Shadowboxer

by Nicholas Pollotta

  He took a deep drag on the cigarette, the tip glowing red as a laser sight. “I may need to know,” Wilson informed her.

  “Demonstrate that, and I shall personally brief you.” Another puff and the cigarette was ground out on the expensive carpet underfoot.

  “Fair enough.”

  Harvin rose and started for the exit, trailed by her entourage of guards and aides. “There is a tremendous profit to be made down here from pressure-welding unique alloys, superconductor chips, and the near limitless supply of food for the surface.”

  “Which you will happily sell to the starving of the world.”

  “Of course. Gunderson is a business. The ocean is also a pharmaceutical cornucopia of plants with fantastic medical, and even recreational, properties.”

  Barbara Harvin held out a hand, and a dapper aide proffered a small wooden box. She lifted the lid and drew out a handrolled cigar with a golden band bearing the Gunderson logo. She offered it to Shawn Wilson. “This is deepweed, a prime example of the resources down here. It has much more nicotine than land tobacco, and a good dose of the chemical THC, just like fine Colombian marijuana. The world market potential for such a luxury item is staggering.”

  With a pocket lighter, Wilson lit the tip and inhaled, lolling the smoke on his tongue like an expert. “Draws like a good Havana,” he complimented. “Very mellow.”

  “Yes, it is very popular in the lower districts.” Harvin watched him puff contentedly on the cigar for a moment, then turned and started along the hallway. “So you see, we desperately need the freedom to harvest the sea without hindrance or interference. The Gunderson Corporation wants those pirates dealt with once and forever.”

  Continuing along the plush hallway of the theatre lobby, Wilson looked at her over the cigar. “By the way, exactly how do you get staff down here?” he asked. “Not many folks would want to work in a fish tank situated in a warzone.”

  “Normally, we hire them in gangs through fake ads,” Harvin said. “We have many thousand workers at present, but always need more. And if there is a specialist we need and cannot lure here”—she shrugged—“we simply kidnap him.”

  “Such as mages?”

  Barbara scowled at him. “There are no shamans or mages in the city. This is important for us to maintain absolute control. Riggers and deckers we allow because of their tremendous usefulness, and because the dometown is not connected to the world computer grid. With no access to the Matrix, there is little harm a decker can do. And if they’re foolish enough to try a run against our coldframe, then the problem solves itself.” She smiled at this last.

  “If babies are being born, you’re going to have mages someday.”

  “When a child shows the talent, we kill him or her in an accident.”

  Wilson frowned. “Crude.”

  “But efficient. It has served us so far.”

  “No mistakes?”

  Barbara Harvin stopped at the elevator, and an aide pressed the button for them. “Only once. And it was also corrected. Although there have been complications from the solution. However, that was before my administration, and such an event will not be allowed to occur again.”

  With a sigh, the elevators doors parted, and then parted again. Wilson blinked. “Just like an airlock.”

  “It is one,” Harvin informed him. “All major doors to the executive quarters of Old Dome are. For the safety and protection of our people in case of a minor dome leak.”

  “What do you tell the workers when they want to go home? Pirates again?”

  “Oh, no. We control all the submersibles and Jym suits.

  Nobody leaves without our consent. Also, upon arrival we give them a medical injection to help their bodies cope with the terrible pressures down here. Actually, it’s a powerful narcotic extracted from deepweed and genetically altered. Once administered, the worker must continue to take more of the substance daily for life. If an unauthorized person escaped to the surface, he’d be unconscious within hours, dead in a day without the antidote.” She smiled. “Because, you see, they don’t even know about the drug. We place it secretly in their food, beer, soymilk, candy, even the free cigars and cigarettes we regularly distribute from quote—manufacturing excess—end quote.”

  In abject horror, Shawn Wilson dropped the cigar from nerveless fingers. It fell to the floor and lay there smoldering at their feet, slowly dying on the plush carpeting. Nobody made a move to retrieve the item.

  “Welcome to Old Dome,” said Barbara Harvin, motioning him with a smile into the upholstered corporate cage.

  25

  Waddling through the ankle-deep silt, the five Jym suits clumsily moved along the bed of the ocean. Thankfully, their underwater armor was in good condition, batteries fully charged, air tanks at max, the DeCamp joints flexing freely, and the heaters toasty warm, although the insides did smell of old beer and sour sweat like a locker room after a game. Operating at the bottom of the sea, the runners had six hours to find some place to recharge both, or die. The suits weighed a good ton apiece and there was no way even magic could float them to the surface. Which gave them only one option.

  Every shuffling step of the group puffed up little clouds of silt that settled with amazing speed. The pressure was tremendous, and they all kept a close watch on the quivering needles of the dynamic-tension gauges set with the other controls and meters along the jaw line of each helmet.

  With their shoulder-mounted lights off and the sonar deactivated, the black suits were silent invaders into the briny depths. Thermographs, struggling against the polar currents, only offered them vector graphics of the world around them, sketchy green outlines devoid of color or details. It made the whole scene seem unreal. Schools of cartoon fish swam by like the radioactive ghosts of trout long past. Unbelievably, plant life was abundant in the crevices of the flat plain, waving fronds, bushy clumps that shrank inside themselves at their approach, and weird things resembling upsidedown octopi. And crabs, of course.

  Silver knew that radio waves couldn’t travel through salt water, not at this pressure and temperature. However, the Jym suits carried something called a Gertrude, an acoustical sea phone. The five of them could talk, and it was supposed to be impossible to tell the scrambled sonic signals from natural biological background noise. Or, at least, that was the theory. The darkness compounded with silence was intolerable, so the risk was worth it. Besides, she had other uses for her radio.

  “How much further?” asked Thumbs, wheezing slightly, the faceplate of his helmet fogging.

  “Decrease your oxygen,” snapped Moonfeather. “You’re getting too much.”

  “Thanks,” he panted. “Thought I’d need more cause I’m big.”

  “No.”

  “Another two, three klicks,” said Silver, wiggling an arm free of her sleeve. As it came out, she flexed the limb in the scant confines of her torso area and happily scratched her nose. “The explosion threw us farther away than I thought.”

  “If you hadn’t zapped the sub, it would have sunk and we could have looted the wreckage for air tanks,” grumbled Boomer.

  “To what end?” asked Delphia, in the lead. “You saw that scout come to look over the blast zone, and then leave. It wasn’t a rescue sub. It was a recon looking for survivors to geek.”

  “Yar? And how do you know that?”

  “Their airlock was sealed, torpedo tubes flooded.”

  A pause. “Oh. Bidamned, you’re right.”

  Easing the fiber-optic cable from her jacket pocket, Silver spoke. “External temperature, minus fifty. We’re in the middle of the polar river now. Should be close.”

  “Gods, I wish we could use the lights!” said Moonfeather. “Don’t!” snapped Boomer. “It’ll attract everything alive for klicks. And some of the larger ones will be hungry.”

  “Or armed.”

  “Gotcha. Dark it is.”

  Reaching an arroyo, they circled a copse of kelp stretching upward out of range of their thermographs. Fish da
rted in and out among the strands of kelp like birds in a tree.

  “There it is!” cried Thumbs, gesturing.

  Everybody hurried toward him. The clump of brain coral was sitting alone and innocent near the exposed gnarled roots of the kelp. A single squat crab peered out at them like a prisoner from his jail cell window.

  Delphia moved around the illusion, hands spread wide. “Don’t go near it!” he reminded them sternly. “There will be more defensives. Deadlier ones.”

  “Natch, kemosabe. What am I, stupid?”

  “I can answer that.”

  “Lick my pud, mage.”

  “Arc-store it troll.”

  The group walked around the clump of brain coral at a good distance. The smooth sand seemed primordial, undisturbed for millennia.

  “Anything?” asked Moonfeather anxiously, tapping her gauntlet against her forearm controls to up the heat some more, and then further still.

  “Over here!” cried Boomer, standing near a crack in the seabed, kicking at the silt. His scuffing had partially exposed a thick cable buried underneath the compressed sand. It led to the brain coral and stretched off toward the north.

  “Toward those black mountains,” said Silver, her voice echoing slightly in the confines of her helmet. “Odd that we can see them down here,” she added softly, sliding the cable into her temple jack. “Should be far out of our range.” With awkward fingers, she slid the other end into the communications jack of her radio.

  “Thumbs, take point,” said Delphia’s voice over the Gertrude. “I’ll cover the rear.”

  “And do what?” snorted Thumbs, fists on hips. “These things don’t have any external weapons.”

  “To trip booby traps,” said Moonfeather, walking away slowly.

  His black helmet nodded, and he started moving off. “Accepted. At least it’s a plan.”

  “Can’t you throw a mana bolt or summon something if we get ambushed?” asked Boomer. “Magic should work under water.”

  “Sure. But through the metal of the suit? No.”

  “Excuses, excuses,” he mumbled.

  The land rose and fell before them in flat rippling dunes with dull monotony, the compressed sand providing an easy walk. And the minutes became hours as their battery power and air decreased with lethal regularity. Then they reached an expanse of rolling foothills, a mud swell running between them.

  “The cable goes in this end,” announced Thumbs, kneeling in the hard silt.

  “And comes out Over here,” said Delphia, unseen. “But the coating on this side of the cable is the kind they use on fiber-optics.”

  “Vulcanized rubber on this side,” added Boomer.

  “The junction box,” breathed Silver. “Where the EM pulses from the coldframe are converted into maser signals. Nobody uses a combination of the two anymore, not for decades.”

  “Who cares whether they do or they don’t?” stated Boomer urgently. “Let’s find out where it goes and get there.”

  “Careful,” warned Delphia. “The swell itself is probably armed and armored against intrusion.”

  “Hopefully the cable is vulnerable,” offered Silver. “Supercomputer or not, it would be useless unless it could get to the data banks of the CDP, and that means terminals of some sort with access ports for inspections, repairs, and diagnostics.”

  “If you say so.”

  “Do it, girl. Go find the thing.”

  Bypassing the mud swell, Silver proceeded around the lump. “Ha! It’s a top-hat style. The top is solid, but the bottom is open!” she said. “Maybe to vent off heat or allow the waters to cool the circuits. Whatever, the internal relays are plainly visible.”

  “Can you jack in?”

  Silver opened the control panel of her sleeve and hesitantly started splicing plastic wires to her dead radio. She closed the lid of the service panel to help hold the fibers in place, then reached out and gently pocked the bare ends of the optic cables to the exposed ports of a transmodem. They slid in perfectly. Another triumph of Japanese standardization. She boosted power, activated a shield program, and tentatively attempted to access the data stream.

  * * *

  Silver’s mind swirled under the explosion of data and instantaneously she was in, surrounded by a million copies of herself, reversed, backward, and inverted. A hundred datastreams silently thundered by, the lambent rivers of bytes traveling in both directions simultaneously. She reeled under the onslaught of impressions, and struggled to focus her attention on her own hands, the only non-reflective things in sight.

  In here, everything was chromate, a billion endless mirrors reflecting in mirrors, in silvered pools of polished lightning. It was like the Matrix boosted on chips, a concept that made her temples throb. A neon aurora in the stainless steel sky, a coded menu shimmered above a reflective collection of nodes and relays. Oddly, the shiny ground under her was slightly dull, not as perfect as the rest of the landscape. Distorted from the minor heat of her presence? How sensitive was this thing? Tentatively, Silver tried moving further in and activating a sophisticated can opener when gray ICE suddenly hit her from every direction in a perfect globe. There was a jarring flash of brief pain.

  * * *

  “Drek!” cried Silver, staggering a bit. “It dumped me!”

  “You okay?” asked Delphia, touching her metal shoulder with his gauntlet.

  More annoyed than anything, she took a tiny sip of water from the nipple of the bottle inside her helmet. There wasn’t much left. “I’ll live,” she sighed. “And I got inside. But it was too fast, too complex.” Her gloves moved in the water trying to show them the polished visions in her mind. “It was wonderful,” she whispered. “Beautiful! Ghost, I want to go back right now!”

  “So do it,” prompted Boomer.

  She hung her head, the helmet staying motionless. “It would kill me. It’s like breathing pure oxygen or running a V8 on straight nitrous oxide. Sounds great, till everything blows.”

  “Hey, that’s arctic, kid,” said Thumbs. “Were you able to get anything at all?”

  Slowly, as if laying flowers on the grave of a friend, Silver disconnected the cables from the transmodem in the junction. “Yeah, I found stuff. Nothing direct, but I got a glimpse of the main menu.”

  “Is it . . . part of what we’re after?” asked Boomer. “The Yamato?"

  “No. It’s a war computer, just like we thought.”

  Delphia threw up his armored arms. “Drek! A toy of some Carib League member? Or does it belong to Atlantic Security itself?”

  “Don’t know, but it’s never been used, except in practice runs. There’s no hot file, so that’s a lock. And what it’s protecting is about sixty klicks due north. Something really, really big.”

  She smiled even though she knew no one could see her face. “Something with atmospheric and temperature perimeters suitable for life.”

  “Yes!” cried Thumbs, doing a slow-motion jig. “We live!”

  “If we can travel sixty kilometers in . . . four and half hours,” retorted Boomer sourly. “Uphill with no roads.”

  “Have we got a choice?” inquired Moonfeather, her voice acid sweet.

  “No,” said Delphia. “Sixty in four, with thirty for getting lost. Cake. Let’s go.”

  He lurched off for the black mountains, the others close behind. As they moved away toward the foothills, an albino crab scuttled out to see if they’d left anything edible in their wake.

  26

  Cresting an arroyo near the top of the lowest mountain, the five gasping people in Jym suits stopped wheezing and inhaled sharply.

  “Slot me!”

  “Motherfragger!”

  “A'i, carumba!”

  “Yes! Thank the gods, yes!”

  Towering undersea mountains stood proud and tall to the south, west and distant north of them, a half ring of protective granite rising klicks high into the ocean. To the east was an endless impossible nothingness, a yawning chasm in the ocean floor stretching beyond
visibility. A ravine, an abyss larger than the Grand Canyon of the Ute Nation and the Marianas Trench in the Philippines combined. It was like looking over the edge of the universe and straight into hell.

  Lamp pots shed brilliant white light on the thousands of hexacres of cultivated fields, with different types of submersibles tending the crops, bringing in harvests, relaying personnel in yellow Jym suits, and hauling about gigantic nets full of fish and crabs.

  Dominating the center of the half valley was a double bubble: a large squat dome of transparent material with a smaller round dome set on top, a massive shaft of granite, a mesa, in the center, supporting both like a stalagmite tent pole. Inside the upper dome of clear material could be seen scaffolding and rigging similar to that used on oil fields. The large lower dome was squalid, filled with gray machines, pumps, and what looked like some kind of processing plants. On the ground level was a wall of interlocking granite slabs, thick and tall, ringing the floor of the dome, an inner wall of protection.

  “Incredible,” breathed Delphia. “Fantastic.”

  “Salvation,” panted Thumbs.

  “And how the frag do we get in?” demanded Moonfeather irritably. Boomer grunted a similar sentiment.

  Silver pointed. “We’ll use the backdoor. Follow me.”

  * * *

  A colossal god towered above Old Dome, frowning with impatience.

  Rolling up his sleeves, Shawn Wilson narrowed his eyes and stared down at his new domain. The lower level of the undersea bubblecity was mostly machines, storage and repair shops, the few housing complexes made from converted factories that had obviously been destroyed in the fighting. What fighting he didn’t know yet, but anyone could see that a major battle, or maybe more than one, had been fought within the confines of the lower dome. And not that long ago, either.

  The upper portion of the city was known as Old Dome, the other as Low Dome. Old Dome contained the remnants of what may have been a prototype city, though it was now in ruins.

  Chewing on a stylus, Wilson walked around the colony-in-a-crater, studying the details and angles. The place was recreated with amazing exactness in the dynarama on the table. The model filled most of what was called his office here inside The Core, the granite mesa. The papier mache mountains stood at throat level, the undersea farms waving to holograph currents. Wilson gave a signal, and watched intently as pinkie-sized submarines came floating into the space behind the mountains to launch tiny torpedoes, and the city retaliated with a dozen burning lines. The slim lances of fire moving sluggishly outward like burning radio antennas rising from a car.