Authors: Taylor Anderson
“A rack? He
sleeps
down there?” Jim asked, amazed.
“Yeah. Even has his chow brought down. Nobody minds but the snipes trying to work around him, and it keeps him from pestering the deck apes.”
“He does
report
to you, doesn’t he?”
“Sure,” Russ grinned. “But he prefers it if I go down there to take his report. He’s gone even squirrellier than
Walker
’s Mice used to be.”
“But he does his job?”
“Oh yeah. And he’s good at it. Remember, he did more than anybody to get this heap off the beach in that swamp. He got her engine restarted and took on the overhaul when we got her in dry dock. I think he’s grown attached to the old girl. What’s more, much as his division bitches and rants about him, I think they’re kinda . . . well, proud of him too. It’s hard to explain.”
“The pride of communal misery endured?” Jim asked with a smirk.
“Maybe some,” Russ conceded wryly, “but that can’t be all. There haven’t been any requests for transfers in a while. Who knows? Maybe he’s remaking them all into a bunch of Mice. But the screw keeps turning, and that’s good enough for me.”
“Lookout confirms six Grik battlewagons, an’ a dozen-plus cruisers!” the talker announced. “They seen us, an’ it looks like the wagons is headin’ straight for us.”
“What about the cruisers?”
“They line up a bit north, like they screenin’ the wagons from the rest o’ the fleet.”
“Speed?”
“Eight to ten knots.”
“Very well,” Jim said. “Have
Arracca
’s wing concentrate on the cruisers, while
Baalkpan Bay
’s Fleashooters maintain the CAP. As soon as we’re engaged, Tassana may release the transports and
Baalkpan Bay
to land their troops. Just keep an eye on those battleships that didn’t come out!” Jim looked at Russ. “
Santa Catalina
’s your ship. Fight her as you see fit, Captain Chapelle.”
“Thank you, Commodore Ellis,” Russ answered formally. He turned and spoke to the bridge watch at large: “The main battery and all secondaries will commence firing at five thousand yards. Sparks,” he added to the wiry Lemurian signal ’Cat. “Get on the TBS and confirm with
Arracca
that we’ll have spotting planes to correct our fire and report any damage we inflict on the enemy!”
S-19
Lieutenant Irvin Laumer watched the growing behemoths through his Imperial telescope, hat tucked under his arm, longish, tow-colored hair streaming back. The wind was out of the west and there wasn’t much of a sea, but S-19 was laboring against cross-grained swells that
Santa Catalina
—maybe any other ship ever built—would hardly notice. The boat had a small enclosed pilothouse atop her flying bridge, but the only people in it now were the Lemurian helmsmen and talker.
Newly minted Ensign Nathaniel Hardee tramped up the stairs aft and handed Irvin a cup of monkey joe. The ersatz coffee on the boat was far better than that Irvin remembered from
Walker
.
“Thanks, Nat,” Irvin said, taking a sip. Hardee was little more than a kid, barely sixteen. The son of a British diplomat on Java, he’d been one of the youngsters S-19 evacuated from Surabaya, and like Abel Cook, he’d grown up fast and jumped into the cause. Even before they crossed to this world, Hardee had been fascinated by the old submarine and now knew her as well as Laumer himself. Most considered him part of the boat’s original crew, and he was her acting exec. There weren’t many original S-19s left, and only four were aboard, counting Irvin and Nat. Danny Porter was chief of the boat, and “Motor Mac” Sandy Whitcomb was engineering officer. There were five ex-pat Impie gals too, but the rest of the crew was Lemurian. Some of the ’Cats had been with the boat ever since they rescued her from the now obliterated Talaud Island.
“Those things
are
pretty big,” Nat observed quietly over the rumble of the boat’s NELSECO diesels.
Irvin snorted. “You know it. Sound general quarters.”
“Aye, aye, sir.” Nat moved to the pilothouse. Inside, he twisted the switch that activated the old diving alarm. ’Cats burst from below and uncovered and unplugged the 4"-50 on the fo’c’sle, while others scampered to prepare the three-inch gun aft.
“Torpedo room report maanned an’ ready,” the talker cried. “Main baattery . . . all stations maanned an’ ready!”
“Very well,” Irvin said. “All ahead slow. We’re close to our assigned position. Let’s see if we can cut down on the wake.” He smiled nervously at Nat. “No sense waving a white flag! I sure wish we could make this attack submerged,” he murmured. “Those devils have an awful lot of big guns on ’em!”
“
Saanty Caat
commence firin’!” the talker echoed the lookout, high above the wallowing deck. Irvin looked through his glass in time to see the white smoke sweep away from the big gun on the old freighter’s fo’c’sle. All
Santa Catalina
’s guns, her twenty-foot breech section of one of
Amagi
’s ten-inch rifles, and the four, 5.5-inchers in the superstructure casemate were bag guns. They hadn’t received the same priority for modern propellants as the 4"-50s and 4.7-inch dual-purpose guns, partly because so few of even the humans had much experience with them. Most had trained on them, aboard other ships, before coming to
Walker
,
Mahan
, or even S-19, and they had the manuals but almost no idea about acceptable pressures—and how to keep them that way in a bag. Therefore, all of
Santa Catalina
’s guns still relied on black powder.
Big Sal
had done fine under that constraint, but recon reported the Grik had up-armored their dreadnaughts. They’d soon know how much difference that would make.
“Five thousand yards,” Irvin stated, just as a monstrous waterspout erupted in front of the leading Grik battleship. “We’re not far from that ourselves,” he continued. “I hope Mr. Chapelle and Commodore Ellis can keep their attention while we creep closer!”
For the next ten minutes or so, those aboard S-19 could do nothing but watch the battle develop on the vast purple sea. The Grik heavies went from column into line, just as they had against Des-Ron 6 in the previous battle. Again, they clearly meant to close the range as quickly as possible before turning to present their heavy broadsides.
Santa Catalina
was barely half as big as the enemy ships, and seemed pathetically vulnerable confronting them all alone. But Laumer knew looks were deceiving. In addition to her powerful guns, they’d lavished considerable armor on her—maybe more than her skeleton could bear, some feared. Her frames had been reinforced, of course, and she’d made it here through some heavy seas that should’ve tested her structural integrity. Still, she wasn’t
really
a warship; she was a freighter. Laumer had to admit she looked tough, though, as Silva once described her. On an experimental whim, hoping to confuse Grik gunners, she’d been painted in the old-style “dazzle” camouflage pattern of sharp angles and contrasting shades of gray. At a distance, it made her look shorter, squatter, and farther away. Irvin smiled. The giant Stars and Stripes battle flag she now streamed also added to the illusion that she was smaller than she was.
Her big gun continued firing once every two or three minutes. Irvin knew the effort it took to raise the heavy shells from the magazine with a hoist, place them on a removable feed ramp, then seat them in the breech with a hydraulic ram. The same process was repeated for the powder bags. The most time-consuming and frustrating part was that each time it was loaded, the gun had to be traversed back to a centerline position, then aimed all over again. It was a tedious, backbreaking process, and they’d discovered that big as
Santa Catalina
was, she was nowhere near as stable as
Big Sal
—and therefore more liable to miss. She needed to get closer.
After a succession of heavy geysers—near misses, mostly—one of the Grik battleships suddenly fired its three forward guns. Almost simultaneously, soot and steam rocketed from two of its funnels, and a gaping exit hole opened in her starboard casemate, also gushing steam. There was smoke too, and a series of yellow-orange flashes lit the inside of the great ship. Seconds later, a mammoth internal explosion practically bulged the roughly five hundred feet of her armored casemate, and as quickly as that, the whole ship seemed to
drop
beneath the sea. Nothing remained but a dirty gray cloud and the slowly dissipating streams of her own coal smoke.
“Silence there!” Laumer shouted down at the gun crew on the fo’c’sle, hopping happily on deck and trilling with glee. “You want ’em to hear you?”
There wasn’t much chance of that. The distance and thunderous boom of the explosion that rolled across them would drown their celebration, but S-19 had crept within three thousand yards of the closest Grik ship, and Irvin was growing more concerned by the moment that they’d be discovered. That remained unlikely. The old boat couldn’t look like much from that distance; she made almost no smoke, very little wake, and her dark paint closely matched the surrounding sea. But S-19 was cruising directly toward the enemy’s open gunports, the giant weapons pointed directly at her.
Santa Catalina
had, most likely, just concentrated the enemy’s attention amazingly, however. Irvin contented himself with scolding his crew and continued his advance.
“The Grik shots all missed,” Nat Hardee said, gazing through his own glass. “
Santa Catalina
has opened with her secondaries!”
Two tall splashes towered over another Grik ship, and two explosions snapped against the forward casemate. Chunks of iron spiraled away, splashing into the sea, but the dreadnaught surged on.
“Damn. They can’t penetrate!” Irvin said.
“Not yet,” Hardee agreed, “but they peeled off a layer. The next rounds might punch through.”
One did. The others missed entirely, but one was enough. There was no massive explosion this time, no catastrophic damage at all that they could see, but the Grik monstrosity careened sharply to starboard—with surprising agility for its size—and smashed hard into the stern of the ship alongside. The collision was audible aboard S-19 a mile and a half away.
“Looks like they got her right in the eyes!” Danny Porter chortled, joining them on the bridge platform. Both ships closest to their boat had slowed to a crawl, turning into each other until they crashed together again, beam on. Through Laumer’s telescope, he saw a smoldering gap where the bridge or conning slits should be on the one now pointing at them, and the thing seemed already low by the head. The other ship wasn’t flooding, but white water churned from the starboard side aft, and it continued turning into the ship that rammed it.
“I guess we can now definitively say they’ve got twin screws,” Irvin observed absently.
More splashes rose among the three battleships still steaming toward
Santa Catalina
, but even as he watched, their aspect began to change. “They’re turning to fire!” he stated. Three great puffs of smoke erupted from the stern of the closest Grik ship, now pointed at S-19! “They’ve seen us,” he said unnecessarily, steeling himself for the fall of shot. Splashes rose, widely scattered, far to port. They’d clearly been rushed, but the next ones might come closer. There was no doubt they were in range.
“All ahead flank!” Irvin shouted. “Come left to course three two zero. We’ll do an end around and try to come up on the unengaged sides of the ones still in the fight!”
“Can we shoot now?” shouted the Lemurian captain of the 4"-50.
“Yeah, but only at the one that shot at us,” Irvin cried back. “You’ll have to quit when we clear those two wrecks. If the others haven’t seen us, there’s no sense poking them in the nose if we can tear out their guts! Danny, get on the TBS and tell Mr. Ellis what we’re doing—and warn him there’s an awful lot of iron about to come his way!”
“I bet he already knows,” Danny said, racing for the pilothouse.
The three undamaged Grik ships steadied on a north-northeasterly course, and almost as one fired their broadsides of heavy guns at
Santa Catalina.
Santa Catalina
“What the hell?” Dean Laney roared when something—maybe a flying rivet—shot his coffee mug out of his hand. He’d been happily watching
Santa Catalina
’s powerful, immaculate, lovingly tended triple expansion engine turn the ship’s great shaft while the massive rods made their eccentric way—down, around, up! Down, around, up!—with a staggered, rhythmic thumping like the beat of a giant heart. He knew they were in action, and he’d responded to bells. He even felt the ringing concussion of the ship’s guns in her fibers as she pounded the enemy. But something had just slapped the hell out of
them
! That was bullshit! A ’Cat scurried down the stairs from the catwalk above, and Laney grabbed him by the arm. “What the hell was that? Sounded like a hailstorm of goddamn
moons
!”
“They ain’t moons, but they nearly as big!” the Lemurian gasped, looking around. “Our five-fives not doin’ so hot, so we get closer, an’ they hammer us! I sent down to see for leaks!”
“Why not just call?”
“Elec-tricksy out, for-ard, an’ nobody get you on voice tube!”
Laney grunted. He hated the wail of the voice tube, and he’d taken the whistle out and put it in his pocket. He fished it out. “I, uh, guess this got knocked out. I found it . . .”
“But there no floodin’ in here?” the ’Cat interrupted his excuse, and Laney’s face darkened. “No, there ain’t no goddamn floodin’ here! Check the firerooms an’ work your way forward! I’ll send a party aft.”
The hull shuddered under another, sustained series of terrible blows that sent ’Cats sprawling on the deckplates. Laney grabbed a support and saw—
saw
—great dents appear as if by magic in the portside hull plating between the frames. More rivets flew—and so did a high-pressure jet of water. Whatever was hitting them was big.
Santa Catalina
’s plates were half an inch thick, and they’d armored certain areas—like
here
—with another two inches of
Amagi
’s steel! Laney yanked the ’Cat up and yelled in his blinking face. “We got floodin’
now
, by God! Tell those idiots on the bridge to get my engine the hell away from whatever’s knockin’ holes in us!” He flung the ’Cat back at the ladder. “Go! I’ll check the firerooms myself!” He grabbed the voice tube and blew in it. “Damage-control parties to the engineerin’ spaces, right damn now! What the hell’re you lazy bastards waitin’ for? We got water comin’ in!”