Earth Thirst (The Arcadian Conflict) - By Mark Teppo Page 0,5

us, holding position in a half-arc with the two harpoon boats positioned at either end. We take a single Zodiac and head west, our rubber boat rising and falling across the restless sea. We mean to approach them from the south. This route will take an extra half-hour—time we don't really have, but it is a calculated risk.

I'm not driving the boat, nor am I spotting, which means I get to bail. The rubber shield stretched across the front of the boat disperses the brunt of the spray from the ocean, but a lot of it still manages to get in the boat, and I spend most of my time hunched over in several inches of water, working the manual pump. The water is cold and tenacious, undeterred by the dry suits we are wearing; by the time we reach the research vessel, I've started to lose feeling in my toes. As Nigel cuts the engine of the Zodiac, and we glide the short distance remaining between us and the factory ship, I let myself think of the warm embrace of Mother for a moment. How good it would feel to be buried in her humus, surrounded by that warmth—that familiar security.

But then the Zodiac bumps against the ugly steel plates of the research boat, and I'm wrenched back to the present, to the cold semi-darkness of the short night on the Southern Ocean. The tight embrace of the dry suits and Gore-Tex balaclavas isn't the same thing. Nigel eschews the headgear entirely, wearing a black stocking cap instead, and I can't say I blame him. Being in the tight grip of synthetic fabrics can be too constricting. It makes you clumsy.

Phoebe goes first, the metal spikes in her gloves and boots giving her enough purchase to scale the side of the boat. The nylon line spools out in her wake, wiggling back and forth with the motion of her body as she climbs. With the sun below the horizon, we can keep our optic protection low; it is easy to follow her progress—a black glob of ink against the dull metal of the boat. She reaches the top, disappears, and then a few seconds later, the rope snaps tight.

All clear.

I go next, as Nigel secures the Zodiac to the hull with a pair of mag-clamps. He follows after and, just like that, we're on board the research ship.

We all have the same map memorized, and with Phoebe on point, we move quickly across the rain-slick deck. All our individual paranoia is set aside as soon as we climb aboard the boat. We've done this drill too many times over our lengthy lives. We know our jobs.

The meat-processing equipment is in place, and I give it a cursory glance at first, but then there is something that nags me about the general disarray and decrepitude of the hooks and blades. It hasn't been used. Even if they haven't been catching whales for the meat, they'd still need to process them for the research. And there are large barrels with hose-mounted assemblies bolted to the deck that look like recent additions. A cleansing system? It doesn't make sense. Why wouldn't they just use sea water pumps?

“Silas—” Nigel and Phoebe are already inside the central stack. She gestures at me to stop dawdling, and I tear myself away from the scattered equipment on deck. I join them, and we slip down two levels and then through a cluster of tight hatches.

The boat creaks around us, and the sound of the engines are a dull throb, but there is no other sound. It's as if we are ghosts on a ghost ship. I fall behind the other two, growing more and more suspicious of the emptiness of the boat. With modern equipment, you could pilot a boat this size with a crew of six, but that sort of skeleton crew was normally reserved for massive shipping boats, not whalers who were ostensibly on a fishing expedition. If you caught a whale, you'd need at least twenty able bodies to run the processors; you could do it with less, but the risk to the crew was exponentially more dangerous than the savings in labor. And if this was supposed to be a research boat, wouldn't there be a scientific crew?

So where is everyone?

I pause at the next hatch. The lining is thicker than I'd expect it to be on a boat like this, even if it had been retrofitted into a high-tech floating bio-pharmaceutical