Blood In the Water (3 page)

PROLOGUE

Christmas Island
South of Java

Contre Amiral Rauol Laborde paced the bridge of his elderly battleship,
Savoie
, scratching absently at his thin mustache. It was a nervous habit, he knew, and he tried to control it, but the dead-calm heat in Flying Fish Cove, where his ship was anchored, was almost unbearable, and the mustache always itched.
What a relief it would be to simply shave it off! But that won't do,
he decided.
The men are used to it.
More important, it was part of the persona he endeavored to affect: the figure of the confident, dashing commander. And that image was particularly vital now, after his powerful ship had been forced from its station at the southern African port of Alex-aandra, the capital city of the Republic of Real People. The Republic was a nation composed of an odd mix of vaguely catlike creatures calling themselves Mi-Anakka and of various human cultures apparently collected across the ages.

His assignment had been to intimidate the Republic into, essentially, inactivity, and prevent it from joining a faction of Americans and other catlike folk in a wider war against the vicious reptilian creatures to the north. He still didn't fully understand why that might be.
Why
not
let the barbarians of this twisted world exterminate one another?
He supposed there must be a reason, but he wasn't sufficiently well connected to—or possibly trusted by—the leadership at Tripoli to be privy to their grand strategy. He snorted, looking out the bridge windows, past the two gunhouses forward on his ship's fo'c'sle, at the lush island embracing his
Savoie
. He was a holdover, one of the few remaining flag officers of the old regime retained by the “new” France that had joined Italy and Spain to form the fascist Concert of Versailles, or, more specifically, the Confédération des États Souverains. He'd survived the purge only by pretending to embrace the new order. One of the reasons he'd been given his isolated and ambiguous assignment in the first place was that enough of the other officers with the invasion fleet originally sent to conquer British Egypt—but who had instead wound up on this . . . other Earth—had probably voiced their suspicions to that effect, he reflected resentfully. Still, it had gotten him and his ship away from Tripoli and all the bitter intrigues that racked the leadership of the Triumvirate, composed of the highest-ranking officers from the three most important powers involved in that “old world” invasion. France had supplied the most ships, though the Italian vessels were generally newer and more capable. All had supplied armor and some aircraft crated in transports, but Spain had sent the most troops. Ultimately, each had a claim that theirs was the strongest member of the current alliance, or “League of Tripoli,” that they'd established after arriving in this world. The “Third Triumvirate,” some ironically called it, with the expectation that it would eventually go the way of the first two triumvirates of ancient Rome. The French general Faure was currently “first among equals” owing to the support of the German contingent, which didn't rate full representation and had already changed several times over the past six years.
And the Germans are fickle,
Laborde mused.
Throw their support behind whoever benefits them most
. They had the smallest contingent of all but were disconcertingly capable and therefore disproportionately influential.
Sooner or later, one faction or other will emerge as the
unquestioned leader of the League as the rest are pushed aside, and whoever that is will likely owe a heavy debt to the damn Boche.

Laborde was disgusted with the politics and really couldn't care less who wound up on top in the end as long as he and his crew could remain French. And as ridiculous as he considered the League, he didn't want it to disintegrate into open warfare with itself. The League was far from perfect, but it represented the closest thing to modern civilization he'd seen on this distorted world—with the possible exception of the Republic. But the Republic of Real People was largely composed of, well,
animals
, after all.

What disgusted him and his crew most at present, however, was that their old but still mighty ship had been chased away from Alex-aandra by a meager
wooden frigate
armed with
muzzle-loading cannon
, a few primitive ironclad monitors, and a handful of shore batteries of unknown capability. He still didn't know whether it had been a bluff, but even though the League had been subverting the American-led alliance for some time, he remained under strict orders not to provoke overt hostilities. When the leader of the Republic—
They call him Kaiser!
he thought, and snorted again—presented his ultimatum, Laborde had had no choice but to depart. He'd wanted nothing more than to test the primitives; let
them
fire the first shots so he could atomize the puny American-Lemurian ship and devastate the city with
Savoie
's eight 340-mm guns. But Alex-aandra, with its comfortable villas and impressive harbor, would make a fine addition to the League someday, when it had the resources and manpower to expand across the globe. He understood and supported that much of the “Grand Strategy.” The Triumvirate wanted Alex-aandra intact and planned to get it through guile—and perhaps a more irresistible show of force when the time was right. That still didn't make Laborde feel any better.

He glanced around the bridge, past the sailors, who recognized his desire for quiet contemplation. Emplaced around him were four bronze plaques, each engraved with a single word:
“Honneur
,
”
“Patrie
,
”
“Valour
,
”
and
“Discipline
.
”
All were interrelated, but there was no
patrie
, no “homeland,” anymore. That left him most compelled by
honneur
—of the sort, in his mind, that one earned only through
valour
. But his had been savaged by ignominious retreat in the face of what he considered a
pathetically meager threat, and if his honor had been stained, how could he expect to maintain
discipline
among his crew without the
patrie
to sustain him? It was a terrible equation, and he had to do something. Yet there he was,
hiding
at the League's most far-flung, secret outpost, on Christmas Island, south of Java, where they'd been observing the American-Lemurian-Imperial alliance for nearly three years, quite literally in its own backyard.

Even this can't last much longer,
he fumed.
They will find this place eventually
. There'd been small chance of that while what little Allied shipping willing to venture beyond the Malay Barrier crept close along the coast to avoid the terrible monsters of the Indian, or “Western,” Ocean. But things had changed, and the Allies had developed countermeasures to repel the great ship-eating beasts. Laborde imagined it was a type of sonar, such as his own people used to the same effect. In any event, the Allies now ran entire convoys through the Sunda Strait to Diego Garcia, and ultimately to Madagascar. Christmas Island lay south of that route, but the Allies had already established a way station in the Cocos Islands. It was just a matter of time before they chose to do the same there. They'd immediately recognize the purpose of this outpost and might finally even suspect what had happened to some of their missing people and ships. Discovery would be catastrophic from an intelligence-gathering perspective, and Laborde couldn't imagine that the Allies would appreciate the League's continued presence. It might even precipitate the open hostilities they'd been avoiding. He contemplated that while glancing around the harbor. The facilities there were not extravagant, little more than a fueling and listening station, after all. There were camouflaged fuel tanks and a radio shack on a shore entirely infested with large (and, he had to admit, frightening) crustaceans of a sort he'd never seen before. Some were large enough to trip or even hamstring a man with their claws. And if they ever got a man down, other crustaceans would swarm in and tear him apart before he could be saved. Laborde hadn't seen this—the Italians who operated the base had spread the tales, and he wondered darkly whether they were true or merely told to keep his men from going ashore. But if they
were
discovered, he wondered, would he be ordered to retreat yet again or would he be allowed to fight? Nothing he knew of that the Allies had could possibly compete with his lone ship. They had a pair of old destroyers, at least
one of which was supposed to be damaged beyond repair. They'd armed an even older cargo ship of some kind that they'd found not far from there on the Java coast, but it was small and weak. Otherwise, all they had were steam frigates with large but short-ranged guns. They'd be no threat at all. None of the known Allied carriers was anywhere close, but their airpower might still pose a menace, primitive as it was, because the island was within extreme range of a base they'd established at Tjilatjap. But
Savoie
was well equipped for air defense, and they'd lose a great many aircraft overwhelming her. And
Savoie
wasn't alone.

A Spanish oiler armed with machine guns shared the little bay, anchored near an Italian destroyer, an “exploratori” of the Leone Class named
Leopardo
. By the standards of the Great War, she was practically a light cruiser. Well armed and fast, she alone was more than a match for anything the Allies could send to boot them out. He understood there was even a pair of submarines that provisioned there. One hadn't been seen for some time and was presumed lost, but the other, a German boat, had visited and departed just before he arrived. All in all, he felt secure. The question was, what would the Triumvirate instruct if it came down to it? He
couldn't
flee again if he wanted to maintain discipline and the respect of his crew!

“Amiral,” said Capitaine Dupont, standing beside him, breaking his reverie. Laborde hadn't even noticed the wiry, light-haired man's approach.

“Yes, Capitaine?”

“Sir, our . . . ‘observers' have reported that the big steamer
Amerika
, which the Republic calls their ‘War Palace'”—he managed not to snicker—“has sailed from Diego Garcia, bound for the Sunda Strait.” He shook his head. “Our adversaries are so naive! They have tightened their wireless communications and changed their codes, but still talk quite freely over their high-frequency transmitters, their ‘TBS,' trusting to its short range. And thankfully, they still do not suspect that we have learned their, ah, ‘Lemurian' language from captives we have taken.”

“Most naive,” Laborde agreed, then shrugged. “So? She will pass near us. Nothing we did not already know.”

“She would make a fine prize,” Dupont urged with a small, predatory grin.

“Indeed. But I need not remind you that we are restrained from any
overt acts.” He grimaced. “The Third Triumvirate would not approve.” Dupont was of the “old school” as well, and Laborde felt free to use the skeptical term in his presence.

“They might if they knew who was aboard her,” Dupont replied.

Laborde raised his eyebrows in question. “I thought she was carrying wounded troops from their campaign against the principal Grik city on Madagascar, back to their capital of ‘Baalkpan,' on Borneo?”

“She is,” Dupont confirmed, “but she also carries other, more important passengers. Passengers that, in terms of intelligence and . . . leverage, might more than make up for our loss of this place if we are forced to abandon it.”

So. Dupont can read my mind,
Laborde thought.
How many more aboard can do that?
“But . . . our orders stand. We cannot act.”

“Untrue. We are allowed to use whatever force we must to prevent our discovery, including whatever
discreet
‘overt acts' that may require.”