Ign shook his head in wonder. “You have already become a better general than I,” he admitted. “It will be as you say, if either of us can manage our parts. Whatever you save of my Guards are now yours. If you live . . .” He shook his head and said no more except: “There is no time. We must hurry.”
As it turned out, there was little hurry after all. Six hundred disorganized troops had blown three thousand out of their defensive position, but couldn’t effectively pursue. And the enemy commander clearly had other priorities in any event, as Jash watched the fast little boats shuttle back and forth between the beached behemoth and shore in the growing light of the new dawn. Hundreds were landing, thousands quickly digging trenches and throwing up breastworks of their own. None of the Grik guns still in action—mainly because they’d still had crews—were taken. Probably half of those captured could quickly be put back in service, but their ammunition had to be mostly spent or destroyed. Exhausted runners succeeded in communicating Jash’s orders to both “his” now widely separated regiments, which had simply pulled away from contact along the riverbank. They were both marching toward Ign’s growing defense, giving the long-range enemy weapons a wide berth. Several warriors broke away from the Slashers and trotted toward where Jash, with a couple of Firsts from the Guards, stood in the tall prairie grass roughly four hundred paces from the strengthening enemy position and two hundred from Ign’s.
Jash knew he was still in range of enemy rifles, but their warriors seemed too busy digging to bother with him. He raised his gaze to the river and his young crest rose. Far from being over, the great battle on the river still raged. Santa Catalina was utterly doomed at last, its wreck blazing from end to end. Four cruisers of the Race harried two others like them, flying the huge, tattered, striped banners of the enemy, as they tried to fight their way toward Arracca and shore. Both were battered and slow, gushing steam. Arracca still fired in their defense, her heavy shot peeling armor off their attackers and slowly wrecking them as well, but she didn’t fire with the same sustained fury as before. Even such a monstrous thing as that must eventually exhaust its ammunition, Jash supposed.
Somewhat inspiring, however—if less than he’d anticipated—was that the Final Swarm had indeed been loosed. Three more cruisers had already rushed past the battle, avoiding it as best they could, steaming directly downriver. In their wakes swam hundreds of galleys, oars flashing in the probing rays of the rising sun as they also avoided the obstinate combatants. A few were wrecked by shot and some were rammed under, but most merely cruised past the fighting. Jash glanced at the sky, surprised the enemy flying machines hadn’t returned. Tightly packed as they were, the galleys would make a tempting target, but he was more concerned about the force Second General Ign was massing behind him.
“Ker-noll Jash!” Naxa exclaimed excitedly as he and the other Slashers approached. “I am so pleased you are not dead.” He jerked his snout down at their former position. “What a mess.”
“Indeed,” Jash agreed, actually relieved to find Naxa alive as well, despite how fickle he’d proved. Then again, he realized, capriciousness appears ingrained in our race. Second General Ign seems immune—as had First of One Hundred Seech. It dawned on Jash with a mixture of surprise and pleasure that he, at least, had remembered one warrior past his time. “Come,” he said. “I have seen enough. We must join Second General Ign at once. The longer his force grows in the open, the more vulnerable it is to air attack.” He gestured downhill with his own snout. “And the longer they have to prepare, the harder it will be to destroy them.”
* * *
* * *
“General Silva!” Major Simon Gutfeld called sarcastically as he dropped over the side of a motor launch and limped heavily toward him. Gutfeld had two wounds in the same leg and a bandage wrapped around his torso, blood seeping through under his arm, and Silva was frankly amazed he could stand, much less move.
Lawrence snickered in his annoyingly hissy way, and Silva rolled his eye. “Good God a’mighty, don’t call me that! You here to take over?”
“Hell no,” Gutfeld denied. “I’m wounded, and you’re doing fine. Where’s a chair?” He grinned. “Surgeon Lieutenant Pam Cross told me I could only come out to play if I took it easy.”
“Lucky she let you come at all,” Dennis moped. “Damn woman’ll lord it over you unmerciful, you ever show her a scratch. How’s Risa?”
“Worse than me,” Gutfeld hedged, quickly adding, “but she’ll be okay. Last I saw, she had a chair, sitting there, yelling at the walking wounded to help Pam get all the wounded ashore.”
Silva frowned. “What about Arracca?”
Simy shook his head. “She’s finished, Dennis. You can’t see it, but a good bunch of galleys are after her now, on the other side. She’s low on ammo and there’s no infantry left aboard.” He shrugged. “Tassanna can’t keep the lizards off for long and means to burn her once enough of ’em scramble aboard.”
Dennis was stunned. “I’ll swan.” Tassanna burning Arracca would be like Alan Letts burning Baalkpan.
“Yeah.”
Gunny Horn joined them. Of the three leaders of the assault against the guns onshore, he’d been the only one wounded—by a musket ball that grazed his cheek and left a red furrow in the black beard on his face. Now he was gesturing angrily at the sky. “Our planes could keep ’em off her! Where the hell are they? It’s full daylight now and they ought to be buzzing the whole joint!”
Gutfeld was nodding. “I got the full dope. Air is waiting for the Grik army to bunch up more in front of you—hitting them now’ll just keep them spread out—and they’re waiting for those Grik cruisers that got past to run into Captain Reddy, coming up the river. He’ll stop ’em,” he said matter-of-factly—and nobody doubted that—“and then the air’ll hit the galleys as they stack up behind. That’s the plan, anyway.”
“Goddamn plans,” Silva snorted, lips twisting as if the very word smelled bad. “Damn galleys’re thick as can be out there now,” he disagreed, pointing at the river.
“And the air is coming for them,” Gutfeld objected. “I think I hear ’em now, as a matter of fact.”
Silva glanced at him and back at the water and slowly nodded. He heard planes too. Then his eye went wide and a great flash reflected off it. “Holy—” One of their lamed cruisers, full of Santy Cat survivors and still trading fire with two others, had suddenly exploded. The concussion and expanding cloud of debris swept away a dozen Grik galleys and rolled the closest, equally battered enemy cruiser on its beam ends—where it stayed and filled.
“What the hell?” Horn demanded.
“Signal ’lags on Arracca!” Lawrence said urgently. Horn had an Imperial telescope and quickly raised it, reading the flags a ’Cat was whipping around in one of the hangar bays. Before he could report, a comm-’Cat raced up, started to salute, but then just blurted, “Grik baattle-ships is comin’ through the gaap!” she practically wailed. “T’ree of ’em is seen, so faar. An’ our air is report enemy planes!”
“Bullshit!” Gutfeld roared. “Calm the hell down! Grik BBs can’t get through that tangle upstream—and they damn sure don’t have any planes! Ours are coming in, though. Look!”
Simy Gutfeld was right—and wrong. Three Grik BBs actually had forced their way through the gap at last. It was one of their monstrous forward guns that had smashed the crippled cruiser. But Allied planes had also arrived. At that moment, all of Arracca’s fourteen remaining P1-Cs and Nancys swooped out of the sun, aiming at the galleys assaulting the port side of their Home. Machine guns yammered, shredding the flimsy craft, and light bombs tumbled down on top of them. Then, in the blink of an eye, two Nancys were blotted from the sky as they pulled up from their attack. A third staggered, suddenly trailing smoke. This because, unfortunately, Simy was wrong about something else: the Grik did have planes.
“Jumpin’ Jesus! It’s the Japs!” Silva shouted in a
mazement.
* * *
* * *
Colonel Chack-Sab-At stepped slowly aft, limping slightly, holding a bandage pressed firmly against his side where a Grik bayonet had bidden him—the very last person off the wreck of Santa Catalina—farewell. Now he unconsciously avoided Itaa’s great guns as they recoiled inward, trying to keep his eyes on the sooty, debris-choked spot where USS Ris had ceased to exist. So many good people, he lamented, put through so much, only to end like that. He didn’t have words for how he felt as his tear-sheened eyes searched for struggling figures in the water. He didn’t expect to see any, and he wasn’t surprised. He did see the three huge Grik dreadnaughts creeping around the bend, however, and his amber eyes burned with hate. He wanted to go after them, kill them, but that was impossible. There were still two cruisers dogging Itaa, bashing her apart even as she returned the favor, and they’d be lucky to make it to shore as it was. He glanced at the sky. Where are our planes?
Hardly noticed, Major Enrico Galay paced beside Chack, hovering. They were all exhausted, but Chack had also lost a lot of blood. He’d seen young Major Abel Cook wounded and carried aboard, watched Gutfeld’s gallant and equally young Lemurian XO, Captain Flaar, repeatedly bayoneted and torn apart. He’d basically witnessed the death of half his Raiders and Gutfeld’s Marines, and now he’d seen Ris’s death, along with so many others he knew. Still, Galay wasn’t concerned whether Chack would continue on regardless, until he was dead or his job was done. He worried only that the young Lemurian they all admired and relied on so much might simply collapse.
“There are our planes!” Galay said excitedly, pointing barely a hundred yards ahead at the space between them and Arracca—a space so choked with Grik galleys that the enemy cruisers had finally been forced to bear away.
“Taarget the gaalleys now, Cap-i-taan Jarrik!” Chack shouted toward where Keje’s cousin Jarrik-Fas stood beside the wheel. “And see whaat more speed you can coax from this ship. We must run her as far aground as we can.” He turned to Galay, as if emerging from a daze. “Do we have comm?”
“Just now repaired. The aerial was shot away,” Galay replied, glad to see the renewed energy in his commander. Nancys and Fleashooters roared past just ahead, flailing at the galleys.
“Jaap planes!” shrieked a lookout, and Chack blinked to hear something so unexpected. Then he saw them. They were Jap-Grik planes, just like they’d seen at Mahe and Zanzibar! But what were they doing here? An instant later, when two Nancys were destroyed and another wrecked, he knew. “Report this to Cap-i-taan Reddy at once!” he shouted. “How maany are there?”
“Cap-i-taan Reddy knows!” came a response from the talker by a bank of voice tubes behind the tiller. “Our planes seen ’em! We got more pursuiters on the waay—” The talker’s voice rose. “But they was all loaded for ground attaack! Is gonna be awhile. For now, we got only Arracca’s six pursuiters in the air!”
“Signaal their flight leader to lay off the gaalleys and attaack the Jaaps!”
“Ay, ay, Col-nol!”
“Brace yourselves!” Jarrik-Fas roared through a speaking tube. Chack turned to stare at the shore, coming up fast, and Major Galay actually grabbed him and pulled him to the deck, onto his lap.
* * *
* * *
Silva’s eye was fastened on the surreal dogfight that erupted over them as six Fleashooters tangled with eight or ten Jap-Grik fighters, the like of which he’d never, ever, expected to see again. And it was the same Jap/Griks! The same green-and-sky-blue planes wearing the very same glaring red meatball! Shouts tore his gaze away and he watched as the battered cruiser—the last to leave Santy Cat, so hopefully Chack was in her—bash its way ashore. It was going slower when it hit and wasn’t nearly as big, but it didn’t draw as much water as Arracca, so it made it to within fifty yards of shore before it ground to a halt. But the way it lurched and juddered, it probably encountered just as many rocks with its frailer hull.
“Take over here,” he said, handing his Doom Stomper to Lawrence. “Keep movin’ every able body with a weapon to the line.” With that, he was off and running toward an empty launch that was shoving off. Gutfeld and Horn both looked at Lawrence, holding the big rifle as if that meant he was now in charge. Quickly, the Sa’aaran leaned the weapon against a crate, part of the massive pile of supplies they’d been taking off Arracca, in a gesture that implied “Not me!” All three started shouting orders for more boats, more hands.
With Silva directing the ’Cat coxswain—the only other person in the boat—to head for Itaa instead of returning to Arracca for another load, the launch rumbled out to the newest wreck this tragic stretch of river had claimed. A lot of the galleys that’d been strafed were just milling around, too damaged to continue or unsure what to do. Silva sprayed a clip from his Thompson at one, earning a few returning shots. “Hey!” objected the coxswain.
“Shut up!” Silva growled, inserting another magazine. For good measure, he emptied that one at a Jap-Grik plane zooming overhead, firing at Arracca.
“You gonna get ’em aall shootin’ at us!” the Coxswain complained.
“Nothin’ new about that.” Another strafing Jap-Grik plane swooped on Arracca but suddenly developed a dark smoke trail. Silva realized it had a P1 on its tail. Starting to spin, the Jap-Grik arced down and slammed into the top of Arracca’s flight deck, exploding and spewing burning fuel. Furious, Silva saw the P1-C Fleashooter impact Arracca’s side, most of the aircraft’s tumbling, burning carcass scattering itself inside, on the hangar deck. Another Jap-Grik fighter pulled up and barreled away. “Goddamn Japs!” Silva seethed, but in reality he had no idea whether the enemy shot the Fleashooter down or the Arracca pilot, untrained in dogfighting, had been too focused on his target. It didn’t matter. Arracca was burning now, and with almost everyone but Tassanna, her gun’s crews, and some of the worst wounded ashore, there was no one left to fight the fires.
“No puttin’ that out,” Silva growled as they neared Itaa’s savaged side. “At least Tassanna’ll be spared burnin’ her own Home.” Looking closely at Itaa for the first time, he was amazed it made it to shore. Its armor had been beefed up by Kurokawa and it was probably tougher than the new Grik cruisers, but it had taken a hell of a pounding. Only a stump remained of the mainmast, and the foremast was completely gone. The funnel, amazingly still streaming gray oil smoke (as opposed to the black coming from the coal-fired Grik), was a sieve. Half the ship’s big guns were dismounted and her bulwarks had almost been battered away, exposing the shambles around the few guns still in operation. Aside from all that, the rocks she’d run up on had torn her bottom out, and her stern, still afloat, was quickly settling.
“Chackie!” Silva called. “Chackie! Where’s Colonel Chack, goddammit!”
“Here!” shouted down a form, but the face was unrecognizable through the blood-clotted, smudged, and fire-curled fur.
“Get your blotchy tail down here so I can get you ashore!”
Chack glared past the growing defensive position at the just as quickly growing Grik horde beyond. “Is the enemy about to attaack?”
“Whadda you think?” Silva demanded incredulously. “O’ course they are. It’s what they do! We may have a minute er two, but that’s all the more reason to get you ashore to take goddamn charge!”
“Tassanna raad-ioed that you’ve done well enough on your own,” Chack countered. “I haave to get these people off, and there are three Grik BB’s bearing down.” A huge splash right alongside almost tossed Silva from the boat, underscoring Chack’s point.
“Which you can’t do a damn thing about!” Silva stressed.
“He is right,” agreed Jarrik-Fas, whom Silva did recognize. He and Enrico Galay had joined Chack by the splintered rail. “Take your troops ashore; prepare for your battle on land.” Jarrik blinked. “Arracca is abandoning even now—she must.” It was true. The fire on the flight deck had almo
st burned itself out, but the hangar deck, its timbers long soaked with spilled oil and fuel, was already becoming an inferno. Steam gushed from the bays as fixed water sprinklers fought the blaze, but with the great ship’s boiler rooms flooding and no one left in them, the pumps were already dying. If more evidence was required, Arracca’s guns had finally gone silent, and great splashes erupted on her unengaged shoreward side as the huge, rectangular wooden rafts she’d used at anchor for seaplane docks slapped down. Silva had no doubt Tassanna meant to use them to quickly offload the last of her people.
“This ship,” Jarrik continued gruffly, “afloat or not, is still on the water. It remains her and her crew’s duty to engage enemies of the Union on the surfaace of any waater, no maatter how putrid!” He actually grinned. “And need I remind you, Col-nol, that I still out-raank you at sea—where I believe your permanent raank of boatswain’s mate second has somewhat . . . staag-nated?”
Chack gazed at the older Lemurian he’d looked up to all his life, then tightly embraced him. A heavy shot struck Itaa aft, and a plane roared by overhead. “Go,” Jarrik said. “You waste time.”
“Yeah, get a move on, Chackie,” Silva agreed anxiously, looking west. Six more launches had joined his, and all the precious little vessels were in danger. The closest Grik BB was little more than a mile away now, and someone cried, “Get down!” as a Jap-Grik plane strafed them, launching splinters and little geysers of spray.
“All Raiders, Third Maa-rines”—Chack glanced at Jarrik and saw his nod—“and any other personnel not essential to fighting this ship will enter the boats alongside as quickly and orderly as you caan.” He hesitated and blinked something close to sick desperation. “This includes waalking wounded, but those too baadly hurt to move must stay aboard for now.” His voice turned harsher. “Do not forget your weapons, and any aammunition you caan find! I haave no use for un-aarmed troops!”
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