Book 3: 3rd World Products, Inc

by Ed Howdershelt

  "Well, they do get around, but it could take a while to get any good feedback."

  "That's essentially what they said, too. Their pods occasionally encounter each other while hunting, but they have no comprehensive communications network that extends beyond their individual groups."

  Searching the ocean is a time-consuming task, even for an entity like Stephanie. My own business concerns—and the boredom of watching the seabed roll endlessly by—kept me from going along on every sweep, and so it was that I happened not to be aboard Steph the day she found a half-ton of gold coins and bullion amid the hull debris of a seventeenth-century ship.

  Stephie burst out of the ocean and arced high across the Florida sky on her way to my house. With Tiger's intent supervision, I was designing a new pendant for WiccaWorks on my computer when she called me through my implant.

  "Ed, are you busy? Can you spare a few minutes?"

  "Sure, Steph. You sound ... Well, odd. What's up?"

  "Oh, I found another wreck, that's all. I thought you might like to see it."

  There was a curious quality to her Jessica Rabbit voice. Excitement? She'd found something; maybe something big. I decided to play cool and let her break her news.

  "Well, gee, Steph, I'm kinda busy, you know, and I've already seen an old wreck. You think this one's worth the trip?"

  "Oh, maybe. That's why I'm calling. I'd hate to drag you out there for nothing, of course, but I think you may need to pick up some more shelves. When's the last time you saw half a ton of gold in one place?"

  "Oh, wow! You scored big, didn't you, lady? Not bad for a beginner. Yes, ma'am, I'd like to see that. How soon can you be here?"

  I knew the answer to that question as a high-altitude sonic boom rattled my windows.

  "I'm on my way down,” she said.

  "And I'm on my way to the driveway, ma'am. Good going, Steph."

  Elkor had already transformed his faux-feline golem into a transparent cat carrier and Tiger had stepped onto it. We had made it to the front door and stepped outside just as Stephie said, “I'm here. All aboard. Shake a leg. Get a move on. Hup hup."

  A field closed around me and lifted me to her deck. I took a seat, then reached into Stephie's cooler field for a beer as I watched Tiger settle into his usual seat.

  "Steph, that gold'll still be there in a few minutes, won't it?"

  "If you'd looked in the cooler as you reached for that beer, you'd have seen that some of it has already been retrieved."

  Oops. I'd missed her surprise. I was about to get up to go look when the canopy field opaqued and the cooler floated toward me. The lid opened and two bright bars of gold reflected sunlight at me. Picking one up, I hefted it and studied the markings on one side of it.

  "Very nice, Steph. Very nice. One suggestion, though. Don't clean the bars and coins and be prepared to demonstrate how you do that. In fact, be prepared to let a few other people clean some and to field clean about half of them in a parking lot with news cameras rolling. We don't want anyone questioning their authenticity. We'll set up some kind of display to kick off the whole show."

  As we leveled off at about thirty thousand and began a rapid forward motion, Steph asked, “The whole show, Ed? What whole show?"

  "We'll combine authenticity verification, public demonstrations of your cleaning method, initial sale offers, and the matter of your recognition as a person. Remember our trip to Cuba, when we never touched the ground? That's how we'll handle this, too, for now. At no time will anyone other than me see that loot anywhere but on your deck. Since you never actually land yourself on the ground and we won't tell them where you found the stuff or where you stash it, there'll be a question of whether the US, Florida, or anyone else has a valid tax claim. As soon as they mention taxes, we'll mention your desire to become a legal person and see if we can't come to an agreement."

  "You technically own me, remember? Won't they just hand the tax bill to you?"

  "They'll want to, of course. They may even try, but we'll stage your show in another country. I'll deed the house and car to Sharon in advance, pack a few things, and we'll stay outside the US as long as it takes to get the job done."

  "I'm not sure that's such a good plan, Ed. If they don't cooperate, you may encounter difficulties that you haven't considered. What if you can't return to the US?"

  "I've been on my own in Europe before, Steph, and I don't have a better plan at the moment. Do you? Something that accomplishes all of our goals at once? You may launch when ready, ma'am."

  Ordinarily a passenger would feel nothing much when Stephie started moving, but in this case, I think she meant for us to share her excitement. I was pushed slightly back into my seat as she leaped skyward. Tiger instinctively hunkered and tried to get a grip on his seat with his claws, even though it wasn't really necessary.

  "Um, Steph, are you maybe a little excited about things?"

  "What makes you ask that, Ed?"

  "Oh, maybe the fact that I feel as if I'm in an Apollo capsule, riding a booster rocket into space. It seems as if your inertial dampers are fritzing, ma'am. May we assume that you're not defective and that you may be somewhat excited?"

  "It wasn't that bad and no, I am not defective. I am a little excited, Ed. Aren't you?"

  "Yup, but mostly because you are. Gonna tell me all about how you found it?"

  What ensued was one of those excitedly told 'and there I was ... ‘ stories. She'd been cruising along, sweeping the ocean bottom in uniform strips, when a dense and fairly large anomalous mass well ahead of her had begun to register.

  Almost as soon as she'd sensed the larger mass, smaller masses—some quite tiny—had begun to appear in a random pattern below her. They'd been coins, ballast, cannon balls, and other objects that had formed the debris field of the sunken ship. She'd shaped a field into a probe and picked up some of the loose stuff to show me.

  "I could have brought everything home,” said Steph, capping her story. “But I thought it might not all fit into that relatively tiny space in the garage."

  "Good thinking. Measure twice, dump once. Commendable trait, ma'am."

  Tiger sounded off. I didn't need a translation to know that he'd interpreted the word ‘trait’ as ‘treat'. He hopped down to sit by the console and looked expectantly up at me as he repeated his querying “Yahh?” sound. I put the bar of gold on the deck near him and he sniffed it, then completely ignored it, as expected. Leaving the gold where it was, I opened Steph's console and fished out the vastly more important kitty treats.

  Some forty miles from shore (you needn't know which shore) Stephie entered the water at around thirty miles per hour and let herself sink to perhaps fifty feet. The bottom was well below us and unseen as she turned south and increased her speed.

  "I decided that it would be better if I didn't touch down directly over the wreck,” she said. “We're still fifty miles away from it."

  "Weren't we in stealth mode, as always?"

  "Yes, but Amaran technology has found its way into some of the more critical Earth services, like air traffic control and the drug trafficking prevention efforts. I can't be sure that my usual field effects will be effective, so I'll be entering and leaving the water from different directions and at varying distances from the wreck site."

  I grinned and said, “Gee. Finding a little gold sure does make some people paranoid, doesn't it?"

  Stephie asked, “Do you disagree with my precautions?"

  "You're being teased, miLady. Laugh."

  "Ha,” she said. “Ha."

  Some kind of really big-assed gray blur of motion scooted quickly away as we approached. Steph identified it as a shark—which didn't surprise me at all, since my one encounter with them had left me feeling that there was probably one every twenty feet or so in the ocean—and she said that something about her fields seemed to both attract and repel them.

  "They're drawn to me, but as soon as they get within a few feet,” she said, “It's as if they smell somethi
ng bad and shy away from me. They stay in the area, but they never get too close after their first brush with my fields."

  "A Discovery show mentioned a shark at some aquarium a few years ago that seemed to have a problem with the metal wall of its tank. The water and metal and something else combined to create electrical signals that screwed up the shark's equilibrium or irritated it. It would attack the bare wall in one spot all the time. When they moved it to the outside tank, the odd behavior stopped."

  "I think I know which episode you mean, Ed. Their sensitivity to me is what alerted me. If sharks can detect my field, so might someone's devices."

  "Reasonable to me. How deep is it around here? I kind of expected to be able to see the bottom this close to shore."

  "The seabed is at an average of one hundred feet in this area. You probably could just barely see it if the water contained no sediment and wasn't moving."

  I took a long look over the side and realized again—as I had one evening in 1980—that I very much didn't like looking down into the dark depths of the ocean.

  I'd been with some other people on a cabin cruiser that hit a mostly-submerged tree that had been washed out to sea. There had been pitch-black water all around our raft and blood in the water that we'd unthinkingly bailed out of the raft. Soon the sharks had appeared, rolling near the raft and shooting past it repeatedly as they searched for the source of the blood. We turned off the flashlight and huddled together in several inches of water all night, whispering if we spoke at all for fear of making any noise that might attract the attention of the sharks.

  Tiger stood on the deck in front of me and yowled something at me. I shuddered and tore my eyes away from the view of the depths below us.

  Stephie asked, “Ed, are you not feeling well?"

  I cleared my throat and said, “Just remembering something, Steph."

  "It must have been truly horrible,” she said.

  "It could have been a lot worse, I suppose. We all made it to shore."

  "Your bioscan readings were almost as high as I've ever seen them. You were even frightening Tiger. Is there something about being underwater that frightens you?"

  "Not when I look up. Not when I look forward or back or to the side. Only when I look down into the blackness. I was remembering my own shipwreck in 1980 and the way the water looked around the rubber raft when it was teeming with sharks."

  "Would you rather not continue?"

  "I'm fine. As I said, it only bothers me to look down, for some reason."

  "But the water is just as black ahead of..."

  I cut in sharply with, “Shut up, Steph,” and then amended my words with, “I'm sorry. I'd rather deal with one direction at a time, please, and without discussion. One direction is more than enough right now, okay? I'm inside you and I'll be fine and I know it. Being inside you is very comforting to me, Steph. I'll get by."

  "I ... Okay. Sorry."

  "No sweat. How about putting something on the screen, Steph? Show me something of what you see out there."

  She brightened and said, “I'll blend my sensor data into something like what you'd see through a Starlight scope, Ed. The images will be rendered in shades of blue, though, not green. Would that do?"

  "Actually, that would be fine, Steph. It would look more as if we were flying over the terrain. Thanks."

  From one side of the deck to the other, her fields projected our immediate vicinity. For the most part, we were ‘flying’ over a vast, almost featureless plain. Fish of all sizes seemed to hang suspended in the ‘sky’ around us as we continued our journey. Only those closest to us appeared to move much, and those fish were most interested in getting away from us. As I looked forward, it seemed as if the ocean were literally crowded.

  "Why are there so many fish around here, Steph?"

  "There aren't, really. Some of them are almost a mile away. It's difficult to display true size and perspective properly in this viewing mode."

  I put a finger on one quarter-inch long fish and asked her how far away it was.

  "That one is nearly eight hundred feet distant and turning away from us, Ed. You have your finger on a hammerhead shark that is almost fourteen feet long."

  "Good place for him. Far away. Farther would be good, too. How long until we get to the wreck?"

  "Eight minutes at this speed. If I go any faster I'll begin to generate a detectable signature, and there's a US submarine twenty miles northwest of us."

  "This is fine, Steph.” I laughed shortly and said, “It might be fun to buzz them later, though. Give ‘em something to talk about, wouldn't it?"

  "Buzz them?"

  "Yeah. Go past them at high speed. You could configure your field to really stir up the water. They'd hear us, but they wouldn't be able to see us."

  "That would be fun?"

  "If you have to ask, possibly not. I guess you wouldn't know if it was fun unless you tried it. Oh, wait one. You aren't including an envisioning of the panic on their bridge, are you? Think of it, Steph. A close, high speed pass..."

  "You're suggesting that we frighten them after you've just had a considerable fright of your own?"

  "Excuse me, ma'am. What I had was a mild case of trepidation."

  "Semantics, Ed."

  "Oh, hell, I know that. So? They'd say the same thing over beers later."

  "Was your ... trepidation ... of a few moments ago at all enjoyable, Ed?"

  I sighed and reached into the cooler for a beer.

  "Okay. Forget I mentioned it. No buzzing the submarine. Happy now, Mother?"

  Chapter Eight

  The bottom seemed to be rising beneath us, and at first I thought Stephie was descending, but the surface of the water seemed to be about the same distance above us. When the bottom became rather starkly outlined on her fields, I asked her to let me see the outside world as it really was and she complied.

  It was still dark and murky below us, but when Steph turned on her glow-field, I could actually see the seabed and a scattering of startled fish nearby.

  "Did we head back toward shore, Steph?"

  "No, this immediate area averages less than a hundred feet deep. The ship lies in a depression at a depth of one hundred and thirty-two feet."

  "I wonder why someone's instruments haven't tripped over it by now? Are we near shipping lanes or fishing areas?"

  "Not shipping lanes. There is some very old fishing netting tangled around the ship's rudder, but it seems likely that most nets would slide over the debris."

  Some minutes later, Stephie said, “We're within one hundred yards of the wreck, Ed. You should be able to see it."

  "I see lumps and bumps and some fish. No ships yet."

  "It's lying on its side, buried in sediment. Keep watching."

  "Steph, would my five suit work at this depth?"

  "Your personal field could withstand almost twice this depth, Ed, but you'd still need to decompress properly."

  As a small shark of some sort scurried out of our path, I asked, “But you said that fields seem to attract sharks. How would it stand up against a shark bite?"

  "It wouldn't help you at all. A shark's jaws can generate two tons of pressure per square inch or more."

  "Uh, huh. Guess I'll mostly just watch, then."

  An elongated lump ahead caught my attention and I said, “I think I see it."

  Something dark and flaccid seemed to blow past outside, slithering quickly over the canopy field and away into the darkness.

  "What the hell was that?"

  "A black plastic garbage bag."

  "The current here must be pretty strong, then. It was really flying."

  "The current averages between four and seven knots in this area. It's one of the reasons that the south side of the wreck is almost a solid mound of sediment. You'll be able to see most of what's left of the upper deck, but much of the ship's starboard hull has collapsed inward or been eroded away."

  "Can you get to everything that's worth salvaging?"

>   "Not without damaging the remains of the ship. I can reach into most parts of the wreck, but there are two areas that have closed doors, and those doors are blocked by sediment. Clearing the sediment could cause parts of the ship to collapse."

  "I don't care about a bunch of worm-eaten, rotted wood, Steph, but if those are personal cabins, there's undoubtedly stuff in them that should be in a museum. Could your field hold things together while you excavate?"

  "My field would be inadequate."

  "We could come in from above, then. Where's the gold?"

  "Underneath the ship, mostly. It and the ballast and some cannons and cannonballs crushed the hull and fell through, apparently long after the ship sank, but they held it in place long enough for sediment to fill the ship."

  "Okay. What's inside the ship is mostly lightweight archaeologically important stuff, and it isn't going anywhere. People can dive to this depth, so let's leave some of the gold, all of the cannons and like that, and announce the find. You can publish an inventory of what was aboard the ship, what you've claimed for yourself, and what you've left aboard the wreck. Say that you'd prefer to have professional help recovering the fragile stuff and dozens of qualified volunteers will jump at the chance to be involved in recovery efforts."

  "If the sediment is removed, the remnants of ship will definitely begin moving in this current, Ed. Divers would be risking injury or death."

  "Could you hold things steady?"

  "No. It's more than twice what I could manage."

  I studied the mound of mud in front of me. “How much more, exactly?"

  "Two hundred and thirty percent, if the current remains fairly constant."

  I considered matters briefly, then called Elkor.

  "Elkor, can you suit up in one of the other flitters you made and help her?"

  "No, Ed. They are no longer available to me."

  "Could you make another one?"

  "No, Ed. That design is now owned exclusively by 3rd World Products and a consortium of Earth manufacturers. I was specifically ordered not to manufacture any more such flitters."

  "Damn. Steph, how about moving the cannons and stuff back aboard the ship?"