The Command

by David Poyer

  The trawler had been headed for Tel Aviv With a tremendously fallout-enhanced nuclear device of some sort. Probably enough, if the wind was right, to contaminate most of Israel. Where had it come from? Who’d been behind it?

  He didn’t know. But he looked forward to finding out.

  A sailor came from aft, bedraggled and wet. Their eyes met. “Gonna make it, Captain?”

  “I’ll make it.”

  “How about the ship, sir? She gonna make it, too?”

  “We’re hurt. But I think we’re going to come through. Thanks to our shipmates.”

  “That’s good, sir,” the seaman said. He hesitated, then reached out and slapped his arm. “You doin’ good, my man.”

  He went on forward, leaving wet tracks on the deck. But Dan stood there still as the lights came back on, the ventilation kicked on, as far beneath him he felt the first rumbling vibration of the turning screw. As he felt the sting of loss, and the exaltation of survival, and the cold certainty of revenge. As around him, like him, hurt but still afloat, wounded but because of that even more dangerous, USS Horn came slowly back to life.

  The Afterimage

  THE ship came home under an autumn overcast. Her starboard side was dished in between her stringers. Here and there sheet-steel patches were welded on. Her antennas were bent and some were still missing. She moved, not under her own power, but at the end of a long wire from a stubby tug.

  Her crew had flown back ahead of her weeks before. She was still too hot for round-the-clock manning. The weapon in the intercepted trawler had been modified in some as-yet-unclear way to generate an enormous fallout plume of radioactive cobalt 60, enough to contaminate hundreds of square miles. The plan had been ruthless but artfully conceived, one of the techs flown out to meet them in Soudha Bay had told him. Detonated off the coast, dispersed by the prevailing winds, the isotope would contaminate air and drinking water, making Israel—the presumed target—uninhabitable for years. The current population would have had to evacuate to Europe, North America, Latin America. And once resettled, how likely was it, speaking realistically, that they would ever be allowed to return?

  As to the ship, her sea life was over. Once home, she’d be left to cool in some shipyard backwater for years, then scrapped. But still she moved with the deliberate grace of a cared-for thing. She was like a living being, though she was not alive. She was something more and something less; enduring only so long as those who had loved her lived, but for that period of time granted an individuality of her own.

  Almost, a soul.

  She’d left the country that had built her, to defend that country. Now she returned. But she’d never be the same.

  Like every creature who voyages, she’d undergone the sea change.

  The man who stood on the tug’s fantail, fingering a neck brace as he watched her plodding submissively astern, had tried to define exactly what that change was. Most of it he couldn’t put in words. Some he’d probably never understand, because it was not given to men to understand all about their lives, or even, perhaps, the deepest things about their lives.

  But he had some idea. For one, that his hopes about young American men and women had been justified. The counsels of fear and intolerance had been proven wrong. That maybe it was purely and only that— the willingness to accept change—that set his country apart from so many that preferred the certainties of the past to the possibilities of the future.

  He also suspected, to his astonishment, that he was beginning to answer a question he’d always asked of himself.

  He’d always questioned authority. Distrusted those above him. Searched for a standard he didn’t have to believe in because it was handed down, or inherited, or imposed; but only and simply because it was the truth. Now, to his surprise, he was beginning to suspect he didn’t need someone else to tell him what was right. That his own anchors, when the strain came, would hold against the storm wind.

  He didn’t feel wise. He certainly didn’t feel infallible. But something had stood up in him that hadn’t been there before. He couldn’t say what it was, or where it had come from. Maybe just from being tested, and coming through. But in some mysterious way, he’d left the fear behind.

  Ahead rose the upperworks of other ships, the shattered, shifting glitter of the sun on the river as the overcast thinned away. The jut of the piers, and visible on the nearest, as he raised his binoculars, the colors and flags of a waiting crowd. Blair would be there, fresh from what she saw as a victory: Following congressional lifting of the ban on women’s assignments, the secretary of defense had directed the services to open virtually every career path to them except direct ground combat and submarines. And with a house in Arlington she wanted to show him. To take up a life together at last.

  But was this home? Or was home the battered metal astern? His family, the men and women he served with?

  He smiled at the realization he was questioning again. Doubting. And probably, always would.

  But maybe that wasn’t a bad thing. Maybe it was only those who were most certain they were right who were guaranteed to be wrong. And that maybe, just maybe, those who questioned the most were in the end those who came closest to being wise.

  Lowering the binoculars, he looked toward home.