A lucky ship, they called the Ulysses.
Twenty months on the worst run and in the worst waters in the world and never a scratch.... But Tyndall had always known that some time, some place, her luck would run out.
He heard hurried steps clattering up the steel ladder, forced his blurred eyes to focus themselves. He recognised the dark, lean face at once: it was Leading Signalman Davies, from the flag deck.
His face was white, his breathing short and quick.
He opened his mouth to speak, then checked himself, his eyes staring at the handrail.
"Your hand, sir I" He switched his startled gaze from the rail to Tyndall's eyes. "Your hand! You've no gloves on, sir!"
"No?" Tyndall looked down as if faintly astonished he had a hand. "No, I haven't, have I?
Thank you, Davies."
He pulled his hand off the smooth frozen steel, glanced incuriously at the raw, bleeding flesh.
"It doesn't matter.
What is it, boy?"
"The Fighter Direction Room, sir!" Davies's eyes were dark with remembered horror. "The shell exploded in there.
It's, it's just gone, sir.
And the Plot above..."
He stopped short, his jerky voice lost in the crash of the guns of
'A'turret Somehow it seemed strangely unnatural that the main armament still remained effective.
"I've just come from the F.D.R. and the Plot, sir," Davies continued, more calmly now. "They, well, they never had a chance."
"Including Commander Westcliffe?" Dimly, Tyndall realised the futility of clutching at straws.
"I don't know, sir.
It's-it's just bits and pieces in the F.D.R., if you follow me.
But if he was there-----"
"He would be," Tyndall interrupted heavily. "He never left it during Action Stations..."
He stopped abruptly, broken hands clenched involuntarily as the high-pitched scream and impact explosion of H.E. shells blurred into shattering cacophony, appalling in its closeness.
"My God!" Tyndall whispered. "That was close Davies!
What the hell!..."
His voice choked off in an agonised grunt, arms flailing wildly at the empty air, as his back crashed against the deck of the bridge, driving every last ounce of breath from his body.
Wordlessly, convulsively, propelled by desperately thrusting feet and launched by the powerful back-thrust of arms pivoting on the handrails, Davies had just catapulted himself up the last three steps of the ladder, head and shoulders socketing into the Admiral's body with irresistible force. And now Davies, too, was down, stretched his length on the deck, spreadeagled across Tyndall's legs. He lay very still.
Slowly, the cruel breath rasping his tortured lungs, Tyndall surfaced from the black depths of unconsciousness.
Blindly, instinctively he struggled to sit up, but his broken hand collapsed under the weight of his body.
His legs didn't seem to be much help either: they were quite powerless, as if he were paralysed from the waist down.
The fog was gone now, and blinding flashes of colour, red, green and white were coruscating brilliantly across the darkening sky.
Starshells?
Was the enemy using a new type of starshell?
Dimly, with a great effort of will, he realised that there must be some connection between these dazzling flashes and the now excruciating pain behind his forehead.
He reached up the back of his right hand: his eyes were still screwed tightly shut.... Then the realisation faded and was gone.
"Are you all right, sir?
Don't move.
We'll soon have you out of this!" The voice, deep, authoritative, boomed directly above the Admiral's head.
Tyndall shrank back, shook his head in imperceptible despair.
It was Turner who was speaking, and Turner, he knew, was gone.
Was this, then, what it was like to be dead, he wondered dully.
This frightening, confused world of blackness and blinding light at the same time, a dark-bright world of pain and powerless-ness and voices from the past?
Then suddenly, of their own volition almost, his eyelids flickered and were open.
Barely a foot above him were the lean, piratical features of the Commander, who was kneeling anxiously at his side.
"Turner?
Turner?" A questioning hand reached out in tentative hope, clutched gratefully, oblivious to the pain, at the reassuring solidity of the Commander's arm.
"Turner!
It is you!
I thought-----"
"The After Tower, eh?" Turner smiled briefly.