Sewer, Gas and Electric

by Matt Ruff

  Meisterbrau tore through the tugboat’s port-side hull without stopping. There was a shriek of terror and a screech of rending metal from below; the two deckhands ran to the far rail in time to see Meisterbrau burst out the starboard side, the boat’s mangled drive shaft clamped between its jaws like a chew toy. Gutted, the tug sank almost immediately, but to the immense relief of the deckhands, the shark kept going, skirting Governor’s Island to head for the Battery.

  The city skyline was mirrored in the surface of the Bay; reflected upside-down, the Electric Billboard on the south face of the Gant Phoenix looked like this: . As the hands of the big clock above the Staten Island Ferry terminal approached one P.M., the Billboard, aping a mechanical counter, began rolling over to . The men from the tugboat didn’t notice this, though; like Meisterbrau, they were too busy swimming to pay much attention.

  I Know How That Can Be

  Kite leaned across the newsstand counter and leveled her Colt at the man behind the register.

  “I’m dreadfully sorry about this,” she apologized, cocking the hammer, “but my companion’s head is going to explode if he doesn’t get three hundred and nineteen dollars, and I’m afraid we don’t have time to debate the matter.”

  The newsstand attendant, a transplanted southerner, matched her politeness for politeness: “Not a problem, ma’am.” He punched NO SALE; Clayton, exhibiting no courtesy whatsoever, dove on the cash drawer as soon as it was open.

  “You’ll be reimbursed, of course,” Kite said, sounding embarrassed.

  “Well I appreciate that, ma’am,” the attendant said. He glanced down at her gun. “Colt Army Model 1860, am I right?”

  “You have a good eye.”

  He shrugged modestly. “I used to be a collector, back home.”

  “Georgia?” Kite guessed.

  “Alabama,” the attendant said. “Now would your firearm be a reproduction, or—”

  Kite shook her head. “Genuine.”

  “May I ask what you paid for it, ma’am?”

  “I didn’t,” Kite said. “It was a gift from my adopted Uncle.”

  A low whistle. “Nice uncle.”

  “Yes and no.”

  “Relatives.” He nodded. “I know how that can be, ma’am.” He turned his attention to Clayton’s collar. “What kind of explosive are we dealing with? Plastique?”

  “There I couldn’t help you,” Kite said. “Not my forte.”

  Another nod. “Looks like plastique. Do you know when it’s set to go off?”

  “Not precisely.” She looked up at the station clock; it read 12:59. “But soon, I’d say, judging from his urgency.”

  “We may want to step back, just in case . . . and speaking of backs, ma’am, I know I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but there’s an Electric Policeman coming up fast behind you.”

  “Oh?” Kite said. “Is it armed?”

  “It’s got a big steel bar in its hand. Hmm. Never seen one use a club before . . .”

  “Hold this for me,” Kite said, setting her Colt revolver on the counter. She tugged the Browning Hand Cannon from her belt, turned . . . and froze.

  The Electric Policeman—Roscoe 254—was about thirty feet away, passing a brightly lit coffee kiosk. Green neon reflected in its eyes and chased the blue of its uniform; the steel baton in its hand gleamed like a saber. Kite groaned, smelling North Carolina woods from a morning a century and a half gone, seeing a dead face; her stump ached and her finger would not tighten on the trigger. The Policeman came forward, raising its baton, the charging disc in its palm putting out enough voltage to stop the heart of a bear at a single stroke.

  And Clayton Bryce, feeding in the last dollar of his ransom, tore the collar from his throat, spun around, and flung it away with all his strength. It whickered through the air like a Mexican bolo, curling neatly around Roscoe 254’s neck. The Policeman’s eyes seemed to bulge.

  “Lightning Transit’s High Roller to Atlantic City has departed the station,” the P.A. system announced. “The High Roller has departed.”

  One o’clock.

  18

  I am an old man now. . . as I look back on the years which have passed since I first wrote the life-story of the Nautilus, and of its owner, I see no progress in the submarine which makes me hope for its use as a commercial medium. It has been wonderfully improved, I grant you—miraculously improved almost—but the improvements have all tended to one point—its efficacy as a war weapon; and that will be its one use in the future, I believe. I even think that in the distant future the submarine may be the cause of bringing battle to a stoppage altogether, for fleets will become useless, and as other war material continues to improve, war will become impossible.

  —Jules Verne writing in Popular Mechanics, 1904

  I must confess that my imagination . . . refuses to see any sort of submarine doing anything but suffocate its crew and founder at sea.

  —H.G. Wells, Anticipations of the Reactions of Mechanical

  and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought

  City of Women

  Wendy Mankiller’s great-great-great-great-grandfather had served with the Standing Bear Cherokee Platoon of the Confederate Army, but her parents turned their backs on the broken promises of the American South and crossed the sea to England. Wendy grew up in Newcastle. She married a coal miner’s son, attended King’s College, and in 2007 became the first full-blood Cherokee in history to enlist in the Royal Navy. It was only half of a dream come true, for although women’s military career prospects had opened up considerably since the days of the Civil War, the posting she most wanted was still officially closed to her. The possibility of captaining a frigate or a destroyer wasn’t enough for Wendy Mankiller; her true heart’s desire was to go under the water, and not by sinking.

  Five years passed. In 2012 the Irish Republican Army decided to assassinate the British matriarch, for reasons having as much to do with fatigue as politics; six decades of Queen Liz, the Provos felt, were simply enough, and who knew, perhaps the accession of Prince William to the throne would inspire a new attitude towards the question of home rule. But their carefully planned ambush on the royal motorcade failed to come off, thanks to the courageous intervention of Wendy Mankiller, who was in London on extended shore leave and got caught up in the crossfire. Five months pregnant and armed with only a grocery sack full of canned goods, she nevertheless managed to take down four Kalashnikov-wielding terrorists single-handedly; Queen Liz, firing an antique Vickers machine gun out the side window of her stalled limousine, annihilated another half-dozen Irish before the remaining ambushers called it quits and fled.

  “And how shall We reward Our most loyal subject?” asked the Queen, when the skirmish was ended.

  “Let me captain a submarine,” Wendy Mankiller replied. “A big one.”

  “Impossible,” said Commodore Sir Kellogg Northrope Peas of the Office of Naval Standards and Traditions, when told of this request. “In order for Mankiller to command a submarine, she would first have to serve on a submarine; and as there are presently no submarines with female crews, that would imply serving with men, in the most cramped and confined circumstances imaginable, which would lead to a complete failure of discipline and probable instances of moral turpitude, followed by outright mutiny. Also, I don’t like the idea.”

  “Commodore Sir Peas,” the Queen inquired, looking him in the eye, “who is the wealthiest and most powerful woman in the world? Do remind Us.”

  “Now, now, Your Majesty . . .”

  The commodore died mysteriously in his sleep soon after this exchange, but Wendy Mankiller still had to wait several years to receive her reward. Parliament would not finance the construction of a brand-new sub, and the navy refused to feminize any of those already in service—the Admiralty closed ranks and held fast against the thinly veiled threats from Buckingham Palace—so the Queen was forced to pay for it out of her own pocket; selling off spare castles and jewels to raise the necessary cash too
k a while. In the meantime, Wendy Mankiller and a handpicked female crew underwent a rigorous training regimen at the Royal Submarine Academy in Portsmouth.

  HMS City of Women was christened in Gibraltar on February 29,2016. England’s first (and only) Dread Virago-class nuclear attack submarine, it was actually an Anglo-Spanish hybrid, prepared secretly by Andalusian shipwrights at the behest of Queen Liz’s longtime whist partner in the Royal House of Bourbon. City of Women proved herself in combat that very summer, when Wendy Mankiller and her Dread Virago crew sent a boatload of Basque revolutionaries to a watery grave in the Gulf of Cadiz.

  But all of that is another story. It was now November 2, 2023, three months shy of Wendy Mankiller’s eighth anniversary in Her Majesty’s most secret service. City of Women loitered off the U.S. Eastern Seaboard, awaiting orders; the sub had escorted the QE2 Mark 2 on its transatlantic voyage, and would likely accompany it home as well. To avoid encounters with American submarines—whose captains tended to be touchy about territorial incursion—Wendy Mankiller took City of Women into the sea monster zone above the Hudson Canyon. At 1820 hours Greenwich Mean (1:20 P.M. local time), passive sonar picked up the Mitterrand Sierra.

  “Unidentified surface contact bearing one-three-seven,” Gwynhefar Matchless called from the sonar bay.

  “Mechanical or biological?” Wendy Mankiller asked.

  “It’s a ship, right enough,” said Matchless. “I can hear a pod of whales, as well . . . and something else. Hold on.” She fed the various sounds to Bloody Mary Tudor, City of Women’s combat computer. “Bloody Mary says the ship is frog, but it tastes like chicken.”

  “How’s that again?”

  “French. A French anti-submarine platform, Robespierre-class. But there are no Robespierre-class vessels active in the Gallic fleet at present, so unless the Algerians have decided to go fishing for American submarines . . .”

  “It shouldn’t be here.”

  “No. Most especially not alone.”

  “Can you or Bloody Mary use the ship’s signature library to give me a more precise identification? I want to know if it is Algerian, or a rogue.”

  “Sorry, I can’t answer that without getting closer. The signal isn’t clear enough.”

  “What about the ‘something else’ you say you heard?”

  “Can’t give you an answer on that either, Captain. It’s awfully noisy here for what is supposed to be a godforsaken sector of the ocean. Perhaps if we snuck in a few kilometers nearer . . .”

  “Hmm.” Wendy Mankiller considered. “Just how good is the sonar suite on a Robespierre?”

  “That would depend,” Gwynhefar Matchless said. “The ship class is a decade old, but it was designed for easy retrofitting. Her sonar might possibly be state-of-the-art.” She added: “French state-of-the-art.”

  “I see. Helm?”

  “Yes, Captain?”

  “Ten pounds says you can’t halve the distance to the Robespierre without getting caught.”

  The helmswoman laughed. “That’s a poor wager on your part, Captain.” Her name was Dasher MacAlpine, and her great-ancestor Lake MacAlpine had been a famously successful cat burglar. Stealth ran in the family, the MacAlpines liked to say, though it was also true that Lake MacAlpine had ended his days on a gibbet. “Fifty pounds says I can take us right under them without their being any the wiser.”

  “Not that close, thanks,” Wendy Mankiller said. She switched on City of Women’s intercom. “Attention all Viragos, this is the captain speaking. All hands to battle stations; conditions of maximum quiet until I say otherwise. This is not a drill. MacAlpine, take us in.”

  Yabba-Dabba-Doo

  “Approaching first buoy release,” Morris said.

  Together with Philo and Norma Eckland, he viewed the tactical situation on a two-dimensional tabletop plotting screen that had been set up beside the periscope pedestal in the control room. The display centered on the Mitterrand Sierra—represented by a skull-and-crossbones—as it turned in a slow, left-hand circle around the imaginary intersection of 39° 17’ north latitude and 72° 00’ west longitude. The Yabba-Dabba-Doo, represented by an ecology symbol, had just begun its own circle, moving clockwise about three miles farther out from the center. Off to the east, a cluster of stylized whales spouted plumes of foam. And south and southeast, a shifting, sinuous dotted line snaked across the display, phasing in and out uncertainly from moment to moment.

  “Ghost net?” Philo said, of this last.

  Morris nodded. “Ghost net.” A light flashed on a panel above his head. “First buoy release.” He reached up and depressed a switch; from an already open hatch on the Yabba-Dabba-Doo’s missile deck, a yellow buoy swam free. “First buoy away.”

  A small peace sign appeared on the display, marking the buoy’s position. Over the next hour and a half, if everything went as planned, the Yabba-Dabba-Doo would release three more buoys, one to the east, one to the south, and one to the west of the Mitterrand Sierra’s position. Synchronized ballast release would bring all four buoys to the surface simultaneously, and shortly thereafter—again, if everything went as planned—the Mitterrand Sierra would cease to be dangerous. The Yabba-Dabba-Doo would move in, take the ship, and free the lemurs.

  All they had to do was drop the buoys and back off without getting caught.

  “Twenty-seven minutes to second buoy release,” Morris said. His palms were damp with sweat, though he knew better than any of them just how quiet the Yabba-Dabba-Doo really was—quiet enough to outslip even the Mitterrand Sierra’s intelligent sonar suite, for a while. That it was so quiet was largely the result of Morris’s one effort to get in touch with his ethnic roots, two weeks spent at a kibbutz in upstate New York when he was nineteen years old. Morris had been stuck in a thin-walled dorm room adjacent to that of an amateur electric guitarist with a taste for classic heavy metal. When his attempts at a negotiated settlement fell flat—his neighbor lecturing him about Nazi repression of the Jewish artistic impulse—Morris had opted, as usual, for a technological fix: he’d designed and built a sound suppressor powerful enough to turn a hundred-twenty-decibel rendition of “Bang Your Head” into a butterfly fart. A variant of the same quieting system had been installed in the Yabba-Dabba-Doo, which was how they could get away with having hamsters and other pets running around the sub during their pirating expeditions. But today’s operation was different; this was the first time they’d ever gone after a real warship, and even with all the animals safely removed to shore and everybody in the crew tiptoeing around in soft-soled shoes, it was nerve wracking.

  “Why aren’t they pinging for us?” Norma Eckland asked, in a low voice. “That’s more effective than just listening, isn’t it? Especially if you’re not worried about giving away your own position?”

  “They don’t want to spook us,” Morris said. “They want to lure us in where they can be sure of nailing us, and they know that if they start hammering on active sonar while we’re still too far away, we might decide to cut and run and not come back. So they can’t ping until they’re sure we’re close.”

  “But we’re already close,” Norma said. “As close as we’re going to get, right?”

  “Right.”

  “So if they aren’t pinging, that must mean their passive sonar can’t hear us.”

  “Or that it hasn’t heard us,” Morris said. “Yet. Probably.”

  “Then as long as they don’t ping, we know we haven’t been detected.”

  “Well, not necessarily. If they could get a good enough fix on us with the passive sonar, they might not bother with the active. They might just launch a torpedo.”

  “But we’d know if they did that, right? Asta would be able to hear it.”

  “Probably. Unless it was a rocket-propelled torpedo.”

  “A rocket-propelled torpedo?”

  “Launched from the deck of the ship,” Morris said. “It flies through the air on a rocket, splashes into the water near the target, and starts homing. Kind o
f like a forward pass with a warhead attached.”

  “So we wouldn’t hear the rocket taking off from the deck—”

  “No. If we were close enough to hear the rocket, they wouldn’t be firing torpedoes, they’d be dropping depth charges.”

  “But we’re not that close—”

  “No.”

  “—so no depth charges, and even if we couldn’t hear the rocket take off, we’d at least hear the splash when it came down, right? So there’d be some warning, right?”

  “Unless it dropped directly on top of us,” Morris said. “Then we might not hear anything before the explosion. And of course if the explosion were to breach the hull directly outside the control room, we might not even hear—”

  “Forget it,” Norma said. “I withdraw the question. Forget I asked.”

  Mitterrand Sierra

  The Mitterrand Sierra’s combat computer didn’t speak English.

  “What do you mean it doesn’t speak English?” Captain Baker had demanded, upon first being informed.

  “French ship, French systems,” Troubadour Penzias told him. “It’s got Arabic, too, but I don’t.”

  “But you do have French?”

  “Oui.”

  “From where?”

  “My grandmother,” Penzias said, and Captain Baker paused, trying to imagine Penzias with a grandmother. “There is a French-language tutorial in the databanks,” Penzias added. He entered something on a console, and a female voice began to recite: “Répétez après moi:. . . j’attaque, tu attaques, il attaque, nous attaquons, vous attaquez, ils attaquent. . . je détruis, tu détruis, il détruit, nous détruisons, vous détruisez, ils détruisent. . .je—”

  “Turn it off,” Captain Baker ordered.

  It was just one more thing to worry about: Penzias the psychopath could communicate with the ship’s weapons systems, but the captain could not. Once again he questioned his judgment in accepting command of a mercenary vessel, but determined to see the job through regardless, he did what he could to assure order. He confiscated Penzias’s hunting rifle, locking it away in a small-arms cabinet “until I decide there’s something you ought to shoot at.” Penzias surrendered the weapon without argument, which only increased Captain Baker’s wariness; he went back to the arms cabinet and got himself a pistol, which he strapped to his hip.