by Ben Weaver
He released a long cry, and I knew he had gone over the side. My security uniform flapped violently against the wind, and I had trouble forcing my head down to look at the ocean rushing up at me. I skinned up, and the tactical computer issued a mindless proximity alert that had me telling it to shut up. I wondered what it would feel like to hit the water at such a high velocity while skinned. They had not subjected us to anything like that at the academy. My curiosity wouldn’t last long.
Reflexively, I held my breath, though my skin would recycle my air supply and keep me comfortably warm and dry. I hit the waves, and the water enveloped me with a dull force as I immediately weakened the skin to decrease the rebound. Surrounded by curtains of bubbles illumined by the phosphorescent green emitted by my skin, I sank three, four, maybe five meters, then the inertia wore off and the bubbles cleared. I whirled to get my bearings. There was the ship, off to my left, its dark gray hull curving down into the water so far that it blended seamlessly with the darkness. Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted Halitov, swimming toward me like a shimmering jellyfish. I opened a channel. “Stay close to the hull.”
“I don’t like it here,” he said. “It feels kinda closed in, you know?”
“What’re you talking about?” I argued, trying to shift his thoughts away from his phobia. “This ocean covers the entire planet.”
We kicked hard, heading back to the ship, when a gauntlet of particle fire triggered from above streaked into the water. Glowing rounds chased away from me and dematerialized into the depths. I sighed with relief as I found the bond and torpedoed forward, feeling at least two rounds strike and rebound off my combat skin before I reached the algae-slick hull and began floating up. I increased the strength of my skin at my shoulders, and the force kept me submerged.
I shared the finding with Halitov, who swam up next to me and did likewise. “Nice trick,” he said. “But floating down here begs the question, what now?”
“Working on it.” My HUV shimmered to life, and I called up the Eri Flower’s schematics, zeroed in on our location, and scanned for dive hatches.
I didn’t hear them at first, just felt the dull impact of the water they displaced as it reached me. Then I looked away from my HUV and saw the bubbles. Four Marines were in the water, their skins brightening as they drew closer.
“Fuckin’ pool party,” said Halitov, swimming past me toward our pursuers, who opened fire with QQ81 aquatic rifles that I had never seen in use. The weapons’ highly accelerated rounds traveled through the water as though no drag were being placed upon them. The laws of physics were not being violated; those rounds were just god awfully powerful and fast. Halitov swam right into them.
“Uh, Rooslin?”
“I’m tired of running.”
“But you’re not running, you’re…” I didn’t finish. Nothing I could say would stop him.
After a huge breath, I stiffened and reached for the bond, diving beneath one of the Marines until I turned and shot straight up from below. He got off a round that struck the skin over my left eye and made me flinch a second before I wrenched the gun from his hand and found his tac. Off came the tac. And his hand. His drowned cry amid a swirl of rising bubbles faded as he floated toward the surface, blood jetting from his stump.
Two meters directly below us, Halitov wrested away another Marine’s rifle, then did as I had taught him: he tore the tac from the Marine’s wrist. She, like her comrade, screamed and trailed blood as she fought her way to the surface. The other two Marines were already retreating as I headed back toward the hull, with Halitov just behind me.
“We should’ve killed them,” he said.
I reached the hull, pivoted to look up at the Marines heading toward the surface. A great, oval-shaped shadow glided near them. “We did kill them. You, me, and the hirosasqui that’s up there now.”
“Oh my God,” he said, craning his head back.
With mind-boggling speed, the massive fish circled once, twice, then broke from the spin and launched itself toward the Marines. The water displaced by the hirosasqui’s powerful tail blew us back, into the hull. We couldn’t see its face or its teeth, just all those dorsal fins cutting through the water like old-fashioned saw blades, sharp and relentless. The fish rose faster and faster. And though we couldn’t hear them, you just knew those Marines were shrieking, watching this incredible maw some five or six meters in diameter rush up at them. I couldn’t take my eyes off the scene as the carnivore made one quick lash of its tail and lunged at two of the Marines, swallowing them whole before it darted off and vanished.
Halitov and I floated there, breathing, not saying anything, until the hirosasqui pushed through the shadows and showed itself once more. For a terrifying moment, it took interest in us, barreled forward, came within a dozen meters, its cold, gray eyes the size of my fists narrowing on us. Then its head twitched, and it steered left, speeding toward the remaining Marines.
In the blink of an eye, the whip of a tail, those Marines were gone. Only this time, one of them hung limply in the animal’s jaw, his head and arms flapping violently as the fish arrowed down, into the gloom.
Halitov’s voice came thin and shivery. “What are we doing here, man?”
A chill wove up my own spine as I pulled up the schematic once again, this time ordering the computer to scan for entrances. A dive hatch about twenty meters away and located about ten meters below the ship’s waterline appeared in a databar. “Found a way inside. Follow me.”
Haunted by what we had just seen, we found the bond and broke all swimming records getting to that hatch. Once there, I punched in the code, one of nearly twelve thousand sets of numbers I had cerebroed prior to coming on board. We had also downloaded the ship’s schematics, but we had later learned that the prints were outdated and that many of the ship’s features had been upgraded after the alliances had taken control. Only data collected by our tactical computers would be useful, and that certainly proved correct as the doors parted, letting ocean water flood inside the lock. I waved Halitov in first.
As he pulled himself inside, something slammed into me. My head jerked. My back felt as though it had snapped. The force of rushing water pinned me to a smooth, rubbery surface. It was, arguably, one of the strangest sensations I have ever felt, and when I realized what had happened, none of it seemed real. A second hirosasqui, this one slightly smaller than the first, had caught me in the corner of its massive jaw.
“Scott? Jesus, Scott? Are you there?” Halitov screamed.
I forced my head down, saw that my combat skin held off the fish’s razor-sharp teeth, though they hung just a few centimeters above my uniform. I drove my hands down, pressed palms onto its lips, and tried prying myself free against the awesome strength of its jaw.
“Scott? Where are you?”
“Rooslin, man. This thing’s got me.”
He didn’t reply, but I could hear him hyperventilating.
The hirosasqui slowed almost to a stop, then shook its head violently like a dog playing with an old sock. Though my skin blunted some of the force, the pauses and jerks sent the world spinning.
“Scott, use your skin, man. Full power. Full power!”
With palms still placed squarely on the fish’s lips, I counted three, two, one, and did as Halitov had instructed. The repulsor field that rippled through my combat skin blasted open the fish’s mouth and sent me rumbling away from it.
Panicking, I swam upright, whirled, searching for the hirosasqui.
And there it was, about twenty meters out and shooting straight toward me, mouth open, triple rows of beryl-like teeth clearly visible against the blackness of its gullet. I reached into my boot, withdrew one of my Ka-Bars, and even as I came up with it, the fish was on me.
“Scott, are you there?”
I slammed a fist into the thing’s stout nose, then punched my knife home beside one of three nostril-like orifices. I dragged the blade a little, but the fish’s skin was so thick that I hardly caused much
damage. Surprisingly, though, the pain I inflicted was enough. The fish whipped its head around and retreated, my Ka-Bar sticking from it like an antenna.
“Scott? Are you there?”
I looked around. Nothing but ocean. The ship’s hull was gone. I tried pulling up my location on my HUV, but all GPS signals were being jammed. “Hey, Rooslin. I’m okay, but, uh…I’m lost.”
“Yeah. And it looks like the pool party’s still not over…”
My gaze lifted to a whirring sound from above: a two-man jumpsub was plunging toward me, its yellow, bullet-shaped nose painted with a blue 6.
“Hold your position,” came an unfamiliar voice over our private channel. “Or we will fire upon you.”
I thought of the tac code that would end my life as I watched the jumpsub slow a little. Something flashed off to the right. The jumpsub exploded in a bubbling cloud of debris and dark liquids.
I paddled around, toward a different whirring, much lower in pitch, coming from behind me. Three skinned-up people riding a fast-moving skiff glided forward. I couldn’t tell from their nondescript dry suits if they were military personnel, civilians, or even what side they were on, though the bubbles still pouring from one of their cannons indicated they had just taken out the jumpsub. One of them, the pilot, waved me on.
“Scott? There’s a skiff here. They want me to get on board.”
“Got one here, too. I think they took out that jumpsub. Let’s take a chance.”
“Aw, shit. All right.”
The skiff, a long, sledlike vehicle with a clear, curving water shield that wrapped over us, seated up to six, and its cockpit and compartment remained open to the sea. The one I strapped myself into had seen better days and made me suspect that maybe, just maybe, these people were locals with no love for the alliances. I noted that much of their equipment was fishing-related, with several types of harpoons and spear-type weapons, along with the more contemporary particle and skin-powered devices.
As we started off, I looked at the woman seated next to me, her face barely visible through her skin. I tapped my ear, gesturing that I wanted her to open a channel and talk to me. She shook her head and grabbed an old-fashioned water board with pencil from a pocket behind the forward seat. CLOSE ALL CHANNELS, she wrote. NO SIGNALS.
WHO ARE YOU? I wrote.
She cocked a brow at me, wrote: CLASSIFIED.
ARE WE POWS NOW?
NO.
WHO ARE YOU?
She ignored the question and shoved the board and pencil back into their pocket.
I rolled my eyes, then leaned back and took in the view as we descended toward an amazing trench several kilometers deep and at least a half kilometer wide. The skiff’s pilot switched on the headlights, and off to the left, another pair of lights clicked on and drew near. That’d be Rooslin’s ride. I wasn’t sure how deep we were descending, but one of my databars noted the increased water pressure on my skin. Soon, the water grew even darker, near black, and, finally, there were only the twin beams of light, twinkling with billions of tiny particles. We whirred on for at least another thirty minutes, and I began to drift off. After all, we’d had a busy day…
A nudge to the shoulder woke me, and my gaze focussed ahead on an exceedingly impressive sight that answered at least one of my questions. I recognized the ship immediately from my cerebroed data, the CWVN Charles Michael, a Valiant-class submarine equipped with the latest in Racinian-influenced technology, including a tawt drive capable of allowing the ship to jump even while submerged. As we drew closer, I gasped at her two colossal cylinders joined at their bows and sterns by wedge-shaped cross members that gave her the appearance of a submerged catamaran, sans the sail. If one of her cylinders was damaged, the other could detach and operate independently, making her in effect two submarines. Dim lights from hundreds of portholes shone like glowing rivets across her dark green hull.
As we maneuvered into our final approach, it dawned on me that once the brass had received our intelligence transmission, they might have decided to move the Charles Michael into the area as part of an extraction plan. When we didn’t call, they had ordered the ship’s captain to send out a recon team. But that seemed too easy, and the timing of our rescue was just too damned coincidental. Someone knew we had jumped ship. Someone knew we were in the water and needed extraction. I hoped my questions would be answered once we were on board.
We traveled up, into a docking pool located near the stern of the ship’s port cylinder. We rose vertically, broke water, and glided toward a dock. I de-skinned and caught a whiff of seawater and a burning smell from the skiff’s turbine. We bumped against the dock, and two crewmen began mooring the skiff while a third helped us out. I crossed to a rail and turned back to marvel at the huge docking station, with its sweeping overhead and half dozen pools where more skiffs, all of them as old as ours and betraying no evidence that they were being piloted by military personnel, were either arriving or prepping to head out. Above the pools, a command box jutted from the bulkhead, its wide windows revealing dozens of officers orchestrating and monitoring the activity via holos and conventional displays.
Halitov’s skiff arrived, and I offered a hand, helping him onto the dock. He de-skinned, had a look around, regarded me with a crooked grin. “And I thought our luck sucked. Here we are. Rescued. How ’bout that?”
A tall, bearded man in his forties and wearing a dark blue command uniform came down a catwalk and toward us. A slightly shorter man, a lieutenant in his late twenties, trailed him. “Captain St. Andrew? Captain Halitov?” called the bearded officer. “I’m Commander Eric Main, ship’s XO.”
Halitov and I snapped to and saluted. “Sir,” I acknowledged, wondering if I should follow with: “What the hell’s going on, sir?”
The XO returned the salute. “As you were. I’m sure you have a lot of questions. I can take you up to C&C, but first, if you’re hungry or you want to rest, I’ll have Lieutenant Feers show you to our guest quarters.”
“Sir, I’m hungry, sir,” said Halitov.
“You can take us up, sir,” I corrected.
Halitov shot me a dirty look. “I guess you can, sir.”
A smile nicked the corners of the XO’s mouth. “Very well then.” He withdrew a pen scanner from his breast pocket. “Gentlemen, your tacs please.”
“Sir, you’re deactivating?” I asked.
“A security precaution. I insist.”
Halitov stuck out his wrist, and the lights faded on his tac. Resignedly, I raised my arm, watched my tac wink out.
The XO pocketed the scanner and tipped his head. “Follow me.”
Neither Halitov nor I had ever been aboard a submarine. I noted that corridors seemed a little more narrow, the hatches much more reinforced than those aboard your average interstellar craft. Other than those differences, the two were remarkably similar, and by the time we reached Command and Control, I had already forgotten we were deep within a submerged trench.
I felt a little awkward as the officers seated at their stations turned their heads to regard us. But the awkwardness quickly turned to sheer awe as I took in the view through an enormous, wall-to-overhead window that curved lazily around the forward half of the bridge. Beyond us lay the rocky walls of the trench, lit up here and there by dozens of skiffs coming and going. A pair of hirosasqui strayed near one of the skiffs. The pilot discharged a reddish brown ball that sent the carnivores veering after it. Still more sea life, colorful fish and a few aquatic creatures I’d never seen before, occasionally wriggled by the window. I could have remained there for an hour, just watching.
The XO led us down a short staircase to the captain’s station, a long, U-shaped bank of displays behind which stood the woman herself.
“Skipper,” began the XO. “This is Captain St. Andrew and Captain Halitov. Gentlemen, this is Captain Ves Angelino, Colonial Wardens.”
We stood rigid and offered our salutes. She answered with a perfunctory salute of her own, then told us to stand eas
y as she blew an errant wisp of short brown hair from her eyes. It was hard to tell how old she was, maybe thirty, maybe even forty. Her gaze seemed wise and practiced, but her skin looked smooth and cast a faint glow. At least her deportment was easy to pin down and seemed friendly enough. “Gentlemen, I understand you’ve been running an intel op aboard the Eri Flower.”
“Ma’am,” I began tentatively. “I’m supposed to say that information is classified.”
“Supposed to say,” she echoed. “Very good, Captain. You’ve just covered your ass, but I’ll save you the trouble of having to do that again. Let’s get right to it. We’ve been running our own operation for several months now. We already have four people aboard the Flower. One of them was keeping tabs on you.”
Halitov closed his eyes, and his shoulders slumped. “Begging your pardon, ma’am, but are you telling us that the Wardens are already gathering intel here and that our mission was redundant?”
“I’m afraid so, Captain. It’s a classic case of one hand not knowing what the other is doing—and that’s because the new colonial government doesn’t trust us anymore.”
“Then you knew we were being sent on this op,” I said. “You knew all along.”
“Of course we did, Scott.” That reply came from behind us, the voice painfully familiar.
I glared back at Captain Kristi Breckinridge, who came down the stairs and raised her brows at me. “We even have an operative working within Rebel ten-seven. We know exactly what the Seventeen is trying to do, which is all the more reason why you need to be with us. They send you down here on a wing and a prayer and with no backup plan for extraction. You should thank God we’ve been monitoring your progress.”
My next came through clenched teeth. “Because we’re valuable commodities, right?”
“You need us as much as we need you.”
Angelino shifted between me and Breckinridge. “I suggest you continue this conversation in the wardroom.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Breckinridge replied.
Angelino hoisted her brows at me and Halitov. “If there’s anything you gentlemen need, don’t hesitate to ask.”
