"Ringo, John - Council Wars 3 - Against the Tide" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ringo John)

- Chapter 1Against the Tide by John Ringo



CHAPTER ONE
The humpback whale cruised slowly northward through the blue waters of the
eastern Atlantis Ocean, listening to the sounds of the sea around him. Sound
carries far under water, depending upon its frequency. The humpback did not use
sonar, but used the sounds created by other sea creatures large and small, to
create a three dimensional map of its surroundings that stretched, with
decreasing accuracy, for a bubble hundreds of miles around.
To the southwest were several schools of fish. Birds were diving on them and
tuna were working over one while a school of spiny sharks was attacking another.
To the northwest, by the lands of ice, a pod of fellow humpbacks, the ocean's
great communicators, were giving their siren calls, imbedding in them a constant
litany of information. A school of squid was in the deeps below the humpback,
but he was neither a pelagic hunter like the sei and blues, to go after the
schools to the south, nor a deep hunter like the pod of sperm whales to the
west, that could make the five hundred meters down to the shoal. No, he was an
inshore hunter, who could gorge on herring for a few weeks and then survive for
months on the stored fat.
So Bruno told himself. But he was still hungry and the resupply ships weren't
due for another two weeks.
As he was mentally grumbling to himself, and turning to the east to stay inside
his patrol zone, he picked up the frantic squealing of delphino. He listened and
then continued his slow and lazy turn until he was pointed in the direction of
the distant pod just sculling along a hundred meters below the surface where the
interference from the surface chop dropped off. The sound was attenuated by the
distance, the high-frequency pinging of the delphinos dropped off rapidly even
in cold water, but the humpbacks were not merely the loudest whales in the
ocean, they had the best hearing. He waited until the sound began to shift and
then surfaced, blasting out the air he had held in his lungs for long minutes
and taking in a deep gulp of cold north Atlantis air. He then dropped back to a
hundred meters, turned tail up and began to let out a deep series of throbs,
like deep, giant drumbeats that resounded through the ocean.
* * *
The mer was lying in mud, his hands interlaced behind his head to keep it up out
of the glutinous black mass. Asfaw didn't like sitting in mud, but the
alternative was swimming back and forth and that got old quick. He thought to
himself, as he had at least a hundred times, that he ought to do something about
there being nothing but mud down here. But then he reminded himself that writing
memos was a pain in the tail and probably nothing would be done anyway; support
of the mer was a pretty low priority around here as their quarters proved. So he
continued sitting in the mud, lying in the mud and occasionally playing with the
mud through the long watches.
As he was contemplating, again, that he'd much rather be back at Blackbeard Base
or even out with the scouts, he sat up and cocked his head to the side. He
listened for a moment then blanched, his fair skin turning fairer in the dark
waters. He quickly swam to the surface and took a breath of air, using it to
blast the water in his lungs out through the gill-slits in his ribcage. There