Shadowboxer

by Nicholas Pollotta

  “With nobody on the bridge and the bilge filled with corpses?” asked Boomer, moving around him to get to the hatchway and almost slipping in Moonfeather’s spilled coffee.

  “No prob. I got it covered,” said Thumbs grimly, ducking low to make his own sprint through the hatchway. Another shake and the ring of monitors winked out behind them. The Manta was blind.

  “Covered how?” shouted Delphia, clambering down a metal staircase far ahead of the troll.

  Moonfeather was right behind him, followed by Silver gripping her bulky bag, and trying not to bump into anything. Boomer traversed the stairs by grabbing the rails, lifting his boots off the deck and sliding down in practiced ease.

  Thumbs simply jumped to the next level, landing in a crouch. “I set the Firelance to fire, full power in ninety seconds.”

  “Underwater?” screamed Boomer aghast, his breath fogging.

  “It’ll be a sight to see.”

  “Yar. From a distance. Let’s book.”

  Creaks and groans sounded from all over the vessel. Struts snapped free from ceiling joyces to lethally swing across corridors like scythes. Hatches popped open randomly, and the lights flickered as the fusion reactor fought to stay on line against the encroaching cold.

  Following the others, Thumbs banged his head on a normsized hatchway. Blood trickled down his cheek, but he kept going. “I sure hope you had a troll in the crew!” he said, shaking the blood off his face.

  “No,” Boomer answered, punting down a corridor. “But we once had a really fat ork, and his suit is still here.”

  “Close enough!”

  The Manta was starting to list severely as mists crept along the decks, icy crystals forming on bare metal by the time the team reaching the airlocks. A deadly chill was in the atmosphere and getting worse by the tick. Delphia wrapped a pocket handkerchief around the latch, then hauled open the hatchway. Everybody tumbled in, then Boomer slammed it shut. He grabbed gloves from a locker and put them on to spin the locking wheel to seal the portal tight.

  The lights were dim in the pressure chamber, the filaments of the bulbs easily visible as the power to them was so low. Lockers lined the bow wall, with dressing benches bolted to the deck before them. Hung on the opposite side were the Jym suits. They lined the bulkhead like overstarched tuxedos, flat black instead of orange like the ones the Gundersons had been wearing. Resembling military power armor, the suits were in two pieces, top and bottom, the waists open. However, the arm and legs were fastened to the bulkhead with chains and one mother of a padlock. Delphia gestured, the Manhunter spoke, and the lock exploded into pieces.

  Thumbs dogged his waist seals tight, then punched the emergency start button clearly marked on his sleeve control panel. The Jym suit came alive with power, lights, and air. Frost was creeping along the bulkheads at an incredible pace, and the thickening mists made it difficult to see as he searched for the keypad to open the huge hinged hatch in the deck.

  “Where’s the switch?” he shouted, his voice muffled by the thick metal and plastic of his helmet.

  “Here,” said Boomer clearly from the twin speakers inside each of the helmets. He pressed the keys on the icy pad. Nothing happened. He tried again, and again, with the same result. “The safeties have shorted out!”

  “Then we improvise,” said Silver, and she flipped the safety latches off with a metal kick. Instantly, the pressure hatch slammed back, indenting the perforated metal floor, the hinges cracking apart. A solid column of water thundered into the room, impacting against the ceiling and punching through the deck above them.

  Fascinated by the sight, Moonfeather reached out a gauntlet, and Delphia pulled her arm back. “Don’t. The pressure will shear off your hand. Wait for the water to come to us.”

  Bitter cold began to creep through the bulkheads, ice forming around their suits as the thundering sea water rose to knee depth, waist, chest, and they were finally under. One by one, the runners stepped into the gaping hole and dropped through.

  Truly resembling shadows, the ebony Jym suits plummeted through the cold sea, the running lights of the Manta wildly splaying about as the hull buckled and writhed like a huge beast dying in anguish. Then a perfect sphere of fire brighter than the sun replaced the submarine. The deafening shock wave brutally shoved the falling Jym suits into the killing depths below as hot shrapnel hissed by in a deadly rain and darkness swallowed them whole.

  24

  “Here they come again!” cried a sonar operator.

  Filling the forward display with gentle majesty were the waving forests of the undersea farms, organized hexacres of crops colored in brilliant hues growing in wild abundance under the powerful lamps of the undersea arcology. And traveling straight in from the west came several pirate submarines, their advance heralded by a fusillade of torpedoes, arcing and spiraling toward the shimmering bubblecity in an ever-expanding cone formation.

  “Anti-torpedoes launch, activate countermeasures. Deckers proceed with jamming and whiplash!” ordered the duty officer, using both hands to operate his console. Seated next to him in the command dais was the XO officer. She was slumped in her seat, comely features charred from the electrical explosion of her console. It was caused by a freak overload when an enemy torpedo hit a power relay junction Beyond The Wall.

  In fast precision, the amber cross hairs on the screen surrounded each of the enlongated submarines, and the antitorpedoes streaked away. The tiny needles lanced through the ocean to slam deep into a pirate boat, and then the vessel vanished, engulfed in a globular fireball that expanded, contracted, and was gone.

  Outside the mesa, alarms sounded on the streets of the city as the shock wave hit and thousands of tiny cracks appeared over the section of the dome facing the blast. Slowly, the fissures started to close, but water sprayed in through the hairline fissures, knifing through buildings, carving off chunks, and cutting passenger vehicles in half.

  In the Command Center, the side screens displayed a hundred bubbling trails crisscrossing in wild patterns as the pirates released anti-anti-torpedoes to counter the city’s defense. Made of ceramics and powered by compressed air, the deadhead projectiles were invisible to magnetic sensors, so The Cube master-computer formed vector graphics of the incoming projectiles based on sonar readings; glowing green lines to show the silhouette of an enemy incoming where the passive sensors indicated they should be located. The accuracy of the plotting and graphics was highly doubtful.

  Two rumbling explosives blossomed on the horizon and the computer screens as a pair of torpedoes were destroyed. Then the easterly screen went speckled as dozens of pirates in green camouflaged Jym suits were released and disappeared into the farmland of the city. The duty officer cursed. “The pirates never used troops before!”

  “Launch salvo of anti-sub limpet mines,” the commander snapped. “Needlers, fire at will. Prepare to trigger outlying depth charges.”

  A chorus of acknowledgments greeted the orders, when an entire panel of controls went dark and an alarm began to howl.

  “Another hit,” called out the female operator at the damage control console. “Missile strike in Section Ten, breach in Quadrant Four of Old Dome. Explosive decompression in Quadrant Three and Two!”

  “Sonar is down,” called out the operator at engineering. “Fusion reactor number two is down. Shunting emergency power to back up sonar and the Wall.”

  With the resurgence of power, the althropic dome over the city closed the hissing cracks faster, but the streets were already flooded in some sectors, with traffic snarling in the outer divisions.

  Almost undetectable against the mass of the arcology, a swarm of microscopic dots launched from a battery hidden in the surrounding mountains. Under independent control, the sleek drones curved away at full thrust, a trail of bubbles streaming behind them like a jet’s contrail in the atmosphere. Rapidly accelerating at ten ... fifteen ... thirty-five knots, the finned bombs dodged around the lamp posts in the farm field to zoom in on the Jym s
uits amid the greenery. Balls of fire erupted in the cropland, grisly bits of armor and clouds of red blood forming a dense cloud. Needlers, plain steelloy rods with barbed tips stuttered out of nests through pressurized ports, the thousands of quills riddling the Jym suits by the score and detonating incoming torpedoes everywhere.

  Then a lone torpedo pierced the defensive barrage and struck the bubblecity dead center on the west side. Fifty tones of diakote and marcoplas glass vaporized instantly, leaving a hole the size of a fist clear through. A stream of water shot out of the puncture, lancing across the city.

  One tick later, explosive decompression hit, the dome rupturing from the shock and spiderwebbing cracks for hundreds of meters in every direction. Unstoppable, the ocean poured in through the ever-widening rupture. Clawing at anything, men and women screamed, their bodies banging helplessly against walls as the deluge poured into the city, smashing everything.

  Alarms sounded everywhere, from The Cube to Old Dome, and banks of monitors were flashing red in the Command Center.

  “Breach in Sector Ninety-four!” cried a technician, frantically throwing switches and levers. “No . . . Sectors Eighty through One-twenty! And on levels eight, seven, and six!”

  “Launch everything!” screamed the duty officer, brandishing his fist at the computer screen. Overhead the lights flickered and died. “Motherfragger! They got the fusion plant!”

  The sea outside the wounded dome was filled with spheres of fire as drones and torpedoes battled for supremacy. A flash, and a pirate submarine was gone. Another, then a third! Then the roof of the city violently shook as tremendous bombs dropped from out of the dark sea overhead to pound the dome in unrestricted fury. Cracks spread to every quadrant, knives of water roaring in through splintering cracks. A geyser of boiling water shot across the center axis of the city, toppling buildings into the central granite mesa. A thousand death screams were drowned in the titanic roar of the sea unleashed.

  A bomb larger than the rest combined hit the top of Old Dome. The five meters of resilient dome material held for no longer than a heartbeat against the blinding fury of the hellish onslaught. The upper city burst apart like a cheap lightbulb, the inhabitants jellied from the stark implosion. The steelloy girders of buildings were driven into the reinforced granite of the central mesa like tent pegs, splitting the rocky edifice to pieces.

  The fuel tanks of liquid hydrogen for the fusion generators detonated, sending out a death cloud of shrapnel toward the damaged city below. Overloaded, circuit breakers exploded into molten metal, power relays slagged solid and the superconductor cables heated to the point that they ignited their own fireproof casing. Soon, billowing clouds of poison gas were added to the chaos. Busbars hissed into nonexistence, then the mighty fusion reactors exploded and melted. Gigawatts of stored power were released, and blue lightning crackled over the wounded arcology, setting fires everywhere that were promptly extinguished by the flooding from above and both sides.

  More torpedoes arced in through the weakening defenses and struck the dome, embedding in the transparent material, then detonated in unison, the titanic force vectors separating the crack with a screech of tortured glass unheard by any living soul. The physical shock wave rippled along the streets and granite of the central mesa, shaking off chunks of cliff. The main dome split asunder, the remaining atmosphere woofed out as the sea rushed in, carrying with it a million tons of debris and failing bodies. Bridges, buildings, streets collapsed, crushed flat under an avalanche of falling concrete. A hundred unoccupied escape pods launched. Even underwater a chemical fire raged unchecked in Industrial, and the bubbletown went dark.

  The pirates fired salvo after salvo of torpedoes into the ruins as bombs dropped from overhead to complete the utter destruction of the trillion-nuyen arcology and its many inhabitants.

  * * *

  The tridscreen went dark and the theatre lights gradually came on to rosy levels. The rows of seats were completely empty except for two patrons, a man and a woman. Both were norms, both elderly, and neither seemed the least bit pleased.

  “Pitiful,” stated the skinny male slumped in his seat. “Absolutely pitiful.”

  “Agreed,” replied the distinguished woman, sitting alongside. She was lovely but severe in a restrictive dress of formal function. “And that was our best combat simulation so far.”

  “I can see why you hired me, Ms. Harvin.”

  “My Miami contacts recommended you highly. Lights, please!”

  Instantly, the theatre was illuminated. Turning about in her chair, Barbara Harvin studied the old norm siting near her. Pole-thin, with gray hair and a chromed datajack in his temple, the decker wasn’t physically impressive. On the other hand, she could hire all the street muscle ever needed, and it wouldn’t do the job. Shawn Wilson could.

  “So you agree with my assessment?”

  The decker nodded. “Totally. Your people seem to lack the necessary . . . um, non-linear thinking mandatory to defend this type of installation.”

  “Pirates attack in a straightforward manner, why not? All the advantages are theirs. They’re small and mobile, we’re large and stationary.”

  “A single torpedo and the dome is gone.”

  “Oh, more than just one. Our althropic”—she stumbled over the word—“glass shell is the most resilient material known.”

  “Radio waves can’t travel through salt water,” he observed. “How do you communicate with your subs and control the torpedoes?”

  “An acoustical phone called a Gertrude. It’s limited only by the thickness of the water, compounded by the distance needed and the power of the sonic transmitter.”

  Wilson rubbed the chrome jack on his forehead. “Like shouting at a car in the wind?”

  “Exactly.”

  He chewed that over. “Bad for your subs. The pirates can hear every command.”

  “We have a solution for that,” she said, but that was all. Wilson gave a wry smile. “Only one way to shout in public and not have the world understand what you’re talking about. Codes.”

  She nodded. “Changed daily.”

  “What about cutting off the problem at the source?” Shawn Wilson lit a cigarette. “The dead can’t hurt you.”

  “If we knew the location of the pirate base, it would have been over long ago,” said Harvin.

  Wilson sent a puff of smoke toward the ceiling as a perfect ring. “You must have already tried capturing one and torturing the location of their main base out of him. What was the name of this gang again? IronHell?”

  “Yes, that has also been tried and also failed. The pirates have cerebral bombs surgically planted inside their skulls set to explode if anything happens to them. We believe that the upper echelon do not, but so far it’s been impossible to confirm this, much less find and capture one of their leaders.”

  “Drugs? Hypnosis? Magic?”

  “All tried and failed,” Harvin said. “Mr. Wilson, if these are the best suggestions you can offer, then perhaps it was a waste of time bringing you here.”

  “What about infiltration?”

  “We already have a very special team working on that particular angle.”

  “Any progress?”

  “Oh, most assuredly. Our contact is incommunicado at the moment, but we expect good news at any time. They are most resourceful.” A pause. “Of course we’ll never be able to use them again after this.”

  “Ah, they know too much,” Wilson did not state it as a question.

  Barbara Harvin stared at him. “Quite the contrary. They know absolutely nothing about what’s really going on.”

  Thoughtfully, Wilson ground out his smoke in an ashtray, and lit another. “How much time have we got?”

  “For the moment, all the time you need.”

  He raised his eyebrows in surprise. “How is that possible?”

  “Gunderson currently has an ... agreement with IronHell. In exchange for leaving the city alone, we provide them with all the food and medical s
upplies they can carry in ten ships every month. Other times they want money, and sometimes they want ships.”

  “Expensive.”

  “Extremely expensive. It cuts our profit margin to the bone. It is, however, necessary for the present.”

  “Any reason this place is so attractive to them?”

  “None to our knowledge. Aside from the obvious fact that they know it’s here and can successfully extort supplies and nuyen and ships from us. Only the deep-water location of this city is unique. People have been successfully building underwater cities since the 1970s.”

  He stared at her.

  “Incredible, but true.” Harvin took a cigarette case from a pocket of her suit, removed a slim cigarette and puffed it into life. “The difference is that until now the dometowns have always been located in shallow waters. Old Japan and America both tried deep-water cities and failed. So did Brazil, Australia, France, and Russia.”

  Harvin gestured expansively. “The ruins are still out there somewhere. Secret cities of the dead. A fortune for anybody who ever finds one, figures out why they failed, and brings back the data.”

  “Interesting.”

  “However, until confirmed, the reason those primitive arcologies are believed to have failed is thermal inversion. There are rivers of water running through the ocean, some hot, some cold. They shift about and move freely, so there can be a dynamic difference of twenty degrees in ocean water within a mere ten meters. For a dometown a thousand meters tall, the differences can be incredible, and deadly. Mini-fissures are created by the temperature differences. These lead to a general weakening, then cracks and explosive decompression and total dome failure. Millions, and in some cases, billions lost in an eyeblink.”

  “Then how is it that yours is still standing?”

  She inhaled deeply, letting the smoke trickle out her nose. “That information is on a need-to-know basis only.”