Seas of Venus (26 page)

The stink of gunsmoke, and the greater stink of feces when fear and death voided men's bowels. 
 

Captain Haynes squeezed through the hatch before it was really open enough to pass a man of his solid bulk.

Haynes was panting. He must have walked—run—all the way from the deep-buried battle center rather than chance an elevator when any instant could bring a shell and a power failure.

His face was livid, but that was more from anger than from exercise. His left hand gripped so hard on a visicube of his wife that his knuckles were mottled.

"Commander Cooke," Haynes said in a voice like millstones, "you're at my station—"

Though by the time the words came out, Uncle Dan had moved to an ordinary console nearby. A quick gesture—a twist of his index finger as though it were a boning knife—sent the technician there scrambling out of his seat.

Johnnie followed as if he were his uncle's shadow. He was drifting through this ambiance like a thistle seed in a zephyr. He felt nothing, but his senses were sharper than he ever remembered them being.

Captain Haynes seated himself with the swaggering certainty of a dog staking out its territory. He set the visicube on the plotting table before him. "Sir," he said to Admiral Bergstrom "I felt the ULF communicator activate while I was on the way here. What—"

"Pedr thought," Dan broke in, "that unless we slow the Warcocks' withdrawal, they'll be able to join Flotilla Blanche before we bring them to battle. If they have to zigzag because of submarine attack—"

"Let them join!" Haynes snapped. "Then our subs take care of both of them!"

The Warcocks' ten battleships were in a straggling line-ahead on the plotting table. The new emergency had further disturbed a formation that had been rough to begin with.

The Warcocks left their base in a rush to block the
Holy Trinity
from the presumed destination of the Blackhorse fleet at the Kanjar Straits to the northwest. When the stolen dreadnought turned southwest, Admiral Helwig had thrown his Warcocks into the pursuit—as though the Angels' own three battleships would not be sufficient.

Now they were racing back to the northwest again, hoping to join Flotilla Blanche as it streamed from the position it had taken at the mouth of the straits.

The light forces of Flotilla Blanche speckled the upper edge of the plotting table. The Warcock screen of cruisers and destroyers formed a broad arc between their dreadnoughts and the oncoming Blackhorse fleet. They were well positioned to block torpedo attack by Blackhorse hydrofoils, but they could do nothing to stop the one- and two-ton shells from the dreadnoughts which would rumble overhead as soon as the range closed to thirty miles or so.

They weren't in a good position to defend against the submarine ambush the Warcocks had blundered into the center of, either.

"Subs can't
destroy
them," Dan said, speaking loudly enough to be heard by everyone on the bridge. "These are good outfits, both of them. We can just cause confusion, as we decided in the planning—"

"The Admiral and I—" Haynes shouted.

Admiral Bergstrom's face was suffused with the frustrated pain of a child listening to his parents quarrel. He must have been a decisive man at one time, but age and his rumored drug habit had rotted away the hard core of his personality.

"—changed that plan, Commander, while you were off having your fun playing soldiers!"

"Oh, God!" muttered a lieutenant commander, who then buried his face in his display. Everyone, even Captain Haynes, looked embarrassed.

Everyone but Dan and Johnnie. Their burned, bloodied, torn fatigues left them immune to embarrassment by any of the clean-uniformed personnel on
Semiramis
' bridge.

Besides, there was no room in Johnnie's eyes for embarrassment or any other emotion.

The starboard secondaries opened fire. The enclosed bridge damped the shock of the muzzle blasts, but the hull belled as the guns' thick steel breeches expanded from the pressures they contained.

"Torpedoboat attack in sector A-12," explained a lieutenant loudly.

Any of the bridge personnel could have learned that data from their own consoles, but the statement served its real purpose of breaking the vicious argument between two of the fleet's most senior officers. Admiral Bergstrom gave the lieutenant a look of gratitude. The emotional temperature of the big room dropped to normal human levels.

"All right," muttered Captain Haynes as he twisted his face toward the plotting table. "We've got a battle to fight, let's not forget."

Dan's fingers worked his keypad though he continued to watch the side of Haynes' determinedly-averted face for some moments longer. A distant—blurry despite being computer-enhanced—view of the Warcock line appeared on his console.

The display above the plotting table showed sudden chaos within the hostile battlefleet. None of the ship symbols indicated damage, but the dreadnoughts had started to curvet like theater-goers after someone noticed smoke.

"Revised estimate of time to engagement," said public-address speaker in the mechanical voice of the battle center computer. "Three minutes thirty seconds for leading El Paso elements; sixteen to seventeen minutes for all El Paso elements."

Captain Haynes opened his mouth and reached for the transmit key of his console.

"I'll take care of this, Captain," Admiral Bergstrom said coolly. He pressed his own transmitter and said, "Blackhorse Six to all El Paso elements. You may fire as you bear, gentlemen. Blackhorse Six out."

For this operation, "El Paso" was the code name for the dreadnoughts.

An ensign at the far end of the bridge shouted, "Yippee!"

Then suddenly the tune went false,
The dancers wearied of the waltz,
The shadows ceased to wheel and whirl. . . . 
 

—Oscar Wilde

On Uncle Dan's display, the second ship from the rear of the Warcock line suddenly wreathed itself in flame and powder smoke. She had opened fire with her main guns. A moment later, all the other battleships visible from the glider joined in.

The Warcocks certainly knew that they were still out of range.

They also knew that they were shit outa luck.

"Ah, sir . . . ?" said Captain Haynes as his left hand stroked the image of his wife. "Do you think it might be better to delay firing until we can overwhelm them with a full fleet salvo?"

"No," said Admiral Bergstrom without turning to face his executive officer. "I do not."

"We'll be eating them up piecemeal, Captain," Dan said. He glancing from his display and then back. "Their formation's strung out for nearly five miles."

Johnnie nodded, professionally impressed by the way his uncle managed to keep his tone along the thin neutral path between insulting and conciliatory.

"We'll have plenty of concentration on the rear of their line," Dan continued blandly as he examined the desperate Warcock dreadnoughts, "even if only the eighteens can fire for the first ten minutes."

Haynes' face was a thundercloud, ready to burst in a storm of invective unmerited by anything that had happened in the past few minutes. As his mouth opened to snarl, the portside Gatlings blazed in a sudden fury whose rate of fire made the enveloping armor sing.

Johnnie's training held, though his intellect was dissociated from control of his actions. He reached reflexively for the keypad of the console behind which he stood. The only reason his fingers did not shift the display to the gunnery board and echo the Gatlings' target information—

Was that Uncle Dan's fingers were already doing so.

The ship-shivering burst ended three seconds after it began. There was nothing on the targeting display except a froth where over a thousand 1-inch projectiles had ripped a piece of flotsam.

"Omigod, sorry, sorry," muttered the junior lieutenant whose console was the primary director for the Gatlings. "I thought, I mean. . . ."

He caught himself. His face hardened. "No target," he said crisply. "All clear. No target."

The
Semiramis
' main fire director rippled off a salvo from A and B Turrets, four 18-inch guns. The dreadnought shook herself like a dog coming in from the wet. The air of the bridge was suddenly hazy because finely-divided dust had vibrated out of every crack and fabric.

The thirty-inch armor covering the bridge flexed noticeably with the waves of compression and rarefaction. Johnnie could not imagine how the sailors manning the open gun tubs survived the muzzle blasts.

Dan switched back his display. The dreadnoughts had ceased cavorting in wild attempts to avoid torpedoes from Blackhorse submarines. The Warcock line reformed and resumed shaping to the northwest. Anti-submarine missiles from the dreadnoughts and their screen were forcing the subs to concentrate on evasion rather than attack—or to press on and die pointlessly.

Yellow symbols on the plotting table hologram indicated that two of the Warcock battleships had been hit, but they were still keeping station. Half a dozen red symbols marked the destruction of attacking submarines.

Johnnie's face did not change. Ships and shells and men; all were expendable.

The rearmost of the Warcock battleships had been the leaders in the pursuit. They were the fastest and generally the most modern members of the fleet, and two of them mounted 18-inch guns.

Semiramis
' six railgun batteries began to tear the universe apart, dwarfing the racket of the Gatlings a minute before. Railgun discharges brightened the images of the Warcock vessels as well, but a splotch of white water beside the last ship marked a shell that had gotten through the defensive barrage.

The rising banshee moan of a dropping shell became a background to the crackling of hypervelocity slugs. Johnnie's face did not change, but his body began to shudder uncontrollably. The youth's deep-buried lizard brain remembered that sound. Conscious courage—conscious fatalism—could do nothing to quell the tremors.

The shell burst with a dull
crump
, thousands of feet short of its intended target.

" . . . oboats in. . . ." the ceiling speaker said during the brief interval the railguns were silent.

If Johnnie cared to hear the details of the report, he could have flexed his helmet to the console, but the information didn't matter except to the men at the gunnery boards. The 6-inch batteries were firing, both port and starboard; a moment later, the Gatlings added their sharp-tongued chant.

Three shells burst directly above the second ship from the rear of the Warcock line, so close that the red-orange flashes and the blots of filthy smoke they left behind were visible in the image transmitted to Dan's console.

Most of the salvo screaming in a few seconds later struck on or around the dreadnought.

The forward superstructure, including the bridge, warped and shredded. There was a glowing pockmark where armor of particular thickness had been heated white-hot by a sixteen-inch shell.

A shell penetrated X Turret magazine. Instead of an explosion, a yellow flash hundreds of feet high blazed from every interstice of the turret and rear hull. As the initial glare sucked itself back within the blackened armor, the Y Turret magazine flashed over and burned with identical fury.

Johnnie keyed intercom mode on his helmet, the channel reserved for members of the raiding party. Him and his uncle; no one else within range . . . and scarcely anyone else alive.

"They're screwing up," he said flatly. "Their railguns are on automatic mode, but then they only react to direct threats. The poor bastards at the end of the line are on their own."

Like we were in the Holy Trinity. 

Dan made a quick series of keystrokes without bothering to check whether or not the input was necessary. "Blackhorse Three to El Paso elements," he said to his console. "Your railguns are now firing on Sector Defense Mode. You will not switch them to Local Defense without orders from the flagship or an acting flagship. Out."

He turned to look up at his nephew. The 18-inch guns boomed out another salvo just then, but Johnnie could see his lips forming, " . . . 
safe than sorry
."

The third and fourth ships from the rear of the Warcock formation winked amidst waterspouts. The second had fallen out of line, her whole stern a mass of flames ignited by the powder flash.

The final vessel seemed to bear a charmed life with no shells falling near it, but her course had begun to diverge from that of the remaining dreadnoughts. Carats on the plotting-table display indicated that several torpedoes had gotten home and had jammed the ship's rudder.

"Sir," said Uncle Dan, "with your permission, I'll signal General Chase." His voice echoed in Johnnie's helmet: he was using an open frequency that everyone on the bridge could overhear, rather than the command channel.

Because he was Commander Daniel Cooke, that wasn't an accident or oversight. He wanted the statement public, because he knew that every one of the pumped-up officers who heard it would regard arguments against General Chase as cowardice rather than caution.

The screens along the bulkheads, taking the place of the now-shuttered viewslits, showed a dozen pyres on the sea. The Warcock light forces were making desperate attempts to slow the hostile battle-line, but the Blackhorse screen and the dreadnoughts' massed secondaries immolated the attackers as victims.

The Blackhorse battleships formed an arc with the ends slightly advanced. The Warcocks were in line-ahead, roughly centered within the pursuing arc. There were between two and six railgun installations on each Blackhorse dreadnought, and every one of them could sweep the sky above all seventeen ships in the formation.

If the Blackhorse formation broke up and each dreadnought proceeded at her own best speed, the defenses became porous.

But it was the only way the Blackhorse could be certain of running down the ships at the head of the Warcock line.

"Sir, I—" Captain Haynes began. Though he spoke to Admiral Bergstrom, he looked across the short intervening distance to his rival.