by John Ringo
Herzer ran up to the shoulder of the ridge that formed the embayment and looked out to the darkening sea. Sure enough, there was a snakelike head slowly making its way back to shore.
Thirty minutes later Joanna dragged herself up onto shore. Her belly was ripped in numerous places and her back was covered with broad, red welts. But she was alive.
“Cristo,” she muttered, collapsing in a heap. “Remind me not to do that again.”
“So did you escape?” Edmund asked. “Or eat?”
“Neither,” she answered, wearily. “I swear I died. But I know it did. And I didn’t eat; have you started serving ixchitl yet?”
“No,” Edmund said, looking at the rapidly shallowing water. “Soon.”
“Good,” she said, “wake me up when some’s done. I’d like mine medium.”
“The kraken is definitely dead,” Edmund pursued.
“Cracked its brain case with my own teeth,” Joanna said, her eyes closed. “Poke me if I lie.”
“And you didn’t eat it?” Herzer asked, aghast.
“Worst stuff I’ve ever tasted,” she answered. “Now, if you please, I vunt to be alun.” In moments she was snoring hugely.
It was after dark before the tide had gone out fully, but Herzer and Bast had gathered quantities of firewood and the water in the bay was lit with red when they and Edmund walked across the sandy bottom.
The ixchitl were crowded into the narrow stretch of remaining water, their wings flapping as they fought for the remaining breathable liquid, the firelight reflecting from madly churning wings, backs, eyes.
Herzer stopped as he raised the boarding pike and looked over at the general.
“Question, sir,” he said, lowering the pike as one of the ixchitl rolled an eye upward at him, gill openings on its back flapping in distress. “Is this a violation of the laws of land warfare?”
“Good question,” Edmund said, leaning on his own pike. “They’re sentient beings, so they can’t be treated like animals. On the other hand, they’re not signatory to any agreements with us and they have all participated in their own illegalities. On the gripping hand, we’re planning on feeding them to our dragons. And, honestly, I’m thinking of having a couple of wing-steaks myself. What’s your feeling, Lieutenant?”
Herzer looked down at the flapping rays and raised his pike. He thought about the tail of a mer-child lying on the sand of Whale Point Drop. Of Bruce, Jackson and all the others, paralyzed and dying for a breath of water or air. Eaten alive.
“Kill them all, sir,” the lieutenant growled, spearing downward and flipping the wounded ray out of the mass onto the hard, dry sand where it would die like a fish out of water. “God will surely know his own.”
* * *
“It tastes like… scallop,” Herzer muttered around a steak the size of a large Porterhouse.
The band of ixchitl had yielded enough food for the entire party to eat their fill. Cutting along the backbone and peeling back the skin of the wings revealed huge chunks of white, linear sections of meat separated by cartilaginous tissue. The dragons had simply torn into the ixchitl given to them, but Pete had shown how to separate out the steaks and these had been grilled over the fires, using the monomolecular net to keep them away from the flames. The produced meat was succulent and juicy, heavy in fat, and Herzer realized he’d eaten his steak without a pause.
“Back before replicators,” Edmund said, “they would catch rays and chunk them up, selling the meat as scallop meat. When replicators were introduced they used that meat as the template rather than real scallops. Real scallops got called ‘bay’ scallops. They’re sweeter and less chewy.”
“It’s still good,” Herzer said.
“You realize that this is cannibalism, right?” Pete said, chewing slowly.
“For you,” Bast said. She had produced a fork from her apparently infinite pouch and was delicately cutting slices from her steak. “I’m an elf. It doesn’t count.”
“They’re still sentient beings,” Jason pointed out.
“I’m not telling you you have to eat it,” Bast said. “In fact, if you’re done…”
“No,” Jason said, popping a piece into his mouth. “Just wanted to point it out.”
“For me, it helps,” Elayna said, chewing on a mouthful of the juicy meat. Her arm was tender and swollen around the harpoon still in it and had been bound up in a sling. But the other more than sufficed for current needs.
“Why?” Pete asked.
“The next time we have to fight them, I’ll just be thinking about the barbecue afterwards,” she said with a feral grin.
The barrels of water had been recovered but the island hosted a small spring and Herzer had had a chance to drink his fill and wash some of the salt off. All in all, he was feeling better than he had since the first attack on the town.
“Sentries are detailed, General,” he said formally. “I’ve got the second watch, so I’m for bed.”
The flood tide was making and there was enough room for most of the delphinos to fit in the bay again. The rest, mostly young males, hovered nervously at the dragon-covered entrance. But the two wyverns were posted by the water and if there was any attack they would be ready.
“I’d join you,” Elayna said, “but out of the water I’m not much fun.”
“If Herzer will carry you, feel free,” Bast smiled. “I wouldn’t mind a threesome.”
“Oh, Lord, what have I done to deserve this?” Herzer asked, holding up his arms.
“Is that thanks or a plea?” Elayna laughed. “No, you two go. I’m going to stay here by the fire and finish off the rays.”
“Do you want some help with that?” Pete asked.
“Yes, as a matter of fact,” she replied, smiling at him. “I’d love some help.”
“Come along, love,” Bast said, pulling Herzer to his feet. “You got plenty of sleep last night.”
Jason watched them as they walked up the hill and winked at Antja. “Care to try it on land?”
“Not on your life,” she said. “General, what happens tomorrow?”
“I think the ixchitl, if there are any left, aren’t going to be a problem anymore,” Edmund said. “But the orcas are still unaccounted for.”
“They’re not going to go in the shallows,” Jason pointed out. “They get beached too easily.”
“So I don’t think we have to worry about them until we reach the far side,” Edmund replied. “But we shouldn’t let our guard down. We’re not safe until we’re linked back up with the carrier and everyone is safely in your bay. Maybe not even then. I won’t be happy until there’s a serious guard force down here and a solid defense set up. Then we can start striking back.”
“I look forward to the day,” Jason said. “But I’ve got third watch, so I’m for bed.”
“I’ll snuggle with you, but that’s all,” Antja said, crawling into the darkness. “Understand?”
“Snuggle,” Jason said with a grin. “Right.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
“Mr. Mayerle,” Commander Mbeki said, “what are you doing?”
The engineer was in the process of attaching a small box to the mainmast. It had a brass dial on the front and a winding key on the side, which he proceeded to wind up.
“Gravitic anomaly detector, sir,” the engineer replied. He had finished winding the key and headed for the rear of the ship. “It detects small changes in the gravity as the ship passes over. By taking the punch tapes in them, and comparing them to the course, I think I can figure out a back-up navigational system for when we’re under cloudy skies. I thought of it when we were having all that trouble finding the shoals when we were clouded over.”
“It wasn’t finding the shoals we were interested in,” the commander said with a chuckle. “It was avoiding them.”
“As you say, sir,” the engineer said, seriously. “I need to attach one by the captain’s cabin. It will just be on the wall in the corridor. Is that okay?”
“Th
at’s fine, Mr. Mayerle,” the commander replied. “Carry on.”
* * *
Joel was back on night duty, the day watch steward having been put back on limited duty. So he was surprised to see the odd box on the wall when he walked down the corridor to the wardroom.
“What’s that?” he asked the sentry on the general’s door.
“Somebody said it was a gravity detector.” The marine shrugged. “Something about navigation. Ask one of the officers.”
Joel walked over and examined the box curiously. He could hear it faintly purring and at first feared that it might be some sort of trap or bomb. But without an explosive, it could only hold a small charge of fire-making material. Or, perhaps, poison.
“Who put it here?” Joel asked.
“How the fisk would I know?” the marine said, grumpily.
“Just asking,” Joel replied, heading to the galley again.
If that was a gravity detector he was Paul Bowman. The question was, who had put it there and why.
By the end of the shift he had determined that it was the civilian engineer who had put them there and that there were three, one in the officer’s corridor, one on the mainmast and one in the forecastle.
The question remained what their real purpose was. Or, maybe he was just being paranoid. But he knew enough of basic Newtonian physics to question that you couldn’t get a reasonable reading of gravity using that small of a device. Especially without advanced technology. Now, that it was measuring something, was possible…
Like avatar emissions. Bloody hell, that meant that someone else was stumbling around looking for the leak. He recalled, bitterly, what Sheida had said about “not stepping on each other’s toes.” At this point it had to be clear that there was someone passing information to New Destiny; three attacks, each right on their course, was just too much coincidence.
His only contact point was Duke Edmund. Admittedly, the duke’s wife was Queen Sheida’s sister, but that didn’t mean she was a viable contact. He didn’t go blabbing his missions to Dedra and Miriam.
He decided he’d wait until they rendezvoused with the duke and hope like hell that nobody did anything stupid until then. Let it be soon.
* * *
The delphinos had had to quit the bay before dawn, as the tide sucked the water back out, but there was no attack from any quarter and the party, after finishing off the leftover rays, started down the passage to the west.
They overnighted in a small bay near the exit to the banks. There weren’t islands around them, but the shoals on either side were shallow enough that no ixchitl or orca could pass over them. In the morning the dragons woke up hungry; there hadn’t been anything for them to scavenge on the trip across the banks.
“Take them out feeding,” Edmund told Joanna. “The deep water is just to the west. Keep an eye out for the carrier; the rendezvous is just to the north of the entrance.”
“Will do,” Joanna said, climbing up onto the shallows. The tide had come in and the shallows were ankle deep to the dragon but she and the wyverns were still able to get aloft.
“Where does all this sand come from?” Herzer asked, picking up a handful and letting it slide through his fingers. “On shore it’s from runoff from eroded quartz. But this isn’t quartz.”
“It’s mostly eroded coral,” Jerry replied. “Which is calcium carbonate. I say ‘eroded’ but much of it, believe it or not, comes from parrot fish… droppings. But it’s also some pure carbonate. The banks are one of the few places in the world where the temperature is just right for carbon dioxide to form carbonate. It reacts with the calcium in the seawater to make it. Not so much on this section, but over on the far side of the deeps there’s a huge bank that is constantly making.”
“Which makes it a carbon sink,” Edmund noted. “Back when there was hysteria about ‘greenhouse effect’ and global warming, all that people would talk about is how it was impossible to correct. Admittedly, cutting down ninety percent of the rainforests was silly, but the people who were hysterical about its effect were lousy atmospheric scientists. Tropical rainforests aren’t any sort of carbon sink; they recycle too quickly. And they’re actually a net oxygen consumer. Oxygen production, and carbon sinkage, occurred mostly in the temperate regions. And carbon sinks were everywhere that the hysteriacs weren’t looking. In the banks, in industrial farmlands, in a huge current off the coast of Anarchia. In fact, Norau, which was considered the most wasteful country on earth at the time, was a net carbon consumer because of its plant coverage, despite being a heavy source of carbon dioxide and methane. But nobody particularly cared for truth. They just wanted Norau to quit producing carbon, not realizing that if they did half the sinkage would go away with it. Nor that the warming that was occurring was part of a natural cycle that had been repeatedly proven from historical research. Not that humans have changed that much or we wouldn’t be in this war.”
“But there was a man-made heat wave,” Herzer said.
“In the twenty-third century,” Edmund pointed out. “When you’re producing sixteen to thirty terawatts of power, the heat efficiency gets very bad. But the carbon dioxide hysteria was just that, hysteria. As real as the Dutch Tulip Frenzy or the Beanie Baby Recession of the late twentieth century when the sudden drop in Tyco sales set off a market panic. Plenty of scientists, most of the atmospheric scientists, were saying it at the time, as well as pointing out ways to increase the rate of carbon deposition. But nobody wants to listen to the voice of reason when there’s a good hysteria to be had. Humans are like that.”
“Humans were evolution created,” Bast said, sitting down in the shallow water. “Must have been evolutionary positive to hysteria in small groups. Whole tribe to pile upon the leopard, perhaps.”
“Perhaps,” Edmund said with a grin. “The history of the period is so funny at a distance. As deadly in its own way as the present war. The world was in a golden age, and no one would pay attention to it! It’s maddening, like looking at the Inquisition histories and going ‘Well, duh, why didn’t you just try to get along?’ Science, engineering, were both expanding, lifestyles, across the world, were improving. The environment was improving. More people were living longer and better lives, in the areas that had decent governments at least. But everyone was screaming that the world was coming to an end.”
“Why?” Herzer asked.
“Why did Paul start this war?” Edmund replied with a sigh. “He saw the present trend, falling birthrates, and felt that the human race was on the edge of extinction. The people of the time took present trends, present methods of production, present resources, present population growth rates, carbon dioxide output, temperature increases, and created a straight line model, ignoring the fact that the historical models were anything but straight line. And every time that their doomsday pronouncements were disproved, they just shouted louder about some new looming catastrophe. Over a thirty year span, the same group of so-called ‘scientists’ first predicted a coming ice age, then that the polar ice caps would melt, then the ice age again! Instead, population growth fell off. Industries became more efficient. Every year a new, previously undiscovered, carbon sink was found. New energy sources were discovered, each of which created a new cry that a resource would be exhausted. People just seem to prefer that the world be a bad place, even when it’s clearly not. For chicken little, the sky is always falling.”
“Well, I wish I could grab a few of them and drag them into this world,” Herzer growled. “Show them what bad really means.”
“Nah,” Edmund said with a grin. “Bad was the Dying Time. The war is just challenging. Herzer, you’re sitting waist-deep in warm water. There’s a beautiful elf maid by your side. The sun is shining. The wind is light. Take a look around for a second and tell me you’re not in heaven.”
“I’m hungry and I need to go to the bathroom,” Herzer said, but he grinned as he said it. “Okay, point taken.”
“The war will wait for us,” Edmund said, sighing. “It
’s waiting for us right now, unless I’m much mistaken, just off the coast. But in the meantime, let’s just enjoy the sun and water, okay? And not look for a reason for hysteria.”
* * *
“Unfortunately, Miss Rachel, your father was right.” Evan sighed. “There is a steady power source in the rear of the ship and another that comes and goes. I think, though, that I’ve traced one of them to your father’s room.”
“That I know about,” Rachel said. “There’s a datacube in there. It’s also designed to protect the ship against a direct energy strike, assuming that Paul can free some up long enough to attack us.”
“That makes one headache go away,” he sighed. “Unfortunately, the other one is coming from the wardroom. And it’s intermittent. There have been two surges in the last day. But I’ve been unable to determine who was in the room when they occurred.”
“Damn,” Daneh said. That narrowed it down to the officers and the stewards; nobody else used the room. And another thing. “I’ve never seen the rabbit in officers’ country.”
“Nor have I,” Evan said. “It is possible that he’s coming up with the reports and then giving them to a steward. But the stewards don’t go in the wardroom unless there’s an officer that needs something. Or, occasionally, to clean up when they’re not there.”
“I think I need to ask some more questions,” she said, frowning. “I’ll be back. Keep monitoring.”
“I shall,” the engineer said. “Be careful.”
“I’ll try.”
* * *
Rachel had prowled most of the ship but for various reasons she hadn’t been down to the marine quarters. For that matter she hadn’t paid much attention to the marines; they were just ornaments as far as she could determine. But at the moment, they were going to have the information she needed.