The Lotus Eaters cl-3

by Tom Kratman

  Chu looked down at the deck, isolated from the hull by shock absorbers, the better not to transmit internal noise. Of course, he's right that it would, but at the cost of blowing our little secret. Then again, does that matter? Carrera only has us, so far as I know anyway, for the purpose of taking out that carrier . . . well, that one and another and a couple or three from the Zhong. The surprise wouldn't last past our first successful attack anyway. What difference if it's now or in a couple of years? They'll still be shy a carrier. And, hell, in a couple of years the secret of how quiet we really are might be blown anyway.

  Ah, but then there is the timing issue. A carrier sunk now might be the same as a carrier sunk then . . . as far as the size of the enemy fleet goes . . . but the timing would be all wrong . . . could be anyway. I just don't know. I only know . . .

  "We've got our orders, Ibarra, and you have yours. Now shut up and quit pestering me."

  "Fuck. I trust that you'll be the one delivering the next of kin notices."

  "We don't know there'll be a need for any next of kin notices. Now—"

  "I know. I know. Shut up and quit pestering you."

  Building 59, Fort Muddville, Balboa, Terra Nova

  Whatever it was Admiral Duguay said to Janier over the phone, it was enough to turn the general's face ashen.

  Replacing the phone on its receiver, Janier said simply, "He refuses to listen. He says if there's an attack here because he kills that submarine that will be my problem. He said other things, too.

  "Do we mobilize the troops then?" asked de Villepin.

  Still ashen-faced—What did the admiral say to him, wondered de Villepin—Janier shook his head. "No, no. Let's not let our actions notify the Balboans as to what is going on at sea.

  "And now leave me in peace and quiet for the next hour."

  D 466 Portzmoguer, Gallic Navy, Shimmering Sea

  The bridge was hushed. Every man present knew Casabianca was guessing, frankly. They also knew his guess had a few things going for it. He knew where the enemy below could go for succor. He had a pretty good idea of its maximum speed while gliding, as it presumably was. He had a point of origin to trace from.

  "East or west," the captain said softly. "One or the other. I chose east. If I'm right, maybe we get him. If I'm wrong . . ."

  "Sir," Mortain said, taking a telephonic radio receiver away from the side of his head, "Montcalm, Horizon, and Cotentin are on station. The admiral says it's your command. Oh, and Captain Bertin of Montcalm is bitching about it, too."

  "Bertin always bitches," answered Casabianca. The captain turned towards his sonar major. "Major, on Lieutenant Mortain's command. Weapons, stand by. Mortain?"

  "Sir?"

  "On radio . . . command . . . continuous . . . Ping!"

  In seconds the major announced, "I've got them."

  "Fire!"

  BdL Orca, Shimmering Sea, Terra Nova

  "Skipper," said Yermo to Quijana, "they're boxing us."

  Quijana looked up from the deck to the screen toward the boat's bow. It was true enough, with four surface ships taking up position approximately to the four cardinal direction of where Orca had been perhaps half an hour ago.

  "They don't hear us," Quijana said, uncertainly. "If they did they wouldn't be so far out. They'd—"

  The captain's words were cut off as the submarine was suddenly deluged with the sound of four separate sonar emitters all going to continuous ping.

  Yermo tried to ignore the sounds, listening intently for the much more ominous, "Oh, shit, I've got a surface launch . . . no, two . . . three . . . four. Each ship's fired once."

  "Fired what?" Quijana asked.

  "The Gallic frigates usually mount Ulysses anti-submarine rockets," Quijana's XO said. "That means they'll be here . . ."

  "Plonk," said Yermo, looking straight up. He squeezed a headphone to his ear. "Plonk, plonk . . . plonk."

  Do NOT panic, Quijana ordered himself. Besides, the thing you're most afraid of is being afraid . . . and you don't have much longer for that to happen, now do you, Miguel?

  Aloud, he said, "Friends, we're dead. But we're going to sell ourselves dear. Weapons?"

  "Aye"—gulp—"aye, sir."

  "We've still got two supercavitators?"

  "Yes, sir, two."

  "Good. Fire one on self guidance at target three, the other at target . . . ummm . . . two. Fire when ready. Once they're away fire two standard torpedoes at targets one and four. Guide those yourself to the extent you can. Stand by to drop guidance on those and guide the close in defense torpedoes. Helm?!"

  "Aye, sir."

  "Turn on the clicker. Flank speed ahead."

  "The clicker?" the XO, Garcia, looked aghast.

  "We're dead anyway," Quijana said. "But the secret can be preserved."

  The exec started to object, then admitted, also aloud, "Yeah, you're right."

  Quijana nodded. His XO then added, "Miguel, I never believed before that old Pedraz booted you off the Trinidad. I thought you jumped. I believe it now."

  D 466 Portzmoguer, Gallic Navy, Shimmering Sea

  Mortain went white, not because the counterattack from the Balboan sub was unexpected, but because of the speed of the torpedo coming for his ship. That wasn't unexpected either; it was still shocking. Bending over the sonar screen, the naval officer simply couldn't bring himself to credit the way the supercavitator ate up the kilometers.

  The "major" running the sonar station whistled and said, "Dear God, I don't think we can escape it."

  "Head straight towards it," ordered Portzmoguer's captain.

  The helmsman turned his head and eyes in the direction of the captain. "Towards it, sir?" He sounded as if he thought that the stupidest order he'd ever heard.

  "The things are so noisy they can't use their own passive sonar," the captain explained. "They slow down at a preset point and ping, then adjust and start moving again. If we're not in a position for it to get a bounce from us, there's a fair chance we can lose it altogether. And stop wasting fucking time. Do it! And, Mortain, pass that to the"—the captain looked briefly at his operations board—"pass it to the Montcalm."

  D 469 Montcalm, Gallic Navy, Shimmering Sea, Terra Nova

  "Tell that stupid bastard aboard Portzmoguer to stuff it," snarled the captain. "Helm, hard away from the torpedo. We'll outrun the bitch! It's got to have limited fuel."

  Montcalm heeled over as the helm applied full rudder to turn the ship away from the oncoming torpedo. Men all over the ship either swayed on their feet or fell on their rear ends. Down by the galley a cook, Matelot breveté—or ordinary seaman—Dupre, managed both to keep his feet and to keep upright the tray of sandwiches he was bringing to the bridge. The cook was just congratulating himself when the frigate came out of its turn and took off at flank speed. Not expecting this, Dupre slammed his head into a bulkhead and bounced to his arse as the sandwich tray went flying.

  Leaving the sandwiches behind, Dupre began to stagger topside to give the bridge crew a piece of his mind. Imagine the nerve; treating a chef like this. What do they think; that we're an Anglic vessel?

  * * *

  "A stern chase is a long chase," so it was said. It was even true when first said, in the day of sail on Old Earth. But when the chaser has a speed nearly six times greater than the quarry, and the quarry's less than ten kilometers away, a stern chase is likely to be very short indeed. When that quarry has to waste time turning about . . .

  Captain Bertin stood over the sonar board, watching the torpedo eat up the distance between the two. Hmmmf. Maybe that asshole Casabianca was right. He sighed. I so hate it when he's right. Why my sister married him, I simply can't fathom.

  Suddenly Montcalm's own sonar major and the captain exclaimed in surprise. The torpedo had stopped. Perhaps it ran out of fuel. Hah! I'll show that bastard of a brother in law who's right . . .

  The exultant shout coming to Bertin's lips cut off as the torpedo began pinging furiously, only to stop that an
d commence moving at fifty. It rapidly accelerated to a blistering two-hundred knots.

  Bertin raced topside. If he was going to die he wanted to see what would kill him. He didn't have long to wait.

  The sea underneath Montcalm was suddenly lit by a bright orange flash. The flash itself lasted but a moment before being replaced with a green and black and sea foam circle of Hell, rising to both sides of the ship. Bertin felt his frigate lurch upward from the center. Driven to his knees on the hard steel deck, he felt as much as heard the tortured metal below bending with the force of the blow. Water, moving faster than the ship's upward twist, blew upward along both sides of the hull.

  As the pressure underneath was relieved, both by collapse of the cooling explosive gasses and by the movement of water upward to either side of the hull, Montcalm found itself supported on the two ends by water, and with no support below. The hull which had so recently been half broken by the upward pressure in the center now found itself unsupported in the center by either water or its own structural strength. It collapsed into the hole thus created, continuing the work of destruction. To add injury to insult, water rushing back into the vacant space met the sundered hull halfway down into the vacuum. This blow was the end; Montcalm lifted again and split in two.

  * * *

  Bertin found himself floating, supported by an arm encircling his chest under his own arms. The two ends of his former command floated, points up, a few hundred meters away. Even as Bertin watched the bow section slipped under the waves.

  "Who? What?" he asked, groggily.

  "Chef Dupre," came the answer from behind.

  "How many got out?"

  "Not many, mon capitaine. I see only a few heads bobbing in the water. I am taking you to one of the auto-inflating lifeboats."

  Automatically, Bertin corrected, "We have no 'mon capitaines' in the navy. We have 'my God' and—"

  "And 'my ass,' yes I know, sir," Dupre finished.

  D466 Portzmoguer, Shimmering Sea, Terra Nova

  "All stop," Casabianca ordered. "Hard port rudder." He, along with every man of the crew, was nudged in the direction of the bow and to the right, as power was cut to the propeller and the ship began a turn.

  "Do you really think, Captain . . . ?" Mortain asked.

  "I am betting, Lieutenant, that that supercavitator, having been fired from fairly deep, will be too far down . . ."

  "She's passing underneath us," sonar announced.

  "The next few seconds will tell," said Casabianca.

  "And she's still going," sonar amended.

  The captain pointed at the weapons station.

  "I am tracking, Captain. When she stops to ping . . ."

  "Fire one Ulysses," Casabianca said.

  On the foredeck a boxy looking device, partitioned into six section, two of them empty, rotated to the bearing of the Balboan supercavitator. The box elevated to fifteen degree, then washed the deck with fire and smoke as its rocket took off, bearing a torpedo to intercept the other.

  Casabianca watched the missile cum torpedo off, then turned his direction of view over the starboard bow where a brace of helicopters were dropping self-guiding torpedoes ahead of the known location of the enemy sub.

  SdL 2, Orca, Shimmering Sea, Terra Nova

  Quijana could read the forward screen as well as any man aboard. Orca now had not only two torpedoes in pursuit, another two had plonked in ahead and to either side.

  I'd take some satisfaction in the knowledge that we took a lot a killing, he thought, except that in a few minutes I'm going to be too dead to feel anything. I do take some satisfaction in taking out two for one.

  Hmmm. Confession time? Maybe so.

  "Garcia?" he asked.

  "Yes, skipper."

  "I've got to clear my soul on this. Pedraz booted me, I didn't jump. But I can't say I was sorry he did. I was relieved."

  The exec, Garcia, just nodded. Why not? Any man might feel the same.

  "Goodbye, Miguel," the XO said, right at the end.

  SdL 1, Megalodon, Shimmering Sea, Terra Nova

  Chu had the main screen focused in close on the unfolding drama. With all the torpedoes flying around the ocean, in some cases—the supercavitators—literally, it was the only way to distinguish.

  About half those torpedoes fired so far had lost their prey to its uniquely stealthy characteristics. These searched the sea in spiral patterns, but too far away to be of much concern to Meg and her crew.

  Hope surged for a moment as one of Orca's small defensive torpedoes took out one of its pursuers. It did so again as one of the Gallic torpedoes destroyed itself and another. Those three, however, were not enough. One of the shots dropped by helicopter found the small submarine, exploding so near the hull that Chu and company couldn't tell the difference between it and a contact hit. Another came in from the rear and likewise detonated. After that it was nothing but breakup noise as the remnants of the Orca plunged for the bottom of the ocean.

  "Weapons, prepare two shots for the carrier," Chu said, bitterness in his voice. "Route the fire command to my chair."

  "Aye, sir."

  Chu's XO, Ibarra, shook his head and placed one hand over the fire controls. "No, skipper, don't do it."

  "Why?"

  The exec smiled, sadly, answering, "While it might still have done Orca some good, I'd have said, 'Damn the carrier, and every frog aboard.' Now?" The exec shook his head. "Skipper, Miguel never turned off his clicker. Think about that. Even at the very last moment it was 'mission first,' as it should have been. You shoot now, let them know how frigging quiet we really are, you throw away a part of what the men aboard Orca gave their lives for."

  "We'll get 'em, skipper, never fear," Ibarra said. "But we'll do it at the time that's best for us, not for them."

  "All right then, we'll wait," Chu agreed. "But we're going to shadow that bitch for a few days and, if war has broken out above and we can tell it has, I'm killing it."

  Chapter Twenty-six

  —though the lessons of ancient Rome, Greece, and Sparta are not perfectly supportive of the timocratic ideals put forth in this work, we should not lose sight of the valid lessons they do have to teach or illustrate. Among these is that only an armed citizenry, and one which is trained to arms, has a hope of maintaining its own political power and freedom in any degree whatsoever, that they can only gain any degree of political power and freedom through either the use or the threat of use of arms, or the withholding of those arms when the state needs them, and that, whatever their stated intent, those who would deprive the people of arms inevitably also deprive them of political power and freedom.

  —Jorge y Marqueli Mendoza,

  Historia y Filosofia Moral,

  Legionary Press, Balboa,

  Terra Nova, Copyright AC 468

  Anno Condita 472 Executive Mansion, Hamilton, FD, Federated States of Columbia, Terra Nova

  The Shimmering Sea was, as far as the Federated States and her Navy were concerned, their pond. Oh, the Taurans could come in and play, but they'd do so—had done so—with an FSN nuclear sub shadowing them from a distance. Unseen, unheard, the FSS Oliver Meredith had tracked the Gauls long before they'd passed the island of Cienfuegos. The Meredith had recorded the whole engagement between Orca and the Gauls.

  That record, digitally sent to Hamilton and reduced to script, now sat on the desk of the President of the Federated States, Karl Schumann (Progressive), brought there by none other than his Secretary of War, James K. Malcolm.

  "The Gauls fired first?" was Schumann's only real question.

  "Yes," Malcolm admitted, reluctantly, "but they had reasons. That sub was attempting to get into a firing position against their carrier. After being spotted. That indicated hostile intent."

  "That's speculation," Schumann answered, calmly. "Moreover, it's speculation colored by your affection for the Gauls. Though why you have that affection after they let us down in Pashtia, I admit I do not quite understand, James."

&nb
sp; Malcolm opened his mouth as if to speak, then suddenly closed it again and went silent. Though silent, he thought, What is it? The fucking spics in Balboa do a mission and let Schumann take credit for it and he suddenly takes their side? Or is he afraid they'll reveal the truth after he took credit for it? Whatever it is, he should be slapping the Balboans silly and he won't.

  Far worse, from Malcolm's point of view, Schumann picked up his phone and dialed a number. In French not quite so good as Malcolm's own, Schumann said, simply, "About the Balboans, Mr. Ambassador? Tell your country to back the fuck off."

  Sub Pens, Puerto Lindo, Balboa, Terra Nova

  Fernandez, Fosa and Carrera, all three, were waiting inside the concrete pen as Chu climbed out of the hatch atop the sail and descended the brow to meet them. Alongside, a crew was in the process of fitting the new boat, name still undetermined, with diving planes and torpedo pods.

  "What happened?" Carrera asked.

  "We penetrated their screen," Chu answered, "but the frogs killed Orca."

  "Was it Orca that destroyed the Tauran frigate?" asked Fosa.

  Chu nodded his head, wearily. "Yes, sir, the frigate and a frog sub we made as being an Amethyst Class. The frog fired first. Orca had to fire in self defense. And later, Miguel only shot up the frigate after a bunch of them had him boxed in and were salvoing torpedoes on his ass.

  "We hung around shadowing their carrier in case war broke out. It didn't seem to have happened, so we came home."

  "No," Carrera said, "war didn't break out. I'm not sure why, really."

  "I'm sure," said Fernandez. At Carrera's raised eyebrow he added, "I've got my sources, Patricio. Their general, Janier, isn't ready. He even tried to call off the pursuit of Orca. And apparently the FSC is not happy with the Gallic 'allies,' either."