Perfect Gravity

by Vivien Jackson

  She moved slightly, let out a puff of breath that grazed his shoulder, a ghost touch of warmth. “And these ones?” She pointed to the dance of light on Yoink’s holographic grid.

  He sighed, feeling like he’d just dodged a judgment bullet. “Well, the yellow ones are skeeters—”

  “Mosquitoes? Oh yuck, Kellen. Eliminating them was one of the first major successes of this century. Why in seven hells would anybody want to bring back a population of those?”

  “They aren’t my favorite, I’ll admit, but they deserve to live, same as anybody. It wasn’t their fault Zika and Dengue B went nuts, and there were better ways of handling that crisis than wiping out a whole species.”

  “Better ways? You know, it is possible to lavish too much love on a bunch of blood-sucking disease vectors that don’t even know you exist.”

  “Aw, honey, ain’t no such thing as too much love,” he said. Accusingly as all get-out.

  He hadn’t meant to put it like that, but watching his words settle over her face, moonlike in the headlights and bathed in something that looked like shock, it felt like the right way to phrase his impression of the matter. The only way, in fact. He dared her to deny it, to prove somehow that she wasn’t a heartless, opportunistic, selfish bitch. That she wasn’t gonna leave him high and dry just as soon as she got her vengeance.

  Her mouth closed, and she took a visible breath. “And the blue dots?”

  Well then. Guess that was that.

  “Dolphins,” he said. “Special ones adapted to live in the toxic radioactive soup of this particular shithole of a coastline.”

  That super hurricane had taken out the South Texas nuclear plant when it devoured its way up to Houston, and nothing in the whole Gulf of Mexico had been the same afterward. Most natural marine life was gone or changed. Only the sturdiest stuff endured. And the adaptives.

  “These bottlenoses right here are natural echolocators,” Kellen said, focusing on the dolphin blips and not Angela’s too-beautiful face, “so I asked ’em, via their nanocoms and Yoink’s relay, to show us anything under water that is neither ruin nor critter.”

  If Vallejo had some underwater fortress casting up that data hole, Kellen’s network would find it.

  “They can tell the difference?” The obvious disbelief in Angela’s voice caused him to look up.

  “Yeah,” he said. “They’re smart, princess. Brightest of the bright.”

  Like us. Only better, since they don’t give a shit about nation building or law slinging.

  On the other hand, dolphins did join pods for a time, then drift off, joining another one. Loyalty seemed transient for them, as were concepts of home or family. So maybe they were more like her and her class than he’d realized. And maybe Angela wasn’t the freak of nature he’d been painting her for a lifetime now. Maybe he wasn’t either. Maybe both of them fit into their parallel ecosystems just fine, separate but crashing together like storm-tossed birds for one bright, emotionally excruciating encounter, and then just as suddenly drifting off back to where they belonged, separate, content to live off memories until the next climatic convulsion dropped them into the same biome.

  “So is that a real big one or what?” she asked.

  “A real big what?” This conversation could go down a gutter fast.

  “Dolphin.” Angela pointed toward Yoink’s still-blinking display.

  Holy moly. “That’s not a dolphin.”

  The new blip didn’t have solid edges like the nanotracked animals; it was amorphous, a giant, gelatinous, pill-shaped blob burbling through the ocean. Which didn’t mean that’s what it looked like for real, just that several dolphins had located it and were transmitting click identifications per his request. It was the size of maybe a dozen adult dolphins, so definitely not a marine mammal itself, not even a collection of them. Pods didn’t get that big around here, this close to the shore and in an environment as hostile and uncertain as a string of sunken, polluted cities.

  “It’s coming our way,” said Angela in a voice that sounded like armor being donned, safeties unlocked.

  Kellen couldn’t look away from the image. Jesus, that thing was huge.

  “No,” said Yoink. “It is here.”

  Her display went dark.

  • • •

  Dark night, no moon, clouds obscuring the stars. And something that was supposedly not a dolphin coming right at them. Logic required Angela to run back to the car and grab that gun. She knew how to shoot. Sort of. Okay, she had been in conference with people who knew how to shoot. And they hadn’t been any smarter or more athletic than her. If those guys could figure out how to disable a safety and pull a trigger, she sure as shit could do the same.

  But her goddamned feet would not move. She just stood there, dry mouthed and frozen. Under cover of darkness, Kellen’s hand found hers, and she clasped it. Probably harder than she should have.

  Out there, the surface undulated. Something splashed.

  As if a strange mutant sea creature was surfacing, searching. For prey? For her?

  “Dolphins say to be quick. The intruder will move soon, underneath the water. From here, he will go into West Bay and may be harder to reach,” Yoink said, her digital voice perfectly calm, issuing as it always did from a com, this time Angela’s. “He says thank you for the communication relay and seeks admin access. Enable?”

  “No,” Kellen said. “You don’t let anybody in there but me, little bit.”

  “Okay.”

  The kitty pushed her head up beneath their clasped hands, almost as if she were insisting on a pet. Only this time her motives were less adorable and more utilitarian.

  Kellen guided Angela’s hand to the back of Yoink’s neck. He stroked the soft fur further up, between the ears. It took Angela a couple of seconds to figure out that he was using the cat’s skull as some sort of input device. No wonder he’d worried, back at the Pentarc, that she would be creeped out by Yoink. The interface certainly was…weird. But also not. Figure Kellen to devise a communication system based on comforting touch. How very him.

  Yoink went stiff, growling under her breath.

  “Easy, sweet girl,” Angela soothed. This wasn’t her thing, this caring for others. Usually she enjoyed the expedience of pushing her own emotional experience onto others and expecting them to follow. Or to react within a predicted response radius. She never reached out, not physically. Not intimately. But this was her kitty. Her companion. Her friend. She needed to flay some habits. “I’m not going to let you get eaten by a sea monster. I swear all the best swears.”

  “Do not swear at all, or if thou wilt, swear by thy gracious self.” Kellen’s voice, coming out of the darkness and laying that heavy shit on the night air.

  She tore her gaze from the rising kraken to stare at him instead. “Shakespeare? We are in mortal danger, and you spout Shakespeare? What the actual fuck, Kellen?”

  “Would Wordsworth wiggle your noodle more?”

  “Wiggle my…” She shook her head to clear the nonsense out. The nonsense stayed put. “Has anybody ever told you that you are completely inappropriate?”

  It was dark, he was facing the water rather than the car, and she couldn’t see properly, but he might have smiled. Smiled. Right then.

  “All the damn time, princess.”

  “Look, we’re about to get fucking eaten by the ocean, Mr. Inappropriate. Color me crazy but—”

  Yoink broke in, upping the creepy factor by a gazillion. “You two. He says you two bicker like childhood siblings or very old lovers and which is it?”

  That drew them both up cold. They said in unison, “Who?”

  “Dolphins say the sea monster. The intruder. The does-not-belong-here-you-take-him.” She sneezed. “Dolphins speak strangely. He is on the sub-sea, sub-fish, sub-marine. That one.”

  The cat didn’t have a finger
to point, but her holo-emitting head lasers rolled out a light grid, like the one before, and put a single blinking dot on it. Ominous, purple, this dot was a hell of a lot closer than any of those others had been, even the mosquito ones. From the grid, it looked like the intruder was about a hundred feet from where the water started, maybe a hundred twenty from the tips of Angela’s toes. And he was talking to her Yoink.

  “There was a bridge here,” the cat went on. “He says it is good you stopped the car because the drop is deep and do you have wet dresses. Suits. Do you have wet suits? You cannot wade to his sub-marine. The drop is deep. The water is cold danger. Do not drink it.”

  “Let me get this straight. There is a person out there in a submarine, talking to us, through you?” said Angela.

  “Yes. He can communicate over short ranges because the anal openings underestimated dolphins, and I can interpret because I am a fancy cat.”

  “You sure are that, little bit. Now these assholes, are they on the submarine, too?” Kellen asked.

  Angela wondered if she should compliment his ability to translate digital cat translating digital dolphin. He’d always envied her ease with languages, but this was impressive by anybody’s standards.

  “He says he will explain all. He wants…no, definitely no.” Yoink bowed up her back.

  “No?”

  “No.” Beneath Angela’s hand, Yoink hiss-growled. Her ears flattened. Likely she was beyond soothing at this point, but Angela tried anyway.

  The bright dot went away, and Yoink moved, a dark blur of fear and fur. In the next instant, her claws embedded themselves in Angela’s shoulder—ow—points of pain—more ow—trembling in echo of the cat’s own terror. Yoink was still making unholy sounds, and it was all Angela could manage not to do the same. Holy fuck, those claws hurt, but she couldn’t do what instinct told her she must: reach up, grab the cat by her scruff, and yank her off. Logic told her it wouldn’t work anyhow. Yoink’s claws were hooked in deep. They panged at the slightest movement, even breathing.

  “Yoink,” Kellen said, his voice firm but not shouty, “that shit command he gave you, don’t you pay it no mind. Listen to my voice. Who’s in charge here?”

  “You are, but he wants—”

  “Don’t matter. I need you to do a thing for me, okay? Can you slink back into the car and try Garrett on the com? Call us some backup, please, and keep them dolphins in the know? Just keep patching them through on my earpiece, and I’ll take it from here. You can do that, can’t ya?”

  Try Garrett? Hadn’t he just said a few minutes ago that they couldn’t get communications in or out of this data hole? How was this supposed to work? Tiny robot radio mosquitoes?

  Yoink was still growling, but she did pull her claws back, withdrawing them from Angela’s shoulder. Ow, but definitely not the worst pain Angela had ever endured.

  “So,” she said. “The plan.”

  Kellen frowned at the black ocean. “I hope you ain’t thinking about goin’ down there. It’s a toxic soup hell.”

  “A toxic soup hell full of answers, though,” she said.

  “Maybe.” He shrugged. “We do have wet dresses. Bought some swanky ones off Dead Fester, after word came we were headed down to the coast.”

  “Suits. Wet suits. We are completely undressed.” She covertly peered at him out of the corner of her eye, to see if he got her joke.

  He did, even though it wasn’t a great joke. His low chuckle rumbled into the night like a physical thing, linking them together.

  “Still, diving right in with no preparation is a shit plan,” he said, “undressed and sexy as hell or not. We don’t even know who ‘the intruder’ is.”

  She pursed her lips and glared, but his compliment stroked her insides. “Oh, don’t we just?”

  “Could be Vallejo,” he said. “Could be some other TPA technocrat shithead. Could be Elvis Presley back from the dead. We just don’t know what’s out there.”

  “I called out Vallejo’s sins in public. The drones up in the sky right now came from Texas. His guilt could only be clearer if he sent me an I-did-it message.”

  “So we’re just going to swim out to his dungeon like lemmings?”

  “For a self-professed animal lover, that was terribly unfair to lemmings.” She shook her head. “You asked for a relay. What do your dolphins say about that sub?”

  He closed his eyes, tipped his head back, and crossed his arms over his chest. The face of capitulation. Maybe? Or he might have just been listening to the com stuck in his ear.

  “They’ve reconnoitered some and transmitted a bunch of data to Yoink and then on to me. They’re saying there’s only one living creature on that sub. It’s a disaster-porn tourist sub, big and quiet but unarmed.” He opened his eyes and shot her a look. “But I still ain’t gonna let you go down there bare-assed and vulnerable.”

  “I don’t need your permission,” she reminded him, but she kept her tone gentler than it might have been a month ago. A week ago. “Don’t you want to end this?”

  He had the strangest expression on his face when he said, “All’s I want is to make you safe, forevermore.”

  Because that’s what knights in shining armor do. That’s why they trot around rescuing princesses. That’s why the princesses love them so damn much.

  Something clogged her throat, but she swallowed past it. “Good. You keep those dolphins on the line to Yoink and whatever other badass altered beasties you have swimming around, and let’s dive.”

  He peered straight at her in the light of the headlamps for a while. Unspeaking. Unquestioning. Then he leaned down and kissed the top of her head, where her hairpiece usually hooked on. His kiss was soft, reverent, like she was holy to him and not broken.

  “That’s my girl,” he said and turned to the car.

  By the time Kellen returned from the trunk with a double armload of diving equipment—wet suits and pony tanks and jacket-style buoyancy compensators and a gajillion other things—Angela had almost convinced her body that it was okay. She was okay. He was okay. They were going to be okay.

  She looked out at the water surface, the slightly darker shadow of a submarine sail poking up through the slate black. The old nightmares tried their bad mojo on her—the water is disease, don’t drink it, if you breathe, you die, blah and blah. She blew out a breath, banishing the old fears.

  “All right,” she said, pushing authority into her voice. “I’m going to swim out to a submarine, force this intruder to take me to Damon Vallejo, and then capture, incapacitate, or kill that motherfucker. I’m going to end this trying-to-kill-me nonsense, on my terms. Right now.”

  “Damn, that’s hot.” He set a stack of clothing on the hood by her hip.

  “What?”

  “You in charge.” He half grinned but then shook his head and looked away, as if he wasn’t prepared to fess up to the compliment or any implications it might have. As if he didn’t particularly like the fact he found her attractive when she was in full scary-ass orders-giving mode. Or did he dislike the fact he found her attractive at all?

  But he called me hot. And kissed my head. And dug my fuck poem. Her mind snagged on that and wouldn’t let go.

  Until, oh wait no, that was hot. That. Right there. In front of her fervid gaze, with zero embarrassment, Kellen had started taking off his clothes. Pretty much every sane thought fled her mind in an instant. Danger? What danger? No amount of brain training, personal injury, winter night, or mortal risk could have prepared her for the sight of Kellen Hockley ice-cold and naked in the flood of headlamps.

  He was gorgeous and lickable, and sweet cosmos, what did you even call those, those ligamenty doodads that arced from a man’s hip to his pelvis? Because those things. She wanted to put her fingers in the grooves and trace them straight to paydirt. Followed closely by her tongue.

  He calmly indicated the pile of
equipment on the car hood a half second before he pushed jeans down over slim hips. “You gonna suit up or what?”

  She bit her bottom lip. Released it. Reminded herself where she was and what she was about to do. And then she said the worst possible thing for a girl to say when she was trying to think about anything other than sex. “Don’t we need lube?”

  He had one leg of a suit bunched up and was about to start pulling it on, but he looked at her, flashed her the side-eye. “How long’s it been since you went in the water?”

  She flushed. “Years. I had an irrational fear.”

  He straightened, giving her all his attention. Putting that entire lean body back on display. “I do remember. Are you going to be able to handle this? We could wait till morning, scrounge around for a dinghy or inflatable or something…”

  “No, we’re doing this tonight,” she said, forcing herself to look anywhere but his bod. With a huff of breath, she tugged her shirt up and over her head and then folded it neatly and stacked it on the hood. “We lived near the ocean, and Daniel disbelieved in fear, had no patience for it, so he put me through dive training until I stopped having stupid panic attacks. I’m good. I was just asking because, you know, wet suits and unintentional hair removal and ouch.”

  “Ah. These suits ain’t neoprene,” Kellen said slowly, still distractingly naked and so comfortable with it that her hands flexed toward him, completely of their own accord, longing to touch. “They’re smartfabric. They’ll filter out the toxins, make it so we don’t start glowing in that stew out there, and plus, they’ll ventilate once we get on board. Biometric sensors help them regulate temperature, and they smell a helluva lot better than the older kind. But it ain’t the suits bothering me right now. You do know fear, as a thing, isn’t related to how smart you are, right?”

  She picked up the smaller suit. Light fabric, almost slippery and still holding the heat from the car’s vents. She couldn’t find any device pouches. Was the technology built into the fabric? Like her gloves, just for all-over body protection? Soft too, pliable. The suit smelled like decaf coffee.