Straits of Hell

by Taylor Anderson

  “Close?”

  “Indeed, COFO Reddy. I am taking my ship into the fight.”

  “Lord,” Orrin muttered, then shrugged. “Oh well. Why not? I can’t fault your strategic logic, regarding Dom survivors, and the Makky-Kat might not have armor, but she’s hell for stout. She can take a lot.” He chuckled. “And just seeing her coming at ’em, like a smaller version of that weird island, ought’a scare the water out of the Doms. She might just turn the tide.”

  “That is my hope. We will leave our support ships behind, of course. They will recover your aircraft if . . . no one else can.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Orrin replied, standing as straight as he could. With a lopsided grin, he plopped his battered crush cap on his head and threw her a salute.

  Lelaa grinned back. “Really, COFO Reddy. Saluting indoors?”

  “Second Lieutenant Orrin Reddy, United States Army Air Corps, ma’am. You keep forgetting I’m not Navy. I just made a report on the state of my air wing.” He shrugged again. “And besides, I felt like it. With your permission, I’ll go get my planes off this tub before the Doms start shooting holes in her.”

  “By all means. Bring her into the wind,” she ordered the ’Cat at the big wheel. “Make your course three zero zero. As soon as Mr. Reddy’s planes are in the air, we will secure from air operations and clear the ship for surfaace action!” She glanced back at Orrin, touching her brow. “May the Heavens protect you, Lieuten-aant Reddy,” she said.

  “You too, Admiral.”

  • • •

  “What a screwed-up mess,” Orrin muttered to himself, staring down through his goggles at the vast smoky brawl below. Looks like somebody set fire to a giant, two- or three-mile-wide amoeba, he thought with a sick feeling in his gut. There were a number of other ships wallowing helplessly on the periphery, or steaming in impotent circles with one of their paddlewheels shot away, but the bulk of the massive smoking germ was locked up tight. It was impossible to tell who was who, and all he could see was a hopeless scramble of indeterminate ships wreathed in gun smoke, and crisscrossing jumbles of churned-up wakes. The continuous cannonade was audible even over the dutiful drone of the engine above and behind him, and he could feel the stuttering overpressure of hundreds of guns in his chest. It was late afternoon now, the “main” battle nearly four hours old, and the visibility beyond the steaming, flashing, roiling cauldron below was virtually unlimited, with no trace of land besides that big screwy rock.

  It was chilly up there, and he was glad for his peacoat, but it really was a beautiful day. Except for the battle, of course. His eight-ship flight—one plane had immediately been forced to turn back with engine problems—was orbiting the battle at two thousand feet, trying to avoid the smoke and figure out who the good guys were. Usually that was easy, with the Doms’ red sails, but not now. The chase was over, and every ship had furled her canvas and was fighting under steam alone. That only aggravated the visibility problem, particularly since the Impies and Doms both still used coal. In addition, a lot of ships were burning, and the smoke slanted roughly eastward in multicolored streaks of black, brown, gray, and near white, all obscuring the ships to varying degrees. Why didn’t Jenks stay back? he wondered. Hibbs was clear. He could’ve pasted ’em from a distance, for a while at least. Maybe he, like Lelaa, figured the only way to keep them from running off was to get stuck in. But that doesn’t make sense either. Sure, the Doms wanted to pick off TF Eleven after we dropped it in their lap, but they’d obviously come looking for a battle just like this. So why did Jenks turn around and hand it to ’em with a bow wrapped around it? Realization dawned. Honor. Simms, Icarus, and Tindal are in that mess somewhere; were in it, anyway, he corrected, all alone. After all the sacrifices TF Eleven made to get their wounded out, then the final sacrifice of Simms’s little squadron of DDs, he just couldn’t leave them there while it was in his power to provide some relief. His own desire to finally get at the Doms in the same old, instinctive way probably played a part, but when all was said and done, it probably did come down to honor. Kinda stupid, Orrin grumped, but really, no less than he’d have expected of the man.

  He glanced south and sure enough, here came Maaka-Kakja, steaming at full speed, with a giant bone in her teeth. Her 5.5s would already be firing if they could pick out targets any better than he could, and they alone would be a big help. But Lelaa wouldn’t hang back either. She’d slam her big fat carrier right into the brawl like a pickup truck through a flock of guineas, spitting fire in all directions. She’d been a destroyerman—gal—’Cat—whatever, before she got Maaka-Kakja, and it suddenly dawned on him that her first Navy ship had been a razeed Grik Indiaman named . . . Simms. That ship was long gone, destroyed by traitorous Imperials working at least indirectly with the Doms. Could her willingness to go for broke be motivated, at least subconsciously, by something as primal as revenge? The hot fury of an old trauma roused by the name of a lost ship, and rising behind her conscious thoughts? Orrin knew in a flash that he was vulnerable to such things. He was still uncomfortable around Shinya after all, just because he was a Jap. He suspected Matt, his cousin, was just as vulnerable in other ways. Jenks as well. He was a man, after all. But Lemurians were different, weren’t they? Might as well’ve been Quakers before the war, from what I’ve heard. Practically pacifists. He knew they weren’t now, but did that make them more or less likely to act out of hatred? He had to doubt it; had to hope what was happening here today was more . . . rational than that. He grimaced, feeling for the first time that he knew how Cousin Matt must’ve felt at the battle for Grik City when all the ’Cats, people, whoever it was he was always trying to ride herd on, slipped their leash and just . . . stampeded. He took a breath. Either way, there’s a world-class hair-pulling underway down there. Nothing for it now, he realized. Question is, what can I do about it?

  He looked in the mirror at the goggled ’Cat in the aft cockpit behind the motor, the brown and gray fur on his face plastered back by the propwash. “Seepy,” he said in his voice tube to Sergeant Kuaar-Raan-Taak, who’d been his “backseater” through thick and thin. Even now, Orrin wasn’t convinced he and the crusty ’Cat noncom were actually “friends,” but theirs was a familiar, bantering relationship that both were comfortable with. More important, they trusted each other. “Send to all other ships in the flight: attack independently, repeat, attack heavy targets of opportunity independently.” He was suddenly uncomfortably aware that he didn’t even know the tail numbers of all the planes. Everything was so jumbled up, they didn’t necessarily correspond to their aircrews anymore. “The two lowest numbered ships’ll hunt to the north of the battle, the next lowest, the south. Then east. The highest number . . .” He craned his head around in frustration. His usual plane—with the.50 cal in the nose—was down for a new engine of its own, after the morning sortie. At least that meant he could carry more bombs. “Goddamn it, Seepy, what’s our number?”

  “Turty-two.”

  “Okay. The highest number’ll join us over by the big rock. Tell them to give ’em hell, but watch out for our guys and make their bombs count. This is our last shot, unless they can find somebody just bobbing around out of the line of fire to refuel and rearm ’em. And for God’s sake, tell ’em not to smack into each other!”

  “Ay, ay. I send it,” Seepy said.

  Orrin nodded and banked to the right when he saw the formation begin to scatter. A few moments later he saw a Nancy with a big numeral “20” over the smaller “CV-3” emblazoned on its tail tuck in behind his left wing. “Okay,” he said to himself, “let’s do some hunting of our own.”

  Lower down, the battle seemed even more immense, if better defined, with ships flailing at one another with fire that seemed at first to be shockingly indiscriminate. He began to see that such was not necessarily the case, however, and the Allied ships, at least, were making an effort to stick together here and there in twos and threes for mutual support. No
doubt that was made easier by their better communications, but that was literally going by the board—with their masts—as the battle persisted. He caught a glimpse of Mithra, identified by Jenks’s pennant, tailed by another battlewagon. Both were pounding toward a tangled gaggle of fouled Dom heavies that gushed smoke and shot back at them as they approached, even while the two Impies fought both sides against smaller steamers, their masts askew, edging in from port and starboard. He waggled his wings and pointed, the only order his wingman needed to follow him in and attack one of the ships on the left side of the jumbled pack.

  “Hang on, Seepy!” he called. “And stand by on the bomb release. I’m going to try to put two on that big mother with its bowsprit hung up in that other one’s mizzen rigging. It looks to have the best angle to hit Jenks the hardest.

  “Ay, ay. I stand-een by. I hose ’em with my Blitzer too? There ain’t no Grikbirds in sight.”

  “Not this time. Maybe later. Save your ammo in case some of the damn things do jump us. We couldn’t have got them all.” Orrin pushed the stick forward and bored in. A few musket balls whizzed by, maybe a couple hitting, as he shouted “Drop!” The bombs fell away and he banked right to avoid any jinking his wingman might have to make. Looking down, he saw they’d hit two ships—their target, and another just beyond, directly alongside. The “20” plane got a hit and a near miss, and was clawing skyward as well, starting to bank right to join back up. He couldn’t tell if they’d done any major damage to their target, although it had stopped firing for the moment, but the accidental hit had blown most of the upper stern and mizzen off the other ship, and flames surged upward amid the cloud of splinters and fragments of men that their bomb had thrown into the sky.

  “She’ll burn,” Seepy declared, also looking back and down. “Prob’ly burn the one beside her too, they don’t shove her off. Either way, they be too busy for much shootin’ for a while.”

  Orrin silently agreed, already looking for another target. “What the hell?” he suddenly blurted, his eyes catching sight of a dismasted hulk, close to the great rocky isle. The thing was shot to pieces, with only the stump of a toppled funnel gushing gray smoke. It was also visibly low in the water, but still, somehow, underway. What was more, it was towing a smaller, equally battered ship at a meager pace. He blinked disbelief as he realized the thing that really caught his attention was the ragged, practically shredded Stars and Stripes streaming from the stump of its foremast.

  “Jeez! That’s gotta be Simms or Tindal, and that can only be Icarus she’s got in tow!”

  “Looks bad,” Seepy agreed. “An’ there’s Doms comin’ up to finish ’em off!”

  Orrin scanned the battle near the cripples. A few Allied ships were close, but there were more Doms in the way and they’d never get there in time. He banked harder right. “We’ll see about that,” he ground out grimly.

  CHAPTER 26

  ////// USS Simms

  The gallant DD was a smoldering, shattered wreck. All her masts were shot away, the tangle of rigging still being cleared by the ’Cat sailors who worked the sails, forming roving damage-control parties who chopped at taut cables with axes and cutlasses. Some worked to trim the dangerous, jagged splinters jutting in every direction from the bulwarks, and the blood-soaked deck beneath their feet, the latter making it dangerous to even walk about.

  The hull was logy with barely controlled flooding, and only the heroic Lemurian pumps and semiwatertight compartmentalization had kept it afloat this long. The engine and boilers still labored valiantly, with little complaint, preserved for the most part by the armor belt. But the armor was still relatively light, never intended to withstand so much punishment for so long; it was sprung or even shot away in a number of places and its protection had been compromised. Just as bad, after all the high-speed steaming the ship had done, fuel was becoming a problem. Not only was it depleted, but the bunkers lining the inside of the hull were leaking oil as quickly as they let seawater in to contaminate what remained. Seven guns were operational on the port side, currently unengaged and facing the great stony wall of Malpelo. There were only five guns left in the starboard battery; the rest either dismounted or rendered unloadable by muzzle strikes. It didn’t much matter. Simms barely had enough gunners and Marines left to serve those few. The wardroom looked more like a slaughterhouse than a sick bay, and the seriously wounded had overflowed it to a degree that there was little point in taking more below. Many just lay on the main deck where they’d been dragged to the illusory safety of the creaking bulwarks, dosed with gulps of seep, and quickly bandaged by well-meaning but harried shipmates.

  But the five remaining starboard guns were still in action, firing in “local control” with the new “friction primers,” which were little tubes filled with an explosive compound and ignited by briskly yanking a coarse, sealed wire through the mix. Remarkably stable, efficient, and very nearly waterproof, they’d been reinvented by one of Mizuki Maru’s rescued prisoners of war working in the Maa-ni-laa Naval Arsenal. First manufactured in the Filpin Lands, they were one of the few innovations that might’ve made it to the “Dom Front” even before they went west. Intended for the field artillery, the Navy had snapped some up to replace the dangerous, smoldering linstocks used to back up the electric igniters, or when guns fired independently. Like now.

  Fred Reynolds staggered up the companionway, dragging another pair of powder pass boxes, just as a gunner pulled a lanyard to ignite one of the new primers and sent an exploding shell crashing into an approaching Dom ’wagon about four hundred yards distant. It had just come barreling out of the tighter press beyond and seemed intent on closing. Fred shook his head with a curse. Simms had been downwind of the battle all day, and the titanic roar of the entire action had been a continuous, bone-jangling presence. Now, his hearing was so far gone, his head so full of what felt like sloshy wet cotton, he barely heard the shot. The shell detonated amid the enemy’s headrails, shivering the foremast with splinters and shards of hot iron, but for all the notice the huge ship took, it might’ve been her first hit of the day. Fred looked around. Except for them and Icarus, under tow behind them and in even worse shape than Simms, there was nothing left moving out on this end of the battle. “Why’s that one . . .” He paused, seeing another Dom heavy following in the first one’s wake and realized it wasn’t alone. “Why’re they picking on us? There’s a whole big-ass battle going on. Don’t they have anything better to do? Jeez! We wouldn’t be a threat to a rowboat right now, if it left us alone!”

  “Gangway!” Kari gasped irritably below him, burdened by pass boxes of her own. He jumped and staggered dumbly toward the gun that just fired, even as the one beside it roared and trundled back. Absently, he tried to pop his ears again, but it was no use. One of the ’Cat gunners—a Marine—grimly took one of his boxes and slung him an empty one. The ship shuddered from a hit forward—the Dom had a pair of big bow chasers—and Fred’s knees buckled. Straightening, he staggered to the next gun, aft, even as a powder-stained youngling bolted past him with two pass boxes, each containing a pair of exploding shells.

  “Shit! I’m useless!” he railed aloud, realizing the “kid,” half his size, was carrying twice the weight.

  “Move it!” Kari snapped behind him.

  “What’s the point?” he demanded miserably, glancing back. Her flight suit was covered in blood from helping move the injured, and it was matted in the fur that showed. He looked much the same, for the same reason. Both had found helmets and still wore their goggles to protect their eyes from splinters and grit. He wasn’t hurt, that he knew of, but he was so tired. Flying airplanes didn’t do much to keep one in shape for this sort of thing. “We’re just getting in the way!”

  “You gettin’ in my way!” she snapped, and he glared at her. His only experience aboard a ship in combat had been as Walker’s bridge talker. Tabby was technically a communications officer, but she’d never actually done anythi
ng but fly with him. With Simms’s comm out, there’d seemed nothing else for either of them to do, so he’d volunteered to help the youngling ordnance handlers who’d been decimated along with everyone else.

  “That’s what I mean,” he said with a near hysterical laugh as he waved his empty box at another youngling racing past. “I’m in your way, and you’re in their way.” Then he pointed at the Dom ships bearing down. “And none of it’s going to matter a few minutes from now.”

  “Lieuten-aant.” Fred barely heard, after yet another gut-shaking shot. “Ensign Faask.”

  They turned and saw Captain Ruik standing between two of the guns, trying to stay out of their crew’s way as they feverishly worked. It was the only way he could see anything, but he didn’t look good at all. He’d lost his helmet and was having trouble with his telescope since a Dom solid shot had taken his hand off, halfway up his forearm earlier in the fight. He’d had the arm bound and lashed to his body, high across his chest, but that was about it. He’d remained on deck throughout the action. When Fred spoke to him before, he’d merely joked weakly that he’d have to get Prime Factor Bates of the Empire of the New Britain Isles to give him the name of the gunmaker who’d built the long-barreled pistol the one-armed man used for sport shooting.

  “Sir!” Fred and Kari chorused.

  Ruik managed a pained grin and beckoned them over with his glass. “Please,” he said. “With Lieuten-aant Gaal wounded”—(Fred knew Gaal was still alive, but with a big percentage of the top of his head knocked off, he was more than just “wounded”)—“and . . . out of the fight,” Ruik continued, “and all my other officers either dead or occupied below, I’d raather the only other naval officers aboard refrain from tasks such as you are engaged in, laudable though they may be. I’ve learned that, in the Navy, the example officers set at times like this can be more important than anything they actually do,” he added wryly.