“Good morning, Commander Sandison. Commander Rodriguez,” Cook said in his vestigial, high-class British accent, and saluted. “Hiya, Dennis.”
“Mornin’, Mr. Cook,” Silva replied, stressing Abel’s new status. “Mr. Brassey!” Cook’s freckle-tanned face reddened, and Brassey smiled uncertainly.
“’Ister Cook!” Lawrence tried to repeat, and saluted as well.
“Lawrence,” Abel managed, then turned back to Bernie. “Ah, may we assist in some way, sir? We have no other duties, at least until we report back to Mr. Letts in the morning.”
“Sure, kid… I mean, Mr. Cook,” Bernie said, catching on to Silva’s unexpected reminder that despite a degree of informality among them all that harked back even to their Asiatic Fleet days, distinctions between officers and enlisted men must always be maintained.
“Thank you, sir,” Abel and Stuart chorused, stepping into the column that was now waiting for the meat carts to pass.
Dennis suddenly did a double take and then trotted over to an old Lemurian, swatting a paalka clear of the pathway with a long, dried bamboo shoot. “I’ll catch up, Mr. Sandison!” he called behind him. “I gotta talk to this guy a second.”
“No screwin’ around!”
“No, sir.”
“Hey, Moe. What’s up?” Silva asked the ancient ’Cat. Moe looked good for his age-whatever that was-and was still just as tough and sinewy as Dennis remembered. Now, in addition to the ragged kilt he usually wore to town, he also wore dingy rhino-pig armor with sergeant’s stripes.
Moe looked up at him. “Si-vaa,” he said. “Where you been? Lotsa huntin’ to do.”
“Oh, I been here and there.” Silva answered. He waved at Santa Catalina. “Heard you went on a little jaunt yourself.”
“Damn weird place,” Moe nodded. “Weird critters too. Glad I back here.”
Silva gestured at the heaps of meat on the carts. “I see you ain’t run outta pigs. They gettin’ harder to find?”
“No. We kill all we want. They make more.” He shook his head.
“Look. They’re sendin’ me and Larry and the kids over there-you remember them-up the river, north, into Injun Jungle Lizard territory. We’re s’posed to say howdy to ’em. You wanna go?”
“No,” Moe answered truthfully, but then twitched his ears at his stripes. “But I Army scout now. They make me go, an’ I been helpin’ plan the trip.” He shrugged like he’d learned to do and gazed northward. “We go up there, we gonna die, I betcha.” He grinned. “But I old. Gonna die soon, anyway!” He laughed at Silva and swatted the paalka again. “See you around, Si-vaa!”
A grandstand had been erected near the water overlooking the old seaplane ramp, and it was packed to overflowing. Nearby buildings were covered with ’Cats and women as far away as the Screw in one direction and the main dry dock in the other. Sailors and yard workers lined the rails of the completing ships, and others skylarked in the masts and rigging. Below the grandstand, beside the ramp, with deep water in front of it, was Walker ’s refurbished number-one torpedo mount. Some distance to the rear of the triple-tube mount, resting securely fastened on cradle trucks exactly like the one Silva remembered from Walker, were three long, shiny cylinders with rounded noses in front, and four fins and two propellers at the back. Compressors and large accumulators for charging the air flasks were close at hand. Whatever the things were actually capable of, they sure looked like torpedoes to Dennis.
“Nice fishies, Mr. Sandison. Do they work?”
“God, I hope so,” Bernie whispered, then raised his voice. “The torpedo division will assume their posts!”
Dennis was surprised to see Ronson join a crew beside one of the weapons.
“We’re trying three kinds,” Bernie explained. “Two are reverse-engineered Mk-14s like that wadded-up fish we carried around so long. The only difference is one’s hot and the other’s cold. You’re probably thinking the ship’s sailed on that one, but we’re not talking the same ranges here-yet. If the cold fish can do the job for now, it’ll save a lot of effort.”
Dennis wasn’t sure exactly which ship Bernie meant. He didn’t much care about torpedoes and didn’t trust them. He firmly believed you should never send a fish where you could send a bullet, and though nobody knew what kind of ships the Grik were working on, he hadn’t seen anything on this world since Amagi that needed a torpedo. His attention was already focused on something else.
“The other one uses the same gyro, Obry gear, everything,” Bernie continued, unaware he’d lost his audience. “But Ronson talked me into letting him try an electric motor and batteries in place of the air flask.” He shook his head. “I think it’ll work eventually, but I’m afraid our batteries just aren’t there yet.”
“The only thing I care about is if the damn things’ll go off,” Silva said absently but darkly.
“Yeah, they’ll go off,” Bernie assured him. “They’re contact exploders all the way, no horsing around.”
“Good,” Silva said, still distracted.
About forty yards from the torpedo mount, on the old ramp itself, was Walker ’s glisteningly restored number four, four-inch-fifty gun. Mounted beside it, bolted to a similar concrete pedestal, was an almost exact replica of it, except the mount was taller and more reminiscent of the Japanese 4.7s they’d salvaged. Bernie had told Silva to expect it, but he hadn’t had time to come down and see the thing. He’d been too busy familiarizing himself with the small arms. Now he knew he truly was looking at a dual-purpose four-inch-fifty!
“I’ll be derned,” he said. “Ain’t that a pretty thing? What did you make her out of?”
“All our modern weapons are made of Jap steel, from Amagi.” Bernie shrugged. “Not sure how good it is, but it’s better than what we can make so far. Somebody calculated that we salvaged enough steel off her to make every single rifle and pistol used by everybody on both sides in the Great War. I find that hard to believe, but there’s a lot-and we can use local iron in projectiles and nonordnance applications. We are making some steel of our own now, like I said, and we’re doing it by the book-but there’s no way to know if it’s really worth a damn, since Laney’s the closest thing we’ve got to a metallurgist. He worked in a steel mill for a while before he joined the Navy.”
“Got fired, I bet,” Silva quipped.
Bernie shrugged. “Probably. I wish Elden hadn’t got himself killed. He really knew stuff.” He brightened. “Spanky does too, but until he gets back, Laney’s the expert. We’ve had to do a lot of guessing and experimenting with heat treating and stuff.”
“I know heat treating-on small parts an’ springs an’ such,” Silva said, and Bernie glowered.
“All the more reason why…” He stopped and sighed. Silva had long ago taught what he knew about making springs and case hardening. That knowledge was widespread now. Silva knew nothing about making steel for heavy ordnance. “Well, for now, the new breechloading guns like that one will still use the black-powder shells we’ve been making, to keep pressures down. They’re basically wrought iron-or wrought Jap steel.”
“It is a four-inch-fifty? Why didn’t you standardize on the four-point-seven? We’ve actually got more of those scattered around, and I guess you could eventually convert the four-inch-fifties.”
“We thought of that,” Bernie admitted. “We’ve got salvaged Jap gun directors and everything, but production on ‘our’ shells was already so far along and performance being so close, we figured it would be easier to line the four-point-sevens when the time came. You got us on this lining kick with your Allin-Silvas, and it made sense.”
“Sure,” Silva nodded. “And you can reline ’em when the bores are shot out.”
“You got it.”
The rumble of the crowd softened when Adar, High Chief and Sky Priest of Baalkpan and Chairman of the Grand Alliance, stood from his seat at the center of the bleachers. Near silence was achieved when he raised his arms. As always, he still wore his old “sky-priest suit” as the humans called it. It was deep purple with a scattering of embroidered silver stars across the shoulders and hood, which today was thrown back, revealing his gray fur that glistened like silver in the morning sun. Beside him, Alan Letts stood as well, his whites almost painful to look at. Other high-ranking members of the Alliance flanked them, and also stood as a group.
“Who’s the skinny guy there by Mr. Letts?” Silva asked. “In the officer suit.”
“New guy,” Bernie replied. “Name’s Herring. Commander Herring, he made a point of rubbing in at first. He came in from Manila with a couple China Marines, an Aussie, and some Dutchman Colonel Mallory grabbed up. They were off Mizuki Maru, poor devils. That one was ONI, and Letts tapped him for the same job around here, once he
