Specs Peterson snorted. "What do you think?"

Martin inspected him. He was even filthier than he had been before the dive into the shelter, and had unkempt stubble sprouting on cheeks and chin. Frowning sadly, Martin said, "So why the hell haven't you shaved any time lately?"

"I was going to this morning, Sarge, honest, but the Rebs started shelling us." Behind his steel-rimmed spectacles, Peterson raised an eyebrow. "You may have noticed."

"Oh, yeah." Martin snapped his fingers. "You know, I knew something was goin' on then, but I couldn't quite remember what." Paul Andersen threw a clod of dirt at him. In the trenches, though, it passed for wit.

The Dakota steamed out of Pearl Harbor. Standing on deck, Sam Carsten said, "You know somethin', Vic? This ship puts me in mind of the old joke about the three-legged dog. The wonder is, she goes at all."

"Yeah, well, I ain't gonna argue with you, you know what I'm saying?" Vic Crosetti answered, scratching his hairy arm. "I'll tell you something else, too. She's as ugly as a three-legged dog right now."

"Yeah," Sam agreed, mournful for a couple of reasons. For one thing, if he'd scratched himself half as hard as Crosetti was doing, he'd have drawn blood from his poor, sunburned hide. For another, the Dakota really was ugly these days. "What she's really like is a guy who took one in the trenches and he ends up with a steel plate in his head."

"Got enough steel plates to eat a whole steel dinner off of," Crosetti said, whereupon Carsten made as if to pick him up and fling him over the rail.

Bad pun aside, though, the description was accurate enough. Not all the damage the Dakota had taken in the Battle of the Three Navies was repaired; parties were still patching, strengthening, refurbishing. Some of the damage wouldn't be fixed, probably, till the war was over. But the battleship could make twenty knots and fight, and the Japanese and the British hadn't disappeared off the face of the earth. Ugly or not, jury-rigged or not, she was going back out on patrol.

"I just hope the steering holds us," Carsten said.

Vic Crosseti's bushy eyebrows went up and down. "Why the hell do you want that? Didn't you think it was fun, charging the whole damn British fleet all by ourselves? Nobody else had the balls to try anything like that. The other guys, they stayed in line like good little boys and girls. You want to stand out from the crowd, is what you want to do."

"When they shoot you if you stand out, it's not as bully as it would be otherwise," Carsten said. Crosetti laughed. Then he got busy in a hurry, swiping a rag against the nearest stretch of painted metal. Sam imitated him without conscious thought. If somebody near you started working for no obvious reason, he'd spotted an officer you hadn't.

Commander Grady-the fat stripe where a thin one had been before got sewn onto his cuff after the Battle of the Three Navies-said, "Never mind the playacting, Carsten." He sounded amused; as sailors knew the nasty ways in which officers' minds worked, so officers had some clues about how sailors operated. Grady went on, "You come with me. I've got some real work for you."

"Aye aye, sir," Sam answered. As he followed the commander of the starboard secondary armament, he knew without turning his head when Vic Crosetti would put down the rag and light himself a smoke. He also knew the little dago would be grinning like a monkey, because Sam had had to go do something real while he got to stand around a little longer.

Grady said, "We're trying to get the number-four sponson into good enough shape so we can fire the gun if we have to."

"Yes, sir," Carsten said doubtfully. The number-four sponson had taken a hit from somebody's secondary armament, whether British or Japanese nobody knew-nobody had been taking notes, and the shell hadn't left a carte de visite: except for smashing the sponson to hell and gone, that is. Nobody had come out of there alive. Thinking about it gave Sam the horrors. It could have been the number-one sponson, easy as not.

"I think they can do it," Grady said. "In fact, they damn near have done it. But the gun mount still isn't quite right, and there's not a lot of room in there, what with all the other repairs they've had to make. I want somebody familiar with a sponson as it's supposed to be to pitch in with some good advice for them."

"Yes, sir," Sam said again. "Uh, sir, so you know, 'Cap'n' Kidde has forgotten more about sponsons than I'll ever know."

"He's still helping with the rebuilding of the number-two on the port side. That got it worse than this one. He suggested you for the duty."

"All right, sir," Carsten answered. He didn't know whether Kidde was mad at him and wanted to keep him hopping or whether the gunner's mate was putting him in a spot where he could shine for the higher-ups. A little of both, maybe: that was "Cap'n" Kidde's way. If he did this right, he'd look good where looking good could really help him. If he fouled up, he'd pay for it.

He ducked through the hatchway. Commander Grady didn't follow; he had other fish to fry. Even the bulkhead around the hatchway showed the damage the sponson had taken. It was a mass of patches and welds, none of them smoothed down or painted over. There might be time for that later. There hadn't been time for it yet.

Inside, the sponson was even more crowded than it had been when the gun crew filled it during the Battle of the Three Navies. A bunch of men in dungarees turned their heads to stare at Sam. One of them said, "You must be the guy Commander Grady was talking about."

"Yeah, I'm Sam Carsten, loader on the number-one gun, this side." Carsten pointed toward the bow.

"Good." The fellow in dungarees nodded. "Then you know how one of these damn things goes when it's working right." He jabbed a thumb at his own chest. "Pleased to meetcha, Sam, by the way. I'm Lou Stein. These here lugs are Dave and Mordecai and Bismarck and Steve and Cal and Frank and Herman."

Sam spent the next couple of minutes shaking hands and wondering how the hell he was going to keep the repair crew straight in his head. The only one he knew he wouldn't forget was Mordecai, who'd lost a couple of fingers in some kind of accident and whose handshake was strange because of it. He couldn't have had any trouble with tools, though, or they wouldn't have let him do his job.

At the same time as Sam was sizing up the repair crew, he was also sizing up the sponson. It was even more cramped than it would have been otherwise, because they'd welded steel plates inside the inner curve to cover up the damage the entering shell had done. They hadn't covered quite all of it. Above the new steel, a dark, reddish brown stain still marked the inside of the armor plate. Carsten tried not to look at it. It might easily have come from a loader.

He shook himself. Got to get down to business, he thought. "Commander Grady said you were having some kind of trouble in here-I mean, besides all this stuff." He waved at the roughly welded steel slabs. He wouldn't have wanted to serve this gun-might as well put toilet paper between him and enemy gunfire as that thin metal. But then again, the armor plate over it didn't look to have done the best job of protecting the sailors in here, either.

Mordecai said, "Damn gun won't traverse the way it's supposed to. It gets all herky-jerky about a third of the way through the arc. Here, I'll show you."

He demonstrated. Sure as hell, there was one point at which the five-inch gun would not hold a target steadily. "That's pretty peculiar, all right," Carsten agreed. "Acts like there's a kink in the hydraulic line some kind of way, don't it?"

"That's what we figured, too," Lou Stein said. "But if there is, we sure as hell ain't been able to find it. Those things are armored, after all; they shouldn't kink."