Page 26 of Prima
He drapes a small towel around his shoulders, which does nothing to cover his bare, still dripping torso. Sunlight, reflecting off the turquoise water, ripples across his gloriously striated abs.
“Well,” he muses, “itisonly a midget sub. Maximum crew of four. Are you going to torpedo it?”
She does carry two mini torpedoes, but her mother would really have her hide if she used them when her life was not in imminent danger. Besides, “If I hit it, the sub will be destroyed and useless to you as a prize.”
He rubs the towel against his hair. “Then what are we going to do? Throw depth charges at it?”
“Precisely.”
The understructure of her raft might be a sub, but it’s so cramped that even someone without a shred of claustrophobia would feel as if she’s been buried alive after more than fifteen minutes inside. Therefore, her plan was always to stay atop the raft, a surface vessel, and she prepared accordingly, with ammunition suitable for a surface vessel to use in defense against subs.
Between the shockwave generated upon their explosion and the pressure waves rebounding from the seafloor, depth charges can cause just the right amount of damage to disable a submarine. But that requires the depth charges to go off at the correct distance. Too close, and they cause as much damage as a torpedo. Too far, and a sub under a disciplined crew will continue to function despite the bombardment.
After he pulls on the same Dawani Coast Watch t-shirt he wore earlier—alas, alas—she gives him the specifications of her depth charges. “You probably know the Risshvai sub better than I do. I’ll let you judge how close you want to toss these.”
She also shows him how to set the depth on the charges. She hasn’t seen the instrumentation aboard his boat, but if his Sea Sense is anything like hers, he should be able to gauge the depth of the sub with minimal fuss. And if not, this would be the time to tell her.
He only listens, then repeats the directions, to make sure that he has understood them correctly. “So your goal is for the sub to come to surface and for the crew to abandon ship. When they do, should we eliminate them?”
She raises a brow. “You don’t mind killing four people to obtain a prize?”
“I’d rather not, but if they see you and report back, you might have further trouble.”
“Which is why I don’t plan to be seen. Do you have a spare uniform?”
She’s slept with boys, but never worn any man’s clothes. He will be her first.
Together they clean up the remnants of their lunch and stow away the folding furniture. She detaches the top portion of her vessel and entrusts it to him. “I’ll set the understructure to autopilot, but I’ll go with it for a bit to make sure everything functions properly. And then I’ll come back, put on your spare uniform, and we’ll be two Dawani patrols doing our patriotic duty.”
He rolls his eyes. “Go then, and come back fast.”
A beat passes before he adds, “I can’t do this on my own.”
* * *
The girl is seated on her raft, which, without its understructure, feels disconcertingly light—much wobblier too. The raft, with fenders he provided hanging in the front, is towed by the patrol boat. The boy is reefing the sails—the wind has kicked up to fifteen knots and his job is to make his fast craft advance at a leisurely pace.
“I like your boat,” she tells him. “But I would have called itThe Arrow of the Gods.”
The way it sheared through the waves on its way to intercede on her behalf against the hooligans in that canoe—what a beast.
“The Arrow of Timeis a boast,” he says without turning around. For the first time in their brief acquaintance, he sounds pleased. “My mother once said that there is nothing as swift under the sun as the arrow of time.”
She whistles. “It does move cleanly.”
“Thank you. I built it myself.”
She did not expect that. The Potentate’s sons, as a whole, do not have a reputation for being learned or skilled in much, besides palace intrigues. “Are you just a boatwright or are you also a naval architect?”
“If you mean whether I designed this boat too, yes, I did.”
“I knew you were more than a pretty face.”
He scoffs. “You didn’t know that at all and it was definitely not my talents that caught your eye.”
“Wrong. If you hadn’t steered just far enough behind me as to be invisible I wouldn’t have bothered to take a look at you.”
“Hmm,” he says.
