“What?”
“It’s sad. Our woods are gone now, forever. We’ll never see ‘em again.”
“Well, let’s look on the bright side,” Warren responded, eyes alight with the reflection of the dancing fire. “That stupid Monatawana - he’s probably toast by now.”
56
The minutes , seconds, hours and days onboard the Phoenix were each counted down with dreadful sluggishness. But, the more Seven learned about the remarkable technology of the slow but astonishingly powerful platform, the more impressed he became and the more he fretted about the safety of Pacifica.
Legend had initially estimated it would require nearly 13 days to reach the underwater city. But Seven had befriended and awed each of Legend’s crew so that they had worked behind the scenes to tweak the system and eke one more tenth of a knot out of the structure on each watch. In so doing, they had reduced the time to Pacifica by nearly two days.
The secret to Phoenix ’s propulsion was relatively straightforward. The platform utilized exactly the same power system as did Pacifica – Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion – OTEC. Legend had designed the platform to draw cold water from the deeper depths and utilize it in the system’s ammonia vaporization state energy production mechanism. The pressurized outflow of ocean water was directed through a duct at the midpoint of the platform that not only swiveled to any direction he desired, but it was also designed in the shape of a highly efficient thruster to take advantage of all the available power. Hence it was that the energy production system doubled as a thruster, a fact that had absolutely escaped the watchful eyes of the Chinese who thought the craft could only free-float in the surface currents. While the platform was no speed demon, and it was hardly hydrodynamic, it was still able to make its way with purpose beneath the surface in the ocean void.
On the evening before their rendezvous with Pacifica , Seven sat in the Phoenix ’s control center with Legend. It was his rest period, but sleep had altogether escaped him. At Seven’s feet, Luci was curled up on the deck, sleeping soundly. She would not leave his side, even for one minute. As many times as he had attempted to put her to bed, unless he lay down beside her, she managed to escape and follow him. She also seemed much more at peace and comfortable sleeping on the deck than in a bed. But if Seven moved from his position, Luci would be fully awake and would follow him wherever he went.
“You have quite a little friend there,” Legend observed as his eyes shifted down to Luci, curled like a cat beneath their feet.
Seven had already shared Luci’s story with him, but added, “I’m gonna have to turn her over to my mother when we reach Pacifica . She’s the only human I know who can actually train and understand females – of any age.”
“Your mother’s on Pacifica ?” Legend asked with obvious surprise.
“Yes, her, my father and seventeen of my siblings.”
“Seventeen siblings! My Lord, you have seventeen brothers and sisters? And they let you bring ‘em along, all of ‘em?”
“Yes,” Seven responded matter-of-factly. “They’re all safe and accounted for. As a matter of principle, it was a package deal, if you know what I mean.”
Legend laughed loudly, causing Luci to stir. “Let me get this straight. You told ‘em that if they all didn’t come along, you weren’t comin’ either. Am I correct?”
“Yes, quite.”
Legend bellowed again. “An honest-to-God man of principle! Aaron Seven, the author of the apocalypse, a man of principle! Who would’ve ever considered that? So tell me, what if they’d turned your package deal down? Would you’ve invented another survival strategy? How would you’ve escaped the storms you yourself discovered?”
“By letting go.”
“So you’re tellin’ me you would’ve been at perfect peace with the quantum storms, just before they killed you and your family together?”
“Such storms are actually common in the universe, as are supernovae that wipe out whole planetary systems, as are runaway disease and ice ages and other cataclysms too numerous to count. I’m at peace with myself, you see. And I’m at peace with my destiny, over which I have only partial control of life and death, but full control over the reasons and justifications for living, dying and acting out my ideology.”
“So, if I hear you accurately, you can fully justify acting out your ideology by pickin’ up your teacher in college and tossin’ him out the window?”
Seven laughed, surprised. “How did you know about that?”
“Come on, Aaron. Didn’t you know your story was broadcast in excruciating detail in the months leading up to the storm? Everybody on the planet knows about that escapade! And you’re a convicted felon, no less. How does all that figure into your eternal decision making strategy?”
“I didn’t say my strategy was perfect!”
Legend laughed loudly. “What a relief! I was startin’ to fear I’d loaded a missionary onboard which would throw my crew profile right out the window!”
“As far as your crew profile is concerned, tell me, Striker, how did you happen to meet up with Sam? I sense there’s much more to that woman than meets the eye.”
“And how do you figure that?” Legend asked suspiciously.
“Well, given the fact that she’s seriously offered to kill me on several occasions would lead to a sense of greater personal depth.”
Legend’s face became rigid and he stared at Seven with hard, steely eyes. He sighed and then admitted, “Okay, so she’s an assassin. But she’s also my highly educated and very able assistant.”
Seven looked back at him for a long, pensive moment, then sighed, “What I wouldn’t occasionally give for that talent in a special assistant.”
“It does come in handy from time to time,” Legend responded seriously with no trace of humor.
“And how did you find an assassin-slash-administrative assistant? Did you advertise for that specific skill mix? Did you interview assassins? What does an assassin’s resume look like? Does it have that little part at the bottom where you can call references?”
“She was sent to kill me, actually,” Legend admitted. “And since she has a perfect record of hits, I’m quite fortunate to be here today.”
“Who sent her?”
“A Kowloon customer of questionable employ and shady connections who was dissatisfied with a Harley I sold him.”
“No way! You’re making this up!” Seven replied, laughing. “You’ve got to be making this up!”
“Nope, it’s all true, I can assure you. Sam’s from a dynasty of assassins that dates back centuries. It’s kinda a cult religion thing, ya know? Anyway, we were dancin’ at a party I threw for my customers. She’s a beautiful woman and she wanted to dance, so who was I to refuse her advances? She told me later that I was but a few seconds away from being offed when out of the corner of my eye I saw an out of control Mercedes about to drive through the front window of the place where we were dancin’. So I pulled her out of the way just before it came crashin’ through the glass. It would’ve killed us both. It just so happens that in her religion, if someone saves your life, you must offer them perpetual service until death. Fortunately for me, it also voided out her previous contract. When I found out that she was not only beautiful, but educated in the west and marvelously talented in many arenas, I accepted her offer of uninterrupted service. I’ve never regretted it, not even for a moment.”
“Well, I have to ask, what happened to the dissatisfied customer?”
“Sam gave him a full refund, of course. Much like you, Dr. Storms, she’s very principled, I can assure you.”
“And did he send others to kill you in her place?” Seven asked.
“Heavens, no! Once I found out he was dissatisfied, I exchanged his bike and we became very good friends, actually. In fact, if it weren’t for his connections and influence, I never could’ve built the Phoenix !”
“Unbelievable!” Seven said with a wide smile. “And how does Sam like being your slave girl?”
>
“Slave girl! You must be joking! I pay her just like the rest of my staff. If I ever missed a paycheck, I don’t know what would happen, and wouldn’t wanna find out.”
“Hmmm…” Seven responded.
“What?”
“That little fact kinda takes the edge off the story,” Seven said with wrinkled eyebrows.
“You’re sick, certifiably sick, you know that?” Legend replied with a wicked smile.
“Wait a minute here, Striker, I’m not the one holed up with a drop-dead beautiful assassin on my staff – no pun intended, of course.”
“And your point is what?” Legend asked bluntly.
“Nothin’, nothin’ at all…” Seven said with raised, open palms.
As he did, an alarm began clanging in the background.
“Sonar contact!” Legend responded.
Seven watched as Legend began expertly operating the control board before him, his fingers dancing across various panels.
“Remember when I told you about the Chicom submarine that was stalkin’ us?” Legend asked Seven. “Well, she’s back.”
“How do you know it’s one and the same?”
“What we’re picking up now is a passive sonar trace from her propulsion system,” Legend explained. “All propulsion systems have unique noise identifiers, kinda like an undersea fingerprint. Our computer stored her signature on our last encounter, and now it’s identified this contact as the identical beast. It’s her, all right, you can be sure of that.”
“How far away?” Seven asked.
“About 52 kilometers – sitting precisely between us and Pacifica . She’s right at our limit of detection.”
“Good Lord, man, if she’s that close to Pacifica , then she must’ve heard her noise by now,” Seven said anxiously.
“Oh, she’s heard Pacifica ’s noise since she got her nose wet. Your little underwater colony’s about as noise-visible as a 15,000 watt bulb in a cave.”
“Can you make out her heading? What’s she doing?” Seven persisted.
“Hang on. Give me time to collect a few more data points,” Legend remarked.
Seven waited as the computer collected information and calculated a solution.
“Okay, she’s apparently orbiting Pacifica out at about 25 or 26 klicks from her center,” Legend explained, as he projected the plot on a large display in front of them. “That’s only a guess, mind you, based on a fairly small arc, as you can see. She may even be simply arcing a safe circle around the colony on her way to somewhere else. But I can tell you three things with confidence: she hasn’t seen us or we’d be dead, she’s not actively pinging Pacifica so they don’t even know she’s there, and she’s in our path of travel, which is bad news.”
“What do you mean by that?” Seven snapped. “By the time we advance 26 kilometers, she’ll be long gone!”
“Well, here we are at this point on the plot,” Legend explained. “If you project our movement in a straight line toward Pacifica , then we intersect the arc right about here,” he said, pointing with a pocket laser pointer. “If the Jiang Zemin is truly moving in a circle around the target, then we’ll meet within about five kilometers right around here, and that’s entirely too close. If she went active for any reason, or if anyone onboard here so much as sneezed or dropped his coffee cup, we’d all suddenly have a very bad day.”
“Damn,” Seven swore, looking at the brilliant, multicolored plot before him with worried eyes. “It looks like they’re actually stalking her.”
“Run the numbers for yourself,” Legend remarked. “Pacifica ’s the prize of the world right now. She’s beautiful and safe from the storms, but more than anything else, she’s energy and resource independent. Any warrior worth his weight in rice would claim the prize as soon as it was practical. Now I suspect our Chicom skipper knows Pacifica has protection from one or more American fast attack submarines, so he’s probably stalkin’, listenin’ and collectin’ data before he moves in. But just think about it, once Pacifica ’s in his hands, he’s achieved the prospect of living to a ripe old age, and can, as a matter of course, rule the world from the luxury of his undersea kingdom. Don’t think for a moment that hasn’t already occurred to our little, devious, slanty-eyed nemesis.”
“But that chain of reasoning makes quite a lot of assumptions,” Seven responded, never taking his eyes off the screen.
Legend laughed. “And that’s what makes the whole rest of the world so continuously pissed off about Americans,” he said. “Your level of sophisticated, civilized thought has long outrun the level of uncivilized reality. Americans tend to reason in kind and gentle terms the world has never, and probably won’t ever, achieve. No, my friend, what you see here before you is a wicked mind scheming evil thoughts of invasion, mass murder, enslavement and warlord-like conquering that has characterized most of humanity’s background thoughts since the first day he was kicked outside the garden gates. In simpler terms, the Chicom bastard has rape and pillage on his mind, period. Call it what you will, what we’re watchin’ here is the cat stalkin’ the mouse, who just happens to be asleep at the wheel.”
“Then you’ll understand if I’m more than just a little concerned if we have to stop out here less than a day away from Pacifica and do nothing but watch!”
“Calm down, Aaron, please,” Legend responded. “Trust me, no one loathes the Chicoms more than I do. And no one wants you to succeed more than me. After all, we’ll ultimately run out of food here, just like they will. And I, for one, would rather count you as my fearless leader than die, as I would, under his boot or blasted to fish food by one of his torpedoes.”
“So what’s the plan?” Seven drove on relentlessly, without pause.
“For now, we maintain speed and heading on the original course. We watch him carefully. But keep in mind, at our current rate of advance and heading, he’s gonna disappear out of our detection range in about two hours. That means, if we can’t see him, then we have no choice but to stop and wait until he arcs back around again, assuming he’s circling Pacifica . We gotta keep him in our sights as much as we can. The last thing we want is to see him appear on our flank and not be able to stay outta his way.”
“Can we make it past him and slide into Pacifica unnoticed, even if he’s circling?”
Legend thought about the question, his eyes flashing about the board, working the calculation in his head. “Yeah, if he’s circlin’ and we wait until he’s at this position here,” he said pointing to a spot on the screen. “Then we can slip by him with some level of safety. But keep in mind, if he goes active on his sonar for any reason, we’re dead and there won’t be any escape. The only saving grace is that I’m certain her captain’s as interested in remaining silent as we are.”
“Can you send one of your little ROV bots out in advance and warn them?” Seven asked, chewing his bottom lip, viewing the plot before him.
“No. A few of the bot’s do have that one-way range, but they’d have to have some acoustic instructions sent to them at that distance across the submarine’s path which risks givin’ our position away. The bots work beautifully, but only if the enemy’s outside the masking envelope, not inside.
“There’re two things that don’t add up here,” Legend continued, eyes fixed on the plot. “Why hasn’t Pacifica picked them up yet? And why hasn’t the Leviathan responded to the threat? Doesn’t she patrol the area?”
“Those are two questions I think I can answer,” Seven responded. “Pacifica ’s acoustics aren’t anywhere near as sophisticated as yours. You see, I don’t believe that anyone ever considered Pacifica to become the focus of an undersea battle. We believed that it was sufficiently remote and isolated as to be out of harms way. We can spot acoustic noise, but I think that the Jiang Zemin is orbiting safely outside of our detection range.”
“I can assure you he knows your capabilities better than you can imagine,” Legend remarked.
“Secondly: the Leviathan patrols one day every two weeks.
She goes out on schedule for two days, then returns. Her main mission is to respond to threats.”
Legend just shook his head slowly. “Somebody needs a good ass whippin’.” “What?” Seven asked, confused.
“What kind of lame military strategy is that? I’ll tell you what it is: it’s not strategy at all! It’s either arrogance or it’s stupidity, but it’s also suicide. Who dreamed that idiotic patrol schedule up? ”
Seven sighed. “One of our staff. A former Naval officer, actually, Frank Spencer.”
“Well, if I ever have the dubious privilege of meeting this Frank Spencer, I’m gonna let him know up front that he needs to pull his head out of his rear, forthwith.”
“Well, you’ll have to stand in a very long line for that,” Seven responded dryly.
“What was he thinking?” Legend seethed. “Hell, man, I’m a Harley salesman and I know better than that! What he’s done by his tight cheeked military discipline has announced his greatest vulnerability to the Chicoms, and whoever else wants to know. I can guarantee they know when the Leviathan comes and when she goes. They know the exact time it takes her to power up and get underway and when she’s gonna deploy. They know exactly when the prime opportunity is to strike and, like the Trojan horse, they’re gonna pull up to your city when your pants are down and the skipper of the Leviathan is in the head. Do you remember the last time the Leviathan went out on patrol?” Legend asked.
“Yes, of course. Give me a calendar,” Seven replied.
Legend projected a calendar on the screen.
“There,” Seven remarked, pointing at the date. “That means she should deploy today, if she’s on the same schedule.”
Legend smiled sarcastically. “What time today?”
Seven looked at his watch. “In about three hours.”
“Fantastic!” Legend remarked, leaning back in his chair and placing his hands behind his head.
“No, wait,” Seven said suddenly, his eyes darting about in the empty space before him. “I believe the Leviathan may be out of pocket now.”
“What do you mean, ‘out of pocket’?” Legend questioned guardedly.
Quantum Storms - Aaron Seven Page 51
