“Prepare to fix bayonets!” he cried. The troops shifted slightly, anticipating, and the drumroll became a staccato rumble.
“Fix!”
As his Marines had trained, and the Imperials had been instructed, three hundred bayonets were jerked from their scabbards with a bloodthirsty roar and brandished menacingly at the enemy.
“Bayonets!”
With a metallic clatter, the weapons were attached to muzzles.
“Front rank, present!”
The Lemurians’ muskets were already loaded, and they would be too busy to shoot in a moment at any rate.
“Aim!”
Hammers clicked back and polished barrels steadied at the surprised foe.
“Fire!”
Even before the smoke cleared, exposing the carnage of that first volley, Chack was already shouting: “Front rank, guard against muskets! Shields at an angle! Get them up! Lean them back! Second rank, present!”
“The Nancy in trouble!” shouted Minnie, the talker, relaying the message from the crow’s nest. Frankie had been staring at the Dominion battle line through his binoculars, amazed at the size of some of the ships. They weren’t nearly as big as a Lemurian Home, but they were easily half again bigger than the largest Grik ship they’d seen-and they appeared to carry a lot of metal. He redirected his binoculars skyward. The little blue plane was coming right at them, purple-white smoke trailing its engine. “They no call ‘May-Day,’ ” the talker finished.
So, Frankie thought, either The Transmitter’s out or Kari’s been hit. Reynolds seemed to be having increased difficulty keeping the plane in the air. “Range to target?” he called.
“Seven zero, double zero, closing at thirty knots” came the reply, relayed from Campeti above on the fire control platform. Walker was making twenty knots, so the enemy must be making ten. Damn. Big and fast. Of course, they had the wind off their port quarter, and that was probably their very best point.
“Very well. Slow to one-third. Stand by to recover aircraft and hoist the ‘return to ship’ flag!”
Even as Walker slowed and the whaleboat was readied to launch, the plane began belching black smoke, and with the reduced roar from the blower, they could hear the death rattle of its engine. Fred seemed intent on a spot just ahead, off what would soon be Walker ’s starboard beam.
“Ahead slow! Stand by to come to course three double oh. We’ll try to put her in our lee. Launch the whaleboat as soon as practical and have the gun’s crews stand by for ‘surface action, port.’ ”
The Nancy wheezed and clattered past the pilothouse, gouging roughly into the sea with a wrenching splash. Even before the propeller stuttered to a stop, Fred Reynolds dove out of his cockpit into the water.
“All stop!” Frankie cried, a chill going down his spine. There were no flashies in these seas, but there were smaller fish that acted like them. There were also a hell of a lot of sharks. Big ones, little ones, a few truly humongous ones… and there was a type of gri-kakka-as well as other things. “Get that whaleboat in the water!” Frankie yelled, even as the boat slid down the falls and smacked into the sea. Fred had swum around to the observer’s seat and was trying to claw his way up the oilstreaked fuselage. Kari wasn’t moving. Somehow, Fred managed to climb high enough to get the Lemurian by the long hair on her head and drag her from the plane just as the overheated engine burst into flames. Almost immediately, the fuel tank directly above it ignited with a searing whoosh and a mushroom of orange flame and black smoke. The right wing folded and the fuselage rolled on its side, and in what seemed a matter of seconds, the entire plane was consumed by fire, its charred skeleton drawn beneath the waves by the weight of the engine.
There in the water, Fred Reynolds was stroking mightily toward the oncoming boat, one arm clawing at the water, the other trying to hold Kari’s head above it. “C’mon!” urged someone on the bridge. A dull moan reached their ears and a huge splash erupted a few dozen yards off the port bow. Another splash arose a quarter of a mile short.
“Bow guns-‘chasers,’ from the Doms,” announced Minnie. “Big ones, say the lookout. The first one prob’ly lucky close.”
“Range?”
“Four t’ousand.”
Frankie glanced back at the sea to port and saw with relief that the whaleboat had reached the aviators. “The main battery will commence firing,” he said grimly. “And pass the word: ‘lucky close’ ain’t an option today. We have to keep the range on those bastids an’ tear ’em up from a distance.” He gestured back toward Scapa Flow. “Our job is to hold ’em back until the cavalry gets here. Like Reynolds, we’ll concentrate on the transports if we can, and stay away from the heavies. As many guns as those things have, they don’t have to be good to shred us, just ‘lucky close,’ see?”
The new salvo bell clattered on the bulkhead behind him.
Matt and the others were running, breathing hard. They’d managed to stay together, however, and even Bradford was keeping up. The streets were eerily quiet and vacant. Matt wondered if the inhabitants were sitting things out, or if they’d already responded to the Governor-Emperor’s call to arms. For some reason, he didn’t think that was the case in this district. He worried about snipers. They turned onto the street dominated by the embassy of the Holy Dominion and were met by a scattered volley that felled one of their Marines and shattered masonry at the corner behind them. Gray emptied a twenty-round stick into the group, sending all but one of the six men sprawling. The other man stood there, stunned, until Matt shot him with his Springfield as they trotted past. Stites had the BAR again, but he was low on magazines for it too. They reached the iron-bound door, and Matt immediately inverted his rifle and drove the butt hard against it. The door didn’t budge.
“God damn it!” he raged.
“Stay cool, Skipper,” Gray said. “I got a treatment for this.” He reached in a satchel and pulled out a grenade, a “real” one, made in the USA.
“I didn’t know you had those,” Matt said accusingly. “We could have used them!”
“I was savin’ ’em for if things got serious,” Gray explained innocently. “Bash in the peephole!”
Matt redirected the butt of his rifle and Gray pulled the pin on the grenade and dropped it inside the door. There was a muffled ba-rump inside, followed by screams.
“What good did that do?” Stites demanded. “We still can’t get in!”
“After the day I’ve had, it was pretty fun,” Gray said. “Otherwise
…” He fished in his pocket. “… Spanky gave me this really swell rubber band! Just look at this thing!” he said, displaying the gift. “Don’t know where he got it, but it’s a peach. I was gonna make me a slingshot for… Anyway, everybody get back!”
He took another grenade, and looping the rubber band around it, hung the little bomb from the top left hinge on the big door. Making sure everyone was clear, he yanked the pin and ran. The spoon flew and the grenade bounced up and down a couple of times.
Blam!
Grenades make poor breaching charges, but the high-explosive inside made short work of the brittle iron hinge. The door trembled, then fell diagonally outward onto the street.
“C’mon!” Matt yelled.
In the grand scheme of such things, compared to other fights Chack had participated in, the Battle of the Imperial Dueling Grounds was a relatively small affair. It was big by Imperial standards, at least as far as land battles were concerned, but it wasn’t even close to something like Aryaal, Singapore, and certainly not Baalkpan in terms of scope. The Dominion had landed and secreted away perhaps a thousand troops in warehouses and an abandoned barracks outside of Leith, and the conspirators had considered that number more than sufficient to overwhelm New Scotland’s small, dispersed, Marine garrison from behind Scapa Flow’s defenses, especially when coupled with the overwhelming surprise that Reed and Don Hernan had achieved. It didn’t work that way.