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.
“Hooks away!” Carpenter called. “Sharp! Sharp!”
Nakata waved an okay and put his hands to the keyboard. An instant later there came the groaning sound of the grapple-hatch opening, and the deep rumbling of the hook gimbals. Somewhere deep in the belly of the ship immense mechanisms were swinging around, moving into position. The great berg sat motionless in the calm sea.
It was a little like deep-sea fishing: the trick didn’t lie in hooking your beast, but in what you did with it afterward, when you had to play it.
The whole ship shivered as the first hook came shooting up into view. It hovered overhead, a tremendous taloned thing filling half the sky, black against the shining brightness of the air. Then Nakata hit the keys again and the hook, having reached the apex of its curve, spun downward with slashing force, heading for the breast of the berg.
It hit and dug and held. The berg recoiled, quivered, rocked. A shower of loose ice came tumbling off the upper ledges. As the impact of the hooking was transmitted to the vast hidden undersea mass of the berg, the whole thing bowed forward a little farther than Carpenter had been expecting, making a nasty sucking noise against the water, and when it pulled back again a geyser came spuming up about twenty meters.
Those poor bastards aboard the Calamari Maru weren’t going to like that. But they had chosen to stay in their anchorage while a hooking was going on, hadn’t they? What the hell did they expect, a teeriy splash or two?
Down by the bow, Nakata was making his I-got-you gesture at the berg, the middle finger rising high.
A cold wind was blowing from the berg now. It was like the exhalation of some huge wounded beast, an aroma of ancient times, a fossil-breath wind.
They moved on a little farther along the berg’s flank.
“Hook two,” Carpenter told him.
The berg was almost stable again now. Plainly there was more undercutting than they had thought, but they would manage. Carpenter, watching from his viewing tower by the aft rail, waited for the rush of pleasure and relief that everybody had said would come from a successful claiming, but it wasn’t there. All he felt was impatience, an eagerness to get all four hooks in and start chugging on back to the Golden Gate.
The second hook flew aloft, hovered, plunged, struck, bit.
A second time the berg slammed the water, and a second time the sea jumped and shook. Carpenter had just a moment to catch a glimpse of the other ship popping around like a floating cork, and wondered if that ice tongue they found so cozy was going to break off and sink them. It would have been a lot smarter of them to drop anchor somewhere else. But to hell with them. They’d been warned.
The third hook was easier.
One more, now.
“Four,” Carpenter called. A four-hook berg was something special. Plenty of opportunity to snag your lines, tangle your cables. But Nakata knew what he was doing. One last time the grappling iron flew through the air, whipping off at a steep angle to catch the far side of the berg over the top, and then they had it, the whole monstrous floating island of ice snaffled and trussed. Now all they had to do was spray it with mirror-dust, wrap a plastic skirt around it at the waterline to slow down wave erosion, and start towing it toward San Francisco.