‘Think of the food,’ said Ghost. ‘Think of the booze.’ He avoided Jane’s eye, mildly ashamed to be luring the men to Hyperion with the promise of limitless alcohol.
Ghost took a vote. A fifty/fifty split. Arguments escalated towards fist fights. Half the guys said it was too dangerous to take a suite on the liner while ravening passengers massed the other side of the door. Half the guys said stateroom luxury was too good to miss.
Insults flew. Push-and-shove. The discussion looked like it would last long into the night so Nikki sneaked out of a side door.
She hurried to a lifeboat station. Red running-man signs all over the rig pointed the way. There were a cluster of rigid shell lifeboats at each corner of the refinery. Orange, fibre-glass cocoons the size of a bus. Room for thirty men. During the weekly fire drill crewmen were trained to strap themselves inside, seal the hatch, then pull a release handle. Explosive bolts would eject the lifeboat from a launch tube into the sea.
Nikki climbed inside the raft. She and Nail had raided the lifeboats for equipment once before. She wanted stuff they left behind.
She dragged a case from beneath a bench seat. A flip-latch lid. Emergency gear: salt tablets, a manual bilge pump and a compact desalinator. She bagged them and ran to the C deck storeroom. She threw them into the boat.
She hurried to the food store. She upturned a wholesale box of dried noodles. Tins and cartons swept into the box. She ran to C deck and threw the box into the boat.
She levered floor plates. Bags of clothes, charts and flares hidden beside the pipes. She threw the bags into the boat.
She found clippers. She bent forward and shaved herself bald. Clumps of auburn hair fell to the deck.
Last look around. She took a crumpled sheet of paper from her pocket. Her checklist. Quick inventory: good to go.
She punched a green wall button with her fist. Trapdoors opened beneath the boat. A typhoon blast of freezing wind and ice particles.
The boat hung on a chain-hoist. Nikki pressed Down and jumped aboard the boat as it descended into the dark.
The boat touched down on the ice beneath the refinery. She unhooked the chains.
A couple of wheeled pallets roped to the underside of the yacht. The boat weighed the same as a van, but the ice was slick as glass.
Nikki buckled crampons to her boots and threw herself against the boat. Once the boat began to move it built momentum. She pushed the vessel, a step at a time, to the water’s edge. She jumped aboard as brittle-crisp ice cracked beneath the weight of the boat and it settled into the sea. She pulled rope hand over hand and raised the sails.
Metallic motor noise. A flashlight beam suddenly trained in her face from above. Jane descending in the platform elevator. Nikki recoiled from the dazzling glare like she’d been slapped.
‘Slinking away, is that the plan?’ shouted Jane. The platform touched down.
‘I didn’t want to make a fuss.’
Nikki shielded her eyes and tried to squint beyond the blinding light. She tried to see if Jane were carrying a shotgun.
‘I like what you did with your hair,’ said Jane. ‘You look like a boiled egg.’
Nikki didn’t say anything. She waited to see what Jane would do.
‘Here’s the deal. You can take the boat. You can take the food. You can take whatever maritime charts you’ve stolen. But you have to take a radio, as well. You owe us that much. We need to hear how far you get. We need to hear what is waiting beyond the horizon.’
Nikki was hit on the chest by a big radio in a canvas bag. She instinctively caught the strap before the radio fell in the water.
‘So how about it?’
‘All right,’ said Nikki. ‘Call me any time you like. We’ll chat, do lunch.’
‘I’m serious. You were dying out there on the ice, remember? You were dead meat. We brought you back. We saved your life. You owe us a few minutes of your time.’
‘Okay. Fuck it.’
‘It’ll be lonely out there. Few days alone in the dark. You might be grateful of a voice.’
The boat began to drift away from the ice.
Twenty metres. Thirty metres. Nikki moving beyond Jane’s reach.
A hundred metres. Two hundred metres. Out of shotgun range.
Nikki was home free. Nail might commandeer the zodiac and try to chase her down, but he would struggle to find her. No running lamps. Too small for a radar fix.
Nikki looked back. Rampart dwindled behind her, a receding constellation of room lights. A massive, skeletal silhouette blotting out the stars.
Crackle as the craft bumped ice plates aside.
She turned her back on the refinery and looked towards the southern horizon, the point where a fabulous dust of the Milky Way met the impenetrable blackness of the sea. A heart- fluttering mix of excitement and fear. She locked the tiller in position with bungee line. She fitted a thermal mask to her face and pulled up her hood. She hunkered down in the cockpit ready for the long haul.
Nail lay in an opiate stupor. The world-obliterating white pain of his snapped ulna had been dulled to an ache by Demerol. He slipped in and out of consciousness for a couple of hours.
He woke. The drugs had worn off. The pain in his arm made his eyes water, made his teeth gnash.
He got to his feet and stumbled down cold corridors to the pump hall. He kicked the storeroom door wide. The floor hatch was open. The boat was gone.
‘Fucking bitch,’ he yelled.
Jane stood at the hatch controls. She pressed Close. The hydraulic rams retracted, pulling the floor hatch shut. It sealed with a heavy, metallic thud, cutting off wind noise.
‘I don’t know why you are acting all surprised and betrayed,’ said Jane. ‘She was aching to fuck you over. Anyone could see it. Personally, I would have hidden the fuse for the hatch controls. Replaced it with a dud. Make sure she couldn’t take an unauthorised joyride while I wasn’t around. You know, deep down, on a fundamental level, you are pretty stupid.’
‘Fucking bitch,’ murmured Nail.
Jane joined Sian on the floodlit helipad.
‘Feeling a little under-appreciated?’ asked Sian.
‘Ghost did a fine job with the power.’
‘It’ll keep them happy for five minutes. Then it will dawn on them. They are still here. Still stuck. Still waiting for someone to get them home. They’ll be knocking on your door soon enough.’
‘And what do I tell them?’
‘That we’ve got a ship. It’s beached. It’s got a big rip in the hull. But we’ll get it moving, sooner or later.’
‘I think the current occupants might object. Look over there, out on the island.’ Moonlit figures gathered at the water’s edge. ‘They’ve come from the ship. A couple of weeks from now the ice-bridge will be complete. The sea from here to the island will be frozen solid. They’ll be able to walk right to our door. You think things got better just because the lights are on? We are now officially under siege.’
The Specimen
‘So are you back in hero mode?’ asked Punch.
Jane was mopping her room. A water pipe had split, spraying water across her bed.
‘I try to help people out, if I can. Mainly to kill time. If the TV actually worked I’m not sure I would give a shit.’
