Ironclad

by Daniel Foster

  He felt Commander Sharpe near him, taking the plate out of his lap, then lifting him from the floor. It was ridiculous, but Sharpe picked him up like an overgrown baby and stuffed him into his hammock. Days later, Garret and Fishy and Curtis would try it a dozen ways, but they never figured out how Sharpe managed to do it. As if he’d had practice.

  Garret was gone to the world, but at least he wasn’t gone in misery. He was warm and safe. He felt the blanket come up to his chin, ensconcing him. Garret felt a big-brotherly pat on his chest. Sharpe undoubtedly thought Garret was asleep, but Garret’s hearing lasted a bit longer than his other senses, so he caught the words Sharpe certainly did not mean him to hear.

  “Well done, sailor.”

  Chapter 12

  Commander Sharpe walked quickly away from the brig, trying to turn his distracted mind to the understaffed duty rosters and depressingly long sick-call lists that now required his attention. But as he stepped past the dispensary, he glanced back. The Captain was right. Vilner was only a boy, and at the moment, so deeply asleep he could pass for dead. “Vilner” was an odd surname for him, Andrew thought. He looked as German as Ludwig von Beethoven. Given Imperial Germany’s recent aggressiveness against the United States’ allies, maybe it had made sense for Barty to suspect Vilner, but it just seemed like a low blow to Andrew. Everybody’s family came from somewhere, and Andrew didn’t see why it should be cause for suspicion.

  Picking him up and putting him in his hammock had made Andrew uncomfortable, but Vilner was so emotionally burned out that he’d gone to sleep slumped against the bulkhead. Sleeping all night in that position would have left him miserable the next day. Anyway, Andrew felt guilty that the boy had been treated so poorly, even though Andrew had had no say in the decision to test his loyalty. Even so, Andrew had checked over both shoulders to make sure no one was around before he’d cradled the teenager up like an infant.

  He’d probably just done it because Captain Maxwell had ordered him to take care of Vilner. Andrew always tried to follow the spirit of an order, not just the letter. Somedays though, it seemed like Maxwell was aware of Andrew’s determination, and was therefore inventing increasingly ridiculous ways to test it. How had Maxwell phrased the last arcane order?

  Your primary duty for the rest of this voyage is to learn why these boys are here. Something like that.

  Andrew couldn’t get his brain around the letter or the spirit of that order. There were almost four hundred enlisted men aboard Kearsarge, and a man’s past was the one thing you didn’t ask him about. It was the unspoken rule.

  Andrew dismissed Seaman Vilner from his head, but Vilner was immediately replaced with Midshipman Burl Garner, who should have requested a special dispensation from his chief to switch his assigned mess table. It got in Andrew’s crawl that Captain Maxwell had let it pass. The Captain did that sort of thing constantly. How would anything but anarchy aboard ship be the result? And yet, anarchy didn’t happen, not on Maxwell’s ships, anyway. Maybe it was because Maxwell punched people in the stomach every so often.

  No, Andrew knew that wasn’t the reason. Maxwell didn’t drive his crews forward by threat or intimidation. He simply expected them to be more. Not only did Maxwell regard the rules as suggestions, but he did it because he honestly seemed to believe that his crewmen were better than the rules. Amazingly enough, as they began to learn how much he believed in them, they rose to the challenge, time and again.

  Andrew sighed as he climbed the last ship’s ladder to his office. Maxwell’s command style was demanding, sometimes it was borderline insurrectionist, but it always seemed to work. There were mutters in the Navy brass that Captain David Maxwell had a screw loose, and might soon be quietly retired. So be it. If Maxwell was crazy, then Andrew was going to learn to be crazy just like him. Even if it killed him.

  But as Andrew mulled over how he should go about learning to be crazy, his shoulders tightened with worry. This mission was different. They were headed for Europe carrying a weapon that made him nervous even to have aboard, and he wasn’t thinking about the cyanide. Maxwell hadn’t told him all the details, but Andrew knew enough to know that they would be fighting hand to hand when they got where they were going.

  Social and political tensions in Europe had never been higher. France and Germany shook their fists across the border at one another while they piled up war machines at home. Britain was consuming the amassed wealth of her empire to build the most frightening navy the world had ever seen. New and more horrible technologies were being invented every day: armored war machines that could roll over infantry as easily as a man crushed an ant, invisible gasses that made men cough until they began to hack up pieces of their own lungs, there seemed to be no end to man’s depraved creativity.

  Many people within the US Navy knew of the horrific new technologies, but only a few people knew the true extent of the crisis from which they sprung. Andrew knew it. So did his captain. So did the Admiral—whoever he was—who had sent them on this suicide mission. The government at the epicenter of the tension—the powerful Austro-Hungarian Empire—was collapsing from within. It would fall soon. Very soon. When it did, it would take all of Europe with it.

  So here they were in the middle of the Atlantic: Andrew, the captain he would die for, and twenty-two other officers hand-picked by Maxwell. With their ancient battleship, a pre-pubescent, untrained crew, not a single combat marine, and every navy in the world hunting them, they were going to sail straight into the middle of the powder keg.

  Andrew set his jaw. Fine. There was nothing he hated more than a boring mission anyway.

  W

  June 5th, 1914. Twenty-three days to Vidovdan

  Garret awoke of his own accord, fourteen hours later. They had let him sleep until he woke up naturally. He sat up groggily and saw that Commander Sharpe had not closed his cell door. He was free to go when he wished. He hadn’t been a prisoner at all. He’d been given a good meal and a chance to rest and recuperate, while making it look like he was being punished. But of course Commander Sharpe had reassigned the guards, so there was no one around to see it.

  W

  The morning was a crisp azure arc, far above Garret and his friends. Hundreds of men had turned out onto the main deck. Garret and his friends were at the stern. Laughter rang and soapy water ran all over the wood.

  The sun was bright and the air was cool, scoured clean by the salt in the wind. Garret drew a breath, letting the tang invigorate him. Beneath them, Kearsarge sang her muted war song, powering across the Atlantic, her proud bow cutting through countless tons of water as easily as if it were air. The foam rolled to either side of her, glinting white in the sun. She was making good time, kicking a breeze over her crew to cool their labors.

  As Garret laughed with his friends and felt Kearsarge’s power rumbling beneath him, he began to feel a snatch of the pride that seemed to drive Twitch in everything he did. Kearsarge was an old war machine, but Garret was getting attached to her. Chief Greely wouldn’t stop talking about the Kearsarge as if she was alive, so maybe it was just soaking into Garret’s brain, but at times Garret understood why the Chief spoke that way. At night, Kearsarge’s electric lights would go down to little more than a candle’s glow, and her vibrations would massage him to sleep. Or when he was happy and feeling particularly masculine, as he was at the moment, she would lay low in the water and prowl across the Atlantic, her gigantic gun barrels shining in the sun, her three hundred and seventy-five foot bulk cruising ahead as if she weighed nothing.

  Kearsarge’s rear turret rose beside them, clean grey paint and forty foot long barrels gleaming in the sun. Her guns had been designed to reduce battleships, fortresses, even entire ports to flaming rubble. The power that slept within them was unimaginable, at least to Garret. He kept hoping he’d get to see them fired before the mission was over. Twitch said it was so loud that you didn’t really hear it. He said it felt like the air around you turned inside out.

>   In other words, it was great to be a man, even though that currently meant that he had to do laundry all morning. So at the moment there was no gunfire, just the sounds of hundreds of scrub brushes and teenaged joshing. All of them were down on their hands and knees. Clothes and hammocks covered the stern deck. Pails of soap chips and deck hoses were plied liberally. They were all teenage guys, so they weren’t supposed to care about being dirty, but Garret was really looking forward to putting on a clean uniform.

  “We might as well be wearing burlap,” Floyd groused as he scrubbed a uniform sleeve. “These things feel like potato sacks.” Garret looked down at his hands and scrub brush, covered with suds, and at his uniforms spread on the deck.

  Garret flushed with embarrassment and hoped no one noticed. He’d just been thinking how nice his uniforms were. Through childhood, he’d never had clothes that fit, and even then they’d always had patches. I was dirt poor. We didn’t have a damn thing. How did I not realize that?

  The first few days of the voyage had been so crazy that this was the first morning they’d had time for a normal day’s washing. The entire starboard division had turned out. It was about time, too. They were supposed to look like United States bluejackets, but they looked more like survivors of a coal mine collapse.

  That would soon be fixed. At least for starboard watch. Half the ship’s company was down on their hands and knees, and every piece of clothing they weren’t wearing was spread on the deck.

  Not far away, Lieutenant Bartram had cornered an electrical striker against Kearsarge’s side railing. Garret couldn’t hear what was being said over Kearsarge’s wake, but the guy’s bamboozled expression and his hands, open in pleading, spoke loudly enough. Garret shot the guy a pitying glance as Lieutenant Bartram interrogated him.

  Poor guy, Garret thought. I know what that’s like. Damn, is he starting to sweat?

  The bucket was coming down the line again, from Burl to Theo to Garret. Burl and Theo were usually side by side now, though as far as Garret had seen, they hardly said a word to one another. Garret grabbed handful of soap chips and passed it on by. Floyd had just made another smart remark about the uniforms, although Garret had missed it.

  Why is Floyd so crabby today?

  “You too good to wear what the rest of us wear?” Pun’kin asked him. That made Garret feel better. “I’ve worn potato sacks before,” Pun’kin added happily.

  “So have I,” put in Garret.

  Theo, who had been scrubbing slowly but intently, looked up at Garret. “Why?” he asked. His round face was open, honestly curious.

  Pun’kin answered first, loudly and with a grin. “Beats wearin’ a barrel, now don’t it?”

  Theo wasn’t tracking. Before Garret could explain, Pun’kin turned loudly on Floyd again. “The Velvet Sailor, that’s what you are.”

  “Velvet!” Fishy crowed in exultation. “Finally!”

  Floyd looked up. “Guys, you’d better not call me—“

  Garret was actually the first one to start chanting, but the others picked it up almost immediately. “Vel-vet! Vel-vet! Vel-vet!”

  They all broke down into laughter, except Floyd, or “Velvet,” as he was now destined to be.

  Burl was scrubbing a pair of pants beside Garret and asked, “What was it like in the brig?”

  Garret had been out of the brig for a while, but it had made him a bit of a celebrity. Not so much because he’d been in the brig, that would have been cause for ridicule, but because the captain had silenced the whole situation.

  Several officers and men had seen Garret on the floor in the captain’s cabin, wrestling with Twitch, but none of them knew why. They also knew that Garret had spent a long night and part of a day in the brig and Twitch hadn’t, and that the Captain had not allowed anyone to speak of it. The crew also knew that Garret had nearly been thrown overboard, but that Lieutenant Bartram had stopped it from happening. The crew couldn’t make heads or tails of it, and no amount of cajoling from Fishy or Pun’kin had wormed the truth out of either Garret or Twitch. Sweet Cheeks was the only one who hadn’t asked. Hadn’t said a word about it, actually.

  Garret didn’t know what to do with the attention, but Twitch sure did. After all, Twitch insisted, the captain had told them they couldn’t talk about what had happened. He hadn’t said anything to bar them from talking about what hadn’t happened.

  So rumors were flying fast and hard, and Twitch had started half of them. When Garret found out, Twitch had patted him on the shoulder and said not worry because it was a social experiment, solely for the advancement of science, and Twitch took no pleasure in it. Garret didn’t see how a rumor about him rubbing his privates all over the master-at-arm’s mess kit was going to advance anything, nor did he see how a story about him proclaiming his undying love for Captain Maxwell and then trying to fling himself overboard would benefit science. But then, Garret didn’t know much about science.

  “Did they chain you in the brig?” Burl asked.

  Garret opened his mouth to say it really had been quite boring, but then he paused for a moment’s consideration. The last Garret had overheard, Twitch was working on a new rumor about Garret being a doomsday prophet with an invisible third eye in the middle of his forehead with which he could summon the Kraken.

  Suddenly it made Garret want to try something he’d never tried before.

  “No, but there are spiders,” he said to Burl.

  Everyone nearby quieted to listen.

  “Spiders?” Burl asked.

  “Yep, they’re big as dinner plates.”

  Fishy rolled his eyes and Twitch pursed his lips.

  Burl gave Garret a narrow look. “Big as…”

  Garret pulled his bare right foot up underneath him where Burl could see, and pointed to the big toenail he’d half torn off on a hatch facing the other day. It was still oozing.

  “They come out at night and try to eat your toenails,” Garret said. “I had to fight them off with my pillow.”

  Burl stared at the toe. “With your… But we don’t have pillows.”

  “They do in the brig,” Twitch put in smoothly. “They’re made of concrete.”

  “But why would—”

  “Aaaanyway,” Floyd interrupted. “Pass me the soap.”

  “Hey Sweet Cheeks,” Fishy called, “Velvet needs more soap!”

  Garret hid his grin by wiping his face on his opposite shoulder. He punched Burl lightly on the shoulder.

  At the sound of laughter, Garret turned. His friends had gathered around Theo’s clothes bag. Twitch was holding up one of Theo’s uniform tops and laughing hysterically. The sleeve that hung down was packed full of something. Garret squinted. It was packed full of cat. Bert the cat. He’d crawled down the sleeve and gotten stuck, his head protruding from the cuff, the rest of his body wrapped tightly in the sleeve like he’d been mummified.

  They laughed and laughed at Bert’s irritated expression. Fishy tickled Bert’s whiskers to add indignity. When Bert laid his ears back and glared at Fishy, they laughed harder.

  Garret laughed with them, and God it felt good. For most of the morning, he felt free and at peace.

  W

  Garret swung his arms over his head and down to his toes, side to side, again and again.

  I hate drill.

  The officer had cranked up the tempo again today. They were all sweating into their uniforms, almost a hundred men on the main deck. The whistle peeped, and everybody switched to doing jumping jacks in time. Sweat rolled down Garret’s back, making his uniform cling. There should have been closer to a hundred and fifty men around him, but everybody was pulling extra duty everywhere. Garret had missed the first few minutes of drill because he’d been helping patch a leak in the water main. Curtis had arrived a few minutes later with mechanical grease smeared on his britches a torn sleeve, and a crabby expression on his face. Garret didn’t ask.

  The whistle peeped again and they were doi
ng pushups. And more pushups. They passed thirty. Forty. Forty-five. Damn, never thought I’d say this, but I’d rather be cleaning something. At sixty pushups, when half the boys had already failed and Garret was about to, the whistle peeped quickly twice. They all flopped to the deck and sucked for air.

  “What…” Fishy gasped. “The fuck…” That summed it up pretty well, so everyone else just laid there and panted. Calisthenics was just supposed to keep them in shape. Garret had heard grumbling from the older enlisted men that it was never this hard on other ships. And it was getting harder every day.

  After about, oh, three seconds of rest, the officer of the deck yelled, “Partners and gloves. Two lines!”

  They all pushed themselves up on jelly-arms. Chief Greely had ordered them all to go to ship’s stores and retrieve gloves before they came to drill that day, so they’d known this was coming.

  They all made their way to the glove crates they’d stacked behind them on the deck. They didn’t have enough gloves for everybody, so some people got to sit out the first round. Naturally, Garret’s division didn’t.

  Garret pulled on gloves and made a beeline for Burl, a nice easy first match. But Theo was already standing beside Burl, helping him lace up his gloves. Damn. Garret veered and made for Floyd. He was already standing opposite Sweet Cheeks. Shit! The lines were forming. Garret turned, and there stood Twitch, grinning fiendishly at him.

  Why me…?

  Garret had never boxed before bootcamp, and he was only decent. Fishy was good. Curtis wasn’t fast, but he was strong as an ox. If you didn’t get out of the way of his right cross, you’d need to shave when you woke up. Twitch was no bigger than Garret, but he was even faster than his nickname suggested, and he was mean as a snake. Not even Curtis liked to box with Twitch.

  “Hey buddy,” Garret said quietly to Twitch. “I’m really tired from working on the water main. Could you take it easy for—”