by Peter Tonkin
‘I say you’re well out of your league, Mr Marshall. You really do not know what you are dealing with. I would pack up my tent and move along if I were you.’
Ernie crowded up towards her, caught between lechery and threat. His arm pressed into one of her pneumatic breasts, unbalancing the perfection of her cleavage. Then their eyes met and he stepped back. On the second step he turned ugly. ‘Now you listen here, Viagra, or whatever they call you. You might be big stuff aboard this little tub surrounded by powder puffs, nancy boys and bunny girls, but I trained as a marine and I —’
‘Look,’ she said placatingly. ‘You haven’t seen everything yet. What about these? They are really something special. Virtual reality pornography.’ From the back of the cupboard she pulled two headsets which looked like thick pairs of wrap-around glasses and offered them to the men. ‘Sit down and take a look at what we’ve really got to offer,’ she tempted.
The pair of them sat and looked up at her, as gullible as Adam and Eve. They sat in the chairs beside her desk. They fitted the headsets over their eyes and, as they did so, she switched them on. Choking gasps came from tiny speakers in the arms of each one, sounds which could have been masculine or feminine; denoting pleasure or pain. Both men leaned forward, reaching out as though blind, their minds engaged instantly and disorientatingly in the drama that was being played out for their enjoyment.
As soon as she knew they were wholly absorbed, Vivien Agran rose and crossed silently to the door. She swung it open and there stood Vasily Varnek, summoned by the message from her computer to his. She glanced across the room to her unwelcome guests and raised her eyebrows. They were not the first who had tried to grab a piece of her action. They wouldn’t be the last. She and Varnek had an understanding and made a good team. He gestured silently with the blunt spade of his chin and she left. He entered silently, swinging the door shut soundlessly behind him. As he crossed the room, he pulled out of his pocket an old-fashioned cosh — a large egg of lead sitting on a heavy steel spring twenty centimetres long, wrapped in strongly stitched black leather. Without even pausing in his stride he brought the cosh down on the top of Ernie Marshall’s head, and swung round to do the same for Billy Hoyle. The stroke was meant to incapacitate, not kill. Varnek wanted the men dazed, helpless, open to reason — he planned to have a little talk with them. But it didn’t quite work like that. Ernie exploded upwards, his skull unexpectedly strong. The headset went spinning and he hurled himself straight at his assailant. Varnek turned, his blow smashing down onto Billy Hoyle’s shoulder, cracking his collarbone. Then Varnek rammed his elbow back, into Ernie’s face. The Englishman reared up and Varnek back-handed him across the forehead with the cosh.
Ernie flipped backwards as though poleaxed and landed on the back of his head with the full weight of his body. His head caught one of the dragon’s claw desk feet and there was a sharp report, like a gunshot, as Ernie’s skull shattered. Varnek had little leisure to worry about him just at that moment, for Hoyle had torn off his headset and was fleeing to the door. He tore it open and collided with Mrs Agran in the corridor. He tore past her and sprinted away into hiding. Varnek went after him, but he stopped at the doorway when Mrs Agran saw Ernie and screamed. Reluctantly the Russian turned and together they re-entered the room.
Five minutes later, Mrs Agran, white and shaking, only just in control of herself, was twisting the latches on her unusually large porthole. ‘He goes out here,’ she said. ‘If you’re absolutely sure.’
‘He’s dead,’ said Varnek bitterly. ‘We’d better get our alibis straight and prepare for a “man overboard” when Glazov does her rounds in the morning.’
‘He’ll be a popsicle by then,’ she giggled, on the edge of hysteria as the body slid past her and out into the bitter night.
The wave of hysteria threatening to overwhelm Vivien Agran frightened her. She hated to lose control. She sometimes saw her intelligence as something independent of her body and its occasionally overpowering demands. Her intelligence very clearly needed to rely on her body now. Her body needed to be quiet and calm so that she could maintain that icy control. Experience had taught Mrs Agran the quickest way to render her body submissive to her will, but it was not something she could do alone.
‘Vasily,’ she said to Varnek’s back just as he reached for the door.
Varnek glanced at his watch and then turned slowly. Vivien was standing, shaking, framed against the velvety blackness of her bedroom door like a candle flame. She briskly pulled her blouse out of her skirt’s waistline. Even before Varnek had taken a step towards her she had unzipped the skirt. She let it fall and flung the blouse to one side. She turned, sliding her fingers into the waist of a half-slip. He followed.
By the time Varnek’s square bulk filled the bedroom doorway, Vivien had switched on the bedside light and placed her foot on the bedcover, rolling her stocking down swiftly. Her bedroom was the opposite of her office, functional, impersonal. There were no pictures or statues to alleviate the white walls, the teak shelving. The only spot of colour came from the cover of a paperback, open and face down under the light. It was Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, Varnek noted distantly. She glanced across at him, seeing his great square hands rise to loosen his tie. The big, raw-knuckled hands were capable of surprising gentleness, she knew. Vasily himself was capable of unexpected tenderness and sensitivity. He was a very competent, complete lover. But sensitivity was the last thing Vivien needed now. She met his hot stare. ‘Do not,’ she said, and stopped. Her voice was shaking as badly as the rest of her. She took a deep breath. ‘Do not be gentle with me,’ she ordered, more loudly than she meant.
She had no sooner removed her second stocking than he threw her down upon the bed and tore her brassiere and then her panties off. King Lear’s line came into her mind as his sinewy power bore down on her. ‘Like flies to wanton boys are we to the Gods. They kill us for their sport …’ She closed her eyes and surrendered to the thrust of his body and the brute grasp of his hands.
As soon as they were finished they both rolled off the tumbled bed. Her legs were firm again and her breathing steady. She stooped and caught up the rags of lace, mopping herself briskly as she checked in her mirror that he had left no bruises anywhere they might be seen. As he pulled himself to his feet, she opened the small porthole and hurled her underwear out after Ernie Marshall. He could have made a fortune out of those, in certain circles, given the state they were in. But Ernie no longer occupied even the smallest corner of her mind. ‘I will go to bed now,’ she said, her voice steady and low. ‘I will check the videos of the corridors first and wipe any showing either Hoyle or Marshall near here.’
‘I’m on watch any moment,’ he rumbled. ‘But I think I’ll take a look around before I go up. I’ll certainly pay the hospital a visit.’
‘Hoyle won’t be there. He’s not stupid.’
‘You’re right,’ he said, zipping up his trousers, ‘but I’ll check anyway.’
*
The man overboard alarm was raised long before Dr Glasov did her first round in the morning, and Ernie was by no means a popsicle before the Zodiacs were in the water searching for him.
It was Richard and Jolene who raised the alarm. After their brief conversation with Andrew Pitcairn, the pair of them went straight down to the ward and found the two beds still empty. A report to Varnek resulted in a detailed search of the ship. The ship’s library of surveillance videos was consulted, but no clues lay there, possibly due to an unexplained failure in sections of the system between ten and midnight.
All common areas from keel to truck were given a thorough search, then the more obscure ones. But it did not occur to any of the searchers, for neither Varnek nor Vivien told them, that they might be searching for a terrified, injured, comatose man whose one ambition was to stay hidden. So they called out and passed on. Only when every other avenue had been explored did the reluctant captain call emergency stations and rouse everyone aboard, passengers an
d crew alike, from their beds, berths and bunks for a head count. Only the patients in the hospital escaped. By this time it was two thirty and Ernie had been bobbing in their wake for more than two hours, held up in the thick ice-oily water by lungs still filled with air, but beginning to frost over under the blustery overcast, floating and freezing; and lucky he was dead.
Irene was reluctant to allow Richard to go in the Sikorsky, but he managed to cajole her into letting him. The thing that struck him most forcefully as he ran across the benighted but still light deck was that the wind had shifted. Shifted in sinister fashion. The instant he felt it on his cheek he paused, looking at the sky. Obligingly, the midnight sun showed a blood-red gathering of mackerel skies overlaid with low purple wisps of mare’s tails. This traditional cloudy warning of severe frontal weather was given added impact by the effect of the blood-orange sun. There was no doubt in Richard’s mind as he hurried down the deck after his apparently oblivious companions that this was a red sky in the morning — and any sensible sailor would take a very clear warning.
Of course they knew their search held only the dimmest of faint hopes. They were looking for little more than a couple of heads, possibly frosted white by now, bobbing somewhere in the wake of the ship as much as six hours’ sailing time back. Moreover, the restless ocean was already littered with pieces of brash. They looked like blood clots floating in a sanguine sea. The light was so thick and garnet-tinged that only the magnesium power of the Sikorsky’s searchlight offered any hope.
The Sikorsky ducked and dived through gusting air. The temperature seemed to be falling off a cliff. And that probably meant that the barometric pressure was doing the same. During the hour of the search flight, the overcast gathered and darkened, making the strange nighttime scene look like an almost infinite abattoir full of slowly congealing gore.
They never found Ernie Marshall. The thickening brash under the strengthening wind finally caught him, crushing the air-filled balloon of his upper thorax between the jaws of a couple of clashing lumps of ice. He sank in a shroud of bubbles to abysses far deeper than Shakespeare’s five mere fathoms, where his eyes may very well have set like pearls, though his bones never made coral. The smear he left on the ice that crushed him was indistinguishable in the blood-red light, and was erased soon enough in any case when the storm rains came.
Chapter Nineteen
The dining salon was sparsely filled at 07.00 breakfast. After the disturbances of the man overboard alert, most of the people aboard were investing a little more sleep against the planned exertions of today and tonight. Not so Richard, whose internal clock had switched over to ship-handling time and who found a few hours’ sleep had left him full of energy and intellectual power. And Jolene DaCosta, spurred by the frustration of never quite being able to get to grips with her investigation, was filled with a burning need to be up and doing. T-Shirt Maddrell, who was almost unique aboard in having slept through the alert, now felt there was much to catch up on and rose from his bed in the sickbay to do just that, apparently none the worse for his swim in the Antarctic Ocean. He left Dai and Max still deep in the arms of Morpheus.
Richard, Jolene and T-Shirt sat in a corner of the salon beneath a square window on one wall and a porthole on the other where Richard could keep an eye on the worsening weather, and where they could talk without being overheard by Vivien Agran’s minions who were completing final preparations for the round-the-world, all day party. The dining salon was to be one of the entertainment centres, with great big television monitors receiving pictures of celebrations all over the world, one or two already showing the wind-up programmes under way in Australia and the Far East. Between them, hanging high where everyone would be able to see it clearly, a big digital clock was already set to count-down.
In fifty-four minutes the millennium would cross the International Date Line where east meets west in the Pacific at 180 degrees of longitude; it would be midnight in New Zealand and the celebrations would start. In twenty-three hours and fifty-four minutes the witching hour would arrive in Tonga, Samoa, Midway and Wrangel Islands, and the wild party would be over, bar the shouting. It was going to be a long day.
‘Lets go over it again,’ said Richard.
Even with her back to the window, Jolene’s wide eyes seemed to have picked up something of the troubled turmoil of the clouds outside. ‘What’s missing is the Power Strip,’ she said. ‘Just telling you about it can’t be giving away too many secrets or breaking any laws, I guess. And it’ll help me focus.
‘The whole of the major’s suit is a computer. The fabric it’s made of looks like silver foil but it’s actually made out of the new programmable carbon. They’ve taken the programmable molecules, put them into fibres, woven the fibres into cloth and layered it up with integral circuitry and a combination of the new photo-chips and micromachine parts. The whole thing is a computer programmed to perform a number of functions, and give a range of information to the person wearing it and to the people monitoring him. It also has other properties — strength, lightness, durability, ability to withstand pressures varying from seven or eight atmospheres to absolute vacuum.’
‘But it’s the computer section that’s important,’ prompted Richard.
‘From our point of view, I guess. Except that one of the properties is its ability to protect the wearer from extremes of heat and cold — if it’s all there and on properly.’
‘Which in this case it was not?’ hazarded T-Shirt, catching up and catching on pretty quickly.
‘That’s right,’ said Jolene. ‘The Power Strip is designed to run from the nape of the neck to the base of the spine. It’s a little over two centimetres wide and nearly a metre long. In many ways it’s the most revolutionary element of the suit. Two layers of programmable carbon tissue, plus a range of other stuff, separated by a layer of material impervious to heat coated in the latest generation superconductor. It’s designed to turn the heat differential between the inside of the suit and the outside of the suit into enough power to make the whole thing work.’
‘But Major Schwartz went out into very severe weather wearing a suit which had no Power Strip on it,’ said Richard grimly.
‘Looks that way,’ nodded Jolene, her eyes slate-grey and stormy.
‘What would have happened to him then?’ asked T-Shirt.
‘He probably wouldn’t have noticed at first. He’d have tested the major functions with back-up power because it takes the Strip a little while to come up to speed. The heat differential needs to be established and locked in. He’d have ridden to location in a John Deere, still none the wiser. In the back, which has been specially adapted. Never in the front. He’d have been dropped off. Standard practice says the dropoff vehicle should stay at the drop-off point until the man in the suit is happy and gives the word; but they were pretty lax about that. I guess the major saw that all the suit’s functions were running OK — he had a head-up display projected onto the inside of his visor faceplate — and off he went. Then after a while he would have switched across to power from the Power Strip. And everything would have gone dead on him.’
‘Just like that?’ asked T-Shirt.
‘Pretty much. Total powerdown. He had back-up radio and there should have been a locator beacon —’
‘But there wasn’t,’ interjected Richard. ‘His first thought would have been to radio in. But with his suit functions down and a very nasty squall blowing, he was disorientated. So he looked for some shelter and found the cleft in the moraine close by. He went in out of the wind and tried to call for help but he didn’t realise that the rock itself was blocking his signal. I suppose he must have thought the radio was packing up as well, because he put it down or dropped it and began to follow the cleft to the far side of the moraine looking for shelter. I don’t know when he would have begun to feel the cold …’
‘He may never really have done so,’ supplied Jolene, taking up the tale again.
‘Remember, because of what had been removed
from his suit, the whole of his spinal column was exposed directly to very cold temperatures indeed.’
‘I don’t know if it’s important,’ said Richard, ‘but when we went into the cleft, the wind was coming very strongly through it, following the line he must have taken. So it was blowing directly onto his back too.’
‘That may have made all the difference,’ said Jolene. ‘Walking away from the wind he might have felt things were improving when in fact they were getting worse very quickly indeed. When he came out of the southern side of the cleft, he must have been nearly dead, but he may not have realised it. It’s a wonder he could still walk. If he had fallen, his spine would have shattered like glass. But somehow he kept going, lost, disorientated, probably thinking he was walking the right way to get back to camp, keeping the wind at his back, I’d guess.’
‘Until he found himself trapped in the little amphitheatre of rock at the far end of the moraine. He must have realised then,’ said Richard sadly.
‘He must have,’ agreed Jolene. ‘He just had the strength to turn round, reach out …’
‘And turn to ice,’ said T-Shirt quietly. ‘It’s like something out of the Bible.’
‘The whole place is,’ said Jolene, gesturing vaguely east and south at the Big White. ‘It’s like the wrath of God.’
They sat for a moment in silence as the first squall of the impending storm thumped broadside into Kalinin’s west-facing port quarter.
‘OK,’ said Richard, riding the uneasy heave of the deck unconsciously. ‘That’s a convincing scenario but it doesn’t end there, does it?’
‘Nope,’ agreed T-Shirt. ‘Because we were all involved pretty soon after that too.’