as, I sure am glad I don’t have to do this. The looks they got from the men were the logical corollary: I sure do wish I didn’t have to do this.
Mike didn’t see anyone he recognized. “Where’s, uh, Carver? Wasn’t he in charge?”
“Was,” one of them sighed. “Got sick. Fever. Two days ago. Bound back to St. Christopher.”
Mike wondered how Lieutenant Governor Jeafferson would take the news that the work he’d agreed to support on Antigua would cost him more of the time, or maybe the life, of one of his most accomplished builders of wells, dams, ghut-flumes, and millruns. “Are you in charge now?”
The fellow who answered shrugged. “Not really. But I think I’m the only one here who speaks English.”
What the hell? Mike wondered. Did I just time-shift onto the set of Apocalypse Now? But Mike just nodded and tried his passable Dutch instead. “Do more of you speak this?”
All of them said yes, but also confirmed that no one was really in charge. They had been told what to do, so they kept on doing it. And no, they hadn’t thought to inform anyone about Carver, because he’d been taken away by the soldiers—or maybe sailors?—when they came to cart down the water barrels two days ago. Hadn’t those men told anyone when they got back to the harbor?
Mike shook his head. “If so, I never heard about it. Okay, so which one of you is best with numbers?”
Two men put their hands up hesitantly, one of whom was the English-speaker. Three of the four others looked very embarrassed.
Kees was looking sidelong at the empty barrels by the side of the flume. Mike noticed the direction of his gaze, nodded. “Okay, men,” he said in Dutch, “here’s what you’re going to do. First, you fill those barrels.”
“But Mr. Carver said we had to—”
“Mr. Carver’s not here anymore and I suspect he thought you’d get more done. This is less than half the progress you made last week. So for now, you have to stop extending the sluice. Your primary job is to get a water ration ready every day. Everyone in the harbor depends on it, and a shipment every other day is just not enough.
“As soon as we get more workers up here, you’ll go back to running the sluice down the hill to the lean-to and building a catch tank there. After that, you’ll get to the scheduled improvements: covering the sluice, sealing its joints, and improving the path to the shack so that we can get a wagon up here: a specially made water wagon.”
“What?” said Kees.
“Two emptied wine tuns mounted and framed sideways into the bed of a regular wagon. One trip with that will give us half again as much water as all these damned barrels.” He raised his voice. “Do you need anything?”
“Two of our axes broke,” said the other man who could count.
“We’re running out of food,” said one of the embarrassed ones.
“When do we get paid?”
Mike got out a small pad, scratched down hasty notes. “I’ll get you answers. And I’ll get a new boss up here for you within two days. My word on it.”
They headed back down the path, never having seen the falls. Oddly enough, they had yet to do so. They heard them, but there was always something that needed fixing or decisions that needed making, so they never even saw the source of the water. Another item on the to-do list: to get a team to follow the falls up to their source. It hadn’t been clear in the one up-time reference that mentioned them whether the water came from an actual spring or, like most Caribbean water, was runoff from condensation on high rock faces. In this case, Boggy Peak.
When they were mounted again, Kees observed. “Well, that was disturbing.”
“Yeah,” Mike grumbled. “For a minute there I thought two of them were going to pull out banjos and do the scene from Deliverance.”
“What?”
“Never mind. Let’s keep going.”
* * *
Eddie put down the report on Curaçao. So much for the unbroken string of Dutch successes. Add one Dutch disaster. And a horrifying illustration of just what the Spanish meant when they said, no peace beyond the Line. They meant no discussion, no mercy, no prisoners, nothing but extermination. Unless you wanted to count the preceding rape and torture as separate activities.
Worse yet, it showed how dangerous an adversary pirates could be, presuming they were given time to gather together and could cooperate long enough to be aimed at a relatively easy target. Problem was, almost all of the allied colonies and ports were just that: easy targets. Of all of them, only three might not have to worry about the same kind of attack: St. Christopher’s because it was too large, St. Eustatia because it was too strong, and Bermuda because it was too far.
Eddie leaned his chin on his palm. On the other hand, the pirates of Tierra Firme hadn’t been trimmed back by Cartagena’s fleet last year because it had been focused on Trinidad and then got its resupply sabotaged at Puerto Cabello. And now this year, the mightier half of La Flota, the Tierra Firme fleet, never showed up at all. So the pirates of the Spanish Main hadn’t really had their numbers thinned out in well over a calendar year. So they were probably stronger and more numerous than they
had ever been.
But that wasn’t the case regarding the pirates that were an immediate threat to St. Eustatia and its allies. Tromp and Eddie had bloodied the pirates of the Greater Antilles and Leeward Islands pretty badly at the Battle of Vieques. And they’d been pretty quiescent since then. According to Diego’s answers to the questions he’d sent, a lot of them weren’t happy with the deal they had made with the Spanish and frankly, didn’t like the odds of sailing against the Dutch and their near-magical allies. Which meant they were weak. Both in terms of numbers and cohesion.
Eddie’s gaze shifted to the wall map across from him, drifted to Guadeloupe and Martinique. When an enemy is weak, he had said to the Dutch admirals and captains when proposing to go there, you take him off the board. You simplify your strategic equation. And that had worked. But it had been comparatively easy.
His eyes drifted northwest on the map, stopped on Tortuga. Now that would be difficult. Much more strongly held. A well-established base. And besides, we don’t have the forces to spend on that. But if we did, oh, if we did . . .
* * *
Mike’s last stop was as reassuring as the one at the water project had been depressing. They could see it from a mile away. Rather, they could see its glare. And best of all, there was a friend working there.
When he and Kees rode down into the small valley closer to Antigua’s windward coast, Mike shouted, “Don’t be sleeping on the job, you lazy bum!”
“Don’t tell me how to do my job, you taskmaster!” Bert Kortenaer howled back as he moved away from the solar boiler. Mike and Kees had to put up their hands against the glare. “Damn, Bert,” Mike grumbled, squinting and wincing, “how the hell do you stand working around these contraptions?” Two others, offset one hundred yards to the north and the south respectively, were similarly painful actinic flares.
