Down to the Sea

by William R. Forstchen

  Even the entertainment now intrigued him, a demonstration of remorseless courage unlike anything he had ever imagined. If that was how the Shiv performed in battle, nothing, not even all the veterans of the legendary 35th Maine, could stand up to them.

  They were the future, he realized, not the grasping of the Republic, which seemed so divided against itself, which pitted rich against poor, state against state, all a mad babble of voices, led by men like his father who bellowed and drank. There was no elegance, no culture, no unity of purpose, and that was what truly intrigued him, the single mind that could control all and offer a dream of the future.

  In a month’s time the fleet of the Republic would be gone, swept away in its first encounter, and for that he felt true regret. Though he no longer loved what he had once served, nevertheless he had taken an oath and more than one friend would be on those ships.

  But, as Hazin said, the price of power, the price of glory, must be paid in blood.

  Once defeated, once the Shiv and the imperial umens had landed on the Bantag coast and Constantine pounded into surrender, the Republic would disintegrate. The internal bickering, the pulling to different goals, the resentment of south to north and frontier to the settled west, would ensure that.

  What Hazin offered, though, and what had been the factor that had captivated him, was a final ending to the divisions.

  Hazin held out a dream, of human and nonhuman united in one empire, which the Republic could never achieve. That was his reason for being here now, he realized. It was not Karinia, though she had opened the door. It was the dream of a final ending without total annihilation of one or the other.

  Once achieved, the secrets of the Portals could at last be explored, revealed, and opened. Then everyone would see the truth behind the Order and all that it promised. An escape from this mad world, a quest to places undreamed and, if need be, to conquer them.

  He knew that even now his thoughts were still laced with drugs that coursed through his soul, altering his dreams, shaping his every wakeful moment, but he did not care. He felt liberated by the joy of the moment, the unity of purpose, the chanting of the emperor’s name, the great power of the ship he rode that, alone, could crush any who resisted.

  Facing back to the bridge, he saw Hazin and raised his clenched fist in salute. To his amazement, Hazin turned, smiled, and returned the salute, a gesture that brought tears to his eyes.

  THIRTEEN

  “Well, Commander Cromwell, all this fuss and excitement simply because we fished you out of the water.”

  Still standing at attention, Richard figured it was best not to reply. He stepped forward and laid the briefcase on Admiral Bullfinch’s desk.

  .“Do you know what’s in here?” Bullfinch asked.

  “Sir, the presidential seal is intact.”

  “Damn it, man, I can see that. But you must have a sense of what the hell it is they are doing up there in Suzdal.”

  “I attended several meetings, sir, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Relax, Cromwell. I told you to be my eyes up there, I want to know.”

  Richard took the word relax to mean that he could stand at ease, and he did so.

  Bullfinch leaned back in his chair, looked appraisingly at Richard. “Hard to believe you are old Tobias’s son.” Richard stiffened slightly, and Bullfinch put out his hand and waved it in a conciliatory gesture.

  “No, no, don’t take offense. It’s just, remember, I served under your father for over a year. They pushed my class out of Annapolis early because the navy was desperate for officers. I’d hoped for one of the new steam frigates; instead I got a transport ship. Damn, how your father hated that. I mean the ship, not me. He wanted action the same as I did.” Bullfinch smiled wistfully. “We both got more than we’d bargained for.”

  As he spoke he popped the seal on the case and opened it, pulling out several thick folders that, in turn, had been sealed as well.

  “Looks all very official and businesslike. Now tell me, Cromwell, what did you see, and what do you think about all this?”

  “The president’s speech, I read it in the papers on the way down. I think he laid it out quite clearly. The Kazan are coming, so now is the time to mobilize and present a unified front.”

  “I read that as well,” Bullfinch snapped. “Andrew at his best, but that’s not what I asked for. What is it that you really saw?”

  Richard hesitated. He was being asked to comment on things political, a realm he wished to avoid whenever possible.

  “Out with it, Cromwell.”

  “Indecision and confusion, sir.”

  “Ah, now we are getting down to facts.”

  “No, sir, just my opinion as you asked for it.”

  “They trained you well at the academy, Cromwell.”

  “Sir?”

  “The military and politics to be forever kept apart. Facts versus opinion. Cromwell, politics has precious little to do with facts and everything to do with opinion, so go ahead.”

  “President Keane clearly understands the issue.”

  “In other words, he completely believed you.”

  “I wouldn’t venture an opinion on that, sir. He said that we have to believe my report, for to do otherwise is folly.” Bullfinch grunted, his one eye baleful, gaze locked on Cromwell.

  “You realize, Cromwell, that if you are wrong, if it should turn out that these bastards are not attacking, then the entire navy will look like fools. Half the senate will scream we cooked the whole thing up to ram through another appropriation. I do not take kindly to being made to look like a fool. Do you get my drift, Lieutenant?”

  “Yes, sir,” he said, thinking it best not to correct the admiral concerning his new rank.

  “The father of Sean O’Donald is one of my closest friends, Cromwell. On the other hand, your father was one of my most bitter foes. The fact that I now have to accept the word of one son over another, an accusation that Sean O’Donald cannot even defend himself against, is an outrage to me.”

  “You know about Sean, sir?” Cromwell gasped.

  “The whole damn Republic knows about him.” He reached over to the table behind his desk and picked up a copy of Gates’s Daily.

  “Some damn congressional assistant spilled it last night, and Gates printed it, damn his hide. Sherman was right: every damn newspaperman should be given a choice, either hang them or hand them a gun and put them on the front line. This will break old Pat’s heart. It will kill him, Lieutenant, kill him.”

  Richard did not reply.

  “You were in this office less than two weeks ago, still dripping wet from your alleged adventure. Why the hell didn’t you tell me about this? As you commanding officer you should have reported to me any allegations you might have against a brother officer first rather than have it spill out like this.”

  As he spoke, he coiled the paper up and slammed it several times on his desk and then in disgust threw it so that it landed at Cromwell’s feet.

  “Sir.” He struggled to control his voice, to not let a hint of anger show. “I kept it in confidence because I believed it proper to first inform Senator O’Donald personally.”

  “You mean, you told him this to his face?” As he spoke, Bullfinch rose half out of his chair, pointing at the paper, shouting so loudly that Cromwell knew that every officer and sailor in the outer office was most likely standing stock still, soaking in every word.

  “Yes, sir. He was the first to know. Him and the president. I have discussed it with no one else since, other than now with you. If some”—he paused for a second and then let it spill out, raising his voice so that the unseen audience could hear his reply—“damn loose-mouthed pencil pusher in Congress ran and told the press about it, I can assure you, sir, it did not come from me. I resolved that no one other than Lieutenant O’Donald’s father would ever know of what happened out there, and I kept that promise to myself and to him.”

  Bullfinch settled back slightly. His features were still re
d, though, so that it looked like he was barely containing his temper.

  “You better pray for war, Lieutenant,” he said, his voice low, “and pray damn hard, because if it doesn’t come, I’ll have you shoveling shit in the most godforsaken outpost I can find, and remember, sir, you owe the Republic eight years service for your education, so you can’t resign and get away from me.”

  “Sir, I will pray for exactly that to happen. I’d rather shovel shit for the next eight years than see my comrades blown out of the water.”

  Bullfinch, taken aback by the reply, looked at him with obvious surprise, and Richard decided to press in.

  “And they will be blown out of the water, Admiral, if we go at them in a ship-of-the-line fight, trading broadsides at three thousand yards. As I told you before, the Gettysburg lasted barely ten minutes against one of their lightest ships. You asked for an opinion, sir, and that is it, and it is the opinion of the president and the Naval Design Board as well.”

  There was the slightest flicker of a smile on Bullfinch’s face, but his gaze was still hard, features red.

  “Damn you, Cromwell,” he said. “At least I’ll say this, unlike your father, you have some guts.”

  Richard sensed his control slipping. He lowered his eyes, and that triggered even more anger within, knowing that Bullfinch would see the action as a backing down.

  “Sir.” He took a deep breath, struggling to maintain his composure. “The issue here is my report and the response from Suzdal. I’d prefer if any allegations you might have about my father remain outside this conversation.”

  Bullfinch blinked and, if possible, his features reddened to the point that it seemed as if he would explode. He exhaled noisily and then sat back.

  “I’ll be damned if a lieutenant tells me what I can and cannot discuss in my own office.”

  “As a commander in the service of the Republic,” he replied, unable to contain being called lieutenant one more time, “I believe I have every right to object to a personal insult, sir, as long as that objection is done in a professional manner.”

  Bullfinch reached up, rubbing the ugly scars that creased his right cheek and forehead. “I’ll be damned, sir. Now you are quoting the rules of the service to me, no less.”

  Richard was tempted to add that Bullfinch had helped to write them, but he was back in control of himself again. Getting into a shouting match with an admiral at a time like this served no useful purpose, either to the navy or to himself, or to the memory of his father, a man whom he had never even known.

  Bullfinch cleared his throat, opened the topmost envelope on his desk, and slowly read through the first few pages.

  He finally looked back up, acting as if Cromwell had not been standing there waiting patiently for him to continue.

  “Insane,” Bullfinch sighed, and he almost seemed to collapse as if all wind had been taken out of his sails. “This whole thing is insane.”

  Richard remained silent.

  “Do you know what they are ordering us to do?”

  - “No, sir, not officially, but I had a sense of it. I attended three meetings with the president and two with the Design Board before being detailed back here.”

  “And you actually saw these ships, these Kazan battleships, as they are called here?”

  “Yes, sir. Eight of them were anchored in the harbor at Kazan, as was most of the rest of the emperor’s fleet.”

  “I hope to God you weren’t behind the mad scheme to tear Shiloh and her sister ships apart, because if so, orders or no orders”—he tapped the papers on his desk—“you will most definitely be handed that shit shovel before you get out of this office.”

  “No, sir. I was at the meeting at the dockyard when Professor Ferguson raised the subject.”

  “Did you influence that woman at all?”

  Richard hesitated. “Sir, she asked my opinion, sir.”

  “And that was?”

  “Shiloh would go to the bottom inside of ten minutes once their battleships got within range. If we had thirty, forty ships like Shiloh, maybe enough would survive to close in and make a kill, but twenty thousand men under your command would die doing it.”

  Bullfinch looked back at the papers, picked them up, and riffled through them again.

  “I’ll say this at least,” he announced slowly, “she has saved our asses more than once.” He looked up again at Cromwell. “You didn’t know her husband. I did. He was a damn good friend, even if he was strange. His mind always seemed to be off somewhere else even when you talked with him. But good God, when you got into things technical, he just exploded with ideas and plans that, damn me, always seemed to work. If he hadn’t disobeyed Andrew with that rocket scheme, we’d have lost the war at Hispania, and that’s a fact.” He smiled wistfully, the tension gone for a moment as he remembered things past.

  “Varinnia was a real beauty, she was, tragic what happened in that fire. But maybe it was a blessing for us all. Ferguson had the strength and moral character few men have to look beyond the flesh, to see and discover a mind as brilliant as his own beneath. No, perhaps even more brilliant because she was a perfect match, a mind that could organize and bring to completion all his mad schemes.

  “And when he died, Lord, how we were terrified. He’d always been our ace up the sleeve. But he had unleashed something within her. In those last months when he knew he was dying, he crammed in years of training, and after he was gone she took off like a blazing comet. She was able to find others like herself, train them, point them in the right direction, and let them loose.”

  He sighed again and then seemed to be embarrassed with his mental wandering. “Still, even if it came straight from her, I’d tell her right to her face that this time she is out of control. She’s trying to do in days what should take months. Hell, that inane decking on Shiloh will raise the center of gravity a good three feet. The ship will be so top-heavy she’ll roll in the first good gale.”

  “She knows that, sir, and the response is, don’t sail into a gale.”

  Bullfinch laughed. “In another month the cyclones start.”

  “In a cyclone even our best armored cruisers have gone under.”

  The admiral slammed an open palm on the papers. “The president orders and I obey, but by heavens, Andrew Lawrence Keane was an infantry officer before he became president. He and that Design Board, and even the damned secretary of the navy, who couldn’t figure out which railing to piss over when the wind is up, don’t know what it is to fight a battle at sea, and I do.”

  “Sir, that was conveyed to me quite clearly by the president just before I left. What you have in those files”— Cromwell pointed at the papers on the desk—“are undoubtedly recommendations and proposals for ship changes, transfers of command such as the air corps, and overall strategic suggestions. The president told me to inform you that you have his full confidence, and how the battle is to be fought is under your control, not his.”

  “Well, thank you very much, Cromwell,” Bullfinch responded, his voice edged with sarcasm. “I was beginning to think that-all I was supposed to do is push these papers around and sit behind this desk.”

  Richard did not reply, but even a blind man could have seen that there was more that he wanted to say.

  “Go on, out with it,” Bullfinch growled.

  “Sir, when I first came in here, you asked for my opinion.”

  “And now you’re going to give it.”

  “With your permission.”

  “Then do it, damn you.”

  He stepped closer, trying to assume a more relaxed position, eyes not fixed on Bullfinch, but instead on one of the papers scattered about the desk: a sketch of a Kazan battleship. He pointed at the drawing.

  “Sir, what is coming at us is unlike anything we ever imagined in our worst nightmares. For the last fifteen years the Kazan have deceived us. The ships they assigned to patrol their outer waters were derelict wrecks from fifty years past. All the time they were watching, observing, g
athering information while they fought amongst themselves to settle their own differences.”

  “Wish the hell they’d slaughtered one another.”

  “The paradox is that the fighting amongst themselves created the threat that exists now. Their fleet has a generation of battle experience behind it.

  “I regret having to say this, but we must assume that Lieutenant O’Donald has told them everything he knows about us, technical and political. The Kazan will come armed with that knowledge.”

  “And these Shiv?” Bullfinch asked.

  Cromwell visibly shuddered. “Terrifying, sir. They view us the same way a tiger would look at a kitten. They’ve been bred for two hundred years by the Order. Why the emperor tolerates the Order’s existence is beyond me, other than the fact that he must fear them and their power.

  “That, sir, is part of the reason for this war. I suspect it is an excuse to divert the emperor.”

  “But you told me that their leader, Hazard . .

  “Hazin, sir.”

  “This Hazin is cunning.”

  Richard nodded. “The most cunning mind I have ever met.”

  Bullfinch looked at him closely. “I sense an admiration in you, Cromwell.”

  Richard reluctantly nodded. “I must confess I was intrigued. I thought he would be like a leader of the Hordes. I was a slave, sir, for the first six years of my life. I remember their cruelty, their rage. Hazin was educated, with knowledge that is beyond us. He could cite ancient poets and philosophers, then ever so subtly shift, pulling out your most hidden thoughts. He is a match for the emperor. In fact, I believe that before this is done, the emperor will be dead and Hazin will control all.”

  “You liked him, didn’t you?”

  Richard lowered his eyes. “He is our enemy.”

  “But personally?”

  Richard looked Bullfinch straight in the eye. “No sir, he is our enemy.”

  Long ago he had learned to read lies, to catch the ever so subtle shift in voice, the momentary flicker in the eyes and tensing of features. It came from searching the faces of his cruel childhood masters. He wondered if Bullfinch could read that now.