“Not a chance,” Matt said severely. “Who’ll cut my hair?”
After an intense fusillade that left them all cringing together behind the disintegrating crate, the firing abruptly ceased, and Matt risked a quick glance. Yellow-and-red-uniformed men had begun to form up on the dueling ground. More and more troops streamed from the woods and spilled out from under the bleachers, adding to the ranks. “Jesus,” he said, “I bet there’s still three or four hundred of ’em. Maybe five.”
“Now will come the charge,” Jenks said quietly. “They’ll sweep right over us and into the city.”
They were startled by a sudden loud drumroll and the initial hesitant skirl of a bagpipe, of all things. Matt turned and looked behind them.
“It’s Chack!” he said excitedly.
“About damn time!” the Bosun grumbled.
“Close up, close up!” Chack roared at the “pickup” infantry they’d assembled at the dock. Blair had managed to scrape up about two hundred and thirty Marines, including those from the ships they thought they could count on. With Chack’s fifty and Blair’s initial dozen, they’d double-timed to the sound of the guns, their shoes and Lemurian sandals echoing off the buildings and stone streets leading through the city from the waterfront. Crowds of panicked civilians cleared a lane in the face of the bizarre collection of troops. Other units were expected, but none had been prepared. It would still be some time before they arrived. One of Blair’s volunteers found his note on the bagpipe and launched into a martial tune that was simultaneously stirring and nerve-racking to Chack. “What in the name of the Heavens is that thing?” he demanded.
The drums continued to roll as the Imperial Marines jockeyed into the unfamiliar formation Chack and Blair had imposed, and once it looked something like they’d envisioned, Chack raised his voice.
“Battalion!” he roared, “Forward, march! Shields, up!” The entire first rank was composed of Chack’s Lemurian and Blair’s human Marines. They’d been marching with their muskets slung and shields trailing to their left. Now they brought the shields around, facing the enemy. A compact block of troops sixty wide and five ranks deep split and surged past the beleaguered men behind the crate, re-forming on the other side, just under seventy yards short of the growing Dominion line.
“Corpsman!” Matt shouted, standing and looking around. Selass, complete with Marine armor, scrambled forward from the rear rank with a pair of assistants.
“Cap-i-taan Reddy!” she chattered. “Thank the Heavens you are safe!’
“I’m fine. Juan’s hurt.”
“Cap-i-taan!” greeted Chack, bringing up the rear with Imperial file closers. Blair was with him. “Thank the Heavens!” he repeated. “I’m sorry we did not arrive sooner. All is chaos in the harbor. Reynolds reports a large Dominion fleet approaching from the south, and a signal calling all Imperial subjects to arms flies above Government House. Walker, Euripides, and Tacitus have sailed, and at first it seemed as though other ships and the forts might actually fire on them! Word is spreading quickly, though, and other ships may now join them. It is like your ‘Pearl Harbor’ all over again!”
“Let’s pray not,” Matt said grimly. “Goddamn it!” he swore, uncharacteristically strongly. “My ship’s steaming into battle, and here I am!”
“You planned for as much,” Jenks reminded him. “Trust your first officer and let us finish the fight ‘we’re at,’ yes?” He looked around. “Where’s Bates—‘O’Casey?’ ”
“In the front rank, holding a shield. He insisted,” Chack replied.
“Fool!”
“Chack,” Matt said, “listen. This is your battle now. Fight it your way. You’ve got to hold them here, but if you get a chance, stick it in!” He paused. Lemurians were only now beginning to grasp the concept of quarter, since the Grik never asked or gave it. “Take prisoners at your discretion,” he said at last. “We need to scram. Jenks has to find the Governor-Emperor and report the big picture. If something’s happened to him, Jenks needs to be ready to sort stuff out. No telling for sure who’s on whose side right now.” Matt looked at Jenks. “Find that pretty wife of yours too, make sure she’s safe!”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to borrow half a dozen Marines and get that bastard Reed. Where do you think he’ll be?”
“The Dominion embassy, I shouldn’t wonder,” Jenks hissed. “He’ll be awaiting the outcome with Don Hernan. I expect he’ll seek his protection if they lose!”
“What protection, after this?” Matt challenged.
Jenks blinked, then nodded. “Indeed.”
Chack detailed an even dozen Imperial Marines (amazing how readily they followed his orders. Kipling was right about “keeping your head”) and Matt, Gray, Stites—and for some reason Courtney—disappeared in the direction of the embassy.
Chack turned to face forward. This would be his first test against an equally armed foe. True, his Lemurian Marines had percussion muskets with tighter tolerances, sights, and therefore better accuracy, but they were holding the shields and their weapons might not load as fast as flintlocks anyway. The “Doms” seemed to be waiting for him, as if battles of this nature, like this one had suddenly become, should have “rules” of sportsmanship. What were they waiting for? he wondered. A pre-battle chat? He looked at the Imperial bleachers, and the bloody corpses heaped and scattered there. His lips curled, exposing sharp canines. Captain Reddy had given him “discretion,” after all.
“Prepare to fix bayonets!” he cried. The troops shifted slightly, anticipating, and the drumroll became a staccato rumble.
“Fix!”
As his Marines had trained, and the Imperials had been instructed, three hundred bayonets were jerked from their scabbards with a bloodthirsty roar and brandished menacingly at the enemy.
“Bayonets!”
With a metallic clatter, the weapons were attached to muzzles.
“Front rank, present!”
The Lemurians’ muskets were already loaded, and they would be too busy to shoot in a moment at any rate.
“Aim!”
Hammers clicked back and polished barrels steadied at the surprised foe.
“Fire!”
Even before the smoke cleared, exposing the carnage of that first volley, Chack was already shouting: “Front rank, guard against muskets! Shields at an angle! Get them up! Lean them back! Second rank, present!”
“The Nancy in trouble!” shouted Minnie, the talker, relaying the message from the crow’s nest. Frankie had been staring at the Dominion battle line through his binoculars, amazed at the size of some of the ships. They weren’t nearly as big as a Lemurian Home, but they were easily half again bigger than the largest Grik ship they’d seen—and they appeared to carry a lot of metal. He redirected his binoculars skyward. The little blue plane was coming right at them, purple-white smoke trailing its engine. “They no call ‘May-Day,’ ” the talker finished.
So, Frankie thought, either The Transmitter’s out or Kari’s been hit. Reynolds seemed to be having increased difficulty keeping the plane in the air. “Range to target?” he called.
“Seven zero, double zero, closing at thirty knots” came the reply, relayed from Campeti above on the fire control platform. Walker was making twenty knots, so the enemy must be making ten. Damn. Big and fast. Of course, they had the wind off their port quarter, and that was probably their very best point.
“Very well. Slow to one-third. Stand by to recover aircraft and hoist the ‘return to ship’ flag!”
Even as Walker slowed and the whaleboat was readied to launch, the plane began belching black smoke, and with the reduced roar from the blower, they could hear the death rattle of its engine. Fred seemed intent on a spot just ahead, off what would soon be Walker’s starboard beam.
“Ahead slow! Stand by to come to course three double oh. We’ll try to put her in our lee. Launch the whaleboat as soon as practical and have the gun’s crews stand by for ‘surface action, por
t.’ ”
The Nancy wheezed and clattered past the pilothouse, gouging roughly into the sea with a wrenching splash. Even before the propeller stuttered to a stop, Fred Reynolds dove out of his cockpit into the water.
“All stop!” Frankie cried, a chill going down his spine. There were no flashies in these seas, but there were smaller fish that acted like them. There were also a hell of a lot of sharks. Big ones, little ones, a few truly humongous ones ... and there was a type of gri-kakka—as well as other things. “Get that whaleboat in the water!” Frankie yelled, even as the boat slid down the falls and smacked into the sea. Fred had swum around to the observer’s seat and was trying to claw his way up the oilstreaked fuselage. Kari wasn’t moving. Somehow, Fred managed to climb high enough to get the Lemurian by the long hair on her head and drag her from the plane just as the overheated engine burst into flames. Almost immediately, the fuel tank directly above it ignited with a searing whoosh and a mushroom of orange flame and black smoke. The right wing folded and the fuselage rolled on its side, and in what seemed a matter of seconds, the entire plane was consumed by fire, its charred skeleton drawn beneath the waves by the weight of the engine.
There in the water, Fred Reynolds was stroking mightily toward the oncoming boat, one arm clawing at the water, the other trying to hold Kari’s head above it. “C’mon!” urged someone on the bridge. A dull moan reached their ears and a huge splash erupted a few dozen yards off the port bow. Another splash arose a quarter of a mile short.
“Bow guns—‘chasers,’ from the Doms,” announced Minnie. “Big ones, say the lookout. The first one prob’ly lucky close.”
“Range?”
“Four t’ousand.”
Frankie glanced back at the sea to port and saw with relief that the whaleboat had reached the aviators. “The main battery will commence firing,” he said grimly. “And pass the word: ‘lucky close’ ain’t an option today. We have to keep the range on those bastids an’ tear ’em up from a distance.” He gestured back toward Scapa Flow. “Our job is to hold ’em back until the cavalry gets here. Like Reynolds, we’ll concentrate on the transports if we can, and stay away from the heavies. As many guns as those things have, they don’t have to be good to shred us, just ‘lucky close,’ see?”
The new salvo bell clattered on the bulkhead behind him.
Matt and the others were running, breathing hard. They’d managed to stay together, however, and even Bradford was keeping up. The streets were eerily quiet and vacant. Matt wondered if the inhabitants were sitting things out, or if they’d already responded to the Governor-Emperor’s call to arms. For some reason, he didn’t think that was the case in this district. He worried about snipers. They turned onto the street dominated by the embassy of the Holy Dominion and were met by a scattered volley that felled one of their Marines and shattered masonry at the corner behind them. Gray emptied a twenty-round stick into the group, sending all but one of the six men sprawling. The other man stood there, stunned, until Matt shot him with his Springfield as they trotted past. Stites had the BAR again, but he was low on magazines for it too. They reached the iron-bound door, and Matt immediately inverted his rifle and drove the butt hard against it. The door didn’t budge.
“Goddamn it!” he raged.
“Stay cool, Skipper,” Gray said. “I got a treatment for this.” He reached in a satchel and pulled out a grenade, a “real” one, made in the USA.
“I didn’t know you had those,” Matt said accusingly. “We could have used them!”
“I was savin’ ’em for if things got serious,” Gray explained innocently. “Bash in the peephole!”
Matt redirected the butt of his rifle and Gray pulled the pin on the grenade and dropped it inside the door. There was a muffled ba-rump inside, followed by screams.
“What good did that do?” Stites demanded. “We still can’t get in!”
“After the day I’ve had, it was pretty fun,” Gray said. “Otherwise ...” He fished in his pocket. “... Spanky gave me this really swell rubber band! Just look at this thing!” he said, displaying the gift. “Don’t know where he got it, but it’s a peach. I was gonna make me a slingshot for ... Anyway, everybody get back!”
He took another grenade, and looping the rubber band around it, hung the little bomb from the top left hinge on the big door. Making sure everyone was clear, he yanked the pin and ran. The spoon flew and the grenade bounced up and down a couple of times.
Blam!
Grenades make poor breaching charges, but the high-explosive inside made short work of the brittle iron hinge. The door trembled, then fell diagonally outward onto the street.
“C’mon!” Matt yelled.
In the grand scheme of such things, compared to other fights Chack had participated in, the Battle of the Imperial Dueling Grounds was a relatively small affair. It was big by Imperial standards, at least as far as land battles were concerned, but it wasn’t even close to something like Aryaal, Singapore, and certainly not Baalkpan in terms of scope. The Dominion had landed and secreted away perhaps a thousand troops in warehouses and an abandoned barracks outside of Leith, and the conspirators had considered that number more than sufficient to overwhelm New Scotland’s small, dispersed, Marine garrison from behind Scapa Flow’s defenses, especially when coupled with the overwhelming surprise that Reed and Don Hernan had achieved. It didn’t work that way.
The Lemurian shields made a big difference. For a while. The Dominion front ranks were decimated by those first volleys, but they had greater numbers to start with. Chack and Blair’s experiments with the shields paid off, teaching them that the dense hardwood-backed bronze implements would turn a musket ball if held at an angle, and the shields were battered and streaked with smears of lead, while the rear ranks delivered a withering fire. The front ranks suffered terribly from the beating they were taking, painfully flayed by spattered fragments of balls, stunned by incessant impacts, and even struck by balls that skated in or found a gap. The shields could take only so much, however, and they began to be pierced or fall apart under the hammering.
“Second rank! Take shields where you can,” Lieutenant Blair ordered, knowing Chack would never do it. “First rank, fall back to the rear!”
Chack spared him a thankful glance. Less than thirty Lemurian Marines were able to obey.
O’Casey appeared, unfired pistols still dangling around his neck. He was covered with blood, caused by dozens of splinter wounds. “This is the damnedest thing there ever was,” he gasped.
“It is quite like a duel itself, is it not?” Blair asked. His hat was gone now, replaced by a bloody rag. “A most appropriate setting, I suppose.”
“It is stupid,” Chack growled. “General Alden would not approve.” He shrugged. “But I don’t know what else to do. We cannot maneuver here, and there is no cover other than the stands—and we can’t reach them without exposing ourselves. Stupid! All we can do is stand here, trading blows like fools.”
“Where’s Captain Reddy, an’ Jenks?” O’Casey asked.
A ball caromed off Chack’s steel American helmet, almost knocking him down. He shook his head and resumed his erect pose. “Stupid,” he repeated, looking almost desperately around for some inspiration. “If only we had a single gun!”
“Just be glad theirs are silent,” Blair said. He looked at O’Casey. “Captain Reddy has gone for Mr. Reed. Jenks seeks the Governor-Emperor!”
“Then I must assist one or the other,” O’Casey said. “I’m of no further use here.”
“Nooo, Mr. O’Casey,” Chack said. “Untrue. Your collection of pistols might soon be of great use. I weary of this mutual mauling! I ask myself what I would do if those ... people were Grik, and I see only one course that will decide this before both sides are annihilated! Lieutenant Blair? I see the enemy has not fixed bayonets. Why is that?”
“Why ...” Blair paused. “Well, they can’t.”
“They do have them?”
“Yes, but they’re a dif
ferent style. A type of plug bayonet. They insert them into their muzzles and they are quite effective, but their shooting is over then. They usually have to drive them out. If they’d affixed them before now, they’d have had to charge, or stand and be shot to pieces.”
“Like we are doing?” Chack practically roared. “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
“I—” Blair was confused.
“Listen to me, Lieutenant Blair. You must trust me. We are about to lose a lot of troops, your men mostly, but then we will shortly end this fight. Do you believe me?”
“I ... uh ...” Blair suddenly remembered the last time he’d disregarded the advice of a Lemurian commander. Safir Maraan had tried to warn him at Singapore that his tactics simply didn’t apply. His command had been virtually eradicated that day, and he’d miserably blamed himself ever since. He’d also come to realize that these ... creatures, these Lemurians, knew a lot more about pitched battles on land than he did. “Yes, I do, Captain Sab-At,” he said finally, formally. “What are your orders?”
“The discipline and execution must be flawless,” Chack warned.
Another grenade preceded Matt, Gray, Stites, and the ten surviving Marines through the shattered door of the Dominion embassy. A second Imperial had been killed by a sniper from a second-floor window. The grenade burst amid another chorus of screams, and the group charged in, Gray’s Thompson spitting at a trio of men in uniforms crawling on the floor.
The entry hall looked different this time. The lanterns were askew and fresh blood pooled beneath bodies on the tile. The red walls didn’t seem any different, but they glistened where fresh color had splashed. The golden tapestries and accents ran with glittering purple-red. There must have been at least twenty men near the door when Gray’s first grenade dropped among them, and many had been killed outright. The rest, probably still stunned, had fallen to the second. A few more shots finished the survivors.
Rising Tides: Destroyermen Page 43
