The rafts splashed free ahead of them, and Eagle ran forward a half a mile to be out of harm's way, heaving to broadside-on to the other ships. Alston and Swindapa walked forward on the quarterdeck, down the steep wooden steps to the main deck, and then down a level further. The main gun deck of the Chamberlain was a single great room now, an oval space six times longer than it was wide, tapering to the narrow shape of the bows, lit only by the crosshatched light of the grating-hatchcovers above. It smelled of fresh wood still, and underlying that, brimstone, salt water, sweat, and the cooking scents of breakfast. Twelve eight-inch Dahlgrens crouched on either side, shaped like soda bottles and enmeshed in their cradle of carriage, lines, pulleys, and tackle.
Pity we can't do many rifled guns yet, Alston thought. Leaton's Bessemer steel just didn't have the consistent quality needed for those pressures, though; and the thought of a burst gun on these crowded decks was enough to make her shudder. There were the chasers, and a few rifled siege cannon struck down in the holds for the expeditionary force to use on land, but most of the Republic's guns were smoothbores. Good ones, at least, modeled on those of the Civil War era.
The gun teams waited, crouching, hands ready; many were stripped to the waist and had kerchiefs tied around their heads as they prepared for the shattering physical effort of serving the guns.
Or stripped to the waist except for bras, Alston thought; it wasn't quite the same as down there as on the gun deck of the Constitution or Chesapeake in the War of 1812. One young woman grinned at her for a second, then turned back and spat on her hands as she braced ready.
"Target's coming on to bear, ma'am," a middie said from his position near one division of the guns.
"Very well. Out tompions!"
The red-painted wooden plugs at the muzzles of the guns were whipped out.
"Run out your guns!"
A long drumming, squealing thunder of carriages across decks as the crews threw themselves on the ropes and twelve sets of two-ton weight ground across the oaken planking; sunlight pierced the gloom of the gun deck in rectangular shafts as the gunports rose.
"Fire as you bear!"
Alston took two steps up the companionway ladder; that gave her a good view of the target four hundred-odd yards to starboard as well as the gun deck, with the heel of the ship pitching the rail down.
"Time this, 'dapa," she said, and Lieutenant Commander Swindapa Alston-Kurlelo put on a grave official face and took out her stopwatch.
The gun captain of Number One, Starboard, spun the elevating screw and heaved at the handspike that moved the rear of the gun as the crew hauled likewise on the tackle that moved the muzzle. He glared over the barrel of his charge a final instant, then:
"Clear!" he bellowed, giving the lanyard of the friction primer a swift, hard jerk.
BAAAAMMMM! A long jet of flame-shot smoke lanced out from the Chamberlain's side. Her eye caught the fall of shot exactly, a grooved splash in the surface of the water ten yards short of the target, and then another beyond it as the ball ricocheted like a flung stone.
Not bad, she thought, smiling a little behind the expressionless mask of her face. That would have gone aboard a ship, right enough.
The gun captain pivoted like a matador, arching his body over the massive steel bulk of the gun as it leaped backward up the inclined plane of its carriage with an angry squeal of wooden brake shoes. As it stopped, the rest of the crew went into a precisely choreographed dance around it, readying for the next round.
Meanwhile, the other cannon roared as the rippling broadside went down the gun deck, and the choking sulfur-tinted smoke coiled across the deck and turned it into a thing of fog and menacing shapes. More than eight hundred pounds of high-velocity iron lashed the sea around the target with stunning violence, as water gouted all around the target, and fragments of plank whipped skyward amid spray and froth as direct hits stove barrels.
The first gun fired again. "Two minutes ten seconds!" Swindapa shouted into her ear. A good many of the crew had wads of cloth stuffed into both of theirs; enough of this could damage your hearing.
Alston nodded. Seventy seconds to reload; not bad at all. Her eye sought the next target.
"Sail trimmers!" she called, standing back from the stairs.
The crews shrank as one from each gun ran up the ladders to the deck, taking their place in the sailing crew. Another period of shattering sound, the crews' bodies running with sweat at the physical exertion and the heat the guns were throwing off. The guns were jumping back harder as the steel soaked up heat, and she could hear grunts and harsh panting at the brutal labor of wearing them around. This time, only half the second broadside could bear on the target, and there was a concentrated move for the scuttlebutts-open-topped casks of water secured to the deck-in the short interval between the second and third targets.
Alston waited until the last second before she called: "Boarders! Boarders to their stations!"
The gun crews shrank again as another thirty left them, grabbing weapons out of the racks as they ran for the companionways. The result looked remarkably piratical, half-naked bodies bristling with flintlocks and edged steel.
And for a wonder, nobody's spearing anyone in the ass, she thought with satisfaction. That had happened once or twice, earlier. Middies oversaw four guns each, and they were running full tilt from one to the next, correcting aim and heaving on lines themselves. For a wonder, nobody got their foot run over, either. That could cause really nasty injuries, but the only way to learn to do this fast was to do it fast, exhaustion or no. You had to accept a certain percentage of training accidents if the training was realistic.
"One minute fifty-six seconds," Swindapa said.
Not so good, Alston thought; and the crews were collapsed around their weapons, panting like hound dogs on a hot day; she could hear someone retching dryly.
"Master gunner, house your guns and secure the deck," she said into a silence that seemed to echo in the aftermath of the cannon roar. She lifted her voice a little, waiting until the sail trimmers and boarders had returned to their stations. "Not bad, boys and girls. But it could be better."
The cheer that followed had an element of groan in it, but there were plenty of smiles as well. First Lieutenant Jenkins was grinning as he saluted her return to the quarterdeck, looking at his own watch.
"We beat Lincoln by a good ten seconds, ma'am," he said.
Alston nodded, smiling a little herself. Victor Ortiz had the other frigate, and he'd be fit to be tied; she knew he'd had the crew doing weight training at intervals, trying to beat her time.
"There's such a thing as overstraining," she said. The shriller bark of the eight-pounders and carronades the schooners carried ended the exercise, leaving only a fogbank of powder smoke drifting eastward as it dispersed.
Marian Alston took a deep breath of the clean air and looked at her watch again. "We'll heave to," she said. "Signal 'Captains repair to Eagle for a working lunch at thirteen hundred hours', Ms. Swindapa. Mr. Jenkins, we'll rig pumps, and have the masthead and a rowing lookout check for sharks."
Lines formed for the salt-water showers after the sails were struck; the gun crews' hands and faces were smut-dark with black powder residues. Luckily Fiernans didn't have a nudity taboo, and the Americans and even the rather prudish Sun People had gotten used to it. Body modesty simply didn't go with the sort of cramped quarters a mixed force in the field or at sea had to put up with; they'd learned that shortly after the Event. After a while it simply wasn't much of a deal.
In fact, she thought, by now I feel much more self-conscious about being the only darkie among the bukra.
By an odd quirk of fate she'd been stranded in the Bronze Age along with a piece of American real estate where blacks were rare- no more than a few hundred in all. Rare, and even more so proportionately with the influx of Alban immigrants; language and culture changed, but Sun People and Earth Folk alike looked very much like their Anglo-Saxon descendants.