The Books of the Wars (21 page)

A mile offshore the Fleet began another turn to bring their guns to bear. Penred stood on the
Havengore
's maintop, rapidly shifting his glass and shouting out target coordinates.

The ancient guns roared majestically enough, but their hits were like match-fires on the
Victory
's flanks.

The cruiser's captain, Fyfe, glared at the Ship and then yelled some orders down a speaking tube. Signal flags went up the cruiser's mast.

The Fleet lunged forward to ground itself on the Yards. The three ships broke out every flag and banner in their lockers and ran for the beach at forty knots. The agonized creakings of the old hulls were lost in the rising din of battle and in the crash of their own cannon. Forty knots through the white smoke of their guns, trailing the rainbow clusters of pennants. White water burst from the bows as the two frigates and the aged cruiser bounded shoreward.

A and B turrets called up for target bearings. "Targets?" Pendred screamed back. "Targets, you flaming morons? Fire at will! Iron sights! And a forgotten grave to the first gun crew that misses that bleeding Ship!"

The deck jumped and buckled as the five-inch turrets joined the main batteries, and then the twenty and forty millimeter guns cut into the chorus. All but the aftermost batteries were now shelling the Yards. Pendred had never thought the three ships capable of such incredible power, or of himself lusting so in battle. He reminded himself that this was a very special fight, though, and not one to be judged by the standards of previous engagements.

Pendred ran his glass along the starboard wing of the
Victory.
He saw a white figure running along the edge of the wing, golden hair and fair skin still clean in the battle-clouded air. As Pendred looked at the lone figure, a sudden, unexplainable hatred seized him; the closer he looked, the more the man seemed to be his, Pendred's own, double or brother. Pendred found even the suggestion that his image should be serving the Ship intensely disgusting. He also felt a kinship to the man that went beyond physical appearance. Pendred sensed something that had once been beautiful and free in the man's lineage, as he occasionally felt in his own, but here the beauty and freedom had been bludgeoned and shaped to conform to the vague, detestable purposes of the Ship.

"B turret!" Pendred roared into the speaking tube. "B turret, can you hear me?"

"Aye, sir."

"You're under gunnery control now! Remote linkage, remote fire! And load fast, I want your guns as near to full automatic as you can get them!"

"Aye, sir!" came the reply, drunk with sheer violence. "Linkage and fire, remote it is." Pendred swiveled his sighting glass and saw the huge turret below turn in response. He laid his eyes to the crosshairs and caught the man in them.

Pendred opened his mouth to yell, but no sound came out, only a little croak of rage and hatred. His hand closed around the firing button and it turned dead-white with the pressure. Burnings leaped up all around the man, but he escaped. Pendred regarded his bewildered expression as the second salvo was being loaded; he seemed astounded that the fury of the
Havengore
should be turned against him, he who was leading the World's downtrodden to a new paradise. This time Pendred managed a terrifying scream as he pressed the firing buttons. The hits began in back of the man and walked down upon him with fantastic slowness; the first petrified him with fear, the second blew him off his feet, the last caught him in midair and slammed him brutally to the deck, crushing him with its weight of liquid iron and burning air.

Pendred twisted himself away from the sighting scope, a savage feeling of fulfillment coursing through him. "B turret, yours again!" The iron can immediately swung and trained its cannon on some target to starboard.

The Fleet closed up and charged down the mile long channel that led from the Yards to deep water. Some of the few weapons that had been dragged away from Coral's ring shifted their attention from the Yards to the seaward attack; a battery of four field guns set up near the beach cut loose at the closest ship, the
Frostfire.
The little frigate was straddled but her speed saved her. A single cannonade from the
Havengore
swept that section of the beach clear, silencing the Empire guns.

The cruiser was now in the van and less than half a mile from the concrete apron; she veered to the starboard, aiming to hit just beside the ways. The
Frostfire
swung off harder to the right, seeking to bring herself up obliquely against the beach, more than a mile from the cruiser. The
Blackthorne
headed for the port side of the ways, where the fighting was a bit lighter.

Pendred wrapped himself around the mast as the
Havengore
neared the beach. He estimated that the ship was pounding along at better than forty-five knots, an impossible figure even in the ship's youth. But forty knots it was; the boiler room gang stood awestruck in front of their gauges, beholding an honest miracle.

The
Havengore
hit and ground her way up onto the beach. Her old hull broke under the impact and shredded to pieces. She settled quickly into the shallow water and was peaceful for a second while her men picked themselves off her decks.

Then came the sounds, of two more metallic shrieks as the frigates hit. A turret sent three eight-inch rounds off into the
Victory
's wing as it curved away overhead. B turret planted her shells into an Empire battery that was firing into the swirl of color where Garrik's pennants could be seen. The smaller guns joined in, the port side firing point-blank into the after-belly of the Ship; the starboard batteries simply pushed a wall of flame away from the cruiser.

The
Havengore
was pouring fire, like water from a hose, into the pale thousands that surrounded her. The
Frostfire
was another fire-font, stamping the white masses into the ground and viciously ripping the skin from the
Victory.

The
Blackthorne
was also doing her terrible work, but her men could see the Tyne Fortress and Gun Hill alive and at the work they had been built for—and they saw the bursts of light and smoke that marked their targets, far beyond the western mountains.

The Tyne Delta quaked to the rhythm of the battle; a million men were marshalled on each side and they turned and blended into a nightmare tangle of combat around the silver Ship.

The East had still not reached the Ship. Above the fight, its great ports closed with their millions inside, and the Ship's men hardened their resolve. They would not sail upon the Ship, but their sons and wives would and that was enough.

Men began to bleed from the ears as the incredible noise of the battle burst their eardrums. They did not notice.

The
Victory
stirred. Somewhere in her labyrinthine hold a block of crystal began to send out the commands that had been engraved inside of it.

At almost the same instant, the men of the
Blackthorne
stared west. Under the light of the Fortress a great low darkness arose from the western shore of the Tyne delta. With a roaring of deep trumpets and battle cries, the cloud, now bristling with thin flashes of steel, swept across the plain and across the Tyne, parting so as not to hinder the Fortress in its work.

And the dead of the First World, vague yet terribly distinct at times, marched onto the Yards. The men of the East, their minds already reeling from the violence of the battle, saw no incongruity in the dead of the first Tyne battle coming to their aid. Many of the People found both armored and skeletal hands at their throats, crushing the life out of them. And Pendred, glancing briefly to the Sea, saw that the old Fleet had returned to assist the last of their race; a fog lay offshore where none had lain before, and thunder and cordite lightning flashed out of it.

Egginhard, delirious with the scope of the conflict, brought the flagship down for yet another run on the Ship. He looked upward and in that second it seemed to him that thousands of gleaming silver craft had suddenly filled the sky and were even now diving down with him, upon the Yards. Egginhard, foam dripping from his mouth, his mind burning with a divine hatred for the Ship, dismissed this vision as an illusion. But as he neared the Ship a great roaring of engines rose until it became so great as to be a silence. Blood spurted from his ears as he pushed the stick hard forward.

Egginhard died, his face and upper torso mangled by shrapnel; the flagship shed its wings and fell vertically onto the
Victory.
It hit, gouging a crater a hundred feet across in the hull of the Ship.

All organization was dissolved, all units were broken. The three armies, the Fleets, the Hill and the Fortress swirled and rumbled about the Ship with mind-shattering fury.

Kiril screamed at his visions and while he did not die, his mind broke into a blood-drenched ruin; the prayer wheel stopped in his hand, its appeals more or less answered.

The dead of the First World lived and strove beside the men of the East, tearing the white bodies apart with their hands and throwing the dripping remains at the uncaring hull of the Ship.

Suddenly, vast supports shot out horizontally from the ways and the towers that supported the wingtips of the
Victory
toppled, crushing hundreds. The
Victory
began to move; a wingtip dipped low, shoving the tiny
Frostfire
into the Sea. Plates and supports rained down from the ways, pounding the
Havengore
into a senseless tangle from which only a few guns still fired.

Like a wall, the hull slid from the Yards, exposing the battle to sudden sunlight. Pushing a tidal wave before her, the Ship settled into the Sea.

She turned with astonishing speed until her tail pointed to the Yards. A burst from her engines sent an unbroken sheet of white fire three miles across sweeping over the Yards and through Gateway. The Ship moved forward as her exhausts incinerated every living thing on the eastern bank of the Tyne. When she was a mile from the beach, great movable slabs of metal slid out from her wings and pivoted into the blast of the engines. The Ship rocked slightly, sending scalding waves ashore as the thrust reversers, originally designed to slow her in the oceans of Home, deliberately turned the fire upon herself.

The white sheet now played over the wings and hull, turning the Ship cherry red. Under this new direction of thrust, the Ship plowed backward to the Yards, a cloud of steam rising before her. The few that had hung back in the mountains and had not yet died saw the actions of the Ship and wondered what had gone wrong. But they guessed that nothing had gone wrong, so deliberately, so precisely did the Ship go about her own immolation and that of the millions who slept within her. The slabs, though white-hot and on the verge of collapse, still functioned and adjusted themselves with disturbing facility so as to bring the maximum of heat back on the Ship; the engines throttled themselves so as not to destroy these plates.

With a noise that was somewhere between a shriek and a detonation, the Ship, glowing red at the nose and white-orange further aft, hit the apron and began blasting her way back up the slipway.

She had only brought the first several feet of her tail ashore when the streams of fire that were still flowing along her hull were suddenly polluted with thin black streaks from which a new, darker, blaze shot. The Ship disappeared behind a billowing mist that escaped from her new wounds, drowning her in her own fire-vomit. Through the cloud could be heard a wailing that was obviously the protest of shattering steel, but as in all dying ships, sounded dreadfully human.

Then came a silence so great that the unabated firing from Gun Hill and the Fortress and the busy steamings of the Sea were only like the crying of a child at night. The quiet passed as Gateway began to burn, its shoddy frame dwellings and factories offering fuel second only to the human wreckage that covered the Yards. The entire eastern bank of the Tyne delta was burning; the flames climbed upward, joined and twisted together, creating a fire-storm; bodies and ruins melted instantly, solid rock and metal began to slag down in spots, the eastern side of the Westwatch blackened and split.

Sensing that the battle had ended, the West finally bestirred itself. A pale orange glow and vast quantities of smoke rose above the distant mountains; two brilliant, noiseless flashes—one directly to the west, the other from the direction of Mourne—cast the shadows of the western mountains over the Yards, even though it was early afternoon.

Arching across the sky, two glowing balls, so hot that their monstrous cores were colored a deep ebony, tore through the smoke and cloud cover above the Yards. They were colossal, indistinct bodies, pulsing with uncontainable energy; their heat set the plains below on fire and crushed the small bits of wandering darkness that were still looking for their old graves. The Sea was boiling from horizon to horizon.

The two bodies descended on an apparent collision course, but their targets were the Fortress and Gun Hill. The western ball roared down and merged with the fire-stream that the Fortress was still pouring out; the one from Mourne simultaneously disappeared into the muzzle blasts of Gun Hill's great cannons.

Again there was no sound, only a light that was first blue and then white and then black. The Tyne delta lived for a second in a night as absolute and as grotesquely perverted as any Hell could have produced.

The darkness slacked off and the shock wave rolled outward from the two impact points, snuffing out the fires that had spawned it and sweeping the delta clean of almost all that had previously existed there. Only a gaunt and twisted skeleton reached a mile and a half out to sea and spread its broken wings over the Yard's concrete beaches. Gateway was marked only by a few isolated foundations and the great roads of the Builders.

A charred stump, fifty feet high and overrun with slag, was all that remained of the Westwatch; it still glowed and bubbled from the heat.

Gun Hill and the low hills on the western bank had been utterly leveled; no trace of the guns was left. There was only a great scattering of tiny metal shards.