by Addison Gunn
Miller ran his hands through his greasy hair. He’d have loved a shower and a shave. He felt sticky, crusted, like the inside of a rotting ship, and suddenly exhausted. What he would have given for a few hours of uninterrupted sleep. “I don’t think they’ll do that. They’re not cruel.”
Du Trieux lifted her chin. “A cup of tea doesn’t make someone decent.”
Miller rubbed his eyes with the heel of his palm, then shook his head. “They shared information with me they didn’t have to.” When he was certain he had all their attention, save Doyle’s, he dropped the bomb about Fredericks.
There was a moment’s shocked silence.
“That’s it, then,” Hsiung said. “We’ve lost.”
Morland spat. “It’s not over yet.”
“We have no country,” Hsiung snapped back. “We’re done.”
“We’re not without allies,” du Trieux said, looking to Miller. “You think the captain will return us to the Tevatnoa?”
“I can’t say for certain, but I think so.”
Du Trieux checked Doyle’s pulse, then slumped back onto a bunk. “If he thinks we’re weak, he could attack.”
Morland shook his head. “I can’t believe we’ve gone through all this, done all the shit we’ve done—and Fredericks turns into a fucking bug head. What are we going to do now?”
The words hung in the air. Doyle mumbled something in his sleep and du Trieux’s face fell.
Miller squinted at her. “What’d he say?”
Du Trieux frowned at the locked door. “He said, ‘Rats in a cage.’”
IN THE HEAT of the second day of their ‘rescue,’ Miller and his team sat silent and stone-faced in a Royal Navy rubber dinghy, empty weapons laid on their laps.
Waves slapped the sides of the raft, spraying their faces and dampening their uniforms.
Less than a kilometer away sat the Tevatnoa, still on the St. John’s River. Three of the ship’s mega-lifeboats approached, laden—as far as Miller could tell—with his team’s ransom.
Behind their dinghy, the Royal Navy ship had launched a Landing Craft Utility Mk 10 from their well dock. Designed for transporting men, stores, and armored vehicles, the thirty-meter-long ship had stern and bow ramps for fast loading and unloading, and could carry over a hundred tonnes. Miller shuddered to think how much the Tevatnoa had had to promise in exchange for their release. It rose and fell with the waves, silent and unmoving, halfway between Miller and the RN ship.
When they were less than a half kilometer away from the Tevatnoa, Miller felt his heart swell. For better or worse, he was headed ‘home,’ as it were. He wondered if James Gray had survived his bacterial infection, and how the other ships of the S-Y fleet had gotten along—if at all—in the Tevatnoa’s absence.
Who knew how many messes Miller would have to clean up upon his return? Oddly, he found the thought comforting. Battling the elements, the sea life, and each other was vastly preferable to being held hostage aboard another ship, even if they were Royal Navy, and presumably one of their allies.
Miller shot a look over his shoulder at the awaiting Mk 10 and frowned. Presumably.
It was too bad they couldn’t come to a mutual arrangement, Miller mused, and work and travel together. It would have been nice to have some added muscle, especially when pirates and ships of Infected got in their way.
“Miller,” du Trieux gasped.
He looked away from the Tevatnoa and followed her gaze. The Mk 10 had dropped its bow ramp. It wasn’t empty, awaiting a king’s ransom, but full of more rubber dinghies, manned with sailors in full tactical gear.
“What the hell?” Morland gaped.
They watched as the dinghies launched from the Mk 10 and skimmed across the water, passing the mega-lifeboats headed toward the Tevatnoa.
“They don’t think they can take a cruise liner with a bunch of dinghies, do they?” Doyle asked, leaning over the side of the raft to peer into the Mk 10.
Just then there came an echoing roar from the RN ship behind them. Water fountained into the sky near the Tevatnoa’s port side.
“That’s bloody cannon fire!” Morland shouted, rising in his seat.
Miller shouted to Hsiung in the stern of the dinghy. “Cut the engine!”
Slowing the dinghy to a crawl, Hsiung stopped the boat and let it idle. By then, the dinghies had surrounded the Tevatnoa on all sides.
“We have to do something,” Morland said.
“Do what? We don’t have any ammo,” Doyle pointed out.
“I can just hear Lewis on the bridge right now,” Hsiung said. “He’s got to be shitting bricks.”
“They could fire the railgun,” Morland suggested. “See how the Navy boys like it.”
Du Trieux shook her head. “It’s still untested. Firing that thing could capsize the Tevatnoa, for all we know.”
“What do we do?” Hsiung asked Miller. “We can’t stay out here on the water. We’re sitting ducks.”
Miller pressed his lips together and eyed the commotion at the Tevatnoa. The sailors on the dinghies had shot grappling hooks onto the ship and were crawling up the cruise liner’s hull like roaches. Soon, the Tevatnoa and all its occupants and resources would be under RN control.
Three-quarters of a kilometer behind them sat the RN Bay Class ship. The Tevatnoa was well within range of their DS30B cannon. They’d missed on purpose, of course, but Miller had no desire to return to either vessel until the hostilities subsided—one way or another.
The other option sat like a swampy goitre on shore. They had enough fuel in the dinghy to make it to Jacksonville. They could avoid capture and call for help to rescue the Tevatnoa, but with the US government now under Infected control and the whole of Jacksonville controlled by communes, the idea was fruitless.
Miller nodded at Hsiung and she re-started the engine.
“Take us to the Tevatnoa. I don’t think they’ll stop us.”
“They could shoot us out of the water!” Morland snapped.
“We aren’t a threat. Besides, if I’m going to be held prisoner, I’d like to do it aboard my own ship.”
Hsiung revved the motor and steered the board closer to the cruise liner. No-one spoke.
Miller blinked at the approaching vessel and ran the pads of his fingers against the stubble on his chin. If anything, he was hoping for a nice shave before they were taken into custody—if that was what the Brits had in mind.
It’s the small things in life, he mused silently.
Small things were all they had left.
24
THE ROYAL NAVY took seventeen minutes to assume control of the Tevatnoa.
Miller saw no sense in running away. His people—for better or worse—were aboard that ship, and he wasn’t going to abandon them. He hadn’t back in Astoria when Harris had gone nuclear. He wasn’t about to now.
They arrived some ten minutes later and docked via the davit system, which emptied Miller and crew onto the second floor deck. RN troops in full tactical gear greeted them.
Miller saw the heads and faces of his shipmates popping in and out of doors down the corridor. They looked equal parts curious and petrified.
“You Miller?” a lieutenant asked.
“I am.”
“Come with me.”
Miller looked back at his team, eyebrow raised, and they followed the officer up the stairs to mid-deck and past the stern hydroponics station, half a dozen armed sailors trailing them. In front of a storage closet, the sailors came forward and confiscated their empty weapons, then motioned them inside.
“You can’t be serious. Just let us back to our quarters,” Miller said.
“Where I’m sure you’ve stashed weapons and ammunition? I don’t think so. You stay here until the captain and the commander reach an agreement,” the lieutenant said. “Shouldn’t take long.”
Miller remained rooted in position outside the door. “I’d like a word with Commander Lewis. He needs to know we’re aboard.”
&nbs
p; The lieutenant nodded briskly. “He’s aware. If you wouldn’t mind?”
Frowning, Cobalt entered the windowless storage closet, Doyle limping along with Morland’s assistance. Miller opened his mouth to speak again, but the lieutenant closed the door in his face.
“So much for the voice of reason,” Miller grunted.
Doyle hopped atop a pile of cardboard boxes and arranged his leg, propping it up. “Come again, boss?”
Miller frowned and paced the room in three strides, swung around on his heel, then paced back. “Forget it.”
Du Trieux sat on the floor in the corner, arms propped on her knees. “Where’s the rest of the security squad?”
Hsiung nodded from her spot beside her. “Good question.”
“I’d forgotten about the smell,” Morland said, drawing everyone’s attention. “You haven’t noticed? This ship stinks of body odor and sauerkraut.” He sat beside Doyle on the boxes and sniffed.
Doyle raised his nose into the air and inhaled loudly. “Oh, yeah.”
“It’s got to be the hydroponics,” Hsiung guessed. “Combined with the fungus in the air. There’s a pipe right there.” A large metallic cylinder, secured with an aluminium bracket, came up the wall from the floorboards by the back wall, ran across the ceiling, then out the other side of the room.
When no one immediately replied, Miller said, “Maybe.”
“What’s the play?” Hsiung scratched behind her ear. “Wait this out?”
“I don’t see we have any other choice,” Miller answered.
“I say we bust out and go find Lewis,” Morland said.
Du Trieux raised an eyebrow. “There’s likely a guard outside our door.”
“They’ll come and feed us, right?” Doyle asked. “Bring us water? I don’t think there’s anything in these boxes but pool toys.”
Miller shrugged. On the RN’s ship, they’d been brought tea, along with cured sausages and instant mashed potatoes, but they were prisoners aboard the Tevatnoa now. It wouldn’t take the captain long to discern the severity of their food situation. No telling what he would do then.
Miller turned and paced again, lost in his thoughts. The storage closet was lit by a single, softly buzzing wall sconce. The entire space couldn’t have been more than two meters deep. Morland and Doyle sat on a heap of cardboard boxes, stacked waist-high to one side. On the other, with du Trieux and Hsiung, was an open box of snorkel gear, two corroded oxygen tanks, and a pair of bent, rusted spear guns. A plastic trash bin sat in the corner behind the door, overflowing with child-sized safety vests.
The ship felt oddly motionless. After the rocking of the turbulent ocean, the tranquillity of the St. John’s River was a nice change. For once, Miller could stand in the middle of a room and not have to hold something for support. He was about to mention it when the entire room shook, tipped to one side, then slammed back down with a jolt.
Miller, the only one on his feet, tumbled to the floor and landed in du Trieux’s lap.
“They’re firing at us!” Morland cried.
“I didn’t hear a blast,” du Trieux said. She struggled to extricate herself from under Miller and a drift of safety vests.
“Are there any reefs around here?” Hsiung asked, also getting to her feet.
Warning bells went off in Miller’s head as he stood. “Yes, but they’re south, near Key Largo,” he answered. “We haven’t moved. I don’t think that’s what that was.”
Another jolt, this time from the stern. The whole ship tipped forward, then fell back with an audible splash. Miller heard cries and screams from the decks below.
With a pop and a snap, the pipe at the back of the room groaned and burst. Water gushed into the closet.
“Can’t we stay dry for a whole bloody day?” Doyle hollered, scrambling out of the way.
Miller and the others flailed for the exit, only to find it locked from the outside. The handle, a tiny brass knob, wriggled in Miller’s palm, but the door wouldn’t move. He piled his shoulder against it, but the sailors had reinforced it. It hardly budged.
“Get back,” Miller ordered them. He wiped water from his face and splashed across the room. The water was up to their ankles already. “Away from the door.” He grabbed the two rusted oxygen tanks and laid one on the floor, the valve and nozzle pointed to the back wall. He then picked up the other one and raised it over his head like a mallet.
“Are you crazy?” Hsiung shrieked.
“Trust me,” he snapped.
The memory was clear as day. Billy had been complaining about Miller’s wall-to-wall work schedule back in his early bodyguard days, and had insisted they have a romantic get-away. Something sporty and fun, to keep Miller from getting bored. He’d arranged for the both of them to go scuba diving off the Molokini Reef in Maui.
Despite Miller’s extensive experience in the water, the instructor on the tour boat had given a long, terribly rehearsed safety speech regarding the oxygen tanks, warning them that the tanks were highly explosive.
That wasn’t true, of course. In fact, oxygen isn’t even flammable, although it acts as an accelerant. It’s the compressed carbon dioxide in the tank that does the damage. The one thing Miller had learned was that if a tank was dropped and the valve was forcibly broken off, the tank would fly through the air at sixty-four kilometers per hour and could not only kill a person instantly if struck, but could puncture the boat’s hull and endanger all those aboard.
The instructor, a tanned, beach-blond former stock broker who’d come to Maui on vacation and never gone home, bugged out his eyes and waved his palms at Billy and Miller with a deadly serious expression. “Like, dudes,” he’d said. “Whatever you do—don’t drop your tank.”
Miller eyed the oxygen tank in the water at his feet, gripped the other tank in his sodden arms, and struck the valve with all his strength. The nozzle popped off and the tank shot across the floor like a missile, smashing clean through the door, leaving a perfectly round hole the exact diameter of the tank.
Sloshing across the room, Miller then leaned down, reached through the hole and groped around, knocking something long and skinny from under the door handle.
Morland heaved up the other oxygen tank and brought it down on top of the brass handle, breaking it loose.
Back out in the hall, there was no guard. Hsiung helped Doyle and the five of them made their way past the sloshing hydroponics station to the railing, just in time to see the end of a large, scaly fin, like the one he’d seen back at the Dunn Roven, cut across the ship’s starboard side and sink below.
“Did anybody else see that?” Hsiung blinked, her eyes wide.
“How is something that small rocking a ship this size?” Morland asked.
Miller squinted at the shadow in the water, a few meters off the ship’s starboard side. It hadn’t been a dorsal fin, he now realised. It was the tip of a fluke. This thing was about twice as long and wide as a California Blue Whale. The tail was more than ten meters long all by itself.
Morland must have seen it too. “Fuck me.”
“It’s a monster,” Hsiung breathed.
Miller looked to du Trieux. At the same time they said, “Railgun.”
Leaving the limping Doyle to fend for himself, Miller, du Trieux, Hsiung, and Morland took off for the stairs to upper deck. They climbed them two steps at a time and sprinted past the exhaust ports, right by Gray Matheson’s office and another hydroponics station, before barrelling up another flight to the bridge.
Two heavily armed RN sailors stood in the doorway, cradling AR-15 assault rifles. One look at the four of them and they opened fire. Miller saw the flash of the muzzles and dove headfirst over the stairwell railing. The others, hearing the shots, ducked down below the landing.
Hanging onto the railing by one hand, Miller shouted, “Launch the railgun!” he shouted. “That monster’s going to poke a hole in the ship!”
“Show me your hands!” one of the sailors shouted. They advanced to the top of t
he stairs, rifles at the ready: one aimed at Miller’s head, the other at the remainder of Cobalt on the stairs.
Du Trieux, Hsiung, and Morland, all crouched at the base of the stairwell, raised their hands out in front of them. Miller, still flapping on the breeze from the stairwell railing, grunted by way of reply.
“Guards?” a female voice shouted from the bridge. “Report!”
From Miller’s vantage point he could just make out the pale, blonde head of Clark, the captainerpses of other Infecteds’s assistant, also in full tactical gear.
“Miss Clark,” he said, finally able to get a foothold and pull himself up. “We need to fire the railgun before that thing...”
The entire ship rocked to the port side, tipping momentarily before crashing back down. Water crashed the Tevatnoa on both sides, spraying all the way up to the bridge. Screams and cries from passengers echoed underneath. From inside the bridge, Miller heard shouting.
Clark, who had grabbed hold of the railing to keep from falling over, holstered her Glock service weapon and motioned to the RN guards. “Bring them up.”
At the top of the stairwell, Lewis’s voice cut through the air. “Firing your weapons at an unidentified biological this close to my ship leaves too much room for error, and is quite possibly the stupidest thing I’ve heard come out of your mouth yet, captain. I’m more inclined to weigh anchor and make a run for it. We can be pretty fast when needs be.” Holding the communications microphone, Lewis squinted at Miller, then waved him in.
The radio burst with static. “And allowing a ship I’ve just commandeered,” the captain shouted back, “to fire their untested weapons system when my ship is within firing range is also a stupid idea, commander.”
“We’re not interested in starting a war, captain...” Lewis kept on.
Corthwell scoffed. “Forgive me if I don’t believe that, coming from an American.”
“The longer we wait,” Miller interjected, “the more likely they’ll be pulling three thousand civilians out of the water and jamming them onto their ship.”