Page 14 of Prima (After the End #8)

Chapter Eight

Ten years ago

The boy is only briefly dumbfounded by the girl’s suggestion to capture the submarine.

He drapes a small towel around his shoulders, which does nothing to cover his bare, still dripping torso. Sunlight, reflecting off the turquoise water, ripples across his gloriously striated abs.

“Well,” he muses, “it is only a midget sub. Maximum crew of four. Are you going to torpedo it?”

She does carry two mini torpedoes, but her mother would really have her hide if she used them when her life was not in imminent danger. Besides, “If I hit it, the sub will be destroyed and useless to you as a prize.”

He rubs the towel against his hair. “Then what are we going to do? Throw depth charges at it?”

“Precisely.”

The understructure of her raft might be a sub, but it’s so cramped that even someone without a shred of claustrophobia would feel as if she’s been buried alive after more than fifteen minutes inside.

Therefore, her plan was always to stay atop the raft, a surface vessel, and she prepared accordingly, with ammunition suitable for a surface vessel to use in defense against subs.

Between the shockwave generated upon their explosion and the pressure waves rebounding from the seafloor, depth charges can cause just the right amount of damage to disable a submarine.

But that requires the depth charges to go off at the correct distance.

Too close, and they cause as much damage as a torpedo.

Too far, and a sub under a disciplined crew will continue to function despite the bombardment.

After he pulls on the same Dawani Coast Watch t-shirt he wore earlier—alas, alas—she gives him the specifications of her depth charges. “You probably know the Risshvai sub better than I do. I’ll let you judge how close you want to toss these.”

She also shows him how to set the depth on the charges. She hasn’t seen the instrumentation aboard his boat, but if his Sea Sense is anything like hers, he should be able to gauge the depth of the sub with minimal fuss. And if not, this would be the time to tell her.

He only listens, then repeats the directions, to make sure that he has understood them correctly. “So your goal is for the sub to come to surface and for the crew to abandon ship. When they do, should we eliminate them?”

She raises a brow. “You don’t mind killing four people to obtain a prize?”

“I’d rather not, but if they see you and report back, you might have further trouble.”

“Which is why I don’t plan to be seen. Do you have a spare uniform?”

She’s slept with boys, but never worn any man’s clothes. He will be her first.

Together they clean up the remnants of their lunch and stow away the folding furniture.

She detaches the top portion of her vessel and entrusts it to him.

“I’ll set the understructure to autopilot, but I’ll go with it for a bit to make sure everything functions properly.

And then I’ll come back, put on your spare uniform, and we’ll be two Dawani patrols doing our patriotic duty. ”

He rolls his eyes. “Go then, and come back fast.”

A beat passes before he adds, “I can’t do this on my own.”

* * *

The girl is seated on her raft, which, without its understructure, feels disconcertingly light—much wobblier too.

The raft, with fenders he provided hanging in the front, is towed by the patrol boat.

The boy is reefing the sails—the wind has kicked up to fifteen knots and his job is to make his fast craft advance at a leisurely pace.

“I like your boat,” she tells him. “But I would have called it The Arrow of the Gods.”

The way it sheared through the waves on its way to intercede on her behalf against the hooligans in that canoe—what a beast.

“The Arrow of Time is a boast,” he says without turning around. For the first time in their brief acquaintance, he sounds pleased. “My mother once said that there is nothing as swift under the sun as the arrow of time.”

She whistles. “It does move cleanly.”

“Thank you. I built it myself.”

She did not expect that. The Potentate’s sons, as a whole, do not have a reputation for being learned or skilled in much, besides palace intrigues. “Are you just a boatwright or are you also a naval architect?”

“If you mean whether I designed this boat too, yes, I did.”

“I knew you were more than a pretty face.”

He scoffs. “You didn’t know that at all and it was definitely not my talents that caught your eye.”

“Wrong. If you hadn’t steered just far enough behind me as to be invisible I wouldn’t have bothered to take a look at you.”

“Hmm,” he says.

Rendered speechless by her factual rebuttal?

She titters. “How does your uniform look on me, by the way?”

It fits her pretty well since they are similar in height. But there is no mirror to let her know whether she looks dashing.

“It’s an ugly uniform. Be glad you’d look decent even in a burlap sack.”

Goodness, did he just call her pretty? Or maybe even beautiful?

“So you left your boat just this side of the border when you went to spy on the Risshvai in their waters.”

He doesn’t comment and she takes his silence as admission that she is correct in her conjecture.

“If anything happened in Risshva, you’d pretty much have had to swim back to Dawan. Much too dangerous.”

“Yes, but still not as dangerous as you drifting along in these parts.”

“I’m safe and sound.”

He finally turns around, satisfied with his shortened sails. “You, maybe. I am suddenly involved in a harebrained scheme to capture a submarine.”

She kicks her feet in the water. The enemy sub is closing in on them at the expected rate, the boy’s orca is swanning about a klick out, and a school of anchovies, fifty meters across in dimension, swarms around a coral reef five klicks to the east of the orca—all is well, for the moment.

“Wrong,” she tells him. “You were already concocting a harebrained scheme to capture a submarine; I merely pointed you toward a more obtainable one.”

But has she? They were two people in the open, going up against a crew of four protected by riveted steel.

She has never lacked for physical courage and the battle off the coast of the Southern Continent confirmed that in a situation of actual danger, she acquits herself very well.

At this moment, however, she is victim to a pang of anxiety she’s never experienced before: Earlier she was responsible only for herself, but now she ponders the consequences to him, should their scheme go badly.

She smooths her fingers over her vambraces and smiles at him.

His brows draw together. “Why are you smiling?”

To cover up her fear? She shrugs. “It’s a beautiful day, I’m with a beautiful boy, and I don’t even need to worry that he’ll turn out to be an awful lover.”

Because he refuses to sleep with her.

He snorts again, even though his cheeks color. “You’ve known a lot of those, have you?”

“If I say yes, would you feel more confident?”

“Why should I? Then when you tell me I’m the best lover you’ve ever had, I’ll have no idea whether I’m actually good or merely not as terrible as the rest.”

“All my lovers have been decent.”

“Maybe they are merely equally mediocre.”

“You could prove that to me only by being a sublime lover yourself.”

The enemy sub is twelve kilometers out. Soon it will be close enough to launch torpedoes.

He narrows his eyes—has he sensed her unease? “Why are we talking about such an irrelevant thing when we should be preparing for the enemy vessel?”

“I don’t know. Isn’t this the sort of nonsense people yammer on about when they are waiting for a pitched battle to begin?

” She exhales, trying not to betray her nerves in front of this all-too-observant boy.

“Shall we review the speed we need to maintain when we pitch in the depth charges so that we escape their effects unscathed?”

“Seven knots. What do we do if the sub pulls into torpedo range and fires at this boat? And are you like this with all boys?”

“No, at home I’m generally considered very serious, possibly a little boring.”

He looks her over. “You?”

“Me. You don’t believe it?”

“I shouldn’t. But you find me funny, which no one ever does…” His hand flexes. She can’t tell whether he’s fretting over the enemy sub or what he’s about to say. “So it’s possible that you’re boring in reality even though I find you…”

His voice trails off.

She waits, her breath held, for his next word. Then she tenses. The enemy sub is now less than ten klicks away—will it launch torpedoes?

It does not. She lets out the air in her lungs. Stupid. Her own sub is still out of range; of course the midget sub, which only carries two torpedoes, according to the boy, wouldn’t waste one on a patrol boat.

Wait, no. He already told her earlier, when they went over various likely and possible scenarios, that this type of midget sub doesn’t carry full-sized torpedoes with a ten-kilometer range, but smaller ones with an eight-klick range.

“You were saying?”

“Nothing,” he replies, as if he wasn’t on the verge of an admission. “You haven’t answered my question. What do we do if the sub fires at us?”

They go over that and fall silent. She kicks her feet again. The anchovies, possibly millions in number, still dart in unison around the coral reef. The orca maintains its distance. The sub approaches.

The sub!

She leaps off the raft, submerging herself. Five seconds later she surfaces. “Two torpedoes incoming! At your boat.”