CHAPTER 33
////// 2nd Bomb Squadron
Above Grik City
“Oh my God,” Doocy Meek murmured as the four ships in the squadron spiraled lower over the target. Rain lashed the canopy in front of him and turned it opaque, and the wind gusts inside the squall battered the little seaplane in a particularly disconcerting way. But looking down to the side, Meek saw the funnel-shaped mass of Grik directly against Walker’s side. It even looked like . . . “Captain Tikker,” he shouted into the voice tube that terminated behind the pilot’s left ear, “I think the Grik have gained the ship’s deck!”
“I see it,” Tikker replied brusquely. “We’re almost too late.”
To Meek, it looked like they already were, but after a brief pause, he’d begun hearing urgent pleas for air support on the secondary TBS-tuned receiver again. He couldn’t respond, but he could listen. He’d learned the man on the other end was Lieutenant Ed Palmer, and the youngish voice was increasingly desperate. Looking down again, Meek could well imagine why.
“Some are holding out down there, Mr. Meek,” Tikker continued, as if reading Doocy’s mind. His eyesight was certainly better, Meek knew, but from this height, he never would’ve guessed it.
“Send to the rest of the squadron that we’ll approach from the north so we don’t have to adjust our aim after flying through the smoke of that cruiser. The first two ships’ll follow us in, and we’ll lay our eggs as close alongside Walker as we can. The second two will drop on more Griks a little farther out.”
“Why not make two passes?” Doocy asked, even as he hammered out the orders.
“We got the biggest anti-Grik an’ Dom bombs in the Navy strapped on,” Tikker explained. “I wanted more, smaller ones, but this is what the geniuses sent over, an’ all Amer-i-kaa had for us. Anyway, if we only drop one, there’s a good chance the ‘rolling moment will exceed the aileron authority,’ as Col-nol Maallory would say. In other words, it’ll flip the plane when the weight goes.” He paused. “So we got one shot to save Walker.”
Doocy Meek finished his transmission and listened for a moment. He really was a “good fist” after all. “Your orders’ve been sent and acknowledged by all of your pilots, Captain Tikker,” he reported.
“Swell,” Tikker shouted back, gauging the angle as his little squadron continued its orbit to the northeast of the battle below. When he decided the time was right, he banked slightly left and pushed his stick forward. “You better start poppin’ yer ears, Mr. Meek, ’cause here we go!”
USS Walker
Aft Engine Room
The fight raging just a short distance over Tabby’s head had been a distraction for some of the Lemurian and female human snipes under her control, but she’d personally managed to tune it out to a large extent. Only when somebody paused in his work, shoring yet more mattresses against the leak in the hull, did she give it any apparent notice—and that was to harangue the culprit with a creditable impersonation of one of Spanky’s more colorful rants. The sound of grenades drumming against the plates overhead caused even her to glance up, however. Grenades on deck meant Grik were on deck!
Chief Machinist’s Mate Johnny Parks splashed through the hatch from the forward engine room, nervously wiping sweat from his brow. The EMs had finally bypassed the junction box and generator in the space (Tabby remained skeptical that the original schematics would’ve made that any easier and resolved to cure that later), but though power had been restored to the pumps and the rest of the ship, the aft engine room remained dark. Parks was looking anxiously for her in the gloomy light of the battle lanterns. “Tabby?” he called urgently.
“Here.”
“Spanky says the Grik got past him somehow! They’re gonna be down here any minute! What’re we gonna do?” Tabby looked at him and blinked. Parks was a good man, but the news had clearly rattled him. That was okay; the very thought of Grik running amok in her engineering spaces rattled her too. She quickly controlled her terror and blinked grim determination. “We can shut ’em outa here, but they’ll raise hell in the steerin’ engine room, at least.” Her eyes narrowed. “We gotta run their nasty asses the hell out!” She looked at her repair party, evaluating which ones would be less useless in a fight. Theoretically, everyone aboard USS Walker was required to be proficient in the use of small arms, but she’d taken on a lot of replacements in Maa-ni-la, and the learning curve in engineering was high enough that she’d let it slide when her snipes habitually skipped the drills. That had been a mistake, she realized now. “Take over here, Mr. Paarks,” she ordered, then called some names. “You guys keep at it. I want this entire space dry as a bone when the tide comes in. The rest of you, quit your shorin’ an’ drop them timbers. Take sidearms an’ cutlasses, an’ follow me!”
The Grik were already in the crew’s quarters when the sixteen combatants Tabby chose had scrambled up the catwalk and through the upper-level hatch. They heard them even before they saw them, down the corridor between the aft fuel bunkers, rampaging among the racks in the compartment. Tabby quickly told a pair of smaller ’Cats to seal and hold the hatch behind them, and charged into the fight with her Baalkpan Arsenal 1911 barking in her hand. There were no mattresses left for the enemy to shred, but they’d already made a shambles of the place, hacking the chains that held the racks from the overhead, and slashing bedding with their swords. Nearly all the lightbulbs had been smashed for the apparent amusement it provided. The companionway to the provisions locker was choked with Grik, gorging on what they found down there, and Tabby’s bullets turned bedlam into pandemonium. Startled Grik, seemingly convinced they’d fought their way past all resistance, hesitated for an instant while the rest of Tabby’s fighters deployed behind her and started shooting as well.
The opening fusillade was stunningly loud in the confined space, but not particularly effective. “Try to hit ’em!” Tabby shouted, disconcerted by how poorly her party’s marksmanship measured up to their enthusiasm. “At least point your weapons at something before you fire!” Her own first shots weren’t much better, but she quickly improved. Downy fuzz floated in the dim light around the portholes, and Grik screeched in agony as they crashed against dangling racks. A lot of them charged, but even her snipes could hit meat at a couple of paces. But bullets ran out. A ’Cat screamed as a Grik slashed her open with its claws. “Don’t take time to reload!” Tabby cried. “Use your cutlasses!”
Transferring her smoking, empty pistol to her left hand, she drew her own Navy cutlass with the right, and chopped at the Grik that killed the first snipe she’d ever lost in hand-to-hand combat. Her cleft lips peeled back, baring bright teeth in a furious grimace as she waded into the enemy. Led by her inexperienced but ferocious example, the rest of her little party followed with a roar and a rush. Somehow, they beat the enemy back past the companionway and a small, dark-skinned girl who hadn’t been able to shoot before, mercilessly emptied her pistol into the helpless Grik crammed on the stairs to the provisions locker. She had time to reload and do it again, and before she loaded her third magazine and moved on, nothing remained alive below. After what seemed like forever but could only have been a few terrible minutes, Tabby and her snipes chased a dozen Grik back up the stairs into the laundry. It cost them, though. Tabby looked around, panting, her right arm and shoulder in agony from the unaccustomed exertion of swinging the cutlass, and realized she was down to ten effectives.
“We keep after ’em!” a burly ’Cat water tender insistently coughed through heaving breaths. His fur was nearly the same shade of gray as Tabby’s, and just as slick with foamy sweat and blood. Tabby nodded. He was right. Despite her inexperience with this sort of thing, everybody knew that when the Grik ran, you chased them. “Okay,” she gasped. “Ever’body reload pistols.” She blinked determination, and her tail swished sharply. “Nobody stops till the deckhouse is clear an’ whatever hatch they come through is secure.” She knew that only the efforts of Spanky and those above could explain why they’d faced so few Grik inside—and there was no telling how long they could keep up whatever they were doing. She suspected it was the grenades she’d been hearing, and sooner or later they’d run out. “Okay,” she repeated, looking up the companionway, “let’s go!”
They clambered noisily up the pierced steel stairs. No Grik met them in the laundry, but several were in the head, apparently looking for a way out. They turned at Tabby’s appearance and snarled, but there was something . . . a kind of desperation in their eyes that convinced her then that these couldn’t be the “new” Grik she’d heard so much about. They didn’t charge either, but only scrabbled more fervently to escape, tearing up the seats across the trough and even slamming themselves against the portholes. Tabby and the couple of others who fit in the hatchway killed them with their pistols. A ’Cat’s scream and a flurry of shots brought them racing into the torpedo workshop where they found two of their own already down. More than the dozen Grik who’d retreated here were still slashing at them, or fighting the rest of their party who’d been backed against the lathe. Beyond that desperate fight, Tabby caught her first glimpse of another, through the open forward hatch. She’d known the Grik were all over the ship; they had to be to have gotten inside, but to see it with her own eyes . . . “At ’em! Kill ’em! Chase ’em out!” she screamed, shooting at the several Grik still savaging one of her own. More pistols popped in the confined space before the three ’Cats behind her joined the rush with their cutlasses. Her pistol empty, Tabby tucked it in her belt and snatched one of several Allin-Silva barreled actions off a rack. She used it as a club in her left hand after she drew her cutlass again. Bashing and slashing, she helped chase the suddenly terrified Grik out the hatch. She briefly caught a bright flash of fiery light out of the corner of her eye, to port, but something clunked on the deck among the Grik just outside, and she slammed the hatch just as a deep bam! peppered it with grenade fragments. “Watch where the hell you thowin’ them things!” she roared, knowing no one above could hear. The water tender tried to push the hatch open again, his eyes blazing with the energy of the moment.
“No,” Tabby said, her own energy suddenly gushing away. “Secure it. We done our job. Now we gotta get this div . . .” She stopped. Three of those by the lathe were badly injured, and two were dead, of course. Her tail went limp. Her division, people she knew and cared for and worked with every day, had suffered a frightful toll. Five members of the party remained unhurt. “We gotta get this division back to work, doin’ what we do,” she finished.
* * *
A gust of orange fire roiled skyward, close enough to Matt that it seemed to sear his flesh. A raucous skirl of tortured shrieks accompanied the ball of blackening flames, and he turned his gaze to view the roaring Nancys that had finally appeared, banking left over the water and away from the burning cruiser’s column of smoke. He blinked watery blood out of his eyes and saw a stream of smoke following one of the planes as it dropped out of formation and angled for the water off Walker’s starboard side. A yell brought him back to the business at hand, and he thrust his sword down the open mouth of a Grik that had lunged for him with yellow teeth. The sword tip pierced the charging flesh and grated on bone before it suddenly appeared, gleaming red, from the back of the Grik’s neck. The creature fell like a reptilian marionette with all its strings cut, and he tried to follow the fall, guiding it slightly as he’d learned to do, so he could retrieve his sword without the blade binding. It had become an unconscious thing. Another Grik battered past a ’Cat to his left, and he shot it with the pistol he’d reloaded at some point and now held in that hand. The Grik took another stumbling step toward him, and his finger tensed on the trigger—but the thing fell under a blow from Bernie’s cutlass to the back of its head.
A part of Matt’s mind was interested by how the fight had become one of brief, snapshot impressions: the yellow teeth, grasping claws, slashing swords, and wild eyes of Grik and friends alike. Occasional muzzle flashes still punctuated the chaos, and bayonets and spearpoints waved and glittered and leveled and thrust like pale grass on a sunny, windswept day. He blinked. The sun was out; at least a few tentative beams had broken through the clouds and smoke above. That almost distracted him as well, but just then he nearly tripped over a corpse behind him as he took another step back. They’d lost the rails, the only physical barrier they had left, and if he went down now, he was finished. The line between the Grik and the bridge still held, but only because the number one gun had ceased firing and its crew had joined the fight on deck with half a dozen Blitzer Bugs. Their arrival and the fusillade of fire they brought had staggered the Grik for a moment, but when they were empty . . . All Matt could think about was what would happen when the Grik finally swept all the defenders off the upper decks of his ship. Eventually, they’d get below where the wounded were . . . where his wife and unborn child were. . . . The fight on the amidships platform was doomed, he knew, but as long as they held out, as long as they kept some of the enemy away from that line forward . . .
The Grik seemed to know it, and they attacked with a focus Matt had rarely seen, even as the men and ’Cats defended the platform with an equally fanatical desperation. Anything that came to hand was a weapon; Grik spears and shields, even helmets, were wielded and thrown. The Grik were caught up in it as well, using spent shell casings as weapons themselves if they had nothing else, throwing the heavy things at killing, skull-crushing velocities. One such narrowly missed Matt’s head, clanging loudly off the open breech of the number two gun behind him. He fought on. No more was he commander in chief of all Allied forces, even if that position had been dangerously undermined by Adar—and himself to a large degree, by his desire to support the precedent Adar was intent on setting. He knew now that had been a mistake; at least the timing of the way it happened had been, and since he’d allowed it, the greatest measure of blame was his. Nobody could’ve foreseen this situation or the sandbar that precipitated it, but that was no consolation. This, and all the other confused, deadly episodes that had unfolded that day were a direct result of a divided command that left various elements uncertain about what, exactly, was expected of them. Matt suspected Walker’s mission was the only one that hadn’t changed at some point during the fight, and he wondered if a firmer, single hand at the wheel might have made a difference now—at least for his ship and her people. He’d become merely another soldier in the Alliance, unable to influence anything that occurred beyond the reach of his blade. He genuinely didn’t expect to survive beyond the next few minutes, but if he did, there would have to be changes.
A thrown weapon of some sort, he had no idea what it had been, glanced off his helmet and sent colorful stars streaking across his vision. He sagged, trying to remember what he’d been thinking about. Campeti had him, he realized, holding him up by his sore right arm and yelling into his ear. He shook his head. What the hell’s Campeti going on about?
“What?” he managed. Grik wavered in front of him, and he tried to aim his pistol. He wasn’t much good with it left handed, not beyond a few short steps, but that had been enough. Now, the Grik seemed to be holding back, and he couldn’t get the sights to stay on any one of them as they turned away, apparently drawn by something else.
“We have to keep them occupied!” Matt ordered. “Don’t let ’em go forward!”
“They ain’t goin’ forward, Skipper!” Campeti rasped. “Look!”
“I see them.”
“No.” Campeti shifted his grip and hoisted him higher. “I don’t mean at the Grik!”
The roar of battle had intensified in the waist, and Matt realized there was heavy firing there for the first time in quite a while. More mushrooms of fire climbed to port and Matt felt their radiant heat, but he barely noticed them when he realized there were suddenly quite a few more Lemurian Marines along the starboard rail, advancing around the number one torpedo mount and shooting into the milling Grik aft of the deckhouse.
“Where’d they come from?” Matt managed, uncertain if he was seeing right through the bloody rain and sweat in his eyes. Even as he asked, he became aware that one of the DDs had drawn up alongside Walker despite the shallow water, and Marines and armed sailors were clambering aboard as fast as they could. Thunderous booming drew his gaze aft, and there was another DD, its sails furled and smoke hazing the top of its ’stack, furiously firing stands of grapeshot into the few Grik still staging to board. It was only then that Matt realized how few of those remained. The firebombs hadn’t only burned hundreds of their enemies; they’d cut the bridge of corpses! Even beyond that, hundreds more of the enemy lay or writhed, crawling and smoldering, on the strangely smaller sandbar that had brought them so near. It suddenly dawned on Matt that he had no idea how long they’d been fighting, but the tide must’ve finally turned.
Ever so slightly, and possibly discernible only to those like Matt and Campeti who knew her so well, Walker shifted in her bed of sand and Matt looked to starboard once more. Salissa was passing in the deeper water of the channel, her high, massive form displacing a bow wave that caused the DD alongside to roll noticeably—and Walker to shift again as another wave struck her. Fierce fighting still raged aboard his ship, but shouts from below, and cheering, trilling jeers from the bridge informed him that many Grik forward of the platform were jumping over the rail onto the bridge of bodies, or even into the increasingly flashy-frothed sea. Matt felt a smile begin to crack his stony visage when he caught the flicker of a Morse lamp high on Big Sal’s bridge.
“Keje wants to know if you’re okay, and if we’ll float if he pulls us off this damn beach,” Campeti croaked after clearing his dry throat and spitting on the corpse-strewn deck.
“I saw that,” Matt told him. “Let’s see how quickly we can reply.”
More sunbeams found them, shifting and fading in the dirty sky, and the rain had stopped at last. The sunlight still looked rather odd filtered through the dense gunsmoke shrouding Walker once more, but the darkness that had been creeping into Matt’s eyes and soul slowly began to clear.