by Julian May
I swam to meet him, chuckling. "Well, you won't need the gun. The cometworm was tamer than a pussycat. It seemed to know I was there to help."
"Yeah. I saw. Damnedest thing. I've heard those worms are smart. Must have been a fluke, the critter getting caught in a net. Some of those back-to-nature clowns over on Sindbad Cay go in for primitive fishery techniques."
"Well, all's well that ends well."
"Too bad it doesn't," my friend said.
He was less than four meters away when he lifted the speargun, aimed it squarely at me, and pulled the trigger.
Chapter 2
I clenched my left hand and the jets blasted me upward at an oblique angle. The spear missed, but I smashed headfirst into the coral ceiling and nulled out amidst a cascade of exploding colored stars and shellshocked marine life.
When I came to my senses, skull throbbing, Kofi was almost done with the job of lashing me securely to my plastic throne with duct tape.
"What the hell?" I moaned.
"Getting you ready for the deep six, old buddy. Sorry about this. Nothing personal, you understand. The word came down while I was back in Manukura. Seems that some very important people are torqued 'cause you still exist. Thought they'd forgotten all about you, but I guess they were just hangin' back till some shady stuff clarified. Anyhow, I've been designated to finish some previously bungled business."
"Kofi," I said. "Kofi... for God's sake!"
"I really hate this," he told me, with what seemed like genuine remorse. "But you gotta understand, Helly, it's my ass or yours."
He finished fastening my flippered legs, slicing off the end of the tape neatly with his dive knife. "See, yesterday this seriously dire dude sidles up to me in the Raiatea Bar on the BB. He tells me that I either polish you off in a tidy and workmanlike fashion tout de suite, or somebody'll notify Omni-vore's gorillas that I'm hiding on K-L. That happens, the Foodies give me a five-minute trial, call me guilty of grand larceny and embezzlement in the first degree, then haul my handsome black butt back to Earth and lock me up in Coventry Blue till hell chills out."
I shook my head in disbelief. My pal Kofi. We'd worked together, got drunk together, saved each other's lives once or twice on hairy dives. He'd even helped build my new shack after the sea toad ate the original when I should have been inside but wasn't.
"Were you in on the toadster caper, too?" I asked sadly.
"Only in an advisory capacity. Bron Elgar screwed that job up all by himself. Never did like that sadistic motherfucker. Slow on the payoff, too." He tucked the roll of tape into a waist pouch and honed the blade's razor edge gently against one of his BC straps to get the sticky stuff off. He didn't put the knife away.
"So you're just gonna leave me here to die? Jesus, Kofi! There's nine more hours of NeLox in my tanks. Can't you rip off my helmet and at least make it quick?"
He shook his head. "Wish I could, but I've got my orders: no bod for autopsy, but enough residual DNA in the bones and scraps to confirm your ID. You had a tragic accident, see. Except, your mother will get the real message and quit trying to stave off the inevitable—"
"My mother" I surged violently against the duct tape. It got me nowhere.
"Hold still now," Kofi admonished, "and this'll hurt less."
He started to work on me with the dive knife. Beginning with my upper arms and proceeding down the areas of my trunk unencumbered with equipment and onto my thighs, he sliced through my skinsuit and into the flesh beneath. I screamed and cursed, writhing helplessly and blinded by tears ofpain.
"Almost done!" he soothed me. "One more time. There we go."
I howled into my helmet as saline water flooded into the shallow wounds, intensifying the pain. Kofi released his hold, and the tethered chair with me taped to it jolted and lurched like an amusement park ride until I finally stopped struggling and subsided, spent and motionless. Dark little strings of blood oozed slowly from at least a dozen small cuts.
I muttered, "Shit. The suit was brand-new. A genuine Phoque from France. Paid full duty, too."
Kofi chuckled and slipped his knife back into its scabbard. "Yeah. Really sharp-looking outfit. Oops! Didn't mean to commit a pun."
"Fuck you, funny man."
"Hey, no hard feelings. I liked you, Helly, even if you were an ex-cop. We had us some good times." He glanced at the dive computer on his wrist. "Well, I guess it's time for me to go. I'll rig Pernio to ride out the storm, then come back tomorrow to search for my poor lost bud—collect your remains and whatever scuba gear the flapjaws don't scarf down. I hope those Corby jetfins survive. Always wanted a pair of those."
"You lousy shithead," I said bitterly. "You could have told me about Gala's blackmail threat. I'd have talked to Matt Gre-goire, had Rampart Internal Security take you to another planet and give you a new identity—"
"I thought about that. Really! I mean, it was okay to earn a little spare change just lettin' Elgar know what you were up to during the past couple years, but I had to do some heavy thinking when this other dude ordered me to blow you away. Weigh the alternatives. If I'd come clean to you, I'd have had to leave K-L. And the place grows on you, y'know? With you deceased, I figure I'll take over: Pernio and all your neat stuff. Our pals on Eyebrow'll appreciate that you would have wanted it that way."
Out of the corner of my eye I saw sinister dull red shapes moving through the water. The vanguard of the flapjaw demons was zeroing in, drawn by the scent of my corpuscles. "Just don't toss my Jimmy Buffet dimes," I croaked. "They're worth a bundle."
"I'll play one of his songs at your funeral," Kofi promised. "How about 'Fins to the Right, Fins to the Left'?"
Laughing merrily, he picked up his discarded speargun, gave me a farewell finger waggle, and swam away into the Glory Hole's access shaft.
Several dozen of the carnivorous piscoids had assembled now and were milling around tentatively, crossed eyeballs pooched out in excitement and toothy mouths oafishly agape. They were a wee bit suspicious of the alien hemoglobin, but they'd get over their inhibitions quickly enough. There were damn good reasons why smart divers wore full skinsuits in waters frequented by this species. Flapjaws weren't all that large, but they were strong and voracious. One coral scratch on your bare skin and you were fish chow.
The pain of the superficial wounds was rapidly diminishing. Kofi had only cut deep enough to draw blood. I strained against my bonds but the tape didn't give a millimeter. Good old duct tape ... For two hundred years the stuff has been the best friend of plumbers, electricians, mechanics, engineers, sailors, astronauts, householders, and billions of other folks desperate for a quick fix. It's very tough—almost impossible for human musclepower to burst. You have to tear it, beginning at one edge, or poke a starting hole in it with something sharp. But there was nothing near my plastic throne but sand and well-worn rock.
And about thirty flapjaw piscoids with teeth like piranhas, getting ready to sample some exotic fast food.
In time the frigging fish themselves would tear me loose. But by then I'd be a goner. Kofi, with careful forethought, had refrained from slicing me anywhere near the wrists or the ankles. The demons were going to start feeding on my leaky parts—upper arms and thigh muscles, and the soft flesh of my abdomen. Eventually the crazed brutes would consume the rest of me, together with my tattered suit and the tape and every other part of my rig soft enough for their teeth to handle.
A single intrepid flapjaw, larger than the others, darted in as fast as lightning and took a chomp out of my right shoulder. I balled my fists and screamed, "God!"
Damned if he didn't answer... sort of.
My jetfins swooshed as I inadvertently activated the control glove. I flipped over violently backward until the chair reached the limit of its twin anchor cords and I was almost flat on my back. When I unclenched my left hand the jets cut off and I floated back to an upright position.
The enterprising demon had fled. Its comrades gathered in a nervous huddle at a safe distance
.
Well, well.
I punched the jets again and again, setting myself gyrating crazily, hoping the movement would scare the predators away permanently. But after a few minutes they seemed to decide there was nothing to worry about and began to close in. I shouted obscenities into my helmet, goosed the fins until I bobbed like a toy balloon in a gale, but the fish kept coming.
I savored the irony of it: that which I had planned to have for dinner was shortly to dine upon me.
The attack came abruptly, but this time I had no sense of being bitten. I felt blow after stunning blow, as though I were being struck by catapulted rocks. At each impact, the demons tore away a bit of my suit. Some of them also took small hunks of meat. I bounced and roared as the vicious creatures swirled around me. My blood began to cloud the water. I shut my eyes to the horror and howled in brokenhearted desperation.
And missed seeing my savior arrive.
But I felt it, a great glancing thump against my left knee that set me twirling. My eyes flew open and I saw a sinuous black body squirm about me like a gargantuan serpent. Its eyes were shining white and it had a luminous blue head and a streaming golden mane, and it was snapping up flapjaw demons like a bull terrier catching butterflies.
The cometworm had come to my rescue—perhaps out of gratitude, like the lion in the fable who saved the life of that Roman slave, what's-his-face, after the guy pulled a thorn from the big cat's paw. Or more likely, the worm just had a really serious attack of the munchies.
I began to whoop with hysterical laughter.
The water around me turned a sickly greenish-brown hue, the color of demonic vital fluids mixed with those of humankind. The frenzied cometworm crashed into me again and I felt myself drifting laterally, out of the melee. My rescuer had somehow snapped the cords holding down the chair.
I curled the fingers of my left hand. Accelerating, I moved through the murk toward one of the larger coral pillars that supported the shelf-reef. Tiny creatures fled at my approach, swimming off or withdrawing into crevices in the rock. I let the propulsion wedge me firmly into a niche, then wriggled about until my right wrist was in contact with a rough coralline peg. I rasped away, enfeebled by shock, and after an interminable interval the duct tape confining that arm shredded and came apart. By the time I had freed myself completely from the chair, only a few morsels of demon flesh were left bobbing about the sandy sea floor, pursued by interested crustaceoids. The cometworm was gone.
A sweet, deceptive sense of relief flooded through my brain. My willpower had been sapped by terror, pain, exsan-guination, and the effort to escape my bonds. I floated aimlessly about the Glory Hole, slipping in and out of rational consciousness. A remote part of my mind realized that if the upcoming storm caught me under the shelf-reef, the surging currents would almost certainly sweep me into some submarine cul-de-sac where I'd be trapped and perish.
I decided that I didn't care.
Indeterminate time passed. The beauties of the hole surrounded me, and my miseries had mercifully faded away. Kofi's treachery was forgotten, as was Eve's desperate plea for help, my fear that the Haluk were planning an attack on humanity, and even the fact that I might be bleeding to death. In a state of neutral buoyancy, wafting along faceup with my arms and legs flaccid, I drifted immediately beneath the hole's main access shaft .. . where the water was breathing!
A faint curiosity roused me from my torpor. The tendrils and other trailing appendages of the marine life encrusting the vertical tunnel were alternately sucked upward, then downward by increasing wave motion at the surface of the sea. I watched the undulant phenomenon in uncomprehending fascination. The bright colors of the creatures had faded in spite of my spectrum compensator lens. This vaguely puzzled me, but I was too far gone to realize that the sunlight was dimming. I experienced a muddleheaded urge to check out the "breathing" more closely and once again activated my jetfins. The abrupt thrust propelled me toward the lower rim of the shaft, directly into a colony of miniature firecracker spongids.
Their stinging nematocysts fired and my torn suit was hopelessly inadequate to protect me. I felt as though I had been struck by a hundred flaming needles. The sudden agony banished my fatal languor and turned me into a convulsing madman, shrieking and caroming off the sides of the passageway as my spastic left hand involuntarily turned the jetfins on and off.
Something or other, maybe Providence, finally prompted me to punch the buoyancy compensator's emergency ascent pad. Still flailing and shouting, I shot up the shaft to the surface, which was less than seven meters above.
I broached and thrashed about in delirium. Some small functioning part of my mind took command, and little by little I forced my body to relax and ride the waves. The pain from the spongid venom was excruciating, giving a sensation of being roasted alive. But the exploding stingers of the miniature species didn't kill; they only caused slow paralysis of the voluntary muscles.
I had about five minutes to reach Pernio and administer the antidote. After that I'd be helpless human flotsam.
Unexpectedly, as my burning body began to go off-line my woozy brain switched back on, with every sense seemingly tuned to preternatural sharpness by sheer agony. The wrist computer's chronograph told me it was late afternoon, which surprised the hell out of me. I managed to look around. The sea had turned from limpid turquoise to muddy olive, the wind had picked up considerably, and clouds were thickening toward the south. The storm might be coming in faster than anticipated. A lenticular cloud that resembled a flying saucer was perched over the summit of the Devil's Teakettle volcano, another indication that the weather was changing for the worse.
There was no sign of Black Coffee, but Pernio was a reassuring golden speck in the distance. If only the water had been deeper, I could have used my dive computer to turn on the sub's autopilot and summon it. But that was no option. Even with the tide now at its height, the sea around me was still less than four meters deep.
The reconnaissance had taken only a few moments. In my extremities, the ghastly burning sensation was gradually giving way to a more bearable tingling. I clamped my arms to my sides and made a tight fist with my left hand. The jets kicked in at max and I surged off, head partly out of the water like a charging grampus, crashing through the stiff chop. It would have been more efficient to move underwater, but I had a desperate urge to keep my yellow submarine in sight.
Prickly numbness invaded my toes, my fingers, my nose, and my lips. I began to consider what I would do after I reached the sub and administered the antivenin to myself. Kofi's sub was slower than mine, but he would almost certainly reach Eyebrow Cay ahead of me. That was all to the good. He'd phone his Galapharma controller in Manukura with news of my putative demise, but I doubted that he'd leave the island. He had to be in place to go hunting for my bones tomorrow. I could return home under cover of darkness, nab him, do a little rough and ready interrogation, and—
I was slowing down, with half a kilometer still to go.
Cursing, I realized that my entire left arm had lost sensation. The damned nematocysts had mostly struck that side of my upper body, and the hand wearing the fin control glove was almost completely paralyzed. With my right hand I squeezed the useless left fingers into a ball. Immediately, my speedy forward progress resumed. But weakness was creeping down the good arm as well, and a few moments later I felt its grip also failing.
Shit. I was losing momentum again, and Pernio was still at least two hundred meters off. I moved at a snail's pace through the waves, which now bore small foamy crests. My right arm functioned, but its fingers were nearly impotent. My feet were full of pins-and-needles now in what I feared was the prelude to paralysis, while my legs still felt relatively normal.
I was dead in the water again before it occurred to me to thrust my hands into my crotch with my last remaining bit of arm strength and press my thighs together.
The jets reactivated momentarily, then cut out again. Somehow, the inner-finger contacts on the glove wer
en't closing properly. I wriggled my legs, trying to work the pinioned hands into an effective position. Both of them fell free, as useless as lumps of lead.
Well, there was always low-tech methodology... until my legs gave out.
Taking a deep breath of the canned neon-oxygen mix, I lowered my head into the water to decrease resistance, turned on the Rolex's navigator, and began scissoring with the stiff, heavy fins. In my weakening state it was desperately hard work. The Corbys weren't meant for serious muscle-powered swimming and they seemed to weigh ten kilos apiece. By now my feet were switched off and I could barely bend my knees, so the entire burden of propulsion fell on my thigh muscles. After a few minutes they were screaming. I ignored the new onslaught of pain and forged on.
I made slow progress while the muscle ache steadily worsened, spreading into my groin. Even my balls hurt. Was I still bleeding? Kofi certainly hadn't opened an artery, and I didn't think the fish had, either. They'd torn my suit to ribbons but I was pretty sure that the bites themselves were mostly small. K-L's seawater is mildly astringent, and minor wounds will often close spontaneously on an immersed body. I was overdue for some good luck and hoped for the best.
I kept kicking woodenly. With my head underwater, the encouraging view of Pernio was lost and I concentrated on the faceplate navigation display. Its tiny sub icon was green, the color of safety, while my body was represented by a white blip creeping crazily along like a drunken slug.
Whenever I veered off course, the navigator squeaked at me to signal a correction: beebeep for bear right, boop for bear left. At first the incessant boop-beebeep-boop drove me nuts; ordinarily, I never used this guidance feature, but I didn't trust myself to swim a straight line under the circumstances. After a time the squeaks became mere background noise, a dreary counterpoint to my misery that I obeyed automatically.
The swim was taking forever. The gap between my icon and the sub's seemed to have stopped closing. Was I making any headway at all?