Arisen, Book Six - The Horizon (36 page)

In any case, he felt like they all deserved a few minutes to lay their burdens down.

And just be tourists in their own fallen world.

* * *

Drake and his senior officers had no such luxury. He had abandoned his cot again and set up shop on the Flag Bridge, with Abrams assisting as XO. They had an intermittently open channel to LT Campbell down in CIC. And they were about to put up some air, to scope things out over the land, and around the Saldanha naval base.

Sailing into an unfamiliar port was both more and less perilous than it used to be. Back in the world, they generally only exercised harbor privileges where they were welcome. But, even when they were officially invited in by the controlling power, they weren’t always welcomed by the populace.

This was something the USS
Cole
had learned to its cost, when a handful of jihadi knuckleheads in a motorboat packed with explosives killed seventeen of their crew, and injured thirty-nine. They also blew a gigantic hole in the side, and came surprisingly close to sinking her. And that had happened just on the other side of this continent they now faced – in the Port of Aden.

Which was also the
Kennedy
’s next port of call.

And, as far as Drake was concerned, they already had absolutely all the holes in this boat they were ever going to need.

Luckily, these days, knuckleheads were a lot thinner on the ground – as were all other types of people, except dead ones. And so now the carrier’s main tactical imperative was to avoid riling up the local Zulus. The sleepier they stayed, the easier the scavenging op would go. In the early days of the ZA, they would continue to exercise a lot of the customary precautions before steaming into a new port. But after a while it became clear that they were only going to be met by the dead, no matter where they went.

But they also didn’t go in blind.

Drake punched a button, palmed a phone, and said. “CIC, Bridge. Send up the Fire Scout… Affirmative, standard pre-mission ISR sweep on a port facility and environs. But I want a six-thousand-foot floor. Yeah. Out.”

He replaced the handset, flicked at a switch he hoped would turn on the big overhead monitor – then got busy dividing his attention between that, and the view ahead out the screens. He looked up when Abrams stepped out, onto the platform outside.

He liked his views unmediated.

* * *

Homer felt the humming of the gigantic aircraft elevator before anyone else heard it. By the time the MQ-8 Fire Scout helicopter drone rose into view, he had both kids pointed back toward it, at the notch in the port side of the deck that the giant elevator platform was just filling back in, with the drone upon it.

Handon also turned to watch the compact rotary-wing aircraft as its rotors spun up. The Fire Scout was an unmanned autonomous helo about the size of a VW microbus. And it had that creepy eyeless alien look of so many drones – with just a featureless bulb where its cockpit ought to be.

Of course, its real eyes were built into its sensor payload, which was packed into a ball-turret slung underneath the nose: electro-optic and infrared cameras, a laser range finder, tactical synthetic aperture radar – and, if Handon recalled correctly, a tactical minefield detection system. This one also visibly had weapons rails, jutting from either side of the body, terminating in rocket pods. Handon guessed these held the laser-guided rockets known as APKWS (Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System).

After only a few seconds of spinning up – it had the lightweight aspect of a remote-controlled toy, which was basically what it was – the Fire Scout rocked smoothly off its skids, took flight, and rose into a blue sky streaked with thin white stratus. It looked like it was headed high enough to recon their target without being audible at ground level.

Handon leaned over to Homer and whispered, “You’re not worried about having the kids up here again? After the zealot attack?”

Homer had just been looking over the starboard side at the hole in the ship, lamenting the destruction of his favorite private spot to hide out in. That had been the deck between the Sparrow missile launchers, and the Phalanx Close-In Weapon System (CIWS), the carrier’s two anti-missile defense systems, before their destruction in the mutiny. He supposed he could always take the kids to the identical area on the other side, if he got the chance. For now, where they were was fine. He smiled and shrugged. “I can’t keep them locked below forever.”

A random sailor standing nearby said, “Yeah, it’s not like we’re gonna get fired on coming into port. Right?”

Handon, Ali, and Homer tried not to give him too baleful a look. They didn’t really believe in careless words jinxing their luck.

Then again, they didn’t totally disbelieve either.

* * *

As the five of them stood watching and waiting, Ali felt she couldn’t take the tension anymore, or maybe the cognitive dissonance of it. So many disturbing thoughts and feelings had been brewing and rumbling in her head ever since Homer’s return, growing larger during the long nights alone – and only getting worse as she saw the problems caused by Handon’s relationship with Sarah, never mind Henno’s probing attacks on their vulnerability. It had all been building to some kind of explosive pressure inside her head, and she had just decided to pull him aside and say something, when Homer beat her to it. Feeling the vibe coming off her like some static-electricity field, he touched her elbow, and led her away.

The two of them stopped and faced each other, about ten meters behind the others.

Before Ali could speak, Homer looked intently into her eyes and said, “I want you to know how much it means to me – you bearing with me these last few days. I know it can’t have been easy.”

Ali merely nodded. There were words down inside her. But they didn’t want to rise past her throat.

Homer went on. “But I’m ready now. Ready for us to start being together for real, spending more time together. And I also want to start getting the kids used to you.”

Ali swallowed drily. “Used to me?”

Homer smiled. “As a more regular, permanent fixture in their lives.” He leaned in closer and inclined his head down, holding her by the shoulders and looking seriously at her.

But he found he didn’t recognize the look in her eyes.

A few more heavy beats passed before Ali broke the silence.

“I’m ending it,” she said.

“…What?”

“It’s over.”

She pulled away from him and just walked away.

But even as she did so, she was already thinking:
I can stop sleeping with him.

I just have no idea if I can stop loving him…

* * *

The Fire Scout didn’t need to get very high, nor very close to shore, before its all-scanning cameras beamed something profoundly unexpected back into the
Kennedy
’s bridge.

“What the hell…?” Drake breathed.

Abrams was back inside now, where the view was better, standing at Drake’s right elbow, and staring up at the big video display. “Is that what it looks like?”

Drake punched up the phone again. “CIC, Bridge.” He knew they were already seeing what he was seeing – a bit before him, in fact. “Get me POSIDENT on that vessel.”

He hung up again, then looked up at Abrams, who shrugged and said, “It’s just going to be another ghost ship.”

Drake exhaled. Abrams was probably right.

On its long wanderings, the
JFK
had passed uncountable numbers of ships that had suffered catastrophic outbreaks – infections that had taken the crew down, no doubt horrifyingly quickly. Either everyone on board had been turned or eaten – or enough had that the survivors jumped over the side in pure panic. Either way, no one was left at the helm, and these ships floated – adrift, lost, soulless.

The great thing was just to stay away from them.

This one had no doubt docked up here, then had an outbreak that got out of control. End of story. Drake said, “Just to be on the safe side, let’s hail them.”

The officer at the comms station asked, “Radio, sir?”

“Radio, signal light, and semaphore.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

The phone on his desk blinked and Drake snatched it up. “Go ahead. You’re sure? Okay.” Hanging up, he looked up at Abrams again. “It’s the
Admiral Nakhimov
.”

“I thought so. Not too many warships that size – in the old world or this one.”

Drake nodded. “But what the hell is a Russian
Kirov
-class battlecruiser, from their Northern Fleet, doing off the coast of South Africa? It makes no sense.”

Abrams shrugged. “She was probably doing what everyone else was – trying to escape the plague. Then they sent a party ashore to scavenge for supplies. And brought the infection back on board with them.”

Both Drake and Abrams looked up at the overhead monitor as the giant weapons-bristling battlecruiser grew bigger, and meaner-looking, as the Fire Scout overflew her. The
Admiral Nakhimov
was anchored out in the mouth of the harbor. Saldanha Bay consisted of a big crescent-shaped body of water, with two arms of land forming its neck; and then another partially enclosed section beyond that, before the land finally gave way to the open sea. The Russian warship was in the second area – a sensible place to anchor a ship that big, and with a draft that massive.

The ship herself looked like a throwback to the WWII-era battleships – long, wide, tall, and menacing – though she didn’t have multiple big deck guns like the battleships of yore, only a couple of smaller 130mm ones. But what she lacked in guns she more than made up for in a huge arsenal of surface-to-air missiles, anti-ship missiles, cruise missiles, rockets, and torpedoes. The whole foredeck was covered with a matrix of pop-up missile cells, and surrounded by swiveling rocket and torpedo launchers.

She also had 76mm armor plating all around, and was fully 827 feet long, nearly as long as the
Kennedy
– and, like the
Kennedy
, nuclear-powered. Her displacement, however, was only about a quarter of the carrier’s, and her crew barely a sixth the size. Though her ship’s complement now presumably stood at zero.

“No response to hails, sir,” the comms officer reported.

“Helm, all stop,” Drake ordered.

After the better part of a week at sea, blasting ahead non-stop at forty knots, the USS
John F. Kennedy
finally churned to a stop. Its massive forward momentum would take it a fair bit closer to land yet.

When Abrams stepped outside again, with binoculars this time, he found he could now make out the tall, menacing shape of the big battlecruiser himself.

An almost unmediated view.

* * *

“We’re slowing,” Handon said, looking over his shoulder as Ali returned. She was just coming to tell him she was going back down to the team room.

“No,” Homer said, coming up on Handon’s other side, and wrapping his arms around Ben and Isabel. “We’re stopping.”

He was feeling stunned by Ali’s bombshell, and slightly surprised his voice worked. But, then again, he’d remained effective through much worse shock, many times before. And now he could actually feel the change in vibration beneath their feet, as the engines, nuclear-powered and thus having no idle mode, went offline.

The familiar artificial breeze against their faces slackened, but a natural one picked up now from the north. The sun glinted on the choppier water here nearer shore. A gull called in the distance, though Handon couldn’t spot it.

Ali could. She stopped and remained with the others, for the moment. Despite the dire awkwardness of remaining there with Homer, she wanted to see what was happening.

And then a muted klaxon sounded, from somewhere just behind and below them, and off to their left. It was followed almost immediately by a great whooshing sound from the same location, as two flashing darts appeared from beneath the port side of the carrier, trailing orange flame and gray-and-white smoke. They were Sea Sparrow anti-ballistic missiles, and now flew off at a speed almost too fast to track, skimming just above the water’s surface.

Quickly, they disappeared, racing out toward the horizon.

Toward Africa.

Two seconds later, a pair of explosions blossomed out ahead of them, also low to the water, and just above the line of the horizon. It was impossible to see what the two outgoing missiles had hit. But the sound of the explosions reached those on deck shortly after. This was followed by one second of silence, as the echoes faded out.

And then they all heard a high-pitched whining sound, like a giant but distant buzz-saw, and also coming from down underneath the left side of the ship.

And in that instant, Homer knew exactly what that sound was: it was the Phalanx Close-In Weapon System (CIWS), the surviving one on the port side – that giant six-barreled Gatling cannon with its big radar-guidance system, which was designed to shoot down incoming anti-ship missiles.

And it was out of ammo.

But its radome worked just fine.

And now it was tracking incoming threats, its barrels spinning and whining, but shooting blanks – at one or more objects approaching them at 2.5 times the speed of sound, much too fast to see, never mind to hear coming in.

Homer snatched up Isabel in his arms and turned toward the stern, not having to tell Handon to grab Ben.

“
Run
,” he said.

Humanity will return in
ARISEN, BOOK SEVEN – DEATH OF EMPIRES

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