Harry Turtledove - Opening Atlantis

"They are a filthy people themselves, and it shows in everything they do," Roland said. The sergeant nodded again. But Roland's eyes narrowed as he surveyed that muddy stain in the river. "I wouldn't have thought they were digging enough to put that much muck into the water."

"It doesn't come from nowhere," the sergeant said.

"True enough. And the river was clean-well, pretty clean-east of here before they came." Roland shrugged. No river that ran past a town could stay perfectly clear. But the Blavet hadn't looked like that before.

The redcoats and the English settlers were still working at their saps. Could they be working enough to make the river so muddy? Roland's shoulders went up and down once more. As the sergeant said, the dirt didn't come from nowhere. So the enemy had to be digging that much.

Scornfully, the sergeant said, "I'll bet they don't have the sense to draw their water upstream and piss downstream."

Roland Kersauzon laughed. "I'll bet you're right."

Once, this little thicket of redwoods had shaded a house outside Nouveau Redon's walls against the sun. Now it kept the French settlers shut up inside the town from seeing the opening to the mine under their mountain. Victor Radcliff wondered whether the English engineers were wasting time and backbreaking effort.

"How long do you suppose all this will take, sir?" he asked the English lieutenant-colonel.

"As long as it takes," the officer replied. "Time is one thing we have plenty of." He checked himself. "As long as the men stay healthy, anyhow."

"There's always that," Victor agreed. "And as long as the French don't manage to bring any more regulars to Atlantis."

"They were lucky to do it once, by God." The Englishman spoke with the unconscious arrogance of a man whose kingdom had got used to ruling the seas. "They'd be more than doubly lucky to do it twice."

"Here's hoping you're right." Victor left it there, returning to his earlier question: "Can your miners even begin to guess how long they'll need. Have you talked with them about it?"

"I have," the lieutenant-colonel replied. "But as long as it takes still seems to be the best answer I can give you. They will need some uncertain amount of time to dig their way under Nouveau Redon, and then some other uncertain amount of time to cast about for the root of the spring, so to speak. Adding one uncertainty to another can but yield a larger uncertainty, I fear. And, of course, there is no assurance that, even seeking, they will find what they seek. The siege, naturally, continues notwithstanding their success or failure."

"Naturally," Victor echoed. He looked up at the fortress. As long as it held out, English rule over Atlantis remained uncertain. Once it fell, if it fell…Then the only way the French and Spaniards could regain power and influence was at the negotiating table-about which, Victor knew too well, he could do exactly nothing. If one of King George's so-called diplomats cared nothing for land to which he couldn't ride in a day or two…Well, in that case, so much of this fighting would have been for nothing.

Victor made himself shrug. If his greencoats and the English regulars failed, those so-called diplomats would have less to work with. All he could do was all he could do. He aimed to do it.

A miner, stripped to the waist and muddied all over, carried another basket of spoil on his back out of the tunnel opening. The dirt wouldn't go into the river till after nightfall, to keep the defenders from realizing how much of it came from this one spot. The miner looked up at sky and sunshine as if he hadn't seen them for years. "Bloody good to breathe fresh air," he remarked to no one in particular.

Victor believed that. He wouldn't have wanted to scrape away far underground, in Stygian darkness illuminated only by candles and feeble lamps, never knowing if all the countless tons of earth and rock above him were about to cave in and crush him to jelly. Timber shored up the passage into the earth, but all the same…

The man sighed. "Ah, well. Back to it." He grabbed the empty basket and vanished once more into the bowels of the earth.

"Brave fellow," the English lieutenant-colonel said. He'd been watching the miner, too, then.

"He is," Victor agreed. "Can they really dig a straight line under the ground? Or will they lose their bearing?"

"They check it by compass, inside and out," the English officer replied. "So the chief engineer assures me. They have had a deal of practice at this sort of thing grubbing out coal on the other side of the ocean, you know."

"They're beginning to do that here, too, up in the north," Radcliff said. "Fewer trees close by where they're needed than there were when settlers first found Atlantis. And coal burns better, which also has its uses. But I don't think anyone could pay me enough to make my living underground."

"Nor me." The lieutenant-colonel shuddered. He seemed glad to point upward toward the town at the top of the hill. "Could your riflemen snipe a bit more than they have been lately? We don't want the foe to think we've given up on taking the fort by ordinary means."

"I'll take care of it, sir," Victor promised. "We don't even have to hit them, so long as they know we're shooting at them."

"Just so." The English officer smiled. "A peaceable sort of war, is it not?"

"It sure is," Victor said. If this scheme worked, if the French gave up…

A few days later, one of his riflemen came back swearing. "I had him in my sights-the French commander, old damned what's-his-name," the man said. "Had him in my sights, and I fired…and I missed. Bugger me with a redwood cone, but I missed."

"What kind of range?" Victor asked.

"Not too long-a furlong and a half."

"Bad luck," Victor said. "Shooting uphill like that-it's hard, and you don't practice it much."

"I should have got him." The rifleman refused to be consoled.

"Well, maybe you'll get another chance," Victor said.

"Not one that good, dammit." Still disgruntled, the other settler stomped away.

He turned out to be right, too. At least, he didn't come running back to Victor claiming he'd plugged Roland Kersauzon. Neither did anyone else. The commander of the French settlers went right on directing the citadel's defense. Victor began to wonder whether Nouveau Redon would ever fall.

Then, one day, the engineers digging far below the fortress ran out of the tunnel they'd labored on for so long. "Water's starting to drip through the wall!" exclaimed a muddy man with a pickaxe clenched in his right fist. "We can hear it flowing by, too."

"By God!" Victor said. He solemnly clasped hands with the English lieutenant-colonel.

"What do you do now?" the English officer asked his men. "How do you ruin the spring without drowning yourselves?"

Three of them went back into the shaft they'd evacuated. Each man rolled a hogshead of black powder ahead of himself and trailed fuse out behind. After what seemed a very long time, the engineers emerged from the tunnel once more. One of them bowed to the lieutenant-colonel and said, "If you'd care to do the honors, your Excellency…"

"I should be delighted." The Englishman lit a twig at a small fire that crackled nearby. He touched it to each of the three fuses in turn. One by one, they hissed to life. With three, Victor thought, one of them will surely reach the powder.

And at least one did. Boom! The ground shook under Victor's feet. He shook hands with the English lieutenant-colonel again. "How long before we know whether we did what we wanted to do?" he asked.

"Shouldn't be long, Major," one of the engineers replied.

A few minutes later, water started flowing out of the tunnel mouth. Victor and the English officer and the engineers joined hands and danced around in a circle. What they could do, they'd done. Now they had to see what it did to Nouveau Redon.