"S. M. Stirling - Sea of Time 01 - Island in the Sea of Time 484" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stirling S. M)

to mainland power, via an underwater cable. For the next few
months they had to soldier along on the old diesel generators,
though.

"Christ," he said. "Not another power-out."

He walked out into the street and stopped, jarred as if he'd
walked into a wall. Stock-still, he stood for a full four minutes
staring upward. It was the screams from people around him that
brought him back to himself.

***
 Nor'easter at twenty knots. Just what we needed, Captain
Marian Alston thought with satisfaction. She kept a critical eye
and ear on the mast captains' work as the royals and topgallants
were doused and struck.

"Clew up! Rise tacks and sheets!"

"Ease the royal sheets!"

The pinrail supervisor bellowed into the wind: "Haul around
on the clewlines, buntlines, and bunt-leechlines!"

The upper sails thuttered and cracked as the clewlines hauled
them up to the yards, spilling wind and letting the ship come a
little more upright, although the deck still sloped like the roof of
a house.

"Lay them to aloft," Alston said to the sailing master. "Sea
furl."

The crew swarmed up the ratlines and out along the yards
that bore the sails, hauling up armfuls of canvas as they bent
over the yards; doll-tiny shapes a hundred feet and more above
her head as they fought the mad flailing of the wet Dacron.

No sense in leaving that much sail up, on a night as dirty as
this looks to be. Too easy for the ship to be knocked down or
taken aback by a sudden shift of wind. The chill bit through the
thick yellow waterproof fabric of her foul-weather gear like cold
damp fingers poking and prodding.

She stood with legs braced against the roll and hands locked
behind her back by the ship's triple wheel, a tall slim woman
from the Sea Islands of South Carolina, ebony-black,
close-cropped wiry hair a little gray at the temples; her face was
handsome in a high-cheeked fashion like a Benin bronze. Spray
came over the quarterdeck railing like drops of salt rain, cold on
her face and down her neck. The sun was setting westward over a