Neurolink

by M M Buckner

  Qi signaled him to kick his fins and follow her. He tried to do as she’d instructed, to keep his legs straight and take long slow kicks, but he wasn’t used to the motion. Qi was a better swimmer and kept getting ahead. Visibility was wretched, and with only one eye, he could barely see the beam of her light. Beating his fins madly, he lunged forward caught hold of her hand and didn’t let go.

  In the turbid gloom, they bashed softly against another hull and pushed their way along its length. This must be the Pressure of Light, he thought. When they rounded its stern, Dominic played his torch beam along the massive propellers, and while he was examining them, Qi struck off toward another vague shape nestled among the trash on the seafloor. Since he still gripped her hand, she towed him along like loose baggage till he got himself aligned.

  This new object was too small to be a submarine. Was this where she hid her so-called “phone”? Dominic wanted to head for the surface—it wasn’t that far above. He’d been underground so long, he practically yearned for it. But when he tried to get Qi’s attention, she ignored him.

  As he kicked through the murky ocean grasping Qi’s hand, he cast his torch beam back toward the miners’ town, and although the gloom was too thick to see it, he waved good-bye. Then he scolded himself for being a soft-headed fool. Hadn’t he lived his entire life on the surface? Under thick, sealed domes, yes, but always with a view of the sky. Many times during the last eleven days, he thought he might never see that smoggy sunlight again. Yet here he was, leaving this dark, watery garbage dump with almost a pang of regret.

  Qi kicked steadily on toward the small, pale object hidden in the trash. It loomed in the murk like a boulder, and if Qi hadn’t spotlighted it with her torch, he wouldn’t have paid it any notice. When they bumped against it, Qi guided his hand to a rail. Then he sensed a pressure change and saw a geyser of bubbles rushing against his mask. Before he could react, Qi grabbed his upper arm and shoved him through a circular opening barely wider than his shoulders. He felt her hand push his butt as he swam inside, and his helmet immediately bashed against a wall. Qi kept pushing, and he tried to move sideways, but all he could do was fold himself up because now she was climbing in beside him. This felt somehow very familiar. When he heard a thump and a clank, felt another slow pressure change, and saw light scattering through the egg-shaped airlock, he knew exactly where he was.

  “The Devi!” he gurgled as soon as the airlock cleared. Then he yanked out his mouthpiece. “You sank the Devi!”

  “This sweet little bitch? Never!” She hooted her boyish laugh. “Nicky, she’s my ride.”

  While Dominic was struggling to take off his fins, Qi climb into the cabin and bragged. “I staged that whole thing to fool Gig. Now both our bit-brains think my Devi’s gone. I never trusted either of them.”

  Stealing the Devi had always been part of her plan, she explained. She had secretly preprogrammed it to lurk under the surface and follow her. “Sleek, huh?” She threw a long leg over the back of her seat and slapped her buttock. “I had a transponder of my own.”

  “You had a chip even the mighty Gig didn’t know about?” Dominic narrowed his eyes. “I thought he spied on you twenty-four/seven.”

  “He didn’t know about this,” she declared, a little too stridently.

  “You’re telling me the Orgs can’t track their own stealth craft?” Dominic shook his head.

  “They’re not freaking gods, Nick. I fooled them. They don’t know about the Devi.” Qi’s eyebrows knotted. She seemed nervous and unsure. Some spy! Dominic began to wonder how crafty she really was. Could the devious major be, after all, just a desperate woman who made mistakes? He noted the angry spots in her cheeks and decided to drop the subject.

  The Devi’s cockpit was just as he remembered, an egg-shaped coffin with a ribbed overhead light tube and very cramped seating. His rubber diving suit bound him like a torture device, so he opened the zipper and tugged his shoulders and arms out before stuffing himself into the miniscule seat. Qi smirked and slipped her AR headband on, adjusted the wire in front of her left eye, and slid cybernails onto her fingertips. Dominic found his own AR headband on the floor under his feet.

  He slid his hand farmer under the seat. That’s where he’d stuffed his briefcase eons ago, the one containing his hyperwave Net node and a small fortune in credit chips, but he couldn’t find it now. When he glanced at Qi, she pretended to pout.

  “I took it, sorry. I spent your money on satellite time for the miners’ broadcast. We were running in arrears with our service provider.”

  “That was low.”

  Dominic rubbed his chin and mulled over this information with a grim sense of irony. He tried to hold his angry scowl, but finally he gave it up. The way she was grinning and shaking her damp hair and humming that sassy tune, who could stay mad at her?

  “Major, you owe me one. Where to next?”

  They had to get far away from the colony before calling the bank, to make sure they didn’t give away the location. Earlier, Qi told him they would sail a raft to Canada. Typical. For all he knew, she might take him wheeling off into space.

  She flicked her cybernails to activate the Devi’s interface, and with a mighty jolt, they shot through the water. Acceleration pressed Dominic back, and it was only with forceful effort that he pried his head loose from the backrest.

  After a while, she gave him a sideways look. “You pick the direction.”

  “How about the Barents Sea?” he said. “Let’s pop up right under their noses. It’ll show our resolution.”

  “I like that.” She grinned. Then she sank back in her seat and closed her eyes. “Dim,” she said, and the cabin light dropped several levels. “Okay, course locked in. Can I sleep now?”

  “How long before we get there? Millard said we have two days or less, and we’ve already blown part of that.” His words were wasted. She’d dozed off.

  Her body slumped toward him, and her long slender arm swung loose, trailing her cybernails on the cockpit floor. He noticed how her dark skin shaded to a creamier tone inside her elbow. Her short, thick lashes lay quiet against her dusky cheeks, but her slack lips moved with each breath, and her head lolled on her shoulder. Gently, he tilted her head back into the cushioned headrest, then brushed her cheek with his hand. Her nose twitched, but she didn’t wake. He gazed down the length of her body in the ragged, cutoff uniform. Slim, muscular legs. Boyish hips. Small breasts.

  He blew a hard breath, tugged on his AR headband and forced his attention to other subjects. He had to consider what he might say to the NP. Only logic would work. The genie would scorn sentimental appeals. He remembered how his father hated sentiment. Emotional crap, the old man called it. “Whenever you have strong feelings about a deal, beware!” he used to say.

  Vividly, Dominic recalled how Richter once barked at some luckless junior officer who took insufficient collateral for a loan. “Tangible assets! That’s the way we secure a loan at ZahlenBank! The day we base a loan on emotional crap is the day ZahlenBank starts to fail!”

  Dominic hunched lower in his seat. There were no logical reasons why the bank should make this loan. The miners could offer no collateral. They couldn’t afford to pay prime plus two—or any amount of interest. They couldn’t even pay back the principal for decades. This deal had no upside for ZahlenBank, none at all.

  Worse, here he was, the bank president, proposing to violate a standing policy against bargaining with employees. Not only that, he intended to represent them! It was a blatant conflict of interest—illegal, unethical, totally without honor. If Richter had lived, what would he say?

  As Dominic ground his teeth and brooded, a memory from eight years ago surfaced in his mind. An ordinary Monday in the executive spire. He was a junior lending officer then, not yet a member of the board. So his request to see his CEO father during banking hours bordered on presumption.

  “It’s come to my notice,” he began, standing rigid before his father’s desk.

&n
bsp; “Sit down, boy. Relax. You want caffie?” Richter spoke into his wrist node. “Ulla, bring us two caffies, plenty of cream and sugar.”

  Dominic perched on the edge of the sofa, while his father grilled him congenially about pending deals. They’d played this game before, and Dominic knew how to prepare. His answers were correct and terse. After Ulla served the caffie and left them alone, the old man sat down beside his son. “You’re doing well, boy. Even Klas Lorn says so.”

  Lorn says what pleases you, Dominic thought. Aloud he said, “It’s about Mr. Lorn that I’ve come to see you. I’ve been going through the house accounts.”

  “House accounts? That’s detail work. Leave that to Ulla.” The old man whitened his caffie with thick oily cream.

  Dominic watched the spoon going round and round in his father’s cup, stirring up vortexes. “Mr. Lorn took out three personal loans this year with no collateral. That’s against bank policy. It leaves us exposed.”

  The old man sipped his caffie, then drew back his lips as if he didn’t like the taste.

  “Our proper course is to call those loans in,” Dominic said. He knew his father wouldn’t like to hear this. Klas Lorn had served Richter in the early days, when they first engineered the Ark. But Lorn’s unsecured loans posed too much risk, and it was Dominic’s duty to say so.

  Richter squeezed his son’s knee. “The house accounts are Ulla’s turf. Let’s talk about our trip next month to the Himalayas. Did you get the boots I sent over?”

  “Father, you haven’t heard it all. Mr. Lorn hasn’t made any repayments. I can’t begin to calculate the interest he owes.”

  Richter looked Dominic in the eye. They sat so close together on the sofa, Dominic could smell his father’s cologne. Like the scent of old dollar bills. “Listen, boy. The bank has use for men like Klas Lorn. When you take my chair, you’ll learn how to play ’em—and how to pay ’em. Till then, leave it to me, understand?”

  Dominic shut his eyes. Yes, he understood. He’d understood the moment he realized those loans weren’t reported in the bank’s financial statement. He’d been hoping that was an oversight, hoping his father would set matters straight. Those loans undercut the bank’s profit. They went against everything Richter taught him.

  “So you got the climbing boots?” The old man leaned back and laced his fingers behind his head. “It’s lucky you and me have the same feet, boy. I never have to guess your size.”

  “Yes, thank you. They’re very nice.” Dominic smiled as Richter nudged him affectionately. What he didn’t say was that tucked inside Lorn’s file he’d found a handwritten log of Richter’s own off-the-books transactions. Billions’ and billions’ worth of uncollateralized personal loans going back for nearly four decades. Richter still paid lip service to executive honor. Why had he stopped believing?

  Dominic never made that trip to the Himalayas. He never climbed mountains with his father or raced aircars or trekked through deserts or sailed yachts. He cited work demands and stayed in Trondheim, doing deals. He tracked clients like a heat-seeking missile and closed loans with ruthless calculation. He mastered the skills, outperformed all rivals and racked up fat profits. He devoted himself. And slowly, very slowly, he grew tired.

  Ocean fluid dripped down his cheek from the sodden eye bandage. The tape was coming loose, so he peeled it off and stuffed it under his seat. The skin around his socket was tender and puffy, and the eye remained stone blind. He touched the swollen lid. When this episode was over, he would have to check into a clinic and replace the eye with a transplant. Or maybe he’d order an artificial eye, custom-matched to his color, with optic enhancements like night vision and zoom. Yes, he thought bitterly, a man-made eye would serve him better than a real one.

  As he explored the scars with his fingertips, his negotiator mind invented arguments and prioritized talking points and gave up in frustration a dozen times. What could he say to win over the NP? So intent was he on laying a strategy that he barely noticed the silty underwater plane of the Canadian shelf rolling by in the luminous false lavenders of metavision, relieved only by mounds of golden garbage.

  Traveling submerged at a depth of twenty meters, they took three hours to cross the Arctic Ocean. Dominic jerked awake when Qi’s automatic timer sounded reveille. He yawned and scratched his belly and rubbed his face. His beard had grown thick and soft, and he liked the way it felt under his stroking fingers. Still half asleep, he pictured his colleagues’ reactions to his new fashion look.

  “Are we there yet?”

  “Yep. Are you ready to place your call?”

  He watched her power up the Devi’s small Net link and activate the onboard node. The dull blue frame of a standard browser appeared on screen.

  “Call from here?” he said. “No, let’s surface.”

  “Safer to stay down,” she said.

  “But we’re this close.”

  His face must have shown his eagerness, because Qi laughed and tickled him under the chin. “Aw, poor Nick. You miss the sunshine.”

  He started to speak, then closed his mouth. His feelings at the moment were too complicated. He didn’t want Qi to laugh at him.

  “What the hell,” she said. “They’ll trace us anyway. Let’s go up and catch some rays.”

  When she flicked her cybernails, Dominic felt his seat shudder, and the Devi rose out of the sea with a frothy crash of waves. Sunlight blazed through the cockpit, and Dominic covered his eye. Tears blurred his vision. The surface! After so long in the dark, he could barely see.

  After a moment, he uncovered his eye and tried to focus on the panoramic view through his headband. Another long summer day was passing over the face of the northern hemisphere. To his left, black mountains rose from the purple waves.

  “Norway?” he asked.

  “Yep, that’s the Varanger Fjord.”

  Dominic twisted in his seat and gazed through the window at the craggy peaks of his homeland, less than five kilometers away. He could swim that distance, he knew he could. He could cross those mountains on foot, with or without his father’s custom-made climbing boots. He could walk all the way to Trondheim if he had to. That would be the easy part.

  CHAPTER 19

  * * *

  NONNEGOTIABLE

  “MAYBE there’s a compromise. Supplies for silence.”

  “What’s come over you, son? We never bargain with protes.”

  The NP’s voice flowed from the Devi’s Net node like warm breath. This version sounded much more authentic than the genie in his eye. The impersonation was so rich and supple, so true to Richter’s living tone, that Dominic felt old fears and hopes battling inside him. A vivid holographic head rose from the screen and seemed to blush with sudden pleasure. A sheen of sweat dampened its forehead, and its handsome sea gray eyes held Dominic enthralled. The NP had drastically upgraded its interface.

  “You’re still in that stealth car? I watched it sink.” The gray eyes leered at Qi, then sliced back to Dominic. “You need a wash, boy. And a shave! Krishna Christ, you’ve been through hell. What’s wrong with your eye?”

  Dominic glanced at Qi, who merely shrugged. He resisted the impulse to touch his dead socket. “We’re talking a straight business loan. A standard contract with—”

  “We’re talking NO DEAL! Tell me where you are, and I’ll send the guards. This circus has lasted long enough.”

  Dominic gripped his seat cushion but managed to hold his features still. “The miners will pay you back. You have my personal guarantee.”

  “You vouch for protes? You’re not my son. You’re a forgery. Hold your palm to the screen so I can verify your ID.”

  Dominic ground his teeth and pressed his hand through the NP’s immaterial face. When his palm flattened against the screen, the face flickered and re-formed. He hated that face. He hated the way the square jaw moved back and forth. He despised the straight nose and the thick, full lips. It made him want to rip his own skin off.

  “Yeah, okay, I recog
nize the palm print. They’ve brainwashed you, boy. Just come home, and we’ll straighten everything out.”

  As the NP spoke, another shape began to stream out from the screen, and Dominic flinched back. But in the small cockpit, he couldn’t draw far enough away. In shock, he watched a shimmering white hand reach to touch his face. A short, thick finger delved into his left eye, crackling with electricity, but his ruined flesh felt nothing.

  Quietly, he said, “Looking for your nanoquans? They’re gone.”

  “So I find.” The NP raised its holographic eyebrows, and the hand withdrew. “That is a serious loss of data, not to mention the investment. I am not freakin’ pleased.”

  Dominic forced a ragged smile. “This deal with the miners, I admit it’s unorthodox. But if you loan this money, the miners will—”

  “The miners are fuckin’ debris! When I find that ship, I’ll sweep it up and toss it in a dump.”

  Dominic bit his lip, trying not to react. “Let’s calm down and talk like reasonable pe—” He faltered over the word. “Like reasonable bankers. Our priority is to stop the Org lawsuit, correct? So if the miners promise no more broadcast—end of lawsuit, problem solved.”

  “The miners’ existence is the problem. We can’t let them set up a haven for runaways. It’ll cause no end of labor troubles.”

  “But if they’re quiet—”

  “Protes don’t know how to be quiet. They whisper like gutterbugs. Chatter chatter chatter. Freakin’ gossips. You should listen in sometime.”

  Dominic rolled his head till his neck made a cracking sound. How could he appeal to the NP’s interests? His father taught him a skillful negotiator had to crawl into his adversary’s mind, understand his secrets, figure out what made him salivate, and play to his greed. Right. He had to crawl into the mind of a bit-brain? The NP was copied after his father. What argument would move Richter Jedes?