“A traveling pocket of air that we endlessly charge into,” smirked Thumbs. “Mega arctic. Ice IV.”
Silver added, “More important, it’s working.”
“Yes and no,” said Rigger, feeling a wave of weakness wash over him. Nerves or reaction from his beating, it made no difference now. “Moon lady bought us time, but that’s it. Ya see, if those things are Interceptors, they’ll have fantastic speed but only for very short ranges. Distance sacrificed for max velocity.”
“Great!”
He went on. “However, if those are HKs, hunter/killers, they may be holding back to try to force us to show them where our home base is, then they cut loose with their full speed and pierce our hull like it was cheap origami.”
“Which?” demanded Delphia, clenched fists in his lap. “How will we know?”
Concentrating on his console, Rigger shrugged. “When we die, or live.”
“Any armor on the sub?” asked Thumbs, rubbing his forearm.
“Sure. Forty millimeters of the best around. Outer armor is forty millimeters flexible impact alloy, cushioning wall halfmeter of power cells, inner hull fifteen millimeters beryllium steelloy composition.”
A tusky grin. “Hey, sounds good to me!”
“Are you saying that we can survive a direct hit?” asked Delphia.
Coaxing the engines back to maximum, Rigger actually laughed. “Survive a hit? Zero reality. Don’t you swabs know anything about subs?”
“Know enough to seize this one,” snarled Thumbs.
“No offense meant. However, even normal torps could toast a boat this size if they hit. Motherfragging nasty things, some sort of gelatin, epoxy, thermite combo.”
“Underwater napalm?”
“Dunno. But it clings to anything hit like it was alive and peaks at 2k Kelvin.”
“That’s the temp of the sun!” said Thumbs.
A shrug. “If you say so. I’m no techie, just a rigger.”
“Must be a thermitic reaction,” declared Silver, eyelids closed, chemical formulas scrolling on the screens of the console. “Salt water would actually feed the chemical reaction, not slow it down.”
“Accepted,” snapped Delphia, watching the missiles creep ever closer and closer. “So what can stop it if they hit?”
“Nothing in science or magic can do that,” stated Silver. “Thermite is a one hundred abso-fragging-lutely unstoppable chemical reaction.”
“Nothing? So if those thing hit. ..”
“We die. End of trans.”
High above Miami, Emile Ceccion dropped his silver spoon with a clatter and started to choke on his clear soup. Managing somehow to swallow the boullion, he gasped for air like a fish out of water.
Merde!
Breathe, he couldn’t breathe! The air before him swam and filled with the image of other elves dying for lack of air. They lay sprawled like winter leaves on the ruined streets of the sprawl. Many held wands or fetishes, and all had a strip of red cloth tied about their left arm. A symbol? A badge? Then even as he watched they crumbled into dust.
Mon dieu!
Heart pounding, Emile called out to his familiar under the table. Grand yipped in response, startling Emile so violently that he jerked forward in his chair, nearly tumbling out onto the plush carpeted floor of the penthouse.
With ragged breaths, he gratefully drew in lungful after lungful of cool sweet air, the environmental systems of the Gunderson Corporation tower having done their job of removing every trace of pollution from the ambient air of Miami. Soon, his vision cleared of the horrid nightmare, and Emile stumbled from the dining room table to the gleaming white lavatory and splashed mineral water on his face and neck. The back of his mind still echoed with the vision of his people dead and dying. Shattering like broken glass. How
many had there been? Four, six?
Emile closed his eyes for a moment as Grand leapt from the floor onto his shoulder, and nuzzled his master’s cheek. His sight swept through the fourteen rooms of his spacious penthouse and out beyond the steelalloy-plated walls and bullet-proof Armorlite windows. All was well, his home safe. His watcher spirits kept their vigil against physical or magical threats.
What was this horror that dogged his thoughts? Was it some vision, a dire warning ... oh, what nonsense. It was just a stupid daydream. His mind had been wandering. On the other hand, this might be what came of drinking red wine with fowl. His mother would have beaten him for such a gross practice. Propriety with food was as important as wearing the proper clothing.
Opening the medicine cabinet with calmer hands, Emile found a prescription bottle and took several draughts. He had work to do in six hours and needed to be well rested. He kept his toff doss and vaunted position in the corporate world because he was very good at the work he did: corporate defense, industrial espionage, debugging, wards, and so on, services vital to any major corporation. Gunderson was a mid-sized multi-conglomerate, specializing in transportation, inventory systems, and external security. TGC was solid in its slot and secure in the business of helping other corporations do their business. Maybe that was why they weren’t as ruthless as most. At least, not to the best of his knowledge.
Feeling much better, Emile walked calmly back to his dinner, even though it was midafternoon. Like many mages, he was not on a set schedule, except during a business emergency. How different was this place than his home in Paris. Warm and sunny, with its kilometers of beaches and the smell of the sea. He loved the ocean in all of its myriad moods. Stormy, calm, seductive, playful, it was like visiting a favorite lover, ever new, ever familiar.
The memory of salt water brought a nano flash of panic, but the draughts were taking effect and soon Emile was preternaturally calm and continued on with his dinner. The steak Dion was delicious, the Waldorf salad superb. During the dessert, which he shared with Grand, he was suddenly struck with the exact number of dead and dying elves in his momentary flight of imagination. Twelve. There were twelve of them. Odd, eh? A mystic number.
* * *
Ducking in through the open hatchway, Delphia burst
back onto the bridge of the
Manta,
hastily buttoning his fly. “What happened? What’s the situation?”
Thumbs did not turn from studying the main view screen of the weapons console. Everything was peaceful and quiet in the sea around them. “It was awful. The missiles hit and we blew to pieces.”
“Then sharks ate us,” laughed Moonfeather at the security station.
Plugged into the navicom, Silver shook her head slightly at the callous banter.
“Those were interceptor missiles,” Rigger explained. “They ran out of power and simply dropped away. We’re safe.”
“No sign of pursuit. Or trouble?”
“Clean as a politician’s conscience.”
Delphia took his place in the captain’s chair. “Excellent.”
“By the way, where did you dash off too in such a ... oh, never mind.” Thumbs spotted the bit of T-shirt sticking out of the norm’s hastily sealed trousers. “Barn door.”
Delphia was confused for a tick, then smiled in embarrassment and took care of the matter. “Sorry, but the call of nature does not await convenience.”
“For thirty minutes?” admonished Thumbs, tying a bandanna over his gang tats in pirate fashion. “Fall in afterward?”
“In spite of all the study on seacraft we’ve been doing while riding the waves these last weeks, I was completely unprepared for the bathroom ... I mean, the head.” Delphia gestured vaguely. “It was like trying to relieve yourself in a nuclear reactor! I had to read the instruction panel twice just to get the lid up!”
The submarine slowed around them as Rigger removed his hands from the console. “But you did flush correctly?” he asked urgently. “And properly seal off valves nineteen through thirty-five in reverse order, then open the main negative flow pipes?”
“Most assuredly,” Delphia assured him coolly. “And I dogged the hatch and checked the sensors before repressurizing.”
“Are they all like this?” Delphia asked.
“Sure. And we call them heads.”
“Hmm. Most annoying.”
“Agreed.”
Thumbs arched an eyebrow. “Are you two making this drek up?”
Rigger spun about in his chair to face him directly. “Ah ...”
“Thumbs,” the troll told him.
“Right. Thumbs, there’s no machine more complex on a submersible than the head. Or more deadly.”
“Deadly?” laughed Silver, attaching the Fuchi 8 to the navicom console. “A killer toilet?”
“Oh, dis I gotta hear,” said Thumbs curiously.
Rigger scowled irritably. “Look, lubbers, you can’t have a chem toilet on board. Thirty people using one head for a month? The storage tank would have to be bigger than the cargo hold, and the stink—” He waved the air as if dismissing a remembered odor. “You don’t want to know about the smell. Suffice it to say, flush toilets are the only way to go. And with external pressures sometimes exceeding fifteen tons per square meter, the water could explode out of the pipes like a Juggernaut, cutting the boat in half. To get the job done, and not risk sinking the boat, the operator needs to carefully access secondary seals, pressurize the bowl, trim the safeties, and on and on.” To their confused expressions, he added, “A lot of submarines were lost due to improper use of primitive bathrooms in the preAwakened world.”
Standing, Delphia nudged a corpse with his shoe. “As fascinating as all this is, let’s get this meat below before we start smelling like a slaughterhouse in summer.”
In short order, the dead were hauled to the bilge and slid unceremoniously into the ballast tanks. Rigger told them algae would dispose of the bodies within a day or two. Standard procedure. After tromping back to the bridge, they all reassumed their earlier positions.
“Can this thing cruise for awhile without your guidance?” asked Delphia, reclaiming his chair.
Removing his hands, Rigger rotated his chair. “Simple. It will go straight until it hits something or runs out of fuel in nine more months.”
“
Hai
. We need to talk biz for a tick.”
“Download me,” said Rigger.
“Bottom line, we’ve got the sub, but can’t operate it with
our own rigger gone. Also we don’t know as much about
subs as you.”
“So, in short, you can’t kill me,” Rigger said. The next instant shining steel was under his chin, the beating of the blood in his veins forcing flesh against the razor-sharp blade with painful sharpness. A ruby-red drop formed on the edge and trickled down Rigger’s neck, disappearing into his shirt.
“Wrong,” said Thumbs removing the knife. “You’re meat anytime the Big D says so. You scan?”
Touching his neck, Rigger’s hand came away smeared with red. “I scan.”
“Good.”
Unperturbed, Delphia went on, “Of course, you can ram us into an underwater mesa when we’re asleep. So, how about signing on with our crew as First Hat.”
“I thought that was First Mate,” muttered Moonfeather.
“When it’s official, he’s First Mate, pro tem it’s First Hat.”
Rigger chewed his lip and scratched his head. “XO sounds good to me. Would have taken me a decade to get that far under the old Captain.”
“A real bastard, eh?”
“Yar.”
Instantly, the Manhunter was in Delphia’s hand. Rigger gasped in shock. “I am too,” Delphia told him, holstering the gun. “We’re on a special run. Not the usual thing. The haul will be big.” He looked at the others and after a tick they nodded yes. “I offer you an equal share. A full fifth of the haul.”
“XO and a fifth of the booty?” Rigger ran a finger behind his ear. He displayed the dry digit to the others. “Fair enough, Skip. What’re we after?”
“Silver?”
Having prepared for this ploy back on the
Esmeralda,
Silver shoved an optical chip into a slot on the control board, and the main screen displayed a map of the world. “Almost fifty years ago, just before the return of magic, the Jappers built a supersubmarine called the
Emperor Yamato
. It carried every bit of advanced technology of the day. And was supposed to be unstoppable, the ultimate war machine.”
A long, low whistle from the rigger. “I heard of it. Thought it was a fable. Like Atlantis or the Flying Dutchman.”
“Oh, no, it was very real.” She paused. “It also sunk one day.”
“Why?”
She shrugged. “Nobody knows. But we’ve got a rough location.” Silver changed chips for one showing the floor of the ocean. “Lost military tech. You tell us how much that’s worth. On the market, or off.”
“Done and done. I’m in,” Rigger said, smiling.
Satisfied, Delphia stood and walked over to the pirate. “Good.” He stood alongside the man and read the name tag on his shirt pocket. “Is Rigger your real handle?”
“Huh? No, ’course not. That’s my position and job.”
“Change it. We use street names.”
“Never heard of a pirate doing that.”
“New captain, new rules. You copy?”
“Tone and bars, Cap.”
Delphia nodded in satisfaction. “Now show me what this tin can is capable of.”