Carbon Run

by J. G. Follansbee

  CHAPTER 23

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  BILL DELIBERATED HIS OPTIONS ALONE on the maintop cross-trees, thirty meters above Aganippe’s deck. An ancient satellite phone lay in his hands, like a drug he dare not take. Micah’s warning rang in his ears: Bessies, corsairs, or other unruly elements might hear and hone in. Micah’s warning came in a whisper during a hurried discussion about Aganippe’s true cargo, whether a topman’s job was worth the risk, and whether they should jump ship. I’m already accused of one environmental crime. I don’t want to be part of another.

  Bill heeded Micah’s warning for a day, but separation from Anne drove him toward taking dangerous chances. He and Anne had spend time apart in the past, but never at such distance and difficulty of a check-in. Bill doted on his daughter, he admitted, but how many fathers are on the run from the BES, and how many children are witnesses to an unfair accusation of environmental crimes? Bill had to know that Anne was okay.

  McMadden gave Bill permission to climb to the cross-trees below the main t’gallant yard. Bill enjoyed the solitude on the tiny platform. It offered a moment of tranquility in a tense ship. McMadden may be a cranky, profane man, Bill thought, but he was a crack seaman. The ship glided so smoothly over Arctic Ocean that Bill felt as if he floated in mid-air.

  The captain didn’t know he had the phone. Bill found it by accident when he was sent for batteries in the electronics locker. He noticed the phone’s data encryption and electronic masking capabilities. Maybe I could speak with Anne for a minute or two before anyone realizes what’s going on.

  Bill looked down to the deck. Stubbs leaned on the rail and flicked a spent mist stick into the sea. He did not look up.

  His hand trembling, Bill linked into the global com system and dialed Anne.

  Loop failed. Setup may have failed. Tampering with factory settings may void the manufacturer’s warranty—

  Bill cleared the screen. I shouldn’t be doing this. He dialed again.

  Loop failed. Setup may have—

  Stopping himself from cursing, in case it drew Stubbs’ attention, Bill rebooted the phone. He ran the setup routine, hoping—

  Initialized. Satellite located. Number to call?

  He dialed a third time. Excitement drowned out his unease. A series of clicks indicated a search.

  “C’mon. C’mon,” Bill whispered to himself.

  “Hello?”

  The voice was a young woman’s, but the signal had traveled so many tens of thousands of miles that it was barely understandable. “Anne, is that you?” It could only be her. I dialed her unique identifier.

  “Who... Dad?”

  “Anne, it’s your father.”

  “Dad? Is that you? Where—“

  The signal strength dropped away, and Bill feared he’d lost her. “Anne!” He cupped his hand over the mouthpiece, while keeping one eye on Stubbs, who sipped a cup of coffee. “Anne, it’s your dad.”

  “Where are you? I can barely hear you. Are you coming home?”

  How much I want to say Yes! Bill reflected, however, on the course of Aganippe, away from his daughter and his life.

  The elapsed time on the call was already fifty-three seconds. Is someone listening?

  “Listen to me, Anne. I only have time to see if you’re okay.”

  “Tell me where you are, Daddy. It’s so good to hear your voice.”

  “You sound good to me too. Are you home?”

  “Daddy... Da...” The poor signal fragmented Anne’s words. “I can only hear a little of what you’re saying. Are you on a ship?”

  The question startled Bill. Should I tell a lie, in case Kilel is there? “Are you alone?”

  “Mike Schmidt is here. He’s helping me with—.” The signal dropped away.

  Mike Schmidt, the cop’s kid? Is he spying on her? Bill shook his head, disbelieving his own conclusion.

  “Dad, I have to tell you something. Inspector Kilel detained me. I had to tell her that you might have gone to Port Simpson, that you might find work there.”

  Anne’s report set Bill’s blood to boil. Kilel will do anything to track me down, including preying on Anne. His anger was tainted by guilt for having put Anne in Kilel’s sights.

  “I’m sorry, Dad.”

  Bill thought he heard crying. Or is it just static? “No, sweetheart. You did nothing wrong. Bessies are stupid and thoughtless.”

  The elapsed time on the call was one minute, forty-eight seconds.

  “Anne, I have to go. I can’t talk any longer.”

  “No, don’t go.” Anne pleaded with her father. “Kilel said something. She talked about—“ The signal dropped out again. “—afficking—”

  Bill guessed at the missing words. Carbon trafficking. Am I closing my eyes to the obvious? “Anne, I can’t hear you. The signal is very poor. I have to go.”

  “Dad, are you there? Are you ever coming home?”

  Christ. How many times had he asked that question of Molly in the months before she disappeared? After two weeks went by without a call, he left Anne with an older woman who sometimes cared for the toddler. A half-dozen checks at her Seattle apartment and the local Algid office turned up nothing. He returned home and the divorce papers arrived the next day. For a month, the documents sat unread, because he didn’t want to accept the contents. Call after call, ping after ping to Molly went unanswered. She had abandoned her daughter and her husband. It was years before Bill stopped waking up each morning wondering why.

  “I am coming home. I promise, sweetheart. I love you.”

  “I love—“

  Link failed. Reinitialize?

  Bill turned the phone off. The final elapsed time was two minutes, fifteen seconds. Long enough to be heard by practically the whole planet.

  “How come I feel worse, not better?” he said to himself. Bill rested his head against the mast, wondering if he’d done something stupid. Aganippe was watched day and night by a half-dozen governments and international agencies, Bill assumed. No one is unwatched these days.

  Running figures caught Bill’s attention. Sailors were climbing the shrouds.

  “Aloft there! Penn!” McMadden’s voice pierced Bill’s funk. “We’re adding canvas. Cast off the gaskets on the main royal.”

  Bill pocketed the satellite phone and scrambled up the royal yard. From nearly the highest point on the main mast, he loosened the ties that bound the sail and let it fly. He had a few seconds to scan the horizon. The sky was a white-blue color and the sea a matching gray. His chest tightened when he saw a dark shape under the surface slip around Aganippe’s bow. Another fast-moving shape surged underneath the ship. He never served in the navy, but he’d seen the weapons before. Their skippers liked to stalk cargo ships as training exercises. Despite his safety harness, he gripped a hempen line as if his life depended on it. He realized a nightmare was coming true.

  I’ll never see Anne again.

  CHAPTER 24

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  THE ENGINE ROOM OFFICERS ON Extinction learned about Martin’s engineering background, and as he performed his duties with the most efficiency of all the damned, he was given more responsibility as a kind of trusted inmate. He learned that the sub was lost in the last hours of the war for the Arctic, but not to enemy action. A mechanical failure took out her buoyancy systems, and she sank onto the continental shelf a hundred meters above her crush depth. With her communications systems dead, her crew had one hope: a dash for the surface in a submersible with a message begging for help. The captain, Gorov, and a pilot set off, never to be heard from again. The Russian Navy, embarrassed by its failure in the war, covered up the loss of Yuri Dolgorukiy.

  Extinction was Yuri Dolgorukiy reincarnated. The chief engineer gave Martin nominal authority over a team of the damned assigned to one of the reactor’s backup cooling systems. The equipment was jury-rigged and obsolete, and Martin struggled to keep ahead of the continual problems. A pockmarked man, strong but weak-eyed, took Martin’s previous station.r />
  “Captain on deck!”

  Gore maintained a quasi-military posture among his crew, and he made surprise visits to the engine room. The bosses and engineering chiefs came to a loose attention while the damned continued monitoring the boat’s systems. Martin heard Gore before he saw him.

  “Where’s that son of a bitch Kerensky?” Gore’s boots clonked on the metal grate of the deck. His fearsome face, covered with yellow and black hair, entranced and frightened Martin. His eyes had the indifference combined with wildness that Martin guessed kept cat owners wondering when the animal would slash the hand that fed.

  “Here, sir.” The named officer stood at attention, shaking. Gore pushed him into the compartment, closing the door behind. The bosses regarded each other in unspoken expectation.

  Martin heard a loud bang and a scream, but it didn’t come from the compartment. The pockmarked crewman crumpled to the grate, holding his arms above his head as scalding water and steam poured down on him. Alarms sounded and another man screamed. An engineer ran past Martin, parboiled flesh dropping off his back. More alarms sounded. Extinction lurched and Martin felt a sensation similar to a dropping elevator. The boat was going down. Gore emerged from the compartment. “What in the devil’s name...”

  Martin was already moving. He pushed Gore aside and crawled behind an instrument panel. The monk switched a patch cable that routed electronics to a key valve in the cooling system. He yelled an order, and one of the wretched crew closed a valve, stopping the flow of scalding steam. The alarms stopped, the instrumentation returned to normal, and the slow downward drift of Extinction halted. Martin kneeled next to the pockmarked man, whose skin was like boiled cabbage. Martin said a prayer over his body.

  A shape hovered. For a split second Martin thought it was the colonel.

  “You. What’s your name?” Gore said.

  “Brother Martin Scribb.”

  “Scribb.” Gore’s cat eyes revealed nothing, but Martin sensed he was weighing a decision. “Come with me.”

  Glancing around and wiping his hands on his filthy singlet, Martin followed the captain out of the engine room.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Martin sweated it out in the captain’s great cabin. Extinction’s air was kept at a low humidity to resist corrosion, but in Gore’s living space, the humidity had to be one hundred percent. Tropical plants lined the walls, some with huge flowers with exotic scents that matched the thickness of the air. Mixed with the moisture and perfume was a whiff of decaying leaf litter. It was the smell of slow death. The thing missing was the cacophony of insects mating, killing, and dying in a true jungle. The metal walls and deck were clear of the rust Martin would’ve expected in a humid environment. A special paint or coating must fight off the inevitable oxidation.

  Gore tapped at a tablet keyboard, his fingers dexterous despite their thickness and covering of tawny hair. The curved claws that the creature showed on Martin’s arrival were retracted. Gore’s green-yellow eyes bored into Martin. “Well, Mr. Scribb. It seems you have saved Extinction.”

  “Please, sir.” Martin picked up on the military forms of address favored on the sub. “I’m a brother of the Penitents of Saint Francis.”

  “I see... Brother Scribb.” Gore grimaced, which Martin took as a kind of smile, though the teeth were that of a carnivore, not an omnivore. “Allow me to say thank you. You are the hero of the hour.”

  “If I had not acted, everyone on board might’ve died, myself included.”

  “Indeed. You are responsible for enough death, aren’t you?”

  Gore’s remark stunned Martin, until he realized that Gore knew everything about him. “I cannot imagine allowing any more people to suffer, even if they are dissed or murderers.”

  Gore grunted and rose from his chair. “I have not eaten since this morning. Do you mind?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “May I get you something?”

  Despite Gore’s fearsome appearance, and his ability to kill him on the spot in a horrific way, Martin was calm. Perhaps this is how prey felt when they were in the jaws of the predator. “A cool glass of water?”

  Gore removed to an adjacent room, and returned with a tray containing a glass of water dripping with condensation, along with a large bowl of raw meat.

  Martin sipped the water. “You act as your own steward?”

  “Luxuries are few on Extinction, even for me, and stewards in my service don’t last very long.”

  Martin did not want to know what Gore meant, but he was by turns fascinated and terrified when Gore took a piece of bloody meat, placed it in his mouth, and tore at it. He worked it not like a ravenous beast, but as if he were a wild predator with table manners worthy of royalty at a state dinner. He wiped his bloody hands and mouth with a cloth napkin.

  “Forgive me if I do not offer you a share of my little snack, Brother Scribb,” Gore said. “I’ve not eaten cooked meat for many years and I have none in my larder.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “I know you want to ask me questions, Brother Scribb. Please, don’t be embarrassed.”

  “Well, sir, I must admit that... Well, your appearance...”

  “...is unusual.”

  “To say the least, sir.”

  “I’ve always felt, even as a child, that I had the heart of a tiger. That was one reason I went into the military. When I was a midshipman, I had a large bengal tiger tattooed under my right arm. Not regulation, but enforcement was lax in those days.”

  “The Russian Navy?” Damn me, that was presumptuous.

  If the captain was annoyed, he hid it. “I think you already know part of my story.”

  “You rose through the ranks to become captain of a nuclear attack submarine named Yuri Dolgorukiy. She disappeared at the end of the Three Degrees North War. The Stavka presumed the submarine was lost, along with all her crew, but they were wrong. The captain survived.”

  Gore wiped a drop of watery blood from his lip. “I volunteered to risk my life to bring help. Rising through the depths to the surface, I realized that my life was over, my career ruined, because the loss of the boat would be blamed on me, even if I managed to rescue those men and women. The war’s end meant that the Arctic Ocean would have to be shared, not the best outcome for a military man, in my view.”

  “So you killed the pilot and disappeared, leaving your crew to suffocate.” Martin avoided sounding judgmental. He was in no position to wag a finger.

  “Desperate times, and so on,” Gore said. “I was lucky. I found myself in an isolated settlement on the Russian Arctic coast. No one found me or... what is that wonderful American phrase?”

  “Ratted you out?”

  “Just so. After a time, I realized that Yuri Dolgorukiy was salvageable. Before the war, I was assigned to a task force searching out and destroying pirates along the Russian coast. I had made a few contacts among the criminal classes and offered to bring Yuri Dolgorukiy to them in exchange for an investment in a risky but lucrative enterprise.”

  “What might that be?” Martin asked, though he was ready to speculate.

  “You will learn all about that shortly.”

  “Is that why you brought me here?”

  “Originally, you were just another crewman on Extinction. Crew is hard to come by, but the policy of disidentification, rather than execution, created a class of humans desperate to escape a fate worse than death.”

  Martin had to agree. In a twisted way, he had found a renewed purpose to his life, less powerful than his desire to be welcomed back to normal society, but nonetheless an incentive to survive for another day. He was shocked to feel a sense of loyalty to Extinction and Kapitan Gore creeping into his consciousness.

  “We were kidnapped, not invited.”

  “Yes, but you may find it difficult to believe that almost no man or woman leaves my ship once they are aboard.”

  “Are you serious?’

  “Look at yourself, Brother Scribb. Are you in sha
ckles? Are you abused?”

  Martin kept his opinion of the bosses to himself. “I’m several hundred feet underwater.”

  “You may leave the boat at any time, though I cannot vouch for your safety once you step off her.”

  Martin saw Kapitan Gore’s self-delusion. He failed or refused to understand that he and all the people on Extinction were in a kind of prison, despite their freedom of the seas and their stealth. The question was: For what purpose?

  Gore tore at another piece of meat. “Let me tell you something, Brother Scribb. You’re unique among the disidentified. The vast majority are animals. You, on the other hand, are an intelligent, quick-thinking man who recognizes an opportunity and seizes it, even if it means the deaths of millions.”

  “I didn’t plan on the deaths of millions.”

  “Come now. You knew the risks. They’d been known for a century.” Gore shifted in his seat, preparing for something, and Martin soon learned what it was. “I’d like you to join me. I need intelligent men like you. Let me show you the opportunities. Freedom and wealth. Or wretchedness and social nonexistence. You decide.”

  The idea of joining Gore repelled Martin at first. He’s right, though. What other choices do I have? The colonel’s promise to restore me to society could be empty. He may not even have the power. “I’ll have to think about it.”

  “Take your time.” Gore was finished with the interview. “If you’ll excuse me...”

  Martin remained seated. “I still don’t understand something.” He gestured at Gore with an open hand. “This... change. The look. How?”

  “Have you not heard of DNA tattooing?”

  Martin shook his head.

  “Ah, as a religious, you have been cloistered to some degree. It is a procedure, very expensive, very dangerous. Think of that tiger tattoo I mentioned. Something like it has been tattooed on my DNA.”

  “A chimera.”

  “A ‘chimera’ is a fire-breathing creature from Greek mythology with parts of a lion, a goat, and a snake.” Gore chuckled, adding a growl for color. “I’m not that.”

  “A... mutant?”

  “‘Hybrid’ is more benign, though still not quite accurate. I have a self-image to protect.”