Leopard Dreaming (6 page)

Through two more bulkhead doors and then veering into a parallel corridor, he took her further forward than she’d ever been before. At least, she assumed it was forward. Hard to tell now that the sub was silent and motionless, but when she’d been emptied out of the torpedo so unceremoniously, she’d noticed greasy boot prints on the floor at the other end, clearly suggesting regular traffic from an engine room. So assuming the engines were in the tail, she guessed he must be taking her ahead to the command centre. Opposite direction.

She passed two ladders leading down and one up, and noticed bunks slotted high and low along the walls, shelving crewmen like spare parts in the oddest nooks and crevices. Others stacked three high in a section that seemed more obviously crew quarters, but all too short or too narrow to be comfortable.

A toy rabbit on the floor looked bizarrely out of place. A baby’s rattle on a bunk made her think she’d
imagined it. Hallucinations; a common side effect of oxygen deprivation.

In the next section metal doors lined each side of the corridor like an office block squeezed down to fit inside the hull. Two doors slid open to reveal a long galley, in which she passed an old Singaporean woman, a boy barely knee-high who blinked his wide brown eyes at her, and two young mothers bearing babies on their backs. Working together and humming happily, the two young women chopped an assortment of herbs and stirred a set of steaming pots on a stove.

As Maddy passed them by, dismayed that they seemed determined not to notice her, they kept busy making some kind of spicy smelling broth, while the older woman fed white powder and a green sample from the broth into a small bench press that was dropping pellets out the other side into grey tins on a makeshift conveyor belt.

If she didn’t suspect something far worse, she would have guessed they’d been making breath mints.

‘Old family recipe,’ Kurst said. ‘You’ll get a taste to take your pain, if you behave.’

He shoved Maddy squarely between the shoulders, forcing her off balance again, and out through the far end of the galley.

Ahead she saw the hall open into a large room buzzing with crewmen, but Kurst brought her to an abrupt halt only halfway down the grey corridor. He knocked twice on a door labelled with his own name and rank, and when it opened from the inside he hefted her over his shoulder.

Carrying her into the modest cabin, he dumped her into a warm metallic chair at a small desk with a thin Braille manuscript — and greeted Colonel Kitching in a language she’d never heard before. It sounded like a pidgin-mix of Japanese, Chinese and Korean. One
accent Australian, the other Russian, making the whole of their exchange incomprehensible.

On the wall between them she saw a small sink, and above it a grubby mirror with her sad reflection staring back at her. Bedraggled wet hair clung limply around her face when her pert little locks usually spiked sharply to attention; quirky yet elegant, but now soaked with sweat as well as the soapy wash-down. Electric blue highlights bled down her neck into her filthy uniform.

Her image blurred, withered and aged, as it always did whenever Freddie tampered with her future. She saw herself on crutches, in a wheelchair and lying flat on a hospital gurney, each time with a hole in her throat as if shot through with an invisible spear. Her blood burst up through the spurting ruptures, and she saw herself dying — until the ripples settled enough for her to see her normal reflection, with Freddie sitting, terrified, behind her.

She turned as best she could, and found him huddled on a crumpled bunk in the corner.

Freddie stared into the mirror as if he’d witnessed each of those possible futures. Only three amongst the infinite alternatives, so it never frightened her as much as it did him. It only worried her how much he blamed himself.

Confined for the moment in a fancy white leather straitjacket with gold buckles, he looked comfortable enough, and yet more miserable than ever.

Sobbing, he turned aside and resumed gnawing at a worn patch in the leather shoulder like a trapped dingo trying to chew off its leg to get free.

She saw a thick stream of blood coming from his ear and lunged to check it.

‘Hold it,’ Kitching said, catching her by the hip of her skirt. He replanted her at the desk and smiled grimly. ‘We have paperwork.’

‘Bastards!’ she spat defiantly. ‘What have you done to him?’

Head wounds often bled profusely but at least now she’d caught a better glimpse of his scratches and could reassure herself the wounds were mostly superficial.

‘He did that himself,’ Kitching said. ‘If it wasn’t for the jacket, he’d have torn off his ears as well … Dismissed, Commander, and thanks for permitting us the luxury of your cabin for business. I’ll arrange fresh sheets so you’ll have somewhere clean to sleep at the end of your shift.’

‘You need guards, sir?’ Kurst asked, switching back to his own style of English.

‘Only to escort our guest back to her quarters if she fails to oblige us.’

‘Quarters?’ Maddy spat in disgust. ‘That missile isn’t even a jail!’

Kurst grinned at her, saluted the colonel, and excused himself, quietly closing the door behind him.

‘Why does he salute you?’ she asked, incurably curious about human psychology and determined to know as much as possible about her captors so she could use it against them. ‘Haven’t you been stripped of rank by now at a court martial?’

‘Not officially, yet. And in this force, we salute the man, not the rank or uniform.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Traditionally, it’s the rank that’s recognised as worthy of a salute, not the value of the man inside the uniform. But here, every man is considered valuable. That’s why you’ll often see me saluting my men first, as opposed to just returning the gesture.’

‘Sounds like a recipe for mutiny to me. If all your sea dogs are the same, how do you get mongrels like Commander Kurst to respect your chain of command?’

‘You said the word yourself, Matron. Respect. That, and a common goal.’

She forced herself to smile. ‘Kurst respects nothing. That’s not a professional opinion, it’s a statement of fact. If I were you, I’d watch my back.’

‘Every dog needs a master.’ Kitching propped himself against the wall by the mirror. ‘Do you wish to play another mind game? Or shall we be civilised?’

‘Oh, you mean you haven’t been?’ She tipped her head back a little to prevent a thickening trickle of blood from trailing into her eye.

‘Call it role reversal. Not so different to what you dish out at the asylum.’

‘Sanctuary!’ she argued. ‘And how would you know anything about it? All the annual updates we sent for Freddie’s next of kin came back to us unopened.’

‘Updates?’ Kitching laughed. ‘Look at him! He’s as crazy as the day I turned him in.’

Sanchez chose not to argue, determined not to be the one to reveal details of Freddie’s secret. She’d only discovered it recently herself, but she did glance at him, wishing she could gather him aside and cuddle him until he stopped sobbing.

‘Relax, Matron.’ Kitching flicked open a knife from his chest pocket, spun her chair around and sliced the cord from her arms. ‘I know what’s going on. My surveillance assets are second to none.’ He withdrew a small grey tin from his pocket and dropped it onto the Braille manuscript in front of her on the desk. ‘Would you care for a breath mint before we begin?’

She recognised the tin as one from the conveyor belt, and shied away. ‘Why?’ she gasped, and blew a mouthful of air his way. ‘Is my halitosis getting to you?’

‘I apologise for the conditions, Matron. I can assure you that we all suffer to some degree down here. You may use the spare toothbrush from my own kit, if you prefer. It’s just there on the sink.’

She glanced at the sealed bag suspiciously. ‘Did you lace it with any powder or green broth from the kitchen?’

He nodded, amused. ‘Only with your best interests in mind. It’s an effective painkiller. An ancient recipe, that translates roughly as a floater.’

‘I’ll pass.’

‘Are you sure? I’ve tried it myself. It’s every bit as effective as some of the other advanced battlefield medi-tech I’ve been selling over the years, and the only side effect is usually a lasting benefit. I would have offered you one directly, but now with your attitude I think I’d much rather hear you beg.’

‘In your dreams.’ She laughed. ‘You mentioned surveillance, and I’m pretty sure you’d much rather brag about that, Colonel.’

He scowled, snatching up the floaters into his pocket, and slapping down a set of large photos from a nearby shelf. All depicted her with the front hood of her Volkswagen open at the Drift Inn marina, talking to Freddie. All night shots, coloured green or red; three aerial, as if zoomed down from satellite, and two from sea level with range and elevation marks overlaid as if taken through the eye of a periscope offshore. ‘That’s you talking to an allegedly deaf man.’
I have the audio too,
he added in sign language,
but it’s the absence of this form of communication that speaks loudest.

Sanchez clamped her eyes shut, feeling like an idiot. Behind her, Freddie’s sobs escalated to wailing, as if he feared the coming conversation. She’d only signed to him on the pier a few times to help emphasise her frustration at finding him stowed away in her car. Deaf he certainly was, in the normal sense of the word — just as Mira was blind — yet his ability to hear the future enabled him to hear every word she’d been about to say. Albeit out of sync with her lips, which he could also read in real time, but it had never occurred to her that someone else might be watching them.

Be brave,
she mouthed to him.
We have to surface some time.

Kitching slapped her, forcing her attention back to him, while a kick to the bunk also silenced Freddie momentarily.

‘Nothing to say?’ Kitching goaded her.

Sanchez straightened herself and rubbed the circulation back into her hands. ‘I’m impressed,’ she conceded. ‘Sign language is a rare skill in the general populace.’

‘You forget I spent the first sixteen years of my life with him. And sign language for covert ops isn’t so different. So let’s skip all the whys and wherefores, shall we? While you’ve been lazing about the missile silos all week, we’ve been out working. Getting properly reacquainted. Thanks for the loan of your phone, by the way.’ He tossed it back to her in pieces, minus the battery and sim card. ‘It came in quite handy yesterday morning.’

Sanchez arched a brow at him, hoping she didn’t look as frightened as she felt. ‘For what purpose?’

‘Party invitation. Had to send it myself, since your second in charge only invited police.’ He looked genuinely disappointed. ‘Steffi Nagle must really want your job full-time. Otherwise, if she wanted you found, she would have sent for Mira Chambers.’

‘Mira is dead, will be dead, should be dead,’ Freddie sobbed over and over. ‘Isn’t, wasn’t, could have been and will be again, finally, forever.’

‘Mira is dead,’ Maddy said, wishing she could go to him. ‘At least as far as my staff know. She didn’t last a day on the outside, thanks to you, Colonel — which is precisely why I left Serenity in the first place. I needed to see for myself. But obviously you’d know all that, since your surveillance assets are second to none.’

Kitching slapped her other cheek, making it pinker than the first. ‘Quiet!’ he shouted with a second kick
to the bunk. ‘Or you know what you’ll force my next command to be.’

Be silent yourself,
Sanchez argued with her hands,
and you won’t upset him so much!

Kitching laughed. ‘Why do you think I brought him down here in the first place? It’s the same reason we keep shifting. I’ve got a dozen better places to stash you on the mainland, but down here the echoes from the future are all made by the squid and fish. It’s like a holiday for him. He should be grateful. He’s got genuine peace of mind in exchange for cooperation.’

‘Except for times like this, when you deliberately torture him with the threats you want him to hear.’

Sanchez glanced at Freddie, her heart wrenching at the pitiful sight of him growing more and more agitated.

So sorry,
he mouthed at her repeatedly.
Still one more day. One more day to endure this.

‘Hands or voice!’ Kitching ordered. ‘You know I’ve never been able to read your fat clumsy lips.’

‘No, no,
nooo
!’ Freddie wailed, and commenced banging his head against the wall.

‘Leave him alone!’ Sanchez shouted. She knew that all but two of his seven disparate identities suffered from the clumsy tongue; a symptom that often went hand-in-hand with the misfortune of being born deaf. She’d also had all the practice she needed to read him.

‘All he said was sorry that you’re so mean to me.’

‘No meaner than Kurst, you can assure him. It wasn’t my idea to swap you for a nuclear payload.’

‘Of course not.’ Behind her, Freddie’s wailing intensified. ‘You keep mongrel dogs to do the dirty work for you.’

‘Enough,’ Kitching ordered. ‘I had intended to let you watch the Mira Chambers Show this morning, live via satellite as soon as the fog lifts, but that privilege is now revoked …
Moryakov!
’ he shouted, which
summoned two seamen in from the corridor. She’d heard it often enough to guess it must only be Russian for sailor, and not a specific threat, but why his ragtag Asian crew spoke with such an odd mix of languages remained a mystery to her.

‘Take me, take me, take meeee!’ Freddie pleaded.

‘Escort our guest back to her quarters, please. And this time, minus the torch.’