Free On the Oceans of Eternity by S. M. Stirling Page A

said.
    God-damn all political wheedling, he thought, with a touch of anger he kept strictly off his own features. You’d think with a war on and good men and women dying, everyone would pull together.
    He, knew how Martha would react to that; a snort, and a sharp word or two on the subject of his being too smart—and too old—to think anything of the sort.
     
    “Well, they’re not wasting time,” Patrick O’Rourke said.
    He watched the impact footprints of the mortar shells walk up the broad valley toward his position, each a brief airborne sculpture the shape of an Italian cypress made from pulverized dirt and rock. It hadn’t been more than half an hour since he’d arrived to give Captain Barnes the bad news and gotten caught in it himself.
    Whoever was on the other end of that mortar wasn’t very good at it, but they’d get the shells here eventually....
    His staff gave him an occasional glance, as if to wonder when he was going to notice the approaching explosions. Time to take pity on them, he thought, and went on aloud:
    “Take cover!”
    The base’s garrison were already in their slit trenches. Everyone else dived for a hole once he’d given the signal, and he hopped into his after them, with a whistling in the sky above to speed him on his way.
    Whonk!
    The explosion was close enough to drive dirt into his clenched teeth. He sneezed at the dusty-musty smell and taste of it and grinned. There’s one thing to be said for a war; it teaches you things about yourself, it does. One thing he’d learned was that physical danger didn’t disturb him much; some, yes, but not nearly with the gut-wrenching anxiety that, say, being afraid of screwing up and giving the wrong commands could do.
    In fact, sometimes it was exciting, like rock-climbing or a steeplechase on a wet raw day. Whether that said something good or bad about his own character he didn’t know.
    Or much care, he thought. Horses screamed in terror in the pen beyond the field hospital. That was one thing he did regret about being back here; the poor beasts were still caught up in the quarrels of men. There were human screams, too, fear mostly—he’d become unpleasantly familiar with the sounds of agony—from the throats of locals.
    One of those shells could land in here with me, he thought. Of course, if we’re to be playing that game, I could have stayed in Ireland the year of the Event.
    A safe, sane year in the last decade of the twentieth century. PCs, parties, Guinness on tap, girls, cars, trips to England or Italy, himself an up-and-coming young prospective law student in an affluent family. Nothing to bother him but boredom and a nagging doubt he really wanted to follow the law for the rest of his life.
    One more year I’ll work the summer on Nantucket, said I.
    He’d done it the first year for the money and travel, and the second for fun; it was a wild young crowd on the island during the summer back then, one long party. When you were nineteen, working three jobs and sleeping in a garage could be classified as fun.
    Just for old time’s sake, to be sure. Then I’ll stay in bloody Dublin and study for the final exams. One more year can’t hurt, though, and the next thing I know I’m back in the fookin’ Bronze Age with no prospects except farming potatoes, the which my grandfather moved to Dublin to avoid.
    “Or goin’ fer a soldier, which ye’ve doon, at that, ye iijit,” he muttered under his breath, mimicking his grandfather’s brogue before dropping back into his natural mid-Atlantic-with-a-lilt. “Maybe the English are right, and we’re so stupid we don’t even know how to fuck without arrows sayin’ this way tattooed on the girl’s thighs ...”
    On the other hand, not even the English ever claimed that the Irish weren’t hell in a fight. It was just a bit of irony that nearly half the soldiers under his command were some sort of Alban proto-Celts from the dawn of time, who’d been in the process of conquering