The deck of the airship was a bloody mess. Six bodies lay where they’d fallen, as though the survivors had lacked the courage to haul them into cover. Av could see where Homer’s rifle had intimidated them somewhat. He’d ignored them his first time aboard with the Krauthead shavetail, but now he took the time to examine them. None of them wore the Black Sun.
The bodies were the least of the signs of battle, however. Evidence of the raking the ship had suffered at the hands of one or more of Kestrel’s fighters showed along the entire quarterdeck in the long, ragged holes in the decking and the soot-stained hatchways that told of belowdecks fires that hadn’t gone out in any hurry. It was a wonder she’d made it this far.
He didn’t quite make it belowdecks. The pungent tang of chemicals and burnt wiring was strong enough to make his head rock back before he’d gotten close to the hatch.
He contemplated the idea that there might yet be somebody hidden down there, waiting for the hubbub outside to die down. They’d accounted for just over sixty pirates between KIA’s and prisoners, but he had no real idea of the complement of a ship of this size and type. Could be anywhere from that sixty-two to over a hundred-fifty. More, even, if she was a troop transport rather than a cargo raider.
So there might still be guys down there, alive or dead. Maybe. But if they were alive, it couldn’t be too awful pleasant down there at the moment and dead they weren’t a problem. Nor was he exactly enthused about the prospect of clearing the belowdecks on his own.
It was a predicament. Left to their own devices, anybody down there might decide to scuttle the ship right here over the stead wall. That would be ugly. Or they might be down there waiting for some idiot to poke his noggin down the hatchway so they could blast it off. If there was even anybody down there. He should have asked that shavetail.... Nah, he’d not have believed any answer the kid gave him and would be in the same spot he was in anyway.
Moving to one of the midships hatchways, he sidled up to it and sniffed. No trace of fire or damage up here. The fires had been contained in the after decks, then. He already knew the fo’c’sle was clear from his previous visit. He wished he knew which areas housed the powder magazines.
He moved to the railing and shouted down into the yard. “Milo!”
“Yo!” Milo called up.
“Send a coupla your bright young lads up here to clear this scow!” he called down.
“Make that four o’ your bright young lads. Any o’ them you think can do that?”
Milo gave it some thought. Militia training had mostly concerned close order drill and marksmanship. Oh, some small unit, open field tactics, but no building clearing, let alone ship clearing. You needed marines for that sort of thing.
“Somebody I could trust to do it right?” he asked.
That was all the answer Av needed. “Never mind! Just send me four guys who can stand around on deck holding rifles without they shoot each other! You got guys can do that, right?”
He wished that Marty or even Dar were here. Even with two of them who had some notion of what needed to be done, the chances of success would be increased by an order of magnitude. Hell, he thought, even—
“Milo!” he called down. “Where’s Entigh?”
Entigh was grumbling as he climbed the ladder. He was angry at being taken from his daughter. He was still angry over the clout Marty had fetched him. And now he was angry at being summoned like some green boot. To top it off, this ladder was hell on his knees.
Av helped Entigh up over the side and onto the deck, helping to steady him as he caught his breath. He noted that the man had lost the Smelly somewhere and replaced it with a couple or three additional large bore revolvers and cartridge belts. He looked like a matinee bandito with his crossed bandoleers all stuffed with cartridges. All he needed was a sombrero and a different accent.
“You know that I haven’t done anything like this in twenty-five years,” Entigh coughed out between gasping breaths as he struggled to let his heart resume its normal pace. He spat on the decking for emphasis.
“But you have done it before,” Av told him. “Which puts you ahead of just about anybody else within eleven hundred miles of here.”
He nodded subtly towards the four militia who were standing uncomfortably around the deck, staring morosely down at the sprawled bodies that they should already be hoisting over the side.
Entigh almost mentioned Marty, but Dar still hadn’t regained consciousness and it wasn’t in him to suggest that the man leave his injured son. Not when those injuries had been incurred on his behalf.
For himself, well... Rolly was already gone and Evie was sleeping and uninjured. And he had done this sort of thing before, away back in the bad old days when he was young and stupid. Back when he’d been Henry Entmann, soldier, sailor, adventurer. Back when he’d been Marty Palin’s mechanic and shadow. Back before he’d become Hendrel Entigh the shopkeeper and shook the dust of mother Earth from his heels forever. More than a few times, in fact.
His breathing was slowing as his heart caught up with his exertions. He sighed and nodded, slicking a pair of heavy revolvers —big old Dante & Coburn .475 double actions he’d retrieved from Pascal’s gun cabinet— out of their holsters. “Alright, Avery,” he said tiredly, trying to remember what it had been like. “Which end?”
“Deck houses first, I think,” Av said. “Doubt there’s anybody in there, but maybe there’s a map or a set of plans somewhere might save us some work.”
If there were, they were in one or the other of the safes they found in what had to be the captain’s sea cabin, the ship’s office, and in the combat operations center. There wasn’t even a fire plan laid out in the pilot house. But there were clues. Clues Av didn’t much care to contemplate just at this moment.
The deck houses and bridges were clear, so they gathered back at one of the fo’c’sle hatches. The easy part was over.
Av called out to the militia to keep an eye on the remaining hatchways and to kill or capture anybody who showed their heads that wasn’t either him or Mr. Entigh.
He motioned Henry to the fo’c’sle hatch. “Anybody down there,” he called down at his best volume. “You’ve got thirty seconds to holler out and give yourselves up! We find you on our own, we shoot on sight!” Then he repeated it in poorly accented German.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
They counted it out, but there was no answer.
“There ya go,” he smiled over to Henry. “Now you can shoot with a clear conscience.”
“You’re so thoughtful,” Henry smiled back insincerely. The old man was worse than his son-in-law.
Snugging the Thompson tight to his hip, Av nodded to Henry and ducked inside, dodging instantly to the far bulkhead and sliding down the ladder rails like a circus clown. He was still scanning the companionway when Henry came up behind him, revolvers leveled down the short corridor.
Katzbalger wasn’t a commercial liner, with its wide companionways and ordered cabins neatly arranged to either side. She was a warship — which was to say a maze of compartments and passageways stuck wherever there was room and need for them. Nor were there any maps posted on the bulkheads or directions labeled.
The only signs painted on the bulkheads were the compartment numbers, and since they only told you where you already were, they were useless for the task at hand. Her crew were expected to know their way around, and strangers weren’t supposed to be wandering around.
Turn and turnabout, they leapfrogged through the short stretches of companionway, bouncing into and through compartments of various sort and description, trying to map the place out in their heads.
Just abaft the fo’c’sle proper, a ladderway led down to a lower deck. Henry sagged against a bulkhead just out of sight of the hole, sweat pouring down his red face. He was too old and too shopkeeper for this sort of thing anymore, and his body wasn’t being fooled by any of his youthful memories. He figured fuzzily that if he got out of this without a heart attack, he’d surely be amazed.
Av nodded and held his position at the blind head of the ladderway, sweeping slowly between it and the dogged fo’c’sle hatch. When Henry nodded, he surged forward, slamming his back against the fo’c’sle bulkhead beside the hatchway, his Thompson trained down the ladderway. Henry moved up and undogged the hatch, keeping clear as he swung it open. They went in hard, Henry first and low, revolvers akimbo, with Av hot on his heels and up high, Thompson to his shoulder.
Like the other compartments they’d searched, it was empty and in good order, though surprising in its makeup and contents. And the compartment number was giving Av an itch. They followed the compartment forward and through to the bow of the ship as Av’s concern grew.
The ship’s hospital, such as it was, was down on deck two. Giving it a more deliberate tossing than Av had earlier, they found body bags. Five of them.
Av peeled them open, one after the other. Large pieces of bodies anyway. Whatever had killed them had torn great, gaping chunks out of them. Like the 37mm of a Lamprey, for instance. No tattoos here, either, at least on the chests of those who still had chests.
By the time they’d cleared all three forward decks, Henry had begun shaking as though with a chill. They’d found no one. The bulkheads separating the forward section of the ship from the aft were all closed and dogged. This had been a tightly run ship.
They entered the lower midships hold from the fo’c’sle end. The going should have been easier that way, since clearing up is so much less strenuous than clearing down.
Unfortunately, the hold was nearly full. Sixteen or seventeen feet high, over seventy long, and thirty wide, the whole, cavernous compartment was stuffed with boxes, crates, and odd shapes. What the hell? Had they already looted the packet before getting jumped? That made no kind of sense.
Av carefully moved into the compartment, edging sideways, Thompson ready. Like the other compartments, it was only dimly lit with emergency lighting, and the shadows were massive — capable of hiding nearly anything. He edged up to the nearest stack of long crates. They were lashed carefully and neatly to the deck, labels and bills of lading aligned as precisely as though it had been a contest.
His face went grim. The bills and the labels were in German, but while the labels only identified the contents as machine guns, the bills claimed that they were Browning heavy machine guns, caliber 12.7mm.
Some few of the Brit vessels used Brownings, though a far greater percentage used Norbertson and Vickers models. The Germans, though, tended towards Mausers and Steyrs for their medium guns, and their heavies were almost exclusively Volkmanns.
Sure, the Volkmann was a shameless copy of the Browning M2, but it was a shameless German copy. You’d never find one labeled as a Browning on a German ship.
He moved to the next stack of crates, slinging his Thompson, almost forgetting that he was down here looking for holdouts.
He ripped the bill of lading from the envelope glued to one of the larger crates from this pile, examining the bill carefully. While it might have taken him awhile to stagger through most of the obtuse print, the words “Sperry Corp.” were plain enough.
He looked around the hold more slowly, fuming. How much materiel was crammed into this hold? And where had it come from?
Halfway in, up hard against the port bulkhead, they found a ladderway going down. Av had sort of expected to find something along these lines somewhere.
Leaving Henry behind to rest and keep watch, he dropped down this final ladderway and into the hanger bay. Like the other compartments, it was empty.
There was a small maintenance bay forward of the main bay doors that looked neat and well stocked, so they’d obviously carried aircraft. The trapezes were currently empty. So they’d launched aircraft and not retrieved them. That was interesting.
He scanned the wall and decided that they could just about rebuild anything they had parts for with that array of tools.
Various warning signs and instructions painted on the forward bulkhead told him that the oil bunker, or one of them at least, was just on the other side. Looked like it was filled from nozzles and pumps in here. Well, that made sense.
Looking aft, he spotted another pumping setup, this one labeled for gasoline. Gasoline limpets, then. He wondered what kind. The trapezes looked like standard Bristol pattern jobs, so they might have been about anything that would fit up inside the hull. And with a bay this big, that meant just about any standard pattern trapeze fighter made.
Off in the corner, a pole descended from the deck above. He sauntered over to it, looking up at an open hatch. Now what had been up there, he wondered to himself. Pilots’ quarters, obviously, but did he remember gear in there or not?
In any case, there was nobody down here but him, so he climbed back up to rejoin Henry.
“Hanger bay,” he told the old man. “Looks like they were rigged for two limpets. Empty.”
Henry nodded tiredly, without bothering to climb up off the crate he’d been sitting on. At this point he wouldn’t have cared if Av had told him he’d found Amelia Earhart’s Electra down there — he just wanted this ordeal to be over.
“Stay here,” Av told him as he moved forward. “I’ll be right back.”
“Take your time,” Henry wheezed. “I’m in no hurry at all.”
Av found the stateroom at the far end of the short hall just forward of the hold hatchway. His first quick glance on the way in had been cursory —solely to determine occupancy rather than to investigate purpose— so he’d missed the significance of the small compartment.
Two bunks, a pair of wardrobes and chiffoniers, a writing desk. Officers’ quarters alright. And they’d been occupied. The bunks were neatly made, and the place had been left in good order, just as had the rest of the ship.
There was a small weapons locker, clearly labeled, up on the aft bulkhead. Empty, door swinging open. Room inside for two handguns, looked like. Plenty of room for extra ammunition, though none was in evidence.
The hatch with the fireman’s pole was tucked all the way back and around a corner, which explained how he’d missed it earlier.
Riffling through the papers in the small desk, he came up empty. No surprise. These guys were unnaturally cautious. The chiffoniers were locked, of course, but they weren’t armored. A few minutes each with the thick blade of his pocket knife had them opening just fine.
He whistled softly at the contents of the first one. Photographs, letters, study materials. A ship’s lay-out with various compartments labeled in a nice, precise script. More data than he could easily assimilate at the moment. Setting the map aside, he stuffed the remaining documents inside his jacket and into a shirt pocket.
The contents of the second chiffonier were just as good. They joined the first bunch and he buttoned the pocket. Then he carefully closed both doors and let himself out, map in his left hand, Thompson in his right.
“Miss me?” he asked Henry when he returned to the hanger bay ladderway.
“It was on my list,” Henry groused, “but I didn’t get around to it.”
It took them more than twenty minutes to finish clearing the hold, and not only because Av kept getting distracted by some new outrage he hadn’t quite been prepared for.
By comparison, number one deck was a cake walk. Well, except for the long climb up to it. They were tempted to move straight back from up here and save themselves the climb back down on the narrow vertical ladder, but the hatch was discolored and warped, as though whatever had happened on the other side of it had caused it to go soft and start to sag.
The two old men looked at one another for a moment in silence before turning as one back to the ladder.