Manuscripts Burn


MANUSCRIPTS BURN

"Manuscripts don't burn"
- Mikhail Bulgakov

Hi, I'm horror and science fiction author Steve Kozeniewski (pronounced: "causin' ooze key.") Welcome to my blog! You can also find me on Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads, and Amazon. You can e-mail me here, join my mailing list here, or request an e-autograph here. Free on this site you can listen to me recite one of my own short works, "The Thing Under the Bed."

Thursday, June 4, 2009

The Last War: Chapter 15, Part 1

Admiral Yuan Timur smiled as a breeze blew back his hair. The salty taste of the ocean and the sweet taste of victory mingled in his mouth.

Timur had never been to the ocean before. Mongolia had always been landlocked, and so his fleet had been confined to lakes and rivers. Because of that, it was considerably small. But ever since China had been taken, things had been different.

He looked around him at the slowly gathering armada. The Mongolian fleet was massing in the Indian Ocean at a top secret point, preparing for an assault on India, and, eventually, Africa and Australia.

Hundreds of ships and submarines were falling into formation. They were mostly Russian built, and most of the airplanes that were on the ships, such as the carrier Timur commanded, were Russian MIGs. Very few were Mongolian made, but that was only because Mongolia had only begun major military production very very recently. Most of their weaponry was captured from the invasion of Russia.

Soon that would change, however. Mongolia would begin pumping out ships (and other weapons and vehicles, but that hardly mattered to Timur) and their fleet would be purely Mongolian. For the moment, though, the Golden Navy was a motley assemblage of ships.

"Begin plotting a course for the sub-continent," he said to the navigator, and then, to the radio operator, "Order all the ships to follow us once we begin."

Both answered, "Yes, sir."

They were both Chigols. Useless nomads. Timur silently wished that once the war was over, Emperor Bleda Khan would eliminate all of the Chigols. It was not likely to happen, though, Timur lamented.

"As long as the fleet is just sitting there, let's start running some battle simulations. I want our ships..."

But the world would never know what Timur wanted his ships to do because a Chigol grabbed his shoulder and shook him vehemently. The man (or boy, really, he couldn't have been over eighteen) apparently couldn't speak Mongolian. He kept on going on and on in Chinese.

"Stop!" Timur said harshly.

The Chigol handed Timur a pair of binoculars and pointed. Timur looked in the direction the Chigol was pointing. There was nothing there. The binoculars were showing black, as though the lens cap was on. Timur checked, but the cap was off. The binocs must've been broken.

"You idiot! These binoculars are broken!"

Timur looked in a different direction. They were perfectly focused and clear. He looked back and the binocs were black again.

"What the hell?"

Timur slowly lowered the binocs from his eyes. A ship the size of a planet was bearing down on them from a distance. If he hadn't been looking for it, he never would've seen it. It was too huge to be noticed. That was a strange paradox. He took it none of the rest of the fleet had seen it either. They had been reporting a lot of sonar and radar malfunctions, though.

"That's too big!" he said, "Radar and sonar can't pick something like that up the way it should!"

There came a screaming whine through the air. Several shells the size of large automobiles were plummeting down towards them.

"Shit! Abandon ship! Abandon ship!"

"It's too late!" yelled the Chigol in his native tongue.

Three seconds later Timur had a huge splintered plank rammed through his stomach. A barrage of shells rained down on the Mongolian vessel. It was blasted into lumber and shards of metal almost instantaneously. Timur would never go down in history, only into the dark ocean depths.

A moment later, a depth charge put a hasty end to a Mongolian submarine. The fleet commanders began to grow scared, and a few ships actually steered into one another. The fleet was being slaughtered.

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