The Mystery of the Solar Wind

by Lyz Russo

9 April 2116

 

  Katya

 

  Very nearly, your brother joined you today. Captain must be off his mind. He outwits that Anya Miller, and then, when Federi has made doubly sure that all danger is past and she can’t come after us and fry us with her lightning bolts, Captain catches a virus and orders me to rescue her! Right back into that nest of Stabs! After such a beautiful getaway yesterday! It’s enough to drive a man twitchy! Katya, sometimes I really think Captain is a madman.

  He’s protecting our three little musicians, and that’s great – haha, the little songbird’s pretty upset with Federi bout that thieves’ honour thing, can’t accept that I’m not an honest, ethical, upstanding – Katya, are you laughing as hard as Federi? Maybe Federi’s not laughing all that loudly anyway, rats in pyjamas…

  Pretty impressed with Shawn, the kid’s got wits. Was the first to figure out we’re pirates, even before Captain told them.

  Captain talks about Donegal magic. They have an amazing effect on us all. We’re laughing more than in a long time. And that music… Cor, my heart-sister, I’m tired of being a morose pirate! Want to be a happy Tzigan again! Haven’t had much chance at playing the clown since the Princess is all grown up. Hells, Katya, but I can’t laugh after I’ve seen the voltage of that woman’s hatred… Can’t stop thinking of headless old Störtebeker!

  Going to pass out a bit and then make everyone coffee. As though they need it, blasted crew of hyperactive monkeys!

 

  Kathal, my sister.

  Your wrecked little brother.

 

  7 - Old Sherman

 

 

  Shawn came shimmying down the rigging in the early dusk to join his sister and old Sherman at the rail. Paean had her violin out and was playing a few tunes to Ronan’s accompaniment; but her heart wasn’t in it.

  “That was an ace trick today,” Shawn laughed. “Wonder what that Anya Miller is doing now!”

  “I don’t like wondering about psychopaths,” replied the old storyteller.

  “Och, won’t you tell us a ghost story, Sherman?” begged Shawn.

  “You like your ghosties, Shawn,” laughed Sherman Dougherty. “Are you three planning to tour around the world playing music?” He pulled out his pipe and started cleaning it.

  “Och no,” said Paean, giving up on the tune she’d been attempting. It didn’t want to.

  “But why not? You three are good, Paean!”

  She studied the old man, with his wild white mane and his huge, somewhat tobacco-stained beard. An old leprechaun. Not even the Unicate had managed to edit leprechauns and shenanigans out of Irish folklore.

  Almost she’d like to trust the grandfatherly old sailor and give him a real answer. But… yeah. That was suicide. A low profile!

  “Och, Sherman, we didn’t make it in Dublin, and that’s the world capital for music.”

  “Made a good deal of money though,” piped Shawn happily. “Up until…”

  “Shawn!” Paean frowned at him. It was bad luck if Shawn wanted to talk about the past right now! Couldn’t he just keep on shutting up until Hawaii? Anyway, what did he call a good deal of money?! “It was Ronan who was earning money, remember? We just went along!”

  “Sure,” came a cryptic comment. The gypsy had appeared out of nowhere and was leaning against the foremast, watching them. Paean peered back at him critically. He was in a lime-green flared shirt with a sky-blue waistcoat and a mauve paisley headscarf – a combination that hurt the eye, even in the dusk. He must be feeling better.

  She had changed her mind. She wasn’t going to give Ronan’s plan of making friends another go. Making friends on this ship was not only darned tricky; it was pointless, too. She couldn’t really see why she bothered. Ro could carry his plan out alone. And Shawn. Friends were dangerous. You ended up telling them things.

  Quite a few of the sailors were out on the deck by now, drawn by the beginnings of the Ceilidh. There was an air of elation. They wanted to party, having pulled one over on the Unicate.

  “Yup, that’s right,” grinned Shawn. “They kept on just giving Ro all the money! And we did just as much of the work! Played weddings, funerals, seedy pubs…”

  “Ceilidhs,” corrected Ronan sternly, putting his Clarsach away in its weatherproof bag. Mist was beginning to rise. The wind was picking up. The Ceilidh would have to move below the deck. “All you two ever played was Ceilidhs. Paean, pack up your violin, it’s going to get wet! We’re a law-abiding family, Shawn. Don’t know where you got all those other ideas! Sir, he dramatizes!”

  “Stands to reason, he’s Irish,” said Wolf Svendsson. Paean glanced up from putting her violin away. So Wolf was back on deck!

  “Now, Svendsson, what precisely do you mean by that?” asked Sherman Dougherty sharply.

  “Och, Sherman,” begged Shawn, “a ghost story, please?”

  “Wouldn’t you rather tell us about your own ghosts, Shawn?” replied Sherman. “Why are you at sea, when you ought to be at school?”

  Paean hissed under her breath. The Donegals had last been to school in September. It was not a topic she wanted to discuss. “Sherman, what is the Solar Wind’s mission in Hawaii?”

  A small sound caught her attention. Federi was laughing quietly to himself.

  “Might as well ask how a Dougherty gets by the name of Sherman,” said Ronan, trying to get the conversation back onto safer ground. Drat Paean and her sharp wit! He didn’t want to be put ashore in the next port! The plan was to get to Hawaii, not stay in Plymouth!

  He had his hands full with his sibs. Shawn had to be pulled in line all the time, telling people too much, while Paean had developed a style of communicating that was – well, loudly suspicious.

  “How a Donegal gets by the name of Paean,” countered Sherman. He had the pipe lit by now and puffed on it, studying them all.

  “Mother picked it,” said Paean defiantly. She turned away, walking along the rail towards the prow. The Ceilidh was over.

 

  The Solar Wind was cutting her way south-southeast towards Plymouth, another free port. Captain Lascek, Marsden and Rushka were on the bridge, holding a conference.

  Radomir Lascek summarized the situation. The Unicate had been swarming all over Hamilton harbour. Discovering that Hamilton was a pirate port, they would carry on searching now until they found more pirate ports. What Federi had found out that night on his pub mission was disturbing. The Unicate was systematically checking every last port now. Hamilton was gone; Manila was gone. Several ports in the Gulf and along the Florida coastline, including Key West, had already been discovered and taken over. Nicaragua, a resilient free country, had folded to the Unicate days ago. It would be in the World News now. All in all the Unicate had suddenly become a lot more vicious – but why? What lay behind it all?

  Some answers would await them in Hawaii, this they knew. Jonathan Marsden had been working on the decryption of those data sticks and especially the high-security capsule Federi had picked off the Hun – with little success. It seemed as though whole parts of code were missing. What single glimpses emerged, made no sense as yet. This was no small project.

  The Solar Wind’s concerns for safety lay closer still. Had the Unicate discovered Plymouth yet? Unicate was like a bulldog – once they had a grip on something, they never let go until they had finished it. The Unicate was a fearsomely thorough conqueror.

  But Plymouth was only the first stop on Lascek’s map of concerns. They would have to cross the Panama Canal to get to the Pacific. Anya Miller knew of their course, that was clear. She had been too accurate positioning herself. So the Unicate would be waiting for them in Panama.

  “It’s madness,” said Marsden.

  “Good,” replied Captain Lascek. “So, any ideas yet?”

  Rushka shrugged. “Go around the Cape?” />
  “For all that’s going to cost us in delay,” replied her father, “it’s not that much safer. Unicate’s all over the Atlantic. You know this.”

  “At least we won’t be delivering ourselves right into their hands,” said Rushka.

  Radomir Lascek’s eyes narrowed. “Right into their hands, you say?”

  Jonathan Marsden shuddered. There was a plan brewing in that formidable mind! All he could do was modulate the Captain’s risks down, try to make it a bit safer.

  “A year ago I would have said, go north,” he suggested. “Even now – wouldn’t that be better?”

  Lascek shook his head. “The passage is frozen again.”

  “Blast our way with the nuclear drives?”

  “Not doable, Jon. The ice is finally recovering. Sea level has dropped.”

  “Submerge and pass under the ice cap?”

  Radomir Lascek leaned back and folded his arms, mulling.

  “For all it’s possible,” he said, “it would cost nearly as much time as going around the Cape. Now that the Unicate is hatching something, I feel there is more need to hurry. We’ll just have to find our way through Panama.”

  “If the sea level has dropped, Lake Gatun will be a challenge,” warned Marsden.

  “It will be a challenge anyway,” said Lascek.

  Rushka nodded. “Stabilizers,” she said.

  Lascek’s glance fell on the little Irish waif out there at the rail, under the occasional spray of the prow wave. She stood as tall as her tiny frame allowed and met his eyes across the whole length of the deck with Donegal pride in every inch of her stance.

  “Rushka,” he said, “remind me!”

  “Igen, Captain.”

  For now, he needed to focus on the Panama Debacle.

 

  Sherman Dougherty had his audience gathered around himself now. The ship’s deck lights lit up automatically just as he took a breath to start.

  “Shawn,” he said, “you know where we’re going, now don’t you?”

  “Sure,” said Shawn, “Hawaii!”

  “And do you know how we’re going to get there?”

  Shawn’s face was a blank. It was on the tip of his tongue to say, “by sailing ship”, but clearly this was a loaded question. He waited.

  “D’you know your geography, Donegal?” asked old Sherman.

  “No, but I will,” said Shawn happily. “Give me five years or so at sea!”

  “Plymouth in about four days,” said old Sherman, smiling. “We restock, and then we pass through Panama – that should be sports! From there –“

  “What kind of sports?” asked Shawn, riveted.

  “Unicate,” said Sherman. “Now listen! Don’t get so excited! You think you’re a pirate? You don’t know anything! Probably read too much subversive literature! You want some real pirates, go to the east coast of Africa. The Indian Ocean coast. Mayotte. Dzaoudzi. Reunion. Slave trade, Donegal! Right into this century! Why do you think there’s a place on the northern tip of Mauritius that is called, to this day, Cannonier’s Point?”

  Shawn nodded, impressed.

  “In any case that’s the most dangerous stretch of ocean ever designed,” said Sherman Dougherty.

  “I thought that was south of the Cape of Storms,” interjected Ronan.

  “Storms, ha,” said Sherman. “The Agulhas comes down from India along the East Coast. Warm water pushing south. The Oceanic Conveyor Belt goes up that coastline, but of course deep down. Storms? You get lots there. Great cyclones. High waves. Ships tend to disappear without leaving a forwarding address…”

  “The place must be littered with wrecks,” commented Shawn.

  “Sherman, won’t you tell us the one about the Bronberg?” asked Wolf Svendsson.

  “Which one -? Oh. All right!” Sherman puffed on his pipe and settled comfortably on the deck. The ship rolled as she ploughed on through the dark. Fine salty spray settled on them. The crests glowed a bit with bioluminescent plankton.

  “The Bronberg was a Namakura, Class fifty-seven,” said Sherman, leaning back against the starboard rail. It was the holes that worried him. He hadn’t yet had a chance to build holes into the Bronberg’s tale for Ronan. Well, he’d just have to do it as he went along. “Blue ship. Now wasn’t she beautiful as the evening breeze? A steamship from the mineral fuels era; ran on what they called dirty oil. Unrefined oil. And was it dirty, now!” He frowned and went silent for a moment. He had been there. “You kids have no idea what rubbish was thrown into the atmosphere by those old steamers! And all other transport! Why do you think the ice caps started melting? If the Unicate ever did one thing right…”

  “What?” asked Shawn, surprised. “The Unicate stopped the use of mineral oils?”

  “We don’t really know, do we?” replied Sherman. “I believe it did run out. The Unicate wasn’t responsible for Nemesis II either.”

  “You sure?” asked Wolf Svendsson with a grin. Nemesis II had been one of a pair of meteorites. It had hit Earth in the mid-Atlantic. Nemesis I had been caught further up the solar system by Neptune.

  Sherman had been alive at that time, too.

  “Oy! That was a tense time for Earth, wasn’t it!” he recalled. “Tidal waves, earthquakes, volcanic outbursts. Luckily it was a comparatively small hit; Nemesis I would have sliced our planet in halves. Geography shifted.”

  “How?” asked Ronan, eyes narrowed. Here it came!

  “The Mid-Atlantic Ridge? Boys, you should see it now! Used to be a nice fault line. Now it’s a real cliff. And hasn’t the east side sunk a great bit lower?” He grinned and drew on his pipe.

  “Ah.” Had it, now? Ronan smiled and considered whether scrubbing the galley floor was a worthwhile option tonight. It had to be a tall story! If the east side of the ridge had sunk any lower, Ireland would be where Tir Nan Og was! And probably, half of Europe too!

  “What about that dirty fuel, and the ice caps melting?” asked Shawn, ears hot.

  “You’re talking about another story now,” said Sherman. “And they didn’t exactly melt, did they? Just thinned a bit. The ice receded a wee bit. Unicate blasted a passage into the thinned Northern Ice Cap in the late Eighties to promote traffic between Tokyo, New York and London. But it has iced over more every year now, as the atmosphere recovers from the Greenhouse effect. Soon it won’t even be open in summer any longer, and what a pity that will be for the sea trade!”

  “And the sea levels?”

  “They’ve been dropping, but not too dramatically,” said Sherman. “Don’t you Dubliners know? All harbour towns were built up quite a bit in the fifties, with the sea levels at their highest. Harbours were raised and dykes were built higher every year. A lot of technology went into that! You think you had a problem? Should have seen Holland, and Florida!”

  “Lowlands,” muttered Ronan.

  “Now that the sea level is dropping again, there are places where one can see the old submerged buildings resurfacing,” said Sherman. “Old highways. And so on. Isn’t that the plain truth!”

  “Och,” said Ronan and bit his tongue. Decks!