by Sage Walker
The officer looked like he was alarmed, but Signy couldn’t read his Asian body language well enough to be sure of it.
“He’s talking about the Gojiro,” Paul said. “That’s one of the subs from the Kasumi. Damn, I’d like to talk to Campbell.”
“We need contact with someone down there. There’s that woman,” Signy said. “Anna. The med tech.”
“Hush!” Paul said. “The Siranui—”
Signy windowed up a view of Paul, hunched over his phone.
“Yes,” Paul said. He waited. “You will have Mr. Campbell call us as soon as possible. I understand.”
Paul turned away from his console to watch his own stage in New Hampshire. Washes of color, reflected from Paul’s view of the Siranui’s bridge, bronzed his cheekbones and deepened the hollows under his eyes. “The Kasumi got another call from its sub. They are leaving the area and going after it. There has been no sighting of anything in the water. Anything at all.”
Signy remembered swimming in the Sea of Cortez, in placid water that was just barely cool. Even in a sheltered cove, the rocking of the quiet waters had made the yacht dip up and down, away from her sight at times. The world had become a totality of walls of water and sky, immensely lonely. And she’d been safe in that water, safe and comfortable, with the deck and help just yards away. Not lost in frozen twilight.
The Kasumi had given up. There had been nothing to see; she knew it.
Over. Gone. What should she be feeling? What response should she have?
She had to pee. Her overwhelming concern, in this moment that she would remember for years, for the rest of her life, was that she had to pee.
“Somebody try to call up Anna de Brum,” Signy said. “Send a repeat to her on the sick-bay monitor. Here.” Signy opened the codes for that address. “I’ll be right back.”
Signy stumbled out of the room and down the hallway. The dawn light was cloudy gray and bitter cold. Her mind raced and halted in infuriating ways. Janine should be leaving for the airport in less than an hour; Janine couldn’t stay in Seattle and she wouldn’t want to leave. Janine had to get to Lisbon, whether she wanted to go or not.
Signy sat on the commode, the comfort of an emptied bladder bringing with it a wave of fatigue. She yawned, hiccuped, and yawned again. How much sleep had she had since yesterday? Maybe three hours, maybe less. She pulled the skinthin back on and splashed water on her face.
Could anything they had seen be trusted? None of them knew, firsthand, what conditions were on that water. It might have been bright in the sea; no true night ever darkened it at this time of the year. How could Jared drown in the light?
Jared was so strong. There may have been some way for him to survive.
I’ve killed him, Signy thought. I’ve killed him for money.
But Paul had watched, and Paul thought Jared might be alive. They had to look at what Paul’s eyes had seen—Signy wasn’t sure she was ready for that, but they had to do it, soon. Her dark warm Jared. Signy wanted to touch his skin, now, smell his sweat. She would always want that.
Jimmy had shrunk the bridge camera’s view back to fit a console screen when Signy returned to the room. The Taos stage was filled with views of the Seattle studio in real time, and Signy picked up Pilar’s sensations, her thin flesh tense with concentration.
“He ain’t asleep. Don’t give me that shit,” Pilar said. “Get his ass on-line.” Then her voice went silky. “Toshiki? Whiteline? Sweet ronin man, I have a little job for you.”
Janine, suited and with her coat thrown over her shoulders, paced behind Pilar and Jimmy. Janine had no task and no console access at the moment.
“Sure,” Pilar told Whiteline, whoever the hell he was. “I’ll send the man over in ten minutes. You can’t work sleepy, I know that.”
Pilar reached behind her and gripped Janine’s waiting hand. “I got the son of a bitch,” Pilar said. “But the blow is going to cost us a little. Whiteline doesn’t work without it.”
“He’s a good translator?” Janine asked.
“The best. He’s a poet in Japanese and English,” Pilar said.
“Then fill his nose,” Janine said. “Wire him any way he wants.” Janine drew her hand away and held Pilar’s shoulders, as if to massage them.
“Jimmy, send that bridge download to Pilar’s screen,” Signy said. “Janine, shouldn’t you be gone?”
“I have an hour. But I can’t go to Portugal, Signy. Not now.”
“You must. We need you there.”
Paul’s virtual hand squeezed Signy’s shoulder and jerked her back to her console. “You have a call,” Paul said.
“Huh?” Signy looked down at her empty flatscreen.
“Hello?” The voice was Alan Campbell’s. “Signy?”
“I’m here.”
“You worked with Jared, he told me.” Alan was on a voice-only line.
“Alan, what happened?”
“We were looking at one of the subs. Jared left and said he was going on deck. The sirens raised hell and called a lifeboat drill, was the next thing I knew. And everybody yelling for Dr. Balchen. I thought somebody got hurt.”
“I understand. What’s happening now?”
“The Kasumi just picked up its other sub. Everybody’s pretty busy with that.”
“So you didn’t see anything.”
“No. I’m sorry.”
“Could he be somewhere on the ship? Hidden somewhere?”
“There’s lots of hidey-holes on any boat,” Alan said. “I’ll look, but didn’t I hear that you guys watched him go overboard? Took the crew a minute to sort that one out, let me tell you. We’re down here beaucoup miles from anywhere and some gaijin yahoo in New Hampshire tells the captain somebody just fell off his ship. But I’ll look, Signy. I’ll look for him, just in case.”
“When are you going back to the Siranui?” Signy asked.
“Not for a few days, is the plan.”
“Do you know the med tech that was working with Jared?”
“Anna? I’ve met her.”
“Listen, we’re going to try to keep in contact with her. If you see anything, if there’s any news at all—”
“I’ll talk to her on ship-to-ship. At least twice a day, Signy. Whether I have any news or not.”
“Thank you,” Signy said.
Silence.
Signy raised her eyes to a view of Seattle, where Pilar tapped her fingers against her console and nodded at something Whiteline was doing. Janine sat on the floor, pulled her knees up and tucked her head down, hiding her face.
“Can we see the sequence where Jared fell?” Jimmy asked. “There might be something helpful in it.”
Janine uncurled and got on her feet again.
Just standing there, quiet, she was every inch the barroom brawler who had once emptied an Alaskan bar of a population of half-drunk roughnecks in ten seconds flat. Janine had been holding a beer bottle packed with crushed ice, then. She held nothing at all now; thank goodness. “Wouldn’t you think you’re being just a touch voyeuristic?” Janine’s voice dripped sarcasm. “Just a tad involved in something that’s going to cause us pain? Is that how you get off, McKenna?”
But there was nothing else, at the moment, to be done. No other channels to open, not that anyone had managed to think of yet. “Leave him alone, Janine,” Signy said. “Jimmy’s right. Maybe we’ll see something that might help.”
Janine relaxed with a visible effort of will and pulled a chair up to sit next to Pilar.
Paul’s voice murmured in the background, leaving a message for Anna, his words slow and deliberate, his voice thick with tension. Signy waited for him to finish.
“Paul?” Signy asked.
“Yes.”
“Let’s see it.”
“Yes.”
The watchers vanished into shadowy darkness. The world filled with Jared’s view of his own hand, flicking lights on to show a metal catwalk beneath his feet.
“Where are we?” Pilar a
sked.
“We’re in the hold of the Kasumi,” Paul said.
Jared talked to Campbell. Jared’s body language, sensed as a familiar blanket of grace and strength, enveloped Signy, enveloped them all.
A sound intruded in real time, Janine, who sobbed once and choked back the sound.
“Nothing’s wrong, I kept saying. We need this job. I did this,” Signy said.
“Shut up, Signy,” Paul said.
Paul let the virtual run at normal speed. Jared climbed out of the hold and on to the deck, and Signy caught her breath at the sudden blow to the back of her knee, bit her lip as the side of the ship rose and she/Jared/Paul fell. Signy felt the enforced relaxation of Jared’s muscles as a hand tugged at the inflated parka, and a slow sense of amazement and pain as Jared sank—
“That was murder,” Janine said. “That thing that hit him. He didn’t slip. Jared was never clumsy a day in his life.”
“What was it?” Pilar asked.
“A gaff.” Paul froze the image, silver bar descending. There was no sight of a human, no view of a hand, not in the quick glimpse Jared had caught. Paul faded the scene and let Seattle show again, puzzled faces blinking in the studio’s bright yellow light.
“Who? Why?” Pilar asked. “It makes no sense.”
“Skylochori,” Signy said, the dead sailor’s name rising out of a cascade of suspicions left unexamined, worries glossed over.
“You think that sailor was murdered?” Pilar asked.
“A theory,” Paul said. “Let’s assume that Skylochori may have been involved in sabotage against Tanaka. That Mihalis Skylochori was on, or not on, the missing Tanaka ship, or that he sank it. That someone didn’t want to have Skylochori see what he was seeing.”
“The missing ship was sabotaged? Could have been. Someone, some group, wanted it sunk. They don’t want cameras in the deep south, maybe,” Janine said. “They don’t want us to publicize whatever we’re publicizing. Jared kept trying to get information; nobody knew anything.…”
“That’s nonsense,” Pilar said. “Shit, we don’t even know what we’re going to try to sell. Murder Jared, because we might push this treaty? Because we might oppose it?”
“The gaff could have fallen,” Janine said. “Come loose from somewhere.”
“Bullshit.” Pilar watched her flatscreen, tuned to a view of the Siranui’s bridge. No words scrolled across her screen. Pilar spoke for her throat mike, in low and urgent tones. “Whiteline, you awake, man?”
“For sure,” he said.
“Just checking, hon.”
“Move Jared’s sequence back just a little,” Jimmy said. “As he fell. I think I saw—go back, Paul.”
Signy shut her eyes while Seattle disappeared and images scattered.
“There,” Jimmy said.
—silver bar of metal in peripheral vision, lurch of lost balance, catlike, trying to recover, a slick dark sea with a black cylinder bobbing up once as the water rose above his/our eyes.
“It’s a Zodiac,” Paul said.
A Zodiac, a black inflatable boat, a standard for fast travel on treacherous water. There were thousands of Zodiacs in the seas, and they all looked the same.
Signy felt water rising, a strange crawling on her skin that would translate as cold if the suit’s sensors would feed in cold that severe, felt a sensation of strong fingers on the back of her/his neck, saw a slick oval silhouette of a goggled head glimpsed once.
A sharp downward tug, and startled muscles jerked as the water closed again over mouth, nostrils, eyes. Black quiet, with twitches of sensation as the suit monitored the pressure of currents against lax muscles.
Superimposed, Signy heard Pilar sobbing, quiet, hushed little sobs.
“Paul, you didn’t tell us someone was out there,” Janine whispered.
“I didn’t see it the first time,” Paul said.
“Go back to the woman,” Signy said.
Paul stopped the recording. Signy felt her world vanish into an aching void, as empty of sensation as if she were suddenly enveloped in vacuum. She was never prepared to be cut off without warning, hated it. Paul hadn’t slipped up and jerked her out of contact like that in a long time. This was not the best time to yell at him for startling her. Later, she would fuss at him, but not now.
“Why do you think it’s a woman?” Paul asked.
Twilight colors and the dull metal of the ship’s hull reappeared, and the fingers of sensation that would have been burning cold on Jared’s face and neck.
“I think it’s a woman,” Signy said. “I don’t know why.”
“Someone turned him off,” Jimmy said.
“What?” Pilar asked.
“Turned Jared off. I mean, everything stops there, right? If he were dead and still powered, the suit would keep feeding us body motion and wave tilt, wouldn’t it?”
He’s right, Signy thought. Jared drowned or didn’t drown, but someone was with him, someone who knew enough about him and about our rigs to find the power switch and shut him down.
“It could be a short in the skinthin,” Jimmy said. “I’ve never tried to dunk mine in salt water, myself.”
“The suits handle it just fine. Ours do, anyway,” Pilar said.
“Metal,” Janine said. “If Jared got blocked by something thick enough. Like that titanium submarine that he climbed into before. If he were in that thing, we couldn’t pick up his signals.”
Dead or alive, Jared became reality again. His presence shifted from an abstract in Signy’s mind and became palpable, weighted, precious, and human. His body, at least, existed for her. Unless his murderess had turned him off and let him sink.
I’ll kill her. I’ll kill her, Signy realized. The decision gave her a sensation of cold; pure, exhilarating. The woman is there, somewhere in that wilderness. I will find her and she will die.
The Taos house, filled with winter morning light, already held the silence of desertion. The clock said 6:03. There wasn’t much time to pack, not if she planned to get on the shuttle. Signy hoped she could find her down mittens, the clumsy, warm ones.
“Janine, you’d better call your cab,” Signy said. “I’ll make sure you don’t miss out on anything. I’ll stay on-line with you every minute while I’m traveling. You go on to Lisbon, baby. I’m going after Jared.”
“When?” Paul asked.
“Now,” Signy said.
“What if Tanaka pushes this incident aside, like they seem to be doing with that dead sailor?” Pilar asked.
“That’s why Janine has to get to Lisbon. We need to get some pressure, some live warm human pressure, on someone to help us sort this out. I’ll go down on the ice and see what I can find.” Knowing that she reverted, in this stress, to the primitive, to a need for hands-on, real-time flesh-and-blood contact.
Knowing that for this, virtual was not enough.
“You have to be hired,” Paul said. “No one goes there without a job.”
“Tell Tanaka we don’t have enough documentation to get them a product. Get me hired to finish up Jared’s work.”
“Sure.” Paul’s windowed face grinned a feral grin.
“What if Tanaka doesn’t give us any help? What if Tanaka is involved in this?” Pilar asked.
“Then we’ll give Tanaka a product Tanaka hasn’t asked for,” Paul said grimly. “We’ll give them the kind of image that will sink their little business forever.”
FOURTEEN
A rare sight in winter, Mount Rainier’s impeccable snowcap glinted above the city, an apparition bright enough to make Pilar squint. Clouds rolled in from the sound, predictably. The mountain would vanish in moments. Pilar was oblivious of its beauty, for somewhere in a repeating loop in the back of her mind tires howled on asphalt and metal screamed. She heard the tinkling of broken glass and the call of an owl in the sudden silence. The sound track from the night her parents died was always the same, each noise in its place, a memory track laid down in nightmare, and it ran again now, over the me
mory of Jared sinking into bitter cold.
Rainier vanished in fog. On a flatscreen display, Whiteline’s translations of a night’s work on a fishing ship scrolled past, the routine comments of workers at their jobs. There was no mention of Jared. Pilar watched the words go by and altered them with idle brush strokes, making them look like pagodas and flying birds. Jimmy sat quiet beside her, a stodgy lump of discomfort who obviously didn’t know what to do with this situation.
“This is a bad time for you,” Jimmy McKenna said. “I should go.”
Janine’s absence was a palpable thing in the Seattle house, a lack that made the air colder, more humid. Pilar could see, still, Janine’s firm little rump marching off into the dawn, a warrior on her way to bait an Asian fox called Tanaka in his lair.
“No,” Pilar said. “I don’t think so.”
“Jared is—special to you?”
“You mean is he my lover?”
“Yeah.”
Was he? Pilar never had really thought about it that much. Jared did good stuff with his cameras, moved well. In bed, he knew the timing and the touches; he knew a woman’s capacities, and his own. He was handy to have around for sex, or talk, or no sex if that’s how things went. But Jared didn’t wrap strings around a bed, or a friendship, or a job—
“Yes, he is. More a friend, though.”
Jimmy nodded as if he understood what she meant. Maybe he did.
Paul and Signy wanted Jimmy picked over, turned inside out, wanted Pilar to find out why Jimmy McKenna existed in their space. The boy—now, why did she think of him as boy? In virtual, where he had insisted on staying for most of the night, Jimmy presented a deft, far-ranging mind that leaped and danced through the worlds he chose to show her; Jimmy was proving himself to be a brilliant observer of visual forms and a musical epicure of fey and eclectic tastes.
Afraid of flesh, though. Pilar hadn’t pushed him. She sought Jimmy’s trust; she intended to ensorcel Jimmy, more or less, for Edges’ purposes. She liked him well enough to want to force him to bloom a little, too, and Pilar considered for a moment that she might be able to do it without harming him.