He stared at the Lightbringer. And stared and stared.
The features behind the mask remained hidden. Unknowable.
But the voice…
Oh gods. Oh Osiris of Djed-pillar. Oh Isis of the Blood Knot.
That voice.
Huskily, querulously, not even in a whisper, more an exhalation, David spoke the name.
''Steven?''
12. Aegean
Let me tell you this, Dave. All the advance planning in the world, all the preparation, all the well-formulated tactics, it doesn't amount to a bucket of shit once the fighting starts. That's true of any battle and it's truer than true of naval battles. The moment you and the enemy engage, everything goes to pieces. All you can do is hang in there, keep hammering away at the other guy, and hope there are more of your ships left afloat at the end than there are of his. That's while contending with sea conditions, tides, weather, all of that as well. It's a wonder the admirals even bother with strategy meetings. They might as well sit in a circle wanking each other off for all the difference it makes. They probably do that anyway.
So there we were, three days out of Marseilles, steaming up through the Dodecanese to take on the Nephs, who were harrying merchant shipping all along the east coast of Greece from Thessaloniki to Athens. It was a classic piece of sabre-rattling from them. Things had been pretty quiet on the Mediterranean front for a couple of years and someone high up at Neph Fleet HQ must've got bored and fancied some action. You can bet the Setics were egging them on from the sidelines, too. Moscow in particular had been itching to reopen hostilities in the Med arena. All those battleships docked at Odessa and Sevastopol — couldn't have them sitting there gathering barnacles, now could we? Besides, there's nothing worse than sailors in port with nothing to do. They drink the bars dry, wear out the whores, and start fights. So it was in the Setics' interest if the Nephs stirred it up with us. Then they could come whizzing to the rescue from the Black Sea, bingo, everyone happy.
On the day of the battle itself, I was on Forenoon Watch and eight bells were about to toll. Which means, landlubber, my shift was nearly over and it was coming up to midday. It had been a beautiful morning. I remember telling myself to try and take it all in, how the sky looked, how the sea looked, the smell of the air, because I knew we were likely to encounter the Nephs that day and I mightn't have the chance to enjoy another morning ever again. The sky was sapphire. The sea was purple, choppy, frenetic. We were sailing with a strong southerly bumping us along from behind, so I was inhaling plenty of fumes from the funnel but I didn't mind. Barely noticed. Everywhere on a warship smells of diesel. Your clothes stink of it, your hair. It's a sailor's perfume.
Lovely morning, like I say, and it felt good to be part of a fleet heading towards a battle zone. From my starboard watch post I could see at least half a dozen other ships — a couple of frigates, a destroyer, our fellow dreadnought the Indomitable, and the corvettes that were escorting her and us. Our corvette was the Serapis, and personally I blame her imbecile of a captain for what happened to the Immortal. I mean, his one and only job was to stop a submarine getting a shot off at us, and did he do that? Did he arse!
But until he let us down so grievously, it was comforting to see his ship and the others, all forging along on the same heading at a rate of knots. It really gave me a feeling of invincibility. His Pharaonic Majesty's Mediterranean Fleet in full force, backed up by some French and German cruisers, with a Spaniard or two somewhere in the mix, all of us with our battle ensigns flying. The Hegemony out for blood, happy to take the bait the Nephs had dangled before us, eager to in fact, with Britain of course leading the way as usual, belligerent and bloodthirsty bunch that we are. I thought nothing could beat us. I'd accepted the fact that this could be my last day on earth but I didn't really anticipate that being the case.
Just as the watch was over, a Saqqara Bird came scooting in from the north. The ship's priest had been sitting cross-legged for an hour at the bows, little spot he had there that he liked to occupy while in trance. He stood up, straightening out his cloak and adjusting his gold silk headcloth, and held up his hands to catch the bird. It glided to him and he cradled it in his arms and stroked it like a pet, like it was a real feathered creature and not just a ba-animated piece of carved willow. Priests, I ask you! It's not a profession for a sane person, is it? Some of them are born communing with the gods, in which case they don't start out normal, and the rest learn how to commune with the gods at seminary, in which case they inevitably end up a bit bonkers. Either way, they're doomed to a life of mental wonkiness. Hearing voices, seeing visions — it soon loosens your grip on reality.
Anyway, I could tell that our guy's bird had shown him where the Nephs were while it was out on its scouting mission, because he wasn't looking any too happy. And judging by the way he scurried aft to the bridge to report to the captain, they weren't too far off.
A few minutes after that the battle stations klaxon sounded and everything went crazy. A whole lot of ship-to-ship heliographing went on — no radio communication so that the Nephs couldn't intercept the transmissions — and the fleet closed together in battle formation, becoming this moving wall of armour and firepower, ironclad, unstoppable. Or seemingly unstoppable.
Then they appeared on the horizon, the Nephthysian fleet, coming towards us, another moving wall of armour and firepower. Their smoke hung above them, a long, dark grey stain in the sky. It was the smoke I could see, more than the ships themselves, which were little more than dots. But I could still tell that there were as many of them as there were of us. There seemed to be more, in fact.
By this point I was belowdecks, overseeing the manning of the for'ard guns. But there's a viewplate in the turret just next to the barrels, to help with range-finding and observation, so I could watch from there as we bore down on the Nephs and vice versa. They were well within range of our sixteen-inchers, and us of theirs, when the firing started. Ten thousand yards or less between the two fleets when the ba shells started flying.
The madness of battle…
Well, you must know about it as well as I do, Dave, now that you're a soldier boy. Honestly, who'd have thought it? The Westwynter heirs, both of them joining military service. Never in a million years would anyone have predicted that about us. Least of all you, bro, turning your back on the cushy lifestyle, giving Dad the two fingers and buggering off to the army. Zafirah tells me I'm to blame for that, indirectly. You'll have to tell me more about it later. You want to know what happened to me, so I'll carry on. Here's the rest of the story.
Guns fucking blazing. The turret rocking with each shell that we fired. A boom that was deafening despite ear defenders. A noise so loud it left you feeling dizzy each time. And no other thought, no other purpose in mind, but to lob as many of those shells as you could, as quickly as you could, and pound the bastards over there to bits. Radar and the gunnery obs post telling us what to do, where to aim. Shooting at a foe we could barely see. Men loading charge and projectile, yelling at each other. Gunners calling out their firing solutions. A chaotic machine.
I'd been in skirmishes before aboard Immortal, random encounters with stray Neph craft where the odd shot was exchanged, usually a low-level tit-for-tat zapping with ba bolts, never anything like this, with the big guns in play. The incoming fire was terrific. The sea around us kept exploding in huge white geysers of water, lit from within by ba. I saw, with my own eyes, one of the frigates go up, less than five hundred yards from us. It was there one moment. The next, it was this fragmented thing, barely a ship, more a rough outline of one, aflame, listing over, rolling like a wounded whale.