The Lotus Eaters (63 page)

"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 and 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.

"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.

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.

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."

—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

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."

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."

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."

Carrera didn't enquire further. Fernandez had his sources. He did say, to Chu, "It was still touch and go for a while. There was a Maracaiban fishing trawler about thirty miles from where the Gallic frigate went down. It heard the automatic distress signal and went in to assist. The Gauls sank it before it could get close. Maybe they thought it was a Q ship. Anyway, big stink around the whole of
Colombia Latina
."

"How are they explaining away the lost frigate?" Chu asked.

"They're not. Their story is that it was an unprovoked attack by us. Our story is that it was an unprovoked attack by them to which our sub responded in self defense."

"It was," Chu said.

"I know," Carrera agreed, "but—"

"—but," Fernandez finished, "since you're the only one who can prove that, and since,
officially
, you weren't anywhere near there . . ."

"It doesn't really matter, anyway," said Carrera. "People who want to believe our story would, even if they had proof of the Gauls' version of events. People who want to believe the Gauls would, even if I had you swear to them on a stack of bibles that they fired first. There's so much information these days, and so much of it is conflicting, that people have grown jaded and simply believe whatever their prejudices tell them to. Hell, language itself is losing its ability to inform or persuade . . . or even to communicate."

Chu scratched his head through long-unwashed hair. "Yeah."

He then remembered something he'd been wanting to tell Carrera and Fosa for days. "There at the end, sirs, there's something happened you need to know about."

"What's that?" Fosa asked.

Chu's voice was full of admiration as he said, "Toward the end,
Orca
put on a burst of speed to try to evade some of the torpedoes coming for it."