Chapter 26
The Pacific Ocean
Deep in the belly of the Baktun’s combat information center, Captain Stokes studied the monitor, his bleary eyes fixed on the bright yellow triangle denoting the cargo ship Agua Linda.
The errant vessel had just crossed into the Baktun’s no-go perimeter of drone buoys and needed to be turned aside.
It was just past two o’clock in the morning.
Moments earlier, Stokes had been roused from a fitful sleep when the intruder alert had sounded and his first officer appeared at his cabin door. A fresh cup of hot Royal Navy “HMS Bulwark” tea helped ease him out of his stupor.
According to the Baktun’s available databases, the Agua Linda was steaming from the Port of Busan, South Korea, to Ecuador’s Guayaquil Port with a load of washing machines and other household appliances.
Nothing terribly unusual other than the fact its captain had decided to take an unconventional route for unspecified reasons.
“It’s a Panamanian-flagged vessel,” Stokes’s first officer said, reading from the big display. “Captained by Diogo Neves, a Portuguese.” He sniffed. “Hard to believe that pathetic little tourist trap was the world’s first global superpower.”
Stokes’s eyes narrowed as his mind reached back into an ancient memory from his public school days. “ ‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ ”
“Sir?”
“Percy Bysshe Shelley.”
The first officer frowned with confusion.
“The poet? Never mind.” Stokes turned to his drone tech. “It’s probably a contract crew. Program your drones accordingly. Follow your protocols.”
“Aye, sir.”
With orders to keep the Baktun invisible and hampered by his inability to power up his engines to flee, Stokes had to rely on his least-lethal means of persuasion to get the Agua Linda to change course.
If he had his way, he’d simply blast them out of the water with the deadlier weapons at his disposal.
The Baktun’s radar invisibility was assured by its AI-assisted cloaking system. Radar detection worked by sending out radar signals. When those signals struck hard targets, they bounced back to the radar receiver and thus provided target location.
But the Baktun had engineered a unique way to defeat conventional radar detection.
Every exposed surface of the ship was coated with a variety of metamaterials like split-ring resonators, each of which possessed negative refractive properties.
Negative refractive metamaterials didn’t reflect radar waves so much as bend and curve them, much the same way rushing water flowed around smooth stones in a river.
Of course, not all radar wavelengths were the same nor were they on the same platforms—land, sea, and air systems were all broadcast at different angles relative to their targets.
To compensate for the wide variety of wavelengths and angles, the Baktun’s metamaterials were dynamically adjusted by an AI-assisted program to match both the frequency and angle of incoming radar signals.
It was therefore virtually impossible for any conventional broadband radar system to fix a location on the Baktun.
In order for the Baktun to remain entirely invisible beyond radar detection, it needed to keep all intruders at arm’s length—or more precisely, beyond visual range.
Deploying the Baktun’s traditional kinetic weapons would easily destroy commercial vessels that entered into its visual range, but such weapons would also alert naval authorities.
Stokes’s orders were clear: draw no undue attention unless absolutely necessary—under penalty of death.
Nothing short of the imminent sinking of the Baktun and its precious cargo would allow the deployment of his more lethal arsenal.
The “spectral drone theater,” as Stokes derisively referred to it, had proven quite effective, and thus he would rely upon it yet again.
There was no virtue in risking his neck for a load of dishwashers.
★
Twenty minutes later the Baktun’s holographic projection drones landed at various points around the Agua Linda’s decks.
Stokes retired to his captain’s chair with a tablet to review his systems logs, simultaneously bored and disgusted by the spectral charade unfolding on the monitors.
His minions were perfectly capable of handling the whole affair.
He knew that in moments a giant witchlike creature wielding a flaming broadsword would begin brandishing curses as it called out Captain Neves’s name in his native Portuguese.
Other drone-borne demoniacs would dance and shriek in the wires.
As if on cue, the cacophony of ghastly screams and spine-chilling expletives filled his command center’s audio speakers.
A few moments later, his first officer called out.
“Sir…there’s no response.”
Stokes didn’t bother looking up from his tablet.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, there’s nobody responding. There’s nobody even on deck. No one has come out of the bridge.”
“Put it on the big screen.”
Stokes finally glanced up from his tablet. His first officer was right. The Agua Linda’s deck was devoid of a single crewman. Even at this late hour, that was impossible. At a minimum, there should have been at least a night watch on the bridge.
“Perhaps we’ve caught someone napping while on duty. Send a scout to check out the bridge.”
Moments later, a camera drone hovered near the cracked and dirty bridge windows, feeding a live image of the interior. Clearly nobody was inside.
“Maybe we found a real ghost ship?” the first officer asked.
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“What are we going to do?”
Captain Stokes darkened, lost in thought.
Strange, indeed.
★
The Oregon had spent another fruitless twenty-four hours plying a mind-numbingly boring search grid in the remotest and least traveled patch of the Pacific. Operation Snipe Hunt felt like a bust.
Until things got very interesting.
Juan sat on the edge of the Kirk Chair, surrounded by a full complement of op center crew with Linda Ross occupying the weapons station in Mark Murphy’s absence.
Most prior demon ship attacks had reportedly occurred at night or in the early-morning hours, which was why Cabrillo’s best team was on duty on the overnight watch.
“I don’t believe what I’m seeing,” Max said. A spectral, three-masted pirate ship sailed in the distance on one of the big wall monitors. But Hanley was referring to the howling twelve-foot-tall witch-monster and her flaming sword on the nearest crane’s platform.
“Hali, put our guest on the overheads,” Juan ordered.
“Aye, Chairman.” The comms officer hit a toggle. The witch’s eerie voice bellowed in Portuguese over the speakers.
“Hit the translator, Hali.”
Kasim mashed a toggle. “Translating to English.”
“—before it’s too late, Captain Diogo! Or you will all perish in flames! Turn around now! Turn around!”
“Kill the transmission.”
Hali tapped the toggle, cutting off the witch mid-rant.
“Well, looky there,” Linda said, pointing at the bridge-eye camera. She zoomed in on the image. A quadcopter camera drone hovered outside the filthy windows.
“Stoney, grab a close-up of our witchy friend. Her demons, too.”
“I was just thinking the same thing.” Seconds later, Eric Stone grabbed extreme closeup images of a dozen projector drones perched in the rigging and other locations, each ablaze with fine light.
“Holographic drones,” Stone said. “Cool.”
“Linda, let’s hit ’em with an electromagnetic pulse cannon. See what happens.”
“I’d rather you and me grab a couple of Benellis and put some double-aught buck in their bellies,” Max said. He and Juan busted clay targets off the stern of the Oregon once a month in friendly competition. They were equally matched.
“You might still get your chance if the EMP cannons don’t work.
” Cabrillo wasn’t worried about an electromagnetic pulse harming the Oregon.
Once he and Max decided to upgrade to electromagnetic pulse cannons, they had to harden all of the Oregon’s electronic systems to protect her gear from their own weapons system.
The bonus was they were now protected from everyone else’s EMP attacks as well.
“Firing pulse cannon,” Linda said. One of the domes on top of the superstructure spun on its axis as the cannon raised and lowered under Linda’s direction, fire-hosing the drones in a bath of electromagnetic radiation.
One by one, the holographic images snuffed out like blown birthday candles, the witch being the last to go.
“Too bad. I really had a hankerin’ to pull out the boom sticks,” Max said.
“Chairman,” Linda shouted as she pointed at the starboard-forward wall monitor.
In the far distance, the holographic pirate ship had turned broadside, and her banks of spectral guns cut loose in a fiery cannonade.
Boom!
The Oregon shuddered with an eruption beneath her waterline.