Straits of Hell: Destroyermen

by Taylor Anderson

  They were close now, though; close enough to hear garbled TBS traffic between Jarrik’s scratch task force, which meant at least a few of his ships remained in action. He told them repeatedly that they were coming and had the Arracca Nancy flying on his wing send the same by wireless, but nothing coherent came back from the ships. He did get Safir Maraan’s latest assessments from the Cowflop, however, based on earlier wireless reports she’d received from TF-Jarrik and the last planes she’d had over the action. None of what he heard was very useful. Flying conditions had deteriorated so badly that Safir had finally relented and suspended further sorties from Grik City. She couldn’t justify the sacrifice anymore. In addition to combat accidents—the Grik weren’t even shooting at her planes—she was losing planes and pilots every time they tried to land on water or the airstrip. The water was too rough, and the strip had turned to mud.

  “The Gen-raal say to land,” came the crackly voice through Tikker’s left-ear speaker. “She say you lose too many ships when you attack in dis wedder, an’ maybe not hit nuttin’ anyway. The Griks is gonna get past Task Force Jarrik, an’ Lib’ty City’s defenses is bein’ shifted to center where dey can deploy to face any Grik land-een.”

  “No!” Tikker snapped back. “We didn’t fly all this way just to dump our bombs on nothing—and crack up landing at Grik City. If we’re gonna lose ships anyway, we’re gonna bomb the Grik first!”

  “Okay,” said the comm-’Cat, as if he’d been expecting that response. “But be aad-vised; we lost wireless contact wit Task Force Jarrik an’ hadn’t had eyes on the strait for over a hour, so we don’t know what’s goin’ on there.”

  “I’m getting some TBS, but I can’t make much out.”

  There was a moment’s hesitation before General Queen Safir Maraan’s own distinctive voice replied. “Then you must be extra careful, Cap-i-taan Tikker,” she said. “Jarrik’s remaining ships must have taken damage to their masts—and aerials. They are also probably quite mixed with the enemy by now. Try not to harm any of them. They will have likely suffered enough.”

  “Ay, ay, Gener-aal. We’ll try,” he said, knowing all his planes would’ve heard. He risked another peek over his windscreen, and in the moment that he had, he saw bright gun flashes against the dark sea to the south. “We got ’em in sight!” he cried. “And somebody’s still fighting.” He squinted, frustrated. “You’re right about one thing, though. A lot of Grik ships are past the fighting, making for the northwest headland that opens on Grik City Bay! They’re all scattered out, but there’s a bunch of ’em!”

  “Can you see if any, what, uh, fraaction of the enemy fleet may have been driven ashore?”

  “No, not yet.”

  There was another long pause. “Then we must continue to assume the greater fraaction has bypassed Task Force Jarrik and will land along the northern shore. It will be the most protected from the weather in any case, and they will know that.” The wind had turned around out of the south, turning colder and starting the rain. “If you must make the attempt, your orders are to attack those ships, Cap-i-taan Tikker, and destroy as many as you can.”

  “Ay, ay, Gener-aal,” Tikker replied, wiping his goggles again while fighting to keep his plane under control. It was so hard to see, and the dingy white enemy sails were difficult to differentiate from the heaving, white-capped sea, but he thought there must be at least two hundred still coming relentlessly on. A fist clenched his heart. With three to four hundred warriors on each ship, that could mean as many as eighty thousand Grik were still poised to strike at Grik City’s defenses. He and his planes had to thin them out because if even half that many made it ashore, they’d outnumber Safir Maraan’s entire force.

  “You heard the gener-aal,” he said grimly into his mic. “Pair up and hit ’em, north to south, then west to east. Try not to run into each other!”

  “What about Task Force Jarrik?” asked one of his flight leaders.

  “Whatever’s left of it must still be fightin’ to the south. Try not to hit anything flying the Staars an’ Stripes… but I don’t think you gotta worry about it much. All planes! Taallyho! And good huntin’!”

  CHAPTER 34

  ////// USS Walker

  Chief Isak Reuben amazed himself and everyone around him by suddenly puking on the rattling deckplates of the forward fireroom. He’d been gleefully and loudly recounting a particularly vomity episode he and Gilbert once endured in the Philippine Sea in the old destroyer tender Blackhawk’s fireroom—their first Asiatic Fleet assignment back in ’thirty-nine—when he just suddenly… spewed. It was damn rough in the fireroom, and everybody was holding on to something as the ship wallowed and pitched. The roar of the blower and the boiler was almost insurmountable by his reedy voice. Everyone not already puking—the ex-pat Impie gals had it bad—was leaning forward, trying to hear, when what must’ve been half a gallon of the subversive coffee they brewed in the fireroom so they didn’t have to drink Earl Lanier’s swill just hosed right out of his mouth. Some got on a shedding ’Cat leaning close, and she turned and spewed as well—on the only Impie gal not already afflicted. Isak kind of hated that. He supposed he was sort of sweet on her. She immediately doubled over and added her stomach contents to the disgusting mix of sweat, condensation, oil, soot, rancid bilgewater sloshing up past the plates—and now vomit—that had combined with the fur ’Cats always shed in the hellish firerooms to create a kind of dark, creeping ooze.

  In mere seconds, everybody was puking and retching—and Isak grinned. That had been the point, after all, to test the power of his developing social skills. He didn’t know what made him puke; he felt fine. Maybe it was being ashore so long? Or maybe just going on about puking long enough would do the trick on anybody? Didn’t matter. If he’d known he could start the ball rolling so easily, he’d have just conjured up some retching noises and saved his coffee. Amid the continuing sounds of gastric misery, he wiped his mouth on his skinny arm. “Well, anyway . . . ,” he began again.

  The airlock hatch to the aft fireroom banged open, accelerated by the motion of the ship, and Tabby glared at him. As usual, and like everybody—even human females—in the ferociously hot firerooms where temperatures often hovered around 130 degrees, she wore no shirt. That had driven Spanky nuts for a long time, and she’d finally had her department keep T-shirts handy in case Spanky came down, or for whenever they went topside. But with the storm and Spanky’s gimpy leg making it unlikely he’d visit, and the extra heat of the high-speed run, she hadn’t given a damn about T-shirts that day. “What the hell?” she demanded when she saw—and smelled—what had happened. She shook her head. “Never mind. C’mon, Isaak! We got problems!”

  • • •

  “Tabby says we’ve got a bad condenser leak, salting the feedwater,” Spanky quickly reported when Matt trotted up the stairs aft, into the dank, dark pilothouse. Rain had lashed him during his brief exposure, and he wiped it out of his eyes. “Cap’n on the bridge!” Minnie shouted belatedly, but Matt merely waved his hand, saying, “As you were,” as usual. He’d been in the comm shack with Ed Palmer listening to developments at Grik City when Spanky called him. Stepping toward his chair where Spanky sat, he nearly slammed into his friend when the ship’s bow buried in a heavy swell and the sea pounded the pilothouse. They would’ve already lost their new glass windows if the battle shutters hadn’t protected them. Of course, that left nothing but small slits to see through. It didn’t matter. Right then there was nothing to see but the dark, malevolent, rain-swept waves. “And the firebrick in the number three boiler is starting to crumble. Isak thinks it may collapse completely. All this banging around,” Spanky apologized. “I told Tabby to split the plant so only one boiler gets the contaminated feed—but that means running one engine off one boiler and the other off two—”

  “And different RPMs on the shafts if we maintain speed,” Matt agreed grimly, noting that Paddy Rosen was already straining harder at the wheel than he’d already been. It would soon get muc
h worse.

  “I’ve called a relief to double up with Rosen at the helm,” Spanky said, reading his mind. He hesitated. “Skipper?” he began.

  “We’re not slowing down,” Matt said firmly.

  Spanky nodded resignedly. He didn’t need to tell Matt that the salted feedwater would eventually ruin the boiler tubes. If just one let go, the feedwater would flash, snuff the fires, and turn all the other tubes into busted guts. The whole boiler could be finished, maybe for good. Spanky contemplated pressing his point. They had spare tubes to fix the condenser, or they could just plug the leaky tubes. But they had to take the boiler off-line to make the repair. What he choked back was that they couldn’t rebuild a wrecked boiler. Not out here.

  “The condensers always leak,” Matt pressed.

  “Not like this.”

  “The tubes’ll hold until we finish the job,” Matt stated stubbornly. “Tabby and Isak will fix them when this is over.”

  “But what about the firebricks?” Spanky asked.

  Matt braced for another big wave and then sighed. “The firebricks will hold up too. They have before; they will again. Then we’ll rebrick the boiler like always. Spanky.” He paused and rubbed the grit in his eyes. “You’re not the engineering officer anymore. You’re my exec.”

  “I know.”

  “Then you also know, as much as we love her and as careful as we try to treat her, when this ship has an important job to do, the job becomes more important than the ship, see? Sometimes, the way this war, this world has turned, it’s hard to keep that straight, but it’s still the truth.” Matt went on to describe what he’d heard in the radio room; that two hundred plus Grik ships had made it past Jarrik and were heading straight for Grik City. Tikker’s two wings had accounted for maybe fifteen or twenty of those, losing half a dozen planes in the effort, and then cracking up twice that many trying to land. Tikker himself would try to fly again, but he wouldn’t risk any more pilots unless the weather improved. “So we’re it,” he said at last. “This old, worn-out, leaky ship is it. Again. Now, we don’t have much farther to go, and if we can keep this speed, we might get there before the enemy. Even if we do, we’ll be running and gunning like never before, and Tabby has to keep our feet under us that long.” He waved his hand. “We don’t have to sink ’em all, at least. Just whittle ’em down to a bite-size chunk for Safir Maraan. But we’ve got to do that, and it’ll be tough. Afterward?” He nodded at Spanky’s crutch, “You can spend your deferred ‘convalescent leave’ helping Tabby patch things up.”

  “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m not arguing with you this time,” Spanky said. “So who are you trying to convince? Me or you?”

  Another wave pounded the ship and she shook beneath their feet, but then surged ahead to meet the next one as if emphasizing that she was game. Matt smiled but looked away. “Habit, I guess,” he said, then shook his head. “I don’t know,” he finally added, barely loud enough for Spanky to hear, “but I just have this feeling that we’re right on the edge, at last. We smash this Grik fleet and they’ll probably send another. Maybe bigger and even better. One of Jarrik-Fas’s last transmissions included a theory about that, and I think he’s right. But we’ll have all of First Fleet then, and two more corps as well. Not to mention another front to get the Griks’ attention when the Republic attacks. It may not seem like it now, but I think the Grik are close to breaking, right down to the core.”

  “So are we,” Spanky pointed out.

  “Yeah, I’ve thought about that too,” Matt confirmed. “So are we.”

  They passed another hour like that, slashing through the heavy seas, the old ship rising and plunging and fighting her way back up. Making the ride even worse than usual, she was getting low on the fuel that not only fed her boilers but also provided much-needed ballast. Combined with all her extra topside weight, she’d invented a new, intermittent, corkscrewing roll in the rough, disorganized sea that had even the saltiest hands feeling a little green. It did begin to moderate ever so slightly as they neared the northernmost point of Madagascar, however, long in view from the crow’s nest above, and even visible from the bridge when the ship heaved herself up to the crest of a wave. The wind wasn’t as fierce, with a shorter run off the big island, and the swells weren’t as high with the seafloor coming up. It was still raining, but not with the same storm-lashed intensity as when it began.

  “Crow’s nest report Griks! Many Griks, bear-een two two seero!” Minnie cried. “They hard to see through the rain, but the closest is about fifteen thousand yaards!”

  “Very well,” Matt said, glancing at Spanky. “I guess we made it, barely. Reduce speed to two-thirds. That’ll take some of the strain off the boilers—and the rest of the ship.” He shrugged. “We’ll have to slow down to hit anything in this sea anyway.” He raised his voice. “Sound general quarters—wait!” He caught himself and grinned. “Belay that. Pass the word for the bugler instead. I believe we have time, and I’d like to do this right.”

  • • •

  Other than their Hij leaders, Grik were not generally social creatures. They worked and fought together under close supervision and direction, but the average Uul warrior possessed barely enough language to follow the most basic commands. Predatory, pack-attack instinct took over after that. It was already clear to the Allies that this wasn’t because they didn’t have the capacity for more, but because they were so rarely allowed to live long enough for their mental maturity to match the physical maturity and lethality they achieved so quickly. The current war had begun to change that to various degrees, and there’d always been exceptions. Particularly bright Grik, if recognized, were allowed to mature, to be “elevated,” to the status of Hij, though the privilege had rarely been extended beyond the offspring of already long-established Hij with the influence to persuade a regency’s choosers to “recognize” and elevate their own young. Hij shipmasters were particularly adept at this, and the growing need for experienced Grik sailors was long established. Further exceptions had been made during the current crisis, creating leaders for vastly expanded armies and changing the very nature of the armies themselves. General Halik was a prime example, having been elevated from a successful sport fighter to commander of all Grik forces in India. He’d lost most of his battles there, but he’d learned. And though his peers couldn’t know it, he’d taken things a long step farther. At first of necessity and then by design, he’d preserved as much of his army as he could for long enough that a fair percentage had begun to “elevate” itself. Having influenced the program that elevated Halik and others like him, “General of the Sea” Hisashi Kurokawa was doing much the same independently, and also by design, as was General Esshk to a more limited degree. Such had never been done before, in the long history of the Grik, and it remained to be seen what the result would be.

  But on that wild, stormy day when the “traditional” forces commanded by Regent Consort Ragak of Sofesshk made their great attack to recover the Celestial City from the grasp of the prey, the only Hij to attend Ragak were the usual generals and shipmasters. The generals were of the “traditional” sort as well, whose only role was to design battles and then set their Uul warriors loose. Due to the limited nature of those designs, they had little to do until they reached the shore and generally stayed out of the way. But the shipmasters and Regent Consort Ragak, who’d taken the role of “General of the Sea” for himself, had been quite busy indeed. Ragak’s plan to quickly shift his horde across the Go Away Strait to the southwest coast of Madagascar itself before the prey organized its meager patrols far enough south to discover its passage had worked perfectly. There his swarm had waited until the bait was laid in the Seychelles to draw off the more powerful elements of the prey’s fleet. That had worked even better than Ragak hoped, and spies that remained among the trapped survivors near the Celestial City had signaled watchers beyond the Wall of Trees with colored cook-smokes that the prey had taken the bait. They, in turn, raced south in relays along the coa
st. Many were slain by the various preys inhabiting the island, but enough survived to bring Ragak word that the time to strike was at hand.

  Ragak was already imagining himself as Regent Champion of all the Grik, and contemplating how General Esshk should be destroyed when things suddenly became… tedious. First, after several days at sea without the least sign of the prey’s flying machines—Esshk’s air raids had drawn them back to the city, no doubt, he grudged—his great fleet encountered troublesome weather that roughened and slowed its voyage. Then, that morning near the Comoros, they’d run into a most troublesome handful of ships that, combined with the worsening weather, had thrown his entire swarm into disarray. More than half his ships had been swept or diverted to the west coast of the island, and their warriors would have to make their attack there. The remaining swarm struggled on, sped by a turn of the wind, and was now rounding the northeast point of land, its objective in sight at last. He was content. The flying machines had been grounded by the storm, with one lone exception that had suddenly reappeared but merely watched from above. The rest of his fleet was turning into a quartering wind that would send the ships racing across a milder sea beyond the harbor mouth and the great guns he knew awaited him there, to the broad, flat beach he’d chosen to slam his ships ashore. After that, his warriors would leap into the surf. Some would be eaten by the ravening fish, of course, but the storm would keep most of those from the shallows. Few enough would die. Then it would merely be a matter of loosing his proud, pure, Uul, untainted by General Esshk’s revolting experiments, to quickly scour the Celestial City of the feral vermin prey infesting it. He fully expected to be feasting on the defenders in the Celestial Palace by nightfall.

  “My Lord Regent Consort!” The shipmaster hurled himself at Ragak’s feet on the sodden deck of his flagship, the Giorsh. Ragak stared suspiciously at the creature. Giorsh, with her white-painted hull and lavish appointments reminiscent of another time, had been the flagship of all the Grik for a hundred years. Ragak had been astonished when Esshk gave her, and the prestige that went with her, to him. But he was suspicious of her master’s constant caution.