Jaava Sea
Admiral Keje-Fris-Ar honestly still couldn’t decide if his colossal ship’s new configuration made him ecstatic or morose. Certainly he had spells when one emotion or the other predominated. The unavoidable sight of his beloved Home from her new “bridge” constructed from the abbreviated “battlement” made him sad. Gone were Salissa ’s three great pagodalike structures, the apartments of the wing clans. Gone as well were her towering tripod masts and vast “wings,” or sails. All that, almost her very identity, her soul, had been demolished in the great Battle of Baalkpan. Salissa Home, or Big Sal as his human friends called her, had been altered forever by that cataclysmic day and night. She was not dead, however, and difficult as it sometimes seemed, he still believed he sensed a soul within the pounding, vibrating body beneath his feet. Salissa now had only a small offset superstructure and four large, equally offset funnels, venting gray smoke from her eight oil-fired boilers where once the Body of Home clan and her vast polta gardens and fish-drying racks occupied her main deck. She looked like nothing Keje had ever seen before-squat, in a way, but longer somehow, even though he knew she wasn’t.
What Keje believed was still Salissa ’s “soul” tasted of a different purpose now as well. She’d lost the benign, passive essence that once so mirrored the great Galla tree that had grown upward from her very keel to bask in the glory of the light let through the shutters of the Great Hall. In its place, her soul was now an avenging spirit, sustained by the pounding, steam-driven heart deep within her body. She was a thing of heat now, of passion, no longer content to move with the wind. Now she harbored an urgent anger, a drive to return to the fight and avenge her people who’d been taken from her by the Grik.
Keje considered his Home formidably enough armed, particularly if her planes were as effective as the destroyermen predicted. Dozens of the ungainly but oddly familiar “Nancys” she’d been rebuilt to accommodate were secured to her high, flat deck. Even more were stowed below, where they could be serviced and assembled and moved up to the main deck by means of ramps that dropped to accept them. Far below, in Salissa ’s magazines, were bombs that would give teeth to the fragile-looking craft. The planes weren’t her only weapons. She now boasted a broadside armament of fifty 32-pounder smoothbores, twenty-five to a side, and they’d breeched and mounted a section of one of Amagi ’s ten-inch naval rifles on a pivoting carriage forward, beneath the “flight deck.” They’d designed a muzzle-loading projectile for the gun with copper skirt and bearing bands, and the nearly two-hundred-pound bullet could reliably strike a target the size of a small felucca at a range of fifteen hundred tails. No “gyro” was required because the massive Home was so stable in most seas. All they needed was a good range, course, and speed estimate of the target. There were also a couple of longer-range guns aboard, fore and aft of the superstructure. These were five-and-a-half-inchers salvaged from the sunken Japanese battle cruiser. They could have installed more of Amagi ’s guns, and they might still, but Matt, Spanky, and Brister had other plans for them.
That was some consolation. Salissa was back in the fight, one way or another, and though her splendor was gone, Keje had long recognized that form and function often possessed a beauty of their own. He couldn’t entirely suppress the elation he felt over the fact that his altered Home could now move in literally any direction he desired. Also, with her mighty engines throbbing at their maximum safe rpm’s, she could do so at the almost unimaginable speed of twelve knots! Before, his ship had been capable of achieving ten knots on occasion, when the sweeps were out, but the speed could be maintained only until his people were exhausted. Now Salissa could steam at “high” speed almost indefinitely. Her fuel bunkers were immense, easily large enough for her to replenish other ships. Combined with her two huge, relatively crude but extremely reliable reciprocating engines turning a single shaft, there was sufficient mechanical redundancy to make him confident that his ship could steam to any point in the known world. He’d often wondered why Walker was so utilitarian, so devoid of the decorations his people loved so much. Now he knew. Just as had now been done to his own precious Home, aesthetics had been sacrificed for capability.
Fortunately, Big Sal was still large enough for some amenities. The “battlement bridge,” which was quickly becoming simply “the bridgewings,” still sported decorative awnings to protect her officers from the sun and the occasional swirling soot. There were no cushions on the bridge, but there were stools for the watch to rest upon. Speaking tubes were clustered here and there, connecting the bridge with every part of the ship, from the “crow’s nest”-a dizzying hundred tails above the centrally located “pilothouse”-to the “ordnance strikers” stationed in the dark, gloomy magazines far below the waterline. Matt had told him that Salissa now most resembled a ship from his own world he’d called Lexington, and he insisted Salissa ’s hull was probably much tougher and her aircraft nearly as capable as the ones Lex first sailed with. He’d shown Keje a picture of Lex in one of his books, and Keje had to agree the comparison was not without foundation.
Striding across the wide bridgewing, Keje reached his own favorite stool. The rest of the stools were ornately carved, but not his. His was old and creaky and somewhat battered, but he and it had been through a lot together. The faded wood was even liberally stained with his own blood. He wasn’t about to abandon it-and woe was he whom Keje ever caught sitting on it! There’d been several occasions now, enough that he suspected his new officers had begun a tradition of hazing their juniors as they rose, when “newies” had been told they had to “start out” on the ugliest stool, only to have the “aahd-mah-raal” descend upon the unlucky candidate like a roiling Strakka. Instead of being angry with his officers, he played along, pleased that they too seemed to recognize the need for many new “traditions” in this new Navy to replace some of those they’d lost.
Settling upon the protesting stool, Keje leaned on the rail before him and watched the labor far below on the forward “flight deck.”
“Aadh-mah-raal,” said Captain Atlaan-Fas, “we have received a wireless message from Lieutenant Mark Leedom, Tikker’s executive officer. He will arrive within two hours with our new medical officer, Nurse Lieutenant Kaathy McCoy. Captain Tikker has been working his flight crews very hard and begs you to allow him to fly a sortie to meet Lieutenant Leedom’s plane.”
“Outstanding,” Keje replied. “I assume that if Nurse McCoy is joining us, Nurse Theimer’s-I mean, Letts’s- youngling must be thriving.” He shook his head. “Most curious that human females change their names when they mate.”
“Not terribly curious,” Atlaan objected. “Our younglings often follow the names of their fathers.” He grinned. “It is certainly not the most significant difference between our peoples!”
Keje huffed a laugh. “No concerns for the mother?”
“Surely not, or Nurse McCoy would not be joining us.”
All Allied transmissions the evening before had been virtually dedicated to the happy news that “Allison Verdia Letts” had been born into this world at last. Congratulations were returned from the far reaches of the world, from Commodore Ellis in the Western Ocean to a late-night message from Captain Reddy in the Eastern Sea, relayed through Manila. Chairman Adar had proclaimed that this day, October 3 by the American calendar, would henceforth be “Allison Verdia Day,” in honor of the first human youngling born among the Lemurian people. May there be many more.
“Very well,” Keje replied. “It is time we tested the new launching system, at any rate. Captain Tikker may take a single flight of planes. We will have plenty of time to recover the aircraft before dark.” Keje grinned, and glanced port and starboard at the two new steam frigates pacing his Home. One was USS Kas-Ra-Ar, named for his lost cousin and the first frigate of that name destroyed during the Battle of Baalkpan. The other was USS Scott. Everyone believed that a frigate was a far better monument to the heroism of Walker ’s lost coxswain than a motor launch. “You may also grant his request to ‘play’ with our escorts when he returns!”
“Aye, aye, Aahd-mah-raal.”
Captain Jis-Tikkar, or “Tikker” to his friends, glanced to his right, over his shoulder, to make sure the rest of the ships of “B” flight were still where they were supposed to be. He was mildly amazed to see that they were. Somehow, in the twisted way of things that seemed to have become the norm, he was Salissa ’s “Commander of Flight Operations,” or “COFO,” in general, and commander of Salissa ’s air wing of, eventually, forty planes, in particular. Officially, the wing was the “1st Naval Air Wing,” composed of the “1st and 2nd Naval Pursuit Squadrons,” and the “1st, 2nd, and 3rd Naval Bomb Squadrons.” Evidently, the officious, confusing, multiple names of the elements under his command were the result of a compromise between Major Ben Mallory and the Navy types that predominated. If it didn’t make much sense to him yet, he presumed that it would eventually, when other “wings” were operational.
His own lofty new status was gratifying, he supposed, but it still struck him as astounding. Granted, he’d become a good pilot and had learned he actually had a gift for teaching. He was also the most “experienced”
