"Positions on the Pride, and asylum and probably land if we want it at the other end," Nigel went on. " Tasmania 's well beyond the king's reach-or the queen's, more to the point."
Just then a voice rang out from the masthead a hundred and twenty feet above their heads: "Sail ho!"
The three Englishmen tensed. Beside the wheel the vessel's executive officer turned her head up and raised the speaking-trumpet in her hand; long strands of black hair flew out from under her billed officer's cap as she called, "Where away? What rig?"
"Nor' nor'east, ma'am! Barque-rigged, three-master."
"What colors?"
"I can't see: wait a bit! Well, fuck me! It's a jumbuck holding a flag, on their flag!"
The three relaxed. Nigel frowned as well; the Australian concept of discipline had never appealed to him, and this troop of merry-andrews made the pre-Change Australian military look like the Grenadier Guards. Still, they got things done: And he knew who used a sheep holding a banner as their blazon.
"Lieutenant Flandry!" Nigel called. "That's the Visby arms. She'll be a Norlander, a Swede out of the island of Gotland, probably heading for Dover with paper salvaged from their mills."
Dominique Flandry nodded. "Thank you, Sir Nigel. I remember that briefing paper you had done up for us when we made Southampton."
That had been back before his arrest; he'd done up an appreciation from the survey reports-some of them from survey parties he'd led in person. The Tasmanians had naturally wanted to know the state of Europe. That was extremely simple for most areas west of the Vistula : Everyone died. There were exceptions, of course. Born-holm and some of the other Baltic islands like Gotland and Oland and the Alands were among them, analogous to the Isle of Wight as opposed to mainland Britain. And a fair-sized clump of towns in northern Norway had made it through the Change, courtesy of isolation and a huge NATO ration dump they'd discovered, along with villages in the more remote parts of Sweden. That came to a quarter million in total, and lately they'd cobbled together a loose federation called Norland under a scion of the Norwegian royal house, to resettle the empty death zones of southern Scandinavia. They claimed adjacent Germany as well, and there wasn't anyone to say them no, except for a few thousand neo-savages.
"Nothing to worry about this time," Alleyne said. "But."
Hordle tossed the fleshless chicken bone over the side and wiped the dark red furze on the back of one of his hands across his mouth.
"Right you are, sir. But. Twenty people knew what we were planning to get you out; there wasn't time to set it up bit by bit. What're the odds on a secret staying secret when that many know it?"
"Somewhere between twenty to one against and zero, Sergeant," Nigel said crisply. "For that matter, the Pride's course will look dashed odd, given that she was supposed to be heading for the Americas ."
They looked at each other. "It depends on what the king decides to do," Hordle said. "He could just decide to forget about us, I suppose. Even though we've made him look a right burke."
"And the queen. You'd be closer to the truth if you said it depends on what she talks him around to doing," Alleyne replied. "Having met the woman, I'd say that's pretty well anything, given time. And she's spiteful."
"Perhaps I shouldn't have lost my temper with her in public," Nigel admitted, remembering eyes gray as a glacier. "And I should have remembered her namesake, and that her people's literature is entirely concerned with blood feuds and revenge."
They all looked at each other again, and then out to the English coast. "Not time to relax just yet," Hordle said with a sigh.
"I think we'd best acquaint ourselves with our duties on this ship," Nigel said. "And leave the matter of pursuit to the evil day."
Because there's damn all we can do about it, he thought.
John Hordle sucked at a barked knuckle as they slid down the ropes to the waiting longboats. Above them the side of the Kobayashi Maru reared in a rust-streaked iron wall. The big tanker had been listing hard to port when the Pride's lookout spotted it, with an oil slick behind it a hundred miles long. Even as the boarding party left you could see how she'd begun to settle as water flooded into her spaces from the open scuttlin-cocks. For a moment he wondered idly where the crew had ended up. According to the log they'd rigged the ship's lifeboats with improvised masts and sails ten days after the Change, meaning to try for the coast of Argentina and then come back with help.
Must 'ave been a bit of a shocker if they made land, and found out the truth, he thought. Then he shrugged-if they'd survived at all, they'd done better than most of the human race.
It was a hot late-August day on the Atlantic; they were standing off the Portuguese coast, with land out of sight on the eastern horizon. The water stretched like hammered blue-green metal around them, riffled by a mild breeze and a long low swell out of the west. Like many of the crew, he had a bandana tied about his head; like all of them he wore loose blue trousers and bloused shirt, belt with a sailor's knife, and bare feet. Most of them were Tasmanians, with Kiwis second and Aussies from the mainland third; a few were wildly varied, picked up all over the world on the Pride's great survey voyage.
Sir Nigel and his son wore the same outfit as Hordle, but with shoes and peaked caps-officer's garb. That had caused a few minor problems-the elder Loring was no martinet, but the Ozlander conception of rank was still a little too casual for someone who'd started in the Blues and Royals. Also, he didn't regard "She'll be right, mate" as an appropriate attitude to problems.
"That was a proper job of work," Hordle said; the supertanker's manual scuttling-cocks had been awkwardly placed in dark narrow spaces and rusted solid to boot. "Why bother? It was going to sink soon anyway. Hull must be like a lace tea cozy beneath the waterline."
"British ships have the same regulation, Sergeant," Sir Nigel said, taking the tiller with an expert's hand. "Hulks are a navigation hazard. Besides that, tankers do less damage if they sink in deep water rather than break up on a coast, and we're over the Iberian Abyssal Plain here."
"Ah," Hordle said; that made sense. Eventually the black goo decayed naturally, but it could foul a shoreline for years, and there had been a lot of tankers at sea eight years ago. The only thing crude oil's good for now is killing fish. "Funny how everyone wanted the stuff before the Change, and now we want to get rid of it."
There was a murmur of agreement as the longboat's crew ran out their oars and sculled for the Pride where she lay hove-to half a mile away. Some ships had cargoes that were still valuable even after all this time-medicines and luxury goods mainly, though even intact toilet paper was worth a fair bit. He knew men who worked full time at salvage, although merchantmen still afloat were growing rarer and rarer as time and tide and storms had their way with them.
Hordle stood in the bow of the longboat, ready with the boathook. The Lorings and he had fitted easily enough into the Pride's crew, since their small-boat skills were readily transferable; they'd all gone together on expeditions up the Seine and Loire, and once overland to the Rhone, down it and out through the Med in a ship that met them there. The Tasmanians also struck him as being a little less belligerently Aussie than most Ozlanders he'd met before the Change, which was pleasant; he'd worked with the Down Under SAS on his single deployment east of Suez.