Slave Ship (14 page)

Of course, we did have the curtain of the thermoplane over our heads, and that was a help. But it was as helpful to the Caodais now as to us. I was sympathizing with the men at the sonar stations, pinging into the dark deeps, charting and weighing the echoes that came back. There would be a vague splash of light in the sonar screen, warped by distance, almost obliterated by the thermoplane. Was it a blue whale, a school of fish—or a Caodai sub? Our real advantage was that we could fairly assume any sighting was a sub, whereas they might not expect to find us here.

Semyon was already in the whaleboat, of course. He was sitting with the puppies in his lap, talking nervously to Josie; he blinked at me as I slid in through the entrance hatch.

He scrambled to his feet, and then: "Oh," he said in relief, "it is you, Logan. I did not know but perhaps it was an admiral. In Krasnoye Army—"

"—There were no admirals," I finished for him. "Are the animals all right?"

"Oh," he said dourly, "they will perhaps survive if the rest of us do. Have you news, Logan? Are we to be in combat?"

"Can't you hear the squawk box?" It was rattling a repetition of what it had been saying, at intervals, ever since the first alarm:
Remain
at
stations
.
We
have
lost
sonar
contact
,
but
the
audic
listening
posts
indicate
the
enemy
still
on
course
. Which meant that we had stopped pinging the waters for fear of having them hear our own sonars; but our directional microphones had a fix on the Caodai screws, not muffled as ours were because, it appeared, they did not know we were around. It was good; if only they didn't close to a point where even the curtain between the dense, cold water and the bottom and the lighter, warmer, saltier layers above no longer screened us from their sonars.

Semyon sat down and lifted the puppies into his lap. He clucked over them and petted them. "Always jumping up and down," he complained. "Is never a moment to sit, or to play chess, or merely to think. Ah, Irkutsk, if only I could see you once again! How precious the memory—"

His voice trailed off; he was staring past me at the entrance hatch. I turned; and there was Nina Willette-or-whatever. She was not alone. She had with her the surly officer named Winnington; and she also had a wide-mouthed, dangerous looking gun in her hand.

I said dazedly, "Lieutenant Timiyazev, Commander Willette."

Semyon pushed the puppies off his lap and stood up to give her a ramrod Red Army salute, hand twanging wide at the temple like the ancient Coldstream Guards. But he glanced at me inquiringly, all the same.

I started to explain, but Nina Willette cut me off. "Inside, Winnington," she said, and gestured with the gun. And to me: "Sorry to barge in like this, but I had to get him out of the way. They'd tear him to pieces back in the fire control room."

Winnington only looked even more sullen. He walked casually over to the navigator's desk, pushed Josie onto the floor and sat. "You've got no right to do this," he observed flatly.

"No right!" she blazed, but Semyon outblazed her.

"
Svoloch
!" he roared at Winnington. "Leave dog alone! She was not hurting you, the dog!" Josie whined her complaints; and then, as she caught the timbre of her boss's voice, barked threateningly: Go
away
!
Go
away
!
Go
away
!

Winnington looked more alarmed at Semyon and the dog than he had at Nina's gun. "Get these characters off me," he appealed to her.

"I ought to let the dog take a bite," she said sourly. "But we'll save you for better things." She sat down, looking weary, and glanced at me. "Congratulations, Lieutenant," she said. "You almost loused things up, but not quite, I got to Winnington just as he was about to pull the trigger on the Caodais."

He said matter-of-factly: "I was setting up range and vectors. That's all. I wouldn't have fired without an order."

She laughed. "Of course not. And you're not a pacifist either, are you?"

"Pacifist?" I said, shocked; and Semyon blared:

"Patchifist? This one, a patchifist? Logan, leave me turn Josie loose on him! Is first patchifist I have ever seen!"

"Please," I begged him. "Tell me about it, Nina—Commander, I mean."

"Nina will do," she said wearily. "That's all there is to tell. I was assigned to keep an eye on him; he's been under surveillance for a long time. But he's smart. He didn't make a move—until it could be a big one. If I had been five seconds later he would have salvoed his whole battery at the Caodais; and they would have wiped us right out of the water ten minutes later."

Winnington laughed sharply, but he didn't say anything. He was watching Semyon, cradling Josie in his arms and murmuring to her in Dog, with what appeared to be genuine amusement.

A pacifist! I'd heard about them—I'd seen traces of their work, a newspaper report of a time bomb at the Caodai legation, an Army installation mysteriously ablaze—but as-far as I knew I had never seen one in the flesh. And here was Winnington, my surly bridge partner of the wardroom, revealed as an authentic pacifist. It was like seeing a cobra emerging from a washstand drain—the essence of dangerous evil, where only familiar and safe things should be.

I started to question her, but the rattle of the loud-hailers in the passageway stopped me. There was a new tone to the bridge talker's voice: "Attention on deck! All hands to Condition Baker! All hands to Condition Baker! Bandits past closest point of contact and holding steady on course." And then, humanly "They missed us!"

"So you see, patchifist," Semyon said nastily, "you have lost your chance!"

"Leave him alone," I told him. There was a tramping and talking in the passageways as the damage-control parties came up from the fuel tanks, where they had been waiting for possible Caodai hits, and almost certain cremation if one occurred. They looked hardly human in their anti-flash face paint and heavy hoods. Josie, spying them from the entrance hatch, barked like a rabid animal.

"Hush!" said Semyon to her, and repeated the order in Dog whine. I said to Nina Willette:

"Now what? Do you want me to escort you back to the Exec's office with this one?"

"Give us ten minutes," she said. "Let them cool off a little, I want him to get there alive. We pretty near had a lynching when I arrested him. He isn't popular with the ship's complement right now."

Winnington might not even have heard her; he was still watching Semyon trying to soothe the disturbed dogs, still with the air of amused detachment. He bent over casually to remove one of the puppies from his shoe, and Josie, the vigilant mother, sprang for him.

Semyon made a grab and caught her, yipping, by the tail, while the puppies clamored at him. "Fortune pulverize the fortune-pulverized beasts!" Semyon snarled. "Hush, now! Hush!" And he went on to bawl them out in Dog.

Nina said approvingly, "He barks like a native," and Semyon glowered at her briefly. But only briefly, because no mere human distraction could keep him from his animals.

"All right, all right!" he said, in a mock-furious motherly growl. "Semyon will tell you a story. Be calm! A nice story, I promise it. He had spoken in English, but the dogs, and even the seals behind their bars, reacted at once. Apparently they recognized the word "story," which told me a little something I hadn't known before about why Semyon so frequently slipped back to the animal quarters for a few moments before he went to bed.

Winnington stared in disgusted unbelief and Nina almost exploded. Well, it was a mad sight: There were the animals, yapping with joy; there was Semyon, oblivious of us all; and there were Nina and Winnington, watching a full-grown fighting man tell bed-time stories to a brood of animals. It must have been funnier to them than it was to me, but it still was funny to me.

Semyon had a mixed audience. It was like tucking a six-year-old and a three-year-old into bed at the same time. One story will more or less do for both of them, but the differences in vocabulary mean you have to double up oh the story as you go along—something like the facing Hebrew and English pages in the Holy Book they read from at the Christmas Feast of Lights. Semyon squatted down among the dogs, next to the seal pen; and then it was a steady stream of bark-whine-sniff-and-twitch, shiver-and-whine, grimace-and-growl. The animals were delighted; they followed the story with frantic absorption.

And Nina was delighted, too. After the first incredulous stare, she stuffed a handkerchief to her mouth and kept it there, eyes on Semyon, cheeks puffed out and pulsing. But she managed not to laugh out loud, which is more than I could say for Winnington.

But Semyon was oblivious. It was the longest monologue in any animal tongue I had ever heard, and I realized that it accounted for a lot in the comparative fluency Semyon had over me in talking with the dogs; it must have been splendid practice. I watched him admiringly as he improvised substitutes for words that did not exist, wagging the tail he didn't have, making the croupy barks that are Seal punctuation. When he finished, the animals applauded wildly.

And so did Nina. "Thank you very much," she said sincerely, regaining her self-control.

Semyon said suspiciously, "For what, thanks?"

"For telling us the story of Little Red Riding Hood. I wouldn't have missed it for the world."

He looked puzzled. "Oh, no, Commander," he said earnestly, "was not Riding Hood. How would that be tactful? Was Goldilocks and Three Bears, don't you see? Josie enjoys it very much, perhaps because of connotations of—" He stopped, indignant; Nina lost her self-control completely on that one. And when she laughed that broke me up.

But it didn't last. Nina stopped short and blinked at me. "What was that?" she asked shrilly.

But she knew the answer. I felt it too. The deck pulsed underneath us. A pause, and it pulsed again, as though a blue whale were nuzzling playfully up to
Monmouth
in our deeps.

But it was no whale, I knew. I had felt just that gentle pulsing on
Spruance
; I knew the feel of the recoil as a ship's main batteries loosed against an enemy.

Winnington grated triumphantly: "Caught me, did you? But maybe there was somebody you missed!" Someone had salvoed a burst of at least a dozen missiles. If we had been hiding, we weren't hiding any more; beyond doubt, those missiles were laid on course at the fat and ignorant Caodais as they waddled blissfully away from us . . .

But they wouldn't be waddling any more.

XIV

IT WAS BAD. Worse than we figured.

While the four of us and the animals waited in the whaleboat, the loud-hailers roared orders and the ship lurched continually against the recoil of missiles leaving for Caodai targets. And then there was a shudder that was not a missile leaving the tubes. A Caodai torpedo had exploded against our deflection net, close enough to jar us all; and then another, and more, and one final one that was not against the net but against the hull of
Monmouth;
we were hit, and badly.

And even that was not the end.

Monmouth
took six direct hits by my own count, standing helpless in the whaleboat. The ship was hurt. Our lights failed, and then went on again as the secondary circuits cut in; the secondaries failed, and our own whale-boat batteries lit the little cabin as I cut in the sealer switches. Outside in the passageways there was no power at all, at least in our deep laid section of the keelson; but from far away I could hear the rattle of the loud-hailers, and what they said was:

"All auxiliaries abandon ship. All auxiliaries abandon ship!"

And that was the beginning of eight long hours of death-in-life for the four of us.

We hugged the bottom; squatted there and waited.

Crippled
Monmouth
was still fighting. We could hear the distant explosions; but there wasn't anything we could do about it. Communication was impossible; the deeps were shuddering with explosions enough to drown out any call. To fight was out of the question: Our whale-boat had no armament, for the space for the missile rackets and projectile tubes had been pre-empted by the animal pens.

We squatted and waited.

There came a time when the noise of combat slacked off and seemed more distant. I cut out the ruptured "eardrums" of our sound-ranging gear and tried to take a fix: There was still fighting, but it was drifting south of us and east.

Nina said over my shoulder, watching the indicator needles: "They're running for it. The Caodais are chasing them."

It seemed that way; but whatever
Monmouth
was up to, we had still only one choice: To wait. If we were spotted by any Caodai, even a corvette, we were done; but if we stayed dead and silent on the ocean floor, we had a prayer of a hope. We would be spotted, no doubt about it; but spotted as a hulk of metal, nothing more.

And the floor of the Indian Ocean just about there was rich in hulks of metal.

It was hard on us, but even harder on the animals. Josie was anxiously asking what the devil was going on, the puppies were alternately demanding food and whining for their box; the seals in their pens were barking worriedly. The process of learning had gone both ways. While we were picking up Dog and Seal, they were picking up human intonations. They could tell we were upset, and there is nothing in the world more likely to upset an animal than that knowledge. "Quiet, quiet," pleaded Semyon, in English and Dog and Seal. "You will drive me insane, you beasts." He pushed the puppies to the floor and called Josie to attend to them. "Dog," he said, but not to the animals; he was glowering at Winnington, silent against the hull of the whaleboat.

"Leave him alone," I said.

Semyon switched his glower to me. "Leave him alone, it is? But did he leave us alone? He sent us to the bottom, Logan! Filthy patchifist, he fired the guns!"

Winnington said morosely, "From here?"

"Hah," said Semyon. "No, not you, but your brother patchifist, whoever he was. For peace, you did it? Pig, how could it be for peace to make war?"