Ironclad

by Daniel Foster

  “For you, Charlie,” he breathed, and pulled the trigger.

  W

  Audacious’s guns came fully to bear, and Andrew counted away the last few seconds of their lives.

  Three. Two. One—

  Without warning, gun number one, the five incher immediately beneath and behind the flying bridge, exploded. For some reason, though he would never know why, Andrew dropped his gaze towards the gun the instant before it went off. Perhaps he heard the crew scrambling frantically to load her. Perhaps he heard a whispered prayer from one of the young men under his charge.

  Or maybe he heard the sound of hope.

  Either way, when the gun went off, Andrew was looking at her barrel, protruding from Kearsarge’s flank like all the others. But unlike all the others, Number One has been adjusted, down and to the stern. With the last seconds of his life, Andrew traced the flight path of her round across the short expanse of water between the ships to a spalled plate on Audacious’s beltline.

  He didn’t have time to realize what it meant before old Number One exploded. The sound was horrible, hearing the steel of a gun giving up the ghost under the force of its own powder. He heard the shrapnel pounding the inside of Kearsarge as the gun flew apart.

  Smoke rolled out of the barrel, but more of it belched from Kearsarge’s side as the broken fragments of Number One filled the citadel with the noxious remnants of spent powder.

  Despite all, Andrew heard the shell hit Audacious. More than that. He heard it penetrate. He even saw, for a split second, the ovalized hole the shell left as it cut through the plate at an odd angle.

  He knew where that angle would take the shell.

  “Captaaai—!”

  The rest of Andrew’s scream was lost as the Audacious, the ruler of the seas, and the most powerful destructive force the world had ever seen, exploded.

  The shell from gun number one had found Audacious’s forward powder magazine.

  The force of the explosion rocked the earth’s foundations. Andrew and Maxwell and both ensigns were flung from their feet. Fire and smoke erupted from the ship as from Mount Pompeii, returned from the pages of history to again bury the Roman Empire. Every window and porthole down Kearsarge’s starboard flank shattered under the force of the blast.

  The explosion tore Audacious in half. Charred men and steel rained on the ocean. The smoke billowed up into the sky, miles high, and the once proud hull of Audacious, now to broken pieces, began to sink. Smaller explosions followed as boilers and weapons went up.

  Maxwell and Andrew watched in silence as the Audacious slipped beneath the waves. Within three minutes, only a burning oil slick remained.

  The HMS Audacious, and every man aboard her, was gone.

  Chapter 22

  Garret awoke coughing. His thoughts were scattered to the wind. Most of his body was singing with pain. It took him a moment to realize that the side of his face felt smashed because he was lying prone on the deck. The air reeked heavily of powder smoke and scorched human flesh. Still coughing, he rolled over on his back, which made his legs jerk and twitch and prickle with pins and needles.

  Men were yelling, boots were stomping around him. Leggings flashed past his face as he lay. Someone was screaming. It was an anguished, wounded animal wail, bubbling up from the most primal reaches of someone’s heart. It wasn’t physical pain, though. It was worse.

  Garret’s mind tried to pick up the pieces. Nancy… we fired. I think she exploded. Oh Jesus, who’s screaming? Garret began to push himself up on his left arm, but when he tried to shift some of the load to his right arm, his right shoulder stabbed him with the white-hot pain of broken bone. He gasped and fell back to the deck. Two pairs of the leggings stopped and a couple sailors knelt beside him.

  “Help me,” one of them said to the other.

  The other tried to protest. “I don’t know if we should—”

  But the first was already sitting Garret up, making his ribs and his shoulder flash with more pain. The guy was asking him if he was okay, and other things that didn’t make sense. Then Commander Sharpe and Captain Maxwell appeared among the forest of milling uniforms. Maxwell was barking orders. The chaos quickly became organized.

  Commander Sharpe stooped and caught Garret by his good shoulder, urging him to lay down slowly. Garret did, but it was more due to Commander Sharpe’s efforts. Garret would have fallen by himself. Men bustled everywhere, including the surgeon. Men were setting up cots, turning the area around Nancy into a small triage center. Garret struggled to see.

  Who’s screaming… oh God, who’s making that sound?

  Despite Commander Sharpe’s gently restraining hands, Garret kept straining weakly, trying to wiggle to a better position to see. His fear was tightening towards terror as the soul-shredding wails continued.

  At last Commander Sharpe shifted far enough to the side for Garret to see what was happening inside the triage area. Allowing Garret to see must have been an accident. Nancy was only a broken snag of a gun pedestal. Most of her barrel had blown off into the sea. The rest of the gun had exploded, flinging thousands of pounds of steel.

  Garret’s friends were thrown about like jackstraws. Pun’kin was sitting up against the far bulkhead beside Velvet. They were leaning against each other, as limply as if the explosion that had flung them there had crushed every bone in their bodies. Pun’kin looked like a lost child, staring blankly at Curtis. Velvet was crying silently. Both of them were blackened with powder, and Velvet had a chunk of metal sticking out of his right thigh. His pant leg was wet with blood.

  Curtis lay in front of them, dead. His muscular body was intact, though badly powder burned, but his head was gone, turned into a spray of blood, brains, and hair by the chunk of steel that had hit him.

  Burl laid on the deck beside Curtis, severe burns blackening his right arm, neck, and face. His skin was crackling and drawing up so that it looked like black scales. His right hand was curled up. With his left, Burl kept hold of Curtis’s boot, and every so often, Burl quivered a little. Then medical staff swarmed them both and Garret lost sight of them.

  Twitch was crumpled against the far bulkhead, sitting, but partially pinned there by the piece of metal driven through the edge of his abdomen and into the steel behind him. It was the support from his own seat at point. Garret couldn’t tell if Twitch was alive or dead. Twitch jerked, came awake. He spasmed, retched on the deck, and gripped the piece of metal with both hands like a crusader, clinging to the blade that had impaled him.

  Fishy was the one wailing. He was sitting up, covered with blood. Garret couldn’t tell how much of it was his, and how much of it was Theo’s. Theo was in two pieces. The blood-covered breech block was laying a few feet further on.

  When Nancy had exploded, the breechblock had been blow free. It hit Theo. The block was a solid chunk of steel, bigger than Theo’s head. The impact of it sheered Theo’s small body in two. A trail of blood was running from Theo’s legs, down a crevice in the deckboards, and mingling with Curtis’s blood. Bright red, the most precious fluid that ever existed, splashed around on the deck as carelessly as the cook might throw out dirty dishwater.

  Fishy was clinging to what was left of his brother’s torso, soaking himself in Theo’s blood, and screaming as if he himself was dying. Fishy rocked back and forth, every breath tearing its way out of his chest with a wracking wail. Garret sobbed at the sound. He tried to turn himself over and crawl to Fishy.

  “Lay still, sailor,” Commander Sharpe said, pressing down on his chest. “You did it. You and your friends saved us all.”

  Garret fought him, weakly. “Let go of me,” he sobbed, trying to get to Fishy.

  At the same time, someone was trying to take what was left of Theo out of Fishy’s arms. Fishy went crazy.

  “Take me to him,” Garret begged Commander Sharpe, coughing up tears. “Please…”

  Sharpe glanced at the surgeon, who shook his head sternly and said, “And
y, don’t you dare move him.”

  Sharpe frowned, set his jaw, then grabbed Garret under the arms and dragged him across the deck to Fishy’s side. The pain in Garret’s shoulder almost made him pass out, but at least Sharpe dragged himself close enough to touch Fishy, so Garret rolled over and wrapped his good arm around Fishy’s leg.

  Fishy clutched his brother’s ruined body, and he screamed and screamed.

  W

  June 10th, 1914

  It was high noon, the day after the destruction of HMS Audacious. Garret stood at attention on the main deck. He wasn’t alone. Bandaged, bloodied, and burned, everyone in the ship’s company who still drew breath, and who were physically able to stand, stood at attention around him. Garret was in his place in formation, where he and his friends had always stood. Nothing in heaven above or hell beneath could have dragged him out of that spot. Burl, Twitch, Pun’kin, and Velvet were standing haphazardly around him like fragments of a shattered bowl. Curtis, Sweet Cheeks, and Theo were all dead, and the gaps they left around Garret felt like cold chasms at the bottom of the sea.

  The previous day, he’d shifted to wolf and back quite a few times as soon as he could be alone. It had eased most of his aches and pains and had reknit his broken shoulder. At the time, he’d thought he would need all the strength he could get to help his injured friends with their duties. Now, standing with them, he wished he hadn’t done it. In front of him, Curtis, Sweet Cheeks, and Theo were laid out in pine boxes, along with dozens of others. They were dead. The least he could have done for them was to still be in pain.

  He’d found the sand in his pocket, too. The handful that the Chief had given him before the start of the battle. Somehow, more than half of it had managed to stay in his pocket throughout the horrors. He’d poured it from his pocket into the corner of his ditty box as carefully as he could.

  Garret strained the tail of his vision to see Fishy’s spot. Fishy still hadn’t shown up yet, and it was worrying Garret and the others to death. Fishy was somewhere on the boat, but no one had seen him in several hours.

  Garret, Twitch, Burl, Pun’kin, and Velvet would have liked to stand closer together, but that would have meant they would have had to stand in the places that belonged to their dead friends. Nothing could have induced them to do that.

  The rest of the ship’s crew, those who remained, were assembled in the same way, with gaps and holes all through their ranks, irreplaceable chunks of the crew, torn out and thrown away. The survivors were haggard with loss—loss of blood, loss of innocence, and loss of friends.

  The sun grinned garishly down at them, its wide, horrible smile baking them with midday heat. It made the sea sparkle in beautiful mockery around the broken Kearsarge and her half-slain crew.

  Kearsarge’s deck was scorched, broken, and gouged. Her rear cage mast was gone, leaving only snags. Her conning tower was twisted and gnarled as if a huge steel parasite had exploded out of Kearsarge’s neck. Her armor plates were cracked, her upper bow mangled, her guts shredded from the shells that had exploded inside her. Yet she floated still.

  She lived, limping and in pain, just like what remained of her crew.

  In front of Garret, rows upon rows of rude pine coffins were laid out on the deck, lined up to the starboard gangway. There was no chaplain. They had left Philadelphia without him too. Apparently Maxwell had decided even God himself wasn’t worthy of a Captain’s time.

  So in lieu of a chaplain, Maxwell was speaking. He spoke to all of his men, the living and the dead. He consoled, extoled, and praised the bravery of those who had given everything, and he shored up the bravery of the living who now stood on the deck, grieving and riddled with guilt because they hadn’t died. Garret hated Maxwell for it, almost as much as he hated himself for healing his shoulder.

  In Garret’s ear, Maxwell’s words were only insult to injury. Maxwell stood there in the bright, happy sun as if he was reveling in it. All the buttons on his perfect uniform gleamed in the sun. He wasn’t hurt at all. Not a scratch. Maxwell was speaking about each department aboard the ship, commending the bravery and sacrifices of everyone aboard. He took his time, speaking about each and every man who had given his life. But now he was talking about Garret’s gun crew, the bravery of the crew of five inch gun Number One.

  Don’t you say anything about Theo or Curtis! Garret fumed. Don’t you dare! You don’t deserve to say their names! They’re dead because of you, you crazy son of a bitch!

  Garret was clenching his teeth so hard that it was making his temples throb. He hated Captain Maxwell as he had never hated anything or anyone before in his life. Garret hated him more than he’d hated the creature that had killed his Ma and his Pa and taken Molly and his little brother from him.

  Garret was absolutely convinced that Maxwell was responsible. Maxwell was the one who’d put this whole mission together. Maxwell was the one who’d dragged them all off of the Columbia in the middle of the night. Maxwell was the one who’d forced them to coal this wretched beast and drive her across the water into one impossible situation after another. Maxwell was the one who pushed the Kearsarge, the mission, and the insanity forward, day after day after day.

  For Theo’s death especially, Garret could not—would not—forgive his captain. Garret stared at the coffins, each in turn as they went by. They all looked alike. He couldn’t tell which pine boxes contained his friends, and not knowing which one contained Theo or Curtis was eating Garret up. He owed everything to them, but he couldn’t even acknowledge them as they went hurriedly over the side to their watery grave. So he watched each and every coffin as if it contained one of them.

  There were so many dead men that they didn’t have enough flags to cover all of their coffins. So as each coffin went over the side, they draped its flag over the next one in line and let it rest for a few seconds.

  Two seconds, Garret thought. Two seconds is all he’s going to give each of them because he’s still in a hurry.

  Off to the side of the formation stood four of the German storm troopers. They had American Springfield rifles from the ship’s armory. As each coffin was pushed over the edge to slide down the gangway, the Germans raised the rifles to their shoulders and fired a salute. It was brisk, efficient, and respectful. They pulled the bolts in perfect unison, shucking the spent shells and chambering fresh ones. Garret had heard they’d helped extinguish a fire in the engine room. He’d also heard that all but four of them had drowned while shoring up bulkheads in damaged sections of the Kearsarge. It appeared that rumor was true.

  The next coffin went over the side. The weight of one dead body would make no difference aboard a battleship, but it felt to Garret as though Kearsarge bobbed up a bit as each coffin splashed down, as though the ship was being relieved of the grievous weight of Maxwell’s sins, one at a time.

  I hate him

  Garret glanced around again for Fishy, but by this point, Garret had realized that Fishy wasn’t going to come. Garret wanted to be here for his friends in the wooden boxes, even though they couldn’t see him now, but at the same time, he needed to find Fishy and make sure he was okay. The conflicting desires grew in intensity until Garret’s head began to pound.

  Again and again the rifles cracked. Over and over, soft splashes came back up over the side as the remains of each of their friends fell into the water. Over and over they had to reload. Garret was almost prancing by the time they pushed the last coffin onto the starboard gangway.

  Garret craned his neck again, nearly insane with worry for Fishy. I’ve got to find him.

  “We commit their souls to God, and their bodies to the sea,” Maxwell said quietly.

  At last it was over. Garret was moving away before Commander Sharpe dismissed them. Velvet caught his arm. Velvet’s face looked a lot like that cracked porcelain bowl Garret had been thinking of earlier.

  “We all want to find him,” Velvet said quietly. “We need to work together. Which section do you want?”

>   Beneath them, the Kearsarge began to move. Maxwell hadn’t even given the crew ten seconds to say goodbye to the floating coffins. Additionally, he had vanished. Kearsarge picked up speed quickly, undoubtedly being driven by her hellbent captain to go and do whatever it was that would eventually get everyone killed. Which meant they all had duties to attend. Garret was supposed to start inspecting and cleaning hatch seals in the belly of the ship. Fuck duty.

  “I don’t care, just give me a section,” Garret said as he glanced back at the flotilla of dead friends that was falling astern. Dozens of coffins, containing the burned, broken bodies of people he cared about, floated under the happy sun. Some of them hadn’t been old enough to shave. Some were beginning to sink already. But the sun was bright and cheery. Garret wanted to reach up, snatch it out of the sky, and drown it in the ocean.

  W

  Andrew’s pulse thundered in his ears. The internal pressure of remaining calm felt like it was going to blow his eardrums out. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. They’d just sent the bodies of forty-eight young men overboard, and now finally, for the first time on this mission, there was something they could do about it, but the Captain was stonewalling. Andrew leaned forward, laying a hand out on the Captain’s polished table in entreaty. “But sir, Lieutenant Bartram says he knows who the saboteur is! He says he has evidence!”

  Lieutenant Bartram, seated next to Andrew, nodded, but without taking his eyes off the captain. “I have proof, sir. We can extract this thorn from our side and finish the mission. I don’t understand why—”

  “It is not yours to understand, Lieutenant. It is yours to do your duty, and you have done it. You have no further responsibility in this matter.”

  Maxwell sat across the table from them, his uniform top unbuttoned, but not yet removed. He didn’t look as haggard as Andrew felt, and his face certainly didn’t reveal the torment in Andrew’s soul. Maxwell’s face was impassive. The man had retreated far behind the visage, and that was as close as Maxwell got to expressing torment.