Halcyon

by Demelza Carlton

  It was harder going without his fins, especially now he was fighting the current, too. He felt the faint pull of the pipe inlets as he passed them, but that was actually a good thing, as it kept him away from the fountain. He made it halfway back before a particularly strong tug dragged him upward, into one of the pipes closer to the surface. Galen tried to fight it, but the current was too strong, pulling him along until his shoulders wedged into the pipe and he found himself stuck fast.

  He fought to free himself, but the suction of a pump somewhere above him was stronger than any pressure he could exert, plus the water pouring into the pipe behind him, rushing to reach its destination, pushed him deeper in.

  His rebreather only allowed him an hour of air. Past that, and he'd drown. He had to calm down and think. If he was wedged too tightly in the pipe to get himself out, he'd need help. He couldn't call anyone, so the next best thing was to trigger an emergency alert. The easiest way to do that was to block the pipe, and hope there was still someone up to answer the alert before his air ran out.

  Galen spread out his arms and legs, trying to angle his body so no water could get past him. The current buffeted his back, trying to force its way through, but he held fast, fighting to block the flow for as long as his strength held out. His only hope was to trigger an alert.

  After an eternity that was probably no more than fifteen minutes, Galen gave up. He hurt all over and the pressure was starting to make his head pound. Or maybe he was running out of air. He hoped it had been enough.

  Something brushed his bare foot. Something warmer than the water. Galen twisted his head to try and see behind him. His headlight reflected off something orange, before he saw nothing but water. It couldn't be. He blinked, watching the pipe inlet again.

  This time, he clearly saw a coppery tail fluke brush against his foot, before the rust-coloured Mer blocked off the end of the pipe.

  Halcyon. It had to be. Galen tried desperately to squeeze inside the pipe so she wouldn't see him, but all he succeeding in doing was to bash his head so hard against it that he saw stars. Then the stars faded to blackness. Galen's last memory was terror at what the siren would do to him – a helpless Human caught in her world – before he lost consciousness altogether.

  "If we were Human, they'd have done something by now. It's because we're Metas that we're being ignored," Sven grumbled. "You're the only one who listens."

  "I'm sure that's not true. I heard he's been testing the water all week, trying to find your mystery contaminants. There's nothing, Sven. I'll pull up the results myself, just to show you." Allie extracted her tablet, swiped at it a few times, then held it out to the frowning merman. "See? The fresh smokers supplying the Aquatic Dome are some of the purest in the Complex. What kind of results are you getting in the aquaculture tanks? If there's a problem, it could be in the pipes, or the tanks themselves. There's so many things that can go wrong between the source and your fish."

  "What do you take me for? No one knows water quality better than Mer. We can smell it. But our test results are just as mysterious as yours. They show nothing. But the fish...I've never seen anything like it. Nor have any of the others."

  "Show me, then," Allie said. "If we can't find your problem in the water, maybe the answer lies with your fish."

  She followed Sven along the raised catwalk between the pools, watching his muscles ripple and flex as he undulated along the surface. His tail was quite a striking shade of green, brighter than it really needed to be right now. Sven was showing off, she realised.

  He dived under a section of catwalk and came up in the middle of a pool teeming with fish. Huge fish, bigger than anything they'd brought into the Complex. Nothing grew this fast in the space of a few weeks, unless...

  "What do you think?" Sven waved at the school circling him. "They're fully mature and the flesh is just superb. We harvested a few when they reached minimum size, but this is more than we can eat. We could supply the whole dome for a month from this pond alone. We'll have to, because at this rate of growth, they'll be sexually mature within a month and we'll be overrun."

  "If you have that much to spare, send a few fillets my way. I can't remember the last time I had fresh tuna," Allie said, staring at the tank. It was a lie. The last time had been with her husband, before the war. He'd been working on accelerated growth as a recessive trait, so the population could build up rapidly before he'd released a spawning of fish without the acceleration gene. Within two generations, he'd had a sustainable population with a normal growth rate. "Where did you get these fish?"

  "The fertilised embryos from Ceyx' lab," Sven admitted. "I know you don't like to hear his name, and I've heard stories about how you two met and fell in love. They've been embroidered into legends, to listen to the young mermaids sighing about you two like some sort of fairytale. But that was so long ago. Surely it's time to move on." He wiggled his tail suggestively.

  Allie shook her head. "It's not that. He should be remembered. His work, as well as who he was. He'd have been thrilled to see his project doing so well. I only wish he'd lived to see it." She stared at the fish, avoiding Sven's eyes. "In the short term, I think you should deal with the oversupply by sharing it with the rest of the population. There's a vacancy for a seafood supply shop in the Main City. I know a lot of the restaurant owners would love to have access to some of your fish. If you apply for premises tonight, I can slot you in for fitout tomorrow. You could be selling tuna fillets to Humans before the week's out."

  "I'll look into it," Sven said. "But only if you promise to consider...there are other mermen here, eligible ones right here in the Complex. Not all of us supported the neutrality the Mer Council decreed. Some of us watched your victories with admiration. Any one of us would be both willing and capable of giving you children when you want them. You only have to ask."

  To someone unfamiliar with Mer society, Sven's offer wouldn't sound the slightest bit romantic. But once you understood the nuances of Mer mating, where the females tended to rule while the males took care of children in between their other duties, it took on a whole new light. If she allowed a merman to give her a child, he'd dedicate himself to being her lover for as long as it took to conceive the child. After the birth, he'd care for it until it reached adulthood, for two or perhaps even three decades. Sven was offering something akin to a Human marriage proposal.

  And for all the love she'd shared with Ceyx, she'd never carried a child past the first trimester. He'd assured her it was neither his genes nor hers that were the problem, but a combination of the two. Allie had all but given up on children long before Ceyx died. Now...just thinking about it brought back memories of her many miscarriages. And threatened to break her heart anew. She refused to lose anyone else.

  "Thanks, but no," Allie said abruptly. "You said you'd planned to start another tank of tuna. If you fill the pond now, I could better observe their progress, because I'd be here at the start."

  "Yes, ma'am," Sven said. He swam up to the control board. "I'll fill pools twelve and thirteen. Twelve will have embryos from Ceyx' stock, while thirteen will use unmodified stock from the colony ship, so we can see the difference." He turned the valve, muscles rippling again.

  Water fountained up in a pool to Allie's left. "You've got good water pressure here. I remember seeing something about the fresh smoker here being the most powerful, but I didn't think I'd be able to see the difference." Within minutes, the pool was full, and the one beside it began to fill up. When it was perhaps a third full, the outlet started to sputter before the flow stopped altogether. "Ooh, that's not good."

  Sven frowned. "It's never done that before." He leaped over the catwalk into the next series of pools to investigate. "It's still flowing, but it's down to a trickle," he reported.

  "Maybe the pump died," Allie said, reaching for her tablet. "Beems, show me all the error reports for the Aquatic Dome water supply for the last six hours." There was only one – a blockage in the pipes, down near the supply source. "I
better go down and fix it. I shouldn't take long."

  "The force fields will be down for curfew before you get there. Go home. Fix it tomorrow, and come back when you're ready. The embryos can wait another day. Get some rest."

  Allie nodded and called for a glyder, but she didn't tell it to go home. Instead, she directed it to the maintenance corridors beneath the dome, not even getting off the vehicle to palm open the door. She was soon whizzing down the corridors as the roar of the fountain drowned out all other sound. Glad to let the glyder steer itself, she tried to call Galen, to tell him about the blockage, but he didn't answer.

  Maybe the man was finally getting some sleep, instead of working late like he usually did. She would, soon, too, just as soon as she'd fixed this.

  Allie was surprised to find a toolbox and a set of Maintenance coveralls already in the pumping station, but the owner of them was nowhere in sight. Probably already fixing the problem, she reassured herself. She checked the toolbox lid, and her mouth fell open when she recognised it was Galen's. He was the boss; unblocking pipes wasn't his job. And the clothes were cool to the touch, like he'd been in the water a while. That wasn't good at all.

  Fearing the worst, Allie stripped out of her coverall. If she was wrong, she'd head home to bed and leave the job to Galen. If she was right...oh, please, don't let her be right, she begged the universe. If she was right, Galen could be running out of air and stuck in a pipe. If he hadn't run out of air already...

  Without hesitation, Allie dived into the water.

  "Hey, boss? Remind me to show you the pool tomorrow. There's a NO SWIMMING sign on the wall here for a reason."

  Galen's head hurt and he was freezing. Oh, and his arms burned, from the shoulder right down to his elbows.

  "Wasn't swimming," he managed to say. His brain raced, trying to work out how to explain this to Allie. He settled for, "There's a bomb in there. I tried to get to it, but..."

  "Yeah, I found it," Allie said. "That's not all I found, either. Someone tried to blow up the Complex. You interrupted them, and it nearly cost you your life. If it weren't for you, we'd all be dead."

  No. That wasn't right. Galen hadn't planted enough explosives to damage more than the space in this room. Halcyon must have done something. "How?" he asked.

  Allie pointed at the uranium rods, nestled in some black fabric that looked suspiciously like his wetsuit. "There's enough plutonium there to blow this place twice over. The bomb was a distraction; nothing more. If even one of those rods hit the water, this whole Complex would be nothing but a crater. You must have scared the saboteur away before he could finish the job."

  Not he. She. Galen sat up, then wished he hadn't, because the pounding in his head increased in intensity. He flopped back down. No wonder he was cold – he was lying naked on the catwalk. What must Allie think? The shrinkage alone... "Where's my clothes?" he mumbled.

  "Your clothes are right where you left them, over there." Allie pointed. "Your wetsuit...well, it tore while I was trying to get you unstuck, so I helped things along a little until I managed to get the wetsuit off you altogether. I might have scraped off a bit of skin getting you out of the pipe, but I wasn't sure how much air you had. I figured you'd forgive me a few grazes as long as I got you out before you ran out of air."

  She'd saved him. How, he didn't know, but right now, he didn't care. "Thank you." The heartfelt words just didn't seem like enough. He'd have to think of a way to thank her properly. She'd taken such a risk. If she'd come here while Halcyon was still here, Allie would have been killed like he almost had been. Numbly, Galen pulled on his pants, then his shirt. His hands shook as he struggled with the buttons, but he didn't dare ask Allie for help. She'd done so much already, and she'd nearly...she'd nearly...he'd nearly lost her.

  Galen sank to his knees, breathing hard. He wasn't cut out for this sort of thing. He'd never killed anyone in his life. And to think that his attempt to catch the siren so he could keep Allie safe had almost killed her...it made him too dizzy to stand.

  "I've dismantled the bomb," Allie said. "The explosives are relatively inert without the detonator. We should still take them back to the Intra as evidence, though. The plutonium is another matter. That's much too dangerous to leave here, but I'll need some sort of shielding for it. The wetsuit's just so I can touch it. That stuff is hot."

  Galen pointed a shaking finger at the pump casing. "Take the explosives out of that and put the...what did you say it was?" Uranium. He'd been certain it was uranium. That's what nuclear bombs were made out of, back on Earth.

  "Plutonium. The result of the decay of radioactive uranium. Powerful source of alpha radiation with a very long half-life, which is what makes it so dangerous. Especially in water." Allie dumped the explosives into Galen's tool box and bundled the wetsuit with its radioactive contents into the pump casing.

  "How do you know that?" Galen asked.

  Allie shrugged. "Experience. There was still a supply of plutonium batteries aboard the Human spaceships when they came to the system, and they've been used to power transportation modules. Especially those attempting to be stealthy and operate without engines. Submarines in particular. The easiest way to check if a battery was still good was to measure the temperature. If it was hot, great. If not, the nuclear fuel was spent and it was safe to dispose of."

  "But....batteries. Not enough to make much of an explosion, right?" Galen couldn't take his gaze off the pump casing now he knew what it held.

  "I already told you. There's more than twice what you'd need to blow this place up. Just one of those would be more than critical mass, under the right conditions, like the ones here. That's why we can't leave it here." Allie shoved the box of explosives into his arms. "Here, you take this and your toolkit. I'll take the payload. I've already called for a zipper that'll be waiting for us when we leave the maintenance corridor, but we'll have to take a glyder from here. Unless you'd rather walk?"

  Galen quailed under her searching gaze. He wasn't sure his legs would hold him. He'd built a nuclear bomb. A bomb big enough to take out the entire city and all its inhabitants. He shook his head, trying to dislodge the thought, but it was stuck firmly in his mind. He'd never killed anyone, but he'd nearly killed everyone. To take out one terrorist.

  If he'd succeeded, he'd have been worse than Halcyon. Killed more people. Done more damage.

  Numbly, he climbed up behind Allie on the glyder, oblivious to his surroundings. When she took him to the Intra, he'd confess everything. Someone like him should be locked up, where he couldn't hurt anyone. Allie should never have rescued him. She should have left him to drown in the pipe like he deserved.

  Genocidal maniac. Mass murderer. Terrorist of the worst kind. Not Halcyon. Him.

  By the time they reached the zipper, Galen had sunk into a deep state of shock. He didn't respond to a word Allie said and she had to half carry him into the zipper, where he curled up on the floor in the corner with his back to the wall, looking like a stricken elf who'd drunk so much moonshine he couldn't tell the difference between his own hallucinations and reality.

  The man could do with a shot of moonshine, Allie decided, as she loaded their gear into the zipper. The force shields were down, but between her Maintenance ID and her assurance to Beems that it was an emergency, the zipper passed straight through them.

  Her first thought was to take Galen to his apartment where he could sleep off his shock, while she reported to Lennox with the dismantled nuclear weapon, but the man was a wreck. He shouldn't be left alone in his current state. Especially not if the person who'd planted the bomb recognised him and came after him at his apartment.

  No, Allie decided, she'd take Galen to her place instead. There was space for two, so she could stay with him, and she was more than a match for any Human who managed to follow them to her apartment. Any Meta, too, but most Metas knew that, so they wouldn't try something that stupid. Besides, the bomb had all the hallmarks of Human technology, not Meta, especially the plutonium
payload. The canisters that held the radioactive material were battery casings, for goodness' sake.

  She had to tell Lennox, but she needed Galen to tell him what he knew, too. And right now, the man wasn't coherent. Lennox could wait until tomorrow. As long as she kept the evidence close where no one else could touch it, it would keep until morning. Galen needed her now.

  She left the box and the pump casing just inside the doorway of her apartment before returning to the zipper for Galen and his things. He moved like an automaton, or someone who'd been subject to Meta mind control. Surely that wasn't possible, though. Galen had a fully functional implant that prevented most forms of Meta mind control. Of course, if it had been a siren, the implant would have had no effect. Only a handful of Meta races could resist siren song, and Humans had no resistance whatsoever.

  Once he'd shuffled into her apartment and taken a seat on her couch, Allie asked, "Galen, was there a siren in the tunnels with you today? Did she give you orders?"

  Even as the words left her lips, Allie didn't believe them. For all Sven's talk of support, mermen lacked the voice range to use a song to control anyone, Human or Meta. And no mermaid would dabble with explosives. None of this made sense.

  "I saw her," Galen said grimly. "Because of me, she could have blown us all up. You shouldn't have saved me. Should have left me to drown."

  Now Galen wasn't making any sense.

  Allie narrowed her eyes, and really looked at him. He was still shaking, and his clothes stuck to him like he'd still been wet when he put them on, or the clothes had been damp from the fountain spray, or he'd broken out in a cold sweat since dressing. She laid a hand on his arm, and was surprised to find his skin colder than hers. No wonder he was shivering. She'd put her money on the man simply being in shock, nothing more.