Ice Breaker Read online

  Also by Lian Tanner

  The Keepers trilogy

  Museum of Thieves

  City of Lies

  Path of Beasts

  First published in 2013

  Copyright © Lian Tanner 2013

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or ten per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  A Cataloguing-in-Publication entry is available from the

  National Library of Australia

  www.trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 978 1 74331 306 0

  eISBN 978 1 74343 187 0

  Cover and text design by Design by Committee

  Cover illustration by Sebastian Ciaffaglione

  Set in 12.5/17 pt Bembo by Midland Typesetters, Australia

  To Margaret Connolly,

  with love & thanks

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  Nothing Girl

  The Frozen Boy

  A Stranger on the Ship

  As Harmless as a Seal Pup

  Secrets

  Lies

  Escape!

  The Fishing Shift

  Murder!

  That Is Not My Name

  Fever

  The Funeral

  His Treacherous Memory

  Your Da Was a Traitor

  Some May Call Us Cruel

  Half a Truth

  A Patch of White

  Fin's Ship

  Fire on Board!

  Icebound

  We Have Caught the Murderer

  An Army of Men

  The Maw

  The Sleeping Captain

  Brother Thrawn

  North

  PROLOGUE

  The child’s face was beaten silver. His mind held the knowledge of ten thousand libraries. His fingers were so cunningly made that they could mend the broken bones in a kitten’s paw, setting each one in place with care and precision.

  So far, every moment of his short life had been spent hiding from the Anti-Machinists.

  For all his cleverness, the child could never understand why his enemies hated him so much. ‘They have not even spoken to me,’ he said to Professor Serran Coe. ‘They do not know me.’

  ‘Ah, but they think they know you,’ said Coe with an angry laugh. ‘They think they know all about you. According to them, you are an abomination, even worse than the automobiles and trains that they delight in smashing. They say you are too clever to be trusted. That you wish to set yourself up as a false god.’

  ‘That is not true,’ said the mechanical child.

  ‘No, of course it isn’t,’ said the man who had made him. ‘The whole thing would be laughable, if only their aims were not so deadly. Last week they burned seven libraries and besieged a university. Their ideas are spreading, and not just in this country. A battle is being fought all across the world, between knowledge and ignorance . . . and ignorance is winning. I fear we are heading into a new Dark Age—’ A knock interrupted him, and a young woman peered anxiously around the door. ‘The Antis have found us again, Professor. They are twenty minutes away, a hundred or so of them, shouting their stupid slogans and brandishing their axes. We must leave, immediately. The carriages are waiting.’

  Serran Coe did not move. Instead, he sat and stared at the mechanical child, as if trying to fix those fine silver features in his mind.

  ‘Professor?’ said the young woman.

  ‘Yes, yes, I heard you.’ Coe stood up and stuffed various papers into the pockets of his coat. ‘I will take him to the ship,’ he said over his shoulder.

  The young woman’s face lost its colour. ‘Must you?’

  ‘We cannot put it off any longer. You and the others had best go to the university and begin packing up the laboratory. I will meet you there as soon as I can. Be careful. The mobs will be watching for us.’

  The young woman bit her lip. ‘I wish they would chop each other to pieces,’ she said fiercely. Then she rushed forward, kissed the mechanical child on his forehead, and hurried out of the room with tears in her eyes.

  ‘The ship?’ said the mechanical child, staring after her. ‘I do not know of any ship.’

  ‘It is my finest creation, after you,’ said Professor Coe, taking a long metal box from a cupboard and placing it carefully on the table. ‘There has never been another ship like it. It could cruise for a hundred years at the furthest end of the earth if necessary, and never come to port.’ He grimaced. ‘Perhaps such a long voyage will not be needed. Perhaps this Anti-Machinist nonsense will fizzle out by summer’s end. But somehow I doubt it. Come here, my dear.’

  The mechanical child stood trustingly while a panel in his shoulder was unscrewed. ‘Will I like the ship?’ he asked.

  ‘You will like it – very much.’ Professor Coe swallowed, peering down at the screwdriver in his hand as if it was an assassin’s knife. ‘Forgive me,’ he mumbled. Then, before he could change his mind, he dipped his fingers into the child’s body and removed two intricately wired devices.

  The light in the child’s eyes died immediately, and he fell against Coe in a jumble of limbs. The professor cradled him, then laid him carefully in the box, straightening his arms and legs and stroking his silver face.

  ‘I have hired the most trustworthy crew I could find,’ whispered Serran Coe, ‘but I dare not give you the run of the ship, in case there are Anti-Machinist spies among them. Sleep well, my dear. You are my joy, and the hope of the world.’

  It was only when he had kissed the child’s cheek and closed the lid of the box that he took a second box from the cupboard. This one was considerably smaller, and when Serran Coe opened it, a reluctant smile flickered across his face.

  ‘You will be his guardians,’ he said. ‘And when the world is safe again, your sacrifice will wake him.’

  Before he left the house, the professor paused in the hallway to wrap a cloak around the boxes. Then he threw open the front door, looked both ways for signs of the approaching mob, and walked down the steps to the waiting carriage.

  Professor Coe was right – the Anti-Machinists did not fizzle out by summer’s end. Instead, their grip on the world gradually tightened. They infiltrated armies. They toppled governments. They killed anyone who disagreed with them.

  In this way, a hundred years passed.

  And another hundred years . . .

  And another. At the furthest end of the earth, the ship kept its course. But on board, much had changed.

  NOTHING GIRL

  Petrel was asleep when they came after her. She’d made a nest of rags in the narrow space around the shaft of the wind turbines, and for once she was warm and almost happy. The familiar sound of the icebreaker’s engines rumbled through her dreams like a lullaby, and she smiled, and snuggled deeper into the rags.

  The Officer bratlings might’ve caught her there if they’d had more sense. But they were so sure of themselves – so certain that this time they had her trapped – that they didn’t even try to be quiet. Petrel woke to the sound of eager voices coming at
her from two directions, and the smell of hot tar.

  ‘This way! This way!’

  ‘We’ve got her!’

  There were ten of them, mostly girls, with Dolph grinning in anticipation at the front. Petrel saw them out of the corner of her eye as she sprang from her nest and leaped for the iron ladder above her head.

  Dolph screamed, ‘There she goes. Quick, grab her!’

  But by then Petrel was halfway through the rusty hatch that led to the next deck, and running for her life.

  As she tore desperately along the passageways she could hear the bratlings a little way behind her, laughing and shrieking, ‘Rat hunt! Rat hunt! Catch the rat!’

  ‘I found her paws,’ cried one of the girls. ‘Look, I’ve got her nasty little paws.’

  Which was when Petrel realised she had left her gloves behind.

  Furious with herself, she snarled over her shoulder as if she really was one of the ship’s rats. Then she ducked into a cabin, scrambled under a hammock full of wailing babies, dived through a rusty hole in the bulkhead and threw herself beneath the first berth she came to, with no idea whether it was occupied or not.

  The footsteps pounded past. As soon as they were gone, faded into the distance along with the ugly clank of the tar bucket, Petrel scrambled out from under the berth. An old man peered up at her from his pillow. She made a clumsy curtsy to him and crawled back the way she had come.

  The babies had quietened now, soothed by their mothers, a trio of women with Officer stripes tattooed on their muscular arms. As Petrel tiptoed past, hunching her shoulders and making her eyes blank and stupid, the Officer women whispered to each other.

  ‘She’s a strange one.’

  ‘Not Officer nor Cook nor Engineer. Imagine not having a tribe.’

  ‘Well, you remember what her parents did.’

  ‘Disgraceful . . .’

  Petrel goggled witlessly at them.

  ‘What are you doing in Braid, Nothing Girl?’ one of the women asked loudly.

  Petrel didn’t answer. Silence was one of the few weapons she had against the crew that had rejected her. Silence, stubbornness and the knowledge that she was not who they thought she was.

  ‘It’s no use talking to her,’ said a second woman. ‘She’s as thick as winter ice. You might as well chat to a toothyfish.’ She made a shooing gesture. ‘Go away, Nothing Girl. We don’t want you here.’

  Petrel crept down the passageway and through the hatch, hoping that her pursuers might have dropped her gloves in the excitement of the chase. But there was no sign of them, no sign of anything except for the dollops of tar all over her nest.

  She sighed. ‘Can’t stay here now,’ she muttered in her hoarse voice. ‘Dolph’ll be watching for me, sure as blizzards. Better keep away from Braid for a while; find somewhere safer to sleep . . .’

  The trouble was, nowhere was really safe, not for Petrel.

  During the Oyster’s long voyage, the ship had accumulated centuries of rust, and a hull as battered as an iceberg. But that wasn’t the worst of it. Roughly two hundred years ago, a midwinter disagreement between crew members had flared up into three months of violent warfare. Nearly half the crew had died in that war, and precious books and papers had been burned, among them the ship’s log, with all its history and instructions.

  In the bitter aftermath, with everyone blaming everyone else, the Oyster had been divided into three territories, each of them jealously guarded. The bottommost part of the ship, with its engines and batteries, was called Grease Alley – that was where the Engineer tribe lived and worked. The middle decks, which included the kitchens and store rooms, was Dufftown. That was Cook territory. And the upper decks, Braid, belonged to the Officers.

  Petrel, who had no tribe, was the only one who could move freely between the three groups. But that freedom came with a high price. None of the tribes turned her away at the border, it was true. But none of them welcomed her, either, or fed her, or protected her against cruelty.

  As she stood there, thinking, she thought she heard the clank of a bucket. Dolph, she thought, and she rose on tiptoe, as alert as a gull. The clanking sound came again, and Petrel ran.

  Braid, where the Officers lived, was a maze of cabins. Most of them were floored with iron, but in others the original deck had rusted away long ago, and been replaced with driftwood or netting, or bones scavenged from ancient whaling stations.

  There were folk everywhere on the Braid decks – bratlings hopping from one whale rib to another in a game of chasings, babies tied to their hammocks with seal gut, grown men and women rubbing their eyes as they woke, and calling greetings to their neighbours.

  Petrel shuffled between them, eyes lowered. Most folk ignored her; they were too busy with their own lives to bother themselves over a witless girl.

  Which suits me, thought Petrel. Safety lies in being ignored.

  She trotted along the passages until she came to one of the Commons ladderways, where fighting between the ship’s three tribes was forbidden. Her nerves were still jangling, and she had a sudden overwhelming desire for sunlight and salty air.

  She glanced around to make sure the Braid border guards weren’t watching, then fumbled behind the ladderway for her ancient and very ragged sealskin jacket.

  ‘You’re getting old, you are,’ she muttered to the jacket as she wriggled into it.

  As if in answer, there was a dull tearing sound and several grey scraps fluttered to the deck.

  Still, the jacket was better than nothing. Petrel fastened the strings, then scurried up the ladderway to the hatch that led to the Oyster’s foredeck.

  There must have been a time, centuries ago, when the hatch had been weather tight. But now the damp and the cold seeped through it like sea fog. Petrel drew the tattered hood of her jacket over her head, then she turned the clamp, pushed the hatch open and stepped out onto the deck.

  The cold air hit her like a bucket of water.

  ‘Oof!’ she yelped, then she jammed her lips shut and scuttled away from the hatch in case someone had heard her.

  The sea was dotted with icebergs. The morning sky was yellow. Petrel ran for’ard across the snowy deck as quickly as she dared to where an ancient crane loomed, and the wind fiddles sang their endless song.

  There was a sheltered area there, beneath the body of the crane, and she tucked herself into it, out of the wind. Spring was on its way to the frozen south, and the song of the wind fiddles was luring penguins, seals, whales and every other speck of life back to their summer haunts.

  But the air was still cold.

  ‘Ice cold,’ mumbled Petrel. ‘Bone cold!’ And she stuck her hands into her armpits and wondered whether Dolph would think to look for her out here.

  Probably not. The fishing shift would start soon, and men and women from the Oyster’s three warring tribes would have to work together to feed the ship. Like the Commons ladderways, the open decks were neutral territory where knives, poison and pipe wrenches were forbidden. Even hot tar would be seen as a weapon on the foredeck.

  Which meant that the only real danger for Petrel – apart from the cold – was that someone might creep up behind her and push her overboard.

  ‘Trouble is,’ she muttered, ‘if I stay out here for much longer my nose’ll fall off. I’ll have to take my chances inside.’

  With a grumble, she stepped out into the wind. On the horizon, something flashed white . . . and was gone. Petrel squinted after it.

  ‘Must’ve been a berg. Though I’ve never before seen one so neat and square.’

  The next moment she had completely forgotten that odd glimpse. Because the ship was sailing past another berg, and this one had an ice cave near its summit.

  Petrel never tired of watching ice caves. Some of them were so blue and so beautiful that they made her heart ache. She leaned on the rail, stamping her feet for warmth. The berg came closer.

  That’s when she saw him. A boy, laid out on the ice like a dead fish, with a scatte
ring of snow almost covering his face. A boy, where there should have been nothing but the memory of winter.

  A frozen boy.

  THE FROZEN BOY

  Petrel was so stunned at the sight that her wits almost deserted her.

  ‘A – a – a stranger!’ she whispered.

  She had to dredge the word up from the depths of her memory. She’d never had need of it before. In all the hundreds of years that the Oyster had been circling the southern icecap, there had been no strangers. Not a single one.

  There were stories, of course. There were always stories, especially in the long winter dark when there was nothing much else to do but mend clothes and fishing lines, plot against the other tribes, and listen to the blizzards thrashing about the ancient iron hull.

  But no one took those stories seriously. So what if there were other folk in the world? They were of no interest to the Oyster and its crew. The ship was what mattered. The ship was a world in itself; it was life and shelter, birth and death, love and hatred and protection against the elements. It was all any of them had ever known or wanted.

  Until now . . .

  Petrel pinched herself. The Oyster was already more than halfway past the berg, and if she didn’t act quickly it would retreat into the distance and she would never find out who this stranger was, and where he had come from.

  She dived through the hatch, pulling it shut behind her and taking a stub of iron from her pocket. There was a pipe running along the base of the bulkhead. Petrel banged a message on it in Engineer code.

  To Chief Engineer Albie. Stranger on berg. Starboard bow. Orca says don’t stop.

  She didn’t sign it; no one would take any notice of a message signed Petrel. She just sent it on its way with an anonymous tap tap tap, so that it could have come from anyone. The echoes rattled through the pipe, all the way down to the engine rooms. Petrel pictured her uncle, the Chief Engineer, cocking his head to listen. She imagined his lips curving in a humourless smile.

  The lack of other messages in the pipes told her that she was the only one who had seen the boy. The Officers on the bridge should have seen him, but maybe they had been looking the other way, or had mistaken him for a seal. Whatever the reason, it meant that First Officer Orca, who was Dolph’s mam, could not possibly have said, ‘Don’t stop.’