The Bomb Ship

by Peter Tonkin

  The next companionway was a ladder reaching down behind the funnel to the small deck where the stores crane was footed. This was quite a solid machine which pointed its short boom out towards the stern, and was used for the purpose its name implied. Like everything else, it was well stowed and had handled the foul weather of the last week surprisingly well.

  The final companionway was a much more decorative affair, coming down like a staircase onto the fair-sized poop. There had been much debate with the shipbuilders, she remembered, about whether to place a swimming pool here for the use of the off-watch officers and crew. In Heritage Mariner supertankers there was always a pool in this spot, overlooked by the windows of the gym. But the courses these ships were destined to follow reached exclusively across the northern seas, and the designers questioned the need for such a frippery. Richard and she had insisted, however, and in the end they had come to a grudging agreement. There was a little pool beneath the decking before her, empty and carefully covered until the heat of the summer months. So well designed and fitted was the ship that the deck seemed solid and seamless. What a superb hiding place for Reynolds’ loot that would make, she thought. Perhaps she might even have the leisure to check it out herself in due course.

  Without pausing as these thoughts sped through her mind, she strode across the deck to the capstan where Timmins had anchored the shore lines. She glanced at them from a distance as though her interest was on other things. She did not want to alienate him further by seeming to mistrust his work. Nor was there any need to check too closely. One glance from her experienced eye confirmed that he seemed to have done a good enough job. But having come this close to the edge of the deck, it was impossible to ignore the ice any longer.

  It exerted its own atmosphere and the power of it crept up coldly and swept aboard with an almost physical force like a mist, a miasma or a ghost. It was something far beyond the everyday rough and tumble of the jostling between the fenders and the crystal cliffs. It was something quite apart from the grating rumble with which the ship and her floating dock rose and fell in relationship with each other. There was a mesmerism which could not be denied. Inexorably it called her to the railing and held her there, looking down.

  In fact the ice was moving very little, but the ship was still rising and falling on the swell. Robin could see why the nameless sailor had been tempted simply to jump down onto the soft-seeming white slope. When Atropos was in a trough and the barrier was on the back of the wave, there was little more than five feet between the green deck and the ice. A counter-breeze suddenly swept back into her face and she really smelt the ice for the first time. It had not occurred to her that the ice would smell of anything but, just as the oceans have their own odours, so did this frozen segment of Atlantic water. Oddly, for this was sea ice and thick but not old, it had a timeless smell. The sort of smell she imagined would inform the still air of undisturbed tombs. But there was something rich there too, rich but rancid. A touch of whale’s breath, of seal’s bark. So slight as to be little more than her imagination. So powerful as to make her close her eyes and sniff at the freezing air again, for all she knew it was refrigerating her adenoids and probably giving frostbite to her nose tip. But it was gone.

  Disappointed, she opened her eyes. And frowned with sudden worry. The ice was at its relative highest, hovering tantalisingly close. The fenders were bunched up high enough to be oozing water over her feet. The ropes from the capstan were at full stretch past her shoulder, angling down to a spike hammered into the snowy crystal to act as a makeshift bollard. And as the full strain came onto it, the spike moved. ‘Number One,’ she said, just as though she was talking to Nico Niccolo. ‘This is funny, look at this.’

  He crossed to stand at her right shoulder and followed her gaze downwards. ‘That was well in,’ he said defensively. ‘Hammered hard home. I checked it myself.’

  She nodded. ‘I’m sure you did. But there’s something ... Let’s go down for a closer look.’

  No sooner had she spoken than she was off, climbing nimbly over the railing and swarming down the Jacob’s ladder onto the green-white frozen surface. It was so still and solid it almost made her knees buckle. From the heaving deck of her command it had been so easy to imagine that the ship’s movements were reciprocated by the barrier, but this was not the case. She had no real idea how big was the body of solid water she was standing on, but it was moved not one whit by its liquid cousin rolling by beneath it. Surprised, she staggered back and found herself skidding. Again, it had deceived her. The surface behind the vertical faces of the cliffs had seemed flat but it was not: it sloped down with increasing steepness into the first of the corrugated valleys and it was all Robin could do to stop herself sliding away.

  As she turned, Atropos heaved up above her and the ten feet between her and the deck became fifteen, and she appreciated anew the size of her command. Forty feet above, on the way up to being fifty, was the overhang of the bridge wing. Sixty feet to the topmost railings. Nearly a hundred to the top of the main radio mast on the bridgehouse. And the great curve of the funnel was only ten feet shorter, just behind. The roaring of the surf between the steel and the ice was incredible. She walked forward to where Timmins was standing, looking down at the spike. Sure enough, the ground in front of it, the snow-caked ice nearest to the ship, was a different colour and as the black column stirred, pulled forward by the pressure of the ship’s movement, so water bubbled up and flowed away to freeze again. ‘It’s the pressure,’ she said. ‘Pressure causes ice to melt. We’ll have to think of some way to anchor it more securely. After a while that stake will just pull itself out of the ground. It’s okay for the moment, though, so we’ve time to take a look at the other one as well. Odds are that Hogg won’t have done as good a job as you did.’

  Automatically Timmins turned to go back aboard.

  ‘Don’t bother,’ she said. ‘We can walk down the ice from here.’ She turned and was off without further thought, her eyes busy on the treacherous but fascinating surface in front of her boots. She had likened the powdery coating over the crystal to snow, but in many ways it was more like sand. When she kicked her toecap into it, it behaved like any beach half remembered from her holidays. Except that there was no real depth to it. Not here at any rate. She looked away to her left, down the deceptive slope into what looked like a shallow valley at the foot of another, higher cliff face.

  She suddenly envisaged this section of the barrier like a wide staircase which had been tilted backwards so that the absolute verticals and horizontals of the steps had been softened into a rising series of escarpments and valleys, each a little higher than the last. The angles in the feet of the valleys had been cloaked in this drifting ice sand. Then the whole aspect of the barrier seemed to change and in a matter of a few feet she found herself looking through the ice cliffs up a valley she hadn’t realised was there. She had been so busy thinking about the main structures in the ice running east to west parallel to the coastline that it came as quite a shock to see a feature running north to south, separating the cliffs into blocks as though the whole barrier had been bent upwards to crack open at this point.

  The sound of the surf thundered hollowly beneath her and she suddenly realised that this was what had happened. The seemingly solid ground on which she was standing was probably a thin crust over a crevasse reaching straight down into the freezing sea. She glanced over her shoulder but Timmins was a good way behind still, watching his feet as though he expected them to vanish at any moment. Fascinated, and with no sense of danger whatsoever, she paused there for a second, waiting. Sure enough, another sea thundered in. This time the sound was louder. And she felt the ice stir. A sort of ripple fled past her insteps, strong enough to make the soles of her feet tingle even through the boots and all the socks she was wearing. And about ten feet down the slope, exactly in line with where she was standing, a geyser of spray and ice crystals shot up into the air as though a whale was breathing there. She skipped off this se
ction at once and turned to warn Timmins of her fears.

  The thoughtless action was enough to cause her boots to lose their purchase and she fell forwards onto her face. The ice was as hard as concrete. No sooner had she hit the treacherous surface than she was slithering down the slope into the first of the valleys. As much with frustration as because she believed it would help, she beat at the ground with her gloved hands and her fists jarred painfully along corrugations which were the miniature counterparts of the series of hills behind her. Thinking quickly, she pushed her chest and stomach into the air and ground her hands, knees and toe tips into the surface. At once she slowed and after a moment or two she was able to start crawling back up the slope.

  At the crest of the shallow slope, Timmins stood watching her with a strange, unsettled, uncertain look on his face. He wasn’t too scared to help her. It was something other than that. Still, she thought grimly, she didn’t need his help now and she’d be damned if she would ask for it. Then she realised where he was standing. She looked up again and he saw the desperation on her face and utterly misunderstood it. A slow smile spread across his thin lips and the sight of it sickened her just enough to choke off the warning in her throat. He straddled his legs, put his hands on his hips and got ready to enjoy watching her suffer.

  Then the black side of the ship which framed him stirred and began to rise. The trembling thunder started again beneath her. ‘Timmins!’ she yelled and the force of her warning sent her sliding again. Her warning was wasted because the wild sound of the surf drowned it out. Atropos continued to rise and rise. Somehow Robin managed to tear herself to her feet, just in time to see the stake Hogg put into the ice at her bows tear loose. The length of the ship rocked back and then slammed forwards into the ice cliffs, adding the massive inertia of twenty thousand tons to the force of the surf in the chamber just beneath the surface of the ice. The flat ram of the side shut tight against the mouth of the cavern, forcing untold amounts of water and air into it like gas into a balloon.

  From the point where Robin had seen the geyser of ice crystals and spray, right back along a line to the side of the ship, the ice crust blew open. It came close enough to knock her off her feet again but she knew how to stop sliding now and she remained on her knees, looking up. The force of it went straight up into the air between Timmins’s arrogantly spread legs and took him with it. He was blasted into the air, the one dark object in the heart of a dazzling cloud of purest white. He didn’t go up very far but from Robin’s point of view he seemed to hang in the air, arms and legs spread as he performed a lazy back-flip worthy of a circus acrobat. And perhaps he did actually hang there, supported by the fountain of air like a ping-pong ball sitting on a water jet.

  But the situation couldn’t last. The overwhelming power of the explosion began to falter. The spray-soaked body fell. But where there had been a solid crust beneath him brief moments ago there was now a broad crater at the heart of a long crevasse shafting down to a subterranean cavern made of emerald crystal. He hit the edge of the crater with his chest and, once again, his body seemed to hesitate in the grip of powers beyond control. He lay there, legs down the glacial slope and arms thrown out towards Robin as though beseeching her help. It was clear that he was in fact unconscious, and at first there did not seem to be any great rush for her to go to his aid. She was anyway more than a little shocked by the impact of what had happened, and her reactions were slowed to a dreamlike pace by the sudden rush of adrenaline into her exhausted system.

  In the heart of a hollow silence, she picked herself up, stumbled, and danced until her footing was firm. All the time she was watching Timmins lying face down on the ice and it was only when her feet were steady that her brain had leisure to consider the fact that naked skin on bare ice at temperatures like these would be frostbitten within seconds. But that thought was overwhelmed almost at once by the realisation that the apparently still body was not in fact stationary at all. It was slipping backwards with increasing rapidity into the throat of the crevasse.

  Reality arrived with the sound of a slamming door. Speed came back to normal. There was sound and sensation. And bitter self-recrimination. Timmins was likely to die here and the fault was hers. All because she wanted to walk on ice instead of steel. Stupid, stupid, stupid! She hurled herself forward with almost masochistic force in a long dive for his hand. She landed on her stomach with bone-shaking force and skidded forwards spectacularly but she was still too late to save him. She froze, spread like a starfish at the top of the green-glass slope, and watched him slither downwards. At the bottom of the crater was a hole wide enough to admit his body and to show her a cavern maybe twelve feet deep, in the jumbled gravel ice of whose floor the waves foamed restlessly but shallowly. She realised at once that only the tops of the biggest seas could get in there. The cave was long but not deep. Its floor stood above the waterline. It stretched fifty feet at least into the barrier, but it wasn’t deep enough to flood properly. And as she realised this, among the restless, rolling boulders which tumbled like giant lustres from some gargantuan chandelier in the shallow foam she saw the dark jumble of Timmins’s body and realised there was still a chance to save him, if someone was willing to go down there after him.

  No sooner had the realisation hit her with dizzying force than a huge pair of boots slammed onto the ice beside her. She looked up to see who was surefooted enough to jump down from the deck without slipping and recognised the massive frame of Henri LeFever. Round his waist was tied a rope which had held him erect when he landed. Above him at the rail hung a group of worried faces: Ann Cable, Errol, Sam and Joe.

  LeFever reached down for her but she yelled at him, ‘No! Give me the rope. I’m going down there after Timmins.’

  LeFever froze and his eyes narrowed, his mind was clearly racing, calculating the odds.

  ‘You’re too big,’ she pointed out breathlessly. ‘You would never fit through.’

  But he had already seen that and was untying the rope. ‘What you need to do, Captain, is calculate how much he’s actually worth. He’s worth a couple of bruises and maybe a bad head cold.’ He leaned down and pulled her to her feet — she had already scrambled up to her knees. He supported her in a gentle but unshakeable grip as she tugged her gloves off with her teeth and held them in her mouth like a puppy while she secured the rope round her waist. ‘He isn’t worth a broken bone or anything worse.’

  She thought he was being jocular but he wasn’t. He was advising her with absolutely calm calculation.

  ‘When you get down there you’ll want to take risks. Don’t. If you get too badly hurt to run the ship then we’re all in very bad trouble indeed. The only way we can rely on Captain Black, obviously, is if we find his stash of coke or whatever it is Reynolds supplied him with. There’s no way we can trust Timmins or Hogg if anything goes wrong down there. You’re all we’ve got, Captain. He’s maybe worth one hair of your head, as they say. But he’s not worth a hell of a lot more.’ His grip tightened. ‘You remember that, now.’

  Aboard Atropos, the others kept a long loop of rope coming down to him independently of the half-tethered ship’s wave-driven motion, and he eased her down the slope with as much easy power as the cargo crane. Throwing dignity to the winds, she slid down the icy incline on her bottom as though she were a child too poor to afford a toboggan. When her feet dropped over the gleaming green edge she called, ‘Stop!’ so loudly that she gave herself a fright. She jerked to a halt and looked down. She had reason to be tense. She seemed to be sitting on a wedge of ancient glass, green and full of twisted planes, veins and bubbles. She could see through it only vaguely, enough to make out light and darkness, movement and vague shapes only at its thinnest edge underneath her knees. Under her hands, which were on either side of her hips, it was thick and dark, almost smoky. And, amazingly, it was dry. There was no sign of moisture on it.

  Until, with unexpected ferocity, a combination of air and spray roared up past her at considerable pressure. Only LeF
ever’s iron grip kept her safe but neither the ice nor she was dry by the time it had passed. ‘Go,’ she bellowed when she had regained her breath, and he eased her forward until her buttocks were just sitting on the edge.

  Then she was in, and he lowered her swiftly so that her hips, torso and head followed each other rapidly into the hole. As her shoulders went in, she twisted round so that she was hanging upright in the chamber, ready to look around herself as soon as her head came below the level of the roof.

  It was as though she was inside a little dome of ice. The thinness of the crystal on either side of the crack let the light in untinted, but all around her the crystal coloured it to different hues so that even at its deep-sea darkest, it seemed to give off brightness. It was breathtakingly beautiful but she soon discovered that the chill rapidly eating into her bones was matched by an equal chill working its way out. This tomb of ice was utterly, inhumanly, terrifyingly alien. Life forms of any kind had no business in here, for this was death solidified. Its chill, petrified beauty was the negation of anything warm with pulsing life. And she remembered that of all the witches, goblins and monsters in the fairy tales which had filled her childhood, the Snow Queen had scared her the most.

  Air hissed past her as though the place had whispered a curse, and green water snarled beneath her dangling feet.

  The clear green boulders trundled along the floor like giant uneven balls of glass, and in among them was Timmins. He was just beginning to come round and his eyes were wide with more than panic. He had no idea she was just above him for he could no more hear her shouts than she could hear his screams. Wildly, fighting free of the deadly swirl of water and ice boulders, he managed to stagger to his feet and when he looked up — and not with any hope of salvation — she found herself staring into the face of a man who was looking hopelessly at death.