Salvage

by Chris Howard

  They were certain when they pulled into a space in a lot across the street from the entrance; between the buildings, across the harbor, was the old Domino Sugar sign.

  Andreden got out, turning his back to the building—in case there were cameras. He was just another employee on the wharf-front, starting a new day. He tossed his backpack over one shoulder and came around, keeping his head down, to see if Laeina was ready. “We’re just going to walk in through the front doors?”

  She took his hand, and they headed across the street. “Unless you know of another way inside.”

  Security stopped them before they reached the thick brass handles of the double glass doors, an angry squawk from the speaker in the entryway. “No admittance without prior arrangements.” It was probably the standard response for unsolicited salespeople.

  Andreden was looking up, wondering if the voice was automated, when he heard a loud click as the front doors opened of their own accord—or rather, Laeina’s will. An alarm went off for a couple of seconds, and then Laeina somehow shut that off as well. They walked right past the security pass-through, two guards mute and immobile on the polished marble floor, breathing and looking terrified, but otherwise unharmed.

  A stern-looking woman in a gray business suit swept into the lobby from one of the brightly lit halls. Her indignant voice cut through the noise of things breaking behind them, and the rustle of the guards on the floor. “What are you doing?”

  Andreden pointed a finger at her. “We’re looking for her sister and some friends of mine. What does it look like we’re doing?”

  Laeina held out a closed fist.

  The woman stopped, not because she wanted to, but because she saw the blue faceted shape Laeina tossed to her. The structure grew, like boxy blue popcorn expanding in slow motion as it passed through the air, the size of two balled-up fists by the time the woman—apparently without any control on her part—reached out and caught it, her fingers gripping tight, a pale azure glow from the shape coming through her skin.

  Laeina held out an upturned, inviting hand. “Now, take us where we want to go.” The woman in the suit hesitated, and Laeina added. “If that means we have to talk to someone else or several others, then take us to them.”

  Andreden turned to Laeina, and she nodded back. “I think she is head of security.”

  “But she may not know of other things going on here?”

  “Right.”

  They took a flight of stairs down one level and into a less showy and more functional area of offices and meeting areas with cheap cushioned chairs and foldable tables. The lobby had been clean and neat. It was sloppy downstairs, papers scattered on the floor, someone’s discarded laptop bag leaning against one of the chairs; one table had a dying plant curled limply in a plastic pot.

  A man with a thin mustache and messy hair, wearing an ill-fitting suit, ran from an office halfway up the hall. He was already angry, shaking his head as if some discretionary line had been crossed—for the umpteenth time. “Maureen, you fucking idiot. I told you. Not through here. Check in with Cameron and take them down the back . . . ”

  His voice trailed off: something about the way Maureen was ignoring his complaint, maybe the crazy blue thing she was holding, or something about the two strangers with her . . .

  Andreden quickly took the three long steps between them, grabbed a handful of the front of the man’s shirt and yanked him off the ground. “Where are they?”

  Chapter Forty-three

  Dive Knife

  Wade Corkran held up the headline, bold black sans-serif capitals: DOCTOR DEATH DISAPPEARS. He had to send his wife, Lorraine, out for the actual printed newspapers, and it took her almost an hour to track one down at two o’clock in the afternoon. “It is done. As you wished. I don’t know what Ernest Straff will do for you. He’s old. He lost—long ago—all of the knowledge that earned him that title. He was broken, and was just living out the rest of his days in a concrete cell. But he’s all yours now.”

  The face of Damaris, lean and handsome, with a few strands of blond hair angling across his forehead, floated in the center of the video panel on one side of Corkran’s carved bloodwood desk. “I am confirming this, Wade Corkran.” With a thoughtful look, Damaris said, “What is the origin of your first name, Wade? Does it have to do with wading into the sea? I think it would be wonderful if it is related.”

  Corkran stared back at the screen, thin tendrils of fear tightening under the skin, around his throat. He tried to shake his head. He didn’t know what his first name meant.

  Without taking his eyes off Corkran, Damaris started speaking in a rich Germanic-sounding language. It wasn’t Deutsch, or at least it wasn’t modern. He kept repeating a word that sounded like ga-wa-eid, and then returned to English with, “It is related. A wading place, such as a river ford or low-tide area. You have the water built into your name.” With a smile like broken glass scraping skin, Damaris said, “You have already been uncommonly useful to me, Wade Corkran, with only one mistake that remains to be played out and paid for. And now that I have discovered the soul of your name is close in nature to water, it pleases me more to know you.”

  Corkran didn’t know what to say. If he could wish for something, it would be that Damaris did not speak at all. Every word from the man—or god or whatever he was—came with some measure of fear. Each spoken syllable was like rolling dice, but the game had uncertain rules. Land on one randomly selected number—like a revolver with one bullet in a single chamber—and you were dead. It was as if just in speaking, Damaris gambled with his life.

  A bead of sweat tickled under his hairline—almost white hair that had been salt-and-pepper before he had met Damaris. Corkran looked down at his trembling hands. “I have sent you another vessel name, the Carla, and her general location.”

  “Very good.”

  April Capek had settled scores in Florida—a couple of her own as well as a few for her friends. Then she refueled Carla and took the forty-two-meter platform supply ship back out to sea with the provisions she had aboard, wheeling southeast to follow the gentle curve of the Keys. If she pushed it, she could be edging up to the Marcene in a little over a day. She left Fort Lauderdale with a lean crew, six in all: herself, the mate—an old hand named Raf Hoek—two able seamen, and two engineers, one unlicensed.

  April ran her fingers over the map, zooming in south of Key West, tapping ship traffic ahead of her, trying to see what they had logged for wave height and winds—anything that looked like trouble. “Weather looks good the whole way.”

  The Carla’s mate nodded back, his eyes fixed on the horizon.

  Five hours out of port and about fifteen miles off Key Largo, Raf picked up the binoculars. “April, you want to come see this?”

  She had been down in engineering, and was in the bridge head washing up. She came out drying her hands on a towel, tossing it over one shoulder. “What’s up?”

  He lowered the binocs, pointing way out, a darker patch of ocean moving toward them.

  “A shoal of fish? Close to the surface.” She took the binoculars. The darker shade of blue wasn’t solid; holes opened up as it moved, a web of shadow that let the brighter blue through where threads drifted apart to form gaps in the structure. “Never seen anything quite like it. Bring us a couple of points port.”

  She had been aboard a dive boat in the Gulf of Mexico when thousands of migrating Golden Rays had passed under them, painting the sea pale, the sunlight dancing off them as they raced for their summer feeding grounds. This reminded her of the rays, but ink dark, and not as tightly packed or layered—and spanning a much larger area. She pulled in a zoomed view, and it really did look like many thousands of fish speeding toward them in one coordinated rush through the water.

  Carla’s bow was now slightly east of the mass, heading away from the Keys, and April came around the other side of the bridge to step out on the ship’s starboard observation wing. “It looks like fish.” She had left the door open and s
he could just hear Raf’s quiet acknowledgement.

  She lowered the scope, felt the frown tighten on her face, then she ducked back into the bridge space.

  “The school’s turning, Raf. Coming at us fast.”

  “Remain on it, or you want me to lose some speed?”

  As he said the words, the ship rocked heavily. April grabbed the captain’s chair, barely avoiding a hard toss to the deck. “What the fuck?”

  The hum of the engines died. Carla had stalled. She called down to the engineers. “Trouble?”

  “Captain! Power’s gone. Fuel’s where it should be. We’ve lost everything from the generators, and all the electron—”

  The engineer’s voice cut with all the electronics on the bridge popping and fizzing behind the panels. Raf was already on his knees, prying off the metal doors, coughing against the cloud of smoke that spilled from the opening. He waved it away from the opening to see what was burning.

  “Holy shit. We’re dead in the water.” She pointed at her mate. “Get someone on the emergency radio.” That’s when she looked up, and through the big panorama windows saw the net being cast over her ship.

  She ran for the starboard door, kicked it open, letting the railing take her momentum. She was staring at the sky.

  Thousands of elongated diamond shapes, slick dark skin spotted pale blue or purple, cupping along the length, the stubbier rounded points on the short axis flapping like crude fins. Parallel rows of segmented ribbing looked almost as if each one had a set of legs tucked up underneath. They could swim, and they could fly. They swarmed across the sky, clouds of them, each rocketing from the sea around the Carla in graceful synchronized arcs hundreds of feet in the air, spinning out thick cord like a tail, weaving over and under the thousands of other diamond shapes casting a net over the ship.

  April shouted at the sky. “Not my fucking ship!”

  She cut through the bridge, dropped and skidded across the floor on her knees to the ship’s safe. The sky was already going dark, and the emergency lights had come on—battery-powered. Her experienced hands spun open the lock, and she pulled out her gun, reaching in again for two full magazines. She had one jammed into the gun before she reached the door, shouldered her way through it, and had the muzzle up and firing. She leaned into the heavy steel rail, keeping her feet apart.

  The gun thundered in her hand, shells popping into the air. Every couple of rounds, she saw one of the shapes spin out of alignment, some of them bursting with pale yellow fluid. The gun snapped angrily, like a dog losing its bark. She ejected the magazine and slid in the second.

  She snapped a round in the chamber, taking her time with the last seventeen shots, finding a pattern in the swarm, following the paths of the diamond-shaped animals before selecting one and taking it out. April starting shouting every time one of the creatures spiraled out of its path or exploded into wet chunks of flesh and segmented loops of what could have been intestines.

  The gun clicked impotently, and in anger, she pulled it back and threw it hard toward the dark wet wall forming around her ship. It flipped end over end, struck the webbing and slid out of sight. Raf came out behind her, shouting something, but she couldn’t hear him. The monster drummed against the hull, and the Carla shuddered under April’s feet.

  Seawater was pouring in on the three low-hull sides. The ship was going down.

  “Follow me,” she yelled over her shoulder, taking the stairs three at a time down to the main deck, one hand on the railing to keep her balance, the other tugging at the snaps that held a big Smith & Wesson knife at her belt. She slid it free, using the last of the steps to spring to hull’s rail.

  A foot of water sloshed along the main level.

  April screamed and kicked into the air, bringing the knife up.

  Jumping the twenty-foot gap between her ship and the monster, she used her momentum and gravity to land with enough force to chop through the weave of living cables thrown over her ship. The blade cut through four of the animals, splattering her with yellow fluid. Blood? She pushed harder and drove the blade’s edge into the woven net, opening up a gap in the structure twice her height.

  Slipping and clawing against the fibrous wall and jetting animals, she stabbed into it, hooking gaps with her fingers, jamming her boots in the spaces to hold her weight while she savagely hacked and chopped deep into the swarming monster. A punch in the back pushed her through the opening, a second cannonballed into her. It was trying to crush her. Two more of the diamond shapes squeezed up her legs and forced her to change tactics. She kicked hard, scraped one of the things off her boot. Two more fired at her from the dark water around the Carla’s hull.

  One hit her across both legs, flipping her upside down. She lost her hold. Then the monster, apparently annoyed by her attacks, sent ten of the diamond shapes at her. They merged into a single rigid shape that scooped the air, slammed into her, and flung her away from the net, sent her cartwheeling into the sky beyond. The knife flew from her hand.

  April hit the water hard twenty meters away and went under, clawing at the waves and swallowing water.

  She surfaced, choking and gasping for breath.

  Teeth clattering from the frigid water, she twisted back toward her ship in time to see it completely covered and sinking into the Atlantic. All she could scream was “No!”

  My Carla, she’s gone, my crew . . .

  She spun in the water, kicking furiously. “Raf? Where are you?”

  No sound except that of the ocean against the rumble and hiss of rapid sinking motion in the sea. It almost sounded like a pot of water boiling on the stove.

  The thing vanished under the waves and left nothing on the surface but April’s panicking form tossed on the blue.

  Tears were running down her face, and she cried out names, hoping some of them made it through. No one answered. Her boots felt like stones around her ankles, but she kicked until her muscles burned and weakened. “Raf! Kelley. Aresh. Where are you? Please! Answer me!”

  Something hit her in the legs, pushing her sideways in the water. Then it came around for another pass, finger-like pressure testing the skin above her boot, another digging into her jeans with a strong grip just below her left knee. She kicked out; one boot connected with something solid.

  A cylindrical bundle of cabling, hydraulic shafts, and threaded motor drives lifted out of the sea beside her, bending at the mid-point like an elbow. Then the top half of the thing surfaced, spinning toward her, holding out two long mechanical arms ending in what were clearly machine hands with delicate fingers.

  Then it spoke. “Hello. Are you injured? Please hold on to me. I will keep you above the water.”

  April stared at it, forgetting to breathe. It was definitely a machine and it didn’t look like it had anything to do with the swarming monster that had just taken the Carla under.

  “You’re talking to me.”

  The machine didn’t respond. Maybe because it didn’t sound like a question.

  She looked down at her shaking hands, clutching at the machine’s plastic and metal frame. “What are you?”

  “I am Theo. I saw your vessel in distress and I came to help.” As if that might not be enough, the machine added, “Helping vessels in distress is part of my first-level functioning. I take first-level tasks very seriously.”

  April wanted to drown the fucking thing. “Distress?”

  Theo didn’t appear to notice anything unusual in her response, except maybe a need to explain more. “I have never encountered an animal like the one that struck your vessel. I took tissue samples,” said Theo helpfully. The head on the machine turned to her, its “face” made up of a pair or cameras and other sensors—electrochemical and other environmental readers. “I will sequence it later, when I have time. Then I will forward my analysis to my lab partner.”

  Shivering, with seawater lapping at her shoulders, April almost laughed. “Lab partner? What is this, fucking high school chemistry?”

  “Jon
Andreden is my partner. We came out here from California on a special mission. We work for Knowledgenix Incorporated in Moss Landing. Unfortunately I have lost Jon. Two divers attacked us. I was damaged. I have been running self-repairs and searching the coast of Florida for him. That is when I witnessed your ship under attack.”

  April sucked in a ragged breath. “Yeah. That was an attack. Not distress. Not my Carla being struck by something.”

  “Your ship was taken under by that significantly sized coordinated attack. Yes.”

  April tried to look over her shoulder to see if there was anything left, and she cried at the empty sea. “She’s gone.”

  “I’m afraid so. Were you the only one aboard? I can find no other occupants of the ship in the water with us.”

  She let the tears run, and couldn’t even taste them with the Atlantic rinsing around her mouth.

  “What is your name?” Theo asked in a friendly tone.

  She focused on him for a minute, looking doubtful, even felt a little weird talking to a machine. “April Capek.”

  “Were you the captain of that ship?”

  She swallowed an angry response at the use of past tense. Just mumbled, “Yes.”

  “I have alerted the United States Coast Guard. They are aware of your location and are sending out a surface vessel to pick you up. You do not need to kick or tread water. I will hold you up, April Capek.”

  She held on tighter, letting the rest of her body relax. “Thank you, Theo.”

  Chapter Forty-four

  Contained

  Jon Andreden dragged the manager in the loose suit down the hall, continuing the way Maureen, the chief of security, was leading them. “Your name?”

  “I’m not telling you.” His words came spitting out.