John Birmingham - Without warning

Jules saw the Viarsa 1 appear as an indistinct, faraway blip on the big screen. It must have climbed a crest at the same time as the Rules and been painted by the radar. She wondered if there was somebody on the other vessel hunched over a screen, hanging on for a fleeting glimpse of them through the fury of the storm. There had to be. Otherwise Lee would’ve lost them already.

She turned back to address the Mexican again. ‘As soon as the weather calms down enough to get them out of their bunks, Miguel, I want you and Sergeant Shah to start training everyone again, especially the Yanks. Just the basics, as we discussed. Aiming, firing, reloading, clearing jams. Over and over and over, with every minute we have. These bastards may never get within a bee’s willy of us, but if they do, I want to kick them so hard that their goolies pop out of their eye sockets.’

‘The passengers will be fine, Miss Julianne,’ Shah assured her. ‘They did very well in their lessons before the storm. They understand what is required, and what will happen to them if the pirates get control. They will fight. All of them. Even the children, if you let them.’

She looked across at Miguel. Deep hollows under his eyes gave him a ghoulish appearance in the dim light of the room. The ship plunged and rolled again, forcing him to grab the arms of his deep padded chair with white knuckles that stood out starkly against the blue fabric.

‘I have discussed this with Mariela, my wife, and the old ones,’ he said. ‘We have agreed that only the very youngest will go with Ana and one of the crew in the big launch if the worst happens. The other children will carry ammunition, and if they can hold a weapon, they may fire it too.’

It was hard to be certain in the half-light, but Jules thought he may have been on the verge of tears.

‘My daughters, they will fight,’ Pieraro went on. ‘They must. Better for them to die quickly than to live out their years as a slave to some stinking Peruvian cabron.’

‘Miguel, I promised you safe passage for you and your family,’ said Jules, as softly as she could and still be heard. The girls do not have to fight. If the Viarsa 1 gets close enough, we can put them in the sport fisher with Lars or Dietmar and Grandma Ana. They would outrun any pursuit.’

Pieraro smiled sadly. ‘And then what, Miss Julianne? How far are we from safe land? They would not survive a storm like this, and they would be heading into the bad weather. I told you I would hold you responsible for their safety, but I do not hold you responsible for this. You are not pursuing us. You did not bring the storm out of the skies.’

Shah clapped his hands together, a thunderous sound. ‘Enough of this talk!’ he declared. ‘This will defeat us as surely as any man. How many of these monkeys have we seen off in these last weeks? They are desperate, foolish fishermen playing at pirates. Let me tell you what will happen if they should come alongside us: we will cut them down and take their stores for our own.’

‘Hooah!’ cried Fifi, grinning hugely. ‘That’s the spirit, mountain man!’

Julianne braced her back against one arm of her chair and her feet against the other as the Rules began another tumbling ride down a foaming summit. She glanced at the screen to see if they’d lost radar contact with the Viarsa 1, but it wasn’t on screen to begin with. It must have been hidden in some shifting valley of water at that moment. The seas were large enough to tower over both vessels at times, hiding them from each other.

‘Okay,’ sighed Jules. ‘Shah’s right, Miguel. Now, if you’ll all excuse me, I’d best get on with my King Henry routine.’

‘I am sorry, Miss Julianne?’ quizzed the Mexican, confused.

‘A little Shakespeare, darling. Benefits of what classical education I received before Daddy pissed away his ill-gotten gains and all the family silver. “For forth he goes and visits all his host; Upon his royal face there is no note, how dread an army hath enrounded him.’”

Pieraro was an intelligent man, but she could see she’d lost him.

‘Don’t bother none about her, Miguel,’ said Fifi with good humour. ‘She gets all thinky and stuff sometimes. Your girls, they’ll be fine. I will personally take apart any motherfucker who tries to interfere with them.’

‘You are kind, for one so fierce, Miss Fifi. But in the last extremes, I shall attend to my own family.’

‘Enough!’ barked Shah, clapping his hands together again with a thunderous report.

‘Yes,’ said Jules, ‘enough.’ She pushed herself up out of the chair with the momentum of the ship. ‘Try to get some sleep.’

Her rounds of the ship took nearly an hour – a slow, difficult progression through all decks, moving hand over hand along companionways that violently plunged and rolled and shifted as the storm tossed the super-yacht about. Most of the passengers were in their beds, many of them strapped in against the violence of the night. Down in the engine room her grease monkeys – a Sri Lankan and two Dutch merchant mariners she’d picked up in Costa Rica – were tending to the Rules’s gleaming white plant with the universally pissed-off look of all engineering crew. The Sri Lankan, Pankesh, had one hand bandaged, the legacy of a fall against a steam conduit in the difficult conditions. She checked his burn, which seemed quite ghastly, but he insisted on remaining at his station.

The main lounge looked very bare now, with most of the fittings stowed away. There she found one half of the trust-fund brats, Phoebe, sitting with one of the village children. They’d wedged themselves into one of the heavily padded loungers. Before Jules could ask them what the fuck they were doing out of their cabins, Phoebe spoke up.

‘Maya was scared,’ she said. ‘She got lost looking for the little girls’ room – didn’t you, sweetheart? – and wandered into my cabin. I said I’d sit with her a while.’

Julianne wondered if Maya was the only one who’d been scared, but she let it go. The last thing she needed now was hysterics over a lost child. ‘Thank you, Phoebe. Good show,’ she replied. ‘But make sure you get her back to her bunk soon. I need everyone rested.’

She had turned around and was about to claw her way back to her own sleeping quarters when Phoebe called after her: ‘Hey, Julianne?’

‘Yes?’

‘Do you mind if I ask you something?’

There was a neediness in the girl’s eyes that answered Jules’s earlier, unspoken question. ‘What’s up, Phoebe?’

The little village girl, Maya, no more than five or six years old, snuggled in tight, burying her face in the young woman’s chest.

‘You used to be rich once, didn’t you?’

Jules couldn’t help but smirk. ‘So did you.’

‘No,’ said Phoebe, ‘that’s not what I mean. Before all of this, before the Disappearance, before you found this yacht. Before whatever it was you were doing with Fifi and that Chinese man. You used to be rich. Like me. I can tell from your voice and from the way you run your crew – like you were always meant to.’

The ship dipped and plunged again, unbalancing Jules and propelling her forward. She let herself fall into another lounger close to Phoebe, lest she get hurled out through the glass doors.

‘Yes,’ she sighed. ‘My family had money. Old money. And my father stole a lot more. But it was never enough to fund his extravagant tastes, or to pay the upkeep on our estates.’

‘I knew it,’ said Phoebe with a note of triumph. ‘So you, like, grew up in a castle?’

‘Something like that. It’s not nearly as much fun as it sounds. We had to throw the place open to the public every other weekend just to pay for heating.’