"Right . . . ," murmured Johnnie as he stared at the huge machines around him. He wasn't really hearing the words.
A computer program could perfectly duplicate scenes of war as plotted in a dreadnought's battle center. A man who never left the keeps could become as expert in strategy and fleet tactics as the most experienced admirals of the mercenary companies. But that led to an impression of the instruments of war as being items of electronic delicacy—
And they weren't. Or they weren't entirely, at any rate. Here, in a gloom relieved only by the glowstrips that provided emergency lighting, were the triple loading cages—each of which lifted a shell weighing over two tons from the central hoist and carried it up a track into the turret above.
The loading cages rotated with the turret so that the guns could be fed in any position. A rack-and-pinion drive, powered by a massive hydraulic motor, encircled the top of the barbette. This was the apparatus that trained the guns by swinging the whole turret with the precision of a computer-controlled lathe.
Friction wasn't a factor: the turret bearings were superconducting magnets. But the sheer weight of the rotating mass must be over a thousand tons. It was inconceivable until you saw it—
And even then it was inconceivable.
"Pretty impressive, right?" Sal noted as he began clambering up the ladder into the turret.
"That's not the word," Johnnie said as he followed.
He wasn't sure quite what the word was, though. A dreadnought in action would be a foretaste of Hell.
The door at the back of the turret was open. Johnnie blinked and sneezed at the light flooding in. Powder fouling and burned lubricants gave the air a sickly tinge; all the surfaces were slimed with similar residues.
The breeches of the 18-inch guns were closed. Their size made them look like geological occurrences, not the works of man. Johnnie tried to imagine the guns recoiling on their carriages; the breeches opening in a blast of smoke and the liquid nitrogen injected to cool and quench sparks in the powder chambers; hydraulic rammers sliding fresh thirty-six-hundredweight shells from the loading cages and into the guns as the twelve-hundredweight powder charges rose on the track behind the shells. . . .
A vision of Hell.
"Really something!" Sal noted cheerfully. "The guns can be fought from here—" he pointed to the four seats, each with a control console of its own "—if something goes wrong with the links from the bridge and battle center."
Or something goes wrong with the bridge and battle center. . . .
Johnnie walked to the door. The armor, even on the back of the turret, was so thick that it gave him the impression of going through a tunnel. "I'm about ready for some sunlight," he said.
It struck Johnnie that he'd never seen direct sunlight until the day before . . . but the carefully balanced illumination of the domes had nothing in common with the crude functionality of this huge weapon's artificial lighting. The heat and glare on deck were welcome.
The deck had a non-skid surface, but at the moment it was under a glass-slick coating of blue and green algae. Sal spat over the side and muttered, "They need to hose this off with herbicide, but everybody's so damn busy with the St. Michael and loading stores that it'll maybe have t' wait till we're under way."
At the land perimeter of the base, a sort of battle had broken out between the guard force's flamethrowers and what were probably roots, though they moved as swiftly as serpents. Human weaponry created enormous evolutionary pressures on the continental life forms, ensuring that whatever lived or grew in the immediate vicinity of fleet bases was tougher and more vicious than similar forms elsewhere in the planetary hellbroth.
A tall barbette raised B Turret so that its guns could fire dead ahead, over A Turret. Just abaft and starboard of the barbette was one of the ship's four railgun batteries. Johnnie looked with interest as they walked past it.
From the outside, the installation was a fully-rotating dome whose only feature was a pair of armored slots which could open from +90O to -5O. That spread was wide enough to permit the railguns to engage anything from a missile dropping out of orbit to a hydrofoil a pistolshot out.
The tubes themselves were too fragile to survive on the deck of a ship under fire, so the weapons were designed to accelerate their glass pellets up a helical track. That way, their overall length could be kept within an armored dome of manageable size.
Given enough time—and not a long time at that—railguns could blast through anything on the surface of Venus, whether a dreadnought or a mountain. But, though they could destroy a target in orbit, they were unable to engage anything over the horizon from them. Furthermore, the power requirements of a railgun in operation meant that only dreadnoughts had the generator capacity to mount such weapons.