War Surf

by M M Buckner

  As I cower here in this airless fluorescent room waiting for my future to unreel, how well I recollect our grim mood after the seafarm fiasco. My ego was rubbed raw. When a surf goes right, it’s transcendent, but if you get cocky and let details slide, you can make a royal botch of things. Kat swore we would not let that happen again. We would prepare with utmost exactitude. We would focus, pay attention, itemize.

  “But that won’t be enough to get us through Heaven!” I roared.

  Kat and I had been wrangling for days. She called me a mouse. I called her a redheaded fascist. I spouted breathtaking lies to scare my friends away from Heaven. My excuses ranged from limp to fairly ingenious, but I never gave the real reason. That was too shady and convoluted to explain.

  Just as I was about to sputter one more annihilating insult, Verinne interrupted. “Nasir, please. I need this.”

  Cara Verinne. Her chalky brows rose in two hopeful arcs toward her widow’s peak, and her dry gray eyes urged me to yield. Verinne wanted Heaven to be her swan song, her grand finale. Quietly, she coughed into her handkerchief with a hacking sound that cut through my resolve. It killed me to disappoint Verinne.

  “We’ll vote,” Kat said. “Verinne and me, that’s two for Heaven. Who else?”

  Grunze nibbed his bald head and gave me a sheepish grin. “I’m with the girls on this.”

  “Grunzie!” Betrayed by my best friend.

  “Ha, three votes. Majority rules.” Kat sashayed around my futon, gloating.

  “Screw voting. We WILL NOT do this surf.” I went bonzo and started throwing cheese snacks. I threatened to lock up the tequila and cancel the Web site. I was desperate. For a fleeting instant, I actually considered telling them the truth about Heaven.

  Thank the idol gods, events tend to arrange themselves by laws other man human will. That very day, an enormous CME occurred. For the uninitiated, that’s “Coronal Mass Ejection.” Basically, it’s an aneurysm on the sun. Picture shock waves of solar wind spewing out from the sun’s corona and colliding with the Earth’s magnetic field. Intense X rays blast the ionosphere, and gigatons of solar protons auger in to zap communications. Lethal radiation builds up, threatening even the most spaceworthy passenger cars and disturbing the peace of war-surfing parties. This timely CME put Heaven beyond the pale.

  But the canceled trip left Verinne devastated. She tried not to show it, although even Winston noticed her long silences. By that time, Verinne was spending half her waking hours in acute bioNEM therapy, and she admitted to me privately one night that it wasn’t helping. I was the only one who knew how fast her time was running out.

  To comfort Verinne and placate my crew, I offered to underwrite the full cost of surfing the Lorelei, a mega-challenging Class Nine rain-harvesting ship owned by Greenland.Com. Like Heaven, the Lorelei would be a “first assault,” meaning no other crew had tried it yet. If we performed well, the Lorelei would put us back on top.

  Let me be frank though. My main objective was to restore Sheeba’s faith in me. That seafarm episode had left her quiet and gloomy, but if anything, it deepened her interest in surfing. She still hoped to find her dark canal, or whatever the heck it was. And I needed her approval too much to tell her she couldn’t come. I needed her to witness my boldness. And, well, if she wanted dark scenes, the Lorelei would fill the bill.

  Bombed out, radioactive and presumed lifeless, the old rain ship drifted in the Arctic Ocean. Why, you may ask, was this disabled hulk rated Class Nine? Partly due to its high ambient radiation, but mainly because of its cargo. The Lorelei carried a cache of fetuses. They were frozen DNA duplicates of Greenland.Com’s senior staff—-a sort of key-man insurance policy. When the Greenland execs hid their crèche aboard the Lorelei, they didn’t account for the whims of the ship’s aging and poorly maintained nuclear reactor.

  Its explosion gutted the ship and fried the workers en masse. Still, many experts believed the cryogenic tanks preserved the precious cargo—and talk about salvage value. If those embryos were still viable, their price on the hot market would be staggering. But no one could go aboard to check because the ship was tied up in a lawsuit, and the World Trade Org maintained a sensor-net blockade to keep everyone out. That WTO blockade pegged the Lorelei a Class Nine.

  “Strictly speaking, it’s not a war,” Verinne pointed out. “There are no hostiles.”

  “What do you call a WTO lawsuitr I argued. “Nothing’s more hostile than that. Besides, the Lorelei has an official zone rating. All crews recognize it.”

  “But I don’t have a rad-hardened surfsuit,” said Winston.

  “Quit grousing. You can afford it.” Grunze scooped up a cracker full of cheese dip and swallowed it whole, then noisily licked his fingers.

  Perched on my sofa, Shee watched our faces and listened. She wore a lavender sari and a frosting of peach skin dye. Her pinwheel, turquoise-and-white contact tenses spun disconcertingly every time she blinked, and her hair was stuffed under a white knit cap, which made her look younger than ever.

  Kat fidgeted beside her, flushed and ruddy, in jet beads and formfitting black suede, wrapping a strand of red hair round and round her index finger. Verinne, in her usual dun unisuit, crouched on the floor and squeezed medicinal drops in her eyes. Winston, in elegant silks, roamed aimlessly in the background, playing with my telescopes. Grunzie and I sprawled on the futon in our terry robes, near the food. We were feasting on cheese snacks, popping them into our mouths by the handfuls. Of course we all wore stomach pacemakers to control our digestion and limit caloric intake.

  “The hard part is getting through the sensor net. That’s mega-sleek tech,” said Kat.

  “Right. We can’t circumvent it, so we run straight through it,” I said.

  Verinne wiped the excess eyedrops from her cheeks. “Run a WTO blockade? It’s never been done.”

  “The trick is speed,” I said. “We’ll be in and out so fast, they won’t even notice.”

  “And how do we achieve this faster-than-light velocity?” Verinne asked.

  “Yeah, sweet-pee?” Grunze engulfed another cracker. “Don’t tell me you’re thinking about the Celerity.”

  When I grinned and nodded, Grunzie flashed his teeth. Kat spat out her strand of hair and said, “Ooh.” And Verinne popped open her notebook to run a search.

  Winston said, “What’s the Celerity?’

  Win knew about the Celerity, but he’d forgotten. So I explained it again, partly for Sheeba’s benefit The Celerity was an experimental, high-speed, plasma-powered submersible. It had been developed in secret by Deuteronomy.Com, on whose board of directors I faithfully served. Taking the Celerity out for a recreational spin wasn’t exactly orthodox, even for a board member. But we Agonists had our ways.

  “Urn, Nasir?” Sheeba actually raised her hand like a schoolgirl. Those pinwheel contact lenses made it impossible to guess what she was thinking. “This rain ship, are all the workers dead?”

  “Scorched to cinders.” Grunze flexed his triceps. “The nuclear blast went through that ship like a blowtorch.”

  “Hostiles won’t be a problem,” Verinne added as she browsed her search results, “although we may get some noteworthy Reel.”

  Sheeba kept gazing wide-eyed, evidently hoping for more explanation, and those three adorable little furrows creased her eyebrows. I squeezed her hand.

  “The Celerity’s docked in Point Barrow,” Verinne announced. For fast info retrieval, count on Verinne every time.

  “Perfect,” I said. “It’ll be a short hop from there to the Lorelei, once we find her.”

  Once we find her, yes. The WTO’s sensor net blocked the rain ship’s location on satellite scans. Didn’t I say this was a Class Nine surf?

  But trust Verinne. In the next few days, she scanned the Arctic from coast to coast using magnetic resonance and gamma-ray triangulation. Her scans turned up a gargantuan list of submarine objects somewhat close in size to the rain ship. Then, with sublime artistry, she programmed an a
lgorithm to sift the data based on the Lorelei’s technical specifications. From the two hundred thousand possibles her search yielded, we were able to pick out the Lorelei by exact weight.

  While everyone was toasting Verinne’s success, Sheeba pulled me aside. “Nass, this rain ship rattles me. My aura’s turning beige.”

  “Dear heart.” I embraced her. Despite my spine extension, Shee still overtopped me, and when we cuddled, my nose nestled sumptuously under her chin. From there, I said, “Sheeba, everybody’s spooked by a Class Nine. All you need is confidence.”

  “Beau, that’s not it”

  “Kat’s been needling you. Just tune her out, Shee. Confidence is a matter of acting. Strut onto the stage like you own it, and—”

  She pushed away and shook her head. “We’ll find dead bodies.”

  “Oh.” I patted her hand. The Reel. The thought of the rotting corpses aboard that ship gave me the willies, too. “Don’t worry, Shee. In time, you’ll learn to disconnect. It just takes practice.”

  “Disconnect.” She said the word as if testing the way it felt on her tongue. After a long silence, she said, “The dark canal is meta-grievous, beau.”

  Her words chilled me. I stroked her silky arm, envisioning grisly scenes. Putrid flesh, blistered bones, loose hanks of hair. Memories swirled up from the boggy bottom of my past, images I tried every day to forget. Suddenly, the taste of lychee nuts filled my mouth, and I swallowed hard.

  “Darling, we can arrange not to see any dead bodies. Will that suit you?”

  She seemed preoccupied, and when I kissed her, she barely kissed back.

  That same hour, I rewrote our surf plan. Instead of boarding the Lorelei, we would plant a transponder on the exterior hull. That would verify our feat. Nothing fancy, no run-ins with scorched cadavers. No five-star Reel either, but since I was footing the bill, my crewmates had to agree. Of course, only a powerful hyperwave transponder could break through the WTO’s sensor-net blockade, and that meant a severe price tag. I sent Chad to cash some bonds.

  In the tense quiet of my observatory three nights before the surf, we delegated tasks. Verinne would track the rain ship’s drifting course. Grunze and I would steal the Celerity. And Kat would stock our base camp—Winston’s yacht. Win would sail the vessel up from Baffin Bay, anchor off the Alaskan coast and play bartender. Winny didn’t like his role. He wanted to come on the surf. But his backbone was still healing, and besides, I didn’t give him a choice. He might screw up again.

  The worst problem was, the submersible would carry only four people. So someone else besides Winston had to stay behind. When I named Grunze, he spat out his mouthful of martini and almost choked.

  “You can’t pick Sheeba over me!” His meaty fist pounded the table and made our cocktail glasses jump. “You need me, Nass. Everything depends on speed, and a newbie’ll slow you down.”

  “For once, I agree with Grunze,” said Kat. “Sheeba’s liable to panic. She’s too green.”

  I tried to catch Sheeba’s eye, hoping my choice pleased her, but she drew back into the sofa cushions and toyed with her navel ring.

  “You should have seen her at the seafarm,” I said. “She was terrific.”

  “Right, the seafarm. That stellar success.” Kat flicked her nails.

  Verinne remained stiffly mute.

  “Grunze, it’s a four-seater.” I faked a clownish grin. “You want to sit in my lap?”

  His facial musculature twisted as if he might cry. “Where are your loyalties?”

  Where, indeed? Grunze and I had been friends for a hundred years. We’d shared secrets and stock tips and sexually transmitted diseases. I couldn’t answer his question, then or now. As I wait in this anteroom to die, his crestfallen gaze still skewers me. I wronged you, Grunze.

  “It’s all right, beau.” Sheeba bounded off her sofa and scrambled into the hammock beside Winston. “I’ll wait behind and go next time.”

  Win fondled her waist, and his lewd expression drove Grunze off my mental scope. “Sheeba, you’re coming with me.”

  We didn’t draw straws or cast lots. As financier, I made the choice by fiat. Sheeba, my inexperienced newbie therapist, would take the place of our seasoned crewmate, Grunze. No one liked it. Yes, it made a rift in our group. A subtle fissure.

  We left Nordvik at dawn—always dawn, that ominous hour. I checked at least twenty times that I’d locked my new emerald signet ring in my safe. I would not make mat mistake again. Grunze, still grumpy and miffed, flew us straight across the pole and landed on Win’s yacht, anchored in MacKenzie Bay. No one was surprised to find Win still snug asleep in his cabin. His bartending skills wouldn’t be needed till later.

  Filching the submersible from Deuteronomy.Com proved simple enough, once Chad negotiated the various bribes. As we drove back to the yacht, Grunze hardly spoke three words. But sunlight filtered through the Arctic smog like honey, and the sub’s power hummed through the steering yoke. At the yacht, we zeroed our clocks, waved goodbye to Grunze and glided away in the sub. I used my travel mirror to check my hair. Zone rush was building around us like a static charge.

  “So much for Class Nine. This surf’U be as treacherous as a bubble bath.” Grunzie spoke to us over the sat phone. “My money says you ladies finish this gig in two hours.”

  “One hour or less,” I countered.

  “I want some of that,” said Kat from the backseat.

  We were all making an effort to regain our sense of camaraderie. Sitting inside the tiny sub, trying to figure out all the switches and screens, we kept up a forced banter. But Sheeba stayed silent, and I twisted around to see how she was faring. Her porcelain white skin dye made her look waifish. She gave me an elusive half smile.

  “This’ll be fun,” I said, to calm her nerves.

  Right then, I should have performed a ritual to mollify the gilded gods. Touched wood. Tossed salt. Sacrificed a body part. Something! Our plan started unraveling the minute we left Win’s yacht.

  First, the Celerity overheated and stalled. The Deuteronomy engineers had designed a new catalytic add-on to increase fuel efficiency, and it crashed. With molto smug teasing, Grunze towed us back to shore, and while Chad found a discreet IT guy to uninstall the add-on, Kat and Verinne argued whether to set our clocks back to zero or to count this delay as surf time.

  Then I got a tingly alert from my IBiS. One of my doctors was authorizing a telomerase booster by remote Net link. (The boost was preprogrammed, of course. The actual doctor was probably playing foosball on the moon.) Sure, I needed the boost to lengthen my telomeres and tone up my complexion, but it created inconvenient side effects, like heart palpitations and sudden urges to urinate. Even with Chad to remind me, I could never keep track of all these freaking doctors’ appointments.

  Next it started raining.

  You wouldn’t think rain would interfere with a submersible, but you have to understand what global warming has done to the Arctic rain. It falls at times in great brown pellets the size of your fist, half ice, half muddy grit blown up by the storms that scrape the northern continents. This so-called rain perforates the Arctic like a million piledrivers, penetrating ten meters deep. To reach maximum speed, the Celerity needed to travel just under the surface, but at that shallow depth, its hull would take punishing hits from the rain.

  And we couldn’t just wait out the storm, either. Once an Arctic rain system moves in, the pattern can last for weeks. After extended debate, we decided to take the Celerity deeper—and slower—till we reached the outer limits of the WTO’s sensor net. Then we would rocket up to the rain-whipped shallows, accelerate to top speed and do a drive-by shooting to plant the Lorelei transponder by compression gun. Hopefully, this quick turnaround would minimize damage to the “borrowed” sub.

  We finally deckled to re-zero our clocks when we launched a second time, and I recalled my impetuous side bet One hour or less. Ha. What sum had I mentioned? Two million deutsch? Well, at least I would plant that transponder
and salvage our crew’s reputation. With a brave glance at Sheeba, I said, “Lorelei, prepare to meet your master.”

  “Don’t presume too much. We’re not there yet.” Verinne sat beside me in the front passenger seat, reading documentation on her new radiation-hardened helmet

  Meanwhile, Kat shuffled around in the back, making exasperated sighs. “Sheeba, you’re hopeless. You have your camera mounted upside down. Give it here. I’ll fix it”

  That couldn’t be. I’d personally checked Sheeba’s gear. I twisted to see, but Kat had already popped Sheeba’s camera out of its slot

  “Show me your radiation badge,” Kat said next “Sheeba, do you remember what the colors mean? You’ll have to pay attention. We can’t baby-sit you every minute.”

  I said, “Stop picking at her, Kat,” but Sheeba remained oddly silent.

  As we neared the Lorelei, Grunze came online to remind us that the sensor net would break our connection. Good old Grunze, he still sounded peeved. “Start your ascent, sweet-pee. And keep those cameras rolling. I wanna see the replay when you get back.”

  Alarm sirens blared when we hurtled through the WTO blockade. Climbing toward the surface, our sub bucked and vibrated like the inside of a snare drum. Preter-vicious rain. Verinne fought to click her seatbelt, and her new helmet ricocheted off the ceiling.

  Kat shook the back of my seat. “Kill that noise. It’s making me loco.”

  “Slack off, Katherine.” I shut down the alarm, but the rain still pinged our hull like cosmic static. I glanced at Sheeba and yelled over the noise. “We have two minutes before the cops arrive. Everybody ready?”

  The forward viewing screen showed the gutted rain ship floundering in swells not far ahead. Verinne tumbled with her compression gun. She was trying to load the transponder in the chamber when the sub reeled sideways and flung her against the armrest. She said, “How many spare transponders did you bring?”

  “Spares? None. Hyperwave transponders cost a bloody pile,” I said.

  She looked at me with startled eyes. “What if I miss?”