‘They are under orders from their new Captain. You, on the other hand, are guilty of mutiny!’
‘Guilty? What, no court martial? And you have replaced me as Captain on what authority?’
‘Orders from our new…’
‘Owners! Son, the closest thing the Navy has to an owner is His Majesty the King. Did he tell you to mutiny?’
‘Like it or not old man, things change. The government, our actual employers, have sold us…’
‘Then the government has failed! We are the Royal Navy, we serve, we defend the people of the United Kingdom of Great Britain. Our only consideration is the best interests of those people. Those interests will not be served as the maritime enforcement arm of a rapacious multinational company, responsible for a number of atrocities and reintroducing indentured servitude to the civilised world.’
‘So what? We make up our own orders, become little more than pirates guided by Captain Harper’s morals? The same morals you had, presumably, when as the ranking weapons officer on board the Anguish you fired on your own capital city?’ Stevens demanded.
Harper closed his eyes for a moment. He remembered Battersea Power Station backlit by flames, but he pushed it down. He couldn’t afford to dwell on that now, to falter.
‘Stevens, we’re British. We ruled the sea. We have a proud history of piracy.’ There were a few chuckles from around the bridge. ‘And the most important thing any officer possesses is a conscience. The world knows full well of the horrors of military men forgetting that. You know that this order is wrong. You know that working for CELL is wrong. You know that killing Lieutenant Commander Swanson and Sergeant Martin was wrong. And you know you’re not doing this out of any sense of duty. You’re doing this because you know that you will be rewarded for it.’
Harper had noticed that the majority of the sailors had lowered their weapons now. Stevens was still aiming his pistol at Harper, however.
‘I’m not an officer anymore, sir,’ he all but spat. ‘I’m an executive.’ He started to squeeze the trigger. Then the gun wasn’t there anymore, and neither was his hand. There was only a bleeding stump. Stevens looked at his wrist in horror. Dane flickered into view holding a large and very sharp knife with a bloody blade.
‘Get that corporate piece of shit off my ship,’ Harper ordered. Dane thought about refusing — strictly speaking Harper wasn’t in his chain of command — but he grabbed the now howling Stevens and started dragging him off the bridge.
Talpur and the rest of the marines poured into the bridge and started removing weapons from the sailors.
‘Lieutenant, can you please let the rest of the men out of their quarters?’ Talpur nodded and took six of the marines with her, leaving the rest to secure the bridge and finish disarming the sailors who had been watching the other entrances.
‘Any of you who do not wish to follow my orders, please leave the bridge now.’ A number of ratings and officers left their stations, but not so many that the ship wouldn’t be able to function. ‘Navigation, set a course for the Atlantic by the most expeditious route possible that doesn’t involve going past Manhattan. Engineering, keep the cloak up. Helm, as soon as we are in open water I want fifty knots out of her.’ He was giving these orders as he walked across to weapons, glancing at his watch. They had little time left.
The commander of the weapons section was standing up as Harper arrived at his station.
‘Lieutenant Chalmers?’ Harper asked.
‘I’m sorry, sir,’ Chalmers said. He wouldn’t meet his Captain’s eye.
‘Get off my bridge,’ Harper ordered, disappointed. He turned to the second in command of the section. The petty officer had not moved. He handed the man the laminated map. ‘You have ten minutes to plot firing solutions for those co-ordinates. Can you do that, Bridges?’
‘Yes sir.’
‘No, no, please god no!’ Stevens begged as Dane dragged him through the corridors of the ship. Dane stopped and turned to the Commander.
‘Seriously, you have to come to terms with this. This is no good for you. This is the fulfilment of your dharma, it’s a shitty dharma for sure, but you need to deal. This,’ he pointed at the sobbing man. ‘This is no good, there’s no dignity here for either of us.’
Stevens just gaped at him and then started crying and begging again. Dane sighed and resumed hauling the Commander through the ship.
Dane dragged Stevens up onto deck just as the hatches to the vertical launch systems were opened, revealing the warheads of the twenty-four Perseus cruise missiles.
‘There’s a beauty in the focused purpose of a weapon like that,’ Dane said. He kept a tight grip on Stevens as he watched the Bronx riverside go by. He watched it until the sight of all the ghosts got to him and he had to look away.
‘Please, please, I can tell you something?’ Stevens begged.
Dane turned to look at him.
‘Think of something good to say, man,’ Dane said.
‘They knew that Harper might be problematic and they were worried about him absconding with a ship that has the Robin Hood’s stealth capabilities. They knew I would be loyal…’
‘Harper’s loyal. You can be bought.’
‘They gave me a transponder,’ Stevens told him.
The suit was picking up lots of strange atmospheric readings, as if the air was ionising. They know where we are, Dane thought. He looked up. The clouds. They looked funny. Then they caught fire. He jumped. Everything became light and heat.
Dane jumped through steam and hit the molten riverbed of the East River. Then the water came back. He realised he had been screaming. The armour on his back, made from nearly indestructible alloys, had blistered and then turned molten and then fused with his flesh. All the times he’d fallen, been shot, stabbed, beaten, battered, run over. All the times that it had felt like he had died, none of it compared to this. This was pain in its purest form. Pain so extreme that it was an abstract. He was only conscious because of the suit’s advanced medical systems. No human had ever experienced this degree of pain before. Then, mercifully, he died.
The suit forced him back to life minutes later. The water all around him was boiling from the heat of the armour. He died again.
The suit had to block signals from a lot of his nerve endings before it could shock the soldier back to life with the built-in defibrillator. Dane came to again on the side of the river, amongst the ghosts. He did some more screaming but managed to get it under control. He lay in the mud, making it steam. He looked back upstream. The East River was moving quickly, trying to replace the gap where a significant part of the river had just been vaporised. Plumes of steam were still shooting high into the sky. The suit was repairing itself, separating away from Dane’s flesh and doing its best to return to a functional state.
The thing was they had missed, he thought, when he could think like a human again. The Robin Hood was gone, certainly. More ghosts. But had it been a direct hit he would never have survived, armour or not.
In the distance, the suit’s enhanced hearing brought him the sound of rapid large-calibre weapons fire. New York, he thought, I have to get to New York.
The Goat
FUBAR. Clusterfuck. There were so many good ways to describe what had just happened to them, Chino thought. The Brits, the fucking Brits, had let them down. Left them badly blowing in the wind. It had been foolish to trust them.