To Sail a Darkling Sea

EPILOGUE

“Captain,” General Brice said. “I’m glad to see all your people, if not boats, survived to make it out of Tenerife.”

“The fact that this lash-up works at all is the surprising part, General,” Steve said, shrugging. “The occasional Keystone Kops moments are to be expected. I take it you got that via the subs in living color?”

“Satellite,” Brice said. “Happened to be making a pass. Speaking of which, we’re not terribly busy down here and have been using them to do a bit of diplomacy.”

“Still having issues with General Kazimov?” Steve asked. “I’ll get his subs the vaccine as soon as possible.”

“The general is no longer an issue,” Brice said, frowning. “It seems that he nearly made good on some of his threats and subsequently suffered from lead poisoning. Committed suicide by shooting himself twenty-three times in the back or something similar. Colonel Ushakov is a rather charming rogue who sends his regards to Seaman Apprentice Zelenova. He apparently was an acquaintance, even friend, of her father and is unsurprised she is ‘a little tigress.’

“The diplomacy aspect was mostly targeted on the Chinese. One of the realities of our condition previous to the Plague was that, well, we had much better satellites than anyone else in the world. And with the permission of the NCCC and since we’re not going to be able to make them again in somewhere between fifty years and never, we’ve been sharing rather copiously. If for no other reason than this little video. You might want to dim your compartment lights.”

The picture started with a shot of the earth’s surface, by night, dated the day the Plague was announced. There were more as the plague progressed and the sparkling strands of light slowly began to turn off, portion by portion, Africa went before South America went before Asia went before North America went before Europe until the entire world was cloaked in pre-industrial darkness. Then the shots zoomed down, pre-Plague satellite and file images of New York, Beijing, Moscow, Tokyo, filled with people and life and laughter, the cities bright by day and night with a billion incandescent and fluorescent and neon and LED lights proclaiming to the heavens that Here Was Man.

Then the same cities, in satellite shots, with cars choked with decaying vehicles, and raven picked bodies and infected roaming the deserted streets.

A world cloaked in darkness.

The somber music swelled as a single satellite passed over India then Africa, picking out shots of dead Mumbai, Cairo, Casablanca then paused and seemed to shift, zooming in and in and in… On a single point of light that on further zoom was a hundred ships and boats crowded into a harbor.

In all the world, there was a single point of light.

Wolf Squadron.

“Mind if I borrow this, General?” Steve asked, his eyes misty.

“Of course,” Brice said. “Pass it around. Your people need to see it. They need to understand.”

“It’s easy to curse the dark, ma’am,” Steve said. “We’ll light a candle instead.”

Riding the day, every day into sunset

Finding the way back home