Seas of Venus(119)

Down toward the fifty-foot lizard.

* * *





July 23, 382 AS. 0344 hours.


Officer-Trainee Wilding heard the shells howl.

The sound was more penetrating than the crash of the Mouflon's main batteries or even the drumming bass note of 1-inch Gatlings trying to claw the incoming out of the air before it hit the cruiser.

He looked up from his console, trying instinctively to see through the armored ceiling. His mouth was open.

Two Seatiger shells burst in the storm of fire from the automatic weapons. The other four slammed into the Mouflon's bridge and forward hull.

There was a green flash. All the lights went out. Wilding felt his buttocks lift from his chair. He had no sense of direction. The air smelled burned, and the shockwaves of the blast were so severe that he felt them as pressure, not as noise.

Wilding hit his chair again. The emergency lights went on, yellow strips set into the deck and ceiling moldings. Wilding's console hummed and flickered as it re-created the display affected by the power interrupt.

Blue tungsten-sulphide letters on the margin of the display switched from BACK-UP to PRIMARY.

The regular gunnery officer, a senior lieutenant, sprawled at the console beside Wilding's. His face wore a surprised expression. One of the shell impacts had flexed the armored ceiling enough to spall fragments across the bridge. A saucer-sized disk whacked through the lieutenant's neck, then sawed his workstation into sparkling ruin.

Wilding was now gunnery officer for the Mouflon's starboard automatic weapons, though computers would fire the weapons unless Wilding chose to override their electronic decisions.

The Mouflon rippled off a salvo from her twelve 8-inch guns. Her hull twisted like a snake from the recoil stresses.

Captain Glenn got to his feet. His left shoulder was bleeding. His good hand pawed aimlessly.

Glenn's eyes focused. He looked down at the deck, picked up his commo helmet, and slapped it back in place over his short-cropped hair. "Damage report," he ordered harshly.

"Hull nominal," said Collor, the Mouflon's executive officer. "Main battery nominal. Fires in three forward compartments, controllable at present." Collor looked up from his holographic display. In the same dry voice as before, he concluded, "Thirty percent damage to bridge command-and-control installations, but back-up systems are in place."

Shock had unbonded a ten-foot swath of sound-deadening foam from the ceiling. Damage-control personnel sawed at the fallen blanket to get it out of the way.

The foam was dense and twelve inches thick. It was supposed to be able to trap spalled fragments. It hadn't done its job well enough for Wilding's immediate superior. . . .

The Mouflon writhed with another outgoing salvo. Burning propellant expanded the gun breeches; they rang like huge bells.

Wilding's console indicated that no further Seatiger shells were in the air. The Gatlings were silent for want of targets.

Wilding's mouth was dry. He made an effort of will to close it. For a moment, he couldn't remember why he sat so rigidly in his chair. He was afraid that if he tried to move, his head would slip from his shoulders and bounce to the console, the way the lieutenant's had done. . . .

"Sir," said the lieutenant-commander in charge of communications. He reached over with the sheet of hard copy which his console had just run off.

Captain Glenn bent to take the flimsy. "Wait!" chirped the medic cutting away the back of Glenn's jacket. Glenn shouted a curse, reacting to the pain of the forgotten wound rather than the medic's order.

"First bloody time I wore this uniform," Glenn muttered as he snatched the print-out with his right hand. "First bloody time."

The eight-inch guns salvoed again. Each tube fired a half-second behind the next previous. The firing sequence spaced the shockwaves and avoided a simultaneous recoil which would do more damage to the Mouflon than an enemy shell.

Wilding's mind rang with the scream the lieutenant had died too quickly to utter.

"Right," said the screen commander. He keyed his commo helmet with his right hand, still holding the scrap of hard copy. "Cease fire," he ordered. His voice boomed from the bridge tannoy and echoed through every compartment of the cruiser.

"All Root elements," Captain Glenn continued. "Change course to one-one-two degrees and proceed at flank speed."

Wilding was fifteen feet away from the communications console. The red tinge of the characters flickering there indicated the Mouflon was now broadcasting to all the screening vessels—code-name Root.

Glenn stood at his console. His broad face wore a cat's grin. He seemed oblivious of the medic working behind him with scissors and a spray can of artificial skin.

"We've finished our job here," Glenn said. "Now we'll join Trunk and finish the rest of it. We can expect to contact—" his voice boomed in exultation "—the Seatiger main body within twenty-five minutes unless they run . . . and they can't run fast enough!"