She didn’t think so, though. She thought the ghost knew exactly what it was saying. Sarah was closer to Ayaan’s heart—did it mean—could it mean that Sarah was nearby? Physically close to Ayaan’s heart? But how, and more importantly, why?
She had a feeling the brain was quite genuine in its forgiveness. She had a feeling it knew exactly what had happened, and that it saw her not as a butcher of mummies but as an ally against a common enemy. She could use whatever help it might offer but she didn’t worry too much about whether to trust it or not.
She had a mutiny to pull off, after all, and there were going to be casualties. If the brain or its attending mummy got in the way it wouldn’t hold her back.
On her return trip to the stern surgeries she passed around a side of the rear superstructure, a four-story structure that tapered to a spacious suite of officers’ quarters with a magnificent view of the surrounding ocean. Only the radar tower stood higher. There was a reason for putting the officers’ quarters up so high—it kept the ship’s most important personnel as far as possible from the depleted fuel rods in the forward compartments. The liches were hardly bothered by the stray gust of ionizing radiation—it probably did them good, actually, because it would sterilize their putrid flesh of microbes and slow down their decay. They had taken the tower for themselves simply because it afforded the best view.
On the lowest level of the tower Ayaan passed the zealots she’d seen earlier laying down a second coat of marine paint on the hull plates. They didn’t so much as glance up at her.
They didn’t have to. One of them, an old man with a Russian accent but the Asian features of a Siberian, stood up with one hand holding his back and stepped into the shadows of the tower entrance. Ayaan passed the hatchway by, then doubled back once she was out of sight of the cultists and stepped in through an emergency exit. The Siberian was busy in the darkness inside, shoving bits of torn-up, paint-stained rag into a crawlspace near the floor. Ayaan bent down to help him. “You know the sign we’re looking for,” she said to him.
He didn’t nod. He didn’t stop what he was doing. He had been a librarian in another universe, a better one, and a closeted homosexual. His partner, a colonel in the Russian air force, had convinced him to join up with the Tsarevich, had been one of the most fervent recruits when the call first came. He swore up and down that they would not be persecuted in the new life, and to be fair, they hadn’t been. When the liches carried the colonel off to satisfy their appetites they hadn’t even considered his sexual orientation. They were equal opportunity devourers.
“When all of them are inside, that’s when you set the fire,” Ayaan repeated, just in case. Perfect timing would be the only way to carry this off. Even then she would need a great deal of luck.
It would be impossible to foment a revolution on the Pinega, she knew. There were too many true believers on the ship and far too many animated corpses. With the help of her friend in the navigation room however she had learned of a way to cut those odds in half. When the Soviets fabricated the nuclear waste hauler they had built a special feature into the holds. By throwing certain unmarked switches on the flying bridge anyone could open hatches on the bottom of the ship, hatches meant to dump the enclosed wastes into the ocean at large. It had been standard practice to take the fuel rods and radiothermic generators and depleted uranium cargo out into international waters and just let them go. According to Ayaan’s informant, there never had been a containment facility near the North Pole—it would have been prohibitively expensive to build it, at least compared to the cost of open-sea dumping. The bankrupt bureaucrats at the end of the Soviet empire had little concern for the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea and even less for Greenpeace.
Now, if Ayaan could get those hatches open, the undead stored in the compartments would be flushed away like so much toxic waste. The tepid waters of the Mediterranean might not kill them but she really didn’t care. They could wander around the bottom of the sea forever, spearing whatever fish were stupid enough to wander by with their sharpened forearms. She would have bigger problems to deal with—namely the liches. As soon as they realized something was up they would retreat to their tower. The green phantom could kill from a distance. Other liches could turn their own powers against Ayaan and her tiny cadre of rebels.
If the tower was set on fire once they were inside, however, she imagined they would be too distracted to put up much resistance. The doctor, who had access to bonesaws, fire axes and hammers (his surgery was neither precise nor delicate) would stop anyone from trying to get out of the tower—or anyone living from trying to rescue the liches trapped within. It would take some time for the tower to burn down but the Siberian’s hard work secreting inflammables in its various nooks and crannies meant the blaze would get off to a good start.
The Tsarevich lived in the penthouse on the fourth floor. He would be the last to be incinerated, which was a bit of a risk. It would give him time to realize what was happening and maybe do something else about it.
Another risk was that she had no way to put out the fire once it started. The Pinega had a steel hull but much of its interior fittings were made of wood. It would burn like a torch for days, perhaps, and maybe kill everyone onboard. If the fire got into the vast tanks of diesel fuel at the bottom of the ship everything inside the hull would be incinerated.
Then there was the question of what the living faithful, the zealots who worshipped the Tsarevich, would do once they saw what was happening. Ayaan hoped they would listen to reason. With the Tsarevich dead they would be leaderless and their power would be cut down to a fraction. If they strung her up from the yardarm, well, at least she would have spared the rest of the world from whatever it was the Tsarevich had planned for his ship of fools.
She had only one certainty—that this was the best chance she would ever get. The Tsarevich was bent on something, some unknown scheme. Capturing the ghost had set his entire operation into motion. By the time they reached dry land it would be too late to stop him. She had to act with real haste or lose this opportunity forever.
“Get back to your station or someone will see,” the Siberian told her. He never looked at her eyes. He had lived as a gay man under Soviet rule long enough to know how these things were done. He’d been trained by the best—the KGB. Under their ever-present gaze, just to have a love life he had become a master conspirator.
Ayaan had little experience at plots and schemes. She’d always believed that the Avtomat Kalashnikov Model 1947 was the answer to every question life posed. She was learning so much. The girl navigator, the Siberian, the doctor cutting hands on the stern—they had been secret agents from the beginning. They needed her, too, though. None of them would ever have acted on their own. The Tsarevich’s power felt too great, too pervasive. They needed Ayaan’s leadership.
She headed out of the tower and back toward the stern, back toward her official duties. When the time came she knew she would be ready. She had no choice.
Chapter Fifteen
Sarah swabbed out the inside of one of the buckets they used to catch rain. As usual a seagull had shit in it—the birds mistook the white canisters for public toilets every time. Sarah had never thought she could learn to hate living animals so much.
The tug rolled and she smacked her hip against the gunwale. It happened enough she was starting to get calluses. She had learned not to use her hands to try to steady herself when she had tried to catch a moving line on the side of the wheelhouse and felt the skin burn right off her palms. The tug had not been meant for the kind of swells the Mediterranean offered. Sarah had no idea how they would stay upright on the open ocean, if it came to that.
At least she was getting over her seasickness. As long as she didn’t go aft and have to smell the diesel fuel (or worse, its hot hydrocarbon exhaust), she only felt partially nauseous. Bilious, perhaps. Like something liquid and extremely foul was wallowing around in her empty stomach but at least it didn’t try to come up too oft
en.
She cleaned out the last bucket with a dirty rag and headed forward, toward the bow where Ptolemy sat in a perfect lotus position, evidently enjoying the salt spray. She touched the soapstone. Even though he was facing away from her that simple contact was enough to get his attention. “Were you a sailor in a past life?” she asked.
everyone was sailor in that dream time canopus they sea say canopus time was desert a sailor they time say that desert all who canopus live in the desert sailor dream of the sea
As usual she understood maybe ten per cent of what he had to say. “Canopus, that’s part of your name. Ptolemaeus—that’s the Roman form of Ptolemy.” Jack had explained it to her. “Ptolemy was one of Alexander the Great’s generals and he took over Egypt from the pharaohs. You were a descendant of his.” Ptolemy nodded. “And then Canopus... like the star?” she asked. “And those... what do you call them? Canopic jars. The jars they put your internal organs in.”
He nodded. Both.
Well, at least that made some sense. Then he had to ruin it by going on.
he drowned was troy helen menelaus’ helmsman, a city sailor beyond drowned compare they say named a drowned city for him a city that helmsman drowned menelaus he beheld helen city of troy a sailor they say
In her bleary condition it was too much. Sarah let go of the soapstone. “Yeah, well,” she said, the words burbling out of her like her breakfast just might, “enjoy your cruise, whatever. Don’t get up and do any work or anything.”
To be honest she wasn't being fair. Ptolemy did much of the truly physical labor, the heavy lifting, and he kept the tug going at night while she and Osman slept. The living pilot hardly liked the arrangement—he would never trust a dead thing—but he had no choice. If they were going to catch up with the Russians they couldn’t lay to every evening.
“Sarah,” Osman called, sounding a little excited, maybe, “you should see this.”
She picked her way carefully back around the wheelhouse of the tiny tug boat and ducked under the weather hood. Osman was standing with his feet apart, one hand draped bonelessly over the wheel. He didn’t look down at the radar screen so much as point at it with his chin. His eyes were busy scanning the horizon.
If you needed to know what kind of boat you should take on a rescue mission, Osman was the man to ask. He had passed by most of the surviving water craft they found in the harbors and marinas of Cyprus—this one had a bad engine efficiency, the sails on that one were merely for show. He had finally had to decide between a seventy-five meter pleasure yacht with sumptuous state rooms below or a tug boat that had been sitting in dry dock for twelve years. He picked the tug.
It had a monstrously large fuel supply, for one thing. It was meant for hauling supertankers down through the Suez Canal. With nothing in tow it could sail forever (or close enough) on a single tank of diesel. Secondly it had a radar tower much, much taller than the boat was long. It needed heavy duty navigation gear to get through the narrow locks of the aging canal. Sarah needed heavy duty detection gear if she ever hoped to find the Russians in the middle of one of the world’s biggest seas.
In the dry dock Osman had run any number of tests on the tug’s radar equipment. Miracle of miracles it still worked. Now Sarah looked down and saw the blip that had caught Osman’s attention. It looked like a splotch of glowing bird shit to her. “How do we know it’s not an island, or a drifting log?”
“Because, little girl, I know the difference between a radar and a tin can on a string. A bogey that size was rare enough back in the golden age. Now it means only one thing—a sea-going vessel at least a hundred meters long.”
So it was a lot bigger than the tug. Well, no surprise there. “How far away?”
“We’ll see it in a moment. You’d better get your boyfriend out of sight. We know this bunch don’t care for mummies.”
Sarah understood. She touched the soapstone and asked Ptolemy to go below decks, just in case anyone was watching them even then. The mummy acquiesced without a word of complaint. Osman took his wheel in both hands and adjusted their course a hair. “Do you see it?” he asked.
She knew he wasn’t asking if she could see something visually. She stared out over the boat’s prow, trying to ignore the flapping canvas of the backup sails, letting her eyes focus on the rising and falling swells off in the distance, the occasional scrap of foam drifting on the waves. “Nothing,” she said. There was no energy out there, living or dead. She imagined there were probably some fish but the water blocked her special sense.
Osman just nodded. He’d stared out over enough empty seas in his life, Sarah imagined, to recognize when something was about to appear. He didn’t speak, didn’t move, didn’t breathe as far as she could tell. And then—
No. It was nothing, a trick of the light. She could have sworn something was there and then it just wasn’t. “Maybe a whale,” she said, thinking it might have dived at the sight of them.
“Bullshit,” Osman said, and opened up his throttle a little. He picked up a microphone for the tug’s radio set and clicked it on. “Hey,” he said. “Hey, we’re alive over here. We are not dead.” He repeated this simple message in Arabic, in Farsi, in Greek.
Sarah turned to look away, her eyes glazed over by the sight of the endless sea constantly moving, and found herself looking into a periscope. She fell backwards against the tug’s wheel but Osman caught it before she could turn the boat. “Submarine,” she said, when she had caught her breath.
It surfaced with a great pitching of the sea, a boiling white explosion that rolled the tug around like an ice cube in a blender. Saltwater lapped up over the side and splashed Sarah’s bare feet.
On top of the waves the submarine dwarfed the tug, its enormous curved black side slick with water and glaring with sunlight. On its deck they saw what looked like an acre’s worth of photovoltaic cells and a heavy machine gun on a pintle mount. Its barrel pointed away from them. Something wrapped in tarpaulin, about half the size of a human being was secured to the deck with heavy lines. It dripped a steady stream of water as the submarine rolled under the sun.
A hatch in the stubby conning tower opened up and a white woman with golden hair and a wet suit stepped out onto the pitching deck. She rolled with the motion of the submarine as if her feet were nailed down. “Ahoy,” she called, no more than ten meters from where Sarah stood on the tug. She had a pistol on her belt.
“Hi,” Sarah replied, her heart sinking. “I’m... sorry to disturb you. You’re not the woman I’m looking for.”
The woman spoke English with a Scandinavian accent. “That depends,” she said, her face a mask of consternation. “Is your name Sarah?”
Chapter Sixteen
Ayaan dipped her sponge in the murky tub and then squeezed it between her two hands so it wouldn’t drip. The liches in the officers’ mess were quite particular about their windows. There was little in the way of entertainment available to them onboard—those who could read had already worked their way through the scant magazines and books left behind by the previous crew. Looking out at the waves was hardly the pinnacle of excitement but it had a hypnotic power, especially in the twilight hours. The hairy lich, the one Ayaan had begun to think of as a werewolf, could stand by the window for whole days at a time, moving only to eat. It seemed that being dead changed your brain chemistry, made you less anxious at the passing away of time, of the waste of your life. Of course maybe it was just the fact that the liches were functionally immortal. If she knew she had centuries, millennia to pass, Ayaan thought, she would feel a lot less urgency to carpe every diem.
“Look, Amanita’s come out for some sun,” the werewolf said. His voice was muffled and distorted—the weird growth of hair lined all of his orifices, his tongue covered in what looked like sodden felt—but Ayaan could understand his simple English. Along with the other liches in the room she stepped over to where he pointed, his furry finger smearing grease on the window pane. Ayaan silently grumbled: she would have to cl
ean that mark.
Amanita, the creature the werewolf had seen, was often spoken of by the cultists but Ayaan had never seen her before. She had, she remembered, seen mushrooms and puffballs growing in profusion at the refinery on Cyprus, so she must have been very close to the Tsarevich’s most accomplished lieutenant. Still she wasn’t prepared for what she saw through the window. Atop the tower where the liches kept their quarters Amanita stood naked in the sun, perhaps two and a half meters tall. She made no attempt to cover her genitalia but then she hardly needed to. A thick layer of fungal growth covered every square centimeter of her skin. Long, filamentous mycellia made her hair while her shoulders and back were studded with yellow chytrids. Dark fuzzy mildew draped from her breasts while rows of bright orange Judas’ ear mushrooms ringed her distended belly and mold dripped from her fingers.
She had the power, they said, that made grain sprout from the earth, that made creeping olive vines twist across Siberian tundra. She had the ultimate green thumb, she could make anything vegetative flourish wherever a dried-up seed or a crystallized spore or a half-gnawed rhizome still lingered in the ground. They said she had saved entire villages from starvation after the unceasingly hungry ghouls had devoured all their crops. Her true love, though, was not in green things but in blights and rots and molds and especially mushrooms. The name she’d chosen sounded pretty enough. It was also the Latin name for the mushroom commonly called the Destroying Angel.
What she might be doing atop the tower was anyone’s guess. “I wonder if this has anything to do with your friend,” the green phantom said, turning to look directly at Ayaan.
Ayaan held the sponge carefully with both hands so it wouldn’t drip on the floor. She tried to look like she had no idea what he meant. It wasn’t that hard, since she didn’t.
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