Ironclad

by Daniel Foster

  Garret smiled tiredly. The rain picked up, falling in big drops that splattered on his neck and shoulders. They trudged on, eighty United States bluejackets in a loose formation. They dragged their feet, they slouched, but other than Pun’kin’s occasional outbursts, no one spoke.

  There was a quiet camaraderie between them that didn’t require words. It had begun in bootcamp, and had been cemented during on-ship training. Garret always wanted to be part of the group, but on his bad days, he had a hard time with it. He felt like he might contaminate them by his presence. Maybe it wasn’t logical, but then, overwhelming guilt rarely is.

  Some of the camaraderie had to do with working together. Most of it had to do with cooperating to get away with whatever they could when there were no officers present. And at the moment, there were no officers to be seen, so they trailed carelessly through the dark and the rain, as slow as they could possibly walk, the soggiest group of sailors in Philadelphia.

  The three hundred foot hulk of the battleship was well behind them now, fading into the downpour. The formation began to swing out wide across the shipyard. Whoever was leading the pack seemed to be taking the scenic route to wherever they were going. Offices, storage buildings, and residences passed them on the right. Some were lit, most were not.

  Garret’s uniform clung to him. Judging by the sodden feel and increasing weight of his clothes bag, it wasn’t shedding water very well. So the rest of his uniforms would be soaked too. His ditty box was digging into his side.

  A rectangle of light appeared in the front of the nearest building. Someone passed through the open door and then slammed it hard enough to make it echo off the flank of the distant battleship. From the single stride Garret saw before the light was cut off, he knew the man was an officer. The officer headed straight for them. Apparently, Garret wasn’t the only one to notice that. In the rain and muck, both divisions began an awkward attempt to fall in.

  It wouldn’t have mattered. The officer was down their throats while he was still far enough away for the rain to muffle his voice. Anyhow, his frustration carried well enough.

  “Are you men my skeleton crew? God help you if you are. You should have been shoveling fifteen minutes ago.”

  He was stressed, tense, and angry, but more than that, he was disappointed in them. Finally the man got close enough for Garret to see him clearly through the rain. He was probably mid-twenties, but he’d already reached the rank of commander. Garret’s posture straightened instinctively.

  “Are you the divisions from the Columbia?” he demanded again. Their embarrassed silence was answer enough. “Damn it men,” he grated. “You have no idea what you just delayed.”

  Garret’s fear of punishment turned to chagrin. Around him, others shifted uncomfortably and looked at the mud. They’d failed their duty. Without another word, the commander, wearing his dress blues, gold buttons, white gloves and all, broke into a sprint through the mud. He didn’t slow as he reached the head of the pack. Without even looking back he yelled, “Double time!” Chastised, both divisions fell into quick formation and tried to catch up to him.

  The rain pelted Garret, and he pelted the ground even harder. The commander was running almost flat out. Garret’s state of exhaustion would have made it hard enough for him to keep up, to say nothing of having his ditty box under one arm and every piece of navy clothing he owned slung over his shoulder. Around him, there was no talking, only gasping.

  The officer was leading them back towards the water’s edge. He took them down a side street between a couple of buildings. One of them was a naval office of some sort. The other was a stately Victorian, maybe the commandant’s residence. They were headed for the deepest corner of the bay.

  They passed a fenced area containing several tree-trunk sized gun barrels, rusting in the rain, the three-sectioned bulk of a warship boiler, and a steel rudder the size of a barn wall. The commander cut right, still maintaining an effortless sprint, and took them beneath the legs of a five story crane.

  Garret’s lungs were burning so badly that he was beginning to wonder if they might still have some Delaware River in them. The officer cut left again, down a narrow alley between two brick buildings that looked more like factories. They broke into the open and crossed a set of railroad tracks. After another breathless sprint across a long strip of grass, the deepest edge of the naval bay opened before them.

  Warships were moored in even rows on the rain-swept water. A line of small destroyers floated there, moored together with a monitor. There was even an old sloop, its graceful wooden curves and sailing masts looking amusingly delicate against the hulking, four hundred foot long steel battleship docked opposite. Garret looked down the length of the battleship. Before leaving the Appalachians in which Garret had spent his whole life, he wouldn’t have thought people could build such things.

  Only one ship in the entire bay was lit up, and she was wearing her lighting in the best battleship style. In the modern world of 1914, the Navy was the pride and strength of every up-and-coming nation, and the battleships were the crown jewels of the Navy. They were destruction incarnate. The steel armor they wore down their flanks and around their turrets was often a foot thick. They could annihilate coastal cities from miles out to sea, and when battleships met in war, the ocean raged, fire and smoke rolled, steel shredded like paper, and men died by the hundreds.

  A shout distracted Garret’s attention from the looming ships. Off to the right and ahead of their formation, it looked like a fight had broken out. A big one. Dozens of men grappled and swung at each other, grinding their opponents into the mud. Garret craned his neck as he huffed and puffed. Mercifully the commander leading their formation had slowed when he saw the fight. He was observing it with some apprehension, and unless Garret was mistaken, some confusion.

  “Ho,” the Commander shouted. “Daugherty, is that you?”

  When an answer was not immediately forthcoming, the commander began to list towards the grappling men. The formation swung to follow, taking Garret with it. As soon as the commander realized he was veering off, he corrected his course, but kept his eyes on the fight.

  At last a response came back from “Daugherty,” whoever he was. His replied shout was punctuated, as if he was hammering on somebody even as he answered. “Captain… Maxwell’s… orders… Commander…”

  As they drew abreast of the altercation, the combatants became more visible through the rain. It wasn’t a fight, not really anyway. It was too lopsided for that. It looked like a group of soldiers, Marines actually, had been escorting a group of prisoners somewhere. The prisoners had decided they didn’t like it so well. Whoever the prisoners were, they’d have been better off just going along, because the young Marines were quickly beating them into submission with fists, rifle butts, and anything else that struck their fancy. One of them had even found a section of rusty chain lying around somewhere.

  As the front of the formation began to pass by the fight, Garret caught snatches of shouted threats through the darkness and rain.

  “You men are finished! You hear me?”

  “This is insurrection, you’ve all broken your oaths!”

  Then came the surly, uncomplicated voice of a Marine, “We have our orders, sir.”

  Suddenly an order came from much closer. “Eyes front!” It was the commander who was leading their formation. Garret and the rest did so, but their peripheral vision was more than enough. As they passed by, Garret did a double take.

  The Marines were beating down a group of Naval officers. Everyone’s uniform was covered with muck, but Garret could still recognize some of their insignias and shoulder patches. Lieutenants, Lieutenant-Commanders, ensigns.

  What in the hell?

  The Marines were efficient. Garret was at the tail of the formation, and by the time he passed the sopping gaggle of officers, the Marines had most of them up and were beginning to march them away again.

  One of the Marines stepped
up to the Commander and saluted as he passed. The Marine called after him, “Sir, make sure your men do not speak of this to anyone on punishment of court-martial. Captain Maxwell’s orders!”

  The commander who was leading Garret and the rest yelled back to them without breaking his stride. “You heard the man! Breathe a word and go to a naval prison. Captain Maxwell is not a man to be trifled with.”

  The Marines and their prisoners had vanished into the rain. As quickly as that, it was over and everyone carried on as if it had all been perfectly normal. Life in a naval yard was nothing if not random.

  A warm glow turned Garret’s attention back to the battleship. They were much closer to her now, and she displayed herself in the darkness like the wicked old piece of floating annihilation that she was.

  Battleships were doomsday weapons, and as such, they showcased the most cutting edge technology a nation possessed. Electric lighting, which Garret had never even seen in his home town in the Appalachian hills, was used here with abandon. Strings of lights ran all along the battleship’s deck rails at two different levels. Every porthole and open hatch on the ship glowed from within. The metal cage masts and even the flying bridge were all strung with bulbs. From stem to stern, the battleship glowed as warmly as if she were alive.

  But she wasn’t. Though both of the other battleships in the bay were much larger, and if Garret had to guess, quite a bit newer, the glowing ship was more menacing than either of them. Maybe it was her stance. She had an unusually low freeboard, which meant she rode low in the water, as if she was planning to sneak up on her prey. Or maybe it was just her paint scheme. Every other ship in the harbor, whether a diminutive monitor or a hulking cruiser, was painted in peacetime colors: white hull with buff superstructure. The glowing ship, however, was painted in dark, war-time grey.

  But we’re not at war, are we?

  The color was only intended to make ships blend with the ocean as they crested the horizon, but combined with her low freeboard, it gave her a sinister look.

  Or maybe it’s just those damn guns.

  She bristled with weaponry. Guns that dwarfed cattle protruded in rows from her flanks and casemates, but they were negligible compared to her main battery. It consisted of two double stacked turrets, one each front and rear on her main decks. Together, each double turret was almost two stories tall, with two pairs of double barrels protruding from each.

  The Commander leading them had picked his pace back up again. Garret silently cursed him for it. They angled towards the battleship’s starboard flank, slowly rotating Garret’s view. His eyes widened as he got a better look at her largest guns. Those barrels have got to be forty feet long. And at the base, probably fifteen feet in circumference. It would have taken a train to carry a single one of the guns.

  Across her tapered stern, not far behind and below the guns, the ship’s name was painted in simple script, as if her name was the only small, unimportant detail in her construction. A string of lights illuminated it warmly.

  Kearsarge.

  W

  Garret drove his shovel into the coal mountain again and again. So did several hundred other exhausted, soaked young men. They’d been at it for hours. The other slack, coal-smeared faces around Garret looked like he felt—that nothing existed in the universe except the black mountain in front of them, which refused to get smaller no matter how much they shoveled. Shovel, lift, dump into the big bag, shovel, lift, dump, shovel, lift, dump. The guys around Garret were half-lit in Kearsarge’s electric glow, and half-shadowed in darkness. Their faces would have looked dead, but for the fact that everyone kept shoveling.

  The scraping of so many shovels had blended into a din that numbed Garret’s mind and hands. It did not, however, numb the aches everywhere else. His hands and shoulders were crying for rest. His legs were starting to hurt too, but it was his back that worried him. The pins and needles had started again, moving from his lower spine down into his hips. He dumped a shovelful into the waiting burlap, then drove the shovel into the coal again. Shovel, lift, dump. Shovel, lift dump. Shovel, lift, dump.

  Beneath the sound of shovels and whir of a few cable winches, hand pulleys squeaked constantly. On Kearsarge’s deck, above and behind Garret, men grunted with effort, hauling on the ropes that wound through the pulleys. In response to their effort, three hundred pound bags of coal lifted off of the dock, through the air and onto Kearsarge’s deck to be emptied down the coal chutes.

  It should have gratified Garret, or at least given him some sense of progress to see each full bag lift away, but no sooner did a bulging bag lift off the dock than a freshly emptied one thumped into its place. They were feeding a bottomless pit.

  An exasperated voice rose above the shouts and shovels. “Sailor, if you hit the side of my ship with that coal bag one more time, I’ll have that pasty hide of yours made into a throw rug.”

  The rain had lessened but continued to fall, smearing coal smudges into long dark streaks down everyone’s uniforms.

  The commander who had led them here, the tireless cheetah in dress blues, had run them straight up the gangplank onto Kearsarge’s deck and handed them off to a couple of middle-aged master chiefs. Without so much as an order to attention, the master chiefs had told them to drop everything right where they stood, then ran them back down off the ship to the docks where a literal mountain of coal—thousands of tons of it—awaited them. Garret and his divisions added their eighty-odd hands to the men who were already shoveling, already exhausted, and already soiled with coal dust. Garret could only guess how long those poor guys had been at it.

  One of them was working beside Garret at the moment. He was perhaps a couple years Garret’s senior. He was also pale with exhaustion. Garret raised his head to say something encouraging, but his back caught, sending a sharp tingle down into his left leg. He flinched and stopped. This was a very specific kind of pain. He’d only felt it once before, and he had hoped it was long behind him.

  The creature had been killed more than a year ago. But before that had finally happened, it had tormented Garret for months, injuring him in countless ways. The worst injury had been the blow the creature dealt to his back. In a fit of rage, it had hit him so hard that it had severed his spine. Garret would never forget the feeling of paralysis. His own legs, dead and unresponsive, hanging off his waist like a ball and chain.

  The older guy interrupted Garret’s thoughts. “They’ll make you wish you weren’t born if they see you being lazy.”

  Garret didn’t hear him. Garret’s ability to shift created several unique problems and opportunities for him. One was the ability to heal. A former friend had explained it to him a long time ago, and Garret didn’t understand all the details, but the gist was that when he shifted, every tissue in his body had to be rearranged anyway, so his body took advantage of that rearrangement to put things that had been damaged back into order again.

  Even such an ability as that was no match for a cleanly severed spine. Garret had made a desperate, terrible gamble to reconnect the broken ends. He would never forget the agony that resulted from that decision, or the pain and trouble that followed him for weeks as his constant shifting struggled to complete the healing.

  The reason he would never forget it was because he was feeling it again. Right now. As he stood beside the mountain of coal, the tingling, burning, pins-and-needles were beginning again, just as they had more than a year ago.

  Why is it hurting again? He knew why. He’d known it for weeks. He couldn’t shift anymore. The damage to his back had never been fully healed. His constant shifting back and forth held the deterioration at bay.

  But now I can’t shift anymore.

  A heavy wave of fear rose from the thought. What if it gets so bad I can’t move my legs again? Garret stood cautiously and tried to relax his back. He remained standing for a moment, breathing deeply as the rain pattered on his upturned face.

  “You’d better get back to work,” th
e other guy warned.

  Garret watched a coal bag swing over his head and up onto Kearsarge’s deck. As it did so, he noticed a small form sitting on the edge of the deck. It looked like a cat.

  “What’s that,” Garret asked, trying to distract himself from his worry about his back.

  The guy stopped and turned to see where Garret was pointing.

  “That’s Bert,” the guy said. “Ship’s mascot. He doesn’t like anybody.”

  The guy drove his shovel back into the coal.

  Garret squinted. Bert was backlit by Kearsarge’s deck lights, so he was little more than a feline silhouette. His fur was soaked, sticking out from him in sodden lumps, but he sat there, seemingly unconcerned by the downpour.

  “I’ve never seen a cat sit in the rain.”

  “Yeah, he’s brain damaged,” the other guy grunted.

  Before he could go on, someone on the deck, another silhouette, pointed at Garret. “Get back to work!”

  Garret dug in again. His back was far from well, but at least the moments of respite relaxed it enough that it didn’t spasm.

  The entire officer corps of Kearsarge was tenser than a bunch of squirrels in a wildcat’s den. They were tense with the enlisted men. They were even tense with each other, as if they didn’t know one another very well. Whatever was going on, it was obviously not going nearly as fast as they had planned, and the resultant pressure in the damp air was making everyone edgy in addition to weary. But the glow from Kearsarge washed over them from behind, so at least their misery was well lit.

  Despite their tension, the officers on Kearsarge’s deck barked a little encouragement in with their orders and reprimands:

  “Keep it up men, I know you’re tired. This is more important than you know.”

  “You men, move down there and help load the stern bunker. They need more hands.

  Garret’s shoveling was interrupted again when a new presence stepped in between him and the guy he’d been shoveling beside. Garret moved to the side and blinked in surprise. The man was an officer.