Liberty's Heirs

Chapter 33

"Our shift begins at o three hundred.  We're reporting to the Indefatigable, sir."  Rob said with a salute that Blion imitated.  It was true.  Rob had signed up to join the merchant marines and he was assigned to that very ship.  He'd been on his way to work when he met Blion.

Both of them were wearing sailor's uniforms and carrying duffel bags.  Rob was a bit bigger than Blion so his clothes didn't fit well.  Hopefully in the dark, not only would the soldier miss Blion's face but also miss the fact that the uniform was ridiculously big.  Rob had convinced Blion that it would be impossible to get past the guard with his staff, but Blion wasn't happy about it.  It would be hard to defeat a soldier with a gun with just his bare hands.

The soldier ignored Rob but looked Blion up and down.  His face showed a sneer of disapproval.  "Get yourself a new uniform, bruv," he said.  "This one fits terrible."

"I'm a new recruit.  They didn't have my size so gave me some other guy's until the new uniforms come in.  As if I didn't have enough problems fitting in here."

The guard addressed Rob, "Tell 'em to go easy on the little guy, eh?" and gave Blion a pat on the back before sending them on.

It made Blion feel all the more pity for the islanders.  So many of them were such good people.  Didn't they deserve a better life than this?

They got on the ship and no one was around.  It was surprisingly big for a boat made of wood.  Must have been very time consuming and laborious to make such a thing that the sea would just eat up in a few years.  The ship rocked gently, it was sickening.  They walked quietly across the deck looked down into the water.  There was a small row boat bobbing down there.

"Here's a ladder," said Rob, handing him a strange contraption.  It was made of rope and little pieces of wood to serve as places for his hands and feet to grab.  "Don't go too far out.  They say if your boat gets anywhere close to the other side of the channel, that the sky opens up and fire comes down.  It boils the ocean and leaves nothing behind but smoke and steam.

He climbed down the ladder and into the little boat.  He was already getting sick from the motion.  How was he going to make it to deep water where he could drop the core?  He waved goodbye to Rob who was carrying a lamp and began rowing out to sea.

The dawn was hardly a dawn at all: the distant sun just turned the sky from black to dark gray.  The rain was falling harder and harder and the light wind was blowing him south east.  At least he didn't have to row.  He had already vomited up all the food in his stomach.  He was pale and water logged but he was still too close to shore to dump the core which was sitting in its bag under water on the far side of the little boat.  He hardly had the strength even to shiver.  His warming undergarment was ripped in places and had partially failed.  The parts that were still working were too hot, just short of burning him and the rest of him was freezing cold.  He hadn't been this cold since Mac Spencer had saved him from hypothermia in California.  He gathered the strength to look around him.  After wiping the rain from his eyes, it took all of his strength to sit up.  Nothing but gray in every direction.

A couple more hours passed.  The rain stopped and the air began to clear but the change wasn't all for the better.  The wind began blowing more erratically and the waves were getting bigger.  The tiny boat was being tossed up and down, up and down.  Blion couldn't think for the sickness and more water began to get into the boat.  The sun came out, but it seemed like the air got even colder.  When the boat rode up on a wave, he could see the coast.  The docks were long gone, but there was a problem: there were big white sails.

Despite the blur of the sickness, he realized he was being chased.  Surely the barbarians of England knew how to read the wind and sea currents.  The must have realized that a man in a row boat couldn't get far.  He tried to pick up the oars and row actively but he couldn't.  He was just too weak.  He laid back down for another couple of hours.

He got up again and saw the outline of the English coast in the distant haze, he must have drifted southward where the land jutted out into the sea.  The white sails were getting closer but the coast of the European continent was still invisible beyond the horizon.  The wind was getting stronger as were the waves.  He was having to hold tightly to the boat to keep from getting knocked out when big waves hit.  He couldn't lie down any more the boat was filling with water.  There was a life vest in the boat and he put it on in between waves.  It wasn't Ancient.  Somehow these people, with their minimal industrial civilization had managed to manufacture it.  Never underestimate human ingenuity, he thought.  He opened the duffel bag and removed the core.

He looked at the silvery shell that contained the spheroid.  He had been hoping to be farther from the coast of England by the time he dumped it.  He had imagined it sinking down into the depths, safe out of the reach of these people but instead, a wave knocked it out of his hand.  And down it went into the unsearchable sea.  All he could do is hope that they would never find it.

He had been hoping to sneak back to the English coast and make a home with Giant Jon and Margaret Boggens.  When all the fuss died down, he would be able to return and save Keira.  What foolishness those hopes had been!  Now the boats were too close.  The best he could hope for now was to make it close enough to Europe to be killed by a beam from the weather control station.

Half an hour later, even that hope was lost.  The sky had darkened and the rain began to pour again.  Either he was going to fall overboard into the water and drown or he was going to get caught by the ships and taken back to the capitol for guillotining.  The sailing ships were nearly on top of him.  Then he saw it: a huge wave.  It must have been twenty feet tall.  His boat flipped over and down he went into the frigid ocean depths.  He struggled with all the strength he had left to make it to the surface.  His survival instinct was strong despite its hopelessness and irrationality.  It seemed nearly a minute before he came up.  He wouldn't have made it at all except for the buoyant plastics in his life vest.  He could feel his life ebbing away in the cold.  At least he had not been stricken by his lost boat.  It had drifted a safe distance away.

Another wave lifted him up just in time to see it, something he'd never seen before.  The microwaves were invisible, but their knock-on effects were not.  The light was brilliant as was the sound.  Just as Rob had warned, the ships disappeared.  A great plume of steam and debris flew upward from the location of each ship in the fleet.  Fragments of wood shot like bullets into the water as Blion went under but Blion didn't hear them.  Neither did he feel the splinter that entered his chest, pierced his right lung and emerged out his back leaving tiny splintered all the way through.  The shockwave had blown out his eardrums and rendered him unconscious.  This time he didn't fight to avoid drowning.

Nerves near his trachea detected the first trace of water entering his lungs which triggered his vocal cords to constrict and seal the passage way.  Meanwhile, a large vehicle descended from the sky and an Attendant jumped out into the water.  Within seconds, his unconscious body was dragged out of the water and placed on a table inside the vehicle which then lifted off back into the gray sky from which it had come.