Emergence Read Free

all-too-admissible evidence on his Facebook page.
    Not hers, even.
    His.
    ‘Ah, man,’ he sighed. ‘What the fuck was I thinking?’
    He let his head fall into his hands. As usual, he hadn’t been thinking at all.
    *
    ‘Whoa! Dave. Wake up. We got a problem, man.’
    For one confusing moment, he was back in college and his roommate was trying to wake him up because the cops and campus security were banging on the door, looking for a missing KFC bucket.
    Not a cardboard bucket full of Southern-fried awesome.
    No. They wanted to ask him a few pointed questions about a giant fibreglass bucket missing from the tall pole in front of the Colonel’s nearest off-campus eatery. Someone had sawed it off and . . .
    Then the better part of twenty years fell away, and he came to in the cabin of the chopper hammering out toward the Longreach.
    ‘S’up?’ he asked.
    His voice cracked, and he coughed until he could speak again.
    ‘Sorry. What’s up, J2?’
    Her voice replied in his headset. Controlled, but only just.
    ‘Fire on the rig, Dave. A fire and . . . something else. I don’t know what.’
    He was instantly awake. His fatigue and the ragged edges of the hangover sluiced away in the adrenaline surge. Dave twisted left and right in his seat, disoriented, unsure of where he might find the rig. If Dave Hooper had trouble understanding people and social graces, mechanical objects were an entirely different matter. He had a natural knack for machines, engineering, and the rigs. When he was dealing with a mechanical problem, the universe felt right, as if solving such problems was why he’d been made.
    Dave knew what he had to do.
    ‘You gotta get me down there, J2, right now.’
    He waited for her to say no, to quote the company rules and federal law and common fucking sense, but after a second of silence she came back in a clipped voice.
    ‘Yep. Okay. Gonna be a fast one, though.’

02
    T he column of dark oily smoke was rising high above the absurdist metalwork cube of the Longreach as J2 brought the nose of the chopper around, giving Dave a clear view forward through the plexiglas windshield. His heart seemed to stop for a second. Everything, all his organs, seemed stunned into paralysis before spasming back into life at double speed. Malevolent blooms of bright orange fire fed a dark tower of smoke as it climbed away from the platform, but within a second or two of the initial shock Hooper frowned at the . . . wrongness of the scene. The seat of the blaze appeared to be down in the living quarters and hadn’t spread from there. The critical areas around the drill works were still clear for now. So was the helipad.
    ‘Two minutes, Dave. I’m wheels down and gone in thirty seconds. Jonty says they got wounded. Lotsa wounded. Gonna cross-deck ’em to Thunder Horse.’
    ‘Okay,’ Hooper replied, giving her only half his attention while he leaned forward and studied the fire. It was bad. It was always gonna be bad on a rig, but it wasn’t the hellstorm he’d been expecting.
    ‘There’s more, Dave,’ Juliette shouted as a secondary explosion blew out a cabin on the southern side of the platform. Dave watched as flaming debris fluttered down toward the deep blue water churning around the pylons. ‘I’ll patch ’em through,’ she shouted. ‘Put your damn cans back on, would you? And your harness.’
    ‘Sorry,’ he said, still distracted and not bothering with his safety belt. He wanted to get as far forward as he could to get a better look at the unfolding disaster. He fit the headphones back over his ears, however, even though the short cord kept him tethered in the rear of the cabin. The intercom crackled and popped just before he heard the guttural South African accent of the day shift supervisor, Jonty Ballieue, through the static. He sounded panicky, almost hysterical, and that frightened Hooper a lot more than the fire. Ballieue was one of the more unflappable yarpies he’d ever met.
    ‘. . . attack .