"Walter Jon Williams - Argonautica (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Walter John)

"Lt. Jase Miller, C.S.N., commanding the _General Bee,_" Jase said.

"Glad to meet you," Pendergas said, for all the world as if Jase was a constituent.

"Let me have men about me that are fat," Jase thought, "Sleek-headed men and such as sleep o' nights." And felt inwardly pleased.

"You got any engineers?" the Senator asked. "I'm having problems with my engines."

"I've got _Navy_ engineers," Jase said. Because Pendergas was Army, and so was his boat apparently. And on account of the first point, Jase aimed to change the second.
Pendergas looked at him with little eyes half-hidden by lids of fat. "We can work something out, I reckon."

"I am ordered to cooperate with you, sir."

Pendergas spat tobacco onto the grass. "Well, that's good. Because you and me, that's all the South has to defend Vicksburg."

Which was, Jase reflected, sadly true. A few months ago Flag Officer Davis had taken Memphis with his Yankee river squadron. Farragut had captured New Orleans with his salt-water flotilla, then steamed up the Mississippi, right past Vicksburg's batteries, to join Davis north of the city. With the two Yankee fleets united, it was clear that Vicksburg was next on their agenda, and the South didn't have much to stop them.

Pendergas looked down at Jase's stocking foot. "Ain't the Navy issuing full sets of boots these days?"

"The Navy issued the full set," Jase said, "but nobody told me the Yazoo River was planning on collecting a toll."

Pendergas curled a lip at this sorry example of wit. "Let's hope the Yankees don't get the other," he said. "And your boat with it."

There was a rushing sound as the _Bee_ blew steam. Pendergas' little eyes almost disappeared into his fleshy face as he looked at the _General Bee_.

"What kind of boat has the Navy given me, Jase?"

Chill mirth crept round Jase's brain. So Pendergas thought the Navy had given him a boat, did he? They would see whose boat would be given to whom.

"Armed tugboat, sir, escaped from New Orleans before it fell," he said. "We carry a thirty-pound Parrott bow chaser, a twenty-pound Parrott aft, and a twenty-four-pound smoothbore on each broadside."

Pendergas' lip curled again. "And no more armor than a country whorehouse," he said.

"Oh, a little more than that," Jase said. He had built waist-high log structures around the cannon to protect the gunners, and stacked bales of cotton around the pilot house, the boiler, and wherever else he thought it might do any good, but there wasn't much else that could be done. The _Bee_ had been built as a tugboat, taken into the Navy because the Navy had no other vessels, and then named after a man who had been dead since First Manassas. None of these omens seemed particularly auspicious.

"Well," Pendergas said, "come and look at _Arcola,_ and I'll show you the boat the Army's going to use to clean Farragut off the river." He turned toward the rust-red monster he was building in his cotton field, and raised his voice. "Argus! Argus McBride!"

Limping on his one stocking foot, Jase followed the senator toward the drydock. McBride turned out to be an old man, with a shock of white hair and a handshake dry as sand.

"Formerly of the New Orleans, Galveston, and Great Northern Railroad," Pendergas said proudly. "He's rebuilding _Arcola_ for me."

Argus looked at Jase skeptically. "You wouldn't know anything about triple-expansion marine engines, would you?"

"I'm your man," said Jase.

The senator clapped Jase on the shoulder. "Good boy! I knew we could use you!"

"If you like, I will send for my chief," Jase said, "and we'll look at the engines together."

While they waited for Chief Tyrus to come from _General Bee,_ Pendergas and Argus proudly showed them over the armored ram they were building on the Yazoo.