The Castle in the Sea: Quest of the Sunfish 2

by Mardi McConnochie

  ‘It wasn’t exactly stealing,’ Annalie said.

  ‘My dad gave me that creditstream to use,’ Essie said, ‘and I used it. We needed the money.’

  There was a long, unsettling pause from Spinner. ‘Where are you now?’ he asked again.

  ‘Off Estilo,’ Annalie said, ‘in the Sea of Brundisi.’

  ‘Oh, kids,’ Spinner groaned. ‘What have you done?’

  ‘We came to look for you,’ Will said.

  ‘We found the clues you left for us,’ Annalie said. ‘We worked out you were going to find your old colleagues. We already saw Dan Gari. We ran into trouble in the Moon Islands, so we didn’t get to Dasto Puri until after you’d already left. We went to try and find you at Sujana’s house, but you’d already left. Spinner, I have to tell you, Sujana sold you out. After you left, she called up Beckett and told him where to find you.’

  ‘I know,’ Spinner said. ‘He almost got me too.’ But he didn’t want to talk about Sujana. ‘I thought I told you to stay home and stay safe.’

  ‘But we weren’t safe,’ Annalie said. ‘Beckett came to see me at Triumph. He knew about us from the start. We had to get away from him.’

  ‘They would’ve burned the boat too,’ Will said. ‘So I had to get it back from them. They wrecked the workshop, though.’

  Spinner let out a long breath. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said finally, his voice unsteady. ‘I thought at least you two would be safe from him.’

  ‘It’s okay,’ Annalie said. ‘We’ve made it this far. And at least now we know you’re not dead.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not yet. Although it looked a bit dicey there a couple of times.’

  ‘Tell us about it,’ Will muttered.

  ‘You still haven’t told us where you are,’ Annalie said.

  ‘In Brundisi,’ Spinner said. ‘With Vesh.’

  ‘So, what happened?’ Will asked. ‘Where have you been all this time?’

  Spinner’s story

  ‘The night Beckett’s men came for me I didn’t have a lot of time,’ Spinner explained. ‘I had an exit strategy in place—several strategies actually—but Plan A turned out to be impossible.’

  ‘Getting away on the Sunfish?’ Will guessed.

  ‘Right,’ Spinner said. ‘When I got there, they already had a marine guarding the boat. So I had to look for another way out.’

  ‘So you went to the Crown and Anchor with Truman,’ Annalie said.

  ‘Right again,’ Spinner said. ‘You two did some sleuthing, didn’t you? I had a contact among the Kangs, and I arranged to meet him at the Crown. I knew I had to get out that night. I was lucky—they had a boat that was about to do the run to Dasto Puri, so they smuggled me aboard along with all the other illegal stuff, then I waited in the cargo hold for two more days before they actually sailed. Have you ever tried living in a cargo hold? It’s not nice.’

  Pod was nodding. He knew all about living in a cargo hold.

  ‘I’d made a deal with my contact that I’d pay them some of the money upfront, and the rest would be held in a trust account by a third party and only paid out when they got me where I wanted to go. It’s a pretty standard arrangement, whether you’re moving illegal cigarettes or illegal people and, stupidly, I thought I could trust them because I knew the guy onshore. But he didn’t come with us on the journey, he just brokered the deal, and once we got deep into the Moon Islands, someone in the crew decided to see how much more they could squeeze me for. They stopped in the middle of the ocean and threatened to toss me overboard if I didn’t double the sum I’d agreed on.’

  ‘What did you do?’ Will asked.

  ‘Well, I negotiated. I said I didn’t have double the sum, I only had what I’d promised because I’d had to escape at such short notice, blah, blah, blah. Eventually I managed to more or less convince them I didn’t have any more money and if they threw me in the sea they really would get nothing. The captain shut it down, but I knew it hadn’t really gone away. Some of the crew were looking at me funny and lurking around at night, and I just had a bad feeling somebody might try something.

  ‘So I decided to take matters into my own hands. After we left Dux I’d been free to move about the ship, and I’d made sure to take a good look at all the tech they had on board. You know, some of those Kang boats really are impressive. This one had the same propulsion system that some of the Admiralty boats use—’

  ‘The wave-powered ones?’ Will said eagerly.

  ‘That’s it,’ Spinner said. ‘It’s a bit bolted-on, since it’s stolen, but they’ve got it. The boat was amazingly fast. But that’s highly sophisticated technology and if it goes wrong you need specialist help. You can’t just stick it back together with a spanner.

  ‘So one night, something goes wrong with the wave-propulsion system, and the boat grinds to a halt.’

  ‘Something?’ Will prompted.

  ‘I might have had something to do with it,’ Spinner said. ‘Next day, the whole crew’s going over the boat trying to work out what’s gone wrong and why they’re dead in the water. Eventually they realise it’s the propulsion system but there’s no one on board who can fix it. They can send for help from the nearest Kang technician, but it turns out he’s on Dasto Puri—days or even weeks away—and we’re stuck there, a sitting duck, with a big load of cargo on board that no one wants to get caught with.

  ‘So I said, “I know something about wave-propulsion systems. I could take a look at it for you. But there’s a price.” And the captain said, “What price?” I said, “You guarantee me safe passage to Dasto Puri. No little accidents, no more shakedowns, and when we do get there, I want a fifty per cent discount on the fare as payment for my services. That’s my price, take it or leave it. If it’s too high, we can all just sit here and wait for your technician to get here, and hope no one else stumbles upon us first.”

  ‘Well, the captain didn’t want to be stuck there any longer than he had to, so he agreed to my terms and let me fix the propulsion system. I made it look like a super-complicated job: I had pirates fetching me a million different kinds of tools and gadgets and running all kinds of diagnostics. Then when nobody was looking I switched back the relays I’d swapped over the night before and the whole thing started up again. I’d saved the day!’

  Will and Annalie cheered.

  ‘So we got to Dasto Puri without any further mishaps, and I met up with Dan Gari.’

  ‘Danny Boy!’ said Graham.

  ‘That’s him,’ Spinner said. ‘Personally I don’t know how he can live with pirates full-time. He claims they protect him, but it seems an awfully high price to pay. I wouldn’t have said he seemed happy there, but there was no shifting him.’

  ‘He seemed kind of paranoid,’ Annalie said.

  ‘He is paranoid,’ Spinner said. ‘Always was. Although maybe if you’re working for a criminal enterprise, maybe it’s not paranoid to think everyone’s out to get you, since everybody is. Anyway, I’d been hoping I could stay with Dan for a while and consider my options, but he didn’t want anything to do with me. The Kangs back in Dux were reporting that Beckett’s lot had turned Lowtown upside down looking for me and they were scared someone might talk. So they wanted me gone as soon as possible. By that stage I was ready to say goodbye to the Kangs, and I was hoping to get to an island with a ferry service—or anything really—but you know how it is on Puri. They control who comes onto the island and who goes off it, and the only way off was on another one of their boats. So, reluctantly, I paid them again and left Puri with a different bunch of Kangs.

  ‘It was a smaller boat this time. Not as fast. I don’t know what their mission was. I was going to hop off at the first land we came to, but I didn’t get the chance. We were caught in a shocker of a storm and the boat started taking on water. The crew started fighting about what to do—stay with the boat and try to save it, or abandon ship. If it’d been up to me I would’ve stayed with the boat—would’ve tackled the storm differently too, but that’s anothe
r story—anyway it all got violent and people started shooting—’

  ‘In the middle of a storm? While you’re taking on water?’ Annalie asked incredulously.

  ‘Yep. I think if they abandoned the ship they wouldn’t get another one so they had powerful reasons to stay, but some of them were convinced they were going to go under. Anyway, some of them decided to stay and shoot it out, but the captain gave the order to abandon ship, and they took me with them. So there we were, in a horrendous storm, ten people jammed into one lifeboat, and the lifeboat was being smashed by waves, and things kept getting washed overboard. We had no water, we had no food, the emergency beacon was gone. It’s the Moon Islands, and we’re in the middle of nowhere. Some of the guys were hoping our boat would come back and pick us up, but the others said there was no chance: if they’d managed to survive the storm without sinking the boat or shooting each other dead, they’d be heading for the nearest safe port and claiming the boat as booty. Apparently that’s how they do things in the Kang Brotherhood: once you get a boat, you fight to the death to hang onto it, and let your shipmates look out for themselves.

  ‘Anyway, no one came for us, and we didn’t see anybody. We drifted for days. Then one of the crew said, “Why are we keeping this guy around? He’s not one of us and he’s just one more mouth to feed.” The captain said, “When we get him to land he’s worth money, and we’re going to need it.” They all started arguing about whether they should keep me alive or not. I tried to convince them to keep me: “I can help you, I’ll catch fish, I know how to make fresh water.” So I built a solar still, but they were too impatient to let it work properly, then someone knocked it over and the fresh water got mixed back in with the salt water, so the captain said, “I’ve had enough of this. Let’s throw him overboard.” Well, that was bad enough, but then someone else said, “Now let’s not be too hasty. He’s an old bloke, but he’s still got a bit of meat on him.”’

  Annalie squeaked. ‘They were going to eat you?’

  ‘Raw?’ Will added.

  ‘Spinner sashimi,’ Spinner said. ‘Some of them didn’t like the idea at first, but then they started to come round to it, so I decided it was time to go.’

  ‘What did you do?’ asked Annalie.

  ‘When it was dark, I stole a life jacket and went overboard. I floated in the dark all night, and I was afraid the whole time that something was going to come up from the deep and eat me. But nothing did. The next day I floated past a boat that picked me up. Fortunately they weren’t pirates, and after they dropped me off I took a passage to Norlind to see Sujana, then made my way south to see Vesh.’

  ‘Did you take the Trans-Northern Express?’ asked Annalie.

  ‘No,’ Spinner said, sounding puzzled. ‘It doesn’t take you anywhere near Brundisi.’

  ‘I knew he was lying!’ Annalie said. ‘Beckett told us he’d almost caught you on the Trans-Northern Express but you fell off the train and got smashed to bits.’

  ‘He told you I was dead?’ Spinner asked. ‘What a horrible thing to do.’

  ‘He was desperate,’ Will crowed. ‘He can’t catch you and he can’t catch us. But we knew he was faking.’

  ‘But you still haven’t told us why you never answered our messages,’ Annalie said.

  ‘The Kangs took my shell away on the first day and I never got it back,’ Spinner said. ‘They have a theory that the Admiralty secretly hijacked the technology so they can monitor every shell in the world. Sounds a bit unlikely to me—do they really have the resources to do that?—but you never know, they could be right. Anyway, I’ve never really used the thing that much, so I didn’t really think about it until Vesh showed me that story about my children the kidnappers. Anyway, I’m sorry. I had no idea you’d been trying to reach me. From now on, I’ll try to be more contactable.’

  ‘Contactable is good,’ Will said. ‘But findable is even better. Don’t go anywhere until we get there, okay? We’re on our way to see you!’

  The Sea of Brundisi

  Before the Flood, Brundisi was a big country with dramatic geography—huge mountains, a vast river, fertile countryside—and an enormous population who spoke many different languages. Once, Brundisi had been a patchwork of kingdoms and clans, republics and fiefdoms, but gradually it had coalesced into a more or less coherent nation; it had grown rich on its goldfields, its abundant agricultural output, and later, on its factories, which churned out every item imaginable.

  The Brundisi that arrived on the world scene in the hundred years or so before the Flood was energetic, abundant, and ever-growing as it tried to drag its enormous population out of rural poverty and into the kind of wealth and comfort that countries like Dux and the nations of the north enjoyed. But Brundisi was unlucky. The geography that had made it rich—the great river, fed by snowmelt in the high mountains, and its fertile floodplain, where all the crops were grown—also made it vulnerable. As the world grew warmer, the snow stopped falling in the high mountains; the snowmelt stopped feeding the river; the river began to dry out. The rains stopped too and soon there was not enough water to drink or grow food. Hundreds of millions of people lived in Brundisi. As the price of food and water skyrocketed, riots broke out.

  The Brundisan government held talks with other governments about what could be done, but the other governments had their own problems with food and water and riots; they didn’t offer much help.

  Extraordinary measures began to seem reasonable. Water was the problem. They had once had water, and now it was gone. Was there anything they could do to get it back?

  Then a small team of scientists announced that they had discovered a way to release some of the water back into the system. They called it the Collodius Process.

  No one really took the scientists very seriously. They were a small team, from a small country, at a not-very-prestigious university. There wasn’t an outcry when they published details of their process in a scientific journal. The few people who took any notice of it—a few scientists, a few politicians—thought it was nonsense. One or two of these scientists said that if you ever attempted such a thing the results could be catastrophic, but most of them didn’t. They simply thought it wouldn’t work.

  But someone in the Brundisi government had noticed. They were willing to give it a try. They summoned the scientists to Brundisi and gave them a lab to work in. The team built a prototype of the device. They tested it in secret; it worked. The Brundisi government decided to take it to the next level. They let the scientists announce their success as a prelude to the next round: a live test, in real conditions.

  More people paid attention this time; a few leading scientists warned them not to do anything stupid. A few ambassadors were asked to tell the Brundisi government to back off. But even now, the level of urgency was not that high. With all the other things that were going on in the world—famines and water wars—a live test of a dubious new scientific process seemed like the least of anyone’s worries.

  The Flood was the result. Brundisi itself suffered torrential rain for weeks. The country was devastated by flooding. The loss of life was staggering. The problem spread wider, became a global event, became the Flood. And at the end of it, the original problem had not been solved. The snow didn’t return, the river wasn’t saved. Brundisi was wrecked, and the rest of the world, furious about what they had done, turned their backs on them.

  The country the Sunfish was sailing towards was truly a disaster area. The Sea of Brundisi had risen particularly high in the Flood, swamping great tracts of coastal land. The wreckage of the old Brundisi extended several miles out to sea, the factories, the apartment blocks, the railroads and bridges and flyovers turning to decaying hulks of cancer-ridden concrete and rusting steel, a vast barrier to shipping of all kinds. Brundisi was now one of the poorest nations on earth, so they had never attempted to clear away the wreckage, as other, richer countries had.

  Vesh—Ganaman Kiveshalan—lived somewhere near the coast in the city of Dio. The addre
ss they had for him was not really an address at all; rather like Sujana’s, it was a set of directions for how to get somewhere, rather than a place you could simply look up on the links. Annalie had discussed how to get there with Spinner as they planned their final approach, and he had given them some useful tips about how to find their way.

  ‘You do know about the Sea of Brundisi, don’t you?’ Spinner asked, as Annalie finished making notes about the route. The four friends were sitting round the table in the saloon, Annalie’s shell on speaker.

  ‘What about it?’ she asked.

  ‘There are a lot of pirates here.’

  ‘Oh,’ Annalie said. ‘Yes.’

  ‘We’ve run into pirates before,’ said Will. ‘The proper ones down in the Moon Islands with the massive gunships. Aren’t these just guys in dinghies with a bad attitude?’

  ‘And automatic weapons,’ Spinner said. ‘Don’t underestimate them. If you see anyone like that coming toward you, get out of there. Okay?’

  ‘We can handle it,’ Will said. ‘In fact, I’ve been doing a bit of work on the motor. I think you’ll be pretty impressed when you see what it can do.’

  Spinner chuckled. ‘Just make sure you get here in one piece.’

  Despite Spinner’s warning, their journey along the coast of Brundisi was uneventful, and they soon reached the place where the Sunfish would wait while Will and Annalie went ashore. To a casual observer, the debris field seemed to extend unbroken in both directions up and down the coast, but Spinner had explained that there was, in fact, a channel running through it which was big enough to allow decent-sized boats to come in to shore, and once they were upon it they could see that the way was actually quite clear. The Sunfish could probably have sailed up it without any difficulty and found a mooring somewhere much closer to shore, but Spinner had advised against it. ‘I’d rather not leave the boat lying around where people can look at it and get ideas,’ he’d said. So they’d agreed to drop anchor at the opening of the channel where they could easily escape to open sea if they needed to.