River of Bones

by Taylor Anderson

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  “Stand by for surface action, port bow!” called Russ Chappelle. His order was quickly relayed to the lightly protected fire-control platform above the pilothouse. USS Santa Catalina had won the race to the bend in the river, barely, and as predicted, the Zambezi became very narrow there—so narrow that the main channel was probably little more than 250 yards wide. That was perfect for Russ’s purposes, but it also meant his ship couldn’t maneuver much in the action to come.

  And it was coming.

  They’d seen the four tall, smoke-chuffing funnels of the leading Grik dreadnaught long before they could get a shot, and even if Santy Cat was barely half their size and making little smoke, Grik lookouts had doubtless noticed her as well. As she turned the corner, a monstrous dark shape loomed into view, practically nose to nose, at the ridiculous knife-fighting range of four hundred yards—and they all got an intimately close look at what they were facing for the very first time.

  At a glance, the enemy ship looked like an insanely enlarged version of the old CSS Virginia, or “Merrimac,” its main deck low to the water with little freeboard, dominated by a high, sloping ironclad casemate protecting two long gundecks. Santy Cat had fought similar ships before, admittedly much farther away, and handled them fairly successfully, but this thing and the others creeping up on its starboard flank had been altered in ways that remained imperfectly understood—until now. At least in one respect. Russ raised his binoculars while the gun crew on the fo’c’sle turned their massive training and pointing wheels to swing the 10″ rifle on target.

  “Holy crap,” he muttered. “Commence firing!”

  “What is it, Captain?” Gutfeld asked.

  “Every Grik BB we’ve seen had three big hundred-pounder smoothbores up front. This one only has two guns forward, in armored sponsons, barbettes—whatever—that follow the curve of the casemate, but they’re huge! I bet they’re four- or five-hundred-pounders!”

  “My God.”

  Santa Catalina’s own massive bow gun roared and recoiled back, belching a fogbank of dirty white smoke. They still used black powder in the 10″ rifle because they simply hadn’t been able to test it with the newer propellants. Only the 5.5″s and other secondaries used the “new” powder. But the 10″ shell was a long conical projectile that weighed five hundred pounds itself and carried an impressive bursting charge detonated with a contact fuse. With a sound like ripping canvas, it flew downrange and exploded heavily against the starboard-side curve of the target’s casemate. Iron fragments flailed the water, and what looked like a huge, long sheet of armor plate twirled away, folded and warped. But as Russ stared through his binoculars, he drew a surprised breath.

  “Holy crap!” he repeated hotly. “It knocked a layer off but didn’t penetrate!” He turned to the talker. “Tell Lieutenant Baak he’ll have to shoot straighter! Hit her square—or aim for the gun shields. And have Amagi’s old armor-piercing rounds rousted out of the lineup in the magazines. We might need ’em!”

  Santa Catalina still carried a grand total of five of the dead battlecruiser’s AP shells. The rest had been expended or turned over to the Air Corps and transformed into bombs—which had also been used up, as far as Russ knew. The Air Corps had its own lighter, somewhat-armor-piercing bombs now, but the homegrown “common” shells for Santy Cat’s big number-one gun had been considered sufficient for any armor they’d encountered before. Now . . .

  “Maybe they just added armor to the front, to get close,” Gutfeld suggested.

  “Maybe,” Russ conceded. “But they are close and the front is to us!” He glanced at the high banks of the river on either side, even as the crew on the fo’c’sle feverishly went through the laborious process of reloading. “Signal the engine room to back us down to ‘ahead slow,’ and stand by to reverse the engine,” he told the ’Cat at the lee helm. “We can give ’em a little rope,” he added to Gutfeld.

  At that moment, two enormous white clouds blossomed in front of the Grik BB, their sheer size a grim testament to how much powder its guns gulped. Freight-train roars rumbled overhead and there was a loud crack as the portside funnel support stays parted.

  “Guess they ain’t used to shootin’ this close neither,” the Lemurian quartermaster at the wheel quipped.

  The enemy dreadnaught directly behind the first had started easing to the side, risking the shallower water on the south bank to bring its own guns to bear. One fired, quickly followed by the other, at a range of about a thousand yards. The first went wild, but the second skated off the water a hundred yards short and slammed into Santy Cat’s bow near her port hawse with a ringing clang. The ship had almost no armor there, but the angle was such that the huge roundshot—they’d seen it—merely gouged a deep dent in the plates and ricocheted into the water close alongside. The tall waterspout drenching the lookouts on the port bridgewing was sufficient testimony to the energy it still carried.

  “Gun number one is up!” cried one of the wet ’Cats.

  Boom! Swoooosh! Blam! Another hit, almost dead center between the top and bottom barbettes, and more shredded armor flicked away amid a spray of rivets or bolt heads.

  “Tough mother . . .” Russ grunted grimly. “Still, I bet that shook ’em up. It can’t be easy to load those big-ass guns either.” He’d been watching, and the enemy artillery had recoiled all the way inside the casemate—but how far back? Besides being bigger, the guns were longer than any the Grik had showed them before, and he was trying to imagine what kind of mounting system they used, how bulky, and how long it would take them to reload. The gun’s probably on a track, on top of a pivot. And I doubt they’ve got the same monsters down the sides; they’d recoil into each other. He frowned. Unless they have half as many, and they’re staggered. Less than half, he realized. They couldn’t put any on the old upper gundeck. Even if they weren’t too heavy, there isn’t room. The question is, would they do that? Sacrifice lots of bloody powerful guns for fewer superguns? Are those things really “all big gun ships,” true “Dreadnaughts”? They already kind of were, in a sense, but with those superguns—God, if they ever rifle them, or come up with an effective fire-control system, we might not be able to get close enough to hurt them. Even with our newest torpedoes.

  He refocused. To load, they have to hoist a charge and shot up in front of the muzzle, place it in—we won’t see that, but we should see . . . Still staring through his binoculars, he observed a long wooden rod the size of a ship’s topmast protruding through the armored casemate and supported by a spiderweb of lines. That’s when he realized there was a narrow boom overhanging the gunports above the enemy pilothouse. Lines snaking along the sides of the rod went taut and drew it swiftly inward. Seconds later, it came back out and rose, out of the way, until it snugged itself to the overhanging boom. A second rod, servicing the lower gun, did the same. Pretty smart, he conceded. No sense bringing them back inside during action. Be tough as hell to use in rough seas, though; they’d get all tangled up. And they’re pretty damn vulnerable. I’m surprised we didn’t cut a bunch of lines with the punches we already landed—but they’re practically loaded already. I never dreamed they could do it so fast.

  “Back us off. Half astern,” he ordered, looking impatiently down at the number-one gun. A slightly rusty white-painted shell with a thin red band around the middle and a green nose lay on the loading tray. It was one of Amagi’s. The rammer quickly slid it into place and retracted, just as a pair of powder bags—the short section of barrel could burn only two—were laid out. The ram operated again, and a ’Cat gunner slammed the breech even as the tray folded back and the trainer started turning his wheel. Santa Catalina was beginning to slow, but the range between her and the first BB had dwindled to just over two hundred yards when the enemy guns roared again. Russ’s old ship heaved as another shot hit her bow, smashed through, and bored deep in the ship. The other round hit as well, sna
pping the foremast off below the lookout’s perch, spraying the bridge with chunks of hot steel and a sleet of thick paint fragments. Booms slammed to the deck, and the whole top of the mast, complete with screaming lookout, crashed down on the cargo hatch over the forward hold.

  There was more screaming on the fo’c’sle, where ’Cats scrambled to clear fallen cables from the gun, even as its crew doggedly labored to bring it on target. The second Grik BB fired again and another huge shot hit, almost exactly where the first one had, but this one punched through and the portside anchor dropped with a splash, its chain shot away. Again, there was no telling where the second shot went. Santy Cat’s screw was beginning to bite and she was drawing away, but the enemy was barely a hundred yards distant when the number-one gun, finally on target, roared its defiance. They were close enough that its own smoke obscured the hit, the report drowning the concussion of the resulting blast. Pressure shattered the windows, and orange jets of flame gushed out gunports toward the rear of the Grik’s casemate. A second detonation dwarfed the first—they heard this one—as the starboard side of the target peeled upward from a roaring gust of fire and steam. All four funnels toppled to port and the burning wreck started to settle, ready charges cooking off with surges of thumping smoke.

  “Reload Ayy-Pee!” came Lieutenant Baak’s distinctive, yowelly voice.

  “Corps-’Cats to the fo’c’sle,” Russ ordered. “Wait,” he told Gutfeld as the Marine started to move. “What’s the range on your mortars?”

  Gutfeld blinked. “All we have are the light three-inch jobs, effective to about eight hundred yards. My guys can usually drop ’em in a pickle barrel at six. On a moving ship—against a moving ship? Hell, I don’t know.”

  “We’re not shooting at pickle barrels today, Simy. I just want you to smother the front of those damn BBs.” Realizing Gutfeld hadn’t seen what he had, he quickly explained. “This whole fight’s gonna be up close, brass knuckles and belly guns,” he added. “You already knew that, but if you knock away all that rigging out front, they’ll have a helluva time loading. Probably have to send lizards out to do it, see? Then your guys can hose ’em with mortars and machine guns while we blast ’em at our leisure. It’ll be a turkey shoot!”

  Nodding understanding and starting to grin, Simon Gutfeld bolted. Immediately, he ran into his XO, Captain Flaar. “Round up the mortar crews, on the double, and set up every tube that’ll bear forward.” He quickly repeated why. “Machine gunners will support, but fire only on command.” This was punctuated by the bellow of the 10″ rifle, but Gutfeld continued without even looking. “Hopefully the mortars’ll do the job, and we can help the navy stop those big bastards without taking too many licks. But like the skipper said, it’ll probably come down to teeth and claws, and I don’t want to waste ammo. Got it?”

  What began as confused blinking turned to anticipation, and Captain Flaar’s yellow-furred face spread in a grin of its own. “Ay, ay, Major!”

  The Battle of the Zambezi River was never going to be a turkey shoot—Russ knew that even as he said it—but despite her early wounds, Santa Catalina had it mostly her way for a while. She hit the second Grik BB with a common shell as it steered away from its stricken sister, but the strike was farther back on the casemate. It punched through, seemingly confirming the speculation about armor thickness, and blew out a respectable chunk of the ship aft of the armored pilothouse. Also confirming Russ’s personal opinion regarding Grik doctrines of naval warfare, the enemy then fired a badly angled broadside of twelve hundred-pounder smoothbores at a range of about six hundred yards. Two hit and knocked more holes in the old ship’s bow, but now her portside 5.5″s would bear, and the Grik never got a chance to fire again. Between Gutfeld’s mortars ravaging the loading apparatus for the enemy’s most lethal guns, the 10″ rifle speaking again, and the 5.5″s slamming through the thinner armor at will, the second Grik BB was soon another burning wreck. And as hoped, the water was shallow enough that neither sank very deep. The next BB had to come straight at Santy Cat, right between them, and Russ tried to get ready.

  He backed his ship off a bit more, with another Japanese AP shell waiting in her main gun. Naga and Felts, unengaged so far, took station on her flanks, presenting their broadside batteries of ten fifty-pounders in support. Details busily cleared more debris from Santy Cat’s fo’c’sle, and Kathy and her division carried the wounded aft. Laney hadn’t made a peep, and his engine had promptly answered every bell. Russ was beginning to hope they could destroy the next BB before it got off a shot with its superguns, and he’d retreated as far as he dared. At the first sign of the enemy, Naga and Felts would hammer it, while Gutfeld’s Marines smothered the fo’c’sle and reloading gear with mortars. The 10″ rifle would assassinate it.

  At least that was the plan.

  The wind was out of the south, and dense smoke from the ship they’d killed on that side of the channel choked the river between it and the first half-sunken BB. Another airstrike from Arracca, the heaviest all day, roared by overhead, the small, gallant planes a thrill for the lonely Santy Cat to see. But from their perspective, with nothing but wreckage before them, the multitudes of the enemy beyond weren’t yet real and they felt pretty good about what they’d accomplished.

  “Cap-i-taan!” cried the talker. “Raa-dio report fum Arracca’s COFO, fly-een above!”

  “Well?”

  Even before the talker could respond, the bridge lookouts on both wings shouted inside. “Surface taa-gits, two six seero!”

  Russ hurried to the windows and peered at the smoke ahead just as two Grik BBs emerged, almost side by side. “Commence firing main battery!” he shouted. “Target closest to your current point of aim. Commence firing all mortars that will bear, port to port, starboard to starboard!”

  The crew of the number-one gun quickly lined up on the enemy ship to the left, requiring the least adjustment. Even as they did so, Russ watched the enemy guns slowly shift and change elevation as their Grik crews did the same. Heavy thumps sounded aft as the first mortars lobbed into the air. It’s a gunfight, Russ realized, his heart in his throat. But with nothing else he could do, his mind was strangely detached. A showdown just like in the Western pictures, to see who’s quicker on the draw, but here it’s two ships and four gun’s crews against our one.

  In the end, Santy Cat’s gunners won in the sense that they fired first and hit their mark. Their AP shell punched through at the very base of the casemate, and the resulting detonation savaged the two forward guns, and the armored pilothouse above it all was blown completely out. Unfortunately, Santy Cat’s gunners were only a fraction of a second quicker, and their heroic, professional act was the last thing they ever did. All four enemy guns fired, practically simultaneously, while Santy Cat’s shell was in flight, and the first of the three 400-pounder roundshot that hit Santa Catalina actually struck the muzzle of the 10″ rifle. The brittle iron shattered and jagged fragments shredded its entire crew. The second shot hit near the waterline, tearing a giant mouth through the forepeak and two more compartments, and ripping through the lightly armored forward magazine bulkhead. It came to rest inside after killing two ’Cats in the handling room. If it had been an exploding shell, Santy Cat would’ve ceased to exist right then. The third hit went in directly under the bridge, but hardly anyone felt it. Crashing through the officers’ quarters like fragile leaves, it left a wake of personal, if inconsequential, devastation before rebounding—barely—off the heavy forward armor of the 5.5″ gun castle. From there it shot straight up, splintering through the upper deck and scattering a mortar crew behind the bridge before dropping into the water alongside Naga.

  In that strange moment, normally reserved for the near silence of shock before the screams begin, Naga vomited a broadside of fifty-pound shot, and nearly every one hit the undamaged BB amid the exploding mortars Gutfeld’s Marines had sent. The shot scattered against the heavy frontal armor and flailed the
river. Russ shook his head to clear it and began shouting.

  “Damage report! Ahead slow, come left thirty degrees to unmask the starboard battery!” He didn’t know how badly his ship was hit, but it was obvious the main gun was at least temporarily out of action. “Signal Naga to give us some room!” He stared at the enemy through the smoke as his ship began to move, already turning slightly to port. One Grik BB was hit hard and apparently out of control, veering sharply toward its consort. With an audible crash they collided, and the wounded behemoth began pushing its sister toward the burning wreck on the north bank of the river. It wasn’t dead, though. A half broadside of hundred-pounders thundered out, causing a loud crash aft and slashing the water. Felts fired, her accurate, powerful guns peeling armor away from the closest enemy’s side.

  “Number-one gun’s outa’ aaction,” the talker reported. “Muzzle’s baad bent, an’ a shock is knocked off. The whole crew’s dead. There’s floodin’ for’aard, but is mossly open seams an’ sloshin’ in a big-aass hole. Officers’ quaar-ters is smashed. Engineerin’s okay, but even behind the armor, one o’ them lass hits opened seams an’ staarted leaks. Laney says pumps can haandle it.”