The Lotus Eaters

D 469 Montcalm, Gallic Navy, Shimmering Sea, Terra Nova

"Tell that stupid bastard aboard Portzmoguer to stuff it," snarled the captain. "Helm, hard away from the torpedo. We'll outrun the bitch! It's got to have limited fuel."

Montcalm heeled over as the helm applied full rudder to turn the ship away from the oncoming torpedo. Men all over the ship either swayed on their feet or fell on their rear ends. Down by the galley a cook, Matelot breveté—or ordinary seaman—Dupre, managed both to keep his feet and to keep upright the tray of sandwiches he was bringing to the bridge. The cook was just congratulating himself when the frigate came out of its turn and took off at flank speed. Not expecting this, Dupre slammed his head into a bulkhead and bounced to his arse as the sandwich tray went flying.

Leaving the sandwiches behind, Dupre began to stagger topside to give the bridge crew a piece of his mind. Imagine the nerve; treating a chef like this. What do they think; that we're an Anglic vessel?

* * *

"A stern chase is a long chase," so it was said. It was even true when first said, in the day of sail on Old Earth. But when the chaser has a speed nearly six times greater than the quarry, and the quarry's less than ten kilometers away, a stern chase is likely to be very short indeed. When that quarry has to waste time turning about . . .

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.