Gods of Pangaea by John C. Wright

Author:John C. Wright [Wright, John C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Theogony Books
Published: 2020-03-31T23:00:00+00:00

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Chapter 19 Ships of the Sixth Men

The gale force wind made the madly rushing Tosspot groan and creak alarmingly as she sped on. The scene of war grew clearer as the Tosspot drove forward, coming out of the storm clouds into the clearer air.

Preston saw an ironclad submersible, sleek and shark-finned, her green and blue hull a handsome surface of rippling scale mail, leap from the sea. Thin, glittering darts shot upward from independently rotating blister-shaped nacelles mounted port and starboard, tiny spears meant to penetrate water. However, this was followed by a barrage never meant for submerged use; a trio of rockets erupted from dorsal launch-tubes. These were not the liquid-fueled Polaris rockets such as Preston knew—they were black powder rocket affairs not much more advanced than the Congreve rockets whose red glare Francis Scott Key beheld above Fort McHenry, but with some simple improvements: combustion chambers and de Laval nozzles, with the exhaust offset to impart spin. The conical heads were packed with a jellied gasoline and phosphorous agent that ignited on impact and stuck where it splashed.

Preston looked on with a sense of immense satisfaction at the sight.

Two disk vehicles were struck. One absorbed the explosion with the layer of solid air shielding it. The aura grew bright red, and the disk fled to a higher altitude. The other was shattered like a clay pigeon by the simple rockets, dropping men, equipment, and debris into the sea, while smaller shapes of Watchers floated upward in the wind.

Other submarines projected only a prow above the water, firing spline-throwing spear guns mounted as bowchasers before twisting and diving back down below, shooting stern-chasers as they retreated. The impacts were slowed and deflected by a half-unseen shield coating the disks, but any disk raising such a shield slowed dramatically and did not return fire.

Closer still, Preston saw more.

Just below the water was a vast armored dome like the back of a sea turtle. It was the same radius as the dreadnought above it, so, for a moment, it looked like a reflection in the sea. Only the tuning-fork shaped muzzles of this mobile half-submerged sea fortress protruded above the waves, shrieking with strange energy projections that struck with the concussive force of a thunderclap, not bullets. These giant sonic-energy guns pounded and pounded at the dreadnought, and the aura shielding the vast ship flickered and wobbled with each blow, and cracks grew in the glassy hull.

And from a superstructure in the center of the dome of the sea base came a ray, thin, hard, opaque, and opalescent. It was the same effect that shielded the dreadnought—the Van der Waals phenomenon that might as well be called a tractor-presser beam. The dreadnought was anchored in place, unable to ascend or flee, and her shields were visibly shrinking in radius.

A flotilla of disks was diving in waves against the sea-fortress, firing spline-guns and ballistae as cover for other disks landing on the dome itself, driving anchoring hooks on lines into the surface.

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