Neurolink

by M M Buckner

  “I don’t have food,” Dominic said.

  The boy dropped his chin with an air of disgust and went back to his grandmother.

  Later, when the children were out of earshot, Qi whispered to him through her breathing mask. “You told them you’re a banker?” She giggled and patted the barrel beside her, inviting him to sit. “Workers think a banker is a machine that dispenses coins.”

  “Do you have any food?” Dominic squatted a couple of barrel lengths away and watched Qi warily. She shook her head no. “What about water? You gave the old woman our only water sack. She’ll drink it in one gulp. We need to ration it.”

  “Calm down. It’s not a problem.” Qi dangled her bare feet over the edge and kicked at the fetid ocean. She seemed completely at ease.

  Dominic adjusted his mask. He was hungry and thirsty and tired, while this skinny dark spy girl seemed as fresh as ever. He wondered how old she was. Late twenties? Maybe she took energy tabs, but that didn’t explain her total lack of fear. He envied her that. She seemed to be enjoying herself.

  “Mmm. I love this view. We’re below the smog layer, so we can see a long way. Look.”

  She pointed north, where the clouds were brightening to fiery crimson. The sun was already rising again. A whole day had passed since he left the beach in West Spitzbergen. Barely forty hours ago, Dominic had been sitting in his office in Trondheim. He recalled that now with astonishment.

  “You sleepy? Put your head in my lap,” Qi said.

  “I’d prefer answers. You control this situation, I’ll concede that much. But you still need something from me. If you expect my help, you’d better be more forthcoming.”

  Qi dipped up a handful of grayish sea fluid. She studied it for a moment as if searching for life-forms. Then she flung it away. Behind her, the improvised sail flapped steadily. They were running with the wind, due west.

  “I watched you rig that sail,” he said. “You set us on course for somewhere. Are we moving toward the Benthica?”

  “The Pressure of Light,” she answered. “I can’t tell you anything, Dominic. Be patient. You’ll know soon enough—”

  “That’s not acceptable!” he shouted.

  In response to his shout, the sullen little boy popped up over the mound of barrels and glared at him. Dominic glared back. Then the boy made a face, and Dominic clenched his jaw. Sweat prickled under his face mask and made his nose itch. He continued more quietly, “Major, I know we’re undercover, but you can’t expect me to pretend I’m a prote. I haven’t the least notion how protes behave. I’m not trained for espionage. They’ll see through me at once.”

  “Like clients see through you at ZahlenBank? You’re as clear as water, aren’t you, Nicky?”

  Dominic rolled his head to stretch his neck muscles. He looked at her sideways. When she smiled, he noticed how her mocking black eyes crinkled almost shut.

  She said, “Tell them you’re a banker if you like. It doesn’t matter. They’ll hear your educated accent and your college vocabulary, and they’ll trust anything you say. Only the smartest workers go to college. They’ll respect you.”

  Dominic frowned. “Protected employees do not attend college.”

  “Sure they do. Who do you think runs the production lines? Who keeps the equipment working? Who takes care of the sick? You think some aristo exec would stoop to that kind of work?” Qi laughed. “You’ve been locked up inside too long, Nick-O.”

  “Where’s the Benthica?” he asked.

  “Dominic, Dominic. So many questions. Look at the sunrise. Isn’t it beautiful? Have you ever seen dawn with your naked eyes?”

  “How long before we arrive?”

  Qi rocked back and let out her boyish hoot. Then she hopped up and dove at him bodily. She tumbled him over and started wrestling him on top of the barrels, bruising his shoulders, knocking his mask sideways and tickling him under the arms. “Ask one more question, and you go for a swim, Nick-O!”

  Her playfulness ended abruptly. She sat up listening, while Dominic struggled to get his mask back on. “Shhh,” she whispered.

  Then Dominic heard it, too. A sucking liquid noise. Far away, but growing louder. “What is it?” He sat up, cocking his ear. The noise was echoing out of the west, and they seemed to be heading straight for it. He said, “It sounds like the edge of the world.”

  CHAPTER 5

  * * *

  FLOATING EXCHANGE

  THEY sailed steadily westward toward the booming roar, shading their eyes and squinting into the horizon. In the distance, a slate gray object projected from the ocean, and Dominic saw it gleam intermittently between swells. The roar gradually resolved into a loud pulse of churning waters, and the closer they approached, the larger the object grew. By the time they came within half a kilometer, the din was deafening, and the structure loomed up like a colossal black wall blocking half the sky.

  The noise drove Dominic to cover his ears. He stared dumbfounded. The ship was so enormous, it could have held a city. Its gargantuan rust-streaked hull was shaped like a drum, squat and cylindrical with a flat top, and there were no portals or openings. Just below the waterline, a ring of slime-crusted machinery circled the drum, slurping up water and rapidly spewing it out again. This action caused the ring to revolve briskly around the hull, creating a dangerous wake of boils and whirlpools. Their little raft was sailing straight for it.

  When Qi hauled the sail down, Dominic sprang forward to help. At last, he recognized the strange craft. It was a factory ship. He’d seen them in holographs on the Net. These titanic vessels lumbered at the edge of swift ocean currents and generated power from hydrodynamic differentials. At the ship’s core whirled a thick column of turbines, and inside its huge hold, robots and protected employees manned the revolving rings of production lines powered by the turbines. Such a ship could manufacture anything from cars to caffie pots. But the factory ship wasn’t alone.

  Clustered in its shadow, just beyond reach of its treacherous wake, Dominic saw a mat of floating debris, and as they glided closer, the flotsam resolved into the outlines of fragile little boats. Junkers they were, cobbled together from polyfoam crates, PVC tubing, plastic jugs and billboard panels. Beer logos and snippets of advertising copy slanted across their sails in a bright linguistic patchwork. Dominic even saw a hazardous-waste tank lodged among the trash. There must have been fifteen or twenty of these boats, each with its crew of men, women and children, exposed to the atmosphere, worn-out, beaten down and clinging—like animals, he thought.

  “Runaway protes,” he said aloud.

  Qi couldn’t have heard him over the din. When she finished tying down the sail, she stood and shouted, “This is our rendezvous.”

  It took Dominic about a second to grasp that the protes were sheltering in the factory’s infrared shadow to hide from satellite scans. A fairly clever idea. He wondered who thought of it. At the top of his voice, he yelled, “What Com owns this factory? Are the executives complicit in this?”

  Qi put her mouth close to his ear. “Don’t get your shorts in a wad, Nick. There’s only one exec on board, and he stays zonked twenty-four/seven on Mellow Yellows. That exec doesn’t even know we exist.”

  Dominic assumed the Benthica was hiding directly below. He studied the ship for markings. If only he could get a fix on the location. But Major Qi had made sure he couldn’t do that. “You’ve known the submarine’s coordinates all along,” he shouted.

  She drew away and eyed him with a smirk. Then her long fingers circled the back of his neck, and she pulled him close again so she could speak in his ear. “What would you do with the coordinates, Nick? Let your bit-brain send his guards?”

  Dominic jerked away from her, angry that she’d already guessed his intentions. “Whose side are you on?” he said. His throat felt raw from shouting, and the roar made his head ache. He yelled, “This situation is destabilizing the markets, and we’re here to shut it down. Am I right or wrong? Tell me now.”

  She shoo
k her head and put her mouth to his ear again. “How close are we to the ship’s boil line? I don’t want those current mills to suck us in.”

  Dominic glanced at the water. Their raft was drifting a good hundred meters from the factory’s booming wake, safe for now. He shouted, “You’re changing the subject.”

  He felt a sharp tug at the back of his waistband. The naked boy was standing beside him, balancing on the raft’s edge and pointing into the water. Beneath them, the ocean suddenly lifted in a mighty swell, and Dominic grabbed the boy to keep him from falling overboard. All around, water welled up and doused them with filthy spray as a decrepit metal sphere popped up beside their raft like a toy balloon. It was a bathysphere, old and dented, a submersible shuttle craft of the type used for short runs to and from an undersea facility. Dominic saw plainly where the Benthica logo had been scraped off.

  “Our taxi has arrived,” Qi shouted over the roar. “Benito, help your grandmother.”

  The boy squirmed out of Dominic’s arms and scampered over the barrels.

  “This is what we’ve been waiting for, Nick.” Qi indicated the bathysphere with a nod, as a man with a sunburned face and short, hairy arms emerged from the hatch and lowered a ladder to the waterline. In one of the other boats, two women started paddling toward him with their hands.

  Qi leaned against Dominic and draped an arm over his shoulder. He could feel her thigh rubbing his. She touched her mouth to his ear. “Since you ask, I don’t know the Pressure’s position. I only know this rendezvous point. From here on, we’re entering unknown territory.” She took Dominic’s hand and laced her long, dark, graceful fingers through his short, thick, pink ones. “I can’t tell you what to expect, Nick. My bit-brain master limits my info. Trust me. We’re going to need each other.”

  Dominic smiled grimly, recalling the NP had used those very words. He would have said something sarcastic, but he was tired of straining his throat. So he turned away and watched the little boy, Benito, help his grandmother to crawl over the barrels.

  One by one, the tattered fleet of boats transferred their passengers to the bathysphere. The pilot shuttled eight full loads of people down below the gray waves before Dominic’s turn came. Without his wrist node, it was hard to measure time in the perpetual Arctic day. Usually he stayed live-linked to the Ark and got market news every ninety seconds. Now he wasn’t even sure of the date. He tried to time the first shuttle run by counting seconds, but he was bone weary, and the factory ship’s racket numbed his senses.

  He spread his short fingers and checked for skin rash, the first symptom of toxic exposure. Nothing yet. Then he lay on his back and gazed at the clotted smog. Was the NP watching? Even metavision had limits. Without that transponder in his hip beaming up his identification, he’d be just one more heat signature lost in the infrared blur of this factory ship. He squeezed his eyes shut. Never had he felt so cut off in his life.

  He awoke with Benito sitting on his chest. When he moved, the boy grunted and dove into the water. The grandmother was already climbing the bathysphere’s ladder a couple of meters away. More boats had joined the little fleet—over fifty vessels. And the northern horizon glowed liverish red again. Another midnight had come around.

  Qi sat beside him and kicked at the water. “Ready, Nick?”

  “You didn’t bother to ask me that before.”

  Above the breathing mask, her eyes narrowed to merry slits. “It’s a rhetorical question.”

  Dominic made a running leap to reach the bathysphere—it was either that or swim through the foul, oily ocean. He banged into the ladder and scraped his shins and bit back the oath he wanted to yell. Inside, the shuttle’s tiny cabin stank of prote. The moment he entered, he could smell their wretched breath and body dirt through his mask. Even the toxic atmosphere had smelled fresher than this. Fifteen people, counting the pilot, were packed into a space meant for six. When the hatch clanked shut, the noise of the factory ship abated, and Dominic sensed a faint humid breeze. An air exchanger was laboring to blow filtered air into the cabin and displace the toxic atmosphere. But the smell didn’t improve. A green indicator light flashed overhead, and the pilot said it was okay to remove face masks. Dominic kept his on.

  If there had ever been seats in this crude little craft, someone had ripped them out. The passengers sat in each other’s laps on the bare metal floor. Dominic would have preferred to stand, but the pilot ordered him down, so he squeezed in next to the old woman, Juanita Inez. Benito sat on his other side, scowling as usual, with arms crossed defiantly over his narrow young chest. A tiny girl climbed into Dominic’s lap. The girl’s nakedness embarrassed him, so he took off his silk undershirt and helped her put it on. It swallowed her small body, but she toyed with the sleeves and seemed very proud of it. Before he could stop her, the little girl squirmed onto his shoulders, locked her ankles under his chin and clenched his hair with her sticky little fists. From the other side of the cabin, Qi winked and blew him a kiss.

  “Thank you,” Juanita said, touching her granddaughter’s new silk shirt. “Our clothing fell apart. It wasn’t made for the surface.”

  She drew the clear plasticene a little tighter around her body like a shawl, and Dominic wished he had more to give her. It wasn’t seemly, a woman of her age with nothing to cover herself. Most of the other protes were naked, too, or nearly so. What kind of clothing did they wear that disintegrated so easily? Their commissaries must be run by swindlers. His silk underwear was holding up just fine.

  As the shuttle bobbed downward, the cabin temperature began to rise, and he decided nakedness might be an advantage. The shuttle’s cooling unit evidently wasn’t sized for this load. In no time, the air grew suffocatingly hot, and everyone sweated. More than once, Dominic wiped salty drops out of his eyes, and finally, he took off the hot face mask. The cut on his knee throbbed.

  Despite everything, the protes kept talking. They wouldn’t shut up. In their gutter accents and awful grammar, they told jokes and congratulated each other and passed around a bottle of sour-smelling wine. They imagined this stinking little bathysphere was their salvation. Damp, musky flesh pressed in on Dominic from every side. He hated this closeness. If only they would stop talking!

  He closed his eyes and fought down his disgust. This was taking longer than he’d planned, but soon he would board the Benthica. Only now, thanks to the major, he couldn’t call the bank guards to get him out. Well, hadn’t his father schooled him to be resourceful?

  First priority, find and disable the miner’s Net link. Second, get back to the surface and hail the NP. He’d memorized the submarine’s layout, so he knew the Net link was housed on the bridge. He could use any heavy object to smash the vulnerable electronics. Stewing in his own sweat, he imagined scenes of hand-to-hand combat with a desperate mob, and he was suddenly glad the major had insisted on disguise.

  Escape—how could he manage that? Again he thought of stealing Qi’s earplug to call the NP. Or maybe—a new inspiration struck him—maybe he could hijack this very bathysphere and get back to the surface. Medical attention. Decent air. A very long, very sanitizing bath. Yes, hijack this shuttle craft. That’s what he’d do.

  He began to feel optimistic, but the little girl on his shoulders kept yanking his hair and making his eyes water. He could tell the shuttle was going deep because his eardrums ached, so he held his nose and blew hard to equalize the pressure in his middle ears. Next, an infant started crying. That was just one too many sounds.

  Dominic reached through the crowd and tapped the young mother’s shoulder. “Give it something to chew. Make it swallow,” he said. “Haven’t you got something to give it?”

  When the young woman shook her head in confusion, Dominic raised his voice to be get everyone’s attention. “Who has some food or water for this baby?”

  For a moment, the other passengers stared at him without speaking. The infant began to scream.

  “Speak up. This baby needs to swallow to clear its ears.�
�

  The grandmother, Juanita, was the first to react. From the folds of her plasticene shawl, she drew out Qi’s water sack—still two-thirds full. A moment later, other people brought forth treasures. A bit of moldy bread. Some kelp juice. A tube of nutrient paste. Someone offered half a bag of hard caramel candy. The mother gave her baby a little water, and the crying subsided. Dominic smiled with sardonic pride. At least he’d achieved one objective.

  The bathysphere plowed interminably on, sometimes dropping, sometimes rising, and Dominic guessed the pilot was hugging the contours of the seafloor to avoid detection. Apparently, the Benthica had not been hiding under the factory ship. When the little girl slid off his shoulders, sound asleep, he handed her over to her grandmother and stood up to stretch. He craned to see over the pilot’s shoulder, hoping the console gauges would yield some clue to their location. The pilot must have noticed his interest because he stepped aside so Dominic could see everything. The gauges were all in Spanic though, a language Dominic had never bothered to learn.

  “You’re an educated man, yes? I hear it in your voice. What is your training?” The pilot’s face was creased and pitted with black grit, and three of his front teeth were missing. He garbled his words with the same syrupy American drawl the old woman used.

  Dominic hesitated. Should he say he was a banker and let the man think he dispensed coins for a living? In the periphery, he saw Qi smirk. Some of the others were looking his way. He had to say something. “I’m a negotiator.”

  “Ah.” The pilot wrinkled his forehead and nodded sagely, though Dominic doubted he understood the term. “Whatever your training, you are welcome here. We need many skills. Many. My name is Estaban.”

  The pilot stuck out his hand to shake, and Dominic felt obliged to introduce himself. But he had no lie ready. Major Qi should have prepared him. What kind of covert agent was she? Thinking his hesitation might raise distrust, he shook hands and improvised. “I’m Nick. I came with those people there.”