Three 57mm rounds caught her low in the forehull. Punching through her composite skin, the shells exploded in the forward systems compartments.
In death, Gunner’s Mate 1st Class Daniel Sullivan O’Roark and Gunner’s Mate 2nd (Missile) Dwaine Robert Fry performed one final service for their crewmates. Their bodies absorbed the bulk of the shrapnel blast that ripped back into the main bay. More fragmentation tore upward, through the overhead and into the cockpit.
A fourth Union round struck lower, at the leading edge of the hull raft, tearing the forward end of the plenum chamber skirt loose from its mounting frame. The Queen’s supporting air bubble collapsed and she came off pad at fifty knots, plowing and skidding across the sea like a crashing airliner.
Every hand aboard not strapped down in a seat or secured by a monkey harness was first thrown forward against the bulkheads, then deluged by water bursting in under fire hose pressure through the shell holes. Turbine compressors stalled. Power faltered. Chaos commanded.
Up in the cockpit, Amanda felt the concussion of the shell hits and was aware of the jagged shards of metal punching upward through the deck. She heard Steamer Lane yell a warning, then a wordless agonized cry from Snowy Banks. Then they hit.
The hovercraft’s stern kicked upward as the bow dug in. The windscreen exploded back into the cockpit, pushed in by a wall of water. Possibly this latter event saved Amanda Garrett’s life. She hadn’t fastened her safety harness, and as the impact of the crash threw her forward out of the navigator’s chair, she was met by the cushioning blast of the inrushing sea. Caught between two irresistible forces, she was kicked away from consciousness.
But not completely.
A fragile thread remained, linking her to the world. To awareness. To the awareness that she yet lived and there were things that had to be done. The entity that was Amanda Garrett tugged recklessly on that thread, demanding that limbs move, senses record. Demanding that the battle continue.
Survival as a consideration was past. Only the blind, wounded-creature instinct to fight on remained. The will to die with her jaws locked in her foe’s throat.
Hands moved. Plexiglas shards cut. Salt water stung. She crawled, pulling herself back up to the navigator’s station. The wave that had deluged the cockpit drained away into the main hull and the emergency battle lights flickered on. Power. Somewhere there was still power.
Up onto her knees. The panel. The panel was dead. The screens dark.
Lower right pane quadrant. Double row of breaker resets. You know that! You know what to do!
Focusing on it, she demanded that her hand obey. It did, coming up as she fiercely watched. She thrust her palm against the reset switches, driving them back in.
Circuits sparked and sputtered, but responded. Solid state, shock proof, and water sealed, enough key elements remained intact within the multiply redundant systems net for partial function. Automatic battle-damage switches opened, isolating destroyed and shorting components. Relays cycled, seeking and finding functional links.
The panel screens lit off, telling Amanda a tale of catastrophe in their patterns of red and yellow warning prompts, but at least speaking to her.
Beyond the Queen’s battered hull, the battle still raged. Around her lay the dead and wounded. But all that mattered to Amanda at that moment was the joystick in her hands and the glowing square of light marked “Fire Control Systems Access.”
A weapons mount responded to her plea.
***STARBOARD PEDESTAL***
1**2.75 RKT /\ SINGLE FIRE
2**2.75 RKT \/ SINGLE FIRE
The main screen filled with the imaging of its thermographic sights, the spiderweb of the targeting grid coming up on call. Amanda’s hands moved the joystick, both fists clinched around it to suppress the trembling. The pedestal elevated, traversed, seeking the enemy.
Gun Corvette Promise… Navy of the West African Union… Former Nigerian Minesweeper Marabai… Length 167 feet…Armament…
Armament. At the Corvette’s bow and stern, muzzle flashes pulsed as she fired on the other craft of Amanda’s squadron. Trying to kill them as she had killed the Queen.
Rage building within her, Amanda Garrett reached out and wiped her enemies away.
Click… Click… Click… Click… Click.
Her doubled fingers closed convulsively on the trigger. Somehow neither the gunfire nor the sound of the Hydra rockets screaming out of their launching tubes registered on her mind, only the soft clicking of the firing button as it depressed.
Hell walked the decks of the Promise, deliberately, from stern to bow, consuming the gunners at their stations, twisting and smashing the gun mounts, stoking the flames with the stacked ready-use ammunition.
The sighting crosshairs elevated minutely, backtracking. Click… Click… Click… Click…
The side bulkheads of the bridge caved in and damnation swept the Promise’s officers away. Jagged fiery rents opened in the exposed side of the superstructure, letting in the fire and the death.
Down-angle. Stern to bow again. Hold the prime horizontal gauge at the waterline. Click… Click… Click… Click… Click…
In the engine rooms and magazines, hull plates exploded into jagged, white-hot shards, tearing, rending, ricocheting, seeking, leaving behind nothing in their passage but terror and searing pain. But then the sea followed, curling in over the broken sizzling steel and mangled flesh, soothing, cooling, engulfing ship and crew both in its promise of peace.
Click… Click… Click… Click… Click… Click… Click…
The rocket pods were empty. Amanda suddenly realized they had been empty for a long time. And there was a hand, shaking her by the shoulder. And there was a voice.
“Skipper, c’mon, let go. Skipper, can you hear me? It’s over. Let it go!”
Amanda looked away from the targeting screen. Stone Quillain knelt beside her, helmetless, blood and camo paint streaking his face. Gradually the rest of the world seeped back into her awareness.
Beyond the empty frames of the windscreen she saw the Union battle squadron, what remained of it. The gunboats Alliance and Unity, drifting and ablaze from bow to stern. And the corvette, the Promise, the outline of her flame-licked upperworks distorting as she slowly capsized.
The sounds of the night came back as well. The guns were silent, but Amanda heard the turbine howl of the Carondelet and the Manassas as they hurried to the side of their crippled sister and the thudding rotors of the first medevac helicopter in the distance.
Someone wept nearby. Across the cockpit, Steamer Lane cried as he cradled a small, pale, and very still form in his arms, her water-sodden fall of honey-colored hair fanned over his arm, her blood a growing dark stain on his uniform shirt.
Amanda returned her gaze to the navigator’s console and to her hands, still locked around the joystick. “Stone, could you help me here, please?”
She was surprised at how normal her voice sounded.
With clumsy care, Stone helped break the grip of her frozen hands on the controller. Freed, Amanda fell away from the console and back against Quillain’s chest. Her face pressed against the wet, smoke-reeking fabric of his utilities and his arm came around her shoulders. For a long minute they huddled together, not as a man and a woman, but only as two battered and bone-weary animals propping each other up. For the first time since she had come to Africa, Amanda felt cold.