Author’s Note: This story takes place some eighty-five years after the events of “The Ice War” (Asimov’s, September 2008), and is similarly loosely related to my 1993 novel Anti-Ice. In our timeline Admiral Collingwood did fight beside Nelson at Trafalgar, and Robert Fulton’s Nautilus was built and trialed, though never used in war.

Prologue

I discovered the attached manuscript on January 1st 1806, a dismal New Year, when with my father’s staff I was sifting through the charred wreckage of the Ulgham manufactory. It was scribbled on odd bits of paper that themselves tell something of the author’s extraordinary story—a torn blueprint of the old Nautilus submersible machine, a warship’s victualling sheet still reeking of gunpowder, even a memorandum in my own hand, all rolled up and stuffed into a spent Congreve rocket shell, presumably in the very last moments before the Tom Paine rose for its momentous journey to the Phoebean nest and the ice line. Though I did not immediately recognize his hand, it was immediately clear to me who was the author...

I

The drummers sounded battle stations, and it was a noise fit to chill the blood...

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