Duvalier wished she was on a boat that was rolling a little less. The motion gave her a headache and left her feeling nauseous. Ahn-Kha spied out her condition and stuck one ear out and one ear up; in the semaphore parlance of Golden One ears she knew that to be a good-humored reassurance. The sea didn’t seem to bother him.
She didn’t have time to decide between the ship’s rail and a toilet. An alarmed shout sounded almost as soon as they were in the Atlantic swell.
“A patrol boat! Christ, we’re goners,” one of the sailors called.
&
nbsp; The boat was sleek and speedy-looking, closer in size to the crab boat now almost lost in the mist than to the Out for Lunch. It had a single turret with a cannon up front, probably a 30 mm or 40 mm, capable of tearing the fishing boat to pieces as easily as a twelve-gauge used on a bag of marshmallows.
“They can just stop and board you anytime?” Sime asked.
“There’s no law out here,” Ableyard said. “We fishermen have our own ways to keep order, of course, and there’s our little Coast Guard, not that they’re where you need ’em.”
“First day out! This makes no sense at all.”
“It makes perfect sense if the Kurians know you’re carrying us,” Valentine said.
“We were too visible in Halifax; that’s the problem,” Sime said. “I’m sure they have spies there.”
Yeah, I’m sure news of me shopping with Stamp was all over Washington DC in minutes, Duvalier thought.
“It’s quick action,” she said. “The spy has to report to his superiors, who have to relay the information to someone who can make a decision about what to do about it, and then these sailors have to move their ship into a likely position to intercept. I think it’s probably bad luck.”
“Do you have weapons, explosives, anything?” Valentine asked.
“We have a shark stick,” Ableyard said. “It can put a twelve-gauge round into something. You have to be touching, pretty much, and it takes forever to reload.”
“There’s the charges,” an older fisherman said.
“I have a scuttling charge,” Ableyard said. “If my boat’s ever seized. It’s large enough to blow it into matchwood.”
“I have a bag with a few grenades,” Pistols said.
“Best just to hide. Maybe it’s a routine search,” the old fisherman said.
“Nothing routine about searching an outbound fishing boat,” Ableyard said. “If they’re going to steal some catch for ‘analysis,’ that is. Not like there’s anyone I can complain to. Law of the sea is whatever the person with the biggest boat and the biggest cannon says it is.”
“Get me that scuttling charge,” Valentine said.
Ableyard took them down to the smuggling compartments in the fish hold. The smell, though faint, made her seasickness worse. Stamp had it even worse; she was quietly vomiting into a wash bucket.
They hid, two to a compartment. The “false fish” would be laughable to anyone who would know they left that morning, and they hadn’t had time to try to catch anything to add verisimilitude to them. No, any way you looked at it, they were screwed.
Pistols hid with Sime, Stamp and Alexander took another, Val and Duvalier hid in the third, and Ahn-Kha crammed himself into the fourth.
“I don’t care what they say. I’m not getting taken like a rat in a hole,” Duvalier said.
“So what are we doing?” Valentine said.
“Surprising them?”
Valentine whispered through the hole to Ahn-Kha’s chamber and the Golden One growled something back.
“They’re expecting diplomats, not you, me, and Ahn-Kha. It’s not a destroyer; it’s not all that much larger than this thing. Running down smugglers and whatnot is more their style. The chances of a couple Reapers being on board are pretty slim, especially in these waters. No Kurian’s going to like the idea of swimming in the North Atlantic; it would kill them more quickly than us.”
Ahn-Kha relayed another message: “Pistols says he’s in. Sime says to shut up and not do anything unless they discover us.”
They couldn’t see the boarding party, but Duvalier counted footsteps.