Tipping Point

by David Poyer

  “Yessir, respiratory fauna. Urine and stool samples.” Rubber gloves snapped, and the corpsman laid out tubes, swabs, and needles on a stainless tray. Talc smoked the air. Grissett added, “In view of, uh, what’s been happening, we better take a vaginal swab, too.”

  Dan blinked, then realized what he was saying. He looked at the others in the compartment. All male. “Um, how about holding for a couple of minutes, until we can get either the exec or Lieutenant Singhe down here. No, wait, maybe Garfinkle-Henriques. I’d just feel more comfortable if there was a … you know what I’m saying.” They nodded and stepped back. Dan jerked his head toward the door and headed that way. Grissett accompanied him.

  “Chief, I’ve got to get back to the bridge. There’s a situation I have to make sure stays sorted out. But we’ve had this conversation before.”

  “We did, Captain. In the Med. When Seaman Goodroe died.”

  Uncannily like this, except the previous victim had been a strapping young man. “I need your best guess as to what’s going on,” Dan told him. “We reported this and got nowhere. We scrubbed down all the ductwork, but that only bought us a break. How many of our crew are down with this now?”

  Hermelinda Garfinkle-Henriques clattered down the ladder. Dan explained to the supply officer what was going on. She frowned and went on into the compartment. Grissett murmured, glancing back at where the supply officer was leaning over the body, “Sir, I have to caution you about drawing direct lines between whatever most of our people are reporting, which is some kind of flulike illness, and the deaths. They may be linked. They may not— Don’t let her touch it! We don’t want contamination.”

  The lieutenant flinched away. Dan said, “Okay. All right. But you’re saying, what our two fatalities are from, might not be the same as the … Savo crud?”

  “It might. It might not.” Grissett looked bewildered for just a moment, before the curtain of professional detachment dropped again.

  Dan tried again. “What did Scharner just die from, then?”

  “Looks to me like some kind of atypical pneumonia. Leading, I guess, to something like toxic shock syndrome.”

  “Atypical how?”

  “In that we didn’t see the progressive fluid buildup, the other classic signs of pneumonia. High fever. Heavy mucus production. Breathing difficulty, pain in the chest, so forth.”

  “Instead—”

  “They just wake up dead.”

  Dan had about three dozen more questions, but he needed to get back to the bridge. He left them there, gathered around the bunk, no one saying much. Except for a sharp intake of breath from Garfinkle-Henriques, when Grissett rolled the body over to begin taking samples.

  * * *

  DAN was climbing the ladder when the nausea returned. Suddenly, overwhelmingly, his stomach had to spew out something raw and dark inside him, right now. He clamped his hand over his mouth, barely holding it as he undogged a door and bolted outside. It was raining, a soft mist that felt like part of the clouds. Its breath cooled his face as he craned over the rail, gagging. Fortunately he was on the lee side, opposite the still-accompanying destroyer.

  Above all else, he didn’t want them to see that.

  * * *

  HE stopped in his at-sea cabin to rinse his mouth. It was raining hard when he got up to the bridge. Mitscher rode a mile to the east, her haze gray melting in and out of the squall’s skirts. The Chinese destroyer lay close to the freighter, as if protecting her from further harassment.

  Staurulakis updated in laconic sentences. Mytsalo was on his way back. The Chinese had sent a boarding team to Patchooli. He heard her out, looking away. Scharner’s death only made it worse. Something was stalking his crew. Deadly, persistent, and it was taking down more and more people. Not only that, the aftereffects were worrisome: difficulty sleeping, malaise, weakness, continuing lung problems, something like asthma.

  He stayed on the bridge until the RHIB was back aboard. Mytsalo saluted, but Dan was in no mood to hear his report. He leaned back in his chair, the bridge absolutely quiet. No one spoke, not even in the usual murmurs, as Savo slowly hauled around to southward.

  * * *

  HE hadn’t figured to get any sleep that night. Hadn’t been able to eat anything; felt like he’d never be able to swallow again. He didn’t need psychoanalysis to know why. The most shameful and miserable day in his career. Maybe the worst, for the United States Navy, in its two hundred–plus years. It had been surprised, defeated, stabbed in the back, and crushed—but it had never backed down.

  Until now. He shuddered, a vomity taste still lingering, and pulled the blanket over himself.

  The CO’s buzzer woke him. He clawed up, coughing and hacking. Something was wrong with his throat. The darkened room was distorted. Larger than he remembered. Was this his cabin? Dark shapes loomed and leered. A sensation like rough noodles sandpapered his tongue. He fumbled a vague response to whatever the OOD was asking. Hermelinda repeated her statement, tone insistent, and Dan finally understood: a message from Strike One; the Pakistani armed forces were going to full alert. He mumbled, “Okay, got it … How far’re we from Karachi?… Bearing, range to Wuhan?… Let’s set self-defense condition three. Just in case. And, uh, have the chief corpsman report to me. Yeah, now.”

  With no transition, in the blink of an eye, Grissett was by his bedside, shining a flashlight on a thermometer. “Fever. Dry cough. How you feeling, Captain?”

  “Like … shit.”

  “Afraid you’ve got it, sir. The Savo crud. Or whatever you want to call it. Take two of these. Drink this. How’s that trachea? Any breathing difficulties?”

  “No … not yet.” But his lungs were wheezing and crackling, deep down, when he breathed out. He fought panic. Unable to breathe … back at the Pentagon, inhaling smoke.…

  “Brought you up an inhaler, in case. Don’t be too proud to use it. I’ll tell the XO you’re down hard.”

  The corpsman eased the door closed. Dan coughed and coughed. When he got up to urinate, he staggered into the side of the little head compartment. Only its tight confines saved him from falling. Having voided, he felt his way back out into the cabin. Clicked on the shaving light and stared at the mirror.

  Remembering the skipper of USS Reynolds Ryan, and how one wrong order, when he’d been sick, had killed a ship and most of her crew.

  12

  The Indian Ocean

  HE passed the rest of the night in fevered dreams, each with some aspect of frustration or terror. He took Savo, now a huge silver spaceship, down to land on an asteroid where she displaced all the air, leaving them unable to breathe on the surface. Yet they had to accomplish some shadowy mission … He didn’t remember the rest, but each dream was unimaginably detailed, vivid, scary. Each time he was about to die, or the missile was about to hit, he battled to wakefulness, panting and coughing. He sucked on the inhaler in the dim light from the radio remote. Listened to distant creaking, voices. Then let his eyelids drag shut again.

  Cheryl woke him at 0800. Grissett hovered behind her, with Longley in the doorway. They looked concerned. “Sir, we doing all right?” the exec murmured. Her hand hovered over his brow, but she didn’t actually touch him.

  “Yeah … still here.” He coughed and cleared his throat. Tried to roll out, but found he just had too little horsepower to sit upright. “Um, maybe some coffee—”

  “Right here, Captain. And some nice rye toast, with butter.” Longley set the tray down, poured half a cup. Dan eyed the plate, but it made him feel like hurling.

  “Try to eat,” Grissett said. “Even if it comes up again, you’ll get some nourishment.”

  “Look, you guys don’t need to fuss over me.” He gathered all his strength and hauled himself upright. Then grabbed the bunk frame just before he went down. “Where … where’s Wuhan? Mitscher? Pittsburgh? What about this increased alert status?”

  Staurulakis explained, but Dan couldn’t get traction on the answers. Something about the Chinese
task group re-forming south of Karachi. Something else about submarine activity off Singapore. He sagged back into the bunk. “I’ll be up to the bridge in a little while. If anything serious goes down, Commander Staurulakis has command authority. Chief, Longley, you can witness that.”

  Staurulakis patted his blanket. “Stay here, Captain. There’s nothing to worry about.” Grissett drew a glass of water from the tap and set it and two white oval pills beside the bed.

  The door closed, leaving him staring at the overhead. “Nothing to worry about.” With the newly confident and aggressive Chinese moving into what might very well be a blocking position, and tensions escalating between Pakistan and India?

  If only that were true.

  * * *

  HE slept until 1030, when guilt goaded him out of bed. He felt very slightly better, or at least stronger, though every muscle ached, his head still felt stuffed with bronze wool, and his thinking was not exactly first-class. He started to shave, but his hands shook; he quit after the second sting that meant he’d cut himself. He stepped into yesterday’s coveralls, made sure he had a pen and his Hydra, and lurched into the passageway.

  Only to stare up in dismay at a ladder that loomed above like the East Col of the Matterhorn. He was about to turn back when one of the fire-control petty officers stepped out of the equipment room, ran a gaze up and down him, and held out an arm. Dan gripped the handrail, half-supported by the petty officer, and managed to make the top. He squinted into the light. “Captain’s on the bridge,” Nuckols yelled, making him flinch.

  “Too loud, Boatswain, way too damn loud.”

  “Sorry, sir.”

  Dan tried to get up into his chair. Nearly fell, but made it, and sank back with a deep sigh that turned into a wrenching coughing fit that left his ears ringing. He rubbed his face, trying to regenerate the Big Picture. Headed south … en route to join up with the battle group for Malabar. Behind them, the Chinese. Up north, the Paks and the Indians gearing up for another go at each other.

  One of the worst things about a deployment was how distant the rest of the world began to feel. It wasn’t quite as bad these days, with satellite e-mail, chat, but he still had to guess at and try to reconstruct what was going on over the horizon. If there still was a world out there. If Savo, like one of Heinlein’s generational starships, wasn’t all the universe that still existed. He simply had to infer, from the crumbs of information that reached them out here … but why was he worrying?

  Hey, if you needed to know, your bosses would tell you, right?

  Yeah, like they’d explained what was supposed to be in the freighter’s holds, and why they’d suddenly decided to call him off, when he’d all but had his hands on it.

  He coughed, levered upright, and took a fresh grip on the clipboard. He should be studying the exercise op order. But even the thought was laughable. He had barely enough energy to bite off another breath.

  “Captain. Heard you were under the weather.”

  He screwed his head around to meet Amarpeet Singhe’s dark-lashed gaze. As usual, a hint of cleavage peeped at the neck of tailored coveralls, and gold glinted deep within. But he didn’t even care to squint for a better view. Just sighed. “Amy.”

  “Thought you might want to know how we’re doing on the investigation.”

  “Uh, right. Yeah … very interested,” he lied. Tried to struggle upright again, to at least pretend a modicum of interest. “You’re working this with Chief Toan, right? Where is he?”

  “Actually I’ve been doing most of the interviewing. The chief’s been concentrating on the physical evidence.”

  “There’s physical evidence? I thought…”

  “I didn’t mean that. Just, following up on the disconnection of the light switch in the darken ship trunk.”

  “Oh. Right. You followed up on that? I mean, he followed up?”

  Singhe came close, as if sharing something intimate. “Sure you’re in shape to take this aboard, Captain? XO said you were down hard.”

  “I’m listening, God damn it.”

  “Well, it turns out the switch was disconnected, yes. But anybody could have done it—it was just a piece of cardboard slipped between the contacts.”

  “So that’s a dead end?”

  “So far. But I’ve been interviewing the girls, about who’s been paying particular attention to Terranova, so forth and so on. There’s a significant amount of fraternizing going on aboard, Captain. That the command either doesn’t know about, or doesn’t care to acknowledge.”

  He cleared his throat. “Um, I wonder if you could … the coffee urn…”

  Dark eyebrows crept up. “You want me to get you coffee?”

  “Um, no, I didn’t mean that. Ask Nuckols to bring it over.” As he coughed into his fist, then couldn’t seem to stop, lights strobed behind his eyelids. Maybe he should be in his rack. “You said, um, significant fraternizing. Is this something we want to ackowledge?”

  “Everybody knows. And I’m afraid it runs deeper than I expected, frankly. We need to raise consciousness about this issue. Maybe a command-wide time-out—”

  Dan suppressed a sigh and fitted his fingertips together. He’d always felt there was little point in cramming healthy twenty-something men and woman cheek by jowl in a six-hundred-foot hull for months at a time, and expecting saintlike chastity. As long as it didn’t impact readiness, he was willing to look the other way … to a certain extent, anyway. “I’m not happy to hear that, Amy. We’ll have to think about how to address it. But isn’t a limited amount of, um, interaction between consenting adults a different issue than assault with a knife?”

  “The environment generates the crime, Captain. If you stop panhandling, your murder rate goes down too. They proved that in New York.”

  “Uh-huh, but can we focus on one thing at a time, Lieutenant? You were going to look into Peeples, right? He had the attitude.” Something else occurred then, and he added, “Also, Petty Officer Scharner, the one he had the set-to with—”

  “She’s dead. Yes sir. But the chief corpsman swears that was the crud.”

  “He’s absolutely sure? She couldn’t have been smothered?”

  “No sir. Neat as that would tie it up, I don’t think we have to go there yet. And as far as Peeples, the CMAA searched his locker and bunk area—”

  “What?” Dan hitched himself upright. “I didn’t sign off on that.”

  “He consented to a voluntary search. No knife, no stained coveralls, nothing incriminating.” Singhe inspected the overhead. “So we’re at a dead end. Except for one thing Terror remembered at the re-interview: the smell of limes.”

  “Limes, huh? She didn’t mention that.”

  “Remember, she was pretty shaken up. Once she had time to think about it, she remembered. He smelled like limes.”

  “Okay, maybe that’s valuable, maybe not. Do we have anything lime-scented in the ship’s store?”

  “Not for two years, Captain. Hermelinda remembered stocking a lime aftershave back then. But nothing recently. So it might mean, whoever our guy is, he’s not a recent accession.”

  Behind her, Bart Danenhower lounged against the nav console. Obviously, next in line to talk. “Okay, good.” Dan hitched himself once more; he kept slipping down on the slick leather. “Keep at it, Lieutenant. Sooner or later, he’ll try it again. I’d rather nail him before that happens.”

  * * *

  THE chief engineer had nothing much new, just needed permission to tear down one of the gas turbine generators to replace seals. The message traffic came up, which Dan usually read on his desktop, but apparently word had gotten around that he was installed on the bridge. He ate a couple more ibuprofen. Forced himself to turn pages and initial routing boxes, skimming most, but stopping to read one.

  Staurulakis had mentioned sub activity off Singapore the night before. This morning’s message gave more detail. Chinese nuclear submarines had been detected approaching the Malacca Strait. To join an already robust prese
nce in the IO? He rubbed his forehead, contemplating what that might mean for force numbers and threat level, the delicate balance of red line and boundary testing, that prevailed in the Darwinian, Mahanian world of the Indian Ocean. But generating thought felt like squeezing molasses through a strainer.

  One by one, his department heads came up through the forenoon hours, and he tried his best to give appropriate responses. But he could feel his attention wandering, his responses disjointed and partial. His arms ached as if he’d spent the morning shoveling coal, and his head spun whenever he made the slightest effort. Was this how half his crew felt? Grissett had mentioned lingering effects. Longley brought up another tray, but Dan winced and waved it away.

  The overcast was thinner today, the sun brighter behind the scrim of monsoon cloud. He sent his steward down for his sunglasses, leaned back, and rested his eyes.

  * * *

  HE was asleep again when a sudden increase in the noise level roused him. He cleared his throat and stretched, then tensed as Savo heeled and a sudden cacophony of shouting broke the drowsy routine of the watch.

  When he joined the officer of the deck out on the wing, Van Gogh had his binoculars up, staring ahead. “What’ve we got?” Dan asked him. “Why’d you change course?”

  “Something weird on the surface search.”

  “Weird? Weird how?”

  “A line … straight line across the screen. Combat reported it; the JOOD confirmed.”

  Dan looked down at the sea. Out at the horizon. Then behind them. The sea heaved in all directions, shading from a slate graygreen far out to a deep cobalt directly below. Small birds darted along the crests, and bits of weed the pale hue of drowned corpses slid past, their shadows slanting down blackly into the deep blue beneath. His mind labored, but couldn’t summon an explanation. “A squall line? Or some kind of anomaly effect?”