Neurolink

by M M Buckner

  THE Devi circled the wreck. In the choppy waters below, Dominic saw that the barrel raft had been warped by some rogue storm into a twisted mountain of junk. Buckets and plastic bags were tied everywhere, small ones, large ones, all hanging in shreds that rose and fell with the waves. Qi maneuvered closer and adjusted their headband visors for true color, transmuting the false golds and lavenders of metavision into the dull, grimy grays of reality. The tepid ocean swelled and sluiced through the barrels, churning up geysers.

  Sure enough, there were human bodies wedged among the debris. He counted six, wrapped like mummies in clear plastic sheeting, bobbing with each motion of the waves. Through his headband, they looked small and shrunken, curled up in tight, shriveled knots, and though it might have been a trick of the wind, one of them resembled an old woman lifting her hand to the sky.

  “Are they dead?” Dominic asked.

  “Maybe not.” Qi maneuvered the Devi into a hover just above the wreck. “I’m gonna open the hatch.”

  “Wait, I’m not sealed!” Dominic fumbled for his helmet.

  Qi hummed a snatch of melody. “You’re getting all tangled up, Nick. Take off your headband first. It won’t fit inside your helmet. Here, I’ll activate a flat display so you can still see.”

  She tapped a key, and a console screen winked on, showing a two-dimensional view of the raft below. While she plucked off her cybernails and snugged her helmet into place, Dominic struggled to get his neckband seated. He’d only just sealed the gasket when she retracted the Devi’s cockpit cover with a loud thump. Now the cockpit lay exposed to the atmosphere, and in seconds, a lethal oily dew covered every surface. Frantically, he tugged on his gloves, wondering how she would clean the cockpit later. She probably had an air exchanger to blow out poisonous gases, but how would she get rid of this noxious residue? This stop was turning into a real annoyance. They might have to keep their helmets and gloves sealed for the rest of the journey.

  “I’m picking up heartbeats, Nick. They’re alive.” Qi climbed out of her seat, which caused the whole craft to list to one side. Dominic tightened his seat belt.

  “Should we call for a med crew?” he asked.

  “Nick, we’re undercover. No one’s supposed to know we’re here. Get it?” Qi threw her legs over the side and dropped out of sight.

  Dominic tilted his notebook so the NP could have a view of the flat-screen. “See the raft?” he whispered.

  “Don’t worry, boy. I see your location now.” The NP’s holographic head bulged out of the notebook and smacked its lips. “You lit up my scans the second Major Qi opened that cockpit. Pretty sweet stealth cladding. Get me a sample if you can. And why don’t you plant your wrist node on the outside hull so I can track you when she closes that hatch.”

  Dominic chewed his lip. “No wrist node. She fried it.”

  “Huh? You let her do that? Don’t think I’m criticizing, but that wasn’t smart.”

  Dominic watched the flat-screen view of the raft. Major Qi seemed to be taking a lot of chances, leaping around on those loose barrels. When she disappeared behind the central mound of junk, it occurred to Dominic that he had no idea how to fly this high-tech little craft.

  He said, “Major, are you all right?”

  Her voice crackled in his helmet radio. “Get down here, Nick. I need you.”

  “Don’t leave your seat,” the NP warned. “Tell her she’s wasting time. You have a critical objective. You should be on your way.”

  Dominic didn’t relish the idea of boarding a wreck in the middle of the ocean, but the major said she heard heartbeats. He swelled his cheeks and blew out a sigh. Then he unbuckled his seat belt.

  “Don’t budge from that seat, boy! Remember why you’re there!”

  Dominic chinned his helmet radio. “Major, do you need a first-aid kit?”

  “Thanks, Nicky. I’ve got it with me. Bring a sack of water.”

  “Son, you’re a fool to waste time with this. What’s the point?” the NP said.

  “These people need a little help. It won’t take long.” Dominic found the water sack in a bin under the console. When he stood up, the craft tilted like a small boat, and he clutched the steering yoke to keep his balance.

  “Hurry, Nick,” Qi’s voice buzzed over the radio.

  Dominic searched for a good place to stow his briefcase, and the NP seemed to guess his intention. “Son, don’t shut me off. Take the case with you. I’m the only one you can trust.”

  Dominic ground his molars and felt his jaw muscle quiver. “You’re watching me on satellite scan. Surely I can survive a few minutes without your advice.”

  When he shut the notebook and snapped the briefcase closed, the sudden quiet felt like bliss. He leaned over the Devi’s flank to see what Qi was doing, and this caused the craft to tip so steeply, it nearly dumped him out. His breath rasped inside his helmet and fogged his faceplate. The helmet narrowed his view like a set of blinders. With great care, he threw his long legs over and slid down onto the barrel raft, which bobbed heavily under his weight.

  “Toss me the water sack.” Qi was propping the old woman in her arms.

  Dominic glimpsed thin gray hair and mottled skin under the shroud of clear plastic. A cheap, disposable mask covered the old woman’s nose and mouth, the kind factory workers used when they handled hazardous waste. Dominic couldn’t believe that was her only defense against the atmosphere. Her lungs must be riddled with toxins.

  He passed Qi the water sack, then boosted the coolant inside his suit, hoping to stop his perspiration. The storm had wadded the raft like a used handkerchief. He could barely see over the mound of scrap in the center. When a wave pitched the whole thing to and fro, he fell between two barrels and sputtered for help.

  In a frenzy, he seized a lashing cord and pulled himself up. Qi paid him no attention. She was feeding the old woman a pill. He started to protest, but then he saw the others. They were not lifeless bodies. They were children. He saw their streaked brown limbs swaddled in plastic. Above their breathing masks, their wide black eyes stared at him in terror.

  An aircar droned overhead, and the children ducked into hiding.

  “Freaker!” Qi hissed over the radio. “Your dear old Da sent his guards!”

  Dominic’s breath echoed like surf inside his helmet, and he had to lean way back to peer at the sky. But there was nothing to see, only cloud cover.

  Qi said, “Your bit-brain spotted us when I opened the cockpit. Freak, he’s planning to arrest these people. We’re undercover. Can’t he grasp the concept?”

  The major had to be getting updates from her Org boss, Dominic decided. She was probably wearing an earplug. He started to ask a question, but then he heard a thunderous splash and swung around on his knees. The Devi had disappeared. The ocean surface boiled gray-white where the craft had gone under.

  “Wha—” He opened his mouth and stared at the roiling foam, then at Qi’s dark faceplate. She was talking with the old woman. Behind her, the horizon tilted crazily, and the waves looked gargantuan. Dominic had never been at sea in a craft so small. As the immense undulating plane of ocean swelled around him, the small barge rocked wildly, and he gripped the cord to keep from tumbling.

  The pitching motion was making him nauseous, so he drew a slow, deliberate breath through his nose to calm down. With an eye on the horizon, he ignored the spinning in his ears and spoke with more composure than he felt. “Major, Where’s the Devi?”

  “I had to sink her,” Qi answered.

  “Sink?” Another set of waves tossed the barge, and Dominic focused all his will on not throwing up.

  “Hey, I couldn’t risk your NP blowing our cover. And by the way, that transponder in your butt? I zapped it, too. Remember when we were turning those cartwheels? Just a small sting. Don’t be mad.”

  Dominic recalled the pain in his hip. He tried to concentrate on that pain. Anything to take his mind off the unremitting motion. “You said bank guards are coming to rescue us?�
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  “Relax. Gig called them off. He’s masking our position with a sonic noise field.”

  Dominic gripped the lashing cord with both hands as a fresh set of waves sent the barge tilting and creaking like a circus ride. How the hell was he going to get back home?

  “This is a stroke of luck,” Qi went on. “With this raft and these children, we’ll definitely look like runaway workers. It’s the perfect cover. Let’s take off these surfsuits, Nick.”

  Qi removed her helmet and threw it in the ocean. It sank out of sight. Dominic stared at her naked face, appalled. She’d exposed herself to the atmosphere! With a shrug, she shook her hair free, flashed a smile and yanked off her gloves. When she unbuckled her gear belt and threw that in the water, Dominic leaned forward and stared at the spot where it sank.

  “Strip, Nicky. The miners’ll never believe we’re runaways if we show up wearing this technoid stuff.”

  He said, “You’re breathing poison.”

  Qi laughed aloud. She stood up and tugged her suit gasket open to her crotch. Underneath the suit, she wore a gray prote uniform. It was stained and threadbare, and the sleeves and pant legs had been cut off unevenly. Dominic gaped at her dark bare arms and legs, which soon glistened with noxious dew. He sank back on his knees, horror-struck. Major Qi had sentenced herself to die.

  “Do I have to come over there and undress you, Nicky?” Her voice sounded muffled and distant now that she no longer spoke by radio. With a smirk, she jammed her hands against her narrow hips. “What did you expect, a picnic? Don’t be so squeamish. You have to pretend you’re a worker, and this is where it starts.”

  “Major, this is not rational.” Dominic tried to sound calm. “You want me to negotiate. Why can’t I simply introduce myself? I’m Dominic Jedes from ZahlenBank. I’ve come to talk. Simple. Reasonable. Why wouldn’t that work?”

  “Why? Hoo. Maybe because half a minute after you mention your name, they’ll remember you set them adrift without life support.” Wind blew hair across Qi’s face, and she pulled it back with her ringers. “The miners’ll probably beat you senseless, Nick. That’s the only hitch I can think of. So quit stalling. Off with your duds.”

  Dominic clung to the lashing. “It’s suicide.”

  She laughed again and tossed her head. “You’ve got executive blood flowing in your veins. Designer additives, right? You can’t get cancer. Now c’mon. Peel.”

  Dominic had always thought of himself as a bold man. He liked taking risks. But this he couldn’t do. Nature kills. The lesson had been drummed into his brain since nursery school. A single whiff of atmosphere, a single drop of rain, a single grain of dust from the natural world carried enough pollution to eat away his flesh. Like every exec, he took his antibody injections once a month—conjugated monoclonals, transgenic chimeras, the whole cocktail. But that didn’t guarantee protection from the deadly great outdoors. Everyone knew the prime rule of safety: Never leave a sealed environment. Never. He sat rigid, gazing at Qi’s dark dew-covered arms.

  “Such a baby.” She tugged a flexible mask out of her pocket and placed it over her nose and mouth. Its white cone accentuated her Asian eyes and made her look vaguely extraterrestrial. With an athlete’s grace, she danced across the barrels and knelt beside him. “I’ve got antiviral tabs. You’ll be fine. Hey, workers do this all the time. You’ve gotta start thinking like a worker.”

  Dominic had been gripping the cord so hard, his fingers had locked up. The hollow eyes of the children drilled into him. They looked like ghosts.

  Qi reached for his helmet.

  “Don’t!” Too late, he knocked her hand away—she’d already released the seal! He heard a gaseous hiss, and his breath caught. Damp atmosphere rushed into his helmet. It reeked of sulfur and burnt carbon, and his eyes stung. Then his heart jolted into action, and he choked. A fit of coughing bent him double. Qi pulled off his helmet and shoved an antiviral tab between his lips.

  “Suck on that, Nick. It’ll help for a while.” Her voice sounded like a distant echo as she chattered on. “A lot of workers build up resistance to the toxins. Years of exposure and all that. Seems to run in families. Maybe it’s a genetic thing.”

  He was too stunned to fight her. His muscles had stopped working. All he could do was imagine the unseen toxins whirling around him, invading his lungs, penetrating his skin. Soon he would begin to die. Vaguely, he became aware that Qi was wiping his cheek with her thumb. Was he crying? When she placed a filtering mask over his nose and mouth, he felt the elastic band snap across the back of his head. A moment later, he realized she was prying his fingers loose from the cord, so he let go.

  Like the hollow-eyed children, he watched Qi in mute shock as she stripped off his surfsuit and ripped it with her knife to make sure it would sink. Then he watched her toss the knife after it. She might have kept the knife, he thought. When she was done, he hunched in his silk underwear on a rusty dented barrel, clasping his knees to his chest and shivering in the warm, stinking wind. Dominic Jedes wasn’t one to cower, but at the moment, all other options seemed beyond his reach.

  For a long while, he sat on the barrel hugging his knees in blank, mindless shock. Clouds were turning colors on the northern horizon. Brick red and liver brown and furious white gold. The sun had reached its lowest point in the sky. It must be midnight, he realized.

  Hours had passed, and he wasn’t dead yet. Perhaps those additives in his blood really worked as advertised. He blinked and rolled his shoulders, and he actually felt a little better. His expensive silk underwear had dried and matted to his skin. He recalled with irony the dozens of fresh pairs folded neatly in his closet in Trondheim. Not to mention the handsome trousers and jackets and patent leather shoes. At this hour, he should be dressing for dinner. Here he was, ZahlenBank’s savviest dealer—and he’d fallen into (his woman’s ambush like a junior clerk. She’d taken everything from him, and he’d let her. He had to laugh at himself. President of ZahlenBank, one of the ten richest men on the planet, and he couldn’t even order a cup of caffie.

  Except for his silk shirt and trunks, he’d lost everything. He was barefoot. Qi had thrown his boots overboard. He’d lost his last Net node when the Devi sank, so he had no way to contact the NP. No way to receive the digital genie’s guidance. He felt crippled. Blast the NP! He hated to admit his dependence on that prying, nagging, artificial brain, but there it was. Still, one thing he knew. The NP would not be idle. The genie would find a way to rescue its flesh flunky. That gave Dominic some hope.

  Then he remembered Qi’s words after the Devi went down. “Gig’s cloaking our position,” she said. That meant she was still in contact with her Org master. If she was wearing an earplug, maybe he could steal it.

  The raft rode up a swell and crashed down the other side. Dominic drew a deep breath and watched the horizon. Like a piece of flotsam, a memory drifted through his consciousness: The summer solstice should be occurring about now. At least his nausea had passed. He squared his shoulders. Yes, he’d lost his wits temporarily, but now he was thinking again. He still had his banker’s cunning. Fear had shut him down, but he wouldn’t let that happen again.

  “You are a seafarmer?”

  He glanced in the direction of the voice. It was the old woman. She spoke English with an American accent as thick as syrup. She was sitting up now, resting her back against an overturned bucket. She’d pushed her plasticene veil back from her face, and her gray hair hung in limp coils that swung around her shoulders with each rocking motion of the raft. Her mask sat askew on her wrinkled brown face. Two tiny children squatted beside her.

  “You farm?” she repeated the question.

  “I’m a banker,” he said.

  “Eh?”

  He could barely see her black eyes peering out of the web of wrinkles. Only protes showed age like that. She was a dependent, too old to work. Dominic felt a surge of irritation. If not for Com charity, this woman would never have reached her ripe, withered age. Yet she’d
deserted her Com. She didn’t have enough human gratitude to stay where she belonged. Dominic spoke through his teeth, “You’re a runaway.”

  The woman nodded. “My name is Juanita Inez. These are my grandchildren. They’re free.”

  Stolen property, he would have said. You’ve doomed them to early graves. But Dominic knew better than to reason with an uneducated prote. He heard a scuffle on the other side of the raft, and he rose on wobbly knees to see over the mound of junk. At the far end, Qi and the two older children struggled to lift a three-meter length of pole. Dominic recognized they were trying to stand the pole upright to make a mast. Now he understood the white plastic sheet he’d seen trailing in the water. It was a sail. Slowly, he crawled over the wave-tossed barrels to help Qi. Orange paint chipped off and stuck to his palms as he went, and when a jagged piece of metal scraped his bare knee, he cursed aloud.

  A small brown foot stepped on his hand, and he glanced up at the fierce, sullen face of a child. The boy wore no mask. He was naked, with arms like sticks, a round belly and a nose caked with mucus. Dominic couldn’t guess his age. The boy balanced with feet wide apart on the barrels and swayed like an athlete in perfect tune with the waves. For one long second, he deliberately leaned all his weight on Dominic’s hand. Then he raced away over the barrels toward his brothers with the mast.

  The boy’s weight wasn’t much. Dominic hardly felt it. What he felt was the insult. He wiped the boy’s footprint off his hand and stood up straight, then swung his arms madly at the sky and fell backward. Cautiously, he got his legs straightened out for another try. This time when he stood, he spread his feet wide, as the boy had done, and flexed his knees to take the impact of the rolling deck. He tried a few steps, then paused. His workouts at the gym hadn’t gone for nothing. He could do this. Another careful step. Another. When he reached the far end of the raft, he was able to hold the mast in place while Qi secured it with guy lines.

  The little boy never stopped scowling at him. It took them an hour to rig the plastic sail. When he sat down to wipe sweat from his eyes, the boy sat beside him and tugged his sleeve. In pantomime, the boy bunched up his little brown fingers, poked something imaginary into his mouth and pretended to chew.