Shadowboxer

by Nicholas Pollotta

  “Underwater lasers,” said a norm in a lab smock, working a pocket computer. “Will those really work, sir?”

  Standing in the great abyss, Shawn Wilson bent low to watch how the holograph workers abandoned their harvesting machines to get into the city. The procedure was slow and sloppy, endangering the whole operation. He made a mental note to see they got some practice on how to do an orderly retreat. “Yes, fire a static laser under water, and you get a backblast from the reflection that blows the weapon apart. Yes?”

  “Of course,” sniffed another of the labcoats.

  Wilson didn’t know their names yet, and had a feeling he wouldn’t bother to take the trouble. He disliked them already. Dumber than trolls, if such a thing was possible. “Granite. So, instead, start with weak beams, spotter rays like we use on weapons to show where the bullet will go, then gradually increase the power into a pulsating beam flashing through the visible spectrum a million times every tick, and you counter the reflection problem, avoid a thermal backlash, and have an underwater energy weapon.”

  “The range is fragged,” stated another lab coat.

  “Slower than drek,” added a third.

  “Sussed,” said Wilson, hands on knees as he watched the holo torps blink out in tiny flashes one by one. “But if the pirates didn’t know about such things, their tactics wouldn’t include a counter move, and we could tear their fleet apart.”

  “An edge,” he said standing upright and looking over the assemblage of the lab staff. “That’s all any good tactician needs. One single advantage and the other side loses.”

  “What about our submarine fleet, sir?” asked a woman, hands stuffed into her pockets, chewing a pipe. “We have the subs hidden inside the Bermuda Trench. There’s a mesa out there just above crush depth. When the pirates arrive, we’ll flank them, hit from both sides in a classic pincer movement.”

  “That’s good,” Wilson admitted, hoisting a thigh up on the edge of the table. “Very good, in fact. But not good enough.”

  “If I may ask, why not, sir?”

  Wilson scowled. “Because I’d bet they either know about the existence of those subs, or have a strong suspicion. And without the element of total surprise, it’s lambs to the slaughter.”

  “I must respectfully disagree, sir,” she said, shifting the pipe stem to the other side of her mouth. “To spend millions installing energy weapons of doubtful function seems wasteful and pointless.”

  “Tough. I’m in charge.” Shawn Wilson smiled thinly. “You don’t like it? Talk to Barbara Harvin.” Their faces went pale and apologies poured as there came a knock on the door.

  “In!” he called, taking the chewed stylus from his mouth and prodding a minuscule fireball to expose the pea-sized tractor inside. “These explode? Who designed this drek, an ork?”

  “Mr. Wilson?” said an ork guard, standing there uncertainly.

  “That’s me,” he said, not turning to look. “What is it?”

  The metahuman cleared his throat. “Sir, we’ve just received the report of a submarine detonating near The Cube in the polar plain.”

  “How unusual. However, why is Reclamation telling me this?” Wilson asked tartly. “Path the sub and add it to our fleet.”

  “The . . . our asset was not damaged, but recon teams conducting a search for survivors on the surface located two norms in a life raft. Escapees from the pirate sub that was destroyed. They claim there was a mutiny, which is how they escaped.”

  Turning about, Jake paused and frowned, glaring at the guard in cold formality. “A pirate mutiny? Impossible. They’re lying. The cerebral bombs prevent such actions against their leaders.”

  The guard lowered his voice. “We agree, sir. I have taken it upon my own personal authority, due to the unique elements of their acquisition, to cancel the usual procedures of assimilation and have Security immediately begin their interrogation.”

  “Good. Tell me when they learn something solid.”

  “Certainly, sir.” As the guard departed, Shawn Wilson turned back to the dynarama table. “Lock’n load, my fellow humans, let’s double the number of pirates, add our own sub, and have somebody do a suicide run at the main dome and see that happens then. Chop-chop!”

  * * *

  The massive airlock doors in the granite walls parted with a loud hydraulic hiss, and a small gush of water poured out onto the ferroconcrete floor. Trundling in on rusty rails, the cargo box clanked and rattled through the locks and on deep into the maze of machinery before coming to rest at a padded buffer. The double doors closed with a strident boom and then hissed again, prominent wall gauges showing pressure being reestablished on the other side.

  Squealing in protest, the hinged top of the rectangular container separated with an exhale of air, exposing a pile of wiggling fish inside. Instantly, the fish stopped moving as their bodies swelled to double, triple their original size, eyeballs bursting, pale blood pouring from their open mouths and gills. Computerized locks mechanically disengaged, and the container swung over to one side, disgorging its contents in an avalanche of still bodies. Sliding across a meter of floor, the fish disappeared into a funneled chute, bands of laser lights scanning the deluge. The digital readout climbed into the thousands before the appearance of five black Jym suits. Immediately, alarms began to howl.

  “Motherfragger!” howled Boomer as they careened along the metallic chute, banging and clanging off the sides as they hurtled along with the cargo of dead sea life.

  “Stay loose!” cried Delphia, looking over his boots at the others close behind him.

  With brutal impacts, the suits landed sprawling on a conveyor belt covered with still swelling fish. It proceeded to move off with a jerk as skeletal arms reached out from slimy gimbals to neatly align the fish, while a different set of mechanical hands a few meters away began gutting and filleting them.

  Struggling to her boots, Silver saw the flashing knives converge on her and raised her arms to protect her face. The whirling blades broke by the dozen against the armor of the Jym suit, the blades careening off to ricochet among the machinery on either side of the moving belt. Proceeding past the broken shredders, the Jym suits were whisked through a thundering curtain of steaming water and came out the other side into bright lights. As their faceplates dripped clear, they saw a score or more of chairs lining the moving belt, a double line of people, norms and metas, young and old, all wearing stained jumpsuits and hairnets, the knives in their hands paused in the act of chopping off the heads and tails. Further down the line, one side was sorting the filleted bodies into different boxes. The other group was separating the heads from the tails onto conveyor belts going in different directions.

  A female ork screamed as the ebony Jym suits went past her. A teenage norm followed her lead, and soon the whole area was filled with wildly running people making as much noise as possible. A battered door in a macroplas kiosk flew open, and a fat norm with a frown and a stun baton stepped out.

  “Shut the frag up,” he bellowed. “I was trying to sleep!” Then he lost both the frown and the baton at the sight of the Jym suits and staggered backward to hit a red button on the wall. Bells started clanging everywhere.

  “Pirates!” he shouted. “Attack ’em! Kill them!” Only he was alone by now, everybody else having scrambled for safety long ago.

  Jumping to the floor, Delphia snatched a vacant chair and threw it at the clanging bell, knocking it off the wall. That bell stopped, but others continued elsewhere.

  Cursing vehemently, the overweight norm fumbled a Seco into view and fired at them, the flechettes banging ineffectively off the deep-sea armor. Bending low, Thumbs grabbed a knife from the side table and flipped it at the norm. The blade hit the wall alongside his belly, going in to the handle, the plastic cracking for meters in every direction. The norm promptly fainted, sliding to the grimy floor in a heap. A stygian behemoth, Moonfeather leaped off alongside the male, and grabbed the stun baton. Advancing upon the kiosk, she removed the
door from the frame and checked inside. “All clear!” she called, tossing the plastic door away.

  “Over here! This way!” cried Silver, clambering off the belt, crushing a chair flat as she waddled toward a flight of metal steps leading to an upper-level catwalk.

  Bounding up the steps, the metal bending under them like warm taffy, the group charged along the catwalk, the metal framework shaking horribly under their combined tonnage. Delphia yanked open a door, and cleaning supplies tumbled out. Thumbs did the next portal, and a group of people in aprons and hairnets screamed, bunching tighter together in a corner. Moonfeather grabbed the handle of the next door and it came off in her gauntlet. Silver opened the next. “Hallway!”

  Piling through, they pounded past a huge machine pumping and hissing, while another complex bit of ironmongery steadily ground what looked like fish guts into a ghastly puree. Huge glass tubes rose on their right sides, filled with colorful liquids constantly churning with endless streams of gaseous bubbles. There was a riveted metal door at the end of the passage clearly marked in ork and norm Authorized Personnel Only. Both a print and a retinal scanner were on the wall alongside. It resembled a bank vault. No passage there.

  Delphia stuck two fingers into his mouth and gave a shrill whistle. “Here!” he cried, stepping over the side railing and grabbing hold of a frosty metal pipe. Wrapping his armored legs about the icy length, he slid down and out of sight.

  The others followed close behind. Machines and furnaces, floors and catwalks, flashed by until the conduit went through a terrazzo floor a hundred meters later. When Delphia slammed to a halt, he stepped out of the way of the person above him and raced through a zigzag maze of machinery and equipment.

  27

  The surface of the Atlantic ocean was choppy and rough, the swells cresting to over a meter in height, but the Atlantic Security battleship Conquistador was motionless in the water as if nailed into position. Resting his back against the angular armor plating of the portside gun battery, Emile Ceccion stood in a tight-fitting twilled jumpsuit of plain utilitarian gray while enjoying the shade of the triple 200mm cannons of the foredeck.

  Idly breaking off pieces of hardtack and feeding the crumbs to Grand on his shoulder, Emile studiously watched the crew in their starched white uniforms finish the preparations with the bow crane of the stationary vessel. Swarms of sailors and officers were triple-checking the connection of a thick hook and massive chain to the hoop on top of a squat, flat-bottom, metal ball, its outside ferruled with bands of steelloy and bulk iron. Roughly five meters across, the bathysphere had a single entrance point, the two oval-shaped doors set on either side of the ball’s dense hull facing only millimeters apart. Set along the equator were four tiny portholes whose slabs of Armorlite glass were heavily veined with reinforcing wire filaments. It seemed overly much, but Emile always preferred excess in favor of survival. The awful pressure of the lower depths was not the only known killer down there.

  Grand chittered and arched his long back, as if agreeing with his master’s thoughts. Emile feed him another chunk of the traditional navy bread, his long blond hair blowing in the wind. Grand accepted the treat in his tiny paws and nibbled greedily on the hard cheese-like bread with obvious delight. Emile knew his companion was an omnivore, but this seemed to be taking the definition to new heights.

  “Or is that a new low?” he said aloud. Grand playfully nipped the point of his right ear. “Ouch!” said Emile, pushing him gently away. “Pax, little cub, pax. Here, take the rest.”

  Holding a piece of hardtack larger than his pointed head, Grand chittered in triumph and began to stuff his bulging cheeks with the greasy-gray foodstuff in unabashed glee.

  Set in tandem at the very point of the bow of the ship, located between the forward missile battery, were two huge spindles rolled with cables and pressure hoses. Both lines fed to an even larger spool of cable that connected directly to the ball. From his briefing, Emile knew that these were the lifelines of his transport, designed to keep him comfortably supplied with air and power until reaching his destination: Old Dome, a bubblecity some hundreds of meters below on the bottom of the ocean. He found the concept intriguing. To be that much closer to the very heart of Mother Earth. Licking his stiff whiskers clean, Grand nuzzled his master’s cheek with a rumble of contentment.

  Stroking the ferret under the chin, Emile saw an ork sailor snap a salute to an officer. The norm male was using a lightpen to check off items on the flatscreen of a pocket computer that was lashed to his belt. Originally, Emile thought the bondage an odd affectation before watching a dwarf gunner trip on a loose rope, which sent the box of clay skeets for the captain’s evening shoot flying out of his hands and over the railing into the sea.

  Briskly, the officer pocketed the computer and started on his way, the wind tugging on his cap but not succeeding in removing it.

  “Hoi! Everything ready, Lieutenant?” Emile asked loudly over the growing easterly winds. According to readouts from the Gunderson Corporation’s meteorological satellite, another severe storm was brewing up northward and would be coming this way in short order. Once underwater, he would be safe from the ravages of the hurricane, but the Conquistador would bear the full brunt of the tempest as it stayed to lower him to the underwater city nearly two full klicks below the surface.

  Emile sincerely hoped the ship did not capsize while he was still linked to it. Grand hissed in agreement, his bushy tail lashing about.

  “Aye, sir!” called out the officer. “The Cousteau is ready whenever you are, sir!”

  Gathering the plastic shoulder bag and vine-covered wooden staff at his boots, Emile stolidly crossed the freshly painted deck. An ork ensign held open the outer hatch of the bathysphere for him, the inner hatch already swung out of the way. Stooping, Emile entered the metal ball.

  Once inside and upright again, he was surprised to see that the interior of the Cousteau was pleasantly upholstered, with velvet walls, plush rugs, and a curved bank of cushioned seats from which seat belts dangled loosely. Off to the side opposite the seats was a stack of crates lashed to the hull with elastic straps. Another hatch was in the center of the floor, the lid locked with a wheel-shaped mechanism. A brief inspection of the equipment crates showed that they were secure and that his personal seals had not been disturbed.

  “Any last requests, sir?” asked a lieutenant, one mirror-polished shoe resting halfway on the rim of the hatch.

  “Such as?” asked Emile, tugging a strap tightly around his shoulder bag to hold it in place.

  The norm shrugged. “Food, medical supplies, narcotics, weapons, bookchips, simsense chips, spare clothes . . . Mr. Harvin himself authorized carte blanche, sir. Whatever the Connie carries is yours.”

  “Thank you,” Emile said, jabbing his staff into the flooring. The vine-covered rod of wood stayed there. “But I appear to have all that I require.” Leaping off his shoulder, Grand landed on a seat and yipped.

  “I stand corrected,” Emile turned to face the norm. “Is there perhaps any more hardtack?”

  Watching Grand with distrust, the lieutenant said, “Ah, not up here, sir. I can get more from ship stores.” Outside the sky was rapidly darkening, and soft thunder sounded.

  “We shall do without,” Emile decided. Grand yipped again. “Silence,” he said softly, and the ferret went motionless. After a tick, Grand chased his own tail until he was a small ball of fur, head and tail indistinguishable.

  “As you say, sir.” The lieutenant saluted. “The trip should take approximately six hours, adjusting for current drift. You do have the authorization codes?”

  “Naturally,” Emile said, swinging the inner door slowly shut.

  “Good voyage, sir!” the lieutenant called through the closing crack, moving his foot just in time.

  Emile spun the wheel to dog the hatch shut, then slid the lock in place. Taking a seat near Grand, he clicked on the straps of his safety belt, then reached up to a concealed control panel and turned on the
external microphones.

  “Stinking elf bastard,” he heard the lieutenant say. “Hope a fragging leviathan eats him on the way down.” Then much louder. “Ready at the ball!”

  “Ready, sir!”

  “Undog the clamps!” Metallic thumps came from four sides of the sphere. “Stabilizers on full! Release the lines! Power on! Pressure on! Drop the soap, boys!”

  Emile felt the sphere lift smoothly into the air and gently swing toward the left. His aerial view of the Conquistador was of the deck lined with sailors standing in clusters between the banks of depth charges regularly dotting the gunwale. The middle of the vessel resembled a porcupine, its array of cannons and gun turrets pointing every which way. Personally, he found it difficult to believe that any pirate ship could survive even a brief confrontation with a technological terror such as the Conquistador.

  The immersion into the water was flawless, and only the rocking of entering the water itself marred the descent. As the ball dipped into the ocean and the waves washed over its tiny windows, green lights flooded the bathysphere, quickly darkening to stygian blackness. The only sounds came from the soft whine of the heater, the gentle hum of the pressure/ depth gauge, and the reassuring thumps of the air regenerator. With nothing to do but wait, Emile settled in his seat and closed his eyes. His regular sleep schedule had been seriously thrown akilter because of this trip, and a short nap would be most appreciated. As he drifted off to sleep, Grand hissed in warning and once more the nightmares began. But more sharp, more vivid. Almost as if they were real.