4 Mission
I am the vampire of my own heart,
one of the great outcasts condemned to eternal laughter
who can no longer smile.
Am I dead?
I must be dead." - Charles Baudelaire
The folder was stamped in smeared red ink, marking it cleared by Commander Fury and the World Security Council. Natasha sat in her apartment and memorized the contents as she reread the files. There was no doubt the leads Loki had discovered on her laptop led them to Karnilla, a jack-up oil rig in the North Sea, just as she had thought.
The oil industry's propaganda proclaimed extended vacations, huge benefits, shared camaraderie on the job. Most vessels included gyms, hair salons, pubs, even massage therapy on board. Her own research into Karnilla, however, showed an aging rig with deplorable conditions and 14-hour days.
Perfect. She nodded with satisfaction and threw back the last of the vodka in her glass. There was nothing that would suit her better than slaving away physically and hunting up the leads on the case – it would all keep her from thinking too much.
And just that line of reasoning brought unwanted images flickering in front of her like an old slideshow: black hair, pale skin, ceiling mirrors, a scar in the shape of Perthro. A mystery.
A mystery, she repeated to herself. Did that scar even exist anymore? Was it erased through magic, dissolved into perfect flesh so the next lover would never know it had been there at all? Because there would be a new lover – that much was certain. Loki, the ruler and protector of the nine realms, would hardly suffer solitude for long; the candidates to succeed her as his next inamorata were literally lined up at his door.
So, yeah. Hard work would be perfect, and perhaps after a long, exhausting shift as watchstander on Karnilla she would be able to sleep without dreaming too much, at any rate.
Disgusted with herself, Natasha returned to memorizing the file. Karnilla seemed legal enough, under chartered bond for a small Mexican oil company. That detail made the hair on the back of her neck prickle – if it was working for an oil business in Mexico, why was the rig in the North Sea and not the Gulf?
Yes, her instincts told her something was up.
Along with several lugubrious Turks who spoke little English, Natasha was helicoptered out to the rig. Karnilla was already jacked up, towering over the waves on four legs like an immense Tinker toy.
The man strapped into the seat beside Natasha grunted and poked her with one thick forefinger. His face was creased and permanently dirty, probably from the job, and when he turned to speak she saw he had a long, thick scar digging deep into his hairline. It made him look like the cartoon version of a typical villain. "Too high," he said, jerking his chin in the direction of Karnilla.
"I beg your pardon?"
"Sea. Too deep. Rig too high. You watchstander?" His gaze was hooded with lack of interest.
Although crudely put, the scarred man's words were clear. The company that owned the rig had overextended Karnilla's capacity in the depth of the North Sea; part of her job would be to keep a lookout and make certain the rig didn't overbalance. Systemic checks and crosschecks were in place – or at least they were if they were fully functional – and would adjust for tidal disturbances. However, a huge storm could throw the entire place out of whack; her job was to make certain that didn't happen.
Natasha nodded. "Hard," he commented.
"Yeah, whatever."
His response was another grunt.
As one of three women on the rig, Natasha was granted her own room with a tiny attached shower. The quarters were mainly taken up with the single bed, although there were drawers in one wall and a pullout surface for writing.
She ignored all the furnishings and immediately went to work, finding the hidden cameras and moving them. One was on a timer and therefore easy to adjust; she simply had to wait until it clicked off and reconfigure its view to the side of the room near the door. The other was more difficult, since it was on 24/7. Natasha got around that by approaching from the back and making a series of infinitesimal changes until it also showed nothing but one corner of the bed and the view near the door.
Those manning the cameras would think they had an unobstructed view of her room. Natasha would make certain to be in full view ninety percent of the time, but the remaining two and a half hours would be completely private. She would have to space it out but knew how to do it: already a pre-composed schedule of camera-ready moments interspersed with private work time mapped itself out in her mind.
That done, Natasha put away her belongings. She had packed for warmth, with long underwear and extra-thick socks. Her zippered gym bag also held utilitarian pajamas, simple toiletries, one spare pair of boots.
No weapons were allowed on board Karnilla, so Natasha had arrived without her guns. The gold loop on her necklace was a disc-charge, she had an enamel knife strapped to her thigh, and the seemingly tatty belt on her jeans held a retractable Widow's Line without the grappling hooks. She would have to rely on her own strength, flexibility, and smarts for the rest.
Sewn into the lining of her coat was a slim notebook - a plain copybook she bought in Heathrow for a few pounds, not the one bound in leather Loki had given her. Out of the range of the cameras, she got it out and wrote her first entry in code. It went behind a panel near her bed; she could retrieve it in her few moments of privacy.
A look at her watch showed there were two hours before her next shift. Natasha lay down, closed her eyes, and tried not to think about Loki or Asgard.
Her first few shifts were with Sergil, the Turk with the scar who spoke to her on the helicopter. Despite his villainous appearance and blunt manner, he was pleasant and respectful enough, and after a while they bypassed the language barrier. Sergil retrieved crumpled pictures of his wife and daughters from his wallet and showed them off; she confessed to a recent break-up.
"No man now?" he asked with one of his characteristic grunts.
"No. No man." Natasha offered no more information, and he didn't ask. It made her like him, and the time went quickly enough when she was paired with Sergil. They had to watch the deck of the Karnilla closely and react instantly when the rig unbalanced by more than a third of a degree; the tedious job forced an ongoing conversation that she eventually began to find pleasant.
A mechanics crew was supposed to spring into action and retool the jacked-up legs of the rig when an overbalance happened, usually at least twice a shift. Once there was no response from the service workers when they called in a seventeenth of one degree shift. Sergil slammed down the phone, cursed, and grabbed a metal box with a handle; he motioned to Natasha and climbed out of their watch station with her out onto the deck. There they spent a hairy twenty minutes fiddling with a slipped bolt on one leg of Karnilla, while her fingers quickly froze in the icy rain. The waves roared far below, and the jacked rig swayed from the buffets of the wind. It was like being on the back of a metal spider with four legs.
Back inside, Sergil fetched them both cups of coffee to warm up. Natasha nursed the Styrofoam cup in her hands and listened idly as he sang a tune in a language she didn't understand.
In contrast, her other shifts were hell. Agnija, a young Serbian woman with a foul mouth and a penchant for stealing, considered Natasha a personal threat and kept up a continuous stream of squalid gossip, complaints, and vicious insults. When the girl offered a particularly nasty dig and an attempt on her gold chain, Natasha had to give her a black eye to warn her off. After that, Agnija sulked in silence and refused to do any work at all. Even when they had to hoist a jack manually, Natasha was forced to go out on the deck and grapple with the toolbox on her own.
Rostislav, her other coworker, had roaming hands and a tongue continually poking out of his mouth like a pink slug. Young, with slicked back hair and a cheap blue leather jacket, he kept his gaze firmly on Natasha's breasts. She almost preferred Agnija, since the girl's move had let Natasha establish a pecking order with the agent firmly on top. Rostislav, however, skulked just on the borders of indecency like a shadow on the edge of her vision.
When they had to go outside and do a manual balance fix, Rostislav took the chance to hold her arm, slide his knee next to her shin, finger her waist. When she complained he laughed with a high-pitched giggle and told her he was just trying to keep her safe.
Natasha came close to punching him that time.
Worst of all were the nights. As exhausted as she was, sleep eluded her while she tossed and turned; the palace in Asgard wavering in the back of her mind like a lovely mirage. Usually she got up and did some yoga stretching in full view of the cameras to try and relax; in her precious private time she drew a slowly-growing sketch of Karnilla's layout.
Because something was odd about the rig. Most jack-ups had some sort of entrance to the interior, where sensitive machinery was kept and the managers slept in relative luxury. Karnilla, however, seemed to be composed of a outer ring of quarters and watchdecks with no sign of drilling or seabed monitors. Natasha wanted to find out what lay in the center, but there seemed to be no way to get inside.
Sergil handed her a cup of coffee and grunted when she thanked him. As Agnija left, the Turk's eyes followed the woman and he emitted one word: "Shit."
"Sorry?" Natasha felt a spark of something like humor, the first since she had been ejected from Loki's palace.
"Her. Shit. She – shit."
"She's a shit?"
"Yes, yes – that is what I say."
"Well, I gotta agree with you there." Natasha took a long sip of the coffee. She was slowly discovering that Sergil was hard-working, respectful, and strong. He seized every opportunity to talk about his three daughters and a wife of twenty years. She admired the way he worked long days and spent weeks away from his family to try and give them a better life.
Furthermore, calling Agnija a shit was a major point in his favor.
"She and Rostislav," Sergil added. He made a circle with one hand, thrust a finger through it several times, winked.
"Really?" Natasha couldn't help smiling. If Agnija and Rostislav were fucking each other, it would remove a few headaches – maybe the female would stop being such a bitch and he would keep his hands in the pockets of that hideous blue leather jacket.
"No. Agnija and Rostislav – worse. Together, worse."
She began to see what Sergil meant after a few shifts. Agnija and her new boyfriend seemed to take annoying Natasha as a leisure activity. Life on the rig was boring and the watchstander jobs incredibly tedious; the new couple obviously entertained themselves by needling the agent as much as possible. Natasha had to punch Agnija again and came close to stabbing Rostislav in his ballsack with her enamel knife.
Still, the op was proceeding well. Her suspicion about the interior of the ship became clearer; every detecting sense told her it was important to find a way to the center.
The other workers on the rig – managers, drillers, mechanics, controllers, and the sole medic – were all dull, quiet, almost stupid, further setting off Natasha's suspicions. Life on most oilrigs was bustling, quick, and the atmosphere utterly professional. The employees were intelligent and dedicated, the tech advanced.
But Karnilla was like a dark copy of the petroleum business, filled with stupidity. It all reminded her of something, and as she wrote out plans and sketches in her notebook during her private time, Natasha realized what it was.
The rig reminded her of Dr. Holmes' asylum. The place was as rundown, the workers just as stupid.
Yes, she was on something like the jacked rig version of the hospital – and she was in there alone. If things went wrong on Karnilla, Loki wouldn't arrive to save her.
She shook her head, muttered to herself she could handle it. She was the Black Widow, and she preferred working alone.
Sergil arrived at the end of Natasha's graveyard shift. She gave him a friendly punch on his shoulder to say goodnight and left the watch stand deck, so tired the corridor swam in her vision.
The neon lights overhead flickered overhead. She decided she could take a few minutes to pretend to lose her way, to look once more for a way into Karnilla's core.
The staff quarters all lay on the outer ring to her left. The inner side on the right was blank metal, a featureless expanse of gleaming chrome. That was wrong too – everything was old and rundown, but the chrome seemed new and retrofitted to the archaic rig.
Natasha traversed the squared-off ring as she had dozens of times. After half an hour she stopped and regarded her reflection in the chrome – white-faced from exhaustion, cheeks pale and pinched.
A sudden recollection of her and Loki looking into the mirror together in the safe house floated, unbidden, to her mind. We could be twins, he had told her.
She remembered the exact inflection, the deep chocolate of his voice, his pain mirrored in her own expression. The thought that it was all nothing but a memory overwhelmed her, and she had to put a hand on the wall to keep herself upright.
It was then Natasha felt the way inside. Under her fingers there was a very slight depression in the wall, running in a regular line bisecting the wall vertically. Probably a code or eyescan would make the hidden door slide back and get her into the core.
Forgetting Loki, Asgard, and everything except her mission, Natasha knelt to retie the laces of one boot. She memorized the location before walking back in the direction of her quarters without a backwards look.
There were twenty minutes of camera time left on her self-imposed privacy schedule before she could remove her copybook from the panel behind her bed and add what she had found to her sketches. She wanted to get inside that core - and she had an idea how to find the code.
NOTE - I've taken a lot of liberties with the oil rig business here and morphed the jack-rig into the type of vessel I needed in the story. For that and for any other errors, I apologize.