The Lotus Eaters

Ah, but what about the United Earth Peace Fleet? How do we keep them from spotting us? Marguerite hasn't answered the phone in quite some time now. Maybe that's my fault for shutting the communicator up so long. Anyway, there's no way to probe her to see. And the Yamatan intelligence has dried up. I wonder if she's even still in system.

He asked Fernandez about the problem of UEPF surveillance.

'I don't think they're watching very closely, Patricio,' Fernandez said. 'And, no, I'm not sure why and, yes, it does bother me. But there should have been something, some kind of reaction, to our operations in La Palma and Santander. For that matter, we've done enough recon flights over Atlantis Base with the Condors that there was a fair chance of visual spotting. But they don't seem to be looking.

'I think it's a good bet.'

They walked in silence until reaching the cemetery. There, Carrera nodded and said, 'All right. Tell Fosa I authorize him to do it.'

'What are you reading?' Carrera asked, really noticing for the first time that Fernandez was carrying a book.

Holding up the thing, front cover toward Carrera, Fernandez said, 'Memoirs of Belisario Carrera, Annotated and Abridged. Interesting stuff.'

'It was right here, you know,' Carrera said, sweeping an arm around the clearing.

'What was?'

'The first fight between my multi-great grandfather-in-law and Old Earth.'

'Ohhh. It was here that they killed the slaver, Kotek Annan?'

Carrera pointed at a spot not very far from Linda's memorial. 'His head stopped rolling right about there, according to family legends.'

Fernandez stopped dead, then opened the book and thumbed back forty or fifty pages. When he found what he was looking for, a description of that first fight, he read the passage and then reread it. Then he furiously skipped chapters to get to the section about the second fight, the one in the city. This he read, too. For a long moment, Fernandez chewed on his lower lip, as if searching for something.

'What happened to the shuttle?' he asked, excitement in his voice. 'The one they took out on the ground at the old UN station in Ciudad Balboa?'

Carrera shrugged. 'Dunno. I imagine the Earthers recovered it. I doubt old Belisario knew how to fly one. And his people were all simple campesinos.'

'Yeah . . . maybe. But, give the old boy his due; he was no dummy. Why would he leave the earthpigs with a repairable shuttle? Would you?'

'Now that you mention it, no,' Carrera said.

Fernandez smiled broadly. It was so unusual an expression for him that Carrera was slightly shocked.

'Would you happen to know where are the unabridged memoirs?' Fernandez asked.

Carrera pointed down the road. 'The original originals, I'm not sure. But there's a mostly complete copy at my old house a couple of miles down the road. I wouldn't recommend them, though.'

'Why's that?'

'Handwritten, and old Belisario's penmanship was not of the best. Likewise, the paper he used was awful . . . crumbling, now, mostly. I understand that the PhD candidate who did the annotated version used up a lot of research assistant's time trying to preserve them and sucked up a lot of computer time trying to decipher them.

'I was going to try to publish them, myself, back before the war. I finally gave up on the old boy's penmanship.'

'Would you mind letting me see the copies?' Fernandez asked.

'Would you mind walking a couple of miles?'

Fernandez shook his head no.

'Can you tell me why you're interested?' Carrera asked.

'I'd rather not; not just yet,' Fernandez answered, thinking, Because it's such an outside shot I'd look like a fool if it doesn't pan out.

Carrera shrugged. 'Come on, then.'

Puerto Lindo, Balboa, Terra Nova

The new submarine pen was intended to base a naval maniple of nine boats and their crews, any three of which could be presumed to be out on patrol or training at any given time. The concrete overhead was a full three meters in thickness and that on the sides not much less. Nine portals led to the Puerto Lindo bay while dual railroad tracks led from the factory, then entered the rear of the pen before descending into the water. With only two Meg Class submarines present, the pen seemed empty and cavernous.

Cavernous it might be, thought Warrant Officer Chu, watching as Meg 3 was railed into the water. Quiet, however, it is not.

The boat, about ten meters by forty, moved on four specially modified and linked flatbeds on two straight and parallel sets of track. This was deafening in the confines of the pen. Huge armored doors slid to either side to permit the vessel entry. That added to the screeching of the rails the sounds of machinery and grinding gears. Lastly were the sounds of preparation, by no means soft, though now drowned out by everything else.