“Ready—”
THUD.
MTB 110 blew up in a globe of yellow flame, its breath like the foretaste of hell.
“Hold her steady!” Kneally yelled, helping the CPO wrestle with the wheel as blast knocked the shallow dish-like hull sideways.
They plunged through the flame in a single searing instant, the spray-plumes of their passage helping to keep it from searing them too badly. MTB 109 was travelling as fast as anything on the oceans of Visager now, bounding forward like a porpoise driven by the power of four hundred horses. A thousand yards, maximum range. Nine hundred. The nose of the 109 was trained precisely on the cruiser’s stern, lined up on the winking light of the pom-pom tub there. The shells drifted out towards him and then snapped by overhead.
“Fire one! Turn her, Chief!”
With a flat bang the launching charge slammed the first torpedo out of its tube. The frail fabric of the torpedo boat shuddered as the silver cylinder arched into the water, its contrarotating propellers already spinning. The boat was heeling to the right, its bow tracing an arc that carried it along the whole length of the enemy warship.
“Fire two! Fire three! Fire four! Get us the fuck out of here!”
The night was a chaos of flickering shapes and blinding lights, tracers and searchlights and explosions. Kneally twisted in the coaming to look over his shoulder. White water cataracted up from the side of the cruiser that had been their target—from others, too. He howled a catamount screech, until his teeth clicked painfully shut. This time they had hit the boom much harder, and there was an ominous crackle from the framework of the MTB 109.
But it only had to hold together a little longer. Another light was blinking to port, the guerilla pickup who would smuggle them out through the mountains, if they could reach shore and then avoid the Land patrols. Kneally’s head swiveled, trying to see everything at once. It was still too dark, too tangled with lines and bars of light that bounced across his eyes. If one of the cruiser’s magazines had not exploded behind them he would never have seen the destroyer coming. The actinic light showed it all too clearly: the turtleback forward deck and four billowing smokestacks, and the waves curling back from the cruel knife bows looming over his boat.
Kneally threw himself backward with a yell. A huge impact threw him pinwheeling into the air, and the water hit him like concrete. Somehow he pushed the whirling darkness away and fought his way to the surface, aided by the buoyancy of the cork vest he wore. Prop-wash sucked at him, and he bobbed in the destroyer’s wake. Oily water slopped into his mouth.
“Jesus,” he grunted, almost giggling with incredulous relief at rinding himself alive. “And Dad wanted me to be a hero.”
His viewpoint was too low to see much, but several of the cruisers that had been his squadron’s targets were burning, and he could see a stern rising into the sky with its huge twin bronze screws glinting in the light of fires and searchlights.
That sobered him, and he turned towards the beach and began to swim doggedly. If they didn’t kill him, he’d live . . . and there would be other battles.
He almost missed a stroke. The adrenaline was wearing off, and he was remembering the look on the chief’s face as the destroyer’s bows loomed over them. He might be the only survivor of the dozen crew who’d manned MTB 109.
Kneally shuddered. Another battle.
* * *
“About bloody time,” Gerta said with satisfaction.
Only the last gunpit was still uncovered, and work was going on through the night under the harsh light of the arcs.
It was sunk deep into the cliff face, taking advantage of a natural ravine through the chalky limestone. Labor gangs and explosives had hollowed out an oblong chamber, wider at its rear than at the face of the steep rock. It still smelled of green concrete, but the complex metal mountings of the giant guns were in place, and the two tubes themselves were being fastened in their cradles below. The same great cranes—modified shipbuilding models—that had lowered the guns were now transferring beams and planks of steel that were small only by comparison. Down below pneumatic riveters hammered and arc welders stuttered as hundreds of Protégé laborers and Chosen engineers assembled the intricate jigsaw puzzle into multiple layers of steel. Tomorrow other teams would begin burying it under layer upon layer of concrete laced with rebar and filled with massive rubble from the original excavation, topped with twenty feet of granite quarried from the old Imperial fort.