A whistle blew, and slaves attacked the clay of the mold with wooden mallets and chisels. Large sections of it peeled away, revealing the dull brown-gold color of the bronze, still painfully hot to the touch. Walker and Cuddy stepped close, examining it with painstaking care from the thick breech down through the trunnions and the extra foot of spongy, pitted metal at the muzzle. The center was still full; they'd hollow-cast it with a water-cooled core for greater strength, the outer layers shrinking in as they solidified.

"We'll saw this last foot off, and then we're ready to bore it out," Walker said, slapping the metal. There's a thrill to it, he thought. Sort of like having a giant hard-on, in a rarefied intellectual sort of way.

"Yeah, but that boring, that's going to be a bitch, boss. The tool pieces and the gearing for the boring machine- that'll be mostly a hand-filing job."

"You've got the gauges for measuring results, don't you?" Walker asked, crouching and looking along the top of the barrel.

"Boss… ah, hell, yeah, I can do it. I can build a tool-and-gear cutter, too, it's just a shitload of work."

"Nothing worthwhile without sweat," Walker said cheerfully. "You've got those locals understudying you, don't you?"

"Right. Boss, have you tried to get the notion of doing something exactly into these wogs' heads? It's like on time, they just don't have that file on their hard drive."

"Actually I have, Bill. It just takes persistence and a boot up the ass now and then."

Perfect, he thought, touching the cannon again.

The sights were elementary, a blade at the front and a notch at the rear, just like the model, the Civil War twelve-pounder Napoleon. Saltpeter was still the bottleneck in gunpowder production, and Isketerol was working on that-his people used it as a medicine, and it was just a matter of scaling up the leaching process. When it was solved, he'd have the same power at his command that stopped Lee's men at Malvern Hill and Gettysburg.

"Ultima regio regnum," Walker said, patting the barrel again. "The last argument of kings." If the Nantucketers wanted to fuck with him, he was going to give them a right royal welcome.

Bill Cuddy blinked at the sound of Walker's laughter, and several of the slaves made covert signs with their fingers as they cringed.

"Oh, God," Doreen said, looking up the companionway stairs that led to the fantail of the Eagle and at the tumbled slope of foaming water beyond.

"Quickly, please, Ms. Arnstein!" the yellow-muffled figure at the head of them said. "Can't keep this hatchway open!"

Ice-cold sea spray was blasting through, already hitting her face and trickling down into the layers of quilted parka and wool sweater beneath her waterproofs. She took a breath and ran up the slippery treads; the fact that the ship was riding up the slope of one of the huge waves made it a little easier.

At least the air and cold cut the nausea. Seasickness had never bothered her before, but the four unbroken days of a high-latitude North Atlantic gale had triggered it well and truly. The crewman grabbed her as she came out and snapped her belt onto one of the safety lines that ran down either side of the quarterdeck. The wind snatched the breath out of her, leaving her gasping as she pulled herself slipping and crouching along past the radio shack and toward the great triple wheels.

She looked at the waves and felt her stomach heave one last time, but mastered it. It isn't really storming anymore, she told herself. Not really. Not the way it had been for the previous four days. Then she looked back over a sea like a long range of mountains in labor, white water from horizon to horizon except in the troughs between the great waves. Appalled, she turned her back on it-had to, because otherwise she couldn't breathe. Somewhere up there it was near noon, but the light was a somber gray wash.

The Eagle's bow climbed until it was pointing at the growling iron sky. Wind moaned and whistled through the rigging, loud enough to drown out a voice five paces away. No sleet today, but spray still came in sheets. The ship seemed to pause and then pitch forward under a mountain of gray and steel blue streaked with white, plumes of white throwing back from the twisting lunge of the bows. The rigging changed its note as the height of the wave itself sheltered them a little from the force of the monster wind raging down out of Greenland. Dim in the sheets of water coming over the side, figures in yellow slickers fought with the ropes in the waist or aloft.

The wave broke behind them and poured across the port rail, cataracted across the waist deck, hip-deep to the crew. Doreen felt her feet slip out from beneath her and clung for sheer life to the safety line; it bent like a bowstring under the terrible leverage, and her head went under-or she thought it did. With wind and water so intermingled there was no real surface to the billow streaming about her, only a zone of increasing density. Then like some great dog Eagle shook herself and roared upright again, with a Niagara pouring overside and through the scuppers.

Oh, God, thank You, she thought, coughing and wheezing to get the water out of her lungs as she fought her way to the wheels. Eight crewfolk wrestled the savage leverage of the following seas as it played through the rudder and the gearing.

"Sharp weather," the captain called, bending to shriek into her ear. "This is real sailin'!"

"You're out of your mind!" Doreen yelled back.

White teeth split the black face dimly seen under the slicker's hood. "Yeah, I am. Ain't it cool?" Alston shouted in turn.

Swindapa laughed beside her. She was bareheaded, long wet hair streaming like a yellow banner in the gale.

One advantage of weather like this was that you could mutter and not be heard. "Oh, great, I stop puking my guts out for the first time in sixty hours, and what do I get? The Loony Lesbian Sailors' Comedy Hour."

She pulled herself closer, holding on to the safety line. "How are we doing, Captain?"

Alston seemed in a playful mood. "Do you take Band-Aids off slowly or rip 'em quick?" she yelled.

"Slow-why?"

"I'm of the rip-'em-quick school," Alston replied. "This blow was just what we needed, to see how the crews settled in, test the schooners' seakeeping… and get us across fast."

"The schooners aren't sunk?" Doreen said, looking around.

Nothing. The Eagle came to the crest of a wave, and she couldn't even tell where sea and sky parted company. The Queen Mary couldn't live in this.

"Not as of the last radio check, half an hour ago. Good weatherly little ships-they float like corks. And we've been making three hundred sea miles from noon to noon, or better. This blow's dying, though; we'll rendezvous off Ireland in two, three days. Fast passage."

"I'm glad we're not in danger."

"Oh, there's danger. Let a couple of sails go in this and we'll broach to-be turned broadside on to the waves in a flash."

"Would that be bad?"

"We'd capsize and go down like a rock," Alston yelled cheerfully. "But don't worry-it's a sound ship and the crew's shaken down somethin' wonderful."

"I'll take a 747, thanks, given my choice," Doreen shouted back. "Anyway, Ian says he's finished."

"Lead along then," Alston said. "Ms. Rapczewicz, you have the deck. Keep her so."

They went down the companionway behind the radio shack and forward of the emergency wheel. The narrow passageway on the port side was dimmer than it had been when the electric lights were on; even the smell was different, a very slight fishy-nutty tang from the whale oil, and the officers' galley to their right gave off an occasional whiff of woodsmoke. They turned left, past the usual captain's quarters and back to the flag cabin at the rear.