Bruce Sterling - Islands in the Net

Hesseltine's hand. Maddeningly, the two of them began speaking fluent French.

They climbed the spiral stairs, walked down a long dim stifling corridor. Hesseltine's shoes squelched loudly. They chattered in French, with enthusiasm.

The officer showed them into a set of narrow shower stalls.

"Great," said Hesseltine, stepping in and pulling Laura after him. For the first time, he let go of her wrist. "You up to taking your own shower, girl? Or do I have to help?"

Laura stared at him mutely.

"Relax," Hesseltine said. He zipped out of his utility vest.

"You're with the good guys now. They're gonna bring us something new to wear. Later we'll eat." He smiled at her, saw it wasn't working, and glowered. "Look. What were you doing on that ship? You didn't turn data banker, did you?

Some kind of double-agent scam?"

"No, of course not!"

"You got some special reason to regret those criminals?"

The moral vacuity in it stunned her. They were human beings. "No... " she blurted, almost involuntarily.

Hesseltine pulled off his shirt, revealing a narrow suntanned chest densely packed with muscle.

She stole a sidelong glance at his utility vest. She knew he had a gun in it somewhere.

He caught her looking and his face hardened. "Look.

We'll make this simple. Get in the shower stall and don't come out till I say. Or else."

She got into the shower and shut its door and turned it on.

She stayed in it for ten minutes, while it squeezed out maybe a quart of buzzing ultrasonic mist. She rinsed salt from what was left of her clothes and ran some thin acrid soap through her hair.

"Okay," Hesseltine shouted at her. She stepped out,-wear- ing .the raincoat again. Hesseltine was neatly groomed. He wore a midnight-blue naval uniform and was lacing his deck shoes. Someone had laid out a gray terry-cloth sweatsuit for her: drawstring pants, a hooded pullover.

She stepped into the pants, turned her back on him, threw off the raincoat, and tunneled quickly into the pullover. She turned back, saw that he had been watching her in the mirror.

Not with lust or even appreciation-there was a chill, vacant look on his face, like an evil child methodically killing a bug.

As she turned back, the look vanished like a card trick.

He'd never sneaked a glimpse at all. Hesseltine was a gentleman. This was an embarrassing but necessary situation that the two of them were working through like adults. Somehow

Hesseltine was managing to say all this to her, while bent over and tying his shoes. The lie was radiating out of him. Out of his pores, like sweat.

A sailor waited for them outside, a wiry little veteran with a gray mustache and faraway eyes. He led them aft to a tiny cabin, where the hull formed a rounded, sloping roof. The place was about the size of a garden tool shed. Four deathly pale sailors, with their sleeves rolled up and collars open, were sitting at a tiny cafe table, silently playing a checker game.

The French-speaking officer was there. "Sit down," he said in English. Laura sat on a cramped wall bench, close enough to one of the four sailors that she smelled his floral deodorant.

Across the cabin, stuck to the curved ceiling, were idealized portrait posters of men in elaborate uniforms. She had a quick look at two of the names: DE GAULLE, JARUZELSKI.

Meaningless.

"My name is Baptiste," said the sailor. "Political Officer aboard this vessel. We are to have a discussion." Pause, for two beats. "Would you like some tea?"

"Yes," Laura said. The mist-shower hadn't offered enough for drinking. Her throat felt leathery with seawater and shock.

She felt a sudden trembling shoot through her.

She didn't delude herself that this was a situation she could handle. She was in the hands of murderers. It surprised her that they would pretend to consult her about her own fate.

They must want something from her, though. Hesseltine's lean, weasely face had a look on it like something she would have scraped from a boot. She wondered how badly she wanted to live. What she was willing to do for it.

Hesseltine laughed at her: "Don't look that way, uh, Laura.

Stop worrying. You're safe now." Baptiste shot him a cyni- cal look from beneath heavy eyelids. A sudden sharp cascade of metallic pressure pops rang from the wall. Laura started like an antelope. One of the four sailors nearby languidly moved a checker piece with one forefinger.

She stared at Hesseltine, then took a cup from Baptiste and drank: It was tepid and sweet. Were they poisoning her? It didn't matter. She could die at their whim.

"My name is Laura Day Webster," she told them. "I'm an associate of Rizome Industries Group. I live in Galveston,

Texas." It all sounded so pathetically brittle and faraway.

"You're shivering," Baptiste observed. He leaned back- ward and turned up a thermostat on the bulkhead. Even here, in some sort of rec room, the bulkhead was grotesquely cluttered: a speaker grille, an air ionizer, an eight-socketed surge-protected power plug, a wall clock reading 12:17 Green- wich Mean Time.

"Welcome aboard the SSBN Thermopylae," Baptiste said.

Laura said nothing.

"Cat got your tongue?" Hesseltine said. Baptiste laughed."Come on," Hesseltine said. "You were chattering away like a magpie when you thought I was a goddamn data pirate."

"We are not pirates, Mrs. Webster," Baptiste soothed.

"We are the world police."

"You're not Vienna," Laura said.

"He means the real police," Hesseltine said impatiently.

"Not that crowd of lead-assed bureaucrats."

Laura rubbed one bloodshot eye. "If you're police, then am I under arrest?"

Hesseltine and Baptiste shared a manly chuckle over her naivete. "We are not bourgeois legalists," Baptiste said.

"We do not issue arrests."

"Cardiac arrests," Hesseltine said, tapping his teeth with his thumbnail. He truly believed he was being funny. Baptiste stared at him, puzzled, missing the English idiom.

"I saw you on Singapore TV," Hesseltine told her sud- denly. "You said you opposed the data havens, wanted them shut down. But you sure went about it in a screwy way. The haven bankers-my former coworkers, you know-laughed their asses off when they saw you handing that democratic guff to Parliament. "

He poured himself tea. "Of course, they're mostly refugees now, and a pretty good number of the bastards are on the bottom of the sea. No thanks to you, though-you were trying to kiss them into submission. And you, a rootin-tootin'

cowboy Texan, too. It's a good thing they didn't try that at the Alamo. "

Another sailor made a move in the checker game, and the third one swore in response. Laura flinched.

"Pay them no mind," Baptiste told her quickly. "They're off duty."

"What?" Laura said blankly.

"Off duty," he said impatiently, as if it embarrassed him.

"They are Blue Crew. We are Red Crew."

"Oh ... what's that they're playing?"

He shrugged. "Uckers."

"Uckers? What's that?"

"It's a kind of ludo. "

Hesseltine assembled, aimed, and fired a grin at her. "Sub crews," he said. "A very special breed. Highly trained. A

disciplined elite."

The four Blue Crewmen hunched closer over their board.

They refused to look at him.

"It's an odd situation," said Baptiste. He was talking about her, not himself. "We don't quite know what to do with you. You see, we exist to protect people like you."

"You do?"

"We are the cutting edge of the emergent global order."

"Why did you bring me here?" Laura said. "You could have shot me. Or left me to drown."

"Oh, come on," said Hesseltine.

"He's one of our finest operatives," explained Baptiste.

"A real artist."

"Thanks "

"Of course he would rescue a pretty woman at the end of his assignment-he couldn't resist a final dramatic grace note!"