Unfathomed (The Locus Series Book 1)

by Ralph Kern

  Reynolds looked at the icily competent woman and gave a slight nod.

  ***

  “Bring us alongside and lay out the fuel lines. Let’s give Ignatius a drink,” Solberg said. He wasn’t happy at giving up his precious fuel, but now? It was necessary if they wanted the protection Ignatius afforded them.

  When they had escaped the island, there had been two fishing trawlers, a light freighter, and several pleasure craft along with the cruise ship and destroyer. Now pure prudence took over. With that many craft, with a corresponding amount of engines and fuel burn, it wasn’t efficient. They would cast the pleasure craft adrift along with the freighter after they removed everything worth taking. The trawlers would then be towed by the other two ships.

  Before long, the supplies had been redistributed, and there was just one more thing to do.

  ***

  “Sir, if you’d please come with me.” The steward at Grayson’s door was smart, well presented, and polite to a fault.

  “Sure, where we going?” Grayson slipped on a shirt. Glancing out of the cabin, he saw a security officer standing next to the steward. He didn’t exactly look on high alert. He quickly weighed up and measured what the steward knew, completing a mental threat assessment. He was in the clear.

  “The recent situation on the island, sir, has meant that we are having to reallocate rooms to house all the refugees. I’m afraid this room will need to be reallocated to a family, and you will be required to come to the main refugee center on deck four.”

  Grayson glanced around his comfortable, but small stateroom and gave a sigh. “I guess I can’t complain? Give me thirty minutes to pack.”

  “That’s quite alright, sir.” The steward stepped to one side. “I will come and do that shortly.”

  Grayson looked the steward in the eyes and repeated coldly, “Give me thirty minutes.” With one smooth movement, he slammed the door shut in his face.

  Quickly, Grayson began throwing his small collection of possessions into his rucksack. Reaching between the cushions on the small settee, he retrieved his CB radio and other kit and stuffed it in his bag before looking around, making sure that there was nothing left that was in the slightest bit incriminating.

  Nodding to himself in satisfaction, he opened the door, seeing the red-faced, angry steward standing there.

  “Right, I’m ready. Lead the way.”

  Chapter 48 – Day 18

  Jack’s face was red and swollen, both eyes blackened, and his teeth loosened. Spitting the blood out his mouth, it splattered on the deck.

  “I think that’s quite enough.” Vaughan stood. “I doubt you have anything more to tell us, do you, my dear?”

  With raw hatred in her eyes, Laurie stared at Vaughan before giving the slightest shake of her head.

  “Good. Urbano, if you would like to take our guests back to their... suite and join me on the bridge.” Vaughan swept out of the room.

  Bautista released the ropes and gently, in stark contrast to his brutal demeanor of the previous hour, lowered Jack to the floor.

  “Why?” Laurie whispered. “Why did you do that?”

  “We’re dying.” Bautista poured a cup of water and knelt next to Jack and offered it to his lips. “Our only chance of survival is preying on others who come through. This is the way the world is now.”

  Her eyes puffy with tears, she looked at the man. “If we’d worked together, we could have helped each other, been more than the sum of our parts.”

  Bautista stood. “Maybe, but we couldn’t take that risk. We have families here. People we would do anything to protect and provide for. As I said, the world is a different place.”

  Walking to the table, he took Jack’s prosthetic leg, turned, and offered it to him. Giving a cough, Jack paused for a moment before, with a trembling hand, he took it.

  “Come, I will return you to your people.”

  ***

  “Eric, if the locus offers us a chance to save our people, we have to take it.” Bautista thumped the desk to emphasize his point.

  “No!” Vaughan shouted. “It’s a pipe dream. A fantasy. Nothing can get us home.”

  “We have to try!”

  “Do you really want to face off against the Ignatius again, Urbano?” Vaughan said. “Last time, it didn’t go too well.”

  “Fuck you. This was as much your plan as it was mine,” Bautista growled.

  Vaughan stared at him, the anger burning in his eyes. Slowly it subsided. Giving a sigh, he said, “Urbano, you want to go home. We all do, but that isn’t going to happen. Whatever this locus is, it isn’t the answer. We have the information from the Ignatius, thanks to our new friends downstairs. We need to make for the coast.”

  “And what if it can get us home, Eric? What if we can stop scrabbling around, preying on the weak just for a little bit of extra time?” Bautista said earnestly. “What if we can go back to our lives?”

  “Urbano, this has always been your life,” Vaughan said quietly. “Even if you go home tomorrow, what would change? You would go back to being the two-bit gunrunner and drug trafficker you were before. Here, those skills make you a leader, someone to be respected. At home... you are nothing but a criminal.”

  “I don’t care what you say, you don’t really want to go home, do you?” Bautista shook his head in disgust. “You are like me, a no one. No... worse, a barnacle on the ass of humanity. Back home, you sucked the world dry for oil and profit.”

  “Maybe,” Vaughan said introspectively, before finally nodding. “But here? We are made for this world, Urbano. Why give it up?”

  “Because we have a responsibility now, Eric. We have a responsibility as the leaders of our community to do the best by our people. And if it gets out, no, when it gets out that we didn’t at least try, what do you think will happen to us? We will take a long walk off a short plank, if we’re lucky. In fact, we’ll be lucky to see the week out anyway, considering the amount of people we lost trying to capture that fucking ship. We have precisely nothing to show for it other than an island we can’t hold if the Ignatius comes back. But what we do have is a sliver of information that will give our people hope.”

  Vaughan drummed his fingers on the desk. Bautista was right. They needed to show some kind of result, any kind of result for the attack. A hope, even a weak one, might just be enough to save both their necks.

  “Your point is self-defeating, Urbano. I can guarantee the one place where the Ignatius will be, and that’s at this locus.”

  “Yes. The obvious and major fucking problem is that if we go there, the Ignatius will blow the hell out of us. Again. How do we stop that?” Bautista asked. The undertone of fear lacing his words. The horrific beating even the severely disabled warship had landed on him was more than enough to strike terror in his heart.

  “They’ve demonstrated they know that the Titan is too much of a commodity in this region,” Vaughan thought out loud in response. “She’s still stocked full of oil. They’ll want her intact just in case the locus doesn’t pan out. The fact that the helicopter backed off when it could have put a damn big hole in the ship tells us that.”

  “And the other ships?”

  “Disposable. Sure, they’ve shown a reluctance to sink them as they know we have our own non-combatants on board, but we’ve angered them now and they’ll smash them given half the chance. Unless we give them a damn good reason not to.”

  Bautista looked across at Vaughan, seeing where his thoughts were taking him. “And we have a reason now, don’t we?” he said quietly.

  “We have over a hundred reasons.” Vaughan smiled.

  Chapter 49 – Day 18

  Grayson was led into the large bingo hall, which now appeared to be little more than a refugee camp. The former opulence of the room was hidden behind a hastily established indoor shantytown of thin white bedsheet-divided cubicles.

  It was full of the dispossessed. Those that had no ship, boat, or island anymore. Those who were now staying at the suffe
rance of Atlantica’s master and commander.

  Slinging his rucksack onto a creaking camp bed, he couldn’t help give a bitter smile. He had seen this before, many times since his own arrival. When Atlantica realized they were just more mouths to feed, more people to protect, and more people than their rapidly dwindling resources could cope with, they would, if they were lucky, be cast adrift.

  That was just the way of the world now.

  He looked into the crowd of quietly murmuring people and he also knew that Atlantica knew that someone, maybe more than one person, in the room was a saboteur. A plant. That was the only reason for gathering them all in this one place. And the reason for the guards who were now at the doors.

  Unfortunately, one of the innocent people in this room would just have to take the fall for him.

  ***

  “Keep an eye on them. No one is allowed unaccompanied beyond the annex,” Kendricks finished briefing two of the remaining hastily recruited security staff on board. “We’ll begin the searches later today. You might get a little resistance, so make sure you keep your wits about you, got it?”

  “Yes, no problem,” the security officer said. The man was a recent recruit and Kendricks forgave him the lack of reference to his rank.

  Turning, Kendricks walked away from the imposing automatic double doors of the bingo hall itself, which would provide the sleeping accommodation for the refugees. He crossed through the annex which would form a makeshift dining and recreation hall, nodding to himself in satisfaction that all was in place.

  Kendricks didn’t like this one little bit. But the truth was, at the moment someone, or perhaps several people in that hall didn’t have the best interests of Atlantica at heart and right now, the only thing they could do was start the slow process of searching everyone in the room. Something that would take hours.

  ***

  “Shot out!”

  Perry watched through the binoculars as the distant splash signaled where the shell the Mk-45 cannon had boomed out plunged into the water.

  “We had a clean fire,” Donovan said.

  “Accuracy is still shit, though.” Slater lowered her own binoculars. Donovan didn’t even seem to notice her profanity and simply nodded. The collection of barrels they were using as a target floated unperturbed by the cannon shell that had landed fifty meters away from them.

  “I’ve been thinking about that.” Donovan gestured upward, signifying the twisted wreckage atop the bridge superstructure. “We can repair all that, but not nearly soon enough to help us out if we run into trouble between here and the locus.”

  “Perry, we’re all very tired,” Slater sighed. It had been a long few days trying to get the ship back to something approaching combat readiness. “You’re a very smart man, and I know you have some cunning scheme to help us overcome our current disability. Would you be so good as to cut to the chase?”

  Giving a tight smile, Donovan nodded and turned to face his captain. “Atlantica has a working radar system. I mean, it’s nowhere near up to military specs, but it can certainly help with our range finding. We can draft up a simple program that will take into account our relative positions, compensate and pipe the information through to fire control. It is, in principle, little more than basic trigonometry. The VLS will still be down, but at least we’ll have the Mk-45 back up to something approaching combat standard.”

  “Maybe,” Slater nodded. “But the datalinks are still bust. We’re still struggling with basic coms.”

  “Well, they have a mobile phone mast on there,” Donovan inclined his head at Atlantica, the huge white and blue ship keeping pace next to them. “We just need to appropriate one of their smart phones. Hell, half the crew probably have them shoved in their lockers. We could just use theirs. The information could be sent that way and we feed it into the CIC manually. As long as we remain close to Atlantica, that is.”

  “Good thinking, Perry. Okay, get on it.”

  “Aye aye, ma’am. Would you be so kind as to arrange someone to cover my watches while I work on that? I’ll probably have to link in with Tricia, she has the know-how.”

  “Perry,” Slater said, a rare smile crossing her face as she stretched out the R in his name. “Are you just coming up with excuses to talk to that good-looking lady on Solberg’s crew?”

  “Ma’am?” The confused look on Donovan’s guileless face was entirely genuine. “She’s just their IT expert; she can help with this kind of stuff.”

  “Right,” Slater gave a mocking nod while forcing the smile from her face. The captain gestured with an open hand at the Atlantica cruising alongside. “By all means, run it through her and I’ll sort out the watch roster.”

  “Thank you, ma’am.”

  With a slight bounce to his step, Donovan made his way to the hatch.

  Slater shook her head and gave a tired smile as she watched him leave.

  Chapter 50 – day 19

  Jack’s head was still pounding from the blows that Bautista’s fists had landed on it and his body didn’t feel much better.

  Gargling water in his mouth, he spat the now-pink liquid down the small drain in the deck he was sitting next to. With a grimace, he looked at Laurie’s concerned face. “Sorry... gross, I know.”

  Reaching across to him, Laurie gave his hand a squeeze. “It’s okay. I’ll make an exception seeing as you’ve had a damn good pasting.”

  “A pasting? I think that means something different where I’m from,” Jack managed a smile.

  “I dread to think.” Laurie kept squeezing Jack’s hand and looked around the crowded room. “Jack, how are we going to get out of here? I mean all of us, not just you and me.”

  “At the moment, they want us alive,” Jack said introspectively. “And the only reasons I can think of are either as bargaining chips or as a human shield.”

  As if to confirm their fears, the door to the hold slammed open and the murmuring within the room went silent as a group of armed men walked in.

  “Five. Those will do.” One of the men gestured at a family huddling by the door.

  “No!” The man, clearly the father of the children, stood up. “Leave them here. Take me, just not them.”

  “Either come with them, or watch them go.” The pirate’s tone was cold as his men walked in and roughly grabbed each of the family members by their arms.

  “Where are you taking them?” Laurie shouted, standing as she did.

  The pirate looked at Laurie before electing to simply ignore her as the family was hustled through the hatch. With a loud clang, it slammed shut.

  “I think that’s answered that,” Jack said.

  “Bastards,” Laurie spat.

  “They are that.”

  ***

  What the hell is wrong with me? Bautista thought to himself as he watched the terrified family make their way down the metal steps on the side of the vessel. The bottom of the steps rested on the blackened, scarred roof of the Liliana where she nestled against the Titan’s vast flank.

  There was a time, long ago, where his conscience was as vestigial to the former criminal as his appendix. He had killed, trafficked weapons, drugs, and people along the Latin American coast and cared not in the slightest for the misery he had wrought.

  Now though, that conscience was worrying at him like a brain tumor. It was like a pervasive ache, threatening to overwhelm him.

  He had lost dozens of men and women on two ill-conceived adventures to take the Atlantica. Still, every person in their little community was looking to him and Vaughan for leadership. Instead of even considering an alliance with the Atlantica and Ignatius to survive this strange place they had found themselves in, they were doing their level best to kill each other.

  And for what? Was the model the pirates had established years ago working? Preying on the weak, recruiting or killing those they found? Well, it wasn’t working any longer. Since Ignatius had come here, they were no longer the meanest thing on the seas. There was a beast out there and now t
hey had awoken it.

  And that beast was angry, and undoubtedly Atlantica would give the monster the sustenance it needed to come after them. Fuel.

  They reached the gangplank and the family was hastened across toward the shattered Liliana. He stepped on, about to cross to his own vessel.

  “Urbano?” Bautista looked back and saw a dark-haired woman standing on the steps. She must have followed them down and just caught up. “Urbano... Karl, where is he? He was supposed to be home. You said he would be after the attack?

  “I know, Kristen,” Bautista addressed Grayson’s wife. “He’ll be back soon.”

  “Don’t give me bullshit, how the hell is he going to get back now?”

  “We’ll find a way, or he will.”

  “He better, Urbano, or I swear, I’m going to steal a ship and go get him back.” Kristen stormed back up the ladder.

  And she will as well, Bautista thought. I’d put money on it.

  Bautista clenched his fists as he watched her disappear back inside the Titan. The ache of his knuckles was slight, but a reminder of the torture he had administered on the man below.

  But that act, as barbaric as it had been, had given him something that he realized had been lacking in his life—Hope.

  Hope he could guide these people out of the region.

  Whatever the locus was, it must be able to help them.

  If the Ignatius didn’t get them first.

  Chapter 51 – Day 20

  “Shot out!”

  The shell whistled in a long arc toward the collection of floating barrels. This time, it clipped the edge of the cluster of flotsam, ripping some apart and scattering the others.

  “It’s not up to military accuracy,” Donovan said, regarding the scattering debris though his binoculars.

  “What have we got our inaccuracy down to?”

  “We’ve been getting a consistent three-meter margin of error over two nautical miles.”

  Slater lowered her own binoculars and furrowed her brow. It was nowhere near the pinpoint accuracy Ignatius could achieve over those distances. The warship could, if called upon, put a shell through a car window from much higher ranges—with a fully operational targeting suite. Slater gave a sigh, “That’ll just have to be good enough for government work.”