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Captain Bertin stood over the sonar board, watching the torpedo eat up the distance between the two. Hmmmf. Maybe that asshole Casabianca was right. He sighed. I so hate it when he's right. Why my sister married him, I simply can't fathom.

Suddenly Montcalm's own sonar major and the captain exclaimed in surprise. The torpedo had stopped. Perhaps it ran out of fuel. Hah! I'll show that bastard of a brother in law who's right . . .

The exultant shout coming to Bertin's lips cut off as the torpedo began pinging furiously, only to stop that and commence moving at fifty. It rapidly accelerated to a blistering two-hundred knots.

Bertin raced topside. If he was going to die he wanted to see what would kill him. He didn't have long to wait.

The sea underneath Montcalm was suddenly lit by a bright orange flash. The flash itself lasted but a moment before being replaced with a green and black and sea foam circle of Hell, rising to both sides of the ship. Bertin felt his frigate lurch upward from the center. Driven to his knees on the hard steel deck, he felt as much as heard the tortured metal below bending with the force of the blow. Water, moving faster than the ship's upward twist, blew upward along both sides of the hull.

As the pressure underneath was relieved, both by collapse of the cooling explosive gasses and by the movement of water upward to either side of the hull, Montcalm found itself supported on the two ends by water, and with no support below. The hull which had so recently been half broken by the upward pressure in the center now found itself unsupported in the center by either water or its own structural strength. It collapsed into the hole thus created, continuing the work of destruction. To add injury to insult, water rushing back into the vacant space met the sundered hull halfway down into the vacuum. This blow was the end; Montcalm lifted again and split in two.

* * *

Bertin found himself floating, supported by an arm encircling his chest under his own arms. The two ends of his former command floated, points up, a few hundred meters away. Even as Bertin watched the bow section slipped under the waves.

"Who? What?" he asked, groggily.

"Chef Dupre," came the answer from behind.

"How many got out?"

"Not many, mon capitaine. I see only a few heads bobbing in the water. I am taking you to one of the auto-inflating lifeboats."

Automatically, Bertin corrected, "We have no 'mon capitaines' in the navy. We have 'my God' and—"

"And 'my ass,' yes I know, sir," Dupre finished.

D466 Portzmoguer, Shimmering Sea, Terra Nova

"All stop," Casabianca ordered. "Hard port rudder." He, along with every man of the crew, was nudged in the direction of the bow and to the right, as power was cut to the propeller and the ship began a turn.

"Do you really think, Captain . . . ?" Mortain asked.

"I am betting, Lieutenant, that that supercavitator, having been fired from fairly deep, will be too far down . . ."

"She's passing underneath us," sonar announced.

"The next few seconds will tell," said Casabianca.

"And she's still going," sonar amended.

The captain pointed at the weapons station.

"I am tracking, Captain. When she stops to ping . . ."

"Fire one Ulysses," Casabianca said.

On the foredeck a boxy looking device, partitioned into six section, two of them empty, rotated to the bearing of the Balboan supercavitator. The box elevated to fifteen degree, then washed the deck with fire and smoke as its rocket took off, bearing a torpedo to intercept the other.

Casabianca watched the missile cum torpedo off, then turned his direction of view over the starboard bow where a brace of helicopters were dropping self-guiding torpedoes ahead of the known location of the enemy sub.

SdL 2, Orca, Shimmering Sea, Terra Nova

Quijana could read the forward screen as well as any man aboard. Orca now had not only two torpedoes in pursuit, another two had plonked in ahead and to either side.

I'd take some satisfaction in the knowledge that we took a lot a killing, he thought, except that in a few minutes I'm going to be too dead to feel anything. I do take some satisfaction in taking out two for one.

Hmmm. Confession time? Maybe so.

"Garcia?" he asked.

"Yes, skipper."

"I've got to clear my soul on this. Pedraz booted me, I didn't jump. But I can't say I was sorry he did. I was relieved."

The exec, Garcia, just nodded. Why not? Any man might feel the same.

"Goodbye, Miguel," the XO said, right at the end.

SdL 1, Megalodon, Shimmering Sea, Terra Nova

Chu had the main screen focused in close on the unfolding drama. With all the torpedoes flying around the ocean, in some cases—the supercavitators—literally, it was the only way to distinguish.

About half those torpedoes fired so far had lost their prey to its uniquely stealthy characteristics. These searched the sea in spiral patterns, but too far away to be of much concern to Meg and her crew.

Hope surged for a moment as one of Orca's small defensive torpedoes took out one of its pursuers. It did so again as one of the Gallic torpedoes destroyed itself and another. Those three, however, were not enough. One of the shots dropped by helicopter found the small submarine, exploding so near the hull that Chu and company couldn't tell the difference between it and a contact hit. Another came in from the rear and likewise detonated. After that it was nothing but breakup noise as the remnants of the Orca plunged for the bottom of the ocean.

"Weapons, prepare two shots for the carrier," Chu said, bitterness in his voice. "Route the fire command to my chair."

"Aye, sir."

Chu's XO, Ibarra, shook his head and placed one hand over the fire controls. "No, skipper, don't do it."

"Why?"

The exec smiled, sadly, answering, "While it might still have done Orca some good, I'd have said, 'Damn the carrier, and every frog aboard.' Now?" The exec shook his head. "Skipper, Miguel never turned off his clicker. Think about that. Even at the very last moment it was 'mission first,' as it should have been. You shoot now, let them know how frigging quiet we really are, you throw away a part of what the men aboard Orca gave their lives for."

"We'll get 'em, skipper, never fear," Ibarra said. "But we'll do it at the time that's best for us, not for them."

"All right then, we'll wait," Chu agreed. "But we're going to shadow that bitch for a few days and, if war has broken out above and we can tell it has, I'm killing it."

Chapter Twenty-six

—though the lessons of ancient Rome, Greece, and Sparta are not perfectly supportive of the timocratic ideals put forth in this work, we should not lose sight of the valid lessons they do have to teach or illustrate. Among these is that only an armed citizenry, and one which is trained to arms, has a hope of maintaining its own political power and freedom in any degree whatsoever, that they can only gain any degree of political power and freedom through either the use or the threat of use of arms, or the withholding of those arms when the state needs them, and that, whatever their stated intent, those who would deprive the people of arms inevitably also deprive them of political power and freedom.