Devil's Due (Destroyermen #12)(115)
No more than six or seven 47 mm shells exploded against Donaghey’s sides. None penetrated her stout timbers, but each did as much surface damage as Matarife’s roundshot—before Donaghey’s twelve portside eighteen-pounders fired as one, double charged and double shotted. Such a load didn’t lend itself to accuracy, and the added recoil strained the gun’s breechings and heaved Donaghey over several degrees. At little more than a hundred yards, however, hardly a shot could miss. A couple did, both hooking into the sea, while at least twenty struck savagely home, tearing gaping holes through the destroyer’s thin sides like BBs through a beer can. One shot swept so close by Tomas’s head, the pressure wave sent him staggering and left him momentarily stunned. Not so much that he didn’t see the same ball spatter both Capitan Abuello Falto and Teniente Casales Padilla all over the aft bulkhead, gouge its way through the equipment there, and punch out through the port side of the pilothouse. The hellish thunder of impacts ended—for almost three seconds—before Matarife’s rolling broadside, carefully aimed by Donaghey’s Marines and everyone else she could spare, continued tearing Antúnez apart. A great explosion shook the ship, and Tomas suspected a boiler had blown. Screams tore forward through a gush of steam, and the 47 mm went silent as the sound of small arms joined the cannonade. Two shots, in quick succession, blasted through the aft part of the bridge where the ship’s electronic gear, her sonar, and radios were stationed. The alarm bell instantly fell silent, but that just made the other sounds more intense.
Matarife’s cannon kept firing, quite deliberately, and Antúnez shook with each impact. It already seemed an eternity since Tomas called for his captain’s attention, but he realized this horror had taken only seconds to engulf them. Donaghey hadn’t even finished reloading yet. Trying the blood-sprayed shipwide circuit, the microphone dangling from a bundle of twisted electrical conduits, he found it dead. Snatching a dented speaking trumpet from the deck, he staggered out on the bridgewing, expecting a bullet or cannonball to find him at any moment. Nothing came at him. The forward gun crew was all either dead or hiding behind the gun mount. And as long as they made no effort to continue traversing their weapon, no one shot at them. He looked aft. Little was visible through the smoke, but for the first time he realized the ship was already listing to starboard. The boiler, he thought. Probably tore out the bottom. And as she leans, more water comes through holes in the hull, open portholes . . . With a chill, he considered the hungry denizens in the water. Raising the speaking trumpet, he shouted aft through the turmoil. “Cease firing! Prepare the rafts and lifeboats!” They couldn’t fight and they couldn’t run. Only one alternative remained. “Stand by to abandon ship!”
? ? ?
“My God,” Greg Garret murmured, watching the Alsedo lean farther onto her starboard side. What had been a proud, trim fighting ship just moments before was already a sinking wreck. “Cease firing! Bring the boats around.” All Donaghey’s and Matarife’s boats had been secured on the landward sides of the ships. ’Cats quickly jumped in them and took in their lines, grabbing oars. The motor launch was already speeding around Donaghey’s bow with a couple of armed Lemurians aboard. Two of the destroyer’s boats splashed into the sea, and a raft fell on top of one of them. It was chaos over there, Greg realized, and men were going to die in their panic to save themselves. “Be careful!” he called to his boats through the trumpet. “Don’t let them swamp you!” More boats were coming around Matarife and there’d be more than enough for everyone on the sinking ship, but only if they got there in time and her people could control themselves.
“Well done,” came a high-pitched voice behind him, sounding quite satisfied. Greg turned, surprised, and there was the little Dom midshipman—holding a rifle pointed at Greg’s belly. The weapon looked huge in his hands, but steady as a rock, and the boy shrugged. “One of your demons was kind enough to unlock my door before the action, just in case. I suppose she feared I might drown if things went poorly.” He shrugged again. “I killed her with my dirk and took this.” He raised the rifle slightly. “No one ever searched me for weapons, you know. How careless of you.”
Marines were quickly gathering now, pointing their rifles at the boy, shouting for him to drop his. Greg held up his hand to quiet them and took a deep breath, somehow not surprised the boy spoke English after all. “Why do you say ‘well done’? My impression was that you and the League are friends now.”
The boy snorted. “Hardly friends. They’re weak, like you, and unknown to the God of this world. That may change,” he added thoughtfully, “but for now they’re merely useful tools.” He smiled. “Far more so after what you just did.”
“You just said they’re weak. Why would that benefit you?”
“Weak in spirit, not in arms. You saw their ship and knew what it was capable of. That’s why you did as you did. It was your only hope. But such a convenient encounter will be difficult to arrange again and they have many more ships, some quite near.” He nodded at the Alsedo, now lying on her beam ends. “And that was probably the least capable of them all.”
“Then what makes you think they’ll be your tools and not the other way around?”
“As I said, they’re weak. They’re afraid of this world and do not possess the spiritual strength to survive—without our guidance. Some even know that already.”