Distant Thunders

by Taylor Anderson

  Caught off guard, Laney was stumped. Usually, his gruff comments went unanswered. He felt it was his duty to make them periodically to keep the workers on their toes. His face turned red and he stood up—making his ass hurt even more. “You mean you don’t know what you’re doing?” he demanded hotly, questing with his eyes for some fault.

  “I know what I doing,” came a shockingly abrasive retort. “Do you?”

  “Why you . . . ! Just look! Look at all that shit coiled around your feet! It looks like a goddamn tumbleweed! What if that chuck snatches it up? It’ll yank you in by the tail and all there’ll be is a cloud of fuzz! Who the hell taught you to be a machinist’s mate?!”

  “Dennis Si-vaa! He teach me good! He make weapons to kill Grik, not stand around all day making big pole less big!”

  Laney’s eyes bulged. “Silva?! Why, that big malingering ape couldn’t machine a proper turd with his ass!” Inwardly, Laney blanched at his own comment. Lately, he literally couldn’t do that himself. He forged ahead. “I want you to slip the belt on that machine this goddamn minute, find your chief, and tell him you want to learn how to be a real machinist!”

  Dean was so intent on his harangue that he didn’t hear the sudden snap-hack! or the shrill, warning cries of alarm. He kind of heard the dull, buzzing whoosh! of the broken belt that slapped him on the back of the head.

  He was still mad when he woke up in an aid station sometime later, but couldn’t remember why. He felt like he’d jumped off a roof head-first, though.

  “Whadami doin’ here?” he mumbled. When no answer was immediately forthcoming, he closed his eyes and raised his voice. “Hey, goddamn it! Why am I here?”

  “Shut up!” came a harsh, heavenly, female voice. “You want to wake everybody up? Besides, you might burst a vessel!”

  Laney opened his eyes and saw Nurse Ensign Kathy McCoy hovering over him.

  “It’s an angel!” he said wonderingly.

  “Nope.” Kathy laughed. “Just me.”

  “You’re an angel, all right,” muttered Laney, “and there’s damn few of you. Scarcer than the kind with wings, I bet. You danced with me a couple o’ times at the Busted Screw.”

  Kathy grimaced. “Yeah. I try to dance with all the fellas. I’d never forget you, though.” Laney’s eyes went wide and he beamed. “You stomped all over my feet,” Kathy explained. “I haven’t walked right since.”

  Destroyed, Laney uttered a groan.

  “Head hurt?”

  “Yeah. Who hit me? One of those chickenshit monkeys I have to put up with?”

  Kathy frowned. “Not who, what. One of those leather belts that runs your machines broke. Conked you pretty good. Didn’t break the skin, but you’ll have a goose egg the size of a baseball. You guys ought to be wearing helmets in there.”

  “Mmm. Ought to be doing lots of stuff. We do what we can.”

  “Yeah. Hey, you hurt anywhere else? You’ve been squirming around like a worm on a hook, even in your sleep. By the way, now that you’re awake, you need to stay that way for a while in case of concussion.”

  Laney nodded—painfully—but hesitated.

  “What? You are hurting somewhere else. Where?” Kathy demanded.

  “I’d, uh, rather not say. I’m fine.”

  Kathy nodded. She easily recognized the code words for “I’m not telling a broad about my private agonies.” “Okay, without telling me what hurts, tell me what it feels like.”

  “Like I’m shitting busted glass!” Laney blurted, then caught himself. “Hey! You tricked me!”

  “It’s my job,” Kathy said. “And it was easy. I won’t even ask to do an exam, and I don’t really want to. But judging by your physique, your complaint, and your job, I bet you spend a lot of time sitting, right?” Reluctantly, and somewhat indignantly, Laney nodded. “Just as I thought. Hemorrhoids. Piles. You know.”

  Laney shook his head. “Piles! That can’t be it. Sometimes I think I’m gonna die! You can’t die from piles . . . can you?”

  Kathy almost laughed, but shook her head. “No, and I’ll give you something that ought to help, at least a little . . . on one condition.”

  Laney’s eyes narrowed. “Doctors ain’t supposed to put conditions on helping folks, are they?”

  Kathy shrugged. “Maybe I’m a doctor here, but I’m just a nurse back home. I can do what I want.”

  “What’s the scam?”

  “Tell you what. I get a lot of guys—’Cats—in here who work for you. Just like you, they get hurt now and then. Anyway, they’re doing important work and they’re proud of that. Some would rather be doing something else, and I understand, but your division, or whatever it is, is just as critical as any other—maybe more so—and they know it. They don’t mind the work or the hours or even getting hurt, but nearly everyone I see—though anxious to get back to work—is not anxious to get back to work for you. You’re a jerk, Dean. Right now you’re a hurt jerk, so I’m trying to be nice. What it boils down to, the ‘scam,’ I guess, is this: promise to try to quit being such a pain in the ass, or I’ll let your ‘pain in the ass’ keep reminding you how you make everybody around you feel. Deal?”

  Chief Electrician’s Mate “Ronson” Rodriguez heard the exchange between Ensign McCoy and Laney through the thin reed screen that separated them. He’d come in to get his hand fixed after he’d cut it on some of the sharp Lemurian copper wire. Now stitched, disinfected, and bandaged up, he’d been taking his ease for a few moments away from the “powerhouse,” the factory he’d been put in charge of where they built, refurbished, and experimented on the various electrical contrivances Riggs was in charge of. The problem was, that stupid ox Laney was always cruising through his shop looking for deserters. Rodriguez knew Laney resented him as a jumped-up electricians’ mate third class, and thought he could toss him around with his size and personality. He was wrong.

  Ronson might have let him get away with it once, but a lot of things had changed besides relative ratings. Rodriguez had been wounded in action far more often than Laney, and besides Laney’s genuinely impressive underwater adventures, Rodriguez had seen a lot bigger “elephants” than the chief machinist’s mate. His most recent escapade was the one that finally earned him a nickname. His first name was Rolando, and his shipmates had tried to tag him with “Rolo,” “Rodent,” and even “Rhonda,” but none ever stuck. When Walker took that Jap shell in her auxiliary fuel tank in the forward fireroom, somehow Rolando’s sweatband and longish hair had caught fire. Silva put him out, but the mental image of him running around on the amidships gun platform like a lit match had left him with “Ronson” Rodriguez, and this time it took.

  Since then, he kept his head shaved to his slightly scarred scalp and the only hair he cultivated was a Pancho Villa mustache. The men were allowed trimmed beards and razors were scarce, but the chiefs were allowed a little more leeway by everybody, captain to Lemurian cadet, because in most cases, they’d earned their stripes the hard way. All of Walker’s and Mahan’s chiefs who hadn’t gone to other ships had filled dead men’s shoes except Campeti—and the Bosun, of course—but Rodriguez didn’t think Laney filled Harvey Donaghey’s very well. If Laney felt the same way about him, he could eat turds and chew slow.

  The arguments they had over Laney’s “defectors” always escalated to bellows of rage and interfered with work in the powerhouse. Laney did know better than to take a swing, and the contention between them always had to be taken to Riggs or Spanky—more lost work in both departments. Riggs and Spanky tried to be fair, but if Laney really needed the deserter in question, the poor bastard got sent back. Rodriguez suspected the two officers were getting as tired of the situation as Rodriguez was, and Laney was probably out on a cracking plank. He wondered whether Kathy McCoy’s comments would do any good.

  Well, with that bump on his head, Laney would probably leave him alone for the rest of the day, anyway. Time to quit malingering. He stood up from the chair he’d been sitting on, cradling his wounded han
d. The throbbing had nearly passed. Neat stuff, that pasty goo, he reflected. Not waiting to be released by the nurse, he ducked out of the aid station and headed back for the powerhouse.

  He trudged through the muck of the recent rain and avoided the heavy carts pulled by bawling brontosarries until he saw the smoke rising from “his” boiler. Several ’Cats tended the beast, and it shimmered with heat and suppressed energy. The engine it powered was one of the first they’d built, and it wheezed and blew steam from its eroded and imperfectly packed pistons. He hated the engine and wanted another one, but he had to respect it as well. It had been a prototype, crudely built and not expected to last, but here it was, still chugging away after, well, thousands of hours. The generator it turned was also one of their first and he was proud of it. He’d designed it himself, and it was doing fine. Laney’s shop had actually made the transmission gears that boosted the RPMs of the slow-turning engine to spin the generator fast enough to provide the calculated voltage, but Laney probably didn’t do it himself.

  “Silly, useless bastard,” he muttered, and opened the fabric flap that covered the entrance to his domain.

  “How you hand?” asked one of his new strikers solicitously. Rodriguez didn’t remember the ’Cat’s name. It was unpronounceable and he hadn’t earned a nickname yet, but he’d been one of the deserters he’d succeeded in keeping. The kid was working on one of their simplest products: thermocouples for the vast variety of temperature gauges everybody was screaming for. Essentially all he had to do was join a piece of copper to a piece of iron. When heat was applied to the joint, current was produced. The higher the heat, the more current. The reason he got to keep this ’Cat was that when he was trying to explain intangible, invisible free electrons, the little guy actually seemed to understand. He had high hopes for him.

  Lemurians in general were almost naturally mechanically inclined and great with practical geometry. They were accomplished jokesters and pranksters and could conceptualize common hypothetical outcomes. They loved gizmos, and if they could see something, they could understand it without much trouble. They were very literal-minded, though. When it came to things they couldn’t see—like electricity—or even hypothetical outcomes they had no experience with, they had more trouble. He’d been forced to set up a few grade-school demonstrations to let them see electricity before he could convince them it was real. He also let them feel a little now and then, but had to caution them very carefully about feeling too much of it! He still wasn’t sure how much most of his ’Cat electrician’s mates and strikers really grasped, but they knew they had to make gizmos to create and harness the semimythical electricity, and they were good about scrupulously following safety regulations. The fact that he’d threatened to give them to Laney if they goofed around with the juice probably helped in that regard.

  He waved his bandaged hand at the ’Cat with the unpronounceable name and moved along. He wanted to check on the progress of the portable DC generators they’d been working on when he hurt himself. He was surprised to find Steve Riggs waiting for him at the benches they’d set aside to assemble the things.

  “Mr. Riggs! Good to see you, sir.”

  Steve laughed. “You mean it’s good to see me without Laney for a change. Otherwise, you’re probably wondering what I’m doing here, getting in the way.”

  “Well, yes, sir.”

  “How’s the hand?”

  Rodriguez raised his hand and flexed the fingers in the bandage. “Fine.”

  “Good. Look, I really don’t mean to pester you, but these transmitters we’re putting together are pretty simple affairs. They don’t have tubes and their voltage requirements are somewhat critical. I just wanted to see for myself how you’re coming along.”

  “Fair enough.” Rodriguez motioned him to a bench where several ’Cats were cleaning up a stack of short, pipe-shaped objects. “Those are the frames. They came out of Laney’s shop and they’re rough as hell. I have to have the guys file the burrs—with shitty files out of Laney’s shop. . . .”

  “I get the picture. Laney’s a piece of work. Skip it.”

  “Aye-aye, sir. Anyway, those are the frames. These guys over here are wrapping the field coils.” He stopped, self-consciously. “That’s how I cut myself. It’s great the ’Cats can make wire; I just wish it was a little more, you know, round.”

  “We’ll get to that someday,” Riggs said patiently. “For now, just be thankful. We’re starting to get a lot of wire out of Amagi, but we need it for other stuff.”

  “Yes, sir. Anyway, there’s the pole shoes. We screw ’em to the frame on the inside and it holds the coils in place.”

  Riggs gestured at a bin with a number of internal assemblies. “Those armatures look like they came out of the Delco factory.”

  “Thank you, sir. They’re a bitch. First we have to turn the shafts on the one little lathe we have. . . .”

  “It is one of the ship’s lathes.”

  “Yes, sir, thank you, sir. It would be nice if we could get the guys in the ordnance shop to make those, though. Them and the core. We can’t make those like they do at Delco. We have to mill the slots on the rotary table. It’s still not a huge job, but we’re going to need more capacity. We have to make the big generators one at a time, mostly using crap from Laney, and we can’t work on those at all while we’re doing this.”

  “The guys at ordnance have their hands full. I’ll see if I can get you one of the new, bigger lathes, and maybe a bigger mill. You’ll have to make motors for them, though. This isn’t a belt-drive shop, and it isn’t going to be.”

  “I understand. Motors we can do.”

  “So, what are you insulating the coils with?”

  “Fiber. Just like the real thing, only we mulch up some of Mr. Letts’s gasket material and mix it with some other stuff. Mikey’s in charge of that.”

  “How does it hold up? What about heat?”

  “So far, so good. We haven’t had the glue-up issues Ben has, for example, and it does insulate well. It’s kind of like putty. We cram some in on top of the coils in the core slot too. Anyway, the coils are soldered to the commutator bar.”

  Riggs inspected one of the brush end frames that a ’Cat was finishing up. “You wave-wound the core, but you’re only using two brushes?”

  “Yes, sir. We’ve still got a hell of a spring shortage. We’re actually using the same gear springs Ordnance is making for their musket locks! Wave-wound generators will work with two brushes or four. We might want to put four in later.”

  Riggs pulled the short whiskers on his chin. “Musket springs!” He snorted. “How do the brushes hold up?”

  “The springs are fairly stout and they don’t have much range of motion. The brushes’ll have to be replaced every hundred hours or so, I’m afraid. Since we have to use brass bushings, they’ll have to be kept lubed and replaced pretty often too.”

  Riggs nodded. “Okay, I want a dozen extra brushes, two extra musket springs, and half a dozen bushing sets for each completed generator. What are you doing to regulate the voltage?”

  “Well, sir, since you want these things to be wind powered, we’ve calculated a low cut-in speed and a high charging rate at those lower speeds. If a serious blow hits, it’ll need to be disconnected. If they spin up too fast, centrifugal force will throw the windings out of their slots and thrash the whole thing. To cap the voltage, well, we’ve got to use a voltage regulator.” Rodriguez pointed at yet another group of ’Cats working at a separate bench. “They’re making vibrating regulators. I don’t think they have a clue what they’re doing, but I calculated all the values and gave them the plans. They could all be watchmakers after the war. They won’t screw ’em up. Of course, I’ve got my ammeter to double-check each one. Managed to save that.”

  Riggs smiled. “Very good. Very, very good. If you weren’t already in charge, I’d put you there.”

  “Uh, thanks.”

  “Now, one more thing; just a little matter, really. How do you
plan to refurbish the generators, motors, and other essential equipment on Walker after we raise the ship?”

  “And this, dear boy, if I’m not much mistaken, is the spleen!” Courtney Bradford leaned back and fanned himself with his sombrerolike hat, as much to clear the vapors of the quickly putrefying creature as to cool himself. It was hot, even in the shade of the trees surrounding the parade ground where the lesson was under way. Abel Cook, his most avid student, leaned forward to view the structure. Abel was thirteen, and he’d long since grown out of the clothes he’d been wearing during his evacuation from Surabaya aboard S-19. Most of the other boys who’d been similarly saved had applied to become midshipmen in the American Navy. Abel had too, but of all of them, he was the only one who’d shown an interest in the natural sciences. Bradford couldn’t—and wouldn’t—try to prevent the boy from serving, but he saw in the blond-haired, fair-skinned, somewhat gangly teen a much younger version of himself. “We need more of me around here,” Courtney had argued with Captain Reddy, and to his surprise, Matt had agreed. Abel was still a midshipman, and naval dungarees had replaced his battered clothes, but Courtney would have him as an apprentice. For a while, at least.

  “I believe you’re right,” the boy replied, his voice cracking slightly. “And that must be the gallbladder,” he said, pointing. “It is quite large!”

  “The better to digest the dreadful things they eat, I shouldn’t wonder!” Bradford beamed.

  Other students attended the dissection as well, ’Cat corpsmen trainees, and they shuffled forward to look. The cadaver was that of a local variety of skuggik, a much smaller but clearly related species to the Grik. Skuggiks were vicious little scavengers, mostly, and their arms had evolved away, so their external physiology bore marked differences to that of their enemy. Internally however, they were virtually identical smaller versions. Courtney had attempted to save actual Grik for the demonstrations, but there was no means of cooling them. His modest hoard of postbattle corpses had been revealed by their stench and he’d been forced to surrender them. For now, his little open-air class on comparative biology would have to make do with skuggiks.