And then the Queen and the Manassas exploded on scene, pouncing into the middle of the swarm, the hammering of their guns becoming a single continuous roar.
The Queen cut a flaming pinwheel arc around her wounded sister, her stern skidding outboard and her weapons spraying death into the night. As the G forces of the wild skid grew, Amanda clung to the grabrail behind the pilot’s seat with her left hand, while with her right she fended off the cascade of searing shell casings raining down from the hatch guns.
“Steamer,” Snowy Banks screamed. “Two of them! Coming across the bow!”
Looking up, Amanda saw a pair of Boghammers cutting directly across the path of the hovercraft. Half a dozen points of flame flickered and danced along the gunwales of the lead boat, the muzzle flashes of machine guns and automatic rifles. In the second craft, the outlines of two Union gunners could be seen, bracing a third upright as he stood in the bow, leveling a Carl Gustav rocket launcher at the cockpit of the Queen. For one indescribable and inescapable moment, Amanda and her crew looked down the barrel of that launcher and waited for death to emerge.
Then, from overhead, the tracer streams of Chief Tehoa’s guns slashed and thrust like a saber blade, the storm of heavy slugs smashing and crumpling the living weapons mount. The barrel of the Carl Gustav sank toward the Boghammer’s deck and the fist of its gunner clinched convulsively around the launcher’s handgrip as death claimed him. The rest of the Bog’s crew followed an instant later. The 84mm antitank round slammed into the ammunition cases lining the belly of the gunboat.
The Boghammer vanished in a blue-white fireball. The Queen’s windscreen shattered and blew inward, bullets and shrapnel ripping through the cockpit, shorting systems and exploding telepanels. Holding its course, the surviving Union gunboat turned inside the arc being cut by the seafighter, its weapons angling back and hosing the hovercraft.
Steamer Lane tore off his night-vision visor, its lenses smeared and blinded by the blood streaming from his lacerated forehead. He had only one weapon at his immediate disposal, and he didn’t hesitate to use it. Slamming the drive throttles against their stops, he locked the air rudder and puff-port controller hard over, his turn tightening into a pursuit curve.
The crew of the Union gunboat saw the nose of the seafighter come about and aim with deadly deliberation, kerosene-fired turbines shrieking. Suddenly enormous, the bow of the hovercraft loomed above the Boghammer, its broad painted shark’s mouth snarling in outrage and triumph.
The Queen’s foreskirt rode up and over their fragile shell and the sea monster ate them alive.
Amanda felt the thud and scrape of splintering Fiberglas under the Queen’s plenum chamber and heard Steamer’s short, fierce cry of victory over the intercom. “Yeah! Busted your ass!”
“Report!” she yelled into her headset over the slipstream, now howling unchecked through the cockpit. “Anyone hit? Systems status?”
“M’okay,” Snowy wheezed, pulling herself upright in her seat. “Hit on the vest. Wind knocked… out of me. I’m okay!”
Steamer glanced across at his copilot, then dragged his attention back to his console. “Primary controls functional. Console readouts are down.”
“Are we still battle worthy?” Amanda demanded.
The hover commander swiped another handful of blood out of his eyes. “We’re good!”
“Steamer… You’re bleeding!”
“Fuck that, Snow! Reboot the screens! Get me some instrumentation!”
“On it!” The young woman began working intently over the ruins of the control board.
The panels at the navigator’s station were still operational. Amanda turned to the tactical display, seeking to regain track of the battle, only to find that it was over.
Only six target hacks remained in the battle area: the three blue friendlies, clustered tightly together, two circling warily about the inert third; her own craft; and the Manassas, guarding the crippled Carondelet.
To the westward, three red hostiles fled the engagement grounds — the three survivors of the Boghammer squadron. The remainder of the Union flotilla had been converted into a slowly widening debris field: scattered bits of drifting wreckage, puddles of flickering gasoline on the night sea, floating bodies, some still feebly struggling.
The convoy of oil carriers had disappeared. During the sacrifice of the gunboat force they had vanished into the network of small lagoons and salt swamps bordering this stretch of the coast.
“Frenchman, this is Royalty,” she called into her lip mike. “What is your status?”
“This is Frenchman,” Lieutenant Clark, the Carondelet’s commander, replied promptly. “Situation under control. Starboard power room knocked out by AT rocket. Two crewmen wounded. Fires are out and medevac is inbound. No loss of flotation. Weapons and sensors operational. Vessel is underway in swimmer mode.”
“Roger that. Can you operate as a search-and-rescue platform?”
“Affirmative, Royalty.”
“Very well. Frenchman and Rebel, initiate combat-zone search and rescue.” She shifted her address to the two Patrol Craft lurking just over the horizon. ”Santana and Sirocco, this is Little Pig Lead. Move into the engagement area and assist Carondelet and Manassas. We have a lot of men in the water.”
The string of acknowledgments sounded in her headset. Twisting in her seat, she yelled forward to the control stations. “Steamer, come right to two seven zero! All engines ahead full! We’ve still got three Bogs out there, and Belewa isn’t going to get them back!”
The Queen of the West flared about and the gale of air blasting in through the shattered windshields grew to hurricane proportion. Snowy Banks fitted her own night-vision visor over Steamer’s face, then crouched low out of the slipstream beside the control pedestal, her eyes narrowed to slits against the slipstream.
Night-vision systems were almost redundant. In the cold light of the full moon, the wakes of the fleeing Boghammers could be made out with the naked eye, silver thread laced across the black sheening silk of the sea. And if the Union gunboats could be seen from the Queen’s cockpit, so she must be visible from theirs, a shadowy, mist-shrouded revenant closing in behind them.
“Fire Control, let’s finish this,” Amanda directed grimly. “Load Hellfires.”
Aft, behind the cockpit, the two weapons pedestals whipped vertical to loading mode. Automatic handling arms sliced downward, locking on and lifting stumpy multifinned projectiles onto the launching rails, laser-guided AGM-114 antitank missiles, navalized into small-craft killers.
“Hot birds and green boards,” Danno O’Roark announced crisply. “Systems are hot. Designators are up. Port-side pedestal designating red.”
A set of glowing crimson crosshairs rezzed into existence on the tactical screen, sweeping across to center on one of the surviving gunboats.
“Starboard designating green,” Fryguy Fry added calmly, his sight snapping up and hunting.
“Cockpit, designating yellow.” Amanda’s hands played across her own keyboard, executing the systems call-ups. “I have the mast sight designator. I am assuming number-two round, starboard.”
The image from the masthead video camera filled her screen, a cartwheel sight centering in it. The northernmost of the gunboats had yet to be designated, and she claimed it for her own. Guiding the camera with her joystick, she ran the death pip up the wake until she reached the dark arrowhead mass at its end. Her thumb rocked forward on the trackball atop the controller and the image zoomed in, the mass expanding until it became recognizable as a boat and crew. Her thumb pressed down and a needle beam from the infrared laser atop the snub mast lanced out, painting the target.