CHAPTER 12
Eastern Sea
Walker had averaged eight
knots during the last week, a respectable speed given the generally
light airs the other ships relied on. Sometimes she sped up,
steaming a wide circle around her plodding consorts. Occasionally,
she hove to and let the Nancy down into the sea and Reynolds flew.
Matt forbade him to fly out of sight, but one of the flights did
warn them of a basking mountain fish, several miles farther out
than they would have detected it with lookouts. This allowed them
to give it a wide berth. Fred Reynolds saw nothing else, no islands
or ships at all. If they’d been in the Carolines before, they must
have left them behind. Otherwise, the sea was calm, the weather
pleasant, and if not for the antiquated sailing steamers they kept
company with and the Lemurian heavy crew, it would have been easy
for the men aboard USS Walker to
imagine that they’d somehow returned to the world they’d left
behind.
Beginning the third
week out of the nameless atoll where the ships refitted after the
fight, the sky grew dark and the sea began to dance. A cool wind
pushed rolling swells out of the south, and Walker started rolling sickeningly, as was her
custom. A pod, or herd, of gri-kakka, a form of plesiosaur they’d
grown uncomfortably accustomed to, crossed their path and blew
among the swells. The creatures veered away and plunged for the
depths as the ship’s sonar lashed at them. They used the sonar to
frighten mountain fish—or “leviathans,” as the Imperials called
them—away, and it seemed to work extremely well. Walker’s crew was glad to learn it worked on
gri-kakka too. They’d taken some damage once by just striking a
young one.
That night
Walker ran under running lights and the
other ships hoisted lanterns. The wind and sea continued to build,
veering out of the southwest. The quartering swells made
Walker’s crew, particularly the
Lemurians, even more miserable as the roll took on a swooping,
corkscrewing motion. Even the ’Cats who’d been on the sea all their
lives had a hard time with it. Except for the ones who’d made their
living on the fishing feluccas, none had ever noticed any except
the most severe storms. Riding heavy seas on a Lemurian Home was
like doing so on an aircraft carrier. Walker’s relatively small and slender round-bottom
hull made for a far more boisterous ride. With the dawn came the
realization that they were unquestionably in a typhoon, or possibly
a Strakka—something even worse that this world’s different climate
managed to conjure. They’d never experienced a deepwater Strakka
before.
Ever eastward they
struggled, in the face of the mounting sea. Waves crashed across
Walker’s narrow bow, inundating the
forward four-inch-fifty and pounding against the superstructure
beneath the bridge. During her refit, they’d replaced Walker’s rectangular pilothouse windows with glass
salvaged from Amagi, but there hadn’t
been much to spare. To protect the new glass, as well as the people
behind it, plate steel shutters had been cut and installed that
could be lowered into place over the windows. The shutters retained
only small slits to see through, and all but eliminated visibility,
but they had the compass, and soaked lookouts stood watch on the
bridgewings. Chack stood watch-on-watch high above in the crow’s
nest as well. He had the longest experience aboard the old
destroyer of any Lemurian, and had probably developed the strongest
stomach of any of his farsighted peers. Still, the wildly erratic
and exaggerated motion of the crow’s nest would have made the post
hell for anyone. As the storm built, he was the very last to report
visual contact with the lanterns of the other ships.
Even then, they
maintained wireless contact with Achilles, but her signal grew weaker with every
passing hour. The growing distance between the ships wasn’t to
blame. The problem was that they hadn’t been allowed time to
install and regulate one of the virtually “Allied standard”
120-volt, 25-kilowatt generators in Achilles’ engine room when they left Baalkpan. She
still relied on one of the portable six-volt winddriven generators
used by Allied sailing ships. The wind had grown much too violent
to continue operating it, though, and the batteries were beginning
to fade. Icarus and Ulysses had only lanterns, flags, guns, and rockets
to communicate with, and by late afternoon even Achilles couldn’t see them anymore over the
mounting crests of the tortured sea.
“Jeez, this is
awful!” protested Frankie Steele through clenched teeth, struggling
with the large polished wheel. Water beaded in his beard. Everyone
on the bridge had been saturated by windblown rain and spray. “I
remember steering Mahan through that
big Java Sea Strakka on one engine, but I don’t think it was this
bad.”
“If you’ll remember,”
said Matt, “Walker only had one engine
at the time as well, and I believe you’re right. The water’s a lot
deeper and the swells are more organized, but the troughs are
deeper too.” He braced himself against his chair, bolted securely
to the bulkhead, when the bow shouldered through another high peak
and then tilted downward at an alarming angle. With a rushing
crash, it pierced the next enormous wave and the sea boomed against
the pilothouse. Through the slits in the shutters all Matt could
see was a swirling white vortex, and water gushed into the
pilothouse over the bridgewing rails, nearly sweeping the lookouts
aft and down onto the weather deck. Somehow, they managed to hold
on, and climb hand over hand back to their posts as the rush of
seawater drained through the bridge strakes. Slowly, reluctantly,
the bow came up again and the ship heaved sharply over to
port.
Kutas, clinging to
the support pole near the chart table, watched the clinometer pass
twenty degrees. “A lot deeper,” he muttered nervously. “Skipper,
the wind’s come around out of the northwest, and these waves are
getting harder to crawl up at an angle. I recommend we change
course to one, two, zero. We might take them harder over the bow,
but maybe they won’t tump us over!”
Matt hesitated. If
they turned away, they might get separated even farther from their
consorts. But the Imperial ships couldn’t steam forever in these
seas. Sooner or later, they’d have to run with the wind. “Very
well. Mr. Steele, make your course one, two, zero. Mr. Kutas,
please have Mr. Riggs inform Achilles
of our course change. According to their charts, there shouldn’t be
anything out there we need to be concerned about running
into.”
“Aye, aye, Skipper,”
Steele replied, “making my course one, two, zero.”
The Bosun staggered
up the stairs aft, and gasping, joined Kutas at the
pole.
“What are you doing
running around in the rain, Boats?” Matt quipped.
“Oh, just checking on
things.”
“How’s she holding
up?” Matt asked.
“Swell,” Gray replied
breathlessly. He’d pulled the decorative strap on the front of his
sopping, battered hat down under his chin to keep from losing it.
He didn’t add “so far.” That might jinx them. On the other hand,
maybe just thinking it was bad enough.
“Skipper!” cried
Reynolds, who as usual joined the duty roster as talker when he
wasn’t flying or tending the plane in some way. Right now, the
Nancy had been disassembled and secured as well as
possible.
“What is it?” Matt
demanded.
“Lookout, ah, Chack,
says there’s a whopper coming in! It just keeps getting bigger! He
sounds ... scared!”
Chack scared? Oh, hell. “Mr. Steele?”
“Almost there,”
Frankie replied, straining against the wheel.
Matt joined the
starboard lookout on the bridgewing. At first he couldn’t see
anything through the darkness and the blinding spray. Then he heard
it. Even over the screeching wind that moaned hideously through the
foremast stays and the wireless aerial, over the blower and the
groaning hull and thrashing sea, he heard a sound like mounting
thunder. What he could see of the horizon beyond the gray-green
foam had become as black as night. He looked up. And up. “Oh,
Lord,” he said. Then he spun. “Sound the collision
alarm!”
In spite of the
situation, Tabby was actually pleased with herself. This was the
worst storm she’d endured yet on Walker, but for the first time, she hadn’t been
transformed into a heaving, retching, practically lifeless wreck.
Must be The ’sponsibility, she decided.
She’d never seen Spanky look even mildly ill when the sea kicked
up. He’d been through the aft fireroom just a few moments before,
moving carefully along the rail with the motion of the ship. The
hull seemed tight, and though brackish water gushed back and forth
in the bilge, the ship didn’t seem to be taking much on as she
worked. At least the hull repairs had been properly handled—of
course, they’d had more time on them. The boilers had been a
hurry-up affair. She didn’t mind. She’d finished the work on number
three, and it was roaring away contentedly despite the turmoil
outside. She was satisfied.
She glanced around
and wrinkled her nose. Just because she
wasn’t sick didn’t mean there wasn’t a powerful lot of puking going
on. She’d been the first Lemurian fireman and had suffered her
baptism alone, except for the somewhat disinterested solicitations
of the “other” Mice. Now the whole fireroom was full of her
people—none of whom had ever endured anything like this. She felt
sorry for them, spewing wretchedly on the deck plates, trying to
reach the one they’d left open to the bilge as a “puke hole,” but
she felt slightly superior as well. She was superior. She was a chief, wasn’t she? The others would come along,
just as she had, and at least most still seemed able to
function.
Suddenly an alarm
blared in the compartment that she’d only heard a couple of times
in drills. Her spine stiffened and her eyes went wide.
“Everyone! Grab hold
of something!” she screamed. “Get away from the boilers and hold
on!” She embraced a feed line and clenched her teeth. Something
struck the ship like the hand of God. One instant, Walker seemed to be climbing a swell like so many
others, and the next, the old destroyer was practically on her
beam-ends. Deck plates were uprooted and went sliding or tumbling
to port, and the air was filled with loosened condensation,
followed by a flood of bilgewater ... and screams. Tabby’s feet
fell out from under her, and she held on to the heavy pipe for dear
life as others in her division did the same, or fell screeching
amid the clattering tools and other debris. A few must have fallen
against the boilers themselves—suddenly the air smelled of burnt
hair and flesh. She watched as one of her water tenders, motionless
against the port-side hull, was impaled by a plummeting deck plate
that struck her with its sharp, pointed corner. The water tender
never made a sound. A thundering vibration added to the din, and
whether it was water coursing over the ship or the starboard screw
running away, she couldn’t tell.
Another sound began
that she’d never heard before. It started as a whooshing, drumming
hiss, and quickly grew to a pounding rumble, and she
knew—knew—that water was pouring down
at least one stack into the smoke-box uptake! For what might have
been only moments but seemed like forever, the ship just hung like
that, heaved over, as if trying to decide whether to right herself
and struggle on, or roll all the way over and go to sleep at
last.
“No!” Tabby screamed.
“You NOT give up! You NOT!” Over and over she shouted, “You NOT!
You NOT!” until she no longer knew if she was screaming at the
ship, herself, or her weakening arms. Slowly, slowly, the angle
grew less extreme. “Pleeeese, ship!” she begged, almost sobbing.
“You got too much to do! You got too many who love you!” Almost as
if in response to her plea, Walker
practically lurched upright and her screws bit again. There were
more screams when firemen fell into the jumble of iron that slid
deckward with them. Then came a terrible roar, and Tabby remembered
the water in the uptake. Later, she could never exactly describe
the sound she heard when warm seawater coursed down into the number
three boiler. Maybe her ears were already shot from all the noise,
and her own high-pitched wail. The best she could remember was a
“crackling, thundering BONG!” before
the aft fireroom filled with scalding steam.