There is never a storm whose might can reach
Where the vast leviathan sleeps
Like a mighty thought in a mighty mind. . . .
—John Boyle O'Reilly
"Fasten your belt," Sal ordered, stuffing his cap in a side pocket as he dropped into the pilot's seat of the skimmer bobbing like a pumpkinseed at the end of the ferry dock.
He latched his own cross-belted seat restraints and added nonchalantly, "It won't matter if we flip—there won't be a piece of the frame left as big as your belt buckle—but at least it'll keep you from getting tossed into the harbor when we come off plane."
"Right," said Johnnie, realizing that the scooter ride was going to be the calm part of the trip.
The skimmer had a shallow hull with a powerful thruster, two side-by-side seats, and a belt-loaded 1-inch rocket gun mounted on a central pintle. The weapon could either be locked along the boat's axis or fired flexibly by the gunner . . . though the latter technique meant the gunner stood while the skimmer was under way.
Other recruits had learned to do that, so Johnnie figured he could if he had to. For now, it looked tricky enough just to stay aboard.
Sal touched two buttons on his panel. First the thruster began to rumble; then the bow and stern lines unclamped from the bollards on the quay and slid back aboard the skimmer as their take-up reels whined.
"Hang on!" Sal warned unnecessarily. He cramped the control wheel hard, then slammed it forward to the stop in order to bring the drive up to full power.
The skimmer lifted; its bow came around in little more than the vessel's own length. Within the first ten feet of forward motion, almost nothing but the thruster nozzle of the tiny craft was in the water. A huge roostertail of spray drenched the dock behind them.
"Yee-ha!" Sal shrieked over the sound of the wind and the snarling drive.
The seat back and bottom hammered Johnnie as the skimmer—the ass-slapper—clipped over ripples in the harbor surface that would have been invisible to the eye. He braced his palms against the armrests, letting his wrists absorb much of the punishment and—incidentally—permitting Johnnie to look forward past the vessel's rounded bow. The Holy Trinity was expanding swiftly.
Johnnie knew Sal was giving him a ride as well as a lift—but he was pretty sure that the pilot would have been running in a similar fashion if he'd been alone in his ass-slapper. What Dan had said about hydrofoil crewmen was true in spades about the skimmers.
But it was true at higher levels also. The battle centers of the great dreadnoughts were buried deep below the waterline and protected by the main armor belts. All the sensor data—from the vessel itself and from all the other vessels in the fleet—was funneled there.
The battle center was as good a place from which to conduct a battle as could be found in action. The muzzle blasts from the ship's main guns jolted the battle-center crews like so many nearby train-wrecks, but even that was better than the hells of flash and stunning overpressure to which the big guns subjected everyone on the upper decks. Enemy shell-hits were a threat only if they were severe enough to endanger the entire vessel.
In the battle center, hostile warships were a pattern of phosphor dots, not a sinuous dragon of yellow flashes and shells arching down as tons of glowing steel. Friendly losses were carats in a holographic display rather than water-spouts shot with red flames and blackness in which tortured armor screamed for the voiceless hundreds of dying crewmen.
The battle center was the best place from which to direct a battle . . . but the men down in the battle centers were clerks. The commanding officers were on the bridges of their vessels, emotionally as well as physically part of the actions they were directing.
It made no sense—except in human terms.
But then, neither did war.
The Holy Trinity's mottled hull swelled from large to immense behind the rainbow jeweling of sunlit spray. Part of the blurred coloration was deliberate camouflage, shades of gray—gray-green, gray-brown and gray-blue applied to hide the great dreadnought in an environment of smoke and steam . . . but the environment had similar notions of color. The natural stains of rust, salt, and lichen spread over even a relatively new vessel like Holy Trinity and provided the finishing touch that outdid human art.
They were getting very close. Sal heeled his pumpkinseed over in a curve that would intersect the dreadnought's armored side at a flat angle instead of a straight-on, bug-against-the-windshield impact, then throttled back the thruster.
For a moment, the skimmer continued to slap forward over the ripples; the major difference to be felt was the absence of drive-line vibration. Then they dropped off plane and Johnnie slammed forward into his cross-belts, hard enough to raise bruises.
Sal let the reflected bow wave rock the skimmer to near stasis, then added a little throttle to edge them forward at a crawl. He was chuckling.
"How d'ye like that?" he asked Johnnie. "Are you going to specialize in ass-slappers yourself?"
"Ah, no," Johnnie said, answering the second question because he was going to have to think about the first one for a while before he was sure. "I'm supposed to be serving as aide to my uncle, so I guess that means battleships. Ah, my uncle's Commander Cooke."
Sal raised an eyebrow. "Commander Dan Cooke?" he asked. "I've heard of him. No wonder you're good."
Johnnie beamed with pride and pleasure.
Sal had brought the skimmer to a tall, six-foot-wide slot at the waterline, some hundred and fifty feet astern of the cutwater. For a moment, Johnnie thought the hole was either battle damage or some general maintenance project, as yet uncompleted.
"Starboard skimmer launch tube," Sal explained with satisfaction. "Come to think, you don't have ass-slappers in the Blackhorse, do you?"
"Ah," said Johnnie. "I don't think we use them, no."
"Gunboats look all right," his guide said scornfully, "but what they really are is bigger targets. This baby—" he patted the breech of the rocket gun "—can chew up torpedoboats and spit out the pieces. And besides, they can't hit us."
Try me on a hydrofoil's stabilized twin-mount, Johnnie thought, but it would've been rude to speak aloud. Rocket guns coupled a serious warhead with the low recoil impulse which was all a skimmer could accept, but neither their accuracy nor their rate of fire were in any way comparable to the armament of a hydrofoil gunboat. The ass-slappers made a bad second to hydrofoils for fleet protection—
But they were better than nothing, and nothing was the alternative which economy would force on the Angels.
Sal rotated the skimmer on her axis again.
Johnnie was looking up at the side of the Holy Trinity, expecting to see a derrick swing into view to winch them aboard. "What are we—" he started to say.
Sal accelerated the boat into the tight, unlighted confines of the tube meant for launching ass-slappers in the opposite direction.
The skimmer bumped violently to a halt on inclined rollers. Its wake sloshed and gurgled in the tube, spanking the light hull another inch or so inward.
Sal cut the thruster. "Anybody home?" he called. He switched on the four-inch searchlight attached to the gun mount and aimed it upward.
They were in a cave of girders and gray plating. A dozen other skimmers—eleven other skimmers—hung from a curving overhead track, like cartridges in a belt of ammunition.
"Anybody?" Sal repeated, flicking the searchlight around the large cavity in a pattern of shadows. His echoing voice was the only answer.
The skimmer magazine was in a bulge outside the battleship's armor plating. A sliding plate, now open, could be dogged across the launch tube's opening when the vessel was at speed, though neither protection nor the watertight integrity of the main hull were affected if it stayed open.
Forty feet overhead was a large, grated hatch in the forecastle deck, the opening through which the ass-slappers were meant to be recovered by derrick. There was also a man-sized hatch into the main hull. The latter looked like a vault door and was probably much sturdier.
The little boat was sliding slowly back down the launch rollers. Sal added a bit of throttle and ordered, "Grab that—"
The searchlight indicated an empty yoke on the overhead track. The skimmers already in place were hanging from similar units.
"—and bring it down to the attachment lugs. There oughta be somebody on duty down here, but they've drafted everybody and his brother from the watches to get the St. Michael refitted in time."
Sal grinned. "We'll get a better price from Admiral Bergstrom if we bring five dreadnoughts 'n four, right?"
"I think . . . ," said Johnnie. He stood on his seat, then jumped to grab the yoke. Its telescoping mid-section deployed under his weight, allowing him to ride it down.
"I think we'll kick the Warcocks 'n' Blanche's ass just fine with four," he went on, because he did think that. "But sure, more's better."
Together they locked the skimmer into its yoke; then Johnnie watched as his guide operated the winch controls to hoist the little vessel up with its sisters.
"Now," Sal said, "let's look at the best damned ship in the world!"
There was a large handwheel in the center of the personnel hatch, but a switch—covered with a waterproof cage which Sal opened—undogged and opened the massive portal electrically.
The hatch was tapered, like the breechblock of a heavy gun. It swung into the skimmer dock, so that a shell impact would drive it closed rather than open. The hatch, and the forward armor belt of which it was a part, were twelve inches thick.
"In battle," Sal explained, "all the watertight doors are controlled from the bridge. If the bridge goes out, control passes to the battle center. I guess that's a bitch if you're trying to get from one end of the ship to the other in an emergency—but it beats losing watertight integrity because somebody didn't know the next compartment was flooded."
"Everything's a trade-off," Johnnie said; agreeing, but balancing in his mind an expanding pattern of decisions. Dreadnoughts and skimmers, against fewer dreadnoughts, a carrier, and hydrofoils.
Above that, the Blackhorse on retainer to Wenceslas Dome: using the permanent arrangement to expand in power and prestige faster than rival companies . . . but facing now utter defeat and humiliation, because of the jealousy and fear of rivals who were no longer peers.
Above that, Commander Cooke and the Senator juggling war in the service of what they said was peace, would be peace, if. . . .
All in a pattern that took Johnnie's breath away in a gasp, though he knew that he saw only the base of it and that the superstructure rose beyond the imaginings of even his father and uncle.
"Yeah, well," Sal said as the hatch closed behind them. He grinned because he misunderstood Johnnie's sudden shock. "It's not as though it matters to me whether they got the door back here dogged shut."
There were lights on in the passageway behind the armor belt. Sal led the way briskly, commenting that, "There's nothing much at main-deck level, just bunks, chain-lockers and the galleys. I'll take you down t' the battle center 'n' magazines, then give you a look at the bridge."
They had turned into a much wider passage, one which could hold hundreds of men rushing for their action stations in a crisis. On one side was a barracks-style bunk room whose three double doors were open onto the passageway. On the other side of the passage was what Johnnie presumed was an identical facility, but it was closed up.
"We've got just a skeleton watch with the drafts working on St. Michael," Sal explained, "and they're trying to keep the power use down so that we'll have max fuel available if the balloon goes up real sudden."
Johnnie tried to match the other ensign's knowing grin. Sal had been in action before. All the training in the world couldn't make Johnnie a veteran. . . .
"Anyhow, they're just running the air-conditioning to the one sleeping area—and where there's people on duty, of course, the engine room, the bridge and the battle center."
The accommodations were spartan. Cruises of more than a week or two were exceptional for vessels of the mercenary fleets. There was no need to provide luxury aboard warships when the crews would be back at base (or on leave in a dome) within a few days.
On the other hand, space wasn't at a premium on a battleship. Automation permitted 350 men to accomplish tasks that would have required a crew of thousands in the days of the early dreadnoughts on Earth, but the hull still had to have enough volume to balance the enormous thickness of armor covering the ship's vitals.
Here on the Holy Trinity, sleeping crewmen had only a simple bed and a locker for a modicum of their personal effects—but the bunks were individual, and they were clamped to the deck at comfortable distances apart. Sleeping quarters in the domes themselves were far more cramped for any but the richest and most powerful.
Sal began clattering down a companionway. "No elevators?" Johnnie asked as his own boots doubled the racket on the slatted metal treads.
"We'll go up by the bridge lift," Sal said. "Most of 'em are shut down, like I said . . ."
He looked back over his shoulder with his wicked smile. "Besides, I can't think anyplace I'd less like t' be than trapped in an elevator cage because the power went off when the ship was getting the daylights pounded outa her."
They'd reached the lower-deck level, but Sal kept going down. He waved at the huge, dim shapes beyond the companionway. "Generator rooms for the forward starboard railguns," he said.
The companionway ended on the platform deck. The air was dank and seemed not to have stirred for ages. Instead of a single long passageway, the corridor was broken by watertight doors every twenty feet. For the moment, they were open, but a single switch on the bridge or battle center could close them all.
"Next stop, A Turret magazine," Sal said cheerfully. "How do you like her so far?"
So far she seems dingy and brutal and no more romantic than a slidewalk installation, Johnnie thought.
"She's really impressive," he said aloud.
The armored wall of the barbette enclosing the magazine was sixteen inches thick. The mechanism opened smoothly, but it seemed an ungodly long time before the drive unit withdrew the hatch far enough that the hinges could swing the plug out of the way.
"How long does it take to open it by hand if the power's off?" Johnnie asked.
"Hey, this is a battleship, not a ass-slapper," Sal laughed. "Things take time, right?"
The powder room was circular, with spokes of sealed, side-facing pentagonal bins in double racks built inward from the walls. The two ensigns had entered one of the wedge-shaped aisles between racks. Above them was a track-mounted handling apparatus, empty at the moment.
The air had a faint, not unpleasant odor. The room could have been a linen store.
"There's a four-man crew in each powder room during action," Sal explained as he unlatched one of the bins. "If everything's going right, they just sit on their hands . . . but with the shock of the main guns firing, stuff jumps around like you wouldn't believe."
Johnnie grinned tightly. "And that's if the other guys' shells aren't landing on you, I suppose?" he said.
Within the bin—filling it to the degree a cylinder could fill a pentagonal case—was a powder charge sheathed in transparent plastic.
"The inner casing's combustible," Sal noted. "But then, if something penetrates to the magazine, you got pretty big problems already."
"It's huge," Johnnie said, looking at the garbage can of propellant.
"And that's a half charge," Sal said complacently. "A full charge takes two bins—over twelve hundredweight. And if you think that's something, the shells—"
He pointed at the steel floor, indicating the bilge-level shell room beneath them.
"—weigh thirty-six hundredweight apiece. How'd you like to be where they land?"
The center of the powder room was a ten-foot diameter armored shaft. Waist-high hatches, big enough for men but intended for the powder charges, were positioned at the center of each aisle where they could be fed by the automatic handling apparatus—or, in an emergency, by the sweating human crew struggling with charges on a gurney.
A ladder led up from the powder magazine in a tube beside the hoist shaft. Sal strode to it and began to climb. "Come on," he directed. "This leads to the gun house."
"Isn't this hole dangerous in case the powder explodes?" Johnnie asked.
Sal laughed. "It's the blow-off vent," he explained. "The idea is, maybe it'll channel the blast up instead of blowing the sides out."
Johnnie blinked. "Will it work?" he asked. "The vent?"
"I'm just as glad I'll be a mile or so away if it comes to a test," Sal said. He laughed again, but his words were serious enough.
The vent plating was relatively light—two-inch, thick enough to redirect the powder flash which even the heaviest armor couldn't contain. Sal opened the hatch into the turret's gun house while the vent continued up its own angled path to the deck through the barbette wall.
"This," said Sal, rapping his knuckles on the barbette armor, "is a thirty-two-inch section, just like the turret face. Because it's above the main belt, you see, so it may have to take a direct hit by itself."
"Right . . . ," murmured Johnnie as he stared at the huge machines around him. He wasn't really hearing the words.
A computer program could perfectly duplicate scenes of war as plotted in a dreadnought's battle center. A man who never left the keeps could become as expert in strategy and fleet tactics as the most experienced admirals of the mercenary companies. But that led to an impression of the instruments of war as being items of electronic delicacy—
And they weren't. Or they weren't entirely, at any rate. Here, in a gloom relieved only by the glowstrips that provided emergency lighting, were the triple loading cages—each of which lifted a shell weighing over two tons from the central hoist and carried it up a track into the turret above.
The loading cages rotated with the turret so that the guns could be fed in any position. A rack-and-pinion drive, powered by a massive hydraulic motor, encircled the top of the barbette. This was the apparatus that trained the guns by swinging the whole turret with the precision of a computer-controlled lathe.
Friction wasn't a factor: the turret bearings were superconducting magnets. But the sheer weight of the rotating mass must be over a thousand tons. It was inconceivable until you saw it—
And even then it was inconceivable.
"Pretty impressive, right?" Sal noted as he began clambering up the ladder into the turret.
"That's not the word," Johnnie said as he followed.
He wasn't sure quite what the word was, though. A dreadnought in action would be a foretaste of Hell.
The door at the back of the turret was open. Johnnie blinked and sneezed at the light flooding in. Powder fouling and burned lubricants gave the air a sickly tinge; all the surfaces were slimed with similar residues.
The breeches of the 18-inch guns were closed. Their size made them look like geological occurrences, not the works of man. Johnnie tried to imagine the guns recoiling on their carriages; the breeches opening in a blast of smoke and the liquid nitrogen injected to cool and quench sparks in the powder chambers; hydraulic rammers sliding fresh thirty-six-hundredweight shells from the loading cages and into the guns as the twelve-hundredweight powder charges rose on the track behind the shells. . . .
A vision of Hell.
"Really something!" Sal noted cheerfully. "The guns can be fought from here—" he pointed to the four seats, each with a control console of its own "—if something goes wrong with the links from the bridge and battle center."
Or something goes wrong with the bridge and battle center. . . .
Johnnie walked to the door. The armor, even on the back of the turret, was so thick that it gave him the impression of going through a tunnel. "I'm about ready for some sunlight," he said.
It struck Johnnie that he'd never seen direct sunlight until the day before . . . but the carefully balanced illumination of the domes had nothing in common with the crude functionality of this huge weapon's artificial lighting. The heat and glare on deck were welcome.
The deck had a non-skid surface, but at the moment it was under a glass-slick coating of blue and green algae. Sal spat over the side and muttered, "They need to hose this off with herbicide, but everybody's so damn busy with the St. Michael and loading stores that it'll maybe have t' wait till we're under way."
At the land perimeter of the base, a sort of battle had broken out between the guard force's flamethrowers and what were probably roots, though they moved as swiftly as serpents. Human weaponry created enormous evolutionary pressures on the continental life forms, ensuring that whatever lived or grew in the immediate vicinity of fleet bases was tougher and more vicious than similar forms elsewhere in the planetary hellbroth.
A tall barbette raised B Turret so that its guns could fire dead ahead, over A Turret. Just abaft and starboard of the barbette was one of the ship's four railgun batteries. Johnnie looked with interest as they walked past it.
From the outside, the installation was a fully-rotating dome whose only feature was a pair of armored slots which could open from +90O to -5O. That spread was wide enough to permit the railguns to engage anything from a missile dropping out of orbit to a hydrofoil a pistolshot out.
The tubes themselves were too fragile to survive on the deck of a ship under fire, so the weapons were designed to accelerate their glass pellets up a helical track. That way, their overall length could be kept within an armored dome of manageable size.
Given enough time—and not a long time at that—railguns could blast through anything on the surface of Venus, whether a dreadnought or a mountain. But, though they could destroy a target in orbit, they were unable to engage anything over the horizon from them. Furthermore, the power requirements of a railgun in operation meant that only dreadnoughts had the generator capacity to mount such weapons.
They were lethal and efficient within their limitations; but those limitations made railguns primarily defensive tools, the shield of the battleships slashing at one another with the sword of their big guns.
There was another enclosed companionway leading up the exterior of the shelter deck superstructure to the bridge whose wings flared out beyond the line of its supports. Sal opened the hatch, then paused.
"Those," he said pointing to the railguns, "would have to be ungodly lucky to hit us in the ass-slappers."
They can hit a plunging shell, Johnnie thought, so they could damn well hit a skimmer if they wanted to waste the ammunition.
"And those," Sal went on, indicating a turret holding twin guns of the dreadnought's secondary armament, "the five-point-two-fives, they couldn't hit us if they had angels riding on every shell. Sure you don't want to transfer to us and ride ass-slappers, Johnnie? Safest job in the fleet, I tell you!"
"Aw, my uncle's a big-ship man," Johnnie lied with a grin as the two of them began echoing up the slotted treads of the companionway.
The skimmers weren't safe even when nobody was shooting at them. The bow wave of a friendly vessel—or the back of a surfacing fish—could either of them flip one of the little pumpkinseeds in the air like a thumbed coin. If that happened and the ass-slapper's own speed didn't kill the crew, the life teeming in the sea would finish the job in minutes if not seconds.
No, skimmers were romantic—and now that Johnnie had seen a dreadnought close up, he realized that the big ships surely were not. But battles were decided by the smashing authority of the dreadnoughts' main guns. Everything else, necessary though it might be to a successful outcome, was secondary to big-gun salvoes.
Everything but perhaps strategy was secondary to the big guns. Uncle Dan hadn't risen to his present position simply because he knew how to press a firing switch.
Johnnie had thought he was in good shape . . . and he was, for the purposes for which he'd trained. He hadn't been running up and down staircases on the planet's surface, though. His legs were so rubbery that he used his grip on the handrail to boost him up the last few steps to the hatch marked: "Bridge/Access Controlled."
"It's closed," Sal explained as he touched the switch, "because they've got the air-conditioning on inside. Scratch a big-ship man," he added, smiling to take the sting out of the words, "and you find a pussy."
A puff of cool air spilled down the companionway as the immensely thick hatch cycled open. It revived Johnnie like a bucket of cold water. He wasn't sure that the constant change from Venus-ambient to artificially-comfortable wasn't a lot less healthy than acclimating to the natural temperature—
But for now it sure felt good.
There were six men already present on the bridge. One of them was the senior lieutenant acting as Officer of the Day. The armored shutters were raised so that Johnnie could look out at the harbor area through glazed slits; but it seemed to him that the banks of displays, both flat-screen and holographic, gave a better view.
The OOD was talking to a control console. He looked up and frowned as the ensigns entered the bridge. "Roger," he said as his right hand threw switches. "Roger. Out."
"Just showing a visitor the Holy Trinity, sir," Sal said cheerfully, before the lieutenant could ask.
"Well, keep out of the way, will you?" the senior officer said sourly. "Base wants us to help with the yard work."
"Turret Eye-Eye live, sir," said a technician at another console.
"Bring it to seventeen degrees until they give us final corrections," the OOD instructed. "They'll pipe them in, they say. And load with incendiaries."
"That's the forward starboard five-point-two-five turret," Sal explained, though Johnnie had already figured out the reference. "There's four secondary turrets on either side amidships."
"Want me to ready Beta Battery, sir?" called a junior lieutenant from the far wing of the bridge.
"No, I do not want you to light the main drives, Janos," the OOD snapped. "Besides, for what they want, the secondaries'll do a better job than the railguns would."
There was a horrible squeal of dragging metal, through the fabric of the ship as well as the air. The turret's superconducting gimbals had not come up to full power before the mechanism started to turn.
"That ought to be repaired!" the OOD said.
"It has been, sir," replied the man at the gunnery board. "That mount, it always does that. I think it's the power connections to—"
"Mark!" said the OOD.
A pattern of lines overlay a map display on the active gunnery screen. They shifted suddenly without any action by the tech at the console. The ship vibrated as gears drove Turret II a few seconds of fine adjustment.
Johnnie stepped to the window. The glazed slit was eight inches high, but the thirty-two-inch bridge armor it peered through made the opening seem as narrow as the slots in a jalousie.
The Holy Trinity was deep within the bay and closer to the northern side than the main occupied area on the south. That was desirable for the present purpose, since the mile or more the shells had to travel would give them a chance to stabilize, thus limiting the chances of a wild round. The 5.25-inch guns were only secondary armament for a dreadnought, but their shells were big enough to cause real problems if they landed among the base defenses they were firing to support.
The bridge was forward of the secondary battery amidships, but holographic displays inset every two yards beneath the viewslit showed the entire vessel—a quick reference for purposes of damage assessment. Seven of the eight secondary turrets were aligned with their twin guns perpendicular to the ship's axis. The front turret on the right side pointed just off the bow.
"Fire one," said the OOD.
The right-hand of the pair of guns in hologram flashed and recoiled. The Holy Trinity rang like a railroad collision, and a ball of orange powder gases hid the viewslit for an instant.
If these are the secondaries, what happens when the big guns fire?
The spark of the shell landing was almost lost in the jungle beyond the gash of bare No-Man's-Land, but it bloomed into a cloud of devouring white smoke. The consoles twittered inaudibly with exchanges between base control and the guard units engaged with the non-human threat.
Johnnie turned to Sal, standing beside him, and asked, "Are the turrets manned, then?"
"All automatic," Sal said with a shake of his head. "You only need people if there's a problem—or if director control goes out."
If the superstructure is a flaming ruin, with sensors and communications disrupted and scores of dead . . . then the turrets could fight on alone.
"Fire for effect," said the OOD.
For a while.
The guns began to belch flame at a rate of a shot every five seconds, WHANG WHANG WHANG WHANG WHANG—
A pause.
WHANG—
"Cease fire!"
The target area was a roiling mass of smoke. A huge root burst out of the soil halfway between the jungle and the human defenses; it writhed and died before flamethrowers were able to bathe it.
"Sir, the left tube has a stoppage," announced the man at the gunnery console.
"I know it's got a bloody stoppage!" snarled the OOD. "I can bloody hear, can't I? Get a crew to clear it."
There were patterns of compression and rarefaction rippling across the algae which slimed the dreadnought's forecastle. The marks were vestiges of the muzzle blasts.
"Ah, shall I wake the off-duty watch?" the technician asked.
Something huge leaped from the jungle where the shells had landed. It was a mass of flames. A track of yellowing leaves followed it for hundreds of yards through the forest.
"No, dammit, go yourself," said the OOD. "I'll have Rassmussen send somebody from the engine room. Two of you ought to be able to handle it."
He turned to another technician. "Graves, bring up Turret Eye-Vee in case they need—"
The OOD broke off as his commo helmet spoke to him. He looked at Johnnie. "You," he said. "Are you Ensign Gordon?"
Johnnie drew himself up stiffly. "Yessir."
"Then you're about to go home," the OOD said. "They're bringing your hydrofoil alongside in the few minutes."
The man beamed. For the first time, Johnnie saw him looking cheerful.
"I think," the Angel lieutenant added, "that we've got a deal!"