The Icerigger Trilogy: Icerigger, Mission to Moulokin, and The Deluge Drivers (109 page)

Ethan looked at September, who shrugged. “Say we manage a miracle and do make it back outside. Our troubles would only be beginning. How do we get from here back to Brass Monkey? You’ve seen the size of the guard Corfu’s mounted on the
Slanderscree
—not so much because he’s worried about us taking it back as to keep his fellow citizens from stealing it for themselves. Then there’s the matter of the thirty or so mutineers still living on board.”

“We’ll manage.”

“You got to hand it to her, young feller-me-lad,” September said. “She’s nothing if not confident.”

“We’ll do it because we have to.” She indicated her companions, who were sitting nearby making loud, casual conversation to overload the aural pickup that was almost certainly observing the room along with the camera. “We thought of trying to steal one of the installation skimmers, but those are surely more heavily guarded than our ship. Once we get out, we must find a way to take back the
Slanderscree
.”

September flexed his huge hands. “Once we’re out we might be able to manage all sorts o’ things. The problem is vacating this particular suite. You don’t seem too worried about that.”

“If there is one thing we still have it is a surfeit of brainpower.” She smiled at him. “I have talked it over with Orvil and the Others. The security system watching over us is very simple. This room must have been set aside to hold those employees who become abusive or drunk or break rules and regulations. It was not built to restrain hardened criminals or”—and her smile widened slightly—“dedicated, knowledgeable people who are compelled to find a way out. This is something which Bamaputra or his foreman may soon realize. If they plan to hold us here for any length of time, I’m sure they will begin arrangements to make this area more secure. All the more reason for us to leave as soon as possible.”

“We’ve decided that it would be an advantage to move at night,” Williams put in, “even though technically there’s neither night nor day inside this place. From what we were able to observe on the way in we determined that this installation functions according to a typical twenty-four-hour day/night routine. Much of the equipment we passed is automatic. Probably everyone except designated nighttime supervisory personnel sleeps during the Tran night.” He checked the chronometer built into the sleeve of his survival suit. “Everyone should try to rest some. We’ll see about breaking out of here around midnight.”

“Security won’t sleep,” Ethan pointed out.

“It won’t matter because we’ll be gone,” Hwang told him.

“No, you don’t understand.” He nodded inconspicuously in the direction of the methodical, roving spy eye in the ceiling. “Whoever’s watching that camera’s monitor will raise the alarm immediately.”

“Not if there’s nothing to watch.”

Ethan smiled. “You can’t throw a blanket or something over the lens. That’ll provoke just as quick a reaction as if we start hammering on the door. For the same reason you can’t bust it. If the monitor at their security station goes blank they’ll be down here in seconds to fix it.”

“We’re not going to do either of those things,” Williams assured him. He looked at Hwang and the two of them shared some secret joke. “Whoever’s watching the security monitors isn’t going to see anything unusual all night. Meanwhile we’ll be on our way out of here.”

Ethan shook his head. “Then I confess I don’t have the faintest idea what you have in mind.”

“Good.” Scientist and schoolteacher stood together. “That means they won’t either.”

“So what’s our first step? What do we do now?”

Williams stretched elaborately. Next to him, Hwang yawned. “We go to sleep.”

O
NE OF THE MOST
difficult things to do is maintain the illusion of sleep when in fact you are so keyed up you can hardly lie still. That was what Ethan and everyone else in the room had to do for the rest of that day and on into the night. At the appointed time it was all he could do to remain silent with his eyes tightly closed.

Faint noises came from the cluster of bunks the scientists had grouped together. That would be Blanchard moving about. He and his companions had rehearsed all that afternoon, but even if it worked it was going to be close. The spy eye swept the room every thirty seconds. There would be no second chance. It had to work the first time.

A hand gently touched his shoulder and he slipped silently out from beneath the thin bedcovers. He could sense other shapes moving in the darkness. As time passed without armed guards appearing to check on the sudden rush of nocturnal activity their confidence grew.

They had been allowed to keep their survival suits and the harmless equipment the suits contained. Using their bodies to shield their efforts from the tireless spy eye, Blanchard and his friends had cannibalized portions of that equipment. The result was a tiny, ultrashort range transmitting device.

They couldn’t disable the spy eye because that would bring an immediate response from installation security. But Blanchard had devised a way to achieve the same result. Instead of recording what it saw every half minute, the transmitter he and his colleagues had constructed and trained on the spy eye jammed the recording circuitry. Instead of displaying a new recording every thirty seconds, the camera now continued to play back only what it had observed in the half-minute interval between twelve fifteen and twelve fifteen and a half
A.M.
All the spy eye had seen in that particular thirty seconds was a room full of sleeping people. It would run back that sequence over and over until either the deception was finally noticed or the recording began to deteriorate from repeated replaying.

By which time they hoped to be elsewhere.

Eventually it should occur to whoever was assigned to watch the monitors that no one in the dormitory prison had yawned, turned over, or so much as twitched in his sleep. They were gambling on the boredom inherent in such a job. It was much more likely that the monitor-watcher glanced only occasionally at his screens, and therefore unlikely he’d notice anything out of the ordinary for some time. With luck, their disappearance wouldn’t be noticed until it was time for the morning meal to be delivered.

Compared to fooling the spy-eye system defeating the door lock was an easy matter. A single window was set in the door. By peering through it was possible to ascertain not only that there was no one immediately outside but also that the plant did indeed shut down during the nighttime hours. Only a few dim lights glowed in the corridor.

After everyone had quietly slipped outside, Blanchard removed the lock defeat he’d improvised and listened as it sealed itself shut once more. Anyone happening by who tried the door would find it locked tight. Should they also happen to glance through the window they would be able to see lumpy, motionless shapes lying on the dimly lit cots. Williams had supervised the artistic rearrangement of blankets and pillows to simulate sleeping human forms.

From Blanchard they shifted their reliance to Skua September, who as it turned out had the best memory of all for places and passageways. As they crept down corridors and stairs they remained fully alert, but no one appeared to confront them. Machinery hummed and fussed around them, masking the noise of their footsteps on the metal catwalks. Clearly the installation was attended by a minimal night crew.

“Down this way, I think,” Williams whispered.

September shook his head in disagreement. In the poor light, his white hair served as a bobbing beacon for all to focus on. “Over here. After we left the Tran they took us up one more level.” He started toward a stairwell, silent as a ghost.

In a few minutes they found themselves standing across from the oversize door that sealed the refrigerated storage room where their Tran compatriots were being held. Williams had to admit that he’d been wrong. September accepted the apology as his due.

This would be the trickiest part of their escape attempt, for naturally there was no thought of trying to flee without freeing Hunnar, Elfa, and the rest of their Tran friends.

“Can you see anything?” Ethan and the others looked on anxiously as Blanchard put his face to the window in the door and stared into the room beyond.

“Two dimples in the ceiling. They might be spy eyes, or they might be something else. Can’t make out details.”

“Sprinkler heads,” Semkin suggested hopefully. “Why would anyone put spy-eye cameras in a freezer?”

“I don’t know.” Blanchard stepped back, rubbed at his eyes. “We’ll just have to slip inside and hope that if they are cameras I’ll have a chance to jam them before anyone wakes up.” The abrupt stirring of the fifty or so Tran in the room would be bound to draw the immediate attention of even the sleepiest of security personnel watching the monitors.

They waited while the geophysicist used his homemade device to interrupt the magnetic flow which kept the door sealed. In the darkness the faint clicks sounded preternaturally loud. September wrapped one huge fist around the oversize handle, nodded at Blanchard, then slowly eased the door aside.

Several Tran stirred. One sat up and stared in the darkness but said nothing. Blanchard hurriedly moved to aim the jamming unit at one of the dark spots in the ceiling, relaxed with a sigh. Sprinkler heads. No reason, just as Semkin had said, to put security cameras in what was essentially an enlarged refrigerator. Ethan didn’t doubt such devices would eventually be installed to keep an eye on the Tran as well as the humans. For now it wasn’t an immediate concern of Bamaputra’s or Antal’s. Besides, a primitive native couldn’t defeat a magnetic lock. The cold room was perfectly secure.

As secure as the dormitory.

They spread out and began waking the Tran, admonishing them to silence. Dark furry shapes began to rise and gather. Faint light shone eerily through raised dan, giving their native companions the appearance of enormous bats. Within minutes the entire group had been awakened. Hugs and greetings were postponed until they could be exchanged under more amenable circumstances. They still had to get out of the installation.

The corridor was empty as a newly dug grave and they began filing out of the room. The mere movement of so many bodies produced a certain amount of sound, enough to rise above the soft muttering of machinery. Still, by itself the noise wouldn’t be enough to raise an alarm. Someone had to hear it first. Blanchard reseated the chamber door while Ethan and the others discussed their plans with the newly liberated Tran.

“We’ve got to try and retake the ship.”

Hunnar nodded, that odd little down and sideways movement of the head that Ethan knew as well as any human gesture. “It will be good to fight.”

“Even if we should fail,” whispered Monslawic, Ta-hoding’s first mate, “better to die fighting than rotting away in a cage.”

September clapped the Tran on a furry shoulder. “We ain’t going to fail. Not after having made it this far.”

They followed the giant as he struggled to retrace the path they’d taken when they’d been marched inside the installation. There was no way to muffle the clatter of clawlike chiv on metal, which sounded like an army of dog-sized insects. A single night tech left his dials and gauges to find out what was making the strange noise. He found out. His eyes widened as half a dozen of the
Slanderscree
’s sailors jumped him. They would have cut his throat save for the intervention of the humans. Ethan pointed out that the unlucky man wasn’t responsible for the installation or its raison d’être. It required all their powers of persuasion to dissuade the Tran, who were eager and anxious for someone to kill. In the end they settled for gifting the technician with a mild concussion.

Cheela Hwang and her companions descended on the man’s equipment belt and pockets like so many scientific scavengers, appropriating everything that might prove useful later.

No one guarded the entrance to the installation. It would have been a waste of manpower. The human inhabitants rarely went outside and unauthorized Tran were never admitted. Nevertheless, Blanchard and Moware wasted what Ethan and September thought were precious minutes double-checking possible alarm relays. The Tran milled aimlessly behind the humans, fancying they could already smell the frigid freedom that lay on the other side of the heavy barrier.

The geophysicist, Hwang, and Semkin worked with the door mechanism for several minutes. Then they all stepped back. Blanchard made a connection, a motor sprang to life, and the door swung up and back quietly. Everyone held their breath, but no sirens screamed behind them, no horns shattered the night silence. On the barren slope outside the ceaseless wind moaned invitingly.

There was no holding back the Tran. Sailors and soldiers poured through the opening and gathered on the cleared, flat area that had been sliced from the granite. They sucked in the fresh cold air, spread their dan, and danced pirouettes on the frozen places out of sheer exhilaration.

Off to their left lay the path that led down toward sleeping Yingyapin. Tran-ky-ky’s multiple moons illuminated the switchbacks, a dark ribbon drizzled among lighter rock. A few lights burned late in the would-be capital of all Tran-ky-ky.

Ethan started down as Blanchard closed the door behind them. A clawed hand held him back and he turned to see Hunnar Redbeard’s cat’s eyes glowing down at him. The knight smiled with satisfaction.

“There is a quicker way, my friend.” He turned, exposing his broad back. “Climb on. Put your legs around my waist, just below where the dan is attached.”

“I don’t …”

“Do not argue. In that place we rely on your wisdom. Out in the real world you must listen to us. See.” He pointed and Ethan could see Hwang and the other scientists crawling onto the backs of strong sailors.

As the door closed, Blanchard came rolling out beneath it, just clearing the descending lip of the barrier. He rose panting, the visor of his suit temporarily fogged. His tone was exultant.

“I haven’t done anything like this since I was at university. Rather like a complex game.” He turned to face the doorway, a part of the hillside once more. “The thirty-second repeat is still fooling them.”