Hot Sky

Out there in the chilly zone of the Pacific, somewhere between San Francisco and Hawaii, the sea was a weird goulash of currents, streams of cold stuff coming up from the antarctic and coolish upwelling spirals out of the ocean floor and little hot rivers rolling off the sun-blasted continental shelf far to the east. Sometimes you could see steam rising in places where cold water met warm. It was a cockeyed place to be trawling for icebergs. But the albedo readings said there was a berg somewhere around there, and so the Tonopah Maru was there, too.

Carter sat in front of the scanner, massaging the numbers in the cramped cell that was the ship's command center. He was the trawler's captain, a lean, 30ish man, yellow hair, brown beard, skin deeply tanned and tinged with the iridescent greenish-purple of his armoring build-up, the protective layer that the infra-ultra drugs gave you. It was midmorning. The (continued on page 94)Hot Sky(continued from page 87) shot of Screen he'd taken at dawn still simmered like liquid gold in his arteries. He could almost feel it as it made its slow journey outward to his capillaries and trickled into his skin, where it would carry out the daily refurbishing of the body armor that shielded him against ozone crackle and the demon eye of the sun.

This was only his second year at sea. The company liked to move people around. In the past few years, he'd been a desert jockey in bleak, forlorn Spokane, running odds reports for farmers betting on the month the next rainstorm would turn up, and before that a cargo dispatcher for one of the company's L-5 shuttles, and a chip runner before that. And one of these days, if he kept his nose clean, he'd be sitting in a corner office atop the Samurai pyramid in Kyoto. Carter hated a lot of the things he'd had to do in order to play the company game. But he knew that it was the only game there was.

"We got maybe a two-thousand-kiloton mass there," he said, looking into the readout wand's ceramic-fiber cone. "Not bad, eh?"

"Not for these days, no," Hitchcock said. He was the oceanographer/navigator, a grizzled, flat-nosed Afro-Hawaiian whose Screen-induced armor coloring gave his skin a startling midnight look. Hitchcock was old enough to remember when icebergs were never seen farther north than the latitude of southern Chile. "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 Carter's eyes, and something went curling angrily through his interior, leaving a hot little trail. Hitchcock never thought Carter did anything right the first time. Although he often denied it--too loudly--it was pretty clear Hitchcock had never quite gotten over his resentment at being bypassed for captain in favor of an outsider. Probably he thought it was racism. But it wasn't. Carter was managerial track; Hitchcock wasn't. That was all there was to it.

Sourly he said, "You want to check the screen yourself? Here. Here, take a look." He offered Hitchcock the wand.

Hitchcock shook his head. "Easy, man. Whatever the screen says, that's OK for me." He grinned disarmingly, showing mahogany snags. On the screen, 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 entire eastern Pacific, looking for albedo differentials. The reflectivity of an iceberg is different from the reflectivity of the ocean surface. You pick up the differential, you confirm it with temperature readout, you scan for mass to see if the trip's worth while. If it is, you bring your trawler in fast and make the grab before someone else does.

This berg was due to go to San Francisco, which was in a bad way for water just now. The entire West Coast was. There hadn't been any rain along the Pacific Seaboard in ten months. Most likely, the sea around here was full of trawlers--Seattle, San Diego, L.A. The Angelenos kept more ships out than anybody else. The Tonopah Maru had been chartered to them by Samurai Industries until last month. But the trawler was working for San Francisco this time. The lovely city by the bay, dusty now, sitting there under that hot, soupy sky full of interesting-colored greenhouse gases, waiting for the rain that almost never came anymore.

Carter said, "Start getting the word around. That berg's down here, south-southwest. 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 were picking up an overhead view via the Weather Department spysat, then a sea-level image bounced to them by a Navy relay buoy. The berg was a thing like a castle afloat, maybe 200 meters long, stately and serene, all pink turrets and indigo battlements and blue-white pinnacles, rising high above the water. Steaming curtains of fog shrouded its edges. For the past couple of million years, it had been sitting 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. He was the grapple technician, a sleek, beady-eyed, catlike little guy. "It'll be a four-hook job, but so what? We got the hooks for it."

The Tonopah Maru had hooks to spare. Most of its long, cigar-shaped hull was taken up by the immense rack-and-pinion gear that powered the grappling hooks, a vast, silent mechanism capable of hurling the giant hooks far overhead and whipping them down deep into the Hanks of even the biggest bergs. The deck space was given over almost entirely to the great spigots that were used to spray the bergs with a sintering of melt-retardant minor dust. Down below was a powerful fusion-driven engine, strong enough to haul a fair-sized island halfway around the world.

Everything very elegant, except there was barely any room left over for the crew of five. Carter and the others were jammed into odd little corners here and there. For living quarters, they had cubicles not much bigger than the coffin-sized sleeping capsules you got at an airport hotel, and for recreation space, they all shared one little blister dome aft and a pacing area on the foredeck. A sardine-can kind of life, but the pay was good and at least you could breathe fresh air at sea, more or less, instead of the dense grayish-green murk that hovered over the habitable parts of the West Coast.

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.

Carter 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 you say?"

He wondered if he were going to have to fight for his berg. That happened at times. This was open territory, pretty much a lawless zone where old-fashioned piracy was making a terrific comeback.

Rennett was maintenance/operations, a husky, broad-shouldered little kid out of the Midwest dust bowl, no more than chest-high to him, very cocky, very tough. She kept her scalp shaved, the way a lot of them did nowadays, and she was as brown as an acorn all over, with the purple glint of Screen shining brilliantly through, making her look almost fluorescent. Brown eyes as bright as marbles and twice as hard looked back at him.

"Ship," she said, clipping it out of the side of her mouth as if doing him a favor."Right on the other side of the berg. (continued on page 140)Hot Sky(continued from page 94) Caskie's just picked up a message. Some sort of SOS." She handed Carter a narrow strip of yellow radio tape with 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. He read them out loud.

"Can you help us trouble on ship matter of life and death urgent you come aboard soonest

"Kovalcik, acting captain, Calamari Maru"

"What the fuck?" Carter said. "Calamari Maru? Is it a ship or a squid?"

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 on 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 two days' more experience at sea than he did treated him like a greenhorn.

He glanced at the print-out 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. Samurai Industries wasn't fond of K-M these days. Something about the Gobi reclamation contract, industrial espionage, some crap like that. Besides, he 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. Going aboard another ship out here, you were about as vulnerable as you could be. Ten years in corporate life had taught him caution.

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, heat-plagued year of 2133, 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--Rennelt, 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, Carter thought. He gave the older man a murderous 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."

Hitchcock's gaze was steady, remote, noncommittal. His blocky shoulders seemed to reach from wall to wall. "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 it different now."

Carter found himself wishing he'd never let Hitchcock come aboard. But screw it. He'd go over there and see what was what. He had no choice, never really had.

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, we have to get it mirrored and skirted. While that's going on, I'll go 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, Carter could see the erosion grooves at the water line 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 dry-dock 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," Carter 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. Carter managed a grin.

•

The far side of the berg was a straight high wall, a supreme white cliff as smooth as porcelain that was easily 100 meters high, with a wicked tongue of ice jutting out about 40 meters into the sea like a breakwater. That was what the Calamari Maru was using it for, too. The squid ship rode at anchor just inside that tongue.

Carter signaled to Nakata, who was standing way down fore by his control console.

"Hooks away!" Carter called. "Sharp! Sharp!"

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 berg sat motionless in the calm sea.

Then the entire 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. 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. The shower of loose ice came tumbling off the upper ledges. As the impact of the hooking was transmitted to the vast hidden mass of the berg undersea, the entire thing bowed forward a little farther than Carter had been expecting, making a nasty sucking noise against the water, and when it pulled back again, a geyser came spuming up about 20 meters.

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," Carter told him.

The berg was almost stable again now. Carter, watching from his viewing tower by the aft rail, waited for the rush of pleasure and relief that came from a successful claiming, but this time 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. Carter 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 were going to break off and sink them. It would have been smarter of the Calamari Maru to anchor somewhere else. But to hell with them. They'd been warned.

The third hook was easier.

"Four," Carter called. One last time, a 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 entire monstrous floating island of ice snaffled and trussed.

•

Toward sunset, Carter left Hitchcock in charge of the trawler and went over to the Calamari Maru in the sleek little silvery kayak that they used as the ship's boat. He took Rennett with him.

The stink of the other ship reached his nostrils long before he went scrambling up the gleaming woven-monofilament ladder that they had thrown over the side for him: a bitter, acrid reek, a miasma so dense that it was almost visible. Breathing it was something like inhaling all of Cleveland in a single snort. Carter wished he'd worn a facelung. But who expected to need one out at sea, where you were supposed to be able to breathe reasonably decent air?

The Calamari Maru didn't look too good, either. At one quick glance, he picked up a sense of general neglect and slovenliness: black stains on the deck, swirls of dust everywhere, some nasty rust-colored patches of ozone attack that needed work. The reek, though, came from the squids themselves.

The heart of the ship was a vast tank, a huge squid-peeling factory occupying the entire mid-deck. Carter had been on one once before, long ago, when he was a trainee. Samurai Industries ran dozens of them. He looked down into the tank and saw battalions of hefty squids swimming in herds, big-eyed pearly phantoms, scores of them shifting direction suddenly and simultaneously in their squiddy way. Glittering mechanical flails moved among them, seizing and slicing, cutting out the nerve tissue, flushing the edible remainder toward the meat-packing facility. The stench was astonishing. The entire thing was a tremendous processing machine. With the one-time farming heartland of North America and temperate Europe now worthless desert, and the world dependent on the thin, rocky soil of northern Canada and Siberia for its crops, harvesting the sea was essential. But the smell was awful. He fought to keep from gagging.

"You get used to it," said the woman who greeted him when he clambered aboard. "Five minutes, you won't notice."

"Let's hope so," he said. "I'm Captain Carter, and this is Rennett, maintenance/ops. Where's Kovalcik?"

"I'm Kovalcik," the woman said.

His eyes widened. She seemed to be amused by his reaction.

Kovalcik was rugged and sturdy-looking, more than average height, strong cheekbones, eyes set very far apart, expression very cool and controlled, but strain evident behind the control. She was wearing a sacklike jump suit of some coarse gray fabric. About 30, Carter guessed. Her hair was black and close-cropped and her skin was fair, strangely fair, hardly any trace of Screen showing. He saw signs of sun damage, signs of ozone, crackly, red splotches of burn. Two members of her crew stood behind her, also women, also jump-suited, also oddly fair-skinned. Their skin didn't look so good, either.

Kovalcik said, "We are very grateful you came. There is bad trouble on this ship." Her voice was flat. She had just a trace of a European accent, hard to place.

"We'll help out if we can," Carter told her.

He became aware now that they had carved a chunk out of his berg and grappled it up onto the deck, where it was melting into three big aluminum runoff tanks. It couldn't have been a millionth of the total berg mass, not a ten millionth, but seeing it gave him a quick little stab of proprietary fury and he felt a muscle flicker in his cheek. That reaction didn't go unnoticed, either. Kovalcik said quickly, "Yes, water is one of our problems. We have had to replenish our supply this way. There have been some equipment failures lately. You will come to the captain's cabin now? We must talk of what has happened, what must now be done."

She led him down the deck, with Rennett and the two crew women following along behind.

The Calamari Maru was pretty impressive. It was big and long and sleek, built somewhat along the lines of a squid itself, a jet-propulsion job that gobbled water into colossal compressors and squirted it out behind. That was one of the many low-fuel solutions to maritime transport problems that had been worked out for the sake of keeping CO2 output down in these difficult times. Immense things like flying buttresses ran down the deck on both sides. These, Kovalcik explained, were squid lures, covered with bioluminescent photophores: You lowered them into the water and they gave off light that mimicked the glow of the squids' own bodies, and the slithery tentacular buggers came jetting in from vast distances, expecting a great jamboree and getting a net instead.

"Some butchering operation you got here," Carter said.

Kovalcik said a little curtly, "Meat is not all we produce. The squids we catch here have value as food, of course, but also we strip the nerve fibers, we take them back to the mainland, they are used in all kinds of biosensor applications. They are very large, those fibers, a hundred times as thick as ours. They are like single-cell computers. You have a thousand processors aboard your ship that use squid fiber, do you know? Follow me, please. This way."

They went down a ramp, along a narrow companionway. Carter heard thumpings and pingings in the walls. A bulkhead was denied and badly scratched. The lights down here were dimmer than they ought to be and the fixtures hummed ominously. There was a new odor now, a tang of something chemical, sweet but not a pleasing kind of sweet, more a burnt kind of sweet than anything else, cutting sharply across the boom of drums. Rennett shot him a somber glance. This ship was a mess, all right.

"Captain's cabin is here," Kovalcik said, pushing back a door hanging askew on its hinges. "We have drink first, yes?"

The size of the cabin amazed Carter after all those weeks bottled up in his little hole on the Tonopah Maru. It looked as big as a gymnasium. There was a table, a desk, shelving, a comfortable bunk, a sanitary unit, even an entertainment screen, everything nicely spread out with actual floor space you could move around in. The screen had been kicked in. Kovalcik took a flask of Peruvian brandy from a cabinet. Carter nodded and she poured three stiff ones. They drank in silence. The squid odor wasn't so bad in here, or else he was getting used to it, just as she'd said. But the air was rank and close despite the spaciousness of the cabin, thick, soupy stuff that was a struggle to breathe. Something's wrong with the ventilating system, too, Carter thought.

"You see the trouble we have," said Kovalcik.

"I see there's been trouble, yes."

"You don't see half. You should see command room, too. Here, have more brandy; then I take you there."

"Never mind the brandy," Carter said. "How about telling me what the hell's been going on aboard this ship?"

"First come see command room," Kovalcik said.

•

The command room was one level down from the captain's cabin. It was an absolute wreck.

The place was all but burned out. There were laser scars on every surface and gaping wounds in the structural fabric of the ceiling. Glittering strings of program cores were hanging out of data cabinets like broken necklaces, like spilled guts. Everywhere there were signs of some terrible struggle, some monstrous, insane civil war that had raged through the most delicate regions of the ship's mind centers.

"It is all ruined," Kovalcik said. "Nothing works anymore except the squid-processing programs, and as you see, those work magnificently, going on and on, the nets and flails and cutters and so forth. But everything else is damaged. Our water synthesizer, the ventilators, our navigational equipment, much more. We are making repairs, but it is very slow."

"I can imagine it would be. You had yourselves one hell of a party here, huh?"

"There was a great struggle. From deck to deck, from cabin to cabin. It became necessary to place Captain Kohlberg under restraint and he and some of the other officers resisted."

Carter blinked and caught his breath short at that. "What the fuck are you saying? That you had a mutiny aboard this ship?"

For a moment, the charged word hung between them like a whirling sword.

Then Kovalcik said, voice flat as ever, "When we had been at sea for a while, the captain became like a crazy man. It was the heat that got to him, the sun, maybe the air. He began to ask impossible things. He would not listen to reason. And so he had to be removed from command for the safety of all. There was a meeting and he was put under restraint. Some of his officers objected and they had to be put under restraint, too."

Son of a bitch, Carter thought, feeling a little sick. What have I walked into here?

"Sounds just like mutiny to me," Rennett said.

Carter shushed her. This had to be handled delicately. To Kovalcik he said, "They're still alive, the captain, the officers?"

"Yes. I can show them to you."

"That would be a good idea. But first maybe you ought to tell me some more about these grievances you had."

"That doesn't matter now, does it?"

"To me it does. I need to know what you think justifies removing a captain."

She began to look a little annoyed. "There were many things, some big, some small. Work schedules, crew pairings, the food allotment. Everything worse and worse for us each week. Like a tyrant, he was. A Caesar. Not at first, but gradually, the change in him. It was sun poisoning he had, the craziness that comes from too much heat on the brain. He was afraid to use very much Screen, you see, afraid that we would run out before the end of the voyage, so he rationed it very tightly, for himself, for us, too. That was one of our biggest troubles, the Screen." Kovalcik touched her cheeks, her forearms, her wrists, where the skin was pink and raw. "You see how I look? We are all like that. Kohlberg cut us to half ration, then half that. The sun began to eat us. The ozone. We had no protection, do you see? He was so frightened there would be no Screen later on that he let us use only a small amount every day, and we suffered, and so did he, and he got crazier as the sun worked on him, and there was less Screen all the time. He had it hidden, I think. We have not found it yet. We are still on quarter ration."

Carter tried to imagine what that was like, sailing around under the ferocious sky without body armor. The daily injections withheld, the unshielded skin of these people exposed to the full fury of the greenhouse climate. Could Kohlberg really have been so stupid, or so loony? But there was no getting around the raw pink patches on Kovalcik's skin.

"You'd like us to let you have a supply of Screen, is that it?" he asked uneasily.

"No. We would not expect that of you. Sooner or later, we will find where Kohlberg has hidden it."

"Then what is it you do want?"

"Come," Kovalcik said. "Now I show you the officers."

•

The mutineers had stashed their prisoners in the ship's infirmary, a stark, humid room far below deck with three double rows of bunks along the wall and some nonfunctioning medical mechs between them. Each of the bunks but one held a sweat-shiny man with a week's growth of beard. They were conscious, but not very. Their wrists were tied.

"It is very disagreeable for us, keeping them like this," Kolvacik said. "But what can we do? This is Captain Kohlberg." He was heavy-set, Teutonic-looking, groggy-eyed. "He is calm now, but only because we sedate him. We sedate all of them, fifty c.c.s of omnipax. But it is a threat to their health, the constant sedation. And in any case, the drugs, we are running short. Another few days and then we will have none, and it will be harder to keep them restrained, and if they break free, there will be war on this ship again."

"I'm not sure if we have any omnipax on board," Carter said. "Certainly not enough to do you much good for long."

"That is not what we are asking, either," said Kovalcik.

"What are you asking, then?"

"These five men, they threaten everybody's safety. They have forfeited the right to command. This I could show, with playbacks of the time of struggle on this ship. Take them."

"What?"

"Take them onto your ship. They must not stay here. These are crazy men. We must rid ourselves of them. We must be left to repair our ship in peace and do the work we are paid to do. It is a humanitarian thing, taking them. You are going back to San Francisco with the iceberg? Take them, these troublemakers. They will be no danger to you. They will be grateful for being rescued. But here they are like bombs that must sooner or later go off."

Carter looked at her as if she were a bomb that had already gone off. Rennett had simply turned away, covering what sounded like a burst of hysterical laughter by forcing a coughing fit.

That was all he needed, making himself an accomplice in this thing, obligingly picking up a bunch of officers pushed off their ship by mutineers. Kyocera-Merck men at that. Aid and succor to the great corporate enemy? The Samurai Industries agent in Frisco would really love it when he came steaming into port with five K-M men on board. He'd especially want to hear that Carter had done it for humanitarian reasons.

Besides, where the fuck were these men going to sleep? On deck between the spigots? Should he pitch a tent on the iceberg, maybe? What about feeding them, for Christ's sake? What about Screen? Everything was calibrated down to the last molecule.

"I don't think you understand our situation," Carter said carefully. "Aside from the legalities of the thing, we've got no space for extra personnel. We barely have enough for us."

"It would be just for a short while, no? A week or two?"

"I tell you we've got every millimeter allotted. If God Himself wanted to come on board as a passenger, we'd have a tough time figuring out where to put Him. You want technical help patching your ship back together, we can try to do that. We can even let you have some supplies. But taking five men aboard--"

Kovalcik's eyes began to look a little wild. She was breathing very hard now. "You must do this for us! You must! Otherwise--"

"Otherwise?" Carter prompted.

All he got from her was a bleak stare, no friendlier than the green-streaked ozone-crisp sky.

"Hilfe," Kohlberg muttered just then, stirring unexpectedly in his bunk.

"What was that?"

"It is delirium," said Kovalcik.

"Hilfe. Hilfe. In Gottes Namen, hilfe!" And then, in thickly accented English, the words painfully framed: "Help. She will kill us all."

"Delirium?" Carter said.

Kovalcik's eyes grew even chillier. Drawing an ultrasonic syringe from a cabinet in the wall, she slapped it against Kohlberg's arm. There was a small buzzing sound. Kohlberg subsided into sleep. Snuffling snores rose from his bunk. Kovalcik smiled. She seemed to be recovering her self-control. "He is a madman. You see what my skin is like. What his madness has done to me, has done to every one of us. If he got loose, if he put the voyage in jeopardy--yes, yes, we would kill him. We would kill them all. It would be only self-defense, you understand me? But it must not come to that." Her voice was icy. You could air-condition an entire city with that voice. "You were not here during the trouble. You do not know what we went through. We will not go through it again. Take these men from us, Captain."

She stepped back, folding her arms across her chest. The room was very quiet, suddenly, except for the pingings and thumpings from the ship's interior and an occasional snore out of Kohlberg. Kovalcik was completely calm again, the ferocity and iciness no longer visible. As though she were simply telling him, "This is the situation, the ball is now in your court, Captain Carter."

What a stinking, squalid mess, Carter thought.

But he was startled to find, when he looked behind the irritation he felt at having been dragged into this, a curious sadness where he would have expected anger to be. Despite everything, he found himself flooded with surprising compassion for Kovalcik, for Kohlberg, for all of them, for the whole fucking poisoned, heat-blighted world. Who had asked for any of this--the heavy green sky, the fiery air, the daily need for Screen, the million frantic improvisations that made continued life on earth possible? Not us. Our great-great-grandparents had, maybe, but not us. Only they're not here to know what it's like, and we are.

Then the moment passed. What the hell could he do? Did Kovalcik think he was Jesus Christ? He had no room for these people. He had no extra Screen or food. In any case, this was none of his business. And San Francisco was waiting for its iceberg. It was time to move along. Tell her anything, just get out of here.

"All right," he said. "I see your problem. I'm not entirely sure I can help out, but I'll do what I can. I'll check our supplies and let you know what we're able to do. OK?"

•

Hitchcock said, "What I think, Cap'n, we ought to just take hold of them. Nakata can put a couple of his spare hooks into them, and we'll tow them into Frisco along with the berg."

"Hold on," Carter said. "Are you out of your mind? I'm no fucking pirate."

"Who's talking about piracy? It's our obligation. We got to turn them in, man, is how I see it. They're mutineers."

"I'm not a policeman, either," Carter retorted. "They want to have a mutiny, let them goddamn go and mutiny. I have a job to do. I just want to get that berg moving east. Without hauling a shipload of crazies along. Don't even think I'm going to make some kind of civil arrest of them. Don't even consider it for an instant, Hitchcock."

Mildly, Hitchcock said, "You know, we used to take this sort of thing seriously, once upon a time. You know what I mean, man? We wouldn't just look the other way."

"You don't understand," Carter said. Hitchcock gave him a sharp, scornful look. "No. Listen to me," Carter snapped. "That ship's nothing but trouble. The woman who runs it, she's something you don't want to be very close to. We'd have to put her in chains if we tried to take her in, and taking her isn't as easy as you seem to think, either. There's five of us and I don't know how many of them. And that's a Kyocera-Merck ship there. Samurai isn't paying us to pull K-M's chestnuts out of the fire."

It was late morning now. The sun was getting close to noon height, and the sky was brighter than ever, fiercely hot, with some swirls of lavender and green far overhead, vagrant wisps of greenhouse garbage that must have drifted west from the noxious high-pressure air that sat perpetually over the mid-section of the United States. Carter imagined he could detect a whiff of methane in the breeze. Just across the way was the berg, shining like polished marble, shedding water hour by hour as the mounting heat worked it over. Back in San Francisco, they were brushing the dust out of the empty reservoirs. Time to be moving along, yes. Kovalcik and Kohlberg would have to work out their problems without him. He didn't feel good about that, but there were a lot of things he didn't feel good about, and he wasn't able to fix those, either.

"You said she's going to kill those five guys," Caskie said. The communications operator was small and slight, glossy black hair and lots of it, no bare scalp for her. "Does she mean it?"

Carter shrugged. "A bluff, most likely. She looks tough, but I'm not sure she's that tough."

"I don't agree," Rennett said. "She wants to get rid of those men in the worst way."

"You think?"

"I think that what they were doing anchored by the berg was getting ready to maroon them on it. Only we came along, and we're going to tow the berg away, and that screwed up the plan. So now she wants to give them to us instead. We don't take them, she'll just dump them over the side soon as we're gone."

"Even though we know the score?"

"She'll say they broke loose and jumped into the ship's boat and escaped, and she doesn't know where the hell they went. Who's to say otherwise?"

Carter stared gloomily. Yes, he thought, who's to say otherwise?

"The berg's melting while we screw around," Hitchcock said. "What'll it be, Cap'n? We sit here and discuss some more? Or we pull up and head for Frisco?"

"My vote's for taking them on board," said Nakata.

"I don't remember calling for a vote," Carter said. "We've got no room for five more hands. Not for anybody. We're packed as tight as we can possibly get. Living on this ship is like living in a rowboat, as it is." He was starting to feel rage rise in him. This business was getting too tangled: legal issues, humanitarian issues, a lot of messy stuff. The simple reality underneath it all was that he couldn't take on passengers, no matter what the reason.

And Hitchcock was right. The berg was losing water every minute. Even from here, bare eyes alone, he could see erosion going on, the dripping, the carving. The oscillations were picking up, the big icy thing rocking gently back and forth as its stability at water line got nibbled away. Later on, the oscillations wouldn't be so gentle. They had to get that berg sprayed with mirrordust and wrapped with a plastic skirt at the water line to slow down wave erosion and start moving. San Francisco was paying him to bring home an iceberg, not a handful of slush.

Rennett called. She had wandered up into the observation rack above them and was shading her eyes, looking across the water. "They've put out a boat, Cap'n."

"No," he said. "Son of a bitch!"

He grabbed for his 6 x 30 spyglass. A boat, sure enough, a hydrofoil dinghy. It looked full: three, four, five. He hit the switch for biosensor boost and the squid fiber in the spyglass went to work for him. The image blossomed, high resolution. Five men. He recognized Kohlberg sitting slumped in front.

"Shit," he said. "She's sending them over to us. Just dumping them on us."

"If we doubled up somehow--" Nakata began, smiling hopefully.

"One more word out of you and I'll double you up," said Carter. He turned to Hitchcock, who had one hand clamped meditatively over the lower half of his face, pushing his nose back and forth and scratching around in his thick white stubble. "Break out some lasers," Carter said. "Defensive use only. Just in case. Hitchcock, you and Rennett get out there in the kayak and escort those men back to the squid ship. If they aren't conscious, tow them over to it. If they are, and they don't want to go back, invite them very firmly to go back, and if they don't like the invitation, put a couple of holes through the side of their boat and get the hell back here fast. You understand me?"

Hitchcock nodded stonily. "Sure, man. Sure."

•

Carter watched the entire thing from the blister dome at the stern, wondering whether he were going to have a mutiny of his own on his hands now, too. But no. No. Hitchcock and Rennett kayaked out along the edge of the berg until they came up beside the dinghy from the Calamari Maru, and there was a brief discussion, very brief, Hitchcock doing the talking and Rennett holding a laser rifle in a casual but businesslike way. The five castoffs from the squid ship seemed more or less awake. They pointed and gestured and threw up their arms in despair. But Hitchcock kept talking and Rennett kept stroking the laser and the men in the dinghy looked more and more dejected by the moment. Then the discussion broke up and the kayak headed back toward the Tonopah Maru, and the men in the dinghy sat where they were, no doubt trying to figure out their next move.

Hitchcock said, coming on board, "This is bad business, man. That captain, he say the woman just took the ship away from him, on account of she wanted him to let them all have extra shots of Screen and he didn't give it. There wasn't enough to let her have so much, is what he said. I feel real bad, man."

"So do I," said Carter. "Believe me."

"I learn a long time ago," Hitchcock said, "when a man say, 'Believe me,' that's the one thing I shouldn't do."

"Fuck you," Carter said. "You think I wanted to strand them? But we have no choice. Let them go back to their own ship. She won't kill them. All they have to do is let her do what she wants to do and they'll come out of it OK. She can put them off on some island somewhere, Hawaii, maybe. But if they come with us, we'll be in deep shit all the way back to Frisco."

Hitchcock nodded. "Yeah. We may be in deep shit already."

"What you say?"

"Look at the berg," Hitchcock said. "At water line. It's getting real carved up."

Carter scooped up his glass and kicked in the biosensor boost. He scanned the berg. It didn't look good. The heat was working it over very diligently.

This was the hottest day since they'd entered these waters. The sun seemed to be getting bigger every minute. There was a nasty magnetic crackling coming out of the sky, as if the atmosphere itself were getting ionized as it baked. And the berg was starting to wobble. Carter saw the oscillations plainly, those horizontal grooves filling with water, the sea not so calm now as sky/ocean heat differentials began to build up and conflicting currents came slicing in.

"Son of a bitch," Carter said. "That settles it. We got to get moving right now."

There was still plenty to do. Carter gave the word and the mirror-dust spigots went into operation, cannoning shining clouds of powdered metal over the exposed surface of the berg, and probably all over the squid ship and the dinghy, too. It took half an hour to do the job. The squid ship was still roughening, the belly was lolloping around in a mean way. But Carter knew there was a gigantic base down there out of sight, enough to hold it steady until they could get under way, he hoped.

"Let's get the skirt on it now," he said.

A tricky procedure, nozzles at the ship's water line extruding a thermoplastic spray that would coat the berg just where it was most vulnerable to wave erosion. The hard part came in managing the extensions of the cables linking the hooks to the ship so they could maneuver around the berg. But Nakata was an ace at that. They pulled up anchor and started around the far side. The mirror-dusted berg was dazzling, a tremendous mountain of white light.

"I don't like that wobble," Hitchcock said.

"Won't matter a damn once we're under way," said Carter.

The heat was like a hammer now, pounding the dark, cool surface of the water, mixing up the thermal layers, stirring up the currents, getting everything churned around. They had waited just a little too long to get started. The berg, badly undercut, was doing a big sway to windward, bowing like one of those round-bottomed Japanese dolls, then swaying back again. God only knew what kind of sea action the squid ship was getting, but Carter couldn't see it from this side of the berg. He kept on moving, circling the berg to the full extension of the hook cables, then circling back the way he'd come.

When they got around to leeward again, he saw what kind of sea action the squid ship had been getting. It was swamped. The ice tongue it had been anchored next to had come rising up out of the sea and kicked it like a giant foot.

"Jesus Christ," Hitchcock murmured, standing beside him. "Will you look at that. The damn fools just sat there all the time."

The Calamari Maru was shipping water like crazy and starting to go down. The sea was boiling with an armada of newly liberated squid, swiftly propelling themselves in all directions, heading anywhere else at top speed. Three dinghies were bobbing around in the water in the shadow of the berg.

"Will you look at that," Hitchcock said again.

"Start the engines," Carter told him. "Let's get the fuck out of here."

Hitchcock stared at him, disbelievingly.

"You mean that, Cap'n? You really mean that?"

"I goddamn well do."

"Shit," said Hitchcock. "This fucking lousy world."

"Go on. Get 'em started."

"You actually going to leave three boats full of people from a sinking ship sitting out there in the water?"

"Yeah. You got it. Now start the engines, will you?"

"That's too much," Hitchcock said softly, shaking his head in a big slow swing. "Too goddamn much."

He made a sound like a wounded buffalo and took two or three shambling steps toward Carter, his arms dangling loosely, his hand half cupped. Hitchcock's eyes were slitted and his face looked oddly puffy. He loomed above Carter, wheezing and muttering, a dark, massive slab of a man. Half as big as the iceberg out there was how he looked just then.

Oh, shit, Carter thought. Here it comes. My very own mutiny, right now.

Hitchcock rumbled and muttered and closed his hands into fists. Exasperation tinged with fear swept through Carter and he brought his arm up without even stopping to think, hitting Hitchcock hard, a short fast jab in the mouth that rocked the older man's head back sharply and sent him reeling against the rail. Hitchcock slammed into it and bounced. For a moment, it looked as if he'd fall, but he managed to steady himself. A kind of sobbing sound, but not quite a sob, more of a grunt, came from him. A bright dribble of blood sprouted on his white-stubbled chin.

For a moment, Hitchcock seemed dazed. Then his eyes came back into focus and he looked at Carter in amazement.

"I wasn't going to hit you, Cap'n," he said, blinking hard. There was a soft, stunned quality to his voice. "Nobody ever hits a cap'n, not ever. Not ever. You know that, Cap'n."

"I told you to start the engines."

"You hit me, Cap'n. What the hell you hit me for?"

"You started to come at me, didn't you?" Carter said.

Hitchcock's shining bloodshot eyes were immense in his Screen-blackened face. "You think I was coming at you? Oh, Cap'n! Oh, Jesus, Cap'n. Jesus!" He shook his head and wiped at the blood. Carter saw that he was bleeding, too, at the knuckle, where he'd hit a tooth. Hitchcock continued to stare at him, the way you might stare at a dinosaur that had just stepped out of the forest. Then his look of astonishment softened into something else--sadness, maybe. Or was it pity? Pity would be even worse, Carter thought. A whole lot worse.

"Cap'n--" Hitchcock began, his voice hoarse and thick.

"Don't say it. Just go and get the engines started."

"Yeah," he said. "Yeah, man."

He went slouching off, rubbing at his lip.

"Caskie's picking up an autobuoy SOS," Rennett called from somewhere updeck.

"Nix," Carter yelled back furiously. "We can't do it."

"What?"

"There's no fucking room for them," Carter said. His voice was as sharp as an icicle. "Nix. Nix."

He lifted his spyglass again and took another look toward the oncoming dinghies. Chugging along hard, they were, but having heavy weather of it in the turbulent water. He looked quickly away before he could make out faces. The berg, shining like fire, was still oscillating. He thought of the hot winds sweeping across the continent to the east, sweeping all around the belly of the world, the dry, rainless winds that forever sucked up what little moisture could still be found. It was almost a shame to have to go back there. Like returning to hell after a little holiday at sea, is how it felt. It was worst in the middle latitudes, the temperate zone, once so fertile. Rain almost never fell at all there now. The dying forests, the new grasslands taking over, deserts where even the grass couldn't make it, the polar ice packs crumbling, the lowlands drowning everywhere, dead buildings sticking up out of the sea, vines sprouting on freeways, the alligators moving northward. This fucking lousy world, Hitchcock had said. Yeah. This berg here, this oversized ice cube, how many days' water supply would that be for San Francisco? Ten? Fifteen?

He turned. They were staring at him--Nakata, Rennett, Caskie, everybody but Hitchcock, who was on the bridge setting up the engine combination.

"This never happened," Carter told them. "None of this. We never saw anybody else out here. Not anybody. You got that? This never happened."

They nodded, one by one.

There was a quick shiver down below as the tiny sun in the engine room, the little fusion sphere, came to full power. With a groan, the engine kicked in at high. The ship started to move away, out of the zone of dark water, toward the bluer sea just ahead. Off they went, pulling eastward as fast as they could, trying to make time ahead of the melt rate. It was afternoon now. Behind them, the other sun, the real one, lighted up the sky with screaming fury as it headed off into the west. That was good, to have the sun going one way as you were going the other.

Carter didn't look back. What for? So you can beat yourself up about something you couldn't help?

His knuckle was stinging where he had split it punching Hitchcock. He rubbed it in a distant, detached way, as if it were someone else's hand. Think east, he told himself. You're towing 2000 kilotons of million-year-old frozen water to thirsty San Francisco. Think good thoughts. Think about your bonus. Think about your next promotion. No sense looking back. You look back, all you do is hurt your eyes.

"This was open territory, a lawless zone where old-fashioned piracy was making a comeback."

"He glanced at the print-out again. Urgent, it said. Matter of life and death. Shit."