Hot Sky at Midnight

And indeed the robot, who probably knew nothing about Conrad, was neither amused nor awed by Carpenter’s announcement of his new status. In somber silence it ran one more laser check on Carpenter’s credentials, found them in order, scanned his eyeballs for absolute certainty, and sent him out into the sizzling sunshine beyond the security shed to look for his ship.

His indoctrination course had taken about a week. It was straight subliminal, an hour a day jacked into the data flow, and now Carpenter knew, or hoped he did, about as much as was necessary for him to know about being the captain of an iceberg trawler that would sail the South Pacific. Any aspects of the job that were missing from his shoreside education would have to be picked up at sea, but that didn’t trouble him. He would manage. Somehow he always did.

He spotted the Tonopah Maru right away, by the bulge of the giant rack-and- pinion gear that powered its grappling hooks, and by the great spigots that occupied most of the deck space. Those, as he had learned only the day before, were used to spray the captured icebergs with a sintering of melt- retardant mirror-dust. The ship was a long, slim, cigar-shaped vessel, elegant and almost disturbingly narrow in outline. It was sitting oddly high up out of the water amidst a cluster of other specialized ships that bore Samurai Industries’ familiar sun-and-lightning-bolt monogram. Carpenter had no idea what the other ships might be: seaweed collectors, shrimpers, squid-hunters, whatever. There were a million kinds of ships at work in the sea these days, desperately harvesting the ocean’s remaining bounty. Each type was good for only one thing and one thing only, but very good at that one thing.

A big flat-nosed grizzled-looking man whose Screen-induced body-armor coloring gave his skin a remarkable midnight look was standing on deck, squinting through the eyepiece of some sort of navigational device that he seemed to be trying to calibrate. The gadget afforded Carpenter some notion of who the man might be— his oceanographer/navigator, his number two, essentially—and he called down to him:

“Are you Hitchcock?”

“Yeah?” Wary, a little hostile.

“I’m Paul Carpenter. The new captain.”

Hitchcock gave him a look of appraisal, a long steady stare. His eyes had a considerable bulge to them and they were rimmed with ribbons of red.

“Well. Yeah. Come on aboard, Cap’n.”

No real warmth in the invitation, but Carpenter hadn’t expected any. He understood that he was the enemy, the representative of the managerial class, placed in a position of temporary superiority over the crew of the Tonopah Maru purely by grace of some random twitch of the vast corporate bureaucracy far away. They had to take his orders but that didn’t mean they had to like him, or respect him, or be in any way impressed with him.

Still, there were appearances that had to be honored. Carpenter came down the catwalk, dropped his bag on the deck, and waited calmly for Hitchcock to approach him and offer him his hand.

But the handshake seemed ungrudging enough. Hitchcock moved slowly but his grip was powerful and straightforward. Carpenter even got a smile out of him.

“Good to know you, Cap’n.”

“The same. Where are you from, Hitchcock?”

“Maui.”

That accounted for the color, then, and the face, and the grizzled hair. An Afro-Hawaiian mix, and plenty of Screen to deepen the hue. He was bigger than he had looked from above, and older, too, easily into his fifties.

“Beautiful place,” Carpenter said. “I was there a few years back. Place called Wailuku.”

“Yeah,” Hitchcock said. He didn’t seem very interested. “We sail tomorrow morning, right, Cap’n?”

“Right.”

“You ever been on board one of these before?”

“Actually, no, I haven’t,” said Carpenter levelly. “This is my first time out. You want to give me a tour? And I’d like to meet the rest of the crew.”

“Sure. Sure. There’s one now. Nakata! Hey, Nakata! Come say hello to the new cap’n!”

Carpenter narrowed his eyes into the sun-blink and saw a tiny figure outlined high up along the superstructure on the far side of the ship, doing something near the housing of the grapple gear. He looked no bigger than a midget against the immensity of the bulging gear, the huge silent mechanism that was capable of hurling the giant grappling hooks far overhead and whipping them down deep into the flanks of even the biggest bergs.

Hitchcock waved and Nakata came scrambling down. The grapple technician was a sleek beady-eyed catlike little guy with an air of tremendous self-confidence about him. He seemed a little higher up the class ladder than Hitchcock.

Unhesitatingly he put out his hand, as though equal to equal, for Carpenter. The usual Japanese cockiness, Carpenter figured. Not that being Japanese-American got you anywhere particular in the Samurai hierarchy, any more than being Polish-American or Chinese-American or Turkish-American would. The real Nips awarded no extra points to their cousins of diluted blood. Having a Japanese name didn’t necessarily make you Japanese, in their eyes. A tough bunch.

Grinning, Nakata said, “We going to go get ourselves some monster bergs, huh, skipper? To keep San Francisco from getting too thirsty.” He giggled.

“What’s funny about San Francisco?” Carpenter asked.

“Everything,” Nakata said. “Damn silly place. Always has been. Weirdos and fairies and dataheads and everything. You aren’t from Frisco yourself, are you, skipper?”

“Los Angeles, in point of fact. West LA.”

“All right, then. I’m from Santa Monica. Right down the road from you. I never liked it up here for shit. Samurai had this ship chartered to L.A., you know, until Frisco hired it last month.” He gestured vaguely at the bay behind him, the lovely hilly city on the far shore. “I think it’s funny as hell, me working to bring water for Northern California. But you do what they pay you for, right, skipper?”

Carpenter nodded.

“Right,” he said. “That’s the system.”

“Show you around the ship now?” Hitchcock asked.

“Two more crew still to meet, aren’t there?”

“Caskie, Rennett, yeah. They went into town. Should be along a little later.”

Rennett was maintenance/operations, Caskie was the communications operator. Both women. Carpenter was mildly annoyed that they weren’t on hand to give him his official welcome, but he hadn’t sent word ahead that he was coming at this precise time. The official welcome could wait, he figured.

Hitchcock took him on a tour of the ship. First the deck spigots and the grapple gears, with a view of the stupendous grappling hooks themselves, tucked away in their niche in the ship’s side; and then belowdeck to peer at the powerful fusion-driven engine, strong enough to haul a fair-sized island halfway around the world.

“And these here are the wonderful cabins,” Hitchcock announced.

Carpenter had been warned not to expect lavish accommodations, but he hadn’t expected anything quite like this. It was as though the ship’s designers had forgotten that there was going to be an actual crew, and had made a bit of space for them amidst all the machinery purely as an afterthought. The living quarters for Carpenter and the others were jammed into odd little corners here and there. Carpenter’s cabin was a whisker bigger than the other four, but even his wasn’t a whole lot more roomy than the coffin-sized sleeping capsules you got at an airport hotel, and for recreation space they all had to share one little blister dome aft and the pacing area on the foredeck where Carpenter had first spotted Hitchcock checking out his equipment.

A sardine-can kind of life, Carpenter thought.

But the pay was decent and there was hope of slope for him. And at least he would be able to breathe fresh air at sea, more or less, instead of the dense gray-brown-green murk that hovered over the habitable parts of the West Coast most of the time.

“You got the route specs with you, Cap’n?” Hitchcock asked him, when he had seen all that there was to see.

Carpenter tapped his breast pocket. “Right here.”