Devil's Due (Destroyermen #12)(15)
“I’d love to meet him,” Bolton Forester said.
Alan waved east. “He’s back in the Filpin Lands now, helping with other stuff.” He smiled. “Maybe you can borrow him in the Empire someday, but that guy’s never getting close to anything that’ll shoot him, stick him, or eat him, if I have anything to say about it.” He nodded back at the gearbox. “Building the first of those was like making giant watches.” He gave an exasperated snort. “And then we had to torture them to death! I don’t even want to think about how many units we shredded before we got the bugs worked out. But we’ve got the tooling now, for them and other stuff, and a whole shop dedicated to making one complete unit a week. Just like the ICE houses make nothing but the same engine they’re contracted to build, one after another.” He waved at the crane and chuckled. “Funny thing is, ordinarily, you’d install something like that before you even launched a ship, but we had so much trouble with the first ones—taking them out and putting them back so many times—the yard apes like it this way better. They’re even kind of superstitious about it.”
Bachman surprised them all by speaking, rather hesitantly. “But will that thing, designed for these”—he waved at the narrow hull the crane was lowering the gearbox toward—“work in a larger ship?”
Alan smiled. “Interesting you should ask, Lieutenant.” He nodded down the pier and began to walk. “Watch your ‘steppings,’ gentlemen.”
The second DD had the amidships deckhouse nearly finished and the aft searchlight tower erected. It also rode lower in the water, and Alan explained that was because all her machinery was in place. As on the first one, ’Cats romped all over it, pulling air hoses, driving rivets, and grinding rivet heads amid great yellow, sparkling arcs. Forester and Bachman appeared amazed by how fast the new ships were going together, and Forester even said as much.
“They built USS Ward—one of Walker’s sisters—in seventeen and a half days, at the Mare Island Navy Yard . . . back home,” Alan told them. “And it took less than three months from keel laying to commissioning. That was a big deal at the time,” he conceded, “and they weren’t even fighting monsters that’d eat them if they lost the war. They were going as fast as they could, though, to see what they could do. So are we, and our shipyard workforce, at least, is almost unlimited.” He frowned at Stokes. “Maybe too unlimited, at the expense of other projects. That probably sounds strange coming from me, but we’ll see.” He nodded back at the DDs and his frown faded. “Still, we haven’t already built a hundred of the damn things, to the point where the guys can slap ’em together in their sleep, and we’re still making stuff—to make stuff better. I’ll consider it just as big a deal if these’re ready to go in three more months.”
“That will still be quite a feat,” Forester agreed with a touch of envy, as they continued on. But then their eyes fell on the third ship secured to the pier and Forester barked a laugh.
“Your cruiser!” he said gleefully. “I haven’t seen her since the launch!”
“You weren’t in Sular that long!” Alan objected. He started to say that she could be seen from the Great Hall, but that hadn’t been true for quite a while. Only a small sliver of the bay, due west, was visible from there anymore. There was simply too much in the way now. “And we were on the bay together two weeks ago when we visited the ATC,” he said, remembering. “You didn’t even look this way?”
“No,” Forester confessed. “You may recall we were all a bit . . . preoccupied that day. And otherwise”—he held his hands out at his sides—“between one thing and another, I just haven’t been down to see her. My, she’s a lovely thing! And nearly complete!”
“Well, almost nearly,” Alan qualified. “There’s still a lot to do.”
To a casual observer, the new cruiser looked almost identical to USS Walker except it was bigger, with a higher freeboard even than the empty DD they’d first seen. But the pilothouse looked similar; there were four stacks and an amidships deckhouse, and a rather large aft deckhouse as well. A more careful look revealed the pilothouse was higher than Walker’s and rested atop another deck. Two gun mounts squatted in front of it instead of one, with pairs of muzzles protruding from splinter shields. The second mount was higher than the first, just forward of the pilothouse. Ordinary-looking DP 4″-50s stood on either beam atop the amidships deckhouse, and another pair stood in tubs behind the quadruple torpedo mounts flanking the aft two funnels. A tall crane with a searchlight platform on top jutted behind the fourth funnel. Two empty seaplane catapults dominated the space from there to the aft deckhouse, which was crowned by yet a third protected two-gun mount. Finally, a fifth DP 4″-50 poked up from the cramped fantail between a pair of depth-charge racks. Probably the most obvious difference between the cruiser and its inspiration, however, was a tall tripod mast forward where Walker’s foremast would’ve been, with what looked like a smaller version of the square-windowed pilothouse high in the air. Topping that was another pair of searchlights—and the obligatory crow’s nest near the top of the mast.
“Oh my,” Forester murmured, peering upward and imagining what it must be like in the small tub all alone, so high above the ship.