“We don’t even know if Kurokawa and any other Japs are left,” said Captain Ellis, speaking for the first time. He’d been Matt’s exec on Walker before the Squall and had commanded Mahan on her suicidal dash. He was currently without a ship, but he was one of Matt’s best friends, and Matt was always interested in what he had to say. “We know the Grik ‘rescued’ a lot of survivors off Amagi,” he continued, “but they might have eaten them, for all we know.”
“Perhaps they did,” Shinya grudgingly admitted, saddened by the possibility, but glad they’d changed the subject. “Our prisoner thinks otherwise however.” He referred to Commander Sato Okada, the lone survivor the Allies had taken into custody. Matt still hadn’t talked to the new Jap directly; he’d been too busy. It was probably time he did, but he honestly wasn’t sure how to approach the interview. Shinya had spoken with the prisoner at length and the man was a font of information about Captain Hisashi Kurokawa and the Grik-he hated them passionately and yearned for their destruction-yet unlike Shinya, Okada hadn’t put the “old war” behind him. He’d been willing to cooperate with the Americans against the Grik, and if he’d been able to arrange such cooperation before Amagi was destroyed, he would have. That didn’t mean he was willing to ally himself with the enemies of his emperor. Wounded by Kurokawa in the battle, he’d hidden from the Grik “rescuers” and allowed himself to be taken by the Americans and their allies for the sole purpose of supplying information about their common enemies: the Grik-and Kurokawa. Beyond that, as a Japanese officer and a prisoner of war, he had no other reason to live.
Shinya continued. “Okada says this Regent-Consort Tsalka, and their General Esshk are different from other Grik. They may have taken the lesson of their defeat to heart. He believes if they themselves are not killed for their failure, they will try to preserve as many Japanese as they can to help prepare for… well, what we are preparing for: our next meeting.” He looked at Matt somewhat accusingly. “As Captain Reddy knows, there was a minority faction aboard Amagi already… frustrated with Kurokawa’s command in general, and his association with the Grik in particular.”
Matt nodded at Shinya, accepting blame for not telling him he knew some of Amagi ’s crew were unwilling to aid the Grik. But it hadn’t made any difference in the end, as he’d known it wouldn’t. With Amagi coming for them, they couldn’t pick and choose those aboard her they might kill. Shinya knew that, and he also knew that, by not telling him, the captain had been sparing Shinya’s own conscience. Nevertheless, his point was sound and heartfelt.
Matt cleared his throat and turned to Riggs. “Now, Mr. Riggs, all these grandiose schemes depend on power. What have you got for us?”
“Simple reciprocating steam engines, Skipper, just like we’re planning for the ships, but dedicated to powering generators. Nothing very difficult about building the generators; we still have plenty of copper and there’s more coming in. People here already knew how to make wire, even if it wasn’t for carrying current. It was mostly for structural reinforcement or ornamentation. We’re standardizing most things on one-twenty DC, just like the ship. Nearly everything we have runs off that. We’re also going to have to at least wash out Walker ’s generators when we get them up so we should make new ones as much like hers as we can. We have all the specs, and it’s always nice to have spares! The ship’s generators are little guys, though, twenty-five kilowatts, about the size of a car engine and transmission. We might need bigger stuff eventually. We’ll need some steel, too.”
Matt grimaced. “Plenty of steel in the bay,” he said, referring to Amagi. As soon as Humfra-Dar and Aracca had returned, they’d moored beside the sunken battle cruiser and begun stripping her exposed upper works. Amagi rested in about sixty feet of water, and the eventual plan was to flood down four of the mammoth Homes to build a cofferdam around her. Then they could retrieve the entire ship, piece by piece. Matt didn’t even want to contemplate the stresses involved in holding back sixty feet of water, but the Lemurians assured him their ships could take it. Commander Brad “Spanky” McFarlane, Walker ’s engineering officer, and now chief naval engineer for the Alliance, was convinced they could do it. A lot depended on where Amagi ’s bow had come to rest after breaking away, however. They were fairly certain it was “inside the box,” but there was probably other heavy wreckage scattered on the bottom. If one of the Lemurian Homes flooded down on top of any of it, it might cause serious damage.
“Okay,” resumed Matt, “but that brings up another issue. Acetylene. We removed all the oxygen and acetylene bottles from Walker and Mahan before the… last battle, but with all the repairs we’d made, we’re just about dry. We need more, lots more, to break Amagi, not to mention repairing Walker… if she can be salvaged.”
“Never fear, Captain,” proclaimed Bradford cheerfully. “I may know little about synthetic rubber, but acetylene has been around for a hundred years! Quite simple, really.”
Matt inwardly groaned. What was “quite simple” to Bradford in theory was rarely as easy in practice as he made it sound. “How do we make it?” he asked guardedly.
“Well, acetylene gas is the natural result of combining water with calcium carbide! It can be safely stored in acetone.”
“Okay, where do we get the calcium carbide and acetone?”
“Calcium carbide is made by baking limestone with other easily obtainable ores at extremely high temperatures-I understand an electrical arc furnace is best.”
“An electrical arc furnace?” Matt repeated. He looked at Riggs. “ Big generators.”
“Indeed,” agreed Bradford. “But the result will be abundant calcium carbide, which we can use for other projects as well-desulfurization of iron, for example, once we get around to making our own. Acetone can be made by distilling wood. We have quite a lot of that, but it is a wasteful process. During the last war, it was made with corn to produce vast quantities. Perhaps we can find some local flora with similar properties. We still need ethyl alcohol anyway, to improve the quality of our gasoline, since tetraethyl lead is certainly out of the question for the foreseeable future!”
“Why do we need ‘vast quantities’?” Riggs asked, and Bradford looked at him with astonished eyes.
“Why, if we are ever to make genuine cordite propellants, we must have acetone!”
Matt sighed. “Okay. Letts? Get with Mr. Bradford and Labor and decide what you’re going to need.” He looked back at Riggs. “That leaves communications, and if we’re going to have to cross the whole damn Pacific, or Eastern Sea, to take the young princess home, we’ll need sonar, or some other acoustic mountain fish discourager.”
They’d found active sonar was the best way to deter the gigantic ship-destroying monsters, or mountain fish, that dwelt exclusively in deep water.
“I don’t have anything to tell you on the sonar yet, Skipper, but communications is looking up. We still have all of Walker ’s radio equipment, and, as you know, I’d already built a decent transmitter here after the Japs bombed our other one. We just didn’t have the power to run it. We’ve begun mass production of even better crystal receivers too. Right now, I’m drawing up plans for a simple, powerful, portable spark-gap transmitter based on a surplus Army Air Corps set I picked up when I was a kid. It was a BC-15A, made in 1918 for airplanes, believe it or not. No tubes or anything really complicated. The only problem with it was that it was pretty… broadband… as in, all-band. My folks used to get mad as hell when I’d play with it when they were trying to listen to the radio.”
Matt laughed. “That’s not going to be a problem here. Even if the Japs still have a receiver, we’ll be transmitting everything in code. Good work. I guess that still just leaves us with power-power to make the things that make power, I mean.”