For The Win (40 page)

Cursing himself, hyperventilating, running, he skidded out on the deck and faceplanted into the painted, bird-streaked steel. The pain was insane. Blood poured from his nose, which he was sure he'd broken. And now the ship was rocking and pitching hard, and holy crap, look at those clouds streaking across the sky!

This was not going well. He cornered wobbily around the container stack, had a hairy, one-foot-in-the-sky moment as the huge ship rolled beneath him and his hand flailed wildly for the guardrail, then he caught himself and finished the turn, racing to his container. Once there, he scrambled along the runs that marked the course of the life-support tentacles trailing from his box, and he disconnected each one, working with shaking hands. Hugging the flexi-hose, cabling, solar cells and antenna to his chest, he spidered down the container-faces and slipped inside just as another roll sent him sprawling on his ass.

He undogged the hatches on his airtight inner sanctum and let himself in. The ship was rocking hard now, and his kitchen stuff, carelessly left lying around, was rattling back and forth. He ignored it at first, diving for his laptop and punching up the traffic-logs from the ship's network, but after a can of tuna beaned him in the cheek, raising a welt, he set the computer down and velcroed it into place, then gathered up everything that was loose and dumped it into his bolted-down chests. Then he went back to his traffic dumps, looking for anything that sounded like an official notice of his discovery.

The night-time traffic was always light, some telemetry, the flirty emails from the skeleton crew. Tonight was no exception. The file stopped dead at the point that he'd reeled in his antenna, but it probably wouldn't have lasted much longer anyway. The rain was pounding down now, a real frog-strangler, sounding like a barrage of gravel on the steel containers all around him. After a few minutes of this, he found himself wishing he'd taken the earmuffs. A few minutes later and he'd forgotten all about the earmuffs, and he was grabbing for a bag to heave up his stolen food into. The barfing and the rolling didn't stop, just kept going on and on, his stomach empty, trying to turn itself inside-out, slimy puke-smears everywhere in the tiny cabin. He tried to remember what you were supposed to do for sea-sickness. Watch the horizon, right? No horizon in the container, just pitching walls and floor and unsteady light from the battery-powered LED fixtures he'd glued to the ceiling. The shadows jumped and loomed, increasing the disorientation.

It was the most miserable he'd ever been. It seemed like it would never end. At a certain point, he found himself thinking of what it would be like to be crammed in with 10 or 20 other people, in the pitch dark, with no chemical toilet, just a bucket that might overturn on the first pitch and roll. Crammed in and locked in, the door not due to be opened for days yet, and no way to know what might greet you at the other side --

Suddenly, he didn't feel nearly so miserable. He roused himself to look at his computer a little more, but staring at the screen instantly brought back his sea-sickness. He remembered packing some ginger tablets that were supposed to be good for calming the stomach -- he'd read about them on a FAQ page for people going on their first ocean cruise -- and searching for them in the rocking box distracted him for a while. He gobbled two of them with water, noting that the tank was only half full and resolving to save every drop now that his collector was shut down.

He wasn't sure, but it seemed like the storm was letting up. He drank a little more water, checked in with his nausea -- a little better -- and got back to the screen. It was a minor miracle, but there was no report at all of him being spotted, no urgent communique back to corporate HQ about the stowaway. Maybe they hadn't noticed? Maybe they had been focused on the storm?

And there the storm was again, back and even more fierce than it had been. The rocking built, and built, and built. It wasn't sickening anymore -- it was
violent
. At one point, Wei-Dong found himself hanging on to his bed with both hands and feet, his laptop clamped between his chest and the mattress, as the entire ship rolled to port and hung there, teetering at an angle that felt nearly horizontal, before crashing back and rocking in the
other
direction. Once, twice more the ship rolled, and Wei-Dong clenched his teeth and fists and eyes and prayed to a nameless god that they wouldn't tip right over and sink to the bottom of the ocean. Container ships didn't go down very often, but they
did
go down. And not only that -- about half a percent of containers were lost at sea, gone over the side in rough water. His father always took that personally. One percent didn't sound like a lot, but, as Wei-Dong's father liked to remind him, that was 20,000 containers, enough to build a high-rise out of. And the number went up every year, as the seas got rougher and the weather got harder to predict.

All this went through Wei-Dong's head as he clung for dear life to his bolted-down bed, battered from head to toe by loose items that he'd missed when he'd packed everything into his chest. The ship groaned and strained and then there was a deep metallic grating noise that he felt all the way to his balls, and then --

-- the container
moved
.

It was a long moment and it seemed like everything had gone silent, as the sensation of sliding across the massive deck tunneled through his inner ear and straight into the fear center of his brain. In that moment, he knew that he was about to die. About to sink and sink and sink in a weightless eternity as the pressure of the ocean all around him mounted, until the container imploded and smeared him across its crumpled walls, dissipating in red streamers as the container fell to the bottom of the sea.

And then, the ship righted itself. There were tears in his eyes, and a dampness from his crotch. He'd pissed himself. The rocking slowed, slowed. Stopped. Now the ship was bobbing as normal, and Wei-Dong knew that he would live.

His hidey-hole was a wreck. His clothes, his toys, his survival gear -- all tossed to the four corners. Thankfully, the chemical toilet had stayed put, with its lid dogged down tight. That would have been
messy
. Puke, water, other spills slicked every available surface. According to his watch, it was 4AM on his personal clock. That made it, uh, 11AM ship's time, which was set to Los Angeles. If he'd done the math right, it was about 6AM in their latitude, which should be just about directly in line with New Zealand. Which meant the sun would be up, and the crew would no doubt be swarming on deck, surveying the damage and securing the remaining containers as best as they could with the ship's little crane and tractors. And
that
meant that he'd have to stay put, amid the sick and the bad air and the mess, wait until that ship's night or maybe even the next night. And he had no WiFi, either.

Shit.

He's brought along some sleeping pills, just in case, as part of his everything-and-the-kitchen-sink first-aid box. He found the sealed plastic chest still bungied to one of the wire shelving units, beside the precious two boxes of prepaid cards, still securely lashed to the frame. As he broke the blisterpack and poured a stingy sip of water into his tin cup, he had a moment's pause: what if they discovered his container while he was drugged senseless?

Well, what if they discovered it while he was wide awake? It's not like he could
run away
.

What an idiot he was.

He ate the pills, then set about cleaning up his place as best as he could, using old t-shirts as rags. He flipped over the mattress to expose the unpissed-upon side, and wondered when the pills would take effect. And then he found that he was too tired to do another thing except for lying down with his cheek on the bare mattress and falling into a deep and dreamless sleep.

The pills were supposed to be a "non-drowsy" formula, but he woke feeling like his head was wrapped in foam rubber. Maybe that was the near-death experience. It was now the middle of ship's night, and real night. Theoretically, it would be dark outside, and he could sneak out, survey the damage, maybe rig up his WiFi antenna and find out whether he was about to be arrested when they made port. But when he climbed gingerly out of his inner box and tried to open the door of his container, he discovered that it had been wedged shut. Not just sticky, or bent at the hinge, but properly jammed up against the next container, with several tons of cargo on the other side of the door for him to muscle out of the way. Or not.

He sat down. He had his headlamp on, as the inside of the container was dark as the inside of a can of Coke. It splashed crazy shadows on the walls, the stack of batteries, (he praised his own foresight at using triple layers of steel strapping to keep them in place) the hatch leading to his inner sanctum.

By his reckoning, they were only three days out of Shenzhen, plus or minus whatever course-corrections they'd have to make now that the storm had passed. Theoretically, he could make it. He had the water, the food, the electricity, provided that he rationed all three. But the Webblies would be expecting him to check in before then, and the boredom would drive him loopy.

He thought about trying to saw through the steel container. It was possible -- the container-converter message boards were full of talk about what it took to cut up a container and use it for other purposes. But nothing in his toolkit could manage it. The closest he could come would be to drill a hole in the skin with his cordless drill. He'd used it to assemble his nest, he had a couple spare boxes of high-speed bits in his toolchest. His biggest bit, a small circular saw, would punch a hole as big as his thumb, but only after he'd drilled a guide-hole through the steel. 14 gauge steel, several times thicker than the support-struts he'd drilled out when doing his interior work.

It would make an unholy racket, but he was on the cargo deck, well away from the deckhouse. Assuming no one was patrolling the deck, there was no way he'd be heard over the sound of the sea and the rumble of the diesels. He told himself that it was worth the risk of discovery, since getting a hole would mean getting an antenna out, and therefore getting onto the network and finding out whether he'd be safe once they got to China.

No time like the present. He found the toolchest, inside a bigger, bolted-down box, and recovered the drill. He had a spare charger for it, with an inverter that would run off the battery stack, and he plugged it in and got it charging. He'd need a lot of batteries to get through the ceiling.

Several hours later, he realized that the ceiling might have been a mistake. His shoulders, arms, and chest all burned and ached. He found himself taking more and more frequent breaks, windmilling his arms, but the ache wouldn't subside. His ears hurt too, from the echoey whining racket of the drill, a hundred nightmares of the dentist's chair. He kept an eye on his watch, telling himself he'd just work until the morning shift came on duty, to reduce the risk that the sound would be heard. But it was still an hour away from shift change when the battery on his drill died, and he discovered that the last time he'd switched batteries, he'd neglected to push the dead one all the way into the charger, and now both his batteries were dead.

That was as good an excuse as any to stop. He fingered the dent he'd made in the sheet steel through all his hours of drilling. His fingertip probed it, but barely seemed to sink in at all. He detached a chair from its anchors and dragged it over, stood on it, and put an eye to it, and saw a pinprick of dirty grey light, the first light of dawn, glimmering at the bottom of his drill-hole.

Sleep did not help his arms. If anything, it just made them worse. It took him five minutes just to get to the point where he could lift his arms over his face, working them back and forth. He had a little pot of Tiger Balm, the red, smelly Chinese muscle rub, in his first-aid box, and he worked it into his arms, shoulders, chest and neck, thinking, as he did,
This stuff isn't doing anything
. A few minutes later, a new burning spread across his skin, a fiery, minty feeling, hot and cold at the same time. It was alarming at first, but a few seconds later, it was
incredible
, like his muscles were all letting go of their tension at once. He took up his drill, checked his watch -- middle of the first shift, but screw it, the engines were groaning, no one would hear it -- and went to work.

He punched through five minutes later. Five minutes! He'd been so close! He put his eye to the hole again, saw sky, clouds, the shadows of other containers nearby. His wireless antenna awaited. It had a big heavy magnetic base, powerful rare-earth magnets that he'd used to attach it to its earlier spot. They'd worked so well that he'd had to plant both feet on either side of it and heave, like he was pulling up a stubborn carrot. Now he didn't need the base, just the willowy wand of the antenna itself. He disassembled the antenna, reattached it to the bare wire-ends, and then gently, gingerly, fed it through his dime-sized hole.

He had a moment's pause as he fed it up, picturing it sticking up among the even, smooth surfaces of the container-tops, as obvious as a boner at the chalkboard, but he'd been drilling for so long, it seemed crazy to stop now. A voice in his head told him that getting caught was even crazier, but he shut that voice up by telling it to shut up, since getting information on the ship's status would be vital to completing his mission. And then the antenna was up.

He grabbed his laptop and logged into the network and began snaffling up traffic. He could watch it in realtime -- his sniffer would helpfully group intercepted emails, clicks, pages, search terms and IMs into their own reporting panels -- but that was just frustrating, like watching a progress bar creep across the screen.

Instead he went inside his sanctum and made himself a cup of instant ramen noodles, using a little more of his precious electricity and water, and then opened up a can of green tea with soymilk to wash it down. He ate as slowly as he could, trying to savor every bite and tell his stomach that food was OK, despite the rock and roll of the past day. During the meal, he heard footsteps near his container, the grumble of heavy machinery working at the containers, and his mouth went dry at the thought of his antenna sticking up there.