Point Apocalypse (5 page)

In front of me, the gap's uneven outline came into view,
its bent broken bars barely visible. I stretched out my arms, put my legs together and slid, dolphin-like, through the opening. I surfaced and tried to get as far from the ferry as I could before the vortex pulled me under.

My heart pounded. With every third stroke, I made a q
uick gasp and kept going. I took another stroke and my hand bounced off inflatable rubber. I didn't have time to slow down. Face up, I’d collided with the orange side of the safety raft.

"Where
d'you think you're going?" I heard overhead.

"He l
ooks strong enough. Georgie, Oakum, get him out. Put him with the rest. And let’s pick up the others."

I raised my arms. They grabbed my elbows and pulled me out.

The raft was a six-seater. The bald fatso, a.k.a. the ferry captain, sat on top of a waterproof personal survival kit. He was in his fifties, a round red face, a smooth suntanned skull, and bushy gray eyebrows. His shoulder sported a tattoo: an anchor with a towline wrapped around it and a spike-headed combat dolphin below. Military geneticists had developed those dolphins in order to destroy underwater saboteurs. From what I'd heard, the spikes on their heads were sharp and strong, and also venomous.

On either side of the captain
sat the young sailor and the crane operator with his machine gun.

The crane operator
, dark-haired with gray temples, looked older than the captain. His thin face, wrinkled and wizened, was covered with three days' worth of stubble. By the confident way he held the machine gun you could tell he'd been in a scrape or two.

I looked at the
young sailor. His strawberry hair was tufted together making it stick out like... like oakum. That's how he must have gotten his nickname.

The
youngster handed me a short paddle that looked more like a trenching spade.

"Take it and row," the captain said.

"Give me a chance," I leaned against the bulwark catching my breath.

"Georgie," the captain said.

The crane operator pointed the gun at me.

"
You fucking clone's ass," he grinned showing gapped yellow teeth, "Shut your mouth and row!"

I grabbed a paddl
e and straddled the rubber float. The ferry boat was gone. Jetsam floated on the surface. Amid the growing oil slicks, two bodies rocked in the waves. The murky mist over the jumpgate base had dissolved, and the bright white sun blazed in the clear sky overhead. The silhouette of the guard boat was barely discernible against the steel-and-concrete island.

"Why did they shoot at us from the boat?" I asked.

"Just row!" the crane operator said in a coarse three-packs-a-day voice. "The Feds have their own orders."

"Where do you want me to row?"

"Over there," Oakum pointed behind my back.

I turned around.
Wladas and the Chinese were rocking on the waves a few meters away. Neither of them spoke. I didn't like it. The neurotech lay on his back, arms wide apart, staring into the sky.

I sat
down with my back to the machine gun, lowered the paddle into the water and pulled violently. Oakum on the other side countered, trying to make sure the raft didn't turn. We soon reached the two heads bobbing in the water. I glanced over my shoulder. Several large bubbles billowed up: all that remained from the ferry boat. A few more bodies resurfaced.

Wladas
was pale - unconscious, by the looks of it. With the boy's help I dragged him on board. The Chinese climbed in with ease.

"Is he alive?" the captain asked
as I bent over the neurotech. "I don't need no stiffs here."

Wladas
coughed. I turned his head to one side and water spasmodically gushed out of his mouth.

"You're in luck," the crane operator grinned. "If it wasn't for..."

His stare met with mine, and the gun's barrel pointed at my chest.

"Now," the captain said. "Don't even think of rioting. I'd rather have a chat with you before we reach the shore. I don't care about your names or sentences. But if you can tell me what's going on back on Earth... Having said that, any of you
got sea legs?"

I shook my head and glanced at the Chinese. He sat straight, hands on his knees, smiling and looking much like a votive statue.

"What's wrong with him?" Georgie pointed his gun at him. "What's there to smile at, Chink?"

"He doesn't understand you," I said.

" He will when I shoot him!"

"Shut up, Georgie," the captain shrugged. "Give me a chance to talk to
the people."

He sat up as if nothing had happened and went on.

"Any mechanics among you? My engineer's dead. I need someone to replace him."

Once again I shook my head. The Chinese kept
on smiling.

"Shame," the captain scratched his tattooed shoulder and squinted at the boy. "I'm afraid, it'll have to be Oakum."

The kid's eyes lit up. He spread his shoulders and stuck his chin out.

I didn't like the
way he spoke. Asking about the Earth and new engineers so matter-of-factly as if nobody had just died during the sinking. Okay, they were only deportees, but they were still human. Lots of them, turning into fish food even as we spoke. He didn't seem to care. Death must have become mundane here on Pangea, to the point where no one cared about the dead.

"Quit glaring," the
captain lowered his hands. "Think about those who've survived. About yourself and your future. You can't bring the dead back to life."

"You can't," Georgie butted in.

"Ferries sink all the time," the captain went on, like an old grunt telling war stories to rookies. "Last year, one just disappeared. Like that," he clapped his hands. "A bolt of lightning, and it was gone. Had to be Pangean devils."

Wladas
finally caught his breath. He lay on his side wheezing and clutching at his throat. The Chinese sat with his back straight, smiling.

"
So! No new Civil war out there, apparently?" the captain asked.

"
Apparently not," I picked up the paddle and straddled the float.

"How about Siberia?" the crane operator perked up. "They
haven't sold it to those slant-eyed clones, have they?"

"In your dreams."

"Good," Georgie grinned. "They've pissed away the rest."

"
How many times have I told you?" the captain jumped up. "What do you want with that radioactive waste pit? Siberia! It won't change just because you ask!"

The crane operator sulked.
Clutching his gun, he looked at the Chinese. His knuckles turned white.

"Georgie is a Siberian, see," the captain said.
"A Baikal conflict volunteer. So he's one of our old-timers."

A
Baikal conflict veteran. I see. I hadn't even been born when this Georgie was fighting for Siberia's independence against the Chinese clone settlers, razing their Irkutsk settlements to the ground. No one knew for sure but apparently, Siberian independence was the real cause behind the Civil war in Russia. A year after, the newly-formed Federal Security Agency had started mopping up. It took them several years to properly establish the new totalitarian regime. That had been their hay day - purges and arrests - right up until the Coup of the Seven Generals.

"Okay," the captain slapped
his hips and turned pointing to the direction of the mainland. "Course north west, fifteen degrees starboard from Elephant Ridge.”

"
Leave them, Grunt," Georgie spoke. "Just look at them: they wouldn't tell north west from a shit sandwich. And that slanted-eye monkey don't speak no Russian."

The captain sighed.
"In other words, row till you hit the shore. Oakum! You on lookout, make sure we don't lose the current. Keep an eye on the wind, too. Give your paddle to the Asian. Let him work for his rescue. Georgie, keep a bead on them-"

"
Depend upon it!"

"...
it would be safer for us all," the captain concluded.

The kid passed his paddle over to the Chinese and sat in front next
to the captain. I nodded to the Asian. We made a couple of strokes adjusting to each other and paddled away. Luckily, the wind was at our backs otherwise we'd have to drift and no amount of paddling would have helped, not with all this windage. Now I understood why they'd rescued us: they’d needed someone to paddle. I glanced back again. The island and the Fort receded slowly but surely, and I couldn't see the debris any more.

"Permission to
speak," the captain clutched his hands on his belly and reached out his legs. "Rookies have lots of questions."

Georgie
snorted. I looked at Wladas. He sniffled with his head dropped onto his chest. The dumping and the shock had been too much for him.

"Why didn't they rescue us?" I pointed my paddle at the Elephant
Ridge with its beam trawlers. "Couldn't they come and help?"

"
Trawlers have no business in the Fort area," the captain said. "They'd be sunk straight away. And during these vortex incidents," he raised his eyes to the sky, "the Fort closes the channel and tells them to leave at full steam."

"How big is the base water area, then?"

"About five miles south from the Elephant Ridge. Right up to Cape Fang."

He pointed over Georgie's head to the east where a crooked black cliff hung over the shore. Far beyond it
, mountain tops barely showed through a gray mist: that was the beginning of the mountain range that encircled the continent's east coast. The swamps had to lie by the northern foothills.

"The
only way to get to the base is by ferry boat," the captain waved his hand, "and only when they're expecting a new shipment of convicts. We take carula on board, then wait for the go-ahead from the Fort commander and approach the base. Then we unload, ship the men on board and go back."

I
’d barely heard his last words as the Information clicked on again in my head,

Herba C
earula, or blue seaweed, commonly known as carula, grows exclusively in the New Pang area. It is the only source of biocyne.

Biocy
ne? I thought, thus activating a new page:

Biocy
ne is a biologically active substance produced by the seaweed species herba caerula. It facilitates DNA breakage repair resulting in improved environmental tolerance and longevity...

"Quit gawking and row!" the captain shouted.

The Information finally shut up allowing me to paddle with renewed vigor. I glanced at the unconscious Wladas and the silent Chinese. What was going on here? Nothing but riddles. First the chain of accidents at the jumpgate, then this Chinese who looked as if he was keeping an eye on me. Now this complex informational software in my own head, and when had they ever had time to install it? I could only think of one instant when they could have done so: after the tribunal when army surgeons had removed my combat implants. They'd had to put me to sleep. But if the surgeon had installed the software, he couldn't have done it on his own accord, could he? He couldn't have cared less about me. Which meant he'd been forced into it - why else would he risk facing a court martial?

But what kind of force was it?
Who'd care about a soldier and a murderer on his way to life in exile? And had the Chinese been sent here by the same force? And how about the jumpgate accidents, had they been arranged, as well, in order to distract the Fort operators and slacken their vigilance? True that they hadn't looked too deep into my mental scans - not deep enough to discover the unauthorized software, anyway.

My head was spinning. The Chinese, Infor
mation, jumpgate accidents... biocyne.

"What's carula?" I asked.

"Just some slimy shit," Georgie muttered. "Stinks to high heaven."

I looked at the captain. "Why do you send it to the Fort?"

He shrugged. "God knows. They process it, like, to use as a food supplement. To help with overpopulation. According to them, we deliver food shipments."

"
How often?"

"How can I say..."

"Regularly enough," Georgie grumbled.

"Exactly," the captain nodded. "We send, like, one shipment a month."

"How do you harvest it?"

"It's cultured. Once it blossoms, divers go down and filter the muck... Why would you want to know?"

I didn't say anything.

"Shitty job," Georgie winced.

"Not nice, no," the captain said. "But it's McLean and his people who deal with that. Virtually no Russians on his farms. And I shouldn't think of becoming a diver. They're dog meat, no one cares if they live or die. Worse than clones."

I stared in front of me.
I'd just realized that the Information's data was classified. Here on Pangea no one seemed to know anything about biocyne. The deportees seem to think that the Earth needed the blue seaweed as a handy nutrient to add to cheap synthetic food they sold to the poor. Even on Earth, few knew about biocyne's precious properties. It was used to make medications to reverse aging, affordable to a select few like our President and corporate top brass. Had the common people learned that the authorities manipulated them in more than one way, achieving immortality while the deteriorating environment cut the average lifespan further with every year...