"Worrying is my job."
Two more teenaged boys emerged from the restaurant beneath the terrace and, a moment later, three more came out onto the terrace from the steps aft. They were laughing and joking with one another until they saw the camera crew. "Hey, man!" one said with a distinctly Midwest American accent as he leaned against the terrace rail. "You guys sure got yourselves good seats!"
"How'd you guys get past the guards?" Doherty asked.
"Guards?" the kid said, genuinely puzzled. "What guards?"
A hell of a way to run a cruise ship, Doherty thought. This was the sort of thing that could end in lawsuits — privacy violations, indecent exposure, and even corruption of minors charges.
Or were the Europeans really that free and easy about casual social nudity?
"Wrap it up, Pet," he said. "We've got all we can use, here."
Doherty was curious. He wanted to find someone in Security and ask what the hell was going on.
He heard thunder in the distance and turned. Off to the northeast, a pair of tiny black specks winged in low above the water.
Chapter 13
Commander Christopher Pryor sat in the cockpit of his Sea Harrier FRS.2, watching the screen of his radar as the flight vectored toward the target as the ocean's surface blurred beneath the belly of his aircraft, less than a hundred feet below. His wingman, Commander Vincent Spick, was parked off his right wing and slightly behind, in the four o'clock position. The Rolls-Royce Pegasus engine at his back thundered raw power as the two Harriers hurtled southwest at over six hundred knots.
"Alpha One, this is Alpha Two," Spick's voice called over his helmet headset. "I have visual on the target."
Pryor glanced up. Sure enough, there it was — a cruise ship gleaming a dazzling white in the afternoon sun, still a good twenty miles off. "Copy that, Two," he replied. "I see him. Throttle back to three hundred." "One, Two. Roger three hundred." The two Harriers slowed rapidly. In the dense, wet air this close to the deck, moisture streamed from the upper curves of their wings like thick fog.
"King's Palace, this is Alpha One," he called. "Visual on target. We are on intercept approach." He flipped a switch on his console. "Cameras are rolling."
"Copy that, Alpha One," replied the voice of Flight Control back aboard the Ark Royal "Get us some good pictures."
Except for a pair of 30mm Aden Mk 4 gun pods apiece, the Harriers were unarmed. Both, however, had been fitted with reconnaissance pods, streamlined cylinders slung like bombs from their bellies containing highspeed cameras at both optical and infrared wavelengths as well as forward-looking and side-scan radar. The Sea Harrier had been designed with both fighter and reconnaissance roles in mind, and it performed both well.
Pryor brought the nose a bit higher and began angling the main engine thrust down until his Harrier seemed to be floating in mid-air, drifting forward just a bit faster than the ship was moving. He peered out the side of his canopy, studying the ship.
She was huge, a third again longer than the Ark Royal and riding considerably higher above the water. Her sides looked like cliffs closely pocked by balconies on the middecks, by portholes in long lines both higher up along the superstructure and closer to the water, and by broad expanses of glass at places like the bridge and wrapped around the aft portion of the superstructure. A large swimming pool formed a broad, rectangular patch of azure blue on her fantail; another, smaller pool was on the very top of the superstructure, between the rise of the bridge forward and the aft deckhouse and smokestack. As the Harriers slowly moved up the ship's starboard side, he could see people. Hundreds of them, appearing on the superstructure balconies, along the Promenade Deck encircling the deckhouse, and on the sundecks amidships and aft.
"King's Palace, Alpha One," he said. "I can see a lot of passengers. Some are waving. Everything looks normal."
"Copy One."
"I'm attempting to raise them now."
"Roger that. We are monitoring civilian channels."
Shifting to the radio frequency he'd been given during pre-flight on the Ark, Pryor began transmitting. "Atlantis Queen, Atlantis Queen, this is Royal Navy Harrier Flight Alpha. Do you copy, over?"
There was no reply.
"Atlantis Queen, Atlantis Queen, this is Royal Navy Harrier Flight Alpha. Do you copy, over?"
As he spoke, he eased the Harrier around past the Atlantis Queen's bow, barely a hundred yards in front of her. As he did so, the bow, followed by the long forward deck and the high, blocky deckhouse of the second ship, edged into view. The Pacific Sandpiper was securely lashed to the Queen's port side. Pryor could see the hawsers connecting the vessels clearly, along with what looked like a gangway with safety rails going from the Sandpiper's deck into an open hatch in the Atlantis Queen's side.
"Atlantis Queen, Atlantis Queen, this is Royal Navy Harrier Flight Alpha. Do you copy, over?" He listened. "Pacific Sandpiper, Pacific Sandpiper, this is Royal Navy Harrier Flight Alpha. Do you copy, over?"
Damn it, why don't they respond?
Dr. Stephen Penrose looked up in irritation as thunder rumbled outside. His audience, he saw, was paying more attention to the view out the large forward windows of Kleito's Temple than they were to his presentation.
"The tradition of Lyonesse as we now know it," he was saying, "goes back at least to the tenth or eleventh century, when it was supposed to have sunk beneath the waves of the English Channel. Only one man — one Trevellyn — was supposed to have escaped. Riding the fastest horse of the islands, he made it to Cornwall just ahead of the oncoming flood… "
Several of the people in his class were standing now, and a few had actually left their seats and were walking past him to the front windows.
"As, ah, as I was saying," he continued, "the tradition goes back to the Middle Ages, but there are hints of Lyonesse at much earlier times. The ancient Bretons, for instance, tell of the fable of Ker-Ys, the fabulous city of Ys, sunken somewhere between Cornwall and Brittany in Celtic times… "
More people hurried forward, speaking excitedly to one another. Penrose put down his notes and scowled at them. It was bad enough that those security people had come to him just an hour before his lecture was due to begin, telling him that the Neptune Theater was closed and that he would have to give his presentation in this gaudily decorated restaurant. Now his audience was more interested in whatever was going on outside than they were in his talk.
"I beg your pardon," he said as a young couple walked past his lectern toward the front of the room. "If you don't mind, I'm trying to give a talk, here!"
He'd been flattered when the Cruise Director had approached him a month before. Penrose taught European history at London College… but he was also known as something of an authority on Atlantis and on other traditions associated with lost or sunken continents. Sharon Reilly had proposed that he give a whole series of lectures throughout the length of the two-week cruise, with each talk timed to be given when the Atlantis Queen passed close to that particular site. They were paying him only a nominal fee, but a free booking on a Mediterranean cruise had simply been too good to pass up. He'd arranged for a grad student to take over his classes and taken a short leave of absence from the college.
This morning, as the Queen cruised out of the English Channel with Cornwall and the Stilly Isles to the north and the Breton Peninsula to the south, he was talking about Lyonesse, a mythical island that had little connection with Atlantis save for its ultimate watery fate. He found the subject fascinating, especially with its rich mythic connections with the Arthurian legends. He expected others to find it interesting as well… or at least to show some respect for those who wanted to hear.