For the next few days, Walker described slow, fuel-efficient circles around Salissa as the carrier-sized Home plowed through the waves at four knots. Small boats plied back and forth between the two ships at mid-morning and mid-afternoon, when the destroyer slowed to operate her whaleboat. Human-made cranes lifted debris into Salissa’s lower decks, greatly relieving her depleted crew’s few able-bodied Lemurians.
GQ sounded twice a day at dawn and sunset, when they were the most vulnerable to an enemy submarine that might see their silhouette before they saw it. There certainly weren’t submarines in these waters, but it represented a sense of normalcy aboard Walker. The rest of the time, she sailed at Condition III, manning half the guns at any given time.
At the moment, Spanky was watching the sweat roll off of Twilight’s shoulders in his firerooms’ hundred-fifteen-degree heat. She ignored his presence, however, as she concentrated on the destroyed number one boiler. Very little of its shattered wreck remained, especially after its cannibalization to revive number two, but that may not matter now. With Matt’s reluctant permission, Twilight had taken some of her precious magical skills to the depths to try to build an entirely new boiler using nothing but the schematics and hardened magic. Only the number four boiler, the farthest from her work, was running, which made Spanky a bit less nervous. Depending on the scale of any mistake, a failure could blow a hole in the bottom of the ship, vaporize everyone in the forward fireroom, and destroy what fuel remained.
These stakes were why the princess had first practiced with the whaleboat, towed behind Walker by a hundred-foot line. She’d succeeded with various parts, including boiler tubes, firebricks, and steel plating, and it was now time to put it all together.
With a flick of her wrist, the first firebrick materialized and coalesced into a solid, followed by a second, third, and fourth. A steel plate, rolled to the right angles, did the same. Tubes, valves, wiring, everything was coming together perfectly. She pulled a blueprint up to her right, floating in the air, and repeatedly glanced back at it every few minutes to confirm her build. The firebricks clicked into place, and the plates settled on top. Tubes and valves found their resting spots and screwed themselves together.
By the time Twilight let her hands fall to her side, the entire engineering department had gathered in the cramped fireroom. Slack-jawed faces filled the airlock and crowded the catwalk above.
“Now, we test it,” she panted, her chest heaving with exhaustion. She weakly pointed into the new boiler and zapped the walls. “Should be stable for a while.”
Spanky rung up Matt on the comm circuit. “Bridge, Engineering. Permission to fire up Number One.”
An unsteady silence, then, “Mr. McFarlane, this is the captain. Permission granted. We’ll be watching from here.”
The engineering officer nodded to the Mice. within seconds, the two boiler wizards had pumped fuel into the combustion chamber, filled the water tank to the proper level, run through all the necessary checks, and were holding a lit torch to the burner. A water tender stood ready to adjust the water level as it heated, and they were ready.
“Bridge, Engineering. Firing up Number One now.”
Isak Reuben inserted the lit torch. With a whirr, and cacophony of flaming noise, and groaning steam lines, the boiler temperature increased.
“Shut down Number Four. I want this one to push the ship.”
A fireman relayed the order to the men working number four. A few minutes later, the noise reduced significantly as Walker used one boiler instead of two. Then it ramped back up, number one straining its limits.
“Six knots, considerable strain,” Spanky noted. “A damn good boiler though, considering that it’s made out of magic.” Answering the call from the Bridge, he continued, “Yes, Captain, she works! There’s quite a bit of strain that I can see right now, but the damn thing works! Ready to answer Bells as needed.”
Ding. He grinned as the Throttleman opened up as fast as he could, pouring steam into the turbines and opening the bunkers. The stern crouched low, generating a roar of delight as the hard-magic boiler kept up with the pace. It throttled to full, came back down, stood some high-speed turns, and powered through the outside waves.
Then Twilight gestured for the Mice to back away. At Spanky’s nod, they did, and she opened the burner. Heat surged out, causing everyone to sweat even more profusely. Her next move, to blast a bit of magic into the boiler, sent the bow rocketing skyward and her falling back to the bulkhead. Gilbert caught her by the shirt just in time while Isak slammed the burner home, and the entire engineering crew glanced around for a change in pants. For a brief two seconds, Walker had jumped from eight knots to five times that, faster than she’d ever gone, and the sudden, unexpected acceleration had caused the ocean to act like like an uphill slip-n-slide. Combined with the destroyer’s smooth round-bottom hull, there was almost nothing to prevent her from applying for an airplane’s role. In fact, for a horrifying moment, Larry Dowden on the auxiliary conn saw the clouds dead ahead, and Matt held onto the bridgewing railing as he realized he was flying.
Thankfully, Walker crashed into the waves again, drenching her forecastle and diving several feet. When she surfaced, water fell from her dripping anchors, and she shook it off like a showering hound. Nobody fell overboard, since the entire deck had been cleared of anyone just in case the boiler did something weird, which was extremely lucky, but Lanier couldn’t believe his eyes when he received the all-clear and saw seawater on the Coke machine of all things.
“Bridge, Engineering,” Spanky shuddered after picking himself back up. “Shutting down Number One and reactivating Number Four. Could the Captain call for a meeting in the wardroom? This is gonna be one hell of a report.”