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The formation of Hondo rafts crossed the orbit of the two Harbor Dogs that circled Lady Chatterley, and the nautical drone's enthusiastic, low-frequency warning barks were loud enough to hurt Bonnie's ears. The same barking could be heard all along the shipping lanes that Lady Chatterley had thrown into chaos when she'd come to an unexpected dead stop. She sat with her ballast tanks full of water, and her hull sat a few yards underneath the bay's shining surface. With the spray from the Harbor Dogs no longer obscuring her vision, Bonnie could now make out at least thirty small boats, formations of rafts, and other watercraft approaching. Every boat there was tightly packed to overcapacity.

The Lucky Sue approached the Lady Chatterley from the East, lagging slightly behind the others. She was a luxury yacht. Usually she circled the bay on lazy charter cruises, but today was different. The area usually filled with sunbathers and chardonnay-swilling, shrimp-obsessed bourgeoisie now held militants who had commandeered her.

They were soldiers of Corazon, a Mexican Catholic group that was, like so many of the religious insurgent groups, a mix of zealots and organized criminals. The yacht carried five actual Corazon commandos, nine well-paid Mexican Mafia mercenaries, and one shit-scared charter boat operator who'd shown up at the dock this morning to find something other than his usual passengers waiting for him. They must have had a very inspiring view of the flotilla as it crossed the orbit of the Harbor Dogs and was allowed to pass, because they were cheering. Their antique Kalashnikov assault rifles were plainly visible as they held them high and enthusiastically pumped them up and down in the air.

Inside the Mark Two Harbor Dog Autonomous Nautical Drone's bulbous heads, small but immensely powerful magnetrons were generating pulses of radar waves ten thousand times per second. The energy that bounced back was captured, processed, and used to create a color-coded image for interpretation by the Harbor Dog's primitive artificial intelligences. The colors represented material properties of the objects that could be determined by the manner and degree to which they reflected or absorbed radar energy. In rapid, independent succession the two nautical watchdogs went through identical processes of observation, profile matching, and decision making as they orbited Lady Chatterley, pulsing the Lucky Sue ten thousand times a second with their radar.

Both autonomous drones observed the high density objects that were being hoisted high in the air by the largely wet objects that matched the stored profile of human beings. The dense objects that matched the profile of metal were distributed one per human, and they matched the profile of a radar imaged Kalashnikov assault rifle. The Harbor Dogs would have continued their clockwise orbits of Lady Chatterley in perfect acceptance of this set of conditions if not for the Lucky Sue's complete lack of a properly coded IFF transponder signal that the nautical drones used to Identify Friend or Foe.

Unarmed humans without a transponder, approaching a ship in distress, such as the half-submerged Lady Chatterley appeared to be, were presumed to be a rescue party, a Non-Threat. If they had a properly coded IFF transponder and were armed, then they were obviously G.S.A. Peacekeepers, Coast Guard, Navy, or Law Enforcement, all classified as Non-Threats. Armed humans approaching a vessel in distress without proper IFF signals were one of three things: hijackers, pirates, or terrorists, all classified as Threats. Within a millisecond of each other, both Harbor Dogs independently concluded that the Lucky Sue was a Threat, and they broke from their orbits of Lady Chatterley to begin an attack run.

The Harbor Dogs approached from the angle they'd determined was most likely to sink the Threat and least likely to result in damage to the flotilla of small Non-Threats, the Lady Chatterley, or the two ovoid, safety orange lifeboat pods that had just dropped from her bow superstructure into the water. To obtain an optimal angle of attack, the drones tightened their turns, and rather than maneuvering around the flotilla, cut directly through it in a series of slaloming turns that sent curtains of saltwater spray rising over Bonnie's head. As one passed uncomfortably close, she could see the stubby, dome-turret-mounted, short-barreled, electric gun underneath the Harbor Dog's eyeless, encephalitic head rotate and track its target.

The unfortunately timed display of high morale by the Corazon and Mexican Mafia passengers of the Lucky Sue had not been witnessed by the other boats traveling East to West, since the Lucky Sue was in the rear of their flotilla. As the drones weaved their way through the small boats, most thought the drones were coming for them, and they prayed or cursed. Some did both. Death passed the little boats over, one by one, as the Harbor Dogs dodged the Non-Threats with radical maneuvers, closing on the Threat, the Lucky Sue, on the Eastern edge of the flotilla.

The Harbor Dogs carried three hundred rounds apiece of caseless, solid-propelled, fifty-caliber, tungsten-cored sabot rounds. Both drones fired their rotary, tribarrel electric guns for only a second. From the deck of the Lucky Sue it looked like the Harbor Dogs had grown a second strobe underneath to match the one on top of their heads. There was only the briefest moment for the men on board to realize that was not the case, before the port and starboard rear quarters of the yacht's simulated wood hull was turned into carbon fiber shrapnel. The Lucky Sue shook as rounds tore into her flanks. The air was filled with a ripping sound and staccato impacts as her hull turned to razor-edged fragments, and the engine turned into a spray of molten tungsten, lead, and steel, punctuated by heavy, spinning, deformed chunks.

None of the Corazon insurgents, Mexican mafia mercs, or the kidnapped charter boat operator were killed by direct fire. Their bodies were punctured by thousands of fast moving fragments of metal and carbon fiber hull. They died almost instantly of massive internal bleeding that dropped their blood pressure to nothing over nothing in a heartbeat.

The two Harbor Dogs, satisfied that the Threat had been neutralized, resumed their perimeter patrol of Lady Chatterley, and miraculously, none of the men in the other boats fired on the drones in uncontrollable fear, anger, or vengeance.

Bonnie watched a few distant figures manage to jump from the bow end of the flaming Lucky Sue into the water. She never saw them again, and only then did she notice that nobody in their raft had a life preserver or flotation device, including herself. Their formation and the larger flotilla had plenty of weapons, heavy armor, and explosives, but no life preservers.

The flotilla reached Lady Chatterley, and the rafts, motorboats, tugboats, and other small craft positioned themselves between her bow superstructure and aft towers, endeavoring to keep station over a five-hundred-and-fifty-foot-long, ninety foot wide, five-yard-deep channel that ran down her spine while the water around them bubbled and frothed and turned white. As Lady Chatterley blew the water out of her ballast tanks with compressed air, she began to rise out of the water. When the top surfaces of the flat cargo area broke into the sunshine, the channel running down her spine became a self-contained body of water, separated from the waters of the bay by her rising hull.

Her body became like a bathtub, filled with the comparatively tiny toy boats of the flotilla, bobbing inside. Collisions between the boats were unavoidable, since using the engines made waves in the giant bathtub, and not using the engines meant drifting and colliding anyway. Bonnie was glad to be in the middle of their raft formation because immediately forward of their rafts was a tugboat that loomed over the inflatables below it, and immediately aft was what Bonnie took to be a fishing boat. It was drifting against two of the Korean rafts and threatening to capsize or crush them.

Bonnie looked over the side of the raft and saw the channel they floated in was twelve plenty deep to drown in. She began to paddle with her hands like she saw Carlos and the Koreans and everybody else in the rafts doing. Casper followed suit. They were trying to reach the sides of the bathtub and climb out before one of the larger boats drifted into or over them.

It was quieter now without the noise of their own outboard motors. Lady Chatterley was blowing the bubbles to the outside of her hull, and the roaring noise they made was loud, but not so loud that Bonnie was prevented from hearing something new. It was, she decided after a few moments, a human noise, like murmuring, but musical.

The Koreans were singing. Bonnie looked back at the tattooed gangster that handled their raft. His lips moved around the same strange words as the ex-commando importer and the convenience store owner in the next raft. She thought she'd heard this one before, when she was very young, back before songs like these were illegal.

“I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel:

As ye deal with my condemners so shall ye with my Grace deal...”

The song rose from the tugboat closest to them, too. Its deck was full of Northern California White Sunday militiamen. They were wearing woodland camouflage, and they were trying to out sing the Koreans with their Battle Hymn. She wondered for a moment just why they were wearing the woodland camouflage on a boat until she remembered that woodland camo was just what some Mendonesians wore every day.

The Koreans sensed competition and sang louder.

“Let the hero born of woman crush the serpent with his heel,

Since God is marching on.

He has sounded out the trumpet that shall never call retreat,

He is sifting out the hearts of men before his judgment seat.”

The walls of the giant bathtub were beginning to rise on either side, and she could no longer see the bay's glittering waters or the Harbor Dogs or the shore. Lady Chatterley was draining the water from the channel running down her spine. As the walls of the bathtub rose around the flotilla, the voices of the singers began to echo off the sides, and the sound changed. It had a quality she'd never heard before. It scared her.

Beyond the tugboat were a group of Chinese Christians who demonstrated their faith by standing upright in their own inflatable rafts while singing despite the plainly evident instability of standing that caused them to nearly drown. Next to them were a pod of jet-skis that had been stolen from a rental agency by the Sons of Abraham who, it seemed, had also found time to steal matching blue and green wet suits. Even this group of militant Jews and Muslims sang the same song.

Four motorboats actually owned by the Eastern Front Church floated at the bow end of the bathtub. They sang next to a tour boat filled with yellow-robed monks who didn't seem to know how to sing very well but their tour boat operator did, and he sang loudly and clearly enough for all the monks in the boat.

The Lady Chatterley's screws began to turn, and she moved again through the waters of the bay, carrying the believers in their own body of water, holy water, separated from the bay by the walls of Lady Chatterley's font.

There was a quiet boat tucked in near the stern end of the bathtub. It was plain, white fiberglass, and it was the small boat equivalent of the plain, white, unmarked van. It held three men whose lack of both musical enthusiasm and the recognition code was now clearly evident. Gun barrels lowered from adjacent vessels to point at the uninvited as the singing continued. Abruptly, the battle hymn was drowned out by the hellish, concussive report of gunfire echoing off the walls of the font. Bonnie and Casper saw bodies floating in the water near the stern. At least someone had a life preserver, she thought.

As the singing continued, and Lady Chatterley sailed on through Baccha Bay, Bonnie turned to Casper and asked, “Did you see the crew abandon ship before we came aboard?”

“Yeah, I saw the big orange pods. Two of 'em,” He replied.

“Kinda makes you wonder, huh?”

“Wonder what?” Casper was wondering about a lot of things.

“Kinda makes you wonder who's driving this giant ship.”