thirty-two pounders, and had a couple of the new fifty pounders as well. It would take something like Amagi to tangle with her now. “It has, ah, been my honor, Your Excellency. I’ll miss you too.” He blushed even deeper.
“Mr. Shinya says you will not be entirely on your own,” she said with a concerned series of flashing eyelids, “but the transmitter you carry is not as strong… as powerful as the one Mr. Riggs has supplied to me. You will be able to receive transmissions, sometimes all the way from Baalkpan, but may not be able to transmit that far yourself. Rest assured, we will hear you and will routinely retransmit any message you send. If mischief of any kind should befall your mission or yourself, do not hesitate to call for help. My brother is High Chief of Paga-Daan, and will receive a communication device similar to yours. He will come to your aid immediately. It will, in fact, be his ships that supply you, if your mission is lengthy.”
“Thank you, Your Excellency. On all counts.”
Saan-Kakja offered her hand, and for an instant, Irvin didn’t know whether to shake it or kiss it. He settled for gently grasping the tiny thing in his own.
“Now, Ir-vin,” Saan-Kakja scolded, squeezing firmly with her fingers, “you cannot break me that easily!”
“Of course not, Your… my lady.”
Saan-Kakja grinned and, with an awkward bow, Irvin stepped away. He shook hands with Shinya again and climbed over the bulwark to descend the rope ladder to the waiting launch below.
“Hell,” he muttered to himself, cheeks still hot. “She’s not just beautiful; she’s downright mesmerizing. Even in kind of a ‘girl’ way!”
Simms and her consort hauled away to the east, through the Basilan Strait and across the Moro Gulf. Meksnaak had suggested the gulf might be one of their most hazardous passages until they crossed to Talaud, but they met no danger there. A few large gri-kakka surfaced and blew, and some possibly related denizens with short, serpentine necks watched the ships periodically with large, somber eyes, but other than that, all they saw were the myriad seabirds, flying reptiles, and what looked like a cross between the two. Nothing unusual. The birds capered and swooped among the masts, occasionally even snapping at the top men, but the only real harm they caused was the reeking, fishy slurry they dropped and smeared all over the ships. Otherwise, the weather remained fine, the skies no more temperamental than usual, and the sea in no way stirred itself against them.
Irvin wasn’t much of a practical sailor yet, and he relied heavily on Simms ’s actual captain, Lelaa-Tal- Cleraan. She reminded him a lot of Silva’s supposed Lemurian sweetheart, Risa-Sab-At, with her brindled fur and quick wit. Unlike Risa, however, Lelaa wasn’t a born warrior, and she hadn’t even seen action yet. Before getting Simms, she’d commanded one of the Navy feluccas. She was a born sailor, though, and Irvin was learning a lot from her. She’d translated her skill with the fore-and-aft rigged feluccas to the primarily square rig of Simms with astonishing ease. She was a good, patient teacher and well liked by her crew. She lacked any of Saan-Kakja’s cuteness factor, but she was young and still handsome in an experienced, practical way. Irvin had every confidence in her, and the two of them had become fast friends.
They tried to keep the Mindanao coast in sight as they worked east-southeast over the next few days. There were islands everywhere, and Lelaa was constantly worried about wind direction, something Irvin, a submariner, had never much considered. Truth be known, he was always more worried about how much water was under the keel and what sort of creatures might be in it. Lelaa was worried too; that was why they hugged the coast-a most unnatural act in a sailing ship. The depths here were unknown, however, and everyone was a little tense as they cruised the edge of the Celebes Sea.
“I like coffee,” Lelaa said, staring into her cup with a surprised, wide-eyed blink. She and Irvin were on Simms ’s quarterdeck enjoying another pleasant morning. “Everyone says it is vile and they don’t know how you Amer-i- caans can drink it all the time, but I find it heightens my awareness… and I have even come to enjoy the taste. Does that make me strange… or even more Amer-i-caan?”
Irvin laughed, then took a small sip from his own scalding cup of “monkey joe.” “Well, you’ve been in the American Navy for some time now, and everybody back home would swear the Navy couldn’t function without coffee. I don’t think we could’ve ever won a war without it.”
“You have told me of the great battles in your… our Navy’s past. Is that how they won? We drink coffee and our enemies do not?”
Irvin laughed again. “Maybe. If the only difference in a fight is that one side is wide-awake and alert, it might tip the balance. There are other variables, though, that coffee alone can’t make up for. Crummy torpedoes, being outnumbered ten to one.” His smile faded. “In the war we came from, we drank a lot of coffee, but it wasn’t making much difference.”
Lelaa took another sip. “I bet it would have, eventually. Maybe in that lost world, it already has.”
Irvin grunted.
The alarm bell at the masthead sounded insistently and everyone’s gaze turned upward.
“Island fish! Island fish! Three points off starboard bow! Two t’ousand yards! It just came up!”
“Clear for action!” Lelaa shouted, gulping the rest of her coffee and passing the cup to Midshipman Hardee. Hardee had been one of the kids on S-19 and had volunteered to return to her. Now sixteen, he was also the oldest boy who’d been aboard her. “Pass the word for Sparks to wind up his gear!”
“Aye-aye, Captain!” Hardee replied, clutching the cup in both hands. He raced away. “Tex” Sheider, also known as “Sparks,” like every communications officer on any Navy ship, scrambled up the companionway from below. He was a small, skinny guy, as many submariners were, and had never seemed to fit his other nickname: Tex. Of course, that didn’t matter either. All that mattered was that he was from Texas. There’d once been another Tex on S-19, but he’d suffocated in the battery compartment.
“Captain,” Hardee addressed Lelaa. “Sir,” he said to Irvin. “I heard the alarm. The guys are winding up the gizmo now.” He looked ahead, trying to see the huge fish. A gray-black hump was just visible from deck now. “I sure hope this works,” he added nervously.
The Anti-Mountain Fish Destruction Countermeasures, or AMF-DIC, after the British version of sonar-with a couple of extra letters thrown in-were a collection of mostly untried procedures it was hoped would scare the humongous, ship-eating beasts away. All had an acoustic pressure element, which they’d learned through experience might be effective. The first line of defense was literally a giant speaker activated by the ship’s communication equipment. A wind-powered generator charged a primitive battery in the “wireless shack” that, when switched through a high-amplitude capacitor, allowed them to boost the output through the simple transmitter Riggs had given them. In this case, instead of routing the jolt of electricity to an antenna, it sent it to a crude speaker mounted firmly to the hull. The result briefly turned the entire ship into a resonance chamber meant to frighten the creatures away.
The second defense, one they knew could work when properly applied, was a device most of the destroyermen had been familiar with even though Walker and Mahan had never been equipped with them. It was a form of “Y” gun that used one of the old muzzle-loading mortars they’d employed in the defense of Baalkpan. A weighted barrel of gunpowder rested upon a rack positioned at the muzzle of the mortar, which allowed them to blast the depth charge into the path of an oncoming mountain fish. They knew the monsters didn’t like depth charges at all, and they believed the “Y” gun would work fine-if it didn’t blow up the ship.
They had a final defense that Jenks had told them the Imperial Navy used at close quarters: an indiscriminate, simultaneous broadside of every gun on the ship. The resulting concussion seemed to disorient the beasts, and although it made them very angry, only rarely did they manage to destroy a ship with their enraged convulsions.
“Stand ready to activate your gizmo, Tex,” Irvin instructed. Lelaa nodded. “But wait for the word. I know we want to test it, but if that thing leaves us alone, we’ll leave it alone. Right now it’s just kind of wallowing there, catching some rays.”
“Yeah, but it’s right in front of us. What if it won’t move? Do we go around it, or blast it?”
Lelaa looked at the sky and the set of the sails. “We blast it,” she decided. “If we go around, we will lose speed, and I want us to be as fast as we can be if we are forced to use the gizmo.” She raised her voice. “Signal our consort to lay aft and follow in our wake. Maybe it won’t sense us both. No point in making it feel threatened by our numbers.”
Irvin glanced at her and she shrugged, her tail swishing uncomfortably. “If there were ten of us, I might try it the other way,” she explained, “but with only two, each less than a third its size…”
“It moving, Skipper,” came the shout from above. “It know we here! It coming this way!”
Lelaa shook her head and looked at Sheider. “Stand by your gizmo, Tex.” She gestured at the cluster of
