Hot Sky at Midnight

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.

CAN YOU HELP US TROUBLE ON SHIP

MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH

URGENT YOU COME ABOARD SOONEST

—KOVALCIK, ACTING CAPTAIN,

CALAMARI MARU

“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.