And so they advanced, some like aircraft carriers, others like tall white towers. Trussed up and tied, guided by the tugs and mini-subs and pulled forward by underwater winches, they made stately procession up the fiord. Jetskiers whizzed around them checking their progress.
The air resounded with celebratory music — today it was Handel’s The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba — piped through speakers surrounding the fiord. ‘Bloody Bazza.’ Drake shook his head admiringly.
The sun came out. All of a sudden the fleet of bergs flashed and sparkled and glowed, radiating shimmering colours: delicate pink, luminous pounamu green, indigo blue, deep mauve.
The bergs filled the morning sky with rainbows.
Drake turned back to Colby. ‘And what about your name?’ he asked.
She looked at him sharply. ‘It’s not my real name, of course. In civvy street I had another life and another identity.’
Ah yes, Drake thought, civvy street. History was now marked, not by BC and AD but, rather, BB and AB: Before and After the Big Burn. BB many at the consortium had different names, simpler names, to go with their simpler lives. But AB, orphaned, they had chosen to hide behind new identities, had taken up new names, the more fanciful the better — anything to escape the memories of the world before.
Something must have got into Colby today; she opened up. ‘You won’t believe it,’ she continued, ‘but I was living in South Africa at the time. I went to college in New Johannesburg. I met a guy in the air force. He was in navigation but, man oh man, he should have been a Maori like you ’cause he couldn’t hold a course even when the stars were out. So I took over and found I was good at it.’
‘You married him, didn’t you?’
Colby immediately shut down. ‘You’re getting a bit up close and personal, aren’t you?’
In a flurry of noise Queequeeg and the pilots who had flown with him on the morning shift entered the cafeteria.
Queequeeg began kicking the furniture around. ‘I almost ditched out there,’ he said. ‘We’re flying death traps, tin cans with rotors. Can’t you talk to the consortium, Drake, and get some real flying machines? Take it up with Kuia? I got into a dogfight out there with the Red Baron …’
‘Gonzalez?’ Drake asked, naming their main rival. He and Gonzalez had had a number of major battles as each tried to plant their flag of ownership on a berg, shooting down each other’s flags mid-sky with lasers before they could spear the ice.
‘Yeah,’ Queequeeg nodded his head, ‘but my engine started smokin’ and I had to hightail it out of there with my tail between my legs. Luckily, though, I’d bagged a beauty but I tell ya, if we want to cut it with the competition we gotta have modern choppers and not the second-hand stuff that the consortium buys from Japan.’
Drake had to admit that the base’s fleet was pretty dismal. But it was better than most: since the Big Burn, the consortium had purchased anything that flew, from gas-guzzling jet aircraft to planes with, ye Gods, rotors and propellers. Similarly, it had ransacked the world for a suitable fleet of ships and mini-subs and converted them to waterpower, either in its jetted form or as steam.
Welcome to the retro world of the future.
‘Who else did you see out there in iceberg alley?’ Drake asked. The bergs from Antarctica came up a corridor to the east of the undersea Campbell Plateau, northward past Macquarie Island, squeezing between Auckland Island and Campbell Island and along the east coast of the South Island.
‘Hard to say,’ said Queequeeg. ‘Visibility was low, with the cloud cover down to sea level, so we were wave hopping for most of the time. Apart from Gonzalez, the Germans were operating from their carrier fleet, the Chinese off Bounty Island, and the usual assortment of cowboys sniping at the smaller stuff from their bases on Stewart Island.’
Drake realised that Queequeeg had hesitated. ‘I saw something else out there,’ he continued. His eyes glowed and his voice became hushed with awe. ‘I saw Moby Dick.’
‘There she breaches! There she breaches!’ was the cry, as in his immeasurable bravadoes the White Whale tossed himself salmon-like to Heaven. So suddenly seen in the blue plain of the sea, and relieved against the still bluer margin of the sky, the spray that he raised, for the moment, intolerably glittered and glared like a glacier; and stood there gradually fading and fading away from its first sparkling intensity, to the dim mistiness of an advancing shower in a vale.
At Queequeeg’s words, Drake was drenched with a fearful sweat. His hand went to his shoulder and the disfiguring scars and thick welts from his long ago encounter with the giant berg.
In those days, new to the squadron, he had scoffed at the existence of such a creation, something that defied all logic. But he understood the impulse to imagine such an entity into the world: it was only to be expected that the airmen would create a myth, not of a great white whale but of an icy counterpart which roamed the Antarctic Ocean, malevolent, dedicated only to the destruction of man.
The legend told of a huge iceberg that had existed since antediluvian times, created in the womb of Antarctica and birthed from a glacier canal to fall, slippery, into the sea. Millions of years later, cruelly sculpted by wind and sea, it had become an unholy nemesis in the shape of a whale.
‘Watch yourself, young feller,’ Bazza had warned Drake when he laughed at the story. ‘Moby Dick can hear you challenging him. He’ll be after you now. And if he gets you in his death roll, you’re a goner.’
It was not long after this that Drake had his first encounter with Moby Dick. Young Anders Yates had been his harpoonist in those days, a boy with down on his chubby cheeks, eager to prove himself in the company of older men; he liked to call Drake ‘Captain’.
One clouded dawn, the base’s klaxon began to wail and all the pilots scrambled for their choppers. Rangi, the Tangaroa Consortium’s own satellite positioned above Antarctica, had sent pictures back of bergs which it had been monitoring since they broke away from the Ross Shelf. Huge monsters, some more than eighty kilometres long, they had been gradually moving north with the Humboldt Stream. Now, having broken into smaller bergs, a large cluster of them had arrived at the borders of the FIZ.
The squadron leader at the time was Crozier Dalrymple, and Drake had already been assigned an ancient chopper that he immediately dubbed Pequod. The wind was blowing hard and squally, and the squadron was already at its maximum fuel range when, suddenly, ahead, were the bergs, dazzling in the sunlight.
Crozier Dalrymple radioed, ‘They’re the right size, so take your pick, boys.’
They were soon at it, flagging the catch to their hearts’ delight.
‘Harpoon away!’ cried Anders Yates as he sent the standard pennant of ownership whizzing down to the berg and then, with his harpoon, took the shot. Rocket-assisted, the harpoon sizzled through the air and through the berg’s skin.
Drake watched the computer as it read out the harpoon’s course through the berg. ‘Thirty, sixty, ninety …’ The harpoon zigzagged slightly as it tried to find the berg’s gravitational centre, then — there! — on target.
‘Got it, Captain!’ yelled Anders as he guided the harpoon through the rest of the berg to three hundred and sixty metres. ‘We’re through,’ he confirmed, as he tapped the keyboard and sent horizontal stabilisers snaking along the bottom of the berg.