“Go home! Get out of here! It’s dangerous!”
They paid her no attention at all. They were fish. With a deep sigh that dragged the cloth against her neck, she continued north.
Although she was in deep water far off shore, she still saw schools of shallow-water fish casting swirling patterns overhead. A huge shadow blotted out the thin, blue light from the sun. She stopped to admire the whale shark, its vast spotted belly and plankton-catching maw the size of an automobile, swimming just a few meters above her. How could land-based humans ever understand the beauty of the sea? To them it was just something to fly over, to dump in, to dip in the shallows, but never to examine its depths. Poseidon was under constant pressure to prevent efforts in Congress and other world governments to defund their operations. She hated to be so cynical, but too much lobbying money found its way into politicians’ pockets from unregulated corporations. Some companies threatened to take their businesses to countries without Undersea colonies off their coasts. Nadine shook her head, making her hair dance in the waves. Didn’t they understand that Undersea was vital to the future of humanity? A healthy ocean made for a healthy planet.
Something in the water stung her eyes. Nadine blinked hard, the underused tear ducts kicking in to try and clear them. According to the GPS, she had to be within a couple of kilometers of the storage facility. She reached for one of the sample jars and scooped up a deciliter of seawater and videoed it with the date and location visible on the screen. Even her gills felt as though they were burning. A quick check on her portable screen confirmed that those were symptoms associated with exposure to phthalates. Nin Suliao was going to be embarrassed if it turned out to be coming from their facility, so she would have to be careful about obtaining proof.
She shone her spotlight ahead, scanning for the tank. According to the images in the company’s EPA filing, it was a water-tower-sized cylinder of reinforced concrete with pipes feeding down into it along the continental shelf. Turning off the GPS’s flashing warning signal, she aimed toward the high stone shelf and increased the hand-sub’s moveable spotlight to full.
Most of her escort had peeled off and fled toward cleaner water. Her skin began to feel dirty, an odd sensation considering she had the entire ocean washing her. Though she must have been almost on top of the site, her spotlight had so far failed to illuminate anything that looked like a tank resting on the abyssal plain itself. The drift of sediment accumulating at the base of the continental rise could conceivably have buried most of the bulk, but at least the pipes ought to be visible. She swam in and out of the massive fissures and crevices, flashing her light up toward the surface. Perhaps the pipes had been laid into one of them, giving them additional stability. With a flick of a switch on the hand-sub, Nadine began filming.
The few fish that still dogged her suddenly darted away, toward the cliff. She looked up to see what had attracted them. Almost concealed by seaweed and ferns, a small red LED, no bigger than the palm of her hand, had been fastened into the stone wall. She swam close to investigate it, and her eyes stung as if acid had been thrown into them. Swinging the light down, she saw a steady outflow of white liquid that spread out into the current. Her attendant fish dipped down into the flow to examine it. To Nadine’s horror, one of them began to twitch and jackknife in pain. Another simply stopped moving and turned belly up. It floated upward before her face, eyes dulled, dead.
On instinct, Nadine propelled herself upward, moving away from the flow. She swam a kilometer out and back beyond the outflow, down along the cliff-face, searching far beyond the GPS setting, and back again, puzzled. Her practical brain told her that a whole tank the size of a large building could not have floated away or been stolen by divers. Nin Suliao must never have built one in the first place!
Immediately, she sent a message to Norbert in the home office. His astonished expression agreed with hers.
“Could you be looking in the wrong place?” he signed.
“I don’t think so, but I’ll gather samples and keep looking,” she replied. “Tell Fin. I’ll be back with proof. Tell…”
She stopped gesturing as a shadow from above attracted her attention. Directly overhead, in a tunnel of pale blue boring through the midnight darkness, she saw the unmistakable splashing of scuba divers penetrating the depths, surrounded by a wash of bubbles.
That was timely, she thought. Fin must have sent Nin Suliao a memo that there might be a leak coming from their containment tank after she left and they were sending someone out to look into it. The facility was only about twenty kilometers from the shore.
Oh.
But there was no tank.
They weren’t responding to a potential ecological problem. The red light must have been attached to a motion detector set to a particular density in the water. Only a body of a particular size would set it off, like a shark…or a human being.
She turned the spotlight up toward the divers. She counted three, all wearing deep-diving gear with clear faceplates and double-sized tanks. In their hands, she spotted long, slender objects.
Before she had time to guess what they were, one of them turned his object toward her. Her spotlight picked up the rush of bubbles heading toward her. Underwater rifles!
Suddenly, the light on the hand-sub shattered and went out. Horrified, she nearly dropped the handlebars. They were shooting at her! Nadine steered away from the divers, desperate to find shelter. Such guns had been used in military operations. Intellectually, she knew they weren’t accurate over twenty-five meters, but she didn’t want to be hit by accident, either.
Another bullet winged past her, drilling a green tube through the water not two meters from her head. Suddenly, she was back in her old neighborhood, trying to avoid becoming a casualty.
Where could she hide? At fifty meters, the only cover was the thin vegetation clinging to the sheer underwater cliff. The nearest crevasse was filled with the toxic chemical stream. She switched on the hand-sub and clung to it, glancing back over her shoulder again and again.
The men had hand-subs, too. They hooked their arms through the bars, set the rifle butts on top of the body, and focused their spotlights on her. More slugs drilled through the current. Nadine dodged back and forth, hoping she wouldn’t inadvertently put herself into the path of a bullet. These men were good shots. Too good. They were firing at her even when she was not in the beam of their lights. She realized that the light shining right on her face gave them an easy target.
With her left hand, she snatched off the glowing headband, cut to the right, and tossed it away. Three bullets pierced through the waves, following the lamp as it sank into the depths. It took them each two shots before they figured out she wasn’t wearing it any longer. The delay had allowed her to race ahead forty meters.
It wasn’t enough of a head start. The beams hit her again from behind, growing larger with every moment. Their subs were much faster than hers. The three men spread out to catch her. She maneuvered, weaving between them. Was the gap between them wide enough that she could escape before they closed in on her? She decided to hug the wall, hoping the next fissure would give her a hiding place. Another bullet ripped by just above her body, coming close enough to ruffle her dress. She didn’t have very much time.
She had been a scuba diver from her teenage years, trading working in a local dive shop for tank fills. At forty meters, leisure divers had twelve minutes on a standard tank. With the oversized tanks on their shoulders, they might have another ten minutes’ worth of air. If she could keep ahead of them for twenty minutes, they would have to surface, and slowly, so as not to get the bends. Nadine flailed at the sea cliff, poking blindly at coral and rock, feeling for a gap. With neither headlamp or a spotlight, she was nearly blind. She did not want to die.
She felt the vibration through the water of the enemy’s three engines. Once her eyes adapted to the lack of light, she saw their shadows converging on her.
The hand-subs meant they weren’t burning much in
exertion, but every atmosphere of pressure caused their lungs to gasp for more and more oxygen. She no longer needed a breather and a regulator. And she had a direction that they didn’t have: straight down.
As the men triangulated in on her, she turned upside down and kicked the hand-sub into its highest gear.
A hundred meters, a hundred fifty meters down, more. Her lungs shrank from the pressure to two hard, little masses, jerking her diaphragm up into her chest cavity. The stabbing pain made her vision swim with blackness. She would have given anything to stop, to drift up toward the surface, but her life was at stake.
The men’s spotlights painted the sea wall with brilliant white light that was swallowed up in shadows cast by waving ferns. She spotted an irregularly shaped blackness, a seam that must have been ten meters top to bottom. Nadine turned her sub into it, trusting that it was large enough for her to fit. The sub banged against stone, setting off the emergency flash again and again, but the red light gave her enough illumination to figure out where to steer it next.
Over her shoulder, sharp white lights proved that the divers had found her hiding place. The land dwellers had to be pushing the limits of their air. She slowed the hand-sub to a crawl. With one hand, she shoved her bang-stick business-end up into a clump of coral, then deliberately hit a rock with the sub so it flashed its warning.
One of the divers motored toward her. She dived down behind the coral, and had the satisfaction of seeing the man strike the tip of the bang-stick. The percussive charge did exactly what it would have done to a shark, sending him tumbling in the opposite direction. The other two divers came to his assistance, giving her a respite. She turned her toes up and aimed for the bottom.
Ignoring the pain in her chest, she felt for the nearest opening. A dozen small fish zipped out of her way as she backed into the small gap, feeling her way with her webbed toes. She hoped to God that there were no needle-toothed eels behind her, and that her bulky body would fit into the cave. At last, her feet touched smooth, cold, slimy rock. She shut off the sub, and waited.
All of her instincts told her to go back to the surface and get help. With this much rock between her and Poseidon, she couldn’t get a signal out. She had to outwait her attackers.
Her gills worked frantically on her neck, tickling her throat. Her lungs had shrunk to angry fists of tissue, pounding on her heart from either side.
Wave after wave of water sloshed into the opening of her hidey-hole as the men kicked past it, searching for her. She ducked her head, hoping they would mistake her mass of floating black hair for coral. She couldn’t last there forever. The intense pain she was suffering could bring on a heart attack. Perhaps she could last twenty minutes more at this depth. She had to survive. She had to.
All the sacrifices that she had made to live in the ocean, all the surgery and genetic alterations, all the social rejection that she had undergone as a deaf child, and now a freak of nature, had been worth it to find an accepting, loving society where differences were embraced. Her new life was worth defending, and for that, she had to get the evidence of the corporate crime back to Poseidon. Nadine forced her mind to construct the home of her dreams, one room at a time. Big windows, with double-strong screens. Five bedrooms—no, ten! The kind that could be evacuated and dried, so her family could come and visit. A video room with soft hammocks to watch from. She clutched her chest, emitting soundless screams. A kitchen with a sous-vide station. An atrium filled with clusters of bubble lights, just because she could.
The searching outside became more frantic. They had maybe ten more minutes, then they had to rise toward the surface. They would come back with an army. Nadine had to get away. Common sense kept her immobile. She forced herself to ignore the pain and waited.
At last, the lights were gone, leaving her in utter darkness. Nadine pushed her agony to the back of her mind and cupped her hand around her pocket screen. Ten minutes more, then another ten minutes. They couldn’t possibly have lasted that long.
But she had.
She took in a deep gush of fresh water through her gills, feeling the filter cloth suck tight against her throat. She was alive!
Nadine didn’t dare turn on her hand-sub at first, in case the divers could hear the distant thrum. Instead, she dragged it with one hand as she felt her way out of the pocket of stone, then along the sea wall toward the rush of the continental current. The rapid flow swept her along with it, dragging her toward the south.
She was so relieved she nearly let it carry her along, but she needed evidence. The men would be back soon, but Fin would have her head if she didn’t do it properly.
The loss of her spotlight and headlamp hampered her somewhat but she used the light from her communication handset and the emergency beacon on the hand-sub to illuminate the flow of white particles from the fissure in the rock, and filled every jar in her pack with damning evidence. She took ten solid minutes of video, then kicked the hand-sub into high gear to take her back to Poseidon.
Nadine ran for her life, hoping that the men had not had a good enough look at her to identify her. She had no wish to be hunted down.
* * *
Back at the lab, Fin hovered with her, then watched her explanation and video with narrowed eyes. He played the footage twice more, then patted her on the back. Norbert, hovering like a mother hen, fed her green grapes and pieces of fresh fish as though she hadn’t eaten in nine years. Nadine allowed herself to relax at last, but only a little.
“We’re going to put you in a safe place for a while,” the CEO said, turning a jar of milky-white water upside down and watching the particles settle. “You’ll have to testify. It’s too bad you didn’t get any video of your attackers.” As Nadine opened her mouth to protest, he grinned. “Just kidding. You did more than anyone could have dreamed to help make our case for environmental protection. Now we know what kinds of nonsense landsiders have been pulling on the ocean all these years. It’s one of the reasons they haven’t fully accepted us as a nation. And you got out of there in one piece. Well done. You’re one of the best things that has happened to Poseidon in a long time. Don’t quit us. We need you.”
Nadine smiled. With a feeling of satisfaction, she looked out at the city’s pearly lights through the translucent walls. Her fish bumped at the screens as if trying to get at her replacement headlamp. Then she signed, “As long as I’m down here, I’ll do anything the city needs. It turns out that I work well under pressure.”
THE LAST OF THE REAL GOOD DAYS
Bill Kte’pi
By the time the first shortboards showed up at Echo Beach, life had taken a poor turn for Mickey Lyric. The familiar faces in the lineup diminished, and so in like proportion did the offers of places to crash, pizzas to share, beers to drain. He hated the march of strangers. Not just the gremmies and hodads everyone loved to hate, but the peopleness of the crowd itself, more so with every year, as the things he did that kept him on that beach wore him down. Mickey was thirty, and his old friends and enemies had moved on. Now when people looked him over, in his old-fashioned blue swim trunks and the gold necklace with the ruby so big they assumed it was fake, it was with a smirk at the old guy. His reputation used to be like a shield that insulated him from people. Now he was going to need a place to live. He was going to need a job.
He mulled it all over the morning after Zinger showed him the door, paddling out on Argo with the dawn patrol, those surfers who caught their waves as soon as the sun hit them. There would be benefits to having a place of his own. He wouldn’t have to keep his records or his boards in his woodie anymore. Argo was his favorite, nine and a half feet long, vivid green with black blobby dots and burst lines. It wasn’t made of fiberglass, wasn’t made at all so much as conjured. He had carried it at his side for so long his right arm felt Popeyed.
When you’re paddling out, your mind can wander and worry, but once you’re clambering to get on the wave, it becomes your focus. It was one of the best things about what he did. Mickey
’s whole being centered around the board under him and the wave approaching him from behind as he paddled beachward, just enough for the wave to catch up to him at just the right moment. He popped up with a gasp, a thrill running down his bare back as the water lifted him and Argo up. Suddenly there he was, on top of the wave in the deep water, feet gripping the board. He slid down the face of the wave, the spray of his board’s wake nothing compared to the white crest that curled up and towered over him. He was suspended in space, at once aware of gravity grasping at him and his full-body denial of it.
And then before he knew it, the crest had fallen, the wave was gone, and he was pulling Argo along as he trudged out of the water into the sand. It was like he’d been on a mountain that left no evidence of itself behind.
He got a Bala Club grape soda and tacos in a paper boat from the place across the parking lot, and was fueling up when Jane found him. Mickey didn’t know much about Jane, who was old enough to have been one of the first surfers at Echo, long before it was cool for girls to do that kind of thing. These days she was gray-haired, but still hit the waves when the crowd thinned.
“Listen, Mickey,” she said. “I heard you need a place to stay.”
“Where’d you hear that?”
“Well, the Trip’s in lockup again and I know Zinger kicked you off his sofa.” It was true. He’d overstayed his welcome at Zinger’s hoping the Trip would be out in time to drive the woodie over there. Jimmy the Trip was Mickey’s closest thing to a pal, a photographer who sold just enough drugs to get by, or maybe the other way around, but his old lady would never let Mickey stay there just the two of them. Or maybe the Trip was the one who drew that line, if he was the grudge-holding type.
“I’ll work it out. Must be a surf shop needs a cashier.”
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