21st Century Science Fiction (61 page)

The results were amazing. Take one insecure eighteen-year-old with no skills or social connections. Teach him to be a cyranoid. Then dress him in a nice suit and send him into the downtown core of a big city. In one day he could be ridden by a confident and experienced auditor, a private investigator, a savvy salesman and a hospital architecture consultant. He could attend meetings, write up reports, drive from contact to contact and shift identities many times on the way. All he had to do was recite the words that flowed into his ears and follow the instructions of his haptic interface. Each of the professionals who rode him could build their networks and attend to business there and, through other cyranoids, in many different cities in one day. And by simple observation the kid could learn tremendous amounts about the internals of business and government.

Gennady was cultivating his own network of cyranoids to do routine checks at nuclear waste repositories around the world. These young people needed certification, so he and Oversatch were sponsoring them in schools. While they weren’t at school Gennady would ride them out to waste sites where they acted as representatives for a legitimate consulting company he had set up under his own name. His name had a certain cachet in these circles, so the six young men and three women had a foot in the door already. Since he was riding them they displayed uncanny skill at finding problems at the sites. All were rapidly blossoming.

He sat down under the invisible laser bath and prepared to call up his students. At that moment the ship gave a slight lurch—a tiny motion, but the engineer in Gennady instantly calculated the quantity of energy that must have gone through the vessel. It was a lot.

Now he noticed that the room was swaying slowly. The
Akira
rarely did that because not only was it huge to begin with, it also had stabilizing gyroscopes. “Did you feel that?” he said to the woman next to him.

She glanced over, touching the pause button on her rig, and said, “What?”

“Never mind.” He called up the hack that fed the ship’s vital statistics to Oversatch. They were in the Chukchi Sea, with Russia to starboard and Alaska to port. Gennady had been asleep when the
Akira
crossed the north pole, but apparently there hadn’t been much to see, since the open Arctic Ocean had been fogbound. Now, though, a vicious storm was piling out of the East Siberian Sea. The video feed showed bruised, roiling skies and a sea of giant, white-crowned pyramidal waves. Amazing he hadn’t felt it before. Chatter on the ship’s comm was cautious but bored, because such storms were apparently as regular as clockwork in the new ice-free arctic shipping lanes. This one was right on schedule, but the ship intended to just bull its way through it.

Gennady made a mental note to go topside and see the tempest for himself. But just as he was settling back in his seat, the door flew open and Miranda ran in.

She reached to grab his hands, stopped, and said, “Are you riding?”

“No, I—” She hauled him to his feet.

“I saw him! Gennady, I saw Jake!”

The deck slowly tilted, then righted itself as Gennady and Miranda put their hands to the wall. “Your son? You saw him here?”

She shook her head. “No, not here. And I didn’t exactly see him. I mean, oh, come on, sit down and I’ll tell you all about it.”

They sat well away from the riding woman. The shipping container was very narrow so their knees almost touched. Miranda leaned forward, clasping her hands and beaming. “It was in Sao Paolo. You know Oversatch has been sponsoring me to attend conferences, so I was riding a local cyranoid at an international symposium on vanishing rain forest cultures. We were off in an English breakaway session with about ten other people, some of whom I knew—but of course I was pretending to be a postdoc from Brasilia, or rather my cyranoid was—you know what I mean. Anyway, they didn’t know me. But there was one young guy . . . Every time he talked I got the strangest feeling. Something about the words he chose, the rhythm, even the gestures . . . and he was noticing me, too.

“About half an hour in he caught my eye, and then leaned forward quite deliberately to write something on the pad of paper he was using. It was so low-tech, a lot of us had noticed he was using it but nobody’d said anything. But at the end of the session when everybody was standing up, he caught my eye again, and then he balled up the paper and threw it in a trash can on the way out. I lost him in the between-session crowd, so I went back and retrieved the paper.”

“What did it say?”

To his surprise, she took off her glasses and set them down. After a moment, Gennady did the same. Miranda handed him her notebook, which he hadn’t seen since the first day they met.

“I’ve been keeping notes in this,” she whispered, “outside the glasses. Just in case what we do or say is being tracked. Anyway, I had to snapshot the paper through my cyranoid, but as soon as I could I downloaded the image and deleted the original out of my glasses. This is what was on the paper.”

Gennady looked. It said:

Cilenia, 64° 58’ N, 168° 58’ W.

Below this was a little scrawled stick-figure with one hand raised. “That,” said Miranda, pointing at it. “Jake used to draw those as a kid. I’d recognize it anywhere.”

“Jake was riding cyranoid on the man in your session?” Gennady sat back, thinking. “Let me check something.” He put his glasses on and polled the ship’s network again. “Those numbers,” he said, “if they’re longitude and latitude, then that’s almost exactly where we are now.”

She frowned, and said, “But how could that be? Was he saying Cilenia is some sort of underwater city? That’s impossible.”

Gennady stood up suddenly. “I think he’s saying something else. Come on.” The unpredictable sway of the ship had gotten larger. He and Miranda staggered from wall to wall like drunkards as they left the room and entered one of the lengthwise corridors that transected the row of packets. They passed other workers doing the same, and the Swedes had given up their partying and were all sitting silently, looking slightly green.

“I’ve been checking on the, uh, other cargo,” said Gennady as they passed someone, “every day. If it’s bound for Vancouver there’ll be a whole platoon of Mounties waiting for it. That had me wondering if they wouldn’t try to unload it en route.”

“Makes sense,” called Miranda. She was starting to fall behind, and a distant rushing and booming sound was rising.

“Actually, it didn’t. It’s sealed and near the top of a stack—that’s where they transport the empties. But it’s not
at
the top, so even if you did a James Bond and flew over with a skycrane helicopter, you couldn’t just pluck it off the stack.”

They came to some stairs and he went up. Miranda puffed behind him. “Couldn’t they have a trick door?” she said. “Like in ours? Maybe it’s actually got inside access to another set of packets, just like ours but separate.”

“Yeah, I thought about that,” he said grimly. He headed up another flight, which dead-ended in an empty shipping container that would have looked perfectly normal if not for the stairwell in the middle of its floor. The only light up here was from a pair of LEDs on the wall, so Gennady put his hands out to move cautiously forward. He could hear the storm now, a shuddering roar that felt like it was coming from all sides.

“One problem with that theory,” he said as he found the inside latch to the rejigged container door. “There’s a reason why they put the empty containers on the
top
of the stack.” He pushed down on the latch.

“Gennady, I’ve got a call,” said Miranda. “It’s
you!
What—” The bellow of the storm drowned whatever else she might have said.

The rain was falling sideways from charcoal-black clouds that seemed to be skipping off the ocean’s surface like thrown stones. There was nothing to see except blackness, whipping rain and slick metal decks lit intermittently by lightning flashes. One such flash revealed a hill of water heaving itself up next to the ship. Seconds later the entire ship pitched as the wave hit and Gennady nearly fell.

He hopped to the catwalk next to the door. They were high above the floor of the hold here, just at the level where the container stack poked above deck. It kept going a good forty feet more overhead. When Gennady glanced up he saw the black silhouette of the stack’s top swaying in a very unsettling manner.

He couldn’t see very well and could hear nothing at all over the storm. Gennady pulled out his glasses and put them on, then accessed the ship’s security cameras.

He couldn’t make out himself, but one camera on the superstructure showed him the whole field of container stacks. The corners of a couple of those stacks looked a bit ragged, like they’d been shaved.

He returned the glasses to his shirt pocket, but paused to insert the earbuds.

“Gennady, are you on-line?” It was Miranda’s voice.

“Here,” he said. “Like I said, there’s a reason they put the empties at the top. Apparently something like fifteen thousand shipping containers are lost overboard every year, mostly in storms like this. But most of them are empties.”

“But this one isn’t,” she said. He was moving along the deck now, holding tight to a railing next to the swaying container stack. Looking back, he saw her following doggedly, but still twenty or more feet back.

Lightning day-lit the scene for a moment, and Gennady thought he saw someone where nobody in their right mind should be. “Did you
see
that?” He waited for her to catch up and helped her along. Both of them were drenched and the water was incredibly cold.

Her glasses were beaded with water. Why didn’t she just take them off? Her mouth moved and he heard “See what?” through his earbuds, but not through the air.

He tried to pitch his voice more conversationally—his yelling was probably unnecessary and annoying. “Somebody on top of one of the stacks.”

“Let me guess: it’s the stack with the plutonium.”

He nodded and they kept going. They were nearly to the stack when the ship listed particularly far and suddenly he saw bright orange flashes overhead. He didn’t hear the bangs because suddenly lightning was dancing around one of the ship’s masts, and the thunder was instantaneous and deafening. But the deck was leaning way over, dark churning water meters to his left and suddenly the top three layers of the container stack gave way and slid into the water.

They went in a single slab, except for a few stragglers that tumbled like match-boxes and took out the railing and a chunk of decking not ten meters from where Gennady and Miranda huddled.

“Go back!” He pushed her in the direction of the superstructure, but she shook her head and held on to the railing. Gennady cursed and turned as the ship rolled upright then continued to list in the opposite direction.

One container was pivoting on the gunwale, tearing the steel like cloth and throwing sparks. As the ship heeled starboard it tilted to port and went over. There were no more and the other stacks seemed stable. Gennady suspected they would normally have weathered a heavier storm than this.

He rounded the stack and stepped onto the catwalk that ran between it and the next. As lightning flickered again he saw that there was somebody there. A crewman?

“Gennady, how nice to see you,” said Fraction. He was wearing a yellow hard-hat and a climbing harness over his crew’s overalls. His glasses were as beaded with rain as Miranda’s.

“It’s a bit dangerous out here right now,” Fraction said as he stepped closer. “I don’t really care, but then I’m riding, aren’t I?” As blue light slid over the scene Gennady saw the black backpack slung over Fraction’s shoulder.

“You’re not from Cilenia, are you?” said Gennady. “You work for somebody else.”

“Gennady, he’s with sanotica,” said Miranda. “You can’t trust him.”

“Cilenia wants that plutonium,” said Fraction. “For their new generators, that’s all. It’s perfectly benign, but you know nations like ours aren’t considered legitimate by the attractors. We could never
buy
the stuff.”

Gennady nodded. “The containers were rigged to go overboard. The storm made handy cover, but I’d bet there was enough explosives up there to put them over even if the weather was calm. It would have been automatic. You didn’t need to be here for it.”

Fraction shifted the pack on his back. “So?”

“You climbed up and opened the container,” said Gennady. “The plutonium’s right here.” He pointed at the backpack. “Ergo, you’re not working for Cilenia.”

Miranda put a hand on his shoulder. She was nodding. “He was after the rest of it himself, all along,” she shouted. “He used us to track it down, so he could take it for sanotica.”

Danail Gavrilov’s face was empty of expression, his eyes covered in blank, rain-dewed lenses. “Why would I wait until now to take it?” Fraction said.

“Because you figured the container was being watched. I’m betting you’ve got some plan to put the plutonium overboard yourself, with a different transponder than the one Cilenia had on their shipping container. . . . Which I’m betting was rigged to float twenty feet below the surface and wait for pickup.”

Fraction threw the bundle of rope he’d been holding, then stepped forward and reached for Gennady.

Gennady side-stepped, then reached out and plucked the glasses from Danail Gavrilov’s face.

The cyranoid staggered to a stop, giving Gennady enough time to reach up and pluck the earbuds from his ears.

Under sudden lightning, Gennady saw Gavrilov’s eyes for the first time. They were small and dark, and darted this way and that in sudden confusion. The cyranoid said something that sounded like a question—in Bulgarian. Then he put his hands to his ears and roared in sudden panic.

Gennady lunged, intending to grab Gavrilov’s hand, but instead got a handful of the backpack’s tough material. Gavrilov spun around, skidded on the deck as the backpack came loose—and then went over the rail.

He heard Miranda’s shout echoing his own. They both rushed to the railing but could see nothing but black water topped by white streamers of foam.

“He’s gone,” said Miranda with a sudden, odd calm.