Rising Tides

CHAPTER 12

Eastern Sea

W alker had averaged eight knots during the last week, a respectable speed given the generally light airs the other ships relied on. Sometimes she sped up, steaming a wide circle around her plodding consorts. Occasionally, she hove to and let the Nancy down into the sea and Reynolds flew. Matt forbade him to fly out of sight, but one of the flights did warn them of a basking mountain fish, several miles farther out than they would have detected it with lookouts. This allowed them to give it a wide berth. Fred Reynolds saw nothing else, no islands or ships at all. If they’d been in the Carolines before, they must have left them behind. Otherwise, the sea was calm, the weather pleasant, and if not for the antiquated sailing steamers they kept company with and the Lemurian heavy crew, it would have been easy for the men aboard USS Walker to imagine that they’d somehow returned to the world they’d left behind.

Beginning the third week out of the nameless atoll where the ships refitted after the fight, the sky grew dark and the sea began to dance. A cool wind pushed rolling swells out of the south, and Walker started rolling sickeningly, as was her custom. A pod, or herd, of gri-kakka, a form of plesiosaur they’d grown uncomfortably accustomed to, crossed their path and blew among the swells. The creatures veered away and plunged for the depths as the ship’s sonar lashed at them. They used the sonar to frighten mountain fish-or “leviathans,” as the Imperials called them-away, and it seemed to work extremely well. Walker ’s crew was glad to learn it worked on gri-kakka too. They’d taken some damage once by just striking a young one.

That night Walker ran under running lights and the other ships hoisted lanterns. The wind and sea continued to build, veering out of the southwest. The quartering swells made Walker ’s crew, particularly the Lemurians, even more miserable as the roll took on a swooping, corkscrewing motion. Even the ’Cats who’d been on the sea all their lives had a hard time with it. Except for the ones who’d made their living on the fishing feluccas, none had ever noticed any except the most severe storms. Riding heavy seas on a Lemurian Home was like doing so on an aircraft carrier. Walker ’s relatively small and slender round-bottom hull made for a far more boisterous ride. With the dawn came the realization that they were unquestionably in a typhoon, or possibly a Strakka-something even worse that this world’s different climate managed to conjure. They’d never experienced a deepwater Strakka before.

Ever eastward they struggled, in the face of the mounting sea. Waves crashed across Walker ’s narrow bow, inundating the forward four-inch-fifty and pounding against the superstructure beneath the bridge. During her refit, they’d replaced Walker ’s rectangular pilothouse windows with glass salvaged from Amagi, but there hadn’t been much to spare. To protect the new glass, as well as the people behind it, plate steel shutters had been cut and installed that could be lowered into place over the windows. The shutters retained only small slits to see through, and all but eliminated visibility, but they had the compass, and soaked lookouts stood watch on the bridgewings. Chack stood watch-on-watch high above in the crow’s nest as well. He had the longest experience aboard the old destroyer of any Lemurian, and had probably developed the strongest stomach of any of his farsighted peers. Still, the wildly erratic and exaggerated motion of the crow’s nest would have made the post hell for anyone. As the storm built, he was the very last to report visual contact with the lanterns of the other ships.

Even then, they maintained wireless contact with Achilles, but her signal grew weaker with every passing hour. The growing distance between the ships wasn’t to blame. The problem was that they hadn’t been allowed time to install and regulate one of the virtually “Allied standard” 120-volt, 25-kilowatt generators in Achilles ’ engine room when they left Baalkpan. She still relied on one of the portable six-volt winddriven generators used by Allied sailing ships. The wind had grown much too violent to continue operating it, though, and the batteries were beginning to fade. Icarus and Ulysses had only lanterns, flags, guns, and rockets to communicate with, and by late afternoon even Achilles couldn’t see them anymore over the mounting crests of the tortured sea.

“Jeez, this is awful!” protested Frankie Steele through clenched teeth, struggling with the large polished wheel. Water beaded in his beard. Everyone on the bridge had been saturated by windblown rain and spray. “I remember steering Mahan through that big Java Sea Strakka on one engine, but I don’t think it was this bad.”

“If you’ll remember,” said Matt, “ Walker only had one engine at the time as well, and I believe you’re right. The water’s a lot deeper and the swells are more organized, but the troughs are deeper too.” He braced himself against his chair, bolted securely to the bulkhead, when the bow shouldered through another high peak and then tilted downward at an alarming angle. With a rushing crash, it pierced the next enormous wave and the sea boomed against the pilothouse. Through the slits in the shutters all Matt could see was a swirling white vortex, and water gushed into the pilothouse over the bridgewing rails, nearly sweeping the lookouts aft and down onto the weather deck. Somehow, they managed to hold on, and climb hand over hand back to their posts as the rush of seawater drained through the bridge strakes. Slowly, reluctantly, the bow came up again and the ship heaved sharply over to port.

Kutas, clinging to the support pole near the chart table, watched the clinometer pass twenty degrees. “A lot deeper,” he muttered nervously. “Skipper, the wind’s come around out of the northwest, and these waves are getting harder to crawl up at an angle. I recommend we change course to one, two, zero. We might take them harder over the bow, but maybe they won’t tump us over!”

Matt hesitated. If they turned away, they might get separated even farther from their consorts. But the Imperial ships couldn’t steam forever in these seas. Sooner or later, they’d have to run with the wind. “Very well. Mr. Steele, make your course one, two, zero. Mr. Kutas, please have Mr. Riggs inform Achilles of our course change. According to their charts, there shouldn’t be anything out there we need to be concerned about running into.”

“Aye, aye, Skipper,” Steele replied, “making my course one, two, zero.”

The Bosun staggered up the stairs aft, and gasping, joined Kutas at the pole.

“What are you doing running around in the rain, Boats?” Matt quipped.

“Oh, just checking on things.”

“How’s she holding up?” Matt asked.

“Swell,” Gray replied breathlessly. He’d pulled the decorative strap on the front of his sopping, battered hat down under his chin to keep from losing it. He didn’t add “so far.” That might jinx them. On the other hand, maybe just thinking it was bad enough.

“Skipper!” cried Reynolds, who as usual joined the duty roster as talker when he wasn’t flying or tending the plane in some way. Right now, the Nancy had been disassembled and secured as well as possible.

“What is it?” Matt demanded.

“Lookout, ah, Chack, says there’s a whopper coming in! It just keeps getting bigger! He sounds… scared!”

Chack scared? Oh, hell. “Mr. Steele?”

“Almost there,” Frankie replied, straining against the wheel.

Matt joined the starboard lookout on the bridgewing. At first he couldn’t see anything through the darkness and the blinding spray. Then he heard it. Even over the screeching wind that moaned hideously through the foremast stays and the wireless aerial, over the blower and the groaning hull and thrashing sea, he heard a sound like mounting thunder. What he could see of the horizon beyond the gray-green foam had become as black as night. He looked up. And up. “Oh, Lord,” he said. Then he spun. “Sound the collision alarm!”

In spite of the situation, Tabby was actually pleased with herself. This was the worst storm she’d endured yet on Walker, but for the first time, she hadn’t been transformed into a heaving, retching, practically lifeless wreck. Must be The ’sponsibility, she decided. She’d never seen Spanky look even mildly ill when the sea kicked up. He’d been through the aft fireroom just a few moments before, moving carefully along the rail with the motion of the ship. The hull seemed tight, and though brackish water gushed back and forth in the bilge, the ship didn’t seem to be taking much on as she worked. At least the hull repairs had been properly handled-of course, they’d had more time on them. The boilers had been a hurry-up affair. She didn’t mind. She’d finished the work on number three, and it was roaring away contentedly despite the turmoil outside. She was satisfied.

She glanced around and wrinkled her nose. Just because she wasn’t sick didn’t mean there wasn’t a powerful lot of puking going on. She’d been the first Lemurian fireman and had suffered her baptism alone, except for the somewhat disinterested solicitations of the “other” Mice. Now the whole fireroom was full of her people-none of whom had ever endured anything like this. She felt sorry for them, spewing wretchedly on the deck plates, trying to reach the one they’d left open to the bilge as a “puke hole,” but she felt slightly superior as well. She was superior. She was a chief, wasn’t she? The others would come along, just as she had, and at least most still seemed able to function.

Suddenly an alarm blared in the compartment that she’d only heard a couple of times in drills. Her spine stiffened and her eyes went wide.

“Everyone! Grab hold of something!” she screamed. “Get away from the boilers and hold on!” She embraced a feed line and clenched her teeth. Something struck the ship like the hand of God. One instant, Walker seemed to be climbing a swell like so many others, and the next, the old destroyer was practically on her beam-ends. Deck plates were uprooted and went sliding or tumbling to port, and the air was filled with loosened condensation, followed by a flood of bilgewater

… and screams. Tabby’s feet fell out from under her, and she held on to the heavy pipe for dear life as others in her division did the same, or fell screeching amid the clattering tools and other debris. A few must have fallen against the boilers themselves-suddenly the air smelled of burnt hair and flesh. She watched as one of her water tenders, motionless against the port-side hull, was impaled by a plummeting deck plate that struck her with its sharp, pointed corner. The water tender never made a sound. A thundering vibration added to the din, and whether it was water coursing over the ship or the starboard screw running away, she couldn’t tell.

Another sound began that she’d never heard before. It started as a whooshing, drumming hiss, and quickly grew to a pounding rumble, and she knew- knew -that water was pouring down at least one stack into the smoke-box uptake! For what might have been only moments but seemed like forever, the ship just hung like that, heaved over, as if trying to decide whether to right herself and struggle on, or roll all the way over and go to sleep at last.

“No!” Tabby screamed. “You NOT give up! You NOT!” Over and over she shouted, “You NOT! You NOT!” until she no longer knew if she was screaming at the ship, herself, or her weakening arms. Slowly, slowly, the angle grew less extreme. “Pleeeese, ship!” she begged, almost sobbing. “You got too much to do! You got too many who love you!” Almost as if in response to her plea, Walker practically lurched upright and her screws bit again. There were more screams when firemen fell into the jumble of iron that slid deckward with them. Then came a terrible roar, and Tabby remembered the water in the uptake. Later, she could never exactly describe the sound she heard when warm seawater coursed down into the number three boiler. Maybe her ears were already shot from all the noise, and her own high-pitched wail. The best she could remember was a “crackling, thundering BONG!” before the aft fireroom filled with scalding steam.