At first.
Suddenly, for an instant, the entire center of the ship seemed to bulge as if her seams were straining against some horrendous inner pressure. In the blink of an eye, the seams burst open like an enormous grenade and the ship blew apart amid an expanding, scalding cloud of sooty steam.
“Cease firing, cease firing!” Matt yelled. “All ahead, flank! Have the boats swung out and rig netting along the sides! Stand by to rescue survivors!”
The Bosun started to dash for the stairs. “Uh, Skipper? Maybe we’d better have some of Chack’s Marines handy. If there are any survivors, they might try to pull some kind of fanatical Jap-like shit. Remember that one crazy Jap…”
“I remember, Boats. By all means, keep a squad of Marines at the ready.” He glassed the floating debris that had once been a ship. There did appear to be survivors. If so, they didn’t have much time to get to them. He looked beyond the wreckage. The bigger ship was still headed away and was piling on sail. With her damaged paddle wheel, she probably hoped to escape with the wind alone. He shook his head. Turning, he saw that the one ship that had apparently “surrendered” was still hove to, and was beginning to drift. Turning still farther, he saw that Jenks and the final enemy combatant would soon pass alongside each other, and they were already going at it hammer and tongs. Gun smoke drifted between them and he could feel the periodic pounding of their guns in his chest. “Signal Ensign Reynolds, if you can get his attention,” he said, referring to the pilot still circling the battle overhead. “Tell him to buzz the enemy ship engaging Achilles, but stay out of musket shot! Maybe he can distract them or something.”
“Holy cow!” Reynolds yelled when the ship about fifteen hundred feet below suddenly just… blew up. Kari shrieked when debris peppered the plane and a slender, three-foot splinter lodged in the port wing. “Holy cow!” Reynolds shouted again, and then struggled for control when the shock wave hit.
“I got hole between my feet!” Kari cried over the voice tube. “We leak when we land!”
“Yeah,” agreed Fred, “I bet that’s not the only one either. Who knows what it was. Maybe a nail.”
“Big damn nail!”
“Hey, look! Walker ’s coming up fast. Maybe she’s going to pick up survivors. She’s running up a new signal too. What’s it say?”
Kari strained to read the flags as they went up the several halyards on the destroyer’s foremast. “Ahh, they spell it. I not so good at spell yet. I know standard message flags good. Not so good with spell flags. They too many!”
Reynolds pushed forward on the stick and banked slightly left. “I’ll have a look. Just be sure they know we’re full of holes and our gas is half gone. When we set down, they’d better fish us out in a hurry!” He flew closer to the ship, squinting his eyes. “Okay.” He paused. “They’re not all letter flags,” he accused.
“What they say?”
“They say, ‘Buzz enemy still fighting. Distract from Jenks. Beware mu… muskets.’ Acknowledge that, will ya?”
“Okay.”
Reynolds stood on the rudder and banked right, then began a slow climb. Several minutes later, still gaining altitude, he passed over the ship that wasn’t doing anything and continued toward where Achilles and her enemy were now locked in a deadly, smoke-belching embrace. “Wouldja look at that!” he exclaimed. The ships had apparently damaged each other’s paddle wheels and all they seemed able to do was steam in ever-tightening circles around each other. Both looked shattered, and Achilles ’ foremast was down. The funnel on the enemy ship had been shot away and her deck was choked with smoke.
“Here we go!” Reynolds shouted, and pushed on the stick. The new planes had altimeters, but they weren’t very accurate or quick to adjust, so he ignored his now. The airspeed indicator worked just fine and his was starting to crowd the red-painted line. A few hundred feet above the enemy masts, he pulled back on the stick and the Nancy swooped up and away. Something smacked the plane and he heard a low, humming vooom! whip past him in the cockpit.
“Captain say you stay away from muskets!” Kari shouted.
Fred started to reply that he’d meant to; that he hadn’t really realized how low he’d been. Now he was mad. He spiraled upward, gaining altitude for another pass. Pushing the nose over, he lined up on where he thought he’d have a bow-to-stern approach by the time they got there. Fumbling at his holster with his left hand, he pulled out his Colt. “I’ll teach you to shoot at me, you screwy Brits!” he muttered. He laid the pistol on his lap, then took the stick in his left hand and the pistol in his right. He flipped the safety off.
“We go too low again!” Kari scolded.
Grimly, Fred pointed the pistol over the windscreen, in the general direction of the ship he was diving on. With nothing but ship in front of him, he started yanking the trigger. Drowned by the noise of the engine, all the pistol made was popping sounds, but he suspected the men below might hear it better. The ship was coming up fast and he knew he had to pull out. Easing back on the stick, he heard several more voooms! but nothing hit the plane-until he accidentally shot it in the nose himself as the target disappeared aft.
“Crap!”
He’d shot his own damn airplane! It wasn’t much of a hole, really, although he knew there’d be another one below, where the bullet came out. But with the obvious powder burn on the blue paint in front of the windscreen, there’d be no way he could blame the hole on enemy fire. He was lucky he hadn’t shot his own foot off!
“Crap, crap, crap!”
“What you say?” Kari cried from behind.
“I said ‘crap’! ”
“Get those men out of the water!” bellowed the Bosun. “I don’t care if they are sneakin’, bushwhackin’, traitorous sons o’ bitches! The more you let the fish get, the fewer we’ll have to hang!”
The Bosun’s words were meant more for the men they were pulling from the water than the men and ’Cats who were saving them. Oddly, the usual swarm of flasher fish hadn’t yet arrived to tear the survivors apart. He couldn’t account for that. Maybe the explosion of the ship had driven them away, or maybe there just weren’t as many of the damn things in really deep water like this. Regardless, he expected something with an appetite would be along eventually, and judging by the panic with which the Imperial Company survivors were trying to get aboard, they must think so too. They’d made them send the most badly wounded up first and fifteen or twenty horribly burned and scalded men had already been sent to Selass in the wardroom. She’d appeared briefly on deck and seemed fine other than a few glistening spots where she’d applied some polta paste to her “scratches,” as she’d called them. Now the less injured were coming aboard and a handful already squatted, hands behind their heads, clustered around the steam capstan. Some simply stared back at the, to them, ridiculously small but unfathomably destructive maw of the number one gun.
“Hurry it up, you pack o’ jackals!” the Bosun berated. He pointed at the continuing distant fight between Achilles and her foe. “We got friends over there dyin’ and more scum like you to kill! You got one minute before I yank these nets and we leave you here!” There were moans and cries from the water, but somehow the men, many still injured, managed to climb or splash along a little faster.