Powerdown (Richard Mariner Series)

by Peter Tonkin

  ‘Not possible. We can work within the day, if we’re lucky,’ said Kyril. ‘But there are too many chips in here which know it is December the thirty-first, nineteen ninety-nine. If they come into conflict with the central clock, they’ll close down.’

  ‘But these clocks are accurate down to thousandths of a second,’ said Richard.

  ‘Yeah,’ said T-Shirt. ‘So it’s a bit of a gamble, but it’s all we’ve got. So here we are. Central clock. With no checks or back-ups, we hope. Current date is 12:31:1999. New date 12:31:1999. Current time is 23.58 and counting. New time? Whaddya think, Kyril? 01.58 and ENTER. That buys us twenty-three hours. If it works we can keep doing it over and over until we think of a better plan — or until the ship is safe in dock.’

  They sat silently, watching the figures spin. ‘Seems to have bought that OK,’ said T-Shirt. ‘What do you think, Kyril?’

  ‘I don’t know. It was very close. We will have to wait and see, I think.’

  ‘Well, we haven’t time to just wait here and see,’ said Richard. ‘We’ve a hell of a lot more to do.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said T-Shirt. ‘You’re right. I’ll set this up the way it was. Just take a minute.’

  In a few moments the screen was back to blue. Automatically, he reached over to switch the VDU off, but Kyril stopped him superstitiously. ‘Leave it on screensaver,’ he said. ‘It might just help.’

  ‘Can’t do any harm,’ said T-Shirt accommodatingly, and so they left it. Richard, last out, turned back to close the door — just in time to see the screen click over to a picture of a dancing baby. He smiled automatically as though the baby was real and closed the door softly.

  So that he did not see, the instant after the lock clicked shut, the baby freeze in mid-pirouette and slowly begin to fade.

  The bridge was a purposeful bustle when Richard got back to it. The weather seemed to have eased a little, certainly the first thunderstorm had spun away towards the Weddell Sea, like the first wing of a blitzkrieg. Yazov had laid the new co-ordinates into the Differential Shiphandler and the requisite headings were already clicking into the computer guidance system. Kalinin was turning a little westward already and seemed to be riding slightly easier. Irene had called for full ahead and the ship’s ice-strengthened hull throbbed to a new urgency.

  Kyril was back in his den working on his dead equipment but the other programmers were nowhere to be seen. Robin was deep in conversation with Irene, two experienced captains debating the balance between speed and stability; retracting the stabilisers would give everyone a rougher ride but would add several knots to the ship’s dash for safety. Varnek had pulled out another couple of charts and was preparing to slide them under the Perspex of the chart table. They were detailed charts of Deception Island, and he and Yazov were deep in conversation with Colin and Kate Ross about approaches and cross currents, and how to get safely in through the reef-fanged narrows of Neptune’s Bellow.

  Richard strolled over to Varnek’s table and looked at the latest weather printout. The vicious storm was swinging in behind them. That’s why it had eased, a very temporary relief, as it gathered itself to strike again. The last six hours of their approach would have that and God knew what else running up behind them. The full force of the storm would come after them at hurricane force and worse, gusting off the Beaufort scale altogether by the look of this weather map. Winds of that force would tear great chunks of brash and bergy bits off the blue-white masses south of them and hurl them northward like torpedoes. Richard remembered that iron-hard lump of deadly blue ice which had come so near to crippling Erebus and he shivered. It would be a close-run thing. And they’d be lucky to pull it off.

  ‘All laid in and running smoothly at fifteen fifteen hours exactly,’ said Yazov to Varnek who held the watch. ‘Coming up to full ahead at the captain’s order. Destination, Deception Island.’

  Varnek repeated the information to the captain for the log.

  Richard unconsciously clasped his hands behind his back, narrowed his eyes and squared his chin a little, bouncing on the balls of his feet, feeling Kalinin beginning her wild dash for safety.

  Robin, looking across the bridge and catching his unconscious gesture, smiled. Even in civilian clothes he looked so much in command here. But then she gave an uneasy little shiver. Thank heaven he wasn’t responsible for this ship, these people, in this situation, in this much danger, she thought to herself. Thank God they seemed to have got the computer thing sorted out at least. She shivered once again.

  And Kate Ross said, quietly, ‘is it me, or is it getting cold in here?’

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Kalinin’s epic run to Deception took nine hours. For each and all of those hours, the forces of law and order aboard, other than Jolene, were held by duty and circumstance on the bridge as everything took second place to the survival of the ship and those aboard her. As the hours ticked by, safety and disaster came ever closer.

  During that time Kalinin covered nearly 150 miles of heaving, storm-swept ocean, speckled with berg and bergy bits, crusted with growler and floe. The strange black water itself was made heavy and hard by temperatures and wind chills which should have frozen it solid in moments but for the power of the tempest agitation which simply refused to let the briny molecules fuse fast enough.

  Had Kalinin’s hull not been ice-strengthened and her bows those of an ice-destroyer, she might well have shattered as though she was made of glass, the metal of her battered sides rendered fragile by the strange, sub-zero water, as Titanic’s were said to be. Had her propeller, unlike Erebus’s, not been guarded in a heated, ice-proof cage, she would have been crippled before the run got under way, for the storm did not hesitate for long but threw its terrible frozen armoury in behind them from the instant that the captain gave the order to go north.

  The hurricane, gusting well off the Beaufort scale, swung in hard from the south and west as Richard had predicted, howling after them at velocities more than ten times their own speed. The wind, like the water, was armed with ice. Hailstones the size of tennis balls hurled forward and down relentlessly at one hundred and fifty miles an hour, shattering on impact, half melting under the awful physical laws of compression, and freezing on the instant. The tops of the black waves were twice as thick as whale oil and half as cold as liquid nitrogen. They tore off in chunks, already setting solid in the wind, and spattered like jelly onto the superstructure, clinging and transforming into deadly carapaces of ice. Ice can make a tree trunk from even the thinnest line, multiply the thickness of even the stoutest wall, make ice hills out of flat decks, up-end whalers and turn trawlers turtle within the hour. But Kalinin had been fashioned in Gdansk to run north at the world’s far end, to override the waters between Murmansk, Zemlya and the Pole. She had a draught and a depth, a solidity in the ocean which shrugged off such danger. Her rigging lines were few and well-protected. The areas most at risk from icing could be heated from the engine room, for as long as the engines ran. And, like the pumps and the engines themselves, the system had a manual override to its computer controls.

  And the ship was brilliantly commanded and conned. The details of her course and speed were largely in the control of the automatic guidance system which communicated with GPS satellites, weather sats and ice-warning sats. It was able instant by instant to take readings of wind and sea, drift, current, dangers ahead and behind, so it guided Kalinin with superhuman authority and accuracy at full possible speed north towards distant Deception. But the humans knew, as the machine did not, that the information, the accuracy, the guidance keeping them alive might well be a temporary thing, as prone as Major Schwartz’s suit and Erebus’s ancient electrical system to total powerdown. The commander and her officers stood tirelessly at their posts, with one eye on the relentless sweep of the minute hand on the ship’s old-fashioned analogue chronometer. They checked the information feeding into the ship-handler system, ready and able at a moment’s notice to re-interpret information, override the sys
tem and get Kalinin out of trouble for themselves.

  The strife outside was reflected aboard. Computer garbage whirled across the dying screens like a blizzard as the computers went down one by one and information, systems — and, latterly, people — began to freeze at the arctic touch of the bug. T-Shirt and Max worked with Borisov while Dai worked with Kyril and the engineers who could be spared, fighting like doctors in an epidemic to re-awaken the dead systems and keep the last few survivors up and running. The failure of the environment system at three, in spite of their best efforts, hit them all hard. The next hour passed in a whirl of activity as the weather system was checked and they passed on down to the navigation and propulsion systems.

  The TVs had gone down with the communications, the heating had gone down with the environmental control system and the galley was beginning to grind to a halt. People were milling about with nothing to do, depressed, cold, hungry, bored and looking for mischief.

  Vivien Agran did not have to look far for mischief, and had Varnek not been locked on the bridge like a monk in a monastery, she would have called on him to do some lethal mischief long ago herself. She was in possession not only of the priceless Power Strip but the disk on which its specifications were stored, the one at the bottom of Ernie Marshall’s bag, the other still tucked against her left breast. And, like Killigan and Hoyle, she had an Internet address where contacts would be willing to pay prices beyond immediate reckoning, if she could only get the information out. Her negotiation with Killigan had established some common ground, some shared ambitions and some apparent agreements, but no trust. When she failed to return either the Power Strip or the disk after communications failed, lack of trust became confirmed suspicion. Without Varnek and his cosh, Vivien knew she was exposed. While Killigan and Hoyle plotted and planned how best to reach and deal with her, the bored and the restless passengers began to beat a path to her door, looking for the recreational devices only she could supply. And it was her job to furnish that supply, no matter what the risk. Literally as well as figuratively, her door was always open, and since communications crashed, she could no longer rely on her computer to give her a clear picture of who was standing outside it.

  *

  Jolene was keeping her head down as well. The ship’s computer network had crashed with the general communications system, but she had managed to find a couple of start-up disks, a systems disk and a word processor she could use on the library machine if she set it up as a stand-alone. It was frustratingly slow work, made infinitely more difficult by the fact that the ship was pitching and rolling with increasing ferocity, so that time after time she hit the mouse key or some part of the keyboard by accident, and scrambled the programs she was trying to use. It was a nauseating motion, too, this brutal up at the stern, down at the bow, sudden wrenching corkscrew to starboard that Kalinin was performing. It made Jolene’s stomach rebel with increasingly acid disgruntlement, bringing the green sweat of seasickness to her tingling skin. And her sweat-dampened clothing let the increasing chill in with distracting intimacy. Even so, she did not really register the change in temperature until she noticed that her breath was clouding on the computer screen. God’s teeth! If only T-Shirt could have been with her. The word processor fitted badly with the records she was trying to unlock. Simply finding Killigan’s logs was frustratingly difficult. Finding the back-ups without access to the network’s big file-management system was next to impossible. And when she did finally find something she wished to open, the pages of computer babble made the files almost too impenetrable to read.

  But Jolene was on target now. The pattern of what had been done in the past and what was planned for the future was beginning to emerge in her mind, with all the suspects in their proper places, and their guilt unanswerable. But as things stood, she was unlikely to get the chance to pass on her discoveries to any higher authority — other than the one whose name she kept taking in vain. And that brought her round full circle and made her, unknowingly, Vivien Agran’s fellow in misfortune. For computers and disks were her Achilles heel independently of the bug; the man she relied upon to help her with this was involved in trying to save the system, the men whom she was fighting knew what she was up to and were increasingly careless of what they might have to do to stop her, and the man she was counting on for protection if the going got rough was trapped on the bridge and likely to stay there until Kalinin reached safe haven in the volcanic heart of Deception.

  *

  Richard stood on the port bridge wing looking back over Kalinin’s stern. Occasionally he would pull his binoculars away from his eyes and glance down at the battered face of his Rolex. It was coming up to four o’clock. Unless the computer boys had found a way to overcome the bug, they would lose the weather systems soon. Then the navigation and propulsion at five, unless the chief had put the overrides in place.

  Vasily Varnek stood beside Richard, also straining his eyes to see through the combination of roiling murk, whirling ice storm and freezing spindrift. The rear of the bridge wing was brightened by a long window; thick-glassed, steely-hard and shatterproof. It was rapidly becoming disturbingly opaque as the ice built up on it but, mused Richard grimly, looking ruthlessly on the bright side, that at least meant that the forward-facing clearview section was getting an easier ride. A bolt of lightning, as well defined as an inverted tree of magnesium light, slammed down to the yeasty wave tops immediately behind them. Richard was surprised how rarely Kalinin herself had been struck so far. He had been waiting for the simple electrical power of the tempest to do what the bug had failed to do so far and rob them of their eyes as well as their ears. All the equipment aloft was in strong protective golfballs, wind-resistant and ice-proof, but the sheer power of the lightning strikes stalking their heaving wake was easily sufficient to burn out every circuit keeping their machines in contact with the weather satellites above.

  Richard lowered his binoculars and walked slowly, carefully, to Colin’s side, the twisting heave of the pitching deck playing havoc with his pin-supported knees. ‘Colin,’ he kept his voice low, ‘if the radar went, could we send someone down to the forecastle head to act as lookout?’

  The wild white walls of the ice storm actually seemed to close in front of the square bulk of the bridgehouse, as solid, overpowering, and deadly as the walls of the cleft in the moraine. They met in a howling distance where the forecastle head reached out over the wilderness ahead. Even as Richard spoke, the hull up-ended as a big sea, fanged with a solid ram of ice, came in under her transom. She dived forward and down to starboard, digging her bows in like a cruiser running at flank speed. A blue-black mountain of green water whirled into a whelter of blue-white foam and ran away, leaving thick, glittering tracks as though great slugs had gathered there.

  ‘If you could get a man down there, which I doubt, he wouldn’t last more than a minute or two,’ said Colin.

  ‘So we have to assume we can only keep watch from up here. And if navigation goes down, we’ll need to keep our eyes clear with a vengeance.’

  ‘Aye,’ said Colin grimly. ‘But ye’d better tell that to the god of storms out there. It’s his ice that’s blinding us. His thunderheads that have buried the sun. His hurricane that is pushing this ice storm. And his waves as high as houses that are coming after us at more than a hundred miles an hour.’

  ‘Still,’ said Robin, joining the little group, with Varnek’s latest weather-sat print-out in her hand, ‘the clearview’s working well enough!’ She held up the picture Varnek had just handed her. It was stamped with the fax arrival time: 15.55.

  ‘Only for as long as we have power to heat the glass and move the wipers,’ said Richard. ‘We have to plan for worst-case here. If we lose navigation and the rest of our electrical power, how will we see to steer?’

  ‘That shouldn’t happen, even in worst-case,’ said Robin. ‘The alternators have manual override as well as the engines. Even if the system shuts down and shuts them down, the chief should be able to fire th
em up again and give us electricity!’

  ‘Well, in that case,’ said Kate, joining in as well, ‘it’s a great pity they didn’t back up the environmental heating system with more old-fashioned electric fires.’ She shivered. ‘It is getting really cold!’

  ‘Yes,’ said Robin. ‘I think I’d better go down and check on the twins. I’m sure Gretchen will have thought to wrap them up well, but …’

  ‘You want me to come?’ asked Richard. His eyes wandered back up to the clock: four minutes to four and counting.

  ‘No, darling,’ she answered, her still, level grey eyes fixed on him. ‘You and Colin keep planning for your worst-case scenario. Even though you’re not in command, you’ll be worth your weight in gold braid if things get really tough.’ She glanced across to Irene and Vasily Varnek. ‘I, for one, would feel a lot safer simply knowing you’re still up here, I really would.’

  ‘I’ll come, then,’ said Kate at once. ‘I could do with a few more layers. What about you two? Or does the worst-case scenario not include pneumonia?’ She looked up at the ship’s chronometer. ‘And should we try to be back by four to learn the worst about the weather system?’

  ‘No need to worry,’ said Colin. ‘But I could do with my big Arran right about now.’

  ‘Me too, please,’ said Richard, feeling slightly uneasy to be discussing such mundanities in the midst of such turmoil. During the next four minutes the tension on the bridge became all but unbearable. No one talked or moved. Varnek kept checking his weather monitoring system with almost frenetic insistence. And it was only when the minute hand was almost at the five past position that he said, ‘Clock reading four minutes past midnight, January the first, two thousand, Captain. Your programmers have pulled us through on this one at least. Weather system still running.’