That’s what had saved her, that and Captain Olsen had trained in the Coast Guard and had performed his tour of duty on the sailing ship Eagle. There he had learned more about the waves, the wind and the sea than any cadet could ever have achieved on a gas-turbine or steam powered training ship. Every bit of that knowledge had been called on to save the Carnival Triumph. He had stood, staring out of the bridge, watching the waves and the winds, sensing their patterns, how they interlocked, how they would push his ship this way and that. As he sensed them, he had snapped out the orders to counter their attempts to murder his ship, playing the bow thrusters and the stern engine pods, sometimes pushing the ship sideways, sometimes spinning her, always keeping their bows pointed at the black ellipse that offered a bare hope of safety.
Sometimes, he had looked at the track chart and marveled at how the computer had made some kind of sense out of it all. His own memories were of nothing but chaos, his ship swerving and skidding before he had suddenly realized the Hellgate was but a few meters away and a surge of engine power had taken them through. Even there, the other side of the gate, the seas were ferocious and the wind still howled from the energy passing through the gate but here at least he had sea-room and not the ever-present danger of being trapped on a lee shore. He had turned his bows to the wind and seas and as he did so, he saw that he was not alone. Somehow, somebody had radioed a warning that a civilian cruise ship was coming through and would be in desperate need. Had it been one of the two wrecked warships? Their radio operators, knowing their own day was done, attempting at least to give a more fortunate mariner a better chance of survival? Olsen didn’t know. What he did know was that there were two warships there, one of the massive Russian nuclear-powered cruisers and a French amphibious warfare ship, and they had said they would stand by Carnival Triumph until the storm was done. He had watched while the Russian cruiser took green water over her bows, flooding all the way to her bridge, and then had fought herself free.
And so it had gone on for sixteen long hours, until the fury of the storm had faded and the seas returned to tranquility. Eventually he had bidden his protectors farewell and limped back through the Hellgate, his ship battered and torn by the violence of the storm but afloat with all her passengers, crew and refugees still alive. Seasick, mostly, but still alive. They’d even tried to restore the routine of a cruise ship, Olsen knew for a fact that the glamorous singer in the Rome Lounge had still been heaving the contents of her stomach into a bucket ten minutes before her act, but had managed to clean herself up, change into her stage gown and give the best performance she could, before running back and continuing to try and purge the effects of a ride the cruise liner’s designers had never anticipated.
“Madame, Hamilton is off the port bow.”
The Right Honorable Jennifer Smith shook herself and tried to summon up the courage to look at the devastation that had once been Bermuda’s capital. When she finally managed it, devastation didn’t even begin to cover it. There was not a building or a tree standing, even the massive walls of Fort Saint Catherine were tumbled. The island, once lush and green, studded with white houses, was now bare, brown and desolate. Smith picked up the bridge binoculars, swinging them on their stabilized mounting and pointed them at the center of Hamilton. It was not hard to see where the Parliament building and Cabinet Office had been, although the buildings themselves were gone and even their sites were hidden by a massive Japanese car-carrier that had been driven ashore. With her single screw and huge, flat sides, she had stood no chance, no chance at all. Then she gave a shocked gasp.
“Captain, there are Baldricks in the ruins!”
Olsen took the binoculars and surveyed the scene. The hulking black figures of the Baldricks were crowded in the shattered town. Even as he watched, they swung the main walls of a refugee hut into place while another group lifted up the roof to slide it into place. He looked a little more closely, there were television crews filming them at work. “It’s all right Madame. They’re helping with the disaster relief.”
“Over here Madame. You’ll see what they’re doing on CNN.” Most non-mariners didn’t realize that ships had commercial television receivers on their bridges. There were things on television that sailors needed to know and often couldn’t get from anywhere else with anything like the speed and efficiency. The news was one of them.
“for the survivors. The scale of the disaster in Bermuda is only now beginning to sink in. It is believed that as many as 40,000 of the island’s population have died in the disaster inflicted by Hurricane Paloma. The death toll might well have been higher had it not been for an emergency disaster team who portalled in directly from Hell under the command of Arch-Duke Dagon. The daemons started to clear the wreckage while the storm was still blowing and have shown an uncanny ability to find humans trapped in the wreckage. Of course their added strength and endurance has made their efforts on behalf of the victims more effective. Asked about the prompt response to the disaster, President Abigor said ‘To provide aid is the least we can do for the humans who have rescued us from millennia of slavery.’
“And now, for a report of the Bermudan disaster from one of the victims, we now go to our correspondent in Hell who has been allowed to interview some of those killed in the catastrophe. David, are you there?”
First Officer Carsten leaned quietly towards Olsen. “I don’t feel easy in my mind about this Sir.”
“About the Baldricks helping out? Like they did after the tornados in Missouri last month? Or after Ike hit Houston?”
“Sort of Sir, the way Abigor is sending them to Earth and refusing to accept payment for them. It’s a bit like slavery if you ask me. We took Hell to stop that kind of thing.”
“Abigor is getting paid Knut, not in cash but he’s getting paid. He’s reconstructing the Baldrick image, reconciling humans and daemons to living together. Every time there’s a disaster, the Baldricks are there, helping out. One day, he’s hoping, we’ll be comfortable with each other. That day, there’ll no longer need to be a human army of occupation in Hell. You know as well as I do what the people we’ve rescued from the Hell-Pit think of the Baldricks. If we pulled the Army out today, there’d be a massacre of hideous proportions in there and it wouldn’t be the humans who were doing the dying. The Human Expeditionary Army stand between the surviving Baldricks and the deceased humans they spent millennia tormenting. Sending some baldricks to help is a good way of buying back acceptance. And also making us feel guilty by the way.
Carsten nodded. The people on Earth had been cheering their armies on, and still were in some senses, but the film of the battlefields in Hell had stunned them. Especially the scenes along the Phlegethon River with the piles of mangled Baldrick corpses that went on for square mile after square mile. For perhaps the first time, they realized the incredible disparity of firepower that had existed between the human armies and the Baldricks. The sight of the dead where the Baldricks had tried to fight tanks with bronze tridents had changed opinions in a subtle but very marked way. Humans now pitied the Baldricks who had stood so little chance and had died not even understanding what it was that was killing them. It was rumored that change in attitude was also causing trouble in Hell, with the refugees from the pit unable to understand why the newly-dead from Earth should be sickened by the slaughter they’d inflicted.