A strong hand gripped Andrew’s arm and pulled him back up against the bridge railing. It was Maxwell.
One hand on the wheel, Maxwell yelled at Andrew. Andrew saw his mouth moving, but heard nothing other than the high pitched ring. Andrew traced the line of fire from Audacious to the detonation site, which Kearsarge was now about to ride over on another swell.
Audacious’s line of fire had been perfectly aligned along Kearsarge’s long axis. Fortunately, Audacious’s nose had lifted a degree too far before her trigger man had fired. The salvo had passed within mere feet of Andrew and Maxwell on the bridge.
Andrew wondered if this was what death felt like. Deafness, lack of connection to one’s own body. But the ringing faded and Maxwell repeated himself. Andrew could only hear him in his left ear.
“Go tell them I want that rear turret operational no matter what they have to do. It doesn’t need to adjust. Just tell them to get it aligned with the keel. Tell Sokolov—”
The rest of whatever he was going to say disappeared under the most glorious sound Andrew had ever heard—
American heavy guns.
Kearsarge herself drown Maxwell out by sounding off with the eight inch guns in her upper aft turret. Sokolov, it seemed, had already aligned the turret with the keel. The boom of American black powder expanded out through the storm. Smoke and fire rolled. Andrew felt the force of the recoil through Kearsarge’s skeleton.
The shot went ridiculously wide, making two medium-sized geysers a half mile off of Audacious’s starboard bow, but Andrew whooped like a seaman recruit anyway and jeered at the Audacious. The bigger ship bore down on them, staring them down with her four black, unblinking eyes.
“Come on you ugly bastard! You won’t take us without a fight!”
Ninety-five. Ninety-six. Ninety-seven…
The crackling boom rolled again from Kearsarge’s aft eights. This time the shot was more in line, but Kearsarge’s stern was rising on a swell when the trigger man fired, so the shots arced high, splashing down somewhere far behind the Audacious. The eights weren’t nearly as powerful as the thirteens, but the eights only took twenty seconds to load, maybe thirty seconds in this weather, if they could keep the powder dry.
One hundred fourteen. One hundred fifteen. One hundred sixteen…
The Kearsarge’s thirteen’s took one minute to load, half the time of Audacious’s thirteen point five’s. So that meant they ought to be coming up any second now—
Then, like a mighty beast arising from years of slumber, the old Kearsarge awoke and roared.
Andrew had forgotten what it felt like to be in the presence of discharging thirteen inch guns. Despite the fact that Andrew was two hundred feet away from the aft turret, still it felt like the world had turned inside out.
Kearsarge weighed eleven thousand tons, and every inch of her was solid as an anvil. None the less, every man aboard her felt the force of the thirteen’s being fired. They pushed Kearsarge forward in the water. The concussion momentarily dished the ocean behind her like a meteor crater. The pressure in the air seemed to fling the rain away from the ship, and then there was the sound.
It was the battle cry of a warship. Deep and resounding, pounding against the sky, momentarily deafening everyone aboard.
Andrew gripped Kearsarge’s bridge rail and grinned wickedly. The shells flew straight and low over the water. What happened next was sheer luck, nothing more. Both of the shells hit the water near to Audacious’s port bow. At the great speed with which the shells were moving, water became as hard as iron, and because the angle of incidence was so shallow, both of the eleven hundred pound shells skipped like rocks on a pond.
One of them flew harmlessly away into the storm. The other hit Audacious’s flank at an oblique angle, bounced off, then exploded.
Most of the explosion was directed astern, so it didn’t do much more than leave charred streaks down Audacious’s side, but the armor plate which had deflected the shell, spalled—losing much of its thickness in a multi-ton iron flake that broke loose.
The ring of steel from the hit cascaded over the water, announcing to every soul aboard both ships what had happened. Andrew whooped like a madman. Audacious could still outrun them and outgun them, but a raucous testosterone-laden cheer erupted below Kearsarge’s decks. The chunk of steel sheered from Audacious’s side and fell away into the sea. Beneath Andrew’s feet, he could hear the crew in a frenzy.
The mighty Audacious could be hurt. And Kearsarge had drawn first blood.
W
Garret screamed again and again as the hellhound wrestled with his arm. But it wasn’t a hound anymore, it was a hand, a person’s hand. Other hands held his right arm, still others his legs.
“Sailor!” someone was shouting. “It’s okay, you’re safe! Relax! Stop it!”
The oppressive heat was gone, as was the poisonous air. Both had been replaced with the relative coolness and freshness of the air inside Kearsarge. The voice yelling at him was that of Dr. Dobbs, the pinched face, acerbic ship’s doctor.
Garret flailed to a sitting position. As he did so, his back spasmed hard enough that he couldn’t have finished his last scream if he wanted to.
He was lying on a bed, the first one he’d laid on in months. He blinked and stared owlishly at his surroundings. He was in sickbay. There were orderly rows of beds with steel frames, most of which were occupied by sailors who were as coal-blackened as Garret. The doctor was moving quickly from bed to bed with a harried nurse in tow.
Garret looked over the edge of his bed and blanched. On the floor lay the crumpled, burned remains of five of his crewmates. There had been six of them at the bottom of the coal pile when it had shifted. Two of them were burned beyond recognition. The others were crushed and distended, their bodies charred and leaking viscous blood onto the wood. As Garret stared, unable to avert his eyes, two sailors with grim faces arrived and began to quickly spread clean white sheets over their dead bodies.
One of their faces was still intact. The young man’s body was obliterated, smashed like a snake in a wagon rut, but his face was whole and unmarred, save for a few coal blemishes. His expression was frozen in the last moment of horror during which his spirit had fled his body. Then a sailor covered the face with a sheet.
Garret stared at his own body in disbelief. His uniform was soaked with sweat and blackened with coal slurry, but other than that, he was untouched. No, that wasn’t quite true. He pulled the sleeve up to his elbow. His forearm was punctured in two neat, parallel rows. Blood streamed from the wounds.
“How the hell did that happen?” muttered Dr. Dobbs, who had arrived at Garret’s bed. Dr. Dobbs regarded the injury with medical curiosity only. “That looks like an animal bite.”
This was the first time Garret had seen Dr. Dobbs up close. He was an irritable little man with thin lips and a head two sizes too large for his body.
“You were the only one who survived the collapse,” Dr. Dobbs said as he swiftly cut away Garret’s sleeve at the elbow. “You weren’t breathing when we found you. It took them ten minutes to dig you out. I can’t imagine how you survived under there for that long. Anyway, the job was basically done by that point. Master Chief Greely thinks we’re in the clear. Not that it’s going to matter. I’m sure the Audacious has been ordered to give no quarter.”
“What about Curtis?” Garret asked thickly.
“I can’t possibly remember the names of all the patients under my care,” Dobbs said curtly.
While the doctor dug around in his bag for iodine, Garret clutched his injured arm to his chest and prayed that Curtis hadn’t been buried in the cave-in.
Finally Dr. Dobbs finished with the iodine and turned away to berate his assistant for not having the correct bandages on hand. Garret pushed himself to his feet. He looked over the injured men on the nearby beds, but Curtis was not among them. Garret headed for the door. Maybe the doctor saw him go, maybe he didn’t. It didn’t
matter to Garret. Somebody demanded to know where he thought he was going, but Garret simply walked out, cradling his injured arm.
Gotta make sure Curtis is alright. Garret had already lost one too many friends.
W
For a battleship, a spalled armor plate was little more serious than a hangnail. So the adulations of Kearsarge’s crew were short lived. Their cheers had barely crescendoed when another sky-cracking boom rolled from the Audacious. Two of the four shells in the British salvo found American metal this time. They hit Kearsarge’s rear cage mast with such speed and force that the center section of the cage mast seemed to explode even though the shells did not detonate.
Fragments of the steel basket weave, each thicker than a man’s leg, became lightning-fast projectiles. Some of them hit the ocean, disappearing in the storm froth. Some hit the deck, impaling the wood like javelins, others passed through to the decks beneath, leaving holes.
Andrew, however, was not staring at any of those holes. He was staring at the six foot long piece that had just hit the flying bridge like a spear, imbedding itself a few feet behind Captain Maxwell. It was still quivering and making a thrumming sound.
The storm lulled for a moment and Andrew caught the sound of a crewman screaming through one of the new holes in the deck. Shrapnel from the cage mast must have found him.
The top ninety feet of the cage mast was coming down like the lattice skyscraper, collapsing to starboard. Andrew couldn’t hear the men in the fighting top screaming as they fell through the storm, but he saw them. Several of them hit the ocean, their splashes immediately lost in the white swells. One young man hit the deck. He was the lucky one. He was killed instantly, crushed by the impact. The men who had hit the sea were just as doomed, but they would flail and choke in terror for a minute or so until the storm swells drowned them. Nothing could be done for them. An officer on deck made a valiant try, ordering his men to throw life lines out to them, but it was already too late. The men had been pulled too far behind.
Most of the cage mast hit the sea, and was dragged astern by Kearsarge’s forward momentum. The lower, more mangled part of the mast landed on the deck. It tore off a long section of deck rail, bent a hatch cover, and dug into the wooden deck, clawing along it until the storm finally dragged the whole mast overboard. In Andrew’s head, the countdown was already running for the next shot.
Twenty-nine. Thirty. Thirty-one…
Kearsarge plunged and the water washed over the deck, carrying a river of red away from the young man who had hit the deck. As Kearsarge’s bow lifted, the remaining surge carried his ruined body over the side, leaving the deck as clean and wet as if no human being had ever touched it.
Sokolov’s gunnery crews must have been working like mad. As the cage mast slipped away, Kearsarge’s rear eights cycled again, barely twenty seconds since the last round. The thunder rolled. It was another glancing shot, this time ringing off the foremost of Audacious’s turrets. Andrew couldn’t even tell if they’d left a dent. Probably not.
A swell pushed Kearsarge slightly to port, while in the same span of moments, another swell pushed Audacious slightly to starboard. Audacious’s enormous flank, bristling with gun barrels, became visible in the storm. She was sleek, but so solid and thick that she looked like a floating bank vault.
“How do you sink a ship that damn big,” Andrew cursed. Sailors often said things, even yelled their dirty secrets into a storm, knowing only the wind and waves would hear them. But for a split second, destiny was with them, and Maxwell heard him.
Perhaps it meant the sea had judged them worthy of a fighting chance. Perhaps it meant she was merely enjoying the game and wanted to see more blood and feel more fear from the hundreds of men in her hands. Perhaps it meant nothing at all. Whatever the reason, when Andrew spoke his flippant curse, a moment’s lull in the wind allowed Maxwell to catch his words before they slipped away.
Sixty-five. Sixty-six. Sixty-seven…
Indeed Audacious was a monstrous vessel. Everyone knew that. But when Maxwell heard it spoken aloud, he frowned. He turned, not looking at Andrew, but back at Audacious. By the time he did so, her helmsman had wrestled her flank back into line behind her prow.
Maxwell yelled something at Andrew. Andrew still couldn’t hear out of that ear. He turned around. “Sir?!”
“…Much longer, Andrew?”
“Sir?!” Andrew yelled as Kearsarge rose and another gust of rain hammered the bridge.
“How much longer is she? Estimate her length, as close as you can!”
Audacious was back in line now, presenting nothing more than her steep, heavy-gunned prow, but Andrew had seen her flank clearly enough through the sheets of rain. “At least half our length again, skipper! Maybe more!”
Eighty-one. Eighty-two. Eighty-three…
Kearsarge’s rear eights belched another gout of flame. Behind them, British steel screamed in defiance, tangled with the high pitched shriek of ricochet.
“Get down to the conning tower! I want all flank gun crews standing by!”
Andrew felt his face whiten. Flank guns could only come into play if Maxwell intended to go either hard to port or starboard, either one of which was insanely dangerous in such heavy seas. Kearsarge could, and most likely would, roll over like a barrel. Andrew looked at the sky. Granted the storm was breaking quickly, but unless Maxwell was giving orders fifteen minutes in advance…
“Sir, should I ready on port or starboard guns?”
“Both.”
Well that made no sense at all.
One hundred one. One hundred two. One hundred three…
The rear turret thirteens cycled again and the world behind Kearsarge opened up to the let the monstrous shells pass. The concussion rattled Andrew’s teeth. No steel reported, though. It was a miss.
“Both flanks?” Andrew confirmed. Five inch guns would be little more than an annoyance to Audacious. They would only be able to penetrate her thinnest armor, or none at all.
“Both,” Maxwell confirmed. “Tell Mr. Sokolov the main battery will be broadsiding to starboard. He may fire at will, but he’ll probably only get one shot so tell him to take the first opportunity.”
Andrew wasn’t tracking with whatever harebrained scheme Maxwell was hatching. Turning the ship in these sorts of swells was suicide more often than not. Kearsarge’s broadside was powerful, but Audacious’s was far more so, and her armor was superior. In other words, nothing had changed. Audacious would still tear the old Kearsarge in two. Regardless, Andrew went to do his captain’s bidding.
Kearsarge’s rear eights cycled with a rolling boom, flinging five hundred pounds of steel at the Audacious. Another miss, the shells arcing high and to port.
One hundred nineteen. One hundred twenty. One hundr—
Audacious answered with more than two tons of steel, and this time it was a savage blow.
Andrew saw it in slow motion as he began to descend the ladder off the flying bridge. He happened to glance up from the ladder treads towards Audacious just as a swell lifted her up level with Kearsarge. He saw all four of Audacious’s forward barrels come to bear on him. Andrew dropped and grabbed the stair rail with all his might, and it was probably the only thing that saved him.
Both of Audacious’s forward turrets roared, exhaling fire and smoke. The shells came in the blink of an eye. Three of them missed, but one hit the starboard edge of the conning tower, one story below the flying bridge. The shell exploded.
All Andrew felt was an incredible, violent motion and a force that hit him as if thin air had suddenly become solid. After that, he didn’t know what was happening. Maybe he was still on the ladder, maybe he wasn’t. Up and down didn’t apply anymore.
Steel shrieked as it tore beneath him and the whole flying bridge was wrenched as easily as if a child was twisting the head off a daisy.
A split second later, Andrew found himself blinking, blood running from his nose and his right
ear as he hung by one hand over the side of the ship’s ladder. The ladder had been torn loose, broken and bent away from the upper deck at an odd angle.
He hung there for a moment, staring witlessly at the damage. The conning tower was made of foot-thick steel, so it hadn’t given way completely. None the less, the shell had ripped the starboard side of the conning tower off, exposing the wheel and instruments within to the water. The impact and explosion had twisted the entire structure, and the flying bridge which sat upon it, ten degrees out of line.
Audacious had taken a chunk out of Kearsarge’s neck. Andrew thought he could hear the bloodthirsty cheering from Audacious’s crew. But at this distance, with the storm thrashing the sea between them, that was impossible. A strong hand grabbed Andrew’s arm and fairly yanked him up onto the flying bridge. Andrew stumbled. The flying bridge was not only twisted, but sloped towards the stern.
“Can you hear me Andrew?” Maxwell yelled as he dragged him back to the helm.
Andrew nodded drunkenly. He found he legs again just as the captain grabbed hold of the wheel and spun it hard to realign the Kearsarge’s course. Incredibly enough, she responded. Despite the damage to the conning tower, the steering gear was still attached.
Andrew drew a long unsteady breath and looked over the edge of the flying bridge. The shell detonation had blackened the starboard side of the forward turret, and streaked the planks of the main deck black in front of the turret.
“The storm’s breaking, Andrew. Pass the orders before we lose our chance. And send somebody up here while you’re gone.”
Indeed the storm was breaking up, blowing over quickly, more like a Caribbean squall than an Atlantic storm. The torrents of rain had settled to a normal downfall, and as the wind slackened, the swells began to roll more gently, splashing against Kearsarge’s hull instead of pounding her.
Andrew went, limping and stumbling at first, to the opposite ship’s ladder. The damage to the conning tower had warped the ladder until it was both vertical, and twisted about its vertical axis. It was like climbing down a big drill bit. Andrew dropped quickly and landed heavily, then turned for the door beneath the conning tower. The damage to the conning tower had bent the steel door and its steel frame. Nothing short of the hand of God was going to pull it open.
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