Curtis’s bare white legs shown in the morning, and his face was red with the effort as he bawled, “I love the boatswain’s whistle, yes I do! HOOO—”
The rest of the trumpet call disappeared under an oceanic Pfoooom! All heads swiveled to port. A few miles off the port bow, two waterspouts burst out of the sea, rose several stories into the air, then showered the ocean for a city block.
Garret turned a questioning look to his friends.
“Was that a—” Fishy began.
Twitch broke like a rabbit from cover, sprinting towards the citadel. “Let’s move!” he yelled over his shoulder. Then and only then did the call come down from the fighting top, several stories up on the masts.
“Ship off the port—!”
The rest of it was lost under another Pfooom! and two more water spouts, this time a bit closer. Somebody, or several somebodies, had been asleep at their posts.
Alarm bells were going crazy. Men scrambled, some with white faces, some reddened with determination. Garret and the rest of the crew tried to catch Twitch, who was already into the citadel, no doubt headed for their battle station with Nancy.
Garret and his buddies fell into single file as they approached and leaped through the door into the citadel. The other gun crews were already gathering in between their bulkhead dividers around the guns. Mr. Sokolov was sprinting down the deck, roaring orders to his ensigns, who scattered like sparrows before a charging bear, running to carry his orders to their respective turrets and flank guns.
Garret ducked into the citadel behind Fishy. Men were shouting, breech blocks were spinning, swinging open. Powder and shell carts were on their way, pushed by the hands of running men. Ramroders stood ready.
By the time they arrived at their gun, Twitch already had the breech block open, even though that wasn’t his job. Ensign Astor, the soft-skinned little rich boy with the effeminate voice, was trying to shout above the chaos to spread the starboard orders. No one was paying him any mind. There was no coordination among the guns. Only a miracle would keep someone from firing before the order was given.
Curtis and Sweet Cheeks were running across the deck, carrying shell and powder in hand, not bothering with the cart. Garret stepped up onto the traverse platform. No sooner had he laid a finger on the wheel than Chief Greely caught him by the scruff of the neck. “Captain wants you!”
“Now?!”
“Now! Go!”
“I’m on train,” Garret protested, “they can’t run the gun without—”
“That’s an order, sailor!” Greely barked.
Garret went, wondering angrily what in blue blazes Maxwell was doing calling for his steward at a time like this. Having someone to blame didn’t comfort Garret much, but it did give him some place to focus his ire. Over his shoulder, Garret saw Greely peel Twitch off the side of the gun and fling him after Garret.
Only as Garret dodged his way out of the citadel and ran up the ladder towards the upper deck did he realize that Greely hadn’t told him where Captain Maxwell was. Garret would naturally assume that a captain would be on either the flying bridge or in the conning tower while the ship was under attack, but this was Maxwell, so who knew?
Guess I’ve got to start someplace, Garret fumed, thinking of his friends, trying to load and aim and fire their gun without him. It hurt him not to be with them, not to be helping, doing his job. Garret jumped onto the ladder to the flying bridge, then jumped back off again to let two officers pass. “Where’s the skipper?” he blurted to one of them on the way by.
“Charthouse,” the man said as he split from his companion.
A screaming ring passed by Garret, making his head sing. He blinked at the fore cagemast. Twenty-five feet above the deck, part of its lattice-like metal weaving was gone, ripped away as if a giant had taken a bite out of the side of the mast. Pieces of the steel caging flew and peppered the ocean beside Kearsarge.
We just got hit. Oh my god, we just got hit!
Garret threw himself up the ladder. Twitch was on his heels.
Together, they stayed out of the way of officers until they could burst into the charthouse. The navigator was glancing from the windows facing their attacker to his charts. He walked his compass quickly across the surface. “Captain!” he yelled.
Maxwell didn’t hear him. He was standing in the middle of a small cluster of men from all over the ship, even an engineer. Garret and Twitch squeezed their way into the group.
“But sir,” a torpedo specialist was saying, “it’s the impact with the water that arms them, and without a proper delivery system, I wouldn’t know how to launch them.”
“I brought you aboard because you’re the best torpedo gunner in the Navy. You have half an hour to figure something out,” Maxwell replied. “Maybe less. Also, I need you to ready another torpedo to detonate at minimum safe distance, coordinate with the engineer to calculate against our current speed.”
“Sir, Kearsarge’s stern tubes were sealed over in the refit.”
“Figure it out.”
“She’ll overtake us, Captain,” wailed the engineer.
“Those are your orders,” Maxwell said. “Go.”
They both went.
As they moved out of the way, Garret saw that Maxwell was unbuttoning his jacket. He caught sight of Garret. “Damn,” Maxwell said, “you’re too small. Fine, you’ll trade uniforms with Lieutenant Bartram.”
The rat lieutenant was standing to the side. At that statement, he removed his hat and began to unbutton his jacket.
“Not yet,” Maxwell ordered. “You two,” he pointed at Twitch and Garret. “If there’s one thing I’ve seen you do, it’s run, so get to the store room and bring up ten gallons of kerosene and ten gallons of deck pitch. Deliver them to the forward turret. Then get back here. On the double.”
Garret liked nothing more than being away from Maxwell, so this time, Twitch barely beat him out of the room. Then, for the first time in Garret’s memory, Twitch deviated from his orders. The two ensigns with the binoculars were standing on the flying bridge, fighting over a spyglass this time.
Twitch ran up to them, snatched it from their hands without preamble, telescoped it, and shot a look at the ship on the horizon. She was now directly to their stern. Maxwell had turned Kearsarge and was running for everything she was worth. Garret skidded to a stop at the edge of the ladder. “Twitch! What are you doing?”
Twitch’s face went white. “Holy mother of God, that’s the Lion.”
“The what?”
Twitch shot past Garret and down the ladder, descending it with legs and arms flying like a panicked spider. Garret followed. Twitch raced down the upper deck and Garret ran after him, dodging through the men who were running back and forth trying to ready the ship for battle.
Much like the citadel beneath it, the upper deck was a long wooden planked affair with some machinery, bins, and a bunch of big trumpet-like air intakes down the center. The major difference between the citadel and the upper deck was that the upper deck was the highest deck on the ship, so it was a true open-air deck. The only thing over their heads were the racks that held Kearsarge’s small fleet of boats. There were no bulkheads to port or starboard, only chest high gunwales on which the six-pounders were mounted, directly above the bigger 5”/40’s in the citadel below.
The six-pounders themselves were relics of Kearsarge’s old design, so named because they fired uselessly small six pound projectiles. They stood forlorn and alone in a row down the deck. No one was readying them. They were useless against modern warships.
Twitch was running two paces in front of Garret, but suddenly Twitch had to stop and sidestep a sailor who was running towards the gunwale with a small barrel in his hands. The sidestep saved Twitch’s life. An angry, high pitched wail filled the air, ending in a deafening crash. In front of Garret and Twitch, the gunwale, the six-pounder mounted to it, and a large section of the deck disappeared in a cloud of flying
timbers and steel. Bits of hammocks flew out from inside the disintegrating gunwale, too. Garret had always wondered where they were stored during the day.
While the wood and steel were still erupting, there was a mid-air explosion to port, rocking the Kearsarge and blasting one of her small boats on that side into tinder.
Twitch stumbled and almost fell into the missing chunk of the upper deck. Garret grabbed him and hauled him back. Garret and Twitch both looked down into the citadel through the ragged six foot hole in the upper deck. Below them, inside the citadel, the crew of gun number 5 blinked up at them in shock. Twitch vaulted the hole and ran onward. Garret poured on some adrenaline-laced steam and caught up to him.
“What the hell happened?” Garret asked.
“A shell hit the edge of the upper deck at a shallow enough angle that it bounced off, then exploded to port,” Twitch answered breathlessly. “It was luck that it missed the boat racks,” he added. “Against the Lion we’ll only get one of those.”
“The Lion?” Garret asked.
Twitch went around a steam wench. Garret hurdled a vegetable bin.
“HMS Lion,” Twitch replied tightly. “We’re being fired on by the British flagship.”
Uh… that can’t be good. But aloud Garret panted, “But they’re our allies, right?”
“You wanna stop and tell them that?!” Twitch yelled over his shoulder. He reached the ladder at the stern edge of the upper deck and swooped down it. Garret followed.
Twitch swung through a door into the citadel, nearly ran over an ensign coming out of the junior officer’s dining room, then went down the nearest ladder to the berth deck. Garret was hot on his heels.
“Sorry sir!” Garret said to the startled ensign as he dove down the ladder after Twitch.
“But why are they firing at us?” Garret asked.
“I’ll bet Captain Maxwell could tell you,” Twitch huffed. They’d landed in a spacious area between the engine hatches and the torpedo racks. Garret shot a glance at the fifteen foot long, wickedly streamlined torpedoes as he and Twitch swung round the rails and down the next ship’s ladder.
The chuffing cacophony of the steam engines surrounded them. The engine room was a vast rectangular cavern of steel and heat, which seemed to go on forever. Even so, it was nearly filled with the two story tall triple expansion engines. Twitch and Garret dropped quickly down the ladder onto the maintenance catwalks that belted the engines at half-height. Valves hissed and clattered loudly enough that Garret and Twitch would have had to yell to hear each other.
No wonder the older engineering officers can’t hear worth a damn, Garret thought. He and Twitch swung round the rails again and onto the last ship’s ladder down to the engineering deck, which was essentially the bottom of the ship.
As Garret descended, he watched the moving parts of the engine with wide eyes. He’d been told that the connecting rod and piston assemblies weighed more than ten thousand pounds each, and they were spinning so quickly that his eye had a hard time following them. The crankshafts themselves looked like locomotives that had been turned smooth on a lathe, then mounted into the floor. They also spun so quickly that the eye had trouble keeping up, even though they weighed more tons than Garret could imagine. As the engines spun, grease-covered young men, “oilers,” crawled carefully over and through the engines, laying their oil covered hands on the heavy parts even while they were spinning.
”What the hell are they doing?!” Garret yelled at Twitch.
“They Captain’s running her full ahead,” Twitch yelled back as he descended the ladder. “The only way to make sure the engine parts aren’t overheating is by touch.”
At last Garret and Twitch landed on the deck. The monstrous twin engines towered up above on either side of them, huffing and spinning and shoving the Kearsarge across the ocean as if she weighed nothing.
“Come on!” Twitch yelled, dodging around a couple of engineer’s mates with enormous wrenches. They gave him dirty looks. Garret followed Twitch between the engines. At the end of the engine room, Twitch cut to starboard and went around a big tank, over the thrust bearing, and into the shaft alley.
The shaft alley was exactly what it sounded like. The power generated by Kearsarge’s engines had to be taken from the engine room in the middle of the ship all the way to the propellers at her stern. The only way to do that was through drive shafts, steel rods three feet in diameter and nearly a hundred feet long. The shaft alley was the passage way through which the drive shafts ran, but because the Kearsarge’s designers refused to waste a cubic inch of space, the shaft alley was floored with decking to provide access to numerous doors and hatches which led into all manner of rooms and storage facilities which filled the bottom of the ship.
Twitch sprinted down the alley, and Garret followed. Beside them, the gigantic drive shaft spun in its numerous housings and bearings. The smell of grease was thick in the air.
Fifty feet down the passage, Twitch jerked open a door and ducked through into one of the engineering storage rooms. Garret followed him and slammed it behind them, muting the noise to a tolerable level. Most of the room was full of wooden barrels labeled either “Neptune Oil,” or “Pinnacle Mineral Cylinder Oil.” Twitch stumbled towards the shelving at the back of the room, but gasped to Garret, “Why do you get so angry when Captain Maxwell gives you an order?”
When Garret heard the sound of the question in the air, it sounded really bad, and he didn’t have an answer. He had a good reason, though, right? “He almost had me thrown overboard. I have to send money to my family!”
But that wasn’t the real reason, was it? Garret floundered, then snapped back at Twitch “I don’t know, why do you hate him so much?”
“I don’t hate him,” Twitch said, more forcefully than was necessary. He disappeared between shelves full of barrels of mechanical grease.
“He’s crazy,” Garret burst out. “We’re in the middle of a fight, and he pulls us off our gun to go get tar!”
“Doesn’t matter,” Twitch answered. “It’s the Lion. She’s more than an eighth mile long. Three times Kearsarge’s displacement, seven times the horsepower. Captain Maxwell won’t waste powder on five inch guns. Besides, Captain’s gonna keep our ass pointed at her for as long as he can.”
Garret stopped, “You mean Nancy won’t do any good?”
“I mean we won’t get the chance. Get the kerosene!” Twitch yelled.
“But what for?!”
Twitch was lugging the bucket of pitch towards the door. “How the hell should I know?!”
Chapter 14
Garret arrived back at the turret lugging his bucket of kerosene and gasping. This time Twitch had outrun him. Garret’s back was killing him, doing that prickly, pins-and-needles thing down into his legs again. There was an oddly cold sensation running down his left leg too. He tried to ignore it.
Suddenly, the Hollow Man spoke to his mind, as if he’d made a nest inside Garret’s brain. Garret stumbled and almost dropped the kerosene canister.
I require another gift from you, Garret. I will meet you tonight.
As quickly as the Hollow Man’s voice had come, it was gone, leaving Garret panting. Holy shit, holy shit. Now everything seemed so normal that Garret wondered for a moment if he’d really heard it. Another gift? What the hell is he talking— Then there was a rending explosion, followed by two waterspouts to starboard, barely a hundred yards away. Kearsarge groaned and rattled under Garret’s feet. He reset his grip and ran the last few steps to where Twitch was standing.
A small group of enlisted men were gathering around the turret when Garret and Twitch arrived. A few of them had been part of the group that had been with Captain Maxwell in the charthouse. Several of them were holding empty mop pails, the ones they usually used to swab the deck. As Garret and Twitch arrived, so did another man, carrying paint brushes. The group at the turret quickly unloaded all three of them.
The rat faced lieu
tenant passed them at a good clip, headed back to the flying bridge. “You two,” he snapped at Garret and Twitch, “finish your orders. Report back to the charthouse.”
Then he called over his shoulder to the crew at the turret, “When we start to turn, stop even if you aren’t finished. Keep it thick so it won’t slide off, and don’t light it until the torpedo detonates!”
Twitch, and a split second later, Garret, followed Lieutenant Bartram towards the ladder.
When they arrived back in the charthouse, Garret stopped and blinked. Maxwell was wearing an enlisted man’s uniform. A dirty one at that. Beside him, looking intensely uncomfortable, stood the enlisted guy to whom the uniform undoubtedly belonged. He was wearing Maxwell’s immaculate uniform.
Garret gawked. Twitch narrowed his eyes. The man wearing Maxwell’s uniform tugged at his collars and held his hands clasped in front of him nervously as if he thought the uniform would suddenly burst into flame.
Maxwell pointed at Garret. “Trade with Lieutenant Bartram.”
Another enlisted man, a torpedo specialist by his insignia, burst into the charthouse. “Torpedoes r—” He faltered at the sight of Maxwell in a gunner’s mate’s uniform, but recovered quickly. “Torpedoes ready, skipper.”
“Launch the torpedo twenty seconds after I execute the turn,” Maxwell ordered. “Twenty seconds. No more. No less. Go.” The torpedo technician fled, and Maxwell craned his neck to see out the charthouse windows.
Lieutenant Bartram was standing beside Garret in his underwear, holding out his uniform, his sharp features bent in amusement. “I know that having more than one thing happening taxes your mental faculties, sailor, but try to focus.”
Garret scrambled out of his uniform. He handed it to the lieutenant, then started trying to reassemble Lieutenant Bartram’s more complicated outfit.
Bartram pulled on Garret’s shirt, laced up Garret’s pants across his own backside as if they belonged to him, pulled his neckerchief into place, and was out the door while Garret was still trying to figure out which side of the lieutenant’s pants was the front.
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