Hurricane Fever by Tobias S. Buckell Read Free Book Online Page A

forty-eight hours.
    Some models had a snack pouch. Enough calories to keep you going for a week.
    Teflon and Kevlar fiber weave in the material supposedly helped with sharks.
    And so far, Roo had never had to use one of the damn things.
    “They coming right at us,” Delroy shouted through the cabin at Roo, right before he reached the door leading out to the front decks.
    Roo zipped the suit up. “Shut the door. Do not come out front.”
    Delroy did so, and then Roo slid the door leading out front open with a grunt. The wind hit him, shoved him back off his feet for a second as it battered the bright orange suit.
    He leaned forward into it. As usual, it felt like sticking his head out of a car on a highway. He had to strain to slide the door shut behind him, then he leaned into the driving rain as he staggered up the deck.
    Forty-mile-an-hour raindrops stung his face. But it was the gusts that he had to watch out for. Sudden blasts of air that would knock him back on his ass if he wasn’t careful. Take him right overboard if he was unlucky.
    He crouch-walked his way along the netting and looked up through the howling, painful rain as he got to the starboard bow’s windlass.
    A bowsprit glinted, catching light cast by still-standing streetlights from the road leading down to the bay. The bowsprit was a stainless-steel spear of platform and railing that jutted out from in front of the motorboat coming right at the Spitfire .
    “Not this ship,” Roo said as he gauged the direction of the incoming, storm-powered missile. “She ain’t yours to have.”
    He pulled a carbon-fiber machete out from where it was strapped in a holster next to the Spitfire ’s own stainless-steel bowsprit. The edge, microscopically thin and diamond hard, could cut through anything on the ship. He kept it up here to cut through fallen rigging, even a mast, in weather like this.
    Roo cut through the anchor chain on the deck with a hard chop. The metal links parted and rattled off across the deck into the water.
    The anchor off to the side, stopping them from swinging around, took up the tension. The spidersilk rope snapped tight and threw off drops of water.
    The motorboat lolled, drifting with the surge of roiling water coming in through the cut. The bow dipped and the ship yawed, not quite making up its mind where it was going.
    Roo stared at it. Waiting, waiting. Watching the ship grow larger and larger, waiting for that gut feeling …
    … there. He chopped the rope, burying the machete into the deck a little and swearing.
    Spitfire, no longer held in place by the starboard anchors, swung in an arc to port. Roo yanked the machete free of the deck and sprinted back to the netting. He bounded over and across to the port bow and windlass.
    He let the chain out, leaving the port anchor over to their side take the full brunt of holding the catamaran in place.
    The maneuver swung them even farther away from the wild boat in the dark. It roared past, fifteen feet on the starboard side, a ghost ship that madly flung itself into the mangrove roots just behind them. And that was where it remained, waves holding it in place as they slammed against the side of its hull.
    Roo relaxed for a moment, until he saw the forty-foot monohull coming in next. It was driven toward them by the same waves that had hurled the motorboat at them.
    For a moment it looked like it would swing right on past them as well.
    But then it shifted course. Almost like it knew where to go.
    “No no no no.” Roo tried to will the yacht away from them as the red hull, lit up by the jagged streaks of lightning, swept closer.
    It turned at the last second, giving Roo a stupid sort of hope. It crossed their bows, a sleek sailing ship out of control and ungraceful with its sides to the waves.
    And then hit the anchor chain.
    “Ras …” Roo swore.
    Spitfire jerked and shivered. The spidersilk, strong as it was, still twanged and shot apart, cut clean by the other ship’s keel. Then