He looked back at the Fleet, at the tangle of interests and lies, and felt a new understanding take hold of him. I saw the sky rolled up as if a scroll.
The Fleet was one thing, but it was also many things bound in an uneasy union. They were opposed and they distrusted one another, and they were right to do so. Their coexistence was convenient, not perpetual. That fatal missile had scared Kershaw, had done the same to the captains of the Fleet. He could read their dismay and their amazement on the wall by the door, and that dismay was not assuaged by the fact that every single one of them displayed it. One or more of them could be lying, almost certainly were. It was hardly paranoid to wonder about a false-flag operation when you lived in the middle of the largest, most public, most permanent such scheme that had ever existed.
It was not that there were cracks in the alliance. There was no alliance, only a tenuous concert which lasted for as long as each ship held its station and each nation turned its eyes away.
So long as each ship held its station.
Which in turn called one to consider under what circumstances a ship might do otherwise.
Each vessel took orders from its home authority, of course, by whatever devious backchannels had been established. But oper-ational control was passed to the individual captains so that local and immediate matters could be dealt with appropriately. It was bad practice to shackle your commander in the field to the whims and prohibitions of a faraway master.
If those captains were like soldiers on land they would be slow to waken when crisis struck after a long period of quiet, then overcompensate. They would mistrust one another because the likely source of any attack on a vessel of the Fleet was from within the Fleet. However good they were, these were the realities they lived with. They must ask: who is my friend? Who is a threat? and with so many players in the game in such close proximity, the ramifications of any change in the lines of power and alliance multiplied appallingly, possibilities and dangers expanding to every horizon in an instant. Every captain must ultimately accept paranoia, incomplete understanding or paralysis. The best would act decisively but with restraint. The others would dither and lash out, and in doing so they would further cloud the situation around them, each round of response and counter-response becoming more impossible to navigate.
One thing guaranteed a great movement of the ships in the Bay of the Cupped Hands: a storm. And if, during the preparations for such an event, when ties to the land were severed and all the many vessels must move out and around one another in accordance with the instructions of the Portmaster, one were able to inspire mistrust between them, and at the same time cause one or more to act in a manner which might be seen as a threat – say, by persuading the Portmaster to set them on what might appear to be a collision course – well, then, anything was possible.
The Fleet at rest was a glassy ædifice, smooth and unscaleable. The Fleet afraid was a chaos in which a single man with a clear understanding might do much.
If only one knew when a storm was coming, or could create one.
But then, the Mancreu Meteorology Station was an unmanned post a mile up the road, and the key was held in the offices of the former authority – the British Met Office, whose branch director had been a member of the consular staff. In other words, it was down the hall, on a hook.
By the predawn the Sergeant had a plan. Since discovery was inevitable, he would provide the Elaine’s crew with too much to think about, too many confusing imperatives, splitting their attention in as many directions as possible. First the warning of a sudden storm, then some explosives in a dinghy or two floating among the ships. Everyone would be out on deck and nightblind, seeing patterns in the waves and shadows, seeing other ships moving in unanticipated ways. They would simply have too much to pay attention to. While they were overstretched, he would sneak onto the Elaine and taser anyone he met, flashbang any large groups, until he got Sandrine out and they could escape into the confusion. It would be nice to think that no one would shoot randomly into the water, but he thought they probably would, so he’d need to head away from the main body of the Fleet. Elaine was out on the edge, anyway.
It was a bad plan. It was all he had. He would improvise the rest. He would need to be fresh for that.
The crushing weight of fatigue landed on his shoulders all at once. He pushed it away again, found grit somewhere deep down and clawed his way back into his own head.
Bad Jack. Arno. Kershaw. Pechorin. All and any of them might be added into the plan, for good or ill. Lies are his hill country. Quite. Not Arno.
Pechorin, then? But he was with Arno now, and Kershaw would trust only so far.
Which left Jack. Jack was in this. Back to Jack. He stared at the nest around the Elaine, the madman’s curve of string, and wondered if Jack would yield to the same analysis. Except that he didn’t have schematics for Jack. Jack wasn’t owned by London. Jack, who had been Shola’s boss. Who had been the target of the original attack. Jack who was everywhere. Jack Jack Jack.
He whispered it as he walked through the house alone, hearing his voice echo on the black and white tiles, the wooden boards, the white walls, hearing it inside his own head like a whistle, seeing brown swirls and circles at the corners of his eyes. Sleep now. But he was moving too fast, still thinking. He poured milk from a bottle and made Ovaltine, still in his mind called Ovomaltine because that had been the name on the giant tub of it his mother had brought back from France when he was little. He stood in the conservatory and looked at the tomatoes, wondered if he was fighting them again, their impossible thicket of fibrous green.
He drank deeply, tasted the dregs, felt the malted powder against his teeth. His father had been sparing with the contents of the tub, afterwards, where his mother had always been generous to a fault. In the end, guessing that this was more to do with an unwillingness to let the physical evidence of his wife disappear than with an actual preference, the young Lester Ferris had taken to buying refills and heaping them in when his father was watching television – but even with the tub mysteriously getting fuller with each month that passed, his father made the bedtime drink weaker and weaker. When Lester had moved out, he’d taken the tub with him. Still had it somewhere, back home.
He put the cup in the kitchen and went to his bed. There was a faint light on in the boy’s room, the glimmer of a laptop screen. He paused, knocked. Should he explain about Shola? About death by IOU? No. Not now. Later it would be a final debt to be settled, but you did not burden your soldiers with side issues before the fight. That was how they died.
‘Yes?’ the boy said.
‘Got a minute?’
The boy ushered him in, pointed him to the chair and sat cross-legged on the bed. His face was curious.
The Sergeant sighed. ‘I need something and I don’t know where to get it. I can’t ask anyone else.’ The boy nodded cautiously.
You’re not going to like this. He looked for a way to say it which wasn’t bad, couldn’t find one. ‘I need to talk to Jack,’ he said.
‘Talk to Jack?’
‘To Bad Jack. Yes.’
The boy considered this for a long while, his eyes shuttered and perhaps a little dismayed. ‘Talk to Jack? Why, talk to Jack?’
There were so many ways to put it, to soft-pedal what he needed. But he wanted to tell the truth. Finally he said: ‘Superhero team-up issue.’