River of Bones

by Taylor Anderson

  In that instant, Jash had a profound revelation. He’d believed the Uul galleys were sent to divert attention from his more valuable warriors, but it had been the other way around. In a way, he had to admire Regent Champion First General Esshk’s ruthless strategy, but resented not only the willful waste of New Army warriors, but the fact that Esshk hadn’t told them the ultimate plan. It would’ve worked, anyway, and many more gun galleys—and their crews—might’ve survived, pressing their attacks less fiercely, firing from farther away. Beyond this resentment—another new sensation—Jash also felt something akin to humiliation and betrayal, realizing that despite his devotion to Esshk and the Celestial Mother, Esshk, at least, valued him—and Seech—no more than the lowliest, most mindless Uul.

  * * *

  * * *

  “Damage report!” Russ demanded, rising shakily from the deck. He noted there was blood on his hands and wondered where it had come from. Oh. The Lemurian quartermaster’s mate at the EOT was down, his helmet gone, along with a big chunk of his head. About the same time the galleys blew up, a shot had struck the pilothouse, spinning a battle shutter inside like a warped saw blade. Another ’Cat shoved the dead one out of the way while Russ grabbed the wheel again.

  “Lec—” The talker coughed on smoke filling the bridge. “Lectric comm is out. Laney’s on the voice tube, says there’s baad floodin’ in the fireroom an’ engine room both. Them goddaamn gaalleys blow a big hole under the armor. Engine room’s floodin’ faster, an’ ain’t nothin’ he can do. Pumps can’t keep up, an’ we’ll lose those when the waater gets the boilers.”

  Russ nodded. He’d expected as much, and known immediately his poor Santa Catalina was doomed at last. Still, her job wasn’t finished. “Detail everybody who can stand, not fighting, to bring up all the ammo they can get their hands on before the magazines flood. Stow it in the air castle, the casemate.” He hesitated. “Even the sick bay.” Those were still the most heavily armored parts of the ship, and all six 5.5″s were still in action. The same couldn’t be said for the deck guns, but Russ didn’t know if that was due to damage or dead crews.

  Major Gutfeld swayed through the hatch from the starboard bridgewing, face blackened, eyes red; brows, lashes, and beard mostly singed away. “That was bad,” he murmured simply. “I lost a lot of people.”

  “Yeah,” Russ agreed, steering directly for the open gap in the channel ahead. No less than four Grik cruisers were through now, and though most were damaged to some degree and had stopped firing for the moment, probably as surprised by the galley “bombs” as anyone, that wouldn’t last when they saw where he was heading. “And it gets worse,” he continued. “We’re sinking. Nothing for it. Our only chance is to try to block that last little gap and turn this tub into a fixed battery.”

  Gutfeld was staring at him, wide eyed. “Yeah,” he said. “I guess so. What can I do?”

  “Keep those damn galleys off us. I don’t know if we’ll make it as it is, but any more holes’ll put us down right where we are, savvy?”

  “Aye, sir,” Gutfeld agreed, and bolted out the hatch to rejoin his Marines.

  “Cap-i-taan,” cried the talker. “Laney wants to send his people up!”

  Russ handed off the wheel to a ’Cat with blood matting the fur on his face and lurched to the voice tube. The noise coming out of it sounded like a freight train going over a waterfall. “Laney? Can you hear me?”

  “Yeah. I gotta get my people outa here! We’re done!”

  “Send as many as you can, but keep us going ten more minutes.”

  “Shit! I can’t promise two minutes!”

  “You will, if it’s the last thing you ever do!” Russ yelled. “You want to prove you’re an officer, a man worth respect? Now’s your chance. Give me full ahead, right now, and keep the throttle open until I say so—or you damn well drown, you got that?”

  The EOT clanged behind Russ. “I got it—an’ so do you. All I have left,” Laney shouted back, his voice tinny and strained. “But it’ll only last as long as it lasts. Don’t you get it? We’re fillin’ up and I can’t even slow it down. My baby’s done, an’ there ain’t a goddamn thing anybody can do about it, see? I want my people the hell out, right now.” There was a short hesitation. “I’ll stay myself, an’ make sure you get the last turn she’ll give.”

  Russ felt a stab of guilt but didn’t let it touch his voice. “Fair enough. Everybody out . . . and you too, when the water reaches the fires. With or without your baby, I still need you.”

  “Sure, sure. No sweat. I love this damn engine your cockeyed scheme stole from me, but it ain’t worth dyin’ for. Not when there ain’t no help for it.”

  Russ stepped back to the wheel, taking it in both hands. There was a slight surge in speed, but not much. The ship was getting too heavy with water coming in. The surviving cruisers had opened fire again, as had a couple more of Santy Cat’s guns. A steady chatter came from machine guns and riflemen as the tortured old ship bulled through the floating debris and clustered galleys. Another one blew itself up about forty yards away, killing galleys all around but doing no further damage to the ship. Other galleys were probably destroyed by shot from the Grik cruisers. Russ felt a new, faint shudder through his shoes as the hull, lower in the water by the moment, dragged across the riverbed.

  “Just a little longer, baby,” he muttered.

  A fifty-pound shot struck the port bridgewing and caromed away, right before a shaken signal-’Cat stepped through the hatch, blinking at the huge dent. She shook her head. “We got four more Grik croosers comin’ upriver behind us,” she stated, voice flat. Russ was stunned. There might still be that many already engaged, it was hard to tell, but four more? We’re totally screwed. “Where the hell did they come from? Why didn’t Arracca stop ’em, or at least warn us?”

  “Sur,” the ’Cat hesitated, sparing a blink of compassion for her exhausted, desperate skipper. “Felts is a floatin’ wreck, all her maasts gone. Her raa-dio’s been out for a while. I tole you. . . .”

  Russ nodded. He remembered now.

  “But however they get paast her, Arracca ain’t abaandon us. Her laast planes’re comin’ up the river too, right behind the croosers. Arracca’ll come too, I bet, it comes to thaat. We gonna block this daamn river!” Russ didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. If Arracca came herself, their mission might still succeed, but at what cost? Grik airships couldn’t miss something the size of the huge carrier, and their bombs would eventually burn her to the waterline. It was a disaster.

  At that moment, there was a bursting, gushing sound, like a great bubble of gas moving through the intestines of the ship, amplified a thousandfold, and a plume of sooty steam engulfed the upper deck around the fallen funnel. Russ tried the wheel but could hardly move it. The steering engine was dead. “Give me a hand!” he shouted. With two ’Cats helping, he managed to heave the helm hard over, a spoke at a time, until the waterlogged, coasting hulk finally turned slightly to port just a few hundred yards shy of the mouth of the passage and all the wreckage she’d made. Then, with a rending screech of steel against underwater rocks and a final, bouncing lurch, her fo’c’sle barely ten feet above the surface of the river, her boilers drowned, and Dean Laney’s “baby” dead, USS Santa Catalina came to rest at last.

  Heartsick and emotionally spent, amid a furiously renewed fusillade of hammering shot that pounded the wreck with a deafening roar, Russ impulsively reached over and shoved the EOT handle to Finished with Engine. He was surprised when the pointer from below slowly, deliberately, clanged five times to match the command. Laney really stayed to the end, he realized, suddenly hoping the ship’s asshole engineering officer wasn’t already dead on his feet, mortally scalded or about to drown.

  Like the water rising in his ship, an unexpected, hopeless gloom surged in Russ and he was jarred by the faint cheering that began to rise over the sound of battle, growing louder b
y the moment. The signal-’Cat stared aft.

  “What the hell’s that about?” Russ demanded.

  “Them Grik croosers,” the ’Cat jabbered excitedly. “They ain’t Griks! They’re ours! All is flyin’ the Staars an’ Stripes o’ the Naa-vee Claan!”

  Hope roared against the despair that had threatened to engulf Russ Chappelle, and he realized his Santy Cat would only truly die when all her people were gone. He started shouting orders. “Get more hands shifting ammunition, supplies, anything they can think of. And secure every mattress and piece of plate they can find to the rails! This old ship’s last fight has just begun,” he added grimly.

  * * *

  * * *

  Jash and Naxa had been jockeying their bullet- and shrapnel-wracked galley through the jumbled flotsam of their assault. Quite a few undamaged galleys had become entangled in the confusion and little fire was directed at them. Others were swamped, shot to pieces, or overwhelmed by the effects of the blasts. Naxa managed to fire the great gun at the crippled enemy a couple more times, as did other galleys, but the effect was difficult to discern in the chaos, each shot inevitably summoning a blistering hail of retribution from fast-shooters, garraks, even the high-angle bombs. Nearly a third of Slasher’s warriors had been heaved over the side or lay bleeding in the sloshing bilge. Twice more, Jash ordered his warriors to pause their rowing and fire garraks at the enemy, concentrating their aim at the fast-shooters, but he couldn’t tell if they had any effect. All the while, return fire slaughtered his warriors in the most hideously efficient manner imaginable, leaving Jash furious and frustrated by his inability to respond in kind. Worse, his fragile vessel was filling with water and becoming logier. Soon he and all his warriors would die—for nothing.

  “The great gun will be our end,” Jash said at last. “It must go over the side. And all its ammunition as well.”

  “If we return without it . . .” Naxa began.

  “With it, we will not return at all,” Jash interrupted emphatically, and immediately set his warriors to the task of slashing the tackle holding the gun in place and throwing the heavy shot into the river. When the splashes subsided, the battered galley rode a little higher and the inrush of water could be contained with buckets.

  “The enemy has stopped on the north side of the channel near the middle of the river,” Naxa observed. “Perhaps it has sunk?”

  Jash spared a glance from a plume of smoke he’d been watching approach from downriver, just in time to see Santa Catalina deal a punishing salvo at the closest cruiser, already fighting a fire and trying to get around behind it. “If so, it does not seem to have affected how deadly it is. Still, we may have unexpected assistance.” Ships were approaching, more cruisers of the Race. Excitement rose among the galleys at the sight of the un-looked-for aid. There were three, no four of them, steaming rapidly in from the east. Then a moan of dread drifted across the water and Jash’s relief turned to horror as the new arrivals immediately fell upon the battered nestmates, firing directly into them at point-blank range. The first they encountered was blown apart by concentrated, stabbing muzzle flashes and crashing iron. It quickly began to drift and fill. The other friendly cruisers, an equal number now, with the latest running the gauntlet of the motionless, misshapen wreck, began to fire back, focusing on the traitorous ships, rapidly closing to what Jash was sure must be a mutually destructive range. That’s when his disbelieving eyes finally recognized a profound difference.

  Throughout his short life, he’d watched the banners of the Ghaarrichk’k change, evolving away from the many flags of various regencies, ships, even armies. The bloodred of the Celestial Line was a constant, but the water and airship fleets had adopted a red circle, representing the Giver of Life, cradled within the traditional Kakrik swords of the Race. Behind them, more red lines radiated outward in all directions on a white field, symbolizing expansion and conquest. This had become the banner of the New Army as well, and only some of the regencies still differed. The flag the intruders flew, streaming from every mast as if nailed in place, was the same striped banner as the still-fighting wreck they’d been sent to assault.

  “How . . .” Naxa began, noticing as well, as the battle they’d thought was won quickly intensified to newer heights of close-range ferocity. Virtually ignored now, the iron ship that, nearly all alone, had defied the might of the Final Swarm was free to snipe at targets of opportunity—and focus its fast-shooters on the galleys once more. In addition, another stream of enemy flying machines flew over to make attacks beyond the bend. A few dove on the galleys, ripping them with bombs and fast-shooters of their own.

  “I do not know,” Jash ground out, “but we are being slaughtered to no purpose. We can do no more against the iron ship. It has already sunk, I think, and we have not the power—or anything resembling a plan—to overrun it.”

  “You say we should . . . stop the attack?”

  Jash barked at Naxa. “We no longer attack now! The battle has moved beyond us and we merely mill about and die. We are but a tithe of the Swarm, even of the New Army, but it, even we, have greater value than this,” he said bitterly. “We must save as much as we can. Sound the gathering-away horns!” he said louder.

  “On whose authority?” Naxa asked incredulously.

  “Mine.”

  “But . . . you are not a general, even a ker-noll! You are merely a Senior First!”

  “There are no ker-nolls left!” Jash snapped. “If any lived, they would command us to attack or withdraw—something! Someone must take it upon himself to decide. I shall, if no one else.”

  “They will destroy you!” Naxa warned.

  “We will all be destroyed if we do nothing,” Jash replied, waving up at the small flying machines, turning for another pass. “At this moment, I do not much care if they destroy me—or promote me.”

  A First of Ten had already run aft to adjust the wooden valves on the large boxlike compression horn. Pressing down on the bellows with a clawed foot, he produced a loud, low-frequency rumbling sound that carried far over the water. The cruisers were too distant or firing too furiously to hear, but the galleys—those that could—began to turn from the slaughter and make their way back toward the tangle of wreckage blocking the river. They’d slip through how and where they could.

  CHAPTER 15

  ////// USS Santa Catalina

  Zambezi River

  Grik Africa

  The cruiser fight that ended the Second Battle of the Zambezi River had been a brutal affair. Santy Cat had pounded the enemy cruisers as they passed her, so the prize ships of TF Gri-kakka arrived in better shape than their opponents. But their crews were a scratch bunch, less familiar with their ships and weapons than the Grik, for a change. Deprived of the primitive fire control that made even Felts and her kind equal to Grik cruisers at long range, they’d had no choice but to get close, do things the old-fashioned way, and make it a barroom brawl. By dusk, all the Grik cruisers had finally been pounded down, their smoldering, shattered hulks protruding from various parts of the broader river beyond Santa Catalina, the water around them frothing with predators feeding on their crews. But they’d kicked the guts out of two of TF Gri-kakka’s cruisers in return, and both were in a sinking condition.

  To Dennis Silva’s intense frustration, Chack had directed USS Itaa to keep her distance from the worst of the fighting, unwilling to risk the helpless Marines packed aboard and unable to fight effectively with them underfoot. That left the other three cruisers at a further disadvantage, but they still prevailed—at great cost. Now their boats were busy removing survivors, after they’d added themselves to the river blockage. Amazingly, Felts still lived, and even towed one of the sinking cruisers to a conspicuous gap herself.

  “Goddamn,” muttered Dennis Silva, staring at the shattered wreck of Santa Catalina in the smoky gloom of the dying day as USS Itaa tentatively crept alongside, almost like a young girl
visiting a disease-wracked old woman on her deathbed.

  “Goddamn,” Petey said, but it wasn’t his usual grating shriek. It was as if he was mimicking the big man’s tone as much as his words. Maybe he was even conscious of the mood behind the words for once.

  “She’s been through it,” Gunny Horn agreed, stunned that anything could’ve endured so much damage and floated as long as it had. “Looks like somebody shot a case of shotgun shells into an oil drum.” He thought about his analogy. “Which is probably why it took so much to kill her. The waterline and engineering spaces were armored, and everything else is so thin, solid shot just punched through; didn’t make holes that spread . . .” He shook his head. There was still little accounting for it, and what he was really doing was trying to keep his mind off how many humans and ’Cats had been equally unprotected by the old ship’s thin plates. The cheering that began again as line handlers secured Nosey to the wreckage proved that, somehow, there was still life in the motionless sieve.

  A voice came from the battered bridgewing, carried over the cheering by a speaking trumpet. “I need your pumps! We’re trying to save as much ammunition as we can, but the magazines are flooding!”

  Silva cupped his hands. “Is that you, Russ?”

  Chappelle didn’t hear him, but he did hear Chack when the Lemurian replied in that curious, carrying way his people had. “Of course. Whaat-ever we caan do. We haave the rest of Major Gutfeld’s Maa-reens aboard as well, and will begin sending them across if we caan make faast.” He waved out at the river behind him. “All our boats are otherwise occupied. Caan you lower something to cushion our contaact?”

  “Yeah. We’ll tie lines to mattresses and drop them over the side.” That’s when Silva realized some of Santy Cat’s misshapen aspect was due to the lumpy bedding lining her rails. Once Itaa was secured to the wreck, Lemurian Marines started across. The bulwark along the forward well deck was low enough that they actually had to climb down to it. Sailors carried hoses across and Itaa’s pumps soon had water jetting back into the river. They’d never keep up, but they might slow the flow.