Black Atlantic

by Peter J Evans

  Angle let out an involuntary yelp of shock and took a step backwards, his heart suddenly bouncing and hammering behind his ribs. There must have been an accident, he thought giddily. The crane operator, or one of the maintenance gangers, someone operating dockside machinery. Maybe the poor bastich had fallen into his own equipment.

  Gingerly, he took a step forwards and rolled the body over. It flopped onto its back far too easily. Corpses tend to be heavier when their internal organs are still internal, not left lying on the quay and slithering greasily into the harbour pool...

  "Oh, drokk!" Angle backed away, the alcohol-induced warmth vanishing in an instant. The expression on the corpse's face was terrible, a rictus of pure terror, and worse because it was a face Angle recognised. They'd been drinking together, not long ago; an hour, maybe less.

  Ifrana Rokes, of the Melchior. She'd left the Dancing Norm to check on the moorings, and hadn't come back. Angle had figured that he'd been tactfully dumped and had switched his attentions to the Leaping Eel and Kerryanne instead.

  And all the while poor Ifrana had been lying here. Murdered. Even in the bad light, Angle could see that this was no accident. Someone had opened the woman up in the same way as they might gut a fish.

  He quickly looked up and down the quayside, his head spinning, but there was no one about. No one but him and the opened, stone dead woman at his feet. And possibly the murderer, he thought, feeling his spine turn to ice. Waiting in the shadows with a gutting knife the size of an anchor...

  Angle realised that this was not a good place to be.

  Golgotha was close by, bobbing listlessly in the water. Angle decided that if he had to make a stand anywhere, it would be there, where he could get the spit guns into play. He skirted around Ifrana's body, trying not to see the way her emptied torso was slowly collapsing in on itself, and climbed quickly up Golgotha's gangplank.

  The ship rocked slightly as he stepped aboard. Angle winced at the sudden movement and paused, holding his breath and listening intently. He heard the slow, even creaking of boat hulls in still water, the patter of condensation-rain on decks, the distant murmur of late trade in the market.

  And a low moan from somewhere astern.

  The noise was between him and the guns, he guessed with a mental curse. But then the moan sounded again and he realised it was Can-Rat.

  "Canny? Stomm, what's going on?" Angle scrambled over to where his crewmate lay wedged between the gunwales and a winch drum. The little mutant appeared to have folded his body in half lengthways in order to fit into the gap, making himself almost invisible among the shadows.

  "Angle, that you?"

  "Yeah, it's me." Angle reached down, his multi-jointed arm moving easily into the awkward space. 'Let me help you up."

  Can-Rat shook his head. "I'm okay," he muttered, and unfolded himself from the bolt-hole with an oddly fluid grace, marred only by a sharp intake of breath and a gasp of pain when he was halfway upright. He sagged away from Angle's grasp and leaned heavily against the stern rail. "He got Orca," he said quietly.

  "What?" Angle gaped. "No way..."

  Can-Rat nodded. "Down in the hold. Cut him up without trying. Then he came after me..." He tried to straighten, but the pain was obviously too much. "Grud, that hurts... I thought I'd be safe out here, but he's fast, and he can see in the dark. He hit me... Had a blade..." Can-Rat was beginning to lose consciousness. Pain and shock were dragging him down. Angle grabbed his thin shoulders.

  "C'mon, you furry drokker, stay with me! What happened?"

  Can-Rat swallowed, and shook himself. "Don't know. I heard screams. Maybe he got distracted."

  Ifrana, Angle thought ruefully.

  "I tried to get up, but I think my ribs are busted."

  "Yeah, looks that way," nodded Angle. "Did you see who it was? How'd he get aboard - from the quayside or out of the water?"

  "He didn't come aboard," said Can-Rat, wincing as he pressed a tentative hand to his damaged ribs. "He's been here the whole time."

  The Old Man's chambers were welded deep into the inside of the chem-tanker Hyperion. Originally it had been a vessel in its own right, a high-speed pleasure skimmer. The Old Man himself had sailed the Atlantic in that nimble little ship, back when the seas were still blue. He had been very old, even then, and very rich.

  The cabins and decks of his skimmer were now black with age and the smoke of a thousand candles. Gethsemane Bane had to walk gingerly into the main cabin to avoid knocking over the hundreds of bottles and jugs that covered the filthy wood - offerings from those who had come to the Old Man over the years to hear his weird and ancient wisdom.

  People from all over Sargasso would make the journey down into the bowels of the Hyperion bearing gifts. It seemed everyone had a question that only he, in his strange trances and riddled speech, could answer - who to let a daughter marry, where to hunt for the best salvage, how to make a charm to ward off disease or turn the blade of an enemy. As long as Bane could remember, he had never done anything else.

  Bane had been coming to see the Old Man since she was a child, just after Jester had first adopted her, but not for advice or readings. Despite the Old Man's reputation as the Sargasso's resident shaman, Bane simply came to see him because she liked him.

  He was sitting in the middle of the cabin, surrounded by his candles and bottles. His thin legs were crossed, his head bent so that the curve of his naked back showed his spine and ribs in perfect detail under the dark leather of his skin.

  Bane crept towards him, very carefully, and sat down opposite. The Old Man was naked except for a pair of baggy shorts. His skin was as dark as mahogany, and his hair, cropped close to his skull, was pure white. To Bane, he looked small and heartbreakingly frail.

  "Hey, eldster," she whispered, in case he was asleep. "Brought you some booze."

  At the sound of her voice, the Old Man gave a reedy cry and threw back his head. "Devil child," he spat, his eyes rolling wildly. "Evil you are, evil I see! Terror you bring in your right hand, fire in your left!" He raised a skeletal arm, finger outstretched. "Get thee gone! Sinner, harridan, harlot!"

  Bane was on her feet, shocked by the outburst. She felt something against her boot and heard a bottle clatter onto the deck. "Hey, what-"

  "How dare you bring foulness before me!" he yelled, shaking with rage. The corners of his mouth were starting to quirk up. "Tempter, destroyer! Er, scavenger..."

  "Scavenger?"

  The Old Man was trying hard to keep a straight face. Eventually he gave up. "Ah, what do you expect, child?" He grinned, showing a wide sickle of very white teeth. "When all you bring me is this rancidness?"

  Bane lifted the bottle and shook it at him, making the charms rattle. "You old phoney! You really had me going there!"

  He shrugged. "It's my job. Hey, sit down, sit down..." He waited until Bane, now trying very hard to keep an angry look on her face, had settled back onto the deck. "I've got to keep in practise, haven't I? The punters expect so much and I'm not as young as I was."

  That, Bane knew, was an understatement. The Old Man hadn't been young since before the ships that made up Sargasso were built. He had seen the building of the Mega-Cities, the turning of the dry land into the rad-desert known as the Cursed Earth. He had seen the Atlantic go black.

  Something in his DNA had twisted, long ago, shutting down the processes of natural ageing. He had once told her that he had self-replicating telomeres, whatever they were. Then again, he had told her lots of things as she was growing up. Except his real name - no one knew that.

  Bane glared at him. "Fraud."

  "You and I both know," said the Old Man, "that isn't true." He presented Bane with his open hand. "Give, give..."

  "Sure you want it? Rancid and all?"

  He nodded vigorously. "Booze, child, is like sex and pizza. It's all good." He took the bottle from her and turned to place it among a dozen identical ones just off to his left. "You've been hunting."

  "It's my job." Sh
e gave him a fond smile. "It's good to see you."

  He nodded gently. It was all she needed. Embarrassed, she let her gaze drop to the deck, and changed the subject. "Look, I wanted to ask about-"

  "Can-Rat," he interrupted. He often did that. Knowing what people were going to say before they said it was one of his talents. If he wasn't a natural psionic, he was something very like one.

  "Mm." She looked up. "Is he one of yours?"

  "Of mine?"

  Bane nodded. "He sees things before they happen, I think. We were attacked out at sea, and he saw it coming." She grimaced, trying to put what she felt into words. "I was wondering if he saw things the way you do."

  The Old Man fixed her with a steady gaze. "I've never met the man."

  "That's never stopped you."

  He shrugged. "Can-Rat sees connections. You've said before that he's odd and seems distant sometimes?"

  "That's one way of putting it."

  "He's like that because of the way he sees you. He's more interested in the links that bind you to everything around you, rather than you yourself. Gethsemane Bane as a wave function in the quantum network; a holistic entity, not a discrete equation."

  Bane thought about this for a few moments then shook her head. "I don't have the slightest idea what you're talking about," she said. "But as long as he can keep knocking me over before bullets hit me, I guess he's okay."

  "I think," the Old Man began, and then stopped. A strange expression crossed his face. "He's in danger."

  "What?" Bane frowned. "What, now?"

  "Yes, now!" the Old Man leapt to his feet, sending bottles flying. He hauled Bane to her feet with an astounding strength in those thin arms. "Grud, child, what did you bring aboard?"

  Bane had never seen him like this before, and it frightened her. "I don't understand! Can-Rat's in danger because of what we found?" No sense trying to hide anything from the Old Man. "Because of the casket?"

  The Old Man suddenly reached out and grabbed her by the forearms, holding her still. "Listen to me, Gethsemane Bane," he hissed. "No tricks now. No trances, no riddles. Whatever is in that box is death, pure and simple."

  "What-"

  "I don't know!" he snarled. "There's no mind, no thought. Action, but no intent. A plan, but no purpose. Just death! And your people are in its way!"

  He shoved her back. She stumbled, almost tripping over the bottles. Dozens of them scattered across the deck as she fought for balance.

  "Go," the Old Man was shouting. "Go, before what you've brought here kills us all!"

  7. THE SKIPPER

  It was Erik, the younger and slightly brighter of the Tusk Brothers, who spotted the figure. It was gone almost before his eyes could track it, but it left an after-image in his brain: a tall, slender man, stooped, darting across the street and into the shadows of a nearby alley.

  Erik might have been mistaken, but he could have sworn the man was naked.

  "Hey." He used the back of his hand to slap Igor on the upper arm, drawing his attention. His brother was more drunk than he, and in a fouler mood. Hardly surprising, since it was Igor who had just been thrown bodily out of the Black Whale tavern. Erik had followed as a matter of course. The Tusk Brothers were rarely apart.

  "Whassup?" Igor scowled. Erik put a finger to his lips, indicating silence. It took Igor's grog-addled mind a second or two to catch up, but when he did his big lower jaw closed with an audible snap.

  Erik leaned close. "Just saw some guy, end of the street. Lurking around like maybe he doesn't want anyone to see him."

  A slow smile spread over Igor's ruin of a face. "Yeah," he nodded, slowly. Igor did most things slowly, except drink. "Yeah. Right. So-"

  "So," said Erik, finishing up for him, "maybe he won't shout so loud if we tap him, yeah?"

  It was late; late enough for most of Sargasso's honest citizens to be away in their beds. On most streets, especially in working spaces like the harbour, the only real foot traffic was security patrols by the skipper's men. The Tusk Brothers were on legitimate business, as much as they ever were - staggering home after being thrown out of a tavern wasn't illegal. But anyone darting naked into the shadows on a darkened street was obviously as eager to avoid the patrols as Erik and Igor.

  The street was actually a metal companionway, slung out over two tiers of the dock district and, ten metres below, the quayside itself. The hull-side of the street was lined with stall fronts and kiosks, every one shuttered and locked for the night. Five minutes back towards the bow end was the Black Whale , its windows and open door throwing strips of warm yellow light across the mesh.

  The alley was a dead end. Erik reached around to the small of his back, under his long fishskin coat, and drew the pair of narrow, double-edged daggers he kept there. Igor slipped a heavy billy club from his belt and tapped it experimentally against his palm. He grinned and nodded to himself, happy at the prospect of a little amusement.

  Erik began to increase his pace, his coat - long ago acquired from an unlucky night-time pedestrian - billowing behind him. He wanted to catch the lurker before the man realised he was heading into a dead end and returned to the street. He winced as he heard Igor's heavy tread, keeping up. Igor wasn't the most subtle of men.

  In fact, the brothers were not very much alike at all. Erik was small, lean and dark, while Igor was pale of skin and big in the bone. Erik was dextrous and could flip a knife more than twenty metres, hitting whatever he chose. Igor favoured a more direct approach and could shatter a man's spine in a single blow. Both had long, wicked tusks jutting up from their heavy lower jaws, but that was all they really had in common.

  Apart from a mutual aptitude for relieving others of their possessions, of course.

  They went around the corner together, shoulder to shoulder, blocking the alleyway. There wasn't much light to see by, just a couple of biolume strips throwing a dim, blue-green glow down the walls, but what Erik did see stopped him in his tracks.

  The figure was naked, but it wasn't a man.

  It had its back to the brothers; a hunched, ridged back that gleamed corpse-grey in the biolume light. There was something about the figure that looked raw, incomplete, like a statue half-made and then abandoned before all the rough edges had been chipped away. Its long, stick-thin arms were up, doing something to the service panel at the end of the alleyway.

  As Erik watched, his oversized jaw dropping, the figure reached up and tore the panel free of the wall.

  The screech of tearing metal as the fixing bolts ripped clear through the frame somehow launched Igor into action. Maybe the sound hurt his hangover - Erik would never find out.

  Igor gave a roar and began barrelling up the alleyway, his billy club raised high and his boots crashing on the mesh.

  The figure before them half-turned and made a strange, flipping motion with its hand, almost as though waving them away. The gesture seemed weird, almost effeminate, and Erik barked out a laugh of surprise. But as he did so, Igor tripped over his own feet and went sprawling to the metal floor.

  Erik had seen Igor fall over drunk before but he usually got back up again. This time he stayed where he was, face down on the mesh. A shiver went through him and Erik heard him make a sound - a long, whistling groan, as though all the air was being squeezed out of his lungs. And then he was still.

  When Erik looked away from his brother to see where the naked figure was, it had gone.

  Something was horribly wrong here. There was simply nowhere for the figure to go unless it had climbed over the damaged panel and into the duct. But there hadn't been enough time for that. Igor had gone down almost instantly.

  Erik trotted forwards, blades ready, searching the shadows but seeing no one. He reached Igor in a few paces and crouched down beside him.

  Igor Tusk wasn't breathing. His face was turned to one side, his eyes wide and still. His pupils had contracted to tiny points.

  There were three small needles, like tiny spikes made of plastic or bone, embedded in t
he skin of his face.

  Erik had seen poison at work before, although nothing so fast or powerful. He shouted a curse and jumped up, and as he did so something tiny whipped past him, whining off the mesh a few metres back towards the street. Terrified, he stared up the alleyway, trying to see where the flying thing had come from.

  Part of the wall moved. The rust-bubbled paintwork shifted fluidly, and just for a second Erik saw the outline the movement made: a man-shape, stooped and thin as sticks.

  The figure had never gone away. It was there... with him.

  Erik screamed, long and loud, and then he was running down the alley and onto the street.

  It was Erik Tusk's screams that woke Dray from a very pleasant sleep.

  He lay still for a moment, eyes closed, trying to identify the noise that had roused him. It had sounded like screaming, but who would be making such a deafening noise at this time of night? Maybe one of the kids was having a nightmare.

  He sat up, making his wife stir and roll away from him, drawing the covers up over her head without waking. Dray smiled in the darkness and swung his legs out of bed, getting up carefully so as not to disturb her further, then padded across the room to the door.

  He heard another scream just before he got there, and shouting. It seemed to be coming from below him.

  Dray and his family lived in one of the dozens of habs on the upper level of the harbour barge; most of the scavenger crews resided there so they could be close to their vessels. Dray didn't like being away from Golgotha for long, and since he had moved into the hab he had enjoyed being able to lean over the street railing outside his door and look straight down onto Golgotha's deck, twenty metres below.

  It got noisy sometimes, what with the stalls and the taverns on the next street down, but he was used to that. The Black Whale had once closed for a week while roof braces were being re-welded. Dray hadn't been able to sleep a wink.

  Now, however, something far worse than the usual drunken row was taking place a level below his feet.