The flagship was leading the Guard warships in toward land, wind from the south on their starboard quarter, masts bare of all but fighting sail, with boarding nets along the sides and splinter netting overhead. The deck was nearly empty, except for the hands waiting at the lines and the Marine Gatling-gun crews crouching at the rail where their weapons snouted out from among the rolled hammocks; she looked up to the tops, where the rest of the Gatlings waited. Down again, through the deck gratings, and she could see the gun crews poised around the sleek blue-black shapes of their Dahlgrens. A. few of them looked up, showed teeth that gleamed in the dark, lifted thumbs, but most waited quiet and motionless in the dimness. There was little sound beside the creak and groan of the ship working, the occasional rutch of feet on the sanded decks- sand to keep the footing from growing slippery when the planks ran with blood and body fluids-and the song of the wind in the rigging.
The faces on the quarterdeck were equally grave and quiet, except for a few middies grinning with excitement. Alston turned and looked behind her. The five frigates followed in exact line, their wakes like a single ruled line across the purple-blue of the sea. The low coastline of southwestern Iberia was less than a hint ahead, more like a line of cloud than a firm sight of land-the heights of Gibraltar and the Sierra Nevada were far off to the southeast. Swindapa came up, saluted, and handed her a folder. It held pictures, digital video shots from pre-Event cameras borne by the scouts in the ultralights, dropped onto the Chamberlain's deck and run through the PC and printer in the radio shack.
"They're coming out," she said quietly; their eyes met, saying all that was needed.
Alston gave a small precise nod, looking at the picture. All the larger Tartessian ships, and twenty of the galleys. Fangs out and hair on fire. The enemy had fought hard during the abortive invasion of Nantucket, but they'd fight harder still here, on the doorsteps of their own homes.
What a waste.
She studied the picture. The Tartessians were forming up in a line, ragged but definitely a line, slanting down the wind to the southeast. The Islanders had the weather gauge, the wind blowing from them to the enemy, but that meant little when both sides obviously wanted a stand-up fight. The two fleets formed the acute angles of a triangle; her mind automatically extrapolated the lines. Where they met…
"Pass the information to the fleet, Ms. Kurlelo-Alston," Marian said.
She glanced to starboard. The transports were lying further southward, off the Moroccan coast, hull-down from her present position. Lying to the windward also meant they could move rapidly, if necessary…
"On deck, there! Sail ho!"
The enemy grew from a flash of white to sails to hulls painted dark blue-gray and checked by the opening maws of gunports, as swift as always when fleets were on converging courses. The hulls were long and low, derived from the form of Yare, the first modern ship they'd been able to study in detail. Six-to-one hull-beam ratio, she noted. There were differences, though; slightly more rake on the masts, an ingenious-looking Y-fork coming up from the stem and used to set the mizzen forestays. The Tartessian shipwrights were men who understood wood and stresses and the sea, with their hands and guts if not mathematically. They'd taken the uptime carpentry tools and techniques and run with them-run far and fast.
"Carry on," she said, walked to the rail, stepped up to the ratlines, and ran up the shrouds to the mizzen top.
"Good morning," she said to the occupants-the triangular platform was crowded, with the Gatling crew and several Marine sharpshooters with telescopic sights on their rifles.
"Morning, ma'am," a sergeant said cheerfully, in a thick Fiernan accent. "Beautiful it is a morning for fight, if fight has to become."
There was something to that; not too hot, blue sky with an occasional fleecy cloud, a Mediterranean autumn on the edge of winter. She nodded back and climbed further, up the shrouds that used the top as a spreader and to the topgallant crosstrees. That narrow spreader board had room only for one, and the sailor there ran nimbly out onto the yard to give her room. She leveled her binoculars. The galleys were coming up fast behind the twelve sailing ships…
Now, that's cunning, she thought. Just the thing to hit us when we're taking on the gunships.
Like the sailing ships they had fires going in braziers on their quarterdecks next to the wheel, where the three-legged idols of Arucuttag sat in their little shrines. Her lips tightened. Turning these buccaneers loose on the world with nineteenth-century technology and Bronze Age attitudes was the Nantucketers' fault… hers, in particular.
The decks of the enemy ships showed plenty of other glints, the edged metal of bayonets and boarding pikes, axes and swords; as she'd expected, they'd shipped heavy crews for this action. Crowding might slow them down if they overdid it. If they didn't overdo it, it might give them a little edge because they could rotate gun crews and replace casualties. It would certainly make them harder to take by boarding. She looked up their masts, and from one came a wink of reflected light, a spyglass peering back at her.
"And they've got a smart, hard, unmerciful man to lead them, one who's as able as any I've ever met, I think," she murmured to herself.
We gave Isketerol his chance, she mused. If the Eagle hadn't turned up there in Alba, he'd have lived and died an obscure adventurer, in a people so obscure the archaeologists weren't even sure they really existed. We gave him an opportunity, and woke the fire in his belly.
What was that phrase Doreen Arnstein had used once… a "mute inglorious Milton"?
Well, Isketerol was a mute inglorious Napoleon, or William the Conqueror.
He did have one weakness, or strength, that his friend William Walker lacked. To twentieth-century eyes he was ambitious to the point of madness and cruel as the sea, but he had his own standards. Walker was a solipsist, the one true love of his own life; the rest of the world was game-counters to him. By contrast, the Iberian warlord really cared about his own people; and he was a man of honor, in his way…
Alston leaned out, wrapped an arm and both legs around a backstay, and slid down, thinking hard as she did, as casual as running downstairs in Guard House back on Main Street. On the quarterdeck, she said:
"Ms. Kurlelo-Alston, order to the schooners. They're to move in east and west and engage the galleys. And to remember those damned things can go right into the eye of the wind."
More bitterly than ever she missed the Farragut, and pushed that out of her mind.
"Coming into range," Commander Jenkins said.
And we should take advantage of it, she thought. If they've reequipped with twenty-four-pounders, six a side, they've got a broadside of a hundred and forty-four pounds each. We've got over eight hundred pounds, and the range on them.
"Open fire as you bear on the lead ship, Mr. Jenkins," she said. "To the fleet; general engagement in line, maintain course."
A rattle of orders, from Jenkins through his subordinates, down to the gun crews. Out tompions! and run out your guns! The familiar drumming thunder as the portlids went up and the gleaming blue-black snouts came out, the grunting hnnn-huh!, each crew in unison as they heaved four thousand pounds of cast-steel cannon across the thick oak planking with rope and block and pulley and sheer hard sweat.