It being a moonless night, Max had only his phone’s word that they were descending into the eye of a cyclone. But heavenly body by heavenly body, the stars along the horizon winked out, and then, at ten thousand metres, the sea battle came into view. He couldn’t actually see men dying, but the extent of the maritime carnage shocked him. It was hard to connect the battle with an innocent mistake he had made days earlier.
Flames rising from numerous ships lit the scene, while others fired missile after missile in apparently random directions. Occasionally, a great glowing geyser would erupt from the inky sea. At other times, a missile would appear out of nowhere and then explode midair without reaching a target.
‘Much of this is defensive,’ said Confucius from where it balanced on the tiller. ‘Flares and drone rockets intended to confuse incoming missiles.’
‘But I can see ships sinking. We have to stop this!’ Cathy said angrily. She was leaning out over the side of yacht with just one hand on a mast ladder.
Max certainly had no desire for anyone to die either, but her change of attitude puzzled him. An hour earlier she had been convinced they would all be reincarnated, so what the heck. Que sera sera. Now, suddenly, she was worried about the American sailors? Didn’t they have a place in her next life?
Cathy was clad in an oversized T shirt, and little else, for with each missile launch, the rockets illuminated more than she may have intended. Max leaned over the gunnel on his stomach and tried to keep his attention on the battle. He had lost some confidence in more than one way since flying to her home days earlier. Since then, he had learnt that she, and many others, expected great things from him. Confidence and ability seemed to have an inverse relationship.
‘Confucius?’ he called to the only ally he could trust. It came to join him at the edge. ‘Could we stop the missiles reaching their targets?’
The phone tilted forward so its camera could see what he saw, then blew a raspberry. ‘I’m not going anywhere near that mess, not with the megawatts of electronic counter measures they’re using. I still have ringing in my microphone from the EM blast Miss Hess gave me three days ago.’
Had it only been three days? It seemed to Max that he had done more living in that time than the previous twenty odd years. He’d certainly learnt a lot about the diversity of human behaviour.
‘I’ve been trying to nudge the missiles off course, but, as you can see, I’m not having much effect from this distance.’ Confucius then added in a more optimistic tone. ‘At least the submarines don’t seem to be firing any more torpedoes. Maybe they’ve all been destroyed. The Americans might be shooting at ghosts.’
Confucius had let the cyclone unwind to give the fleet a chance to defend itself, and the eye of the storm had drifted over the harried American fleet. But instead of ending the conflict, as Max had hoped, the relative calm had allowed the Americans to return fire on those below. The hunted had become the hunter, which just meant more death. The sailors on both sides would only be following the orders of some misguided politician. If he didn’t get back to Canberra soon, many more deaths would follow.
Just then a ship fired another missile, but instead of arcing downwards, it continued to climb, and soon it became apparent that it was heading directly for their yacht.
‘We’ve been spotted,’ the phone said, stating the obvious. Max felt the air-borne vessel accelerate upwards and away from the threat. Soon, he lost sight of the ships, and the missile too, but a moment later it punched through the cloud and continued to rise.
‘Can’t we go any faster?’ Max asked, though their speed was already ridiculous for something never intended to fly.
‘I canny push the engines any harder, Captain.’
It was clear the phone was trying its best. The air in front and behind the yacht was being separated into cold and hot molecules so quickly that a plasma glow formed at the prow. Maxwell’s demon had never worked harder.
‘It’s still gaining on us,’ Cathy called. She was coming back towards him but had hardly finished speaking when the boat and its occupants were dropped into free-fall. As Max floated free of the deck, his stomach reminded him of the lobster he had recently eaten. The air around them, which had previously kept pace, now howled over the gunnels and he was blown up into the rigging.
‘What’s happening?’ Cathy screamed. Being the more experienced sailor, she had somehow wrapped herself around the yacht’s rear boom.
Max caught hold of a line and began pulling himself down -- for what purpose he didn’t know. They were clearly plummeting to a certain death. As if to annoy him, and despite the screaming wind of their passage, the phone hovered perfectly stationary in front of his face.
‘Why are we dropping?’ Max screamed. He couldn’t even hear himself, so the phone must have been able to lip read.
‘To give you a little more time,’ Confucius began communication via useful subtitles on its screen. ‘Sorry I can’t stay, Max. I’ve no guarantee that I’ll exist in your future life, and there’s no point my dying with Mrs Taylor. She and I agreed on this.’ A lot of very fine text appeared on the lower half of its screen. ‘Clause three point five. The aforementioned smart phone reserves the right to protect itself in the event of hostile action without breach of contract in this or future lives.’
The phone backed away before Max could read the next clause regarding payment for services.
‘I am expecting you’ll survive,’ the phone continued, ‘but in case you don’t, it’s been fun. You have twenty three seconds to wish her well. Goodbye.’
Max opened his mouth, but the phone had gone.
He caught sight of the missile again. It had overshot its mark and was following them down.
The lead keel of their sailing ketch kept it perfectly level as it fell, so once he got closer to the deck he was partly protected from the wind and could reach down to the sails furled along the top of the boom. He managed to get his legs around the boom, but at the opposite end of from Cathy. With no other plan in mind, he pulled himself, bit by bit, towards Cathy.
Maybe fifteen seconds remained. They were in cloud now, with neither sea nor missile in sight. Which would get them first?
‘I love you,’ he screamed at her from a metre away, but naturally she couldn’t hear him.
The boom sheet had come loose and they were being thrown from side to side. Each reversal threatened to shake him loose, but Cathy laughed each time, calmly holding the wig onto her head with one hand, a bit like a rodeo rider. Could her faith in a future life be that strong?
Then she let go of the boom and appeared to sit up, holding on with just her legs. The red hair looked bizarre fluttering upwards. When had she changed wigs? This looked like the wig she had worn on the day they met. Her loose T shirt obscured her face, so she couldn’t see him. Did she know, or even care, if he was there? She pulled the front of her shirt down, so maybe she did. He inched forward again.
He reckoned six seconds from impact. The clouds thinned, and they were going faster than the rain, so that it drifted up around them. Once again, the flashes from the conflict were visible, but the night was too dark to differentiate between sea and sky. All he could see clearly was Cathy, partly lit from the cabin lighting.
Time must nearly be up.
In desperation, he stretched as far as he could until his own eyes were being whipped by her hair, then his lips touched some part of her face – hopefully her face – hopefully her lips. In any case, when he pulled back, her cheeky grin had turned into a wry smile, and then…
Max was flung deep into the water. It boiled around him in a great hurry to get out of his way. For a split second he saw a vast bubbling explosion erupt above him, fingers of fire reaching down to catch him. He felt its heat. So much energy. It surged through him, even as it destroyed everything in its path. He almost welcomed it, but he was moving too fast and slipped from its fiery grasp into the deep blue.
Gradually, he came to a stop, floating, but not weightless. If he was dead, it was not the impression of the afterlife that he had been expecting, but he’d been wrong about that before. Was this the second or third time he had thought he would die? Max had lost count.
Cathy? The missile had struck after they hit the water, but if she was nearby, he had no way to find her. None of his senses were working.
Eventually, he could at least tell that he was in water, that it was cold, very dark, and that he was naked. In whatever way the phone had saved him from both the impact and the explosion, it hadn’t saved either his clothes or his hair. It may have been shallow to be mourning the loss of his follicles at time like this, but when he found Cathy, surely she wouldn’t mind? Then he remembered the phone had said she would die.
Why couldn’t she have been saved? She hadn’t needed to die this soon. He didn’t see how their deal had prevented Confucius from saving her too?
As for the battle? He was too deep to see it. He didn’t even know which way was up. He could feel the shock waves from underwater explosions that might normally have killed him, but they only made him break wind. Couldn’t he even die when it was fitting to do so? It had been his stupid idea to fly over the battle, and all he had achieved was the death of… What was Cathy to him? A friend, if nothing else. And maybe that was for the best.
The water would kill him if he let it, but he didn’t struggle to breathe. Would his phone even let him take a lungful of water if he tried? The phone hadn’t wanted him to drown, and neither did he, though he still intended to return to Canberra for public execution, which was easier to consider when it was no longer imminent. How could he return there now?
A new noise emerged from the depths to distract his morbid thoughts. A shoo shoo shoo noise. It grew stronger, and a bizarre vision appeared from the darkness.
Even at this depth, luminescent-plankton were disturbed as the submarine pushed through the water at twenty knots, creating a glow around the prow and propeller that changed from red to green and blue. That the sub even had a propeller indicated it was overdue for retirement, but it still moved quickly and heading straight for Max. Then he heard a churning rumble from the destroyer that was chasing it.
The submariners had heard it too, for the propeller stopped, and the goliath tilted downwards, diving for its life. Was that a small Australian flag he saw plastered on its tail fin? Without goggles, it was hard to tell, but he was at least sure the sub belonged to a British colony.
Cathy was gone. He was sure of it. There was no reason to linger for her. If he could reach an Australian vessel, they could execute him on board, put the video on YouTube, and this silly war could end before it had properly started.
Max began swimming, but his frog-like motions got him no where and already he was losing sight of it. He had seen competitive swimmers move like dolphins, wagging their legs and gliding from one end of a pool to the other. He tried to do the same, but could detect no progress. If Confucius would just put some pressure on the soles of his feet, then he should be able to move faster than this. He didn’t know if the phone had mastered the manipulation of water yet, but the daemon principle should be the same as it was for air.
Max felt himself moving, slowly at first, then with gathering speed. Was his phone reading his thoughts, or just second guessing him? Either way, he needed to go faster. And faster he did, boring through the water until it was foaming in his wake. The darker shape ahead must be the sub, but he had no idea how fast he was going. Then it filled his vision.
The collision with the sub’s superstructure hurt, but the phone had protected him from injury by bending the metal surfaces around his head and shoulders. He collected himself and swam back along the sub’s hull, searching for a way in – an escape hatch of some kind. The submarine was stationary, so there was no biological lighting to assist his search. He groped blindly, pulling at any projection he could find. The submarine appeared to be built from very flimsy metal, for when the deck lights came on, he was surprised at the extensive damage that he and the phone had caused. The tower had crumpled from his impact and he had ripped up much of the rubber coating during his search for an entrance. Maybe he could claim the indentations were there before he arrived?
A smaller red LED flashed near the top of the conning tower, and Max swam back to the buckled structure and found it was a security camera. The cover was cracked, but the lens was panning to follow him.
He made various gestures to indicate he wanted to come in. The lens of the camera stared at him for a while, then panned upwards to follow the path of the destroyer which was making another sweep of the area nearby. Only when it had passed did a panel near the stern slide open.
As he had hoped, it had uncovered an air lock, but not one intended it for use by the general public. He had great difficulty working the mechanism. No instructions. No courtesy light. And who would have guessed it opened clockwise?
Max was very cold and tired by the time he climbed down the inside ladder. Colder still when the water had drained away. The lower hatch cracked open at his feet and two rifles and a handgun were pointed up through the gap at his testes by some very sceptical sailors.
‘Do you speak English? Climb down here, sir, and be smart about it.’
The sailor who had spoken had a neat beard and hand gun, so Max guessed he was an officer.
‘Where’s his scuba?’ asked one of the men.
‘The bastard's naked,’ said the other, laughing.
‘Shut up, Barnes,’ said the officer.
‘You can’t talk to me like that no more,’ Barnes replied and turned his rifle on the officer, but the senior man snorted and gestured for Max to hurry up.
What new madhouse had he entered? Soon his wrists were bound with cable ties and he was urged, not so gently, to move through several hatches. The men and women they passed were startled to see a stranger, but that didn’t stop them smirking at his state.
‘I’ve brought the boarder as requested, ma’am.’ The officer saluted his senior when they reached the operations room.
‘If you are no longer calling me captain, Mr Fletcher, there’s no point adding the honoury.’ The captain didn’t look up from her screen immediately. ‘Have you frisked him?’
‘Not necessary, ma’am – Sorry. Force of habit.’
The captain looked up, a middle-aged woman with a stern countenance that morphed into a grin when she saw Max. ‘Welcome, strange fish. I haven’t the time to question you on how you come to be swimming three hundred feet below the pacific ocean, in the middle of the night, without any… um... equipment. Just quickly tell me who you are, your rank, nation, and why you wish to board my vessel – sorry, our vessel. There has been a change of management, you see.’
Max hesitated, but there didn’t seem to be any point being smart. ‘I’m Maxwell Clerk.’
Several heads turned and a gun went off.
The bullet dropped to the floor near Max’s feet as a puddle of glowing lead.
Everyone stared at it, then at Barnes, many complaining bitterly about the damage to their hearing and how his impatience would lead the Americans straight to them. The sailor gradually lowered his smoking gun. ‘They was right,’ Barnes mumbled. ‘He can’t be killed.’
‘How many times have I told you, Barnes? Don’t shoot people inside the hull. Now, explain yourself.’ said the captain.
‘Only natural I’d want revenge. I had a brother in me former lives, but not in this one. I miss him.’
‘If he was anything like you, I’m not surprised Mr Clerk chose to delete him.’ The captain turned to Max. ‘I can’t remember. Was improving general intelligence on the list? I assume you’ve seen our scroll of requests?’
Max groaned. Another Lerkian, even here.
‘Yes. I’ve seen it,’ Max replied, but he wasn’t so sure he wanted to be executed by this lot. ‘Captain. Could you take me back to Canberra now? We could stop this war if they find a way to kill me there.’
‘Happy to oblige, Mr Clerk, provided the crew agree, but there are two other hurdles to cross.’
‘Those are?’
‘Escaping the Americans. They have realised we’re out of ammo and have been chasing us around for the past two hours. I haven’t had any contact with our sister ships for some time, so I expect we are all that remains of Australia’s little act of defiance. They won’t let us go now, not after the bloody nose we gave them.’ The captain chuckled. ‘They must be very cross they sold us those advanced torpedoes.’
‘Okay. What about the other problem?’ Max asked.
‘Canberra is at least a hundred kilometres inland. Do you expect us to fly, Mr Clerk?’