Ironclad

by Daniel Foster

  Maxwell was out the door and moving past the officers’ cabins in a lithe, predatory manner that put Garret in mind of a tiger through tall grass. Officers were emerging from their cabins all around, some of them half-dressed and half-asleep. They parted when they saw Maxwell, but he was moving so quickly that he seemed to slice through them. As they neared the officers’ leather-lined ward room, a junior engineering officer burst in from outside the officers’ portion of the ship, looking for someone. Maxwell got to him first and seized him by the arm.

  “Where?” Maxwell demanded.

  “One of the splinter deck dynamo rooms, sir, I don’t know which one.” The alarm bells were raising such a head-rattling din that it seemed as if the engineer was talking in soto voce even though he was yelling.

  Maxwell released the man’s arm, spun, and dashed back around the corner of the ward room wall. Behind it lay a ship’s ladder Garret hadn’t noticed. Maxwell dropped down it. Garret followed and found himself on the splinter deck. They were in a large open area with doors and hatches all around. Maxwell dashed down the long passage way in from of them, and Garret struggled to stay with him. As they ran, the rumble of the engines grew louder through the hatches to Garret’s left. As they neared the dynamo rooms, the passage became clogged with electricians and firemen, some still wiping sleep from their eyes as they struggled into their gear.

  At the same time, Garret began to smell a cloying reek that reminded him, ever so slightly, of the creature. It smelled like the time he’d dropped a hot iron on his arm, only a hundred times worse.

  The watertight door to the dynamo room was standing open, but the moment they passed through it, the reek thickened to the point that Garret felt it in his eyes, as if Kearsarge herself was struggling to keep the horror contained to one room so it didn’t stain the rest of her crew. A rank smoke hung in the air, making everyone cough. It smelled like someone was barbecuing a rotten corpse. A fireman retched behind Garret.

  Garret knew nothing about electricity, so to him, the machinery and equipment which packed the dynamo room were mind-boggling. The assemblage was both beautiful and sinister at the same time: bundles of wires and cables snaking everywhere, boxes with innumerable lights, switches, and gauges packed along the walls, and in the middle of it all stood the three menacing dynamos. They were barrel-shaped devices, each one of which could have filled Garret’s kitchen. Each dynamo was composed of heavy steel bands, cylinders, thick cables, bundles of copper so precisely wound that they looked woven, heavy steel armatures and supports, and all manner of intricate small parts. Had Garret not known the dynamos produced the electricity that brought Kearsarge to life, he would have assumed that they were some sort of terrifying new weapon.

  On the other hand, the ominous sense he felt from them might only have been because the nearest dynamo was slowly killing someone.

  The other two dynamos were spinning as normal, their copper and iron armatures blurring inside of their exterior workings, filling the air with a tingling sensation. The closest dynamo, however was still as death. A man was lying on the floor beside it, twitching and convulsing.

  Besides the downed man, there were four other electricians in the room, all in a panic. The first was young, probably younger than Garret. He wore the patch of an electrical “striker,” the Navy’s term for an apprentice. The striker was flailing, trying to get past the second man who was restraining him so that neither of them could touch their downed companion.

  The other two electricians, the chief and one of his juniors, were working frantically around the downed man’s leg, shouting at each other over the din as they pried gently with rubber-coated tools.

  They were trying to free his lower leg, or at least what was left of it. Garret couldn’t tell if the downed man was conscious or not. His hand was locked around a broken rod which protruded from the side of one of the dynamos. His fingers were white under the force of his own grip, even though the skin was bubbling up in angry blisters. His jaw was clenched and his eyes were rolled back in his head. Garret and the other crewmen often went bootless aboard battleships, and this man had been doing the same. His bare calf was wedged between one of the heavy steel stanchions and something else Garret couldn’t see.

  From the knee up, the man’s leg was normal: a white uniform lightly soiled from the night’s work. From the knee down the uniform was mostly gone. Black shreds of it lay on deck, but they were difficult to distinguish from the charred husk that remained of his lower leg. His bare foot was intact, sticking out past the steel stanchion. Red and white patches were creeping up the foot towards the toes as he spasmed.

  The rank smoke was from the dying man himself. His leg was burning up into nauseating plumes even while he lived. He twitched, seized, and his face looked less and less human with each passing second.

  Garret’s head was starting to swim. Why doesn’t he just let go?

  “Shut them down!” Captain Maxwell yelled.

  Firemen crowded around Garret and Maxwell, wearing heavy rubber and canvass, but they held back, waiting for instructions from the electricians. Electricity was the new black magic. Tampering, or even trying to help an electrician without his guidance was suicide.

  The electricians didn’t seem to care that anyone else was in the room. One of them dropped his rubber-coated tools and snatched a mop away from a striker who had just arrived with it. An officer, probably the one who would be held responsible, elbowed his way to the front and started demanding to know what idiot who had allowed a man to go barefoot in the dynamo room. No one paid him any mind. The man with the mop was trying to rip the head off it.

  The responsible officer vanished. He’d been yanked back out of sight by Commander Sharpe, who then ran through the gap and down the dynamo room to a storage locker on the far end. He sprinted back wearing heavy rubber gloves and ran to the chief’s side. The chief stopped prying with his rubberized tools long enough to wave Sharpe off and yell, “Get everybody out of here!” Sharpe began doing exactly that.

  The other electrician, who had finally succeeded in ripping the head off the mop, jammed the long wooden handle beneath the man’s incinerating calf and pried upward, trying to force the leg free. The man’s skin and muscle split like a grape, but it didn’t expose healthy flesh inside, only more crumbling darkness. Apparently, the current was burning him up from the inside out.

  As Garret watched, the man’s foot fell off. It just fell to the wood and lolled onto its side. The last bit of bone holding it to his leg had charred through and fallen to cinder.

  Maxwell’s roar drowned out everyone. “I said shut them down!”

  The chief electrician looked up at the captain, “We did sir, that’s why it’s not spin—”

  Maxwell cut him off. “SHUT IT ALL DOWN NOW!”

  The chief’s eyes roved in desperate thought, then he seized a long steel bar from against the wall and exited the room.

  The curling smoke was making Garret’s whole body sick. The lights flickered. Garret’s last sight was of Commander Sharpe, rubber gloves in place, bending and reaching for the dead man, hoping to pull him away from the grip of the current. Then all the lights died, plunging USS Kearsarge into inky darkness.

  W

  Andrew was ready to wring somebody’s neck. Maybe just keep wringing necks until somebody gave him an answer that justified the death of one of his young men.

  “Close the door,” Maxwell said.

  The junior electrician was nearest to it, so he did it, sealing the five of them away from the wide eyes of the rest of the crew. They were in the medical supply room. It was hardly conducive to a staff meeting, but it was the closest available option on the splinter deck, and Maxwell was in no mood to wait. Shelves packed the room from floor to ceiling. Rows of bottles queued in specially designed racks that held them firmly in place. There were entire crates of bandages. All of it seemed to be in the way, as though it was intentionally obscuring the answers Andrew wante
d.

  Andrew stood at attention. Beside him stood Lieutenant Bartram, also at attention, or his own languidly cool version of it. Barty hadn’t even been in the dynamo room, so Andrew had no idea why he was here. Andrew didn’t like Barty. Barty always followed Andrew’s orders, but he interpreted them in his own way. He never took quite enough latitude to get him in trouble, but always just enough to remind Andrew, or any other superior officer, how much smarter Barty was than everyone else.

  Moreover, Barty was the communications officer—on a ship ordered to wireless silence for the duration of her voyage. So in addition to being irksome, Lieutenant Bartram was also useless. Andrew had no idea why Captain Maxwell had brought him along in the first place.

  But none of that was important now. One of the crew was dead. Captain Maxwell stood in front of them, arms crossed, motionless.

  “How in the hell did this happen?” Maxwell asked, almost conversationally. His face might as well have been carved from marble.

  The chief electrician, Mr. Carr, looked at his junior. The junior blinked back at him. The chief reluctantly answered. “The wiring for all three dynamos has been tampered with, sir.”

  “Tampered with?”

  Mr. Carr shuffled his feet as though he was the class dunce before an irritated schoolmaster. Andrew glared at the electrician. This was too small of a room to be cooped up with so many people he didn’t like. A young sailor had just died—burned the death—and the electrician seemed more concerned that he was going to get his wrist slapped. Andrew still had the smell of the boy’s death in his nostrils.

  Maxwell held so still that it seemed to Andrew as if the ship was moving gently around Maxwell, as though Kearsarge’s captain was her fixed point, the pivot on which the entire battleship turned. But Andrew had known the man for a long time. The calmer he looked, the less calm he actually was.

  “Tampered with?” Maxwell prompted again.

  “I don’t know how yet, sir,” Mr. Carr answered. “It looks like someone—not me—disabled some of the safeties, sir.”

  “The man who died?” Maxwell asked, even though they all knew that would not prove to be the case.

  The electrician shook his head. “No sir, I don’t think so. I was with Petty Officer Rogers for all but the last few minutes before the accident, and I wasn’t out of the room long. He wasn’t the best electrician, but he knew better than to do something like that.”

  “You’ll not speak ill of the dead, and certainly not a fellow crewmember, Mr. Carr!” Andrew snapped.

  Maxwell held up a hand but didn’t look at Andrew. “Thank you Commander. Who was in the room with him during your absence, Mr. Carr?”

  The electrician didn’t meet Maxwell’s eye. “No one, sir.”

  “Mr. Carr, I know very little about the electrical intricacies of this ship, but I noticed that the dynamo which killed him did not seem to be in operation.”

  “Well, at night most of the men are asleep and the lights are down so the ship’s demand for electricity is reduced so we were…” the electrician stopped. “So Ensign Rogers was using the opportunity to perform some routine maintenance on the starboard dynamo, sir. You see, every so often the brushes have to—”

  Andrew felt Maxwell’s temper flare from across the small room. “One of my sailors is dead, Mr. Carr. Why?”

  “Well sir, the inactive dynamo was being fed current from both of the active dynamos. Somebody linked them somehow.”

  “Linked them somehow? You failed to follow my order to shut down immediately when I gave it. You do understand Petty Officer Rogers is dead because of that, do you not?”

  “Sir, I’m sorry, but I was afraid we might not be able to restart the older dynamos. We’ve been having problems with them. Not all of them were rebuilt during the refit.” He tried to take an appeasing tone with his captain, but to Andrew’s ear, it came across as sanctimonious. “Sir, I’ve been doing this for a long time, and I can tell you Rogers was dead already—”

  “My sailors are dead when I say they’re dead!” Maxwell roared. “And they’re alive until I say they’re dead. Do you understand that?” Maxwell was expanding, pushing against all of them. “If I had anyone to replace you, Mr. Carr, you’d spend the rest of this mission in the brig. In chains. Go find out why Petty Officer Rogers is dead, and then repair the damage. Now.”

  Mr. Carr and his junior floundered out of the room like men from the edge of quicksand. He stepped on Andrew’s foot on the way by.

  Maxwell turned to Lieutenant Bartram. “Lieutenant, you will conduct the investigation. They told me you are a bloodhound. Prove it. I want to know who in our crew has the skill to do something like this. I get the feeling that our saboteur knows more about the wiring onboard this ship than our chief electrician does.”

  “I was getting the same feeling, Captain,” the lieutenant replied mildly.

  That thought did not comfort Andrew, but strangely, the look on Barty’s face did. Barty was sharp eyed and sharper tongued, and he reminded Andrew too much of a large rat. Yet, suddenly those characteristics made Andrew decide that Barty was the man for this job.

  “I’ll have a report for you soon, Captain.” Barty turned and went, taking his long, hairless, invisible tail with him.

  Andrew was alone with Maxwell. Andrew didn’t have time to blink before Maxwell spun on him.

  “Commander Sharpe, that was the stupidest thing I’ve seen you do.”

  “Sir?” Andrew faltered. Then he remembered reaching for Rogers before the lights went out. “I couldn’t let him die.”

  “He was already dead, Commander. You risked your life trying to save a corpse.”

  Andrew was having trouble following. “But sir, I thought… didn’t you just say—”

  “I’m not talking to my spineless chief electrician. I’m talking to you: the XO I cannot afford to lose, and the XO whom I expect to set an example for every man aboard this ship.”

  Maxwell calmed himself before continuing. “I don’t care what details or watches you have to pull them off of, Andrew, I want guards—armed guards—stationed twenty-four/seven around every sensitive part of this ship.”

  Maxwell turned away and looked out the porthole. They stood like that for so long that Andrew began to wonder if he was dismissed.

  “I should have stationed guards as soon as the engineer found the damage to the steering gear,” Maxwell said. “But I was hoping to draw him out. I thought we were dealing with a saboteur.”

  “We aren’t, sir?”

  “First he tried to cut the steering gear. When that failed he tampered with our electrical system. Killing Ensign Rogers was an accident. But it was probably the accident that saved us all.”

  Andrew wasn’t following. “Sir?”

  “What would killing an innocent seaman accomplish for him? Our electrician said the traitor linked the dynamos somehow. I don’t think he was finished with what he was trying to do.” Maxwell turned grey eyes to the deck above him. “Kearsarge isn’t much to look at now, but in her day she was a flag ship.”

  Andrew finally got where Maxwell was going. Kearsarge was a capital ship, and as such she had been on the cutting edge when she was built. Her designers had done away with the heavy steam drives for the ship’s moving parts, making Kearsarge the first ship to have electric motors for almost everything. Even her massive turrets and her thirteen inch guns were operated electrically. Without dynamos, they would have been blind and defenseless. They would have been sitting ducks.

  “Can you imagine what stories Naval Command is spinning about us, Andrew?”

  Andrew could indeed imagine. It kept him up at night. The Navy brass might not know exactly what Maxwell and the Admiral had planned, but they knew enough, so by now the United States Navy would have warned every European power to be on the lookout for the rogue battleship, Kearsarge. The story would get worse every time it was retold. By now, old Kearsarge was probably captained by a madm
an, crewed by the undead, and bent on Armageddon.

  Europe was ready to erupt on a volcanic scale. The naval arms race had mounted to a world-bankrupting frenzy. With each passing year the world’s battleships got bigger and more terrifying until now they rivaled mountains with their size and humbled earthquakes with their destructive power.

  Nations were paranoid and looking for a chance to flex their naval muscle before their rivals, and now they had been given that chance. The newest, most advanced war machines on earth were searching for the Kearsarge even as she steamed into the night. Andrew, Maxwell, and their old battleship were being hunted by leviathans.

  Maxwell finished. “If he had succeeded, he would have left us immobile and defenseless, and sooner or later, another ship would have found us. He could have gotten every man on this ship killed, including himself, and he was fine with that. Nothing is more dangerous than a man who thinks he has nothing to lose. We’re not dealing with a saboteur. We’re dealing with a fanatic. Ensign Rogers is dead because I didn’t see that in time.”

  W

  Garret was dog tired and sick to his stomach from the rancid reek of the dead man, which seemed to have lodged itself in his nose. Garret was lying in his hammock in the low light. The blast bulkheads between the guns blocked his view of most of the other hammocks, but all of Nancy’s gun crew were propped up on their elbows listening to him, and he knew everyone else within earshot was too.

  Theo had a frown on his face, as if he were trying to figure something out. Fishy hadn’t said a word, just listened to the tale of Ensign Roger’s death with a guarded expression. Sweet Cheeks lay in his hammock, and his sketchbook lay closed on his chest, forgotten for the moment. His expression was regretful, but almost as if he felt as sorry for Garret as he did for the dead man.