Breakthroughs

“Wait a minute. You’re the same guy who was just saying somebody’d have armor-piercing aeroplane bombs long about day after tomorrow, or next week at the latest. Soon as that happens, the jig is up, right?”

“Maybe,” Sam said. “Maybe not, too. It’s up if the aeroplanes get to drop the bombs on the ships, sure as hell. But if our side has aeroplanes, too, to shoot down the other fellow’s bombing aeroplanes, the battleships can get on with the job they’re supposed to be doing, right?”

Now Kidde stopped and did some thinking. “That sounds good,” he said when he came out of his own study, “but I don’t think it works. You squeeze enough, you might be able to mount two or three aeroplanes on a battleship, maybe one or two on a cruiser. That won’t be enough to hold off all the aeroplanes the other bastards can throw at you from dry land.”

“Mmm,” Carsten said-an unhappy grunt. “Yeah, you’re right. A fleet’d need a whole ship stuffed full of aeroplanes, and there is no such animal.”

“See?” Hiram Kidde said. “You got to keep your head on your shoulders, or else you go flying off every which way.” He walked down toward the stern, puffing contentedly on his cigar.

Carsten stuck his thumbs in his trouser pockets and slowly mooched after the gunner’s mate. His idea had been pretty foolish, when you got down to it. He had a picture of the Navy, whose business was ships, building a ship to take care of aeroplanes. It hung in his mental gallery right alongside the portrait of the first Negro president of the Confederate States.

The Dakota swung through a turn toward the west, toward the Argentine coast. Sam knew what that meant: it meant that, aeroplanes or no aeroplanes, the flotilla was going to bore in and see what they could do to the British convoys scuttling along in or near Argentine territorial waters.

He supposed that made sense. It sure as hell made dollars and cents. This attack had surely cost millions to fit out, and as surely hadn’t worked near enough devastation to be worthwhile. Rear Admiral Bradley Fiske either had wireless orders from Philadelphia to do something worth doing, or else he was going to try to do something big to keep from getting wireless orders from Philadelphia telling him to sail his command back to Valparaiso and forget about marauding in the South Atlantic. Carsten had no way of knowing which of those was true, but he’d been in the Navy long enough to be pretty sure it was one or the other.

Rear Admiral Fiske was also doing everything he could to keep the Dakota and the American and Chilean ships with her from getting a nasty surprise of the sort they’d already had once. Long before klaxons hooted men to their battle stations, he had crews at all the antiaircraft guns on the battleship’s deck.

He also sent not only the Dakota’s aeroplane but the other two the flotilla boasted off to the west ahead of the ships. They wouldn’t be able to fight off any bombing aeroplanes, but they could at least warn of their presence. Sam wondered how much good that would do. He shrugged. It couldn’t hurt.

The U.S. aeroplanes could and did do one other useful thing: they could spot convoys for the Dakota and her companions to attack. Down in the five-inch gun’s sponson, Sam attributed a sudden shift in course to the north as likely springing from a wireless report. “Hope they haven’t stuck some freighters out there to humbug us into getting too close,” Luke Hoskins said.

“Now there’s a nice, cheery thought,” Carsten said. He turned to Hiram Kidde, who was peering out through the vision slit. “See anything, ‘Cap’n’?”

“Smoke trails,” the chief of the gun crew answered. “Can’t spot the ships that are making ’em, though. Land behind ’em. We-”

A thunderous roar interrupted him. “That’s the main armament,” Sam said unnecessarily. If it weren’t the main armament, it had to be the end of the world.

Kidde looked disgusted. “They must have let the big guns open up as soon as they could take the range up in the crow’s nest on the observation mast. Skipper doesn’t want to get in close enough to let us do any work.”

“After what happened that one time, do you blame him?” Sam asked.

“Blame him? Hell, yes, I blame him. I want to be in on the fun, too, ’stead of sitting around here like some homely girl nobody wants to dance with,” Kidde said. He paused. “Now if you ask me whether I think he’s smart to do it this way, that’s a different question. Yeah, he’s smart.”

“Listen,” Hoskins said from behind Sam, “the best fighting is the fighting you don’t have to do.” As he spoke, he had both hands on the casing of a shell, ready to pass it to Carsten.

“Nope.” Kidde shook his head. “What matters is winning.”

“If we can win here easy enough so they don’t have to squawk for the secondaries, that’ll be fighting we don’t have to do,” Sam said. “We, this gun crew, I mean.”

“Give the man a big, fat, smelly cigar and put him in the judge advocate’s office,” Kidde said with a snort. “Sure as hell sounds like a bunkroom lawyer to me.”

“I always hated a Rebel accent,” Carsten said, “but this one time when I was a kid, I heard a fellow from Louisiana going on and on about lawyers-he’d just lost a lawsuit down in the CSA, I guess-and every time he said the word, it sounded like he was saying liars. I liked that. The older I get, the better I like it, too.”

“I remember one time I-” Luke Hoskins began. They never found out what he’d done or said or thought one time, because the main armament bellowed out another broadside. Speech was impossible through that great slab of noise, thought nearly so.

Then Kidde shouted “Hit!”-his voice sounding thin and lost after the guns spoke with twelve-inch throats. Everybody yelled after that. Carsten elbowed his way to the vision slit. Sure enough, out there far away, a British or Argentine or French freighter was burning, sending up more smoke than could ever have come out its stack.

The cruisers with the flotilla were firing, too; their guns had enough range to reach the freighters. The destroyers stayed silent, for the excellent good reason that their main armament was no match for the five-inch guns of the battleships’ secondary weaponry. Battleships were fierce, proud creatures, sure as sure. Nothing that prowled the sea could beat them.

For a moment, that thought made Sam Carsten feel as large and powerful as the ship of which he was a tiny part. Then he remembered submersibles and floating mines and the gnat of an aeroplane that had carried such a nasty sting in its tail. Twenty years earlier, battleships might have been all but invulnerable, save to one another. It wasn’t like that any more.

What would it be like for battleships twenty years down the road? He and Hiram Kidde had had that discussion just a little while before. He came up with the same answer as he had then: it would be tough as hell.

That was twenty years down the road, though. Now, here, the battleships and cruisers methodically pounded the convoy of freighters to bits. No one came out to challenge them: no torpedo boats, no submersibles, no aeroplanes. They had everything their own way, just as they would have in the old days before aeroplanes, before submersibles, when even torpedo boats were hardly to be feared.

Sam should have felt triumphant. In fact, he did feel triumphant, but only in a limited way. We pounded them to bits wasn’t really what was going through his mind. It was much more on the order of, Thank you, Jesus. We got away with one this time.

The Canucks and the limeys were pushed back to their last line in front of Toronto. They’d been working on that line since 1914-probably since before that-and had no doubt worked on it again after barrels entered the picture. If Toronto fell, the war for Ontario was as near over as made no difference. They did not intend to let it fall.

What the Canadians and British intended was not the most urgent thing on Jonathan Moss’ mind. He had been a part of the struggle since the day it opened. Thinking back on the Curtiss Super Hudson aeroplane with the pusher prop he’d flown then, he laughed. If either side presumed to put a flimsy old bus like that in the air in this modern day and age, it would last only until the first enemy fighting scout spotted it and shot it down-unless, of course, it fell out of the sky of its own accord, as such antiques had been all too prone to do.

Moss set a gloved hand on the doped-fabric skin of his fast, graceful, streamlined Wright two-decker. Here was a machine to conjure with, nothing like the awkward makeshifts with which both the Quadruple Alliance and the Entente had gone to war.

Archie from the enemy’s antiaircraft guns burst a little below Moss’ flight. Some of those black puffs came close enough to make his aeroplane jerk from the concussion. He started his game of avoidance, speeding up, slowing down, gaining a little altitude, losing some, swinging his course now a few degrees to one side, now a few to the other.