Seas of Venus (25 page)

Johnnie felt too decoupled to be afraid. He looked at his uncle.

The
Semiramis
alone could manage about thirty-two knots, but the speed of the battle line as a whole would be slightly slower. The ships would still be travelling fast enough that if someone slipped while hopping from the hydrofoil's deck to the spray-slick surface of the dreadnought's accommodation ladder, impact with the water would be stunning if not fatal.

The creatures in the water would be certainly fatal.

But it really didn't matter.

Ensign Stocker called an order to his helmsman and throttled back. He looked worried. The unspoken basis of Commander Cooke's offer was that Stocker could match the gunboat's speed perfectly to that of the battleship, despite the turbulence of the huge ship's passage through the sea.

"No sir," Dan said, "I can't discuss this by radio. We
must
come aboard."

They were now so close to the
Semiramis
that the 6-inch guns couldn't depress enough in their mountings to bear on the hydrofoil. The turrets continued to track, however, as though hoping that the gunboat would somehow leap high enough in the air to be disintegrated by a salvo of hundred-pound shells.

Powder smoke still drifted from the eight eighteen-inch guns to surround the
Semiramis
like a sickly-sweet aura.

"I appreciate that, Pedr," Dan said. "And the sooner we come aboard, the sooner Ensign Stocker here can carry the rest of my team back to the
Clinton
for that medical treatment."

Stocker looked at Commander Cooke, then toward the shuddering, whimpering man in the electronics bay. His face was without expression.

The helmsman held D1528 thirty feet off the dreadnought's port quarter. Throttled back to the larger vessel's best speed, the hydrofoil felt sluggish. It had a tendency to follow the corrugations of the sea's surface rather than slicing at the even keel maintained by the telescoping outriggers.

The accommodation ladder hanging from the
Semiramis
' port quarter began to lower toward the water. A pair of sailors rode the stage down, ready to catch the transferring officers as they jumped across.

Dan stood up, swaying slightly with the hydrofoil's motion. "Right," he said. "Take over, Ensign Stocker. Do your usual excellent job and I won't forget you."

Stocker slid into his console and looked up at the superior officer. "Same for me, huh, sir? Cream their ass."

The ensign's words could have referred to the fleets allied against the Blackhorse, but Johnnie doubted it. He was Senator Gordon's son. He'd seen enough politics in his life to recognize them, even when they were being conducted in uniform.

Johnnie unplugged the data feed and rose as the thread-thin optical fiber coiled back onto its spool.

His uncle looked at him sharply. "Are you up to this, John?" he asked. "Because if you're not . . . ?"

"Sure, I'm fine," Johnnie said. He wasn't sure if that was true. He saw everything around him with unusual clarity, but he seemed to be hovering over his body.

It didn't matter.

He followed Dan to the starboard rail. He felt steady; which was a matter of vague intellectual interest to him, because he knew that the deck underfoot was vibrating badly. The drive motors were being run at well below their optimum rate.

Stocker and his helmsman brought the D1528 in smoothly. The accommodation ladder now hung about eight feet above the average level of the sea, but occasional swells surged dangerously near the platform's underside. At thirty knots, the stage would tear loose if it touched the water.

"Go," said Dan, and Johnnie stepped across the six-inch gap.

A dreadnought sailor was ready to grab him, but Johnnie waved the man away. The gunboat was so precisely controlled that there was less relative motion between the disparate vessels than there would have been in getting off a slidewalk.

Dan followed and continued striding toward the steps leading up to the deck. "Come on, lad," he snapped. "Time's a-wasting."

"They'll winch us up, sir!" called one of the sailors.

Dan gestured brusquely, dismissively, without turning around.

"What is it that we've got to tell Admiral, ah, sir?" Johnnie asked as he pounded up the perforated alloy treads behind his uncle.

The gunboat, freed of its shackling need to keep station, curved away from the accommodation ladder in a roar of thrusters coming up to speed.

"I want to make sure they don't throw the battle away," Dan said. "I told you that."

There were splotches of algae on the
Semiramis
' side, but not a solid coating as had been the case with the
Holy Trinity
. This was just the growth since the battleship slipped out of port the day before.

"
I
don't have anything to add," Johnnie said emotionlessly.

Dan had reached the battleship's deck. A section of rail pivoted to form a gate. He turned and looked back at his nephew.

"Oh, you have something to add, John," he said. His lips were firm as the jaws of a vise. "I didn't lie to the Senator about that."

He strode toward a hatch in the dreadnought's superstructure. X and Y Turrets' huge 18-inch guns had blackened the deck and lifted up a sheet of the plastic covering, then plastered it against the railing.

"But
what
?" Johnnie demanded.

A staircase—a ladderway—lay behind the hatch. "In good time, lad," said Dan's echo-thickened voice as his boots clanged upward. "If not tonight, then later. . . . But I think tonight."

As Johnnie closed the hatch behind him, he heard the squeal of the 6-inch turrets. The secondary batteries were returning to the ready position now that they had tracked D1528 out of sight.

The sea is Death's garden, and he sows
dead men in the loam. . . . 
 

—
Francis Marion Crawford

A helmeted gunner raised his head from one of the Quad-Gatling tubs on the shelter deck as Commander Cooke and his aide strode forward to the bridge.

Johnnie started. The equivalent installations on the
Holy Trinity
had been empty. He'd never been aboard a dreadnought with a full crew.

There were crewmen where Johnnie's subconscious expected only the heat-warped barrels he'd burned out as the raiders escaped from Paradise Harbor. He thought of corpses rising in their coffins.

Corpses didn't do that. But neither did the corpses in Johnnie's mind sleep.

The bridge hatch was open but guarded by a heavily-armed senior petty officer.

"Come along, sir!" the man urged. "We don't none of us want to be out here when the big bastards cut loose again, do we?"

There was the sound of distant gunfire and an occasional flicker of light on the horizon, but for the moment action was limited to the screening forces.

Action. Thick armor cracking, perforating. Hell erupting to spew out over the sea, winking from waves and the eyes within the waves.

The hatch ratcheted shut, closing them within the climate-controlled fastness of the bridge. Johnnie trembled because of what was in his heart, not the drop in air temperature.

The bridge of the
Semiramis
was very like Wenceslas Dome's governmental accounting office. The differences were that the warship's bridge crew was uniformed, and that its personnel seemed far more alert.

Of course, accountants would be on their toes if they knew that an 18-inch shell might land in their midst at any moment.

The center of the enclosed bridge was a huge plotting table. In the air above it hung a vertical holographic projection of the same data. The hologram was monochrome, but the air projection aligned itself to appear perpendicular to someone viewing it from any point on the bridge.

The console built into the plotting table was vacant. Uncle Dan slid into it and began keying up data.

"Ah, sir?" said a lieutenant Johnnie had never seen. "That's Captain Haynes' station. He's on his way up from the battle center now."

Dan snorted. "When he heard I was coming aboard, you mean? Don't worry, Bailey. When the captain arrives, I'll vacate."

He unbuckled his equipment belt and hung it, the holstered pistol on one side balanced by loaded magazines on the other, from the seat's armrest. Then he resumed his work.

Admiral Bergstrom was at a console with no visual display up but six separate data feeds plugged into his helmet. He turned, looking like a man whose brain was being devoured by wire-thin worms, and peered at Dan in the seat behind him.

"Commander?" Bergstrom said. "Commander. You had crucial information for us, you said?"

"Right," said Dan, one eye on his console display and the other on the plotting table itself. His fingers danced on the keys. "Have you released the subs yet, sir?"

Johnnie looked over his uncle's shoulder. Strung raggedly along the western edge, barely within the confines of the plotting table at its current scale, were two hollow yellow circles and a yellow X: the electronic remains of the Angel dreadnoughts, sinking and sunk respectively, which had pursued the
Holy Trinity.
 

One of the technicians had the last moments of the X marker up on his display. There were more important things for Blackhorse personnel to be considering at the moment, but Johnnie could understand the tech's fascination with the looped image.

Almost anything was more important than that particular ship now.

The vessel had been the
Azrael
, easily identified because it carried its main battery in three quadruple turrets forward. The unusual layout meant that the thick belt protecting the main magazines and shell rooms was relatively short, saving weight without giving up protection.

It also meant that most of the explosives aboard the battleship were concentrated in a small area.

The holographic image was a sixty-degree oblique, transmitted to the
Semiramis
by a glider which had risked the night winds to spot the fall of shot. The
Azrael
was making a course correction, perhaps to bring her heavy guns to bear on the unexpected threat from the main Blackhorse fleet. Her railgun installations blazed blue-white, and her curving wake shivered with phosphorescent life.

The glider's imaging system picked up the dull red streaks of shells plunging down—not by pairs and triplets as Johnnie remembered from the
Holy Trinity
, but thirty or forty at a time. The
Azrael
was the simultaneous target for half a dozen Blackhorse dreadnoughts; there was nothing the victim's railgun batteries could do to affect the result.

"Flotilla Blanche isn't in the killing zone, yet, Commander," Admiral Bergstrom said. "Ah—Commander, what is it that had to be explained face to face?"

Great mushrooms of water bloomed on all sides of the
Azrael
, distorting the wake and twisting the bow as they hollowed the surface into which the cutwater then slid.

A few of the shells which landed aboard the
Azrael
burst with bright orange flashes because their fuzes were over-sensitive. The dangerous hits merely sparked on the surface of the armor and detonated far within the dreadnought's guts.

The stricken vessel's bow lifted as though she were a flying fish making a desperate attempt to escape. The explosion that engulfed her forequarters was black, streaked with a red as deep as the devil's eye sockets. C Turret sprang fifty feet into the air, shedding hundred-ton fragments like so many bits of confetti.

"We don't
need
the submarines to finish Flotilla Blanche," Dan said as he shuffled quickly through data on his console. "Or the Warcocks, for that matter. We can do that with gunfire easily enough—if we slow down the Warcocks with our subs so that we catch them before the two fleets join."

He tapped the Execute key with a chopping stroke of his finger. The display quivered, then blanked. "With your permission, sir," Dan said, "I'll send the wolfpacks in now."

A thousand feet above the fiery cauldron, the column of smoke topped out in a ragged anvil. The stern half of the
Azrael
was sucked into the crater of white water. It bobbed as the sea closed over itself, then vanished with scarcely an additional ripple.

The recorded images ended with a blur of incandescent light.

The loop began again. Johnnie forced his eyes away with difficulty; the technician continued to watch the repeated horror.

There but for the grace of God. . . . 

"I
don't
think . . . ," Admiral Bergstrom began, but his glare turned to a grimace.

The ultra-low-frequency pod beneath the
Semiramis
' keel began to transmit orders to the Blackhorse submarine fleet at a frequency of between ten and a hundred hertz. Johnnie's bowels quivered.

Due to the sluggish transmission frequency, there was time to abort the command before it reached the submarines lurking on the bottom three miles down. Instead, Bergstrom said, "Oh . . . yes, I suppose you're right."

The submarines were beneath the thermocline, a differential of temperature and salinity in the deep sea which blocked both active and passive sonar. That helped conceal them from the Warcocks, but the subs' best protection was a matter of psychology rather than physics.

The Angel fleet had run the same course without interference. The Warcocks and Flotilla Blanche, now desperately trying to join forces in the northwest quadrant of the Ishtar Basin, assumed the only dangers they need fear were the Blackhorse surface ships which had reduced the Angels to blazing wreckage in a matter of minutes.

The petty officer, alerted by a message through his helmet, activated the control of the hatch he guarded.

"Right," said Dan. He started to get up.

Johnnie's face was still. His mind visualized a pair of raiders wearing Angel khaki as they burst through the hatchway with a cataclysm of rifle and sub-machine gun fire.

Consoles sparking around stray bullets; the chests of neat cream uniforms exploding in blood and smoldering cloth; fingers which were accustomed to stroke keys flailing wildly for pistols almost forgotten beneath polished holster-flaps.