The Floating Zombie

by D.F. Jones

Genres: Science Fiction

Synopsis

The Taking of AT1: Before AT1 had ground down the slipway unchristened - rightly, said seamen, for it would be a ship with no soul - it had been dubbed 'Zombie'. That sinister name would stick and prove its accuracy. AT1 was a robot-ship, a ship with no crew, only a tiny security force of three men & a woman. 'Invulnerable,' said its inventors, 'foolproof'. But it was neither - not if one of the four security guards was an insane, ruthless killer. And if the greatest, most powerful self-contained nuclear reactor in the world fell into the hands of such a person, the whole world was in peril!

Release date: August 27, 2019

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 214

Sample

“I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again.” Tediously, the shipping superintendent kept to his word. “Full automation is mad—dangerous and mad.”

“Mr. Chairman,” put in the chief accountant smoothly, “no one can claim that our seafaring colleague has been anything but consistent throughout all these planning meetings. Observing this is the last, might he not care—just this once—to be specific?”

The chairman and the managing director exchanged hopeless glances. They were at it again; the only thing those two agreed on was their mutual dislike. The chairman examined the backs of his hands as if he had never seen them before. He’d stop them in due course, but meanwhile he was prepared to listen. Home truths could come out in anger, and he wanted to know anything which might bear on the decision that had to be made, and made now. He looked inquiringly at the red-faced, glowering superintendent.

“You mean to tell me that spending seven million pounds on the world’s first crewless ship after a couple—?”

“Four.”

“Very well—four—voyages testing equipment isn’t mad? To wind up its bloody clockwork and push it off with four or five million quid’s worth of cargo on a five-thousand-mile voyage isn’t dangerous?”

“No, it isn’t, and even you have to agree the tests have been perfect.” The accountant smiled maddeningly. “Or are you saying it won’t work at all?”

“Of course the bloody thing will work—on a pond! But we’re talking about the sea! I bow to your superior knowledge of figures—and Bognor Regis beach—”

The accountant stiffened, but the chairman intervened. “Gentlemen, this is getting us nowhere.” Obviously, old Blood-and-Guts had no concrete objections. “Naturally, there are risks in everything, but the trials have been an unqualified success, the seaborne evaluation group’s report entirely favorable. We are assured the equipment reliability rating is on a par with the automated blind landing equipment in an aircraft. What more can we ask—or do?”

“That, Mr. Chairman,” said the shipping superintendent, “is not a fair comparison. In a plane, there’s a pilot sitting watching his box of tricks. This—this thing has no one—except its armed guard. And that’s another point. Our guards in manned ships are under the command of the captain; this thing, armed to the teeth, is in the charge of the equivalent of a sergeant!” He shook his head. “Maybe I’m getting old, but I stick to it: mad and dangerous.”

“Mr. Chairman,” said the accountant. “Only the hopelessly biased can say AT1 is not practicable. Many respected seamen accept it. They too may not like it, but they agree it has to come. Moreover, while we are first in the field, we know others are not far behind.” He pointed a bony finger at the superintendent. “Assume you take his advice, automate the engine room only. Fine: we save five percent on capital costs, ten percent on running costs, and we do well—until someone else builds the fully automated ship. They’ll save fifteen to twenty percent on capital, up to forty percent on running costs. Where does that leave us?”

“Money, money!”

“Yes indeed,” rejoined the accountant. “Money. … If we were running a nautical museum, I might incline to your view, but we’re not! Finally, the armament question.” He pointed unnecessarily once again. “He seems to think this is a novel situation. Not all my weekends at Bognor have been spent staring at the sea. I find that historically, armed merchant ships have been the rule, rather than the exception, up to the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Now the wheel has come full circle. In an oil-hungry world, tankers must be protected.”

“Rubbish!” snapped the superintendent, red-faced with anger. “And even if you are right, it would be a damn sight safer to have a crew of forty than a guard of four!”

“I hoped you’d say that,” said the accountant candidly. “Piracy last flourished in the China Seas in the 1920’s.” He fell to polishing his bifocals. “Security-wise, give me the automated ship. Back in the twenties they called it piracy—as indeed it was—but now we’d call it hijacking. The rather enterprising Chinese pirates infiltrated the passengers or crew, or both. No, Mr. Chairman, give me a carefully selected guard any day.”

The shipping superintendent muttered something about “slab-sided abortions and pen-pushers,” which only made his opponent smile. The old boy knew his stuff about ships—the obsolescent manned variety—but was totally at sea in a board room. A bit of polishing, thought the chief accountant, and I’ll make a useful epigram out of that.

“Gentlemen, time presses. Unless someone has something new”—he leaned on the word—“to contribute, I will put this to the vote.” He looked inquiringly at his committee.

The chief accountant smiled again. With Mammon on his side, how could he lose?

That was in March 1976.

The Boeing bumped heavily; hearts contracted, bowels loosened. Runway lights flashed past; more than one passenger’s foot pressed urgently on a nonexistent brake pedal; then the thankful relaxation for the best part of any flight, the sedate trundle to the arrival terminal. Stewardesses, unfamiliar in faintly ridiculous hats, assumed their farewell smiles as the doors opened; the alien atmosphere, feeling and smelling like a dirty velvet wrap, wound itself around the emerging passengers.

Al Muharraq Airport, Bahrain, Persian Gulf, June 30, 1979. For romantic innocents, their first taste of the magic of the Orient; for the disenchanted, a good deal less. It is claimed that the Garden of Eden once graced this island, but that was long before airports.

If asked, ex-Para Sergeant William Langley would have unhesitatingly ranged himself in the disenchanted class, although to be fair to Bahrain, enchantment in any context was not a word that sprang readily to his practical mind. Insular by nature, travel and experience had done nothing to broaden his outlook. Two or three times the Army had staged him through Muharraq, and this was his fourth trip as a civvy.

He waited patiently in the aircraft’s aisle, in no hurry to renew his acquaintance with Bahrain or the Bahraini, watching with faint contempt the muddle and confusion ahead, the dropped bag, the missing camera.

Bloody civvies! No order, no discipline. … “Do as you like, mother’s drunk” was the motto these days.

He consigned his fellow passengers and the entire Persian Gulf to some private limbo, concentrating yet again on his new job. All the way from London he’d fiddled with it, tossing it aside, only to find it back in the center of his thoughts.

Well, soon the guessing and the speculations would cease, and he’d have to make the best of it, but only one of the many novel aspects of his assignment really worried him: this woman. Four men and one female stuck in a floating steel box for the best part of six weeks—crazy! All right for the daft bastards back in the head office, with their slick phrases about “team comfort,” “job satisfaction,” and “recruit attraction,” plus a lot of other compound words he’d forgotten. He’d like to compound the lot of ’em: bunch of bloody fags who judged other men’s sex drive by their own thin-blooded standards—and he was the poor sod who had to make their scheme work. And if it went wrong? Who’d carry the can?

Unconsciously he braced his shoulders back a fraction more. Only a blind man could make any mistake about him; from close-cropped gray-tinged black hair to well-polished shoes, he was Army, and one glance at his cold stare put invisible stripes on his sleeve. Dressed up, he would have made a fine subject for a recruiting poster—except for one slight weakness, his mouth. Behind that outward sign did, in reality, lurk a certain flaw, one that he knew, one that had made him embrace Army discipline with unusual keenness, armoring himself against himself. The Army had been all to him; the best twelve years of his life; like a bloody fool he’d let himself be talked out of it—weakness again—and all the rest led inevitably to this moment. Thirty-eight now, he’d have been a sergeant major; instead, here he was, a despised civvy, a security guard, doing a boring job which had nothing to commend it except the money—and how he needed the money! All because of a woman; weakness. …

Now, in the one job which he’d reckoned would keep him clear of females, he found, far too late in the day, he was stuck with another of them. He half-hoped she’d be walleyed, fat, and forty. Langley felt confident he could handle the men, but could he handle her? Above all, could he handle himself? Just one pass, and his authority, the discipline of the team, would be right up the spout.

Down the steps, across the short strip of tarmac. Even before he entered the bright-lit terminal, he was sweating. Midnight in Muharraq … title for a song.

Like its owner, Langley’s kit bag was antisocial, rolling down the chute onto the carousel, banging civvy-style cases aside. Through customs and immigration, a mere formality, and to his regimental mind all the more annoying for that: nothing but a stupid waste of time.

In reception he dumped his bag and waited; let ’em come to him. He stared uninterestedly around; usual bunch of grubby white-suited vultures pouncing on travel-dazed passengers. Bet none of the bastards approaches me. Somewhere in that untidy rabble were two of his men—and the woman. He hadn’t sought them on the plane, and sure as hell he wasn’t going to start now.

The public-address system announced hollowly the arrival of the company transport. Langley shouldered his bag, picked up his grip, and marched out into the soft darkness. In the bus he allowed himself a quick look at the dozen or so passengers. Four were women; she had to be one of them. The dim light was no help, but as far as he could make out, she wasn’t fair, fat, and forty; neither was she the reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe. He slumped down into a seat, aware of the PVC sticking instantly to his back. He shut his eyes, letting his thoughts drift; a fantasy vision of the unknown woman, naked and desirable, flashed across his mind, a vision banished with such mental violence that his head shook.

Think of money: as senior guard he’d be getting—was getting, ever since he left London—U.S. $350 a week, tax-free, to his Bahrain bank, plus all allowances, overtime, free board, and lodging. Yes, the money was good: bloody well should be, for this job.

Deliberately he let the rest get out first, glancing covertly at the women. He learned little, but reclassified one as fat and forty and at once concluded she had to be his private millstone. In his irritable frame of mind, he couldn’t decide if he was glad or sorry.

The hotel clerk worried over a list, ticked each arrival, allocating rooms. Last out of the bus, but not in the queue, Langley noticed his team were grouped together. Even upside-down, “AT1” was not hard to read. Three names were ticked: he knew two were on an earlier flight; that meant one had to be ahead of him. He glanced at the small knot of travelers waiting for their main baggage to be unloaded. Yes, that had to be his.

Around twenty-five, he looked like a Yank—they alone have the knack of appearing uncrumpled, fresh, after a three-thousand-mile flight—and his clean-shaven head could only indicate a military man, or a sea guard facing five weeks out of touch with a barber.

The younger man caught his glance, hesitated fractionally, and sauntered over, hands in pockets, offensively casual. His round, rather featureless face was not so much clean-shaven as hairless, and his expression no better than neutral.

“Should we know each other?”

Langley stared at him frostily; he was a Yank, all right. In the senior man’s insular mind, that was one strike against him for a start, but even if he’d been a Brit from his own home town, Langley would still have disliked him. “AT1?”

The Yank nodded, managing a thin-lipped smile which Langley found faintly supercilious. Before he could speak, Langley heard a quick-stifled exclamation behind him; the sound threw him, for the voice was female. He glimpsed a woman’s profile, half-hidden by a headscarf and dark glasses. Even as he turned, her head moved, and he was left with a vague impression, no more than a tantalizing glimpse of a beautiful nose, a well-shaped cheek. Reluctantly he let that promising vision go, glowering at the man.

The Yank’s amused expression showed he had missed nothing of Langley’s thoughts. “Julius Colmar, late of the United States Army—God rot them!—now, you-know-what.” He bowed slightly, ironically, his hands still in his pockets.

Langley’s dislike for the American was powerfully reinforced; Colmar’s manner was bad enough, and his disloyalty to his old service, in Langley’s mental imagery, put the tin lid on it. Colmar was instantly graded as a dropout serviceman, a type he rated even lower than a civvy dropout. A renegade is always more hated by the faithful than a plain enemy. Bleakly, Langley said, “What?”

Colmar repeated his name, but before Langley could go to the second part of his gambit, porters arrived with the baggage, breaking up an awkward scene.

They had adjoining rooms; entering his, Colmar gave his senior a mock salute and that same thin smile, and got a blank stare in return. All the same, both knew who had the points decision.

In his room, Langley’s ill-humor was going full bore. That young bastard was too cheeky by a long way. Was he shy? No, Colmar wasn’t that; his expression said it all: Colmar reckoned he knew the lot, and had a talent for showing it. Well, he’d learn—and Langley would take great pleasure in teaching him. The fact that the run-in with Colmar had distracted him from that female only added fuel to Langley’s fire. But for that bumptious bastard, Langley saw himself chatting her up in the bar. That fleeting glimpse had intrigued him; she was young—certainly under thirty—and what he’d seen of her profile had been good news. A blond? He couldn’t be sure.

Langley swore to himself. Christ—what was he thinking of? If he was this way before they even stepped aboard, what would he be like after a couple of weeks at sea? Again he cursed the head office. Annoyed with Colmar, the woman, the world in general, and himself in particular, he missed out on his usual exercises, showered, and went to bed.

If he could have seen Colmar in his room, Langley would have been even madder. The younger man was contained, quite unruffled by the meeting, taking a casual interest in his surroundings. He turned back the bedclothes, examining the sheets for any trace of a previous occupant. Satisfied, he checked the cleanliness of the bathroom. Whistling softly to himself, he wandered around the bedroom, found no fault, and raised the louver blind, staring into the dark night. That too appeared to pass his inspection. He called the desk; how about two cans of Coke, iced—like now?

The drinks arrived; Colmar glanced away from the window, jerked his head at the table. The waiter put the cans down. Colmar flipped a half-dollar not so much to as at the man, who missed it, and had to hunt for it on his hands and knees. The coin recovered, the waiter hovered uncertainly—fifty U.S. cents for two Cokes was a lot of money. With a negligent backhand flourish Colmar dismissed him, picked up a Coke, and returned to the window.

That limey had “Army” written all over him. They were all the same, Yank, Brit, or whatever. A sergeant, most probably; got that stiff-necked air. Bums, the whole lot of ’em.

Colmar stared at the harbor lights, smiling. Jesus! Life could be real funny—if you had the right sense of humor.

In her room, Jane Harris sat on the dressing-table stool, thankful to be alone. For a space she appraised her image in the mirror; slowly she removed the headscarf, the dark glasses, meeting her own gaze unwaveringly. Fumbling in her bag for cleansing cream and tissues, Jane Harris cried, silently.

By accident or design, none of AT1’s team met over breakfast, a state of affairs easily achieved in the spacious dining room, relic of the days when the company had virtually owed half the Persian Gulf.

Self-conscious as ever, Langley braced himself for his entry, but if any noted his arrival, they did not show it, nor would he look. Much as he wanted to see the woman, he had no desire to meet Colmar’s glance: that young gent could wait.

“All members of AT1’s team are requested to report to the shipping office at eight-twenty. Thank you.”

Langley went stolidly on with his eggs and bacon without glancing at his watch, apparently reading the ingredients label on a sauce bottle with great interest. How he played the next hour or so would be vital; but for that bloody woman, it would be a piece of cake.

The public-address announcement made Jane Harris’ heart thump: thirty minutes to go. Her mouth felt dry; she wished she had the courage to order a stiff Scotch, but that wouldn’t do, however much she needed it. She told herself it was ridiculous to be so strung-up, but it did no good. In the sleepless hours of early morning she had decided on her course of action, and that was that. …

A fanatical timekeeper, Langley knew from past experience it would take only five minutes to walk to the shipping office; he’d get there at eight-ten, time enough to collect his team list, and watch them arrive. He lingered over a cup of tea, watching people leave—including Colmar—but it was the women he studied. One in particular held his attention, for she was dressed in the standard KD skirt and slacks. He had only a back view, but if that was her … Most females over twenty-two, in slacks and shirt, are walking disaster areas, but not this one—and the blond hair didn’t come out of a bottle, either.

If that was her, they’d got dynamite aboard. … His timetable forgotten, Langley left hurriedly.

First in the shipping office, Langley did the usual, very thorough identity check; ID card, fingerprint, and password. Given the inevitable shower of paper, instruction books, a list of his team, and their potted histories, he was allowed to pass into the briefing room. He lit one of his rare cigarettes and concentrated on the list:

Senior Guard William George Langley

SG 10 (ic)

Guard Mark Roger Jacens

SG 153

Guard Julius Colmar

SG 165

Guard Phillip Roscorla

SG 183

Stewardess Jane Harris

SG 228

He flipped through their records. Jacens was an ex-sergeant in the U.S. Rangers, on his third trip. Surprisingly, Colmar had done four, but Langley noted that only in passing, being more interested in the woman.

Harris, Jane. Miss. English, twenty-six. Qualified state-registered nurse. Ten months’ ward and theater experience in London teaching hospital, fifteen months’ experience as long-haul airline hostess. AT1 first seagoing appointment.

Airline hostess! That settled it, thought Langley: she has to be the woman—got that smart, bandbox appearance. God—they must be out of their tiny minds, sending a dolly like that! He turned back to the men; only Roscorla had not served as a guard in manned tankers, but he was ex-Royal Navy, well-qualified in light AA weapons. On paper it looked a pretty good, experienced team. Damn well should be; in a quiet way they would be making seafaring history. Naturally, they’d been hand-picked, but that only made the choice of Jane Harris more inexplicable.

Langley glanced up as the door opened. A tall, rangy man, dark-haired and tanned, came in with easy, loose-jointed grace. His strong face was not so much marred as strengthened by a badly set broken nose. Instinctively, Langley liked him.

“Jacens,” said the man simply.

As they shook hands, Langley re. . .