Black Atlantic

by Peter J Evans

  The project had been codenamed Warchild.

  More bioweapon than biological organism, the Warchild would be able to operate in open battle or undercover, the offensive systems beneath its skin undetectable by normal scanning. Implanted neurocircuitry would render it entirely controllable. It was stronger, faster and infinitely more lethal than the Judges Hellermann intended to replace.

  The proposal split Tek Division. Some saw the promise of her plan, others were troubled by the ethics of the whole operation. While they debated, Hellermann set the project in motion without official sanction. By the time it was decided to suspend the programme pending further investigation and debate, Hellermann had proved her genius: Project Warchild was on the verge of creating its first fully functioning bioweapon.

  When the full implications of the project were finally revealed, Warchild was closed down in a day. The embryonic monsters were destroyed and the staff who worked on them forcibly reassigned. Hellermann never turned up for her new assignment and dropped out of sight. It wasn't until a year later her name resurfaced, when a routine crime swoop in the MegEast docks turned up an illegal consignment of certain chemicals. The chemicals were DNA recombinants and potent mutagens, with molecular triggers that matched those used in Justice Department cloning.

  The subsequent investigation eventually led Dredd and his team to a derelict sector in the Dust Zone, and to Elize Hellermann.

  The woman was finally in the cubes where she could do no harm. A consignment of prototype bioweapons had been completed, but they were out of the city, somewhere across the Black Atlantic. As far as Dredd should have been concerned, the case was closed.

  Dredd rubbed his throat idly, still feeling the Warchild's talons crushing his windpipe. One second after birth and the creature had almost taken him down. It hadn't even been properly programmed - Hellermann had triggered its early emergence as she had escaped through the nursery, trying for a diversion.

  The creatures in the factory had already been disposed of but there were ten more of them out there. Fully grown, fully programmed, utterly lethal.

  The case was closed. And it shouldn't have been personal.

  But to Joe Dredd, Project Warchild felt like unfinished business.

  5. SARGASSO

  It was Angle who saw the cityship first. He was on watch, prowling Golgotha's deck and scanning the moonlit horizon for any sign of salvage or trouble. He had just started shouting when it appeared on Dray's sensor board, and the proximity alarms were what woke Gethsemane Bane. They weren't loud, but some steady, unsleeping part of her brain had been listening out for them.

  Golgotha and her crew were more than twenty-four hours away from their encounter with the stealth ship, and most of that time had been spent arguing about what was in the casket and which grudforsaken hulk the pirates called home. Bane had stayed out of the chatter to a large extent. Her near-death experience had taken more out of her than she was prepared to admit, and she had spent most of the journey back helping Orca fix the gunwales. He wasn't concerned about what was in the box or where the pirates had come from: he had his engines to think about, bullet holes in the upper hull and a missing crane.

  It had been a long trip and Bane was dog-tired. So when the alarms went off and Angle started yelling "Land ahoy," she was up and out of the hammock in moments, hungry for the sight of home.

  Dray was up on the bridge as usual, working both the helm and the sensors. He stepped aside when Bane bounded in. "There it is," he grinned, nodding at a speck on the horizon. "At drokking last..."

  "Aw, don't say you haven't enjoyed this one, Dray!" Bane hunted around for her binocs and found them on a hook under her slicker. "I was thinking of swinging around and heading back out for another week."

  "Wouldn't advise it."

  She winked at him and raised the binocs to her eyes. For a moment all she saw was the darkness of nighttime on the Black Atlantic, with just a slivery gleam of moonlight to pick out the horizon. She then saw a dull smear of light directly ahead, and the binocs changed their focus a fraction to bring the cityship Sargasso into view.

  From here, Sargasso looked less like a vessel and more like an island, a great dark slab of metal rising from the black waters in an insane sprawl of decks and towers and support cables. It was studded with thousands upon thousands of lights: searchlights, running lights and cooking fires. A warm light shone from untold numbers of portholes, and spots of sickly green phosphorescence lit up from the churning ranks of drive screws at the stern.

  Home. Gethsemane Bane had never been more glad to see it. She stayed on the bridge for the next four hours, watching it grow in her vision, never taking the binocs from her eyes until she didn't need them any more.

  It was impossible to say which ships had first joined together to become Sargasso's original core. There were more than five hundred vessels in the structure, everything from pleasure cruisers to fishing boats, chemical tankers to factory vessels. It was even rumoured that an old twentieth century attack sub was bolted somewhere under the waterline. Some smaller ships hadn't actually touched the water for decades; their deck space was more important than their hull volume, so they had been hauled up level with their taller companions and fixed in place.

  Safety came in numbers, nowhere more so than on the poisoned waters of the Black Atlantic. Maybe it was a desire for such safety that drove the Sargasso's first component vessels to sail together. Maybe it was a need to hold formation among myriad ships of differing engine power that prompted their crews to begin lashing them together. And over the years, the crews had been joined by refugees from the ABC Wars, economic migrants and mutants driven out of the Mega-Cities because of their damaged DNA. As Sargasso's bulk increased, so did its population. It stopped being a ship and had become a city.

  Sargasso wasn't the only cityship afloat, but it was the largest at three kilometres from multiple bows to multiple stern, with a wake that could swamp a battle cruiser and a million people calling it home.

  Dray took the helm when it was time for Golgotha to dock. He always did. Only someone who knew every last detail about how the little vessel rode in the water would be able to manage it.

  He began to alter course a few kilometres out, angling to port and Sargasso's stern. The cityship's vast collection of hulls set up a web of chaotic crosscurrents and undertows that could tear a smaller vessel in half. The only safe way to approach Sargasso was from the stern, and even that took a master helmsman to get right.

  Golgotha bucked and wallowed as it crested the outermost limit of the cityship's bow wave. Playing the helm like a musician, Dray brought the vessel in close enough to catch the wave and ride its rear slope back along Sargasso's length. Then, after dropping back more than five hundred metres past the portside stern, he opened the throttles and began to catch up.

  Sargasso wasn't a single, solid structure. Nothing so vast could survive on a moving sea if it couldn't flex and shift with the waves. According to its heading, Sargasso could gain or lose almost a hundred metres in length at any one time, and half that in width. It could open to let an especially destructive wave pass though, or narrow to let obstructions go by on either side. It had even sailed though an old Sov-Block minefield once, each ship in the structure moving apart just enough to avoid the floating thermonuclear weapons. It had almost worked. One of the mines had been sent on a new heading by the cityship's wake, and struck a trailing ship. Bane could still remember the citywide gasp as it had hit, and the cheering a few seconds later when it failed to detonate.

  That fluid structure, essential as it was for the cityship's survival, also made it the devil to dock with. Bane looked across at Dray as he worked the helm, not daring to speak. Dray was sweating, his lips working, one good eye blinking rapidly as he calculated and recalculated Golgotha's course. Sargasso had two main docks set on either side of the propeller fields, but the docks were moving and the props were thundering and the water behind Sargasso was a thousand tonnes of leaping, hi
ssing foam in its wake. A computer autopilot would have had them crushed between a couple of hulls on the way in, or dragged down to a close encounter with a drive screw. Gethsemane Bane, who had captained Golgotha all her life - or at least, the only part of it that mattered - couldn't have done it. She was in Dray's scaly hands now. They all were, and they all knew it.

  Bane returned her attention to the view out of the windshield. In front of her, the harbour entrance was already rearing up.

  The doorway was twice as tall as the Golgotha's topmast and four times as wide as its hull. There were huge doors inside made up of great slabs of formed and welded plasteen cut from the hulls of scavenged supertankers. In the event of an attack, the doors could be swung and locked closed, using power geared-up from the main engines. Sargasso hadn't gone to war in Bane's lifetime, but she knew there was always a danger. Not all pirate vessels were as small as the one that had taken off Orca's precious crane.

  Dray was guiding the ship along the narrow safe channel between the propeller eddies, closing the last few metres of distance from home. Bane saw the shadow of the harbour scan towards her along the deck, then it was over the bridge and she could feel the sudden coolness of it on the skin of her arms.

  They were inside. They were home.

  A cacophony of shouts and catcalls from the maintenance crews were greeting them from twenty metres up. They hung from cradles, greasing the huge rods and gears of the door mechanisms with rendered down megashark blubber. Angle and Can-Rat, who were up at the bow rail, returned the calls with some obscenities of their own, making Bane blush and grin.

  Golgotha trundled along the harbour pool, hunting for a berth. Dray had the throttles back now they were in calm water and Bane could hear the familiar noises of the dockside over the throb of the engines: more shouts and greetings, engines and drive units rumbling, sirens, and loudest of all the hubbub of the dockside market that spread across the entire forward end of the harbour.

  Sargasso had a complement of twenty scavenger vessels. The portside harbour was big enough to house them all, with plenty of space for visitors.

  Bane couldn't keep the smile off her face. This should have been the busy time, the time when the ship had to be unloaded and refuelled and maintained. There were deals to set up, fees to pay, spares to buy and creditors to dodge. Gethsemane Bane, as captain and master of the scavenger ship Golgotha, was in for a harder time in the next few hours than she would be at sea. But despite that, she was grinning like a loon.

  She was back. Everything was going to be all right.

  Somehow, Bane always ended up thinking of Jester when the Golgotha berthed.

  During the first years of her life, she probably didn't think at all. Those times were just a blur of hunger and violence. She had no memory of her mother or father, assuming she had either and wasn't just expelled from the guts of a slick eel dredged up out of the Sargasso's bilges. She had a vague memory of someone telling her that was where she came from. And hurting her.

  One day, she had been big enough to hurt him back. Very badly. Luckily, she had no real memory of that either.

  The thing she could remember, far more clearly than she would have preferred, was hunger. It was an empty belly that had first taken her down to the harbour, driven her to creep along the dockside and dip a fist into the tank of bilge-filth fresh out of Golgotha's pump to take that first slimy lump of decaying mutant fish, chew it and force it down.

  She would have kept on eating the dripping waste until it killed her too, she was that hungry. Luckily for her, she was being watched, and before she had taken another bite she was lifted in one giant hand and hauled, kicking and screeching, onto Golgotha's deck.

  She had expected a beating. After all, that's what such digressions had always earned her before. Instead, she got soup.

  Suspicious and terrified, she would have hurled the bowl away and bolted off the ship and into the water, had she not been so close to starvation. But the smell of the soup had a direct effect on her central nervous system, forcing her to sit and gulp it down, all the time avoiding the eyes of the big, shark-grinned man who had brought it to her.

  Then she ran. But she was back the next day, and once again there was soup.

  It got to be a habit.

  Why Jester Bane, one of the most experienced scavenger captains on the Sargasso, should have considered the foul-smelling, suspicious and occasionally downright destructive child a suitable candidate for adoption, she still had no idea. But then again, he always did have an eye for a valuable piece of salvage. Maybe he could see the worth in that damaged child. That was how a good scavenger worked: sort through the garbage, ignore most of it, but take on board the pieces that will make a profit.

  Jester Bane had never made a profit from little Gethsemane. But over the years, he did make a captain out of her.

  "Remembering Jester, huh?"

  Dray's question brought her back to the present with a jolt. She looked down at the deck and saw that it was clear; Can-Rat and Angle must have already gone down to the crew quarters, getting their things together for shore leave.

  Golgotha's crew didn't spend a lot of time together when they were docked. Dray had family waiting for him and Angle would go and try his luck with anything female whose body temperature approached normal, while Can-Rat often just seemed to wander off, then wander back a while later. Either that or he would remain aboard and watch Orca, his intense gaze making the big engineer nervous.

  "How could you tell?"

  "The way you were smiling," Dray replied. "It reminded me of him. Without the teeth, of course."

  Bane laughed quietly. "Did he ever..." Slightly embarrassed, she trailed off.

  "Ever what?"

  "Say why he gave her to me?"

  "Golgotha?" Dray shrugged. "He knew you'd look after her. Us, too."

  Bane thought about that for a moment or two. Then she shook her head and ran her fingers back through her short, cropped hair. "Ahh, since when did I get to be the mothering type? Get off the boat."

  "You sure?"

  "You've got a woman waiting for you, Dray. Go on!" She shooed Dray away and backed him towards the hatch down to the bunk-hold. "I'm going to see the Old Man, but I don't want to see you back here till you're too exhausted to stand up, understood?"

  "Aye, aye, captain," Dray replied with a smile, and ducked quickly through the hatch.

  Orca, to no one's great surprise, was down in the engine room.

  He had been working on Golgotha's drives for hours; running tests, making small adjustments, sometimes just sitting back on his vast haunches and staring off into space. It was during these periods of trance-like thought that he would often get his best ideas: new ways of tweaking the engines, filtering the fuel, modifying yet another wrench or electro-spanner out of all recognition.

  The only disadvantage to these unfocussed moments was that Can-Rat would be watching him the whole time. Orca would return to reality, full of new ideas, and get a jolt when he saw that hunched body and narrow, intense gaze aimed right at him.

  Orca had been working when the others left the ship and he had continued working as night fell. And Can-Rat had been watching him the whole time. His small, jet black eyes had followed Orca incessantly around the engine room, and he had been scuttling about in swift, darting movements to get a better view of whatever the bigger man was working on.

  Orca had long ago given up on being annoyed by this. Once, he had cornered Can-Rat and asked him if he wanted to learn about engines. Can-Rat had simply replied that he was learning.

  The little mutant's mind simply didn't work the way that most peoples did, Orca had decided. Can-Rat was a bit like him in that respect, able to analyse the structure of a mechanism and thereby discern its purpose and operation, just by external study. It made Orca a great engineer, but what it made Can-Rat he wasn't prepared to say. He got the strange feeling that the furry little man wasn't just studying the engines; he was seeing the entire boat as one
single, interconnected system.

  And that included the crew.

  However, for this night, study time was over. He had done all to the quiescent drive system that he could reasonably do. Time for other things.

  He stood, wiping his hands, and backed away from the transmission unit's complex mesh of gears. The cover locked as he pulled it down, sealing the gears away. Later, he would open a lube-valve and fill the unit with oil.

  Orca took the equipment he had been using back to his tool chest, stowing them carefully in their labelled drawers and niches. Then he waddled past Can-Rat and squeezed out through the engine room hatch. His curiosity, usually so easy to suppress, was getting the better of him. He sighed, and gave in to it.

  Time to look at things other than engines.

  Can-Rat watched Orca leave. He stayed where he was for a few moments, perched on top of Orca's workbench, then he hopped down and scampered after the engineer.

  He knew Orca didn't like him much. None of the crew did, except Captain Bane, but that didn't matter. Can-Rat didn't see things the way other people seemed to. To everyone else, all the parts of the ship were separate; a vast collection of components that only worked when fitted together in a certain way. But to Can-Rat, the engines weren't distinct from the rest of Golgotha, any more than Golgotha was distinct from Sargasso. Even when the ship was out at sea, it was still connected, still part of the whole picture. The crew, too. On one level, they were individual people, but that level was the least interesting one to him. Without them, Golgotha was just dead metal. Without Golgotha, the crew would come apart, be homeless and hungry and miserable. Engines wouldn't work without a ship, and the ship wouldn't work without engines.

  Why didn't people see that? It was so obvious.

  That was why he enjoyed watching Orca at work, in as much as Can-Rat could enjoy anything. The big man often found that the engines worked better when certain parts of them were arranged in a slightly different way. Can-Rat had learned from watching Orca that there were hundreds, maybe thousands of ways that the engine parts could be arranged to work. And infinitely more ways that they could be made to stop working.