boy.
T he Remembrance steamed west across the Pacific, accompanied by three destroyers, a light cruiser, a heavy cruiser, and two battleships. Sam Carsten wished one of the battlewagons would have been the Dakota, but no such luck. His old ship was off doing something else; he had no idea what.
Repairs in Seattle had been as quick as the Navy yard there could make them. He did his best not to worry about that. Back during the Great War, the Dakota had been hastily repaired after battle damage-and her steering had never been reliable again. Her steering probably still wasn't reliable. So far as Sam knew, the Japanese torpedo hadn't damaged the Remembrance 's steering-but what had it damaged that hasty repairs might not discover? He hoped he-and the ship-wouldn't find out the hard way.
Commander van der Waal wasn't aboard. Broken ankles healed at their own pace; you couldn't hurry them. A new damage-control officer, a lieutenant commander named Hiram Pottinger, was nominally in charge of antitorpedo work. But Pottinger's previous service had been in cruisers. Sam knew the Remembrance backwards and forwards and inside out-literally inside out, after the torpedo hit off the Canadian coast. Most of the burden fell on his shoulders.
He'd led the sailors in the damage-control parties when things looked black. That had earned him respect he could have got no other way. It had also earned him thin new gold stripes on his cuffs; he'd been promoted to lieutenant, junior grade, for what he'd done. Glad as he was of the promotion, he could have done without some of the respect. He feared he would end up trapped in an assignment he'd never wanted.
Martin van der Waal had always insisted it was an important assignment. Even had Sam been inclined to argue, the experience of getting torpedoed would have changed his mind. But he agreed with his injured superior. Important, antitorpedo work definitely was. That still didn't mean he cared to make a career of it.
He spent as much time as he could on deck. That meant more tinfoil tubes of zinc-oxide ointment, but he did it anyhow. Watching aeroplanes take off and land never failed to fascinate him. He got plenty of chances to watch, for the Remembrance flew a continuous air patrol. The Japanese Navy had ships out here, too, and who found whom first would have a lot to do with how any fight turned out. The way the arrester hook caught the cables stretched across the deck and brought a landing aeroplane to an abrupt halt still fascinated him.
One perfect morning, he was taking the air on the flight deck after breakfast when alarms began to sound. Klaxons hooting in his ears, he ran for his battle station, wishing it weren't deep in the bowels of the aeroplane carrier. He wanted to be able to see what was going on. As usual, the Navy cared not at all for what he wanted.
'What's the word, sir?' he panted as he came up to Lieutenant Commander Pottinger.
'Nothing good,' his superior answered. 'One of our machines spotted a whole flight of aeroplanes with meatballs on their wings heading this way.'
'There's no Jap base within a couple of thousand miles of where we're at,' Sam said. The light went on in his head before Pottinger needed to enlighten him: 'We've found a Japanese aeroplane carrier or two.'
The other damage-control officer shook his head. 'Not quite. Their aeroplanes have found us, but we haven't found them yet.'
'Heading back along their bearing would be a pretty good bet,' Carsten said.
Lieutenant Commander Pottinger nodded. He was a tall, lean man with a weathered face, hollow cheeks, a long, narrow jaw, and a pointed nose. He looked like a New Englander, but had a Midwestern accent. 'I expect you're right,' he said. 'This is liable to be a damn funny kind of naval battle, you know? We're not even in sight of the enemy's fleet, but our aeroplanes are going to slug it out with his.'
As if to underline his words, one machine after another roared into the sky, the noise of the straining engines loud even several decks below the one from which the aeroplanes were taking off. 'Long-range artillery, that's what they've turned into,' Sam said. 'They can hit when our battleships can't.'
Pottinger nodded again. 'That's right. Battleships are probably obsolete, though plenty of men will try and run you out of the Navy if you say so out loud.' He made a disdainful noise. 'Plenty of men likely tried to run people out of the Navy if they spoke up for steam engines and ironclads, too.'
'I wouldn't be surprised.' Sam had known more than a few officers who never stopped pining for the good old days.
Something burst in the water not far from the Remembrance. He felt the carrier heel into the sharpest turn she could make, and then, a moment later, into another one in the opposite direction. More bombs burst around her.
Hiram Pottinger might have been talking things over back on shore, for all the excitement he showed. 'Zigzags,' he said approvingly. 'That's what you do against submersibles, and that's what you do against aeroplanes, too.'
'Well, yes, sir,' Carsten said. 'That's what you do, and then you hope like hell it works. You get hit by a bomb, that could put a little crimp in your morning.' He did his best to imitate his superior's nonchalance.
One-pounders and other antiaircraft guns on the deck started banging away at the attacking aeroplanes. So did the five-inch guns in the sponsons under the flight deck. The noise was terrific. They could reach a lot farther than the smaller weapons, but couldn't fire nearly so fast.
'I wonder what's going on up there,' Sam said. 'I wonder how nasty it is.'
'It's no walk in the park,' Pottinger said.
'I didn't figure it was, sir,' Sam said, a little reproachfully. He'd seen plenty of nasty action-it didn't come much nastier than what he'd been through in the Battle of the Three Navies. A moment later, he realized Pottinger, if he'd ever been in a battle before, had probably gone through it down here.
Maybe this was harder. Carsten wouldn't have believed it beforehand, but it might have been true. When he was fighting a gun, he had some idea, even if only a small one, of what was going on. Here
… Here it might have been happening in a distant room. The only difference was, what happened in that distant room might kill him.
Later, he wished he hadn't had that thought at that moment. The Remembrance shuddered when a bomb burst on her flight deck. Lieutenant Commander Pottinger said, 'Oh, shit,' which summed up Sam's feelings perfectly. Then Pottinger added, 'Well, time for us to go to work.'
'Yes, sir,' Carsten agreed.
That was how he got up to the flight deck in the midst of combat. He wanted to be there, but not under those circumstances. The flight crew were already doing what they had to do: manhandling steel plates across the hole the bomb had torn in the deck and doing everything they could to flatten out the torn lips of steel.
'Well done,' Pottinger shouted. 'We have to be able to land aeroplanes and get them in the air again.'
'Yes, sir,' Sam said again. His boss might be new to carrier duty, but he'd just proved he understood the essence of it. Sam went on, 'They could have done a lot worse if they'd fused the bomb differently.'
'What do you mean?' Lieutenant Commander Pottinger asked.
'If they'd given it an armor-piercing tip and a delayed fuse, it would have gone through before it blew up,' Sam answered. 'Then we'd really be in the soup.'
'Urk,' Pottinger said, which again matched Sam's thought.
Sam said, 'They're like us: they're still learning what all they can do with aeroplanes and carriers, too.'
An aeroplane with the red Rising Sun of Japan painted on wings and fuselage roared overhead, machine guns in the wings blazing. The engine was even louder than the guns; the fighter couldn't have been more than fifty feet above the deck. Bullets struck sparks from the new steel plates. Others smacked flesh with wet thuds. Men shrieked or crumpled silently. Streams of tracers from the Remembrance 's antiaircraft guns converged on the Japanese machine. For a dreadful moment, Sam thought it would get away in spite of all the gunfire. But then flames and smoke licked back from the engine cowling toward the cockpit. The fighter slammed into the sea.
'Scratch one fucker!' Sam shouted exultantly.
A sailor next to him was down and groaning, clutching his leg. Red spread over his trousers. 'It hurts!' he groaned. 'It hurts bad!'
'George!' Sam's exultation turned to dismay in the space of a heartbeat. He'd known George Moerlein ever since first coming aboard the Remembrance. Seeing him down with a nasty wound made Sam's stomach turn over. By the way the petty officer was bleeding, he needed help right away. Sam tore off his belt and wrapped it around Moerlein's thigh above the bullet wound, tight as he could. 'Give me a hand over here!' he yelled.
'Let's get him down to sick bay, sir,' a sailor said. He helped Carsten haul George Moerlein up. Moerlein
