Riptide

'What are those?' he asked, pointing to the stubby, fat-bellied devices. 'They look like pint-sized vacuum cleaners.'

Neidelman glanced inside. 'Flechettes,' he said.

'Excuse me?'

'A kind of nail gun. It shoots tiny, finned pieces of tungsten-carbide wire.'

'Sounds more painful than dangerous.'

Neidelman smiled thinly. 'At five thousand rounds per minute, fired at speeds over three thousand feet per second, they're plenty dangerous.' He closed the door and tested the handle. 'This room shouldn't be left open. I'll have to speak to Streeter about it.'

'What the hell do you need them around for?' Hatch frowned.

'Remember, Malin, the Cerberus isn't always in such friendly waters as rural Maine,' the Captain replied, ushering him down the corridor. 'Often, we have to work in shark-infested areas. When you're face to face with a Great White, you'll quickly come to appreciate what a flechette can do. Last year, in the Coral Sea, I saw one shred a shark from snout to tail in a second and a half.'

Hatch followed the Captain up a set of steps to the next deck. Neidelman paused for a moment outside an unmarked door, then rapped loudly.

'I'm busy!' came a querulous voice.

Neidelman gave Hatch a knowing smile and eased open the door, revealing a dimly lit stateroom. Hatch followed the Captain inside, tripped over something, and looked around, blinking, as his eyes became accustomed to the low light. He saw that the far wall and its portholes were entirely covered by banks of rackmounted electronic equipment: oscilloscopes, CPUs, and countless pieces of dedicated electronics whose purpose Hatch couldn't begin to guess. The floor was ankle-deep in crumpled papers, dented soda cans, candy wrappers, dirty socks, and underwear. A ship's cot set into one of the far walls was a whirlpool of linen, its sheets strewn across mattress and floor alike. The smell of ozone and hot electronics filled the room, and the only light came from numerous flickering screens. In the midst of the chaos sat the rumpled-looking figure in flowered shirt and Bermuda shorts, his back to them, typing feverishly at a keyboard.

'Kerry, can you spare a minute?' Neidelman said. 'I've got Dr. Hatch with me.'

Wopner turned away from the screen and blinked first at Neidelman, then Hatch. 'It's your party,' he said in a high, irritated voice. 'But you need everything else done, like, yesterday.' He pronounced the word yestidday. 'I've spent the last forty-eight hours setting up the network and haven't done jack shit with the code.'

Neidelman smiled indulgently. 'I'm sure you and Dr. St. John can spare a few minutes for the expedition's senior partner.' He turned to Hatch. 'You couldn't tell from appearances, but Kerry is one of the most brilliant cryptanalysts outside the NSA.'

'Yeah, right,' said Wopner, but Hatch could see he was pleased by the compliment.

'Quite a rig you've got here,' Hatch said as he closed the door behind him. 'Is that a CAT scan I see there on the left?'

'Very funny.' Wopner pushed his glasses up his nose and sniffed. 'You think this is something? This is just the backup system. They shipped the main rig off to the island yesterday morning. Now that's something.'

'Are the on-line tests complete?' Neidelman asked.

'Doing the last series now,' Wopner replied, shaking a lock of greasy hair from his eyes and swiveling back to the monitor.

'A team's completing the installation of the island network this afternoon,' Neidelman said to Hatch. 'Like Kerry said, this is the redundant system, an exact duplicate of the Ragged Island computer grid. Expensive way of doing things, but a real time saver. Kerry, show him what I mean.'

'Yassuh.' Wopner tapped a few keys and a blank screen winked to life overhead. Hatch looked up to see a wireframe diagram of Ragged Island appear on the screen, rotating slowly around a central axis.

'The backbone routers all have redundant mates.' A few more keystrokes, and a fine tracery of green lines was superimposed on the rendering of the island. 'Linked by fiber-optic cables to the central hub.'

Neidelman gestured at the screen. 'Everything on the island— from the pumps, to the turbines, to the compressors, to the derricks—are servo-linked into the network. We'll be able to control anything on the island from the command center. One instruction, and the pumps will fire up; another command will operate A winch; a third will turn off the lights in your office; and so forth.'

'What he said,' Wopner added. 'Totally extensible, with thin OS layers on the remote clients. And everything's tweaked up the wazoo, believe you me, miniature data packets and all the rest. It's a huge net—a thousand ports in one collision domain—but there's zero latency. You wouldn't believe the ping time on this bad boy.'

'In English, please,' Hatch said. 'I never learned to speak Nerd. Hey, what's that?' He pointed to another screen, which showed an overhead view of what appeared to be a medieval village. Small figures of knights and sorcerers were arrayed in various attitudes of attack and defense.

'That's Sword of Blackthorne. A role-playing game I designed. I'm dungeon master for three on-line games,' He stuck out his lower lip. 'Got a problem with that?'

'Not if the Captain doesn't,' said Hatch, glancing at Neidelman. It was clear that the Captain gave his subordinates a fair amount of freedom. And it seemed to Hatch that—however unlikely—Neidelman was genuinely fond of this eccentric young man.

There was a loud beep, then a column of numbers scrolled up one of the screens.

'That's it,' Wopner said, squinting at the data. 'Scylla's done.'

'Scylla?' Hatch asked.