by Chris Howard
Wilraven didn’t answer, but he did wonder when Levesgue had become something other than just the security team.
The moment they came aboard. Didn’t like them from the start, with their shitty attitudes and box of missiles.
The captain stood there, staring after the soldier. Something was going on, something was eating at Levesgue, and it didn’t have anything to do with some culture raft making an appearance out of the blue.
Like the rest of them, Angelo watched the “security team” fade into the busy work on the Irabarren, guns folded away, armor jackets and leggings snapped off and stowed. As soon as they were out of earshot, he leaned in close, handing DuFour’s hat over to the captain. “Levesgue’s lost a man.”
“What?”
“Big guy with the squarish head, small nose.”
“Blockhead?”
“Seems he disappeared in the middle of the night.”
The level of concern jumped. Inda cut in with, “This have anything to do with Adam?”
Inda was nodding. “Or the damage done to my ROV?”
Angelo shrugged. “Don’t know.” He hunched over as if gathering his suspicions into a tighter huddle, lowering his voice even more. “But there’s wet blood on the foot board next to the welding shed.”
With the Irabarren’s deck packed with cranes and sheds, there was still a running foot-wide walk—that was always supposed to be clear of equipment—around the entire vessel, steel angle bracing along most of it. On the port and starboard loading sections, that width was painted with big alternating yellow and black stripes. “No sign of anyone bleeding. Just the smear of blood. Doc’s coming down to take a sample.”
Wilraven said bitterly, “If Levesgue lets him.”
Angelo shook his head. “Levesgue’s the one who ordered it.”
Chapter Twenty-nine
Culture Raft
It was Drino in bright orange shorts, pulling on an equally vivid pink shirt. He waved vigorously, more of a getting-attention gesture than a hello.
When the raft—five or six times the surface size of Irabarren and Marcene together—drifted close enough to allow for a shouted conversation, Drino said, “Your radio busted? Was talking to you for five minutes before I realized you weren’t talking back to me.”
With a quick glance around, Wilraven shouted through cupped hands, “Comm problems.”
He noticed Drino give his crutch and leg cast a serious look as he pivoted to scan the Irabarren for Levesgue and his soldiers. With the exception of Goatee Boy on Marcene’s bow, they had all vanished.
He stopped. Paulina was being ushered out—by the arm and by one of Levesgue’s men—onto the Marcene’s second tier of stairways and railings, and then guided down to the main deck. So that was how it was going to be. Communications blackout lifted while the raft—Drino’s Inés Errantes—was tied up, but no comms personnel at the station. He imagined Ranav had also been kicked out of his chair.
Wilraven lifted a hand in greeting, feeling several separate aches and some muscle-pulling pain from his shoulder where the Cubans had tagged him, as well as another kind of pain: a heavy throbbing coming from his fractured leg.
The painkillers had peaked and were starting to wear off.
Just pretend everything’s normal.
Levesgue, distracted by the disappearance of Blockhead, had not specified any set of topics or anything that was off-limits. On the other hand, Wilraven had seen what the guy was capable of. Given enough cause, Levesgue wouldn’t hesitate to wipe the raft off the surface of the sea—men, women, and children with it.
That obvious detail didn’t prevent Wilraven from letting a few dangerous daydreams run their course. In one he rallied the crews of Marcene, Irabarren, and the Inés Errantes to the barricades, taking back control from Levesgue, raising the Serina, and sailing off into the sunset. Like most of his daydreams, it quickly flooded with seawater, drowned in the last fearful, shaking breaths of the Marcene’s former divemaster, Regina Lowell—the structure she was working on collapsed, umbilical and communication lines snapped, the currents carrying her away.
Forever.
He had been in line of sight—but too far away. He saw and heard it all happen: the slow rumble of steel coming apart, fish darting around him, scattering, shouts of alarm from topside, Regina’s steady voice explaining what was happening amid short quick bursts of breathing . . . and then silence. He had lost Regina, and it hung like a weight around his neck.
“Get a goddamn grip,” Wilraven muttered to himself, shaking off the nightmare. He forced a smile as the starboard-jutting loading dock of the Inés Errantes brushed along Irabarren’s side and several of Drino’s linesmen hopped over to work with the guys Angelo was directing, which included the unexpectedly helpful Royce.
Wilraven’s gaze was pinned to Royce, wanted to burn a hole right through the apparent traitor. Levesgue had obviously sent him over to spy on them and report back.
They got things tied down quickly, and Wilraven, shifting his weight from the crutch to his good leg, made his way toward the culture raft. The raft’s full name was Agnes—Inés in Spanish—was only happy when she was wandering, but everyone in the Caribbean knew her as Wandering Inés—Inés Errantes. Both the raft’s namesake, Agnes, and Drino—who had always kept his real name to himself—had created the raft. It had been their dream, but the human Agnes had died a couple of years back.
The Errantes looked like it had doubled in size in that time, Drino keeping himself busy. There were certainly more trees. At least a dozen buttonwoods, which were like mangroves, broad, multiple-trunked trees that seemed to grow as wide as they were tall and had a taste for saltwater. A big old buttonwood, that had been the center piece of the Errantes raft when Wilraven had first met Drino, now stood thirty feet high, dominating the central square.
All of the trees grew in covered and well-maintained planters the size of shipping containers, sunk into the decks at fixed locations. Most of them were positioned just in from the edges of the raft, where the trees, as they grew, acted as windbreaks for the agro blocks where plants that didn’t do well with saltwater grew.
Culture rafts were, in general, made up of a mix of converted sea and river barges, broad flat-bottomed bulk containers, homemade pontoon platforms, scrap floating bridge sections, and the occasional—very expensive—hex-shaped agri- and aqua-farm platforms currently used by the thousand on the massive floating Sargasso cities in the middle of the Atlantic. Wilraven had actually spent a week on the biggest of these, a city-sized spread called Winderrill, large enough to be measured in square kilometers. There were farms that size in the Pacific as well, and they were migratory, moving slowly from the Australian west coast up into the Indian Ocean and back again every year.
Rafts like the Errantes were more like sea-villages, dozens of platforms bolted, chained, or roped together to make a single open surface on the sea for residences, farming, and other commercial operations topside, with their own aqua-farming and fishery bays underneath.
They moved about the sea, avoiding storms, skimming shipping channels, bartering with anyone who would accept them. Some of them, like Drino’s raft, had solid reputations for trading and providing some level of services—everything from fresh produce, fresh water, coffee, and other cooked or fresh foods to technology services, electronics repair, and welding.
The Inés Errantes did not contain one of the modern hex platforms, but did boast large spaces of actual wood framing and decks, Drino telling Wilraven once that he preferred the flexibility in Nature’s engineering, that it couldn’t be beaten by plastics, carbon fiber, and steel. The argument sounded good coming from Drino. Wilraven had kept quiet, chalked it up to esthetics, and assumed it came down to cost. Just like everything else.
With a population of two hundred forty, Errantes was one of the smaller-sized culture rafts and followed a fairly basic political and economic structure with an elected governing board. It flew its own flag, and it was UN-reg
istered as an independent ocean-faring community, as close to a small country as it was possible to get without the ability to issue internationally recognized passports. It complied with a fairly soft set of rules on citizenship and human rights in exchange for nominal assistance and protection from the charter’s signatories, all of the G13 and a good handful of other seagoing nations.
Drino jumped the gap to Irabarren, strode right up and hugged Wilraven. Releasing him, he leaned away but kept his hands on the captain’s shoulders with enough of a grip to ratchet up the pain from the grazing shot across his upper arm.
Wilraven grinned through the pain, swinging his good arm, fingers curling around Drino’s forearm to give the old rafter an affectionate squeeze. Wilraven saw the question rising in Drino’s eyes and waited for it.
Drino laughed, “What the fuck are you doing so close to Cuba, man?”
Chapter Thirty
Katren
Andreden was cold. Not because he was naked and duct-taped to a metal chair, arms wrapped at the elbow, wrist, and legs above the ankles. He was cold because whatever they had injected him with seeped like ice through his body and made him shiver. He was alone in a wide space, which had to be an empty hold on a ship because he felt the rolling waves, the floor pitching under his bare feet. There was real movement and pain, but the whole world seemed unreal, patterns and shifting sounds layered over some place that used to be the real world.
A rusty table stood in the corner. Above him, one bright halogen light was fixed to an I-beam cutting across the middle of the ceiling. That was it.
The cold was good. At least he thought it was, because it seemed as if he had been through a couple of cycles of cold and warm, and the cold meant they weren’t going to torture him. For now. When he was warm, they made him speak, they made him write or draw on sheets of paper on the rusty metal table in the big room’s corner. They snapped bones in his fingers, cut long slices down the backs of his thighs, crosscutting into a grid. He was sitting in wet blood. He couldn’t see the ends of his fingers, unable to unlock them from his claw-like grasp of the chair’s arms. Everything below the wrists was a rigid cluster of pain.
The temperature drop also meant he could remember things. The cold took away the hallucinations of weird organic-looking submersibles and oceans cutting paths to other worlds. It was as if the oceans were single living organisms with space-traveling abilities—and the oceans spoke to him and told him they had no roots. Oceans were there on the world to help others find their roots.
With the cold he dreamed of Laeina, bleeding all over the lime-green rental car’s interior. Splatters of dark red across the windshield. And flying white vans with doors opening to spill guns and ammunition and people who only wanted to hurt others—spill them into the sky. He remembered Theo, swinging in to take on the divers—after disabling the powerboat by bending the drive shaft, which spun one of the props into the hull, tearing through advanced marine composites. It ended up with an underwater explosion.
Theo was broken, maybe dead by now, lost in the Atlantic somewhere off southern Florida. Even while fighting for his life, Andreden had seen the machine’s left arm had been broken, one of the structural shafts hanging by a few strands of cabling and ribbon muscle. The explosive “shark-stopper” the diver had used had gone right through Theo’s buoyancy system on one side. What made the memory even more painful was that Theo, who had always been talkative, had said nothing at all after he was damaged. Theo had taken a hit trying to protect Andreden and then had sunk into the gloom. Silent.
He remembered the blond man on the chase boat telling him, “We’re going to meet up with some friends who just want to talk to you.” The Katren had already loomed over them by then, a big slate-blue OSV—offshore support vessel, with a high bridge and low decks, a portside crane knuckled down, and containers stacked along the stern. They lowered a power lift to bring him aboard.
A tall, muscular, tanned man in dark sunglasses, jeans, and a white collared shirt with rolled-up sleeves introduced himself as Captain Reyes. Later, pacing around the torture room, he pulled off his sunglasses, pointing and waving them for emphasis as he told Andreden exactly what they were going to do to him. “You’re already dead, Jon Andreden. We just want to know a little about you and your friend before we kill you.” He smiled, showed teeth as white as his shirt. Then he wagged an admonishing finger at Andreden. “I know you’re thinking, ‘If I’m already dead, why tell them anything?’ You will soon see there’s a big difference between wishing you were dead and being dead. We’re going to play in that space for a while.” He sounded cheerful. “Fill in the picture, tell us what we want to know. Okay?”
A sharp sting in the arm, and then it had been very warm in the room, the heat from the injection spreading into his chest, down to his fingers and toes. It made them more sensitive, made his thoughts race; patterns formed in the rust and chipped paint along the walls of the room. Paint peeling into wings of butterflies, wings of flies that buzzed over the dead. Patterns that made insect noises, that hummed, that changed pitch when he moved his head. It turned his focus inward and wouldn’t let his eyes focus on anything outside for more than a second. The chipped, painted steel under his feet felt like large-grained sandpaper. His face felt hot, and when Captain Reyes punched him, the shock sent his thoughts flying.
During one of the cold cycles they had forced him to drink an acidic, foaming liquid. The man who held his head back and tipped the cup to his lips wore a traditional-looking lab coat, and had almost shaggy brown hair. He saw that Andreden was trying to focus on him, and said, “It dissolves the LPD.”
Andreden’s thoughts seemed to latch onto the letters and wouldn’t let them go. Police Department? What’s the L stand for in LPD? Louisiana? Lincoln, Lexington, Lisbon, LaBrea, Lubbock, Lyon, London? In the end, it appeared that he had been saying the cities that started with L out loud, because the guy in the lab coat said, “Location Pulse Device” just to shut him up. Then added, “The LPDs were in your coffee—both yours and Martin Allievi’s because we didn’t know who would eventually drink the stuff.” He made a half-hearted laugh. “Turns out Rebekah Kahley took Martin’s coffee once, so she had the signaling hardware in her body too. That’s why you’re all here.”
Martin and Rebekah are here. Something didn’t seem right about the shaggy-haired lab guy telling him about the location things. These weren’t idiot villains who filled you in on their methods. It wasn’t Goldfinger and James Bond. Do you expect me to talk? No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die.
His pulse jumped, his thoughts scrabbling after questions about why they would tell him about Rebekah and Martin. Then he lost them, thoughts that drifted off in currents he couldn’t control. Had the oceans in his dream abandoned him, too? Left him without an anchor?
Reyes swung in from the shadows. “What he means is that’s why you’re all going to die.” He dismissed the guy in the lab coat.
“I know all about you, Jon Andreden, about your rebellious past, your struggles against tyranny.” Reyes made air-quotes around the phrase. “Your robotics work, your lifelong friends Martin Allievi and Rebekah Kahley. They mean a lot to you, don’t they? I suspect that’s a major part of the reason you’re here. And you know what? I don’t care. I want to know about this Laeina and what you two are really looking for.”
Andreden shook his head, and Reyes turned into a monster, some hulking creature with enormous strength. He grabbed the rusty table with the paper and pencils, the wetsuit and everything else Andreden came in wearing, and he hurled it across the room, booming against the far wall. “Answer me! Where is Laeina? Where is she? What do you two want?”
Andreden’s focus drifted toward the curls of white paper with crude hand-drawn maps and renderings of a submersible with long whip-like appendages, toward the thick folds of the wetsuit. The twisting black chain and finger-long teardrop of sea-filled glass Laeina had given him in the middle of Monterey Bay. It seemed so long ago.
; The glass ampule shattered on the metal floor with a spray of water, the wetsuit landing in a rumpled pile on top of it.
Captain Reyes waved to someone at the edge of the room, and another one of the Katren’s crew shoved Rebekah Kahley in front of Andreden. She looked drugged and beaten—no reaction to seeing him, dark rings around her eyes, burns up one of her arms, her long, tangled hair matted down with dried blood. She had on the clothes she had been abducted in, but no shoes, just fresh wet streaks of blood running down the shirt. Reyes reached behind his back and pulled out a handgun, sliding a round into the chamber in one snapping motion. He raised the gun to the side of Rebekah’s head.
“Tell you!” Andreden gasped, nodding and wincing against the pain. “Leeen . . . tell you . . . Lenient. Adista.”
Reyes pulled the trigger. He released thunder in the big metal room, and Rebekah staggered one step sideways, dropped to her knees like a puppet released from its strings, and rolled limply to the floor. Seconds of silence seemed to pass by, and then the wet splatter of bone and blood against the far wall and floor.
“No.” Andreden’s voice came out rough, just above a whisper. “Lenient Luck. Looking for Lenient Luck. And Laeina’s sister.”
Chapter Thirty-one
Fly a Kite
Drino laughed again, an uproarious belt of noise. “Okay, don’t tell me. At least fill me in on the graveyard faces, and if we can trade for fuel?”
Wilraven sidestepped the questions and just shook his head, gaze fixed on Drino’s face—hair and beard completely white, almost glowing against the deep brown leathery skin of a man who rarely spent a moment out of the wind or sun. Or as Drino had put it once, only two needs for which a man needed some shade, “a shit and a shower.”
The bright pink shirt didn’t help. Only made it harder to look at him.
