Jack Scarlet

by Dan McGirt

  Jack’s rescue attempt wasn’t going so well. Nor was he armed with a Gorgon head that could turn his enemies to stone – though he liked the idea. A mass effect paralyzing agent would be useful just now.

  The paralysis would need to be temporary, for humane reasons. How might it work? A gas or vapor perhaps, but no suitable chemical agent came to mind. Maybe direct brain stimulation via the optic nerve? A pattern of rapid light flashes might induce acute seizure and a disruption of voluntary muscle function sufficient to trigger a Medusa-like full body paralysis. A Medusa ray. It was worth looking into.

  But a petrifying ray was no help at present, because he hadn’t invented it yet.

  Jack regarded the radar scope that showed Marisa on station fifty nautical miles out. He wondered if Oswald knew how unusual it was to have a location lock on his ship. With her stealth design and electronic baffles, the yacht evaded most detection. Deepfire’s radar array must be cutting edge – likely enhanced with a eight-frame stochastic oscillator and a high throughput deep learning signal processor. The Russians had a next-gen radar project along those lines, meant to overcome American stealth technology. With their close ties to the current regime in Moscow, it was possible LiquiOil had acquired it.

  Equally unusual was that MARISA had taken no evasive action, even though the Shrike squadron was halfway to her position. Jack’s orders were clear – defensive fire was authorized. Had the AI mistakenly calculated that Marisa’s stealth coefficient remained within acceptable tolerances?

  If those Shrikes got off a missile barrage...

  Losing their ticket home would complicate matters, but there were ample transport options at Deepfire, including the helo still prowling low above the choppy water in search of Galahad.

  If Gal was still in the game, he’d make his presence known soon enough. Jack’s priority was getting to Cassi. He had to get off the bridge.

  He could take one guard, maybe two. But no matter how he modeled the moves, every scenario ended with his bullet-riddled body hitting the floor. Unless...

  Maybe it was as simple as asking.

  “Sacrifice me instead,” said Jack. “Stake me out there and let Dr. Settles go.”

  “No,” said Oswald.

  “I’m willing to die,” said Jack. “Just let Cassi go.”

  “If we wanted you dead, you’d already be in a body bag and on your way to dissection. You’re useful to us alive, as I explained. Dr. Settles is only useful dead. I brought you to the bridge as a professional courtesy, so that you may bear witness to the success of our great experiment. However –”

  “You brought me here to gloat.”

  Oswald frowned at the interruption. “That too. However, if you prefer to await transport to PsyDoc in confinement below, I will order it. If you do not wish to observe the last moments of your...colleague...Dr. Settles, if you do not wish to see the Litanu take her, I will make allowance for your squeamishness. We are not monsters, after all.” A rictus of malice twisted Oswald’s face.

  Jack considered the spiteful offer. He could attempt escape in transit, but it was likely they would add to his restraints before moving him, and possibly even tranquilize him first. Here on the bridge he had the best overview of the situation. And the best shot of killing Oswald if he could do nothing else for Cassi and Gal.

  “I’ll stay,” he said.

  “Then let us have no more outbursts,” said Oswald.

  “Don’t worry,” said Jack. “I believe your hail just got a response.”

  One of the displays behind Oswald was a real-time bathymetric seascape that charted the sea floor for a twenty mile radius around Deepfire. It pulled data streams from sonar, IR, and other sensor arrays deployed in the surrounding waters to generate a visual model that refreshed several times a second. It was a massive data crunch – but not as massive as what was now showing on the screen.

  The bogey was range five miles, northwest along the San Marcos rift, in a region where the depth reached more than five thousand feet. The hit showed as a red-orange blob that was, per the scale of the graph, half a mile wide and half again as long, oriented along the rift canyon.

  “It is here,” said Oswald, with a note of awe in his voice. “The Litanu has come.” His expression hardened, all business. “I want acoustic and visual now,” he barked at his underlings.

  The bogey vanished from the screen. Jack tilted his neck as far to the left as it would go, then to the right, stretching. He flexed slowly on the balls of his feet.

  “Where did it go?” demanded Oswald.

  “Gone, sir,” said a tech. “It was there, then it wasn’t.”

  “Find it,” said Oswald. “Find it now.”

  Across the control room, one of the sonar operators screamed and jerked back from his console, clawing at his headphones with both hands. A second operator pitched forward as if some invisible hand had reached out of the worktable to grab him by the neck and pull him down. His head cracked against the console, his arms fell limp at his sides. He lay slumped in his chair, twitching and spasming like an epileptic in full seizure. The third sonar op shot to his feet, howling, shedding his headphones as he stood. He staggered back a few steps, collapsed as if his leg muscles had turned to oatmeal, and lay motionless.

  The bogey returned to the tracking screen. It had grown to a mass more than a mile across, centered on Deepfire.

  The screen went black.

  The room shook. There was a muffled groan of twisting metal, more felt than heard. The screen monitoring power flow to and output from to the laser drill flashed warning signals, then went black.

  “We’ve lost BOLD!” announced a tech. “BOLD is offline!”

  A huge wave rocked the floating dock, raising one side at a dangerous angle, threatening to capsize it. It hung in the air, one edge clear of the water. Jack focused on Cassi, small, helpless, terrified. Would the platform right itself or flip, drowning her?

  The feed was lost before the tilted dock’s fate resolved itself. Jack’s eyes darted to the window. Visibility was now zero, nothing but wild slashes of wind-driven rain pounding the glass.

  “Find it!” Oswald’s mind seemed stuck on his last order. He repeated himself with crazed urgency. “Find it! Find it!”

  “It found you,” said Jack.

  A blast of lightning struck the drilling tower, sending off a halo of sparks and a flash of eerie red light. A titanic crash of thunder followed, shaking the bridge.

  Darkness came.

  25: In Roaring Rise

  The electromagnetic pulse that surged up from below Deepfire killed every powered system on the rig. The bridge was plunged into gloom as all lights failed – the overheads, workstation monitors, even the emergency exit signs. Outside, the flashing red aircraft warning lights on the drilling tower winked off, along with the floods, the rig lighting, and the big Daystar spots. The muffled roar of the twelve turbines in the power plant subsided as the blades spun down. Auxiliary power supplies failed. Battery-powered items went inert.

  The pulse also killed the electronic restraints binding Jack’s hands. He was already in motion when he felt the padded grip around his wrists relax when the seals lost power.

  Most people instinctively freeze when suddenly plunged into darkness. Jack’s acute sense of spatial orientation and his extensive training in the Biān Fú martial style of fighting in darkness gave him the advantage. He recalled the position of every opponent and acted while the brains of his foes were still processing the changed environment.

  Jack dropped to the floor and slashed out a kick at the SEG trooper on his left, sweeping him off his feet. Jack sat up as the man fell toward him. There was a pop! of air as his right hand came free of the cuff device. He swung his left arm in a tight, fast arc, smashing the hard ceramic across the merc’s face, crushing his cheek, sending his helmet flying, and knocking him senseless.

  Jack pivoted right and surged to his feet, landing a jaw-smashing left uppercut that rocked the second merc�
��s head back and sent him reeling. Jack let momentum from the punch carry him around to face the two guards behind him. He stepped in with his right foot and threw a hard reverse punch with his armored left. The washed out red flash of a stroke of lightning let Jack’s target see it coming, for all the good it did him. The restraint crashed against the merc’s face, shattering bone and cartilage in a spray of blood.

  Only now were others on the bridge reacting to the loss of power. The fourth guard saw by the lightning glare that Jack was not where had stood mere seconds ago. He caught movement in his peripheral vision and turned toward Jack, raising his NP5. Jack’s right hand intercepted the barrel and pushed it away while his left hammered the merc with a knockout punch that spun his head halfway round and fractured his skull. Jack caught the unconscious trooper in a bear hug, pivoting to put his slumping form between Jack and the four guards around Oswald’s dais. Jack levered his left hand free of the V-shaped restraint and let it fall to the floor. He pulled the NP5 from the soldier’s limp hands. By feel he popped the selector to full auto before sweeping a burst across the control room. 10mm rounds shattered displays, punched through fixtures, and ricocheted off metal struts and cabinets. Jack aimed high, over the heads of the bridge personnel – his goal was escape, not attrition. Though if he happened to take out Oswald on his perch, it wouldn’t be a tragedy. Non-combatants hit the deck. The four SEG security men guarding Oswald took cover. Jack figured two would pull the director to safety, two would return fire. But he wasn’t sticking around to see if that was the plan.

  The window behind him overlooked the roof of the executive housing and administration building the bridge sat atop. Jack rolled and crouched away from the position his muzzle flash had revealed and raked the window with a long auto burst. The glass shattered, admitting a howling wind and a cloud of slashing rain into the control room. Jack dropped the KH and sprinted for the broken window. A strobe of red lightning illuminated him as he jumped through into space, pinning his image to the night sky. Two SEG troopers took shots – as Jack had projected they would – but momentum and gravity had already removed Jack from their line of fire before their first rounds left the muzzle.

  It was a drop of fifteen feet to the hard, rain-slick, metal roof. Jack tucked and rolled as he landed, losing the Gatorz clogs as he tumbled. Water splashed around his bare feet with every step as he ran to the edge of the roof, doubled over against a wind that drove stinging rain into his face.

  A three-round burst barked from the bridge. The SEG trooper was shooting blind and his shots were wide. Jack skidded to a stop beside a steel ladder and was over the edge and on the second floor landing before the next charge of lightning could expose him.

  No power meant no coms which meant the guards on the bridge couldn’t alert their comrades to Jack’s escape. They had no way to coordinate and intercept him. He ran for the stairs, started down toward the first deck – and was lifted off his feet and almost thrown over the rail and into the sea when the entire Deepfire rig tilted hard, the west side listing down ten degrees before lurching back to level.

  Fearful shouts pierced the darkness through the howl of the rain. Nothing short of a tsunami could rock a rig the size of Deepfire. Not even a direct hit from a hurricane would affect its stability unless a ballast tank ruptured or one of the submerged pontoons supporting the rig broke free somehow. Deepfire shouldn’t move.

  Regaining his footing, Jack plunged down the stairs as fast as he could. Deepfire’s apparent instability would slow any pursuers. It also made Jack more eager to be off the rig. The outside temperature was dropping fast. It was starting to feel more like the Bering Sea than the Gulf of Mexico.

  Something bad is about to happen and I’d rather not be here when it does.

  A rectangular platform projecting off the lower deck was an embarkation deck for two lifeboats out of Deepfire’s total complement of eight. Each boat was a fat orange oval resembling an old-fashioned potbelly stove laid on its side. Unlike an iron stove, the vinyl-hulled life capsules floated, seated sixty, and had a self-contained air supply with ten minutes of breathable air. Above each was a winch from which was suspended a single steel cable, called a fall, for raising and lowering the boats.

  Jack chose the boat on the left. He released the gripes that held the boat in stowed position, pulled the safety pins, and boarded. There was neither time nor light for the full pre-launch checklist – he’d have to trust that the LiquiOil crew had everything in order.

  The darkness inside the boat was near absolute, as if Jack had entered a tomb. Flashes of lightning through the portholes allowed him to get his bearings. He sealed the hatches and climbed to the coxswain’s chair in a raised cockpit aft.

  A tremendous vibration shook Deepfire, a deep bass hum of metal under stress. The lifeboat jumped and rocked in its cradle.

  Jack felt the motion in the pit of his stomach as the south face of Deepfire tilted upward, taking the lifeboat with it. The capsule pitched and thumped against the steel platform edge. If the rig listed much more, the change of orientation might foul the cable and prevent launch.

  Go or no go – time to decide.

  Jack strapped in and released the winch brake. Gravity took hold. The cable unspooled in a controlled descent. It would take almost a full minute to reach water level. Gale winds batted the lifeboat in a pendulum motion as it dropped. The splashdown would be rough.

  It didn’t come. The boat jerked to a halt and swung crazily, spinning like a yo-yo at the end of its string, dangling twenty feet short of the water. With the rig deck tilted to the sky, either the cable wasn’t long enough to reach the surface or, more likely, the winch had failed.

  The on-load release was designed not to unhook from the fall wire until the boat was in the water. Unless he wanted to swing here helplessly in the storm while Deepfire leaned ever more precariously, Jack had to override that safety feature manually. Groping blindly, he found the panel for the release handle, turned the safety pin, and removed it with a sharp tug.

  Now the on-load mechanism could free the lifeboat from the wire. This was normally done from a height of no more than four feet. Falling twenty feet wasn’t extreme – the enclosed lifeboat was designed to bear a fall from even greater heights – but it was a dangerous maneuver, especially in rough seas.

  Jack pulled the lever. The boat went into freefall. It hit the surface with a terrific splash, bobbed halfway under and bounced up almost completely out of the water. The force of a wave sent it listing hard to starboard, then the well-balanced orange oval righted itself.

  With the electric starter and battery dead, Jack worked the manual start for the diesel engine. He got his vessel under power, took the wheel, and turned south.

  The lights on the floating dock were out. Jack made the best estimate he could of the dock’s relative position, but with Deepfire’s positioning thrusters disabled, the rig was already drifting slowly with the current. The much smaller dock was also at the mercy of the waves. Finding it in the dark would be challenging.

  The crew boat and other LiquiOil vessels appeared to be dead in the water. Their lights were not visible. Jack got a brief glimpse of the crew boat rolling into a wave several hundred yards off his port during a lightning barrage. It seemed to be adrift. That suited Jack. It meant he didn’t have to worry about being intercepted. With communications down, other LiquiOil personnel were unaware that the lifeboat wasn’t carrying their crewmates.

  Cassi’s out here somewhere – helpless and terrified. He had to find her.

  The little orange lifeboat made poor headway, barely reaching three knots. The craft bobbled in the swell, though with a low center of gravity it was fairly stable. Keeping her upright wasn’t a problem. The challenge for Jack was that a lifeboat was designed to be found, not to find things. Jack thought he was near the floating dock’s last position, but he got only tantalizing glimpses of his surroundings with each barrage of red-tinged lightning – empty, foaming, churning sea in all d
irections. Even those brief views were obstructed by roiling curtains of rain glittering like strands of rubies in the red glare.

  The emergency radio was dead. The compass was haywire. Running an effective search pattern with a lifeboat in the dark and rain was an impossible task. With the direction of the wind and waves shifting minute by minute, the floating dock could have drifted in any direction. Jack might have passed within a few yards of Cassi without knowing it. Yet continuing the search, futile though it might be, was the only option he had.

  A low, deep moaning rose through the sounds of the storm. Jack felt it coming up through his feet, through his hands on the wheel, like the deep vibration of a bass amp at a rock concert. For a moment, standing waves formed all around the boat, then collapsed back into the normal roil of a stormy sea.

  Lighting flashed – There!

  The floating dock appeared like a phantasm, riding a wide, broad wave no more than fifty yards off his starboard bow. Then blackness returned.

  Jack adjusted his heading. He came alongside the dock and cut power, trusting that the boat would hold course long enough for him to make fast. Jack squirmed from the cockpit, banged open the hatch, and snatched up a painter. He threw the line and snared a cleat.

  Jack braced in the hatch and hauled the lifeboat in hand over hand before making fast against the heaving dock. In the emergency kit he found a jackknife and a working flashlight that had survived the EMP. Jack played the light across the dock, finding the pole to which Cassi was bound, arms pulled above her head. He was docked behind her, out of her view.

  Cassi didn’t respond to the shaft of light that transfixed her. She surely had her eyes squeezed shut against the relentless rain and spray. Possibly she was unconscious. Or worse.

  “Cassi!” shouted Jack. “Cassi!”

  She made no reply, showed no awareness of his presence. Even from mere yards away, the wind shredded Jack’s words. He stepped from the heaving boat to the undulating dock and pushed through the black rain, crouched low against the wind, fighting for every step until he reached her side.