Seas of Venus(112)

Captain Glenn glared at the hall. Holman bit his lips but said nothing.

"No," said Glenn. "We'll just talk here for a moment."

The members of the Board of Review slid their chairs into a trefoil. A privacy screen sprang up around them to distort the passage of light and sound waves. Their figures were ghost images on the other side of a gray discontinuity.

The audience began to whisper among itself. Most of those present in the hall had some connection with the proceedings. The other surviving members of K67's crew formed a tight group two rows behind Brainard.

Cabot Holman stared at the officer-trainee with the fixity of a weasel for a rabbit. Brainard looked toward the computer panorama. His mind sorted through disconnected images, all of them terrifying.

The privacy screen dissolved. The Board members faced around. Dabney stifled a yawn. Glenn tried to scratch his bandaged shoulderblade with his good hand, but he couldn't stretch far enough.

"Right," said Glenn, glaring at the audience again.

The wall behind Glenn showed an overhead view of the Gehenna Archipelago as Herd vessels concentrated their fire against the hopelessly outnumbered ambush squadron. Glenn's screening forces were supported by a squadron of dreadnoughts. Every time a Seatiger ship was spotted or revealed itself by firing, salvoes of 18-inch shells blew the victim to scrap.

The holographic screen went gray.

"The Board has reviewed the actions of the officers and men of torpedoboat K67, patrolling against the Seatigers the morning of July 23," said Captain Glenn. "We find the salient points to be as follows."

The face of Tech 2 Leaf appeared on the back wall. The motorman looked even more pugnacious when his features were expanded to the size of monumental sculpture. Leaf had given his evidence with a brutal directness that suggested he was willing to beat the hell out of anybody who doubted him.

"The crew of K67 believed their vessel was making its torpedo run alone," said Captain Glenn.

Leaf's holographic image said, "The target's automatics opened up—that's before the main guns fired. Right then I seen K44 pop all four of her decoys and sheer to port. I had a good place to see 'cause I was checkin' Fan Three and Holman, his boat was on our port quarter."

Leaf's image looked aside. Brainard had expected the motorman to spit, even here in front of the Board of Review. It had probably been a near thing.

Not quite. Leaf stared at the hologram pick-up and said, "I figured they'd cut 'n' run back up the channel we just came out of. I still figure that."

Glenn or a separate director blanked the holographic screen again. The captain resumed, "At the point Officer-Trainee Brainard broke off the action, K67 had received heavy damage."

This time the holographic screen was split. The face of Tech 2 Caffey gave evidence on the left side, while a damage assessment record made after K67 limped back aboard her tender showed to the right.

"I'd got my fish," Caffey said. The torpedoman was a slicker operator than Leaf, but recent memories gave his testimony a punchy credibility Caffey did not always command. "I was tracking. Then bam! The console was gone, just gone. Three explosive shells hit it."

The damage-assessment camera tracked over the torpedo station. Wires dangled from the dual-tracking console. What was left of the faceplate lay on the deck, distorted by electrical fires which followed the shell bursts. Blood spattered the deck and bulkheads.

"Wheelwright was hit," said Caffey's image. The torpedoman was trying very hard to sound calm. "He's my striker. Shrapnel in his legs, but he'd fallen down and I thought it was pretty bad. The interphone was out, and my suit lost its air. Turned out the hose was cut. I didn't know."

The other camera shifted aft from the torpedo station. There was a gap on the stern rail so empty that Brainard had to think to remember what should have been in that place.

"A salvo came in, then," the torpedoman continued. "Main gun. I swear I thought they was firing eighteens."

He forced a smile, but the magnified image showed sweat beading at the line of Caffey's close-cropped hair. "Right overhead. There's a flash, just a flash, and the balloon rig's gone. A shell hit it, but it didn't go off till it hit the sea. That's why we're any of us here. They was using armor-piercing shells with time-delay fuzes, so the one that hit us didn't go off till it was in the sea."

The damage-assessment picture switched to a general port-side view of K67. There were more than thirty thumb-sized dimples in the hovercraft's skirts. Each of the explosive bullets had further gashed the flexible fabric with stars of shrapnel around the black central hole.

"I shouted to the cockpit then," Caffey said. "I said, 'Get us the fuck out of here.' I don't know if they could hear me with the interphone shot away. Anyhow, I thought they was all dead."