“We’ll get into that later. For now, Commander, I’ve held up the wheels of progress long enough. Let’s get underway.”
They dropped through the circular hatch in the cockpit overhead. The service trucks were pulling back from the hovercraft and Snowy Banks was in the right-hand pilot’s seat, working her way down an aircraft-style checklist. The entire cockpit area had an aircraft feel to it, like the flight deck of a big military transport plane. The pilot’s and copilot’s stations were located behind a broad V-shaped windscreen and a bank of multimode telepanels that displayed systems status and navigational data.
A complex lever-studded control pedestal separated the pilot’s seats. Amanda noted a conventional rudder-control dial centered on it, and she suspected that this might be the steering for the swimmer system, operating separately from the two half-wheel control yokes of the air rudders. However, a heavy T-grip joystick was located just below the dial controller, and she had no idea what purpose it served.
A second pair of jump seats were squeezed in behind the pilot’s chairs, as well as a gunner’s saddle for the hatch weapons mount. This latter was swung back against the overhead and latched marginally out of the way.
Lane slid into the left-hand pilot’s seat while Amanda took the jump seat immediately behind him. Wedged in at her side was a small chart table and another set of flatscreen monitors. A button- and trigger-studded joystick suggested that this station might also be used as an auxiliary weapons control point. Amanda elected not to do any experimental button-pushing until she was a little more sure of her ground.
Chief Tehoa slammed the overhead hatch shut and locked the dogging lever. Moving with an amazing ease in the cramped confines of the cockpit, he moved aft to the ladder way and dropped down into the main hull.
“Set to crank?” Lane asked, jacking his command headset into the intercom hardlink.
“Prestart checklist complete and all boards are green. All stations report ready to get under way,” Banks replied crisply. Reaching down, she hit a key on the control pedestal and a row of four red lights snapped yellow. “Auto-start sequence set. All engines ready to crank.”
The hover commander nodded and thumbed the inter-phone button on the end of his control yoke. “All stations, stand by to move out. Snowy, light ’em up.”
Another key was touched. Glowing lines crawled up the scales of tape displays as a low rising whine grew from some where aft. One after another, the row of yellow lights flicked green, the gas turbines coming on stream in a shrill tremolo quartet.
“Cranking… cranking… cranking… cranking… we have power!”
Pilot and copilot lifted right and left hands respectively from the controls, their palms smacking together in a high five. There was an instinctive flow to the gesture, as if it were some personal shared tag-end to the checklist.
“Put her on the pad.”
The young female j.g. interlaced her fingers through the fan control levers and rolled them forward. A deeper contralto howl merged into the chorus as the lift fans spun up. Lane dropped his hand to the T-grip controller.
Once, on leave in the Canary Islands, Amanda had taken a camel ride. The rolling heave she had felt when the dromedary had gotten to its feet was similar to the sensation of the hovercraft lifting up onto its inflating skirts. Abruptly they were six feet farther off the ground and there was a slippery uncertainty to the way they were holding position.
Lane was rocking the T-grip joystick forward, and a series of explosive roaring bursts sounded from astern. “This is the puff-port controller,” he said, raising his voice over the back ground noise. “The puff ports are a series of vents located around the top of the plenum chamber. When you trip one, it releases a jet of high-pressure air that acts like a steering thruster on a spacecraft. We use ’em for low-speed maneuvering. Right now, we’re riding friction-free. If I wasn’t holding us in place with the ports, we’d slide right off the beach.”
He twisted the controller to the left. With an almost super natural smoothness, the Queen of the West rotated in her own length until she was aimed out across the estuary. Wisps of sand whirled beyond the windshield as Lane deftly canceled out the start of her forward slide with the bow ports.
“I’ve been working on this project for almost two years now, ma’am,” the hover commander said, grinning, “and, begging your pardon, but I still think this is just about the neatest damn shit in the world.”
Peering forward around the pilot’s seat, Amanda found herself agreeing. “You may have something there, Commander. Let’s see what else she’s got.”
“Will comply, ma’am.”
Steamer Lane shifted his hand from the T-grip to the rudder yoke. Snowy in turn came forward on the pitch controls and propulsion throttles.
A third voice segued into the Queen’s bellowing song of power, the full-throated baritone roar of the twin drive propellers. The big machine surged forward down the beach, punching through the surf line in an explosion of sand and spray.
Trailing a scant white-water wake behind her, the Queen of the West arced across the mud-stained outflow of the Tabounsou estuary, aiming for the azure coastal waters beyond. The scattering of fishermen and coastal mariners in their pirogues looked up at the hovercraft’s thunderous passage, lifting their hands in respectful acknowledgment. Steamer Lane replied with a double bark of the seafighter’s air horns and held his course for the southeast, paralleling the verdant coastline.
Peering forward out of the windscreen, Amanda continued to acquaint herself with the decidedly odd sea feel of the air cushion gunboat. She’d sailed fast small craft before, even competing aboard Cigarette-class open ocean racing boats on more than one occasion. None of her past experiences quite matched this, however.
Despite the flickering rapidity of the wave patterns sweeping under the hovercraft’s bow, the seafighter flowed effortlessly across the ocean’s surface. Riding over the swells instead of driving through them, there was none of the jolt and spank of a displacement hull running at speed.
“What’s our ETA at Floater 1, Lieutenant?” she inquired.
“It’s a three-hundred-mile run,” Lane replied. “We’ll be there in about five hours.”
“Five hours?” Amanda pulled herself out of the jump seat and came to kneel between the two pilot’s stations. “How fast are we going?”
“’Bout fifty knots.”
Amanda felt her eyebrows lift. “Fifty knots? I had my old destroyer up close to fifty knots once, evading a wake-chaser torpedo, and she almost shook apart on me!”
Her “old destroyer.” That was the first time she’d ever referred to the Cunningham in those terms.
Steamer Lane and Snowy Banks exchanged proud parent grins.
“This is just good cruise for us, ma’am,” Snowy said. “We can do this all day.”
Lane glanced at his copilot again, and Amanda sensed one of those nonverbal discussions taking place. Banks gave a minute shrug of her shoulders, a devilish glint showing momentarily in her brown eyes.
“In fact, Commander, we can do lots better,” the Queen’s commander said casually, reaching the drive throttles. “Strap in, ma’am, and we’ll give you a demonstration.”
Amanda did so, with alacrity. As a survivor of plebe hazing at Annapolis, plus being a holder of both a Shellback and a Bluenose certificate, she understood the mechanism of initiation into a small, tight-knit, and proud community. One could either respond with a stiff-necked resistance, weakening that bond of community, or one could submit and strengthen it. Drawing the seat belt tight, Amanda braced herself and got a firm grip on her stomach.