Devil's Due (Destroyermen #12)(48)
Donaghey had been the first Allied ship, besides Walker and Mahan, of course, to use electricity, originally in the form of a wind generator sufficient to power a crystal receiver and then a weak wireless set. She needed more juice for the firing circuit and needed it on demand, not on the whim of a capricious wind. Even though Allied storage batteries had improved, they still remained unreliable and drained quickly. Besides, a sufficient bank of batteries and capacitors for their purposes would take as much space as the generator and a fairly large fuel tank. The fuel tank, for the generator and floatplane, was below the waterline. But the generator produced more electricity than they needed, thus the electric lights.
Perhaps someone finally saw them, or maybe heard the insistent clanging of Donaghey’s alarm gong and the long roll of the Marines’ drums thundering in the waist, because the Dom suddenly let fly her aft sheets and veered away, her staysails flapping in the wind. Greg raised his telescope and saw utter pandemonium erupting aboard the other ship: men running to and fro, a few beginning to climb the shrouds. A line of officers in large, lacy tricorns stared at them, over the poop, as if amazed. A few gunports opened and guns ran out, but only a few. It seemed forever before the Dom shifted her yards and trimmed her sails in anything like an appropriate manner, and all the while Donaghey narrowed the gap. Even when the Dom seemed as squared away as she was able, running directly away to the northwest, Donaghey visibly gained—even without her studding sails.
Greg continued to study the ship, ignoring his steward, who snatched his hat off his head and tried to reach high enough to replace it with a helmet. Without thinking, he crouched to let the short Lemurian complete his task. He did notice when the little ’Cat buckled his cutlass and pistol belt around his waist, but never took his eye from the glass. He hadn’t fought Doms before, and their ship wasn’t actually what he’d call a galleon either. It had a quarterdeck and poop, but there was no ridiculously high stern castle like the word usually conjured in his mind. Probably one of their heavy frigates, he mused, and it seemed to roughly match the standard dimensions: 170′ x 50′, and about fifteen hundred tons. Likely a crew of about three fifty, he added to himself. It was handsome in a way Lemurians might appreciate, with gilded carving around the broad stern galleries and colorful paintings down its sides, fore and aft, above the gundeck. And the gundeck was a bit disconcerting. All the ports were open now, revealing sixteen heavy guns per side, probably twenty-four-pounders, and Greg had no doubt there were half again as many nine-pounders on the decks above. Considering their relative sizes and apparent power, he supposed the Doms must’ve run on instinct, surprised by the appearance of their foes. They probably hadn’t been expecting to run into anything and their lookouts must’ve been dozing. Wouldn’t want to be them, he thought with a chill, remembering the lurid accounts of Dom bloodthirstiness he’d heard. Still, all those officers peering over the transom are glassing us as well now.
“I wonder what they’ll do now they’ve got a haan-dle on their confusion,” Sammy said beside him. “An’ realize they’ve got us outgunned. Oh! Here come the saamitches!”
Greg glanced up at the maintop—the “fighting top,” now full of Marines with their Allin-Silva rifles—and Smitty Smith and a pair of ordnance strikers, already calculating ranges and clustered around the extremely crude but effective gyro Sonny Campeti had come up with. It was little more than a plumb bob in a wood-framed glass box, but it allowed Smitty to coordinate their salvos, or broadsides, and fire them as true as muzzle-loading smoothbore guns were capable of. Gunners would match his shouted elevations and train their weapons to lead the target as directed, and the guns would be fired electrically by a common circuit leading to primers in their vents—which would be closed at Smitty’s discretion when his plumb bob swayed across a fixed point in the box. “They’ll die anyway,” Greg answered grimly, scooping a sandwich from the offered plate and taking a huge bite.
They’d closed the range to half a mile and were gaining quickly despite anything the Dom could do. He chewed and swallowed. “Run up the battle flag and give them a shot from one of the bow chasers,” he said. “Who knows? Maybe they’ll surrender.” He doubted that. A few Dom ships had surrendered at Malpelo, completely surrounded and hammered into helplessness, or had been boarded and their officers killed. But quarter wasn’t something expected in this war, by either side. The concept was utterly alien to the Grik, with a few notable exceptions, and just as unfamiliar to most Lemurians until recently. They still didn’t quite get it. They’d only ever wanted peace, to be left alone, but if they had to fight it came with the instinctive acceptance that they had to kill whoever drove them to it or die themselves. But maybe . . . Greg reconsidered, the Doms’ll think we’re a New US ship when they see our flag. They’re kind of similar. And they’d had reports from Fred and Kari that Doms would surrender to the “other Americans.” He didn’t know if it worked the other way around.
A huge cheer arose amid stamping feet when the Stars and Stripes swept up the mainmast to the very top and streamed away, reaching to the north-northwest. It was a very large flag, with all Donaghey’s major actions embroidered on the stripes in golden thread. Walker’s flag, similarly decorated, bore the most of those by far, starting with Makassar Strait and Java Sea on another world. But the record of the many bitter actions Donaghey had survived, usually victorious, infused her crew with a fierce satisfaction. To punctuate the cheers, the starboard twelve-pounder on the fo’c’sle barked over the headrails, its report somewhat flat with the wind aft. There was time for the breeze to sweep the smoke to the left before the shot plunked into the sea close enough to wet the officers on the enemy poop with the splash. Another cheer surged.