Sewer, Gas and Electric

by Matt Ruff

  The munitions wranglers, meanwhile, set about arming the Mitterrand Sierra. Once the ship was clear of the mainland and the U.S. Coast Guard’s patrol zones, weapons were brought up from stowage and assembled on the deck: in the bow, a Savage Candle torpedo-rocket launcher; port and starboard, six Automatic .50-caliber machine guns, three on each side; in the stern, a pair of depth-charge racks and a swivel-mounted SAM missile launcher to knock down any Flying Zodiacs or model helicopters that might threaten the Sierra. Sayles and Sutter worked through the night from Wednesday to Thursday; White Negroes did the heavy lifting. On Thursday morning, about the same time Lexa Thatcher and Ellen Leeuwenhoek were entering the parking lot at the Fonda Blimp Drome, they brought up the captive lemurs’ heated habitat, raising it on fixed stanchions above the Sierra’s vacant helipad, high enough to be seen by a submarine periscope.

  Ready for war, the ship proceeded to the rendezvous point, and waited.

  Captain Baker sat in the command chair in the combat information center, a darkened room one level below the bridge where the ship’s sensors and weapons controls were centralized. A White Negro brought sandwiches and coffee; Captain Baker said no to the food and yes to the caffeine. He drank it too quickly and burned his tongue.

  “They’re here,” Troubadour Penzias said.

  Waving a hand in front of his mouth, Captain Baker leaned forward to check his tactical monitor. He could see a whale pod and a ghost net, but no submarine. “Where? Is there a new contact I’m not getting yet?”

  “No new contact,” Penzias said. “Just a hunch.”

  The captain sat back. “They can’t be too close yet. Passive would have picked up something.”

  “Maybe.” The lenses of Penzias’s VISION Rig whirred and focused. “Maybe they’re even quieter than we expected.”

  “You want to go active? If we trust Vanna Domingo’s last radio transmission, all we need is one solid ping off their hull and they’re ours. They won’t be able to hide, and they can’t outrun us . . .”

  “We don’t know they can’t outrun us. And they may have checked their hull for surprise packages since yesterday.” Penzias sucked reflectively on a squeeze bottle of food coloring. Red liquid flecked the corner of his mouth. “No, I don’t want to go active yet. But I do want to rattle them. Force them to make a move before they’re ready, maybe . . .”

  “How?”

  Penzias offered a suggestion.

  “You’re a sick bastard,” Captain Baker said.

  “It’ll work, though,” Penzias replied. “They’ll have no choice but to react. If we make the torpedo run long enough, they may even try to throw themselves in front of it.”

  “And if they don’t?”

  Penzias shrugged. “Then we waste a torpedo. We’ve got plenty to spare. What do you say, Captain?”

  “Sick bastard . . .”

  “Yes, very sick bastard. Do I have permission to fire? Or would you rather just sit and wait until they’re ready to make us react?”

  “Damn it,” Captain Baker said. “All right. Do it.”

  “Done,” said Penzias. “Combat!”

  “Prêt,” the computer said.

  “Parez à lancer une torpille Chandelle Sauvage sur les biologiques . . .”

  City of Women

  “Surface contact now bearing one-three-six, at a rough range estimate of twelve to fourteen kilometers,” Gwynhefar Matchless said. “According to Bloody Mary, the contact’s acoustic signature matches that of a Robespierre decommissioned by the French in 2021 and not currently listed as active in any known fleet.”

  “A rogue, then,” Wendy Mankiller said.

  “Seems so, Captain. Additional contact now positively identified as a castoff drift net, stretched out south and southeast of the Robespierre’s position.”

  Mankiller nodded. “We’ll be sure and steer clear of that. Is the Robespierre still circling?”

  “Yes. Fairly tight circle, too. Must be waiting for something . . . or hunting it.”

  “Should we move away now, Captain?” Dasher MacAlpine asked.

  Wendy Mankiller was thinking of the strange radio message she’d gotten from the Queen last night. “No,” she said. “Ease us in closer.”

  Yabba-Dabba-Doo

  “Second buoy away,” Morris said. “What’s wrong with your face, Philo?”

  “My face?” Philo said.

  “It’s kind of hard to see in this light, but it’s got. . . spots. Your arms, too.”

  “Oh God,” Norma Eckland said. “Not spots. Pox. Chicken pox.”

  “Chicken pox!” Philo looked down at his arms. “No wonder I don’t feel well. I thought it was just nerves . . .”

  Norma edged away from him. “I’ve never had chicken pox,” she said.

  “Torpedo drop off the port beam!” Asta Wills called from the sonar bay. “Torpedo bearing zero-eight-seven, range five thousand yards!”

  “Looks like they heard us,” Morris said. “They’re kind of off the mark, though . . .”

  “Osman!” commanded Philo. “Take us—”

  “Wait a minute!” Asta called again. “No one panic yet, I don’t think it’s aimed at us. Torpedo is headed straight away east, towards—”

  “East?” Morris said.

  “Bastards!” Asta suddenly exclaimed. “Those fucking bastards!”

  The torpedo was represented by a simple arrow on the tactical display; it was pointed at the whales.

  “Oh no,” said Philo.

  “Hold on, hold on, hold on,” Morris said, turning to face another computer screen. “Asta, I need sonar data on console two!”

  “You’ve got it . . .” The screen lit and began to flicker with rapidly accumulating information. “Torpedo’s speed is thirty-six knots, with forty-two hundred yards to go to the nearest target. . .”

  Morris nodded. “About three and a half minutes. Makes sense. They want to goad us into action before we’re ready, so they dropped way short of the target and set the torpedo to run slow . . .”

  “Thirty-six knots is slow?” Norma said.

  “Oh sure. The British have a torpedo now that can do a hundred plus. Or at least that’s what it can do in the North Sea, where they developed it. In warmer waters—”

  “What about this torpedo, Morris?” Philo interrupted him.

  “Savage Candle,” Morris read from his screen. “Standard French antisubmarine standoff weapon—French-and-Israeli, actually, but that’s another long story . . .”

  “Can it kill a whale?”

  “Sure, if it explodes. Like fishing with dynamite. Hydrostatic shock could turn the whole pod into dogfood . . .”

  “Morris!” gasped Norma.

  “If it explodes, I said. But. . . .” A lengthy description of the Chandelle Sauvage had scrolled up on his screen; he examined the fine print and seemed pleased with what he found. “Yeah. That’s what I thought.” He sneered at the skull-and-crossbones on the tactical display. “Shmucks!”

  “What?” Philo said.

  “Watch,” said Morris.

  “Shouldn’t we do something?” Norma asked.

  “No need. Watch.”

  They watched; the arrow closed the gap between itself and the whales, looking more like a harpoon as it neared its mark. Asta called off time and distance until the arrow intersected the first whale icon . . . and passed through it.

  “Huh,” said Philo. The arrow whirled around, darted towards another whale, and passed through it as well. And through a third. Philo looked up at Morris.

  “Built-in safety device,” Morris explained. “During the Gabon Oilfield Action of ’18, the French Navy had a problem with friendly-fire casualties.”

  “They blew up their own submarines?”

  “They blew up two billion francs’ worth of underwater drilling equipment. The French minister of fossil resources was so upset he choked to death on a snail. After the funeral the secretary of the navy decided to talk to Israel about copying the warhead from their
Solomon torpedo; just before it detonates it double-checks the data from its homing sonar and other sensors to make sure it hasn’t been fired at an inappropriate target. . .”

  “But a whale’s not a drilling rig,” Philo said.

  “No, but it’s not a submarine or a ship, either,” said Morris. Viewing the tactical display with amusement, he added: “That torpedo must be pretty confused right now. The target moves like a sub, kind of, but it’s made out of blubber.”

  “Blubber,” Norma said. “Whale oil.”

  Morris nodded. “Not quite a fossil fuel, but still. . .”

  “So it can’t hurt the whales?”

  “Well, I suppose it might still land a hell of a bruise, if it bumped one at thirty-six knots. But it’s not allowed to explode; that would be contrary to the national interests of the Sixth Republic.”

  On the tactical display, the arrow winked out as the Savage Candle’s fuel supply was exhausted. The whales swam on.

  “Shmucks,” Morris repeated. “Third buoy release in twenty-one minutes . . .”

  Mitterrand Sierra

  “Jack of all weapons systems, huh?” Captain Baker said.

  Penzias seethed quietly at his station. “That was intentional,” he said.

  “Sure it was. You had a chance to kill something warm-blooded, and you passed it up. Sure.”

  “La torpille est fini,” the computer said.

  Yabba-Dabba-Doo

  The lovers lay curled beneath a space blanket in Escape Pod C, just aft of the galley. Twenty-Nine Words for Snow was deep asleep, the warmth of the blanket and a pleasant soreness in his muscles inspiring dreams of a chase across the tundra, herds of caribou and musk-ox fleeing before the Mighty Hunter. Seraphina only dozed, her hand traveling lazily up and down Twenty-Nine Words’s bare thigh; her tongue darted out behind Twenty-Nine Words’s ear, bending his dream down a different track.

  The sound of the escape-pod hatch opening brought her fully awake.

  “This is not safe behavior,” a voice said.

  Seraphina lifted her head. It took a moment to locate the speaker, who was only a foot tall. “BRER Beaver!”

  He waved an empty condom wrapper accusingly at her. “Do you know the failure rate for these things?”

  “BRER Beaver!” Raising up on her elbows now. “You’re supposed to be broken!”

  “I’ve been repaired. And none too soon, it seems.” He used his tail to flip up a corner of the space blanket. “Are you naked under there?”

  Seraphina tried to sit up. She got tangled in the blanket, and her flailing arm struck a panel with buttons; the pod hatch swung closed again.

  “No,” Twenty-Nine Words said, and burst out giggling. “No, not the antlers . . .”

  “Really,” BRER Beaver said, with a sniff. “What if it had been your father who found you like this? Did you give any thought to his feelings?”

  Seraphina steadied herself and started punching buttons deliberately.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m kicking you out of here,” Seraphina said.

  “That’s not the sequence that reopens the hatch,” BRER Beaver said. “Stop. Don’t—”

  A sign came on above the panel, announcing, JETTISON TANKS PRIMED; to Seraphina, of course, it was just meaningless squiggles.

  She punched another button.

  City of Women

  “New contact,” Gwynhefar Matchless said. “Disturbance in the water, bearing one-four-nine.”

  “What kind of disturbance?”

  “Some type of compressed-air blow, Captain. Sounds a little like a torpedo launch, but bigger . . .”

  Yabba-Dabba-Doo

  “Four minutes to third buoy release,” Morris said. A tremor ran through the sub; a buzzer sounded.

  “What was that?” asked Philo.

  Morris consulted a status panel. “Somebody just jettisoned one of the escape pods,” he said. His eyes narrowed. “Pod C. Down by the engine room . . .”

  “They wouldn’t,” said Norma. “Would they?”

  “We’re in trouble,” Morris said.

  Mitterrand Sierra

  “. . . relèvement un-six-sept. C’est près.”

  “Gotcha!” Penzias said.

  “What is it?” Captain Baker said.

  “Found them. . . .” Without waiting for the captain’s order, Penzias powered up the Sierra’s active sonar and commenced pinging; the first wave of high-energy sound reached the Yabba-Dabba-Doo’s hull just seconds later.

  Vanna Domingo’s fake polka dot cried out in answer.

  City of Women

  “The Robespierre has found itself a target,” Gwynhefar Matchless said. Her voice grew puzzled: “The new contact is chirping, Captain.”

  “Chirping?” Wendy Mankiller said.

  Yabba-Dabba-Doo

  Asta Wills piped the sound into the control room. Though oddly out of context underwater, it was a sound that any sleep-deprived New Yorker would recognize instantly.

  “A car alarm,” Philo said. “How did a car alarm get on the hull?”

  “Must’ve happened while we were leaving the dock,” Morris guessed. “Or maybe in the harbor, before we dove . . . shit! I should have thought to check!”

  “Osman!” Philo shouted. “Get us out of here!”

  “Istanbul?”

  “Away! Fast!” He spun the annunciator to Full Speed Ahead.

  “Running’s not much use,” Morris said, trying to think. “Not with that car alarm giving away our location.”

  “Do you have some gadget we could use to disable it?” Philo asked.

  “You mean like a Mechanical Crab to crawl out and tear it loose from the hull?”

  “Yes!”

  “No,” Morris said. “I haven’t got anything like that. Now if I had a few hours—”

  “Mitterrand Sierra is coming about and flooding torpedo tubes!” Asta Wills called out. “A lot of torpedo tubes . . .”

  Mitterrand Sierra

  “J’ai une solution de tir pour le sous-marin.”

  “Parez à lancer des Piranhas!”

  Najime brought the Mitterrand Sierra around until the ship’s bow was pointed in the direction of the fleeing submarine. Then, in accordance with Troubadour Penzias’s instructions, she cut back on the throttle, slowing to five knots. Tagore called down to the combat information center: “We are in position.”

  “Paré à lancer,” the combat computer said. “Tubes pleins.”

  “Now,” Penzias muttered, under his breath. “Now I’ll show you a secret weapon, green eyes. . . . Ouvrez les portes extérieures!”

  Below the waterline, to either side of the bow, broad keel plates slid back, unmasking row after row of torpedo tubes. The tube openings were uncommonly narrow, but there were an uncommonly large number of them: seventy-two to the left of the bow and seventy-two to the right of the bow. One hundred forty-four in all.

  “Portes extérieures ouvertes,” the computer said. “Torpilles armées.”

  Penzias bared his teeth. “Feu!”

  Yabba-Dabba-Doo

  “High-speed screws in the water!” Asta Wills said. “Sierra has launched torpedoes at us.” There was a pause. “A gross of torpedoes.”

  “How many?” Norma Eckland said.

  “A dozen dozen. Sonar processing identifies a hundred and forty-four discrete signals.”

  “That can’t be right,” Philo said.

  “Actually, it can.” Morris was studying his computer screen again. “Piranhas. I’ve heard about this.”

  “Piranhas?”

  “Another bit of hardware the French Navy borrowed from Israel, though it’s not even supposed to be in prototype yet. The idea is, instead of launching a couple of big, expensive torpedoes, you fire off a whole slew of cheap little ones. That thins out the explosive punch a little, but in exchange you get a psychological warfare bonus—the thought of all those Piranhas boring in for the kill is meant to induce panic in the target.” He paused
to examine his own feelings, then added: “It works.”

  Philo looked down at the tactical display. “Piranhas, eh? Like a school of fish?”

  “Yeah.” Morris saw it too. “Yeah, that might work . . . if we can get to it fast enough.”

  “Osman!” Philo said.

  “Istanbul!”

  “Come left to course one-seven-five.”

  Morris switched on the intercom. “Engine room!”

  “Morris?” It was Heathcliff. “What is going on, Morris?”

  “I’m going to be diplomatic and not ask which of you bailed out,” Morris said. “But I need to talk to Irma if she’s still there.”

  “Of course she is still here,” Heathcliff said. “We are all still here. What kind of false accusation are you making, Morris?”

  “Never mind that now. Just tell Irma we need all the speed she can give us.”

  “Why? What is happening? Is there danger?”

  “Yes, there is danger. And if we can’t outrun it, Heathcliff, the Palestinian end of the boat gets blown up first.”

  City of Women

  “Piranhas, eh?” Wendy Mankiller said. “That’s the frog version of the Israeli Scorpion?”

  “Supposedly still on the drawing board,” her executive officer observed.

  Mankiller nodded. “Yet here it is retrofitted into a ten-year-old ship that isn’t officially in service anymore. I’d be very interested to learn this Robespierre’s history. Sonar, do you have identification on the submarine yet?”