Seas of Venus

by David Drake

  The light swept over a mass of writhing tentacles. Squid were battling for the bodies of fish killed by concussion.

  Johnnie reached the ladderway again. He clung to the railing, gasping breaths of fiery air in through his mouth because the filters restricted his nostrils.

  More shells hit. Johnnie bounced like the clapper in a bell, but he retained his grip on the rail.

  If the shell that pierced the main belt had landed ten feet forward and ten feet higher, it would have struck B Turret Magazine instead. Perhaps the barbette would have withstood the impact, but its armor was no thicker than that of the belt which failed.

  It would have been quick. Oblivion would be better than this, and even Hell could be no worse.

  "You on the bridge ladder!" growled a demon's buzzing voice. "Identify yourself!"

  Johnnie shook his head. It seemed a lifetime since he last heard human speech. Words didn't belong in a universe of shock waves that flung men to and fro like the disks of a castanet. The helmet protected his ears, but it couldn't save his soul from the pummeling.

  "Awright, sucker—" buzzed the voice.

  He was being challenged over the intra-ship communicator. A Blackhorse seaman waited on a dark landing above him, preparing to fire at the figure silhouetted against the firelit hatch.

  "—you had your—"

  "No!" Johnnie shouted, flinging himself to the side. The shadows might conceal him, though they wouldn't stop a sheaf of ricocheting bullets. "I'm Johnnie Gordon! Ensign Gordon!"

  He didn't have time to unclip his ship-structure transmitter, but for this purpose ordinary helmet radio was better anyway. Johnnie and the guard were within a few feet of one another, and the armored ladderway surrounding them acted as a wave guide.

  He'd lost his sub-machine gun somewhere. Left it in Turret II, he supposed, though he couldn't remember unslinging the weapon with all that had gone on since he left the bridge.

  Johnnie's pistol was in his hand, pointed toward the swatch of darkness which most probably concealed the guard. He'd drawn the gun in an instinctive response to his training, but he didn't think he would shoot even if a blast of shots lit the ladderway's interior.

  The Angels' 16-inch shells were killing them fast enough. The Blackhorse team didn't need to join in the job of its own destruction.

  "Ensign?" buzzed the guard. "Sir? Geez, you shoulda said something!"

  Johnnie got up and holstered his pistol. The stair treads would have been some protection, at least if the guard was firing explosive bullets.

  Enough glow leaked into the armored shaft for the light-amplifying visor to work at short distance. The guard—Johnnie recognized him, though he didn't know the sailor's name—squatted in the conning tower. He'd smashed the light fixtures to keep them from going on automatically at a human's presence. He was waiting with his rifle aimed through the part-open hatch.

  "What the hell's going on?" Johnnie demanded of the man who'd been about to kill him. "What're you—"

  The Holy Trinity staggered as another shell hit her and the remainder of a large salvo landed close aboard. Metal screamed.

  The ship's whipping motion was magnified because Johnnie was a deck higher than he had been before. He wondered how long the dreadnought could endure the unanswerable pounding her enemies were inflicting.

  "It's the Angels, sir," the guard explained sheepishly. When the man stood up to greet Johnnie, he disengaged his flexed transmitter, so his words were relatively clear over ordinary intercom. "Bulkheads sprung when the shells hit forward, so the off-duty crew's loose now."

  He frowned as his mind sought accuracy. "What survived the shells're loose. Cookie, he figures they may try to take over the bridge."

  Even though the two men were face to face, neither could have heard the other's unaided voice over the bedlam of a battleship dying.

  "Right," said Johnnie. If the Angels recaptured the bridge, they would radio their fellows and stop the rain of shells. Somebody aboard the Holy Trinity might survive then.

  "Well, carry on," Johnnie muttered as he started climbing the last flight of steps to the bridge. He had to pause midway as the treads rang and jounced beneath him in response to a fresh salvo.

  Johnnie stepped through the bridge hatch and staggered because the deck was momentarily stable. Dan, Fayette, and another technician were the only living humans present. They did not notice his arrival.

  Several of the consoles showed holographic displays of the Holy Trinity's interior. Fires filled compartments, lending their hellish radiance to the as-yet undamaged bridge.

  "Uncle Dan!" Johnnie blurted. "Sergeant Britten's dead!"

  The three men at the consoles reacted. Fayette ducked, the other technician snatched clumsily for his shouldered pistol—

  And Commander Cooke had the rifle from across his lap pointed at Johnnie's chest before his eyes told his brain not to take up the last pressure on the trigger.

  Dan lowered the rifle. Johnnie let out his breath.

  Sergeant Britten was dead. The entire Angels' bridge watch was dead. Many of the Blackhorse raiders whose packs and equipment littered the deck between the consoles were dead, trying to accomplish whatever final tasks Commander Cooke had set them.

  Very shortly, everyone aboard the Holy Trinity would be dead. A few minutes one way or the other wouldn't really have mattered to Johnnie.

  "Right," said Uncle Dan. He shifted his grip to the balance point of the rifle and tossed the weapon to his nephew. "Watch the hatch here, Gordon. We've got Caleif below in the conn room, but we don't need another surprise like you just gave us."

  He turned back to his console. It was set to a damage-control schematic with symbols rather than grim analogue realities to show the hammering the battleship had received. Fayette resumed speaking to someone in the engine room. The other technician continued a program of controlled portside flooding to balance the amount of sea they'd taken in through shell holes at the starboard waterline.

  The Holy Trinity bucked and shuddered at the heart of a fluorescent maelstrom. Salvoes from all three of the pursuing dreadnoughts arrived simultaneously. Waterspouts dyed red, blue, and yellow sprang up around the stricken vessel, and at least six more of the shells smashed home.

  A 16-inch shell landed on the roof of the bridge.

  Johnnie felt himself suspended in black air. Every working piece of electronics in the big room shorted as the concussion pulverized insulation and fractured matrixes. The regular lighting went out. The emergency glowstrips which replaced it had to struggle through a suspension of thick dust.

  He didn't remember being thrown to the deck, but that was where he found himself lying when the world ceased to vibrate and the dust settled enough for him to see again.

  The overhead armor had held. The shutters had been blown away from the viewslit, so another hit on the bridge would surely kill them all. One of the consoles muttered to itself as it melted around the blue flame at its core.

  Fayette bawled something unintelligible and bolted through the hatch. A burst of explosive bullets up the ladderway hurled his corpse back onto the bridge.

  "Angels!" Johnnie shouted as he fired an explosive placeholder over the body. He knew bullets fired from this angle couldn't hit anyone when they burst in the ladderway, but he hoped the sleet of zinging, stinging fragments would make the desperate Angels hesitate while Johnnie's thumb switched his feed to solid projectiles that would ricochet.

  "Get out of—" screamed someone behind as Johnnie thrust his rifle into the hatch opening, tilted the muzzle down, and triggered a one-handed burst which left as much of his body as possible behind the steel bulkhead.

  "—the way!" Dan finished as his body slammed against the same hope of cover Johnnie was using.

  Dan fired a flamethrower through the hatch.

  Johnnie's helmet visor blacked out the direct line of the magnesium-enriched fuel, but its white streak flooded the bridge like the reflection of an arc lamp. The flamethrower's no
zzle tried to lift in the commander's hands, but he kept it aimed down in a perfect three-cushion shot along the shaft's inner surface.

  There were only a few seconds' worth of fuel remaining in the bottle. The flame died abruptly. The yellow flash of a secondary explosion in the ladderway, grenades or ammunition, was dull by comparison.

  There were still screams.

  Johnnie strode through the hatch. Glowing metal walls provided light for his visor to amplify.

  Caleif and three Angels sprawled below. Another Angel whose uniform was on fire clawed blindly at the conning room bulkhead.

  The living figure turned. Both eyes were gone, and the flesh had melted away from the left half of his face.

  Johnnie fired instinctively, sending the screaming remains of Ensign Sal Grumio to join his brother and the rest of the Dragger's crew.

  Nothing else moved. Johnnie stepped back onto the bridge.

  Uncle Dan and the surviving technician stared at him. None of the three men spoke.

  The deck was tilted at a noticeable angle. Fires were visible across most of the 270O panorama of the unshuttered viewslit. The slime forward had baked dry in the heat of the deck beneath it. The algae now burned with its own smoky flame.

  The Holy Trinity's bow dipped toward the sea, but the dreadnought no longer had enough way on to sweep waves across the sullen fire.

  No shells had fallen since the horrendous triple salvo.

  "Look!" croaked the technician as he pointed to the southwestern sky. "Look!"

  The horizon brightened as though the red gates of Hell had been thrown open.

  Dan was kneading the singed back of his left hand with the fingers of his right. His face was terrible. "Bloody well about time," he snarled.

  Patterns of red specks roared high overhead. They were full salvoes from the seventeen battle-ready dreadnoughts of Blackhorse Fleet, slamming Commander Cooke's trap closed on the Angels.

  24

  Rather the scorned—the rejected—

  the men hemmed in with the spears;

  The men of the tattered battalion which fights till it dies,

  Dazed with the dust of the battle, the din and the cries,

  The men with the broken heads and the blood

  running into their eyes.

  —John Masefield

  There were ten of them still alive.

  Two of the Blackhorse raiders, men from the engine room, were so badly burned that they had to shuffle along with their arms supported by their comrades' shoulders. Johnnie arranged the makeshift harness of packstraps around them with as much care as possible, but the wounded men still moaned and shuddered through their fog of drugs and toxins.

  The gunboat D1528—Murderer according to the legend painted across the turret of the 2-inch Gatling gun on its foredeck—bobbed in swells reflected from the side of the Holy Trinity. Three of the crew used rifle butts as fenders to prevent the gunboat from being smashed into the side of the sinking dreadnought; others received each member of the raiding party as he came down the skimmer winch and passed the shaken men to such comfort and medical treatment as a hydrofoil could provide.

  The sea was lighted for miles by torrents of sparks spewing from the Holy Trinity's stern. Flames reflected from waves, from debris, and from the eyes of things which had learned the chaos of war meant a source of abundant food.

  The hydrofoil's crew was clearly nervous. The little craft depended on speed and concealment to survive. Here, stopped dead alongside the brightest beacon in the Ishtar Basin, they had neither, but they were carrying out their orders without complaint.

  As the men of the raiding party themselves had done; and had, for the most part, died doing.

  Men on the gunboat's deck released the second of the wounded raiders and passed him gently to their fellows in the cockpit. Dan winched up the whining cable at the highest speed of which the drum was capable.

  It didn't have far to come. The skimmer port was long under water, and the gunboat's railing was now only ten feet below that of the sinking battleship. At any time in the past five years, that would have been an easy jump for Johnnie, even onto the bobbing deck of a hydrofoil.

  At any time but now.

  "Go ahead," Johnnie said. "I'll winch you down."

  His uncle shook his head. "I'm the captain," he said. "I leave last. Hop in."

  He pointed to the harness.

  Johnnie wasn't sure whether or not the words were a joke, but he knew that he didn't want to argue—with anyone, about anything. He gripped the cable, intending to ride the clamps down without bothering about the harness.

  He swayed and almost blacked out. He'd been all right so long as he had the other crewmen to worry about, to fasten into the jury-rigged harness. . . .

  Dan caught him. "That's all right, John," the older man murmured. His right arm was as firm as an iron strap. "Here, we'll ride it together."

  The slung rifle slid off Johnnie's shoulder. Dan tossed it to the deck and said, "We won't need that now."

  The youth opened his eyes. He saw everything around him with a new clarity. "Right," he said in a voice he could not have recognized as his own. "Leave it for some poor bastard to blow his brains out before he drowns or the fish eat him."

  The winch began to unreel at a low setting. Dan supported him, but Johnnie's limbs had their strength back again. Hands reached up from the gunboat's deck to receive them.

  The Blackhorse line of battle was in sight, approaching from the southwest. The dreadnoughts' main guns spewed bottle-shaped flames which reflected from the cloud cover. Johnnie had never seen anything like it, even when he was hallucinating from a high fever.

  The seventeen battleships were proceeding in a modified line-abreast formation. Admiral Bergstrom kept his fleet's heading at forty-five degrees to their targets beyond the horizon, so that the Blackhorse vessels could fire full broadsides instead of engaging with their forward turrets alone.

  "For God's sake!" Dan muttered scornfully. "The Angels only have three battleships. What's he afraid of?"

  No incoming shells disturbed the perfect Blackhorse formation. The dreadnoughts' railgun domes were live, trailing faint streamers of ionized air, but they fired only occasional skyward volleys. The Angels had been battered to the point they had scarcely any guns capable of replying to the ships destroying them.

  "Got 'em!" shouted one of the crewmen who grabbed Dan and Johnnie. "All clear!"

  The hydrofoil's drive was churning a roostertail even before the winch cable had swung back against the Holy Trinity's side.

  The Blackhorse fleet was almost upon the burning dreadnought. The nearest of the battleships would pass within two hundred yards. The wake of the massive vessel, proceeding at flank speed, would have crushed D1528 against the Holy Trinity as so much flotsam had the gunboat not gotten under way in time.

  Johnnie wondered who had set the fleet's course . . . though subtlety of that sort didn't seem in character for Captain Haynes.

  Flames from the Holy Trinity picked out details on the hull and superstructure of the oncoming dreadnought, washing the three shades of gray camouflage into one. Johnnie thought the vessel was the Catherine of Aragon, but his mind was too dull for certainty and it didn't matter anyway.

  The dreadnought's twelve 16-inch guns were now silent, but there were squeals as the secondary batteries clustered along her mid-section rotated to track the hydrofoil as the little vessel turned desperately to bring her bow into the oncoming wake. The paired 5-inch guns glared at D1528 like the eyes of attack dogs, straining at their leashes.

  "Bastards!" snarled the ensign commanding the gunboat as he lifted Johnnie over the cockpit coaming. "They probably think it's a joke!"

  D1528 rode over the wake with a snarl and a lurch. The ensign used the drop on the far side to deploy the gunboat's outriggers thirty seconds before her forward motion alone would have permitted it.

  Dan swung himself into the cockpit. The motion was smooth and athletic. He seemed
as fit as he had been two days before in Admiral Bergstrom's office.

  Unless you looked carefully at his eyes.

  "Nice job, Stocker," Dan said to the ensign.

  Johnnie blinked. The name stencilled on the gunboat officer's helmet was worn and illegible in this light. Did Uncle Dan know all the Blackhorse officers by sight?

  Stocker looked up from the horizontal plotting screen. "Thank you, sir!" he said.

  D1528 was beating up to speed. Lifted on her foils, the gunboat was amazingly stable even though cross-cutting wakes corrugated the sea.

  "Where are you supposed to take us?" Dan asked, as if idly.

  He was using helmet intercom. A red bead in Johnnie's visor indicated that Dan had chosen a command channel that the gunboat's enlisted crew couldn't overhear.

  The hydrofoil was headed in the opposite direction from the battleships. The big ships were almost hull-down, their locations on the northeastern horizon marked primarily by the glowing discharges from railguns on alert status.

  All the guns had ceased firing. The Angels must have surrendered—whatever was left of them—and the Warcocks were not yet in range.

  Ensign Stocker looked up from the plot again. This time a guarded expression had replaced the earlier pleasure. "Ah, well, I'm to carry you to the cruiser Clinton," he said. "She's the command ship for the rear screen. Plenty of room aboard her and, you know, first-rate medical facilities."

  Stocker nodded toward the hydrofoil's electronics bay. One of the wounded raiders sat in the open hatchway, babbling to himself while a gunboat crewman tried to comfort him.

  "Admiral Bergstrom is aboard the Semiramis?" Dan asked.

  Stocker nodded cautiously. "Yes . . . ," he said. "Sir."

  "Take us to the Semiramis, Ensign," Dan said.

  The cockpit was cramped. Commander Cooke and the two ensigns were within arms' length of one another, but for an instant there was a cold crystal wall between Stocker and the others.

  "Sir, Captain Haynes specifically ordered . . . ," the gunboat officer began.