"Give up!" Victor called to the knot of embattled Englishmen. "Some of your friends have got away. What more can you hope to do now?"

They kept fighting. Then the Atlanteans wheeled up a couple of fieldpieces and started firing canister into them. One round from each gun was enough to make the redcoats change their minds. The men still on their feet laid their muskets in the snow and stepped away from them. The ones blown to rags and bloody shreds didn't need to worry about it any more.

Victor's men hurried forward to take wallets and muskets, boots and breeches and bayonets. He told off enough greencoats to ensure that the prisoners wouldn't be able to get away. With the rest of his army, he pressed on toward Weymouth.

Had the remainder of the English garrison wanted to fight it out street by street and house by house, they could have made taking the place devilishly expensive. Victor might have made that kind of fight. It didn't seem to occur to the redcoats. Perhaps that sniper had killed Major Lavery the day before, and taken the linchpin out of their resistance. Badly beaten in the field, the English survivors must have concluded they couldn't hope to hold Weymouth.

They chose to save the remains of their army instead. They marched off to the south, toward New Hastings, in good order, flags flying and drums beating. They might have been saying that, if Victor wanted to assault them, they remained ready to give him all he wanted.

Later, he wondered whether he should have swooped down on them. Maybe their demeanor intimidated him. Or maybe he focused so completely on taking Weymouth, he forgot about everything else. Whatever the reason, he let them go and rode into Weymouth at the head of his army.

Some people in the seaside town greeted the greencoats with cheers. Here and there, a young woman-or sometimes one not so young-would run out and kiss a soldier. Victor suspected a baby or two would get started tonight, and not by the mothers' husbands.

But some houses and shops stayed closed up tight, shuttered against the new conquerors and against the world. Victor knew what that meant. The people in those places would have been too friendly toward the redcoats. Now they feared they would pay for it. And they were likely right, if not at his hands then at those of their fellow townsfolk.

That was a worry for another time. Victor had plenty to worry him now. The Royal Navy frigates naturally realized Weymouth had changed hands. They started bombarding the town. One of their first shots smashed a house belonging to somebody Victor had tagged as a likely partisan of King George's. The unhappy man, his wife, and two children fled.

"My baby!" the woman screamed. "My baby's still in there!"

The man wouldn't let her go back. "Willie's gone, Joan," he said. "He's-gone." He dissolved in tears. His wife's shrieks redoubled.

That's what you get for backing England. Victor almost said it, but checked himself at the last moment However true it might be, it was cruel. He would only make these people hate him more-he wouldn't persuade them that they should take up the Atlantean cause. Better silence, then.

He pulled most of his men out of range of the frigates' guns. But he also fired back at the warships with a couple of six-pounders he ran out onto the strand. He'd made that gesture of defiance before, and felt good about doing it again. Weymouth is ours! it said.

This time, though, the frigates were waiting for it. They opened a furious fire on the field guns. One roundshot took off an artilleryman's head. Another pulped a man standing on the opposite side of the six-pounder. Yet another wrecked the other fieldpiece's carriage and killed a horse.

Victor got the intact gun out of there right away, and the surviving gunners and horses with it. The other gun lay on the sand till night fell, a monument to the folly of repeating himself

"We did it! You did it!" Blaise didn't let a small failure take away from a larger success.

"So we did." Victor didn't want all the credit. "Now we have to see if we can hold what we've taken."

They couldn't. However much Victor Radcliff wanted to believe otherwise, that soon became plain to him. It wasn't just because the Royal Navy kept sending heavy roundshot crashing into Weymouth. But people friendly to the Atlantean cause sneaked up from New Hastings to warn him that General Howe was getting ready to move against the captured town with most of his army.

Getting a large force ready to march didn't happen overnight for anyone. And Howe valued thorough preparation over speed. Victor had the time to hold an officers' council and see what the army's leaders thought.

To his amazement, some of them wanted to hold their ground and fight the redcoats. "General Howe purposes bringing a force more than twice the size of ours, with abundant stores of all the accouterments of war," he said. "How do you gentlemen propose to stand against him?"

"We can do it-damned if we can't," Habakkuk Biddiscombe said. "If we lead 'em into a trap, like, we can slaughter 'em like so many beeves."

Victor couldn't tell him he was out of his mind. The French Atlanteans had done that very thing to General Braddock's army of redcoats south of Freetown. Victor counted himself lucky to have escaped that scrape with a whole skin. He did say, "Beeves are rather more likely to amble into a trap, and rather less so to shoot back."

That won him a few chuckles. But intrepid Captain Biddiscombe was not so easily put off. "If we do thrash 'em, General, we throw off the English yoke once for all. They can't treat us like beeves, either."

"I don't intend to let them do any such thing," Victor said.

"Cut! Good!" von Steuben boomed. "No point throwing away an army on a fight we don't win."

"Thank you. Baron," Victor said, and then, to Biddiscombe, "How did we learn of Howe's planned movement?"

"Patriots from New Hastings told us," the captain answered at once.

"And do you not believe traitors from Weymouth are even now telling General Howe of our debate?" Victor said. "Only the Englishmen will style them patriots, reckoning our patriots traitors."

The cavalry officer opened his mouth. Then he closed it again. "Well, that could be so," he said, his tone much milder than it had been a moment before.

"We cannot hope to lay a trap where the foe is privy to our

plans," Victor said. "Can we beat him in a stand-up fight?"

"Anything is possible." Habakkuk Biddiscombe didn't want to admit the Atlanteans weren't omni capable.

"Anything is possible," Victor agreed. "Not everything, however, is likely. I find our chances of success less likely than I wish they were. Since I do, I should prefer to retire rather than fight."

Debate didn't shut off right away. If Atlanteans were anything, they were full of themselves. Everyone had to put in his penny's worth. Baron von Steuben was rolling his eyes and muttering by the time Victor's views carried the day. The greencoats got ready to abandon Weymouth.

Quite a few locals also abandoned the town. They'd given King George's partisans-the ones who hadn't escaped-some rough justice. If General Howe's troops returned, they feared a dose of their own medicine.

"We are not running away," Victor told anyone who would listen. "We won every battle we fought. We returned to the Atlantic after the English thought they had barred us from our own sea-coast. We proved that Atlantis remains hostile and inhospitable to the invaders."

He got cheers from the men who marched with him, and more cheers from the families that were leaving Weymouth to go with the greencoats. Not one word he said was a lie. He still wished he could have told his army something else. He wished he could have followed Captain Biddiscombe's advice and fought.

Back in the last war, he might have. No defeat he suffered then would have ruined England's chances and those of the English Atlanteans against the French. Now all of Atlantis' hopes followed his army. He couldn't afford to throw them away.