They reached the elevators and called up two of them.
☆ ☆ ☆
Jon Sonnenleiter, assistant engineer, said, “Knut, the waveforms are still too rough on the induction furnace,” as the elevator reached deck seven and the doors started to open.
Knut Hedlund, engineering mate, answered, “With all due respect to your exalted rank, Jon, the iron ore is melting and we have too much that is broken or at least in real need—” He stopped as he saw the Greek attire of the men standing at the elevator door. “What are you people doing in crew country?”
The captain had allowed belowdecks crew into passenger country, but not the other way around unless they had special permission. And none of the locals had permission. None of these Macedonian hoplites knew enough to be of any use.
Knut wasn’t armed, but he was belligerent. He grabbed his phone and that was all it took.
Argaeus of Macedonia grabbed Knut’s arm and chopped his hand off with the kopis he was so fond of.
That started Jon Sonnenleiter yelling. The one thing that the squads absolutely could not afford.
Koinos cut Jon’s throat, in the process spraying the bunch of them with blood. “Damn you, Argaeus. I said we wanted prisoners, not corpses.” I hope Tyrimmas is doing better on his end, Koinos thought.
☆ ☆ ☆
The first anyone on the bridge knew of the coup attempt was when the doors opened and sixteen men in the arms and armor of Silver Shields came in. The bridge of the Queen of the Sea was a large, airy, room with lots of big windows. It had comfortable seats and computer consoles that allowed the bridge crew to access any function of the ship from the rudders to the nacelles that pushed the Queen through the sea. They hadn’t been designed to offer cover and concealment.
In moments, the bridge was taken and everyone was in custody. Captain Floden had a black eye and a split lip, but was otherwise unharmed. Tyrimmas looked around and smiled happily.
That was when it all went to hell.
☆ ☆ ☆
When Elise Beaulieu saw the Silver Shields piling onto the bridge she understood immediately that Marie Easley’s worst fears had come to life—and also knew immediately what she would do herself.
She had, as Americans would put it, an ace in the hole—or two, rather.
The first was the obvious one. Positioned in the center drawer of her work station, ready to hand as soon as she opened the drawer, was a MAB PA-15—a fifteen-round 9 mm automatic pistol designed by the Manufacture d’armes de Bayonne. France’s armed forces chose not to officially adopt the pistol, but most of the services purchased some for competition. They selected a model especially designed for that purpose, known as the Pistolet Automatique de Précision (PAP) Modèle F1. Which was the model Elise owned herself.
Her second ace in the hole was more subtle, but ultimately more important. Because she was female, the Silver Shields would immediately dismiss her as a factor in the military equation. They wouldn’t even “dismiss” her, really, because that term implied that they would briefly consider her as a possible threat whereas in actual fact it would never even occur to them that she might be.
So, none of them noticed—none of them was even looking in her direction after an initial glance—that she was quietly opening the drawer and taking the pistol in her hand.
She considered, for a moment, firing from her seated position. But she was a competition shooter by training and decided the extra time it would take her to rise from the chair was worth the advantage she’d have from taking a stance she knew and was sure of.
Only three of the Silver Shields looked at her when she rose to her feet and none of them kept their eyes on her for more than a split second. Their attention was focused entirely on the male members of the ship’s complement, especially Captain Floden.
On her feet. In the Isosceles stance. She fired.
Tyrimmas was standing less than twenty feet away. Elise was a bit excited, so she brought the gun up too far. Instead of hitting him where she’d intended, just above the armor, the bullet caught him in the upper throat and clipped the underside of his jaw before exiting his neck. An artery was severed, producing a gout of blood that covered Doug Warren.
“Merde!” she hissed.
Never, not then, not years later, would Elise admit that she hadn’t been aiming at his neck. She claimed that she was afraid the armor, if hit at an angle, might deflect the bullet—which was true enough, but she hadn’t been aiming more than a few millimeters above the line of his armor.
But all that would come later. Right then, right there, she was furious with herself and leaned on her training. Which was years in the past—but had been taken very seriously by her young self. And she’d trained for the 25-meter quick-firing competitions as well. The men she was firing at were nothing but targets now.
She shifted aim to the left. Fired. The bullet struck right where she’d aimed—at the base of the throat just above linothorax that served Macedonian soldiers as chest armor. Blood sprayed from the man’s back and gushed out of his mouth. She’d severed the aorta.
But her aim had already shifted by then. In competition, at her prime, she’d been able to fire four aimed shots a second. She was a little slower now, but not much.
Fired. Further to the right. Fired. Back to the left where a Silver Shield was finally starting to react. Fired. As he slumped forward, a companion behind him was exposed. Fired.
Beaulieu had trained as a competition shooter, shooting bull’s-eye style, not as a police officer or a special forces soldier. So she was firing only one shot for each target.
It didn’t matter. Except for that first high shot, every bullet had struck where she’d aimed. All but one of the men she’d hit since had had his aorta ruptured, and the one exception had had his spine severed—as had three of the others.
She brought the pistol back around to the right. Fired. Fired. Two more down.
“Elise—stop!” shouted Floden. But a Silver Shield was moving. Away, but he was moving. Fired.
“Stop, I tell you! That’s an order!”
That half-shriek broke through her total concentration. She managed—barely—not to squeeze the trigger again. Vaguely aware of the shock and terror on the face of the Silver Shield who’d come so very, very close to dying that moment.
She lowered the pistol—slightly—and glanced around.
As had…That many? She was quite surprised. As had always been true in competition, her mind—her training even more—had kept her concentration completely focused. Nine of the Silver Shields had already died or were mortally wounded. Seven of them from bullets striking right in the upper chest where she’d aimed. There was…
Blood everywhere. Especially on the surviving Silver Shields, of whom there were…
She counted quickly, using the pistol barrel as a pointer. Without realizing it, completely stifling whatever thoughts of further resistance might have crossed any of their minds. Beaulieu was simply taking a count, but to everyone who watched—especially the battle-hardened Silver Shields—it was blindingly obvious they were all dead men if she chose to start firing again.
There were only seven survivors. Some of the Silver Shields she’d shot were still alive but they wouldn’t be for more than a minute—and there was no way to keep them from bleeding to death. Not with those wounds. Probably none of them had still been conscious before they fell to the deck, except perhaps the one she’d shot as he turned away.
Then Captain Floden pushed a button. A siren started and the motors stopped. Not the engines. The electric motors that powered the screws. It was the emergency stop control.
Captain Floden spoke in English. “The ship is stopped and will not move again until certain codes are input. So whatever mischief others of you may be attempting will be of no purpose.”
Elise blinked. That was sheer nonsense. She had no idea why the captain said it. She kept her pistol level, though. No one was moving.
“And now,” Floden
said, “put down your weapons.” He considered the surviving Silver Shields for a moment, with a very cold gaze. “And take off all your armor. No, strip completely naked.”
He pointed to a far corner of the bridge. “Go sit over there. And do it quickly, or I will order my officer to kill the rest of you.” There was nothing in his tone of voice, any longer, of the gracious and cordial captain of a luxury cruise liner. But Elise had no difficulty imagining that tone of voice in command of a Viking longship.
The Silver Shields obeyed instantly. Occasionally they would glance at Elise, but only for an instant before looking away. She realized that she must have slid her way into their own myths and legends. Diana, whose bow never missed. No, Diana was the Roman goddess of the hunt. Elise couldn’t remember the name of her Greek equivalent.
There were two doors onto the bridge of the Queen of the Sea, one to port and one to starboard. There was a banging on one of the doors, and Captain Floden shouted, “Hold what you have, Mr. Lang.”
Elise wondered if it really was Mr. Lang. If so, he had gotten here really fast.
Then, slowly, Captain Floden reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out his phone. He repeated what he had said about the motors and added that the most the Silver Shields could do was to strand themselves in the middle of the ocean until they all died of starvation and thirst.
☆ ☆ ☆
The ship changed. There was something different.
It took Koinos a moment to figure out what it was. By the time he had, there was an alarm sounding. He didn’t know what that meant either, but the ship stopping hadn’t been part of the plan. They were almost to the engine room, and with two dead bodies and his squad covered in blood it was way too late to abandon the plan. “Move!” shouted Koinos.
They ran.
They burst into the engine room just as an announcement came over the loudspeakers. It was in English, which wasn’t good news.
Almost Koinos ordered a slaughter. He wasn’t a stupid man and he was well aware that losers were not treated well. He had seen infantrymen trampled by elephants at the orders of Perdiccas. There wasn’t much for him to lose. What stopped him was the emancipation. He, like Tyrimmas, Evgenij, and the rest of the Silver Shields had taken it to be weakness. Softness. Wishy-washy indecision. Now he prayed to Ares and Athena, to Nike and Zeus, that the ship people would prove just as soft as he had thought.
“Stop! Put up your swords!” Koinos shouted.
Argaeus turned on him, sword out. “Are you crazy?”
“You think you can defeat them now that they are ready?”
“We take hostages! They are weak! They will back down.”
Koinos considered. It might work. There were perhaps a dozen ship people visible here. Eight men and…no, just three women.
☆ ☆ ☆
Edith Wild looked up at the captain’s announcement.
“A group of the Silver Shields has attempted to take the bridge. All crew go to alert status.”
Then she looked over at the blood-soaked bastards who had just come pouring into the main engine room and thought, Now you tell us.
Edith was wearing sound-damping earphones because even with the insulation, the big turbines were noisy. She was distracted because the captain’s—she assumed it was the captain’s—killing of the motor had put a major spike in the ship’s electrical grid. She had been busy trying to compensate for that when the captain’s announcement came over the comm channel in her earphones. She looked at the Greeks again, then went back to balancing the power system by pouring passive current into the gyros. The Queen balanced power just like any power plant. It used a massive gyroscope to store excess power as mechanical energy.
The Greeks were talking, then they started waving their swords, collecting people.
“Jackie!” Edith shouted. “Tell these assholes that we have to watch the engines unless they want to get burned to death!”
That wasn’t true, but Jackie Ward, chief electrician, didn’t hesitate. She pulled out her phone and called up the translation app. While the engines weren’t going to blow up, pulling the sort of stunt the captain pulled could do real damage to the electrical control systems if they weren’t managed. And everyone by now knew that the ship’s engines and electrical center were completely irreplaceable.
One of the Greeks pointed a bloody sword at Jackie. “Show me phone.”
Jackie seemed to understand. She held up the phone and the Greek spoke, then gestured again. She ran the app and got, “Call captain and tell him we have the engine room. We will make deal to kill you all.”
He must mean that if they can’t make a deal, they will kill us all, Edith thought. The translation app was not perfect. It put in words like to and as, but sometimes misinterpreted colloquial Macedonian Greek. And, according to Atum and Dag, often did the same the other way.
Jackie called the captain and reported. “There are sixteen Greeks down here and they have everyone under guard. They say they want to negotiate or they will kill us all. Captain, they have swords but no distance weapons. One of the swords and about half the Greeks are spattered with blood. I think they have already killed someone.”
The Greek with the bloody sword waved it threateningly at Jackie, and she stopped talking.
☆ ☆ ☆
Five minutes later, everyone on the ship knew at least a part of what was going on because Captain Floden made an announcement.
“There was an attempt to take the ship by members of the Silver Shields who boarded ship in Tyre. The attempt failed and the Silver Shields who survived are in custody, and will be tried on a charge of piracy on the high seas.” A short pause, then Captain Floden corrected himself. “Attempted piracy, which carries the same penalties. Some of the perpetrators are holed up in the engine room and have taken hostages.”
“Gee, I never would have guessed,” Edith muttered.
David Sayre, a motorman, snorted and one of the Greeks hit him with the butt of his sword. That was an almost-good thing. The Greeks had proven in the last five minutes that they were willing to hit women, but they weren’t as fast to do it as they were to hit men.
They would generally threaten the woman first. The guys they just slugged.
☆ ☆ ☆
Lars Floden looked around the bridge of his ship. Two crewmen were mopping up the blood and he had just received word from Daniel Lang of the deaths of Jon Sonnenleiter and Knut Hedlund.
He called Dag Jakobsen. “Dag, these Greek bastards have killed some of our people. You find Marie Easley and get her and that Greek bitch up here. And bring the commander of her guards too.” The normally cool-headed and phlegmatic Norwegian’s face was pale with fury.
“I’ll bring them, Captain, but I don’t—”
“I don’t want to hear it, Dag. Get them here.”
Dag ran. It took him two minutes to get to Roxane’s suite, and by the time he got there, there were a dozen Silver Shields with swords out. Also, the short version of their spears. Dag pulled up short. He was looking at a porcupine of spear points. He slowly and carefully took out his phone, then spoke into it. “Do you stupid bastards want to die?” Then he pushed the translate button.
Evgenij pushed his way through the massed Shields, and spoke in Greek.
By now Dag had a little Greek. Not much, but a little. He understood what Evgenij was saying, or at least he thought he did.
“Some of your men tried to take the ship. If you don’t come with me, and right now, the captain is going to—”
He had no idea what Floden was likely to do, but saw no reason to downplay the possible consequences. “—execute you and everyone with you.”
“I know nothing nonsense nonsense.”
Dag set the phone to record and held it out. “I know nothing of any attempt to take the ship. Tyrimmas and one of his platoons are missing, but they are off duty.”
Dag knew the Greek word the app was translating as platoon. It meant a group of four of the eight man
squads, or files, that made up part of a Macedonian phalanx. Platoon was close enough.
Dag called the bridge and got Doug Warren. Doug was not exactly covered in blood, but his wiping of his face had been less than complete. “Doug, the ones who attacked, was one of them Tyrimmas?”
“Hell, Dag, I don’t know any of them. Wait one.”
A moment later, Dag’s phone beeped in Doug’s ringtone. He switched calls and saw a picture as Doug said, “This is the one who was wearing the gun.”
The picture was of a man with the bottom left quarter of his face blown away, but Dag recognized him. He held out the phone to Evgenij. Once he was sure the man had seen the picture, he called up the translation app and said very carefully, “Didn’t what happened to Kleitos teach you people anything?” He spoke the next phrase to the app. “You and Roxane will accompany me to speak to the captain, or people with guns and hand grenades will come here and kill you. They will keep killing you until you comply or you’re all dead.”
“And Alexander?” Roxane shouted from behind the Shields.
“Alexander is safe. We don’t kill children any more than we allow slavery.”
Then Roxane forced her way through the Silver Shields. When she got to Evgenij, she turned to face him, said, “Come with me,” and came.
Evgenij gave some orders in Greek and joined Dag and Roxane.
Dag started to lead them away, then stopped. He pointed at the kopis on Evgenij’s belt and said into his phone, “Leave that and any other weapons unless you want them seized. The captain is not happy.”
☆ ☆ ☆
Roxane followed Dag onto the bridge and saw the blood on the uniforms. Then she saw the face of Captain Floden and began to be afraid. She’d thought she was safe for the first time in years when she came aboard the Queen of the Sea. She knew what the ship people could do, at least in a small way, because she had seen Dag toss the hand grenade to Kleitos. With the ship people between her and the danger of her husband’s generals, she was safe. Her son was safe.
But now, looking at Captain Floden, that all disappeared.