Hot Sky at Midnight

Hitchcock nodded stonily. “Sure, man. Sure.”

Carpenter watched the whole thing from the blister dome at the stern, wondering whether he was going to have a mutiny of his own on his hands now too. But no. No. Hitchcock and Rennett kayaked out along the edge of the berg until they came up beside the dinghy from the Calamari Maru, and there was a brief discussion, very brief, Hitchcock doing the talking and Rennett holding a laser rifle in a casual but businesslike way. The five castoffs from the squid ship seemed more or less awake. They pointed and gestured and threw up their arms in despair. But Hitchcock kept talking and Rennett kept stroking the laser, casual but businesslike, and the men in the dinghy looked more and more dejected by the moment Then the discussion broke up and the kayak headed back toward the Tonopah Maru, and the men in the dinghy sat where they were, no doubt trying to figure out their next move.

Hitchcock said, coming on board, “This is bad business, man. That captain, he says the woman just took the ship away from him, on account of she wanted him to let them all have extra shots of Screen and he didn’t give it. There wasn’t enough to let her have so much, is what he said. I feel real bad, man.”

“So do I,” said Carpenter. “Believe me.”

“I learn a long time ago,” Hitchcock said, “when a man say ‘believe me,’ that’s the one thing I shouldn’t do.”

“Fuck you,” Carpenter said. “You think I wanted to strand them? But we have no choice about it. Let them go back to their own ship. She won’t kill them. All they have to do is let her do what she wants to do and they’ll come out of it okay. She can put them off on some island somewhere, Hawaii, maybe. But if they come with us, we’ll be in deep shit all the way back to Frisco.” And worse when we get there, he added silently.

Hitchcock nodded. “Yeah. We may be in deep shit already.”

“What are you saying?”

“Look at the berg,” Hitchcock said. “At waterline. It’s getting real carved up.”

Carpenter scooped up his glass and kicked in the biosensor boost. He scanned the berg. It didn’t look good, no. The heat was working it over very diligently.

This was the hottest day since they had entered these waters. It was almost like the mainland out here today, the swirls of garbage gas in the sky, the steady torrid downpour of solar energy, a river of devastating infrared pouring through the murk up there and slamming earthward without mercy. The heat was building, accumulating. The sun seemed to be getting bigger every minute. There was a nasty magnetic crackling coming out of the sky, as if the atmosphere itself was getting ionized as it baked.

And the berg was starting to wobble, all right. Carpenter saw the oscillations plainly, those horizontal grooves filling with water, the sea not so calm now as sky/ocean temperature differentials began to build up and conflicting currents came sluicing in.

“Son of a bitch,” Carpenter said. “That settles it. We got to get moving right now.”

There was still plenty to do. Pro forma, Caskie radioed over to the squid ship to warn them that they were going to begin spraying mirror-dust. No reply came. Maybe they didn’t care, or didn’t know what was involved. The squid ship was still sitting at anchor next to the ice tongue, and it looked like some kind of negotiation might be going on between the men in the dinghy and the women on board.

Carpenter gave the word and the mirror-dust spigots went into operation, cannoning shining clouds of powdered metal over the exposed surface of the berg, and probably all over the squid ship and the dinghy too. It took half an hour to do the job. The sea was still roughening and the berg was lalloping around in a mean way. But Carpenter knew there was a gigantic base down there out of sight—enough, he hoped, to hold the berg steady until they could get under way.

“Let’s get the skirt on it now,” he said.

A tricky procedure, nozzles at the ship’s waterline extruding a thermoplastic spray that would coat the berg just where it was most vulnerable to wave erosion. The hard part came in managing the extensions of the cables linking the hooks to the ship the right way, so that they could maneuver around the berg. But Nakata was an ace at that. They pulled up anchor and started around the far side. The mirror-dusted berg was dazzling, a tremendous mountain of white light.

“I don’t like that wobble,” Hitchcock kept saying.

“Won’t matter a damn once we’re under way,” said Carpenter.

The heat was like a hammer, now, savagely pounding the dark cool surface of the water, mixing up the thermal layers, stirring up the currents, getting everything churned around. They had waited just a little too long to get started. The berg, badly undercut, was doing a big sway to windward, bowing way down like one of those round-bottomed Japanese dolls, then swaying back again. God only knew what kind of sea action the squid ship was getting, but Carpenter couldn’t see them from this side of the berg. He kept on moving, circling the berg to the full extension of the hook cables, then circling back the way he had come.

When they got around to leeward again, he saw what kind of sea action the squid ship had been getting. It was swamped. The ice tongue they had been anchored next to had come rising up out of the sea and kicked them like a giant foot.

“Jesus Christ,” Hitchcock murmured, standing beside him. “Will you look at that. The damn fools just sat right there all the time.”

The Calamari Ma.ru was shipping water like crazy and starting to go down. The sea was boiling with an armada of newly liberated squid, swiftly propelling themselves in all directions, heading anywhere else at top speed. Three dinghies were bobbing around in the water in the shadow of the berg.

“Will you look at that,” Hitchcock said again.

“Start the engines,” Carpenter told him. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

Hitchcock peered at him disbelievingly.

“You mean that, Cap’n? You really mean that?”

“I goddamn well do.”

“Shit,” said Hitchcock. “This fucking lousy world.”

“Go on. Get ’em started.”

“You actually going to leave three boats from a sinking ship sitting out there in the water full of people?”

“Yeah. You got it.” Carpenter’s head felt as if it was stuffed with wool. Don’t stop to think, he told himself. Don’t think about any of this. Just do. “Now start the engines, will you?”

“That’s too much,” Hitchcock said softly, shaking his head in a big slow swing. “Too goddamn much.”

He made a sound like a wounded buffalo and took two or three shambling steps toward Carpenter, his arms dangling loosely, his hands half-cupped. Hitchcock’s eyes were slitted and his face looked oddly puffy. He loomed above Carpenter, wheezing and muttering, a dark massive slab of a man. Half as big as the iceberg out there was how he looked just then.

Oh, shit, Carpenter thought. Here it comes. My very own mutiny, right now.

Hitchcock rumbled and muttered and began to close his hands into fists. Exasperation tinged with fear swept through Carpenter and he brought his arm up without even stopping to think, hitting Hitchcock hard, a short fast jab in the mouth that rocked the older man’s head back sharply and sent him reeling against the rail. Hitchcock slammed into it and bounced. For a moment it looked as if he would fall, but he managed to steady himself. A kind of sobbing sound, but not quite a sob, more of a grunt, came from him. A bright dribble of blood sprouted on his white-stubbled chin.

For a moment Hitchcock seemed dazed. Then his eyes came back into focus and he looked at Carpenter in amazement.

“I wasn’t going to hit you, Cap’n,” he said, blinking hard. There was a soft stunned quality to his voice. “Nobody ever hits a cap’n, not ever. Not ever. You know that, Cap’n.”

“I told you to start the engines.”

“You hit me, Cap’n. What the hell you hit me for?”

“You started to come at me, didn’t you?” Carpenter said.

Hitchcock’s shining bloodshot eyes were immense in his Screen-blackened face. “You think I was coming at you? Oh, Cap’n! Oh, Jesus, Cap’n. Jesus!” He shook his head and wiped at the