Outpost

‘I can look for her, if you like.’

Nail tried to stand, but Jane gently pushed him back down.

‘I don’t know what Rye has given you, kid, but maybe you should just lie back and enjoy the ride.’

Ghost called a meeting in the canteen and laid out his plan. Nikki stood at the back of the room and listened.

Hyperion was partially beached. Spring would come, the ice would thaw, and the ship would float free. So the situation had yet to change. Conserve fuel. Conserve food. Ride out winter.

Ghost suggested the crew transfer from the refinery to Hyperion. Better accommodation. Easier to heat. All they had to do was disable the elevators and rebuild barricades to keep the rabid horde at bay. No reason it couldn’t be done. The infected passengers were mindless, incapable of cunning or calculation. They could easily be suppressed.

‘Think of the food,’ said Ghost. ‘Think of the booze.’ He avoided Jane’s eye, mildly ashamed to be luring the men to Hyperion with the promise of limitless alcohol.

Ghost took a vote. A fifty/fifty split. Arguments escalated towards fist fights. Half the guys said it was too dangerous to take a suite on the liner while ravening passengers massed the other side of the door. Half the guys said stateroom luxury was too good to miss.

Insults flew. Push-and-shove. The discussion looked like it would last long into the night so Nikki sneaked out of a side door.

She hurried to a lifeboat station. Red running-man signs all over the rig pointed the way. There were a cluster of rigid shell lifeboats at each corner of the refinery. Orange, fibre-glass cocoons the size of a bus. Room for thirty men. During the weekly fire drill crewmen were trained to strap themselves inside, seal the hatch, then pull a release handle. Explosive bolts would eject the lifeboat from a launch tube into the sea.

Nikki climbed inside the raft. She and Nail had raided the lifeboats for equipment once before. She wanted stuff they left behind.

She dragged a case from beneath a bench seat. A flip-latch lid. Emergency gear: salt tablets, a manual bilge pump and a compact desalinator. She bagged them and ran to the C deck storeroom. She threw them into the boat.

She hurried to the food store. She upturned a wholesale box of dried noodles. Tins and cartons swept into the box. She ran to C deck and threw the box into the boat.

She levered floor plates. Bags of clothes, charts and flares hidden beside the pipes. She threw the bags into the boat.

She found clippers. She bent forward and shaved herself bald. Clumps of auburn hair fell to the deck.

Last look around. She took a crumpled sheet of paper from her pocket. Her checklist. Quick inventory: good to go.

She punched a green wall button with her fist. Trapdoors opened beneath the boat. A typhoon blast of freezing wind and ice particles.

The boat hung on a chain-hoist. Nikki pressed Down and jumped aboard the boat as it descended into the dark.

The boat touched down on the ice beneath the refinery. She unhooked the chains.

A couple of wheeled pallets roped to the underside of the yacht. The boat weighed the same as a van, but the ice was slick as glass.

Nikki buckled crampons to her boots and threw herself against the boat. Once the boat began to move it built momentum. She pushed the vessel, a step at a time, to the water’s edge. She jumped aboard as brittle-crisp ice cracked beneath the weight of the boat and it settled into the sea. She pulled rope hand over hand and raised the sails.

Metallic motor noise. A flashlight beam suddenly trained in her face from above. Jane descending in the platform elevator. Nikki recoiled from the dazzling glare like she’d been slapped.

‘Slinking away, is that the plan?’ shouted Jane. The platform touched down.

‘I didn’t want to make a fuss.’

Nikki shielded her eyes and tried to squint beyond the blinding light. She tried to see if Jane were carrying a shotgun.

‘I like what you did with your hair,’ said Jane. ‘You look like a boiled egg.’

Nikki didn’t say anything. She waited to see what Jane would do.

‘Here’s the deal. You can take the boat. You can take the food. You can take whatever maritime charts you’ve stolen. But you have to take a radio, as well. You owe us that much. We need to hear how far you get. We need to hear what is waiting beyond the horizon.’

Nikki was hit on the chest by a big radio in a canvas bag. She instinctively caught the strap before the radio fell in the water.

‘So how about it?’

‘All right,’ said Nikki. ‘Call me any time you like. We’ll chat, do lunch.’

‘I’m serious. You were dying out there on the ice, remember? You were dead meat. We brought you back. We saved your life. You owe us a few minutes of your time.’

‘Okay. Fuck it.’

‘It’ll be lonely out there. Few days alone in the dark. You might be grateful of a voice.’

The boat began to drift away from the ice.

Twenty metres. Thirty metres. Nikki moving beyond Jane’s reach.

A hundred metres. Two hundred metres. Out of shotgun range.