Distant Thunders by Taylor Anderson

Homes to build a cofferdam around her. Then they could retrieve the entire ship, piece by piece. Matt didn’t even want to contemplate the stresses involved in holding back sixty feet of water, but the Lemurians assured him their ships could take it. Commander Brad “Spanky” McFarlane, Walker ’s engineering officer, and now chief naval engineer for the Alliance, was convinced they could do it. A lot depended on where Amagi ’s bow had come to rest after breaking away, however. They were fairly certain it was “inside the box,” but there was probably other heavy wreckage scattered on the bottom. If one of the Lemurian Homes flooded down on top of any of it, it might cause serious damage.
    “Okay,” resumed Matt, “but that brings up another issue. Acetylene. We removed all the oxygen and acetylene bottles from Walker and Mahan before the . . . last battle, but with all the repairs we’d made, we’re just about dry. We need more, lots more, to break Amagi , not to mention repairing Walker . . . if she can be salvaged.”
    “Never fear, Captain,” proclaimed Bradford cheerfully. “I may know little about synthetic rubber, but acetylene has been around for a hundred years! Quite simple, really.”
    Matt inwardly groaned. What was “quite simple” to Bradford in theory was rarely as easy in practice as he made it sound. “How do we make it?” he asked guardedly.
    “Well, acetylene gas is the natural result of combining water with calcium carbide! It can be safely stored in acetone.”
    “Okay, where do we get the calcium carbide and acetone?”
    “Calcium carbide is made by baking limestone with other easily obtainable ores at extremely high temperatures—I understand an electrical arc furnace is best.”
    “An electrical arc furnace?” Matt repeated. He looked at Riggs. “ Big generators.”
    “Indeed,” agreed Bradford. “But the result will be abundant calcium carbide, which we can use for other projects as well—desulfurization of iron, for example, once we get around to making our own. Acetone can be made by distilling wood. We have quite a lot of that, but it is a wasteful process. During the last war, it was made with corn to produce vast quantities. Perhaps we can find some local flora with similar properties. We still need ethyl alcohol anyway, to improve the quality of our gasoline, since tetraethyl lead is certainly out of the question for the foreseeable future!”
    “Why do we need ‘vast quantities’?” Riggs asked, and Bradford looked at him with astonished eyes.
    “Why, if we are ever to make genuine cordite propellants, we must have acetone!”
    Matt sighed. “Okay. Letts? Get with Mr. Bradford and Labor and decide what you’re going to need.” He looked back at Riggs. “That leaves communications, and if we’re going to have to cross the whole damn Pacific, or Eastern Sea, to take the young princess home, we’ll need sonar, or some other acoustic mountain fish discourager.”
    They’d found active sonar was the best way to deter the gigantic ship-destroying monsters, or mountain fish, that dwelt exclusively in deep water.
    “I don’t have anything to tell you on the sonar yet, Skipper, but communications is looking up. We still have all of Walker ’s radio equipment, and, as you know, I’d already built a decent transmitter here after the Japs bombed our other one. We just didn’t have the power to run it. We’ve begun mass production of even better crystal receivers too. Right now, I’m drawing up plans for a simple, powerful, portable spark-gap transmitter based on a surplus Army Air Corps set I picked up when I was a kid. It was a BC-15A, made in 1918 for airplanes, believe it or not. No tubes or anything really complicated. The only problem with it was that it was pretty . . . broadband . . . as in, all-band. My folks used to get mad as hell when I’d play with it when they were trying to listen to the radio.”
    Matt laughed. “That’s not going to be a