Carnifex

BdL Dos Lindas

Kurita had stationed himself beside the one serviceable forty-millimeter gun on the carrier's stern port quarter. To either side of him, twenty-millimeter cannon and forty-one caliber machine guns churned futily at the oncoming scow. And the forty does no good either. For that matter, the pounding isn't doing my head much good. No help for that, though.

He watched a small and gallant patrol boat, the Trinidad, he thought, trading fire with, then turn and run right in between two patrol boats. Glorious, thought Kurita, In the best naval tradition. Brave boys. Bravo. Banzai.

Kurita watched as the PTF, smoking and clearly hurt, pulled away and began to retreat. No shame in that, my friends, he thought. You must save whatever you can of this fleet. We here are, after all, just dead men now.

No matter for me, of course. I've been dead since I failed my emperor. But it's a shame about the others.

Kurita watched a Finch swoop down to lay a barrage of rockets on the top of the freighter. They seemed to have no effect at all, except to cause a missile to be launched upward at the Finch. Then Kurita remembered something old and sacred. I wonder if . . . but, no, there's no way to suggest it to you.

Kurita looked out and saw a most remarkable thing. The small patrol boat he thought was the Trinidad turned and almost stopped, as about half a dozen men began to assemble on the rear deck.

* * *

"I . . . can't . . . go . . . into the water, skipper. With this blood . . . the sharks will come . . . for me. I can't."

"All right, Santiona," Pedraz agreed.

"You'll need a back up, Chief," Francés said. And that's, rightfully, my place."

Pedraz had intended to make his last ride alone. It was frustrating and infuriating that more than half his never-sufficiently- to-be-damned, mutinous crew wouldn't go along.

"See, it's like this, Chief," Francés explained, with a casual shrug. "That ship is probably loaded with explosives. This wasn't a minor effort, here, after all, so I figure two, maybe three thousand tons. Nobody who gets off has much of a prayer of surviving that, if it goes off. So . . . all the same, I'd rather not jump ship. It wouldn't do any good anyway. Besides, like Santiona said, we put wounded into the water we'll have sharks all over everyone."

But still, Pedraz wanted to save something. He looked at the youngest crewman, and nearly the only one unhurt who could be spared. That youngest was a nice kid named Miguel Quijana. Quijana, like the others, wore helmet, body armor, and over that a life vest.

Pedraz grabbed the seaman by the shoulders and said, "Stay as much on the surface as possible. Watch carefully; when we hit you'll have a few moments between when the first wave of concussion passes under water and the debris starts falling. Remember, the concussion under water will be worse. Don't get under water until you can feel that wave of concussion pass. Then get under fast. Good luck, son."

With that, Pedraz turned the boy around to face the stern and, placing a boot on his rear end, shoved him off into the sea.

"For the rest of you, Battle Stations! Banzai, motherfuckers!"

* * *

Nobody left the boat, Kurita could see, except for one man deliberately booted off, probably by the captain. And then the boat began to move forward, picking up speed at an amazing rate.

Another man might not have understood. Yet Kurita understood perfectly and immediately. Divine wind. Kamikaze.

He tapped the leader of the forty-millimeter crew and said, "Go and warn the other gunners on this side, you and your crew. Get the hell behind cover. Now!"

Then, as soon as that crew had sped off, Kurita drew himself to attention, saluted the Trinidad with his sword, and began, softly and in an old man's reedy voice, to sing Kimigayo—

" . . . Until pebbles

Turn into boulders

Covered with moss."

* * *

Fosa, too, saw Trinidad's death ride, through the cracked windows of the bridge. He, like Kurita, stood to attention and saluted. Though he had his sword, the one that Kurita had given him, saluting with the hand just seemed more . . . personal.

Some members of the bridge crew, following their commander's gaze and understanding what the salute meant, likewise came to attention and rendered the hand salute. They and Fosa held those salutes all the way to when the Trinidad disappeared into the hull of the enemy freighter, and halfway through the incredible, barely sub-nuclear, explosion that followed.