by Brian Lumley
But again Trask cut him off. “No, you really shouldn’t! You see, Commander, even if I were to tell you, it’s doubtful you’d believe me—and I certainly wouldn’t blame you. But if or when you’ve seen something of it for yourself…”
“Seeing is believing,” said the girl. “Well, in most cases, anyway, where people aren’t quite so stiff-necked, locked in to their own little worlds. But at least it’s encouraging that you are actually beginning to think now, and not just snarling away to yourself.”
The Commander gave a small start. For it was a fact that he had been “snarling away to himself”—getting all hot under the collar—and it was also a fact that he was “actually beginning to think now.” Which made one too many times that Trask and the girl had seen through him. But right through him, to the core!
“Who on earth are you people?” Argyle stared at Trask, then at the girl—also at the tall pale man, and at the yellow one—and began to feel more than a little foolish as he tried to grin and frown at the same time, and only succeeded in blinking his confusion. The way they looked back at him (not in contempt, no, but rather, what, sympathetically?) made him feel very much cut down to size. So that again he felt prompted to enquire, “I mean, all I was told is that you’re E-Branch. So what does that make you? Mind-readers? Psychics or something?”
Or something, obviously.
For the girl only smiled and looked away; likewise her colleagues, the tall man and the small yellow man both, while Trask said, “Now maybe you’ll be so good as to have the pilot take us in closer? There’s no danger, Commander. Not as long as we don’t try to alight on this lady, and even then not until nightfall.”
The “lady” Trask had referred to was a cruise ship that had beached herself on an unnamed island—or more properly a fang of sun-bleached rock—between the island of Áyios Evstrátios, itself little more than a boulder, and the popular Greek island resort of Límnos ten miles to the north. Except E-Branch’s best bet was that she hadn’t simply run aground in some kind of accident but that she’d been wrecked deliberately, and it was just possible that the wreckers were still aboard. As for a mutating strain of the Asiatic bubonic plague: that was the cover story, certainly, but as Trask had stated it was a very different kind of plague that he and his party expected to find here. They had even dared hope (albeit remotely) that they might also discover its source here…and put an end to it forever.
“What do you think, David?” Trask asked the smallest of his colleagues after Argyle had ordered the pilot to take them down and in a little closer. “How does it look to you?”
“Mindsmog,” said the other at once, his voice taut as piano wire over the headsets. “The ship is full of it, stem to stern. This is where they escaped to, definitely. But I find it doubtful that they themselves are still here. It’s too thin. There’s no heavy presence or presences that I can detect, just a lot—a hell of a lot—of individual sources. Not that we can put a great deal of faith in that. For it was the same on Krassos for a while until we learned what we were doing wrong, or what they were doing right. Our ‘old friend’ is good at shielding himself, while she…I don’t need to remind you what she can do! Still and all, I reckon they’ve moved on. They must surely have known they’d make one hell of a target sitting here. So I don’t think we need worry so much about them as what they’ve left behind.”
Trask offered a grim nod of agreement. “They’re on the run, and they’re all through with doing things quietly, covertly. We hit them in Australia, Krassos, London, and ruined their plans. Now they’re deliberately giving us work—leaving a trail, yes, but one of destruction—in the full knowledge that while we’re dealing with problems like this…”
“…We can’t concentrate on tracking them,” the yellow man, whom Argyle knew to be called David Chung, finished it for him. “Yes, that sounds about right…”
“Liz?” Trask glanced at the girl; and totally bewildered by their double-talk, Argyle looked at her, too. Now that a little of his venom had been drawn, that wasn’t at all hard to do. Liz Merrick, as she’d been introduced to him when first the Commander met up with these people, was maybe five seven and about as pert as a girl can get—as he’d found out the hard way. She’d be twenty-something; she was all curves, long-legged and willow-waisted, and when she smiled (she had actually smiled when they had been introduced, but that hadn’t lasted long) it was like a ray of bright light. Her green eyes were a very different shade from Trask’s—deep as a beer bottle, deep as the sea—but her stare could be equally unnerving. Her hair, black as night, and cut in a boyish bob, had the shine of natural good health to it…and Argyle suspected that if he had photographs of her in a swimsuit he could earn himself a month’s salary selling them to HMS Invincible’s crew! Come to think of it, it appeared that at at least one member of the crew had already contrived to get to know her a little better; she was wearing ship’s fatigues three sizes too big for her that had never looked nearly this good on any sailor of Argyle’s acquaintance!
As he was thinking these things the chopper performed a jig in a small thermal, and for a moment the beached and apparently derelict pleasure cruiser sidestepped out of view. In that same moment Liz glanced at Argyle, and said, “That’s better. But now if you’ll try to keep your mental observations low-key, this is one ‘Virtually Incompetent Pleb’ who’s trying to concentrate.”
Argyle’s jaw fell open. Dumbfounded, he could only stare at her. But the shipwreck had swung back into view maybe a hundred feet below and a hundred yards away, and as Liz focussed all of her attention on it her forehead had wrinkled into a deep frown of intense concentration. Taking one hand from the safety rail, she lightly touched her fingertips to her temple forward of her right ear—
—And in the next moment gasped and jerked back on her line as if she had been physically thrust backwards, rebounding when the nylon safety line reached full stretch!
Trask caught her arm—Chung, too—as she steadied herself and made a wild grab for the safety bar with her free hand. She couldn’t have fallen anyway, but some kind of temporary disorientation had completely thrown her. And:
“Liz?” Trask said again, no longer her superior but more an anxious father-figure now, as he continued to support her. “Are you okay?”
She took a deep breath and tried a wan smile, but under her tan she was visibly paler, as if the blood had drained from her face. Argyle, believing he knew what this was, said, “It’s just motion sickness, very much akin to seasickness. I see plenty of it. She’s not used to the rhythm of the chopper, that’s all.”
Trask barely glanced at him, then spoke to Liz again. “What was it? What did you get?”
“People,” she answered. “Hundreds of them—men, women and children—all of them in shock, not knowing what’s happened to them but knowing enough not to come out on the decks in the sunlight. It’ll be ‘instinctive’ by now; the filthy stuff in their blood will have done it to them. And the terrible craving: it’s already there!” She offered a small, involuntary shudder. “It’s horrible, Ben…it makes your skin crawl! In the last twenty-four hours they’ve all of them infected each other. Now they’re hungry again. Soon they’ll separate into factions, and then…and then…”
“I know,” said Trask. “I know. A mini-bloodwar!”
And Argyle said, “Hungry? People on the ship? But you can’t possibly know that! And anyway you must be wrong. This is a big pleasure cruiser and the galley will be full of excellent food. It’s only been a few days, and if there’s still anyone alive on that vessel they’ll—”
“—Most of them will still be ‘alive,’” Trask told him. “If not as we understand life. And yes, they’d be perfectly capable of surviving on the ship’s food…except they’ll be driven to go for something more to their liking.”
Most of this had flown right over Argyle’s head. “Not as we understand life?” He frowned. “I’m not sure I understand any of what you’re saying! You can only mean they’re in
curable, better off dead.”
“Something like that,” Trask answered after a moment, sighing his resignation.
“But—” The Commander was plainly confused, very uncertain now, and feeling well out of his depth.
“—But I want to get in a whole lot closer,” Trask told him yet again. “And I do intend to look inside.” He tapped a fingernail on a pair of binoculars slung around his neck. “Those huge panoramic windows in the bridge will do nicely.”
Standing in line, hooked up in their safety harnesses, from left to right the five were Argyle, Trask, Liz, Chung, and last but not least the tall, pale, almost cadaverous figure of a man called Ian Goodly. Now the latter spoke up. “We’ll have to sink her, Ben. According to the charts, this rock is only the tip of a steep-sided submarine mountain. If we were to send her to the bottom here, the abyss would finish it for us. In fact, there is no ‘if’ or ‘were’ or ‘would’ about it. Though I hate to have to say it, that’s how it’s going to be: the only way we can ensure that nothing of this ever, er, resurfaces.”
“You’ve seen it?” Trask said, sharply.
“Oh, yes,” said the other. “The ship-to-ship missiles going in, the explosions, the stem going up in the air, and the rapid slide backwards off those rocks.”
“Sink her!?” Now Argyle exploded. Finally he had had enough of this gobbledegook. “What? You’re talking about having Invincible sink her? You must be out of your tiny minds, you people! This is an ultramodern pleasure cruiser and even her lifeboats are worth millions! Just looking at her I’m sure she can be refloated, then sailed or towed away—that is, of course, after we’ve made sure she’s clean. But even if she’s too badly holed, still the salvage contract alone would be worth—”
“—Nothing,” said Trask. “Nothing is coming off that ship.”
“You are fucking crazy!” Argyle exploded again. “And if you don’t mind, next time I start a sentence I’d like to be able to finish it! I’m getting heartily sick of—”
“Commander?” the pilot’s voice sounded in his headphones.
“Oh!…Bloody hell!…Yes?” Argyle snapped, still glowering his fury at the four.
“The air-sea rescue chopper has spotted something starboard of the wreck,” the pilot came back.
“Something?”
“Someone,” the other specified. “A living someone, still on board and active. Do you want me to patch you through?”
“Yes,” said Argyle. “Of course. Patch us through. We may as well all hear what’s going on. Who knows? That way I might actually get to learn something, too!”
“Roger,” said the pilot. “And I’ll take us starboard of the wreck so you can see what’s happening.”
The air-sea rescue helicopter had accompanied them out from the carrier HMS Invincible where she lay at anchor like a small landmass in her own right on the horizon some five or six miles away. Starboard of the wreck, about the same distance away from her as Argyle, Trask and party were to port, now the big rescue chopper sat like a great hawk on the air, with the ripples from her downdraft spreading out in choppy concentric circles on the surface of the dead-calm sea.
Along with its regular crew, the rescue chopper carried two other members of E-Branch’s contingent: a roguish, leathery old Gypsy by the name of Lardis Lidesci—possibly of Hungarian or Romanian descent, if Argyle was any judge of ethnic origins—and a young Englishman called Jake Cutter, who seemed to stand somewhat apart from the rest of the team, as if he wasn’t quite one of them. Like the others he had a very definite “attitude,” but where theirs seemed intense beyond the demands of the situation, his was…different. Argyle had spoken to him on first meeting, and it had seemed to him that Cutter wasn’t all there; not meaning that he was in any way mentally deficient, but just that he appeared very much preoccupied despite that he tried to hide it. And while the Commander had no way of knowing it, he’d hit the nail right on the head.
Preoccupied: to engross or fill the mind of (someone) or to dominate (someone’s) attention, thoughts, mind, et cetera, and so on. And therefore from a defining viewpoint, Jake Cutter could be said to be very preoccupied. But for the moment at least he was concentrating…on what could be seen through his binoculars: that tiny human figure on the shielding collar—almost a small deck in its own right—that protected the upper deck from the hot stench of the ship’s slipstreamed “chimney” array, a delta-shaped set of six massive exhaust flues high over the stern.
Right now, however, with the engines at a standstill, there were no exhaust fumes, and the small, lonely figure was leaning or propping itself up against an open service hatch in the foremost chimney, from which he had emerged only a few seconds ago. Jake could see now that it was a man, but he looked so tattered and dirty in grimy coveralls that it had been hard to tell. And he was looking up openmouthed at the two helicopters in a kind of stunned disbelief. Or was he simply in shock?
“Mr. Cutter?” (The pilot’s voice crackled in Jake’s headset, causing him to start.) “Mr. Trask is asking to speak to you. I’m patching him through now.”
“Roger,” said Jake, as he leaned out a little from the open hatch to watch the antisubmarine jet-copter come whup-whupping through one hundred and eighty degrees to the starboard side of the wreck, giving it a wide berth. And in the next moment:
“Jake?” Ben Trask’s harsh, gravelly, unmistakable voice was sounding in his ears. “Where is he? Where’s this…survivor?”
“Our side of the exhaust flues,” Jake answered. “In fact he just a moment ago climbed out of one! You should be able to see him by now. He looks done in.”
“Yes, we see him,” said Trask. “But done in by what? By his experience, or by the sunlight?”
“Doesn’t look like he’s shrinking from the sun to me,” Jake answered. “He’s just shrinking, on the point of collapse. Maybe you should let Liz take a look at him.”
“Wait,” said Trask. And a few seconds later: “She says he’s in shock. He’s almost a blank in there, his mind shot to pieces. So he probably is a survivor!”
“I can go down on their rescue gear and get him off there?” Jake suggested. “Or I could do it my way and get him off faster still.”
“No!” Trask answered at once. “Keep the Continuum as a last resort. Send down the gear by all means, yes, but if he’s going to make it off that ship it will have to be under his own steam. You see that chopper standing idle on the promenade deck?”
“I know, I know,” said Jake. “That’s what happened the last time someone landed on her. They stayed landed.”
“Right,” said Trask grimly, and Jake sensed his nod. “So we won’t be making the same mistake. If this one really wants off, he gets off on his own. By the time you’ve reeled him in Lardis will know if he’s okay or not. If he is okay, then it’s a lucky break—not only for him but also for us. And if he isn’t okay, well, Lardis will be able to handle that, too. It’s one hell of a drop back down to the deck or onto those rocks. Either way it won’t make too much difference.”
“Ben,” said Jake, “you know this is a rescue chopper, don’t you? I mean, the crew heard what you said just then, and if you were the captain I suspect you’d have a mutiny on your hands!”
“Yes, I know it’s a rescue chopper!” Trask answered. “And I also know what we could be dealing with here, as do you. So for now, just you get that gear down to him and then we’ll see what we’ll see. And meanwhile, Commander Argyle and I will be taking a shot at looking in through the panoramic windows at the sharp end…that’s the bridge, to you.”
“Roger and out,” said Jake, sourly.
“That boss of yours,” one of the rescue crew spoke to Jake, after the pilot had reverted to an onboard frequency. “What is he? Some kind of monster?”
“Anyone who doesn’t know Trask or his work,” Jake answered, “might easily make that mistake. But no, he isn’t a monster. He does know an awful lot about monsters, though. Don’t ask me to explain more than that bec
ause I can’t.”
“And don’t ask us to lower the gear,” said the other. “It’s our job, sure, and God knows we’d like to get that guy off. But if he’s a carrier…” His shrug was by no means callous; on the contrary, if anything it was helpless. “Commander Argyle is the only one who can give that kind of order.”
Jake looked at him. The sailor was a young petty officer, a fresh-faced twenty-two-year-old with fair hair and freckles. He was also an expert at his job, and he knew the rules. Only this time he was torn two ways, between knowing what he’d like to do and knowing (or believing he knew) the dangers inherent in that course of action. It was the difference between his training—his duty and natural instinct to save life—and the knowledge that the life he wanted to save might be a plague-bearer, someone who carried the seeds of death. And that was a feeling that Jake understood only too well.
“No sweat,” he said. “So we’ll simply sit tight here—me, you, and your mates—and wait for the order from your Commander Argyle. I understand your position, but the order will come, I can promise you that. So even if we can’t lower the gear now, still we should have it ready.”
“It’s already ready!” said the other, scathingly. “On a job like this and once we’re airborne, it’s always ready.”
“Whoa!” said Jake, ruefully. “What would I know? I’m just a civilian, right?”
The rescue team was made up of three petty officers, and as far as they were concerned, Jake Cutter and Lardis Lidesci were precisely that: “just civilians,” alleged “experts” who’d doubtless get in the way at their earliest opportunity. As for their boss—this Trask bloke and Co. on the sub hunter-killer—well, Gunnery Commander Argyle would sort them out, for sure!
The three glanced at each other where they sat hooked up in their safety rigs, then looked again at Cutter and his Gypsyish companion. And even though Jake wasn’t a telepath—not in the fullest sense of the word—still it wasn’t hard to guess what they were thinking:
