The fifth was on fire, flames licking mast high and the enemy ships frantically paying off to get away from her… God-damn, I'll miss Hiller… no, wait, one of those ships that was fast to Sheridan is flying the Stars and Stripes…

Some substratum of her mind made her throw up a hand and glance away. There was a lightning-bright red flash and a shattering roar; when the ball of smoke and fire and shattered water subsided, what was left of a thousand tons of frigate were slipping beneath the water, or flotsam on the surface or turning and flashing hundreds of feet in the air, falling again like some ghastly burning confetti mixed with parts of human beings.

"God-damn," she whispered again.

From the northward came a line of polished steel beaks and pairs of heavy guns like malevolent black eyes, flanked by the flashing unison of long sweeps; behind them was a pillar of smoke, doubtless a burning ship of hers.

They broke through the schooners, she thought with heavy finality. Just a little more time and we'd… if only… to hell with that. Let's save what we can.

She opened her mouth to give the order to retreat; running before the wind the sailing ships could probably escape, most of them at least. Then Ensign Glidden came up, half of an ear gone under a hasty bandage and his left arm strapped to his chest. He was carefully avoiding looking what he stepped on and over, but his voice was clear:

"Ma'am! Report from the ultralights-the Farragut, ma'am, that smudge is the Farraguts smokestack!"

For a moment all she could do was stare. Behind her, Brigadier McClintock began to laugh. After a moment, Swindapa joined in, wincing at the same time but not letting the pain stop her.

"Well, just another rasher," Jared Cofflin said, wiping his plate with a heel of bread.

Tansawada shook a moa egg the size of a small football, took out the plug that closed a hole in it and poured more into the big iron skillet to scramble a batch. Everyone else was digging in as well, from the younglings in high chairs to the adults shoveling down eggs and sausage and bacon, biscuits and bread and stacks of flapjacks and maple syrup. Farming at this level of technology meant you had to work like a horse, but it was efficient enough that you could eat that way too.

Talk about farmhouse breakfasts… well, I suppose when you're used to sitting down eighteen to a meal a few more are no hardship… "I can always fit-

Hooves pounded up the graveled way outside, amid shouts and a frantic barking of dogs. The sound was clear enough, but the Hollards' kitchen looked south, over fields and woodlots and the distant blue of water glimpsed through gaps between the trees. Cofflin laid down his spoon, conscious of the looks on him from around the big table, puzzled or anxious.

" 'Scuse me," he said quickly. "That's probably a courier."

He walked out into the hallway; the front door let in on another, sort of an airlock arrangement to keep warm air in in wintertime. Only when he reached for the front door's carved wooden knob did he realize he still had his checked napkin in hand, and that Martinelli was beside him, pistol inconspicuously drawn and held down by his side.

The young woman on the other side of the wood almost stumbled in as he pulled the door open; she already had the screen door propped open, and she was reaching into the leather satchel slung over one shoulder. Her horse was hitched to the rail out in the graveled driveway, blowing with wide-flared nostrils, streaks of foam on its sweat-wet neck, trying to reach the water trough. The courier might have been in too much of a hurry to walk it cool, but at least it wasn't let free to drink and founder itself.

"Chief!" the post office courier said in a thick Fiernan accent, dancing from one foot to another with excitement. "Courier message from Fort Brandt… they flew it over, Chief! Right over to Fogarty's Cove!"

The brown paper envelope was crinkly-fresh, the flap sealed with a blob of red wax. He recognized Captain Sandy Rapczewicz's seal, CO at Brandt Point station and the Republic's military commander with Marian abroad. She was a levelheaded type, so this must be important.

"Ms…"

"Mary Burns, Chief," the messenger said.

"Ms. Burns, you'd better walk that horse, then water it."

He broke the seal as she blushed, dithered, and then hurried off to obey. The summary was always right at the top…

He turned, to find he had an audience, some of them still clutching forks or rolls. Heather and Lucy were staring wide-eyed. As they saw his face they began to jump, their squeals an ear-piercing joy.

April, 11 A.E.-Sacramento Delta, California

April, 11 A.E.-Feather River Valley, California

April, 11 A.E.-Sacramento Delta, California

April, 11 A.E.-Feather River Valley, California

The tule-reed boat felt… squishy, that's the word. Peter Giernas thought. It was more like being on a living thing than a boat, or… a memory nagged at him, from his childhood. Yes, just after the family had moved to America, three years before the Event, when his father got a job doing plumber's work with a Nantucket construction company. He'd taken the family to the beach, and the eight-year-old Peter Giernas had gone swimming on a half-inflated rubber mattress. This felt a lot like that, except that the mattress had been smooth rather than prickly.

That was the problem with not speaking the local language; you had to do most of your own scouting, or chance some lethal surprise at the last minute… like the one they'd nearly had when he saw the masts of the enemy ship rising above the heads of the reeds, and couldn't make the local behind him understand what masthead lookout meant. He'd gotten them under the shadow of the sloughside reeds, at least.

The little craft was inconspicuous, a lot more so than a thirty-foot dugout, and just the thing for eeling through the marshes, sloughs, swamps, and shallows where the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers met to form a huge delta before funneling into the Pacific. Despite his compass and map, Giernas had been thoroughly lost within an hour.

There must be millions of acres of this tule swamp here, he thought. Plus riverbank forest even thicker and more junglelike than upstream on the Sacramento, and islands beyond counting, a demented spiderweb of channels. There was swamp, and islands of grassy prairie covered with stems twelve feet high, and swamp shading into prairie and back into swamp and into forest, dry or with standing water around the trunks of the alders.

Mountains and features like Lake Tahoe didn't pick up and move in periods as short as three thousand years, but this soft muck-soiled landscape subject to annual flood was another matter. Only the broadest outlines had any resemblance to the maps copied from a back-issue National Geographic for the expedition.

The smell was rank in his nostrils, full of life and death and green growing things; just ahead of them was the mouth of a little slough between two small islands. The lupines growing there were four feet high and stretched along the banks on both sides for hundreds of yards, with a band of white popcorn flowers beyond and then masses of sky-blue Dowingia to the water's edge.

He made a stay-here gesture to the local Indian in the canoe, stepping ashore onto peat that yielded under his feet like wet sponge. Going to his belly, he eeled forward until he could part the flowers just enough for the lenses of the binoculars. The vegetation closed over his head as well, making him invisible to observers looking down from a masthead.