Ganymede

by Priest, Cherie

  From the doorway, Josephine fought to manage their expectations. “Half of these charges have been in boxes for years. We’ve already burned though a third of them, trying to pick out pieces that aren’t so damaged by damp and mold that they’re liable to shoot.”

  Undaunted, the captain triumphantly declared, “Josie’s right, but when they work, they work like crazy! Troost, whatever you’re doing back there—”

  “I’m smoking.”

  “I can smell it. Put down your cigarette and start sorting out those shells. Pick the good ones, and line them up for the ladies to fire. Houjin!”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Where’s the next target? Who’s closest?”

  “Ninety degrees to the north, another hundred yards that way. Maybe more. Hard to tell from here, sir.”

  “Deaderick, can you set a course?”

  “I’ll figure it out.”

  “Great. Fang, take us to the right, would you?”

  Fang nodded.

  “Ladies, load up another one. Hell, load up two or three!”

  Ruthie said back, “It doesn’t work like that!” But Josephine shushed her, saying, “We’ll get them ready. Give the order, Andan, and we’ll load and lock them down.”

  “Great. Here we go,” he added under his breath, and engaged the lift thruster. “Huey, work your scope. I’m taking us down a notch. Has anyone spotted you yet?”

  “No, sir, I don’t think so.”

  “Just the swimmer, then. I think we’re still secure.”

  “You think we’re still secure?” cried Troost, out by the charges.

  He did not clarify or reassure. “Let’s see how many of these fish we can shoot out of the barrel before they’re on to us.”

  “And then what?” asked Deaderick.

  “Then we kick up the top ball turret and Troost can cut loose on anybody who’s still afloat. All right, men, let’s line ’em up and knock ’em down.”

  “Men?” called Josephine from the other room.

  “You know what I mean!” he shouted back. The other boat was within sight, and moving toward them. “Huey, is it just me, or is that boat coming our direction?”

  “I think they’re moving toward the ship we just shot. Looking to pick up survivors, or see what happened.”

  “I’d rather they didn’t get that far in their rescue efforts,” Cly declared.

  Deaderick said, “Agreed. Don’t let them.”

  “Can you adjust for their movement, incoming?”

  “If I have to, Captain. Give me a second.… All right—bay charges set, aimed, ready to shoot.”

  “Ladies, you hear that?”

  “Why do I get lumped in with the ladies?” asked Troost.

  Josephine shouted at him, “Why do we always get lumped in with the men?” And then over him, she loudly confirmed to the captain, “We hear you!”

  “Fire!”

  The bay door slammed. “Fire in the charge bay!” Ruthie announced with wicked, exuberant glee.

  And a second enormous bullet blew free of Ganymede, propelled toward the bottom of a Texian boat that was swiftly incoming. Everyone on board knew the approaching craft was moving fast, despite the way it appeared to crawl across the bay. From their strange position near the shallow seafloor, everything on the surface appeared to creep.

  The charge in its hydrodynamic shell left a billowing trail of bubbles and a roiling, curling tail of disturbed liquid in its wake. It crashed against the bottom of the boat and lodged there briefly, while the ship bumbled back and forth, shuddering and shaking in response to the hole smashed in its underside. It did its best to settle again to a stable position on the rippling water of the enclosed bay, even as it began to take on water.

  Everyone waited. Josephine ran out of the charge bay.

  She searched the window for the target, and spying it, she hollered, “Explode, Goddamn you! Explode!”

  But nothing exploded, and given another half a minute, the shell toppled out of the hole it’d made, sinking down to the silt of the bay floor and settling there, where it did nothing more interesting than stick halfway into the muck.

  Cly stood up, and Josephine turned around. Their eyes met.

  He didn’t need to say it, but he did anyway—partly to Josephine’s back as she dashed back into the charge bay. “Get another one! Fire another one before they realize what’s happened! Launch another shell while we still have the advantage!”

  She dived headlong into the bay and gestured to Troost and Ruthie. “The next one. Set it up! Load it!”

  Troost was on it. The small man was stronger than he looked; he lifted the next shell in line and dropped it onto the track, then stepped out of the way. Ruthie was right behind him. She shoved the shell along the track and tried to slam the round door behind it, locking it into the firing chute. It stuck, and she swore at it.

  Josephine pushed her out of the way and threw her weight against it, bruising her elbow badly in the process but shutting the door all the same. It smacked closed with a pop of the seals and a click of the latch. Josephine pulled the lever to spark the fuse. When it didn’t take, she yanked it again to light the thing.

  “Ruthie, I need another fuse.…”

  “Oui, madame! It is ready to go!”

  Indeed, the new fuse caught and lit and burned, and Josephine called out, “Fire in the charge bay!”

  “Deaderick?” Cly asked, wondering about the angles and direction, but Early had already corrected for the boat’s continued trajectory, and he announced, “All set, sir!”

  The charge fired, and a third big bullet went billowing toward the boat, almost too close, almost so close that Cly had second thoughts. He turned to Fang, who shrugged—then he turned to Deaderick and asked, “Are we too—?”

  But before he had time to finish the question, the charge connected and blew into a thousand shards, propelled by gunpowder and fire. It shattered and split, right in the middle, and the boat began to sink—this one faster than the first.

  A huge—and hugely heavy—gun slid downward. The shell had come up right underneath it, and now the gun was falling, its weight pulling the craft apart. The antiaircraft piece had been bolted to the deck, and it took a slab of this same deck with it as it tumbled down through the serene, thick water. Pieces of wood shattered, and splintered planking came raining down through the swamp, then up again as it left the weight of the gun and its fixings.

  Everything that could float, did. Everything that could not, drifted to the bottom.

  Josephine came running out again, with Ruthie on her heels. “Did we hit it? Did we take it?”

  “We took it!” Houjin shouted. “It’s gone down! I can’t see it anymore!”

  “Look around that visor, kid!” Cly pointed at the window.

  Houjin peeled his face away from the scope, revealing a red groove around his eyes and down his cheeks, where he’d pressed himself so hard against the seam that it’d left an imprint.

  “There it is!” he all but shrieked.

  “Yeah, kid. There it is…,” the captain said with a bit of wonder taking the edge off his voice. “How many more?”

  “Um?…” Houjin crushed his face back against the visor. “Four more. I can see four. We should be down to two, but the other two—and they’re all Texian—must have come from around the island. They’re coming out to help. They’re not shooting at the airships anymore, so that’s something, isn’t it?”

  “It sure is. Now, where’s the nearest boat?”

  “About sixty … maybe eighty yards north-northeast. Turn us, and I’ll tell you when we’re lined up with them.”

  “Where are Mumler and Little?”

  “I don’t see them, sir. Wait—one of them is right behind us, and he says … he says … he’s telling us to head deeper, to the north.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know!” the boy said, exasperated. “Maybe we’re running into shallow territory. Can you see the bottom?”
/>   “Not well,” Cly admitted.

  “Not at all,” Deaderick amended.

  “Fine. Follow the lead of … whichever one of them it is. You can’t tell?”

  “It’s dark, sir. They’re keeping low. People are shooting—everyone up there, everyone is shooting.”

  The captain grunted and said, “Good thing for us we’re down here. I hope those fellows stay out of trouble.”

  Deaderick turned around and said, “Houjin—do you see the other one? Anywhere? Did he get shot out, or is he just holding back?”

  “I can’t tell, sir. It’s too dark. It’s just too damn dark.”

  At that moment, a shudder shook Ganymede, and its lower portion dragged. Cly and Deaderick leaned forward, and Houjin clutched at the scope to keep from falling—and from the other room came the rustle and tumble of knees and elbows clattering and rolling.

  “What was that?” Houjin asked frantically. “What’s going on? I didn’t see anything!”

  Deaderick took a stab at an answer. “Sandbar? Are we stuck? Captain—are we still—?”

  “Not stuck, no,” he said, and shoved harder on the propulsion levers, and on the depth setters. “But caught. That’s what our friend up top was trying to tell us. Shit, all right. Hang on—and Huey, drop the scope back down, just for now. I’ve got to raise us to keep us going. We’re snagged on the sand, and if we don’t get some lift, we’ll have a hell of a time pulling ourselves loose.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “Everyone good in the charge bay?” Deaderick shouted the question.

  “All good over here!” Josephine replied. “Just get us moving again!”

  “We never stopped,” Cly swore, but he worked the levers with the passion of someone who was terrified he might be wrong.

  Finally, with a lurch and a thrust, Ganymede came free and rose with a bound, breaking the surface—much to the captain’s discomfort. The waterline sloshed at the top of the window, briefly revealing the fire in the sky above, and a flash of red and gold, flickering tracer bullets, and small explosions as ammunition collided with armor.

  “Huey, get your scope back up!” the captain ordered.

  “Yes, sir!” the boy answered, and turned the crank to raise it again, even as he smushed his face against the visor and tried to look through it, though there was nothing yet to see. “Got it, sir. Hold us steady, sir—the water keeps washing over, and I can’t … All right, it’s good. I can see again.”

  “Great. Now tell me this—did the two nearest boats see us, when we breached just now?”

  He hesitated. “They’re coming our way, or it might be they’re coming toward the sunk-down boats.”

  “But either way, they’re headed for us?”

  “Looks like it.”

  “To blazes with the lot of them, then. Troost!” Cly yelled. “Get in here! Deaderick, can you show him around the top ball turret and get him situated?”

  “If he makes it fast!”

  “Fast is our only speed right now. We don’t have time for anything else,” he noted, swinging the chair around and seeing Troost come tearing through the rounded charge bay door.

  “Right here, Captain. Early, set me up and I’ll start shooting. We’ll hit ’em from above and below, both.”

  The captain said, “Good man,” and then flashed Fang a worried look. Those Texian ships … he could see the underside of one approaching, and before he had time to ask where the rest of them were, Houjin cleared it up for them.

  “Captain, I see three Texas boats, all incoming. The fourth has headed back around the far side of the island. It looks like one of them doesn’t have an antiaircraft gun and it’s moving a lot faster. It’ll be on us before the others.”

  “Ladies, get us another charge loaded and ready!”

  It wouldn’t be shootable until Deaderick returned, because God knew nobody else on board had the faintest idea how to calibrate the weaponry, but better to have it ready for firing than add to the delay of setup. In the back of the craft, Cly could hear footsteps and scrambling, and then the squeal of metal being drawn down a track unwillingly—followed by a ratcheting sound that meant something was either going up or coming down, with gritty, forced precision.

  Muffled conversation occurred, and then, without warning, a spray of bullets bucked from the top of Ganymede’s hull, giving the whole vehicle an excuse to shake—and nearly giving the occupants their death of fright, even though everyone knew it was coming. The suddenness of it, and the volume of it … and then the quivering of the compartment … it was too much, too fast. Bullets strafed across the water and clomped against hulls or battered guns and sank through the torsos and limbs of men on deck.

  All these things hit the water, and some of them sank. Some of them floated.

  Deaderick hustled back into the main cabin, and into the engineer’s seat. “He’s got it,” he announced, and immediately began to configure the charge bays for firing. “What’s our next target—what’s … what’s closest? Which one?” he amended, realizing that there were now two more boats within their immediate view. Never mind the darkness; the small suns of burning hydrogen, rockets, and artillery fire gave the sky a peculiar glow that offset the bottoms of the Texian boats, making them easier to see from down below.

  Cly didn’t care which one went down first, and he almost said so. Then he changed his mind. “Huey, which one doesn’t have the antiaircraft?”

  “The one to the left. To the south, I mean. The one that was moving fastest.”

  “I didn’t see which one was fastest,” the captain confessed. “Got distracted. Left craft, Early. Ready, aim, and tell the ladies when to fire.”

  He fixed a switch and called, “Fire!”

  With a pounding sound and a protracted swish, the shell barreled across the bay and collided with the leftmost Texian patrol boat—which was bowled nearly over by the impact, and then came utterly apart when the charge caught, and blew, and sent fragments of the boat in a million directions at once. It sank almost immediately, without the stuttering hesitation of the first boat—and without the dignified fractures of the second. This boat was in bits before it went under, more kindling than craft.

  Several corpses plunged in with it, lacerated and bleeding from thick slivers of timber or the charge itself. A stray limb went spinning by, slapping against the window and leaving a streak of gore that washed away quickly, swiped aside by the plant life of the bay and the pace of the Ganymede, which churned forward toward the remaining boat.

  “Huey, does this last one have antiaircraft?”

  “It looks like a support cruiser, but I don’t see any signs that it’s firing from the deck. It’s turned the wrong direction. I can’t see it clearly enough to tell for sure.”

  But from their own deck equivalent, Troost was shooting like a maniac—threading the bullets into the automatic firing machine with the unmitigated joy of a man who finally has something to do. He swept the water as well as he could, for the range wasn’t as good as true antiaircraft, but he picked a line of men off the support cruiser’s deck, or so Houjin narrated above the din of the Gatling clone above.

  “He’s just about blown the pilothouse clear off the cruiser!” Houjin cried. “It’s falling down. The whole roof is collapsing—he hit a support, and cut right through it. That boat won’t do anyone any good, not for a good long time! But, oh! Captain!”

  “What is it, Huey?”

  “The last boat, the one I lost before—I see it again. Coming up around the west side of the island, and it’s got an antiaircraft mount, and … and … they see us, sir. They see us!” He swallowed, looked around the visor, and asked, “Sir, what do we do?”

  “Where are Little and Mumler?”

  “Can’t locate them, sir. Wait—I see one of them, making for the south-southwest.”

  Deaderick said, “He’s headed for the islands, the bottleneck. He thinks you’ve done enough damage, and he’ll meet us out there. Goddamn, I pray it’s the
both of them.”

  “Can’t tell, Mr. Early. I’m real sorry. But this other boat, it’s coming in—not as fast as the other one, but fast. And they’re dropping the antiaircraft, sir—it’s pivoting on the deck. They’re going to shoot us!”

  Deaderick’s eyes went wide. “Can they even do that? With a gun that big?”

  “They’re going to try,” Cly predicted. “Those things are heavy as hell. I don’t know if they’ll be able to brace it off the side of the boat, down at us. Do you have any idea if this thing can take a hit like that?”

  “No idea at all. I’d say it’ll depend on how far away we are, and what caliber they’re shooting.”

  “Tell Troost to get down from there. We’re going to drop, and I don’t want to drown him or blind him.”

  Early said, “The turret is sealed. He’s in more danger of getting shot off the top than of running out of air.”

  “Fine, then let him stay.”

  Then Early second-guessed himself. “But if he does get blown off the hull like a wart off a frog, we won’t be able to sink again—not without taking on water.”

  “Son of a bitch. You’re right. It’s not worth the risk. We’ll close it up and rely on the depth charges. Troost!” he bellowed at the top of his lungs. “Get back down here, now!”

  Whether or not Troost heard him, he couldn’t say—but the engineer didn’t reply, except with another thread of bullets. Their kick rocked Ganymede gently, but it worried the captain. “Huey, go drag him out of that turret, would you? Drop the scope for a minute and run. Early, you got coordinates on that patrol boat?”

  “Setting them up. Josephine, Ruthie, line up two in a row—these guys are coming in right on top of us!”

  “Oui, darling!”

  “Fire when ready!” he yelled at them, and ready meant “right now,” for that’s how quickly the charge was sent slamming out of the chute and up to the Texian boat. It hit home, right at the seam under the prow, and when it exploded, the patrol boat dipped down, dragging water into the hull with every foot forward. “Fire a second one, do it now!”

  They did, and this one hit beside the hole the first charge had made, effectively turning the boat into matchsticks that billowed underwater in a cloud—so fine, they looked like filthy smoke, or a blotch of dumped diesel murking through the water.