The Seventh Angel - Страница 53

She smiled with exaggerated sweetness. “If you’re going to take care of all that, I’ll go grab a cup of coffee and a Danish.”

“I get the picture,” Sheldon said. “I don’t know how to do any of the stuff you need to accomplish.”

Ann gasped in mock surprise. “You don’t?”

Her fingers starting pecking away at the laptop again. “Then will you please stop interrupting me, so that I can do it?”

“Yeah,” Sheldon said. “I’m sorry.”

Ann stopped typing again. “I’m jerking your chain, Sheldon. I’ve already done all that junk. I just need to run one last program integrity test, to check for disagrees and resource conflicts, and then I’m done here.”

She tapped a key and leaned back. “There. That should take that about ten minutes to cycle. When it’s finished, as long as there aren’t any errors, our buddy Mouse should be ready to go play in the water.”

She checked her watch. “That’s pretty good timing. The Navy boys tell me that the sun will be setting in about fifteen minutes. Since we’re doing all this sneaking stealth business under cover of darkness, that works out just about perfectly.”

Ann stood up and stretched to get the kinks out of her back. “Come on, Cowboy. If you absolutely must help, you can lead me through this metal labyrinth to the wardroom. I really do want some coffee and a Danish.”

* * *

An hour later, Sheldon and Ann stood with a bunch of Sailor types on the boat deck, bundled up in heavy foul weather coats, and stomping their feet to keep warm. The sun was down now, and the moon wouldn’t rise for several hours yet. The darkness was broken only by the stars and the dim glow of amber-lensed deck lamps, cranked down to minimal intensity.

Mouse hung beneath the boat davit, a dark silhouette dangling at the end of the lifting cable for the destroyer’s Rigid-Hulled Inflatable Boats.

That particular bit of engineering had been Ann’s idea. At her suggestion, the robot’s lifting hardware had been made compatible with the single-point boat davits used aboard Navy warships. Any ship that carried RHIBs could launch and recover a Mouse unit without installing special equipment. From the Navy’s perspective, that made Mouse cheaper to buy and easier to integrate into the fleet, which — by extension — made it more likely that the Lords of Navy Procurement would decide to purchase lots of Mouse-series underwater robots from Norton Deep Water Systems.

As far as the company was concerned, the Navy procurement contract was the whole point of the Mouse project. Ann’s priorities were quite different, but they still came back to the bottom line. The Navy was Norton’s best customer. If the Navy didn’t buy underwater robots, then Norton would have no reason to build them. And if Norton didn’t build underwater robots, then Ann would have to either abandon her chosen profession, or go to work for Big Oil. And that was not going to happen.

Ann might not care for the military yahoos, but at least they thought they were doing the right thing. They were well-intentioned, if misguided. Those planet-killing bastards in the oil industry … they were a whole different breed of bad news. There were no good intentions in them at all: just mindless greed, with no thought to long-term consequence.

Ann looked up at the shadowy form of the disk-shaped robot hanging from the end of the boat davit. Norton had provided the funding, and the engineers, and the facilities, but Ann had breathed life into the strange little machine. Mouse was the culmination of her very best ideas, and the product of the hardest work she had ever done.

She exhaled sharply, the freezing Siberian air turning her breath to vapor in front of her face. She had poured her soul into this project. No way would she do that for the oil companies. Never.

Ann felt a jarring thump through the soles of her feet, followed by a prolonged scraping noise and a groaning of metal that she felt more than heard. The ship seemed to shudder until the groaning died away.

She looked at the nearest Sailor. “What the hell was that?”

“Probably a growler,” the man said.

“A what?”

“A growler,” the Sailor said. “A chunk of sea ice. Smaller than an iceberg, or a bergy bit. Maybe the size of a refrigerator.”

“There are chunks of ice out here the size of refrigerators?” Ann asked. “And they’re not freaking icebergs?”

“That’s right,” the man said.

Ann couldn’t see his face properly in the darkness, but the Sailor had an older voice. He was probably one of the senior petty officers, or maybe a chief.

“We’re transiting through the Kuril islands,” he said. “Passing into the Sea of Okhotsk, which is mostly covered by ice. The plan is to skirt the southern edge of the ice pack. As long as we don’t get too close to the pack edge, we’ll mostly run into grease ice. That’s usually just slush — not fully frozen. We’ll get some growlers too, about like the one we just rubbed up against. If we’re lucky, we won’t run into any bergy bits.”

“What are those?” Sheldon asked.

“Baby icebergs,” the Sailor said. “Maybe the size of a house. Not big enough to qualify as real icebergs. You don’t get real bergs in the Sea of O.”

Ann’s mouth felt suddenly dry. She nodded, though the man probably couldn’t see her in the darkness. “No icebergs,” she said. “That’s good to know. At least we don’t have to worry about sinking.”

The man laughed, but there didn’t seem to be a lot of humor in it. “I didn’t say that.” He stomped on the deck, the sound of his boot audible in the darkness. “Our hull is steel,” he said. “But it’s only a little more than a half-inch thick. A decent sized bergy bit will go through us like a can opener.”

“Please tell me you’re joking,” Sheldon said.

“I wish I was. Even a good sized growler could do a number on us, if we hit it the wrong way.”

“What about that killer radar?” Ann asked. “No sparrow shall fall, and all that crap. You can see the ice with that, right?”

“We’re in EMCON,” the man said. “Stealth mode. The SPY radar could probably see most of the ice, but it would give away our position. We’re running without it.”

“So how do we avoid hitting one of those baby icebergs?” Sheldon asked.

“We’ve got lookouts posted,” the Navy man said. “They’re watching the water in front of the ship. If they see anything off the bow, they tell the bridge and we turn to avoid it. We should be okay.”

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” Ann said. ‘But didn’t the Titanic have lookouts posted too? That particular method of ice avoidance didn’t work out too well for those guys, as I recall.”

“You’ve got a point there,” the Navy man said. “But we have two advantages over the Titanic. Our watertight integrity systems and damage control technology are about a century more advanced.”

“Fine,” Ann said. “What’s the other advantage?”

The man laughed again. “We know we’re not unsinkable,” he said. “So we’re a lot more careful.”

“That’s comforting,” Ann said. “Now, we just…”

“Just a sec,” the man said. “I’m getting a call from the bridge.”

He paused for a couple of seconds, and then said, “Boat deck, aye!”

He snapped his fingers. “Peters! Shut off the deck lights. Everybody! Lights off—now!”

The amber lamps went off abruptly, plunging the deck into total darkness.

The Sailor spoke again. “Bridge — Boat deck, all lights are out. We are dark.”

“What’s going on?” Sheldon asked softly.

“Jets,” the Navy man said. “CIC can’t get a lock on the Bogies without lighting off our radar, but our Electronic Warfare guys are tracking emissions from at least four Zaslon S-800’s.”

“What does that mean?” Ann asked.

“It means there are at least four MiG-31 fighter jets out there, probably flying the edge of the ice pack to check for uninvited party guests.”

“Like us,” Sheldon said.

“Yeah,” the man said softly. “Like us. So we’re running quiet and dark, and generally hoping that they don’t detect us. There’s a good chance that they won’t. We’re pretty damned stealthy when we shut down all the toys.”

Ann stared up into the night sky, trying vainly to spot something moving against the backdrop of stars. “What happens if they find us?” she asked.

“Depends on who they belong to,” the Sailor said. “If they’re out of mainland Russia, they’ll more than likely just report our position back to their base. That will stir up some shit, because the Russians don’t like us up here, but it’ll be mostly be political. We probably won’t get shot at.”

“What if they’re not from mainland Russia?” Sheldon asked.

“Then they’re out of the Yelizovo air base on Kamchatka,” the man said. “Which means that they belong to our pal, Mr. Zhukov. If it’s those guys, they’ll shoot us between the eyes about ten seconds after they find out we’re here.”

“This is insane,” Ann said. “We’re dodging icebergs in the dark, and playing hide and seek with freaking fighter jets. What are we going to do for an encore? Juggle chainsaws?”

The Sailor chuckled. “You know what they say. It’s not just a job. It’s an adventure.”

“I’m not joking,” Ann snapped. “What the hell are we doing here? We’re practically asking to get killed.”