Earth Thirst (The Arcadian Conflict) - By Mark Teppo
ONE
It's her, isn't it?”
She tries very hard to look like the rest of the crew—bulky sweater, heavy pants, rubber boots, red hair pulled back into a pony tail beneath a worn Yankees baseball cap—but there is a tiny stutter in her step that gives her away. She hasn't quite figured out how to walk in sync with the motion of the boat.
Nigel leans forward, lowering his face so that he can be sure I see his expression. “Why is she here?”
I suspect I'm supposed to know the answer to his question, but I don't and so I shrug as I return my attention to my mug.
The woman has paused, blocking the people behind her. She's looking at our table. The mess on the Cetacean Liberty is already tiny, and with so many volunteers on board, the room feels even smaller. There are only four tables, and no one ever sits with us. We've done nothing to dissuade the rumor that we're here in case things go wrong, and most of them afford us the space you would any dangerous animal.
I can see the scar that wraps itself around the base of her throat. The one she got from the Chechen gangster. It's part of the reason the network never picked her up after the exposé. She hasn't let it stop her though—her reporting has only gotten better since. Probably due, in no small part, to the fact that she hasn't been trapped in the vicious cycle of appealing to a fickle television audience.
“Mind if I join you?”
Nigel stares straight at her, his gaze hard and empty of any emotion—as if she wasn't there. The woman doesn't flinch, and when the moment of silence stretches too long, Phoebe's leg bumps mine under the table.
“Sure,” I say, nodding at the empty spot across from me.
She looks at Nigel for a second, and then slaps her tray down. The gravy pooling around her mashed potatoes is more gray than brown, and the carrots are a sickly orange color. For all the lip service to ecological principles, Prime Earth doesn't feed its volunteers well. Too many things come out of cans—corporate cans. “It's pretty bad, isn't it?” she says as she sits down. “The food.” Picking up her silverware, she points at our mugs with her fork. “I should probably stick to the tea like you guys.”
“Probably,” I say. Phoebe wraps her fingers—long and delicate—around her mug. Right over left, trigger finger slightly curled and tapping against the middle knuckle of the opposite number on her left hand. It's an old tic of hers.
The woman ignores Phoebe's icy stare and digs in to her meal. We watch her eat, and she lets us watch her—this is the game we play. Patience. Indifference. Slow death by boredom. She plays the game well, but I can read a shiver of excitement in the way she eats too quickly. She gulps air between bites, as if she were drowning, and she fidgets, her right foot tapping against the deck.
“So,” she says, once the island of mashed potatoes is decimated, sunk beneath the gray-brown sea of swill. “You came aboard at Adelaide, didn't you?”
The Cetacean Liberty had left Adelaide three days ago—the last port for supplies and volunteers.
“Did we?” I volunteer.
“The captain isn't very good at keeping track of volunteers, but by my count, we're at least four over this boat's listed occupancy.”
“I'm sure the captain is keeping a close eye on the number of people onboard.”
She snorts. Nigel shifts in his chair, not finding her reaction the least bit amusing.
“You seem to be very conversant with the ship's crew roster,” I point out. “What's your role on this vessel?”
The game becomes more entertaining now, with a bit of daring mixed in. She meets my gaze and returns my smile. We both know more than we should, and the mystery of the game is how much to reveal? How much can you get the other to tell you without letting them know how little you truly know?
“Last time,” she says, toying with her fork, “someone took a shot at Captain Morse. The bullet hole is still in the railing; he likes to show it off.”
“I've seen it.”
“Is that why you're here?”
“To see the bullet hole?”
“No,” she shakes her head. “To shoot back.”
“What would we be shooting at?” I ask innocently.
She puts her fork down and leans forward. There's a gleam in her eye, and the twisted skin in the hollow of her throat flutters with her pulse. “Are you—” She glances at the table next to us, gauging whether its occupants are paying any attention to our conversation at all. “—Arcadia?”
I know who you are, her question says, leaping right to the end game.
“Yes, Mere,” I reply, using the familiar form of her name. I know who you are too. “We are.”
* * *
“There's a woman here. An investigative reporter,” Nigel tells Talus when we return from the mess. “Her name is Meredith Vanderhaven. She has a history with Silas.”
“Why is she here?” Talus echoes Nigel's question. He stalks back and forth across the tiny room we've made our own, his restless energy making the room feel even smaller. His beard bristles and the top of his bald head gleams in the wan light.
“Why else would a prize-winning investigative journalist be on a Prime Earth boat in the middle of the Southern Ocean?” I go for the “playing dumb yet being helpful” answer.
“Why else?” Talus replies, not being taken in by my feigned innocence.
“I don't know,” I say with a shrug.
“But you know her.”
“I do.”
“What does she know of you? Of us?”
“Little or nothing,” I say.
“She knows Arcadia,” Nigel points out.
I shake my head. “She knows the name, but she doesn't know anything else. She is, for lack of a better word, fishing. Nigel, frankly, knows more about her than she knows about us.”
Talus doesn't like my answers; they don't fit his mission profile. I wish I could tell him otherwise, but I'm telling him the truth as far as the woman's presence goes. She's an aberration, an unexpected element that could cause all manner of trouble, and I don't like not having the answers as little as Talus does. Why is she here? Even that question has produced a palpable tension in our quartet. There is little trust among us, and we do not fit together as a cohesive team. There is something awry with this mission—we all know it—and we're jumping at the slightest provocation. There is a poison in our roots, and we fear that it will spread.
It's the water. None of the others have spent any time at sea; it unsettles them. I remember the back-breaking rhythm of rowing and the howl of enraged storms that could never quite capsize a ship, but the memory is very old and frayed.
“Where are the whalers?” Talus asks Nigel.
“A hundred nautical miles due south, but Morse isn't looking in that direction.” Nigel might not have been a sailor, but he had an unerring sense of direction. He always knew where the prey was.
Talus growls in his throat, an ursine sound that belies his size. “Show him,” he tells Nigel. “Let's get this job done and get back on land.” He had never been on a boat during his previous life, and he didn't like the way the floor squirmed beneath his feet, or the way the horizon moved—when we could see it. The weather gnaws on his psyche too. He had fallen during Napoleon's march on Moscow, and the ground had been too hard and the weather too brutal for the dead to be buried. He had lain in the snow for five months before the ground could claim him, and his bones never quite forgot the touch of winter.
“How?” I ask. “This boat is scheduled to be out here for three weeks.”
“That doesn't matter,” Talus says. “Once we're done, we'll convince Morse to return.”
There's a lot about his response that I don't like, and I'm sure my displeasure is clear on my face so I don't bother vocalizing what's on my mind.
“Who is this woman?” Talus ignores my annoyance, and gives me a hard stare that probably terrified Cossack cavalry, but which is wasted on me.
“A reporter,” I tell him again.
“What story is she chasing?”
“I have no idea.” I let some of my annoyance show in my voice. Our conversation is becoming circular.
“She wants Arcadia,” Nigel says.
“We don't know that,” I counter.
“Why do you care?” Talus snaps.
“She's useful to us,” I say. “Do you remember the E. coli scandal around Beering Foods two years ago? She broke the story for the Boston Herald. Nearly won the Pulitzer.”
“What was our involvement?”
“The Grove wanted me to give her some data. We found a way to give her a trail to its location. We weren't exposed.”
“So how does she know you then?”
I have to be careful now. “I was assigned to watch her. Until the data was understood. Until we were sure she would run with the story.”
“And you weren't exposed?”
“No, of course not.”
Talus isn't convinced.
“Look, she took a gamble when she approached our table. It's what she does. She makes people make mistakes—little tics in how they interact with her. That's how she knows she's on to something. Nigel and Phoebe blew our cover back in the mess by getting all worked up about her presence. I simply acknowledged we know who she is. It cut through a dance that could have gone on for days. She knows Arcadia, but has no sense what it means. There are a couple of places where she might have gotten the name.”
“Are you sure?”
His stare is relentless, and I don't like how his guard is up. Nigel is giving me the Evil Eye as well. Phoebe's expression is one of feigned indifference, masking a not entirely concealed dislike; but she's been giving me that look for more than two hundred years now. I've given up trying to read anything in Phoebe's face. The other two, though? They're too edgy, too paranoid, and their decisions are based on bad data.
“I'm sure,” I tell them, even though I know trying to dampen their curiosity is wasted effort.
Talus calls my bluff. “Find out what she knows,” he says to Nigel.
“She doesn't know anything,” I interrupt. “If you do anything—short of killing her outright—she'll know she's right. All that is going to do is make her dig harder.”
“I'll just kill her then,” Nigel says. “Simple solution. I like simple.”
“Simple isn't better,” I sigh. “Black and white; us versus them: it's not that simple.” It never was. When are they going to figure it out? Even in the old days, so many conflicts rose out of such myopic awareness.
Phoebe stirs at my declaration and seems about to say something.
“Explain it to us then, Silas,” Talus snaps, his patience running thin. “Use short words if you think that'll help.”
“We don't know why she is here, but we do know it's not because of us,” I say, ignoring the venom in his voice. “She was already on-board the ship at Adelaide, which means she's here for a story about Prime Earth and the whalers. How could she have known we were going to be here? The simplest answer is that she didn't know. We're a happy accident, and she's good enough at what she does that she knows how to take advantage of any opportunity that presents itself. Killing her accomplishes nothing, but if we consider the most likely reason for her to be here, she might actually be useful to us. We're short on intel for this mission as it is.” I play to their paranoia, feeding the serpents of unease we all have twisting in our guts. We shouldn't be here. This mission is wrong.
Phoebe narrows her eyes, glancing back and forth between Talus and me. I don't like the hardness of her eyes. Before this mission, I hadn't seen Phoebe in more than two decades, and we didn't part on the best of terms—our long-standing antagonism had been tenser than normal. The Grove should know better than to pair us on an isolated mission like this, and neither of us is pleased to not know why. Talus is known for being a bullheaded commander, but he gets the job done in the worst of conditions. Phoebe's a wildcard, and watching her watch us, I'm unsettled, once again, by her enigmatic independence.
Talus clenches and unclenches his fist, watching the way his flesh tightens across his bones. “Stay close to her,” he orders. His eyes flick up at me so that I know I am being given this responsibility. “Feed her enough to keep her interested. Find out what she knows.”
“And then what?” I sense he's not finished.
He shows me his teeth. “Remember your priorities, Silas.”
“Remember who is family,” Phoebe adds, though she is looking at Talus and not me when she speaks.