“Damn Clumsy!” Petey cawed, earning a resentful glare. Petey was a small, tree-gliding reptile from Yap Island. Discarded by the Governor-Empress of the Empire of the New Britain Isles, Rebecca Anne McDonald, as “inappropriate,” Sandra had adopted him by default. He most often lay coiled around the back of her neck like a fuzzy, feathery squirrel—with an insatiable appetite and a filthy mouth.
“They were such pretty shoes too,” Sandra said, ignoring Petey’s parrotlike outburst, as usual.
“Yeah. But I guess the best thing about them is what they represent,” Matt pointed out, still scraping. “Even with all the new ship construction, weapons manufacture, logistical support necessary to maintain and supply two major fleets—more than two, counting the Imperials’—we can still scrape up enough resources to make a pair of fancy shoes!” He shrugged. “Of course, we’re also supporting large armies in multiple theaters, and running what’s turned into a world war!” He nodded ruefully at the shoe that was starting to turn gray as it dried. “I don’t know whether to be proud of these or embarrassed.”
“Don’t be embarrassed,” Sandra scolded, “except for maybe ruining them. And yours aren’t the only ‘shiny’ ones. Just be glad we’ve got enough shoes and sandals for all our troops. That’s something to be proud of.”
Matt supposed she was right—as usual. It wasn’t as if the supply of ships, planes, weapons, ammunition, rations, or anything else he could think of had slowed. If anything, it was speeding up. The only real shortage was personnel, and with more troops beginning to arrive from the Empire of the New Britain Isles—what would’ve been Hawaii, California, and countless Pacific isles in the world they left—and the growing addition of Lemurian troops from the Great South Isle—essentially Australia—even their numbers were starting to improve. But here, on the “western front,” they faced potentially endless numbers of furry/feathery, somewhat reptilian, and entirely lethal Grik.
And the eastern front, aimed at the rabidly fanatical human “Holy Dominion” in the Americas, did have serious supply problems, particularly when it came to the more modern weapons the Alliance was producing, because of the vast distances involved. Worse, it appeared that a major battle was brewing there, and Lord High Admiral Harvey Jenks, commander in chief of all Allied forces in the East (CINCEAST), had just been handed some unpleasant surprises. He was jockeying to counter them even while his forces were overextended by a strategy based on an outdated understanding of the situation.
Matt shook his head. Jenks was on his own. Half a world away, there was nothing Matt could do to help him, and he was about to embark on a major, extremely risky operation of his own. He’d always believed the old saying that “fortune favors the bold.” He couldn’t remember who said it first, and recognized that history was replete with examples of the opposite. . . . Still, though the Grand Alliance was just beginning to hit its stride, it couldn’t afford a long war of attrition against the Grik; Grik bred much too fast, and the Allies just didn’t have, and couldn’t get the numbers for that. Now was the time for a crushing blow, while the Grik were on their heels. The Doms were bad, maybe worse than the Grik in some ways, but they were people—well, human, at least—and couldn’t replace losses any faster than the Allies. So, if the war in the East wasn’t exactly on a back burner, the primary focus of the Alliance was—and had to be, in Matt’s view—against the Grik for now.
Jenks had a formidable, if somewhat outdated force at his disposal, and he was getting at least a few of the new weapons. He also had General Shinya. The former Japanese naval officer who’d become Matt’s friend was maturing into an excellent infantry commander. He had a carrier commanded by the Lemurian Admiral Lelaa-Tal-Cleraan, with Matt’s own cousin, Lieutenant Orrin Reddy as COFO (Commander of Flight Operations). Orrin had been in the Army Air Corps in the Philippines before being captured by the Japanese and also winding up here, and by all accounts he was shaping up well. Jenks also had a lot of other veterans of hard fighting under his command: Colonel Blair, Captain Blas-Ma-Ar, even a few of Walker’s “old” Lemurian hands. He’d do fine; Matt was sure. Right now, he had to concentrate on his own mission.
“If you’re finished with your mud pies, we’re running a little late,” Sandra reminded him.
“Yeah,” Matt muttered, and with a final scrape of his shoe, he joined her to proceed down the walkway.
The storm, a genuine “strakka,”—essentially a particularly vigorous typhoon—had battered them for the better part of a week, but now it had passed entirely, leaving the sky bright and clear. More, it was as if the great storm had finally swept away the lingering “rainy season” that had plagued the region, and made the prelude to the great Battle of Madras, or Alden’s Perimeter as it was interchangeably called, so miserable for its participants. It had also hindered rescue efforts for those wounded in the jungle combat, as well as repairs to the ships damaged in the battle at sea. Now, the humidity remained terrible, but that wasn’t unusual, and the Lemurian Sky Priests predicted that they might actually be rewarded with several sunny days in a row.
The storm had been a bad one, but Matt was still awed by the sheer scope of the battle—and the victory. Serious problems still faced the Allied occupation of south and east Indiaa, and there were still a hell of a lot of Grik beyond their frontier, but a major Grik army had been decimated and a fleet that took two years to build had been destroyed. Madras was the prize, though: a major port with access to abundant raw materials. North of the city were stands of trees with interlocking root systems that produced a kind of rubber that would be a great help. There were coal, copper, tin, and many other metals, minerals, and chemicals the Allies needed, and, just as important, had now been denied to the Grik. There was also iron in preexisting mines stretching like battered moonscapes northwest of town, and hundreds of tons of processed plate had been stockpiled for Grik ironclads. It appeared to be even better stuff than they’d originally used on their ships, which spoke disturbing volumes about what the enemy had achieved technologically. The earlier Grik armor was thick but brittle, and having actually captured a couple of the monster ships fairly intact at the anchorage, they could directly compare the quality. Those ships now floated, also under repair, but Matt wasn’t sure what good they’d be. That was where he and Sandra were headed first—to finally inspect one of the behemoths before attending a staff meeting aboard the even bigger aircraft carrier/tender, USNRS Salissa. It was there that Matt would announce his decision regarding the composition of his audacious mission, and he wasn’t looking forward to it. A lot of his friends were going to be disappointed.
Nearing the pier, Matt was reminded that many Allied ships had been lost or damaged in the battle as well, including his own USS Walker. Rust streaks marred her sides, and she was fire-blackened aft of the amidships gun platform. At least most of her more serious damage had already been attended to, and so soon after a major overhaul, they’d had a lot more to work with than usual. Brad “Spanky” McFarlane, Walker’s former engineering officer and now Matt’s exec—as well as Minister of Naval Engineering—had assured him they’d even start painting over the old ship’s sores as soon as the weather permitted. Matt was content with the pace of repairs, considering the constraints. Walker would be ready.
Other ships weren’t so lucky. Poor Mahan (DD-102), Walker’s only recently reanimated sister, had nearly been sunk by one of Walker’s own errant torpedoes! The new weapons worked amazingly well, arguably winning the naval battle largely by themselves, but they weren’t perfect. Their range remained limited to a couple of thousand yards, and they still had some guidance issues that Bernie Sandison, Walker’s torpedo officer and Minister for Experimental Ordnance, blamed on himself. Matt—everyone—assured the dark-haired young man that it wasn’t his fault, and the torpedoes still worked better than any they’d had to use against the Japanese. It didn’t matter. Bernie was working himself to death, night and day, trying to solve the problem.
Part of his difficulty was that the torpedoes had gone into mass production back in Baalkpan (headquarters of the Grand Alliance on the south coast of “Borno”), and all he could manage were simple field modifications. If he figured it out, the fix could be incorporated at the factory, but he had only finished weapons to tinker with. Matt wasn’t worried. The dreary sight of Mahan sagging at the dock, her new bow blown off, was a sad, cautionary example to them all. It also put a kink in his operational planning for the upcoming mission. But as far as he was concerned, the torpedoes were a success.
Beyond Mahan lay the “Protected Cruiser” (CA-P-1), Santa Catalina. She remained whole, but had arguably been in greater danger of sinking than Mahan after the beating she took. She’d been the main focus of the whole battle line of massive Grik dreadnaughts and had suffered serious casualties. Among the killed was Commodore James Ellis, Walker’s old exec, and Matt’s best friend. She suffered even more later that night when Kurokawa and the last of the Grik fleet broke out of Madras in conjunction with a mass attack by Grik zeppelins and their damn “suicider” bombs. She’d been riddled with heavy shot at close range, and her consort, the old submarine-turned torpedo gunboat, S-19, had been rammed and sunk with nearly half her crew. It had been a terrible, shocking exclamation point to the otherwise successful operation, and Matt took savage satisfaction from the subsequent, personal destruction of every ship they could find that broke out that night. He was morally certain they’d finally killed that Japanese madman, Hisashi Kurokawa, the architect of so many of their woes, and it was impossible not to be pleased by his destruction. Matt supposed Kurokawa would never really be “dead” to him, since he’d never seen him dead, but considering how complete the slaughter of his force had been, he wouldn’t lie awake worrying about him anymore either.
On the pier itself, they passed Walker, Mahan, and Santa Catalina, self-consciously waving at the cheering men and Lemurian “’Cats” working on board. More cheers came from the wooden-hulled steam frigates, or “DDs,” beyond, and they finally reached the gangway leading aboard the dark, malignant shape of the first Grik ironclad.
The thing was huge, over eight hundred feet long, and powerfully armed. The dark iron casemate protecting its armament sloped upward and away, towering high above the harbor water, and resembled nothing more than a gigantic version of the old Confederate ironclad Virginia—or “Merrimac.” Besides being much larger, however, there were other differences. There were two gun decks instead of one, for example, and four slender funnels protruded high above the casemate. So close, the thing seemed invincible—until one observed the deep-shot dents and shattered plates, as well as the heavy streaks and blotches of rust that proved the thing was mortal after all. And of course, Matt had seen torpedoes make very short work of the massive ships with his own eyes. No, it’s not invincible, he told himself. It may not even be good for anything, now, he decided. He might’ve considered it a dinosaur if it weren’t for the fact that there were real dinosaurs on this world, and some remained extremely formidable.
“What are we here to see?” Sandra asked, somewhat reluctant to go aboard. The Grik kept captives as rations on their ships, and she never wanted to see the . . . aftermath . . . of that again.
“Actually, we’re here to see Spanky, and hear what he has to say about this thing,” Matt replied. “Besides, I’d kind of like to have a look. Chances are, we’ll run into more of them.” He saw her expression. “No, I don’t expect we need to go down in the hold.”
They mounted the gangplank and saluted the Stars and Stripes streaming above the perverted version of a Japanese flag, its rising sun embraced by a pair of Grik-like swords that appeared to have been adopted as a kind of Grik naval jack. They turned and saluted a ’Cat guard at the top of the gangway.
“Permission to come aboard?”
“O’ course, Cap-i-taan Reddy! Mister Maac-Faar-lane is wait-een for you!”
Matt and Sandra passed through the crude, heavy hatch that, like all the gunports, had been left open for ventilation. Inside, they found themselves on a cramped, gloomy, open deck on a level with the weather deck outside the casemate. Does that make this part of the weather deck too? Or the orlop? Matt wasn’t sure. Whatever it was, it seemed to have served as a berthing space for countless Grik, and even with the fresh air, the dark, dank interior reeked of death, mold, and rot. It would’ve been unbearably creepy if they’d been there all alone, but the dozen or so Lemurians working within their view helped a lot.
“Gonna have to scour this thing out with bleach,” Spanky grouched as if reading their minds. He approached, ducking under the massive beams supporting the lower gun deck overhead. Spanky was a short, wiry guy, but the power of his personality always left people remembering him bigger than he was. “You better watch your head in here, Skipper.” Matt was more than six feet tall and already had to crouch, even between the beams. “You smack your forehead, no tellin’ what you’ll get infected with!”
“I’ll be careful. What can you show me?”
Spanky scratched the whiskers on his chin. “Well, some of it you can see right here. Look at those casemate timbers, backing the armor plate.” Spanky raised a lantern. “Recognize the design?”
“Sure. I’ll be derned. The timbers are diagonally laminated, just like Lemurian Homes. No wonder they can build something this size out of wood! How many layers?”
“Four below the waterline, and six on the casemate under the iron—and the way they’ve got the iron bolted on every few inches or so just adds to the structural strength.” He patted a beam, not with affection, but respect. “Other Grik ships have always been surprisingly well made. That new Jap, Miyata, that showed up at Diego Garcia with those . . . other folks, told Mr. Garrett he’d been at a Grik shipyard on the Africa coast. Apparently, the lizards’ve been assembly-linin’ their ships for a long time. That could explain how a buncha idiot Uul turn out a decent hull; all they need is a few of their smarter lizards, their Hij, hangin’ around to make sure all the pieces go together right.” He swayed the lantern at the casemate timbers. “This is the first time we’ve seen ’em use this, though. I’d say it was Kurokawa’s idea, or one of the Japs workin’ for him. Good thing for us they put so much faith in protection that they never gave much thought to what would happen if we did knock holes in ’em. No watertight compartmentalization at all. If they can’t pump water out of the whole damn thing, they ain’t stoppin’ it until it fills the whole damn thing!”
“I take it you’ve got a fix for that?”
Spanky’s face turned sour. “Sure. It’s no big deal. Some transverse bulkheads’ll do the trick. Can’t really make ’em watertight, but they’ll survive a lot bigger hole. Put in our better Lemurian pumps, and they’ll only have to handle the seepage past the flooded compartment.”
“You don’t sound enthusiastic,” Matt observed. “We’ve used captured Grik ships before, particularly after you and our ’Cat friends made improvements. The cut-down ‘Indiamen’ make good DEs.”
“Yeah, but this is different.” Spanky rubbed his eyes with his knuckles. “Maybe I’m too much of an old destroyerman,” he allowed. “I like fast an’ skinny over slow an’ fat, and with the weapons we’ve got now, these things are sitting ducks. They’re god-awful big and powerfully armed—though the guns are still rough as hell. As liable to burst as shoot. And wait till you see the power plant! The boilers aren’t bad, maybe even as good as Imperial boilers, but the engines are so crude, they look like some blind Chinaman sculpted ’em out o’ river mud an’ baked ’em in a kiln!”
“They do seem to work, though, don’t they?”
“I don’t see how, unless they’re constantly squirtin’ gallons o’ grease on ’em.”
“But they do work, Spanky,” Matt insisted sternly.
“I guess,” Spanky grudged. “Some of ’em. The ones aboard here don’t, and I figure that’s why they left her. Same on the ot
her ‘prize,’ though it was kinda sunk in the shallows too. No big holes, so we were able to pump her out. I bet some of our bombs opened enough seams that the onboard pumps couldn’t handle the flow.”
Matt looked at his watch, then glanced at Sandra. “Okay, Spanky. Give us the nickel tour. Then we’ve got to get over to Big Sal.”
“Eat?” Petey inquired, almost politely. He’d risen from his perch, sniffing around, but the mention of Big Sal got his attention. He always associated her with good food.
“Soon,” Sandra assured him, patting his head.
Spanky quickly led them to the engineering spaces, and Matt realized he hadn’t been exaggerating. All the great iron castings were amazingly crude, complete with voids and bubbles. But the contraption had clearly worked, and he remembered that a lot of their own early machinery hadn’t looked much better. They toured the gun decks and walked among the monstrous, rough-cast guns. If anything, the headroom was even more limited there. Matt paused several times to look at splintered timbers that showed where Allied shot had struck the armor on the other side. This ship must’ve been one of the first to arrive, a veteran of the First Battle of Madras that drove the Allies out. He wondered briefly if Jim Ellis’s lost Dowden had done this damage. He shook his head. It didn’t matter.
“Skipper?” Spanky asked in a tone that implied he was repeating himself.
“Mr. McFarlane?”
“You want to go to the bridge? Not much there but a wheel and a repeater.”
“No. Not unless there’s anything unusual. We really need to get going.”
Deadly Shores Page 3