Outpost

Nikki broke into a loading bay. Three forklifts parked at the back. She disconnected the batteries and loaded them on to a pallet truck. She dragged the pallet truck to the pump hall.

She stripped insulation from the hatch hydraulics and clipped jump leads. She pressed Open. Burst of sparks. Brief tremor from the hydraulic rams. The hatch didn’t open.

‘Fuck.’

She found a tennis ball. She sat bouncing the ball against the boat hull.

Alan, her boyfriend, used to tell a joke. ‘What’s brown and sticky? A stick.’ He said it was the perfect joke. Elegantly simple. She remembered him reciting the joke at the dining table. Christmas with her parents. But she couldn’t recall his voice. They were together two years, but already the memories were starting to fade like a photograph left in the sun.

He came to her in dreams. She glimpsed him in crowds. He shouted to her across busy streets.

Was Alan dead when she left him out on the ice? Could he have been saved? She would never know.

Scuff marks round a frosted floor plate. Big boot prints. Nikki pried the plate with a screwdriver and lifted it up. Ziploc bags of brown powder lying on the pipework.

She cooked a pinch of powder and siphoned the syrup into a hypodermic. A humourless smile.

‘What’s brown and sticky?’ she murmured, as the needle punctured her skin.

Nail sat with Rye in the sub.

‘Don’t you ever go out?’

‘It’s cosy in here,’ said Rye. She gestured to the bubble window of the cockpit. The crew sat round the fire. ‘Besides, conversation is getting pretty repetitive. The women they will fuck. The drinks they will drink. If Jane and Ghost don’t actually deliver this ship there will be a lynching.’

Rye blocked the cockpit window with her coat. She took a couple of hypodermics from her holdall. Nail opened a snuff box. He tapped powder into a spoon and cooked the mix with a Zippo.

‘You have your doubts?’

‘Jane Blanc. Stands before us and promises a floating Shangri- La. Forgive me if I don’t get too excited. First day she arrived on the rig we had to run around looking for super-sized survival clothes just so she could dress properly. She’s lost her battle with chocolate. She’s been vanquished by doughnuts. Suddenly she’s going to take charge and lead us all to safety? I don’t think so.’

They returned to Hyperion. Jane and Ghost, Punch and Ivan.

‘Okay,’ said Jane. ‘We’ve got a couple of lights on. So let’s power this baby up for real. Let’s get it moving.’

They surveyed the ship stern to prow. They met in the bridge.

‘We have free access to the bridge and the officers’ quarters,’ said Jane. ‘But from level two downward there are barricades at every door.’

‘Plenty of blood around,’ said Ghost. ‘The crew fought a running battle. Must have been a hell of a fight. They prevailed, I guess. The ship is locked down pretty tight. We’re safe, but most of the ship is off limits.’

‘So where are the crew?’ asked Punch. ‘The blokes who built the barricades?’

Ghost shrugged. ‘Maybe they spotted land. The ship was drifting. They saw some kind of habitation. They took to the boats and rowed for shore.’

‘Habitation? Out here?’

‘Hyperion has been adrift a long while. No telling where it’s been.’

‘Imagine the food down below,’ said Punch. ‘Caviar. Real eggs. Champagne. All out of reach. I’m not going to loll around in a presidential suite and slowly starve. I say we organise raiding parties. We haven’t got enough shotgun shells to kill the passengers, but we’ve got enough to hold them off while we grab food.’

‘Explains the Juliet flag,’ said Ghost.

‘The what?’

‘Blue and white flag near the prow. International maritime signal. Dangerous cargo. Keep clear.’

‘See this screen?’ said Jane, sitting in the captain’s chair in front of the Raytheon console. ‘Revs. Engine speed. I’m almost certain these switches govern the propellers.’

Ghost leaned past her. He pressed buttons and turned dials.

‘Off-line. If we want more than light, we will need to fire up the turbines.’

‘I bet they shut down the engine room,’ said Jane. ‘When they evacuated the lower decks they must have turned everything off. Standard procedure. The kind of thing people do in a fire drill. Someone will have to go down there and switch it all back on.’

‘Shit.’

Jane led Punch and Ghost to the chart room. A wall plan. Hyperion , floor by floor.

‘We have free run of the top-most deck. But the engine room is nine levels beneath us.’

‘Three thousand passengers, you reckon?’

‘A liner like this? Yeah. If the ship is running at full capacity there must be two or three thousand infected down there.’

‘Then we would have to move fast and get lucky.’

Infection

Jane explored the captain’s suite. She sat at his desk. She found a passport in a drawer. Dougie Campbell. British citizen. Fiftyeight.

An envelope on the desk blotter. A thick sheaf of handwritten notes. Part letter, part diary. Campbell spent half his life at sea. He got lonely. He wrote to his wife every night.