"Sorry, a what?"
"Dongleberry. This bar dispenser's got a new flavour - Delicious Dongleberry."
"Yummy," said Hopkirk flatly. He still hadn't looked up from his slate. "It'll taste of cardboard."
Taub nodded to himself and took the plastic cup of lukewarm synthi-caf from the dispenser. "Yeah, I know. Just making conversation. Thought it might break up the boredom."
Hopkirk glanced up from his screen. "Bored?" He smiled thinly. "Well, if you want to break the monotony you could try working out whether we're still low enough to keep under Atlantic Division's radar, and high enough to avoid a megashark if one decides to jump up and take a bite out of the tail."
Taub blinked at him. "They don't do that, do they?"
In reply, Hopkirk just waved the dataslate lazily. "Should have downloaded one, Taub. All the answers, right here."
"Ah, drokk you. You're just trying to freak me out." And it's working, thought Taub wildly. Brit-Cit snecker!
He ran his finger down the list of energy bars again, but decided against eating any more. It would have been the third one since taking off from Kennedy Hoverport and it wasn't as if he'd be expending a great deal of energy during this flight. Hopkirk had supervised the autopilot during take off, and would when they landed, too. The coffin-sized cryotanks in the hold were entirely self-regulating. He and Hopkirk were only on board to deal with the unexpected.
Taub went back to his seat and dropped into it, plucking an empty plastic cup from the drinks holder and inserting the fresh one. The empty went into the space between his seat and the curve of the fuselage. "Ah, don't mind me. I just get nervous, is all."
"Nothing wrong in that," said Hopkirk. "Keeps you on your toes. But as far as the Justice Department is concerned, we're just a perfectly ordinary private cargo flight to Brit-Cit. And since when did Atlantic Division have the manpower to check every flight?"
Taub thought about that and nodded, feeling a little better. All the paperwork for the flight had been in place before Eddie the Belly had even contacted him. Eddie was a good payer, for a Fattie, and had given Taub plenty of work in the past - he always seemed to need a pilot who wouldn't ask questions. The flight plan, the security tabs on the cargo bay doors and the customs clearance certificates had looked so good, Taub would have sworn they were genuine.
The Lindberg-CS13 was a nondescript plane, just heading towards obsolescence; no customs officer would give it a second glance. They would touch down in Brit-Cit long enough to refuel and change crews, probably handing over the flight to a couple of Euro-Citters for the next leg of the trip. By the time it took off, the plane would be flying under a new ident-number. To all intents and purposes, the plane now flying across the world's most polluted expanse of water would have vanished while sitting on the blacktop at Brit-Cit's main air terminal.
Taub didn't know the cargo's final destination, and he didn't care. He would take the zoom train home along the Trans-Atlantic Tunnel, running three thousand miles along the bed of the same polluted ocean he was currently flying over, and pick up his payment from Eddie. Simple.
Here's to "simple". Taub raised his cup of caf, took a gulp and almost choked. "Sneck! What the drokk do they put in this stuff?"
"Dongleberries," replied Hopkirk, waving the dataslate.
An hour later, Taub was almost relieved to hear the alarm chime. He had been staring vacantly at the sickly green flashes of a storm on the southern horizon, and there was a chance he might have nodded off for a moment or two. He wondered if he should have another caf, maybe an energy bar. Having Hopkirk report back that that he had dozed off on the job would be a bad idea.
"What's up?" he asked, glancing across at Hopkirk. He was glad to see that, some time in the last hour, the Brit had put down his e-zine.
Hopkirk consulted his control board. "Proximity alert," he muttered, tapping at the screen. The chiming faded out. "Nothing serious. Whatever it is, it's on the surface and over a thousand kilometres away. It's big though. Very big indeed."
"Cityship, probably," Taub said. "They're nothing to worry about, so long as we don't get close enough for them to take a pop at us."
Hopkirk's eyebrows went up. "Do they do that?" Taub grinned at him.
"What, not in your zine?" He sat back and stretched. "Yeah, it's been known. If they brought us down, their scavengers would tear the plane apart for salvage and feed us to the megasharks. Though we won't have to worry about them reporting anything to the Justice Department."
"Quite," Hopkirk replied. And picked up his slate again.
Taub returned his bored gaze to the southern horizon. The storm appeared to have blown itself out. The swirling funnel of dirty cloud that hovered over the ocean there had cleared, and all that remained was a curtain of greasy-looking mist, pierced here and there by shafts of sunlight breaking through the parting clouds. That didn't surprise Taub at all - the vast quantities of radwaste and industrial pollution that had drained into the ocean over the centuries had produced a virulent microclimate, capable of turning from placid to catastrophic in the blink of an eye.
Taub wondered what it must be like to be caught in a storm at sea level. He imagined the muties on their cityships closing hatches, shuttering windows and hiding in the dark, waiting for the storm to pass. He imagined the violent rolling of the individual vessels that made up the floating cities, the creak and snap of the cables, the moaning of the welded joints that held the ancient craft together.
As he thought of the rolling ocean, his eyelids began to droop.
The next time Taub woke, it was to the sound of Hopkirk swearing. Another alarm was sounding - not the chime of the proximity alarm, but a more insistent, insect buzzing.
"What is it this time?" Every joint in his body felt stiff. He must have been out for some time, and the seats weren't exactly built for restful sleep. There was a cot in the back for that.
Hopkirk was stabbing at his control board, but each time one icon blinked out another replaced it. "I'm not sure. Getting system warnings - flaps and rudder are sluggish and the engines are losing efficiency. Even the hydraulics are playing up."
That didn't sound good. Taub was instantly alert, checking his own board. "You didn't see anything unusual?"
Hopkirk shook his head. "No, just this damn mist."
"Mist?" Taub looked up, out of the cockpit windshield. "Mist?"
Something was happening to the plexiglass. What had been clear and transparent when he had closed his eyes had become frosted and semi-opaque. Hundreds of tiny circles, like ripples on a pond, had scoured the surface. "Oh grud. We're in an acid bank..."
Acid banks were another of the random and deadly features of the Black Atlantic's eco-system. Gases would bubble up from the ocean's floor, emanating from any one of a dozen different sources: mutant life forms, sunken toxic waste tankers, ruptured transit pipes and worse. When the gas hit the air it would vaporise, turning into a wall of corrosive vapour that would hang above the ocean surface like a dirty curtain. Acid banks were rare, but they did occur. And they were deadly.
"You dumb snecker, why the hell didn't you pull up?" Taub ran his hands swiftly over the control board, disengaging the autopilot and taking over the stick from Hopkirk. "If this stuff gets into the engines we're drokked!"
"I-I didn't see it..."
"Didn't see it?" Taub was hauling back on the control stick with all his strength, trying to bring the Lindberg's nose up before the acid chewed clear through the fuselage. "You were asleep, weren't you? Or you had your nose in that damn slate!"
"Blame me later," Hopkirk snapped. "Just climb!"
Taub didn't reply, he just kept dragging the stick back. The Lindberg was groaning, wallowing, shuddering under him. The acid bank was thick and heavy, not like air at all. It felt as though he was trying to fly the plane through soup.
Suddenly, the air cleared. The acid bank became a landscape of roiling vapour below them, dropping back out of sight. Taub eased the stick forwards, le
velling the Lindberg out. "Made it!" he puffed, sweat rolling down his face. "Grud on a greenie."
Hopkirk looked white. "Is this going to screw up our flight schedule?"
Taub turned to him, slowly, giving himself time to think of something really foul to call the Brit-Citter. Finally, he fixed Hopkirk with a steely glare, opened his mouth, took a breath - and stayed with his mouth gaping wide open in horror as he saw what was happening to the port engine.
Smoke was vomiting from the sides of the pod, venting through holes and rips in the metal shell. As he stared, the smoke was joined by a belch of flame.
"Grud," he whispered. It would be the last word he ever spoke.
The engine blew up, the acid-etched fan blades giving in to the furious stress of their own rotation and whirling into fragments. The entire pod blasted apart, shattering into a ball of flame and shrapnel, tearing half the wing away. The Lindberg was instantly wrenched sideways and out of the air.
The impact killed Hopkirk instantly, tearing his pilot's throne free of the deck and slamming it with crushing force into the side of the cockpit. The plexiglass windshield, already weakened by the acid, exploded outwards. Taub felt the wind slam into him like a wall, battering him back into his own seat. The pressure was so great he couldn't even get his hands to the controls. He certainly couldn't scream even though the acid-laden air was already ripping into his skin.
His last vision was that of the gleaming Black Atlantic looming up to meet him.
The Lindberg hit the water like a missile, shearing off the remains of both wings. The shattered cockpit gaped even wider with the impact, swallowing tonnes of fluid in a second. The plane slowed in its forward motion and began to settle, dropping through the stew of toxins, rad-waste and industrial pollutants that made the Black Atlantic one of the deadliest places on earth. By the time it hit the seabed it was almost unrecognisable, but not as unrecognisable as the corroded, rapidly decomposing body of co-pilot Taub.
The nose of the plane hit bottom first, and the acid-eaten fuselage gave way as it did so, splitting clear across. Debris drifted out into the murk. Most of it sank.
But ten self-contained cryotanks, their armoured support systems affected by neither the crash nor the poisoned Atlantic, did not sink. They were built to float. So they left the Lindberg to its fate and went spiralling slowly up through the black water like glossy bubbles, one by one, heading for light and air.
3. SCAVENGER HUNT
To the untrained eye, the scavenger ship Golgotha was as ugly as sin. Its hull was a bulbous, blunt-nosed mess, stained black by the Atlantic's toxic waters and patched with a thousand hastily welded plates. So many winches, booms, cranes and outriggers rose above the gunwales that the ship looked more like an upturned insect than a seagoing vessel, rolling drunkenly on its back and wiggling its legs in the air. And it was noisy - the creaking of the outriggers, sullen twanging of cables in the wind and the grind of heavy chain against pulleys was almost enough to drown out the chugging of the engine.
Golgotha wasn't pretty, but it was the closest thing to a home Gethsemane Bane had ever known.
She was up on the bridge, feet braced apart against the swell, standing at the helm with her hands white-knuckle tight on the controls. A storm had passed by this spot not long ago, and while the lashing acid rain and gale force winds were gone, they had left a roiling and disturbed sea in their wake. Bane was finding it hard to keep Golgotha on a level heading, and the thought that the storm might have roused a megashark - or something even bigger - kept flashing uncomfortably through her mind.
"I don't like it," she muttered, partly to herself. "Shouldn't we be able to see it by now?"
Most of the crew was out on the foredeck, clustered around the prow. The plexiglass of the windshield was so smeared and streaked that she could only make them out by the brilliant yellow of their protective slickers. She resolved to treat Golgotha to some new windows as soon as they got back to Sargasso, if they made money on this trip. It was a regular expense. Plexiglass didn't last long against Black Atlantic spray.
Dray was on the bridge with her, running the sensor station. He stood peering into the scope with his one good eye, the crocodile skin of his face painted over with the colours from the readout. "It's off the starboard bow, no more than fifty metres."
Bane triggered her headset mic. "Hear that, guys?" One of the yellow blobs waved in reply, and they all moved to starboard.
"I'll go help them," Dray said. "We're too close for this to be much use now." He turned from the sensor screen and reached for his slicker, which was hanging from a peg by the door.
Bane put her hand to his shoulder. "I'll go. You hold her steady. And get ready on the outriggers."
"Aye, aye, cap'n." Dray flashed her a reptilian grin. A mutant, like everyone on the scavenger ship, Dray had skin like leather and needlepoint teeth. He had been on the Golgotha longer than anyone, Bane included, but he had been the first to start calling her "captain".
Bane grabbed her own slicker and shrugged into it, sealing it quickly before stepping into the wind and spray. The door whined closed behind her, and after waiting a moment to ride out another of Golgotha's familiar rolling lurches, she headed along the companionway and down the stairs to the deck.
Everyone else was down there waiting for her, except for Orca. The big engineer was holed up in the drive room, as usual, tending his precious engines as though they were living things. Bane could have used his strength up at the prow, but she didn't feel it was right to disturb him. Besides, if the object was heavy, Golgotha might need an extra surge of power to the winches, and it would be Orca's job to provide it.
Bane had no idea what the object was. Or objects. Dray had been watching the signal it was giving out for more than eighteen hours, but he still couldn't tell her if there was one big source or lots of smaller ones close together.
One or many, it didn't matter. The object had power, components, and no one to take it home. That made it the personal property of Gethsemane Bane and the Golgotha crew.
As long as she could find the drokking thing!
She leaned over the bow rail, cupping a hand over her eyes to ward off the spray, and searched the sluggish, heaving surface for something other than polluted water and scum. Her eyes were good, but it was Angle, further along the rail, who saw it first.
"There!" he yelped, leaping up and down and pointing. "There it is!"
Angle's arms were too long, and looked as though they had been built with more than their usual number of elbows. But when he pointed at something, it stayed pointed at. Bane followed his arm and instantly saw what she'd been missing.
It was just under the surface, occasionally bobbing through and sleeting black water off its flanks. Something rounded and grey and artificial. "Good eyes, Angle! First round's on you!"
Angle grinned and punched the air. Bane could hear Dray chuckling in satisfaction, and Can-Rat was skittering from side to side in excitement. It had been a while since Golgotha had made a find like this. Once they got it back to Sargasso, it could make them a pretty cred or two.
"Dray?" She turned back to wave at the bridge, and saw Dray waving back through the grimy windshield. "It's not too big, and it floats. We'll need number four crane, but the outriggers can stay where they are. She won't tip."
"Got it," Dray replied, and instantly the medium starboard crane - number four - began to unfold itself from rest position.
"Hey, Angle." Bane moved over to where the slender mutant was still pointing and grinning. "You want to get out of buying that first round?"
"If Orca's drinking with us, yeah."
She snorted a laugh, hoping the engineer wasn't listening in. "Okay, if you can zap that thing with the magoon, I'll be buying. Deal?"
Angle let out a whoop and darted away. Damn, he moved so fast. Too fast for the deck of a ship, really, but he was young. Even younger than Bane, and she was only twenty-four. Young enough to get a real kick out of firing a magnetic ha
rpoon at something, anyway.
She let him go and went over to join Can-Rat. "What do you think it is?"
"Coffin?" Can-Rat sniffed. "Looks like a coffin. Maybe some snecker's fancy idea of a burial at sea."
"With a tracer signal?"
Can-Rat blinked, small beady eyes bright and his muzzle wet from the sea. "Maybe he got lonely."
Angle appeared next to her, holding the magoon. The launcher was a metal tube as long as Bane was tall, with a pitted muzzle she could have put her head into. In contrast, the magnetic point of the harpoon itself looked surprisingly delicate. Like an origami teardrop.
"Maybe it's a treasure chest," said Angle, hauling the magoon up and snapping its mount over the bow rail. There was a loud metallic sound as it locked. "Fell off some rich oldster's pleasure cruiser."
"Pleasure?" Bane gave him a look. "Angle, if anyone's out here for pleasure, I don't wanna know what they keep in their treasure chests!" She paused. "What are you waiting for, kid? Zap the thing."
Angle rolled his head around on his thin neck, shrugged the kinks out of his shoulders, and then leaned down to aim the magoon. His long limbs and twitchy build gave him a combination of leverage and extraordinary delicacy of touch. When he squeezed the trigger, the magoon fizzed out of the launcher straight and true.
The point splayed in midair, faster than Bane could follow. One second it was a sharp point of overlaid metal plates, the next it was a wide dish slapping against the side of the object and grabbing on hard. The cable paid out behind it went taut, reeled back by the launcher's internal winch.
"Okay, Angle, hold it there." Bane slapped him on the shoulder in congratulation, and then gave Dray a signal. In response, the crane dipped low out over the water and released its grab.
"Something's wrong," Can-Rat said, very quietly, eyes fixed on the grab. "I don't like this. Something ain't right..."
Black Atlantic Page 3