Survival (3 page)

Heather began to walk away. Just before she left the deck, she turned back to give them all one last glare. 'Understand this,' she said. A-Watch is going to be a team by the end of this voyage.'

As soon as Heather had disappeared, Amber tossed her head and threw her pad and pencil to the deck. She stalked over to the stern rail and leaned over it with her back to the rest of them. Hex also threw down his pad and, out of habit, reached into the pouch at his belt for his palmtop. An expression of pain crossed his face as he remembered he no longer had it. He slumped down onto the deck, suddenly at a loss for something to do. Paulo and Li sat down together with their pads and started playing an X-rated game of Hangman. Alex stared at his blank sheet of paper and wished with all his heart that he was back home in Northumberland.

'I am hungry,' announced Paulo, a few minutes later. 'I cannot go without food. I will grow faint and pale. See?' He pushed the dark curls back from his forehead to give them all a good view of him wasting away.

'You know, Paulo, you're absolutely right,' said Amber slowly, staring down into the water.

Paulo blinked in surprise. Amber never agreed with anyone. He grinned with pleasure, showing all his even, white teeth. 'I am?'

Amber turned to face the rest of them. 'Yeah. We shouldn't have to go without food. So, here's what we'll do. We're going on a raid, OK?'

'Yay! At last, a bit of action!' said Li, bouncing to her feet.

'Collect up any food or drink you have in your lockers,' continued Amber. 'Grab some bunk blankets, then meet me back here in ten minutes.'

'Where are you going, Amber?' asked Paulo.

'I'm gonna see what I can lift from the galley store-room,' grinned Amber.

'You're going to steal food?' said Alex.

Amber frowned, thinking about it. 'Nah. It's not stealing,' she said finally. 'How can it be? I mean, this whole boat sorta belongs to me. So that must include the galley supplies.'

'I'd like to hear you say that to Heather,' sneered Hex.

'Oh, yeah? You planning on telling her?'

'No.'

'Then how's she gonna find out?'

'On a boat this size?' said Hex. 'She'll find out. Do you think you won't be spotted having a picnic with stolen galley supplies out in full view on the aft-deck?'

'But we're not going to be on the aft-deck,' said Amber, smiling sweetly. She pointed over the stern rail to the water below. They all hurried to look over the rail. There, bobbing along in the wake of the
Phoenix,
was the little wooden boat they used to get from ship to shore on island stops.

'We'll be hidden down there, in the tender,' said Amber. 'That's a boat, to you,' she added, giving Hex a withering glance.

'Are you stupid or something?' asked Hex. 'One glance over the rail and she'd see us!'

'Yeah, but the
Phoenix
has a counter-stern. That means the deck level sticks out over the water like a shelf--'

'I know what it means,' said Hex absent-mindedly, studying the little tender.

'So,' said Amber. 'We could--'

'- haul the boat in with that tow rope,' interrupted Hex.

'You mean the painter,' retorted Amber.

'- then bring the rope round to the side there,' continued Hex.

'- which would tuck the tender right in under the stern!' crowed Li. 'We'd be completely hidden from anyone on deck.'

'I don't know,' said Alex. Aren't we in enough trouble?'

'Come on!' yelled Amber. 'We'll be doing exactly what Heather said. Keeping out of her sight--'

'- and working as a team,' finished Paulo.

Alex hesitated, looking at the four faces staring back at him.

'Or was Heather right? Are you too good for us, Alex?' said Li, slyly.

Still, Alex hesitated. It felt wrong to him, but perhaps this was what A-Watch needed to finally bring them together. 'All right,' he said, reluctantly. 'Let's do it.'

THREE

Ten minutes later, they were back. All the food and drink they had managed to collect was piled up in the middle of the aft-deck and Amber was busy packing it into two rucksacks. Paulo was acting as a look-out. When he nodded the all-clear, Hex and Alex grabbed the painter and began to haul it in, hand over hand. Li finished unclipping the rope-ladder and stood watching as the little tender moved steadily closer to the stern of the
Phoenix.

'That's it,' said Li softly, as soon as the boat was tucked out of sight under the counter-stern. 'That's far enough. I'll go down first. I should be able to swing the rope-ladder in under the counter-stern and then jump off into the tender. You lower the rucksacks and bunk blankets down to me, then I can anchor the bottom of the ladder for the rest of you to climb down.'

Nobody argued. They all knew Li was an expert free-climber who could scale a sheer cliff without using lines. She was an Anglo-Chinese girl, born and brought up in London, but her parents were zoologists and they had been taking her on field trips with them since she was little. Li had come across a friendly group of free-climbers on one of these trips and discovered that she was a natural. The sport suited her wiry strength, perfect balance and sense of adventure. She loved climbing. A swinging rope-ladder would be nothing to her.

Amber tightened the straps on the rucksacks while Paulo left his look-out post to collect a spare length of rope from the deck locker. Quickly he looped one end of the rope through the straps of the two rucksacks and secured them with an expert knot, then stuffed the rolled blankets through the straps, threw the rest of the coiled rope over his shoulder and carried the whole lot over to the stern rail.

The gate in the stern rail had been padlocked shut, so Li pushed the rope-ladder under the bottom rail and let it uncoil. Boosting herself over the top of the rail, she balanced casually on the very edge of the deck and waited for the movement of the ladder to settle down.

Alex left Hex to finish tying the painter while he hurried over to try and hold the ladder steady. Li swung down onto the first rung and Alex grunted with effort as the ladder tried to twist itself out of his hands.

'Be careful, Li!' hissed Paulo. Li stuck out her tongue at him, then quickly made her way down the spinning ladder, stepping from rung to rung with sure-footed grace until she reached the bottom. There, she began to swing on the ladder until it was moving like a pendulum, each swing taking her further and further in under the counter-stern. On the final swing, just before she jumped out of sight to land lightly in the hidden tender, Li lifted her head and grinned up at them, her eyes alight with excitement.

'Five go on an adventure!' she laughed and they all laughed back, caught up in the thrill of a shared rebellion. Not one of them guessed how accurate her words would prove to be.

The
Phoenix
was holding a steady course and moving at a low rate of knots, so the little tender bobbed along gently enough under the counter-stern and they all managed the rope-ladder without any problems. Li had already spread the bunk blankets out to make the seating more comfortable. She and Paulo settled down side by side in the stern, Alex and Amber faced one another across the rucksacks, and Hex sprawled out in the bows with one arm hanging over the side.

'Give me food,' moaned Paulo, pretending to faint with hunger. 'Give me drink.'

'Did you get anything from the galley, Amber?' asked Alex, feeling his own stomach suddenly clench with hunger.

'Did I? Wait till you see the menu for tonight.' Amber reached into one of the rucksacks. 'Soda for starters,' she said, tossing each of them a can of cold drink. 'Fruit to end the meal,' she added, pulling out a bagful of apples and bananas and carefully laying it aside. 'But here's the best bit.'

They all leaned forward as Amber dug down into the rucksack and lifted out two of the large storage tins from the galley. She cracked open the lids and a fragrant steam rose from both tins, filling the air with the smell of roast chicken and cooked rice.

'I snuck in and filled them up from the pots on the stove while the cook was out of the galley,' said Amber proudly, pulling a chicken drumstick from one tin and biting into it. 'Still hot,' she mumbled through a mouthful of chicken.

They all attacked the food, suddenly realizing how hungry they were after four hours of work on deck. The rice was cooked to perfection and flavoured with herbs. They formed it into balls with their fingers and shoved in into their mouths along with pieces of spiced chicken. For a while there was silence as they all concentrated on eating. Finally Paulo leaned back, licking the last of the rice from his fingers.

'Good,' he said. 'Excellent. It is always best to eat outside, after work.'

'Work?' said Li, cheekily. 'You?'

Paulo smiled at her fondly. 'Ah, yes, I work. Back in Argentina, on our ranch, I go out with the vaqueros--'

'The what?' asked Amber.

'The - how do you say--? The ranch hands? The cowboys, yes?'

'OK,' said Amber. 'Got you.'

'We go to round up the cattle. The ranch is--' Paulo spread his arms wide to show how big his family ranch was. 'We are out for days. At night, we camp. We cook on the fire and the food, it always tastes so good.' He turned to Li. 'You must come to stay. I will take you out camping and cook for you.'

'Been there, done that,' said Li. 'We don't have holidays in the Cheong family - we go on field trips. I've eaten plenty of meals under the stars after a day spent trekking through some wilderness or other.'

'Outdoor meals are best,' agreed Alex, remembering his own, solitary camping trips in the remoter parts of Northumberland. There was nothing better than a freshly-caught rabbit, roasted on a spit over the fire, or a trout slow-baked in the ashes.

'Hmmm. Best outdoor meal I ever had?' said Amber, her eyes dreamy with remembering. 'We'd been out on the yacht - me, Mom and Dad - and we found this little cove. Deserted. We had a barbecue on the beach. Man, that was some evening . . .' She smiled softly, then her mouth turned down at the corners and her hand went up to touch the twist of gold at her neck. She turned to Hex and a cruel, hard edge came into her voice. 'You're pretty quiet. Anything to share with us? No? I guess the only outdoor eating street-rats do is out of other people's trash-cans.'

The boat rocked as Hex started to move. His fists were clenched and the muscles in his arms stood out like ropes, but then his gaze shifted to the twist of gold around Amber's neck and he stopped halfway to his feet. For a long moment there was silence, then Hex made himself relax back into a sprawl. 'Food doesn't do it for me,' he said. 'Food is fuel, that's all. Something I can slam in a microwave and then eat without getting drips all over my keyboard.'

'A junk-food junkie too,' sneered Amber, but the hard edge had left her voice. The lack of response from Hex had knocked some of the fight out of her.

'So, if food doesn't do it for you, Hex, what does?' asked Li. 'Hacking?'

'Yeah.'

'Why?' asked Paulo, gazing at Hex with genuine puzzlement. 'What is the fascination with this - hacking?'

Hex narrowed his green eyes and considered them for a moment, trying to decide whether it was worth getting into an explanation. 'What the hell,' he sighed, leaning forward. 'Patterns. Puzzles. Codes. You with me? Binary. Morse. Sequences of numbers, or letters, or shapes. They fascinate me. Always have. Cracking them. Figuring them out. Finding what's hidden inside.'

Alex looked down at Hex's hands and saw that the fingers were jumping, keying the air as he spoke.

'When I was a kid, they thought I was slow,' continued Hex. 'They used to take me out for special lessons. They thought I couldn't read. I could, though. Just didn't want to. Once I understood how to do it, I was bored. So I'd sit in lessons, working stuff out in my head, cracking codes, playing with number patterns instead of listening to the teacher. Then I got into computers. A whole new, beautiful code to crack. A whole new language to learn. I was hooked.'

'So you turned into one of those sad, geeky types who sit in front of a screen all day and don't have any friends,' said Amber.

'I have lots of friends,' snapped Hex. 'Real friends. It doesn't matter to us where anyone lives, or how rich they are, or what they look like, or what sex they are. We even choose our own names. That's one of the things I love about hacking. Everyone's equal. You live by your wits.'

'Correction,' said Amber. 'You live by breaking into other people's systems and stealing data - or destroying it for a fee from a competitor. My dad hated idiots like you!'

'You're talking about
crackers,''
sighed Hex.
'Hackers
don't steal. We break into secure systems just for the challenge. We don't take or destroy anything. We write our own programs and share freeware, instead of buying into second-rate corporate software for dummies. You know,' he added, giving Amber an icy smile, 'the sort of stuff your dad's company churns out.'

'Go on, then,' said Li. 'What's the most difficult system you've ever broken into?'

'I could tell you,' grinned Hex, 'but then I'd have to kill you.'

'And you've never been tempted?' asked Alex. 'You've never gone into a system to get something out of it?'

'Yes,' admitted Hex.

'Ha!' said Amber. 'I knew he was lying.'

Hex ignored her and continued talking to Alex. 'This PE teacher was giving my kid brother a really hard time. Mr Rutter. Except everyone calls him Mr Nutter. My kid brother, he's - not so strong. He can't run very far. Old Nutter kept making him do this cross-country course, week after week. Said it would toughen him up. My brother started skipping school on PE days. He took to wandering around the shopping centre for hours rather than face Nutter again. Then, one day, the police brought him home. He'd been caught walking out of a shop with a tuna sandwich stuffed inside his jacket.'

'Shoplifting is wrong--' began Amber.

'He was hungry!' yelled Hex. 'He'd missed his school dinner. So, I hacked into the school system - and the Local Education Authority system - and Nutter's bank account. Made a few changes. Planted a few time bombs.'