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

England when the Nantucketers arrived. Ireland itself was still populated by tattooed Moon-worshiping gits not yet up to the chariot-and-tomahawk stage. Even the Fiernan Bohulugi who made up most of the rest of the First Marine Regiment thought they were backward.
    “Oh, well, at least Newgrange is there in the now,” he muttered, shivering a little inwardly. The great tomb-temple by the Boyne River was already millennia old in this predawn age, as old now as Caesar’s Rome had been to the time in which he was born.
    He levered himself back up and looked about, shaking clods off his cloth-covered coal-scuttle helmet—what the Yanks called a Fritz. No real damage and it didn’t look as if there had been any casualties. Except among the Hittite auxiliaries; some of them had been caught in the open, and all two hundred hale enough to run were taking to their sandaled heels, except for their officer. He was trying to stop them, poor soul, striking at fleeing men with his whip. At least they were so terrified they were just dodging rather than stabbing or clubbing the man. Discarded spears and bows marked their passage back up the valley toward the high plateau and at least momentary safety.
    “No surprise there,” one of his aides said sourly. “Here we are, outnumbered twenty to one and our allies are running like hell.”
    “It’s a typical Marine Corps situation, to be sure, Sally.” he answered, replacing the helmet and dusting off his uniform instead. “Don’t be too hard on the locals, though; it’s a bit alarming, the first time under fire.” Probably they wouldn’t stop this side of Hattusas.
    O’Rourke unsnapped the case at his waist and leveled the binoculars westward; clouds piled high in the sky there, hiding a sun just past noon. There had been rain a few days ago, and might be more soon.
    He heard a sergeant’s familiar rasp: “Nobody said stop working !”
    The khaki-clad Marines went back to building the wall the company commander had laid out, using mud brick and stones from a livestock enclosure nearby, and sacks of grain and boxes of supplies. More manned the parapet, but the enemy were just beyond effective rifle range.
    The mortar stayed silent; probably the crew had just noticed that it could only reach the Islanders at extreme range, which was wasteful. He watched the men who crewed it lifting it bodily, baseplate and all, into a chariot fitted with floor-clamps to receive it. These weren’t Walker’s uniformed troops; instead they wore plaid-check trousers and wraparound upper garments, their hair and mustaches long, and some of them were blond or red-thatched. Auxiliaries, then, that migrant horde from the Hungarian plains Walker had enlisted, the Ringapi they were called. He scanned back and forth. Five or six hundred of them. A few firearms, amid more spears and bows, axes and swords and gaudily painted shields. Flintlock shotguns, and some rifles. Impossible to be sure at this distance, but he thought that the rifles were muzzle-loaders, probably kept in store after the Achaeans learned to make better and then handed out to allies....
    “We’ll risk it,” he said.
    “Sir?” Cecilie Barnes said.
    “Can’t let them set that mortar up just as they please, Captain,” he said. Because never a piece of artillery have we here, yet. “Let them get into range, position it in a nice piece of dead ground, and they’d hammer us to flinders with it. Sergeant! Saddle up the Gatling. And someone get my horse from the pen.”
    “Ah, sir, I should—”
    “Stay here and hold the fort, Captain.”
    He swung easily into the saddle; Fancy sidled restlessly under him and tossed its head, still nervous from the explosions. The Gatling-gun crew were mounted as well, on the horses that drew it or the ammunition limber. As machine guns went the six-barreled weapon was big and heavy, but it had the supreme virtues of simplicity and ruggedness.
    O’Rourke drew his revolver, and checked that the