The voyage had gone well enough, so far, aside from the one little problem that they hadn’t yet been able to find any bergs. But it looked like that was solved, now.
“We got maybe a two-thousand-kiloton mass there,” Carpenter said, looking into the readout wand’s ceramic-fiber cone. “Not bad, eh?”
“Not for these goddamn days, no,” Hitchcock said. The oceanographer/navigator was old enough to remember when icebergs were never seen farther north than the latitude of southern Chile, and was always glad to let you know about it. “Man, these days a berg that’s still that big all the way up here must have been three counties long when it broke off the fucking polar shelf. But you sure you got your numbers right, man?”
The implied challenge brought a glare to Carpenter’s eyes, and something went curling angrily through his interior, leaving a hot little trail. Hitchcock never thought Carpenter had done anything right the first time. The tensions had been building up, day after day, since the day they had set out from San Francisco Bay. Though he often denied it—too loudly—it was pretty clear Hitchcock felt no small degree of resentment at having been bypassed for captain in favor of an outsider, a mere salaryman from the land-based sector of the Company. Probably he thought it was racism. But he was wrong. Carpenter was managerial track; Hitchcock wasn’t. That was all there was to it.
Sourly Carpenter said, “You want to check the visor yourself? Here. Here, take a look.”
He offered Hitchcock the wand. But Hitchcock shook his head.
“Easy, man. Whatever the screen says, that’s okay for me.” Hitchcock grinned disarmingly, showing mahogany snags.
On the visor impenetrable whorls and jiggles were dancing, black on green, green on black, the occasional dazzling bloom of bright yellow. The Tonopah Maru’s interrogatory beam was traveling 22,500 miles straight up to Nippon Telecom’s big marine scansat, which had its glassy unblinking gaze trained on the whole eastern Pacific, looking for albedo differentials. The reflectivity of an iceberg was different from the reflectivity of the ocean surface. You picked up the differential, you confirmed it with temperature readout, you scanned for mass to see if the trip was worth making. If it seemed to be, you brought your trawler in fast and made the grab before someone else did.
Back in Frisco, Carpenter knew, they were probably kneeling in the streets, praying for him to have some luck, finally. The lovely city by the bay, dusty now, sitting there under that hot soupy remorseless sky full of interesting-colored greenhouse gases, waiting for the rain that almost never came any more. There hadn’t been any rain along the Pacific seaboard in something like ten, eleven months. Most likely the sea around here was full of trawlers—Seattle, San Diego, L.A. According to Nakata the Angelenos kept more ships out than anybody.
Carpenter said, “Start getting the word around. That berg’s down here, SSW. We get it in the grapple tomorrow, we can be in San Francisco with it by a week from Tuesday.”
“If it don’t melt first. This fucking heat.”
“It didn’t melt between Antarctica and here, it’s not gonna melt between here and Frisco. Get a move on, man. We don’t want L.A. coming in and hitting it first.”
By midafternoon they had it on optical detect, first an overhead view via the Samurai Weather Service spysat, then a sea-level image bounced to them by a navy relay buoy. The berg was a thing like a castle afloat, stately and serene, all pink turrets and indigo battlements and blue-white pinnacles. The drydock kind of berg, it was, two high sides with a valley between, and it was maybe two hundred meters long, sitting far up above the water. Steaming curtains of fog shrouded its edges and the ship’s ear was able to pick up the sizzling sound of the melt effervescence that was generated as small chunks of ice went slipping off its sides into the sea. The whole 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
“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.