Down to the Sea (34 page)

Agrippa started to reach for his revolver.

“Don’t, sir. I am not playing a game. Touch that weapon, and you are dead.”

Agrippa looked at him, mouth gaping open like a fish that had been speared and dropped into the bottom of a boat. His eyes darted back and forth, settling at last on the corporal.

“Over here,” he gasped, and the corporal reluctantly approached.

“Remove that weapon from this man and place him under arrest,” Agrippa hissed.

The corporal looked back and forth between the two, and then his gaze shifted beyond them.

“Goddamn, what the hell are you people doing?”

It was the sergeant major Abe had grabbed at the bottom of the hill, pushing a dozen men on foot in front of him. Crouching low until clear of the edge of the butte, he stood up, slowly moving toward the two officers.

“Sergeant major, arrest this man,” Agrippa hissed.

The sergeant hesitated.

“Sergeant, we are staying on this hill,” Abe announced. “Major Agrippa wants us to charge back down and make a break to the west. It will mean abandoning our comrades still down below. I have tried to reason with him, and he refused. So either he backs down now, or I shoot him.”

The sergeant major cautiously approached the two, the entire group breaking their tableaulike poses when a high arcing arrow hissed down, striking the ground between them, and then went skidding off.

The staccato roar of the gatling ignited, and Abe shifted his gaze for a second to the sergeant.

“Deployed on the plateau just below us,” he announced. “We managed to get a couple of thousand rounds up with it. The men are digging in.”

“Sergeant! Get the men mounted.”

The sergeant, moving with steady purpose, stepped between Agrippa and Abe and faced the major. Taking the officer’s revolver out of its holster, he stuck it into his own belt.

“Sir, you’re injured, sir. I think you need to lie down.”

“Sergeant?”

“I can see you’re badly burned, sir. Corporal, get something to drink for the major here.”

“I’ll have all of you court-martialed,” Agrippa cried.

“Sir, will you look over there,” the sergeant replied, speaking softly, as if sharing a few kind words with a friend.

The major turned, looking to where the sergeant pointed.

The revolver in the sergeant’s hand flashed upward. Agrippa fell, sprawling in the dust. The sergeant stood above him, holding the pistol by the barrel.

“Damn,” he whispered, “I think a ball just grazed the major.”

He looked back at Abe and wearily shook his head.

“You were right, sir, but damn it, your ass and mine are in the fire once he wakes up.”

Abe could not help but smile. “Thank you, Sergeant.”

“Look, sir. I think most all the other officers are dead. The damn bastards tore into anyone with a guidon following. I think we got about a hundred men all mixed up down there and up here, but by God if we keep our nerve, we can hold. They’re already pulling back.”

Abe had been so preoccupied with Agrippa that he had forgotten about the battle raging around them. He looked back to the east. The Bantag along the riverbank were holding their position. He could see them moving about, clustering around a rider coming in bearing a guidon.

Looking to either flank, he could see they were pulling back. Some of them had dismounted, hiding behind dead horses, scattered boulders, keeping up a slow but steady fire. To the west, down in the ravine where they had been less than an hour before, he caught glimpses of riders dismounting. The half dozen supply wagons that had been left to the rear were being looted, drivers all dead. The back door was closed. Another bullet zipped passed, sounding like an angry bee.

I’m under fire, he realized. That one down there behind the pyramid-shaped boulder is aiming straight at me.

“We’re stuck here, sir,” the sergeant announced, “but we can put up a hell of a fight at least until we die of thirst or run out of ammunition.”

“Damn, I wish we could have gotten one of those wagons up here.”

“How old are you, Lieutenant?”

“Twenty-one, Sergeant.” He hesitated. “And you?”

“Old enough to be your father. I was in the last war.”

“I could tell that, Sergeant.”

The old man grinned. “Hell, I could have thought you were, too, the way you were down there.”

Another bullet sang past.

“Like the old days all over again,” the sergeant grumbled. He looked down at the still unconscious major.

“Remember, Lieutenant, he got nicked by a spent round. I’m heading back down to the gatling now. You just keep them back from our flanks, sir.”

The sergeant disappeared back over the rim. Abe looked around and saw a few of the men still staring at him.

“What the hell are you looking at? Get back on the firing line, and make every shot count.”

As the men turned away, he caught the eye of the corporal. “Make sure the major is all right,” Abe said, and walked off.

He was startled by the sight of his mount, still standing, eyes wide with pain, bloody froth dripping from her open mouth.

“Oh, God,” he sighed.

He leveled his carbine, which was still cocked, and aimed it at the poor beast’s forehead. Abe closed his eyes and squeezed the trigger.

Andrew opened the door, then extended his hand, greeting Varinnia and the other members of the Design Board as they came into his office and sat down around the table.

Fortunately, the secretary of the navy had been diverted and was down at the naval yard for an inspection. The old Greek autocrat, a political compromise announced before the election to ensure holding that state, was far more interested in drink and the pursuit of young Rus beauties than business, so there would be no inane questions and delays. The 1st Aerosteamer Group was sailing at nightfall and final plans had to be checked.

Varinnia opened without delay, clicking off the details of the conversion of the three armored cruisers.

“The last of the aerosteamers are being loaded even now,” she concluded. “The major problem is one of space and moving them around. The ramp to the lower deck is simply too slow and cumbersome. One of the workers suggested installing a steam-powered lifter, or elevator as he called it. If we had another week, we could do it.”

“If the wind goes up to twenty knots,” Theodor interjected, “we should be able to put all the planes up on the main deck before going into action. With wings folded and packed in, they’ll occupy two hundred and twenty feet of deck space. That will give us a hundred and thirty feet for takeoffs. Falcons go first, then the Goliath, thus giving the heavier aircraft just over three hundred feet.”

“How about landings, though, with all those planes?” Andrew asked.

“Well, they’ll all take off. With luck, they’ll all come back.”

She fell silent, the implication clear. Part of the plan was based on the fact that not all the planes would be returning.

“As each plane lands,” she finally continues, “it gets pushed to the front, clearing the aft deck for the next one.”

“Sounds doubtful. You’ll have damaged aircraft, wounded pilots.”

“Actually, it’s rather insane, but that’s the only way we can get them up in some semblance of a group, which will be the key to making the attacks work.”

“Their weapons?”

Varinnia sighed. “They were designed for launching from our frigates at a range of five hundred yards. Rosovich tried dropping one yesterday, and it damn near killed him when it exploded on impact with the water. He brought the plane in, but it was junked.

“We figure the fuse was too sensitive. My people are modifying them now. Impact with the water snaps the safety on the detonator. The next impact, against the target, sets it off.”

“How many do we have?”

“Forty-three.”

“Damn,” Andrew gasped. “Can’t you get more? I think you’re telling me there isn’t enough for those boys to do some practice runs first, even to test the damn things out.”

“I suggested that Mr. Rosovich do a demonstration run as the ships cruise down to Constantine, but for the rest of the pilots, we’ll just have to rig up drums filled with sand to simulate the weight.”

“Just great.”

“It’s all we have, sir,” Theodor replied. “Remember, we had moments like this back in the last war as well.”

“Damn it,” Andrew snapped, “that was the last war. We’ve had fifteen years knowing the Kazan were out there, and now we are sending boys up with sand-filled barrels so they can practice getting killed? Damn all of it.”

He lowered his head for a moment. If I had complete control, he thought, we’d have pushed the edge back with the Kazan, found out what was beyond the treaty barrier, and the hell with the stay-in-our-own-boundaries majority.

He closed his eyes, thinking about the telegrams piled up on his desk, each of them screaming for attention; messages from senators and congressmen telling him that their constituents were blaming him for provoking a war, that we should go out and meet the Kazan and make a deal, that the entire thing was a contemptible hoax to get money for the navy, which would be spent in Suzdal.

“Is there anything more that we can do between now and when we might expect their fleet?”

The members of the board looked at one another. “Precious little,” Varinnia replied. “We’re trying to upgrade the frigates with rapid-fire one-inch gatlings. If they can dodge in close, it might be effective. Some of the new steel-tipped shells will be distributed to the armored cruisers, and Theodor here promises he can push us up to the production of two aerosteamers a day. That could give us upward of two hundred and forty airships by the end of the month.”

“Not counting the ones on the three aerosteamer carriers?”

“That includes them.”

He nodded sadly.

She shuffled some papers, which an assistant had pulled out of a briefcase. “Here you’ll find our proposals for next year’s appropriations.”

“Next year?”

“Sir, we have to assume that somehow we will fend off the first attack. That’s the only possible way we should be thinking, both privately and in public.”

He noticed the slight edge of rebuke in her voice, and he accepted the briefing that she passed over, printed on the new typing machines.

He scanned through the last page and whistled softly. “You are asking for one hundred and fifty million dollars?”

“For the navy alone,” she quickly inteijected. “Air corps is another hundred million and the army another hundred and fifty million.”

“Good Lord, Varinnia, that’s nearly ten times this year’s budget for ordnance development and procurement. Where the hell are we supposed to get that kind of money?”

“The same way you did last time,” she ventured.

“Last time? We had no money. It was, for all practical purposes, a military dictatorship in spite of what trappings we made about the Republic. People worked and somehow we got them food and shelter. The country has changed now.”

“Do we want to survive?”

“Of course we do.”

“Then this is what I think we need.”

Andrew felt his stomach knot, and a fearful voice whispered that suppose Pat was right, suppose this entire thing was a mad cooked-up story by Cromwell. There was even the underlying fear that Cromwell might very well believe he was telling the truth, but Hazin had fooled him. No invasion, just the threat of it to trigger a political crisis. My God, if they did wait, we might very well collapse on our own accord. It seemed as if the crisis had already triggered a frontier war with the Bantag. Reports had been coming in since late yesterday of skirmishing all up and down the frontier, and the Chin were howling bloody murder.

He closed his eyes, feeling a monumental headache coming on. “Explain this to me,” he sighed, rubbing his closed eyes.

“First, we have to settle within the navy the question of emphasis. Do we go for the larger ships to match the battleships of the Kazan, or do we build aerosteamer carriers? The first path will take at least eighteen months to launch the first vessel. We had rough designs and calculations worked out. The Suzdal yard could be converted to handle two of them within six months, and two more within a year. I’m proposing as well the expansion of the yards at Roum and Cartha. That should lower the political heat a bit.”

He nodded.

“If the aerosteamer scheme actually works, and the war nevertheless continues, remember the old formula, that for every offensive maneuver a defense will be found. If they have both the heavy ships and aerosteamer carriers a year from now, we are trumped. I’d suggest both.”

“What I figured you’d say.”

“Then to the second point. The controlling of fire.”

“What do you mean?”

“Cromwell said something that stuck with me. I asked Petronius and even he agrees. Our guns can fire to over fifteen thousand yards. On rock-solid land they could expect to hit a stationary target the size of a Kazan battleship at that range. But put those guns on a ship, even one sailing in a dead calm, and all bets are off. Right now we’re lucky to hit at a mile, and Cromwell estimated they were hitting at three thousand yards. If we could figure out a way to control the firing out to maximum range, we would have them.”

He could sense the edge of excitement in her voice. “Go on.”

“Working with several of my naval gunnery team, I’ve come up with several basic problems that have to be solved.

“First there is range finding. That is simple enough and might explain those pagodalike towers Cromwell said are on their battleships. If you knew precisely, to the inch, the distance between those two towers you would have a base line.” As she spoke she traced out a triangle on a sheet of paper.

“Once you have the baseline, you measure the relative angle to the target from the top of the two towers. You know the width of the baseline, you know the angles. Combine that knowledge and you can figure the range.”

“So then you shoot. That sounds easy enough.”

Several of the men and women sitting around Varinnia chuckled softly. “That’s the easy part. We need to coordinate all the guns together, then rig them to a single trigger. I’m thinking of some sort of liquid mercury switch. You have to fire when the ship is level in its pitch and roll, because the mercury inside the tube completes the electrical circuit only when it is precisely level, and then the guns fire.”