Straits of Hell: Destroyermen

by Taylor Anderson

  Conversely, the Empire of the New Britain Isles was a seafaring nation. Its sailors were already well acquainted with steam power and relatively sophisticated ship designs, and Imperial vessels now under construction should have been able to cope with armored Grik warships. But those they had in service, with their exposed paddlewheels, were as hopelessly outclassed in “western” battle lines as dedicated sailors like Donaghey had become. Therefore, a growing number of “Impie” officers, particularly from nearer possessions such as Respite Island, were coming west to learn their trade while ships were made for them back home.

  One such officer was Lieutenant Stanly Raj, who was acting as Jarrik-Fas’s executive officer on Tassat. He now stood beside his shorter, bear-shaped Lemurian captain on the DD’s quarterdeck near the exposed helm. The ship was currently hove to and still at morning GQ, her Nancy scout plane being prepared for launch. Tassat had no catapult and had to set the plane in the water where it would take off on its own.

  “A little rough for this, don’t you think?” Raj asked, gauging the wind and sea.

  “Almost,” Jarrik confirmed, “but my pilots are good. They’ve lifted from seas like this many times.” He blinked. “Any worse and I wouldn’t let them, though, and I might still have them divert to Grik City instead of trying to recover aboard here later, if the sea gets any friskier.” He scratched the reddish brown fur above his eyes. “Especially since Haakar-Faask lost her plane, an’ we couldn’t get it replaced. Ours is the only one left out here. But it’s also the only eyes we’ll get in the sky today, and we gotta stay on guard.”

  “It does feel a bit… lonely out here at times,” Raj observed wryly. “I concur that the Grik on the islands are no real threat, but with only our two ships standing between Grik City and the continent to the west—where all the Grik in the world reside… I certainly hope Captain Reddy is right about the Seychelles.”

  Jarrik grunted. “Me too. And he probably is. Reports have a lot of Grik ships gathered there.” He blinked. “But I known Cap-i-taan Reddy a long time, an’ sure as he might be, he’s gonna want to watch for sneakin’.” He grinned. “That’s why we’re here!”

  The Nancy slapped the water and tried to surge against the side of the ship, but the boom held it away. Moments later, its observer propped the engine and when it was running smooth, the pilot pointed it away and the shackle attaching it to the boom was released. Immediately, the plane wallowed away from the ship.

  “Secure from special air detail!” Raj called. “Resume course!” Piercing whistles shrieked, and men and ’Cats heaved on lines, bringing the yards back around where the sails could bite. Almost immediately, they felt the ship surge ahead.

  “By the way,” Jarrik said to Raj, “congratulations! It seems the victory at the Battle of Malpelo was more complete than first suspected. A large number of Dom ships that were thought to have escaped were later captured, severely damaged, and unable to keep up with their friends. Combined with reports from Fort Defiance, it seems things may be looking up in the East at last.”

  “Indeed, and thank you. The aftermath of battles on land and sea is often quite confused, it appears,” Raj observed. “What seems like a defeat, or perhaps a draw in this case, may turn out to be a great victory, under further scrutiny.”

  “It is natural,” Jarrik said. “I’ve been in enough battles to understand that one rarely knows what’s happening beyond one’s own view, much less how an entire, sprawling battle proceeds. And it’s equally natural to concentrate on one’s own wounds before devoting much interest to how badly one’s opponent is hurt.” He snorted a Lemurian chuckle. “And in this case it seems High Ahd-mi-raal Jenks was quite busy gently probing his broken nose while what remained of the Dom fleet dragged itself away, trailing its entrails!”

  “An appropriate, if somewhat disrespectful metaphor,” Raj conceded a little stiffly.

  Jarrik blinked amusement. “No disrespect. He won a great victory, as did Gener-aal Shinya. And like all victories, it remains to be seen how complete they were. But certainly the war in the East can now proceed more briskly?”

  “Let us hope so, and hope also that Captain Reddy can achieve a similar victory north of here.”

  “As you say, ‘indeed.’” Jarrik swished his tail, watching the Nancy disappear in the sky to the south. “Malpelo was a helluva fight, and there will be another one today. Just two days ago,” he said, his tone turning somber, “Santy Cat and Arracca’s battle group finally joined Walker east of the Seychelles after a hard voyage. They immediately proceeded to a point fifty miles south of the islands, and already—right now, most likely—the first planes from Salissa and Arracca are closing on the enemy anchorage. Soon the bombs will fall, the new Grik rockets will rise, and destruction will reign. People will die. Let us hope that surprise has been achieved and the cost will be light. But there will be a cost.”

  For the next half hour, Tassat and Haakar-Faask cruised on companionably, alone in the “Go Away Strait,” with nothing but the Comoros Islands to share the sea as far as the horizon in all directions but to the east, where Madagascar’s low, dark form could be seen. And there was near silence aboard Tassat except for the pounding rush of the sea and the wind in her rigging. Everyone knew a great battle was shaping up to the north and time must pass before any reports were made. It remained unknown whether the enemy had the ability to monitor their wireless transmissions, but they proceeded under the assumption that it did. The codes had been changed, after cryptic orders to do so were received, and traffic was being kept to a normal minimum to prevent any listening enemy from suspecting anything was up, just in case.

  Tassat’s Lemurian signal officer scampered up the companionway from below and stood before Jarrik and Raj, eyes wide and blinking distress.

  “Well? What is it?” Jarrik demanded. “Has the attack begun?”

  “I, aah, not have news of the Saay-shells attaack yet, Cap-i-taan, but our scout makes a report!”

  “Then spill it!” Jarrik demanded. “What have they seen?”

  The ’Cat gulped and swished her tail in agitation. “Grik ships! Hundreds of ’em! All old Indiaa-maans like they use to carry warriors only, is thirty miles sou-sout’west o’ here an’ comin’ this way!”

  “How many ‘hundreds’?” Jarrik snapped.

  “I—I don’t know.”

  “Then find out—and send to all stations: whatever the Grik are doing in the Seychelles, they’re also hitting us here, now. Ask Gener-aal Safir Maraan to release all armed auxiliaries to join us near our current position. With this wind, they might just make it in time. Tell her also that we’ll direct her aircraft as best we can, once we get a better fix on the enemy position.” He paused. “And tell her that if the Grik are indeed in their ‘hundreds,’ we can’t stop them alone and she must be prepared for a ground assault upon the city.” He continued grimly. “Even if no surface elements survive, she should be able to predict where the enemy will strike by air observations, and deploy accordingly.” Blinking irony, he looked at Lieutenant Raj. “It seems there’ll be a ‘helluva fight’ here today as well.”

  Over the Seychelles

  Captain Jis-Tikkar, COFO of Salissa’s 1st Air Wing, and back with his Home where he belonged, led Salissa’s and Arracca’s combined air wings against the Grik anchorage in the Seychelles from the single seat of “his” P-1 Mosquito Hawk, or “Fleashooter.” Much as he’d have preferred to fly “his” strange P-40E configured as a floatplane, that aircraft, draggy as it was with the big Japanese pontoons bolted on, was still too fast to keep formation with his other planes. Besides, as strapped as they were, he considered the P-40 too valuable to risk in this role—whether he survived to fly it again or not. Big Sal had only two short squadrons left, just under twenty Nancys, but Arracca had sent forty, plus a dozen “Fleashooters” configured for antiship attack, with no guns and a pair of fifty-pound bombs. Not since the air attacks preceding the First Battle of Madras had he had so many planes under
his command—and now he had far better bombs, and voice communications via the miniaturized TBS sets now installed in all planes in the West! As his planes approached the anchorage, it looked like they’d achieved complete surprise. The ironclad Grik battleships, or “waagons,” just lay there, moored nose to tail, and there was no smoke rising from their funnels. They didn’t even have steam up! None of the cruisers was in view, so perhaps they were clustered around one of the other islands? But there were plenty of the ubiquitous Grik Indiamen that the enemy used to transport troops and supplies.

  “Taally ho!” he cried into the clumsy microphone mounted on a boom in front of his face. “Odd-numbered flights target the waagons. The rest of you, burn down those transports!” Replies came fast and his planes bored in. It was then that he realized that not all the Grik were asleep. He’d examined the new antiair rockets they’d captured at Grik City. They were about two tails long and very narrow, with a nose shaped like a bullet and topped with a rather delicate-looking contact fuse like a big musket cap glued to a piece of tubing. Three fins were positioned toward the rear. In most respects, they looked just like oversize signal rockets to him, and if they hadn’t already lost some planes to the things, he might’ve discounted them, imagining how hard it would be to hit a plane with a signal rocket. But he’d never seen them in action before and when clustered shocks of the things jetted into the sky in initially dense, but diverging patterns, he was surprised both by their speed and their sheer numbers. Just like everything the Grik do, numbers are what make them dangerous, he realized. A lot of the rockets went wild, cartwheeling in the sky, disrupting the flight of others, or just flipping manically along the ground until they went off with small explosions. But a truly stunning number rose to meet his planes. His first “vee” was already past; they’d fired late, but when he looked back, he saw smoky tendrils intersect the next formations, followed by several flashes of light. At least four planes fell out of formation, one completely out of control with its wing peeling away. Another drifted down almost lazily, in scattered, smoldering pieces.

  Grimly touching the polished 7.7-mm cartridge case piercing his left ear for luck, he bored in on the ships below. Closer he got, closer, his left hand fingering the bomb release lever, caressing it gently, waiting for the exact instant he’d practiced so often. The first great ironclad loomed large below him—and he suddenly began noticing things.

  “Abort! Abort the run! All planes abort!” he cried into his mic as he pulled back on the stick, still not sure if he’d really seen what he thought. Banking right, he looked down and saw that several planes had already released, and bombs exploded on or near two of the huge ships below. Great wooden splinters blasted away from one ship, leaving a gaping wound in the sloping casemate, but there was no secondary explosion. Most telling of all, the damage seemed too extensive to have been caused without setting something off inside.

  “Abort your runs, daammit!” he shouted.

  “What’s the dope, sur?” “Why? What?” “Did I hear ‘abort’?” “What’s goin’ on?” came a flurry of queries.

  “Those waagons have no guns! No armor! Their boilers are cold, an’ there’s nobody home!”

  “You mean they’re not real?”

  Tikker continued his orbit, still looking down. “They’re real enough, just not finished, I bet. No armor bolted on, an’ no iron shutters over empty gunports. They’re just wood, painted black. No iron but the funnels—an’ I bet the funnels’re dummies!” He saw more explosions, crackling among the anchored Indiamen and the flies where they’d assumed the enemy encampments were. “Even-numbered flights, abort!” he shouted. “Everybody abort, I said!”

  “We do!” came an immediate response. “Rockets is fallin’ on our taa-gits!” Tikker stared a moment, then barked a laugh. That was something even he hadn’t thought of. With their contact fuses, of course any Grik rockets that didn’t smack a plane would go off when they hit the ground—wherever that might be. Just further proof they didn’t much care what happened to the ships and equipment they’d gathered here.

  “Skipper,” came another tinny voice. “The Indiaa-mans—they’s wrecks! Old, they look like, an’ no way fit for sea. Half are beached or sunk in shallow water!”

  “But why?” came a confused shout.

  “The rockets are real! Griks is still shootin’ at us!” someone else warned.

  Tikker took a deep breath. “All pilots, listen up,” he shouted, and the chatter died away. “There’re Grik down there, all right, but I bet just enough to shoot the rockets. We’ll take a closer look, but I think there’s only one thing that can possibly be goin’ on here.”

  USS Walker

  “They suckered us,” Matt said grimly, handing the message form to Spanky, who passed it to Herring.

  “I think it’s obvious why the cruisers are absent,” Herring said. “They towed the decoy fleet here and then pulled out.”

  “Obviously,” Matt agreed. “But why decoys—and expensive decoys at that, even if they’re just empty hulks—and why here?”

  Herring pursed his lips. “The Grik are not stupid. Not any longer. They’ve seen that their large battleships, at least as currently designed, are expensive in time and materials to produce, and not particularly effective. They’re extremely vulnerable to our torpedoes as well. My guess is that they expended these incomplete hulks, minus the iron they mean to use on other projects, expressly because they knew how tempting they would be to us.”

  “To sucker us,” Spanky repeated sourly.

  “Indeed. The cruisers were complete, just as capable in a surface action, and far less costly to produce and crew. They have saved them for later.”

  “Probably be better protected from the air when we see them again too,” Bernie Sandison supplied.

  Matt nodded. “But they drew us here for a reason,” he said, staring out at the gray day. Ed Palmer raced onto the bridge with another message form and breathlessly handed it over. Matt scanned it quickly, then slapped it against his leg. “Here’s why,” he snarled. “Jarrik-Fas on Tassat reports a big Grik fleet of transports approaching the Comoros Islands from the south, and all he’s got to stand in its way are Tassat, Haakar-Faask, and whatever Safir Maraan can scrape up to send him, which isn’t much. A few lightly armed DEs and fast transports! Boy, did we get suckered!” He took a deep breath and gazed around the bridge before his eyes settled back on Ed. “Message to all ships,” he said. “Recover aircraft as quickly as you can, and turn ’em around for an immediate flight to support Jarrik. They’ll have to rearm and refuel at Grik City.”

  Herring stepped to the chart table and put his finger on the cracked, filmy Plexiglas protecting the chart above their position. “It’s about two hundred and fifty miles, Captain, and the weather is deteriorating,” Herring warned.

  “I know. But they can get there in about four hours, counting turnaround. It’ll take us eight to ten hours at flank speed in this sea.”

  Spanky whistled. “Hard on the boilers, and we’ll be sucking fumes by the time we get there,” he pointed out.

  “I know, but maybe we’ll be close enough to pick up any aircrews that can’t make it.”

  Herring cleared his throat. “Do I understand that you mean to steam Walker to aid Jarrik-Fas all alone? What difference can this one ship hope to make?”

  “No choice,” Matt said. “And we’re not going to be much help to Jarrik. Whatever he’s gotten into—what I’ve gotten him into,” he added bitterly, “will probably be over by the time we get there. Let’s just hope he can hold them long enough for us to get between what’s left of the invasion fleet and Grik City. Santy Cat, Salissa, Arracca, and the rest of the escorts will proceed at their best possible speed, but we’re looking at sixteen, eighteen hours before they can get there. That’s too long.” He turned in his chair to face Herring full on. “And as for the other, I’d have thought by now that you’d have a far better appreciation of what ‘this one ship’ and her crew can acco
mplish!” He turned back to Ed. “Send it! Helm, make your course one eight zero. All ahead flank!”

  CHAPTER 33

  ////// Grik City

  September 17, 1944

  “I ser’ you, Lord!” Hij Geerki exclaimed, throwing himself on the swept stone floor of General Queen Safir Maraan’s HQ in the former “Celestial Palace.” All conversation halted for a moment, in surprise at the strange creature’s behavior. Lieutenant Colonel Saachic had been suggesting using his me-naak mounted cavalry—essentially dragoons now—as a rapid mobile reserve, while General Grisa, commanding 6th Division, and General Mersaak of the 3rd were arguing over where Major Risa-Sab-At’s 1st Raider (Chack’s) Brigade should be placed. Risa had ideas of her own and remained adamant that the regiment of “Maroons” her raiders had been training must stay close to her brigade. The Maroons, still represented, if not commanded by the man named “Will,” was equally insistent on that. General Safir Maraan, dressed as always in black cape and silver-washed armor had listened just about long enough, and Geerki’s intrusion gave her the break she’d been about to create.

  Competing with the moaning wind of the building storm, rushing explosions throbbed outside the thick stone walls as formation after formation of Grik zeppelins pasted the city—in daylight, for the first time—and there was nothing she could do about it. All her remaining air reserves had gone to attack the fleet of Grik transports Jarrik had sighted and she’d ordered them to ignore the zeps they saw approaching. As usual with the near nightly raids, this new, bolder bombing remained largely ineffective and still focused on the waterfront. At least that was the supposition. The wind was shoving the zeppelins around so badly that it was hard to tell what they were aiming at, and their bombs fell largely at random. Even so, it galled her mightily to just sit there and take it. It galled her even more to “hide” in the Celestial Palace, and she hated the dreary place. But it was centrally located to her various defensive positions and provided her headquarters section good protection from the occasional bomb (the Grik clearly didn’t want to damage their holiest temple) that hit the place no matter how careful the Grik tried to be. Stupid, she thought. They couldn’t hurt the structure with their puny firebombs, but they might burn everybody out if they concentrated on it.