The Shadows of God - J. Gregory Keyes [52]
“Where is the demon?”
“This way, if you want to see.”
“I do.”
They passed the bulkhead that separated the bridge from the rest of the ship. Behind, there were two decks: an upper, where supplies were stored, and a lower, where the rest of the men were packed in tight—an awful, windowless place.
“Hello, lads,” he said, as he went among them. “Cozy down here.”
“Yes, sir!” they answered.
Near the center of the ship, the lower hold was interrupted by a metal cylinder, a bit too large for Oglethorpe to put his arms around. From that, two heavy shafts stretched out to the sides of the ship, where they slipped through gaskets to turn the wheels outside. On the large cylinder was a small door. MacKay produced a key and opened it.
From inside the cylinder, a giant red eye stared back at him.
“Good God,” he swore. He looked quickly away, but his gaze came inevitably back.
It wasn't an eye, exactly, but a large sphere of some translucent material, inside of which was a red glow with a black center that looked very much like a pupil. He had seen globes very like this powering the Russian airships.
“This turns the shafts, somehow. And keeps us down?”
“No, sir. We use ballast, just as any ship would, except we want to sink, of course, so we have a lot of it. The boat has big bilges, too, and clever pumps the lads work to clear them. They don't work if we go too deep, though—if we do that, we have to drop the solid ballast and replace it later.”
Oglethorpe shook his head. “Clever indeed, except for the reliance on the devil to power it. Why didn't they use steam, I wonder?”
“I reckon you'd see bubbles rising, and then not be so invisible.”
“I'd think the water would take the steam back to its bosom, as a liquid,” Oglethorpe argued. “I think instead these Russians have become as reliant on their pet demons as our planters on their slaves. And so it makes them weak, don't you think?”
“In a way, I suppose. But this ship ain't weak, sir. Far from it.”
“You mean those flame cannons?”
“Oh, there's more,” MacKay said, eyes twinkling. “We've a magazine of bombs that float up if we release them.”
“Why? Oh. You would swim the ship under a man-of-war—”
“And let ‘em float up. Yes, sir, and I'll wager blow a great huge hole right in the bottom.”
“Delightful. And if we encounter another amphibian?”
“The Russian pilots said they had nothing for that. They reckoned they would never meet an amphibian that was an enemy.”
“And yet we will. We certainly will, and we must think of some countermeasure.”
“Well—we could always drop them bombs from above, onto amphibians below.”
“I thought they floated, these bombs?”
“We could take off the air bladders. They'd sure sink then.”
“And drop them how? Through the deck?”
“Ah!” MacKay shook his finger, grinning. “I haven't shown you the other hatch. Here.”
He walked a few feet farther on, knelt at a round, metal screw, much like the one on the top of the ship; and began turning it.
“MacKay!” Oglethorpe protested. “You'll let the water in.”
“No, sir. Not as long as the upper hatch is closed.”
“What on earth do you mean?”
“Here.”
The screw lifted out, and beneath was water. It bobbed there, coming no higher.
“How?”
MacKay shrugged again.
“Don't know, sir, but it works.”
Oglethorpe considered that. “Yes, it does,” he said finally. “But can we trust it? And in any event, if we are positioned to drop mines on them, won't they be positioned to let theirs float up to us?”
“Aye. But they won't know we're the enemy, at least not the first time we do it.”
“Not the first time,” Oglethorpe agreed. “We shall need another weapon or stratagem after that.”
“Well, there are the guns. We've fired ‘em underwater. They work tolerable well, though they churn the water fierce and makes cones instead of clean lines. At short range they ought to work.”
“They can be fired from inside the hatch, then?”
“Aye, though not aimed. We have to point the ship to orient ‘em.”
“Well. That's better than I feared. I wish Franklin could see this. He would invent something, no doubt,