The Protector's War (30 page)

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.

Good-enough blokes, good fighting men, but always putting on the Digger and trying to show up the whingeing Poms,
he thought.
You'd think they'd all landed at Gallipoli last week, with a jolly jumbuck under each arm, straight up.

The ship grew from a bobbing toy to its respectable two-hundred-foot length. Hordle looked down the length of the longboat, to where his opposite number was ready to hook on at the stern; she was named Sheila Winston, a pleasantly shaped brunette of twenty-two with snapping eyes whose usual job was in the galley. He'd had his eye on her, and he suspected vice versa. Being on a ship with a mixed crew did make things a little less dull, although he'd have liked it better if the mix had been more even, instead of three men per woman, or the regulations less strict. Still, he had the advantage of not being in the
Pride
's chain of command—formally, that was.

“Oars…
up!
” Sir Nigel called.

The long wood shafts went up in bristling unison; where it counted, the Tasmanians were perfectly capable of doing what they were told, quick and neat. Hordle reached out deftly and caught the boathook in the rope that ran along the scuppers. A petty officer on deck made a polite request that the boat not scuff the ship's paint, and added more obscene embellishments as the boat crew went up the Jacob's ladder and the smaller craft rocked and swayed; two stayed for an instant to hook on the hosting tackle. Then the cry of “Haul away” came, and a dozen deckhands tallied on to the gear. The boat rose dripping from the water, with Hordle and Sheila Winston fending off still as it was swung inboard and hung from the davits.

Think I'll go bother the cook,
Hordle thought as he stepped down to the deck, the worn huon pine smooth under the skin of his feet.

The
Pride
's chief of galley was a genial Fijian who'd been in Nelson on the South Island at the time of the Change, and who outweighed Hordle though he was six inches shorter. It smelled like the midday meal was under way, and the fresh provisions loaded in Britain hadn't quite run out yet, plus overside fishing had yielded fairly well. They weren't quite down to salt pork and ship's biscuit yet.

You know, there's a good deal to be said for
not
having anyone on your trail,
he thought happily.

Alleyne Loring turned at a nod from Captain Nobbes: “Set all plain sail,” he barked.

The crew sprang to the ropes at a cascade of orders from the bosun and mast-captains; Hordle tallied on to the nearest. The
Pride
's sails unfolded as the gaffs rose up the masts, the free outer edges shaking and thuttering as they swung, then cracking taut. The schooner's nose turned south as she fell off the wind and the staysails up forward bit, and the movement grew swifter as steerage way came on her and the wheel turned. Water began to chuckle down the sides, and the bowsprit tracked a long slow corkscrew, a rise-swoop-and-fall motion instead of the short hard pitching she'd made with her nose into the swell.

A voice rang out from the topmast: “On deck there! Sail ho!”

“Where away?” Captain Nobbes called upward through his megaphone.

Good-enough sailor,
Hordle thought.
Not that I'm any great judge. Thinks he's Horatio sodding Hornblower, that's the problem. Or that other one, in the books Sir Nigel likes, written by the Irishman.

“A bit north of leeward, Skipper. Nor' nor'east.”

“What rig? What colors?”

“Ship rig; three masts; all sail set. Flying the White Ensign. A bloody big drongo of a ship, Skipper! Coming on fast.”

Well, stone the crows. I shouldn't have tempted fate like that, not even on the quiet.
He ducked into the forecastle. The crew racked their personal weapons under their bunks.

 

Nigel Loring adjusted easily as the
Pride
heeled, and watched the crew at work. They totaled forty-five, more than were necessary to work the schooner—this rig was economical of labor—but on an exploratory voyage these days you could expect to fight, and to lose some before you returned. Right now the booms of the big fore-and-aft sails were swung out over the water to port, and the schooner's sharp bow cut across the swell directly southward, at ninety degrees to the wind. Then that died down, stuttered back, shifted and backed, coming more from the north. The sky was cloudless save in that direction, an arch of perfect blue turning paler where shadows fell towards the west. In the north clouds piled like thick beaten cream, shading to gold and black where they towered high.

“Set gaff topsails!” the captain called. Then: “Lay aloft and loose main and fore t'gallants and square topsails!”

A topsail schooner carried square sails as well as fore-and-aft; in the
Pride
's case, two each on the upper mainmast and foremast. They helped considerably when you weren't working into the teeth of the wind, but they required more work: someone had to climb out the yards and let them loose, whereas the fore-and-aft sails on their booms could be worked from the deck. Crew rushed up the ratlines and out along the slender-seeming spars, their feet on the man-ropes, bending to wrench at the hard knots that held the sails bundled. Canvas thuttered and cracked a hundred and twenty feet up, like distant gunfire, and taut beige shapes of New Zealand flax bellied out in the wind. The ship heeled further as the wind caught in the four square sails and levered down through the masts and keel. Nobbes kept a careful eye aloft, wincing at loud creaks.

“That's the disadvantage with wooden topmasts,” he said. “They're just not as strong as steel.”

“But more replaceable,” Nigel pointed out.
It's all very well to love your ship,
he thought.
But Nobbes takes it to an extreme.

Of course, it was Nobbes's ship in a very special sense; before the Change he'd owned it, and run it around the South Pacific on excursions for people who wanted a taste of life in the old days. He'd been in St. Helens on the east coast of Tasmania when the Change struck, and ended up in the Tasmanian navy fairly quickly, albeit mostly running cargo and passengers. Some of his old attitude remained.

“Well, there is that,” he said. “They're building a new class much like this back in Tassie, but wooden-hulled with steel diagonal bracing on the ribs. I'm supposed to get one—compensation for the government taking the
Pride,
and all the years I sailed her for 'em. I've some cobbers who'll help me find cargoes, then it's up to Malaysia for rubber, and over to Burma for teak and rice, Ceylon for tea and coffee and cinnamon and back again. I could use a good man or two to help with that—it gets bloody lively, what with the pirates and all. Couple of years and I'd go partners on a new ship.”

“I'd rather thought I'd take up land,” Sir Nigel said. “I understand there's a good deal available, and it's what I know, allowing for differences in the climate.”

“Plenty of room on the mainland, sport, right enough, or on North Island,” Nobbes said absently; his eyes were still on the rigging. “But the land's cheap for a reason; things can get pretty rough there. Tassie and South Island are full up, what with all the people out of the towns and on the farms and stations—there's agitation to break up the bigger ones. Fancy themselves as bunyip barons, some of the stationholders do; and over on the mainland, a lot of them
are
bloody barons. Accent on the bloody, too.”

Nigel nodded. From what he'd heard, the big cities of mainland Australia and New Zealand's more densely populated North Island had collapsed as thoroughly as any in Europe or Asia or America, and they'd taken circles of countryside two hundred miles across with them. Of course, that left a lot of Australia untouched—the circles hadn't overlapped as they had in more densely peopled lands.

Still, Alleyne and Hordle and I could handle any
roughness
where we wanted to set up, I suppose…

The sound of the water slapping its way along the
Pride
's hull changed, becoming a little louder, a little faster, like palms beating out a choppy rhythm on a drum. The motion altered as well, turning longer and smoother, a rocking-horse surge that spoke of sea miles gone away.

“With the wind on our beam like this, that'll give us an extra knot, setting the t'gallants,” Nobbes said with satisfaction. He turned to the binnacle just forward of the wheel. “Eleven…eleven and a half knots.”

Then he looked back over the fan-shaped rail at his ship's stern, over the tarpaulin-clad shape of the catapult crouching on its turntable.

“Odd running into another ship here,” he said meditatively.

“Not so odd as all that. Southampton-Gibraltar is the busiest shipping route we have now—that Britain has now. Which isn't saying much, I grant you.”

Nobbes grunted. “
Bloody
odd Gibraltar made it,” he said.

“A combination of luck and geography,” Sir Nigel said. “Though it took considerable ability to organize it all.”

Nobbes brought up the heavy binoculars that hung around his neck.

“She's just hull-up now,” he said. “Sailing with the wind abeam is the best point for a square-rigger, but even so she's very fast…she'll pass us in a day or two on this heading. There's not many ships could come up from behind on the
Pride,
if I do say so myself. They're cracking on, though. I wonder what their hurry is?”

A suspicion coiled in Nigel's stomach. “Hordle, step up here if you please,” he said. The big man did. Nigel went on: “You were stationed in Southampton for a while, weren't you? At the dockyard, while I was off on that diplomatic mission to the Principality.”