More thick ropes flew out, and the steel flank of the big windjammer kissed the coconut-fiber baffles. Further out, sails furled and anchors splashed, whistles sounded and the steaming ensigns came down, the national flag breaking out at the tops. He could see the party that stood ready to greet them on the dock bracing. Some had sickly smiles, others expressionless masks. The gangplank swung out and thumped down; Ian used councilor's rank shamelessly, crowding in behind the initial quartet of Commodore Alston, Swindapa, Colonel Hollard, Major Hollard, and Captain Nguyen of the Eagle. A bell rang from the quarterdeck.
"Eagle departing!"
"Welcome, Commodore," the commandant of Mauritius Base said.
Marian Alston returned his salute. He was a heavyset, balding man in his early forties, dressed in shorts and sandals and loose shirt and sweating until his scalp glistened through thinning black hair.
Might be the heat making him sweat, Ian thought. Mebbe not. He put Jared Cofflin's dry, skeptical Yankee voice to the thought.
"We've a luncheon laid on," the man-Marvin Lockley, he remembered-began.
"Later," Alston snapped. "I think we need to have a discussion, Mr. Lockley."
Not using his militia rank, Ian noted.
She turned. "Colonel Hollard, Captain Nguyen, please see to disembarking the troops and passengers," she went on in a flat, even tone that anyone who knew her recognized as the danger signal it was.
She turned on one heel and strode away, the luckless Lockley trailing in her wake. Ian followed, looking about. A cat lay in the shade of a thatched hut, nursing kittens. For a moment he accepted the sight, then grunted in shock.
That litter represents half a dozen feral cats in the making, he thought. Dane Sweet will have kittens himself. The Councilor for Conservation had been nervous about colonizing the home of the dodo anyway, and he and his faction had insisted on safeguards. Which, evidently, Mr. Lockley had let slip. A pregnant Fiernan girl waved to them; she was wearing nothing but a palm-frond hat and driving a sow ahead of her with a stick. Feral pigs, too. They were supposed to be strictly penned. A man in ragged shorts sat propped against a wall, a jug beside him…
"I notice that the water-furrow and the sawmill are incomplete," Alston said in a conversational tone.
"Ah… we've had some difficulties… hard to get parts…"
"I see. I think we should discuss this, Commandant."
They turned into what was evidently the commandant's quarters, a series of thatched rondavels. Swindapa halted outside and made a sign to Ian and Doreen; they did likewise and shushed their son. Voices came from within. He couldn't follow them for the most part, not until near the end, when Alston's voice rose to a quarterdeck bellow:
"This may be an island, and it may be a tropical island, BUT IT ISN'T GILLIGAN'S GOD-DAMNED ISLAND-YOU HEAR ME, MISTER?"
A moment later they came out. Lockley was gray-white under his tan, and shaking. Alston stood blinking in the sunlight for a second. The troops from the Eagle were filing ashore, then being dismissed; the civilian technicians and specialists and their families followed. Her eyes came to rest on Lucy and Heather, and a little of the stiffness went out of her shoulders.
"Mr. Nguyen," she said.
The Vietnamese-American officer came to attention as the commodore went on: "Mr. Lockley has decided to resign his position here and ship out on the Eagle as a foremast hand. Rate him 'seaman recruit' and see that he's assigned some fatigues."
"Yes, ma'am."
"Ms. Stearns."
The former commandant's second-in-command swallowed and braced herself. "Ma'am?"
"In the light of Mr. Lockley's resignation, I'm provisionally appointing you commandant of Mauritius Base. With the expeditionary force and the crews, we have more than a thousand pairs of hands here; we ought to be able to get things shipshape in fairly short order." A pause. "Shouldn't we?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"Good." She sighed. "Now, let's see about that lunch."
Doreen gave Ian a silent whistle behind the commodore's back and waggled a hand. He nodded agreement. As they walked away, Swindapa dropped back beside them for a moment.
"Ian," she said, frowning slightly, "who's Gilligan?"
"Let go, and haul!"
A squared ebony log jerked up off the pier, then swung out over the deck of the Eagle as the yard acting as crane pivoted on the mast.
"Heave… ho! Heave… ho!"
"Handsomely there, handsomely!"
Captain Nguyen lowered his speaking-trumpet and turned to Marian Alston.
"That's the last of them, Commodore," he said with quiet pride. He bent a critical eye on his ship. "I'm glad we finally got around to installing a proper hold. She trims well, even so."
"That she does, although I'd like to see her under way," Alston said. "She's a little by the stern."
"Better that than dead-level. I'd been meaning to come at the ballast and shift it a bit anyway. Less likely to press her forefoot down under full sail that way."
"She's your baby," Alston agreed, suppressing an inner pang. Promoted away from ship command, goddammit, she thought.
"That's the last of the cargo loaded, and we're wooded and watered," Nguyen said. He nodded toward the other ships of the flotilla. "Ready to sail with the evening tide, ma'am."
"Well, we're not in that much of a hurry." Theoretically, the stopover on Mauritius was supposed to rest the expeditionary force's people before the action at the end of it. Instead they'd spent an effortful week getting the base itself shipshape.
"Watch crews only," she went on. "We'll give everyone a day or two of leave, then get under way. Morning tide on Monday-oh-nine-hundred hours. Lieutenant Commander, pass the word."
"Yes, ma'am," Swindapa said, conscientiously marking it in the daybook to be issued as a general order.
Cheers and flung hats rose to the sky as Nguyen announced the leave and then exchanged salutes with the commodore. Alston removed her billed cap, sighed, and ran fingers over her damp forehead and close-cropped hair as they walked back up the single street of the little settlement.
"Looks better," Swindapa said.
Alston nodded. It did; the major buildings were all completed, the sawmill in action, livestock neatly penned, and the hollow-log aqueduct had filled the casks and tanks of each ship in turn as they were warped in to the dock. Good spring water too, not likely to go bad out in the middle of nowhere. Hollard's Marines were still putting the finishing touches on the fort, adding stone retaining walls below the earth ramparts. The colonel was lending a hand himself, stripped to the waist, sweat-shining skin rippling as he heaved an eighty-pound block into position. She caught Swindapa's frank look of appreciation and mock-scowled.
"Just looking," the Fiernan said. "I look at girls, too."
"As long as it's strictly a visual relationship," Alston chuckled. She added, "He's setting a good example for his troops."
Alston's expression softened into a smile as they came to the circle of children sitting under a tall, slender tree with a silvery-gray trunk- a tambalacoque. Doreen Arnstein was taking the class, pointing alternately to a live dodo in a wicker cage and a diagram on the portable blackboard. There were around three dozen youngsters, mostly children of the technicians attached to the expeditionary force. This was a long-term project, and you couldn't expect people to leave their children behind for an indefinite stay.
They waited for a moment while the assistant councilor for foreign affairs finished her rundown on evolutionary biology and younger children continued practicing the alphabet on their slates. Nantucket's still small enough to be informal, Alston thought. I like that. It was also small enough that Martha Cofflin had managed to thoroughly revamp the curriculum, and as a parent she liked that even better-they saw eye to eye on phonics and drill, and even Lisa Gerrard had come around on most of it.