Sarah understood. She touched the soapstone and asked Ptolemy to go below decks, just in case anyone was watching them even then. The mummy acquiesced without a word of complaint. Osman took his wheel in both hands and adjusted their course a hair. 'Do you see it?' he asked.
She knew he wasn't asking if she could see something visually. She stared out over the boat's prow, trying to ignore the flapping canvas of the backup sails, letting her eyes focus on the rising and falling swells off in the distance, the occasional scrap of foam drifting on the waves. 'Nothing,' she said. There was no energy out there, living or dead. She imagined there were probably some fish but the water blocked her special sense.
Osman just nodded. He'd stared out over enough empty seas in his life, Sarah imagined, to recognize when something was about to appear. He didn't speak, didn't move, didn't breathe as far as she could tell. And then'
No. It was nothing, a trick of the light. She could have sworn something was there and then it just wasn't. 'Maybe a whale,' she said, thinking it might have dived at the sight of them.
'Bullshit,' Osman said, and opened up his throttle a little. He picked up a microphone for the tug's radio set and clicked it on. 'Hey,' he said. 'Hey, we're alive over here. We are not dead.' He repeated this simple message in Arabic, in Farsi, in Greek.
Sarah turned to look away, her eyes glazed over by the sight of the endless sea constantly moving, and found herself looking into a periscope. She fell backwards against the tug's wheel but Osman caught it before she could turn the boat. 'Submarine,' she said, when she had caught her breath.
It surfaced with a great pitching of the sea, a boiling white explosion that rolled the tug around like an ice cube in a blender. Saltwater lapped up over the side and splashed Sarah's bare feet.
On top of the waves the submarine dwarfed the tug, its enormous curved black side slick with water and glaring with sunlight. On its deck they saw what looked like an acre's worth of photovoltaic cells and a heavy machine gun on a pintle mount. Its barrel pointed away from them. Something wrapped in tarpaulin, about half the size of a human being was secured to the deck with heavy lines. It dripped a steady stream of water as the submarine rolled under the sun.
A hatch in the stubby conning tower opened up and a white woman with golden hair and a wet suit stepped out onto the pitching deck. She rolled with the motion of the submarine as if her feet were nailed down. 'Ahoy,' she called, no more than ten meters from where Sarah stood on the tug. She had a pistol on her belt.
'Hi,' Sarah replied, her heart sinking. 'I'm... sorry to disturb you. You're not the woman I'm looking for.'
The woman spoke English with a Scandinavian accent. 'That depends,' she said, her face a mask of consternation. 'Is your name Sarah?'
Monster Planet
Chapter Sixteen