Powerdown (Richard Mariner Series)

by Peter Tonkin

  *

  Jolene did not go down to luncheon and spent the afternoon watches going through the back-up records stored with the downloaded central network on six 3½-inch floppy disks which she could slip in and out of the port in the side of her laptop. The two systems were not quite compatible and she found her investigations slowed by pages of impenetrable computer babble. As she worked as swiftly as babble and due care dictated through the mass of information and records, her mind became freed of the icy shackles of the Big White and her position here on the edge of it. She became again what she was most supremely: a lively mind on the shores of the third millennium; a child of the next century. And she began to wonder how much of this mass of information on Armstrong’s network was confined to the network.

  Colonel Jaeger had put his report straight through to NASA HQ using the base’s satellite phone. She had done something similar herself, though her system was state of the art and far in advance of anything she had seen down here. But how secure was the network? There were stringent locks and bars in place to prevent hackers breaking in from the outside, but what was to stop someone on the inside simply sending information out on the Internet? There were places — France, Japan and Russia sprang to mind — where just the specifications of Major Schwartz’s suit would be worth a fortune. Though Russian fortunes weren’t what they once were, these days. Not the legal fortunes, at any rate, if such things still existed in the mafia-haunted economic Armageddon of the Republic. Nor were Japanese ones, come to that. She should have a look at the records of satellite phone time over the last few days — assuming they could be trusted any more than Hoyle and his cronies’ logs, the vehicle movement and fuel consumption records, and the explosive materials book. ‘Going round in circles here, Jolene,’ she decided eventually. She stretched until her shoulders popped, looked at the time and realised she was so hungry because it was dinner time. She had missed not only lunch but smoko and the quaint, old-Navy ‘pour-out’ at eighteen hundred hours. She didn’t mind that; she was an abstemious person. Somewhere in the back of her mind, however, she remembered that in spite of the fact that it was a Tuesday, the day’s menu on the wardroom display board promised roast beef And that was something that the British seemed to do even better than gallantry. Knight-errantry, she thought, unfastening the bolt, exiting and locking the door with her big new key.

  Robin gave her a welcoming grin and gestured her over to the Mariner table as soon as she entered the dining salon. Jolene was pleased enough to go, aware of all too many eyes upon her, in spite of the fact that she was back behind the battlements of pullover and jeans.

  The meal was superb. Replete and relaxed, bed beckoned. The twins had been so saintly that they had been allowed to stay up late. It was Richard and Jolene who took the pair up together, for Robin and Kate were down doing their last quick tour of the sickbay.

  Jolene was still feeling gently and indulgently motherly when she went to bed. Before she removed any clothing she turned her new key in her new lock and slid her new bolt home tight. Her sense of security was only briefly undermined when she could not find her fine cotton nightdress. Still, it had been a bit too flimsy in any case. Jolene drew out a clean, lengthy, very much more substantial garment. Wrapped up like the oldest of old maids, she tucked down, virtuously determined not to dream of T-Shirt Maddrell — or any man at all if she could help it.

  Jolene woke up. She was hot. Very hot. The whole of the end of her bed seemed to be burning against her feet. She sat up and her face filled with smoke. Her cabin was on fire. An alarm bellowed out of the tannoy. Feet scurried in the corridor outside. The whole ship must be alight. Refusing to panic, though choking for breath, Jolene swung her legs out of bed. The floor was blessedly cool against the scorched soles of her feet. She reached over to switch on the light but could not find the switch. Disorientated, fighting for control, she sat in the resounding darkness, fearful of breathing in the smoke and aware that she had no more time to look for the stubbornly elusive switch. Still thinking quickly and coolly, she knelt. Her lifejacket was under her bunk. She should take it and go to her assembly point. On the floor there was less smoke. She gulped down a draught of clearer air. Her head began to clear too. What else should she take? The laptop with the records. Had she any chance of getting Schwartz’s body out of cold storage? Almost certainly not. Smoke billowed down upon her. She pulled the lifejacket free, sucked clear air from the floor and pulled herself to her feet — and found herself in a blinding, choking, disorientating world where clear thought, clear sight and clear lungs were impossible. Her right hand held the life jacket, grim as death. Her left hand once again sought the light switch — in vain. Gave up, sought the strap of the laptop’s travelling case instead. Thank God she had packed it all away last night, neat and tidy as always.

  She swung it off the bunk and onto her shoulder. Heart thumping painfully, self-control wearing thin, chest as vividly aflame as her cabin seemed to be, she walked blindly to the door. It wasn’t there. Panic rising, she felt along the wall, searching for the reassuring handle. She transferred her life jacket into her left hand and searched with her right, willing herself not to breathe, call out, cry. At last, unlike the light switch, there it was. She turned it. Nothing.

  Turned it again. The door would not open. Panic welled dangerously close to the surface, incapacitating, deadly.

  You stupid woman. You locked and bolted it. The voice came into her head clearly, as though someone was standing behind her talking.

  Life jacket swinging into and out of the way, she managed to find the key. Turned it. Wrenched the door. Stopped. Controlled herself with an epic exercise of will. While her right hand squirmed round the warm doorknob, she raised her left hand, life jacket and all, and found the neat little handle of the bolt. She had just enough strength to pull it back if she was quick. Just enough strength before the smoke choked her or the fire broke through. Her fingers fastened on it, guided and controlled by her unshakeable will. But it would not move. It was stuck fast. As though wedged there. As though soldered into place, the bolt simply would not yield to her.

  Her self control failed her then. The volcano of panic erupted in her breast and the icy control in her head was swept away. For the last few instants of her life she sobbed and screamed and railed against the bitter helplessness.

  And the door burst back into her face, charged open by a big square shoulder dressed in a blue and green plaid dressing gown. With the shoulder came in fresh, clean air so that her lungs, gasping after her sobbing screams, sucked in life-giving oxygen.

  ‘OK?’ said Richard’s voice from somewhere beyond the orbit of Pluto. ‘Lifeboat drill, I’m afraid. Still, we need to be ready for the real thing …’ He stopped talking as he realised her cabin was full of smoke.

  And, in spite of her best intentions, she fainted into his arms.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Erebus’s routine lifeboat drill became a genuine emergency. While the passengers and crew shivered at their assembly points, a team of firefighters went to Jolene’s cabin. Half an hour’s work revealed that the emergency was not too serious. A few old rags, oily and combustible, had become wedged in the ducting and had begun to smoulder; they had not even really caught fire. The heat she had felt came from the ducting which passed by the end of her bunk. There would have been no real emergency at all, they concluded a little huffily, had she not insisted on having the bolt fixed to her door. Even those who found her attractive were less than sympathetic. It was generally agreed amongst the crew that she had brought the whole thing on herself. And so it was left to the slightly more understanding civilians to arrange the tea and sympathy she really rather needed.

  The whole emergency was over by 2 a.m. on the morning of Wednesday, the 29th. Under the circumstances, Andrew declared himself satisfied and did not call for the lifeboats to be swung out, whereupon Jolene rose in everyone’s estimation again, for the weather was closing in once more and swinging out the boats would h
ave been a cold, unpleasant business.

  The dazed Jolene returned to her smoke-smelling cabin, which had been declared safe if not wholesome. She closed the door, locked it and reached automatically for the bolt. It was hanging off of course, separated from the doorframe by the thrust of Richard’s shoulder. She was in the act of pushing the screws back into the torn wood, wondering whether her nail file would prove a strong enough substitute screwdriver to re-secure them, when she noticed something which turned the accident into something very much more sinister.

  As she moved the little brass bolt, trying to settle it against the frame, its shaft caught the dull light from the cabin bulb, making a glassy carapace glitter for an instant. Jolene looked closer. All around the shaft, where it crossed from door to jamb and slid into the second section, there was some sort of hard coating. Numbly, Jolene opened the door and looked at the frame. A section of it had broken off and was attached to the door. Jolene tried to prise it free, but it would not move, secured there by some powerful glue. Superglue by the look of it.

  During the night as she had slept, someone had crept silently past her door and squeezed Superglue into the crack so that it dripped over the bolt and glued it locked. The logical conclusion to be drawn from this was that whoever had glued her door shut had also filled her air duct with smouldering rags and waited for her to choke to death. The murder plot would have worked perfectly but for the lifeboat drill.

  Jolene crept to her bunk and pushed her shaking shoulders into the corner between the bedhead and the cold, vibrating wall, drew up her knees and spent the rest of the night watching the door.

  *

  What would have been the dawn came grudgingly and dully. The slow swoop up of the sun was distantly obscured by lowering battlements of cloud, piling in out of the west, driven by the same great weather machine which was piling icebergs so unseasonably along the west-facing coast of Graham Land. There was a sense of dull foreboding to it, of distant threat inevitably drawing closer.

  ‘I don’t much like the look of that,’ said Richard as he came onto the bridge after breakfast.

  Andrew looked up. ‘We’ll be all tucked up safe and sound in Palmer before anything hits,’ he said. ‘But I don’t think it’ll be all that bad really.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Richard. He strolled across to the weather prediction equipment. Like the ice-watching equipment, much of its information was satellite-generated. Low necklaces of weather sats were hung around the more turbulent weather bands. There was one above them now; a chain in series watching the roaring forties, the stormy fifties, and the huge unstoppable weather systems which whirled around them, unmoderated by any intervention of land. The conversation Richard had already had with Andrew about there being no land at their latitude except the spindle of Graham Land reaching up towards the dagger-point of South America stirred again in his mind.

  ‘Have you got a picture of the weather system out there?’ he asked the watch officer.

  ‘Yes, sir. That’s the latest one there.’ Beside the ice picture on the chart lay a satellite picture of a classic southern weather system, a perfect reversal of a northern hemisphere depression. Lines of latitude and longitude gave a clear location for the centre of the cloudy whirlpool 65 South and 70 West, just where it could make most trouble with the pack ice around Alexander Island, then sweep it all up towards them as it followed its generally eastward track.

  ‘Does this thing get you weather-sat pictures from anywhere you want?’ asked Richard. He was fairly confident with the new hardware but certain areas of the twenty-first century stuff left him floundering.

  ‘It certainly does, Captain. Just key in the figures and it’ll take the snapshot. If the nearest one can’t, it’ll pass the order round the chain. The further away you ask to look at, the longer it takes to come up with the goods, that’s all.’

  ‘Fair enough. How about our latitude but right round the other side of the world?’

  ‘Sixty-five South, then; and, what, one hundred East?’

  ‘Let’s say a hundred and ten East.’

  ‘OK, Captain. That shouldn’t take long. What with the earth’s curvature, it’s not actually all that far away. And nobody much will be asking to look at some lump of ocean not quite south of Australia anyway.’ As the lieutenant talked, he typed in the co-ordinates.

  The machine began to print almost at once and a darkly swirling picture emerged, tighter, deeper, blacker by far than the picture from their own side of the world.

  ‘Holy Moses,’ said the young lieutenant, awed. ‘What in heaven’s name is that?’

  ‘That,’ said Richard thoughtfully, looking away to the west, ‘is the squall that killed Major Schwartz. In the last five days it has crossed Graham Land and gone out over the Larsen Ice Shelf into the Weddell Sea. It has fallen off the ice shelf into the storm factory between the permanent pack and the Antarctic Convergence about level with Bouvet Island. It has run south of Tristan, over Prince Edward and Kreugen Island and it has been given a new lease of life by the conditions there which on the average day generate about the same amount of energy as ten big nuclear power stations. Have you seen the original Star Trek movie?’

  ‘Well, no, sir.’

  ‘It’s about this little spacecraft, the Voyager, which goes out from Earth, gets captured and adopted by an alien race which makes it the heart of a massive machine the size of a planet and then sends it back again. The people on the Starship Enterprise have to stop it before it destroys Earth.’

  ‘I see. Very interesting. If you like old sci-fi movies. However —’

  ‘That’s what’s happening to the squall that killed Major Schwartz,’ said Andrew as he crossed the bridge. He took the picture of the storm from the confused lieutenant and looked at Richard, frowning with concern. ‘It’s spent the last four days growing out of all proportion. And now it’s on its way back.’

  ‘With no land to moderate its force. Nothing but sea and ice and winds to make it worse. And it’ll be here in four days tops.’

  ‘Four days,’ said Andrew, looking up at the calendar automatically. ‘Happy New Year.’

  ‘Happy New Year indeed,’ said Richard.

  *

  ‘Richard, I think someone’s trying to kill me,’ said Jolene, meeting him as he came down from the navigation bridge, frowning.

  A lesser man might have raised an eyebrow, laughed aloud. Not Richard. It was not in his nature to mock. But he was worried about Jolene. The possibility of cabin fever did not seem too wild. He had seen it happen. Like most travellers and seafarers, he had read widely so he knew well enough that just being down here could affect the unwary as potently as an unsuspected drug.

  ‘What’s more important?’ he asked. ‘Who or how?’

  ‘I don’t know who yet but I’ll obviously have to get to them before they get another chance at me. As to how, I’ll show you.’

  There was nowhere aboard Erebus large enough to accommodate all of her complement, scientists, guests and wounded comfortably. But, with several on watch above and below as the weather worsened from the west, some still bedridden and at least one dead in his gently vibrating drawer, there was just room for everyone to stand in the dining salon. This they were summoned to do the instant luncheon was cleared away.

  ‘It has come to my attention,’ Andrew Pitcairn said loudly, ‘that there has been some dangerous horseplay going on. Some utterly unacceptable bullying.’ Bullying was the worst he could bring himself to believe of his own men. And even his American guests seemed variously incapable of anything much worse. ‘The object of this unwanted attention has been Dr DaCosta. Her cabin has been searched; her clothing disarrayed and misappropriated. Last night smouldering rags were placed in her cabin ducting on purpose and the bolt on her door tampered with. All of this childish horseplay will stop forthwith. I will not single out Dr DaCosta further by placing her under guard, but she and her quarters will be watched carefully until we can offload her and her associates at Palmer
in six hours’ time. Do I make myself clear?’

  The officers and crew of Andrew’s command made supportively awed positive noises. The Americans in particular looked askance at this sledgehammer approach, especially when the threats — and then-objects — were so vague.

  But still, as the captain said, six hours to Palmer base. What could possibly go wrong in so short a space of time?

  *

  ‘What do you think of that?’ Billy Hoyle asked Ernie Marshall on their way back down to the sickbay.

  ‘Put up the price of that nightie,’ said Ernie calculatingly. ‘Might have made me a packet. Why?’

  ‘Six hours,’ said Billy. ‘That’s just time to give her one more good fright. I really want her wetting herself by the time we get to Palmer. I need a little space.’

  ‘Wetting herself,’ said Ernie, rather savouring the prospect. ‘We should be able to arrange that, I guess. What had you in mind?’

  ‘She’s got all the records from Armstrong’s network downloaded onto disks.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Well, disks are only of any use if she can read them, so I was thinking maybe …’

  ‘Steal her laptop? A bit dicey.’

  ‘No. More subtle than that. She’ll likely as not be using it this afternoon, getting everything ready for when the Feds arrive in Palmer. But laptops are pretty fragile, you know? You got to be careful about things like current and feedback. So I was thinking, could we arrange a power surge? Up to her cabin? We’d be well away. Out of trouble. She would be there, with any luck a little bit braised, if you know what I mean, with her hard drive in ashes and her laptop melting all over the place.’

  ‘Jesus, Billy, I don’t know. I’d have to bribe some engineers pretty good. That’d be expensive. Difficult. Lot of — what do you call it — collateral damage. I think we can do it but it won’t come cheap.’