S. Stirling - On the Oceans of Eternity

"Oh, excellent," he said softly.

The watermark was perfect; mainly because it was Great Achaea's royal watermark, and that of the Temple of the Threefold Hekate. The handwriting was near-perfect, too; Walker's smooth hand with the little extra pressure on the "t," a very occasional splotch where too much pressure was applied.

Got a bit of buried anger there, Walker-me-lad, bubbling under that smooth exterior . And Alice Hong's. Slants backward. Ooooh, look at those spiky i's and the little horns on the w's. Classic. Got some unassimilated trauma lurking around there, don't you, you monstrous little bitch ?

"Well, come on now, Ian," he said. Now I'm channeling Doreen. This place is driving me crazy . "It's not really their writing, just a very very good imitation."

Dear Will: Hi! Got to tell you, studmuffin, the telestai really have their testicles in a twist about the latest strategic-readjustment-of-forces. You said it; we need some victories. Or at least we need to throw someone out of the sled for the wolves… and guess who I think it should be? I've got some ideas about how, too, that you'll just love.

God, that was even her style , the giggling little-girl descriptions of how she planned to "operate"… did anyone really still use words like "wee-wee" for penis? The choice of words was perfect, worth all the effort and risk of getting samples. Walker's people had been pretty good about destroying documents with important information . They'd been much less careful about casual notes concerning nothing in particular. The Walker was good, too:

Sic transit gloria His Krautness, babe. Heels have clicked for the last time; we'll get some major credit out of it, too. A King should always have at least one seriously unpopular minister around for occasions like this. It's a pity in a way, I wanted to keep our tame Kraut around a little longer, but on second thoughts it's time for him to go…

The date was in April… Yes, by God, April 1. That was the crowning touch.

"Of course, that means we have to have a victory about then for these to fit. Not a problem; if we don't by then, Odikweos won't move, nohow."

And he himself would die. Most probably exactly the way pseudo-Hong described in these precious pages. They'd been taken from real life, after all.

There were at least a hundred bodies around the gates, lying in the inevitable posture of the dead left on a battlefield-backs arched and limbs splayed as decay and gas build-up had their way with them. Brigadier McClintock grunted as he swung his binoculars back and forth. It was a common scene in Sicily, this February of the Year 11.

"What did they do, just charge right in?" he said.

"That's exactly what they did," Marian Alston-Kurlelo replied grimly, not taking her field glasses from her eyes.

The wind shifted and brought the gagging reek strongly down the road that wound up to the fort. She decided she was getting very sick of the smell of rotting human flesh combined with the bitter scents of burning. The damp freshness of the Sicilian upland winter and the bright sunlight through sky washed clean by yesterday's rain made it worse. Birds hopped and heaved and squabbled around the bodies; Walker must have given them this type of feast on a regular basis.

She shifted her attention to the countryside 'round about. Not very Sicilian , she thought.

Eagle had been through the Mediterranean several times before the Event, on training-show-the-flag voyages; a tall ship made great PR. Central Sicily in the twentieth was a wasteland of rock, scrubby maquis and scraggly crops, and the tumbled remains of worked-out mines. Makers of spaghetti Westerns used it as a good stand-in for Arizona, and it was full of crumbling gray villages where the only living things were ancient crones in black tottering along under huge bundles of brushwood. Or sitting and staring at you with hooded, bitter eyes.

Here it was a sea of branches, oak and hazelnut and pine shaggy on the sides of the hills, giving way to savannas of scattered trees and tall green grass on the flats. Some land had been cleared for contour-plowed fields of wheat and barley and clumps of fig and olive and soft fruits around the remains of a megaron-hall, an Achaean-style manor house; that was still smoldering, along with its outbuildings. She pointed a little further, to another collection of wrecked structures-most of those long, low-slung ergastulae , half-underground slave barracks surrounded by a fence of spiked bars and overlooked by the stump of a watchtower. Beside them was an ugly yellow gash on the side of the hill, pockmarked with the black mouths of tunnels, and a short thick smokestack.

"Sulfur mine," she said. "And see the collection of crosses around it?"

"Surely do," McClintock said tightly. "So the miners came up here and hit the fort after they'd finished off the overseers?"

"Overran the latifundia there first; probably a lot of the slaves from there joined them, and then they came helling up the road and tried to do the same here. The Achaeans were waiting for them, by then. Probably they were drunk… or just drunk on the prospect of getting their own back."

McClintock nodded tightly. Under Walker, the Achaeans had done their best to turn the whole island into a giant plantation, with gangs of slaves pumping out wheat and wool and cotton, sulfur and asphalt and timber for his projects. The process was far from complete, he'd had only a little more than half a decade, but it had gone a long way. They'd overrun a couple of labor camps that made even the mines look good.

"That fort would be expensive," he said after a moment. "Even with a good road, we'll have trouble getting enough artillery here and in range. They've got some of those… what are they called…"

"It's a rip-off of a French weapon called the Montigny Miltrailleuse-from the 1860s. A bunch of barrels clamped together, bullets in a plate you slide into the breech and fire with a crank. The Achaean word translates as quickshooter ."

"Those, yeah, in those bunkers around the perimeter. Mortars in the courtyards-see the craters on the hill slopes? No dead ground around here. Rocket launchers… Ma'am, it'll take a regular siege. I'd need at least a battalion, and, oh, six of the five-inch rifles… take a couple of weeks."

Marian nodded. "The problem is there are dozens of forts like this. That's why they built them in the first place, to nail down the countryside."

For that matter, there were a couple of pretty large areas where the Achaean settlers had come out on top against the slaves and natives, even with the Islanders providing weapons and backup. And Syracuse was still holding out.

So we can't sit down and blast the enemy out of every fortlet.

Not if we're going to pitch in and help the expeditionary force in the Middle East anytime soon.

"Well, what do we do, then, ma'am?"

She smiled grimly. The Islanders hadn't exactly taken over Great Achaea's Sicilian colony by landing and proclaiming liberation. They had turned it into a three-cornered exercise in massacre and countermassacre, as natives and slaves and Achaeans fought each other like crabs in a bucket. It reminded her of what she'd read about Haiti during the slave uprising there in the 1790s, years of terror and madness. However discouraging the Nantucketers' problems looked, she didn't think the other factions felt particularly victorious, either.

"I'm a hammer," she said. "I see problems as nails-even big, badass nails like that." A jerk of her chin at the fort. "The chief has a different approach. That's what I'm going to Syracuse for, to give it a try. And to see what they've been doing with the Fleet in my absence."