by Peter Tonkin
Had Sally been privy to the intensely private goings-on in the headset she might have raised an eyebrow. For Richard, glancing up and down at the exquisite figure standing before him, was working along the tool bar which hovered level with her knees. By the time Sally’s exercises were complete and the voyeurs in the ship’s entrails realised that they had somehow missed this unexpected treat, the girl in the virtual world had slightly squarer hips, a much deeper bosom and a much more defined musculature. Her face was longer, her cheekbones less high; her eyes were rounder and gold with green flecks. Her hair was red and she was no longer cleanshaven.
At the sound of the shower, Richard reached for the section of the tool bar which entered the virtual Sally’s figure into the machine’s memory and pulled the headset off. As he always did, he glanced around, waiting for his eyes to adjust, waiting for reality to click back into place. ‘Tell you what,’ he called, ‘let’s try a stroll. See how far up and down the companionways they’ll let us go and whether we can manage to bump into anyone other than guards.’ He meant Su-zi and Lawkeeper, the two Hos who were so militantly not siblings. Either would do, though the chances of being able to talk to them unobserved were very slim.
The morning was bright, clear and very hot. Sally and Richard stepped out into it soon after 9 a.m. local time. They went up on to the large area of uncluttered open decking which roofed the bridgehouse. Here they could sit apparently unobserved and talk more freely — except that five minutes later a squad of seamen arrived and busied themselves about some unspecified tasks which necessitated their being within five metres of the captives at all times. But it was pleasant enough up here even with the guards so close. The top of the navigating bridge was an area of decking perhaps five hundred metres square. The forward end overlooked the main deck and its piled containers. Beyond it the blue of the South China Sea was beginning to bustle with shipping again in the calm between the storms. The sides looked down on the bridge wings which overhung the gleaming waves and flying fish. The surface of the sea was distant, even to Richard who was used to ships much larger than this freighter, but the bridge wings seemed tantalisingly close. And halfway between the wings and the water hung their only real hope of escape — the ship’s main lifeboats. The after section looked back towards the ship’s freshly painted funnel and the cargo piled upon the poop. In the middle of the area was the ship’s main radio mast and Richard was almost sidetracked from his virtual reality plan by the wild notion of scaling it and somehow breaking into the ether to broadcast a distress signal on behalf of Sally, Lawkeeper and himself.
But as they had suspected, their freedom was less than it seemed. Half an hour established that there was little to do on the bridge deck other than to sunbathe, look at the view and discuss such inanities as they did not mind sharing with the crew. Attempts to descend by the starboard companionway were politely frustrated. On the way back down the port companionway, it was equally impossible to get on to the bridge wings or into the navigating bridge. They passed their own quarters and went on down. The companionway ended at deck level in a little half-deck, half-runway between the leading edge of the funnel and the rear of the bridgehouse. Here, too, they were free to wander but no further, and never quite alone. ‘I ain’t felt this overwatched,’ said Sally drily in a cod drawl, ‘since I brought my first boyfriend home for my daddy to meet. He was a lootenant and I was sweet sixteen. ’Nuff said.’
Attempts to ascend the starboard companionway were as thwarted as attempts to descend it, and further exploration inside the bridgehouse itself soon revealed that they were confined internally to the C-deck corridor that their quarters were located upon; there was a permanent guard on the captain’s cabin door.
‘What did the man say?’ asked Sally over a late lunch. ‘“Stone walls do not a prison make”?’
‘“Nor iron bars a cage,”’ completed Richard distantly. ‘Though personally I prefer Patrick Henry’s thoughts on the subject.’
‘“Give me liberty or give me death”?’
‘That’s the one. A bit extreme, but the sentiment was good. I think we’ve sat on our hands for long enough now. I think we ought to start seeing just how serious our position really is. There’s something … something in the air … ’ He trailed off and her wide green and gold eyes watched him solemnly until his mind clicked back into gear. ‘Anyway,’ he said after a moment, his own ice-blue eyes igniting again with that old, intense flame, ‘are you willing to do a little more exercising after lunch? I’ve some more work on the machine I want to do. Then, if you don’t mind, there’s something I want to show you.’
By three, as she stepped out of the shower, wrapped in a great towelling sheet like the most modest of virgin brides, Richard had pulled down all the scrolls on the tool bar and filled in the background to his flame-haired virtual nude. All unsuspecting, Sally sat down beside him and put on the headset. Without further warning, he pressed Play for her and sat back.
She made a sound as though she had been punched in the stomach very hard indeed. She fought to regain her breath, her hands, innocent of the gloves, waved in front of her as though she was trying to get to grips with what she could see in the machine. Then she lashed sideways and just missed his shoulder with what might have been a rueful punch or a crippling kung-fu strike. It never landed so he never knew.
‘You son of a bitch,’ she said at last. ‘And all the time I thought you weren’t looking.’
‘Keep watching,’ he ordered, rising. He crossed to the shower stall and turned it on full. On the way back he turned up the air conditioning. When he sat down beside her again she jumped. When he touched her she flinched. When he slipped the headset off her, her eyes remained unfocused for a moment, dazzled by what she had seen. He took her by the shoulder and pushed her back on to the bed, rolling half on top of her. His lips just brushed the pale shell of her ear as he breathed, ‘What you saw, a camera will see. If we find where the one watching us is then we can put that thing up in front of it and no one will realise it’s not really you until we’re out and well away.’
‘Jesus, Richard.’
‘I can vary the angle on the cabin background by rotating the whole three-dimensional picture to the angle of the camera — when we find out where it is. What do you think?’
‘No one’s going to be looking at the background, man. My God. That is uncanny!’
He sat up and turned away, crossing to turn the shower down again. As he did so, she sneaked a look at the headset where the virtually perfect simulation of her body was languidly and graphically exercising in a pretty accurate reconstruction of the day room outside.
Down in the tiny communications room on engineering deck A, exactly four levels below them, White Powder Ang sat cackling to himself, his day watch made, convinced he had just observed the gweilos performing in their bedroom. So much for the thoughts of the other watchkeepers who remained convinced the strange foreign devils were going to be able to keep their hands off each other for the duration! But of course all he had actually been able to make out was four feet in a compromising position sticking over the end of the bed and past the edge of the door frame — and a distant, decorous thundering in his headphones which had covered the sounds of their passion. It was definitely time, he decided, to move the camera and the microphone; he wanted to catch them exercising or fornicating in full detail before he killed them.
The feeling that something was in the air that had struck Richard during their stroll this morning was in fact the onset of the storm. The barometric air pressure had fallen relentlessly millibar by millibar during the twenty-four hours between noon on Wednesday and noon on Thursday. Then, at about four o’clock on Thursday, when the first dog watch signed on, it seemed to go off the edge of a climatological cliff.
Richard knew at once, the instant he and Sally walked out into the late afternoon and he got a good glimpse of the sky. He said nothing until they were up on the top deck again, then he walked over to the port-side r
ailing, his eyes narrow as he scanned the western sky between the reddish belly of the sun and the heavy black heave of the horizon. ‘Now that is convenient,’ he said. ‘There’s going to be a nasty blow soon; before dawn if I’m any judge. And unless Captain Song runs for cover — and previous experience leads me to believe that he will not do so — then everyone aboard will be far too preoccupied to worry about us.’
‘But experience has also shown that if there is a nasty blow,’ countered Sally, ‘the last place we want to be is in a vessel any smaller than this one.’
‘Good point. But the plan is not to go for the lifeboat in the first instance anyway.’
‘Well, what do we go for then?’
‘Lawkeeper. And maybe Su-zi if she’ll come with him.’
‘She sure as hell won’t come without him,’ said Sally wisely. ‘Trust me.’
‘I agree,’ he said. ‘Now, if we’re going to look for Lawkeeper before finally heading overboard, we have to be able to get in and out of the cabin without anyone noticing. Did the Special Forces teach you how to pick a lock?’
‘No,’ said Sally.
‘Pity,’ said Richard. ‘I suppose we can — ’
‘But the Thai police did,’ she added.
‘Now you tell me.’
‘Didn’t seem important before,’ she said. ‘Where was there to go?’
No sooner had they finished this snippet of conversation than the work party arrived again.
‘Bingo!’ mouthed Richard as they entered their cabin again half an hour later, after a little more innocuous chat and a great deal of calculated scanning of the horizon. He gestured at the comer where the forward wall met the port side of the bridgehouse and the C-deck corridor. Signs of a hurried piece of DIY where something had been removed were clearly visible. Out of a sloppily filled little hole there now came a fine, pale-yellow wire which had not been there before. Their eyes in concert followed the wire and searched for evidence of the re-installation. And there it was, in the comer above the door through into the cabin itself. If it was a fish-eye lens then this section of the day room and a good deal of the sleeping quarters were now under observation. He would have to do some re-programming and Sally would have to place herself for her exercises with care, but at least they now knew where the lens was. The plan could proceed as soon as the weather closed down.
The typhoon hit at dawn on Friday and all through that day, as it wound itself up into the storm of the century, the ship butted its way intrepidly as close to its course as safety would allow. Richard and Sally would hardly have wished to leave their cabin even had they been allowed to do so and they spent the whole of that increasingly foul day getting everything ready for the execution of their plan. This suited their situation well, for it involved Sally practising exercises more similar to the movements of her virtual self in the machine, in a location where she dominated what they imagined the camera could see. As she did this, Richard continued to re-programme the machine, trying to get the background accurate.
When he was satisfied, his next action was to design a simple but robust bracket to hold the headset in place in front of the camera’s eye and keep it there in spite of wind and weather. And this last was important. All day the monstrous storm had held the ship in its fist like an electric black giant who could not make up his mind whether to crush them, batter them or bum them to death. The ship had heaved, pitched and rolled increasingly wildly. Wind and water had battered the vertical surfaces of wood, steel and glass with terrifying intensity. Food had been reduced to noodle soup and cold rice as the galley closed down into its severe weather disposition. Their conversation, sporadic enough, had died as every attempt at communication was thwarted by the thunder as surely as by an importunate child.
At about five, the storm stopped abruptly and Richard took Sally out on to the streaming deck above the navigation bridge so that she could see what was going on. She had seen many things but never until now anything quite like this. They were in the eye of the storm. Although the sea was heaving and dark, the air around them was still and the sky above them cerulean. But all round that centre of innocent blue stood a black ring of towering thunderheads. They stood, looking forward, and the wild, shrieking rumble of the storm came creeping into their ears like a massed battle far away. ‘We’ve been in the storm for eleven hours,’ said Richard quietly. ‘We’ll be in the eye for an hour then it’ll hit again from the opposite direction and we’ll be in for another ten to twelve hours of it. The second half will be worse than the first.’ As if to emphasise his words, a huge bolt of lightning smashed down out of the cloud base dead ahead. Even from this distance it looked to be the size and shape of a giant redwood.
‘That’s bad,’ said Sally, referring to Richard’s weather forecast.
‘I’m not so sure. You’ll have noticed they haven’t got up here with their work team yet. They’re an excellent crew. I’ve been very impressed. But they’re getting tired now and they’ll have much better things to do than to babysit us. The worse it gets, the more freedom we’ll have.’
‘Oh, good.’
*
They moved at four the next morning, turning up the inextinguishable lights and making a brief pantomime — convincing enough under the circumstances — of mutual sleeplessness. The Virtuality machine went on to a little jury-rig stretched between the top of a cupboard and the top of a half-open door. Sally crossed to the door and wrapped herself round the handle like a spider round a juicy fly. By the time Richard had satisfied himself that the Virtuality machine was secure and running properly, she had picked the lock and the door was open.
They stepped out into the dimly lit corridor. There was no guard on the captain’s door. As expected, the exhausted crew were on duty or in bed. Richard’s plan was simple, and based upon the fundamental error of judgement they had forced from Flat-nose Ang. They now knew that the yellow wire belonged to the observation equipment. It seemed likely that if Lawkeeper was being held like them then, like them, he would be under surveillance. They proposed to follow the yellow wire down to the observation centre and then follow any other wire of similar colour and see where it would take them. Their use of the Virtuality equipment supposed that there would be someone stationed in the observation centre — but Richard was actually in two minds as to whether under the circumstances there would in fact be anyone to spare for such an apparently pointless duty.
This was not a theory they got the chance to test in the end but the plan to follow the wires worked well enough. Staggering slightly as the storm-bound ship battered its way relentlessly through the enormous power of the night, they followed the bright wire down three decks to A deck, and then down again into the first engineering deck. The whole bridgehouse seemed utterly deserted which was all to the good, for one glance would have given them away.
At the doorway into the observation room on the first engineering deck they paused. The wire they had been following snaked in and, on the other side of the frame, another one snaked out. It led them to the far side of the ship and up to A deck. With his heart in his mouth, like a schoolboy about some adventure in the boarding house, Richard stood watch as Sally applied herself to the handle. It yielded to her as spinelessly as their own lock had done.
Richard peered into the gloom of a tiny cabin, smaller than theirs but less well lit than the corridor. One shape stirred on a pair of bunks which lay to either side of the tiny room. ‘Lawkeeper!’ he hissed.
The occupant of the bunk sat up and Richard’s heart raced. It was the wrong man. This was someone much slighter than Lawkeeper. His hair was far longer than the policeman’s. God, they had made a terrible miscalculation! Richard began to swing away, mouth open to hiss a warning to Sally, when further movement stilled him. Behind the slight figure which was not Lawkeeper there rose another, squarer figure which was. A moment of revelation came which Sally would have found very old news indeed.
‘Su-zi! You almost gave me a heart attack,’ Richard breath
ed. ‘Lawkeeper,’ he hissed again. ‘Make some noise to clog up the mike and then try not to give us away to the camera.’
Su-zi, quick-thinking as always, began to clear her throat as though awoken by the need to spit in the good old-fashioned Chinese way. As she wheezed and hacked and hawked a wad of thick spit up from the bottom of her lungs, Richard continued to hiss his message. ‘Listen, I’ll say this just once. We’re going for a lifeboat the moment this moderates. Are you coming?’
Lawkeeper’s head shake was minimal but unmistakably negative.
Slightly deflated, Richard said, ‘Right then. Your decision. Good luck. Both of you!’ He pulled back. Sally swung in, closing the door again.
This time, as they knew where they were going and did not need to bother with the wire, Richard had leisure to admire the manner in which his companion moved through the flat bright corridors like liquid shadow. How she froze and whirled, balletically negotiating the companionways. How she never came out into a corridor at the same level twice and never ever at eye level. He marvelled at the way her hands seemed to fall of their own volition into a profile he recognised all too well — as though they were cradling a gun.
And the instant he ran in through the door into the day room Sally and he shared, he found himself very much wishing that she had been holding a gun. For there, in the middle of the bright room, staring with simple disbelief up at the contraption in the comer, was a crewman with a badly broken nose, and he did have a gun. Richard took the intruder’s presence in at a glance and dived forwards even as the stranger whirled. Bent at the waist like a prop forward going down to a scrum, knees protesting and back complaining, Richard charged forward. He saw little enough other than the flooring and a pair of soft-shoed feet. Then his shoulder connected with a slight midriff and the wall hit him hard on the top of the head. A shot rang out but Richard had no sensation of being hit. Then, amazingly, he was being thumped — on the ribs, the shoulders, the neck. The intruder, having fired, was using his gun as a club.