Ironclad

by Daniel Foster

  Fine. Andrew dashed for the nearest ladder. There was more than one way into Kearsarge’s citadel.

  W

  Garret stepped around Nancy’s blast shield and stood awkwardly until his friends noticed him. Curtis was at his station, and appeared to be fine. He’d also had time to change into a clean uniform.

  “What are you doing back…” Velvet began tersely, then, “Oh my God what happened to your arm?”

  Garret look self-consciously at his forearm, which he hadn’t realized he was still cradling. All of the puncture wounds from the hellhound’s teeth were leaking blood, though now the blood was tinted with iodine. The red rivulets were crisscrossed all over his forearm like a masochistic tattoo. And it hurt like hell. A lot more than it should have.

  Garret dropped his arm to his side. “It’s nothing,” he mumbled. “Happened in the coal bin.”

  Doctor Twitch was immediately at his side, picking the arm up and holding it out for inspection.

  “How did this happen?”

  The rest of the guys were looking at Garret uncertainly, except Curtis, who was trimming down a leather gasket with his naval knife. The rest of the guys were standing close to Curtis, but maybe not as close as usual. Theo was hanging back too, around the side of Nancy, his expression tentative. Garret didn’t know what to say. He flushed with embarrassment.

  “Are you still mad at us?” came a quiet voice. It was Burl.

  Garret shook his head. “No.” He didn’t raise his head, but he meant it for all of them. “I’m sorry I yelled at you. I shouldn’t have done that.”

  “I’m sorry too,” Velvet offered sincerely. Everybody else nodded.

  Tension eased out of the air. Twitch raised an eyebrow at the circle, but instead of asking what they were talking about, he said, “Curtis, I need your sleeve.”

  “Why my sleeve?” Curtis demanded, crossing his burly arms.

  Kearsarge continued to buck around them, but they all shifted their weight unconsciously now.

  “Because we at least need to get this covered right now,” Twitch replied to Curtis, “and you’re holding your knife in your hand.”

  Curtis took a step and grabbed Fishy’s shoulder in a powerful grip.

  “Hey!” Fishy protested, fighting for balance. “What are you…?!”

  “My uniform’s new,” Curtis said. “Yours is already shit.” With that he ripped Fishy’s sleeve loose at the shoulder seam, shucked it down Fishy’s arm, and handed it to Twitch.

  Theo covered his mouth and ducked down behind Nancy to hide his laughter at his lopsided brother.

  “Very funny, Minnow,” Fishy said, crossing his arms. That only made it funnier.

  “Look at ‘im,” came Pun’kin’s Alabama drawl. “He’s pulled the chicken’s neck so much his sleeve fell off!”

  All heads swiveled Pun’kin’s way. Garret blinked. Pun’kin— defender of Jesus’ honor and Mama’s boy to the bitter end—had told a dirty joke. Or at least tried. And he was grinning ear to ear. Everybody started laughing, even Fishy.

  Yes, Garret thought as he tasted the bittersweet laughter on his tongue. It’ll be okay to die with these guys.

  Only then did Garret realize that it wasn’t the storm pounding on the citadel door.

  W

  Andrew slammed the door to the citadel behind himself. “What took you so long?” he barked at the crew of the number one gun. The overgrown muscle-boy who had let him in backed away quickly. The rest of the gun crew shuffled their feet awkwardly.

  It was the gun crew which contained the captain’s moping steward and the belligerent little pain-in-the-ass, Colson. Of course it was them. Who else would it be.

  “Sorry sir,” said one with a Bostonian accent. He continued, but seemed to realize where he was going after the words came out of his mouth. “We didn’t hear you. We were, uh…”

  Andrew rounded on “Twitch” Colson. “Where’s your gun officer?” he demanded.

  Twitch pointed down the citadel. “Not enough of ‘em, sir. He has to run all the guns on this side, so he could be anywhere between here and the number seven gun.”

  Andrew was already running. Kearsarge’s aft eights cycled again, the boom reverberating through Kearsarge’s belly.

  Footsteps were pounding after him. “Sir, wait!” It was Twitch, of course.

  “What Colson? What?!”

  “Am I right in thinking the captain sent you to pass orders?”

  They flashed past the divider between guns four and five. Still no gunnery officer.

  “Yes,” Andrew said, not sparing more breath from running.

  “Sir,” Twitch gasped. “Let me do it!”

  Andrew stopped as quickly as he could.

  Twitch panted and held up hand. “Sir, I can remember and pass the orders exactly as you say them, and we both know the Captain needs you. You’re his right arm.”

  Andrew thought about it for one second, then said, “Listen closely. This will be six sets of orders for six different officers from Mr. Sokolov to Mr. Carr.”

  Twitch stood at attention. “Aye sir!”

  Chapter 21

  Andrew mounted the ladder to the upper deck. The conning tower rose above him like a mangled New York City building. He leaped onto the pretzeled ladder to the flying bridge and shimmied up it.

  As he passed the conning tower, ripped open, jagged pieces of scorched steel jutting everywhere, he saw what was left of the navigation officer, Mr. Linden. The shell’s explosion had simply smeared his organs and blood and skin all over the bulkheads as carelessly as if he’d never been a human being with hopes and dreams and fears. Or a family.

  Andrew jumped onto the deck behind Maxwell, and nearly collided with a runner Maxwell had just sent his way.

  “’Xcusme sorrysir!” and around he went.

  Maxwell was keeping an eye on the sky, which was clearing rapidly. The swells were settling, too, quickly going down to large gentle heaves in the ocean’s surface.

  “We don’t have any more time, Andrew,” Maxwell said. “It has to be now.”

  Without another word, or even waiting for Kearsarge to settle on the swell she was negotiating, the Captain spun the wheel hard to port. Andrew grabbed the rail, but not because he was afraid of being flung overboard. A ship the size of Kearsarge wasn’t going to change directions quickly enough to fling anybody anywhere. The turn to port itself was inherently dangerous. Andrew could feel the barn wall-sized rudder beneath Kearsarge’s stern, fighting against the sea to swing the massive battleship around. Seconds ticked away. Kearsarge continued to rise on the swell at the same time, beginning the gradual turn as she went. As her angle to the center of the swell increased, the swell began to tilt her decks.

  Maxwell wasn’t even looking ahead. He didn’t seem to be aware that Kearsarge was listing.

  “Captain!”

  Maxwell continued to glare back at the Audacious.

  “Captain,” Andrew almost screamed. “She’s listing too badly, we’re going to capsize!”

  Kearsarge climbed the swell, and listed harder. She was fifteen degrees off level now, her deck sloping crazily along the side of the swell. Maxwell hung grimly to the wheel and stared at the Audacious.

  “Take the bait, you ugly bastard,” he muttered. “You gonna let me broadside you?”

  “Captain!” Andrew glanced back wildly. As he did, Audacious took it. The huge ship began to swing with them, altering her course to pursue. At that instant, two things happened at once.

  All of Kearsarge’s port five inch flank guns opened fire, and Andrew felt the engines throttle back. Smoke from the fives blanketed the ocean. That was two of the six sets of orders Andrew had passed to Gunner’s Mate Colson.

  Maxwell cut the wheel back the other way—now full rudder to starboard.

  Kearsarge shuddered, but began the slow swing back the other way. Her deck angle began to lessen. The sky and the ocean began to come back
together in a way that made some kind of sense.

  Andrew sweated and didn’t look at Maxwell. What the hell had been the point of that? He’d nearly rolled the ship and killed them all.

  “Captain, why did you order us to reduce speed?” Andrew asked, eyeing the Audacious, which had used both of their foolish maneuvers to close the gap.

  As Andrew asked it, his mental timer ran out again.

  One hundred twenty. One hundred twe—

  Audacious, now barely a mile off their stern, exhaled flame and smoke and invisibly fast steel. The noise came at them in a shock wave of compressed atmosphere. Even as it happened, Andrew knew that thanks to whatever Maxwell had just been playing at, Audacious couldn’t possibly miss this time.

  She didn’t.

  W

  Garret sprinted, ducked, and leaped his way through the ship with Fishy in hot pursuit. They’d delivered their assigned message from Twitch to engineering. Judging by the sound of the engines, the engineer had just throttled back to about half ahead, so apparently they’d done their jobs. Why the Captain had ordered reduced speed when they were being pursued was beyond Garret. Then again, Garret knew it was a waste of time to try to figure out why a crazy person did anythi—

  Garret thought he’d been killed. Surely nothing could hit him that hard without crushing him like a bug. One second he was running down the passage between the bos’n’s state room and the drying room with Fishy’s bootsteps pounding behind him. The next second, he was flying through the air, sunlight was pouring in, and the bulkheads and decks around him had become became papier-mâché, bulging, twisting, disintegrating into spinning fragments.

  Garret fell and hit the deck, or at least what was left of it. He felt himself quiver, but in a detached way. His mushy brain struggled back into the saddle and grabbed the reins. He sat up on his hands and knees and nearly fell to the deck below.

  The outer wall of the passage he and Fishy had been running through was destroyed. So was the bos’n’s state room that had been behind that wall. So was the coal bin that had been behind that. A chair leg was imbedded in the bulkhead beside Garret and coal dust filled the air. A shell had penetrated Kearsarge’s hull, and exploded in the coal bin, ripping the bin open and obliterating the bos’n’s stateroom. All that remained was a large cavity through which sunlight poured into the ship. Had the many tons of coal not softened and distributed the explosion, the shot would probably have blown Kearsarge in half.

  Oh, and the deck was on fire. What little was left of it. The explosion beneath had blown the center of the passageway out, filling the ceiling with timber and steel shrapnel. The bulkheads, or walls of the room, and the stanchions supporting them had buckled and bent and broken at all sorts of horrible angles. Fishy was hanging from one of them on the far side of the hole in the deck, as neatly as if the explosion had hung him up by the back of his uniform to dry.

  Garret prayed it was only caught in his uniform and it hadn’t impaled him. He stood and fell against the bulkhead. A thin strip of burning decking remained around the edge of the passage. Garret shuffled sideways along it, making sure never to let go with both hands at the same time because his balance hadn’t yet returned. Beneath him, screams and calls for help and fire alarms rang out. Kearsarge could be crippled beyond repair for all Garret knew. He ignored the possibility and focused all his brain power on getting to Fishy.

  Left foot, right foot. Garret stepped over the burning plank protruding at a forty-five degree angle. He held tight to work his way around the area of bulkhead that had bulged out into the passage like a pregnant stomach, trying to push him off the ledge.

  And with a last leap, he was leaning against the bulkhead from which Fishy hung. Fishy was shaking his head slowly, his hands beginning to grope.

  “Easy buddy, I got ya,” Garret said. He ran a hand up under the back of Fishy’s shirt and was enormously relieved to find that the broken edge of the stanchion was resting against his back, instead of imbedded in it. There was no blood.

  Garret considered his options. There weren’t many. The broken edge of the stanchion was jagged and sharp. It had caught the center of Fishy’s uniform and bunched it up under his arms and around his sleeves. Most of the deck beneath Fishy was gone, so if Garret dropped him, he had a long fall. He’d probably be okay if he fell to his feet, but certainly not if he fell on his face. Garret should have undoubtedly called for help before trying to cut Fishy down, but that didn’t occur to him.

  Well, his uniform’s already missing a sleeve. He’d have to buy a new one anyway.

  Garret unfolded his knife and reached up for Fishy’s collar. US Navy uniforms were made to be indestructible, and they were damn close. Garret worked at it with his knife until sweat was beading on his forehead. Curtis just ripped that sleeve off like it was nothing.

  “Lovver Boyy,” Fishy slurred. “What happen—”

  Under his weight, the remainder of Fishy’s uniform shirt suddenly ripped, pitching him forward in a flutter of woolen rags. Garret had miscalculated, badly. Fishy was going to take the fall.

  Garret didn’t think, he only reacted. He rammed the transformation so quickly that it hurt, even as he leaped out over the gap to catch Fishy. He hit Fishy as a half-man, half-wolf. His wolf strength and the sudden surge of adrenaline proved just enough to bridge the distance.

  Garret’s impact carried him and Fishy across the short distance to the opposite side of the passage. They hit the bulkhead. Fishy dropped to the ruined rim of decking, but Garret hit the edge of it, grinding splinters and burning cinders into his chest. He couldn’t return his half-paws into fully opposable fingers quickly enough to keep from sliding backwards over the edge.

  A hand grabbed his wrist just as fur vanished from it. Fishy was sprawled on the burning edge of deck blinking groggily, holding a stanchion in one hand, and Garret’s wrist in the other.

  Garret looked down. “It’s okay,” he said. “You can drop me. I’ve got my feet under me now.”

  Fishy let go of Garret, and he dropped the rest of the way to the deck which was covered with coal. He twisted an ankle a little when he hit, but that was the worst of it. Now that Garret had realized he was probably going to survive, at least for the next two minutes, he became more exhilarated than afraid.

  Fishy was blinking down owlishly at him over the edge. “How bad does it look down there?”

  “Can’t say,” Garret said. “Looks like the shell exploded in the next room over.”

  “We need to get back to Nancy,” Fishy said. “They only had the one shot loaded. I’ll beat you there.”

  And then, as if they hadn’t just slid past Death’s face close enough to polish his teeth, they were in a foot race like two kids. Garret won.

  W

  Andrew gaped in horror at the smoking hole in Kearsarge’s side, at the noises of agony and pandemonium and alarms that rang out from inside her.

  “Captain, what are we doing? Are we going to broadside her?!”

  “Only for a few seconds, Andrew,” came the terse response.

  Andrew clung to the rail and watched Audacious grow closer as Kearsarge continued her course hard to starboard. So now at least Andrew knew why the Captain had slowed. Trying to turn a battleship as heavy as Kearsarge at full speed didn’t work well. It made her plough heavily out of the circle, making the turning radius worthlessly large. For any ship, there was a best speed at which she could turn the tightest circle, yet still be going fast enough that it didn’t take forever to come around. It only felt like it took forever.

  “Captain, if we flank her, she’ll be able to bring all of her guns to bear and it won’t matter that we can do the same. She’s the more powerful ship. A broadside battle is exactly what her captain wants!”

  “That is a risk we have to take,” Maxwell replied. “They took the bait by going to port first. That shortened the time it’s going to take us to come round on her.”

  Andrew blinked
. Maxwell was making a last stand.

  The starboard five inch guns cut loose, for all the good it would do.

  Andrew’s mind was choking on it, unable to understand. There was no brilliant plan. It had at last happened: the great Captain Maxwell had run out of ideas. Apparently, he was human after all.

  W

  The rhythm and coordination were beautiful, and it made Garret swell with pride to be part of it. Nancy roared, her thunder and gut-shaking vibrations sending testosterone roiling into Garret’s blood. It seemed the noise of her discharge hadn’t even died before Theo had the breech open and Burl had materialized behind it, reaching in with his gloved hands and pulling the big brass powder case out. Instead of stepping away, Burl spun smoothly out of the way, swinging the case wide.

  Burl hadn’t made it a full pace away before Fishy had inserted the next shell, sliding it in just far enough that it wouldn’t fall out. He stepped past Theo and moved for the ammo hoist again. Velvet ramrodded the shell and spun around behind Twitch, out of the way of Pun’kin who inserted the fresh powder case. Curtis was coming to a stop, his hands loaded with new shell and powder. Theo had already closed the breech block. Twitch pulled the trigger and Nancy roared. The whole process had taken only a handful of seconds.

  Sweat spattered the deck as they heaved, spun, twisted, and carried. No one was talking, there was no breath and not a second to spare. Kill-or-be-killed was a unifying force that even love struggled to match. It bonded them together as they sweated and slammed steel and fired projectiles and cursed their British enemies.

  One way or the other, a fresh boatload of sailors were going to eat dinner with the dead that night. Garret had already been there. He did not want to go back. But regardless of where he went that night, he knew he would go with the seven guys around him, and he was more than okay with that.

  Garret had once seen the back of a pocket watch open while it was running, all the tiny gears and sprockets whirring in perfect unison. Watching himself and his friends operate Nancy reminded him of the watch. Fishy, Pun’kin, and Curtis ran the shell and powder in an endless circle. Burl was using a three step that Twitch had taught him. He grabbed the casing and pulled as he spun away, swinging the shell wide until he came around Twitch’s opposite side and let the casing fly out the port. Then he reversed the motion and arrived back at the breech just as Theo hauled it open again. For Garret’s part, he kept Nancy in almost continuous motion. He stared through his sight and cranked the brass wheel even while the muzzle smoke obscured his vision. Like all of his friends, Garret’s body had integrated with his function. He didn’t need to see Audacious to realign Nancy with her lateral motion. He knew where she would be.