"I want to get the boilers cool as soon as I can, so we can do some real work on them," Trudeau went on. His hands were bandaged, and his naturally rather dark high-cheeked face had a reddish flushed look, with his blue eyes peering out like turquoise set in copper.
"The boiler's frame seams parted during the blow-the supporting timbers flexed under the stress-and water started dripping down into the furnaces. It was wetting the coal, keeping the temperature down so we lost steam. God knows what happened when we started using the ram in the battle yesterday. Plus she spewed out most of her oakum."
"What did you do about the boilers?" Swindapa asked, moving her mouth carefully. The left side of her face was a rainbow of colors from the bruising impact of the rifle butt, and a couple of teeth were still a little loose. "With the furnace, I mean."
"We had to wrap some people up in water-soaked rags and send them in to slap clay putty on the worst leaks," Trudeau said. "Nobody died, but a couple collapsed… that slowed us up, had to go in twice…"
"People went in while the furnaces were hot?" Victor Ortiz asked incredulously. "Inside the furnaces?"
Trudeau nodded. "Had to, Vic-tabernac, if we hadn't, we'd have lost power completely and been driven onto the cliffs. The masts had already gone by the board, and besides that her seams were working so badly we'd have sunk without power to the pumps, it was like trying to go to sea in a sieve. As it was we were down to six knots and barely made it here in time."
Alston spoke: "I think that was more a matter of leading the working party in than sending it, wasn't it, Commander Trudeau?"
Trudeau had been a cadet when Eagle was caught in the Event. He still looked much younger than the twenty-nine he was when he blushed and shrugged. "Someone had to do it," he said.
"But you did it," she said, nodding and marking it down for later reference. Ortiz was grinning through his bandage. "I take it that the Farragut isn't fit for duty anytime soon?"
"No, ma'am."
"Well, she did well enough yesterday, Gary. The account's in the black for a good long while."
The circle of officers nodded, silent for a second. Marian felt her soul wince slightly, remembering the rowers screaming as the steel-plated bows of the steam ram crashed into the side of a galley and rode it under in a single wallowing rush. The severed halves had each risen like broken pencils sticking out of the ocean for a moment before they plunged, and in the same instant the ram caught another of the lightly built craft with charges of canister, leaving her riddled and sinking in water that turned red…
If it hadn't been for one making a suicide run to fire its Dahlgrens into the port paddle wheels, not a single Tartessian galley would have escaped. She also remembered the sheer enormous feeling of relief as a tactical draw and strategic defeat turned into an unambiguous victory.
Mmm-hmmm, she mused. As it is, they got most of their galleys back, and four of their sail warcraft. Must have lost better than fifteen hundred men killed and wounded, though, and we took a thousand prisoners. That's got to hurt.
The Islander losses had been a little over a tenth of that number, and they certainly hurt… And we took all those cannon.
"Well, there's no reason for the enemy to know that Farraguts out of commission for a while," she said meditatively. "We'll set up manual pumps… no, by God, what we'll do is put one of the stationary engines on a raft and float it out. Ms. Kurlelo-Alston, see to it." Swindapa nodded and made a note on her clipboard.
"The engines are coming ashore later today. Commodore," the blond officer said, using the clipboard to point eastward. "Captain Trudeau, I'll have to borrow your chief engineer?"
"Gladly, Ms. Kurlelo-Alston," he said.
The five surviving frigates were anchored as well; working parties were swarming over them, setting up masts and rigging from the stores-ships, repairing the upperworks, pumping hard; they'd haul them ashore one at a time to do permanent patches on the holes below the waterline, and in a week or so they'd be good as new. There were five schooners as well, but two of them would need extensive overhauls out of the water.
"Captain Galen, you'll take Sherman up to La Coruna and escort the Merrimac and the collier south," she said, picking the commander of the least damaged large warship. "On the next tide; transfer powder and shot from the other frigates' magazines to save time, and enough people to bring you up to full complement. We can keep a schooner on picket duty off Tartessos, and ultralights of course. Mr. Haddon."
The commander of the transports stepped forward and saluted, looking a little self-conscious. He was a reservist, a stocky man in his mid-forties with a gray-shot beard, a yachtsman before the Event and a merchant skipper on the Baltic run in peacetime. He'd brought his ship in to relieve the Chamberlain without a moment's hesitation, though.
"Ma'am?"
She returned the gesture. "Mr. Haddon, as soon as the troops and stores are disembarked, I want the troop-transports to make sail for home; except for four-all over two hundred and fifty tons-who'll be dispatched to Westhaven for another supply run. How soon?"
"Ah… two days, ma'am. We're really very well found now, for the most part. Four ships… that's more than enough."
The old custom of Marque and Reprisal had been revived with a vengeance for this war, and wherever Islander merchantmen met Tartessian, they fought. There weren't any major enemy warships abroad, though, so four big Nantucketer ships ought to be fairly safe.
"Good." She tapped two fingers on her chin; putting hands behind her back hurt, given the wounds she'd picked up. Let's see…
In her birth-century and for a millennia and more before that, Cadiz was a peninsula on the southern coast of Spain, just southeast of the mouth of the Guadalquivir River. Here it was a narrow scrub-covered offshore island nearly eight miles long, just southeast of a vast shallow bay that reached inland nearly to the site of Seville-that-wasn't. The landward side was a narrow channel a mile or two across at its northern end, with salt marsh and pinewoods on the mainland giving way to low rolling hills of oak-savanna and grass, both turning green with the autumn rains, and a few villages of fishers and farmers. The island itself was a sandbank rising to a central spine of low hills-not unlike Nantucket, some of the wags had noted-with a few smaller ones not far away. The only stone was on the western verge, where a few shallow reefs ran up out of the Atlantic swells; doubtless they were what had caught the sand drifting with the longshore current in the first place.
Now it was an instant town of thousands, streets of tents and open squares piled high with supplies. Some of the tents were huge-the field hospital had gone up first, complete with pre-fabricated board floors. Thousands labored, digging ditches and pit-latrines, throwing up the ramparts of earth-and-timber forts, and a steep berm and ditch around the whole camp. Others were setting up the drill that would punch deep tube wells as soon as the engine came ashore. A pontoon wharf extending out into the harbor was nearly ready, and when it was the freighters could unload directly onto handcarts and wagons; the first heavy cargo to come ashore would be steam-haulers. Off to the west she could hear the dull heavy thudump! of a blasting charge, shattering rock to be used to gravel the roadways, and out on the narrow channel oars flashed as boats towed rafts of oak and umbrella pine cut near the shore. A fort was going up there, too, on a point of hard land rising out of green marsh, cutting off any entry.