Even the narrower perspective of the console's central situation display was splotched with islands. But the natural surroundings didn't matter, because a Seatiger warship was edging through a channel between two of the swampy blobs at a charted distance of 5721 yards.
"Ready torpedoes," Lieutenant Tonello rasped over the interphone. He stood to look over K67's cockpit coaming, while OT Brainard hid within his holographic environment. "Flank spee—"
A starshell popped. Tracers snarled overhead measurable seconds before Brainard heard the howl of the Gatlings that fired them.
"Torpedoes ready," Tech 2 Caffey reported. The interphone turned his voice into that of a soloist accompanied by the orchestra of Hell.
"Coxs'n, three degrees starboard."
K67 accelerated like a kicked can. Water slammed upward so near the port side that water drenched Brainard's console. The spout was luminous with the orange flames at its heart. The second shell was dead astern, the third astern to starboard.
Tonello had kept the fans on high, spilling air through the waste slots in the plenum chamber, as the torpedocraft nosed through the archipelago to find the targets he knew were present. OT Brainard cursed the CO in silent terror because that technique made K67 a sonic beacon. Brainard couldn't help matters at the countermeasures board, though the scattering effect of the islands themselves turned the two-vessel patrol into a flotilla.
It would have taken the fans 90 seconds to spin up from low-signature mode to full power. It took a half-second to slam the waste slots closed and lurch toward the enemy. That was many times the difference between a waterspout astern—and a fireball which scattered indistinguishable bits of crew and vessel after a 5.5-inch shell detonated K67's own torpedoes.
Brainard punched up an identification sidebar on his situation display. When his mind and fingers did something, the roar and flashes couldn't drown him in their terror.
The sea was orange with waterspouts; muzzle flashes boiled the whole horizon red and white. K44 vanished from the display. Even the islands blurred and shrank as the shell-storm degraded the data reaching K67's sensors.
Brainard's console told him their opponent was a destroyer-leader with a full-load displacement of 2700 tons and a main armament of six 5.5-inch guns in triple turrets.
He didn't believe it. He was sure from the volume of fire that they'd jumped a dreadnouoght. He reached under the panel and switched to the back-up system. The holographic display vanished for a hideous fraction of a second, forcing Brainard to see the carnage around him. Light trembling from flares twisted sea creatures on the surface into shapes still more monstrous than those of nature. Horrors fought and feasted at the banquet laid by bursting shells.
Then the back-up circuits took over. The new display told Brainard the same thing the old one had, that K67 faced a minor fleet element, not a dreadnought. Only a destroyer-leader, only a hundred times the hovercraft's size—
"Launch one!" said Lieutenant Tonello in a voice as clear as glass breaking. K67 shuddered as studs blew open and dropped one of the torpedoes into the sea beneath her plenum chamber.
"Launch two!"
"Tracking!" Caffey reported as he hunched over his guidance controls. The torpedo's own sensors gave the operator a multi-spectral view of the target. If the enemy tried to dodge, Caffey could send steering commands along the cable of optical fiber which connected the weapon to the hovercraft.
The release thump of the second torpedo was lost in the burst of explosive bullets which buzz-sawed across K67.
Lieutenant Tonello's head vanished in a yellow flash. His body hurtled against the back bulkhead. The shatterproof windscreen disintegrated into a dazzle of microscopic beads, and all the cockpit displays went dead. The coxswain screamed and rolled out of his seat. K67 wallowed broadside, still at full power.
Each side-console had an emergency helm and throttle under the middle display. Brainard rotated his unit up and locked it into position. Wind blast through the missing screen hammered him. The destroyer-leader was a Roman candle of muzzle flashes.
A starshell had drifted almost to the surface astern of K67. By its flickering light, Brainard saw another blacked-out hovercraft race across the wave tops toward the target. He hadn't had time to think about K44 since the shooting started.
Brainard spun his miniature helm hard to starboard. The hovercraft did not respond.
A salvo of 5.5-inch shells straddled K67 with a roar louder than Doomsday. Waterspouts lifted the hovercraft and spilled the air out of her plenum chamber. She slammed the surface again with a bone-jarring crash.
The main circuit breakers had tripped. A battery-powered LED marked the breaker box, but Brainard's retinas still flickered with afterimages of the explosive bullets that raked the cockpit. He groped for the box, barked his knuckles on the edge of it, and finally got it open while several rounds of automatic fire slapped K67's skirts.