There was a noise to his right. He rolled his head; that took considerable effort, but he was curious.

Three Tartessians-one had a bandage around his head-were pulling Evelyn Grant out of her foxhole. She was alive, but her face was bloodied and her eyes were wandering with concussion from the near miss. One of the mercenaries raised his head and looked around, then said something in a fast-sounding language.

If Hopkins had been able to understand that remote ancestor of the Berber tongue, he would have heard the mercenary say, "No officers here-the Tartessian swine is dead."

The enemy soldiers pulled curved knives out of their belts and began cutting off the Islander's clothes. I should do something, Hopkins thought and moved a hand around. His rifle was gone.

Of course, he thought. They overran our position. They took the rifles. Evelyn had waked up enough to struggle a little, and a Tartessian hit her on the side of the head. Then two of them grabbed her legs and pulled them back until her knees were nearly by her shoulders. The other laughed, kneeling and lifting the hem of his tunic.

"Ah," Hopkins muttered. "Got this."

The grenade seemed very heavy, and getting the pin out was difficult. He couldn't throw it.

He could let it roll out of his hand, onto the canvas bandolier of grenades the sergeant had given him this morning. There were still six of them left…

Blackness.

Alston leveled her binoculars, scanning the Tartessian position and then out to sea. Eight warships, she decided; visibility had closed in a little, gray sky over gray ocean. One was out of commission, masts down and firefighters abandoning the ship as she watched. The rest were keeping station, wearing into the strengthening north wind; they'd have to drop anchor or move off, if it got any stronger. There were twenty-five or so transports, some beached. The rest were anchored, and making heavy weather of it as the wind picked up.

Ashore… hundreds of men, on the beach or moving inland; some tents set up, probably headquarters, stores, and hospital, and a couple of temporary plank roads laid over the sand and up into Sconset itself, with traffic heavy. An artillery park, swarming with effort now, trying to bring some of the guns there to bear on her.

"Here," she said, and the gun-jeeps ahead of her fanned out, jouncing up the low slope to her right until a line of them commanded the ground between the ocean and Sesachacha Pond with interlocking fields of fire. Behind them the mortar haulers and unmodified models pulling tire-wheeled carts full of ammunition halted as well.

Their commander-commander of this whole force now that Sanders was toast-trotted up to the side of Alston's vehicle. Marian offered him a hand, and Captain Stavrand climbed up to stand beside her-a pale young man with large post-Event glasses in wire frames secured by a strap behind his close-cropped white-blond head.

"What a target, ma'am!" he said.

"Well, that's why we're here," Alston said with cold satisfaction. "Your heavy mortars outrange anything they've got on shore, and the Gatlings should be able to keep their infantry off. They can't beat up northward in this wind, so you're safe from their warships; and unless they can walk on water, they can't get over Sesachacha Pond. If they try to embark men in launches and row up to flank you… well, the mortars will work in that direction too."

"We can handle it from here, ma'am," he said confidently.

Alston might have smiled at the unspoken subtext: So will you go away and let me do my job? Under other circumstances, of course. Right now she simply nodded and looked over the Tartessian ships once more.

"Nothing heavier than five, six hundred tons," she murmured. "Heavy crews, though. Say a hundred, hundred and fifteen guns on seven keels, and some of the transports, add in another twenty… fairly light guns, but… Whatever that god-awful explosion out on the water was, it didn't sink too many of them."

Alston cased the binoculars and looked behind her. The thick tubes of the six-inch mortars were going up on their support bipods; the loaders were setting up on the beds of the towing vehicles. That would put them high enough to drop the sixty-pound finned bombs down the waiting muzzles.

"With your permission?"

Marina nodded, and Stavrand vaulted over the side of her gun-jeep, back toward his weapons. The motion would have looked more impressive if his katana hadn't caught on the armored coaming, nearly tripping him.

"I hope the Tartessians give up now,'" Swindapa said thoughtfully.

Her eyes had narrowed, watching the buzzing confusion of the enemy base area shake itself out; several hundred men were forming lines and trotting toward them.

"It's going to be very… a'HiguinaYA'nazka if they try to come at us here."

Marian recognized the term; it was untranslatable, meaning something between "repugnant" and "perverted." That was true enough; the only way the Tartessians could storm the gun-jeeps was head-on into automatic weapons fire.

"They probably will try," she said clinically. "They're remarkably stubborn. They're also trying to kill Heather and Lucy."

Swindapa nodded. "That's true," she said, and slapped the Gatling as if to say, I'm here, aren't I? "It's still a 'HiguinaYA'nazka."

"You're right," Alston said, and keyed the headset.

"Rapczewicz here," Sandy's voice said. "Farragut and the rest of the flotilla nearly ready, Commodore."

Meaning, are you going to get your black ass back where it belongs, or am I going to have to handle it for you? Marian thought, her mouth turning up at one corner.

"I've gotten a good firsthand on the enemy fleet," Alston said, in half-apology. "What word from McClintock?"

"The enemy are pressing him very hard, but they're not getting through… yet," Rapczewicz said.

"Good." Very good. "I'm-"

BUDUMPFFFF. The first of the heavy mortars behind her fired, a slap of pressure and hot air at her neck. The shell arched into the sky and moaned away, a falling note, then exploded a mile and three-quarters southward, not far from a stack of boxes under a tarpaulin. Black smoke gouted into the sky.

"Fire for effect!" Stavrand shouted.

"Let's go," Alston said to her driver. She felt a chill satisfaction as the sand erupted among the enemy. From here they could pound the enemy beachhead into ruin, and there was no way they could strike back. "Back to town."

Isketerol underestimated us, she thought.

He'd seen Nantucket, but only in the immediate aftermath of the Event, when they were still reeling. Since then the Republic had had a decade to find its feet and find out what it could do. Probably Walker could have told his Iberian friend better, but Walker had his own reasons to encourage the enmity.

The gun-jeep swayed as the driver backed, turned, and accelerated smoothly down the beach, taking the firmest sand, just up from the waterline. The rhythmic hammer of the big mortars slapped at her back again, and over that the raw sound of the Gatlings, as if a big sail were ripping under the stress of wind. Only this sound did not stop…

The Farragut looked unfinished. "Hell, she is unfinished," Marian Alston said softly to herself.

Nevertheless, the war-steamer moved. Her hull form was similar to Marian's own Chamberlain's, long and slender although not quite so large. The snaky low-lying menace of her was emphasized by the lack of masts; she would have three eventually, but those rested in the shipyard still. A tall black stack fumed from just forward of where the mainmast would stand, sending scuts of woodsmoke backward to her stern, the harsh smell thick in the air on Chamberlain's deck.

The main difference was one hard to see from here: the Farragut's bows didn't have the elegant clipper rake of the Chamberlain's. Instead they were a single scimitar curve from waterline to forepeak, and low domed swellings showed where the heads of massive bolts held steel plates to beams.