by Diane Duane
She stood there looking at him, then shook her head, helpless. "I wish I had..."
Nathan looked from the rebreather to Darwin, and back again. "Do you know what's out there, Darwin?" he said.
"Submarine," Darwin said promptly. "Ship that swims. Ship that kills."
Now, how much of this is from Lucas's "vocabulary" work? Nathan wondered. "Submarine," he said, "that's right."
"Metal shark," Darwin said, and for a moment the wicked teeth showed, and that eternal smile went very feral. "Hunt."
Nathan had to look across at Westphalen on that. She looked faintly shocked. They both knew how dolphins hated sharks and would hunt them down and kill them by ramming them with their beaks until they died of internal injuries.
"Joke," Darwin said clearly, and laughed delphine laughter at them.
"He's learned metaphor," Westphalen said, Bhocked. "And humor!"
"Believe me, humor he had already," Nathan said, grinning briefly. "Shark imitations were part of his stock-in-trade. He'd sneak up behind you underwater and poke you in the back, then hang there laughing and grinning 'gotcha.' But as for the rest of it, I'm going to have a few words with that boy. Never mind—Hunt, yeah, Darwin, that's the idea."
"Deep," Darwin said. "Need air." The tone was still completely cheerful and trusting, but he was looking at Nathan with an expression that suggested he wasn't sure how Nathan was going to help him on this one.
Nathan picked up the rebreather harness and beckoned the dolphin over. Calmly Darwin swam up to him and rolled over in the water so that Nathan could start buckling the harness on.
It took a couple of minutes to get the rebreather onto Darwin—even when willing, a dolphin half out of water is a considerable bulk to wrestle into a harness of any shape. And the correct positioning of this one, especially the small gas-exchange dome over the blowhole, the equivalent of a mouthpiece on a human's rebreather, was crucial: there must be absolutely no chance of it being knocked askew by movement or impact. Once the harness was cinched on snugly and the fastenings tightened, Nathan tried a few different ways to pull the rebreather out of kilter—the harness resisted, and the skin-latex seal around the blowhole stayed tight.
Darwin endured all this with an interested manner, eyeing Nathan as he finished up. "This harness will let you breathe without having to surface," Nathan said, as the dolphin slipped back down into the water, shook himself all over, like a man adjusting a jacket he'd just put on, and then brought his head up again. "It should feel no dif-ferent from the sensor harness you wore back on the island."
Darwin looked at Nathan as if he thought he had taken leave of his senses. "Darwin need air," he said, and this time the concern was audible. "Too deep to go up fast—"
Nathan shook his head. "You won't need to go up fast. You won't need to go up at all, with this."
Darwin kept looking at him doubtfully. "Joke?" he said.
"Not at all," Nathan said. "Go ahead—give it a try!"
Thoughtfully, Darwin ducked his head a little under the surface. Nathan, standing up to watch, saw the blowhole move, saw the dome over it cloud up with condensation as Darwin blew on purpose, and blew again, harder. It stayed in place. Then the dolphin submerged and swam a lap or so, carefully keeping a few feet under. Nathan watched him anxiously.
About thirty seconds later, Darwin came back up, and Nathan saw on him one of the expressions he knew dolphins did have: the jaw dropped open in surprise. "Darwin breathe!" the dolphin said delightedly.
Nathan had to smile despite himself, but the urge to amusement didn't last long. He hunkered down slowly by the edge of the pool once more and pulled the little device on its nylon strap out of his pocket, where it had been weighing like lead, both in his pants and on his conscience.
"All right," he said to Darwin, "you know what to do. When I open the tube, you go out and tag the marker. Remember? Like on the island."
"Do," Darwin said, and reached up eagerly out of the water for the strap.
Suddenly Westphalen was down beside them. "Darwin," she said softly, "you don't have to do this if you don't want to."
In other circumstances Nathan would have been annoyed with her, but now he had to agree that it was the right thing to say. Darwin looked at her very thoughtfully, slipped back down... then upended and smacked the water with his tail, a gesture that Nathan recognized from days of old as one of absolute negation. "No," Darwin said. "Hunt shark. Do for Bridger."
Nathan's insides clenched at the thought that anyone, anything, should do anything "for" him. A long time, it had been, since any human being had said as much—a long lonely time now...
The dolphin reached up again. Nathan turned the small targeting device over in his hands, uncapped the recessed switch, pressed the button there—the device began to cheep intermittently, and a small light on it began to blink. He capped it again, held it out. Darwin took the strap from him, biting down hard on it, and eyed Nathan sideways.
"Darwin swim like Bridger," Darwin said merrily.
Nathan was bemused. "Like me?" he said, and reached down to tap the rebreather, thinking the dolphin might be referring to SCUBA or snorkeling gear.
Darwin's tail slapped the water. "No suit," he said, almost in Lucas's tone of voice, the clever explaining to the slow. "Skin!"
And, laughing in dolphin, he dove, and was gone.
Bridger stood up next to Westphalen, smiling slightly. She stood too, looking rather confused. "What was all that about?"
"Joke," Nathan said, and headed out hurriedly, making for the bridge.
CHAPTER 12
On the bridge, Ortiz looked up abruptly from his console as his WSKR screens suddenly started to flicker with incoming fresh data. "Approaching the flashpoint!" he said to Ford. "Whiskers are picking up multiple small craft... two thousand three hundred yards off our starboard bow!"
Bridger came in through the rear starboard door, and his heart began to bang hard against his chest. The balloon was finally about to go up, and as usual, his insides were screaming, We're not ready. We want a few minutes more to pull ourselves together— "Punch up the visual imaging on the forward screens," Nathan said, making for the middle of the bridge and doing his damndest to ignore his insides, for paying attention to them had never done him any good before...
The screens came alive with the WSKR-imaged views of what most closely resembled an undersea prairie; though even this flatness was not unbroken—here and there across it stretched long, deep pressure trenches, doubtless the reason the housing facility was here in the first place—the mineral composition and fossil record of such places were of tremendous scientific and economic interest. The rolling foothills of the Long Chain Mountains were visible not too far away, and in the distance, visible to the WSKR systems if not to the naked eye, were the great mountains themselves—huge jagged peaks to make a mountaineer proud, some of them eighteen or maybe even nineteen thousand feet high: if they had been much taller, they would have been islands. Down there in the prairie lay the housing facility, a smallish place by comparison to Gedrick, a cluster of bubbledomes and Quonset capsules linked by jerry-rigged access tubes. Hovering around the perimeter of the place were about a dozen minisubs of every imaginable kind of design—observation globes, little one-man, many-armed soil and rock sample retrievers, small crab-walking burrowers for digging up core samples—anything that could move around in the undersea environment and however remotely contribute to some kind of defense. Nathan's throat tightened at the sight of the fragile little crafl, and at what faced them down: the Delta, floating there in silence, a great looming black bludgeon, silent, seemingly invulnerable, waiting... waiting for them.
Nathan stood there looking at the thing with loathing. Once again the Delta had successfully called the shot, bringing them up from the depths to answer its threat to these innocents. I've had about enough of this, he thought. Time to call some shots of my own. "Status, Mr. Ford?"
"Weapons Control reports tube one loaded, l
ocked and standing by," said Ford. "Torpedo is fully charged."
"Belay that," said Nathan, shaking his head. "Reduce the charge to twenty percent. I want to stop them, not destroy them."
"Sir... Aye-aye, sir." Ford glanced at Phillips on the weapons board. "You heard the Captain. Twenty percent charge." Though his tone of voice made it plain that he thought perhaps Nathan had returned to "BB-eyed" mode.
"Twenty percent aye," said Phillips.
"That's all very well, sir," Ford said quietly. "But we don't have any of the automatics back on-line down in the torpedo room, and a manual reload for any second shot will take between sixty and ninety seconds..."
"So we only get one good shot," Bridger said. "Let's make it count." Part of him was protesting, It's not enough! We'll never make it work! The rest of him was insisting, nearly as loudly, that it was still a lot more than they'd had earlier, he should count himself lucky and just get on with it—
"But there's still no targeting," Ford said.
Bridger sighed. "One bad shot...” he murmured. He was going to have to do it after all: what he had been praying he wouldn't have to. But there was no avoiding it now—
He swung around to the screens. The minisubs were moving again: seaQuest's arrival had slowed them down, but only briefly. These were angry people, trying to defend what mattered to them—but trying was going to be the operative term here. They had no armament that was going to matter at all to a Delta, even before the retrofit of its armor: they had research vehicles, with nothing more than harpoons, corers and clawed manipulating arms meant for delicate bottom work. Now they buzzed around the Delta like angry wasps, but wasps without stings—and the Delta lay there, ignoring them—
Until one of them got too close to the huge bow and began hammering on it with something. A rock, Nathan thought, held in its gripping claws—
Within seconds an E-plasma torpedo came searing out of one of the Delta’s tubes, burning its way through the water, and struck another of the surrounding craft, the biggest. It exploded in a starburst of electrostatic flame, and the pressure of the explosion rocked all the other little craft nearby, rupturing one, so that it cracked open like a dropped egg, shedding its air and its pilot into the water. The air lurched and bobbled upward in writhing globules; the pilot, crushed to death in an instant, drifted to the bottom with the rest of the flotsam from his destroyed vessel. The first small ship, the one that had had the temerity to attack the Delta, backed frantically away; so did the rest of its companions, those that were still intact, or had power left to move after the detonation...
* * *
Inside the Delta, Marilyn Stark watched the little craft swarm furiously around her boat, and sat quietly in her command chair, unconcerned. That will have taught them to keep their distance, at least, she thought, and to respect superior force. After all, should I sit here and let them entertain themselves trying to claw us to death? But that nuisance was ended for now. There was much more important business to tend to at the moment—
"It's back!" her sensor chief yelped, panic shrill in his voice. "The seaQuest is back!"
She just smiled. They're doing better than I thought they would, she thought. Not that it's going to do them any good. A last show of bravado: no more. Whoever's in that boat, he's a fine bluffer. But shortly it won't matter anymore, to him or anyone else aboard her...
"Captain!" shouted Maxwell, not believing Stark's disinterest—then he gulped at his own temerity, and shrank down in his seat. Stark just quirked that smile at him: she was really in too good a humor at the moment to chastise the poor creature. "Relax," she said to the bridge at large, "all of you. You're looking at a shark without teeth."
Then she sat a bit straighter in her chair. Extending a pleasure too far is vulgar, Stark thought: it's better to kill quick and clean than to toy with your prey. "Helm," she said. "Bring us around to zero-six-zero..." She smiled slightly. "Attack posture."
* * *
Ortiz checked his readings, checked them again, and the attitude change told him the same thing both times. "The Delta's bringin' her barrels around on us!" he said.
Bridger stepped up beside him. "Heading?"
"Zero-six-zero. She's movin' straight at us."
Crocker looked at Bridger, his expression one from the old days that said, Head-to-head her? Bridger nodded. Crocker instructed his helmsmen, and seaQuest's bow swung around to match the Delta move for move.
"Chief O'Neill," Nathan said, heading toward the command chair, "open up low band, all frequencies. I want everybody out there to hear me."
"Aye, sir," said O'Neill, and worked over his console for a moment. Bridger stopped by the command chair, looked at it thoughtfully—and swung down into it. The bridge got very quiet.
"Low band open, sir!" said O'Neill. "Standing by for transmission."
Bridger reached out to his command panel, cleared his throat and hit a button there. "Attention all colony craft and colonists. This is Nathan Bridger, commanding the deep submergence vessel seaQuest, representing the United... the United Ocean—" His mind went blank. Damn! "What the hell is it?" he whispered to Ford, who was now standing by him.
"United Earth/Oceans Organization."
"—United Earth/Oceans Organization. We are here to protect and defend your facility. All craft free in the water, move to safe territory immediately. Repeat—move clear immediately ..."
* * *
And one of the very few things that could have startled her had now happened, so that Stark, even Stark, came up slowly out of her command chair, with a look of utter astonishment on her face. "Nathan Bridger..." she said under her breath.
Maxwell came hurrying over to her, his eyes wide and frightened. "Captain! Did you hear? Bridger is—"
"Yes, I heard," she said, mildly annoyed: did he think she had suddenly gone deaf? All the same, Stark was bemused. The scuttlebutt had gone right around the fleet and come back the other way about how old Iron-Pants Bridger, right in the middle of building the most powerful submarine ever seen in the world's waters, had abruptly gone south in the brains and taken himself off to some desert island—and had there cut himself off from the world, like some kind of lunatic Prospero with an armful of computers, to do, if you please, research. Now Stark blinked, wondering what on earth had had the power to stir him out of his self- imposed solitude—for the word had gone around that he had refused numerous attempts to get him out of retirement again. "I didn't think he'd ever come back..."
Maxwell, though, knowing none of the man's history, was much more worried about other things. "What's he doing here?"
"I don't know," Stark said.
"And what if he's found the sabotage, and fixed it?"
Stark was busy considering the possible ramifications of this sudden appearance. "Oh, I'm sure he found it," she said absently. "But he hasn't fixed anything. There's no way."
Of that she was more than sure. That ship was one of the most complex, in terms of hardware, of any ship ever built; the old space shuttles were hardly more complicated. seaQuest had been made not to need much in the way of maintenance, and most of her most important systems were protected by way of redundancy rather than by having spares and extra parts on hand. Anything that broke had an identical system right behind it, and another after that, sometimes six or seven layers of redundancy deep—more than enough for even a very long cruise. There had been no protection for the ship, though, against her own systems' redundancy turning against her—which was a situation that Stark had carefully crafted and installed after she was relieved from command.
The concept had crossed her mind more than once while she was still in the center seat, all that while ago. Stark had become determined that while she was still in active service, no one else should command this ship without her permission—for so powerful a weapon was too important to be trusted in less talented, or faithful, hands than hers. Marilyn Stark had considered in some detail how to make herself, in essence, seaQuest's guardian. Then,
suddenly, after the Livingston Trench incident, Stark had found that she was going to have to begin to exercise that guardianship. Since she had spent so very long on the planning, it had taken her only a cou-ple of weeks of work at the programming, and some clandestine installation work down in the bilge, to lay in the self-perpetuating virus routines that would prove to Fleet how big a mistake it had been to take a Stark out of the helm. The first time seaQuest saw action, she would fail disastrously—possibly even be destroyed. But Marilyn Stark thought not. She rather suspected that the ship would escape and crawl back to port. There would be any amount of uproar in the Naval hierarchy. And sooner or later the word would go out: no one else can handle this boat—get Stark. She would be recalled, and those who had relieved her of command would be disgraced, and she would quietly remove the viruses and then show the Navy once more how such a ship should be commanded—
Now, though, that scenario seemed to have come to pieces. As yet, she was more insulted than angry. That they should give her ship back to a lapsed officer, a beach bum, a coward who ran away from his duty—!
"Attention, Delta-IV," came the beach bum's calm voice, "I am prepared and willing to accept your immediate and unconditional surrender. Otherwise I will be forced to fire on you. You have twenty seconds in which to initiate your response..."
Marilyn Stark settled back in her command chair, and smiled.
* * *
Let's see if that does anything, Nathan thought, and closed the channel. "Weapons Control," he said, "flood all tubes, open all outer doors and bow caps."
There was a shocked pause. "But, sir," came the doubtful voice of Weapons Officer Phillips, "only tube number one has anything in it!"
"I know that," said Nathan. "Just do it. Rack the shotgun; make the brave noise." More to himself than to the rest of them, he said, "We may not be tough—but we can damn sure look it..."
