Seas of Venus(65)

"Get out of—" screamed someone behind as Johnnie thrust his rifle into the hatch opening, tilted the muzzle down, and triggered a one-handed burst which left as much of his body as possible behind the steel bulkhead.

"—the way!" Dan finished as his body slammed against the same hope of cover Johnnie was using.

Dan fired a flamethrower through the hatch.

Johnnie's helmet visor blacked out the direct line of the magnesium-enriched fuel, but its white streak flooded the bridge like the reflection of an arc lamp. The flamethrower's nozzle tried to lift in the commander's hands, but he kept it aimed down in a perfect three-cushion shot along the shaft's inner surface.

There were only a few seconds' worth of fuel remaining in the bottle. The flame died abruptly. The yellow flash of a secondary explosion in the ladderway, grenades or ammunition, was dull by comparison.

There were still screams.

Johnnie strode through the hatch. Glowing metal walls provided light for his visor to amplify.

Caleif and three Angels sprawled below. Another Angel whose uniform was on fire clawed blindly at the conning room bulkhead.

The living figure turned. Both eyes were gone, and the flesh had melted away from the left half of his face.

Johnnie fired instinctively, sending the screaming remains of Ensign Sal Grumio to join his brother and the rest of the Dragger's crew.

Nothing else moved. Johnnie stepped back onto the bridge.

Uncle Dan and the surviving technician stared at him. None of the three men spoke.

The deck was tilted at a noticeable angle. Fires were visible across most of the 270O panorama of the unshuttered viewslit. The slime forward had baked dry in the heat of the deck beneath it. The algae now burned with its own smoky flame.

The Holy Trinity's bow dipped toward the sea, but the dreadnought no longer had enough way on to sweep waves across the sullen fire.

No shells had fallen since the horrendous triple salvo.

"Look!" croaked the technician as he pointed to the southwestern sky. "Look!"

The horizon brightened as though the red gates of Hell had been thrown open.

Dan was kneading the singed back of his left hand with the fingers of his right. His face was terrible. "Bloody well about time," he snarled.

Patterns of red specks roared high overhead. They were full salvoes from the seventeen battle-ready dreadnoughts of Blackhorse Fleet, slamming Commander Cooke's trap closed on the Angels.





24


Rather the scorned—the rejected—

the men hemmed in with the spears;

The men of the tattered battalion which fights till it dies,

Dazed with the dust of the battle, the din and the cries,

The men with the broken heads and the blood

running into their eyes.

—John Masefield





There were ten of them still alive.

Two of the Blackhorse raiders, men from the engine room, were so badly burned that they had to shuffle along with their arms supported by their comrades' shoulders. Johnnie arranged the makeshift harness of packstraps around them with as much care as possible, but the wounded men still moaned and shuddered through their fog of drugs and toxins.

The gunboat D1528—Murderer according to the legend painted across the turret of the 2-inch Gatling gun on its foredeck—bobbed in swells reflected from the side of the Holy Trinity. Three of the crew used rifle butts as fenders to prevent the gunboat from being smashed into the side of the sinking dreadnought; others received each member of the raiding party as he came down the skimmer winch and passed the shaken men to such comfort and medical treatment as a hydrofoil could provide.

The sea was lighted for miles by torrents of sparks spewing from the Holy Trinity's stern. Flames reflected from waves, from debris, and from the eyes of things which had learned the chaos of war meant a source of abundant food.

The hydrofoil's crew was clearly nervous. The little craft depended on speed and concealment to survive. Here, stopped dead alongside the brightest beacon in the Ishtar Basin, they had neither, but they were carrying out their orders without complaint.

As the men of the raiding party themselves had done; and had, for the most part, died doing.

Men on the gunboat's deck released the second of the wounded raiders and passed him gently to their fellows in the cockpit. Dan winched up the whining cable at the highest speed of which the drum was capable.

It didn't have far to come. The skimmer port was long under water, and the gunboat's railing was now only ten feet below that of the sinking battleship. At any time in the past five years, that would have been an easy jump for Johnnie, even onto the bobbing deck of a hydrofoil.

At any time but now.

"Go ahead," Johnnie said. "I'll winch you down."

His uncle shook his head. "I'm the captain," he said. "I leave last. Hop in."