This third night, not a true night, for there could be no true nights in the December summer, the changing weather of the Drake Passage gave them what they needed, squall and sleet in the dark of the moon, and seas that boiled and tossed but were as calm as these Antarctic waters would ever be in a storm.
Mihalis said he could take the Zodiac out, and he did, slipping the inflatable boat over the side of the trawler and into the blowing needles of ice. His words, whatever they were, were lost in the howl of the wind.
Psyche waited. Nikos, the brother of Mihalis, waited silent beside her in the cabin.
Mus, the boy from Naxos, was too young and too restless for waiting. He tightened the drawstring of his parka around his face and went out into the storm. Psyche watched him slip on the frozen deck and catch his balance like a cat. He stood gripping the rails with his mittened hands, looking into white nothing.
The wind increased. It roared sounds that were almost words; it whined through the rigging with a sound of giant wasps. The wind drove ice before it, rime that grew in minutes into spikes of wild white hair that coated the lines, the rails, the windward shoulder of the boy. Mus stared out into the storm as if he could see the Tanaka ship that Mihalis planned to cripple, or Mihalis himself coming back across the water. The ice scattered the dim light and made the boy’s thickly bundled shape look like a flat paper cutout. Psyche thought of calling him in, but Mus would watch for icebergs as well as for Mihalis, and it was the face of Mus that would freeze, not hers.
Psyche let the Sirena turn into the wind. The Sirena sent out false codes that made her seem to be a Tanaka ship. Mihalis had copied the chip the Tanaka woman gave him, thinking he might use the codes again someday. The fool. For all Psyche knew, the radios now marked them as Korean, or, worse, as a boat out of Chile. Mihalis trusted too much.
Mihalis had been gone too long.
The sonar was turned off, its red display dark before her, but she could sense the sweetness of the water beneath them, could feel that it was thick with buggy little krill and the larger fish that ate them. In any other time she could imagine, they would circle away from the storm, let it move past, and come back to this spot, where she knew they could load their nets as soon as they were spread.
Dull orange, a wash of light came up from the dark, a false, terrible dawn. The glare turned the frozen spindrift on the lines into dragon’s teeth stained with the colors of flame. The shadow of the boy from Naxos became a black giant ghost that scrambled across the deck.
Mus slammed the cabin door behind him as Psyche hit the throttle. The trawler’s engines rumbled as the Sirena turned toward the dark where the light had vanished. Terror waited there, possibilities of death.
The radio, tuned to search, chattered static and nothing else. The readouts still marked the Sirena with a false ID. Psyche jerked the foreign woman’s little chip out of its slot and threw it against a bulkhead. It skittered across the tilting deck and came to rest by her feet. The Sirena ran silent, anonymous, a dark and dangerous shape on anyone’s radar.
They searched for a long, long time, Psyche and the brother of Mihalis and the boy from Naxos, with their torches strobing futile circles into the sleet. They bellowed with the ship’s horns and with their voices, sounds that vanished in the roar of the storm.
They found ice, only ice, brash, and floes tossed by the sea.
Eventually, the squall forced them away.