Ironclad

by Daniel Foster

  Garret scrambled back from the tree, eager for distance. From beneath his cloak, the Hollow Man produced a glass sphere, cut and faceted in all sorts of wicked looking patterns. The Hollow Man released the sphere, and it hung there in mid air, then it began to unscrew, the top half spinning up and off of the lower half. Inside it was a green powder.

  Is that… from that nasty green organ thingy? Garret felt certain that was the case.

  The Hollow Man cupped his hands beneath it and it upturned, pouring the powder into his palms. He opened his hands opposite directions, letting the powder fall into the grooves Garret had scraped in the soil. The powder sank into the ground, each grain wiggling away into the soil as if it was a tiny insect.

  Garret didn’t want to watch, but he was having a hard time taking his eyes off whatever was happening. Why is he letting me see all this?

  If the Hollow Man heard the thought, he didn’t respond to it. Then Garret began to notice a slight change in the flesh of both halves of Ensign Roger’s body. Where his body joined the tree, the flesh was taking a greenish tinge.

  Garret felt sick, again. He remembered watching the disgusting organ fight its own removal. And now it had been absorbed by the tree and was integrating with Ensign Roger’s body.

  Go back to your world, the Hollow Man said, and gave a dismissive wave of his hand. Garret saw nothing come from the hand, but the dismissive wave hit him like a train, throwing him off the road, through the dark and back through the door in the side of the turret. Garret hit the deck face down and rolled to a stop. He heard the door in the turret slam shut, but when he collected himself and looked up, the door was gone. The turret column was smooth, unbroken metal once again.

  Garret pushed himself to his knees, then to his feet. He was aboard the Kearsarge again. The electric lights shed their steady glow, and he could hear muffled conversation coming from the berthing area around the forward side of the turret column. His uniform was still soaked with diluted blood, and the ship stank like sweat, as usual.

  The feelings of fear and captivity had fled so thoroughly that Garret stepped to the turret and ran his hands over the steel of the turret column in amazement. It was painted American steel, smooth and cool to the touch. The emotional change inside him was so stark that he actually tried to make himself feel afraid again. He tried to rekindle the dark feelings he’d had just a few seconds before, but they were gone, and they would not return. Why should they? He was on the Kearsarge with his friends. He was safe, more or less.

  Garret felt normal, inside and out, and everything looked normal around him. There was no evidence of anything other than scrubbing a ladder. The Hollow Man had become nothing more than a bad dream, again, though Garret was sure he had not been asleep this time. Garret grabbed his left ring finger, but all he felt was his own warm skin, muscle, and bone.

  Suddenly, the memories of everything that had just happened to him began to fade away. No, not again! It wasn’t a dream this time! I know this happened! Garret grabbed hard for the memories, trying to replay them over and over to imprint them on his brain. But even as he tried to recall them, they fell apart, disintegrated, and then dissolved.

  Within a few seconds, Garret was standing in front of the turret foundation, wondering what he was doing there. He took his fingertips off of the smooth steel and then stared at them, as if they might tell him why he was touching it. After a few blank moments, he turned and saw the last of the bloody mess leading up off of the ladder. Well, he thought with a sigh. I’m almost done.

  Garret walked back towards the ladder and the bucket of bloody pink water that he knew waited beneath it. He began to descend the ladder. Just before his eyes dropped below the deck level, he glanced back at the conning tower foundation. Smooth steel, and nothing more.

  W

  June 8th, 1914. Twenty days to Vidovdan

  Alarms went wild, ripping Garret out of a sound sleep. He sat up, bashing his head on the deck above and making his hammock swing crazily. At least he didn’t flip it and land on the gun this time. Beside him, Theo flailed as if he’d just received an electric shock.

  Nearby, Pun’kin jerked and mumbled, “Your dumplin’s are the best, Mama…” then he was asleep again.

  That jerk can sleep through anything, Garret thought sourly as he climbed shakily down. Why the hell did it scare me so bad anyway? You’d think I’d be used to getting woke…

  He paused and actually listened to the alarm. Then he understood why he’d nearly shit his hammock. It wasn’t the collision alarm, or even a gun drill. This alarm, he’d heard only a couple times before in training.

  Fire.

  Greely, who was never around when they needed him, but always around when he needed them, burst into the citadel and yelled, “Fire stations! This is not a drill.”

  They scrambled, but on the way by, Garret and Velvet both grabbed opposite ends of Pun’kin’s hammock and flipped it, dumping him out.

  An hour later, Garret stood in front of the door to the thirteen inch shell room. A guard, a young man about Garret’s own age, stood beside the closed door. Garret had his hands on his hips.

  “Shouldn’t you be at your fire station?” the guard retorted.

  “We haven’t found the fire yet,” Garret repeated. “We’re sweeping the ship. I’m under orders from Chief Greely. I have to inspect the thirteen inch shell room. Now let me in there.”

  “Nobody but the ammo crews are allowed in,” the guard repeated like a skipping gramophone. “Captain’s orders.”

  “That was before the ship was on fire!” Garret argued. “If you don’t let me in there, you’re gonna be guarding this room on the bottom of the sea. If you want to come in with me, fine!”

  “Can’t leave my post,” the guard said.

  Garret was grinding his teeth. “Well fine, then I guess we’ll both just stand here and burn to death unless…”

  Garret drifted off and leaned closer to the door. “I thought you said nobody was in there?”

  “No way,” said the guard. “Nobody gets past me.”

  “Well, I just heard something,” Garret challenged.

  The guard smiled. “Nice try.”

  Then the guard heard it too. Raised voices. Somebody was behind the door. More than one somebody, and they sounded about to come to blows.

  Garret knocked the guard out of the way going through the door.

  Strangely, the thirteen inch shell room reminded Garret of the engine rooms, though they couldn’t have been more different. The engine rooms were awesome and intimidating because of their massive motion and noise. The shell room was equally intimidating, but for the opposite reason.

  The shells bristled from their racks around him, packing the small room floor to ceiling. They were thirteen inches in diameter and weighted half a ton each. They lay silently, their pointed noses and long cylindrical bodies shining softly in the light. Quiet, smooth, featureless. When fired from their earth shaking guns, they would fly faster than the eye could see, several miles distant, and cut through foot-thick steel like butter, killing everything in their path. But now they were sleeping.

  The guard had collected himself and shoved his way past Garret with a glare. Garret followed him. One of the voices fell silent, but the second person continued, berating the first.

  Garret knew the voice. Twitch? He’s not supposed to be checking this section.

  Garret followed the guard around the end of a rack and beneath the overhead trolley that was used to transport the massive shells up into the turrets. Behind the trolley, tucked away back in the corner, stood Twitch and the old man in his three piece suit. The suit was disheveled.

  Was he sleeping in it?

  The old man’s face looked even more haggard than the last time he’d passed Garret on the berth deck. Garret and the guard stood dumbly while Twitch screamed at the man. Garret could only stare. Twitch’s face was red. He was raving like a loon. Garret didn’t know Twitc
h could get that angry.

  Between them, something was hidden beneath a tarpaulin. It looked roughly half the volume of a cord of wood. Pieces of wooden crating lay all around it. Someone had just destroyed the crate that had enclosed whatever was beneath the tarpaulin.

  As Twitch yelled, he brandished a crowbar in the older man’s face.

  Okay, so Twitch destroyed the crate.

  The older man looked too weary to care that he was being threatened, if that was what Twitch’s gesture was intended to be. He only looked down at the tarpaulin, and gripped the far edge of it as if he’d just stopped Twitch from pulling it away.

  Twitch stopped for breath, which hissed through his clenched teeth.

  The guard just stood there, looking back and forth between them.

  Garret was completely lost, so he said the only thing that came to his mind. “Twitch? You’re… not supposed to be here.”

  “Well neither is this!” Twitch snarled, yanking the tarpaulin from the older man’s hand. It slid to the floor revealing…

  “Are those shells?” the guard asked.

  Indeed they were, but sinister in shape and design. Though they had the same basic fusiform body of any of the thirteen inchers in the racks, their noses had a series of spiral grooves cut down their length and there were several separation lines along their length, and a slight constriction in their middle that gave them a wasp-waisted appearance. Garret had been a blacksmith all his life, but whatever metal they were made from was not something he’d seen before. It was a deep charcoal grey, almost black, and polished until he could see his reflection in it. Except the spiraled tips, which shone white as sterling.

  The two shells were locked in a transportation mechanism that looked almost as complicated as the shells themselves. Each shell was held securely by a pair of steel collars, but the collars themselves were suspended by a series of heavy springs. As Garret stared at the strange mechanism, Kearsarge rolled a bit. The shells jostled gently in the springs, but didn’t bang together.

  “What are they?” Garret asked.

  Twitch glared at the older man, who only looked down. “Do you want to tell him?” Twitch barked.

  The older man smiled tiredly. “You’re a boy, Mr. Colson. What do you think you or your father can do? What can any of us do?” he gestured at the dark shells. “This is the way it has to be.”

  “Fuck you,” Twitch spat. “I’m going to Maxwell.”

  “He knows,” the man said quietly.

  “Liar,” Twitch retorted. “He’s gonna throw you, and these, and wherever the other two are, overboard.”

  “He signed the requisition order,” the older man replied, still looking down.

  The color drained out of Twitch’s face. “You’re lying.”

  Then and only then did Garret notice the cot down behind the shells. The old man had been sleeping beside them, probably since they left Delaware Bay.

  The man patted his pockets for a few moments before pulling out a sheet of paper and handing it over. “See for yourself, think about it, and act on it. Or in this case, don’t act on it. I don’t want you to get killed, Mr. Colson. Enough people are going to die already.”

  Twitch unfolded the paper so fast he ripped it. Garret read over his shoulder. It was indeed a cargo transfer order of some sort. It was signed by Captain Maxwell.

  “It just has the crate numbers,” Twitch argued weakly. “It doesn’t say what was in it.”

  The older man just looked at Twitch. His expression said it plainly enough.

  The Captain knew.

  Garret watched his friend uncertainly. Twitch’s mouth was slightly open and his agile mind roved as he put it together. Garret didn’t know what pieces were falling into place, or what they meant, but he saw them aggregate behind Twitch’s eyes.

  “No,” Twitch said despairingly. “No.”

  Garret recognized the look. He’d felt that way before, most recently when Molly had told him that their baby wasn’t his firstborn.

  If Garret had been in Twitch’s place, Garret might have protested, screamed at the older man that the truth, whatever it was, wasn’t true. But Twitch couldn’t do that. It wasn’t who he was. He just knew better.

  “Well you have your father to thank for all of this,” the old man said.

  “The Admiral is not my father!” Twitch yelled.

  “Then what in blue blazes,” the old man said quietly, “are you doing on board this ship, Mr. Colson?”

  There seemed to be a lot more hanging on that question than Garret could understand, because both Twitch and the old man seemed to freeze in a contest of wills.

  “It didn’t have to come to this,” Twitch growled, furious. “You and your Armageddon warmongers—”

  The older man laughed softly. It was a brittle, mirthless chuckle. He leaned on the mechanism supporting the shells. “You know nothing, Mr. Colson. It always comes to this. Babylon, Greece, the Mongol Empire.”

  He laid a hand on one of the sinister-looking shells. “It always comes to this. Men’s greed and arrogance will always make it so.”

  “Well what are they?” demanded the guard, whom Garret had quite forgotten about.

  The old man answered the guard, but only as one might dismissively respond to a passerby. He kept his eyes on Twitch as he said, “These are the four remaining heads of the god, Lord Brahma. Or, two of them, I suppose.”

  “Who says destiny isn’t without a sense of irony?” the old man continued. He looked up at the ship above them. “She’s a failed experiment, really. We tried so many new ideas when we designed her. About half of them didn’t work. And yet here she is now, eighteen years later, carrying this.” His smile fell as he looked down at the dark payload bouncing gently in its spring cradle.

  Twitch was grinding his teeth.

  The guard got frustrated that everyone was talking over his head. “But I mean, what is it really?” he said, gesturing to the spiraled tips.

  The old man sighed. “Superposed turrets,” he said. “Eights stacked directly atop thirteens. Tightest heavy-gun firing pattern ever. The concussive action of the weapon requires it, but only the Kearsarge class ships were built that way.” He gestured to the black shells. “We’re not here because the Kearsarge is all the Navy would give us. We’re here because only the Kearsarge can fire it.”

  Twitch walked out. Garret followed him.

  “Twitch,” Garret said. “What happened in there? Are you okay?”

  “No I’m not okay,” Twitch ground out. “None of us are okay.” He was still clutching the crowbar as if he’d forgotten it was in his hand.

  “But what… four heads of a god? What was he talking about?”

  Twitch heaved an aggravated sigh and looked both ways to make sure that no one was watching. “It’s from a Hindu legend,” he said. “The Brahmanda Astra was a weapon that would be made at the end of the world. It was so powerful that when it was used, it would boil the oceans. It was supposed to be made from the heads of one of the Hindu gods, Lord Brahma, but the Bureau of Ordnance got a little more creative.”

  “Where are you going?” Twitch was headed quickly for the nearest ladder.

  “Where’s Charlie? I need to talk to him right now.”

  “Charlie? Oh, right. Sweet Cheeks.” Garret had almost forgotten his friend’s real names. “He’s searching the forward protected deck, I think.”

  Twitch was climbing the ladder, but his voice drifted back down to Garret. “Not a word to anyone about what I told you, not even the other guys.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m not sure that Captain Maxwell won’t throw us both overboard if he finds out we know.”

  Been there, done that, Garret thought, but he only said, “What?”

  Twitch’s annoyed face reappeared through the ladder hole in the deck above. “Apparently, the Brahmanda Astra is the reason Captain Maxwell brought us all out here. It’s the reason we�
�re on this fucking antique.”

  Then Twitch was gone, leaving Garret alone.

  W

  Many hours later, Garret lay on the deck, spread eagle, just breathing. They’d found the fire, but Garret almost wished they hadn’t. As sometimes happened in steam-driven warships, a fire had erupted in one of the port coal bunkers. No one had yet figured out how it had started and at the moment, no one cared.

  A bunker fire was worst case scenario on a battleship. It was like a flaming parasite inside a ship. In the bunker, it had limitless fuel with which to burn hotter and hotter, but because the coal was their precious fuel, they couldn’t simply dump it overboard. Even as Garret and his friends lay there on the main deck, over a hundred men were spreading burning coal on the deck around them and swilling it with deck hoses to put it out.

  Garret and his friends had just gotten off a shift fighting the fire. Now they were laid out in the fresh air, just trying to breathe. Garret’s head was pounding and his chest felt heavy. Curtis and Pun’kin lay on either side of him. Theo was curled up tightly against Garret’s side like a baby. Theo was having as much trouble breathing as anybody, but for some reason, the fumes also made him sick. He had already thrown up once. Velvet was somewhere nearby, though Garret’s head wasn’t clear enough to remember where. The rest of the guys were sleeping it off. Why was this shift… He sucked another heavy breath …So much worse?

  Eight hours ago, when he’d crawled out onto the main deck after his first shift, he was dizzy and having trouble breathing, but he hadn’t experienced the weakness that had come over him this time.

  “Is it…” Gasp, “getting worse…” Gasp, “for anybody else?”

  “Yes,” Velvet said.

  Theo didn’t respond.

  Garret lifted his leaden head up off the deck, took hold of Theo’s shoulder and shook it. The smaller boy didn’t move, but he did open his eyes part way. He looked dazed and ill. His eyes closed again.

  “Guys,” Garret groaned, “Theo doesn’t look good.”

  “You don’t look so good yourself,” Velvet wheezed.