Island in the Sea of Time Read Free

before that; she’d joined up the year sea duty was opened to women. You learned to trust your gut. And never, never to trust the sea.
    “Finish up and get them down,” she said.
    Cadets and crew poured down the ratlines, the latter sometimes helping the former along; for the first few weeks out, there would always be the odd officer cadet who froze a hundred and fifty feet up on a swaying rope.
    A fat blue spark jumped from her hand to the metal housing between the ship’s three wheels. Alston bit back a startled obscenity—you had to set an example—and shook her hand. Something white-hot stretched for an instant from sky to sea off to her left. More sparks flew; people were leaping and cursing all across the deck. Not the four hands standing on the benchlike platforms either side of the wheels, she noted with satisfaction. They flinched, their eyes went wide, but they kept her steady on the heading they’d been given.
    Light flickered from left to right behind her, curving ahead of the ship in a line only a few hundred yards away—curving from east to west, in a line her navigator’s eye could see was the arc of a huge circle. St. Elmo’s fire ran along the Eagle ’s rigging, blue witch-flame. The curses were turning to screams as the lightning reared up into a crawling dome of orange and white overhead. Like being under the biggest, gaudiest salad bowl in the world, ran through her mind as she stood paralyzed for a moment. Then the noise on deck penetrated.
    Easily. The roaring wind had dropped away to nothing in the space of a few seconds, and the drumhead-taut sails slackened and thuttered limp. The motion of the ship lost its purposeful rolling plunge, changed to a shuddering as the waves turned into a formless chop, and then to a slow sway as they subsided. Shouts and screams echoed through an eerie silence as the rigging’s moaning song of cloven air died.
    “Silence there!” she snapped, quiet but carrying. “Mr. Roysins, let’s get some order here. Whatever’s happening, panic won’t help.”
    But it would feel so good, part of her mind gibbered, looking up at the dome of lights that turned night into shadowless day.
    “On with engines,” she said. Max the diesel hammered into life and steerageway came on the ship. “Strike all sails. Give me a depth-finder reading.”
    She clenched her hands behind her back and rose slightly on her toes, ignoring the blasting arch of fire. “We’ve got a ship to sail.”
     
    “Got the stores covered?” Chief Cofflin asked, as he pushed through the crowd on Main Street.
    “Right, liquor, grocery, and jewelry—just in case. We’re stretched pretty thin.”
    His assistant hesitated; he was a short thin young man named George Swain, and a fourth cousin. Everyone on the island was a cousin, except wash-ashores. It made for a certain lack of formality. So did the fact that there were only twenty-five officers on the force.
    “Some of our own people are a mite shaky, Chief.”
    “Ayup. Don’t blame ‘em, George. Still, we’ve got a job to do.” He stopped to think for a moment, running through a list of names in his head. “Get everyone who’s off-duty back on. And call Ed Geary, Dave Smith, Johnnie Scott, and Sean Mahoney. Tell them to each pick six friends they can trust and come down to the station. Deputize ’em.”
    George missed a step. “Chief, we can’t do that on our own say-so!”
    “I can and I just did,” Cofflin said. “Ed’s a good man and he knows an emergency when he sees one, and so are the rest. You call them and get them posted. Meanwhile, let’s see if I can talk some sense into these people here.” The selectmen or somebody should be doing it; he was a policeman, not a politician. But they were probably out there running around with the rest of the crowd.
    He mounted the steps of the bank at the head of Main Street and looked down the cobbles toward the big planter at the foot of the street. The lights on the cast-iron