by Matt Ruff
“All right,” Twenty-Nine Words said, “if that’s what you want.” He spun around, bent over, and wagged his broad buttocks in Sutter’s face. Sutter blinked and dropped his guard. Twenty-Nine Words nailed him with a reverse flying kick.
“Oldest trick in the book,” Twenty-Nine Words observed, as Sutter fell overboard. He grabbed a survival raft from an on-deck storage bin, pulled the rip cord to start it inflating, and pitched it over the railing.
Forward, on the bow, the Savage Candle torpedo launcher salvoed two rockets; they ignited with a hiss and streaked north over the waves. As the Candles flew out, thousands of locusts blew in, plastic wings crackling like candy-box wrappers in the wind.
They were made in Taiwan, mostly. The bulk of the swarm were cheap robotic novelties, sold in lots of a hundred, whose tiny ROM-chip brains came imprinted with a few simple commands—in this case, find the tallest thing around and flock to it. Except for their special radar-reflectant coating, meant to blind the Sierra’s above-water sensors, these locusts were harmless; but hidden among their thousands were a dirty dozen of much smarter bugs, hand-crafted by Morris Kazenstein and dubbed Severely Antisocial Battery-Operated Termite Saboteurs, or SABOTS. The SABOTS flew into the sub-killer’s superstructure, seeking out the delicate control wiring that permitted the ship to function.
The other locusts, meanwhile, settled on the outside of the superstructure—on the radar mast, antennae, flue stack, flying bridge, bridge windows, weapons mounts, lemur habitat, and anything else vertical. One locust with a problem judging scale tried to land on the unconscious Sayles’s nose, which jutted beakishly from his face; Sayles started awake, jumped up screaming, “Christ! Jesus! Bugs!” and threw himself into the sea.
“Men overboard,” said Twenty-Nine Words, tossing out another life raft.
City of Women
“Savage Candles in the water bearing two-zero-nine!” Gwynhefar Matchless said. “Two torpedoes incoming, ranges eighteen hundred and twenty-one hundred meters.”
“Right full rudder!” Wendy Mankiller ordered. “Full rise on the planes, make your depth fifty meters! Countermeasures, fire off a noisemaker as we turn!”
“Aye, Captain, my rudder is right full, full rise on the planes!”
“Noisemaker in the water!”
“Both torpedoes continuing on current heading,” Matchless reported. “They’re going for the decoy.”
“Helm, all ahead two-thirds, continue right to course one-eight-zero. Fire-control, stand ready for a snapshot.”
“Coming about, Captain!”
“Matchless, I need range and bearing to the Robespierre.”
“Pinging, Captain. . . . Robespierre is at bearing one-nine-two, range seven thousand meters.”
“Flood tubes one and three! Open outer doors!”
“Outer doors open!”
“Match bearings and shoot!”
“Firing one . . . firing three. Malfunction on one, Captain! The motor didn’t turn over! Three is away and running normally.”
“Bloody Chanticleers! Close outer doors and reload.”
“Captain, Savage Candles have looped around and are attempting to reacquire!” Gwynhefar Matchless warned. “Savage Candles now bearing zero-zero-six!”
“Fire another noisemaker! MacAlpine, break left!”
Mitterrand Sierra
Seraphina shinnied up one of the stanchions to the lemur habitat. The habitat, an insulated Plexiglas hutch ten feet on a side, had a square door secured with a pair of slidebolts; brushing away locusts, Seraphina fumbled back the bolts and opened it. A lemur poked its head out. It was a small animal, about the size of a large housecat, its appearance that of a raccoon-faced monkey with big jaundiced eyes. Its bushy, black and white ringed tail was longer than the rest of its body.
The lemur had been snacking on baobab leaves. In a clumsy attempt at greeting, it tried to stick one in Seraphina’s ear. She pulled her head back, laughing, and the assassin’s bullet passed an inch in front of her throat instead of through it.
Seraphina heard the rifle crack and felt the bullet go by, but it was the lemur, technically the less-intelligent primate, who first recognized the danger. It was by following the lemur’s gaze that Seraphina spotted the sniper, high up on the flying bridge, leveling his weapon for another shot. He had strange goggles covering his eyes, and his mouth seemed full of blood; locusts crawled in his hair and dripped from his shoulders.
The lemur—demonstrating remarkable survival instinct for a member of an endangered species—ducked back inside its hutch and tugged the door shut. Seraphina took another three seconds to react, and Penzias would surely have killed her had a locust not flown in front of his rifle scope, spoiling his shot.
“Catch me!” Seraphina shouted, as the second bullet buzzed past her ear. She let go of the stanchion and fell back; Twenty-Nine Words for Snow, who was turning out to be an excellent boyfriend, ran and caught her before she hit the deck. Without breaking stride he carried her forward, putting the after superstructure between them and the sniper. Penzias cracked off another shot in frustration; it ricocheted off the bullet-resistant Plexiglas of the lemur habitat. The lemurs gathered in a huddle and looked at each other, as if wondering what they could have done to attract such hostility.
“I think we’d better hide,” Twenty-Nine Words said, setting Seraphina on her feet.
She kissed him on the mouth and said, “I think you’re right. Where?”
It was not an easy question. There was space underneath the depth-charge racks, but they’d be spotted there for sure. Jumping overboard didn’t seem too smart either. That left three possibilities: run forward along the port side of the boat, run forward along the starboard side of the boat, or enter the superstructure through a hatchway to their right. The hatch swung open as they were considering it; Twenty-Nine Words tensed for a fight, but it was only a White Negro, coming out to swab the deck.
“Excuse me,” Seraphina said. The White Negro put down its mop and bucket and looked at her expectantly. Seraphina pointed towards the starboard gunnel. “Could you go stand over there for a minute?”
The White Negro did as she asked; as it stepped beyond the corner of the superstructure, Troubadour Penzias blew its head off.
“I guess we don’t go that way,” Twenty-Nine Words said. The exposed port-side deck didn’t seem any safer, so they went in through the hatch the White Negro had come out of. “No lock,” Twenty-Nine Words noted, as he pulled it shut behind them.
They were in a short passageway with several exits, including a narrow stairway down marked “Chambre des Machines. “The close, cluttered spaces below decks seemed like a good place to go to escape a long-distance rifleman, but the throbbing of the ship’s engines sounded vaguely infernal and the stairwell was dark, so they hesitated. Another hatch opened farther up the passageway. This time it wasn’t a White Negro that stepped through, but a man with a gun.
“Not that way,” Captain Baker said, as Seraphina and Twenty-Nine Words made to bolt down the stairs. “Corporal Psycho Killer just went below decks forward; I think he’s working his way back to the engine spaces.”
Seraphina looked at him. “Aren’t you one of the bad guys, too?” she said.
“Yeah,” Captain Baker said. He swiped the back of his hand across his forehead; the slick feeling of his own blood made him dizzy and nauseous. “Yeah, I’m a bad guy, all right. Just like you. Like Dufresne. But Penzias . . . he’s not like you and me.”
The Chanticleer
It may have been a mistake on the Royal Navy’s part to name a weapon after a rooster. Chanticleer, the fastest torpedo ever made, had performed splendidly during testing in Britain’s North Sea; it wasn’t until the navy went ahead with mass production and deployment that they discovered that that was the only sea in which it performed splendidly. Chanticleer’s motor was highly sensitive to temperature variations: in the warmer waters of the Mediterranean and the tropics, it frequently overheated and seize
d up after a minute’s run; in Arctic waters, it typically refused to run at all; and in the temperate Atlantic, it was, well, temperamental.
Chanticleer also had guidance problems.
City of Women’s snapshot should have found its mark easily. With no one monitoring the Mitterrand Sierra’s sonar suite, the bridge received no warning of the threat; Najime continued to steer straight north at one-third speed, offering a simple intercept solution for any torpedo with half a brain. But a little over a mile out from the Sierra, the Chanticleer started drifting to the left. Not much; just enough to matter.
Chanticleer was equipped with a magnetic proximity fuse, primed to detonate when it came within thirty feet of a target. City of Women’s snapshot passed the Mitterrand Sierra thirty-three feet to starboard.
A quarter mile on, the torpedo’s seeker-head tried to figure out what had happened to the ship it had been tracking. Could it have ducked aside somehow? The torpedo began to weave right and left in a snaking search pattern, hoping to reacquire; naturally, this didn’t work, as the Sierra was now behind the torpedo, getting farther away every second. But the Chanticleer did not give up, and as it continued south it soon picked out another target, about the size of a London omnibus, that was just now broaching the surface of the water.
Still Further
Morris climbed out on top of the life pod with binoculars to see what he could see.
“We’re looking good,” he called down to the others. “Looks like one of my Pharaoh-busters came up early.”
“Any sign of Seraphina?” Philo asked.
“I see a survival raft, but there’s nobody in it. . . . Wait, there’s another raft in the water, closer to the ship. And another one. . . . Now who the hell are those guys?”
“Morris,” said Asta Wills, “do you see anything else in the water? On a bearing of about three-five-five?”
“Why, do you hear something?” The main sonar listening arrays had gone down with the Yabba-Dabba-Doo, but Still Further had a cheap set of Radio Shack hydrophones for Asta to play around with. “What am I looking for?”
“You’ll know it if you see it,” Asta told him. “About two miles out, I’d say.”
He saw it.
“Oh shit,” Morris said.
“Right,” said Asta. “That’s what I thought.”
Mitterrand Sierra
Captain Baker led them forward to the combat information center. As they walked, it became apparent that something was going wrong with the Mitterrand Sierra; the lights started flickering, and the previously steady engine-throb began to hitch and stutter. In the CIC, the computer was talking to itself.
“Répétez après moi:. . . Amiral Jones a déspensé beaucoup d’argent pour son nouveau cuirassé. . . . Commandant Vendredi a coulé une frégate chinoise avec ses missiles Exocet. . . . Mon tante Trudi a tué un lemantin avec son moteur hors-bord . . .”
“System’s gone buggy,” Captain Baker said. “The locusts?”
Seraphina nodded. “Are you sure we’re safe in here?” she asked; the room had a lot of dark corners.
“Maybe not,” the captain said. “Let’s get up to the bridge. Get all the sane people in one place, and—”
The lights went out, and all the computer screens. There was a tire-squeal of frying electronics, a pop of circuit breakers, then dark silence, interrupted only by the death-rattle of the Mitterrand Sierra’s engines.
That, and one other sound . . . a smooth whirr-and-click, like the auto-focus of a camera lens.
“Go,” Captain Baker said. Muzzle flashes lit the room as someone started shooting. Seraphina ducked down, grabbed Twenty-Nine Words’s hand, and ran for the nearest exit she could find, which was not the one that led to the bridge. The two of them groped blindly along a passageway, dead-ended in a storeroom, backed up, blundered through another hatch, and found themselves outside, on the bow.
Troubadour Penzias was waiting for them, hunched beneath the Savage Candle torpedo launcher like Buddha beneath the bo tree.
“Howdy,” he said.
“But. . . .” Seraphina glanced back over her shoulder; from within the superstructure she could still hear gunfire.
“Is that the captain?” Penzias asked. “What’s he shooting at?”
“You,” Seraphina said.
“Must have hit his head even harder than I thought.” Penzias trapped a locust crawling on the deck beneath the toe of his boot; its battery motor whirred and clicked impotently as it tried to beat its wings.
Twenty-Nine Words squeezed Seraphina’s hand. He slid his foot back towards the hatchway behind them.
“Hey Eskimo boy,” Penzias said, watching them through the third eye of the rifle sight. “Why don’t you close that door before I decide to kill you slowly?” A warning shot whined off the deck. “I said close it, not lean into it. . . . Good. Now get over here.” Gesturing with the rifle, he stepped away and let them take his place beneath the torpedo launcher. “That’s good. That’s just fine. . . .” He worked the Remington’s slide-action. “Just fine. . . .”
“You’re going to shoot us?” Seraphina said.
“Oh yes.”
“But why?”
“No,” Penzias said. “No—you don’t ask that.” He aimed from the hip, the rifle sight and both lenses of the VISION Rig focused on the same patch of black skin, perfect spot for an entry wound. “You don’t get to ask that.”
The ship’s hull boomed like a timpani. It felt like a torpedo hit, but there was no explosion, just impact, like a battering ram. The Mitterrand Sierra heeled over hard; Seraphina and Twenty-Nine Words were tossed off their feet, and Penzias was hurled sideways into the starboard gunnel. “What?” he demanded; his head snapped around, VISION Rig tracking down to the water, which was suddenly much closer.
A monster stared back at him. The sperm whale was a giant, eighty feet long and a hundred thousand pounds, with a barnacled gray hide and a circular welt over its left eye the exact size and shape of a Savage Candle torpedo head. The eye itself was large and cold and pitiless, the color of speckled jade, and it seemed to know who it was looking at.
Penzias screamed. Fighting physics, he tried to scramble away up the canted deck of the frigate; the whale rose up spouting, its blow like judgment day at a boiler factory. Eighteen-foot flukes lashed the side of the ship, rupturing bulkheads and wrenching a machine gun from its mount. The Sierra tilted further, close to capsizing. Twenty-Nine Words wrapped his arms around the base of the torpedo launcher, and Seraphina wrapped her arms around Twenty-Nine Words; Troubadour Penzias, with no handhold in reach, clawed the air.
There came a moment on the outer edge of balance when he realized he wasn’t going to make it. Seraphina saw it happen. All at once Penzias stopped struggling, poised straight as a board, his body forming an acute angle with the deck; he switched his rifle to one hand, drew his leaf-blade knife with the other, bared his teeth, and, turning, let gravity take him. He slid back down to the gunnel and catapulted over the side, firing as he fell.
There was no splash.
The Mitterrand Sierra righted itself, or tried to; rocking back, it didn’t come quite level, but settled into a five-degree list. The whale gave one more lash of its tail before swimming away. Two more compartments were vented to the sea, and the five-degree list became fifteen degrees. Another life raft deployed off the stern; Najime and Tagore had had enough. Chatterjee the engineer was just seconds behind them.
Seraphina and Twenty-Nine Words got up slowly. Twenty-Nine Words saw a red stain on the deck where Penzias had gone over and went to investigate. It looked a little thin for blood so he stuck finger in it, lifted a drop to his nose, and sniffed. It smelled like water. He decided not to worry about it.
“Hey,” Seraphina said. “Lexa’s coming.”
Still Further
“Doesn’t seem fair, somehow,” Morris said, as the Chanticleer bored in. Philo had joined him up top, and Norma, and after that the Palestinians had gotten into a shovi
ng match over who was next. It didn’t matter; the torpedo was closing at a hundred seventy feet a second with only half a mile left to run, and not even an Olympic swimmer could have gotten beyond lethal shock range before it hit.
But still it was funny, the things people thought about with death looming. Morris still had his dreidel, and as time ran out he found himself staring at the little wooden top, trying to remember what phrase its four Hebrew letters were meant to abbreviate.
Let’s see, now. Nun, gimel, he, and peh. Nun-gimel-he-peh, that stands for, let’s see—
“Nes gadol hayah poh,” Morris said, aloud, and Philo standing next to him caught his breath.
“God,” Norma Eckland said. “Thank God . . .”
“What?” said Morris.
“It’s stopped,” said Philo. Less than a hundred yards out, the torpedo wake had faded and disappeared.
“Pinging’s stopped!” Asta Wills called from below. “Screw sounds have stopped too! Hey, I think it ran out of fuel!”
“Morris,” asked Philo, “what were those words you were just saying?”
“Nes gadol hayah poh,” Morris said. “‘A great miracle happened here.’ It’s from Hanukkah.” He looked out on the water at the spot where the torpedo wake had faded, glanced down at his dreidel, then back out on the water again. “Nah. Couldn’t be . . .”
“Hmm,” Philo said.
City of Women
“A whale hit them?” Wendy Mankiller said.
“That’s what it sounded like, Captain. The Robespierre’s engines have stopped completely, and I hear flooding below decks. The whale is moving off to rejoin its pod.”
“What happened to our torpedo?”
“Missed, evidently. The last I heard it was pinging off south somewhere, but there was no explosion. . . . Wait. New contact!”
“What now?” said Mankiller. “Range and bearing?”