The force of the explosion, even from half a mile away, stunned Hanaga. The men in the armored cupola staggered backward from the force of the blow. The forward hundred feet of the Asaga disappeared. The barrel of a five-inch gun, weighing several tons, came spinning out of the cloud of debris, slamming across the deck of the flagship, punching clean through the armor until it stuck out like a broken bone.
The aft end of the dying battle cruiser rose, then came crashing back down. Its forward momentum drove the ship forward ramming hundreds of tons of water through shattered decks and dragging the ship under. The stern lifted up, propellers still spinning, even as the boilers filled with water, exploding.
More detonations convulsed the ship as it corkscrewed. Aft turrets popped from their mounts. A hundred tons of iron and steel dropped, crashing into the water. The crews, if still alive inside, undoubtedly had been smashed to bloody pulps by the blow.
What was left of the ship went straight down. Air, raw steam, and flotsam jetted out of the broken armor plates and the open turret mounts. The stem disappeared beneath the boiling waves, and then, several seconds later, another explosion erupted, blasting part of the stem back out of the water as the aft magazines blew. The shock of the explosion raced through the water, sending a thunderbolt shock through the decks of the flagship.
The Asaga was gone. From the time of the ramming till all was destroyed had been less than thirty seconds…and a thousand of Hanaga’s finest sea warriors were lost.
The flagship had continued to turn, and the disaster was now astern. Five of Hanaga’s six turrets were engaged. The enemy van steamed in the same direction less than six thousand yards off while the insane swirl of the frigate battle raged between them. Both sides tried to block the other from closing while wanting, at the same time, to dash through and make their suicidal runs on the enemy battle cruisers. The light armored cruisers had joined the straggle as well. Both of the fleets having run to windward now turned in on each other.
He saw his first clear hit on an enemy battle cruiser, not the flagship, but still a deadly strike, lifting a forward turret clean off. Massive geysers rose hundreds of feet high, churning the turquoise water into a foaming maelstrom of dark sand, coral, and thousands of dead fish.
The two fleets raced on for several leagues, gradually angling in closer, leaving the frigate battle astern.
“Our flyers, my lord!”
Hanaga ran to the starboard side and peeked out through the open viewing slit. He had kept hidden a hundred aero-steamers, based on land and far heavier than the flimsy handful of planes launched from the rocking deck of a ship.
The airships swept in, hugging the water, several passing dangerously close to his own ship. When his forward turret fired, the shock of the passing shell tore a wing off of a plane. It flipped over, spiraling out of control and crashed into the sea.
The air fleet pressed forward, spreading out.
“Damn! They are not concentrating!” Hanaga cried, looking over at his signals officer. “Can’t you order them to concentrate on the flagship!”
“My lord, in all this confusion, they’ll never see the signal flags!”
“Try, damn it, try!”
Ignoring the danger, he stepped out of the aft hatch of the cupola and came around to the forward bridge. Part of the railing was gone, scorched black, and he noticed a greasy smear, what appeared to be the charred remnant of a leg that had slammed into the side of the cupola and lay broken and flattened on the deck.
— The aerosteamers continued forward and then, to his stunned disbelief, the first airship dropped its bomb a good mile short of the enemy fleet. It pulled up sharply and banked away. One after another the aerosteamers unloaded. Forming up after their leader, the airships started to climb, moving clear of the battle.
Only a handful of the airships pressed in, and all of them were torn apart by the firepower of the Red fleet’s steam machine guns.
Hanaga stood silent, glasses trained on the lead airship. He thought he could almost see the pilot, the master of his air fleet, and wondered if he was laughing.
“Your brother most likely got to him,” Hazin sighed. “I tried to warn you about that.”
“Masterful,” Hanaga whispered. “He must have reached him moons ago. A plan within a plan.”
“You would have done the same.”
Hanaga nodded, and then, letting his glasses drop, he slammed a fist against the side of the cupola. “But those were my airships!” he cried. “I’ll have the air master’s head on a spike for this!”
“If we survive,” Hazin whispered. “My lord, we are already outnumbered by the Red fleet alone. The air strike was your main hope. That is finished.”
Hanaga waved him to silence. If they had turned traitor, why not bomb his own ships? That was curious. Most likely the air master could not get the pilots to agree to a full betrayal and instead simply went for neutrality. Damn them all.
“Signals officer. Order all battle cruisers to turn straight into the enemy line!”
He looked back toward the armored cupola. The officer stood within, wide eyed. All had seen the betrayal of the air fleet and, with it, the dashing of their hopes for this day. With Asaga gone, the odds were now three to two against them, and on the distant horizon to the southeast the dark smudge of smoke, marking the advance of Sar’s fleet, was spreading out. Most likely the fleet was already in view from the upper gunnery control tower.
The officer still hesitated.
“Do it!” Hanaga roared.
The terrified face of the signals officer disappeared. Seconds later, a small top hatch on the cupola opened and the flags raced up on a halyard, catching the breeze, snapping out as they reached the base of the gunnery tower a hundred feet above the bridge.
A heavy shell came screaming in, the wind of it nearly knocking Hanaga over. It slammed into the water barely a hundred yards off the starboard rail. The shock of the explosion washed over him. He ignored it, his glasses trained on the enemy battle line.
The helm, responding to his command, sent the eighteen thousand tons of ship into a sharp, graceful turn, water slicing up from the bow, deck heeling over. As they straightened out, the forward turrets fired, the smoke temporarily blinding him.
Yellow gray clouds whipped past, and looking to port, he saw that all but one of his surviving battle cruisers had followed orders and were turning straight into the enemy fleet.
The maneuver had cut his effective strength nearly in half for now only the forward and middle turrets could bear on a target, while his enemy’s stem turrets could continue to fire. The maneuver had, at least for the moment, thrown their aim off, for the next salvo of shells arced high overhead, crashing down a half mile astern, and hitting where the fleet would have been if they had continued on their parallel course.
The battle of the light cruisers was almost directly ahead. The ships were slashing at one another at ranges of less than a thousand yards. A Red fleet cruiser disappeared in a monumental explosion. One of Hanaga’s frigates rammed another, blowing off the ship’s stem. The frigate actually survived the blow, backing off, its secondary bow intact.
A high shriek came roaring down from above.
Hanaga flung himself to the deck. The shell struck the flagship just aft of the bridge, detonating on top of the portside, a midships turret, blowing it apart. A shower of debris and choking black smoke blew forward. The only thing that saved his life was the heavy bulk of the cupola between him and the explosion.
He felt something hard slamming against the inside of the cupola.
He staggered to his feet and looked inside it. Wisps of Smoke coiled out of the view ports and then cleared. He felt a shiver of fear. A fragment from the explosion must have cut through the narrow access porthole aft-either that or up through the deck below. The red-hot metal then slashed around inside like a pebble tossed back and forth inside a shaken bottle. Everyone inside was smashed to a bloody pulp.