“Karin, that is way too big of a step. You don’t know him that well.”
“I’ve never really wanted kids anyway, so what’s the big deal if I have my tubes tied now or in a few years.”
“Don’t let him talk you into it,” Janni said as forcefully as her weakened body would let her. Karin was nice, but not the strongest person Jannike had ever met.
“He didn’t talk me into it,” she dismissed too quickly. “It’s something I’ve thought about for a long time. I don’t want to be worn out at thirty like my mother was. She’s forty-five now and looks seventy. No thanks. Besides,” she said with a bright smile, “nothing will happen until we dock in Greece anyway.” Janni took Karin’s hand to emphasize her point. “This is a decision that will affect the rest of your life.
Give it some more thought, okay?”
“Okay,” Karin said, as if to a parent.
Janni gave her a quick hug. “Good. Now, go have some fun for me.”
“Count on it.”
Their perfumes lingered long after the girls were gone.
Janni’s face was scrunched in concentration. The ship wasn’t due to dock in Piraeus for another week, giving her hope that she and Elsa could talk Karin out of her decision. One of the prerequisites for becoming a Responsivist is being sterilized. A vasectomy for men and a tubal ligation for women. It was part of their code to agree to not add more children to an already-overpopulated planet, a dramatic first step that was difficult, expensive, and, in later years, impossible to reverse. Karin was too young for that just so she could bed a good-looking guy.
She drifted off to sleep, and when she awoke a few hours had passed. She could hear the muffled rumble of the ship’s engines but could hardly feel the calm rocking of the Indian Ocean swells. She wondered how Elsa and Karin were enjoying the party . . .
Jannike woke again an hour later. She hated being in the hospital. She was lonely and bored, and, for a moment, considered grabbing her old clothes from under the bed and sneaking up to the ballroom for a peek. But her body just wasn’t up to it and again she closed her eyes.
She heard a crash the instant before the mugger wrapped his hand around her throat again and started to squeeze.
Jannike flashed awake, reaching for her inhaler just as the door to her room opened in a blaze of light from the office beyond. Stricken by the asthma attack, she wasn’t sure what she was seeing. Dr.
Passman staggered into the room. He wore a bathrobe and his feet were bare. It looked like the front of the robe and his face was covered in blood. Jannike sucked greedily on the inhaler, blinking to clear her eyes of sleep.
Passman made an obscene cawing sound, and more blood dribbled from his mouth. Janni gasped. He took two more faltering steps, and it seemed the bones of his knees dissolved. He fell back, and his body hit the linoleum floor with a wet smack. Janni saw that wavelike ripples traveled the length of his body, as though his insides had been liquefied, and in seconds he was surrounded by a viscous moat of his own blood.
She clutched her sheets tighter, drawing on the inhaler as she began to hyperventilate. Then another figure came into her room. It was Karin in her little black dress. She was coughing violently, wet, racking convulsions that spewed blood in a bright spray. Janni screamed through her own coughing fit, terrified at what she was seeing.
Karin tried to speak, but all that came out was a watery gargle. She stretched out with her arms in a supplicating gesture, her pale fingers reaching for Jannike. Janni hated herself for recoiling back to the far side of her bed, but she could not will herself forward. A crimson tear escaped the corner of Karin’s eye and left a thick red streak down to her jaw where it dripped, blooming like a rose when it pattered against her chest.
Like Passman seconds earlier, Karin could no longer support herself. She tipped backward, making no move to break her fall. When she hit the floor, it was as though her skin didn’t exist. Blood exploded everywhere as Karin’s body came apart, and in the instant before Jannike Dahl went into catatonic shock she was certain she was going insane.
CHAPTER 5
JUAN CABRILLO STUDIED THE TACTICAL DISPLAY ON the forward bulkhead of the Op Center for a few seconds, time he knew he didn’t have but needed to take anyway. Three of the four torpedoes fired from the Iranian Kilo Class sub were fanning out and tracking toward their targets, while the sonar showed the fourth had slowed so much that the computer gave only its approximate location.
There was less than two miles separating the containership Saga from the first torpedo, while the two-hundred-thousand-ton supertanker Aggie Johnston had another mile-and-a-half cushion. The third torpedo was coming straight for the Oregon at more than forty knots.
Cabrillo knew the Oregon could take a direct hit, thanks to the reactive armor along her hull that exploded outward when struck by an incoming torpedo and negated the detonative forces, though it would likely damage critical systems. He could also dodge the incoming fish, using the Oregon’s superior speed and maneuverability, but the overshooting torpedo then would home in on the Saga as a secondary target and seal her fate. There was simply no way for him to protect the two merchantmen and the Oregon , especially with the reserve torpedo lurking out there.
He was dimly aware of Hali Kasim sending a radio alert to the two ships about the inbound torpedoes, not that there was anything they could do. A ship the size of the Aggie Johnston had a pathetically large turning radius, and needed five miles to stop from her current cruising speed.
“I’m tracking two fast movers off the carrier,” Mark Murphy said from the weapons stations. “I suspect they’re S-3B Vikings, antisubmarine warfare planes armed with either Mark 46 or Mark 50 torpedoes.
That Kilo is going to have a real bad day starting in about ten minutes.”
“Which is five minutes too late for us,” Eric said.
“Hali, what’s the range to the fish tracking us?” Cabrillo asked
“Six thousand yards.”
And for the Saga?”
“Thirty-two hundred.”
Cabrillo straightened in his chair, his decision made. It was time to roll the dice and see what happened.
“Helm, increase speed to forty knots, put us between the Saga and the torpedo headed for her.”
“Aye.”
“Wepps, open the ports for the forward Gatling and target that fish, slave your computer to the master sonar plot, and you might need the targeting reticle from the crow’s nest camera.”
“Just a second,” Mark said.
“Mr. Murphy.” Juan’s tone was sharp. “We don’t have a second.” Murph wasn’t listening. He was engrossed with something taking place on a laptop computer he had jacked into his system. “Come on, baby, learn it, will you,” he said anxiously.
“What are you doing?” Cabrillo asked, leaning over to compensate for the Oregon’s sharp curve through the water.
“Teaching the Whopper a new trick.”
Whopper was what he and Eric Stone called the Oregon’s supercomputer, having stolen the name from an old Matthew Broderick movie about a young computer hacker who breaks in to SAC/NORAD and almost starts a nuclear war.
“We don’t need new tricks, Wepps. I need that Gatling online and spooled up.” Murph spun around in his seat to look across the room at Max Hanley, who was engrossed with his own computer. “I don’t think this is going to work.”