'I'm attempting to raise them now.'
'Roger that. We are monitoring civilian channels.'
Shifting to the radio frequency he'd been given during pre-flight on the Ark, Pryor began transmitting. 'Atlantis Queen, Atlantis Queen, this is Royal Navy Harrier Flight Alpha. Do you copy, over?'
There was no reply.
'Atlantis Queen, Atlantis Queen, this is Royal Navy Harrier Flight Alpha. Do you copy, over?'
As he spoke, he eased the Harrier around past the Atlantis Queen's bow, barely a hundred yards in front of her. As he did so, the bow, followed by the long forward deck and the high, blocky deckhouse of the second ship, edged into view. The Pacific Sandpiper was securely lashed to the Queen's port side. Pryor could see the hawsers connecting the vessels clearly, along with what looked like a gangway with safety rails going from the Sandpiper's deck into an open hatch in the Atlantis Queen's side.
'Atlantis Queen, Atlantis Queen, this is Royal Navy Harrier Flight Alpha. Do you copy, over?' He listened. 'Pacific Sandpiper, Pacific Sandpiper, this is Royal Navy Harrier Flight Alpha. Do you copy, over?'
Damn it, why don't they respond?
Dr. Stephen Penrose looked up in irritation as thunder rumbled outside. His audience, he saw, was paying more attention to the view out the large forward windows of Kleito's Temple than they were to his presentation.
'The tradition of Lyonesse as we now know it,' he was saying, 'goes back at least to the tenth or eleventh century, when it was supposed to have sunk beneath the waves of the English Channel. Only one man — one Trevellyn — was supposed to have escaped. Riding the fastest horse of the islands, he made it to Cornwall just ahead of the oncoming flood… '
Several of the people in his class were standing now, and a few had actually left their seats and were walking past him to the front windows.
'As, ah, as I was saying,' he continued, 'the tradition goes back to the Middle Ages, but there are hints of Lyonesse at much earlier times. The ancient Bretons, for instance, tell of the fable of Ker-Ys, the fabulous city of Ys, sunken somewhere between Cornwall and Brittany in Celtic times… '
More people hurried forward, speaking excitedly to one another. Penrose put down his notes and scowled at them. It was bad enough that those security people had come to him just an hour before his lecture was due to begin, telling him that the Neptune Theater was closed and that he would have to give his presentation in this gaudily decorated restaurant. Now his audience was more interested in whatever was going on outside than they were in his talk.
'I beg your pardon,' he said as a young couple walked past his lectern toward the front of the room. 'If you don't mind, I'm trying to give a talk, here!'
He'd been flattered when the Cruise Director had approached him a month before. Penrose taught European history at London College… but he was also known as something of an authority on Atlantis and on other traditions associated with lost or sunken continents. Sharon Reilly had proposed that he give a whole series of lectures throughout the length of the two-week cruise, with each talk timed to be given when the Atlantis Queen passed close to that particular site. They were paying him only a nominal fee, but a free booking on a Mediterranean cruise had simply been too good to pass up. He'd arranged for a grad student to take over his classes and taken a short leave of absence from the college.
This morning, as the Queen cruised out of the English Channel with Cornwall and the Stilly Isles to the north and the Breton Peninsula to the south, he was talking about Lyonesse, a mythical island that had little connection with Atlantis save for its ultimate watery fate. He found the subject fascinating, especially with its rich mythic connections with the Arthurian legends. He expected others to find it interesting as well… or at least to show some respect for those who wanted to hear.
Turning sharply, he opened his mouth to order the small crowd forward to return to their seats and stopped, eyes wide, jaw hanging. Ahead of the ship, two gray jet aircraft appeared to be hovering in mid-air in a very un- airplane like way. They were facing the ships, the air beneath their bellies blurred with the heat of their jet exhausts, seeming to drift backward to keep them just ahead of the Atlantis Queen.
'Good heavens,' he said. 'What do they want?'
His lecture forgotten, Penrose joined the other passengers at the forward windows.
'What a shot!' Fred Doherty exclaimed.
From the terrace high above the decks of the two ships he and Petrovich had an unparalleled view of the aircraft as they slowly passed up the Atlantis Queen's starboard side, then hovered for a time directly ahead, drifting backward to maintain their relative positions with the ships.
On the Grotto Pool deck below, Harper's exposure had been forgotten as both sunbathers and gawkers ran to the port side railings to watch the show. The two teenagers on the terrace leaned on the railing, pointing, jostling, yelling at each other above the howl of the two jets, and Petrovich had to move back and lean over the railing to get a good angle past them.
What the hell is going on? Doherty thought. Those jets were British, Royal Navy, he was pretty sure. He could see the blue and red roundels just behind their enormous air intakes on the sides, the red, white, and blue roundels on the wings. He'd seen Harrier jump jets before — at an air show demonstration back in the States. The Marine Corps used those aircraft, he remembered; their ability to hover like that had always amazed him.
They were hovering now thirty or forty feet above the water, their vectored jet blasts raising clouds of swirling spray from flat-blasted patches on the sea below them.
Harrier jump jets.
What the fucking hell is going on?
Commander Pryor tried a few more times, then gave up. 'King's Palace, Alpha One,' he called. 'I'm getting no response from either ship.'
'Copy that, Alpha One. How about the forward deck of the freighter? Could you effect a landing there?'
He'd already been wondering about that possibility. It seemed impossible that all radios on both ships should be down, and he'd begun entertaining the notion of landing his Harrier, climbing out, walking up to the Sandpiper's bridge, and demanding to know what the bloody hell was going on.
But something was nagging at him. This was more than mechanical failure, and the possibilities were making the hairs at the back of his neck stand on end. Besides, that damned helicopter was in the way.
'Ah, negative, King's Palace,' he said. 'There's a large helicopter parked on the forward deck, off-center toward the port side. Rotor diameter appears to be about fifty feet. The forward deck is about two hundred feet long, but he's taking his chunk out of the middle. There's also a bridge crane across the deck forward. The LZ is too tight.'
The Sea Harrier jump jet was a bit under forty-eight feet long, with a wingspan of just over twenty-five feet. With its superb VTOL capabilities, he could have touched down on that deck if the ship had been stationary, but the slight pitch and roll of the vessel coupled with its forward movement through the water made the risk far greater than Pryor was willing to accept. There was also the very real danger of the Harrier's exhaust overturning the helicopter if it caught the other aircraft wrong and possibly starting a fire.
'Very well, Alpha One,' the voice of the flight controller said. 'RTB.'
Return to base. 'Roger that, King's Palace. Alpha Flight, RTB. I'll see if I can get a closer look-see on my way out.'
He gentled the throttle forward, letting the Sea Harrier drift ahead. His intent was to essentially hover just off the Sandpiper's port side and let the ship pass him only a few yards away. That would give him, and the electronics packed into his reconnaissance pod, an excellent close-up look at the plutonium ship and a chance to see if anything seemed wrong or out of place on board. Spick followed, keeping his aircraft farther out to give Pryor elbow room for the close-in maneuver.
As the ship passed in front of him, Pryor could see people on the bridge, shadowy figures watching him, though he could make out no details. That meant the ship was manned, however; he'd begun wondering if everyone had packed up and moved on board the Atlantis Queen next door. He could also see a large number of the Queen's
