John Schettler - Golem 7

“You’d best get topside and fetch engineers,” said Paul. “I’ll just see that the last hatch is shut and be along after.”

The man ran off. Paul was drenched and cold, but he slogged off down the corridor where a last open hatch was swinging loose and banging against the bulkhead when the ship would roll. He reached it and looked inside. The dim red lighting revealed an amazing scene. Wooden packing crates had been stored here from floor to ceiling, and they had come tumbling down in a jumbled mass. One had split open and he found himself staring at an elegantly carved horse’s head, obviously a work of art. the pearly wet white marble gleamed in the red light. Overhead pipes had burst with the concussion of the guns and the hold was drenched with leaky water from above as well.

He stood amazed, seeing several more broken crates, glimmering with the telltale shapes of yellow bars of gold bullion. Still others held more large segments of carved marble, like a relief of ancient art that had been segmented away and stored for safekeeping, piece by piece.

The ship rocked and the case with the horse’s head was flung to the slowly flooding deck where it splintered further and cause the marble steed’s head to come spilling out. It tumbled into the grey green seawater, its rougher bottom scraping on the edge of another case as it fell, and Paul saw a segment break away. There, in the gouged area he spied a dark object that he immediately recognized as a thick metal key. He reached for it, instinctively, seeing how it was wedged into the base of the marble figure itself, and managed to pull it loose.

“Make way, make way!” A master chief was laboring down the hall leading a team of engineers. “Close that hatch there, man!”

Paul shoved the key in his pocket, then backed out of the hatch and pulled it closed. “The hold is taking water,” he said, and when the Chief saw he was wearing an officer’s uniform his mood lightened.

“Good show, sir. We’re here now. You’d best get up above and I’ll have my men on this bit here in a wink. We’ve taken two torpedoes, sir. Bloody U-boats about as if that damn Bismarck weren’t enough, sir.”

The news stunned Paul. Torpedoes? There had been nothing at all in the Golem reports about a torpedo strike on Rodney , and the realization struck him that something had again shifted off axis with this intervention.

“Very well,” said Paul. “See to it, Chief.”

“Aye, sir. Thank God you closed that hatch forward as well. Otherwise we would already be up to our ears in the torpedo room there. On your way now, sir. We’ll set things right here soon enough.”

Torpedo room? Paul thought for a moment and then remembered. Rodney still incorporated a couple of hidden torpedo tubes on her forward bow! It was a throwback from the days of WWI when capital ships routinely fired torpedoes at one another when they closed to short distances. The very long range of the big guns made the weapons a bit of an anachronism now, and he doubted his effort had made any difference… but he was wrong.

Thinking nothing more on it, Paul resolved to get up topside as fast as he could to see what was happening in the fight. He climbed several ladders, coughing with the rising smoke from fires and weighted down by his sodden clothing. Breathless and bedraggled he finally reached the upper decks, where he had the presence of mind to press his palms tightly against his ears just before Rodney let loose with another booming salvo.

The concussion was so great that it knocked him near senseless, flinging him to the deck where he saw that the Douglas fir wood planks were literally torn loose by the intense vibration of the main guns. He stared, dumbstruck, and saw that the monstrous black shape of Bismarck in the distance was alight with fire, an angry orange glow on her forward segment. Rodney had struck at least one hard blow there, hitting ‘Anton’ turret and blasting through its thick armored siding with the weight of her awesome shells.

Then the ship rolled violently and his slight frame was tossed up and over the siding into the furor of the sea. It was as if a wave had willfully reached up and swept him away. He vaguely remembered seeing another seaman pointing at him as he went over the edge. Then the sea took him, pulling him under the shoulder of a thick green wave and then swelling him back up to the crest of another.

For one awesome moment he took in the whole scene as the wave topped out, Bismarck , her forward turret aflame but her other guns still firing, Rodney , listing to port, the black smoke still belching from her huge guns as well, and the odd thin running streak of a torpedo whooshing by, fired from the hidden bow tubes of the big ship, her secret weapon put to use after all! He had witnessed the first ever instance of a battleship firing a torpedo at another ship in its class. It was as if Rodney had taken the strike from U-556 on her sides and then angrily spat it back out her forward tubes. She was giving as good as she got.

Then, off in the distance, he saw the hardening silhouettes of two more ships, identical in shape, their squared forward superstructures unmistakable to his well trained eye. White fire lit them up when their guns fired in anger, and he knew that King George V and Prince of Wales had arrived at last. Their 14 inch guns were soon ranging on the stalwart enemy from behind her left rear quarter.

Then the cold shook his frame, and he thought he was breathing his last. His eyes rolled and an incredible sensation of feathery lightness swept over him. What was he in the midst of all the raging turmoil of this great battle? He was no more than a rag doll tossed into the sea, a bit of useless flotsam, and the last thing he saw was the rising swell of a thirty foot wave looming up over him, ready to come crashing down on his tiny soul and drag him into the depths of the angry sea. Yet when the wave curled and broke Paul was not there….

The mistsof acrid fog still hung in the air, and they could perceive a noticeable chill. Maeve blinked, looking this way and that. “Paul?” She called, leaning forward to peer into the cold blue haze.

No one answered.

She walked boldly up to the yellow event horizon line in the Arch Bay, waving her arms through the mist, groping at infinity as it were, but felt nothing. Thinking he may have fallen in a swoon of nausea, she knelt quickly her arms smoothing in wide arcs over the cold concrete floor.

No one was there.

The main lights came on in the bay as the Arch spun down to a quiet 50% power. Maeve had an anguished look on her face. She could both clearly see that the room was empty, and was up and at the intercom in a heartbeat.

“Kelly,” she shouted. “Are you sure the retraction sequence is finished?”

“Yes, it’s fine. All green on my board and the sequence is closed,” came Kelly’s voice.

“Are you sure?… Something’s wrong,” said Maeve. “He’s not here!”

“What?”

She wasted no time, running to the elevator to get up to the lab where she found Kelly frantically checking an incompressible wall of numbers on the retraction module screen.

“I’m telling you the system is showing he made a safe shift. I have no warning flags, no loss of pattern integrity. There was a brief vibration during the shift, but it was just a second and it stabilized immediately. The computers show they brought him in, lock, stock and barrel.”