Coyote Ugly

by Pati Nagle

  “Cameras minimize,” Dimitri said.

  The cycling images retreated to a small window in one corner of the monitor station, and the plant diagram returned to its normal position in the middle of the holotank. Dimitri rotated the diagram, looking for anything that might have caught his dad’s attention, but saw nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing.

  He shut off the music and sat down at the monitor station, straining his brain for anything else to check. His gaze drifted over the holographic icons arrayed along the tabletop, and caught on one shaped like a red wrench.

  “Maintenance log!”

  The wrench turned brighter in response. Dimitri smacked his temple for not thinking of it sooner.

  “Dork!”

  The station pinged a query.

  “Ignore. Maximize maintenance log.”

  A spreadsheet rose up in front of the plant diagram. Dimitri scrolled it to the most recent entries. There was one from just after 19:00 hours:

  PERMEABILITY QUERY ON INTAKE FILTER 27-A.

  Dimitri brought up the status screen for intake 27, one of the fifty giant pipes that drew water into the plant. The volume stats were way down. Frowning, Dmitri ran the numbers back and found they were even worse than they’d been at 19:00.

  It meant the water coming in that pipe wasn’t flowing as fast as it should be. That’s all Dimitri knew, but it was enough. Dad would have checked on it while he was making his rounds.

  “Cameras maximize.”

  Dimitri checked the location chart and brought up the camera aimed at intake 27. It was mounted on the screen cage and gave an angled view of the meter-wide pipe.

  He sucked a sharp breath. The screen capping pipe 27 had a large hole ripped in it.

  “Camera ... fifty-two,” he said, glancing at the chart again.

  The image switched to the access hatch in the screen cage. It was hanging open. Bad.

  “Backpage and zoom.”

  Back on the pipe, the image moved in closer to the torn screen. Dimitri couldn’t see down into the pipe, but he did see something dangling from its rim. Zooming in even closer, he realized it was a grappling harness, the gear that Dad and the other maintenance techs used whenever they needed to do things around the pipes, to keep from getting sucked into them by the draw.

  “Shit. Oh, shit!”

  Dimitri looked at the chonometer: 21:43. His father would soon be out of air, if he wasn’t already.

  Too late to call for help—it would take the rescue team too long to get there. Shut down the plant? He’d watched Dad do it and thought he remembered how, but he wasn’t authorized. It wasn’t something you just did. It cost thousands of dollars to shut the system down, and thousands more to start it up again.

  And he didn’t absolutely know his dad was down in the pipe. He just thought so.

  No time, no time. Dimitri ran for the equipment bay and called rescue while he was struggling into his wetsuit. His explanation was kind of crazy and broken, but he got the idea across.

  “OK, stay there,” the dispatcher told him. “I’m scrambling a rescue team now.”

  “I’ve got to take him some air!”

  “It’s better if you just stay there. The team will be out there in five minutes.”

  Screw that. Dad could suffocate in five minutes. He could be suffocating now.

  “Just stay calm and keep talking to me,” the dispatcher said.

  “Right.”

  Dimitri ran through the safety checklist as fast as he dared, and slid his comcard into the headset just before he pulled it on. The headset molded itself to within a centimeter of his face and threw up its array of diagnostic displays. With a flick of his eyes he sent them to the background, then took down a spare grappling harness from the gear bay.

  He had to cinch all the straps and buckles down to their tightest, and the harness still fit a little loose on him, but it would have to do. Grabbing a full pony bottle of air, he cycled the dive hatch and went in the water.

  Cold and dark. It was always cold, but the dark made him gulp his air faster than he should. His com lost the dispatcher and he kicked up to touch the outside of the structure and reacquire the signal.

  “Are you still there?” said the dispatcher. It was a woman. He hadn’t even noticed that before.

  “Yeah, I’m here.”

  “You sound like you’re breathing hard. Try to calm down, OK?”

  “OK.”

  Keeping contact with the building, he worked his way out from under it and up the side. The plant stretched away into the darkness. Off to the left, the lights of Pacific City glowed hazily through the dome. He’d rather have swum toward the lights, but that wasn’t his goal. Turning away from the city, he turned on his lamps and kicked off toward the plant.

  He brushed his hands against the uppermost pipes as he crossed the massive assembly of pumps and filters that made up the plant. He felt his tension growing as he approached the edge of the draw field. The light from his lamps picked up the dull red edge of the screen cage, a huge, mesh box that surrounded all the intakes for the plant. He reached the cage and drifted to a stop, one hand against the mesh.

  Really a first-level filter, the screen cage kept anything larger than a centimeter away from the intake pipes, keeping out plant matter, fish and other critters, and anything else that could clog or even damage the finer filters down inside the pipes. The reverse osmosis process the plant used to remove salt and other minerals from the water required high-pressure filtering, and what better pressure to use than a hundred feet of ocean?

  Every twenty seconds the pipes drew water. When he was a little kid Dimitri’s dad used to bring him out here once in a while. Dimitri had loved to get up above the cage and let himself be sucked against it over and over by the draw.

  You absolutely could not move when the draw was pulling you against the screen. Even Dad couldn’t.

  “Are you still there?” asked the dispatcher.

  “I’m here.”

  “The rescue team is leaving now. They’ll be there in a few minutes.”

  “OK.”

  “Just stay calm.”

  “OK.”

  Dimitri worked his way down the cage to the open access hatch he’d seen on the monitor. He went through it and paused, fighting off a fit of shivering.

  Nothing between him and the pipes now.

  He looked at the hatch, debating whether to close it. Yes, he should—otherwise critters would start drifting in and clogging up the filters. Maybe this precaution would win him some points to counter the chewing out he was going to get for coming in here.

  He swallowed, remembering the time Dad had yelled at him for goofing around the screen cage without permission. He and Collin had gone to play in the draw. When they’d come back Dad had met them at the hatch, white-faced and silent, his green eyes glaring. He’d waited for them to get out of their dive gear and marched them into the condo, where he proceeded to chew them a new one in a rage-clipped voice.

  “Never, never go out in open ocean without an adult and without getting my permission first!”

  “But, Dad, we were each other’s buddies—”

  “I don’t care if the whole polo team was out there! You don’t go near the screen cage without an adult—namely me—supervising!”

  Dimitri closed his eyes, remembering. There’d been no physical punishment, but the memory of Dad’s fury had kept him from going near the screen cage again. He hadn’t even asked Dad to bring him here to play. Now he was inside the cage, without even a buddy, trying to save Dad.

  Boy, would he look stupid if Dad was somewhere else altogether. Boy, would he get grounded, probably till he was thirty.

  He pulled the hatch shut behind him and took a slow, deliberate breath, then kicked off toward the pipes. He came in a good five meters below their tops, watching the water above them the whole while.

  Small specks—anything littler than a centimeter—drifted in the water. Dimitri saw the bulk of the nearest
intake pipe looming in his peripheral vision as he neared it.

  He felt forward with his hands, still watching the water above. Suddenly the specks all flew downward and the distant thrum of the filters vibrated through the water.

  Dimitri winced, imagining he felt the draw even though he knew he was well below it. He scrabbled at the pipe, trying to find a handhold, while his hindbrain counted.

  One chimpanzee, two chimpanzee, three chimpanzee ...

  After ten seconds the draw stopped. Dimitri gave a small sigh of relief.

  “You all right?” asked the dispatcher.

  “Yeah.”

  “I know this is scary.”

  Yeah. Shut up.

  He found a runner rail on the outside of the pipe and clipped an anchor line from his harness to it, then glanced overhead, looking for the number on the pipe. Six. He needed to be one pipe over, and two rows down. Kicking off, he clipped to the next pipe and released the first clip.

  The intakes sucked water again, and this time he forced himself to keep moving. He worked his way back to pipe twenty-seven, doubling his clips until the draw stopped. When he reached twenty-seven he clipped all of the harness’s anchors to the two rails he could reach, and began to spider his way up the pipe.

  Two meters from the top the pipe throbbed under him as the draw started again. Unprepared, he let out a small sound.

  “You OK?” asked the dispatcher at once.

  Dimitri closed his eyes. “Yeah.”

  “Why don’t you drink some water? That might help.”

  “Um, OK. Maybe you could talk to me?”

  “Sure. You know the team will be there in just a couple more minutes. Nothing to worry about.”

  Dimitri lowered the volume until he could barely hear her in the background, and continued to the top of the pipe where the other grappling harness—or rather, the two frayed straps that were left of it, hung dangling. Seeing them made him start breathing fast again, and he muted his com output so the dispatcher wouldn’t hear.

  The draw stopped. Dimitri poked his head over the top of the pipe, aiming his lamps down inside.

  Torn harness strap drifting from one of the interior runner rails. Dark shape lying against the next screen, ten meters down.

  Dad. Not moving.

  A lilt of inquiry in the dispatcher’s voice caught Dimitri’s attention. He pulled his head back from the pipe and took his com output off mute, then raised the input volume.

  “Huh?”

  “I said where was your dad the last time you saw him?”

  “Uh—he went out on his maintenance rounds. They should check the intake pipes at the plant. There was something on the maintenance log.”

  The draw started, tugging at him hard, this close. He cringed against the pipe and worked his way down it a bit, hand over hand on the runner rail. His heart was thundering.

  “OK, they can check that. Don’t worry. Just stay calm.”

  Dimitri swallowed. “Yeah. Thanks.”

  He muted the output again. When the draw stopped, he would have twenty seconds to get to the inside of the pipe and clip his harness to the rails. He unclipped all but two of them now, and noticed his hands were shaking.

  He put a hand to the pony bottle to make sure it was still on his belt. The draw stopped and he worked his way up to the top edge of the pipe again.

  He reached one arm over and clipped the first harness anchor to the inner rail. He’d done two when something dark came at him from the side.

  Turning his head brought his lamps to bear on the dagger-filled maw of a shark.

  “Aahh!”

  He yanked the pony bottle from his belt, grazing his hand on the clip, and shoved it with all his might into the shark’s nose. The shark swerved away, into the darkness.

  Dimitri turned, dangling against the pipe, his lamps sweeping wildly as he tried to see the shark. He glimpsed a dark shape not far off, turning, coming around.

  Sobbing, he gripped the slippery sides of the pony bottle, ready to hit the shark again. It came toward him, waggling from side to side, sneering with all those horrible teeth.

  The pipe against him thrummed to life. The shark disappeared, sucked down into another pipe, straight through the screen over its top, which wasn’t meant to resist anything as massive as a shark.

  Or a man.

  Dimitri grabbed at the rail as the leads he’d clipped to the inside of the pipe yanked at him. He clung against the rail with one hand and hugged the pony bottle to him with the other, then closed his eyes, gasping as he fought down the panic.

  Stupid. He shouldn’t have come out. He was just going to get himself killed along with Dad.

  How the hell had that shark gotten in here?

  Through the open access hatch. Now it was down in another pipe, and another screen had been breached. That was going to cost some money to fix.

  Never mind. Not his problem. He had to get to Dad.

  The draw stopped, and he unclenched his hand from the runner rail. Before he could think about it too much he swung himself over and into the pipe, through the torn screen, and started clipping more of his anchors to the inside rail. He paused to clip the pony bottle to his belt again, then with shaking hands anchored all his leads.

  It actually hurt to unclip the last two from the outside of the pipe. He was going to get sucked down, he knew. The harness should keep him from being pulled down too far, but then, Dad’s harness should have kept Dad from going into the pipe at all.

  The dispatcher’s voice was a drone in the back of his head as he worked his way downward, clinging to the rail. She sounded pretty excited, but Dimitri didn’t have time to calm her down. He shut off the volume completely so he could concentrate.

  Halfway to his dad the draw began. A strap whipped his arm and the suction pulled him from the rail before he could tighten his grip. He dangled in the harness, the straps digging into his back and shoulders, straining against the intense pressure of the intake as he stared at the top of the pipe above him.

  It stopped after what seemed like a whole minute. Gasping, Dimitri regained the runner rails and struggled downward again until he reached the next screen, where his father lay unmoving.

  Dimitri pulled his father onto his side. A glance at the tank gauge showed him Dad was almost out of air. He swapped in the pony bottle and made sure it was delivering, then shook his father by the shoulders.

  “Dad!”

  No response. Dimitri checked the vitals readout on the wrist display of his father’s wetsuit. Pulse—slow but there. He wasn’t dead, but he wasn’t conscious either.

  Draw.

  The pull slammed him into his father, slammed them both into the screen. Dimitri cried out.

  His leg, which was against the screen, felt like it was going to get mashed right through it. His brain shut down except for the part that kept crazily counting chimpanzees.

  When he got to eleven the draw stopped. There were only supposed to be ten chimpanzees, but probably he wasn’t thinking too straight. Maybe adrenaline made you count fast.

  Sobbing, he took his dad’s face between his hands. Dad’s eyes were closed. Dimitri’s hand brushed an unfamiliar shape at the back of the wetsuit.

  A lump. A lump on dad’s skull the size of an oyster.

  Dimitri gave a moan, then scrambled to strap Dad into the harness with him, using some of the anchor straps. It would put more strain on the rest of them, but he couldn’t think of what else to do.

  He started up the runner rails with the five anchors he had left and his father dangling behind him. He was not quite halfway up when the draw started again.

  Prepared this time, he managed to cling to the runner rails at first but the dead weight of his father dragging on him pried his fingers from the rails. The anchor straps snapped taut with a sharp jerk.

  Dimitri stared helplessly at the clip ends. The clips would hold, but even the heavy duty straps weren’t meant to take the load of two people.

  Sev
en chimpanzee. Eight ...

  His teeth were chattering and he clenched them to stop it. When the draw ended he scrambled up the rail as fast as he could, pulling the anchor lines up, clamping them, pull, clamp.

  He’d stopped looking up and was surprised when he reached the top of the pipe. Beams of light were dancing in the water overhead. He started to laugh, then remembered he wasn’t out yet.

  He unclipped an anchor, reached over the edge to clip it to the outside, and the draw took him again.

  He tried to keep his arm over the edge but the draw was pulling at him, the edge of the pipe cutting into his arm, he couldn’t hold it. He tried to shift and lost his grip.

  Down into the pipe again, water pulling at Dad pulling at him pulling at the harness and he could feel it starting to give, then he swung against the side of the pipe, bashing his head.

  OK, that’s what happened.

  His ears were ringing and his head felt like it had been hit with a sledgehammer. He closed his eyes.

  Nine chimpanzee. Ten.

  He floated, relieved. In a minute the draw would start up again. There was something he ought to be doing, but he couldn’t quite remember what. He was just so tired.

  And anyway, he was drifting up. The harness was pulling him. Maybe they were going up to heaven.

  ~

  Dimitri woke into silence. He didn’t recognize where he was at first, but after a minute he started remembering and realized he was in the Pacific City med center.

  He sat up. Something beeped. A pretty blonde medic came in the open doorway and smiled.

  “Feeling better?”

  “I guess.”

  Actually, now that he thought about it, he was aching all over. He rubbed at one shoulder. The medic checked the array on the wall by the bed, then nodded.

  “You’re doing fine. Gave us a slight scare there. You got a pretty good clock on the head.”

  “H-how’s my dad?”

  She smiled again, softly this time. “Very well, considering. He’s right next door. Want to visit him?”

  “Yeah.”

  She reached out to help him from the bed. He let her—it was easier than arguing. His head swam a little and he was glad for her supporting arm as they walked to the next room.