Torchwood: Exodus Code

stomach for more than ten minutes, including, if truth be told, his own father.
    Before the storm hit, Cash had been losing a game of strip poker to his second-in command, and current ex-wife, Dana, the daughter of a Swedish shipping magnate. Dana was tall and athletic with short blonde hair. She had once worked with MI5 on a mission using the
Ice Maiden
. She now considered the ship her home, loving it as much as, if not a wee bit more than, she loved Cash.
    Clipped to a safety harness out on the aft deck in full storm gear – a hooded slicker, thigh-high black wellingtons and skintight black rubber trousers – Dana looked like a lanky teenager dressed as a Storm Trooper as she punched through the driving wind and sheets of rain to reach the main sonar winch. Cash was watching her from the wheelhouse, realising, and not for the first time, that he’d really screwed up when he’d, well, really screwed up.
    Cash had already secured the computer gear in the wheelhouse with two of the trawler’s crew, Nick Finley and Byron Austin. Both had been dishonourably discharged from the US Navy for dealing in contraband prescription drugs.
    Finn was a wiry Irish-American, whose nickname was not only a natural result of his surname, but also because he’d spent most of his young adult life negotiating the treacherous waters of the Baltimore docks, where only sharks survived. Using a brick-sized remote control, Finn was now locking down and securing the satellite dish.
    His colleague Byron was an African-American from Chicago, whose grandfather had served with Cash’s father in the Second World War. He was double-checking their munitions hold. Given the increase in piracy in many of the oceans in which the
Ice Maiden
had sailed recently, their weapons were as important as any of their sophisticated sonar and computer equipment.
    Below deck, the ship’s cook, a dangerous-looking ex-shrimp boater from New Orleans named Hollis, and the head engineer, a lithe Canadian named Sam, were ignoring the boat’s increasingly rolling gait. They were watching a football match on the flat screen bolted to the wall. When Finn shut down the satellite dish, a wave of static rippled across the television and the picture went black.
    ‘Well, Jesus, marry my mother and have a cow,’ said Hollis, his southern accent at its thickest when he was pissed. He pushed away from the table and walked to the door, his legs steady despite the ship’s rocking movement. He looked both ways down the empty passageway, then lifted the com unit from the wall and depressed the button. He listened for a few seconds.
    ‘No one in the wheel house,’ he said, returning to his beer and to Sam, who was shuffling a deck of cards.
    ‘A storm,’ said Sam, who’d been raised in a commune outside San Francisco, cultivating hemp and sixteen varieties of tomatoes. Sam had a chip on his shoulder the size of Mount Rushmore and hated any conversations that required he talk about his hippy family or his mixed racial ethnicity. He was the perfect recruit for this crew, a man with no real ties to a country and a conscience easily adapted to the needs of a situation. ‘I heard the whistle in the boiler room. Could be a long cold night.’
    ‘So what’ll it be, then?’ asked Sam, arching his eyebrows. ‘Poker, a movie or what?’
    Hollis grinned at him, a smile that could sink ships. ‘Oh, ah’m thinking the “or what”.’
    ‘Or what, nothing,’ said Dana, stepping into the room, stripping off her wet gear until she stood in front of them in damp long-johns, her short hair plastered to her head. ‘Cash and I haven’t eaten since breakfast and this storm’s already on us. We need all hands on deck, boys, not on each other.’
    ‘Dana, darlin’,’ said Hollis, stepping around Sam but not without giving him a light slap on his cheek. ‘Your meal’s right here, hon, hot and delicious,’ he turned and winked at Sam, ‘like me.’ He slid two lidded plates from the galley’s top oven. ‘Anyway, Cash always thinks the worst of any storm.’
    Sam began shuffling the cards as Cash stepped into the mess, handed Dana a thick towel and accepted his plate from Hollis.
    ‘Poker, it is,’ said Sam.
    *
    While at sea, the
Ice Maiden
flew under the research flag of the United Nations, a banner that afforded her a certain camouflaged mobility, but when they docked for supplies they displayed either the New Zealand stars or the Canadian maple leaf, both about the most