Adrift

by W. Michael Gear

  “Tam?” Jaim called. She’d always called her Tam. Hated to refer to her as Varina.

  “Yeah, babe?”

  “Think the kids will be all right?”

  “Yeah. They’ve got good people to take care of them. Love them.”

  “Like family,” Jaim whispered. Then shrieked as the sub was jerked this way and that as the great beast squealed and thrashed back and forth, as if trying the shake its prey apart. More metal could be heard as it parted with pinging sound. The hull groaned as the pressure built.

  According to the depth gauge, they were passing five hundred meters.

  With another bang, the lights went out, the hum of the pumps and fans stopped. Only the faintest hiss of air remained as their captor uttered another of those ear-grating squeals of frustration.

  The hull groaned again, the sound of several thousand atmospheres of pressure squeezing them like a giant vice. Outside, beyond the transparency and the monster, everything was black.

  47

  The pain brought Michaela back. Terrible. Head splitting. Her stomach pumped, body bucking forward as she threw up. Then her gut contorted again, the agony like someone had driven an ax into her skull.

  “Easy.” Casey’s voice came from beyond the misery.

  “What the hell?” Michaela wiped her bile-filled mouth, blinked, aware of bright light, of a slow bobbing. She struggled with the image, trying to understand the water slapping on the transparency. Water? Where was . . . ? And it came to her. She was in the sub, strapped into the command chair. Casey was behind her, pressing something cold and stinging to the side of her head. They were floating? What . . . ?

  “We’re all right,” Casey said. “Kel is preparing the launch. He’s going to tow us back to the Pod.”

  “What happened?”

  “That fucking lobster thing hit the starboard prop when it went past us to get at Varina and Jaim’s sub. Bent the guard into the propeller blades. We’ve got maneuverability . . . as long as we want to go in circles and listen to the sound of tortured metal.”

  “What are you doing?” Michaela’s wheeling thoughts tried to make sense as she leaned away from Casey’s cold pack. That’s when she saw the blood and vomit staining her jacket.

  “You hit your head. It’s still bleeding. You know how scalp wounds are.”

  “Shit on a shoe,” she murmured against the throb in her skull. “What happened to that lobster thing?”

  “I guess it’s still down there,” Casey told her. “I pretty much had my hands full. Not to mention that the impact had me a bit pie-eyed and stunned. We were sinking at a forty-degree list, bleeding air from the number two tank, so I blew the ballast. Never prayed so hard in all my life as I watched the depth gauge.”

  “Where’s Varina and Jaim?”

  “No clue. They blew ballast before we did. Pissed the beast off if you ask me. There’s nothing on com. I’ve looked around, not that I can see much as deep as this thing drafts. Com was breaking up. Like the antennae is only directional. Haven’t heard a peep since Kel said he was coming to get us.”

  Michaela shifted, felt a whole new pain run up her left arm. “Damn, that hurts. Help me out of this seat.” Her left arm didn’t want to move. Was really smarting, which really sucked toilet water given her world-class headache. It was all she could do to keep from throwing up again.

  With Casey’s help, she got unbuckled, gasped, and winced with each jolt to her arm. She made it back to one of the passenger seats when the side of the launch appeared through the transparency at the sub’s nose.

  Just to sit, gasp for breath, and wish her head would clear was like a small victory.

  Casey undogged the hatch, pulled out the ladder, and called, “Michaela’s hurt. Hit her head, and I think her arm’s broken.”

  Kel’s voice could be heard over the waves slapping on the hull. “Hang on. Let us get a line on the sub. Are you taking any water?”

  “No. We’re tight. Where’s Varina and Jaim?”

  “Deal with that later.” Kel’s voice had an unusual tension. “Let’s get Michaela out. Can she climb?”

  Casey ducked back, her ash-blond hair swinging. The look in her gray eyes betrayed a deep-seated worry. “Can you make it up the ladder?”

  “Guess I have to, huh? God, if my head would just stop hurting.” Michaela stood, wavered, had to have Casey prop her against the pitch and sway as the sub rolled with the swells. She got hold of the ladder with her right hand, put a foot on the bottom rung, and levered herself up, her left arm hanging in agony. With Casey pushing on her butt, she made the climb, stuck her head out to find Kel waiting. The man bent over, half-pulling her from the hatch.

  Michaela uttered a piteous cry as her arm slammed the hatch rim. Then she was out, on her feet on the wet and pitching hull. Kel helped her make it to where the launch was tied alongside. Kevina, who’d been standing at the wheel, reached out as Michaela braced her butt on the gunwale and swung her legs over into the launch. From there, with Kevina’s help, it was a quick drop to the cushions on the back seat.

  “That’s a lot of blood,” Kevina said darkly as she pulled the first-aid kit from its bracket and began scrubbing at the matted blood on the side of Michaela’s head. She could feel the cloth pull in the coagulated mess on her cheek.

  “Where’s Jaim and Varina?” Michaela squinted against Capella’s light as she glanced around. There should be another bright yellow submarine bobbing in the blinding light. They’d blown ballast first. Should have beaten Michaela’s craft to the surface. The second sub should have surfaced within meters of theirs. But there was nothing but rising and falling waves in any direction. Just the big white Pod a couple hundred meters away.

  “That thing took them,” Kevina said bitterly.

  “Took them?”

  “We lost any kind of telemetry when it grabbed their sub. We’re still waiting. Yosh is watching the instruments. When that thing gets finished doing whatever it’s doing, they’ll pop up. Jaim blew the ballast. The sub’s got positive buoyancy, so it’s just a matter of time. That creature can’t hold them underwater forever.”

  “How can it hold them underwater? They’re in a submarine, for God’s sake.” Michaela tried to make her wounded brain work. Thoughts kept slipping away.

  “Despite as mean and strong as that thing looked,” Kevina told her shortly, “it can’t crush the hull. Given the possible biomechanics, Odinga figured out the theoretical crush capacity of those claws. He thinks the beast can mangle the mounting hardware for the cameras and mechanical arm, but those pincers can’t come close to putting a dent in the sub. They just have to wait it out.”

  Wait it out?

  At the hatch, Kel helped Casey out, walked the woman to the side of the launch, and steadied her as she climbed aboard. Then he closed and dogged the sub’s hatch. He paused for a moment, taking in the damage to the ballast tank where a valve had been bent and broken. Next Kel tried to get a glimpse of the trashed propeller guard before giving it up as a lost cause until they could get the vehicle out of the water.

  He swung over the launch’s side and took charge of the line tied to the sub as Kevina cast off and throttled up, easing the launch out as the tow line came taut.

  “That thing can’t crush the sub,” Michaela repeated to herself, hope stirring. As long as it had compressed air in the tanks, it could inflate the ballast tanks.

  That’s when she straightened. Holding her broken arm, she made herself climb up on the transom and stare at the submarine bobbing in their wake. She could see spots of algae clinging to the hull. The mounting hardware for the port camera had been folded back, the forward mounting strut torn from its mount. She could see the damage to the number two tank. The valve was bent at an angle, the crack in the pipe visible even from where she perched.

  The valve.

  Casey had said they w
ere at a forty-degree list, losing air.

  The tank had been fine, it was built for pressure. But the valve? Nothing in the design parameters would have kept it from breaking off if something big hit it.

  Michaela stumbled back to her seat. Casey was giving her a worried stare, maybe thinking the same thing. That they’d barely made it.

  No monster lobster-clawed creature had been trying to break into their sub.

  They’d only been bumped.

  48

  At a shallow slant, morning light shone through the dome window. Talina blinked awake from dreams filled with Dek Taglioni. Funny thing was, she knew which parts had been stimulated by Rocket’s TriNA, the parts that Demon had concocted, and which were inspired by her own desires.

  Face it, woman. You like the guy.

  Didn’t mean that Talina wasn’t wary. Kalico had always said that leopards didn’t change their spots, and Dek, in his own words, had been “a shit-sucking piece of work.” A monster. All that power and privilege, being trained to believe that the entire rest of humanity existed only to serve the wants and needs of the family. Didn’t matter who they hurt, who they abused, or who they destroyed in the process of their self-fulfillment.

  No wonder Demon was so taken with him.

  “Yesss. He’s perfect for you.”

  “Eat shit and die, asshole.”

  Demon chuckled in response.

  “He’s worth fighting to save,” Rocket said from beside her pillow.

  She glanced sidelong to Dek’s bed. The man slept with his head cocked, looking uncomfortable where she’d strapped him to the mattress.

  Hard to believe he’d assented to the indignity, but not even Demon wanted to repeat the trip into the forest, only to wake up in some unknown place as a flock of mobbers descended out of the sky.

  “Yeah, tie me.” Dek had given her a wink that flexed the scar on his cheek. “Not only will I awaken alive, but I’ll have the sexiest of dreams thinking about the woman I love and bondage.”

  “You have got to be kidding.”

  “Okay, two out of the three. I’m not so big on the bondage thing. I’m more of a give-and-take kind of guy. But, yeah, strap me in. The last time was too damn close for comfort, and my clothes still smell like mobber guts.”

  So she’d tied him down with cargo straps. Couldn’t have been comfortable. The good news was that he was still here.

  And Talina’s problem was as vexing as ever. More and more, the man kept saying he loved her. But was that Dek or the quetzal? Did he truly feel that way? Or was that Demon’s TriNA slipping little bits of tRNA into Dek’s limbic system to give his hormones a romantic rush?

  “How the hell do I tell the difference?”

  “When do humans ever know?” Rocket wondered.

  “Yeah, well, little buddy, there’s truth in that.” She pulled her blanket back and swung out of the bed. Standing, she stretched, yawned, and pulled on her overalls.

  When she had returned from the bathroom, Dek was watching her through half-lidded eyes, as if he weren’t really seeing her.

  “Hey, you okay?”

  Dek responded with a mocking laugh, voice slurred as he said, “Miko, you are such a blood-sucking spineless parasite. You think you’re a spider? A spider needs to have a grip on each thread of its web. Be ready to pull the prey in and strike. You’re pathetic . . . don’t have the discipline necessary to be completely ruthless. Now, me . . . if I were going to take your father down . . . I’d make sure he knew in those last instants that it was me. You get it? Grind him with my heel . . . so he knows he has nothing left but the extent of his own failure. Call it . . . Call it . . . a parting gift, like a poison kiss . . .”

  Talina made a face. “Hey! Wake up. Dek, you in there? Or is it just the monster today?”

  She reached down, shook him. Didn’t get a reaction.

  Dek’s words dropped into a mumble, kept repeating, “ . . . Such a pus-licking piece of shit . . .” over and over.

  “Demon is winning,” Rocket told her from her shoulder.

  Down in Talina’s gut, Demon chortled in delight.

  49

  Why didn’t I shoot? The thought kept repeating in Michaela’s head. She kept reliving that moment when the lobster monster had been face-to-face with the sub. If she’d shot? If the torpedo had driven into the thing’s mouth, blown it up? Would the detonation, so close, still have destroyed the sub?

  If, if, if. Such a little word with huge implications.

  The nightmare she now lived was insidious, eating at her, consuming in its horror and impossibility: Jaim and Varina had to be alive. Somewhere a couple hundred meters down, trapped inside a dark and broken submarine. Their ballast tanks punctured, or the valves broken off, or otherwise disabled as the creature tried this hold and that in an attempt to crack its prize open.

  The worst part was knowing that if the sub had been functional, it should have surfaced. Should have sent a distress beacon. It wouldn’t have mattered that the creature couldn’t have crushed it; eventually the monster would have tired of the constant battle against the craft’s buoyancy. The struggle to keep it submerged would have eventually worn the thing out. When it let go, the sub would have risen.

  Physics were physics.

  That had been hours ago.

  Kel and Tobi Ruto had been flying circles in the seatruck, glassing the ocean in all directions for a bobbing yellow submarine.

  Which means that Jaim and Varina are down there. Fully aware that they are encased in their tomb.

  Sitting at her desk, her broken-and-aching arm in a sling, Michaela ran the figures. Assuming that Jaim and Varina still had power and directional maneuverability—but with their ballast fully compromised—with a full charge in the batteries they should be able to elevate the submarine’s nose and power their way to the surface from a maximum depth of around a thousand meters. Having its own power supply, the emergency transponder would broadcast their location even if the sub’s powerpacks were totally depleted.

  But they didn’t have full power. Given elapsed time since submerging, and the draw on the batteries, the sub could still surface from three hundred meters. As the clock ran out, the depth from which the sub would be able to power its way to the surface grew shallower and shallower.

  Much more concerning was the oxygen supply. With two people—assuming full power—the sub was capable of reprocessing oxygen through the scrubbers for a little over twenty-four hours. Without power to run the fans and reprocessing filters and scrubbers, Varina and Jaim had about six hours. Maybe seven.

  Michaela glanced at the clock. “This isn’t happening. Not after all that we’ve been through. They’ve got two kids, a daughter and an infant son.” She raised her eyes, as if toward the heavens. “Come on. Give us a break! Don’t put us through this shit!”

  The white ceiling overhead remained featureless, blank, and as unfeeling as the distant stars.

  If the lobster monster had compromised the sub’s power, Varina and Jaim would be down there, somewhere, on the verge of losing consciousness as CO2 saturated the air.

  She looked up as Yosh walked into the office. “Anything?”

  “Nothing. Director, it’s dark. I took the liberty of calling in the seatrucks. Kim Yee is up on the landing pad with the fifty-power scope. He says he’ll stay out there until midnight. He keeps sweeping a circle, looking in all directions for any sign of a light.”

  “Will he be all right up there alone?”

  “Kevina said she’ll go up and keep him company as soon as she gets Felix and Breez put to bed. She and Yee have set up another bed in their quarters for Breez. So far, all we’ve told the girl is that her mothers are still underwater in the submarine. She’s not old enough to figure out just what that means.”

  “And Tam’s little boy?”

  “Kayle’s with
Mikoru tonight while Toni’s in the isolation tent.” He rubbed his weary eyes. “I just stopped by the clinic to see if there was any change.”

  “And?”

  “Gabarron’s out of her league. She’s been on the radio with Raya Turnienko. Toni’s limbs have started to twitch and move. But not with any kind of coordination. Turnienko thinks we ought to fly him to Port Authority. Mikoru and I . . .” Yosh hunched his shoulders in a defeated shrug. “We don’t know what to do.”

  “Shit on a shoe, Yosh. I’m at wit’s end, too.” She tried desperately not to think about Varina and Jaim, who might even now be gasping for air. How did that feel? How did a person live with the panic, the fear, and the awfulness of slowly suffocating in a compartment so many meters under all that water?

  “Shit on a shoe?” Yosh lifted an eyebrow.

  “I never cursed much until I came to Donovan. I guess now I’m starting to figure out why they do it here. Sometimes words . . . well, they just don’t seem adequate sometimes.”

  “How’s the arm?”

  “Aches. According to the X-ray, it’s a linear fracture of the proximal ulna. Could have been worse. Anna says it’s a miracle I didn’t snap it in two.”

  Her gaze went back to the screen. If the sub’s power remained undamaged, it could barely ascend from two hundred and fifty meters. But as the seconds ticked by, the curve was growing steeper. In another hour and five minutes, that sub had better be on the surface, blinking its location.

  “Maybe the lobster monster, as you call it, has them wound up in a bunch of those spear trees or something. It’s just taking them time to cut their way loose with the robotic arm.”

  “I can live with that, Yosh.” She rubbed her eyes with her good hand, careful of the bandaged wound on the side of her head. Gabarron had given her a steroid for the concussion. Nevertheless, it made her brain foggy.

  “How did we read this place so wrong?” Michaela glanced up at him. “Are we that stupid? These submarines are state of the art. Seascapes are used on every ocean on Earth.”