by G R Matthews
“Mayday. Mayday. This is the sub,” I said and paused. What was the name or designation of this submarine? Chunhua pointed to the wall plaque covered in symbols and squiggles. She sighed and muttered the designation in a language I could actually understand. “This is the Sub DLA-40019. We were attacked by pirates and request emergency docking.”
Static. I let go of the controls, rooted through the communication menu and repeated my speech.
Nothing. I was about to have another go when the speakers crackled to life.
“Unidentified Sub approaching, please state your designation and purpose,” the voice said in an accent similar to Chunhua’s.
“This is the Sub DLA-40019. We were attacked by pirates and request emergency docking,” I said and waited for the response.
“Unidentified sub, please state your designation and purpose of visit,” the voice said again.
I turned to Chunhua, who shrugged.
“You try,” I said.
I listened in incomprehension as she spoke into the microphone. Hopefully repeating the same message I had given, but in her language. When she finished we waited again.
“Unidentified sub, please respond.”
“Shit,” I said. “How far behind are our friends?”
“Catching up and on the same course. They’ll be over the cable soon,” she said.
“Unidentified Sub, if you do not respond, you will be fired upon. Please respond.”
“The impact with that mountain must have taken out our transmitter.” I could fix it. From outside the sub. I had my Fish-Suit, but no time.
“What are we going to do?” Chunhua asked.
“We keep going,” I answered.
“And when they shoot at us? Or when the sub behind gets in contact with them?”
“One problem at a time,” I answered. A stupid idea occurred to me and baring any genius idea following it, and none did, I decided to try. “Keep us on course.”
I slid out of my chair and went to Lijuan’s station. The little girl, brave as she was, would not be able to do this. Using one of the panels, I selected the robotic arm controls and brought it to life. A few wiggles, just to get the feel and I was ready.
“Drop us down a little,” I said and Chunhua did so. A little bumpy, but at least she could pilot a sub.
Through the panel video feed I could see the soft sand and mud of the sea floor starting to be kicked up by the passing of the sub.
“Unidentified Sub, please halt and identify yourself. This is your final warning.”
“Corin,” Chunhua said, worry edging her voice into a higher pitch.
“Slow us down, slowly.” I opened the claw on the end of the robotic arm and lowered it further. It now straddled the thin but strong cable. “Are they still following us, over the cable?”
“Yes, right over it.”
“Good, don’t slow down too much yet.”
“Unidentified Sub, if you do not stop you will be fired upon,” the voice said, breaking his own promise about final warnings.
“On the count of three, I want you to lift the nose sharply. Let us rise a few metres before dropping back and coming to a halt. Ready?”
“Yes. What are you doing?”
I didn’t really know, but it was something and that was always better than nothing.
“One,” I started to close the claw.
“Two.” The claw was millimetres from contact with the cable. I waited. Watching.
“Three!”
The claw snapped around the cable and the nose of the sub lifted. I stumbled back towards the door of the command deck, grabbing the back of Lijuan’s chair to steady myself. A second later the front of the sub dipped back towards the sea floor and came to halt. I lurched forward with only my grip on the chair to stop my nose smashing into the back of Chunhua’s chair.
I didn’t, couldn’t, see what happened behind us, but I could guess. The cable lifted from the sea bed, stretched taut for a moment, and a ripple, a tsunami, of cable rushed out into both directions.
Towards the city, the length of cable and its junctions would absorb the wave. They would feel it in the connections and connectors where cable met city. The communications grid would go into shock as the computers tried to make sense, to cope with the change. Not for long, a second or two.
Of more import were all the nodes behind us. They would be whipped upwards by the wave and, if we were lucky, a few of the fibre connections would snap. If they did, our pursuers would be out of contact with the city and we’d be on a level playing field.
Except, I’d just damaged their cable. They might not like that. I could blame Chunhua. She’d been piloting after all, but that thought only flitted across my mind. I got the impression that Lijuan’s father was an important man and making both girls hate me was no way to get them home, or me back to my own city.
“Unidentified Sub,” at least the nodes under us were working, even if our microphones weren’t, “remain stationery. Security submarines are on their way to escort you into custody.”
“Well,” I said. “That went better than I thought.”
“You actually thought that through?” Chunhua said.
“A bit,” I admitted. “Not a lot. With security on the way, there is no way our chasers are going to fire on us. We’re safe for a moment.”
PING.
Chapter 25
As cells go, and I’ve been in one or two in my time, this one wasn’t bad. It was clean, the guards had given me water and food. I don’t know what the food was, but I didn’t ask and ate it anyway. The girls were in another cell a few doors down.
“Do not mention the Sio Sam Ong or Lijuan’s father,” Chunhua had said with an urgent tone as our sub was being towed into a docking bay.
“Why not? Don’t you want to get home?”
“The Sio Sam Ong have spies everywhere. People they pay to tell them what’s going on all around the corporation,” she answered.
“The sub we borrowed is going to be a big clue leading right back to where we came from,” I said. “We need to tell the same story.”
“Story?”
“Security are going to run checks. They’ll use your fingerprints and DNA to trace you back to Nanxun. Lijuan too. They’ll have a little more trouble with me. The story needs to fit those facts.”
She gave me a perplexed look and opened her mouth to speak when I saw the light dawn in her eyes. “I see. Does that mean they will find out who Lijuan is too?”
“I’d have thought so, but I don’t know how the Corporation runs here. In NOAH, your DNA is sampled and stored at birth.”
“It is the same here,” she said.
“That’s a problem, but there’s nothing we can do about it. We need a story and Lijuan needs to know it too. I hope they won’t question her too much. Five year olds are not the most consistent of witnesses or alibis.”
“You are our pilot. We were returning from the city to Nanxun. The family is rich, but our father had to rush back for a family emergency, he took the sub. There were no passenger subs going our way for weeks, which is likely to be true, so we hired you.”
It was a shaky story at best and wouldn’t stand up to much scrutiny. However, it covered the main points of the girls’ identities and gave us a chance. I nodded.
I hadn't had the time to work out any more details before security had stormed onto the command deck and taken us captive. We were under strict instructions, and the barrel of a few guns, not to talk to each other so we didn’t. Lijuan started crying and wailing. I felt like joining in. They let Chunhua comfort her, the two girls spoke in their own language for a moment.
“Listen,” I said because strict instructions have never been a speciality of mine and because I wanted to get a few words in before they started the interrogation, “we were attacked by pirates.”
I didn’t get the next sentence out because the barrel of one of those guns hit me in the stomach. Not hard enough to knock my breath out of my lung
s, or to raise a bruise, but hard enough to know that the next one would do both of those things. I shut up.
For the next few hours there was nothing to do but eat, think and try to sleep. I sat on the bunk. A thin metal frame, no springs, and a mattress that had seen the arse end of many a drunk. Probably been pissed and puked on a few times too. There was faint odour on the air. Cleaning fluid, acrid and metallic on the throat, but behind it Eau’de Vomit. A smell I recognised all too easily.
The pillow was as thick as the single blanket they had thoughtfully provided and I hoped it wasn’t a sign I’d be staying overnight. All in all, a better prison than the last one, but that also meant less chance of escape.
I drained the last of the water, urinated in the toilet in the far corner of the small room and lay down on the bed. Folding my arms behind my head, I closed my eyes and tried to think about sleep.
Thirty-Seven dolphins had swum through the archway, the fifteenth had been a little scared to go through and number twenty-two had flatly refused despite all my cajoling, when there was rattle and a beep from the cell door.
A security guard, dressed in a grey jumpsuit, with a sidearm holstered on his belt and club in his hand, beckoned me out. Here’s the thing. When you are in a cell the first thing you desire is to be out. However, when they come to get you there are times when you’d much rather avoid the almost inevitable beating, questioning and shouting match, which you’d lose, and just stay in the cell. Like now, like always, there was no option but to go with the guard.
I tried a smile. It wasn’t returned. Not a good sign.
He used the club to indicate direction. A stab to the right and I turned. A wave onward and I went forward. He wasn’t the chatty sort.
The gestures guided me into a room and I was, with the club, told to sit down on a chair of tubular metal, which I did. On the table was a panel and opposite me another chair. This one was unoccupied. A dramatic entrance was a key part of the interrogation technique. I’d been in the presence of some true masters in the past.
Part of my service training involved techniques to survive interrogation. It was almost as if they expected us to get caught. Everyone knew you couldn’t hold out forever. The stories of brave men and women never divulging the secrets were all myths. Everyone talked. The military had a secret technique for this. They set a deadline, a goal to meet. Twelve hours from the start of the first session.
Despite a dirty war, the death of countless civilians, the massive loss of life, most interrogators didn’t start with pain straight away. Knowledge gained under torture was always suspect. You’d say anything to get the pain to stop. Hell, I’d admit to sex with an Octopus if it got them to stop. So most questioning began with some simple checks, some little bits of information elicited and a reading of the prisoner.
Cameras in the room, sensors in the chair and all sorts of other mysterious and scientific equipment would measure the prisoner’s responses. Looking for biometric clues, something that would indicate when the one being questioned was not telling the whole truth. Despite centuries of attempts, no one had yet built a reliable lie detector. Some people were just born dishonest.
My escort took up position behind me. I’d have to turn to look at him, but it was another standard trick. It heightened the fear, the paranoia.
The door opened and a fat man, in a grey jump suit, waddled in clutching a Pad upon which he was scribbling furiously. He was followed by two more guards. A woman, who looked as though she could crush the chair I sat on into a small metal ball between her two large hands, and a stick thin man who kept glancing nervously around the room, his head twitching and jerking as he moved.
The fat man sat in the chair and his two subordinates stood behind him. The woman glared at me, whilst the other man’s eyes seemed to wander off of their own accord.
“Now then, Mr… ah… Hanes,” the fat man began, consulting his Pad as he did so. I’d bet a million credits he knew my name. It was all for effect, but I wasn’t new to this. He paused and waited. I didn’t correct him and he had to carry on. First point to me. It’d probably be the only one I scored, but it felt good not to suffer a total whitewash. “You are a pilot?”
“Yes.” Keep the answers short and as truthful as you can, up to a point. That was the advice the interrogation trainer had given.
“And you were transporting the two girls,” he consulted his notes again, “Chunhua and Lijuan to Nanxun?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Why?” He looked up from his notes as he asked the question. Hoping to catch a panicked look appear on my face.
“Why what?”
“Why are you transporting them to Nanxun?”
“Oh, I thought you were asking why I was a pilot,” I answered back. This wasn’t in the training, but being difficult always felt good.
“Are you going to make this difficult, Mr Hayes?” he said, forgetting he had got my name wrong on purpose only a few moments ago.
“I hope not,” I said back.
“Answer the question then.”
“I thought I just did,” I smiled and let the grin reach my oh-so innocent eyes.
His face darkened and I watched his considerable chest expand as he sucked in a calming breath. The club tapped my shoulder and I got the message.
“Yes, I am pilot and yes, I was transporting the two girls to Nanxun because I was being paid to do so by one of their fathers’.” The club retreated, the heavy pressure on my shoulder easing.
“He paid you to?”
“Yes, I don’t work for free,” I answered. Open questions were there to catch the unwary. They invited the sharing of information and I really didn’t have much to share. The story we’d concocted was shaky and sparse.
“Mr Hayes, tell me about the pirates.”
Chapter 26
“What about them?” I said. “All I know is that we were followed on our journey. We couldn’t shake them.”
“Did they ever attack you?” The fat man placed his Pad down upon the table and tapped at the Panel set into the table.
“No.” They hadn’t. They’d just followed and Pinged us a time or two.
“And why were you on this course? It is not the shortest route to Nanxun,” he asked me, lifting his gaze to meet mine once more. The anger and bluster, the indifference was gone from them. Now they looked gem sharp and colder than ice.
“I’m being paid by the day,” I said. “Taking a longer route means more money for me and the girls didn’t know any different.”
I stopped talking, realising I was beginning to go off story and giving information I didn’t need to share. A shrug of my shoulders was all I could do to cover the tailing off of my answer.
“To be clear, for the record, we have examined your submarine’s log. We note the course you plotted and the changes you made when the contact appeared on your sonar,” he said and waited.
I waited too. No one said anything for a few seconds. Eventually, I caved in. A point to him. “Okay.”
“We further note, for the record, your attempt to hide at the bottom of the canyon,” and I forced my lips to stay closed. “The subsequent sonar intercept and your rather reckless piloting along the canyon which resulted with the impact on the mining waste in the centre.”
“That’s right.” I chimed in here, adding more points to his side, but there was nothing I could deny. It was all in the computer logs.
“We also note, for the record, that the sonar contact pursued your craft along this course at a similarly reckless speed. Our investigations remain inconclusive as to the purpose of this pursuit.”
“They do?” Which was a bit of a surprise. If they were Sio Sam Ong, they could claim, rightly, that we stole the submarine and tried to make off with it. Of course, that would open up a whole line of questioning about why we stole it and who everyone really was.
“They do. The occupants of the other submarine claim they were merely heading to this city and having ‘a bit of fun’ along t
he way. When you dove into the valley and caused a lot of noise they feared you had become disabled and tried to discover your whereabouts in an attempt to effect a rescue.”
“Really?” I couldn’t stop my mouth from moving before the word spilled out. I clamped my jaws shut.
“Yes. Really. For the record, our enquiries into the identities of the two young ladies have been confirmed and we have spoken with their father. He corroborates your story.”
“He does?” Even with my jaw clamped shut the words still found their way out.
“Mr Hayes, are you going to persist in questioning everything I say?”
“No. Sorry. Carry on.” I gave him a little wave of encouragement. “Doing a fine job.”
“Thank you,” he said, raising an eyebrow. Some functionaries, security officers, politicians, in fact, most people further up the corporate chain seem to have had their sense of humour surgically removed. “Your Submarine is damaged. A result of the impact with the waste heap in the valley. The repairs will take some days to complete. As a consequence, you have been found guilty of reckless piloting and points added to your licence. The fine has already been paid.”
“By who?”
“Questions, Mr Hayes? I thought we had agreed on this matter.”
“Right. Sorry. My fault.” This was all going much better than I’d any reason to expect. I’d be out of here soon and somewhere else. No idea where, but on the premise that any place was better than prison, things were looking up.
“How long have you worked for organised crime, Mr Hayes?”
“For about…,” and my brain caught up with his words. “What?”
“Organised Crime, Mr Hayes. The girls’ father is suspected of being heavily involved in organised crime. You are transporting his daughter, therefore you too are involved. It is quite a simple question, Mr Hayes. For the record, how long have you been working for the Hai San?”
“The who?”
“The Hai San, Mr Hayes. You are transporting the daughter of one of its suspected members. Do not pretend you were unaware of this.” The dark pupils had gone even colder, if that were possible, and his brows had crunched down upon the lids of his eyes. It was an uncomfortable stare to be the focus of.
