Monster Planet(28)

She didn't think so, though. She thought the ghost knew exactly what it was saying. Sarah was closer to Ayaan's heart'did it mean'could it mean that Sarah was nearby? Physically close to Ayaan's heart? But how, and more importantly, why?

She had a feeling the brain was quite genuine in its forgiveness. She had a feeling it knew exactly what had happened, and that it saw her not as a butcher of mummies but as an ally against a common enemy. She could use whatever help it might offer but she didn't worry too much about whether to trust it or not.

She had a mutiny to pull off, after all, and there were going to be casualties. If the brain or its attending mummy got in the way it wouldn't hold her back.

On her return trip to the stern surgeries she passed around a side of the rear superstructure, a four-story structure that tapered to a spacious suite of officers' quarters with a magnificent view of the surrounding ocean. Only the radar tower stood higher. There was a reason for putting the officers' quarters up so high'it kept the ship's most important personnel as far as possible from the depleted fuel rods in the forward compartments. The liches were hardly bothered by the stray gust of ionizing radiation'it probably did them good, actually, because it would sterilize their putrid flesh of microbes and slow down their decay. They had taken the tower for themselves simply because it afforded the best view.

On the lowest level of the tower Ayaan passed the zealots she'd seen earlier laying down a second coat of marine paint on the hull plates. They didn't so much as glance up at her.

They didn't have to. One of them, an old man with a Russian accent but the Asian features of a Siberian, stood up with one hand holding his back and stepped into the shadows of the tower entrance. Ayaan passed the hatchway by, then doubled back once she was out of sight of the cultists and stepped in through an emergency exit. The Siberian was busy in the darkness inside, shoving bits of torn-up, paint-stained rag into a crawlspace near the floor. Ayaan bent down to help him. 'You know the sign we're looking for,' she said to him.

He didn't nod. He didn't stop what he was doing. He had been a librarian in another universe, a better one, and a closeted homosexual. His partner, a colonel in the Russian air force, had convinced him to join up with the Tsarevich, had been one of the most fervent recruits when the call first came. He swore up and down that they would not be persecuted in the new life, and to be fair, they hadn't been. When the liches carried the colonel off to satisfy their appetites they hadn't even considered his sexual orientation. They were equal opportunity devourers.

'When all of them are inside, that's when you set the fire,' Ayaan repeated, just in case. Perfect timing would be the only way to carry this off. Even then she would need a great deal of luck.

It would be impossible to foment a revolution on the Pinega, she knew. There were too many true believers on the ship and far too many animated corpses. With the help of her friend in the navigation room however she had learned of a way to cut those odds in half. When the Soviets fabricated the nuclear waste hauler they had built a special feature into the holds. By throwing certain unmarked switches on the flying bridge anyone could open hatches on the bottom of the ship, hatches meant to dump the enclosed wastes into the ocean at large. It had been standard practice to take the fuel rods and radiothermic generators and depleted uranium cargo out into international waters and just let them go. According to Ayaan's informant, there never had been a containment facility near the North Pole'it would have been prohibitively expensive to build it, at least compared to the cost of open-sea dumping. The bankrupt bureaucrats at the end of the Soviet empire had little concern for the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea and even less for Greenpeace.

Now, if Ayaan could get those hatches open, the undead stored in the compartments would be flushed away like so much toxic waste. The tepid waters of the Mediterranean might not kill them but she really didn't care. They could wander around the bottom of the sea forever, spearing whatever fish were stupid enough to wander by with their sharpened forearms. She would have bigger problems to deal with'namely the liches. As soon as they realized something was up they would retreat to their tower. The green phantom could kill from a distance. Other liches could turn their own powers against Ayaan and her tiny cadre of rebels.

If the tower was set on fire once they were inside, however, she imagined they would be too distracted to put up much resistance. The doctor, who had access to bonesaws, fire axes and hammers (his surgery was neither precise nor delicate) would stop anyone from trying to get out of the tower'or anyone living from trying to rescue the liches trapped within. It would take some time for the tower to burn down but the Siberian's hard work secreting inflammables in its various nooks and crannies meant the blaze would get off to a good start.