by Eric Flint
“Ow!” complained Pudsey, whose wooly brows gathered into a great frown. “Lady Anne, now see here: I took an oath to protect you. Keeping your secrets was not part of that bargain. Especially when keeping those secrets might get you killed! So yes, I told Lady Sophie, and bloody glad I did, too!” He was flustered when she hugged him very tightly, then mumbled. “Er, pardon the blasphemy, milady.”
“Oh, shut up,” she wept happily.
* * *
On the walk back to Oranjestad, Sophie explained that it was Brandão who had started her searching: “When I arrived at the infirmary, he mentioned you had been behaving strangely. Then I heard about the bricks.”
Anne Cathrine looked over, expecting to see Sophie’s wry almost-smile. But she was expressionless.
“People knew what direction you had gone,” she continued. “Then I saw Pudsey. Following him meant finding you, so . . . ” She shrugged.
“I owe you my life,” Anne Cathrine injected into the silence that followed.
Sophie shrugged again. “Being sent on this voyage with you, I counted myself dead. Then I met Hugh and I wanted to live again. And then today, I didn’t care if I lived or died. But now I know again: I want to live.”
Anne Cathrine nodded. “I understand. Sometimes, I have felt that way about my Eddie. I go from feeling that I cannot live without him, but then feeling that if he died, I must—must—continue on, that—”
But Sophie was shaking her head. “No,” she said, “that is not what I mean at all. I no longer care what it costs to fully return Hugh O’Donnell’s love, nor the obstacles we might face. The freedom to try—to walk that path, or any other—is what makes life worth living. But that is also why, if Hugh O’Donnell died tomorrow—and in this New World, he may well—I would still want to live. More than ever, perhaps. Here, I am not just free from all the meanness and hypocrisy of the Old World, but I am free to work against its infection of this one. I was a child of privilege, but I was also its prisoner. Here, I am neither. And in that is the first real freedom I have ever known. Maybe it is the only real freedom to be had in the world.”
Anne Cathrine did not know what to say to her friend, who simply kept moving forward, as if nothing in the world could stop her from where she was going, and yet was in no hurry to get there.
Chapter 49
Oranjestad, St. Eustatia
Van Walbeeck stared at the white-scorched brick on Tromp’s desk. It was missing a good chunk of one corner. “So, how long do we just stare at that?”
“Probably forever.” Tromp was opening the secure pouch that had just come from the telegraphy station that handled The Quill Array’s coded traffic. “That brick is enough to enrage the people, but not enough upon which to mount a conclusive investigation.” He scanned the comm reports, which, for some strange reason, Eddie sometimes referred to as “flimsies,” even though they were written on the same, stiff paper that was used for all other purposes on St. Eustatia. “It seems that the commodore has been keeping the wind—er, airwaves busy communicating with both Admiral Simpson and Governor Waters of Bermuda.”
Van Walbeeck waited for two seconds, then loudly complained, “Well, do not keep me in suspense. Read it!”
Tromp considered doing so, scanned down the sheet, shook his head. “I am not about to read all these bits and pieces of sentences, punctuated by ‘stop’ and ‘stop’ and ‘stop’ yet again. I accept that they are optimal during battle, but that is where I draw the line. They give me a headache. I shall synopsize.”
“Well, then, do that, already!”
Tromp scanned further down the sheet. “Bermuda has allowed us to put up the antenna.” Which, for now, was just a glorified term for a very long piece of cable held up by a very tall pole. A more worthy successor would be in place shortly. “It has been successfully tested and will enable communications with New Amsterdam, although that will, for now, require an offshore relay.”
Jan shrugged. “Seven hundred nautical miles is at least a workable distance. At fifteen hundred miles, there was no way we were ever going to be able to establish direct radio contact with the mainland. And we are . . . what? Nine hundred nautical miles from the Somers Isles?”
Tromp nodded, barely hearing his friend. “As part of the agreement, the Bermudans require that the Allies—spelled with a capital ‘A,’ mind you—provide a security flotilla. Reasonable,” the admiral commented, “because when the Spanish learn of it, they will certainly wish to eliminate that communication hub.”
Van Walbeeck sighed. “It was only a matter of time before our war spread to Bermuda. Have they agreed to our requests to build port and layover facilities there?”
“Yes, if we can broker an agreement with Warner of St. Christopher’s for a regular exchange of convoys, mostly for trade in comestibles. And in other news . . . Eddie indicates that we should stand up the crew for the first of the ocean-going tugs. He says that the sturdy old blunt-bowed pinks we acquired from Nevis and New Walcheren were, and I quote, ‘capable of being retrofitted’ for the down-time steam engines. Two of which, he notes for our interest, were manufactured in Holland.”
“Well, hooray; and I shall toast the industriousness of our homeland with an extra gill of rum this night. Anything else?”
“An offhand remark that his desk is almost clear of project folders.” Tromp looked at his own clutter. “Enviable.” He smiled. “But as you and I know, old friend, the last few items on a desk are generally not there because they are the easiest to resolve.”
“Do not remind me,” van Walbeeck groaned, “or I shall have to take that gill of rum much earlier than I intended.”
St. John’s Harbor, Antigua
The sun was going down over St. John’s Harbor, but there were still two reports staring up at Eddie Cantrell from the top of his desk. One was good news, the other was . . . well, not bad news so much as it was paralyzing news.
Since he feared he might never get beyond the paralyzing folder, he snagged the good-news report first, opened it, and sighed in relief.
Finally—finally!—the inclinometers installed on Intrepid’s guns were fully functional, including the range adjustment module. The basic link between the two sights—so that the gun would fire automatically when they were aligned—had been reliable enough that his gun crews had been practicing with them for several weeks. However, calibrating the floating sight so that it could include adjustments for other targeting variables, range foremost among then, had proven a thorny challenge. And without it, the entire sighting system was damned-near pointless.
With a typical gun, the means of compensating for any projectile’s increasing rate of drop over the course of its flight was pretty straightforward, if tricky: you aimed “above” the target. That way, the projectile’s drop put it right where you actually wanted it. A lot of math was involved, and if there was any significant wind, or the powder was weak, or even if there was high humidity, your calculations could be perfect and you’d still miss. To Eddie’s mind, gunnery involved as much zen as it did math.
With the inclinometer though, there was only one really good way to compensate for distance (and eventually, other variables): by adjusting, or “re-zeroing,” the position of the “floating” sight. Because you still had to line up the two sights to complete the circuit and fire the gun.
Unfortunately, the offsetting mechanism on the floating sight had proven to be finicky and sensitive. And because Simpson had only been authorized to send over the two hand-me-down systems originally used as second-generation test beds, these particular mechanisms came with some unique quirks all of their own.
But there, on the top of the report he’d opened, was Mike’s terse summary:
Inclinometer targeting offset module functioning to within 0.1 tolerances of projected baseline. Performance refinement continues.
Eddie leaned back with a sigh, rubbed his hands over weary eyes. That was huge: huge. It meant that they could now use Intrepid’s—and eventually
all the other steamships’—eight-inch naval rifles at longer ranges and in rougher conditions. Additionally, they’d spend only half the number of rounds finding the range and getting on target. Or, to put another way, Mike’s two-sentence update meant that they had increased Intrepid’s effective firepower by—well, by a lot.
There was an inquiry attached to the cover of the report, but it was from the chief quartermaster, not Mike: “Retire percussion-lock firing mechanism upon upgrade?” Eddie scrawled his reply in capital letters: “NO!!!” Yes, the inclinometer would revolutionize naval combat—until the damn thing broke. Once this shiny new toy had repeatedly proven itself to be rugged enough and resistant to the vagaries of combat conditions, then Eddie would allow the old firing mechanism to be mothballed. Maybe.
He put that folder aside with a fond, farewell glance and picked up the one that was sure to induce paralysis, both to his brain and productivity. Which was why he’d left it to the end of the day. He sighed and opened it.
It was the planning file on Tortuga, a mostly rocky island off the north coast of Hispaniola that was, even in Eddie’s time, associated with pirates. In addition to all the available up-time information, there were maps from different periods and detailed descriptions from Jol, Diego, Moses, and anyone else who’d ever been there or whose speculations upon it were deemed reliable.
Its first settlers had been French hunters, whose name—boucaniers—indicated their primary product: smoked meat. Originally, that meant sea turtles. However, markets for that meat and the shells proved to have limits, along with the local sea turtle population. So they also began hunting the island’s plentiful boar, but trade still remained marginal. Plantations were tried, but like so many early French efforts in the Caribbean, they foundered for lack of cohesion and support. So the forerunners of the region’s buccaneers made trading their primary activity—specifically, trading in goods that had either been stolen from, restricted to, or prohibited by the Spanish. And after becoming successful black marketers, it had been only a few short steps to sailing under the black flag.
The increasing flow of forbidden goods from the island, the buccaneers’ raids upon the northern settlements of Hispaniola, and the increasing number of true pirates who made it their home port, prompted the Spanish to mount a sustained attack upon Tortuga, using troops from Santo Domingo. Occurring less than a year before Grantville popped into this world, the Spanish succeeded in driving the raiders out of their makeshift home port, but the inhabitants simply fled into the densely wooded highlands until the galleons left.
Months later, an English “privateer,” Anthony Hilton, initiated what was to be the last attempt to establish a legitimate colony on the island. With the support of the same backers who founded the Puritan colony on Providence Island, Tortuga’s plantations were renewed, but ultimately failed again. However, as a base for English-authorized raiding of Spanish shipping, it was a great success.
That was the point at which local and up-time history diverged considerably. According to Diego and Moses, the moment that King Charles relinquished England’s Caribbean claims to the French, the ownership of the island became a matter of fierce dispute between the mixed French-English population. The Puritan influence was the first casualty of that friction and shortly after, Tortuga’s only port, Cayonne, became a true pirate enclave, supported by an inland mountain fortress.
The only firsthand information subsequent to that came from Diego, who had been there as recently as a year ago. Apparently, Hilton had either left or been killed and, perhaps because of the changed fortunes of both England and France, no further support had come from either nation. Tortuga was known among its piratical inhabitants as Association Island, the home of freebooters. They sorted themselves into what they called Free Companies: a noble-sounding euphemism for loose collections of like-minded raiders.
They had been growing steadily stronger until large numbers of them were destroyed at last year’s Battle of Vieques. Whereas the up-time Spanish had returned to, and sacked, Cayonne and its fort, in this timeline, the emergence of consolidated Dutch opposition caused the Spanish to reconceive the pirates as potential privateers.
Now, however, the ranks of those mercenary pirates were sorely depleted, and the ones still operating were doubly wary of continuing to take Spanish silver. Many were convinced that they would lose more of their own blood earning Spanish coin in pitched battles than what they would shed if they simply returned to their own free-booting activities.
Eddie sighed. Which meant that the pirates were close—really close—to leaving Spanish service. On the gameboard of the Caribbean, they were a piece which, with the right push, would no longer be controlled by his opponent, but would return to random activity. Or, if sent the right kind of message, would actually consider it safer to go after Spanish ships than his own.
Eddie leaned back in his chair and rubbed his hair in frustration. But how could he give them that push? Tortuga wasn’t big, but history had shown that conventional attacks upon it had always been costly, and taken longer than expected. And any force large enough to mount that kind of assault was one they would surely see coming.
Eddie scoffed; as if he had any forces left to devote to such an operation. All his own game pieces were already tied down and overextended, both geographically and operationally . . .
He jerked upright in his chair. All his pieces except one. He smiled, imagined a cartoon lightbulb suddenly flashing into existence over his head. But would it work? Could it work?
He leaned back and ruffled his hair again, even more rapidly. He was contemplating the kind of plan that Simpson characterized (in rare moments of crudity) as being “more balls than brains.”
But if Eddie could bring that one available piece on to the gameboard, in the right place, at the right time, then maybe, just maybe, it would be the sucker punch the pirates of Tortuga would never be looking for.
Eddie started rearranging all his sheets, laid out a planning calendar to his left, and opened the telegraph pad and code book to his right. Although the sun had only recently begun accelerating its descent for the horizon, he glanced at the small table across the room, wedged into the narrow space where the floor-to-ceiling map of the Caribbean ended and the windows of the bayside wall began. On that table were two full pitchers of water, a soursop, a pineapple, goat cheese, and four loaves. There were also three stoppered clay jars of lamp oil. He smiled at the latter.
Who knew that one day I actually would be burning the midnight oil?
* * *
Eddie was started awake by a knock on the door. He raised his head from his desk, looked at the clock. Just after midnight. “What is it?” he called, belatedly realizing he had sounded more like a grumpy college kid than a commanding officer.
“Highest priority signal sir.”
He was suddenly very awake. “Bring it,” he ordered.
The first line told him most of what he needed to know:
SPANISH FORMATION SIGHTED OFF SOUTH COAST OF ST. MAARTEN.
“How old is this intelligence?”
“Hours, sir. It was confirmed before relay to us.”
“How did we get it?”
The orderly seemed puzzled. “Er, radio from St. Eustatia, sir.”
Eddie managed not to roll his eyes. “Yes. I mean, who collected it and when?”
“Earlier today, sir. From a Bermudan sloop coming down to freight smoke. They saw the ships a few days ago, sir. The Spanish were apparently reinforcing the island, landing troops. They ran a skiff out after the sloop. The Bermudan captain showed his heels, escaped, but it took him quite a while to get clear.”
“Why, if he escaped them?”
“Because he ran south and ran straight into a much greater number of Spanish, sir. Mostly fast ships.”
“Pataches?”
“Larger than that, sir. Galleoncetes or upscaled fragatas, according to the report.”
Eddie thought for a moment. “Do you have your pad a
nd codebook?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, get them! Smartly!”
“Yes sir!” The runner banged the door behind him as he ran back to the comms shack.
Eddie leaned his head back into his hands. He had known it was going to be a late night. Now, he’d be lucky to finish while it was still early morning.
Oranjestad, St. Eustatia
Making sure not to drip any blood on the infirmary floor, Anne Cathrine bundled up the rags that had served as the first compress for Cuthbert Pudsey’s arm. Sophie had been correct; the wound had been mercifully minor, to the extent that a gunshot ever is. But the ball had been small, and very likely not made of lead; it had gone through cleanly, without the terrible, wider wound left by a bullet that was deforming and expanding.
She had sent Sophie to see that Pudsey went to his room and stayed there while she remained behind to clean up and close the infirmary for the night. And while doing so, she had kept on imagining how she might approach Tromp, what she might say to convince him to take action, yet not so overtly that it would endanger the lives of the Musens’ slaves.
But as she played the many permutations of that scene in her mind, it always ended the same way: Tromp with a pained look on his face as he explained the many reasons he could not take action. And he always ended on, “And if I do as you ask, knowing in advance that all I can do is make an accusation without any clear evidence or witnesses to the act, do you know what the people of Oranjestad will say? That I have become Danish, instead of Dutch.”
Which was an entirely likely outcome and an entirely reasonable reluctance on the part of the admiral. As a foreign dignitary who had the luxury of having her needs provided for, Anne Cathrine had possessed the freedom and time to act and speak as the workaday Dutch colonists could not. But it also meant that she was an outsider whose investigation would appear to be motivated by the fact that the victim had been a woman of her own country.
