Hot Sky at Midnight

12

out here in the chilly zone of the southern Pacific, somewhere between San Francisco and Hawaii, the sea was a weird goulash of currents, streams of cold stuff coming up from the Antarctic and coolish upwelling spirals out of the ocean floor and little hot rivers rolling off the sun-blasted continental shelf far to the east. Sometimes you could see steam rising in places where cold water met warm. It was a cockeyed place to be trawling for icebergs, Carpenter thought. But the albedo readings said there was a big berg somewhere around there, and so the Tonopah Maru was there too.

He sat in front of the scanner, massaging the numbers in the cramped, claustrophobic cell that was the ship’s command center. It was midmorning. The shot of Screen he had taken at dawn still simmered like liquid gold in his arteries. He could almost feel it as it made its slow journey outward to his capillaries and went trickling cozily into his skin, where it would carry out the daily refurbishing of the body armor that shielded him against ozone crackle and the demon eye of the sun. You really had to load up on the infra/ultra drugs out here at sea, where the surface of the water reflected the light like a mirror and hurled it up into your face. Since leaving San Francisco, Carpenter had nearly doubled his regular dose of Screen, building up his armoring, and by now his skin had turned a shimmering iridescent greenish-purple. The effect was strange, but he liked it.

The voyage had gone well enough, so far, aside from the one little problem that they hadn’t yet been able to find any bergs. But it looked like that was solved, now.

“We got maybe a two-thousand-kiloton mass there,” Carpenter said, looking into the readout wand’s ceramic-fiber cone. “Not bad, eh?”

“Not for these goddamn days, no,” Hitchcock said. The oceanographer/navigator was old enough to remember when icebergs were never seen farther north than the latitude of southern Chile, and was always glad to let you know about it. “Man, these days a berg that’s still that big all the way up here must have been three counties long when it broke off the fucking polar shelf. But you sure you got your numbers right, man?”

The implied challenge brought a glare to Carpenter’s eyes, and something went curling angrily through his interior, leaving a hot little trail. Hitchcock never thought Carpenter had done anything right the first time. The tensions had been building up, day after day, since the day they had set out from San Francisco Bay. Though he often denied it—too loudly—it was pretty clear Hitchcock felt no small degree of resentment at having been bypassed for captain in favor of an outsider, a mere salaryman from the land-based sector of the Company. Probably he thought it was racism. But he was wrong. Carpenter was managerial track; Hitchcock wasn’t. That was all there was to it.

Sourly Carpenter said, “You want to check the visor yourself? Here. Here, take a look.”

He offered Hitchcock the wand. But Hitchcock shook his head.

“Easy, man. Whatever the screen says, that’s okay for me.” Hitchcock grinned disarmingly, showing mahogany snags.

On the visor impenetrable whorls and jiggles were dancing, black on green, green on black, the occasional dazzling bloom of bright yellow. The Tonopah Maru’s interrogatory beam was traveling 22,500 miles straight up to Nippon Telecom’s big marine scansat, which had its glassy unblinking gaze trained on the whole eastern Pacific, looking for albedo differentials. The reflectivity of an iceberg was different from the reflectivity of the ocean surface. You picked up the differential, you confirmed it with temperature readout, you scanned for mass to see if the trip was worth making. If it seemed to be, you brought your trawler in fast and made the grab before someone else did.

Back in Frisco, Carpenter knew, they were probably kneeling in the streets, praying for him to have some luck, finally. The lovely city by the bay, dusty now, sitting there under that hot soupy remorseless sky full of interesting-colored greenhouse gases, waiting for the rain that almost never came any more. There hadn’t been any rain along the Pacific seaboard in something like ten, eleven months. Most likely the sea around here was full of trawlers—Seattle, San Diego, L.A. According to Nakata the Angelenos kept more ships out than anybody.

Carpenter said, “Start getting the word around. That berg’s down here, SSW. We get it in the grapple tomorrow, we can be in San Francisco with it by a week from Tuesday.”

“If it don’t melt first. This fucking heat.”

“It didn’t melt between Antarctica and here, it’s not gonna melt between here and Frisco. Get a move on, man. We don’t want L.A. coming in and hitting it first.”

By midafternoon they had it on optical detect, first an overhead view via the Samurai Weather Service spysat, then a sea-level image bounced to them by a navy relay buoy. The berg was a thing like a castle afloat, stately and serene, all pink turrets and indigo battlements and blue-white pinnacles. The drydock kind of berg, it was, two high sides with a valley between, and it was maybe two hundred meters long, sitting far up above the water. Steaming curtains of fog shrouded its edges and the ship’s ear was able to pick up the sizzling sound of the melt effervescence that was generated as small chunks of ice went slipping off its sides into the sea. The whole thing was made of glacial ice, which is compacted snow, and when it melted it melted with a hiss.

Carpenter stared at the berg in wonder. It was a lot bigger than any of the ones he had seen in his training software. For the last couple of million years it had been perched snugly on top of the South Pole, and it probably hadn’t ever expected to go cruising off toward Hawaii like this. But the big climate shift had changed a lot of things for everybody, the Antarctic ice pack included.

“Jesus,” Hitchcock said. “Can we do it?”

“Easy,” said Nakata. Nothing seemed to faze the agile little grapple technician. “It’ll be a four-hook job, but so what? We got the hooks for it.”

Sure. The Tonopah Maru had hooks to spare. And Carpenter had faith in Nakata’s skill.

“You hear that?” he asked Hitchcock. “Go for it.”

They were right at the mid-Pacific cold wall. The sea around them was blue, the sign of warm water. Just to the west, though, where the berg was, the water was a dark rich olive green with all the microscopic marine life that cold water fosters. The line of demarcation was plainly visible. That was one of the funny changes that the climate shift had brought: most of the world was hot as hell, now, but there was this cold current sluicing up from Antarctica into the middle of the Pacific, sending icebergs floating toward the tropics.

Carpenter was running triangulations to see if they’d be able to slip the berg under the Golden Gate Bridge when Rennett appeared at his elbow and said, “There’s a ship, Cap’n.”

“What’dyousay?”

He had heard her clearly enough, though.

A ship? Carpenter stared at her, thinking Los Angeles San Diego Seattle, and wondered if he was going to have to fight for his berg. That happened at times, he knew. This was open territory, pretty much a lawless zone where old-fashioned piracy was making a terrific comeback.

“Ship,” Rennett said, clipping it out of the side of her mouth as if doing him a favor by telling him anything at all. “Right on the other side of the berg. Caskie’s just picked up a message. Some sort of SOS.” She handed Carpenter a narrow strip of yellow radio tape with just a couple of lines of bright red thermoprint typing on it. The words came up at him like a hand reaching out of the deck. Carpenter read them out loud.

“What the fuck,” Carpenter said. “Calamari Maru? Is it a ship or a squid?”

It was a feeble joke, and he knew it. Rennett didn’t crack a smile. “We ran a check on the registry. It’s owned out of Vancouver by Kyocera-Merck. The listed captain is Amiel Kohlberg, a German. Nothing about any Kovalcik.”

“Doesn’t sound like a berg trawler.”

“It’s a squid ship, Cap’n,” she said, voice flat with a sharp edge of contempt in it. As if he didn’t know what a squid ship was. He let it pass. It always struck him as funny, the way anybody who had had two days’ more experience at sea than he did treated him like a greenhorn. Though of course he was. But he could cope with that. When they handed out the bonuses back in Frisco he’d be getting the captain’s stake and they wouldn’t.

Carpenter glanced at the printout again.

Urgent, it said. Matter of life and death.

Shit. Shit shit shit.

The idea of dropping everything to deal with the problems of some strange ship didn’t sit well with him. He wasn’t paid to help other captains out, especially Kyocera-Merck captains. Of all companies, not K-M, certainly not now. There was very bad voodoo between Samurai Industries and K-M these days, worse than usual. Something about the Gobi reclamation contract, a blatant bit of industrial espionage that had gone awry, some crap like that. Besides, Carpenter had a berg to deal with. He didn’t need any other distractions just now.

And then too, he felt an edgy little burst of suspicion drifting up from the basement of his soul, a tweak of wariness that might have had just the slightest taint of paranoia about it, except that Carpenter had had such a good education in the realities of the world over the past thirty-odd years that he wasn’t sure there was such a thing as paranoia at all. The bastards were always out to get you. Going aboard another ship out here, you were about as vulnerable as you could be. What if some kind of trick was being set up for him?

But he also knew you could carry caution too far. It didn’t feel good to him to turn his back on a ship that had said it was in trouble. Maybe the ancient laws of the sea, as well as every other vestige of what used to be common decency, were inoperative concepts here in this troubled, miserable, heat-plagued era, but he still wasn’t completely beyond feeling things like guilt and shame. Besides, he thought, what goes around comes around. You ignore the other guy when he asks for help, you might just be setting yourself up for a little of the same later on.

They were all watching him, Rennett, Nakata, Hitchcock.

Hitchcock said, “What you gonna do, Cap’n? Gonna go across to “em?” A gleam in his eye, a snaggly mischievous grin on his face.

What a pain in the ass, Carpenter thought.

Carpenter gave the older man a malevolent look and said, “So you think it’s legit?”

Hitchcock shrugged blandly. “Not for me to say. You the cap’n, man. All I know is, they say they in trouble, they say they need our help.”

“And if it’s some kind of stunt?”

Hitchcock’s gaze was steady, remote, noncommittal. His blocky shoulders seemed to reach from one side of the ship to the other. “They calling for help, Cap’n. Ship wants help, you give help, that’s what I always believe, all my years at sea. Of course maybe people think different, upslope. And like I say, you the cap’n, not me.”

Carpenter found himself wishing Hitchcock would keep his goddamned reminiscences of the good old days to himself. But—screw it. The man was right. A ship in trouble was a ship in trouble. He’d go over there and see what was what Of course he would. He had never really had any choice about that, he realized.

To Rennett he said, “Tell Caskie to let this Kovalcik know that we’re heading for the berg to get claiming hooks into it. That’ll take about an hour and a half. And after that maybe I’ll come over and find out what his problem is.”

“Got it,” Rennett said, and went below.

New berg visuals had come in while they were talking. For the first time now Carpenter could see the erosion grooves at the waterline on the berg’s upwind side, the undercutting, the easily fractured overhangings that were starting to form. The undercutting didn’t necessarily mean the berg was going to flip over—that rarely happened, with big drydock bergs like this— but they’d be in for some lousy oscillations, a lot of rolling and heaving, choppy seas, a general pisser all around. The day was turning very ugly very fast.

“Jesus,” Carpenter said, pushing the visuals across to Nakata. “Take a look at these.”

“No problem. We got to put our hooks on the lee side, that’s all.”

“Yeah. Sounds good.” He made it seem simple. Somehow Carpenter managed a grin despite it all.

The far side of the berg was a straight sheer wall, a supreme white cliff smooth as porcelain that was easily a hundred meters high, with a wicked tongue of ice jutting out from it into the sea for about forty meters, like a breakwater. That was what the Calamari Maru was using it for, too. The squid ship rode at anchor just inside that tongue.

Carpenter didn’t like seeing another ship nestled up against his berg like that. But the squid ship, hookless, specialized for its own kind of work, didn’t look like any kind of threat to his claim on the berg.

He signaled to Nakata, who was standing way down fore, by his control console.

“Hooks away!” Carpenter called. “Sharp! Sharp!”

Nakata waved an okay and put his hands to the keyboard. An instant later there came the groaning sound of the grapple-hatch opening, and the deep rumbling of the hook gimbals. Somewhere deep in the belly of the ship immense mechanisms were swinging around, moving into position. The great berg sat motionless in the calm sea.

It was a little like deep-sea fishing: the trick didn’t lie in hooking your beast, but in what you did with it afterward, when you had to play it.

The whole ship shivered as the first hook came shooting up into view. It hovered overhead, a tremendous taloned thing filling half the sky, black against the shining brightness of the air. Then Nakata hit the keys again and the hook, having reached the apex of its curve, spun downward with slashing force, heading for the breast of the berg.

It hit and dug and held. The berg recoiled, quivered, rocked. A shower of loose ice came tumbling off the upper ledges. As the impact of the hooking was transmitted to the vast hidden undersea mass of the berg, the whole thing bowed forward a little farther than Carpenter had been expecting, making a nasty sucking noise against the water, and when it pulled back again a geyser came spuming up about twenty meters.

Those poor bastards aboard the Calamari Maru weren’t going to like that. But they had chosen to stay in their anchorage while a hooking was going on, hadn’t they? What the hell did they expect, a teeriy splash or two?

Down by the bow, Nakata was making his I-got-you gesture at the berg, the middle finger rising high.

A cold wind was blowing from the berg now. It was like the exhalation of some huge wounded beast, an aroma of ancient times, a fossil-breath wind.

They moved on a little farther along the berg’s flank.

“Hook two,” Carpenter told him.

The berg was almost stable again now. Plainly there was more undercutting than they had thought, but they would manage. Carpenter, watching from his viewing tower by the aft rail, waited for the rush of pleasure and relief that everybody had said would come from a successful claiming, but it wasn’t there. All he felt was impatience, an eagerness to get all four hooks in and start chugging on back to the Golden Gate.

The second hook flew aloft, hovered, plunged, struck, bit.

A second time the berg slammed the water, and a second time the sea jumped and shook. Carpenter had just a moment to catch a glimpse of the other ship popping around like a floating cork, and wondered if that ice tongue they found so cozy was going to break off and sink them. It would have been a lot smarter of them to drop anchor somewhere else. But to hell with them. They’d been warned.

The third hook was easier.

One more, now.

“Four,” Carpenter called. A four-hook berg was something special. Plenty of opportunity to snag your lines, tangle your cables. But Nakata knew what he was doing. One last time the grappling iron flew through the air, whipping off at a steep angle to catch the far side of the berg over the top, and then they had it, the whole monstrous floating island of ice snaffled and trussed. Now all they had to do was spray it with mirror-dust, wrap a plastic skirt around it at the waterline to slow down wave erosion, and start towing it toward San Francisco.

All right, Carpenter thought.

Now at last he could take a little time to think about the goddamned squid ship and its problems.