"Well… I know about the Fleet, yes, sir."
"You do!" Vickery regarded him a moment longer, then heaved himself up and began pacing about the cabin. "You do! I've no doubt that you're an intell — well, a conscientious officer, Major Quidley, but still you're Army, and not even Royal Army at that. Do you really understand what a fleet movement like that might mean?"
"Sir—"
"Look." Vickery stopped beside a world globe and beckoned him close. "This is the Empire and its allies." He traced a wash of red, from Europe, through Africa, to the Confederacy.
"Yes, sir."
"And this — " His finger moved along a wash of blue. The Union, Western Canada, Alaska, Northern China, Imperial Russia. "And now Japan as well, since the Yankees seem to be absorbing that island nation."
Quidley felt fear in his stomach. If he had miscalculated at this level —
"We live upon a delicately balanced planet," said Vickery. "At times I wonder if it was inevitable; that no matter what happened in history, it was a natural consequence of progress that two superpowers should emerge at the end of the industrial era. Well, they have — the Northern Bloc and the Empire Alliance. Of which the Confederacy is an indispensable part."
"Yes, Sir Leigh."
"Now," the admiral went on, spinning the globe lazily, "do you know why there has not been a war between the two sides?"
"Because together we've been too strong for them."
"Only partially correct. It's because we've had that strength ready, on station, in a palpable and visible form." Vickery rapped the bulkhead; steel rang. "Because of the Allied Fleet. They know any armed adventure will end in their defeat. They support terrorism, unrest, revolution — because that's all they can do. But now, Major, you propose single-handedly to remove this deterrent from the consideration of Philadelphia."
"Sir, it's a false message—"
"And what if you're right and the traitor's among you? What if your plan succeeds and this message reaches the North? Telling them the door's wide open for them to attack. A false message is fine, but — I find it difficult to believe General Norris approved this."
"Yes, sir, he did." Quidley wiped his hands on his trousers; under the tight gray tunic he was sweating. "He read it and approved."
"He must be insane. This could bring about war on its own. Did you ever consider that detail?"
Quidley stammered.
"And with this new shell of theirs, a war now could mean — my God, man, you're threatening the security of the entire civilized world." Vickery held the message for a moment more and then tore it up twice. He dropped it into a slot in the bulkhead. A shredder whined briefly.
"There, that's done." The admiral shrugged and managed a smile. "Don't look so glum. No harm done, after all. But you'll have to find the source some other way."
He nodded, relieved. "Then we'll stick to the original order."
"No, the change in timing's a good idea. Let me note that down. Tell you what, I'll go over your Change One with my staff and get it back to Norris with our recommendations."
"Yes, sir."
"Another tot?"
"Thanks, I'd better not."
"Going to catch the afternoon zep back? I'll try to have my comments ready by then. You met my adjutant? I'll have him give you the shilling tour, take lunch in the wardroom. Oh, and there's a shoot in the afternoon, as well. You were coastal artillery, weren't you? You'll want to see that. Could you stop back about 1600?"
"Very kind of you, Admiral." Quidley rose, hearing dismissal in Sir Leigh's voice, and shook hands. The adjutant was waiting outside the door.
For the next few hours he followed the boy (whose name turned out to be, almost unbelievably, Cecil Hopton-Feeblebunnies) through the warship. It was a floating city, an endlessly complex engine of industrial war, the culmination of human ingenuity and coordination. The size and wonder of the steel monster in whose guts he moved like a worm, a microorganism, began to numb his senses. Ten times larger than the primitive dreadnoughts Jellicoe and von Scheer had maneuvered in 1916, in the closing days of the World War, each modern line-of-battle ship took seven years to build and strained the resources of its sponsor government. Launched, with crews trained to rigid Atlantic Alliance standards, each ship took its place in the Line, steaming endlessly up and down the North American coast from the Antilles to Nova Scotia. For forty years now the Line had been there, the guarantor of peace, of the policy (first formulated by Winston Churchill in 1955) of "containment" of the expansionist Yankees and their no less aggressive Russian allies.
Only now… that ring of guns and steel might be broken.
Hopton-Feeblebunnies broke into his musing with an invitation to lunch. Quidley nodded abstractedly. The meal was very British — plain food and plenty of it — and there was a good port afterward. There was time for a nap on one of the wardroom couches.
He found himself being shaken awake by Vickery himself, carrying a set of binoculars. "Ready, Major? Spot of shooting. Come on up."
On the open wing of the flag bridge he slipped a pair of the glasses about his neck, and glanced apprehensively down over the edge of the breast-high splinter shield. Far below was the flat steel surface of a forward turret, fully as big, it seemed, as a polo field. From one side of it, extending out over the deep blue foam-streaked sea, were six vast tubes, so huge that he was hard put to recognize these tapering bulbous-snouted pillars as cannon. They moved slowly, elevating and dropping as Redoubtable rolled ponderously. He turned, to find Vickery behind him. "Impressive, eh?"
"They certainly are. These are the—"
"Thirty-inchers. Cecil here will now give the figures." He smiled at his adjutant, who began spouting numbers. Armor-piercing shells weighed fifteen thousand pounds, exited the barrel at five thousand feet per second, carried out to sixty thousand yards free ballistic and one hundred sixty thousand with rocket assist. The armor-piercing round could penetrate sixteen feet of waffle armor, while the heaviest Yankee ship, the USS Pacific Canada, carried but fifteen; the high-explosive round had a destructive radius of two hundred yards. He was deep into the complexity of the automatic loading mechanisms when Vickery, smiling, waved him into silence. He looked over the rail and signaled to someone below, then turned to Quidley. "Believe they're ready to let fly. Might want to hold your ears."
He had his hands halfway up when the world erupted around him. The shock smashed at his face, sucked the air from his lungs, and sent him spinning against the rail. A brown cloud of burned powder, mixed with scraps of dirty papery material, blotted out sun and sea. His feet smarted from the jolt of the deck. Vickery, he saw, had retreated inside the enclosed portion of the bridge; but intoxicated with the guns, Quidley resolved to stay outside. Hopton-Feeblebunnies flashed him a boyish smile. Quidley looked over the edge of the shield just in time to catch the second salvo. When, dazzled, blinded, and slightly punchy, he raised his binoculars, the cluster of tiny specks was still visible high above the sea. As he watched, they winked out; then, dragging seconds later, six thin lines of white appeared, miles off and low on the jagged horizon.
"The rockets," the boy shouted. He nodded. Coastal batteries had them too; each shell carried an engine that added speed at the top of its flight, where the air was thin. Some English scientific type — Clarke? — had suggested that a large enough engine in a lightweight shell could escape gravity completely and circle the earth forever. Crazy idea, he thought, watching the white lines curve downward and out of sight. What would be the use of firing a shell that never came down?
Two salvoes later, he retired to the shelter of the flag bridge. "Damned impressive, Admiral. I'd hate to be a Yankee captain facing the Line!"