The Adrift Trilogy: The Black River

by K. R. Griffiths

  "That's how they happen in the movies, yes," he said finally. "I’m not sure the science actually supports—"

  "Or a bomb in the atmosphere," Katie interrupted. "A nuclear bomb, right?"

  Dan snorted.

  "Conspiracy theory," Dan said. "Every third website tells you that. A pulse from a nuke wouldn't be strong enough. The effect would be minimal unless you were directly underneath it."

  "Every third website?" Katie said. "Any particular reason you believe every third one and not the others?"

  Dan ignored her, and tried to remember the hours he'd sat at his desk, trawling the internet as his only connection to the world outside. He'd read plenty about EMP attacks. The internet was full of them. One of the great dangers of modern times. According to some, a massive EMP would essentially reboot civilization.

  Dan got the impression a lot of those folks were secretly praying that it would happen.

  Other websites blinded him with science, but from his recollections, the greatest dangers posed by EMP stemmed from the likelihood that people would build them, and use them at close quarters.

  As a close-range weapon, Dan thought an EMP would be fairly devastating. There had to be a reason he kept reading about the military funding research into the devices.

  Dan shook his head irritably in the darkness. There was nothing to be gained from getting into a debate about the accuracy of facts unearthed on the internet. How an EMP might have been triggered didn't really matter.

  The real question was why?

  "Oh," he said softly, and blew out a long breath.

  "What?"

  "Think about it. A solar storm is pretty damn unlikely. And if someone was going to set off nukes in the atmosphere, why do it above the middle of the Atlantic? That would kind of defeat the point of it, right? Doing it where there are no electrics for it to disable?"

  "Right," Katie agreed, sounding uncertain. "So?"

  "So the only other option is that somebody has set off an EMP bomb close by. Really close by. Like, on board this ship."

  The words tumbled out of Dan's mouth as his mind raced, his anxiety momentarily forgotten. His thoughts followed a dark path to a logical destination.

  And then the anxiety came right back, and it brought reinforcements.

  "The ship is the target," he said.

  15

  Mark woke, and immediately wished he hadn't. His head felt like someone had repeatedly run a truck over it.

  And then there was the darkness.

  Jesus fucking Christ, am I blind?

  It came back to him all at once. The ‘fight’ with Herb. The sucker punch that had knocked out his lights.

  He was lying awkwardly on the floor, one arm pinned beneath him. He waved the other hand inches from his face, and saw movement.

  Not blind, he thought. Just no light.

  That was strange, of course, and worthy of further investigation, but Mark decided immediately that the questions crowding in his aching head needed to be prioritised.

  For the moment, one question took natural precedence: who can I hear breathing?

  Mark held his own breath, listening to the sound of someone nearby panting in the dark; the noise accompanied by the relentless pounding of his own heart.

  "He fucking did it."

  The voice made Mark flinch. He didn't think whoever was speaking was addressing him. If anything, he thought it was the sort of tone one used when they were talking to themselves.

  Whoever was sharing the darkness with him, they were close.

  "I can't believe the fucker actually did it with us still out here. Fucking prick. Herb! Wake the fuck up, can you hear me?"

  A slurred moan in the darkness. Herb wasn’t out cold. Just, apparently, in a lot of pain. Mark remembered the cracking sound that came from the guy’s back as he tackled him, and it dawned on him suddenly that he himself had only been knocked out for a few moments, like the electrics in his mind had shorted.

  Oh shit, Mark thought. Usually getting knocked unconscious meant the end of a fight, but apparently a power cut had called a time out. He was still in the engine room. Still with Herb and whoever-the-fuck had driven the wrench into his temple.

  He felt a surge of anger; the instinctive rage that comes with being blindsided. His father’s words came back to him.

  When someone hits you, you hit back harder.

  Any thoughts about talking his way out of the situation dispersed on a wave of fury. The guy who’d swung the wrench could easily have killed him. Could have done real damage.

  There was only one appropriate response.

  Mark rolled to his left slowly, freeing his arm, and levered himself to his feet inch by inch, half-expecting that at any moment the blow he’d taken to the head would force him back down to his knees.

  "I can hear you moving," the voice snarled in the darkness. "You really think I can't hear you?"

  Mark said nothing. He slowly extended his arms, focusing his every thought on the feeling of the air that his fingertips broke like the bow of a slow moving boat. Scrutinising the feeling and waiting...

  And waiting...

  The fingertips on his left hand brushed against something warm. Fleshy. Head height.

  Mark was glad it was the left. His father's favorite punch in the ring had been a right uppercut—what he called his meal ticket—and it turned out that maybe it was genetic after all.

  Mark twisted from the hip, lightning fast, rising up with the punch and feeling it connect with something hard that made the bones in his fist sing. He was no boxer; not even remotely skilled enough to possess a knockout blow, but Paul Ledger hadn't ever intended to raise a one-punch wonder.

  If one punch doesn’t do the job—and it won't—be prepared to throw more, boy, you understand? Be ready. The fight’s over when the other guy stops moving. Not a moment sooner.

  He followed up the uppercut with a flurry of well-timed jabs. If he'd been sparring with his father in the filthy garage on the Weyford Estate, he'd be on his arse seeing stars already, but most of the jabs landed at least a glancing blow.

  When he threw one that found only air, Mark knew his opponent had gone down even before he heard the crumple as the guy hit the floor.

  Mark felt around with his foot, and delivered a couple of kicks for good measure. The man didn't even grunt by way of response. Unconscious, then.

  Or dead.

  Fuck it.

  As the violent mist that had descended upon him cleared from his mind, Mark became aware of ragged breathing in the darkness, and it didn't come from the man snoozing at his feet.

  Oh, yeah. Herb.

  Mark felt in his pockets, and drew out his lighter. He flicked it into life. The flame offered pitiful illumination, but it was enough for Mark to make out the shapes of the machines around him, the valves and pipes that snaked toward the engine that was the Oceanus' beating heart.

  A heart that was currently silent.

  That was especially troubling. A loss of power to the lights shouldn't automatically mean a loss of power to the engine. The two systems could survive independently of each other.

  After a moment, Mark shrugged and pulled out a cigarette, lighting it and inhaling deeply while he organised his thoughts.

  The power had been cut. To the lights, the engines. Everything. That was the device that the men had built, he guessed. He exhaled the smoke with a sigh of relief.

  Not a bomb, then, he thought. That's something, at least.

  He inhaled again, and his eyes fell on the shape at the very edge of the glow cast by the tiny flickering flame.

  "Now then," Mark said, stepping toward the shape. "You're coming with me. Got a few questions to ask. Up."

  He aimed a half-hearted kick at Herb's prone body.

  Herb grunted in agony.

  "I...I can't," he wheezed pitifully. "My back. It's agony. I can't move. Please, I just need a minute to—"

  "That's a shame," Mark said, and he popped the cigarette in
to his mouth, clamping it between his teeth. "For you, at least."

  With that, Mark placed his hands under Herb's armpits, and half-lifted him, dragging him in the direction that he thought led to the stairs.

  In the dark, stopping occasionally to survey his position with the lighter, it felt like it took him a long time to find the exit.

  Mark figured that Herb wasn't lying about the pain in his back.

  Herb screamed until he passed out.

  *

  For several beats, Edgar and Seb stood in the darkness and remained silent.

  Edgar couldn't hear anything, not the thrumming of the Oceanus' massive engine, nor the shrieks of surprise and fright that he expected were currently rippling through the passengers above.

  It worked.

  Part one of Edgar's mission—the important part—was done. Only two components remained for him to call the day a success: he had to call it in, and he had to gather his brothers together and get to the extraction point on the top deck.

  And he had to do it fast.

  He took the silver satchel from under his arm, and fumbled with the locking mechanism in the dark until it popped open.

  The moment of truth.

  The bag was their lifeline; the only hope they had of getting away from the Oceanus now that the device had been triggered. The material the bag was constructed from was reflective, and it looked garish and cheap, like something snatched up from a discount store.

  It was anything but cheap.

  Constructed from the same material that astronauts wore on space walks, the bag was designed to work like a Faraday cage; to shield the contents from radioactivity. And electromagnetic pulses. Apparently, it also caused X-ray scanners some trouble.

  The material had been EMP-tested, but Edgar still felt a surge of anxiety as he opened the satchel. He doubted the tests had involved a device like the one he and his brothers had built a hundred times; a device with the power to disable a ship as large as the Oceanus.

  As he reached into the bag, his fingers trembled a little, and he felt clammy sweat coursing down his back.

  Inside, just as the guards who'd examined the bag at the terminus had discovered, were four pairs of what looked like protective goggles and a shortwave radio.

  Edgar fumbled at the goggles, and pulled a pair awkwardly over his head.

  When he pressed the discreet button located on the side, the world was suddenly lit in green.

  Nightvision. The goggles had cost Edgar's father a fortune: a clear sign that the old man didn't want his sons to die aboard the ship as Herb foolishly believed.

  Edgar let out a sigh of relief.

  The EMP had fried the circuits of just about everything on board the ship, but the bag had protected its contents exactly as predicted.

  "Here," Edgar said, passing a pair of goggles to Seb, who clutched blindly at the darkness until his fingers closed around them.

  "They work. The bag worked."

  "Holy shit," Seb whispered. "I wasn't sure, you know? Guess Herb got under my skin a little."

  "Yeah," Edgar said. "He does that. But Dad was never going to leave us here to rot, not unless he could help it. Herb should have known that. Family means everything to Dad. After all, without it—without us—who is there to carry on this work when he's gone? Our cousins?"

  Edgar snorted derisively.

  "Herb never could see the big picture."

  Edgar watched as Seb pulled on the goggles, his shoulders visibly slumping in relief when he found them working, and then Edgar pulled the final item from the bag.

  There was nothing expensive about that item: there didn't need to be. A simple radio transmitter, with decent range.

  He depressed the button, and the room filled with a blare of static.

  "It's done," he said slowly. "The whale is beached."

  He released the button and waited for a long, tense moment for the reply.

  A tinny voice crackled from the small speaker.

  "Roger that. Extraction in twenty minutes."

  Edgar grimaced.

  "We've been split up," he said. "I need more time to get everyone together."

  There was a long pause before the radio crackled again.

  "There isn't any more time," the disembodied voice replied. "Package is awake and en route. Twenty minutes. Be ready. Out."

  "Fuck," Edgar whispered through gritted teeth. Even with the aid of the nightvision goggles, twenty minutes was nowhere near enough time to find Herb, not unless he was right outside the room. It barely left them enough time to get up to the extraction point.

  He slipped the radio and remaining two pairs of goggles into his pockets.

  "Let's go," he barked, and set off at a jog before Seb could reply.

  *

  Steven Vega could hear the muffled screams, but with the elevator stuck halfway between two floors, he couldn't see anything. The glass should have afforded a view of something at least—even if that something was just a featureless corridor—but the darkness beyond it was total.

  An EMP strike. It had to have been detonated locally.

  Military?

  Vega dismissed the idea. The military, and in particular the US and UK militaries, were the likeliest source of a mobile EMP blast, but he could think of no logical reason for either government to deploy such measures against a civilian vessel.

  That left terrorists as the only viable option. Vega was quite sure that there were people out there determined to build working EMPs ad use them; maybe even people who already had, but even if that were the case, why attack the Oceanus? And why do it so far out at sea? Terrorists generally wanted to wreak maximum devastation, for maximum exposure. Crippling a ship in the middle of the Atlantic, where nobody would even see it, well, it just didn't seem to fit the profile.

  Unless an EMP is just step one.

  Vega felt his blood run cold.

  "We have to get out of here," he said flatly at the men he couldn't see in the darkness.

  Murmurs of agreement.

  "What do you think is going on here, Boss?"

  Vega did a double take. That, he suspected, was the first time any of his staff had addressed him as boss. Maybe there was hope for them yet.

  "I don't think the EMP is the end of this...whatever this is. It's the start. The ship has been disabled, and we're dead in the water. I can only assume that all comms are down, and that means only one thing. We are currently a very easy target."

  "Uh, a target for what, Boss?"

  The truth was that Vega had no idea. Any of the enemies that he thought might strike a cruise ship wouldn't have the capability to launch an attack in the middle of the Atlantic. That took money; a lot of money, and would almost certainly rule out terrorists or pirates.

  Pirates, he thought with a sneer. The very notion was ridiculous.

  "I don't know, and right now I don't need to," Vega replied. "What matters now is that this ship has a grand total of four handguns for defence and, as of this moment, all four are trapped in a lift and worth less than pea-shooters. We have to get out of here."

  With a grunt, Vega delivered a heavy kick to the glass near the floor. If his memory of the moments before the lights went out was accurate, there was a large enough gap there that, if they could smash their way out of the elevator, they'd be able to drop down onto the fourth deck.

  The glass held firm.

  Far above the elevator, the muffled screams of surprise seemed to have died down a little. Vega was grateful for that. He'd been on holiday in New York once during a city-wide power cut, and he knew the panic that darkness could cause. Most of the cries he had heard so far would have been caused by shock, and he could imagine there were plenty of minor injuries that would need patching up, but at least it didn't sound like the situation out there had devolved any further.

  Whatever part two of the plan to attack the Oceanus might be, it didn't sound like it had happened yet.

  He kicked again, and once more the glas
s refused to yield.

  "Shit," he grunted.

  There was only one thing for it. He slipped the pistol from the holster at his ribs and crouched, feeling along the floor of the elevator until he was certain that he had located the curved glass that overlooked the fourth deck.

  This has the potential to go very badly, he thought. He conjured up images of blasting through the glass and killing some unfortunate passenger who happened to be stumbling around in the dark out there.

  At the very least, discharging his firearm was going to result in a lot of questions and paperwork. If he was wrong about the EMP, and if this was simply some loss of power that he did not understand, firing the weapon would cost him his job.

  Fuck it, he thought. It's a shitty job, anyway.

  He kicked the glass twice more, just to be certain. The glass didn't budge.

  "Stand clear!"

  Vega aimed the weapon down at the patch of blackness that he knew contained the glass.

  "Cover your ears," he growled. "This is going to be loud."

  He gave the others a half-second to comply, and then he opened fire. The roar of the gun in the enclosed space was deafening; loud enough to make his teeth rattle.

  The glass finally gave up its stubborn resistance, and he kicked the remaining shards out, creating a gap that he thought would be just wide enough to accommodate his bulk. The others were smaller; they would fit through just fine.

  "I'll go first," Vega said a little too loudly, when the roaring in his ears began to fade. "When I give the all-clear, you follow. One at a time. Got it?"

  "Yeah, Boss."

  Vega smiled grimly. There it was again. Boss. Funny how people decided that they needed leadership after all when the shit was hitting the fan.

  He tucked the pistol back into the holster, and dropped to his belly, sliding through the hole and dropping several feet to the safety of the fourth deck.

  And froze.

  "Wait," he hissed.

  What is that?

  Vega crouched back against the wall, and dropped his hand to the butt of the gun once more. In the darkness to his right, he saw something moving toward him. A ghostly light that seemed to dance in the air at head-height.