by Peter Tonkin
The flock of birds came straight over the ridge very low and with quite enough speed to make Richard jump. They seemed to pounce forward through the air towards him, a pandemonium of screaming beaks and battering wings. The size of the ship’s bridge seemed to upset them, for they wheeled away in one tight body immediately above his head and sped westwards, their panic echoing on the air behind them.
The walkie-talkie sprang to life at once. ‘Richard, are you all right?’
‘Fine,’ he answered. ‘It was only a flock of birds, Nico.’
‘I know but ...’
‘Yes. I know what you mean. We haven’t seen a living thing since I came aboard. They were a bit disconcerting.’
‘The last living thing I saw was a tiger shark trying to eat Jamie Curtis.’
‘It’s been a rough ride.’
‘You can say that again. And it’s not over yet.’
‘Okay, Nico, let’s go again. We have a five-foot cliff above the water so I guess it may extend the same amount under the water. But it falls away quite steeply beyond and I reckon if we can break through, we might be in business. Hit it with all you’ve got.’
‘Okay. Remember to hang on.’
This time the ice turned them without breaking. Although the ship’s bows were not only strengthened, but specially angled to ride up over obstructions, a five-foot wall went too far beyond the design specifications. Clotho slewed round to port and Richard was hurled against the safety ropes and almost lost his grip in spite of the fact that he was following Nico’s sensible advice. He hung on with all his strength, one hand on the line and the other round a stanchion. His angle, disconcertingly wide of the ship’s side, allowed him to see something that he had not included in his calculations so far. A great spray of water gushed out of number one hold through the hole in its forward wall. He was rolled back fully onto the deck by the counter-motion, and was able to hear the wild watery disturbance from within the ship just beneath him as he lay there, dazed and cursing himself for not being more careful. And as he lay there, looking at the impossibly beautiful blue sky immediately above his head, he suddenly had the strangest impression that he could hear voices echoing. It was too vague and far away for him to be sure of the words — or even of the reality of the impression. Voices rang in his ears, echoing on the wind, building to a kind of climax then fading into silence.
He lay for a moment more, listening to the wind and the hissing of the water below the deck. You’re cracking up, old son, he thought, then he picked himself up. The shock of the fall, and the unnerving experience of hearing voices, had deadened that elusive elation slightly, but when he looked at the point of impact, he saw that the crystalline face of the ice had crumbled. Grimly he dusted himself off and slid his walkie-talkie down to his hand from the position at his shoulder it had somehow achieved while he was rolling about on the deck. He walked across to the nearest box of deck safety equipment and pulled out a harness. He slipped it on, buckled it tight and slid the catches over the safety lines nearest his favourite observation post. ‘Right, Nico. Let’s just try that again, please.’
*
And so the morning passed. Within three hours they had broken through four low ice dunes and gouged a straight channel the better part of half a mile in towards the lower slopes of the central ridge. Here their progress slowed dramatically. Once the ice wall at the water’s edge was too high for the bows to ride up over, they were reduced to battering it aside, foot by foot. Slowly, inexorably, as the target ice thickened, the upper edge of it rose towards the damaged section of the bow and Richard at last was forced to call a halt.
‘It’s nearly time for the noon contacts in any case,’ he said to Nico over the walkie-talkie. ‘I want to know what’s going on aboard Atropos, and I’d better report in to head office.’ He pulled off his harness and left it hanging on the safety lines. At first he walked wearily, for the extravagant motion of the bows had taxed his knee joints sorely, but as he saw what they had actually achieved, as his vision rose from the ice immediately beside the ship and began to take in also the black channel they had created stretching back through the cracked and bobbing jumble of little floes to the emerald of the open sea, so a spring entered his step and he almost ran up onto the bridge.
Nico was poring over the chart table when Richard came into the wheelhouse. ‘Talking of contacts,’ said the first officer. ‘This has just come in. I’m trying to sort it out. Look.’
It was another enhanced satellite picture of their section of the Labrador Sea. Even with the calm weather and the near-perfect conditions, not to mention the advanced computer enhancement techniques which had been used on it, the picture was not all that clear. ‘Probably the solar flares again,’ said Nico glumly as they stood, trying to make out the detail. Most of the picture was uniform white. From the top of the square, stretching down over what must have represented the better part of a hundred miles, the white was featureless. Only in the bottom third of the frame and in the western reach was there any difference. Here the absolute white gave way to absolute black. In the west it was as though something massive had simply been dropped, shattering the glassy surface around it, but the black spider’s web of cracks seemed to fade as, for some reason, the picture lost definition in that area. The area of vagueness spread south, in fact, until the shattered cracks around it joined the thicker line of black which Richard had come to recognise as the clear water along the north of the ice barrier. And, now that he could recognise the ice barrier, he began to see more detail within it. Certainly the picture gave some idea of the overall shape of the solid adversary lying between him and Robin, but when detail was required, it proved frustratingly vague.
More black at the foot of the picture showed the open water from which Clotho had just made her inroad. In fact, thought Richard, as his eyes began to water with the strain of looking so closely at something so ill-defined, it was just possible to make out the whole stiletto shape of the ice barrier for about three-quarters of its length. Its edges were perfectly clear in the east, but as the picture came west, so things began to get vague, especially on the northern shore. That hole where the black cut into the white from the south must be the bay they were currently sitting in. There was no channel marked, for the picture must have been taken earlier. Yes. That bright dot east of their present position must be Clotho and that one due north of it Atropos. They were in their original positions as they would have been soon after dawn early this morning. Since then Clotho had come five miles west. This must be the bay. What lay opposite it on the north shore? He strained to see, but that vagueness made it impossible to be certain. If anything, the pale unfocused area lying spread across the black made it look as though the ice extended north suddenly from this very point right to the western edge of the photograph. But that couldn’t be true, surely.
Without conscious thought, he lifted the faxed photograph and walked to the clearview. Had he been reasoning clearly and consciously, his thoughts would have gone along predictable lines: here we are exactly to the south of this vague area. There is an ice ridge perhaps ten metres high half a mile in front of us, but from the bridge I should be able to see over it quite clearly. Even if I cannot estimate how wide the ice barrier actually is at this point, I should still be able to look directly into the vague area from the photograph and maybe get some idea as to what is actually out there. He was not thinking that clearly. He was simply a man walking across a ship’s bridge with a fax of a picture in his hand, hoping to get something straight in his mind. He actually laid the picture on the console under the clearview and straightened it carefully, deep in his brown study, before he looked up.
When he did look up, he was looking beyond the crest of the central ridge of the ice barrier before him for the first time since perhaps ten o’clock. And what he saw had as much effect upon him as it had upon Robin when she had seen it earlier.
She had been looking at it from very much closer and a great deal lower down, but such wa
s the impact that Richard, too, had his breath stolen and his sense of proportion and reality ravished. It was as though a man who had grown used to looking only at the tenements at the end of his street should suddenly have discovered that a mountain stood beyond them. His eyes ached as they refocused themselves, stretching his vision far beyond that suddenly paltry ridge to the silent majesty of the iceberg beyond. He looked down at the fax, but he hardly saw it. He made the gesture not as a man who wishes to check something but more like someone who squeezes their eyes closed when confronted with something incredible. When he looked up, everything was exactly the same; in fact the distant, lustrous cliffs seemed to have grown clearer and more real in the interim.
‘Nico,’ he said, quietly. ‘Would you come here and look at this?’
Something in his tone alerted Nico who, frowning, joined him at the clearview. Alerted or not, the down-to-earth Italian looked out into the bright blue noon without actually comprehending what his captain was talking about. The mist made the base of it so vague, especially as the ridge of the ice barrier proved to be such a strong sky line against it. And above the grey backdrop, so far into the sky, who would have supposed the dazzling whiteness to have been anything but clouds? So his eyes, like those of the satellite looking for weather systems far above their heads, were fooled. ‘What?’ he said.
‘You don’t see it?’
‘Che...?’ He did feel that something was amiss, enough to slip back into his native tongue as he concentrated, but still he could not see, until ... ‘Dio mio!’ he breathed. ‘My God!’
Just at that moment, Bill Christian stuck his head out of the radio shack. ‘Atropos reporting, Captain,’ he said.
Richard dragged his eyes away from the upper slopes of the distant iceberg and answered, ‘Take it for me, would you, Bill, unless there’s anything important.’
Bill vanished and Richard remained where he was for a few moments more, until Nico said, ‘I didn’t see it. I was looking at it and I didn’t see it. It’s too big. Too big to understand immediately.’
When his lieutenant put it like that, Richard suddenly realised that the people on Atropos might have their comprehension fooled in the same way. ‘Bloody hell,’ he said, and strode across to the radio room. ‘Let me have that mike a moment,’ he asked, just loud enough to overcome the buzzing in Bill Christian’s headphones. And put it on broadcast,’ he added as the radio officer looked up at him.
The microphone felt warm in his hand and he realised how cold he had become. It was shock, probably, he thought. ‘... reported on arrival at the first bay,’ Harry Stone was saying as Bill flipped the switch. ‘Wide and shallow, perhaps with a good beach for pulling her up. Then she—’
‘They’re tearing the place up down there!’ an urgent voice broke in.
Richard frowned. ‘Stone, what —’
‘They’re out of control!’ screamed the voice from Atropos, magnified by the radio link.
‘Stone! What’s going on?’ demanded Richard. ‘Stone! Answer me!’
But the radio was dead.
27 - Day Eleven
Saturday, 29 May 12:00
It could hardly be said that Timmins was holding the watch any more than he was really in command of Atropos during Robin’s absence. He was on the bridge, however, and on the verge of commanding action when Hogg found him.
Timmins had no real duties currently, and did not have the imagination or the inclination to think ahead. Since Black’s sudden collapse, he had been rudderless. He was willing to take orders from Captain Mariner, but only in the same spirit that an orphaned duckling will follow anything that moves. He did not really relish being told what to do by some limey woman with an upper-class accent and the airs of a princess. He was genuinely grateful to her for having come into the ice cave and rescued him, but he was not a generous soul and his thoughts on that subject were tinged by meaner considerations. He hadn’t liked anyone to see him so scared. He would probably have got out without all her grandstanding. He did not like being shown up in front of the men.
Black had run a hard ship as well as a tight one and Timmins was well aware that Captain Mariner had got away with so much in spite of her sex because she had her own crew aboard with her and had somehow earned their loyalty. At the first hint of disgruntlement from Atropos’s men, the word had gone out from Clotho’s that they would protect their captain, no matter what the cost. But there was no one looking out for Timmins, so being hauled aboard by a woman had damaged him in his men’s eyes more than he cared to admit. He currently ranked only a little higher than Hogg and he knew it. The only officer left aboard who held any of the men’s respect was Harry Stone. Then again, no; that wasn’t quite true. LeFever never had any trouble and the engineers, too, asserted their authority when they needed to. But LeFever was away with the captain, the engineers were still convalescent, and when Hogg ran onto the bridge, Timmins only had Stone to turn to.
He had been hanging around the radio room half hoping that Captain Mariner would include some kind of order for him when she next radioed in. He was not a man who particularly relished being idle and, in truth, Captain Black had never allowed him a moment’s rest and he felt the weight of his inactivity now when things were so obviously bad and there was clearly so much to be done. But it was the wrong Captain Mariner on the radio when he arrived and so he just sat and listened to Stone’s report to Clotho, while anticipating some lunch. Since Clotho’s chef had come aboard, the food had improved one hundred per cent, for he had awoken the spirit of competition in Atropos’s own temperamental galley staff.
And, to be fair to her, Captain Mariner had found the time to do some checking and improving down there as well. Just like a woman: get the kitchen sorted out. And now he thought of it, the laundry service had improved too ...
The captain herself broke in on these thoughts by making a connection on the radio. She came through to Stone first, but the tenor of her voice was clearly identifiable even coming out through his earphones. He switched over to broadcast and her words filled the room. ‘Mr Timmins, I want you to retrieve the shore lines and start the manoeuvring system. It will only move you at a knot or two as though you were in harbour, but it will be better than nothing. Make what speed you can along the ice barrier following the course I took in the lifeboat this morning. I shall be coming back to meet you, but I want all speed made, please. Mr Stone, report to Clotho for me. Tell them I came west this morning looking for a natural slipway in the ice ...’ Stone flipped the broadcast button to off and listened to his orders in private.
When he signed off from his captain and called over to Clotho, Timmins was still sitting there. Captain Mariner had given him the one order he didn’t want to hear: he wanted nothing whatsoever to do with the ice. The ice frightened him. It had tried to kill him only yesterday and had very nearly succeeded. He didn’t want anything to do with getting lines back off the ice. He would delegate the job to Hogg and go wake up the chief engineer. Yes, that was it. He would send Hogg onto the ice and go down to the engine room with the chief to check on the best way to engage the little manoeuvring propellers. He certainly didn’t want to make any mistakes about which propellers he wanted ...
Hogg’s face drove all thoughts from Timmins’s mind, for it had trouble written all over it. ‘Timmins,’ gasped the fat officer. ‘You got to back me on this. It’s O’Brien. There’s others too, but O’Brien’s the ringleader.’
‘What is it?’
‘They’re tearing the place up down there. They’re looking for Reynolds’s stash. I told them to stop it and go get some lunch but they told me to fuck off. They’re out of control!’
Timmins swung round to look at Stone. The radio officer’s eyebrows had risen and he was looking out of the radio shack at the two officers in stunned surprise. Hogg’s words had gone straight across the airwaves to Clotho as a corollary to the half-completed report from Atropos, but he didn’t seem to have realised this. Still looking at them, his mind cl
early engaged in what they were saying rather than what he was doing, he switched the radio off. He was not in the habit of breaking contact in this abrupt way, but this looked like a crisis to him and the two officers in the wheelhouse clearly hadn’t much of a clue what to do.
‘Log them. Dock them a day’s pay,’ suggested the first officer uncertainly.
‘You’re kidding, Timmins. This is serious. They don’t give a rat’s ass about a day’s pay. In the first place they’re looking for thousands of dollars’ worth of assorted drugs. In the second place they don’t think anyone’s going home to collect any pay in any case.’
‘Well, what do you want me to do?’
‘I don’t know, but I tell you this. It’s a direct refusal to obey an order. That’s mutiny, for fuck’s sake, Timmins. You got to do something.’
‘You’re winding me up, Hogg. Mutiny, for Christ’s sake! You can’t call it mutiny.’