Bruce Sterling - Islands in the Net

She sprawled in the rippling bottom of the boat, against a hull black and slick as a gut, in her sari blouse and under- wear. One of the sailors tossed the flotation ring overboard.

They picked up speed, heading away, up the straits.

The closest sailor leaned toward her, an Anglo about forty.

His face looked as white as a sliced apple. "Cigarette, lady?"

She stared at him. He leaned back, shrugging.

She coughed on seawater, then gathered her legs in, trembling, wretched. A long time passed. Then her brain began to work again.

The ship had never had a chance. Not even to scream out an SOS. The first missile had wiped out the bridge-radio, radar, and all. The killers had cut their throat first thing.

But to kill a hundred people in the middle of the Malacca

Straits! To commit an atrocity like that-surely other ships must have seen the explosion, the smoke. To have done such a thing, so viciously, so blatantly .. .

Her voice, when she, finally got, it out, was cracked and weak. "Hennessey... ?"

"Henderson," he told her. He tugged his drenched red rain slicker over his head. Beneath it was a bright orange life jacket. Under that a sleeveless utility vest, bulges and little metal zips and Velcro flaps. "Here, put this slicker on."

He shoved it at her. She held it numbly.

Henderson chuckled. "Put it on! You want to meet a hundred red-blooded sailors in wet underwear?"

The words didn't quite register, but she started on it any- way. They were speeding in darkness, the boat bouncing, the wind tearing and flapping at the raincoat. She struggled with it for what seemed an endless time. It clung to her bare wet skin like a bloody hide.

"Looks like you need a hand," Henderson said. He crawled forward and helped her into it. "There. That's better."

"You killed them all," Laura croaked.

Henderson aimed amused glances at the sailors. "None of that, now," he said loudly. "Besides, I had a little help from the attack ship!" He laughed.

Sailor number two cut back the engine. They were coasting forward in darkness. "Boat," he said. "A sub is a `boat.'

Sir. "

In the darkness, she heard water cascading and the gurgle of surf. She could barely see it in the dimness, a vague blue-black sheen. But she could smell it and feel it, almost taste it on her skin.

It was huge. It was close. A vast black rectangle of painted steel. A conning tower.

A monstrous submarine.

It was huge and alive, ticking over like some transatlantic jet, drizzling seawater with sharp pneumatic huffing and a deep shuddering hum. Laura heard drones hissing past her in the darkness, taxiing in to land on the hull. Evil, waspish sounds. She couldn't see them, but she knew the machines could see her, lit by her own body heat.

The inflatable collided gently with the sub, a rubbery jolt.

The sailors climbed a detachable rope ladder up the dark curving hull. Henderson waited as they left. Then he smeared wet hair from his eyes and grabbed her arm.

"Don't do stupid shit," he told her. "Don't yell, don't act up, don't be a bitch. I saved your life. So don't embarrass me. Because you'll die."

He sent her up the ladder ahead of him. The rungs hurt her hands, and the slick steel hull was deep-water-cold under her bare feet. The flattened hull stretched out endlessly into wash- ing darkness. Behind her, the conning tower loomed thirty feet high. Long spines of black-and-white antennas sprouted from its peak.

A dozen more sailors clustered on the hull, in elegant bell-bottom trousers and long-sleeved blouses with gold-braided cuffs. They tended to the drones, manhandling them down a series of yawning hatches. They moved with a strange tippy- toeing, hunch-shouldered look. As if they found the empty night sky oppressive.

The inflatable's crew expertly hauled it up after them, flinging rope hand over hand. They deflated it, trampling out air in a demented sombrero dance, then stuffed the wet rubber mass into a seabag.

It was all over in a few moments. They were jumping back into their vast steel warren, like rats. Henderson hustled

Laura over a hatch coaming onto a recessed floor. It sank beneath their feet. The hatch slammed over her head with an ear-popping huff and a squeal of hydraulics.

They emerged from the elevator shaft into a vast cylindrical warehouse lit with sullen yellow bulbs. It had two decks: a lower floor, beneath her bare feet, of solid iron, and an upper one of perforated grating. It was cavernous, two hundred feet long; every ten feet it was cut, left and right, by massive bulging elevator shafts. Shafts nine feet across, steel silos, their bases stuck with plugs and power cables. Like bio-tech tanks, she thought, big fermenters.

Two dozen sailors padded silently in foam-soled deck shoes on the narrow walkways between the silos. They were work- ing on the drones in hushed concentration. An incense stink of hot aircraft oil and spent ammunition. Some scrambled vibe of war and industry and church.

The compartment was painted in sky blue, the tubes in spacy midnight indigo. Henderson headed aft. As he hauled her along, Laura touched the cold latex surface of a tube, wonderingly. Someone had painstakingly stenciled it with dizzy five-pointed stars, comets with whizzing comic-book tails, little yellow ringed Saturns. Like surfboard art. Dreamy and cheap.

Some silos had been welder-cut and, hung with arcane repair tools-they were retrofitted for drone launches. The others were older, they looked intact. Still serving their origi- nal function, whatever that was.

Henderson spun the manual wheel in the center of a water- tight door. It opened with a thermos-bottle thump and they ducked through. Into a coffinlike chamber plated with egg- carton antisound padding.

Laura felt the world tilt subtly beneath •her feet. A river rush of ballast tanks and the distant whir of motors. The sub was diving. Then a startling junkyard chorus of pops, harsh creaks, glass-bottle clinking, as pressure began to bite into the hull.

Through the chamber into another room flooded with clean white light. Supersharp fluorescents overhead, that strange laserish light of three-peak spectrum radiance, casting everything into edgy superrealism. Some kind of control room, with a Christmas-tree profusion of machinery. Vast tilted consoles loomed, with banks of switches, flickering readouts, needle-twitching glassy dials. Sailors with short, neat haircuts sat before them in sumptuous padded swivel chairs.

The room was full of crewmen-she kept noticing more and more of them, their heads peeking out through dense clusters of piping and monitors. The room was jammed floor to ceiling with equipment and she couldn't find the walls. There were men in it elbow to elbow, crammed into arcane little ergonomic nooks. People sockets.

Acceleration hit them; Laura staggered a little. Somewhere, a faint high-pitched whine and a liquid trembling as the great steel mass picked up speed.

Just before her was a sunken area about the size of a bathtub. A man sat in it, wearing bulging padded headphones and clutching a knobbed steering wheel. He was like a child's doll surrounded by pricey stereo equipment. Just above his head was a gray gasketed lump with the stenciled legend

ANTI-COLLISION LIGHT-SWITCH TO FLASH. He was staring fixedly at half a dozen round glass gauges.

This was the pilot, Laura thought. No way to look outside a submarine. Just dials.

Footsteps on a curved stairway at the back of the room- someone coming down from the upper deck. "Hesseltine?"

"Yo!" said Henderson cheerfully. He tugged Laura along by the wrist, and she slammed her elbow jarringly into a vertical column. "Come on," he insisted, dragging her.

They threaded the maze, to meet their interrogator. The new man was portly, with black curled hair, pouting lips, his eyes heavy-lidded and solemn. He wore shoulder tabs, elabo- rate sleeve insignia, and a round black-brimmed sailor's cap with gold lettering. REPUBLIQUE DE MALI. He shook Henderson