He stared hard, thoughtfully, at the smoking hill, imagining the scene on it. “We know you had them, General,” he repeated, “but perhaps more important, and far more interesting, is the fact that the prey—the very worthy prey—you faced must know it as well. I wonder what they will think of that.”
* * *
Colonel Flynn stared at the withdrawing Grik a moment longer. They’d mauled them badly and they didn’t seem as numberless as they had, but he knew his guys were done. They’d never hold off another assault half as big as this one. They just didn’t have the numbers, ammunition, or strength left to do it. They should have had us, he thought. Hell, even the common Grik warriors probably knew it. I wonder why they pulled back. Suddenly, over the throbbing of his wounds, he felt a chill, and there wasn’t enough of a breeze to blame it on his sweat-soaked shirt. “How in the hell did they pull them back?” he muttered. He’d been amazed to see the growing discipline the Grik displayed ever since Ceylon, but pulling the Grik off the shattered remnant of his division must have been like pulling a pack of dogs off a tree full of raccoons. Wearily, he shook his head and turned back to the trench to check on Bekiaa—and what was left of his troops. He was perplexed and uneasy, but he wouldn’t complain.
“Col-nol!” cried a filthy, blood-spattered Marine corporal.
“Yeah?”
“My cap-i-taan send me. Make sure you see!”
“See what?”
The corporal blinked agitation. “Pease come, sur! You see better on right.”
Almost reluctantly, Flynn followed the corporal around and over the tangled heaps of dead. The hill was a little higher on the west side, the slope a little steeper, and that was probably another reason the Grik had concentrated where they had. That didn’t mean the Rangers and the company of Marines emplaced there had gotten off without a scratch, but the enemy dead did extend considerably farther away from the breastworks, slain by the more accurate.50-80s. As Flynn drew near, he saw that his troops were moving forward to reoccupy their forward defenses. Then he saw something else.
“Oh, good God,” he muttered. A few miles to the west-southwest, an army marched in long, dense, serpentine columns with the precision of a machine. The corporal’s captain joined them and handed Flynn his telescope without a word. Flynn raised it with shaky hands and managed to adjust the focus. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” he whispered without even realizing he’d spoken. Leedom had told him, but he just hadn’t grasped it, hadn’t understood. Marching under the midday sun with a grandeur and geometric inflexibility Napoleon would have envied, an honest-to-God army of Grik churned rapidly, relentlessly, through the tall, green grass, as yet unspoiled by the battle that had raged around the hill.
“Are . . . are they coming for us?” The captain asked hesitantly but almost formally.
Flynn slammed the telescope shut.
“No,” he said. “They’re angling for the Rocky Gap. And look”—he pointed—“the Grik reserves that didn’t come at us are already moving that way.” He shook his head and snorted an ugly laugh. “Now I know why we’re still alive. That General Halik’s got bigger fish to fry, that’s all. There’s not enough of us left up here to worry about, and he knows it. Shit!”
William Flynn was as Irish as any American could possibly be, and despite his pain, even fueled by it, his temper soared. “We gotta report the absolute hell out of this. Pray God we’ve still got comm. Whether we do or not, we’re going to get word out somehow—and make General Halik wish he’d wiped us out when he had the chance!”
CHAPTER 16
////// Baalkpan
March 15, 1944
Dennis Silva walked with Bernie Sandison and Ronson Rodriguez at the head of a virtual army of young torpedo techs and strikers, ordnance ’Cats, EMs, and other “sparky” types. Lawrence trotted exuberantly alongside Silva, his crested head swiveling rapidly back and forth, taking in all the changes to the city. Within the column were carts piled with weapons, tools, and crated ammunition, and it snaked its way through the crowded, festive pathways toward the area between the vastly enlarged new fitting-out piers and the massive shipyard.
Dennis was still stunned to see how packed, bow to stern, the piers were, with completing ships of all descriptions. There was Santa Catalina, smoke coiling above her funnel, looking almost predatory with all the armor and weapons they’d lavished on her. Silva hadn’t seen the ship before—and had fluttery feelings when “her” P-40s thundered over-head—but he’d been told she looked like the old Asiatic Fleet destroyer tender Blackhawk.
Maybe once, he decided with a critical eye. The lines are still similar. Most of the cargo booms are gone, though, and she looks kinda . . . tough now.
His gaze wandered as he walked. He was particularly amazed by the monstrous, almost Home-size floating dry docks fitting out at a completely new facility in the far distance across the bay. These weren’t the same as the ones he’d seen under construction when he left. Those were finished now, and already in use either here or elsewhere. The new class was a powered, self-propelled variety that could steam wherever they were needed, and even fight!
The original permanent dry dock had even more smoking engines around it, and the place was wreathed in a perpetual cloud of steam. A brand-new carrier was taking shape inside the now concrete-reinforced, ’Cat-made canyon, and mighty wooden cranes were poised over mountains of bright timbers like impossible insects. He’d known concrete was in the works. Many of the ingredients were abundant in the highly volcanic region, and they’d been cooking limestone for acetylene. He’d heard that was related somehow. But to see it already in use . . . His eyes strayed to a pair of the old floating dry docks, side by side, and sure enough there were S-19 and the salvaged remains of Walker’s sister, Mahan! The wrecked destroyer and practically wrecked sub were both in the process of becoming something maybe a little different from what they’d been, though major alterations on S-19 had only just begun with Irvin Laumer’s arrival a few days before. Not much to see there yet but a nearly stripped pressure hull. But Mahan! He couldn’t believe it. He wondered how they’d managed to fish her up. Almost half the damn thing had been blown off, but she was beginning to look kind of like her old self again! Maybe shorter . . .
“Silva!” Bernie snapped—maybe the third time.
“Whut?”
“That nasty, creepy thing you use for a brain must be off on the moon! Listen up, and quit woolgathering! You and Risa will be the first ones at bat with all the new small arms, after Adar says his piece. I’d order you not to screw it up—with half the city watching—but then you’d probably start the show by seeing if you can whiz farther than you can shoot!”
Silva shrugged. “Maybe I can . . .”
“Please don’t screw it up!” Bernie groaned. “I’m asking you, damn it! I’m nervous enough as it is without worrying about you! And whatever you do, don’t carry on with Risa out in front of everybody! Besides . . . everything else, she’s a Marine and an officer now!”
Silva grinned and patted the sling that supported his new “Doom Stomper.”
“No sweat, Mr. Sandison! I’m your man! I’m still feelin’ mighty friendly and a-bleeged! Besides, shootin’ stuff is what I do! Me and Cap’n Risa’ll shoot off the good stuff, an’ show ’em why the junk won’t work.” Clearly, Silva had already formed strong opinions about some of the experimental weapons. “Relax,” he continued. “Torpedoes and . . . other things . . . are what you do. It ain’t like you got to sell the stuff!”
Bernie stopped, wordless for a moment, and the whole column ground to a halt behind him. “That’s exactly what we’re here to do today!” he finally insisted. “We have to decide what weapons and systems to devote our resources to, then sell them to the guys and gals who’ll make them—as well as those who’ll have to bet their lives on them! We all bitched about the useless crap the Navy gave us to fight the Japs: the crummy torpedoes, the dud shells. Stuff that cost lives! Now we’re the ones responsible! Al
l this time, we’ve been making do, but the time’s come to put some real weapons in the hands of our people, and I’ll be damned if one sailor, soldier, flyer, or Marine gets killed because something doesn’t go off when they’re counting on it!”
Silva arched an eyebrow. “Zat what yer workin’ on, off in the jungle east o’ town? Real weapons?”
Bernie stiffened. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Bull flops. I seen some o’ the brightest ordnance ’Cats we got headin’ down a trail at first light yesterday, an’ they didn’t never come back. They all get ate, an’ you forget to mention it? What’re you doin’ off in there you can’t tell me about?”
Bernie looked at him. “I wouldn’t tell you I had a hangnail!” he said, then paused. “Look,” he almost whispered, “you try to fool everybody, but you’re not stupid. Of course we’ve got secret stuff going on—you sniffed it out easy enough. Must be the way your mind works. Anyway, some things—big things—have to stay secret now. The war’s changing. We’ve got Impies and all these women running around. Who’s to say not one of ’em is a Dom spy? It would still be tough for the Grik to spy on us, but we have to stay tight-lipped about things here that somebody who gets deployed might blab to a Jap interrogator—or a Grik who understands English!”
Silva nodded. “No sweat, Mr. Sandison,” he murmured back. “I won’t blow. You workin’ on anything that might interest me?”
Bernie hesitated, then shook his head. “No.”
“Then I don’t care what it is.” Something caught his eye and he grinned.
Ensign Abel Cook and Midshipman Stuart Brassey appeared and hurried to join them as several paalka-drawn carts, heavily laden with fresh meat, took the opportunity to cross ahead of the stalled column.
“Good morning, Commander Sandison. Commander Rodriguez,” Cook said in his vestigial, high-class British accent, and saluted. “Hiya, Dennis.”
“Mornin’, Mr. Cook,” Silva replied, stressing Abel’s new status. “Mr. Brassey!” Cook’s freckle-tanned face reddened, and Brassey smiled uncertainly.
“’Ister Cook!” Lawrence tried to repeat, and saluted as well.
“Lawrence,” Abel managed, then turned back to Bernie. “Ah, may we assist in some way, sir? We have no other duties, at least until we report back to Mr. Letts in the morning.”
“Sure, kid . . . I mean, Mr. Cook,” Bernie said, catching on to Silva’s unexpected reminder that despite a degree of informality among them all that harked back even to their Asiatic Fleet days, distinctions between officers and enlisted men must always be maintained.
“Thank you, sir,” Abel and Stuart chorused, stepping into the column that was now waiting for the meat carts to pass.
Dennis suddenly did a double take and then trotted over to an old Lemurian, swatting a paalka clear of the pathway with a long, dried bamboo shoot. “I’ll catch up, Mr. Sandison!” he called behind him. “I gotta talk to this guy a second.”
“No screwin’ around!”
“No, sir.”
“Hey, Moe. What’s up?” Silva asked the ancient ’Cat. Moe looked good for his age—whatever that was—and was still just as tough and sinewy as Dennis remembered. Now, in addition to the ragged kilt he usually wore to town, he also wore dingy rhino-pig armor with sergeant’s stripes.
Moe looked up at him. “Si-vaa,” he said. “Where you been? Lotsa huntin’ to do.”
“Oh, I been here and there.” Silva answered. He waved at Santa Catalina. “Heard you went on a little jaunt yourself.”
“Damn weird place,” Moe nodded. “Weird critters too. Glad I back here.”
Silva gestured at the heaps of meat on the carts. “I see you ain’t run outta pigs. They gettin’ harder to find?”
“No. We kill all we want. They make more.” He shook his head.
“Look. They’re sendin’ me and Larry and the kids over there—you remember them—up the river, north, into Injun Jungle Lizard territory. We’re s’posed to say howdy to ’em. You wanna go?”
“No,” Moe answered truthfully, but then twitched his ears at his stripes. “But I Army scout now. They make me go, an’ I been helpin’ plan the trip.” He shrugged like he’d learned to do and gazed northward. “We go up there, we gonna die, I betcha.” He grinned. “But I old. Gonna die soon, anyway!” He laughed at Silva and swatted the paalka again. “See you around, Si-vaa!”
A grandstand had been erected near the water overlooking the old seaplane ramp, and it was packed to overflowing. Nearby buildings were covered with ’Cats and women as far away as the Screw in one direction and the main dry dock in the other. Sailors and yard workers lined the rails of the completing ships, and others skylarked in the masts and rigging. Below the grandstand, beside the ramp, with deep water in front of it, was Walker’s refurbished number-one torpedo mount. Some distance to the rear of the triple-tube mount, resting securely fastened on cradle trucks exactly like the one Silva remembered from Walker, were three long, shiny cylinders with rounded noses in front, and four fins and two propellers at the back. Compressors and large accumulators for charging the air flasks were close at hand. Whatever the things were actually capable of, they sure looked like torpedoes to Dennis.
“Nice fishies, Mr. Sandison. Do they work?”
“God, I hope so,” Bernie whispered, then raised his voice. “The torpedo division will assume their posts!”
Dennis was surprised to see Ronson join a crew beside one of the weapons.
“We’re trying three kinds,” Bernie explained. “Two are reverse-engineered Mk-14s like that wadded-up fish we carried around so long. The only difference is one’s hot and the other’s cold. You’re probably thinking the ship’s sailed on that one, but we’re not talking the same ranges here—yet. If the cold fish can do the job for now, it’ll save a lot of effort.”
Dennis wasn’t sure exactly which ship Bernie meant. He didn’t much care about torpedoes and didn’t trust them. He firmly believed you should never send a fish where you could send a bullet, and though nobody knew what kind of ships the Grik were working on, he hadn’t seen anything on this world since Amagi that needed a torpedo. His attention was already focused on something else.
“The other one uses the same gyro, Obry gear, everything,” Bernie continued, unaware he’d lost his audience. “But Ronson talked me into letting him try an electric motor and batteries in place of the air flask.” He shook his head. “I think it’ll work eventually, but I’m afraid our batteries just aren’t there yet.”
“The only thing I care about is if the damn things’ll go off,” Silva said absently but darkly.
“Yeah, they’ll go off,” Bernie assured him. “They’re contact exploders all the way, no horsing around.”
“Good,” Silva said, still distracted.
About forty yards from the torpedo mount, on the old ramp itself, was Walker’s glisteningly restored number four, four-inch-fifty gun. Mounted beside it, bolted to a similar concrete pedestal, was an almost exact replica of it, except the mount was taller and more reminiscent of the Japanese 4.7s they’d salvaged. Bernie had told Silva to expect it, but he hadn’t had time to come down and see the thing. He’d been too busy familiarizing himself with the small arms. Now he knew he truly was looking at a dual-purpose four-inch-fifty!
“I’ll be derned,” he said. “Ain’t that a pretty thing? What did you make her out of?”
“All our modern weapons are made of Jap steel, from Amagi.” Bernie shrugged. “Not sure how good it is, but it’s better than what we can make so far. Somebody calculated that we salvaged enough steel off her to make every single rifle and pistol used by everybody on both sides in the Great War. I find that hard to believe, but there’s a lot—and we can use local iron in projectiles and nonordnance applications. We are making some steel of our own now, like I said, and we’re doing it by the book—but there’s no way to know if it’s really worth a damn, since Laney’s the closest thing we’ve got to a metallurgist. He w
orked in a steel mill for a while before he joined the Navy.”
“Got fired, I bet,” Silva quipped.
Bernie shrugged. “Probably. I wish Elden hadn’t got himself killed. He really knew stuff.” He brightened. “Spanky does too, but until he gets back, Laney’s the expert. We’ve had to do a lot of guessing and experimenting with heat treating and stuff.”
“I know heat treating—on small parts an’ springs an’ such,” Silva said, and Bernie glowered.
“All the more reason why . . .” He stopped and sighed. Silva had long ago taught what he knew about making springs and case hardening. That knowledge was widespread now. Silva knew nothing about making steel for heavy ordnance. “Well, for now, the new breechloading guns like that one will still use the black-powder shells we’ve been making, to keep pressures down. They’re basically wrought iron—or wrought Jap steel.”
“It is a four-inch-fifty? Why didn’t you standardize on the four-point-seven? We’ve actually got more of those scattered around, and I guess you could eventually convert the four-inch-fifties.”
“We thought of that,” Bernie admitted. “We’ve got salvaged Jap gun directors and everything, but production on ‘our’ shells was already so far along and performance being so close, we figured it would be easier to line the four-point-sevens when the time came. You got us on this lining kick with your Allin-Silvas, and it made sense.”
“Sure,” Silva nodded. “And you can reline ’em when the bores are shot out.”
“You got it.”
The rumble of the crowd softened when Adar, High Chief and Sky Priest of Baalkpan and Chairman of the Grand Alliance, stood from his seat at the center of the bleachers. Near silence was achieved when he raised his arms. As always, he still wore his old “sky-priest suit” as the humans called it. It was deep purple with a scattering of embroidered silver stars across the shoulders and hood, which today was thrown back, revealing his gray fur that glistened like silver in the morning sun. Beside him, Alan Letts stood as well, his whites almost painful to look at. Other high-ranking members of the Alliance flanked them, and also stood as a group.
Iron Gray Sea: Destroyermen Page 25