Hurricane Fever

by Tobias S. Buckell

  As he talked to Elvin about what Elvin had been up to since they’d last seen each other in general terms, the expanding lower mass of Aves filled out. A horizontal blotch of a city on stilts, surrounded by more sturdy platforms rising out of the sea on rusted, rotund legs. Some of them oil platforms, moved to create more open space where the sand no longer existed. But later, the floating piers and homes systems had been added to Aves that were commonly found in more and more coastal cities throughout the world.

  No one on Aves ever planned to try and keep the roaring seas back. It was a futile gesture. Instead they used the tip of the island peeking up from its submarine mountain range as a base to bolt everything to.

  Even the sand around Aves’s pylons was a fiction. The original Aves Island had long since been swallowed by rising seas. The sand had been imported to continue the fiction that Aves Island was still a thing. A physical spit of something that people could continue to threaten a war over, countersue about in courts, and generally get upset about or use.

  Twenty thousand people lived out here, naked to the ocean’s power, clinging on stilts to what lay underneath.

  “So, you need a favor?” Elvin asked. He didn’t know much about Roo. Roo figured he suspected Roo worked Caribbean Intelligence, though that hadn’t been true since he’d left the Arctic. But the impression meant that Elvin wouldn’t turn him down.

  “You willing to let me buy you a meal?” Roo asked.

  “I’ll send you the location,” Elvin said. “Let me know when you feet hit ground.”

  Roo saw several ships thrown up onto the floating docks and barges around the outer ring of Aves now. Many more shattered and half afloat inside the hundreds of thick stilts.

  A beautiful house leaned dangerously over, its legs half knocked out from underneath. Some of the roads between the apartment complexes and barges had collapsed.

  But Aves was already buzzing with activity. Large oil tankers were docked near the industrial section, vomiting their liquid black gold into barges that would be using it to spit out plastics that could be airlifted by low-cost blimp throughout the Caribbean basin. A hydrofoil ferry from somewhere down island was docked on the main floating dock, people in bright white shirts walking up a steep ramp to get into the main thoroughfares of Aves, high off the water and safe.

  Aves was less a tourist attraction, more of a manufacturing and industrial park. The sort of metallic carbuncle of density and frenetic human energy created by trade, oil, and power. But like every Caribbean island, there was somewhere to dock and for sailors to gather. Roo eased them into a harbor created out of a large concrete floating barge that trailed docks behind like squid’s tentacles.

  Once secured, he checked on Kit. She was asleep in the spare cabin, her arms wrapped around one of Roo’s old tablets, snoring softly. There was a big bruise on her forehead from a violent toss from sometime in the night.

  He closed the door quietly.

  * * *

  Elvin had gained heft, the result of desk jobs and easy consulting gigs. But he wore the extra weight well, particularly in his sharp, shiny black Gucci suit, silver Oakley glasses, and vaguely cowboy-ish looking boots. His shaved scalp beaded with sweat as they met for a late lunch.

  “This is a view to kill for,” he said, sweeping gently between chairs and tired-looking business types hunched over mutual paperwork. The smooth movements seemed at odds with Elvin’s frame, but he’d spent years working front lines before moving his way away from the action.

  A dancer often kept their grace, an athlete a banked fire at their core.

  Elvin picked out a table near the glass railing at the edge of the open-air restaurant. “We’re getting good at this,” he told Roo.

  “What?”

  “Recovery. Just this morning Aves is hit by a powerful hurricane, and by late afternoon, here we all are.” He swept a hand around the business lunch crowd. “When I was kid, each storm would destroy everything. Billions of dollars lost, homes, people’s lives. In some places, it’s still a catastrophe. But Aves is built from the start assuming we’ll get hit by several a year. The new normal.”

  The restaurant perched on a half side of an open floor area three quarters of the way up one of the handful of twenty-story core buildings clustered at the heart of Aves. A small botanical garden wafted the smell of fresh flowers at them. Birds of paradise, ginger, and lots of hibiscus. Thick plastic windows had rolled out from tracks to protect them from the storm, and had been rolled back into place afterward.

  From here they looked out South over all of Aves.

  And Elvin was right. Roo had seen the worst of the damage on his way in. In fact, that damage had been swept by the surge and sea under the city into its pilings. From up here, Aves was streets and buildings.

  The core lower areas assumed flooding and battering seas. The pedestrian walkways and bikeways weaved in and out of carefully maintained greenspace. Most of the roofs had gardens and more greenspace, making Aves look like more of an island from above than it had from the gritty, rusty forest of pillars at sea level that Roo had seen as they approached.

  Some of the island’s walkways were at the same height as the top of Spitfire’s mast.

  And already the cleanup of downed trees and solar shingles knocked loose was finishing up.

  It was survival of the fittest, really. Buildings not able to handle the hurricane-force winds were not even allowed to be built. Add near-bulletproof glass in windows. And anyone building new construction out here demanded roofs with wingtips designed to shove them down harder onto their houses, rather than flip up and fly away into the wind.

  Other designs had long since been swept away and given up on as useless for survival here in Hurricane Alley.

  With Caribbean basin oil money, a lot of rebuilding for rising oceans had been done. Rebuilding that would have bankrupted the small Caribbean nations back when Roo was little.

  “The green tower,” Roo said, pointing out the newest, almost thirty-story spiral to the north.

  “That’s a Beauchamp vertical farm,” Elvin said. “Beauchamp Holdings is all over Aves now. They’re trying to wrangle their way into building another farm specializing in hard-to-grow fruits, and then supplying the nearby islands from here.”

  “They have one on St. Thomas,” Roo said. Some islands had room for agriculture and markets fresh with produce. But lots of things had to be shipped in. Used to be everyone just shouldered the doubled cost of basic foodstuffs. The vertical farms dropped the price slightly and kept the food locally made.

  Roo slid the passport he’d stolen across the table to Elvin once their drinks arrived. “You’re working security for Aves now, right?”

  Elvin flipped through the passport with a single hand and sipped at an alarmingly yellow-colored Carib beer with the other. “Who’s this?”

  “The favor I was talking about. Delroy’s dead. This was one of the crew that did it. They’re Golden Dawn leftovers, or maybe just more generic general Eastern European neo-Nazi types. I’m not sure which. They passed through here. I’m hunting them down.”

  Elvin wiped his scalp with a napkin and then used his glasses to snap a photo of the passport for reference. He tapped the frames, then bobbed his head around as he navigated data only he could see.

  “I’ll pay,” Roo said. “Gold. You work Aves Security. I need to know where your cameras have seen them, who they talked to on the island. Anything. They killed my nephew, Elvin. They killed Delroy.”

  Elvin put the napkin away in a pocket, and look at Roo over the rim of his glasses. “It’s an ethics violation. The contract I have, I don’t have no room for playing around.”

  Roo sat back and made a disgusted sound.

  Elvin raised his hands. “Look, man. For real, the way you get around this is to get Interpol to call me. Or even Caribbean Intelligence…” He let that hang. “Go official.”

  “I’m hunting these fuckers down, Elvin,” Roo said levelly. He couldn’t play the
CIG card. And now Elvin knew that. His position had just weakened.

  “If you come causing trouble on Aves, it’s not just me that’ll be crawling down you throat. There is an actual CARICOM garrison still on the island.”

  Roo leaned forward. “I have a French DGSE agent working with me,” he said.

  “Official?”

  “Big enough player for you?” Roo asked. “Katrina Prideaux.”

  Elvin rubbed his temple and twitched his head. Searching. “DGSE. Here from Guadeloupe?”

  “She came to St. Thomas to see me.” Roo squinted. “Look, I won’t lie, Elvin. I’m here for revenge. I’m following this chain, and I’m going to pull the house down around me to bring pain upon whoever did this. I don’t expect it will be a good thing. I’ll give you three years’ income. If it blows up, you take a vacation and wait until it dies down and you can work again. If you manage to stay out of the mess I want to bring and don’t get fired, keep the gold for retirement. Or whatever you want.”

  “Three years?” Elvin asked, looking around.

  “Three.”

  Elvin sighed and pushed his glasses up. “Fuck it. I’ll run facial recognition; see how well I can still manage old-school detective work. I’ll come down to the docks to see you. Still the Spitfire?”

  “Still Spitfire,” Roo confirmed.

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  17

  Someone knocking on the side of the hull snapped Roo awake. He sat up, the net strung between the front section of the two hulls creaking as he got to his feet. Water lapped away underneath him, and the sun had been burning away at him. Or at least, it had.

  Now it was gloomy dark outside. The sun nowhere to be found, just the last wisps of red and purple in the west.

  “Prudence?”

  It had been comfortable to lay there, soaking in the warmth and succumbing to a sleep deep enough he didn’t keep surfacing to listen for something that wasn’t ever going to come back to the Spitfire’s hull: the sound of Delroy’s voice.

  “Jones!”

  Roo had a gun just by his hip. Fingers still tight around the grip. He frowned at it, surprised he hadn’t dropped it into the water when he fell asleep. He barely remembered getting it. But apparently he couldn’t sleep without one in his hand now.

  “Jones!”

  Elvin stood on the end of the dock, even more sweaty than before. His nice shirt was blotched with wet stains. He fidgeted, moving from foot to foot, jaw clenched.

  Roo moved across the webbing to the main cabin. “Come aboard.”

  Elvin hopped onto the side of the catamaran and over the railing. He followed Roo in and shut the door behind them.

  When Roo set the gun on the galley counter, Elvin stared at it for a moment.

  Roo opened the fridge and looked down. “Beer?” He was hungry, too.

  “Oh good, you’re up,” Kit said, coming out of the port hull’s corridor and climbing up into the main cabin with them. “I didn’t want to bother you. You were very asleep, and very armed.”

  Elvin swiveled her way. “You’re the DGSE agent?”

  Kit shrugged, visibly annoyed. “Apparently.” She grabbed one of the beers, wiped the condensation off on her shorts, and cracked it open.

  Roo pulled out some cheeses from the back of the fridge: gouda, a sharp cheddar, some mild goat cheese. He looked at Elvin’s reflection in the window over the galley as he quickly cut the bricks into slices and spread them out on a wooden platter. He also palmed a small wireless-spectrum sniffer as he did it, checking to see if Elvin was wearing a wire.

  Nothing.

  Roo slid a small panel open near the circuit breakers and flipped a solid switch. The whine of an interference generator let him know he’d dropped an invisible shield down over the cabin.

  Elvin fidgeted with his beer and avoided Kit’s openly curious stare.

  When Roo set the cheese platter on the table between them, it was ignored by all parties.

  “So…” Roo began.

  Elvin jumped in. “I don’t have the time, Roo, quit playing around.”

  Roo tipped his beer forward. “You’re nervous, Elvin.” And Roo wondered what that meant. He glanced outside the window and down the docks, but didn’t see anyone there.

  “Yes, I’m nervous,” Elvin admitted. “Here’s why.”

  He slid a palm-sized phone onto the table and pulled up video. “Backtracked and found you some Nazi bad boys, yeah?” Grainy black-and-white footage taken from some random pea-sized camera lying on one of the many surfaces of Aves showed Delroy’s killers walking into the glass-walled lobby of one of the downtown skyscrapers.

  Roo would have pulled up info about the skyscraper they were going inside, but he’d killed the connections in and out of the boat, so he looked at Elvin. “Where is that?”

  “Beauchamp International Labs,” Elvin said. Kit’s jaw hardened, but she didn’t say anything. Roo made a note of that.

  “They make you nervous,” Roo observed.

  Elvin nodded. “Look, the Americans still are behind on stem cell research, among other things they blocked and made law and are still struggling to undo. So a lot of American companies have set up research labs in the Caribbean and Mexico. They’re close enough they can be easily inspected in person. And, Americans can fly down here for treatment. Medical tourism is a big deal. It’s big money.”

  “Rich people make you nervous?” Kit asked.

  “Stem cells aren’t all the man has fingers in,” Elvin said.

  “What all is he in?” Roo asked.

  Elvin looked at him with mild astonishment. “You know many legit enterprises that have neo-Nazis walking in the front door? You’re the one sniffing after them. You fucking tell me!”

  “What, you telling me you haven’t heard any rumors?” Roo snorted. “You have nothing?”

  “That man is more dangerous than most rich people,” Elvin said. “Leave out Delroy, I seen people destroyed by him for fighting his projects to expand medical tourism here. More important people than me been broken. So, you need to cash me out. Because if he finds out I been snooping I am done. That man all but owns the island, Roo. Even worse, his ship ducked out for the hurricane. The man himself will be back on Aves soon, and I need to be gone by then, understand? I’m headed for the Pacific. I need to be leaving before his boat slides in here and docks for tonight’s big post-hurricane party. So you’re not just going to pay me, Roo. You gonna owe me big, okay?”

  Roo leaned back and put down his empty beer bottle. “Yeah, all right.”

  He slid out of the settee and left them in the main cabin, jogging down the stairs into the starboard hull. He glanced back, made sure they weren’t watching, and dropped to his knees to pull open a bilge hatch. His bracelet snagged the edge of it, the carefully pleated paracord hanging up on a burr of fiberglass. Roo pulled it loose and made sure not to scrape his arm against the hatch’s edge.

  The interior of the bilge near the front of the hull had hoses running around for bilge pumps, but was dry. It gleamed white: Roo liked keeping it as clean as he could, as it helped him spot anything leaking.

  Gray bars were stacked up against a pocket in a ridge. Weight that helped balance the catamaran and kept the hulls level for sailing.

  Roo found a small canvas bag and put three of them in.

  Elvin opened the bag and peered in when Roo dropped them on the settee table with a loud thunk and then a clink. He pulled one out and regarded it suspiciously, but Roo took it from him and peeled at the gray surface with a thumbnail.

  After a few seconds the gray, rubberized paint peeled away to reveal the dull gleam of gold.

  “Ras,” Elvin swore. “That’s gold.”

  “Enough for the Pacific.”

  Elvin swore again and looked up at them both, words escaping him.

  “Told you I look after you,” Roo said.

  Elvin slid the bar back in the canvas bag and petted it absently. “I gonna run,” he said.<
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  Roo watched him leap onto the dock and hustle away. Then he got up and shut off the interference generator.

  “You have bars of gold in your ship,” Kit said, slightly shocked. “Who does that?”

  “I do,” Roo said. “It was a gift.”

  “An incredible gift.”

  He started tapping on a spare screen near the galley. Beauchamp Labs. Construction. Aeroponic and vertical farm investments.

  Roo stared at the image of the man he pulled up. A hawk-faced executive with a neutral expression and dark-blue suit. Shaved, balding head. Wiry. Did that face order the foot soldiers to come in and try to kill him? Or was he separated from it by a cadre of middle management who’d made the call?

  Roo leaned against the galley counter and let out a long, deep breath. “I know you’re DGSE,” he said to Kit. “And I saw you react to the name of the company. It’s a French name, so I’m guessing you had them as a suspect already. You’re going to call this in. And you should. But before you do, I just ask you one favor.”

  Kit had been looking thoughtfully down at the table, not denying anything he’d said. She brushed her hair back and looked at him. “What is that?”

  “Wait until tomorrow morning,” Roo asked.

  “And why,” she asked, poking around at the cheese platter, “should I do that?”

  Roo pointed at the screen over the galley. It showed video taken from the rooftop of Beauchamp Labs from a party thrown last summer. Rich men and women in tuxedos and shimmering cocktail dresses clumped around each other while attendants with silver trays and tiny hors d’oeuvres flitted in between.

  “While most people are fixing hurricane damage or wondering how they’ll handle being homeless, they’ll be enjoying a rooftop party. I’m going to break into the labs.”

  “And find what?” Kit looked less than impressed.

  “I’ll bug it. I’ll look around.”

  “Roo, how much experience do you have with infiltration?”

  Roo picked up the platter and empty beer bottles. “Just give me a day, okay?”

  “I can’t go with you,” Kit said.