Seas of Venus

by David Drake

  He staggered across to join the sergeant. He was suddenly terrified that he'd stumble into the path of the recoiling gun and be crushed like a bug on a windshield.

  The destroyer they had been engaging sheared away. Her superstructure glowed orange, and flames licked above her mast peaks. Pairs of shells still in the lethal circuit continued to strike and smash, fanning the blaze.

  Turret I had ceased firing, but the clang! of a hostile shell hitting astern echoed through the Holy Trinity.

  The sergeant thrust the point of his bar into the breech opening and levered fiercely to free the stuck case. His bare arms were black with powder fouling except where drops of sweat jewelled the skin.

  The image of the burning destroyer dropped over the horizon. A pillar of spark-shot smoke trailed back along the crippled vessel's course.

  A huge orange bubble swelled into the display, then shrank back. The destroyer's bow and stern lifted momentarily as if they were vertical brackets enclosing the space of the explosion.

  The right-hand gun ceased firing, though shells already on the way continued to lift columns of spray and debris on the far horizon.

  In the silence of the gun turret, Johnnie thought he heard the screams of men burning, men cartwheeling toward the jaws rising from the waves to meet them. But the cries were only in his mind.

  22

  When he turn'd at bay in the leafy gloom,

  In the emerald gloom where the brook ran deep

  He heard in the distance the rollers boom,

  And he saw in a vision of peaceful sleep,

  In a wonderful vision of sleep. . . .

  —John Davidson

  "Kid!" Britten shouted as he turned his head. When the sergeant saw that Johnnie was already at his shoulder, holding a maul, anger cleared from his expression.

  "Right!" he said. "Hit it! Right here!"

  Britten tapped a thick finger on the curved hook of his pry-bar. The point was deep in one of the eight slots across the breech threads, but the strength of the sergeant's arm alone was not enough to break the deformed casing free and extract it.

  Johnnie hammered the end of the bar.

  "Harder! The sergeant shouted. "Put 'cher back—"

  Johnnie slammed his maul into the bar, making the shaft spring back with a belling sound. The tool vibrated out of Britten's grasp, but the shell case slid loose also and rattled onto the turret floor. Foul gases curled from the case mouth. They smeared like grease when they touched solid objects.

  "Bloody hell!" the sergeant muttered as he stepped backward and flopped into a pull-down seat beside the hatch. "Bloody hell."

  They could feel the gear-driven vibration of one or more of the port 5.25-inch turrets rotating, but all the Holy Trinity's guns were silent. No hostile shells were falling aboard the dreadnought, either, though by this time the remaining Angel battleships should have had time to catch up with their fleeing consort.

  "Now our course is right across the Ishtar Basin," the sergeant said as if idly. "That's deep water, twenty thousand feet some of it."

  He glanced sidelong at Johnnie, then looked away quickly when he realized the young officer was watching him.

  "You can drown in two inches," Johnnie said, answering what he thought was his companion's concern. Or be eaten by what lives in the wrong two inches.

  "Naw, not that," Britten said scornfully. "I mean it's deep enough water t' hide our subs. They could come up to combat depth when the Angel screen was past and give the dreadnoughts something to think about besides us."

  He looked at Johnnie. "If they was there?" he prodded.

  "Sergeant . . . ," Johnnie said, trying to match the two images of the man beside him: the burly, competent veteran; and the enlisted man of moderate intelligence, who had to trust his officer superiors to balance the risks that he wouldn't understand even if they were laid out before him in meticulous detail.

  "Sergeant," Johnnie continued, "we need to draw them on. Not just the Angels. The Warcocks and Flotilla Blanche besides, because if just those two have time to choose where and how they'll fight us, we lose. The Blackhorse loses. Ambushing the Angels wouldn't help."

  "Except," said Britten, "it'd save our butts." The expression on the sergeant's scarred, blackened face did not appear to be anger, but neither had it any sign of compromise offered to superior rank.

  "I don't think that's at the top of anybody's priority list, Sergeant," Johnnie said as cooly as he could manage.

  Britten shrugged and looked at the open breeches, almost clear of smoke by now. "Naw," he said, "I don't guess it oughta be, even. But it gripes my soul to think how Cap'n Haynes'll laugh if Cookie bites the big one on this."

  The squawk box in the turret roof suddenly cleared its electronic throat, then piped in an unfamiliar voice saying, "Holy Trinity, this is Angel Command. Come in, Holy Trinity, over."

  "Why are they calling us?" Johnnie muttered.

  He didn't realize he'd spoken aloud until he glanced to his side. Sergeant Britten's eyes had widened at proof that the officers didn't know what was going on, either.

  "Blackhorse Dreadnought Holy Trinity to Angel Command," rasped Uncle Dan's reply. "I hope you're calling to offer your surrender, Admiral Braun, because we don't have anything else to discuss. Over."

  "Hoo, Cookie's in great form t'night!" Britten crowed. He sounded as though he had forgotten that "Cookie's" nephew sat beside him, and that the most likely result of Commander Cooke's baiting would be a sheaf of large-caliber shells.

  Of course, the shells would come soon enough anyway.

  "Holy Trinity," said Admiral Braun. The words were slurred as if Braun had a speech impediment, but that might be because the Angel leader was choking with anger. "You've made your point. Now it's time to talk. You're cut off from, from your fleet by overwhelming forces. We know they've abandoned you—"

  "We haven't been abandoned, Braun!" Dan said, ignoring transmission lag in the knowledge that his words would step on those of the enemy commander.

  "Listen to me!" Admiral Braun snarled. "The Blackhorse fleet is blocked at the Kanjar Straits! They've told you you're on your own, you fool! The only thing you can do now is die in vain if you refuse to listen to reason."

  Braun didn't sign a transmission break, but he paused as if to give his opponent a chance to respond.

  "S' long as they talk," murmured Sergeant Britten, "they're not shootin' our asses off. Which suits me."

  He frowned. "Course," he added, "they maybe ain't in range yet. Quite."

  "Holy Trinity," the Angel admiral resumed in attempted calm, "come about now. We'll take your vessel out of service for the duration of the war. All—"

  "Bingo," said Johnnie. "They're talking because they don't want to—"

  "—of your party will be returned to Blackhorse—"

  "—lose the Holy Trinity. They're willing to do just about—" said Johnnie.

  "—Base immediately, free to fight. We're not—"

  "—anything to keep from pulling the plug—" said Johnnie.

  "—asking for your paroles. And you—"

  "—on their own best ship!" said Johnnie.

  "—must have injured personnel. We'll provide full medical treatment for them. Angel Command over."

  Silence from Uncle Dan.

  "This is better than a fair offer, Blackhorse," Admiral Braun concluded in desperation. "This is a complete victory for your party! Over."

  "Gun crews," muttered a different voice, one of the technicians on the dreadnought's bridge. "Stand by."

  "No rest for the wicked," Britten grumbled, but there was a cruel smile on his face as he stood. He was holding the pry-bar. Johnnie noticed with surprise that his own hands still gripped the hammer.

  "Braun," said Dan with the harsh anger Johnnie had heard his uncle use on Senator Gordon, "this is Commander Dan Cooke. This is my offer. You surrender all your forces immediately. That means when the war is over, you'll get them back as is, including the Holy Trinity.
You'll still be in business . . . which you won't, if you push things to conclusions. What d'ye say, Braun? Blackhorse Three over."

  The turret's panoramic display showed the masts of a ship on the horizon again. Hydraulic rammers whined, sliding the waiting 5.25-inch rounds into the tubes and withdrawing as the breeches screwed closed. The sudden activity made both men jump, but the guns did not yet fire.

  "Commander Cooke," Braun said in a voice that stuck to his throat. "Dan. Dan, you know we can't do that. We've got a contract with Heidigger Dome that—"

  "Listen to me, Braun," Dan broke in. His words buzzed like a rattlesnake's tail. "It isn't some sucker like Haynes you're dealing with this time. You know me, and you know I'll do what I say. You can take my offer, or you can rest assured I'll ram it up your ass. Capisce? Blackhorse Three over."

  Turret II turned slightly. The motion was barely noticeable against the thumping background of the dreadnought's fouled drive. The guns elevated a few degrees, then stabilized.

  "Have it your way, you bastard!" snarled Admiral Braun.

  The interior of the turret brightened, lighted by the panoramic display. The image of the horizon had gone orange-red with the muzzle flashes of the pursuing dreadnoughts.

  "For what we are about to receive," Sergeant Britten murmured blasphemously, "the Lord—"

  The paired 5.25s fired in close sequence, aiming not at the invisible battleships but at one of the destroyers which plotted the fall of the batleships' heavy shells. Johnnie flinched instinctively, but the concussion of the secondary armament was almost lost in the hideous sound of the railguns, firing to raise a defensive envelope above the Holy Trinity.

  As the big shells lifted toward their target, the four domed railgun batteries sought them with bursts of hyper-velocity slugs which turned metal gaseous on impact. Not even the armor-piercing noses of rounds from a dreadnought's main guns were proof against hosing streams of projectiles which had been accelerated to astronomical velocities.

  Shells with bursting charges detonated, blowing themselves apart harmlessly. One of the pursuing battleships was firing solid 16-inch shot. Even those dense projectiles melted under the impacts. They tumbled off trajectory, streaming glowing clouds behind them.

  The buzz of the railguns' coils energizing was marrow deep, more penetrating than a mere noise could ever be. When the guns discharged in rapid succession, the ballistic crack of a slug accelerated to thirty thousand feet per second in a few yards shattered the air like nearby lightning.

  The Holy Trinity mounted four railgun installations. The pursuing dreadnoughts carried a total of thirty-three 16-inch guns, each of which was capable of a higher rate of fire than the Holy Trinity's big 18-inch tubes. The mathematics were as simple and inexorable as statistics on aging and death.

  Johnnie could see shells approaching in the panoramic display: three smears of red, glowing from their passage through the air. They hung almost motionless, swelling, because they were dropping directly toward the pick-up feeding the display.

  "—make us thankful," Sergeant Britten concluded as the shrieking railguns detonated one of the shells so close that the flash reflected through the hatch of Turret II.

  A waterspout, colored fluorescent yellow by marker dye, rose over the Holy Trinity and sucked the huge dreadnought sideways. The other shell hit with a rending crash. The sound went on and on while Johnnie screamed.

  The turret lights dimmed, and for a terrifying instant the railguns stopped firing. In the relative silence between shots from the 5.25s, Johnnie heard a distant, overwhelming rumble. It was not thunder, any more than the red glow on the horizon was lightning. He was hearing the sound of guns which reached for his life from twenty miles away.

  The railguns took up their defensive snarl again, but the timbre had changed. The port-side stern installation, Gamma Battery, was no longer part of the mix of ravening noise.

  "Watch it!" Britten mouthed as he leaped for the lift tube. The round that had just presented itself to a loading cage was skewed in its cradle. The Holy Trinity had flexed when the big shell hit, and the motion had jounced the rounds in the loading sequence.

  Britten tried to force down the nose of the shell. The left tube's loading cage pivoted and grabbed the round, still at an angle; the sergeant jerked his hands away just in time to save them.

  Johnnie ducked under the swing of the right loading cage, reaching for its next shell, and seized the rim of the skewed round's casing. He lifted desperately.

  The shell dropped into alignment just as the rammer shoved it into the 5.25's breech.

  Three 16-inch shells hit the Holy Trinity, two and then one. The turret floor bucked and threw Johnnie into a backward somersault. His head rang on steel. The shock dazed him despite his helmet.

  The left-hand loading cage offered itself empty to the gun tube. The rammer and breech mechanism cycled as though the intended load had been thrown out of the cage by the dreadnought's pitching. A fully-loaded 5.25-inch round was bouncing around the turret with Johnnie, the sergeant, and all the tools thrown from the rack.

  The shell wasn't likely to explode. The primer was electrical, not impact, and the shell's own base fuze was activated by the violent spin it got in the rifling of the gun barrel.

  But it weighed almost a hundred pounds. When it caromed into Johnnie's hips as he started to rise, it knocked him back down with a sharp pain he prayed didn't mean a broken pelvis.

  Only one railgun installation was firing. The high-voltage, high-frequency pulses turned the driving cones of its slugs into glowing plasma that hung along the Holy Trinity's course like the track of a snail. The sea beneath boiled with the dreadnought's wake and gurgling fluorescent calderas blown by shells the railguns had not stopped.

  Shells roared overhead, deafening even compared with everything else going on. Fayette had made a minuscule adjustment to the Holy Trinity's course, and the three-ship salvo missed—short and over, ahead and astern.

  Waterspouts drenched the Holy Trinity, sloshing Johnnie through the turret hatch. Only the yellow emergency lighting was on. No railguns were firing.

  The right-hand loading cage picked up the next round. It was aligned correctly, but the tortured lift tube had presented it back to front.

  Johnnie lurched to his feet. His hip supported him.

  "Run!" Sergeant Britten screamed, pushing the younger man aside.

  Three shells hit the Holy Trinity simultaneously. The ship writhed, throwing Britten into the empty toolrack and tumbling Johnnie out the open hatch.

  Johnnie braced himself against an exterior bulkhead. Small fish, flung onto the deck by near misses, snapped and writhed beside him in the algal slime.

  The sky above was a map of Hell.

  For an instant, Sergeant Britten was silhouetted against the turret lighting. He groped for the hatch opening. He'd lost his helmet, and his face was a mask of blood from a cut scalp.

  Johnnie started to rise to help him just as the rammer thrust a 5.25-inch round backward into the breech. The casing crumpled, heating and compressing the powder charge. It ignited in something between a fire and an explosion while the breech mechanism was still open.

  The first blast set off the remaining rounds in the loading sequence. Orange flame enveloped Sergeant Britten, incinerating the back half of his powerful body and driving the remainder against Johnnie as a mist of blood and tissue.

  Johnnie lay against the bulkhead. His eyes were open. He was, so far as he could tell, unharmed.

  Above him, the sky roared and blazed. The fish on deck were making furious efforts to swallow one another down, even as air dried their gills and inexorably slew them all.

  After an uncertain length of time, Johnnie got up and headed for the ladderway to the bridge.

  23

  The pirate Genoese

  Hell-raked them till they rolled

  Blood, water, fruit, and corpses up the hold.

  —James Elroy Flecker

  None of the Holy
Trinity's guns were firing. B Turret had taken a direct hit which wrecked the roof-mounted fire director and must have penetrated the gun house, because one of the 18-inch tubes pointed skyward at a crazy angle.

  Because the guns were not being worked, the turret and barbette were nothing but armored boxes, as safe a target for incoming shells as any on the dreadnought. If the turret had been in operation, one or more of the twelve-hundredweight powder charges in the loading cycle would have burned, sending flames a thousand feet high through the punctured roof.

  If the charges had flashed back into the magazine through the loading tube, the whole forward portion of the Holy Trinity would have vanished in a cataclysmic explosion.

  Johnnie wondered what it felt like to be dead. Did Sergeant Britten care?

  He tried to wipe his face, but his hands weren't clean either.

  There was a fire on the shelter deck, just aft of the second funnel. Sparks rose in swirling clouds, sometimes lifting sections of lifeboats and wardroom furnishings with them.

  There must have been explosions among the flames, but their sound was lost in the greater chaos around them.

  Johnnie reached the ladderway to the bridge. The hatch was missing. While it stood open, the shock of an explosion had caught it and wrenched it from its hinges.

  Three shells hit the Holy Trinity, throwing Johnnie to the deck again. One landed among the flames amidships. A huge fireball lifted into the air, separating from the ship to hang above them like the sun on the day of judgment.

  As suddenly as it had formed, the globe of fire sucked inward and vanished. The Holy Trinity was alone again with the Hell-lit night.

  The dreadnought twisted under hammering shells as the iguana had done when Sergeant Britten's flamethrower bathed it. A shell had pierced the starboard main-belt armor, close beneath where Johnnie pulled himself to his feet. He could not have seen the hole, even if he leaned over the rail, but the fire at its heart threw a bright orange fan across the waves.