figured that out, but I also figured out I do love you-like my own sweet daughter that makes me proud of what she does. Can you see that?”
“You love me?” Tabby asked, sniffling.
“Sure.”
“But like a daughter, not… not like wo-maan? Would it be different if I not… wasn’t a ’Cat?”
Spanky shrugged. “Honest to God, I don’t know. Maybe. You do make me sneeze… But that doesn’t matter, and we’ll never know. I love you the way I love you. I can’t change that… and if you weren’t a’Cat, you never would’ve been down here in the first place.”
Tabby seemed to consider that for a while and her eyes dried up. “I love you the way I love you too,” she said. “I not change that either. But I be Spanky’s daughter for better than nothing.” She managed a slight grin, then it faded. “Just don’t take chief away!”
“Whatever gave you the notion I would?”
“You tried to send me away!”
“Sure I did, because I care about you! I want you well again, damn it! If you keep fooling around down here in all this steam and crap before you’re healed completely, you’re liable to get pneumonia and die! Then I’ll have to make some other dumb-ass chief.”
Tabby hugged him and he patted her gently on the back. His eyes were starting to water. Damn fur! “There, now,” he said. “Go see Selass and get her to listen to your gills. After that, light along aft and get in your rack! Me and Miami can keep things going ’til you’re fit. Nothin’ but smooth sailin’ from here.”
Weird, Spanky thought later when he reemerged into the light and started trying to locate the “feel” again. He couldn’t find it at all. “Great,” he muttered. “It’s off and on. I’ll never figure the damn thing out.”
CHAPTER 24
Mid Eastern Sea
A lone upon the wide, vast, empty blue, Walker churned onward, her abused but faithful sonar scouring her path of lurking denizens. Jenks said mountain fish, or “leviathans,” were rarely encountered in the empty spaces between the India Isles (what should be the Marshalls) and the Home Islands. Apparently, there was insufficient sustenance for the gigantic creatures there. Only occasionally, truly monstrous specimens were seen pursuing an apparently oblivious eastward course. He had no explanation for that behavior, but some Dominion officers he’d met in less tense times had hinted it might have something to do with a strange name they had for a long, shallow gulf on the northwest coast of their realm: El Mar de Huesos. “The Sea of Bones.” He’d never been there. Matt and the rest of Walker ’s senior officers kept that disconcerting name to themselves-not that they planned to go anywhere near the place. Many ’Cats aboard had just recently come to grips with the fact that they weren’T about to steam off the edge of the world into the void. They didn’t need exotic, menacing placenames stirring any lingering superstition.
The sea remained relatively placid and the omnipresent heat grew less oppressive. Walker ’s speed and the prevailing winds kept the ship wetter than her Lemurian crew preferred, because the swells were sometimes higher than her deck, but it was often actually pleasantly cool. They began to see lizard birds unlike any they’d seen before. They had long necks and tails and incredibly broad wingspans of five or six yards, perfect for cruising endless miles on the firm sea breeze with hardly any effort at all. Courtney amused the crew by chasing from one side of the ship to the other with a pair of binoculars in his hands. The creatures-he insisted they were almost true pterodactyls when Bashear called them “dragons”-seemed aware that he was intent on studying them, and constantly avoided his steady observation. Other flying creatures, wildly colorful, began to visit. There was the usual animated excitement aboard that prevailed whenever they neared a new landfall, but there was a large measure of tension as well.
The Lemurians were mindful that they were about to see where the “ancient tail-less ones” had ultimately gone, but along with the fear that they would fall off the world, they’d largely shed the reverence they once felt for those ancient visitors. The bloom was off the rose. After all, they’d met them, fought them, and knew they were capable of treachery. The question that animated most discussions was whether they would have to fight them again. Walker ’s mostly new crew had become nearly as fatalistic, and in some ways jaded, as her original crew of Asiatic Fleet destroyermen had ever been. But in contrast, they also felt a confidence that they could deal with unknown threats, a confidence that their human predecessors had never enjoyed, and the outnumbered “old hands” tried their best to ensure that that optimism remained realistic, but Jenks, Blair’s Marines, and Respite aside, the crew was generally angry at the Empire.
In the way of most Lemurians, they wanted to get along with the strangers, but they were equally ready for a fight. Walker had stood toe to toe with Amagi, after all, and despite the mutual destruction they’d wrought on one another, Walker still swam, wearing Amagi steel. To some-who hadn’t been there-it was as simple as that. They’d come to expect misery, deprivation, and daily toil in the way all destroyermen did, but they’d missed the sense of being a tiny, wounded, hunted animal, which the humans still remembered. They believed they were steaming toward a final, straight-up confrontation with whatever power had attacked them and stolen their people, and it was difficult for some to grasp that it might not be as simple as that, and even if it was, Walker couldn’t smash the whole Imperial Navy by herself. They expected miracles from their special ship, and the “old hands,” Matt included, increasingly wondered and worried if that was a good thing or not.
On November 25-Thanksgiving Day-1943, USS Walker steamed into the New Scotland port of Scapa Flow, and the budding hubris that had begun infecting Walker ’s crew vanished as quickly as an ice cube in the fireroom. Earl Lanier tried to lighten the mood in the spirit of the holiday by unveiling an immense roasted skuggik he’d smuggled along on the trip, deep in the ship’s laboring freezer. He’d spent the entire night before preparing the thing, complete with what notionally struck him as “traditional” trimmings. His well-meaning efforts were met with obscenities (which he duly bellowed in return) and genuine, universal horror. Skuggiks were, after all, giant earthbound buzzards, for all intents and purposes. Lanier failed to see the distinction between a cooked skuggik and a catfish, and went into a profound pout.
What had been a virtually empty sea, except for a blue-brown mound at dawn, practically filled with sails of all sizes and shapes as they neared New Scotland’s leeward coast. Most of the ships, fishermen, coastal luggers, and inter-island packets fled at the sight of the strange iron steamer racing out of the southwest. A few deep-draft “freighters” flying the Company flag ponderously turned away or hove to as the old destroyer approached the achingly beautiful mountainous isle, rising monolithically from the dazzling sea.
“Ain’t that something?” the Bosun said, gaping at the exotically familiar, but eerily… wrong… land. New Scotland retained a semblance of the distinctive crests of the islands now joined to form it, but it was higher, more imposing, more sharply defined. Gray’s question seemed sufficient for everyone.
“A beautiful land,” Matt said wistfully, and Jenks nodded in appreciation of more than the words.
“Thank you, sir.”
Juan Marcos, his arm still in a sling, had joined them with a carafe of coffee. He knew how the captain and the other human Americans felt. He’d been similarly overwhelmed when he first saw what his beloved Philippines looked like on this world. Of course, Matt and the others had had much longer to get used to the idea than he had at the time, and their reactions were more subdued. Still, he could sympathize. The driven-home fact of the thing was harder to bear than the sight of it.
Walker was finally challenged by a swift paddle-wheel sloop with an Imperial jack, just a few miles short of the harbor mouth. Jenks appeared slightly scandalized by the tardy challenge, but it served their purposes. By then, Walker was flying the U.S. and Imperial flags, as well as an extensive colorful signal proclaiming her to be a friendly vessel transporting Commodore Harvey Jenks and urgent “dispatches” for the Governor-Emperor. The signal was authenticated by Achilles ’ number and Jenks’s code group. Probably considering Walker to be a remarkably fast but lightly armed vessel, the sloop was content not to attempt to stop her but to escort her in-after a flurry of signals appealing for her to slow down.
“Jumpin’ Jesus,” Spanky declared when they cleared the western harbor mouth and saw the fortifications guarding it. The “west fort” was in the shape of a vast leaning wedding cake, three tiers high, bristling with forty heavy guns that Jenks assured them could reach two-thirds of the distance across to the opposite, similarly
