Rising Tides (20 page)

Hij-Geerki spoke with his general before replying. “Why? They are of no use except for fodder. They believed the Celestial Mother would not forsake them and remained overlong near the harbor where there was little food. We foraged and remained strong. Eventually, we came to feed on them with almost no resistance. Do you not now easily drive them like prey yourselves?”

Pete shuddered. He’d begun to suspect something like that. He could almost understand a rebel force, in this situation, separating itself from some Pollyanna leader who couldn’t read the writing on the wall, but to then
prey
on former comrades, to eat them like cattle! His skin crawled. The Grik were like Martians or something, totally unlike anything he could imagine, unworthy of existence. When he spoke again, his tone was wooden.

“We’ve heard your general’s terms. Here are mine. He and all his warriors will surrender at discretion, unconditionally, and take whatever I decide he has coming. That’s it.”

Hij-Geerki was practically wringing his hands. He could barely hold them still enough to write. The general spoke harshly to him and he made some sort of reply that didn’t seem to mollify his master. “He will not accept that!” he wrote. “He cannot accept that!”

“Sorry,” Pete snarled. “We don’t allow cannibals in my Marine Corps. We don’t even let ’em in the Army. Besides, if he changes sides once, he’ll do it again, and I don’t keep copperheads in my shirt pocket!”

Rolak looked at Pete. He knew what was about to happen, and knew it would happen fast. He agreed completely with the decision, but also feared losing an opportunity. “Hij-Geerki,” he said quickly, almost interrupting Pete’s last words, “you are not a warrior and you make no decisions here, correct?”

Geerki responded with a large, hasty “NO” on his tablet.

“You seem like a sensible creature that does not want to die, yes?”

“YES!”

“Then I suggest you lie down.”

Hij-Geerki flung himself to the ground just as Rolak drew his sword and slashed across the throat of one of the Grik guards in one continuous motion. General Arlskgter opened his terrible jaws in a shriek of fury and had his sword half out when Pete fired two shots with his .45 that came so close together it was difficult to distinguish the reports. He still carried standard military ammo, and the empty shells dutifully ejected high and to the right amid the smallest wisp of brown smoke. Both 230-grain copper-jacketed slugs struck within two inches of each other, punching deeply recessed round holes in the general’s polished breastplate. At least one bullet must have severed the spine because General Arlskgter crumpled to the ground like a marionette with its strings cut. Both of the Marine guards had driven their long bayonets into the remaining Grik, and it squalled hideously as they twisted their triangular blades and jerked them free.

For just an instant the Grik horde seemed stunned. This whole activity had been beyond their experience from beginning to end, and a little confusion was understandable.

“Come along quickly now, Hij-Geerki,” Rolak said. “You will live, but you are
mine
, understand?”

Hij-Geerki croaked something unintelligible, but punctuated it with a definitive nod. Together, the four “delegates” and their new, possibly priceless acquisition, scampered back to the Marine lines, just as crossbow bolts began thrumming past. Each of the eight light guns of the 1st Marines fired double canister off the muzzle flash of the closest gun on the right, creating a rolling, booming thunder, punctuated by the shrill screech of projectiles and the horrible screams of the enemy.

“Well,” Tikker said, sighing theatrically to himself when he saw the gouts of smoke belch from the Marine line, “I knew it would never last.” He shifted his face so he could speak more directly into the voice tube. “‘A’ flight to form on us,” he instructed. “Send ‘Apparent failure of “diplomatic” effort. Will proceed with final instructions to “kill them all,” unless ordered otherwise. Inform Commodore Ellis we are only a little over half fuel level any way.’ ”

“Roger,” Cisco replied, again reminding Tikker that someday, he’d have to ask why they said that. It was a name, wasn’t it? There was a
Mahan
destroyerman in Ordnance named “Roger.” Maybe he would know? He banked a little left and pulled back on the stick until his compass indicated north. He’d gain a little altitude, then roll out on a reverse course and align his attack on a north-south orientation. He didn’t want to risk hitting any Marines, and he’d still have to be careful not to release too late, or he might drop an egg on the force moving past the target to the south. He glanced around, confirming that the flight was with him—including a stray he’d picked up from “B” flight. He shrugged. There was too much comm traffic as it was, with everybody stepping all over one another. He’d let the pilot’s flight leader deal with it later.

Judging that his distance was just about right, he banked hard left and gave it some rudder until his nose started to drop, then he leveled out and pushed the stick forward. Ben Mallory had passed on what he knew of dive-bombing attacks and the information was good, but Nancys were a little different. With their very high wing and considerable engine and radiator drag, one had to be careful with the rudder so as not to release one’s bombs into one’s own plane. Steadying up, he concentrated on the target below. For once, he didn’t check behind him to make sure everyone else had executed the maneuver properly. He was going in hot, and there was nothing he could do about it. Either they had or they hadn’t.

The dingy sailcloth tents and rude makeshift shelters grew rapidly in size. The Grik were running in all directions: toward the Marines, away from them, and into the surrounding jungle. Smoke still drifted downwind from the Marine line, and it even seemed as if some of the enemy were trying to hide in it—from him! That was it. The air attack
was
panicking them! Whether it started the panic or not was unclear, but it was definitely making it worse. A large jumble of Grik gathered near the center of the camp, either for protection or for orders from some leader. Tikker aimed for that.

Their altimeters were always slow, but they were taught to compensate. Judging his altitude, he pulled back on the stick, counted “one, two, three” to adjust for the relatively low angle of attack, and yanked back on the lever attached to two cables that in turn pulled the pins that held the bombs secured to the hardpoints under the wings. It was a ridiculously simple release. Bernie Sandison had actually been a little ashamed of its lack of ingenuity, but it worked every time they tested it, and it worked again now. The Nancy literally leaped upward when the bombs fell away, and Tikker continued climbing, bleeding off the airspeed he’d gained in the dive. Finally, he banked left again and turned to see the show.

His bombs had already gone off, unheard and unfelt. Smoke and debris filled the air around his target and pieces of bodies were beginning to fall back to earth. As he watched, the next plane in line performed an almost identical attack, and this time he witnessed the impressive effects of the fifty-pounders going off. They weren’t in the same league with
Amagi
’s ten-inch guns, but they appeared at least equal to
Walker
’s four-inchers. They were far more destructive than the little mortar bombs. He whooped with glee when two plumes of smoke and earth rocketed into the sky a third time, and a fourth. So far, the pilots were being careful not to drop on the exact spot he had. They were trying to saturate the clearing with the heavy explosions and lethal, whizzing fragments of crude cast iron. He’d almost reached the point where he first began his dive when he watched the last ship go in. He was preparing to make another pass, low and slow, so Cisco could hand-drop mortar bombs on the enemy, when he realized the last plane was still barreling in.

Even as he watched, knowing with sick certainty what had happened, he saw the plane lurch upward, apparently dropping its bombs at last, but it was too late. Against a floating target on the open sea, the air crew of the last Nancy might have had a chance, but here ... there were trees. Even so, miraculously, the plane almost made it, clearing the first trees by the width of a whisker. Tikker had never believed in anything like the human concept of “luck” before he became an aviator. He did now, with good reason, and thought he had it in spades. But he also knew “luck” was a fickle phenomenon. Just when it looked like the Nancy below might actually survive, it clipped a treetop with its fuselage and created a small explosion of leaves. The contact slowed the plane just enough to force it into another treetop, then another. It collided head-on with the fourth tree, the pilot’s compartment crumpling under the engine, the wing wrapping around the trunk. The ruptured fuel tank ignited almost instantly with a hungry rush of flame, and the tangled wreckage of the fragile plane tumbled to the jungle floor, leaving a dwindling fire in the treetops and a chalky black pall of smoke.

Tikker blinked rapidly with sadness and irritation; his lips were set in a grim frown. Target fixation. Ben had warned them, and they trained hard to avoid it. They’d even lost a couple of pilots and ships in training, and he’d known it was going to be a problem. He blinked again, and surveyed the field below. Their target had evaporated. The Grik gathered there had either fled or died, and there was no point in wasting the little bombs.

“Cisco,” he said, “send to ‘A’ flight: ‘Well done, but let that be a lesson to us all. Never forget it.’ ” He sighed. “‘This squadron’s going home, unless we receive further orders from Commodore Ellis. “B” flight will withhold ordnance for targets of opportunity. That is all.’ ”

The squadron re-formed and together made a low-level pass over the field. Unheard over the engines, the Marines cheered them; Tikker saw their gestures and the waving banners. Without orders, every ship in the 1st Naval Bomb Squadron waggled its wings at the 1st Marines. The squadron had done well in its first action, no doubt about it. The outcome of the fight below had been a foregone conclusion, but the squadron had saved a lot of lives. A lot of highly professional and experienced lives. It was a heady moment. Tikker knew their success would have been proclaimed even more exuberantly in the air and on the ground if not for the already dwindling black column of smoke.

The squadron climbed to a thousand feet. That was high enough to see the jungle panorama below and avoid the eruptions of lizard birds and other flying creatures that flushed, panicked, into the sky at their passing. Larger flying things, like nothing he’d ever seen, with half the wingspan of his plane, didn’t seem too alarmed and even tried to climb and pace them. Whether they were driven by hunger or curiosity was moot because the Nancys easily outpaced them. The port city, “Raan-goon,” still burned, and they flew east, over
Donaghey
, to skirt the smoke and updrafts.

There were wounded on the docks, waiting to be carried out to the ships. There weren’t a
lot
of wounded, compared to the depressing throngs he’d seen after other battles, and he supposed they were getting better at this business of war. The battle wasn’t over, though, even if it had essentially degenerated into a general chase; it might last many hours more. Whatever it had become, there would be more wounded before it was done. More dead. He hoped this exercise would be worth the price.

CHAPTER 12

Eastern Sea

W
alker
had averaged eight knots during the last week, a respectable speed given the generally light airs the other ships relied on. Sometimes she sped up, steaming a wide circle around her plodding consorts. Occasionally, she hove to and let the Nancy down into the sea and Reynolds flew. Matt forbade him to fly out of sight, but one of the flights did warn them of a basking mountain fish, several miles farther out than they would have detected it with lookouts. This allowed them to give it a wide berth. Fred Reynolds saw nothing else, no islands or ships at all. If they’d been in the Carolines before, they must have left them behind. Otherwise, the sea was calm, the weather pleasant, and if not for the antiquated sailing steamers they kept company with and the Lemurian heavy crew, it would have been easy for the men aboard USS
Walker
to imagine that they’d somehow returned to the world they’d left behind.

Beginning the third week out of the nameless atoll where the ships refitted after the fight, the sky grew dark and the sea began to dance. A cool wind pushed rolling swells out of the south, and
Walker
started rolling sickeningly, as was her custom. A pod, or herd, of gri-kakka, a form of plesiosaur they’d grown uncomfortably accustomed to, crossed their path and blew among the swells. The creatures veered away and plunged for the depths as the ship’s sonar lashed at them. They used the sonar to frighten mountain fish—or “leviathans,” as the Imperials called them—away, and it seemed to work extremely well.
Walker
’s crew was glad to learn it worked on gri-kakka too. They’d taken some damage once by just striking a young one.

That night
Walker
ran under running lights and the other ships hoisted lanterns. The wind and sea continued to build, veering out of the southwest. The quartering swells made
Walker
’s crew, particularly the Lemurians, even more miserable as the roll took on a swooping, corkscrewing motion. Even the ’Cats who’d been on the sea all their lives had a hard time with it. Except for the ones who’d made their living on the fishing feluccas, none had ever noticed any except the most severe storms. Riding heavy seas on a Lemurian Home was like doing so on an aircraft carrier.
Walker
’s relatively small and slender round-bottom hull made for a far more boisterous ride. With the dawn came the realization that they were unquestionably in a typhoon, or possibly a Strakka—something even worse that this world’s different climate managed to conjure. They’d never experienced a deepwater Strakka before.

Ever eastward they struggled, in the face of the mounting sea. Waves crashed across
Walker
’s narrow bow, inundating the forward four-inch-fifty and pounding against the superstructure beneath the bridge. During her refit, they’d replaced
Walker
’s rectangular pilothouse windows with glass salvaged from
Amagi
, but there hadn’t been much to spare. To protect the new glass, as well as the people behind it, plate steel shutters had been cut and installed that could be lowered into place over the windows. The shutters retained only small slits to see through, and all but eliminated visibility, but they had the compass, and soaked lookouts stood watch on the bridgewings. Chack stood watch-on-watch high above in the crow’s nest as well. He had the longest experience aboard the old destroyer of any Lemurian, and had probably developed the strongest stomach of any of his farsighted peers. Still, the wildly erratic and exaggerated motion of the crow’s nest would have made the post hell for anyone. As the storm built, he was the very last to report visual contact with the lanterns of the other ships.

Even then, they maintained wireless contact with
Achilles
, but her signal grew weaker with every passing hour. The growing distance between the ships wasn’t to blame. The problem was that they hadn’t been allowed time to install and regulate one of the virtually “Allied standard” 120-volt, 25-kilowatt generators in
Achilles
’ engine room when they left Baalkpan. She still relied on one of the portable six-volt winddriven generators used by Allied sailing ships. The wind had grown much too violent to continue operating it, though, and the batteries were beginning to fade.
Icarus
and
Ulysses
had only lanterns, flags, guns, and rockets to communicate with, and by late afternoon even
Achilles
couldn’t see them anymore over the mounting crests of the tortured sea.

“Jeez, this is awful!” protested Frankie Steele through clenched teeth, struggling with the large polished wheel. Water beaded in his beard. Everyone on the bridge had been saturated by windblown rain and spray. “I remember steering
Mahan
through that big Java Sea Strakka on one engine, but I don’t think it was this bad.”

“If you’ll remember,” said Matt, “
Walker
only had one engine at the time as well, and I believe you’re right. The water’s a lot deeper and the swells are more organized, but the troughs are deeper too.” He braced himself against his chair, bolted securely to the bulkhead, when the bow shouldered through another high peak and then tilted downward at an alarming angle. With a rushing crash, it pierced the next enormous wave and the sea boomed against the pilothouse. Through the slits in the shutters all Matt could see was a swirling white vortex, and water gushed into the pilothouse over the bridgewing rails, nearly sweeping the lookouts aft and down onto the weather deck. Somehow, they managed to hold on, and climb hand over hand back to their posts as the rush of seawater drained through the bridge strakes. Slowly, reluctantly, the bow came up again and the ship heaved sharply over to port.

Kutas, clinging to the support pole near the chart table, watched the clinometer pass twenty degrees. “A lot deeper,” he muttered nervously. “Skipper, the wind’s come around out of the northwest, and these waves are getting harder to crawl up at an angle. I recommend we change course to one, two, zero. We might take them harder over the bow, but maybe they won’t tump us over!”

Matt hesitated. If they turned away, they might get separated even farther from their consorts. But the Imperial ships couldn’t steam forever in these seas. Sooner or later, they’d have to run with the wind. “Very well. Mr. Steele, make your course one, two, zero. Mr. Kutas, please have Mr. Riggs inform
Achilles
of our course change. According to their charts, there shouldn’t be anything out there we need to be concerned about running into.”

“Aye, aye, Skipper,” Steele replied, “making my course one, two, zero.”

The Bosun staggered up the stairs aft, and gasping, joined Kutas at the pole.

“What are you doing running around in the rain, Boats?” Matt quipped.

“Oh, just checking on things.”

“How’s she holding up?” Matt asked.

“Swell,” Gray replied breathlessly. He’d pulled the decorative strap on the front of his sopping, battered hat down under his chin to keep from losing it. He didn’t add “so far.” That might jinx them. On the other hand, maybe just thinking it was bad enough.

“Skipper!” cried Reynolds, who as usual joined the duty roster as talker when he wasn’t flying or tending the plane in some way. Right now, the Nancy had been disassembled and secured as well as possible.

“What is it?” Matt demanded.

“Lookout, ah, Chack, says there’s a whopper coming in! It just keeps getting bigger! He sounds ... scared!”

Chack scared? Oh, hell
. “Mr. Steele?”

“Almost there,” Frankie replied, straining against the wheel.

Matt joined the starboard lookout on the bridgewing. At first he couldn’t see anything through the darkness and the blinding spray. Then he heard it. Even over the screeching wind that moaned hideously through the foremast stays and the wireless aerial, over the blower and the groaning hull and thrashing sea, he heard a sound like mounting thunder. What he could see of the horizon beyond the gray-green foam had become as black as night. He looked up. And up. “Oh, Lord,” he said. Then he spun. “Sound the collision alarm!”

In spite of the situation, Tabby was actually pleased with herself. This was the worst storm she’d endured yet on
Walker
, but for the first time, she hadn’t been transformed into a heaving, retching, practically lifeless wreck.
Must be The ’sponsibility
, she decided. She’d never seen Spanky look even mildly ill when the sea kicked up. He’d been through the aft fireroom just a few moments before, moving carefully along the rail with the motion of the ship. The hull seemed tight, and though brackish water gushed back and forth in the bilge, the ship didn’t seem to be taking much on as she worked. At least the hull repairs had been properly handled—of course, they’d had more time on them. The boilers had been a hurry-up affair. She didn’t mind. She’d finished the work on number three, and it was roaring away contentedly despite the turmoil outside. She was satisfied.

She glanced around and wrinkled her nose. Just because
she
wasn’t sick didn’t mean there wasn’t a powerful lot of puking going on. She’d been the first Lemurian fireman and had suffered her baptism alone, except for the somewhat disinterested solicitations of the “other” Mice. Now the whole fireroom was full of her people—none of whom had ever endured anything like this. She felt sorry for them, spewing wretchedly on the deck plates, trying to reach the one they’d left open to the bilge as a “puke hole,” but she felt slightly superior as well. She
was
superior. She was a
chief
, wasn’t she? The others would come along, just as she had, and at least most still seemed able to function.

Suddenly an alarm blared in the compartment that she’d only heard a couple of times in drills. Her spine stiffened and her eyes went wide.

“Everyone! Grab hold of something!” she screamed. “Get away from the boilers and hold on!” She embraced a feed line and clenched her teeth. Something struck the ship like the hand of God. One instant,
Walker
seemed to be climbing a swell like so many others, and the next, the old destroyer was practically on her beam-ends. Deck plates were uprooted and went sliding or tumbling to port, and the air was filled with loosened condensation, followed by a flood of bilgewater ... and screams. Tabby’s feet fell out from under her, and she held on to the heavy pipe for dear life as others in her division did the same, or fell screeching amid the clattering tools and other debris. A few must have fallen against the boilers themselves—suddenly the air smelled of burnt hair and flesh. She watched as one of her water tenders, motionless against the port-side hull, was impaled by a plummeting deck plate that struck her with its sharp, pointed corner. The water tender never made a sound. A thundering vibration added to the din, and whether it was water coursing over the ship or the starboard screw running away, she couldn’t tell.

Another sound began that she’d never heard before. It started as a whooshing, drumming hiss, and quickly grew to a pounding rumble, and she knew—
knew
—that water was pouring down at least one stack into the smoke-box uptake! For what might have been only moments but seemed like forever, the ship just hung like that, heaved over, as if trying to decide whether to right herself and struggle on, or roll all the way over and go to sleep at last.

“No!” Tabby screamed. “You NOT give up! You NOT!” Over and over she shouted, “You NOT! You NOT!” until she no longer knew if she was screaming at the ship, herself, or her weakening arms. Slowly, slowly, the angle grew less extreme. “Pleeeese, ship!” she begged, almost sobbing. “You got too much to do! You got too many who love you!” Almost as if in response to her plea,
Walker
practically lurched upright and her screws bit again. There were more screams when firemen fell into the jumble of iron that slid deckward with them. Then came a terrible roar, and Tabby remembered the water in the uptake. Later, she could never exactly describe the sound she heard when warm seawater coursed down into the number three boiler. Maybe her ears were already shot from all the noise, and her own high-pitched wail. The best she could remember was a “crackling, thundering
BONG
!” before the aft fireroom filled with scalding steam.