American Empire: Blood and Iron - By Harry Turtledove Page 0,139

passage pounded on the dogged hatch. A shout came through the thick steel: “Anybody alive in there?”

“Fire!” Sam said, and the gun roared. That should have answered the question, but the pounding went on. He nodded to Wesley. “Undog it.”

“Aye aye.” The shell-jerker obeyed.

Half a dozen men spilled into the sponson, Commander Grady among them. “Two dead, sir,” Carsten said crisply, “but we can still use the gun.”

“So I gather.” Grady looked at the bodies. His rabbity features stayed expressionless; he’d seen his share of bodies before. After a moment’s thought, he nodded briskly. “All right, Carsten, this is your gun for the time being. I’ll get you shell-heavers. We’ll clean up this mess and get on with the job.”

Another shell from the shore splashed into the Irish Sea, close enough to the Remembrance to send some water through the hole the hit had made in the sponson’s armor. Sam said, “Sir, if we can use a couple of aeroplanes to shoot up that gun and its crew, our life will get easier.”

Even as he spoke, one of the Wright fighting scouts buzzed off the deck of the aeroplane carrier, followed a moment later by another and then another. Commander Grady said, “You aren’t the only one with that idea, you see.”

“Never figured I would be,” Sam answered, not altogether truthfully. All his time in the Navy had taught him that officers often had trouble seeing things that should have been obvious.

Grady pointed to two of the ratings with him. “Drinkwater, you and Jorgenson stay here and jerk shells. Carsten, can Wesley cut the mustard as a loader?”

“Sir, if we fired with a two-man crew, we’ll sure as hell do a lot better with four,” Sam answered. Calvin Wesley shot him a grateful glance. Loader would be a step up for Wesley, as crew chief was a step up for Sam. Sam wished he hadn’t earned it like this, but, as was the Navy way, nobody paid any attention to what he wished.

Grady pointed to the dead meat that had been Willie Moore and Joe Gilbert. “Get these bodies out of here,” he ordered the men he hadn’t appointed to the gun crew. “We’ve already spent too much time here.”

As the sailors dragged the corpses out of the sponson, Sam took what had been Willie Moore’s spot. The chief of a gun crew had an advantage denied the rest of the men—he could see out whenever he chose: through the vision slit, through the rangefinder, and now through the hole that would, when time allowed, no doubt have a steel plate welded over it.

Sam peered southwest, toward the shore half a dozen miles away. The fighting scouts the Remembrance had launched were buzzing around something. A flash told Carsten it was the gun that had fired on his ship. The shell fell astern of the aeroplane carrier.

He twisted the calibration screw on the rangefinder and read out the exact distance to the target: 10,350 yards. Willie Moore had known without having to think how far to elevate the gun for a hit at that distance. Sam didn’t. He glanced at a yellowing sheet of paper above the vision slit: a range table. Checking the elevation, he saw the gun was a little low, and adjusted it. Then he traversed it ever so slightly to the left.

“Fire!” he shouted. He’d given the order before, with only Calvin Wesley in the sponson with him, but it seemed more official now. If he fought the gun well, it might be his to keep.

Wesley let out a yelp as the shell casing just missed mashing his instep. But when one of the new shell-heavers handed him the next round, he slammed it home in good style.

“You want to mind your feet,” Sam said, traversing the gun a little farther on its track. “You can spend some time on crutches if you don’t.” He turned the screw another quarter of a revolution. “Fire!”

He spied another flash in the same instant as his own gun spoke. The shell the pro-British rebels launched was a near miss. At the range at which he was fighting, he could not tell whether he’d hit or missed. But the gun on the shore did not fire again. Either his shell had silenced it, one from a different five-incher had done the trick, or the aeroplanes from the Remembrance had exterminated the crew.

He didn’t waste time worrying over which was so. As long as the Irish rebels couldn’t hurt the Remembrance