Distant Thunders d-4

by Taylor Anderson

  “Most impressive, my dear,” Jenks replied, somewhat awkwardly. He glanced at his escort. “Gentlemen. Most impressive indeed. You have accomplished all this in the three months since your battle?”

  “No, sir,” said Letts. “The basics were here when we first arrived. We added a lot while we were preparing for the enemy, and not much was damaged in the fighting. Evidently, they wanted these facilities preserved. Baalkpan would’ve made them a good base from which to go after our other friends-as well as your people, eventually.”

  “Indeed,” came Jenks’s noncommittal reply.

  Letts looked at Captain Reddy and saw the nod. This was his show now. “If you would all follow me, I’ll point out some of the more interesting things we’ve been working on.”

  They trudged past furnace rooms from which an endless relay of naked, panting ’Cats pushed wheelbarrows loaded with copper round shot. These they brought to waiting carts, where others stood with heavy leather gloves to transfer the still-hot spheres. There were hisses of steam and scorched wood when the shot dropped on the cart’s wet timbers. Most of the party smiled and returned the waves of the workers. Jenks said nothing, but clearly took note.

  Moving along, they reached one of the several foundries that now dotted the basin. Great bronze gun tubes, each with carts of their own, waited in patient rows for their journey to the boring and reaming loft. These new guns had rough, sand-cast bores and would still be smoothbores after reaming, but even as their interior diameters had increased, the quality and sophistication of their shape had improved and the weight of metal they required was much reduced. Most of the original guns that had defended Baalkpan had already been recast, and generally, they could get five or six guns from four of the earlier, much cruder weapons. The next foundry they passed was pouring molten iron under an open-sided shed and gouts of sparks and fiery meteors arced out and sizzled on a damp beam decking roped off for safety.

  Jenks saw all this and was much impressed. Matt and Sandra talked excitedly of what they’d accomplished and Letts seemed almost jubilant. Even Keje had lost some of his earlier overt unfriendliness. As often as he must have seen it now, he still seemed to have an air of wonder. A long, high shed stood nearer the water, covering an assortment of bizarre shapes in various stages of evident completion. Before they headed in that direction, the group was distracted by a series of shouts followed by what sounded like a rough volley of musket fire. The noise quickly settled into a sustained roar.

  Brevet Major Benjamin Mallory twisted his arm to stretch the aching muscles. His T-shirt and Lemurian-made dungarees were sweat blotched and stained, and a dark rag dangled and swayed from his belt as he grabbed the wrench and strained against the final bolt.

  “There,” he said to no one in particular, “my built-in torque wrench says that’s about right.” He stepped back from the odd-looking machine and dragged the filthy rag across his forehead before he plopped the hat back on his head. It was the only item remaining to him that had once been Army brown. The OD pistol belt and leather holster were his, but they were essentially the same as everyone else’s. The machine was an engine-he hoped. It was a vague copy of an upright, four-cylinder Wright Gypsy that would serve as a prototype power plant for the airframe design they’d-tentatively-settled on. It was inherently more difficult to balance a four-cylinder engine than one with six cylinders, but they were trying to keep things as simple as possible for now. The cylinders themselves were air-cooled legacies of the crashed PBY, and they’d dredged up as much of the old plane as they could hook from its scattered resting place on the bottom of Baalkpan Bay. They’d recovered only one of the engines, but fortunately, it wasn’t the one they’d already removed a couple of damaged cylinders from. It had been damaged beyond repair by a couple of holes through the crankcase and a warped crankshaft sustained when the spinning prop hit the water, but twelve cylinders, fifteen pushrods, eleven piston rods, eighteen valves, and nine pistons were still up to spec. They’d serve his purpose of testing the rest of the new engine they’d built from scratch.

  Seaman (maybe Ensign now, if his transfer came through) Fred Reynolds stood nearby poring over a black-bound book with red writing on it. It was a copy of Brimm and Boggess’s Aircraft Engine Maintenance they’d found in the tool kit of the PBY’s doubtless long-dead flight mechanic. It was exactly like a similar copy Ben had done his best to memorize in pilot training. He liked to think he had memorized enough to build something like the simple engine before him on the stand, but when they inevitably went on to build bigger and better things, the wealth of formulas, diagrams, and general tidbits of information including things as mundane as hand file designs would prove invaluable. Even when one considered the relatively large, eclectic library of Walker ’s dead surgeon, “Doc” Stevens, and the many technical manuals they’d off-loaded from the two destroyers before their final sortie, it was, in many ways, the single most precious book they possessed. Some of Adar’s Sky Priest acolytes had already made a handwritten copy, and others were being copied from it.

  The book was already invaluable to poor Reynolds, who stared at the pages like they were written in ancient Greek. Ben stifled a chuckle. Apparently, Reynolds had finally decided what to strike for; he wanted to fly. He’d said he wanted excitement, but he was a little guy, and that would have made Ordnance hell-or so he believed. Ben suspected that in reality, the kid was scared to death of Dennis Silva-completely understandable-and since Silva was the most… visible representative of that division and had as yet untested limitations on his authority… the fledgling Air Corps, or Naval Air Arm, or whatever it would be called, probably seemed like a comparatively safer billet. Ben chuckled aloud at that, unheard over the machine noises emanating from the rest of the shop.

  He glanced at the only other human in sight: Commander Perry Brister. Formerly Mahan ’s engineering officer and now general engineering minister of the entire Alliance, the dark-haired young man was making a final inspection of the fuel line leading to the simple, crude carburetor. Ben knew Perry had other things to do that day, but he’d always liked fooling with small engines, he’d said, and he wanted to be there when they cranked it up.

  “Looks good here,” Perry rasped. His once soft voice had never recovered from all the yelling he did during the great battle. Ben looked at the two Lemurians poised near the propeller. One, a sable-furred ’Cat with a polished 7.7-millimeter cartridge case stuck through a hole in his ear, grinned.

  “You boys ready?” Ben asked.

  “You bet,” answered the ’Cat Ben called Tikker. Mallory shook his head and grinned. It was Captain Tikker now. Stepping to a small console, he flipped a switch.

  “Contact!” he shouted.

  “Contact!” chorused the ’Cats, and, heaving the propeller blade up as high as they could reach, they brought it down with all their might. For a moment, the motor coughed, sputtered, and gasped while the ’Cats jumped back. With a jerk, the wooden propeller came to a stop.

  “Switch off!” announced Mallory, and the two ’Cats approached the propeller again. They hadn’t thoroughly tested the remote throttle adjustment, and Brister stepped forward and squirted a little fuel in the carburetor. Nodding, he joined Ben.

  “Contact!”

  This time, the propeller spun with an erratic, explosive, phut, phut, phut! sound, backfired, burped, then became a popping, vibrating blur. Brister hurried forward, careful of the spinning blades, and tinkered with the throttle linkage. Slowly, the vibration diminished and the smooth roar overwhelmed their cheers.

  “This way!” Letts shouted over the din, and they hurried toward the noise. Another shed, smaller than the first and enclosed on all sides, was nearby. Letts moved a curtain aside and the racket flooded out. In he went, and Jenks was swept along with the rest. Oil lamps dimly lit the interior of the shed, but there were small, brightly glowing objects placed near large, complicated-looking machines. Lemurians and a few men toiled at those machines with singular concentration i
n spite of the noise emanating from another brightly lit area toward the back of the shed. As he passed them, Jenks saw the machines were turning and spinning, throwing coiled pieces of metal aside. They were also noisy-or would have been-without the cacophonous roar. Most were fairly straightforward. He’d seen their like in Imperial factories: lathes, mills, etc. Great leather belts whirled around pulleys attached to the high ceiling and transferred their rotation to the machines. A very few of the machines had no belts whatsoever, but seemed to run off insulated copper cables terminated at the same source as the brilliant white lights. The mystery fascinated him as much as the roar that grew even louder as they approached.

  A haze of smoky fumes was gathering in the light, swirling in a strange, artificial wind. In it stood three men and a couple of Lemurians staring intently at a relatively small machine vibrating on a stand. A big paddle of some kind whirled to a blur at one end of it.

  “Mr. Mallory!” Matt shouted at one of the men who stood, hands on hips. He turned.

  “Captain Reddy!” There was a huge smile on the man’s bearded face. “Good afternoon, sir.” He motioned at the machine and eyed a set of gauges on his console. “Temps are a little variable on the cylinders, but that’s to be expected with an air-cooled in-line. The production models’ll be liquid-cooled and heavier, but the horsepower ought to be similar. The main thing is that it looks like we’ve solved the crankcase and oil pump issues-at least for straight and level.” For the first time Mallory noticed Jenks and his smile faded a little.

  “It’s okay,” Matt shouted. “It’s time.”

  Mallory shrugged as if to say, You’re the skipper, and motioned to one of the ’Cats stationed near another panel. “Bring her up, Tikker!”

  The sable-furred ’Cat with a shiny brass tube in his ear nodded and advanced a small lever. Immediately, the noise increased and the paddlelike object whirred even faster, redoubling the gale of wind and noxious fumes. Jenks began to feel a little ill. Sandra coughed violently and patted Captain Reddy on the arm. Matt looked at her and nodded, noting Jenks’s expression as well. He patted Mallory, and when he got his attention, he made a “cut it” gesture.

  Tikker noticed and backed the throttle down until the engine finally wheezed and died. The sudden, relative silence was overwhelming.

  “Mr. Mallory, you’re going to choke all your workers,” Matt said with a grin. Ben looked around. If anything but excitement made him feel light-headed, it didn’t show.

  “Well, yes, sir,” he said, beaming, “but it works! The damn thing works! Uh, begging your pardon.” He glanced at Jenks and his euphoria slipped a notch. “Yeah, it stinks, I guess, but we’ve been trying to keep things under wraps.”

  “I know. That’s over now.” Matt clapped Ben on his good shoulder and nodded congratulations to the others. “Besides, it looks like we’ll be ready for flight testing soon and there’s no way to keep that a secret. I think it’s time Commodore Jenks, at least, sees what we’re up to.”

  Jenks finally surrendered to a coughing fit of his own, but when he composed himself, he pointed at the engine. “What is that thing?” he asked. “Some sort of weapon?”

  “Not by itself,” hedged one of the other workers who’d joined the group. He was a former Mahan machinist’s mate named “Miami” Tindal.

  Tikker stepped closer. “We put it on a plane, and it’ll be a weapon,” he said excitedly. A lot of Lemurians acted uncomfortable around the Imperials and were hesitant to speak to them. Tikker never seemed uncomfortable talking to anyone.

  “What’s a ‘plane’?” Jenks asked.

  Matt looked at Ben. “If you and… Captain Tikker would accompany us?” He paused, his amused, understanding eyes on Perry. “You as well, Commander Brister.”

  Workers raised awnings to vent the exhaust while together, the growing entourage returned to the larger, open shed. There they showed Jenks an array of ungainly contraptions. Some were mere skeletons, made from laminated bamboo strips, cannibalized even before they were complete. A couple had a kind of taut fabric stretched across their bones to which some kind of sealant or glue had been applied. One, the nearest to the shop, rested on a cart or truck much like the earlier gun tubes. This one not only appeared almost finished, but was painted a medium dark blue. There were darker blue roundels-significant devices of some kind, Jenks was sure-in several places, with large white stars and small red dots painted within them.

  “So this is it?” Matt asked appreciatively. It didn’t look much like the NC craft he remembered seeing pictures of. If anything, it looked like a miniature PBY. The fuselage/hull form was virtually identical, except there was a single open-air cockpit behind a slip of salvaged Plexiglas where the flight deck would have been. Another open cockpit was positioned halfway to the tail, where the PBY had possessed a pair of observation blisters. The large single wing was supported by an arrangement of struts instead of being attached to the fuselage by a faired compartment. It was easy to see the motor would go in the empty space between the wing and fuselage-with the prop spinning mere feet behind the pilot’s head.

  “What about wing floats?” Matt asked. By the tone of his voice, he was reviving an old argument.

  “They’ll be cranked down mechanically by the observer/mechanic in the aft cockpit.” Ben looked a little sheepish. “I know you wanted to keep it simple, Skipper, but this is a lot simpler than putting fixed floats on a lower wing. Not to mention we don’t have to make those lower wings.” He gestured at one of the incomplete skeletons. “This way she’ll be lighter, faster, more maneuverable, and honestly, we should be able to put her down on rougher seas. With that bottom wing so close to the water, I was really worried about that.”

  “That’s fine, Ben. I told you, when it comes to flying you’re the boss, and your arguments do have merit. I just want to make sure the things aren’t overly complicated. Like the ships, I want a lot of good ones, not a few of the best.”

  “I agree, sir. But with this design, I think we get a little of both.”

  Jenks interrupted. “Flying… you mean to say that thing will. .. fly?”

  “Hopefully.” Matt nodded toward a large heap of twisted wreckage piled in the space between the two buildings. It was all that remained of the crashed PBY. “That one did.”

  “Not very well,” Jenks observed skeptically, “if its present condition is any indication. And that one is metal. Why not these new ones?”

  “You’d be amazed how well it flew,” Matt answered wistfully, “and for how long. But our enemy managed to knock it down. Do you think you could shoot down a flying target?”

  Jenks didn’t answer.

  “Anyway, the metal it was made of is called aluminum. It came from our old world, and I don’t know when or if we’ll ever be able to make it here. We’re having enough trouble with iron. When we get that sorted out, we’ll try steel-besides what we’re salvaging from the enemy ship. I’m afraid the lizards are probably ahead of us there… . Anyway, once we get real steel, and plenty of it, you’ll be amazed at what we can do.”

  Sandra pulled him down to whisper in his ear and Matt’s face became grim, but he nodded. He straightened and looked Jenks in the eye.

  “Now we’re going to show you something else,” he said. “So far, you probably haven’t seen anything that would assure you we aren’t a threat to your empire.”

  “Quite the contrary, Captain,” Jenks answered honestly. “I could even argue that what I have seen here today proves you are a threat that should be quashed before you reach your stride, as it were.” There was no hostility in Jenks’s tone, only a dispassionate statement of fact.

  “Very well. I’ll prove it to you. I’ll show you something that, up until now, we’ve been willing to kill your spies, if necessary, to keep them from seeing. I guess you could call it an industrial achievement of sorts”-he waved around-“but not like these others. Mainly, it’s an admission of vulnerability, I guess, more than anything.” His green eyes turned cold.
“Something I damn sure wouldn’t show you if I was trying to intimidate you with our power. That alone should convince you we mean you no harm.”

  “Does this have to do with your mysterious iron-hulled steamer you’ve been hiding from us since we arrived?” Jenks asked quietly.

  “Follow me,” was all Matt said.

  The group gathered on the dock overlooking the old shipyard basin. Oily brown water coiled with tendrils of iridescent purple and blue lapped gently against the old fitting-out pier. It was quiet where they stood, although considerable activity bustled nearby. Four of the great Homes had been flooded down across the mouth of the inlet in two ranks. Work was under way to seal the gaps between them, fore and aft, so there would ultimately be a pair of continuous walls from land to land.

  A single “wall” was the customary dry-dock technique Lemurians had always used to build their great ships in the first place. Inspired by that, and realizing the need for a permanent dry dock, Spanky and Perry had designed one. It was a hard sell at first, since the effort required Walker to remain on the bottom even longer. Also, even though he helped design the dry dock, Brister had made a reluctant but strong argument against taking labor and resources away from construction of the new Allied fleet. It was actually easier, he’d reasoned, to build entirely new ships than it would be to fix Walker. He’d been in favor of using the Lemurian method to refloat the ship-and then only so they could stabilize her and prevent further deterioration. Perhaps someday they could attempt repairs. In the meantime, they should concentrate all their efforts on the new construction. As for the dry dock, it would certainly be a useful convenience, but one they could postpone.