John Ringo - Emerald Sea

“Do you want some help with that?” Pete asked.

“Yes, as a matter of fact,” she replied, smiling at him. “I’d love some help.”

“Come along, love,” Bast said, pulling Herzer to his feet. “You got plenty of sleep last night.”

Jason watched them as they walked up the hill and winked at Antja. “Care to try it on land?”

“Not on your life,” she said. “General, what happens tomorrow?”

“I think the ixchitl, if there are any left, aren’t going to be a problem anymore,” Edmund said. “But the orcas are still unaccounted for.”

“They’re not going to go in the shallows,” Jason pointed out. “They get beached too easily.”

“So I don’t think we have to worry about them until we reach the far side,” Edmund replied. “But we shouldn’t let our guard down. We’re not safe until we’re linked back up with the carrier and everyone is safely in your bay. Maybe not even then. I won’t be happy until there’s a serious guard force down here and a solid defense set up. Then we can start striking back.”

“I look forward to the day,” Jason said. “But I’ve got third watch, so I’m for bed.”

“I’ll snuggle with you, but that’s all,” Antja said, crawling into the darkness. “Understand?”

“Snuggle,” Jason said with a grin. “Right.”

“Mr. Mayerle,” Commander Mbeki said, “what are you doing?”

The engineer was in the process of attaching a small box to the mainmast. It had a brass dial on the front and a winding key on the side, which he proceeded to wind up.

“Gravitic anomaly detector, sir,” the engineer replied. He had finished winding the key and headed for the rear of the ship. “It detects small changes in the gravity as the ship passes over. By taking the punch tapes in them, and comparing them to the course, I think I can figure out a back-up navigational system for when we’re under cloudy skies. I thought of it when we were having all that trouble finding the shoals when we were clouded over.”

“It wasn’t finding the shoals we were interested in,” the commander said with a chuckle. “It was avoiding them.”

“As you say, sir,” the engineer said, seriously. “I need to attach one by the captain’s cabin. It will just be on the wall in the corridor. Is that okay?”

“That’s fine, Mr. Mayerle,” the commander replied. “Carry on.”

Joel was back on night duty, the day watch steward having been put back on limited duty. So he was surprised to see the odd box on the wall when he walked down the corridor to the wardroom.

“What’s that?” he asked the sentry on the general’s door.

“Somebody said it was a gravity detector.” The marine shrugged. “Something about navigation. Ask one of the officers.”

Joel walked over and examined the box curiously. He could hear it faintly purring and at first feared that it might be some sort of trap or bomb. But without an explosive, it could only hold a small charge of fire-making material. Or, perhaps, poison.

“Who put it here?” Joel asked.

“How the fisk would I know?” the marine said, grumpily.

“Just asking,” Joel replied, heading to the galley again.

If that was a gravity detector he was Paul Bowman. The question was, who had put it there and why.

By the end of the shift he had determined that it was the civilian engineer who had put them there and that there were three, one in the officer’s corridor, one on the mainmast and one in the forecastle.

The question remained what their real purpose was. Or, maybe he was just being paranoid. But he knew enough of basic Newtonian physics to question that you couldn’t get a reasonable reading of gravity using that small of a device. Especially without advanced technology. Now, that it was measuring something , was possible…

Like avatar emissions. Bloody hell, that meant that someone else was stumbling around looking for the leak. He recalled, bitterly, what Sheida had said about “not stepping on each other’s toes.” At this point it had to be clear that there was someone passing information to New Destiny; three attacks, each right on their course, was just too much coincidence.

His only contact point was Duke Edmund. Admittedly, the duke’s wife was Queen Sheida’s sister , but that didn’t mean she was a viable contact. He didn’t go blabbing his missions to Dedra and Miriam.

He decided he’d wait until they rendezvoused with the duke and hope like hell that nobody did anything stupid until then. Let it be soon.

The delphinos had had to quit the bay before dawn, as the tide sucked the water back out, but there was no attack from any quarter and the party, after finishing off the leftover rays, started down the passage to the west.

They overnighted in a small bay near the exit to the banks. There weren’t islands around them, but the shoals on either side were shallow enough that no ixchitl or orca could pass over them. In the morning the dragons woke up hungry; there hadn’t been anything for them to scavenge on the trip across the banks.

“Take them out feeding,” Edmund told Joanna. “The deep water is just to the west. Keep an eye out for the carrier; the rendezvous is just to the north of the entrance.”

“Will do,” Joanna said, climbing up onto the shallows. The tide had come in and the shallows were ankle deep to the dragon but she and the wyverns were still able to get aloft.

“Where does all this sand come from?” Herzer asked, picking up a handful and letting it slide through his fingers. “On shore it’s from runoff from eroded quartz. But this isn’t quartz.”

“It’s mostly eroded coral,” Jerry replied. “Which is calcium carbonate. I say ‘eroded’ but much of it, believe it or not, comes from parrot fish… droppings. But it’s also some pure carbonate. The banks are one of the few places in the world where the temperature is just right for carbon dioxide to form carbonate. It reacts with the calcium in the seawater to make it. Not so much on this section, but over on the far side of the deeps there’s a huge bank that is constantly making.”

“Which makes it a carbon sink,” Edmund noted. “Back when there was hysteria about ‘greenhouse effect’ and global warming, all that people would talk about is how it was impossible to correct. Admittedly, cutting down ninety percent of the rainforests was silly, but the people who were hysterical about its effect were lousy atmospheric scientists. Tropical rainforests aren’t any sort of carbon sink; they recycle too quickly. And they’re actually a net oxygen consumer. Oxygen production, and carbon sinkage, occurred mostly in the temperate regions. And carbon sinks were everywhere that the hysteriacs weren’t looking. In the banks, in industrial farmlands, in a huge current off the coast of Anarchia. In fact, Norau, which was considered the most wasteful country on earth at the time, was a net carbon consumer because of its plant coverage, despite being a heavy source of carbon dioxide and methane. But nobody particularly cared for truth. They just wanted Norau to quit producing carbon, not realizing that if they did half the sinkage would go away with it. Nor that the warming that was occurring was part of a natural cycle that had been repeatedly proven from historical research. Not that humans have changed that much or we wouldn’t be in this war.”

“But there was a man-made heat wave,” Herzer said.

“In the twenty- third century,” Edmund pointed out. “When you’re producing sixteen to thirty terawatts of power, the heat efficiency gets very bad. But the carbon dioxide hysteria was just that, hysteria. As real as the Dutch Tulip Frenzy or the Beanie Baby Recession of the late twentieth century when the sudden drop in Tyco sales set off a market panic. Plenty of scientists, most of the atmospheric scientists, were saying it at the time, as well as pointing out ways to increase the rate of carbon deposition. But nobody wants to listen to the voice of reason when there’s a good hysteria to be had. Humans are like that.”