Seas of Venus(62)

Johnnie could see shells approaching in the panoramic display: three smears of red, glowing from their passage through the air. They hung almost motionless, swelling, because they were dropping directly toward the pick-up feeding the display.

"—make us thankful," Sergeant Britten concluded as the shrieking railguns detonated one of the shells so close that the flash reflected through the hatch of Turret II.

A waterspout, colored fluorescent yellow by marker dye, rose over the Holy Trinity and sucked the huge dreadnought sideways. The other shell hit with a rending crash. The sound went on and on while Johnnie screamed.

The turret lights dimmed, and for a terrifying instant the railguns stopped firing. In the relative silence between shots from the 5.25s, Johnnie heard a distant, overwhelming rumble. It was not thunder, any more than the red glow on the horizon was lightning. He was hearing the sound of guns which reached for his life from twenty miles away.

The railguns took up their defensive snarl again, but the timbre had changed. The port-side stern installation, Gamma Battery, was no longer part of the mix of ravening noise.

"Watch it!" Britten mouthed as he leaped for the lift tube. The round that had just presented itself to a loading cage was skewed in its cradle. The Holy Trinity had flexed when the big shell hit, and the motion had jounced the rounds in the loading sequence.

Britten tried to force down the nose of the shell. The left tube's loading cage pivoted and grabbed the round, still at an angle; the sergeant jerked his hands away just in time to save them.

Johnnie ducked under the swing of the right loading cage, reaching for its next shell, and seized the rim of the skewed round's casing. He lifted desperately.

The shell dropped into alignment just as the rammer shoved it into the 5.25's breech.

Three 16-inch shells hit the Holy Trinity, two and then one. The turret floor bucked and threw Johnnie into a backward somersault. His head rang on steel. The shock dazed him despite his helmet.

The left-hand loading cage offered itself empty to the gun tube. The rammer and breech mechanism cycled as though the intended load had been thrown out of the cage by the dreadnought's pitching. A fully-loaded 5.25-inch round was bouncing around the turret with Johnnie, the sergeant, and all the tools thrown from the rack.

The shell wasn't likely to explode. The primer was electrical, not impact, and the shell's own base fuze was activated by the violent spin it got in the rifling of the gun barrel.

But it weighed almost a hundred pounds. When it caromed into Johnnie's hips as he started to rise, it knocked him back down with a sharp pain he prayed didn't mean a broken pelvis.

Only one railgun installation was firing. The high-voltage, high-frequency pulses turned the driving cones of its slugs into glowing plasma that hung along the Holy Trinity's course like the track of a snail. The sea beneath boiled with the dreadnought's wake and gurgling fluorescent calderas blown by shells the railguns had not stopped.

Shells roared overhead, deafening even compared with everything else going on. Fayette had made a minuscule adjustment to the Holy Trinity's course, and the three-ship salvo missed—short and over, ahead and astern.

Waterspouts drenched the Holy Trinity, sloshing Johnnie through the turret hatch. Only the yellow emergency lighting was on. No railguns were firing.

The right-hand loading cage picked up the next round. It was aligned correctly, but the tortured lift tube had presented it back to front.

Johnnie lurched to his feet. His hip supported him.

"Run!" Sergeant Britten screamed, pushing the younger man aside.

Three shells hit the Holy Trinity simultaneously. The ship writhed, throwing Britten into the empty toolrack and tumbling Johnnie out the open hatch.

Johnnie braced himself against an exterior bulkhead. Small fish, flung onto the deck by near misses, snapped and writhed beside him in the algal slime.

The sky above was a map of Hell.

For an instant, Sergeant Britten was silhouetted against the turret lighting. He groped for the hatch opening. He'd lost his helmet, and his face was a mask of blood from a cut scalp.

Johnnie started to rise to help him just as the rammer thrust a 5.25-inch round backward into the breech. The casing crumpled, heating and compressing the powder charge. It ignited in something between a fire and an explosion while the breech mechanism was still open.

The first blast set off the remaining rounds in the loading sequence. Orange flame enveloped Sergeant Britten, incinerating the back half of his powerful body and driving the remainder against Johnnie as a mist of blood and tissue.

Johnnie lay against the bulkhead. His eyes were open. He was, so far as he could tell, unharmed.

Above him, the sky roared and blazed. The fish on deck were making furious efforts to swallow one another down, even as air dried their gills and inexorably slew them all.