Waterwings

by James Patterson

  To save face, I started barking orders anyway. “Let’s go up front, by the main hatch,” I commanded, oozing confidence. “If we have to abandon ship, that’s where we’ll escape from.”

  We waited for a break in the line of running sailors, then threw ourselves into the passageway and started rushing forward. It seemed to take forever, with us hurrying and jumping over all the raised thresholds. Around us, sailors were sealing off compartments with their little turny-wheel things.

  All of a sudden Angel stopped dead, causing the rest of us to pile into her.

  “Angel, go!” I yelled.

  “No, wait!” she said, holding up her hand.

  “We can’t wait! We need to get up front! Move it!”

  “Wait,” she insisted. “It’s the dumb-bots.”

  “Whaat?”

  “It’s those M-Geeks, the dumb-bots,” Angel said. “They’re trying to get into the sub.”

  Lovely, just lovely. I’ll fight anything on the surface or in the air, but under water? I was literally out of my element, so much more than anyone else is who says they’re out of their element, like at a party. I pictured the M-Geeks drilling through the sub walls, pictured it filling up with water, with us trapped inside…

  “Okay,” I said firmly. “We need to stop them. I’ll get the Triton.”

  “Does it have weapons?” Iggy asked.

  “No. But it has big claw arms,” I said. “Maybe I can whack them or knock them off or something.”

  “Here, take this,” Gazzy said, pushing a small metal first-aid box into my hands. “It’s waterproof, so put it in the claw. And here’s a remote. Don’t sit on it or anything. Push the button to watch a DVD, then use the Triton’s claw to toss it at the M-Geeks. Do it fast.”

  “Okay. You guys go forward,” I said. “I’ll catch up soon.”

  “I’m going with you,” said Fang.

  I looked at him. “I need you to take care of the others,” I said very quietly. After a conflicted moment, he nodded.

  “I’ll go with you,” said Gazzy. “I know how to work the IED.”

  I hated to let him, but he was right. “Okay.”

  “I’m going too,” said Angel.

  “No, Angel, please,” I said, trying not to beg. “Please stay with Fang.”

  “I want to go too.” There was that face again.

  “Angel, come with me,” Fang said, taking her hand. “Iggy, Nudge, let’s move it.” He headed quickly down the hall, all but dragging Angel with him.

  I watched them go down the dark narrow corridor, hoping it wasn’t the last time I’d ever see them. I turned to Gazzy and handed him the metal box. “Let’s go. We’ve got a Triton to steal and dumb-bots to kill.”

  56

  I’VE HOT-WIRED quite a few cars and driven all kinds of weird vehicles, like a school bus and a tank. Here are a couple of tips: school buses do not corner well, and tanks smell like old gym socks. I’d never stolen a Triton, but I had watched the crewman steer it around, and I thought I could do it. No one even tried to stop Gazzy and me as we raced back down the corridor and entered the pressure chamber.

  The Triton was sitting there waiting for us.

  “So cool!” Gazzy said. “Did you jack a key?”

  I grinned. “No key. Just a push button.”

  Gazzy took his metal box and put it on the floor right next to one of the Triton’s arms, then we scrambled up to the dome and opened the hatch. We dropped down into the seats, and I started flicking switches, hoping I was doing it in the right order. I’d only seen it done once. Gazzy sealed the hatch, and all the panels lit up inside. He looked thrilled, but I wasn’t any happier about this than I was the first time.

  Then it hit me, amid all the flashing lights and alarms and the banging sounds that were getting louder: a realization that made my blood run cold and my hand freeze into a claw on the single joystick that operated the sub.

  I was locked in a very small airtight container… with the Gasman.

  I’m not huge with religion, but right then I started praying to every deity I’d ever heard of. Please do not let Gazzy have one of his episodes in here. Please.

  The Voice suddenly chimed in: Get a move on, Max.

  Right, right. Inside the sub, I grabbed the remote that would open the chamber doors, dropping us out into the ocean.

  “Gaz, you have the arm operators right there,” I said, pointing. Dr. Akana had used them to gather small samples of water. “Pick up your metal box.”

  Gazzy caught on to the simple hand controls and quickly swept up the box with the claw. Then I hit my remote. Suddenly the doors beneath us opened, and the Triton slid clumsily into the ocean as I tried to keep us level.

  It was way dark, and I peered out through the Plexiglas bubble, not wanting to turn on the headlights. Stealth was the answer here, and we would be as stealthy as a bright yellow, three-ton, bubble-trailing baby sub could be.

  “I can’t tell where the noise is coming from,” said Gazzy. “We’ll have to check the whole sub.”

  I nodded, jerkily moving us forward.

  “Maybe I should drive,” Gazzy offered.

  “Shut up,” I said, concentrating. We started sinking fast, and I frantically worked the lever to make us rise up and stabilize. I hated this. I hated it with a whole new kind of hate that I should probably have reserved for Mr. Chu.

  Sweat broke out on my forehead, and my hand started cramping up from clutching the joystick too tightly. But I got us out from under the Minnesota, and we started trailing along its side toward the back.

  Gazzy practiced maneuvering the arms, and he accidentally whacked a big grouper in the side of its head. It darted off, while he muttered, “Sorry, sorry!”

  “Do you see anything?” I asked.

  “You mean, besides the sub the size of a football stadium? And a bunch of fish? Nope.”

  I was getting better at driving, and we putt-putted along-side the sub. What was going on in there? Had the others made it to the front? Were they getting ready to evacuate?

  Tap, tap! I almost screamed when something knocked on the Plexiglas above our heads. If the dumb-bots got a hold of the Triton…

  Angel’s smiling face looked down at us. My eyes almost popped out of my head. She had done this again, after I’d lectured her the first time! I started yelling at her, but she ignored me, instead urgently pointing toward the aft of the Minnesota.

  I pushed the joystick forward and in another couple seconds, saw what she was warning me about: eight M-Geeks, clinging to the side of the big sub. One was wielding an underwater welding torch, and it was attempting to cut through the sub’s hull.

  “Angel! Get behind us! Hide!” I yelled as loud as I could, which of course caused her to immediately let go of us and swim directly toward the M-Geeks.

  I flicked on the headlights and again shoved the joystick forward, trying to increase our speed. I was forming a vague plan of having one of the Triton’s arms grab Angel somehow, but in another two seconds Angel had gotten close enough to the M-Geeks to actually tap on one’s head.

  Immediately, all of them stopped working and swiveled to look at her. In the next instant, they had quickly grouped around her, and I saw they had little motors keeping them stable in the water.

  “Do you see her?” I asked Gazzy tensely.

  “Uh-uh.” His voice sounded choked. “They’re surrounding her. And I can’t use my bomb.”

  I moved forward cautiously. The eight M-Geeks were a cluster of metal, tools, and weapons, shining brightly in my headlights. And there was no sign of Angel anywhere.

  57

  “I’M GONNA RAM them,” I said.

  “No — you might crush her!”

  “Okay, I’m gonna start batting them out of the way then,” I said, edging the Triton closer.

  “Max, be careful!”

  “What else can I do?” I exclaimed. “I don’t exactly want to open our hatch and see if I’ve developed gills yet! We’ve got to g
et Angel out of there!”

  Every muscle in my body was as taut as a wire as I moved closer to the throng of M-Geeks. Somewhere in that mess of violent metal was my baby, my Angel. She might think she could rule the world and do anything, but I knew that despite all her powers, she was still a flesh-and-blood, six-(possibly seven)-year-old girl. Who I needed to save. Again.

  “Okay, you work the arms,” I whispered. “Try to push one aside.”

  Gazzy’s face was white as he nodded, his hands clenched on the controls.

  “On my mark,” I said. “One, two, thr —”

  Suddenly the dumb-bots moved apart, revealing Angel. She seemed to be talking to them earnestly, motioning with her hands, trailing tiny bubbles out of her mouth.

  I stared at her, then at Gazzy, whose jaw had dropped in surprise.

  Then, as we watched, the dumb-bots seemed to huddle in for a consultation. A minute later, they started to disperse, heading off into the dark water one by one, their little fanlike rotors leaving small white trails behind them. Angel waved good-bye to them, then turned and wiggled her eyebrows at me and Gazzy.

  I gave her the universal WTH expression, and she grinned and dog-paddled closer to the Triton. Clinging to the side, she went through an elaborate “told you so” pantomime.

  With Angel still holding on, I turned the Triton around and headed back to the Minnesota, feeling overwhelming relief, tension, and extreme irritation all at the same time.

  I was giving Angel a look of “Wait till we get back on board, missy,” which she was cheerfully ignoring, when her face suddenly went blank. Then her eyes widened in fear, and she pressed herself flat against the Plexiglas dome, her small knuckles white.

  “What? What?” I cried. She looked in at me, and my heart turned to ice when I saw how scared she was.

  In the next moment, a powerful swell of water came out of nowhere and swept us beneath the bigger sub, making us crash against its underside. Angel clung to the Triton and hunkered down.

  “What the — there aren’t currents like this, this deep!” I said. Our dome smashed against the metal sub again, and my throat closed as I wondered just how tough the Plexiglas was.

  “Holy crap!” Gazzy shouted, pointing.

  A mountain was coming up out of the murky depths below us, creating such a huge swell that the Minnesota was actually tipping to one side. We crashed against the sub again, and I jammed the joystick forward, desperately trying to get back to the underwater hatch we had exited from.

  “What the heck is that thing?” I cried. If I couldn’t keep us angled right, Angel would be smashed between us and the sub. I yanked the joystick to the left.

  Off to one side, the mountainous thing moved past us, heading toward the surface. I saw now that it had a beginning and an end and wasn’t quite Everest-sized but still totally qualified as ginormously freaking big.

  “There!” Gazzy pointed above us, and punched the remote that opened the Minnesota’s bottom hatch. The next water swell carried us up into the belly of the sub, Angel still holding on tightly.

  “Close the hatch!” I commanded. The hatch doors closed beneath us, and lights flashed as the hydraulic pumps began to force water out of the chamber. Another twenty seconds, and we popped the Triton’s hatch, breathing in the damp air. Gazzy and I quickly jumped out, and I grabbed Angel, who was sopping wet and shivering. Holding her tightly, I stroked her hair.

  “What happened with the M-Geeks?” I asked.

  “I just asked them to go away,” she said. “They said okay.”

  “O-kaaaay,” I said. “And what was the swimming mountain?”

  Big troubled eyes met mine. “I don’t know, Max. It’s like nothing I’ve ever felt before — not like a person or an alien or a mutant. But — it was thinking. It has thoughts. It’s intelligent. And it wanted to kill. It wanted to kill everything.”

  Just then something hit the sub hard, knocking us off balance. More alarms blared, and we heard shouting. There was a gut-wrenching grinding, the sound of screeching metal, then the sub went silent, tilted on its side.

  We were dead in the water.

  58

  BITTER IRONY crushed me: we’d escaped death so many times on land and in the air, only to be doomed to die in the ocean.

  I’d read news reports about a hundred Russian sailors who had all died trapped in their sub in less than two hundred feet of water. We were in much worse shape. I didn’t know if the sea monster would be back, or if the M-Geeks had really gone away. I didn’t know if we were sinking slowly into the darker, colder depths of the ocean, never to rise again. With the power gone, we couldn’t even limp back to the base. And at this depth, the water pressure was so great that the hatches couldn’t be opened. There was no way out.

  But a leader can’t dwell on stuff like that. A leader has to lead.

  “Okay, guys,” I said, channeling confidence and authority. “First, let’s get —”

  The chamber door opened, and Total peeped in, the flashing red emergency lights highlighting his fur every couple seconds

  “Yo,” he said. “Sub’s in trouble. Climb out here — we’re doing an emergency surface.”

  “An emergency surface?” Quickly we scrambled up the slanted floor to the open doorway. Fang was standing behind Total, followed by Nudge and Iggy. My flock was together, and they’d come to find us.

  “Yeah,” said Fang, giving Gazzy a hand up. “There’s all sorts of backup systems. Apparently. We’re dumping ballast and pumping in air and should be at the surface in about half an hour.”

  Well. Let’s hear it for those thoughtful sub designers, eh?

  We ended up feeling our way to the front of the sub and were among the first off when it finally reached the surface. They popped the hatch and deployed inflatable life rafts. I’ve never been so thankful to breathe fresh air.

  We bobbed around in the ocean in six-foot waves until navy choppers came. They lowered a long rope ladder, and some Navy SEALs jumped down into the water to help. It was all very controlled and orderly, which is, I gather, how the navy likes it.

  “Children first!” shouted a SEAL, holding the ladder. “Let’s go!”

  There were eighteen sailors with us in our raft, all waiting for us to go first.

  “Can we just meet you guys somewhere?” I asked John Abate. “We don’t need to take up space in a chopper.” Plus I’m dying to stretch my wings and get up in the fresh air, where I feel normal.

  John nodded and quickly gave me directions to a marine research station about thirty miles away, where we’d meet.

  I clapped once to get the flock’s attention. “Okay, guys,” I said. “Ready to do an up and away?”

  They cheered and stood up.

  “Please get on the ladder!” the SEAL barked.

  “We’re not getting on the ladder,” I said firmly. “Thanks anyway. I really think you’re being all you can be. But we’re out of here.”

  It was hard to jump up into the air from an inflatable raft, but we managed, though we sank about a foot into the water before we were aloft. But finally there we were: moving our wings strongly, feeling the air blowing against our faces, our hair streaming back. It was heaven.

  Below us, stunned sailors and crewmen stared up at what they’d heard about but had never expected to see. John and Brigid waved, and maybe I’m imagining things, but I thought Brigid looked envious. Maybe she wanted wings too.

  “Thank God!” I said, climbing high above the ocean. We soared until the rafts were tiny dots on the dark, gray blue water.

  Angel was peering downward. “I’m trying to see that big thing,” she said. “The big sea-monster thing.”

  We looked, and though we could make out whales and rays and sharks, nothing we saw looked anything like the moving mountain that had almost capsized our sub.

  “Our new mission: figure out what that was,” I said, as we turned in a lazy, thirty-degree arc back toward the big island of Hawaii. “I just know it has somethin
g to do with my mom — and Mr. Chu.”

  As we headed toward land and the marine research station where we’d meet up with the others, I had another, more disturbing thought: What exactly had Angel told the M-Geeks under water? Why hadn’t they attacked her? They were machines, and I didn’t think she could influence machines the way she could humans.

  Did Angel know something about Mr. Chu I didn’t?

  59

  THE MARINE RESEARCH STATION was kind of like the research station in Antarctica, but with no snow, carnivorous man-killing leopard seals, or Angel falling into deadly icy crevasses. Part of it was built out over the water, and there was a section of glass floor where you could look down and see fish and manta rays and sharks swimming beneath you.

  The flock and I were lying flat on the glass to watch the fish, thankful that we were back on dry land again and not on a freaking sub.

  An intern came to get us. “Will you join us in the conference room?”

  I got to my feet. “Sure. I love conference rooms. Some of the best times in my life have been in conference rooms. Can’t get enough of ’em.”

  The intern looked at me oddly, but we followed him down the hall. Fang brushed up against me, and it reminded me that we hadn’t had any time together, just the two of us, in days. Not that I wanted any. I just noticed is all.

  The conference room held the usual cast of characters: John, Brigid, Dr. Akana, some navy types, some other scientisty-looking people who couldn’t keep their eyes off us. I was used to crazed scientists in white lab coats coming at us with needles and electrodes and wrist restraints. I wasn’t used to scientists who found us fascinating but still kept a respectful distance and treated us like we had actual rights and dignity and stuff. I mean, what was up with that?

  “I’ve been developing a theory,” said Brigid, walking to the front of the room. I sat down and tried not to glower at her, but I braced myself: maybe Brigid wanted to do a special mission, just her and Fang. The cow eyes she kept flashing at him made me want to drop-kick her to the middle of next week.