Dunsmore's attitude annoyed the captain. The man was a bigot. He didn't like blacks, he didn't like Asians, and he didn't like the third-world hands who made up the majority of the deck force on board working ships. As the ship's executive officer, Dunsmore was responsible for the thirty men of the Sandpiper's crew — and a good three-quarters of them were Pakistani, Malay, or Filipino. Dunsmore was an elitist of the worst type, a snob and a racist who liked to boast that an ancestor of his had been in the court of the first Queen Elizabeth.
It must, Jorgenson thought wryly, be something of a comedown for Dunsmore, having to work with the riffraff like that.
Jorgenson didn't care what the man thought, so long as he did his job. He was a competent first officer, and that was all that mattered.
PNTL was a British company, the Pacific Sandpiper a British-flagged ship. Their chief client and business partner, however, was Japan. Since 1995, Japan had been shipping radioactive wastes to France and England for reprocessing. The high-level radioactive waste, or HLW, belonged to ten Japanese utility companies using nuclear plants to produce electricity. The waste was processed and vitrified at the Sellafield reactor complex in England, north of Barrow, then returned to Japan for disposal. The last shipment from France had been completed in 2007; shipments from England would be continuing through 2016.
Since 1999, a new twist had been added, when PNTL had begun transporting used fuel rods from Japanese reactors to Sellafield, where useable plutonium was extracted from the waste and mixed with depleted uranium into fresh fuel elements, called MOX. Japan had some fifty-three reactors online that could use these fuel elements, and more were being built. They were building a new processing plant at Rokkasho-mura, in northern Honshu, but there'd been delays. Until that plant was up and running, Japan would rely on Europe for its supply of nuclear fuel.
Pacific Sandpiper and her sisters had been custom-built for transporting radioactive waste halfway around the world, and they'd been very well designed for that task, and that task alone. They'd been called the safest vessels on the seas, and with good reason. With double-hull construction, double collision bulkheads, and redundant power and propulsion systems, she was designed to be as close to unsinkable as a ship could be. She was safe from attack, too. Hidden away inside her superstructure were three 30mm cannons, the first time since World War II that merchant ships had actually been armed. The guns were backed by thirty ex-military British AEF police on permanent assignment to PNTL and by the Sandpiper's two escorts, the Campbeltown, which would escort them out of European waters, and the Ishikari, which would accompany them all the way to Japan.
Jorgenson puffed his pipe alight, discarded the match, and raised his binoculars for a closer look at the Ishikari ahead, then looked to starboard and studied the Campbeltown for a moment. As they left the Irish Sea for the Atlantic Ocean proper, the water grew swiftly rougher, and both escorts were making rather heavy work of it.
Yes, the crews on board the Piper's escorts were certainly in for a rough ride.
Jerry Esterhausen glowered at the monitor screen, where a beautiful woman's face stared back with a blank-faced lack of emotion. "You electronic bitchl" he said.
"You do know how to sweet-talk a girl," Sandy Markham said.
"She's determined not to be cooperative this morning," Esterhausen said. He pushed his glasses higher up at the bridge of his nose, then began typing furiously at the keyboard in front of him. "I swear sometimes she has a mind of her own."
"Danger, Will Robinson!" Markham said, putting an edge to her voice as she imitated a famous robot from American TV. "Danger! Danger!"
"Yeah, right," Esterhausen said, still typing. He'd only heard that lame old joke a few dozen times in the past year, and it was no funnier now than it had been when he'd started. "Believe me, there'll be plenty of danger for Rosie if she doesn't behave herself."
"Rosie" was the CyberAge Corporation's latest commercial product, a robot that could play blackjack and several other card games. Named for another American TV robot, Rosie looked nothing like her cartoon namesake. She was bolted to the deck, for one thing, a slender, upright pylon capped by a moveable TV monitor that displayed her face and a small video camera. She had broad shoulders supporting a pair of spidery arms ending in finely articulated mechanical hands. Those hands, sold by the Shadow Robot Company in London, possessed a touch delicate enough to handle a wineglass, pick up a feather — or deal playing cards from a deck.
At least, she could deal cards when she was properly working.
CyberAge was an American company, located in Paterson, New Jersey, and Esterhausen was one of their service representatives. Royal Sky Line had purchased one of CyberAge's half-million-dollar machines for the Atlantis Queen's Poseidon Casino, a novelty item to complement the cruise ship's ultra-modern decor. It was a dream assignment, really… a free two-week cruise to the Eastern Mediterranean on board a luxury liner, and all he had to do was make sure Rosie was functioning properly.
Well, she had been working when she'd left the shop… and she'd been working okay after she'd been installed in the ship's casino last week. But an hour ago he'd come down to run some test programs through the infernal contraption and she'd locked up hard. Her debut was supposed to be tonight, and he'd promised Sandy Markham, the Queen's Entertainment Director, that Rosie would be up and dealing by 6:00 p. M.
He hit enter, and Rosie's arms swung protectively across what would have been her breasts if she'd had them. "Please, sir!" she said in a sultry, come-hither voice. "You're making me blush!"
Markham burst out laughing. "Good heavens! What are you doing to her, Jerry?"
"Trying to find out why it's hanging up." He typed in another command.
"Please, sir! You're making me blush!"
"That," Markham said, still giggling, "is funny as hell!"
Esterhausen ignored her and kept working. His boss had promised dire consequences if Rosie screwed up, and Esterhausen was painfully aware that he and his company's card-playing robot were both on display. If Rosie didn't perform as promised — and by showtime tonight — they might both find themselves out of a job.
"Please, sir! You're making me blush!"
Several other ship employees had heard the exchange and were gathering around now — one of the bartenders, a couple of janitorial types sweeping the deck, and a dark, Arabic-looking man with the badge that said he was a Ship's Security officer. "Why does it keep saying that?" the security officer asked.
Esterhauser sighed. "It's designed to banter with the customers," he said. "The program's smart enough to identify if someone is male or female — it reads the tonal qualities of your voice, actually — and to respond to a few hundred different words, phrases, and movements we've programmed into its operating system. It says that in response to four or five different risque comments it might hear, or if a man tries to touch its… its chest. Right at the moment, though, it's stuck in a loop, and I can't… Hang on. Wait just a sec… "
He typed in two more lines of code and hit enter. Rosie's arms came down to the ready position, hands slightly flexed just above the tabletop before her. "Awaiting input," she said in her sexiest voice.
"I'll just bet you are, girl," Markham said, and she laughed again.
"That's obscene," the security officer said, though whether he was referring to Rosie or to Markham's bawdy comment Esterhausen couldn't tell. The man shook his head as he walked off.
Esterhausen typed in "Run Program 1" and hit enter. The hands flexed, stretched in an eerily human way, then picked up a deck of cards nearby. The hands began moving, shuffling the cards too fast for the eye to follow. "That's more like it," Esterhausen said.