Heiresses of Russ 2012 Read online

  Consuelo checked every book she could get her hands on—all written by men. Even Cuba, which hadn’t let a man command a sub since they first had subs, taught submariners as in Spain: Fear the mermaids and their dangerous wiles. “You might be women,” said her first instructor, a tall, gruff woman with her steel gray hair pulled into a tight bun and a cruel scar on her face. “You might think because you’re immune to her song, that you have nothing to fear from her. But your flesh tastes just as good as a man’s, don’t you forget it!”

  Consuelo counted on it. She flipped her hair back over her shoulder and raised an eyebrow at the mermaid. Cool. Consuelo did cool best, and her first love had taught her to play to her strengths.

  The mermaid offered her a shy smile in response, and curled her fins over her back like a girl kicking her feet up. She was a pretty thing, but mercy she was young. Men always talked about the pretty and youthful ones, lithe and nubile girls who would lure a man to his death with her wits and charms, but any submariner who lived long enough in the shallow seas mermaids frequented knew better: men liked them young, just like with human women, but it was the older ones you had to watch out for. They were the ones who knew how to play the game.

  Consuelo held up a finger and slipped out of the cockpit. It wasn’t as graceful as she hoped, but the Amphitrite wasn’t made for alluring, barely made for comfort, and Consuelo was a small woman, and agile. She climbed through the passage and out the hatch at the top of the boat.

  She could look down on the mermaid from the raised hatch, on the highest point of the Amphitrite. The mermaid lay on the dome viewport like a cat in the sun, its light scattering across her delicate scales of rose gold. Her hair fell in damp C-curves over her shoulders, a pale, honeyed brown that would dry to molten gold.

  Consuelo resisted the urge to shake her head; a vest, but no shirt. Of course, mermaids had no use for fashion as anything but an amusement. “Buenos días, muñequita,” she said, tempering the potentially forward comment by an amused inflection in the nickname, a sort of wry inside joke. It was possible the mermaid didn’t speak Spanish, but she likely spoke some language Consuelo knew.

  “I thought this would be an American vessel,” the mermaid said in flawless Spanish: not the Spanish of the Caribbean or mainland, but something from the Canaries. Tenerife, maybe. “But then I saw you in it, and I didn’t think the Americans had woman submariners.”

  “Not here, no. Why do you think she’s American?”

  “They write their names the same way, and these are Florida waters.” She shrugged.

  “Oh, yes, they do and they are. It’s my sub, but they put their name on her, sure enough. I’m here to take her back home.”

  The mermaid brightened. “You stole it?”

  “That’s an uncharitable way of putting it.”

  “Does that make you a pirate?” The mermaid tilted her head to one side with a sly curve to her lips.

  “Oh, aye, a pirate captain like no other. I’m as like a pirate queen, when you get down to it. Come now, I can’t get home if you sit on the viewport all day, and the Americans will be sure to find us both if we stay at the surface.”

  A mermaid is all mischief, and it might be at this point that a submariner thinks himself lost. But one should never underestimate the power of authority, particularly not the authority that comes with age. The mermaid looked uncertain, torn between the unwillingness to get in the way of a bona fide pirate and the desire to continue on as she would. “I have never met a captain before, or a pirate, or such a pretty submarine…”

  Consuelo smiled a slow, lazy smile. “I would hate to sully this opportunity for you. What say we help each other? Though I think you get the better end of the deal.”

  “How do you mean?”

  Consuelo leaned out of the hatch and patted the slippery-smooth skin of the Amphitrite. “How would you like to pilot a submarine?”

  That was when she had her. The mermaid’s eyes went wide at the very idea. Doubtless she had met a captain before—Consuelo didn’t believe for a minute that she hadn’t—but had she met one who offered her anything like the opportunity to pilot a sub? Doubtless not. “I—really?” And then sense took hold of her. “In return for what?”

  “Oh, a little bit of piracy is all. I need to get my darling back to Cuba before the Americans try to steal her away from me. I have the guns, but can you imagine what would happen if I opened fire on one of their subs? What say you?”

  “You want me to…?”

  “Turn them away, sink them, run them aground, whatever the situation warrants and strikes your fancy.”

  The mermaid laughed, a merry giggle that ended in an indelicate snort. She looked embarrassed, and covered for it by saying: “I would have done that, anyway.”

  “Then, welcome aboard the Amphitrite, pilot.” Consuelo offered the mermaid a hand. “Consuelo Valdez Armenteros.”

  “Aurelie.” The mermaid took her hand and giggled again. “Thank you, Captain Chelo.”

  Consuelo let the nickname slide and helped Aurelie inside. Having no legs would make it easier for her to navigate the submarine; only the hold was big enough for someone to walk in comfortably, and that was often full of cargo. All the other passages were crawlspaces, some of them so tight that even Consuelo had to crawl like a caterpillar or use handles to pull herself along. Consuelo dismantled the sails, folded the canvas, and telescoped the mast and boom, and dropped back down into the hatch.

  “Let me go first,” she told Aurelie. “You can pilot, but you need someone to reach the foot pedals.”

  Aurelie watched her with interest as Consuelo put the equipment away. “The cockpit didn’t look big enough for—oh!” She blushed.

  Consuelo turned and smirked as she dragged herself to the cockpit, slipping out of the crowded corridor and back into the pilot seat where she could almost stretch out. “Here—”

  Before she could offer a hand to the mermaid, Aurelie had followed her lead. She may have navigated the hallways, but in the open space of the cockpit she slipped out of the entryway and fell into Consuela’s lap. “Oops!”

  “Oops,” Consuelo agreed as Aurelie squirmed about in an attempt to find the instruments she would need. Fortunately, the mermaid was mostly dry, and while the instruments weren’t waterproof, they could tolerate the bit of dampness lingering in her hair—they had to, to go into a submarine. The early ones would rust through or the salt would ruin them, with catastrophic results for the crews and the countries that commissioned them.

  Consuelo took one of Aurelie’s hands and guided it toward the yoke. She spread her legs to slide her feet onto the foot pedals, and Aurelia dropped to the leather seat between her thighs.

  Aurelie wiggled, as if in revenge for having to sit between her legs, and Consuelo fixed her gaze on the viewport.

  “Why did you name her the Amphitrite? That’s a mermaid name.”

  Also the name of a Greek goddess, but that was neither here nor there. Consuela released the gas from the air bladders, compressing it back into the water of the cooling system. “She was my first love.”

  Aurelie twisted around to stare at her, dark eyes searching her face. Were they truly sailing in a submarine named for some other woman? One ought to never underestimate the jealousy of a mermaid’s heart.

  “It wasn’t long before she got bored of me, but you never forget your first.” Consuelo laughed.

  “You must not have been a captain then. I would never be bored of a captain.”

  “No, but I was very young. Your age, maybe, I had just graduated from university with my engineering degree; I didn’t go back for my submariner’s certification until after I met her.” And had her heart broken, but she knew why Amphitrite had grown bored with her—Consuelo had been young and something of a fool. Amphitrite taught her what there was to know, and set her loose on the world.

  The furnace grumbled back to life as the engine stirred; the sub sank for several meters before the rotors began to s
pin and sent the Amphitrite forward.

  “Here, hold on to this. It steers, just turn and the nose will follow you from side to side. To orient the nose up or down, pull back and forward, but if you want to sink or rise, you need this dial here for the air bladders. Be gentle, or your eardrums will explode and there will be a mess. Oh, and you’ll go deaf and maybe die.”

  “Deafness and death. Check. Ooooooh!” Aurelie gasped as the Amphitrite sank below the surface and the silvery meniscus of the water crawled over the viewport and closed over their heads. “Wow, that’s so…” she leaned forward to tap on the glass, and Consuelo caught her by the shoulder and pulled her back.

  Don’t scratch the glass. “Pay attention to the controls, pilot.”

  “Oh. Right. What are the foot pedals for?”

  “They turn the fins that are on either side of the rotors; the yoke turns the rotors themselves. Turn them together and you can spin in little circles.”

  Aurelie couldn’t sit by and listen to these directions go without trying for herself. She leaned hard on the yoke and slapped Consuelo on the leg, “Use your feet!” Consuelo obliged and pressed down on the pedal, and Aurelie whooped as they sent the Amphitrite chasing her tail. “This is brilliant! I never thought they would be so nice inside.”

  “Oh? Weren’t you gawking through the window?” Consuel smiled at the image of Aurelie as a girl looking into a candy store. “Come to think of it, how did you find me?” Almost no one thought to ask a mermaid such questions, but Amphitrite had told her that any mermaid could smell the furnaces. But these new submarines didn’t spew exhaust into the water; the smell they had came from their skins like any other marine creature—not much of a smell at all.

  “Oh, I heard it. It hums.”

  “She. A submarine is a woman,” Consuelo corrected.

  “Oh. I can see that, she’s very pretty,” Aurelie continued. “I’m glad she’s yours, I’d be sorry to make her sink.”

  “You could leave her alone.”

  “No! I couldn’t let men sail her around, that wouldn’t be right at all. They might think they own the ocean, and it’s no place for men, you know. That would just be silly.”

  Consuelo buried her face against the mermaid’s shoulder and laughed. Insulted, Aurelie squirmed more forcefully against her, and Consuelo almost choked on her laughter. “No one owns the ocean.”

  “That’s right! And I’m going to keep it that way.”

  “All by yourself?”

  “If I have to,” Aurelie huffed. “Don’t laugh at me.”

  “I’m not laughing at you, you just…remind me of myself.”

  “Do I?”

  “Yes. Myself, from twenty years ago, back when I was silly.”

  Aurelie squealed and turned around to pummel her, the blows raining down on her like the pounces of kittens. “Silly! How—how dare you, just because you’re a decrepit old lady doesn’t mean you can say such things!”

  “Forty is not decrepit, and if it were, what an unconscionable thing you are, sitting in my lap. You might break my little old lady hip.”

  “Hmmph. I might eat you, anyway, for being so cruel. I don’t care if you’re not a man.”

  “Mhmm. Mind the controls, pilot, before we crash.”

  Aurelie spun around to find the Amphitrite drifting through open ocean, and she let out an annoyed sigh. “There’s nothing to crash into.”

  Consuelo slipped a hand around the curve of the mermaid’s waist. “Always mind the controls, no matter what might distract you. Now, why would you eat men but not me, if you’re so worried about someone trying to take over the ocean?”

  “You shouldn’t be trying to distract me.”

  “No, I shouldn’t, but someone has to put you through your paces, to see how you do under suboptimal conditions.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. It’s because women are boring.”

  Amphitrite puffed on a cigar, one of the ones she demanded Consuelo bring her any time she visited. “The ocean, so dark and mysterious, like the heart of woman! I’ll show them dark and mysterious. I slept with one once. Never make that mistake, Chelo; they’re too busy thinking about plowing the unfathomable enigma. I’m a simple woman, I have simple pleasures, how enigmatic could I be?”

  “A simple woman,” Consuelo laughed.

  “Yes! Oh, just you wait, niñasita, you’ll hear it from them, too. How mysterious, how ineffable! What is more fickle, the woman or the sea? Oh, the pain of not knowing because I am too stupid to ask! I don’t know how you can eat cows; they’re much smarter.”

  Consuelo directed Aurelie lower: the viewport might offer a panoramic view, but it didn’t do to get too comfortable; one’s field of vision was still limited. From below, the bubble of the viewport granted a wider field of the epipelagic zone overhead. This worked out in her favor, with Aurelie’s fascinated gaze turning upward she nudged the Amphitrite’s nose toward the surface as she leaned forward. Consuelo had little choice but to run them in deeper water so Aurelie could gawk, and she could keep an eye out for trouble.

  “Nose down. Keep the ship parallel to a horizontal plane.”

  Submarines were easier to see from below, anyway.

  They saw the Argus class sub long before it spotted them. It swept into view like a ghost, riding the surface to keep any heated water from giving its location away. Not even the Amphitrite could recycle her coolant forever; eventually that water would heat to the point where she would have to dump it. Traditional subs did so all at once, and the hot water might vaporize on contact with the cooler ocean and leave a tell-tale sign of its passing. The Amphitrite could do so a little at a time, better able to mask her presence than any other submarine that came before. Argus subs didn’t run as hot as others. There wouldn’t be much point in running them on reconnaissance if they gave themselves away, but they were old and couldn’t do incremental exchanges like the Amphitrite could.

  Consuelo smirked against Aurelie’s shoulder. You wish you’d kept me around. The coolant exchange system would never go to men who thought her incompetent. They could keep their single-exchange methods and their submarines that announced themselves for anyone listening.

  Aurelie went tense, and Consuelo ran a hand along her arm to soothe her. “What do we do?” the mermaid asked.

  “Just what you’re doing. Go slow. Throttle back on the rotors. Slowly! We don’t want them to notice us going quiet.”

  The Argus sailed along, leaving a V-shaped wake, a black watcher limned in quivering light, except where the rays of the sun reflected and refracted off its many windows. Consuelo could almost make out the long observation bells protecting the sensitive instruments in its belly from the water, seeing them more from memory than with her eyes. Once, those instruments had been housed in true bells; now they were housed behind long glass panels running from bow to stern, but tradition dictated they still be called bells.

  Consuelo wasn’t sure which vessel it was, but it didn’t matter. It was an Argus from the late 1870s, back when they were built with a broad, exaggerated hammerhead that was the class’ signature. Sending a twenty-year-old sub after the brand-new Amphitrite meant that they didn’t have many subs available nearby; the war with Spain required more attention than one rogue thief. Send out a sweep to find her, and call for reinforcements. That was the purpose of the Argus: to watch, and report.

  The Argus dropped below the surface and turned its headlamps on the Amphitrite. The yellow beams cut through the dark water around the sub, flooding the cockpit with sickly luminescence. Consuelo bit back on the urge to swear, neither wanting to alert Aurelie to the danger of the situation, nor thinking it appropriate language for polite company.

  Aurelie offered no resistance as Consuelo took the controls back from her, instead keeping her gaze on the descending submarine.

  Consuelo grinned. “How do you feel about a little piracy?”

  “You’re going to steal that?” Aurelie asked with breathless wonder.

 
“No, it’s ugly. There’s more to piracy than stealing; you also need to make a clean escape. Or put some meddlesome people in their place.”

  The Argus continued to descend, bearing down on them with its streamlined nose. It was fast for its size and age, faster even than the Amphitrite over a straight run. But this wasn’t to be a straight run.

  “I—I suppose.” Aurelie sounded uncertain.

  So young. “Surely you’ve sunk a submarine or ship that big before. Something like that can’t handle the pressure at four atmospheres.” Consuelo nudged the mermaid with an elbow and a knowing grin. She wasn’t that young.

  “Oh, yes, but…because I felt like it.”

  “Don’t you want to defend your sub, pilot?” Consuelo leaned forward, her breath stirring the hair at the nape of Aurelie’s neck. “Or what about me? I’m in sore need of rescue.”

  Aurelie shivered and giggled. “I don’t think you’ve ever needed rescuing,” she chided, and her fingers fluttered over Consuelo’s, touching her like the feet of butterflies. “How do I get to the bay doors?”

  “Now, how do you know about those?” Consuelo murmured, and smiled against her ear as Aurelie laughed. So she’d investigated the Amphitrite before climbing onto the viewport and waking her up. Of course; if she had originally thought the sub held a potential meal, she would have investigated all the ways in before calling attention to herself. Definitely not her first time. “Out into the corridor, second hatch on the bottom. Close the hatch and knock twice and I’ll get the bay doors.”

  Aurelie pulled herself out of the cockpit using the handholds, muscles flexing in her arms. Consuela heard the hatch clang shut, and the locking mechanism grind into place. She put a hand over the lever to release the bay doors, but no knock came. What could Aurelie be doing? The bay wasn’t that fascinating; it was a small space meant to hold cargo that had to be dumped on the sly, or store mines or instruments to be laid to catch unwary followers. She never expected the latter use, but designs had to be war-ready to get the government grants.