Page 28 of Prima
“No, at home I’m generally considered very serious, possibly a little boring.”
He looks her over. “You?”
“Me. You don’t believe it?”
“I shouldn’t. But you find me funny, which no one ever does…” His hand flexes. She can’t tell whether he’s fretting over the enemy sub or what he’s about to say. “So it’s possible that you’re boring in reality even though I find you…”
His voice trails off.
She waits, her breath held, for his next word. Then she tenses. The enemy sub is now less than ten klicks away—will it launch torpedoes?
It does not. She lets out the air in her lungs. Stupid. Her own sub is still out of range; of course the midget sub, which only carries two torpedoes, according to the boy, wouldn’t waste one on a patrol boat.
Wait, no. He already told her earlier, when they went over various likely and possible scenarios, that this type of midget sub doesn’t carry full-sized torpedoes with a ten-kilometer range, but smaller ones with an eight-klick range.
“You were saying?”
“Nothing,” he replies, as if he wasn’t on the verge of an admission. “You haven’t answered my question. What do we do if the sub fires at us?”
They go over that and fall silent. She kicks her feet again. The anchovies, possibly millions in number, still dart in unison around the coral reef. The orca maintains its distance. The sub approaches.
The sub!
She leaps off the raft, submerging herself. Five seconds later she surfaces. “Two torpedoes incoming! Atyourboat.”
ChapterNine
Ten years ago
The girl zips along underwater.
The torpedoes, according to the boy, use a wake-homing guidance system. They will turn when he wheelsThe Arrow of Timearound and she must therefore intercept them before their trajectory curves away from her.
She adjusts the angle of her path slightly and prays that the boy is correct and the torpedoes are not equipped with acoustic homing guidance instead. If he’s right, so long as she is headedtowardthem, she should be fine. Otherwise, her DPV—diver propulsion vehicle—as light and as quiet as it is, might still trigger the torpedoes’ sensors.
Her person behind a fairing, she pushes the little electric tug, which looks like a missile with two seats, to the limits of its performance. He has begun his wide turn, timed to the second. She needs for the torpedoes not to change course for another three seconds. One, two, three. She turns off the motor of her DPV and yanks it around. Now she faces the torpedoes, which, having made a hundred-and-ten-degree turn, head directly at her.
But she, floating in place, produces no wake that would interest them.
The torpedoes are close together, only two meters apart in trajectory, one ahead of the other by about a hundred and fifty centimeters or so. She glances down at the thin, ultra-strong cord in her hands, which can be limp like a rope, stiff like metal rod, or sculpted in two-centimeter segments. She shakes the cord loose from its coiled state and shapes it into a somewhat straggly rod with two loops at the ends. After making sure the loops won’t come undone, she checks the rod’s dimension again and waits between the two torpedoes’ trajectories.
They zip toward her at forty knots. Her hands shake, mostly from strain. She is holding not just the lasso, but the chains and anchors from both her raft and the boy’s boat. Even in water, at roughly 75% of their land weight, they come to at least fifty kilos.
Her heart thumps. All that dead weight was strapped to the backseat of the DPV. But with the torpedoes almost on top of her, she must hold it in hand as?—
The torpedoes arrive. She lets go of the anchors just before the torpedoes’ noses press into the loops. They zoom past. She pulls her knees in and allows herself to tumble a few times, tightly tucked, in the turbulence created in their wake.
The torpedoes, dragged down by the anchors, will sink before they can reachThe Arrow of Time. The girl chases down her DPV and heads for the boy.
He sails so fast his entire main hull must be in the air, only minimal contact with the surface of the sea via hydrofoil. At this rate, the longer she pursues him, the farther away he will be.
But within minutes he decelerates. The sub, out of weapons, has turned to run; he adjusts his course to intersect its path.
And he does so at precisely seven knots. Depth charges explode like underwater fireworks. The midget sub keels violently. Then almost flips stern over bow when the expanding waves caused by the explosions ricochet off the seabed and slam back into it.
The sub shoots to the surface. The girl pumps her fist, ascends, and shakes water out of her face in time to see its hatch open and a needle-sharp paddle boat emerge onto the still turbulent sea. Two crew members climb in and start paddling. The other two crew members grab onto handlebars at the rear of the surf ski and swim. The streamlined craft departs the scene at a rather amazing speed, cutting across the water like a rapier.
Only then does the rippling effect from the depth charges reach her. Most of the enormous energy they released has dissipated. She tosses around a bit like a buoy in high waves, then starts the DPV and heads for the boy, who is coming this way to rendezvous with her.
