The good captain, p.6
The Good Captain, page 6
Giddy with the unexpected intimacy, the first mate marvelled at Mel’s richly freckled face and the cool touch of her fingers at the back of his head. ‘It’s good to see you too.’
Both were a little embarrassed by the pleasure they had found in a single kiss. Mel thought how lovely it was to see Christopher happy again – back to his old self – less burdened by guilt for what had happened to Roope. At the same time Christopher realised how tormented Mel had been by the idea that he and the others might not make it back to Mama alive. He would have kissed her again if she hadn’t already moved towards the ladder.
‘I need to go below and tell Rena about the trawler.’
The lingering flavour of the orange had melded with the warm taste of her mouth. ‘Shouldn’t Bill do that? It’s her helm, isn’t it?’
‘I know, but I think she’s nervous about waking up the captain.’
‘You think Rena is asleep?’
Mel descended the ladder attached to the side of the wheelhouse. ‘Why wouldn’t she be? I thought she was sick.’
Christopher gestured a sticky hand towards the trawler in the distance.
8.
Caesar rested his feet on the back seat of the car and re-examined the day’s schedule. Next up they had the opening of a new tunnel – must remind Angus to wear a hardhat so he looks like one of the workers – then a stop at a local bakery – the PM loved cakes for afternoon tea – followed by a press conference outside a fracking facility at the end of a suburban street – you see, they’re perfectly safe! It was a lot for one day, and they were already running late. The town hall meeting was meant to have been nothing more than a quick round of applause for moral support, but the crowd that turned up had been larger and more argumentative than anticipated.
‘Here he comes,’ said the driver as he watched the prime minister cross the burnt lawn in the company of his security team.
‘Well that was a disaster,’ Angus announced as the car door slammed shut.
From the opposite seat Caesar noted that the PM’s shirt was wet with sweat and needed to be replaced. ‘Yes, sorry about the air conditioning, but it wasn’t that bad was it?’
The car manoeuvred into the traffic. ‘Not bad!? That crowd was fucking brutal. Didn’t you hear that woman in the front row?’
‘Which one was that Prime Minister?’ Caesar had left the hall as soon as the meeting began and retreated to the comfort of the air-conditioned car.
‘Which one? The one moaning on and on about losing her home to the banks and asking me when I was going to do something about it. I should have told her the truth and said I wasn’t going to do a damn thing. Maybe then she would have let it go and got on with her life. Jesus, I thought that crowd was supposed to be on my side. Who let in that old bastard babbling on about the oil spills in the Great Australian Bight? Don’t these people realise that if you want the Americans and British to come to your rescue you have to give them something more valuable than just Australian lives? Traditional alliances don’t matter these days. All they care about is oil and money. And if the Yanks and Poms weren’t drilling the Bight it’d be someone else – someone who wouldn’t even pretend to care about the environment. The people in that hall aren’t living in the real world. One of them kept asking me how much my shirt cost – what I paid for it. How the hell would I know something like that?’
‘I suspect the lack of air conditioning was a factor Prime Minister. I think it was intended to keep the crowd docile, but it seems to have had the opposite effect. You didn’t find them at all supportive?’
‘Supportive? You mean like that guy asking me if I knew how my refrigerator worked? How my DeePlug worked? How my quarterglow worked? And when I finally admitted to him that I had no idea he asked me why I then thought I was qualified to comment on climate science? You wait. It’s the only thing the media will be running for the next two weeks. That and those two ancient blokes in the middle row asking when they’re going to be allowed to retire. Stupid old bastards. Never, probably – like most people. If they wanted to retire they should have worked harder or got a better education, or invested in property and cheated on their taxes like the rest of us do. Maybe then they could afford to retire.’
Caesar frowned out the tinted window. He could recall a time when both sides of this road had been lined with enormous trees reaching out long branches to form an arch of shade that was wonderful to walk beneath on a summer’s day. But during his years away in Canberra the street had been widened and all its trees cut down.
‘Did you hear what I said?’
‘Yes Prime Minister. Of course I did.’
‘Well make it happen. Get the chief whip out of bed. I want a news story to bury that town hall meeting. Find some junior minister with his snout too deep in the public trough. Or uncover a terrorist threat – that usually works. Even a sex scandal would do, just make sure it’s juicy enough. I don’t care what it is so long as that meeting is pushed out of the news cycle. Here, give me one of those stellarshots.’
‘I thought we’d agreed to one in the morning and one in the afternoon.’
Angus flicked sweat from his forehead. ‘We also agreed that I was to be kept cool and relaxed during this campaign, but it was like an oven in that hall. So give me a stellarshot or I’ll make you put it in.’
Caesar clicked open his briefcase, handed over the bottle of amphetamine suppositories and turned to the window to give the nation’s most senior elected official a moment of privacy.
‘Why are you going towards Phillip Street?’ Angus yelled to the driver as he buckled his belt. ‘You want us to end up in the fucking harbour? Jesus C, where did you find this guy, an AA meeting?’
Caesar swivelled in his seat. ‘Take us back to the main road, then turn left and follow the signs to the airport.’
‘I thought we were staying in Sydney today. Why are we going to the airport?’
‘Your next event is the tunnel opening. Remember, we talked about it last night? It’s part of the new roadworks to the airport.’
The car rejoined the traffic. ‘My security team will think I’ve been kidnapped.’
‘We’ll catch up with them in a minute.’ Caesar settled into his seat and reactivated his quarterglow. ‘Just sit back and relax.’
But Angus was in no mood to relax. ‘Hey, you up front, ever hear of global warming? Rising sea levels? Phillip Street is all seafront now. Houses worth millions of dollars if you can find someone stupid enough to buy them.’
‘I thought you didn’t believe in global warming,’ muttered the driver.
The prime minister stiffened. ‘C, did that fucker just talk back to me?’
The chief of staff sighed as he looked through the latest Treasury figures. He knew what show was about to occur and was bored, bored, bored with it.
The stellarshot was already kicking in – Angus inhaled through his nose and clenched his jaw. ‘Did you just talk back to me arsewipe?’
The driver avoided the rear-view mirror.
‘I believe that pathetic excuse for a human being just talked back to me C.’
‘He did indeed Prime Minister.’ Caesar continued to read. ‘What are you going to do about it?’
‘Hey, fuck-knuckle, let me tell you one or two things you might have missed on your way to becoming a glorified taxi driver. Global warming doesn’t exist until I say it exists. I don’t care how many dead polar bears you’ve seen or how white the Great Barrier Reef is – without even trying I can show you thirty or forty scientific papers that can explain it all without once mentioning global warming. For years those greenie bastards have been predicting the end of the world, but nothing has changed. We’re still here, eating and drinking and driving our cars and flying our planes. Look around, the human race is thriving. Eleven billion people on Earth – more than at any other time in human history. All thanks to coal and oil and gas making our lives better. And now we’re meant to go back to the Stone Age? You think voters want to hear me tell them to stop driving their cars and eating their hamburgers? You think they want to hear about the world growing more uncertain and that it’s time to panic? It’s the fear about global warming that I resent the most. I can get on board with protecting pandas and recycling plastic, but stopping businesses from growing and people from buying the things they want is nothing more than a communist conspiracy. It’s got nothing to do with saving the planet. It’s all about controlling people’s lives and poisoning their minds. Someone will eventually solve our problems – there’s always a geek in a garage inventing shit. And until then all we need to do is improvise. Rising sea levels? Move further inland – easy. Too much smog? Put on a gas mask – easy. The Middle East is too hot to live in? Who gives a fuck? That’s just natural justice for them being pricks to the rest of the world. You should be bloody grateful I don’t care about climate change, because if I did I’d probably have one of those electric cars that drives itself and you’d be out of a fucking job. Think about that when you vote in a couple of weeks. You want to save some tiny island from going under water, or you want to keep your job? That’s the decision you need to make – your skin or some brown skin.’
Caesar turned up the air conditioning and handed the PM a bottle of water. It was good he’d let off some steam, but now he needed to prepare for the tunnel gig. ‘You have to change your shirt, Sir.’
Angus gulped and breathed and started undoing buttons until he found something clipped to his shirt behind his tie.
‘Is that the microphone you were wearing back at the town hall meeting?’
‘Fuck. Fuck. How do I turn it off?’
The chief of staff snatched the tiny object, dropped it to the floor and ground it beneath the heel of his shoe as a motorcycle revved loudly beside the car – its helmeted rider giving a thumbs-up before racing ahead. C sighed. ‘Well that’s one problem solved, Prime Minister. I can guarantee today’s lead news story isn’t going to be that town hall meeting.’
9.
Rena peered south-east through the bridge windows as a procession of endless caves passed beneath Mama’s keel. There was a flawless lustre to the darkening ocean that always materialised prior to a storm, and the prospect of disrupting it made her resent the presence of the trawler even more. The crew on the bridge – Bill, Euan, Sook and Mel – were awaiting orders. Had they even noticed how gracefully the sea was behaving? ‘Bill, you’re relieved. Mel, take the helm.’
The midshipman vacated the pilot chair and moved below deck to indulge her disappointment in private. The bridge was no place for displays of discontent or entitlement. Her relations with the captain were already strained. A childhood too picturesque with an education too prestigious – funded by an income too incriminatory – was something that Rena could not easily overlook no matter how committed to the mission Bill had proven herself to be.
The captain double-tapped the circular interglow in the bulkhead at the rear of the bridge and watched its gelatinous silver surface display the interior of the engine room with a slight concave distortion. ‘Ken, report.’ All she saw were fans and reduction gear and strip condensers and the circulatory system of pipes that surrounded the drive to the main engine. ‘Ken, report!’
Pali’s nose and forehead appeared abruptly from below, along with the dark cavity where her left eye should have been. ‘Ken’s in the sick bay.’
‘Can you give me a report?’
The second engineer twisted her lips. ‘Ummm, okay. Main engine is at thirty-six per cent; steering motor is fully functional, and all conviction data is set to inert.’
‘What about the second engine?’
‘Second engine is still out.’
The captain reassessed her options. ‘Any idea what the issue is?’
Pali ruffled an already messy tangle of brown hair. ‘Ummm, well, we have a theory, but in the end it could be more than one thing.’
‘How long until you have it up and running again?’
‘I’d say forty-eight hours at the earliest, Captain.’
Rena tapped the interglow blank, then slid a finger left to right across its surface. ‘Fanc, report.’
Mama’s surgeon turned away from her patient and towards the interglow that hung beside a shelf of potted herbs. ‘Ken’s right hand, it is badly burnt.’
‘It’s nothing,’ insisted the chief engineer from the edge of a treatment bed. His voice, however, was too faint to travel across the sick bay to the interglow.
‘I’ve applied Autumn Breeze and a seven-day bubble. He will pick up a fork, but little else.’
‘It’s my own stupid fault,’ he added – still so softly that no one else could hear.
Fanc stepped towards the interglow and revealed how her self-restricted intake of food had deepened the hollows at her temples and the lines around her mouth. ‘He uses Pali’s eye to test the second engine, but it rolls under a pipe that burns his hand. It is down there still, moving around. To treat a piece of static like this – in my life I have seen only one, maybe two.’
‘You can eat dinner off the deck of my engine room.’ A dose of indignation had helped Ken to discover a stronger voice. ‘I’ll find Pali’s eye as soon as I get —’
Rena tapped the interglow then drew a V on its surface to reveal Sonja and Gaiek standing to attention in their workshop. Neat. Calm. Quiet. And unequivocally suspicious. ‘What’s the problem?’
The Russian twins turned their blond heads towards one another in an unconvincing display of nonchalance.
‘Nothing,’ insisted Gaiek. ‘No problem.’
The captain waited with a blank expression.
‘It’s just a tiny accident,’ admitted Sonja. His mother had wanted a daughter so badly that even after the twins were born she could not let go of the name.
‘Not an accident exactly,’ corrected his identical brother who had never been good at keeping secrets. ‘More an unexpected eventuality.’
Rena wished the gunners would learn to be more blunt. ‘Tell me what it is or I’ll come down there myself.’
‘Well if you do,’ said Sonja, ‘could you bring a bucket of —’
Rena tapped the interglow blank and descended through the wheelhouse to the upper deck where she strode towards the bow and the workshop stairs.
Mel swivelled in the pilot chair. ‘Any idea what that was about?’
Euan relinquished his corner at the rear of the bridge and adopted a conspiratorial whisper. ‘Fookin’ idiots. I told ’em to wait. The skipper’s gonna think it’s well unfunny.’ Most days the deckhand’s Scottish brogue was only significantly thick, but if he was bored or in the wind it could be almost impenetrable.
‘Wait for what?’
Euan leaned even closer. ‘Nother invention I reckon.’
‘You know what type?’
‘They’d no say. Wanted it to be a surprise.’
‘Didn’t Bill send you down there to make sure they were all squared away?’ Mel suspected Euan of ignoring the order – he had been aboard Mama longer than Bill and was clearly disappointed when she’d been awarded the rank of midshipman.
‘Aye, I’m your man. But the bastards must’ve waited ’til I were gone. Thought that way they’d be uncaught.’
The captain found Sonja and Gaiek still standing to attention, and a glance at their legs explained why. From their knees to their feet they were covered in a thick yellow foam that appeared to have bonded them to the workshop deck.
‘It’s an emergency flotation device,’ explained Gaiek as Rena stepped through the oval doorway. ‘You keep it inside your sea boots in case you get swept overboard, and the moment it’s submerged it spreads out into a type of raft.’
‘But now we realise it needs to stay in the water,’ added Sonja.
‘Otherwise it dries and grows hard,’ finished Gaiek.
On the scale of problems that the twins might have caused it was not as bad as the captain had feared. Still, she was in no mood for a delay. ‘Be at your stations in five minutes or you’ll be testing your new invention for real.’
Upon her return to the top of the wheelhouse she ordered Euan to the workshop – ‘take a bucket of water with you’ – then approached the communications room at the rear of the bridge. The space had been designed to accommodate two, but Sook’s large frame and air of proprietorship meant that most people – including Rena – stopped at its threshold. She peeked inside the dimly lit room and distinguished the outline of his broad back bent towards the five large glows that stood on his desk. ‘Raise the cloak – they can see us by now – but keep jamming their signal.’
Sook tapped the elaborate control panel in his desk and reinstated a cascade of information to the glow furthest on his left. ‘ThThThThat storm is…is now a CCCCategory FFFour, with po…po…ppotential for a whirl…a whirlpool at its centre.’
Rena looked back to the bridge windows. She preferred to believe the ocean she could see and feel rather than the predictions of a piece of static.
The communications officer hated being ignored and mumbled to himself that not everyone thought it was fun being tossed about. A red signal flashed on his middle glow. ‘SSSSSatellite SSixteen has just pa…passed over us. That… That leaves thththree hours before…before FFFFour comes into range.’
‘Any sign of Twelve?’ She watched an opaque heart break over Mama’s deck. In an hour’s time they would be higher than the bridge.
‘There…There’s been no sssssighting for more than tttttwo weeks. I think…I think it’s sssssafe to assume it’s gggggone for good.’
‘All right then, go ancient.’
Sook thrust his chair back across the room and reached up to a small grey box attached to the bulkhead. ‘GGGGoing ancient,’ he announced before pulling down a thick switch that turned his five glows black. He stood up to button his coat – rubbed his eyes – pulled on a beanie and closed the door to the communications room. ‘Any…Anyone wwwwwant anything to eat?’
