Days of the Python (Python Trilogy Book 1)

by David Jurk

  It was a slow and awkward process getting everything onto the boat and though I did lose one of the boxes of ammunition overboard, it seemed a small enough loss. The medical supplies, the weapons, and to a lesser degree the food – it all made up for that moment of terror as I clung to the ladder, alone on the sea.

  But the cost exacted from me for this theft from the Mare Oriens was not yet paid in full. As I dropped into the cockpit with the satchel of bounty heaped beside me, the soaring joy I felt to be back aboard overwhelmed all sense of caution. I yelled to Ray to give me control and took up the rudder and thrust the throttles forward. Concerning myself with one thing only – that we avoid that mountainous steel hull only a meter away from us – I veered sharply out and away from the tanker. As Windswept surged forward, my elation turned to confused panic as I felt a hard impact, knocking me to my knees. Utterly bewildered, I saw the starboard ama being shoved under water and looked upward in terror and saw that I had, in my haste and carelessness, forgotten about the overhanging stairway. Still moving forward from the force of the motors, the tip of the mast scraped and bounced along the bottom of the platform, the entire boat canted at an angle, until we passed free of it, finally accelerating. With utter relief, I saw that the mast itself seemed undamaged – it looked straight, with no torn shrouds; even the spreaders were intact. But the equipment that had been mounted on top of it was destroyed, ripped free of it, fallen now into the Pacific. We no longer had either our shortwave or VHF antennas, the electronic windspeed indicator or the wind direction arrow.

  I was very worried that the mainsail sheave had been damaged, but when I stopped the motors, the sail winched easily to its full height without any issue. Ultimately then, the damage was this; we had no radio and we couldn’t directly measure wind speed. Maybe we could manage local VHF with the internal antenna, but there’d be no more SSB sailing nets, no shortwave of any kind.

  With the sails raised and my pride as a sailor only mildly damaged, Windswept surged back on course once more. I set the autopilot and settled into the cockpit, my back resting against the canvas satchel taking up most of the space and watched the Mare Oriens recede behind us.

  It was tempting to see the encounter as some kind of cosmic quid pro quo – what penalty fate had exacted on them it had rewarded me. But what did I mean exactly by fate? Surely not divine providence? Maybe in the end nothing more than what it was – they’d stopped at a port somewhere and the plague had found them, and I’d gotten safely away from a different port just in time. Or maybe I hadn’t. Maybe Windswept was just another Mare Oriens, carrying her crew with theCh 13 alterations seed of death that just hadn’t sprouted yet. Maybe I’d been infected back in San Diego and didn’t know it. Maybe there was no fate, not even luck, and sure as hell no such thing as good fortune. Maybe the world had just simply run out of it.

  I sighed in frustration and turned away, my attention back on the sea. I had no real explanation for anything; not the events consuming the world, not Rachel’s death, not seeing her in Colorado, not hearing her voice. Maybe these were simple psychological coping mechanisms. Or maybe I was just losing my mind. Cosmic intervention? Don’t make the Mare Oriens into anything more than luck. Don’t think there’s anything out here helping you. If you survive, it’ll be because you managed it on your own. And maybe, just maybe, gotten a little bit lucky.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  TWELVE DAYS LATER, Ray informed me that at our current average, we were only five days out of Kauai. It struck me very distinctly that there was a note of pride in his voice, and I wondered briefly if there had been an emotion-generator algorithm built into his neural net. Perhaps so; god knows some of his Australian slang was nutty and seemed completely extemporaneous most of the time. It made me wonder if I’d fully tapped into his capabilities. Maybe at some point, I ought to actually read the manual.

  So, I asked him to display our daily runs; it was impressive. Some days - meaning twenty-four hour periods - we’d managed nearly three hundred kilometers. Whatever my role was in that, it made me feel good. And if he did have a generated emotion and had attributed part of our progress to his management of the autopilot, well, he deserved it. We were alive and moving well – seventeen days from where we’d begun in San Diego. And it occurred to me that he’d had the skills from the start; I’d had to learn from scratch. And I could imagine Rachel laughing – competing with a software program for credit. I had to laugh too; the fact was, I liked Ray. He was a good mate.

  We’d hit two more squalls, both less intense than the first and I’d taken them pretty much in stride, sailing through both without the autopilot. When I was awake, I kept the sails fully deployed much longer into gusty conditions, only reefing and furling when things seriously turned into a blow. When I slept, though, I still stayed cautious. No matter how mild things seemed when I went off-watch, I always put a reef in.

  I’d taken to napping in the cockpit in the afternoons when the weather was good. Closing my eyes, an hour would go by in a blink, and I’d sit up, completely refreshed. And yet, I don’t think I was truly, fully asleep. Sometimes, finishing up a watch, I’d linger in the cockpit, particularly when the sky was clear, closing my eyes and just listening as Windswept moved through the sea, feeling our inexorable slide to Hawaii. And that’s the best way I could put it – that it felt like a downhill slide, as if we’d gotten over the bulge of the Earth and were sailing downward on the other side, gravity pulling us along faster and faster. I knew that was nonsense, but I couldn’t shake the feeling.

  Gradually, I took the time to sort through all the food, weapons, ammunition and medical supplies I’d pulled from the Mare Oriens, having no small difficulty finding places to stow everything. I wanted the guns accessible, but not intrusive, and fashioned a row of straps along the aft cabin bulkhead where those that would be most likely to be useful could be quickly reached from below, or through the hatch if I were in the cockpit. I considered how I’d started out – with the Winchester stuffed under a mattress, thinking I’d never use it, and now I had an arsenal. The explosives went beneath the cockpit seats, padded with the sail covers and life vests. Still, even with that cushioning, they were in my thoughts every time I sat down.

  I wasn’t very familiar with the assault rifles, and completely new to explosives, so I spent considerable time looking at instruction manuals on the internet, though getting access seemed to be more and more difficult. Ray had no explanation. At some point it became so frustrating, I just experimented, and through trial and error eventually gained some confidence. In the end, I test fired everything, including one of the explosives. It used a digital match; you pulled back a patch of silver film that covered a fingertip-sized screen, scratched your finger across it, it turned red, and you had five seconds to get rid of it. Testing it was nerve-wracking; I threw it off the stern when we were on a good beam reach, flying along at fifteen knots. It arced through the air, hit the water and sank. I was counting ‘one-thousand-and-five…’ when a muffled wump came from behind us, and the sea seemed to form a divot on the surface, then reversed itself and blew upwards with remarkable force, throwing water twenty meters skyward. The power of it was sobering – and frightening. I considered dumping them all overboard, but never quite did.

  We continued westward, the weather staying good with helpful, steady winds from the south. In three days, I began to feel a change in the air. The winds veered slowly around until they were on our nose and the seas rose steeply into two-meter waves, topped with white caps, and we were forced to beat into them, which gave a very wet ride. Sheets of spray as we hit the waves were unrelenting, fanning back over the length of the boat every few minutes. I was constantly soaked, even with my weather gear on, and took to the cabin for long stretches, leaving Ray to drive.

  It gave me a lot of opportunity to finally do some reading. I’d brought every book Bernard Moitessier had written and re-read them all; his journeys, his feelings about his boat and about sailing. I wanted ve
ry much to feel about Windswept the way he felt about Joshua – to achieve that sense of oneness, as though he and the boat were joined into a single creature, half mechanical, half sentient. During the best of times as we sailed, I wanted to believe I achieved a little of that with Windswept; standing on the forward deck or on one of the ama nets, balanced, feeling her moving over the ocean; each little shudder, each surge, skip and thrust a part of me. For a moment, I’d see the sea in front me and know before we reached it how it would feel as we passed through it; pierced that wave, rose to that swell, bent to the wind. During those moments, there was no movement she made that didn’t feel natural and right to me.

  It was during this stretch that we lost the internet entirely. Ray had simply announced one afternoon, when I’d asked for weather, that he was quite sorry, mate, but the connection with the global web had been lost. I didn’t mind all that much losing news streams and Vids, but it was a great loss in other ways. Without the web, I had no weather forecasting, no route planning in terms of current and predicted conditions. Without it, I had no ability to search for documentation about any of the technology and tools on board. Without the internet – and now I felt the full import of my carelessness leaving the Mare Oriens, becsuse we had no radio to compensate – I was completely cut off from news of the world. I thought of Moitessier, who had intentionally isolated himself from human affairs while he was at sea. But he had not grown up with information available about anything, anytime and anyplace. His body of knowledge was carried with him in his head, in his very soul; he needed no link to a global internet.

  For me, it was a very different situation. I had books, I suppose - I had Buys Ballot’s Law: In the Northern Hemisphere, if you turn your back to the wind, the low pressure center will be to your left, the high to your right. Good to know, now what do I do with it? Keep reading of course – this law was used as the basis for an entire set of sea piloting actions based on conditions; it formed the primary rules of conduct for ship’s masters for more than a century. In fact, it held sway until the advent of modern weather charts; weather charts I no longer had a near-infinite supply of. And I was no master; so far, perhaps all I’d had was a run of decent weather luck.

  The days passed, Windswept danced through the sea, waves cascading as she split them, sails full and drawing. Those streaks to starboard – dolphins? I stood, closed my eyes, planted my bare feet on her hull and felt her moving beneath me, felt as much at home as if I were walking up the dusty drive of the farm. It’s happened, I thought, I have become a sailor. And lines from an ancient poem of Lord Byron’s came to me. But what poem, what was it? Yes, that’s it; The Corsair.

  O’er the glad waters of the dark blue sea,

  Our thoughts as boundless, and our souls as free,

  Far as the breeze can bear, the billows foam,

  Survey our empire, and behold our home!

  And I had to laugh at myself, at my hubris. From the timidity and fearfulness that had consumed me in San Diego to here and now on the open Pacific, audacious with words of Lord Byron on my lips. I’d better be careful – the ocean doesn’t countenance that sort of arrogance.

  And perfectly on cue, the next morning while idly watching the GPS, I noticed that the satellite icon in the corner of the screen seemed to have changed color. Normally a bright, signal light green, it had gone a dull amber. I wiped at it with my finger, leaned in to look closely. It wasn’t dirt; it had literally changed color.

  “Ray,” I asked, “what’s the status of our satellite connections?”

  “Nominal! She’s fair dinkum!”

  “What does it mean that the icon has changed color?” There was the briefest of pauses.

  “She’s on a bit of a wobbly, mate. Still operational, right? But not optimal. That blodgy icon’s tellin’ us we’ve had a bit of a boil-over on some of the sats.”

  I sat straight up.

  “You’re saying we’ve lost some of the satellites?”

  “Right as rain, you are!”

  I took a deep breath, exhaled. Another.

  “Define optimal,” I said quietly.

  “Nineteen, mate.”

  “How many are we actually receiving, then?”

  “Eleven.”

  “Ray, why have we lost eight satellites? Is it something with our system, or with the satellites?”

  Again, a brief pause.

  “System check is spot-on, mate.”

  Weather perhaps? Solar flare or something? Could it be us, despite the self-test? I abruptly remembered the old hand-held and ducked below and rummaged around until I found it. It was pretty ancient technology, stubbornly slow to connect and after waiting twenty minutes, it seemed to have found every satellite it could – exactly eleven.

  Christ, were the satellites going off-line? This seemed ridiculous to me; I refused to believe it. They were self-sustaining, weren’t they? They had instruments and nuclear power – or whatever the hell they used. Hadn’t I read they were designed to stay in orbit functioning perfectly for decades? So even if the people that dealt with them on the ground were not showing up for work - and that seemed all too likely - why would that make any difference?

  “Ray,” I asked slowly, “at what point do we lose functionality?” On reflection, it wasn’t a very clear question, but he got the gist.

  “Below six, we lose speed, mate. Below four, we’ve gone cactus.”

  “Cactus?”

  “Sorry, Cap. Four is our minimum for being able to function at all.”

  In the silence that followed, I first tried to convince myself that it was unlikely things would get that bad, but there was nothing whatever reassuring about any of it. There had to be some other factor at play, something I didn’t understand. We’d lost eight satellites in three weeks – what on Earth gave me any belief we wouldn’t lose more, wouldn’t lose them all?

  And then what?

  Then, celestial navigation, I guess, or wander aimlessly until I ran out of food. We had taken a Celestial Nav class, Rachel and I, which I’d considered little more than a joke, nothing more than an indulgence to her insistence that we needed to know how to navigate without a computer, without GPS. An absurd waste of time, I’d told her laughing; we’d never lose the GPS system.

  She passed the final exam; I failed. I laughed it off and called her ‘Professor’ for a couple of weeks. But that Christmas there was a teak box for me under the little tree, with an honest-to-god brass sextant nestled inside. It was with me now, in its ceremonial place near the chart table. Would it come to that, for Christ’s sake? I looked at the GPS map, at the satellite icon - stay at eleven you little bastard; I need you. I failed the damn course.

  And one morning, my twenty-third at sea, the monitor showed us less than one hundred kilometers from the Big Island of Hawaii. For a brief moment, I was very tempted to change course, to make straight for land, forget Kauai. We could be in Hilo by tonight! But the more I thought about it, the more I knew that I wanted no part of it. The Hawaiian Islands, in general, present some of the most treacherous sailing conditions in the world. Because of their close proximity to one another and the steep volcanic profiles of the land, wind is often funneled between them with great force, building up steep, confused seas. The same happens to the prevailing currents; with water flow squeezed between land masses, at times it can become violently accelerated. I’d reached a level of comfort – maybe even a little confidence - sailing Windswept, but even very experienced sailors went out of their way to avoid encountering ten meter, steep-breaking waves, and winds howling at sixty or seventy knots dead on the nose. There were surely some elements of approaching Kauai that would require care, but nothing at all like the challenges I’d face trying to make landfall on the Big Island, or Oahu. And ultimately, that was all about logic anyway; in my heart I wanted to go to Kauai for reasons having nothing to do with sea conditions.

  We’d stay the course.

  All day, I thought of little else than seeing land, but ma
intaining our heading for Kauai meant that I wouldn’t as much as catch a glimpse of the Big Island. We were aiming for the southeast coast; a direct course line there kept us out to sea for at least another day and a half, perhaps longer.

  Truly though, what drew me to Nawiliwili Bay were the memories of Rachel and I on honeymoon, the days spent in a timeless dream before the ocean, doors open to the lanai day and night, the caress of trade winds, the fecund forests and impossible lushness. Memories of the beach and the bay, swimming hard in rip currents and finding her waiting for me, laughing in the sand. Of gritty grains of it on her body; the smell of lotion on her skin, the rising fever of wanting her. The pure, sun-whitened heat of careless, mindless happiness. Of foolish happiness, believing it had no end.

  I was fidgety all that day and into the night and for the first time in many days I had trouble sleeping, and when I did sleep, my dreams were unsettling, leaving me feeling exhausted, threatened, and vaguely uncertain when I awoke.