Warships, on the Great Lakes. And the concept of lake didn’t really register — she couldn’t see land in any direction, not even the distant sparkle of cities or towns.
As the helicopter closed in, the faint lights of the four gray ships became more clear. The ships were big… so big they seemed to ignore tall, black, undulating swells that could have dragged normal boats to the bottom. The longest of the gray ships looked boxy, like a cargo hauler. Two others were nearly as big but had the sleek lines of combat vessels. One rode tall in the water, pristine and impressive, while the other listed slightly to port, parts of its superstructure blackened and twisted. It took her a moment to realize the two ships were identical, a before-and-after image representing the effects of combat. The smallest of the four didn’t look like any ship she had ever seen.
Margaret pulled on Clarence’s sleeve and pointed at the identical pair’s undamaged ship. She tried to lean into him and cracked her helmet against his. He reached up, tapped the helmet’s microphone sitting directly in front of her mouth.
“Oh,” she said. “Sorry.” She didn’t need to yell over the helicopter’s engine to be heard. She pointed out again. “What is that?”
“That’s the Pinckney,” Clarence said. “Arleigh Burke class guided missile destroyer. It’s the flagship of the flotilla. The one that’s listing is the Truxtun. The one that looks like a tanker is the Carl Brashear. That’s where we’re headed. It’s about seven hundred feet long, so your motion sickness should settle down once we’re aboard.”
She hadn’t told him she felt ill. He just knew.
Margaret gestured to the final ship, the smallest of the four. Its long, thin, pointed nose widened near the base, flaring out into the superstructure, which itself led to a flat, square back deck. The ship’s steeply sloped sides reminded her, somewhat, of the old Civil War ironclads, and yet the vessel’s overall appearance was that of a spaceship from a science fiction movie. On the back deck, she saw two helicopters, ready and waiting.
“That’s the Coronado,” Clarence said. “It’s new. It’s called a littoral combat ship.”
“So it literally does combat?”
“Not lit-ER-al, lit-OR-al,” he said. “It means close in to shore. That’s where SEAL Team Two is.”
Guided missile destroyers. Littoral combat ships. SEALs. This was the equivalent of putting a floating flag in the middle of Lake Michigan and telling the rest of the world this is ours, and if you even look this way, you’re going to get a black eye.
How typical. Five years after what could have been the extinction of the human race, and her government chose to rattle its saber instead of working with other countries to share the biggest scientific discovery in history.
And yet as impressive as three of the four ships looked, she realized that just a day ago there had been a total of seven: two more on the surface, one below. Somehow, the infection had taken them out.
I will beat you.
The helicopter suddenly plummeted, an elevator with the cable cut. Just as quickly the drop ended with a hard rattle that bounced her in her seat and jostled her loose helmet.
“Sorry about that,” said the pilot’s voice in her earphones. “The wind is pretty tricky. Turbulence is going to be rough as we come in to land. Hold tight.”
Something seemed to slap the helicopter’s left side. Margaret’s stomach let out a brief-but-intense prepuke warning. She started to look for something to throw up in, but Clarence was already offering her an open barf bag.
Margaret held it to her mouth as she discovered that she was not, after all, in charge of such things. She kept throwing up as the helicopter descended toward the Carl Brashear.
MUTUALLY ASSURED DESTRUCTION
Steve Stanton stood at the rail of the Mary Ellen Moffett, wondering if the phrase “freezing your nuts off” was less a figure of speech and more an accurate scientific possibility.
He stared out at an endless black surface, not that he could see all that far at 5:00 A.M. on a starless morning. November wind tore at his raincoat. Five-foot swells slapped against the hull, splashing icy spray into his face. He’d been out on the lake dozens of times while testing the Platypus, but until this moment he had never, in his entire life, been in a place where he couldn’t see land. He felt like a shivering speck in the middle of nowhere, like a satellite surrounded by the expanse of space.
Bo Pan stood next to him. The old man had already thrown up over the rail once. He looked like he might soon do so again.
It was hard to believe that just twelve hours earlier, Steve had been sunning himself in a lawn chair. As soon as the Mary Ellen Moffett left the dock, the temperature had plummeted twenty degrees. The growing wind dragged it down at least another fifteen. The Gore-Tex foul-weather gear he’d bought (with some of Bo Pan’s wad of cash, thank you very much) was rated for temperatures well below this, and yet still Steve felt wet and cold. When he got back, he’d write a stern letter of complaint to the manufacturer’s customer service department.
Steve found himself caught between excitement and fear. Despite years of preparation, it seemed impossible to believe that he was here — to possibly acquire a piece of something created by an extraterrestrial race.
“Bo Pan,” Steve said in a whisper that was lost on the wind. He leaned in closer and spoke louder. “Bo Pan, do you really think the location is accurate?”
Bo Pan shrugged. He looked miserable, but resigned to the misery, like a wet sheep patiently waiting out a hailstorm. Bo Pan hawked a loogie, spit it over the side. The man had cornered the market on phlegm.
“I do not know,” he said. “I was told to bring you here, and to launch your creation that way.” He pointed starboard, to the north.
Steve stared out. Maybe his destiny was out there, nine hundred feet below the surface. He could be the one to find it, to bring it back for the glory of China. If what lay on the bottom provided new technology, if it was or helped create a weapon, his country needed it. Hard times were coming to the world. America would not give up her place at the top without a fight. The People’s Party had spent decades preparing for that final shift to ascendancy — it wouldn’t be fair if a chance find gave America some kind of accidental edge.
Steve knew his history: when America had an advantage, it used that advantage. The atom bomb against Japan. Logistics and manufacturing against Germany. A superior air force against Iran, Libya and Bosnia. The shock and awe tactics against Iraq. When America fought with one hand tied behind its back, as it had in Vietnam and Korea, it lost. When it used everything it had, when it let the generals decide strategy, America always won.
China was gaining, gaining fast, but America still had the best tanks, the best planes, the best ships. Chinese armed forces claimed technical superiority, but as an engineer Steve knew such claims were a steaming pile of bullshit. Even with the largest manufacturing base in the world and an entire government dedicated to developing a high-tech military, China was still a decade away from being able to fight on equal terms. If war came, America would use everything it had: including alien technology, maybe even that psycho disease President Gutierrez had talked about.