Thunder’s speed was falling away. Kondor was head-reaching on her and he saw she was starting to turn, slowly, to creep across ahead of Thunder and so out to sea. She was trying again to make it a big gun battle and Thunder did not have a big gun. She would haul out of range of the lone six-inch and then smash Thunder to pieces. Smith could not stop it.
“Steer four points to port!”
Thunder started to turn so that at least that one six-inch would bear.
Reports had built on themselves to tell him of a ship so battered that it seemed not an inch of her but had been torn by high-explosive, ripped by splinters or scourged by fire, a ship that still fought with a solitary gun, that still functioned only by the courage and the dogged discipline of the men who manned her. He did not need reports. He could see some of the havoc from the conning-tower, feel the sluggish response with the ship’s speed down below ten knots and falling still.
She was dying beneath his feet.
XVI
When the hit smashed the mast below Garrick it threw him up in the air to fall on his back in the fore-top, that was itself already falling. For a second it hung as stays parted, then it fell and Garrick fell with it. He clung on with arms wrapped around the mast as the fore-top smashed against the funnel and then on to the boat-deck. He was hurled loose to roll and almost plunge the ten feet to the upper deck but he grabbed half-dazed for handhold, found one and held and checked that rolling as he hung on the edge.
He was winded, bruised, disorientated. His left arm hurt and he could not move it. He collected his scattered thoughts slowly but with instinctive sense of priority realised his danger out there on the boat-deck where splinters whined with every hit that Thunder took. So he rolled over the edge, this time of his own volition and at his own speed, lowered to the length of his good arm and dropped to the deck. His legs gave under him and he collapsed in that illusion of shelter as Thunder was hit forward.
Flame reached back a long tongue to lick at the conningtower, blinding him. When he opened his eyes he was staring down at the deck below his face, clinging to it. His legs felt numb, useless. He rolled over and rubbed at them, flexed them, until he felt the numbness running away and instead the pain of a huge bruise across the backs of his knees. He tried to stand and succeeded at the third attempt. He had to reach the Captain. He took a step and Thunder was hit aft and he skidded once more across the deck. He climbed to his feet blaspheming, sobbing at the pain in his arm then stopped and stood with breath held. Then he turned and started to stumble aft, felt the shock and slam of a six-inch firing and thought that there was one gun still firing, and then somehow broke into a shambling trot.
The engine …
Albrecht’s little party consisted of Gabriel, the sick-berth Petty Officer, and Purkiss, with half-a-dozen cooks detailed as assistants and gruesomely, the butcher. Through the first few minutes of the action they waited scattered around the sick-bay. The ventilation was still working then and the air was tolerably clean but they sweated. The scuttles were closed so they could see nothing of the dark world outside. They rocked and braced themselves as Thunder heeled and rolled in those tight turns and shuddered as her guns fired and jerked at the nerves of all of them.
They waited, Albrecht with hands resting on the operating table, shirt sleeves rolled up above the elbows. His eyes checked once again the knives and saws, the gag and the drop-bottles of chloroform and ether.
Until Thunder shook to shock that was not recoil and a crash that was no discharge. She had been hit.
The horror began. The casualties came down; vicious splinter wounds, the flesh cloven to the bone; hideous burns. Albrecht saw the shock on the faces of his raw amateurs and even, carefully concealed but obvious in its stiff-faced absence, on Gabriel and Purkiss. This was new to all of them. Albrecht seized on his expression of professional detachment and stamped it on his face and on his mind. Feeling he would banish until later when it would hurt no one but himself. From now until it was over he would not feel. It was a determination hardly held.
The trickle of casualties became a stream, the wounds more terrible, the task impossible. The sick-bay filled as Albrecht operated with Gabriel’s assistance, Purkiss stitched and treated and the amateurs wound on dressings. As the ship rocked and lurched around them the light flickered and returned, went out and gave way to the emergency lighting. The ventilator sucked down smoke and fumes now, and vomit added to the stench. The stream of shattered men became a river, overflowing the cots and carpeting the deck with their bodies.
Then the firing ceased. Albrecht thought, ‘Maybe he’s surrendered. He must have surrendered.’ But he did not believe it. Or was Smith dead? Were all of them dead up there — it was incredible that they should survive — were all the survivors here, around him in this abattoir?
Looking up for an instant he saw Daddy Horsfall and a stoker black with coal dust stumble in, a body between them. They found a space and carefully, gently laid him down and Purkiss went to them.
Albrecht called, “Horsfall!”
He came over, looked once, quickly, at the thing on the table then up at Albrecht. Who asked, “Has the action ended?”
“Dunno, sir.”
“If it has I want to move out of this. Find out what you can: I want a place with light and air —” Thunder came out of a turn and the smoke and opened fire. The ship shook. Albrecht finished: “— as soon as it’s over.’’
“Aye, aye, sir.” Daddy went away, thinking: ‘You’ll be bloody lucky, old cock. D’yer suppose some referee’ll blow fer time? More like the first you’ll know’ll be the water round your balls.’
Albrecht worked on. The hit just forward sent him to the deck and Gabriel sprawling, clawing over the table to hold the latest victim from following the surgeon. The emergency lighting failed totally. Gabriel produced a torch then others flicked on and bobbed around them. The ship still shook but Albrecht knew his shaking came from inside now and clamped down on that weakness to keep his hands steady until the job was done. And the next one. And the next …
Until he stopped. Everything stopped. He stared across at Gabriel, similarly frozen, as the sick light of the torches made greasy yellow masks of their faces.
Gabriel said dully, “Stopped, sir.” And: “Engines have stopped, sir.”
Gibb had worked lost to the world outside the clanging, reeking turret. Fletcher, and the trainer and the layer through their telescopes, saw something: smoke, spray, a blurred and lurching, distant target that was lost, seen and lost again. Everyone else sweated in ignorance of how the battle went. Until they were hit.
Gibb returned to hazy half-consciousness to realise numbly that a great weight lay across his legs, pinning him to the deck. He had been hurled against the side of the turret and lay there. Now besides fumes, smoke rolled in the turret and flame danced. Hit in the instant of loading, the shell lay on the deck below the open breech and the charge was scattered around the turret and blazed in a dozen places. It blazed around Gibb. The crew, like the charge, were tossed about the turret. Through weeping eyes he saw that the weight on his legs was Farmer Bates.