S. Stirling - On the Oceans of Eternity

She's walking better , he thought. The- young woman , not " girl." Kathryn was right to ream me out about that -was in the dark wolfskin jacket that had become something of a trademark, beating snow off it with her knitted cap, looking slim and dark and dashing.

Clemens said the left leg ought to recover full function, and the hand nearly so. Still a heavy limp, but less pain. But the scar tissue will always be more sensitive to heat and cold, or to drying out . It must have cost her considerably to come here through the weather outside.

He could see most of her face; the molded black-leather mask only covered the affected areas, a triangle from brow over the left eye and down to the corner of her mouth. That mouth turned up in a smile as she saw him, the lines of endurance melting to unaffected pleasure. He forced the silly grin back…

… and yeah, it's logical to have mood swings after a trauma like that . The problem was, how exactly did you convince someone you weren't just courting her out of a misplaced sense of personal honor? Especially when you are a bit of a prig .

Everyone sat, and also eagerly accepted the cups of hot cocoa an aide dealt out from the big pot warming over a spirit lamp in a corner of the big room.

Big market there after the war , he thought, half-amused at the sharp-nosed Yankee profiteer buried somewhere in his subconscious.

For that matter, Tudhaliyas and his queen were casting an occasional envious glance at the little tile stove. Even a Great King spent the winters here being miserably chilly when he was out of bed. Enough braziers to heat a fair-sized room also courted carbon monoxide poisoning, unless you left the windows wide open, which sort of defeated the purpose. Kenneth suspected that-presuming they beat Walker-Tudhaliyas would be moving heaven and earth to get an Islander engineer in to do a fixup on the palace. Which meant all his nobles would, too, and then…

"Let's get going," Doreen said.

Most of it was as boring as policy meetings always were; figures and estimates, troop dispositions and training, the endless question of how to keep the refugees fed; some of them had been moved all the way down to Carchemish to be within reach of grain barged up the Euphrates.

"So in the end," Tudhaliyas said, "What we have gained is a chance to do everything over again this coming year, with both sides stronger and my country a battleground once more."

"Better a battleground than spear-won land of the Achaeans," Zuduhepa said sharply.

Kashtiliash blinked, not quite used to a woman showing such outspokenness before a King. Kathryn gets away with it , Hollard thought. But she's in a special category in his mind, I think . He felt a moment's envy at the solid bond that was almost physically perceptible between the Babylonian and his sister. But then, they were both solid people; and they'd put in time and effort enough to earn it.

He wasn't looking forward to next year's campaign either. Raupasha didn't flinch when anyone looked at her any more, but God knew what another set of battles would do; he'd bribed her attendants to tell him about the nightmares and crying jags.

Doreen tapped the wooden handle of her steel-nib pen against the surface of a report. "We have gained time, which is the most precious thing of all," she said. "Remember, the war here in Haiti-land is only one front…"

The usual translation difficulties stopped them for a while, searching for a word for "sector."

"… sector, division, part , then, of a larger struggle."

"So you say," Tudhaliyas said. "We fight Great Achaea, not Tartessos."

"As a matter of fact," Doreen said, smiling…

Smugly , Hollard decided. But a nice smug, if you're on her side .

"… I've got something more concrete to tell you about the news from Tartessos."

"That was quick work," Marian Alston-Kurlelo said, looking at what was left of the Merrimac .

It was one of those mild, brilliant Andulusian winter days that gave her occasional daydreams of wangling a posting here after the war. Wind like spun silk caressed her face, and everything from the ship before her to the flamingos cruising like giant pink butterflies in the marshes had a fine-cut clarity.

"Four weeks and four days from the time we hauled her up on the slipway," the Seahaven supervisor said, wiping her hands on a greasy rag.

The gesture was one of Ron Leaton's trademarks, and engineers all over the Republic copied it, along with his air of abstracted competence. There were worse role models, and most of the mechanics and engineers had come up through Seahaven or its spin-offs.

An entirely forgivable foible , Marian Alston-Kurlelo decided, walking through the construction-yard litter of timber, tools, and grinning workers slapping each other on the shoulders to view the craft from all sides.

The big merchantman had been cut down to the waterline. A sloping three-foot glacis surrounded the hull above that, solid oak beams a yard on a side covered by a bolted carapace of big interlocking steel plates three and a half inches thick. More steel covered the low deck, and a slope-sided central casement at midsection. That had three gunports a side, and a row of them in the cone-sectioned front and rear where a pivot-mounted gun could swivel around. A single thick smokestack rising from an armored collar, a couple of air-scoops and a low octagonal pilothouse with vision slits completed the picture topside, with a big bronze propeller at the stern.

It didn't give her the stab of pure pleasure a good sailing craft did; in fact, she still felt guilty at murdering something beautiful to make this. But it was… solid workmanship , she thought, taking a deep breath and inhaling the scents of drying paint, varnish, tar, timber, brass, iron, and whale-oil lubricating grease. Satisfying. It'll do the job it's designed for .

"Well," Gary Trudeau said. "At last I've seen something less seaworthy than my poor Farragut ."

Alston snorted slightly. " Farragut was supposedly designed to handle anything on salt water. This one was not intended for deep-ocean work, Mr. Trudeau," she said.

Victor Ortiz chuckled. "At least we know she can carry the weight; it came out from Alba in her hold."

A deep breath. "All right, let's get on with it."

Bosuns' pipes twittered, the Marine band played, and Swindapa stepped up to hand her a point-bottomed, jug-eared amphora of requisitioned Tartessian wine.

"I christen thee Eades" she said, and threw the amphora.

It shattered on the reinforced ram that projected out just beyond the bows of the ironclad. Wine ran down armorplate and oak, red as blood. Everyone cheered; Marian smiled broadly, in a public display of emotion rather rare for her.

In fact, she was thinking of the original Merrimac , transformed into the ironclad Virginia by the Confederates for its meeting with the Monitor off Hampton Roads. How they'd have hated the thought of black-as-tar Marian Alston commanding something so like her; and how they'd have hated naming her after the engineer who'd designed the Federal gunboat fleets that stormed down the Mississippi and cut the Confederacy in half. Her father would have loved it.

I hope, somewhere, those bukra ghosts can see this. While they roast in hell .

Sledgehammers struck at the wedges and chocks. The timbers holding the Eades against the force of gravity gave way, and the steel rollers of the cradle rumbled and squealed as she began to move. The huge weight started slowly, then accelerated with terrifying speed. Waves of muddy water surged up in twin plumes on either side as the stern slid into the bay, then subsided as the ironclad shot out. A dozen thick cables secured to deep-driven tree trunks paid out and then came twanging-taut; the ship rocked and then settled.