Frank Schatzing - The Swarm

At that moment the pilot called to them through the open door of the plane, and waved. Anawak knew what that meant. Ford had made contact. It was time. Instead of responding to Shoemaker's comment he put a hand on his shoulder. 'Could you do me a favour when you're back at the Station?'

'Sure,' he said. 'I'm not exactly rushed off my feet.'

'Find out whether there's been anything in the papers over the last few weeks about the Barrier Queen and her accident. Maybe check the Internet too – and the TV.'

'Why?'

'I've a feeling it wasn't reported.'

'Uh-huh.'

'Well, I can't remember hearing anything about it, can you?'

Shoemaker squinted up at the sun. 'No. Just some vague stuff about shipping accidents in Asia. But that's not to say it wasn't mentioned. I haven't read the papers since things kicked off round here. But it's a good point. Come to think of it, not much has been said about the whole damn mess.'

'Exactly,' said Anawak.

AS THE PLANE TOOK OFF, Anawak turned to Danny. 'Your job is to fire the tag into the blubber. The whale won't feel a thing. Scientists have been trying for years to get tags to stick to whaleskin, but a biologist in Kiel came up with the solution – a crossbow with tags and time-depth recorders that are fitted to the darts. The tip pierces the fat, and the whale carries the device for a few weeks. It doesn't even know it's there.'

Danny looked at him. 'A biologist from Kiel?'

'You don't think it'll work?'

'Oh, sure. Just seems to me he should have asked the whale about it hurtin'. Jeez, you gotta be pretty darned accurate. How you gonna know it won't go deeper than the fat?'

'They used pork to test the darts and kept going until they knew exactly how far the tips would penetrate. It's all a question of math.'

'I'll be darned,' said Danny. His eyebrows appeared above his dark glasses.

'What happens if you fire it at a human?' Delaware piped up from the seat behind them. 'Would the dart go in part-way?'

Anawak turned to face her.

'Yes, – but deep enough to kill you.'

The DHC-2 banked, the lagoon glittering beneath them.

'It wasn't the only option available,' said Anawak, 'but the key thing was to make sure we could track the whale over a significant period. The crossbow method seemed the most reliable. The tag records information on heartbeat, body temperature, water temperature, depth, speed and other variables. Fitting the whale with a camera is more of a problem.'

'Why not use the crossbow?' asked Danny. 'Save yourself a lot of hassle.'

'There'd be no means of ensuring which way up the camera would land. In any case, I'd like to see the whale. I want to be able to watch it, and that's only possible if the camera is further away and not mounted on top of it.'

'Which is why we're deploying a URA,' explained Delaware. 'It's a new type of robot from Japan.'

Anawak's lips twitched. From the way Delaware talked, you'd think she'd invented it.

'What robot?' Danny looked around.

'We didn't bring it.'

The plane was out of the lagoon, flying close to the swell. The water off Vancouver Island was usually full of pleasure-boats, Zodiacs and kayaks, but no one was brave enough to venture out now. In the distance a few freighters and ferries passed, too big for the whales to be a problem. The coastal waters were deserted, apart from a single mighty ship. The plane headed away from the ragged coastline, straight for it.

'The URA is on the Whistler- down there,' said Anawak. 'First we need to find and tag our whale, then the robot gets its turn.'

JOHN FORD STOOD aft on the Whistler , shielding his eyes with his hand. He saw the DHC-2 approaching at speed. A few seconds later the plane swooped over the boat and swung round in a gentle curve.

He held his radio to his mouth and called Anawak on a tap-proof frequency. A host of channels was reserved for military and scientific purposes. 'Leon? Everything OK?'

'Receiving you, John. Where did you see them?'

'To the north-west, less than two hundred metres from the ship. Five minutes ago we had a cluster of sightings, but they're keeping their distance. There must be eight or ten. We identified two. One was involved in the attack on the Lady Wexham; the other sank a fishing-trawler last week in Ucluelet.'

'They haven't tried to attack?'

'We're too big for them.'

'How are they behaving as a group?'

'No signs of aggression.'

'Good. They're probably one big gang, but let's stick to the whales we've identified.'

Ford watched as the DHC-2 disappeared into the distance, then banked and flew back in a loop. His gaze shifted to the Whistler's bridge. The deep-sea rescue tug was sixty-three metres long, fifteen metres wide and belonged to a private company in Vancouver. With a bollard pull of 160 tonnes, she was one of the strongest tugs in the world, and far too heavy to be threatened by a whale. Ford guessed that a breaching humpback would cause the ship to rock but no more.

He still felt uneasy, though. At first the whales had attacked anything that floated, but now they seemed to know what they could and couldn't harm. Boats had been attacked by fin and sperm whales, as well as the omnipresent orcas, greys and humpbacks. And there had been a marked refinement in technique. Ford was certain that they wouldn't attack the tug – and that was what disturbed him. The idea that the whales were suffering from a rabies-like illness didn't fit with their growing ability to size up their targets. There was intelligence in their behaviour, and he wasn't sure how they'd react to the robot.

He radioed the bridge. 'We're off,' he said.

The DHC-2 circled overhead.

They'd started looking actively for the whales as soon as they'd identified some of the aggressors on the camcorder footage. For three days the tug had cruised up and down the coast and that morning they'd finally struck lucky. Among a pack of greys they'd seen two flukes they recognised from the pictures.

Ford wasn't sure if they stood any chance of getting to the truth in time. He shuddered when he thought of the increasingly militant calls from fishing unions and shipping lines who didn't like the scientists' non-aggression policy. They wanted military action – a few dead whales to show the herds what was what and to scare them into staying away from humans. The scheme was as dangerous as it was naive, but it had found plenty of supporters. The whales were doing an excellent job of gambling away all the credit that environmentalists and animal-rights groups had worked so hard to raise for them. For the time being, the emergency committee was still taking the line that killing the whales wouldn't resolve anything since no one knew what was causing their behaviour. The only option was to fight the symptoms, or so they'd said. Ford didn't know what the government was planning in the long-run. Either way, there were clear indications that individual fishermen and rogue whalers were preparing to take matters into their own hands. While no one could offer a solution to the problem, everyone was certain that the others were wrong. It was fertile ground for mavericks.

Ford glanced at the robot in the stern. He was curious to see what it could do. They'd got it from Japan remarkably quickly and with almost no red tape. The technology was only a few years old. According to the Japanese, it was designed for research, not whaling, but few were convinced. Western environmentalists saw the three-metre-long cylindrical device, studded with sensors and highly sensitive cameras, as an invention from hell, intended to hunt down entire herds of whales as soon as the moratorium on whaling was rescinded. After the URA had tracked and followed humpbacks among the Japanese Kerama Islands, it had found favour at an international symposium for marine mammals in Vancouver. But the distrust remained. It was no secret that Japan had systematically bought the support of poorer countries with the aim of putting an end to the 1986 whaling moratorium: the government had called its machinations and horse-trading 'legitimate diplomacy', while providing the bulk of the funding to the University of Tokyo, to which the inventors of the robot, Tamaki Ura and his Underwater Robotics and Application Laboratory team, belonged.