Cut Off

by Robertson, Edward W.

"This or I swim you to Hawaii," the alien gestured.

  Ness snorted. They got into the boat and struck east, then hugged the shore leading to the airport. Previously, the ocean had smelled pretty much like your typical ocean, but the inlets held the richer, muskier scent of water interacting with earth and plants. They guided the boat onto the strip of sand on the airport's back side and heaved the aluminum vessel up past the treeline. Gregarious birds cawed from the canopy.

  "Stay here with the boat," Ness signed. "We'll have a look at the docks. Back in two hours."

  Sebastian nodded. Ness led the way to the airport. It was a local field, just two full-size jets amidst a number of prop and business jets. He had the brief vision of using one of these instead of a boat—he had played several flight simulators in his day—but discarded that as soon as he saw the hose dangling from the fuel compartment of the largest jet. If these had been drained, no doubt the airport's fuel tanks had been sucked dry, too. Anyway, he didn't know shit about flying.

  They walked briskly past the silent tarmac. A highway sliced past giant warehouses with curved metal roofs. Vast paved lots were stacked with multi-colored containers, creating makeshift mazes. Someone had dragged chain link and barb wire into the passages, snarling them. Ness moved to the far shoulder of the road. Small metal tubes projected from the dirt: spent brass, tarnished with age. He moved on.

  They crossed a small river. A pier projected from another container yard. Ness watched the grounds a minute, then crossed the concrete for a look, but the only boats were bizarre things like floating trailers supported by pontoons on either side. Two had been pushed into shore by storms. A third was crunched into the pier, broken boards creaking with each sway of the meager current. Ness stared glumly at the wracks.

  Sprite pawed at his shoulder, pointing north. "Check it out."

  Less than a mile away, the coast turned to run east-west. As it swung about, an arm of water extended into the city. A series of piers thrust into the body of the sub-bay. Most appeared to be shipping-related, but through his binoculars, Ness spied dozens of small white boats docked in the deepest recess of the inlet.

  The marina turned out to have five docks, each of which housed an array of private vessels ranging from cigarette boats to yachts. Many were sunk and virtually all showed heavy damage from storms and the wear of the sea, but on the marina's right flank, forty more boats sat on dry land. Three of these were sailing yachts ranging from thirty to fifty feet in length. They were filthy with accreted dirt, but the sails were tucked neatly away inside their holds and their hulls appeared intact.

  Ness and Sprite scouted around for any signs of habitation, then backtracked to the airport. Inside the cover of the trees, Ness filled Sebastian in on what they'd found.

  "You are excited," Sebastian gestured.

  "Shouldn't I be? We've got our choice of boats and all the replacement parts we'll ever need!"

  "And it is good to see you break your inside ice."

  They ate and napped. After dark, they pulled the sailboat into the water and guided it to the marina, lugging it aground and taking down the sails, which would be a dead giveaway of recent use. The plan was simple: get a yacht up and running, then sail it back to their farmhouse in the north, where Ness would continue generating the fuel they'd need to help make sure they could get to Hawaii.

  Sebastian scuttled off to the warehouses beside the marina and emerged with three sacks clanking with tools. He climbed inside the cabin and went to work. Ness decided the best use of his time was to keep watch, but by the first hints of dawn, there had been no sight or sound of other humans.

  After sleeping, he went from boat to boat, checking their fuel levels. Each one had been drained long ago. In an administrative building, he found an expansive maritime library. Some of the books were written in local languages, but many of the official texts were English. As Sebastian mucked about with the engine, and Sprite practiced rigging the beached boats and moved on to the semi-seaworthy vessels at the marina, Ness read and read, skimming where appropriate, homing in on anything related to long-term maintenance and extended voyages.

  It was in this way that he discovered their plan had no chance of success.

  "Oh fuck." Ness dropped the manual to the table with a thunk and jogged into the blaring daylight.

  No sign of Sebastian. He waved his hands over his head, then jumped up and down, turning in a slow circle. From the mast of the yacht beside the one they'd claimed, a piece of the rigging detached and waved back. Ness blinked and Sebastian resolved from the ropes. Ness jogged across the cracked asphalt to meet him.

  "We're making the wrong kind of fuel," Ness gestured.

  "What is wrong?"

  "Ethanol. You can't use it in boats."

  "Is this law? There is no more law."

  "Not a law of people. A law of nature."

  "I do not see," Sebastian signed. "Your fuel was used in the smaller boat."

  Ness nodded. "That's because it only had to get us fifty miles. Long-term, it dissolves gaskets and such and leaves the engine full of water. It'd kill our engine halfway through the trip."

  "Why do you have one fuel for one thing and another fuel for another? All things go the same."

  "I imagine that, a long time ago, two guys had different ideas about which system was best, so we wound up with both."

  "Not elegant." A bird winged past and Sebastian flicked up one of his sense-pods. "What can we use instead?"

  "Gasoline, but it's all bad by now. Jet fuel would probably work, but the airport got tapped long ago."

  "Can you make more gasoline?"

  "Not a chance."

  "Shit!"

  Ness laughed out loud, but his humor didn't last. "Could try it with sails alone. But I don't care for that option. We don't have nearly enough experience."

  As if to prove his point, at that very moment Sprite was wrestling with the rigging of a twenty-foot sloop as it drifted across the calm waters of the marina. The rocky shore loomed nearer and nearer. Moments before impact, Sprite glanced up, went wide-eyed, and cannon-balled off the side with a yelp. The sloop crunched into the rocks.

  "Can you make diesel?" Sebastian signed.

  "That's a million times more complicated than ethanol. Why?"

  "Because that is what this boat likes."

  "It's a diesel engine?" Ness closed his eyes, unable to take any more. "Then ethanol would never have worked in the first place. This is hopeless."

  "I will think," Sebastian gestured. "We will find our way."

  While Sebastian noodled on that problem, Ness dived into the issue of navigation. The marina library came through big time: while determining latitude was relatively straightforward—it could be done by measuring the angle of the sun or stars versus a chart, something that could be done with a sextant or octant, which the library display cases featured several of—the discovery of longitude had apparently been a centuries-long international quest involving many of history's brightest minds, not to mention million-dollar prizes from England, France, and various other historical powers who'd once had a vested interest in figuring out how to quit depositing their navies at the bottom of the ocean.

  Very interesting, and Ness intended to return to these histories once they were at sea, but for the time being, all he cared about was the solution. This turned out to require nothing more than an accurate clock, something that had been a bitch to get right back in the day, but had become trivial in the modern era.

  Which they were no longer in. Mechanical clocks were about to get extremely valuable—as were those who could maintain and build them. If they were ever able to put an end to the Swimmer shadow war, Ness thought he might enjoy learning to become a clockmaker. It seemed right up his alley, and it would be nice to prevent navigation from regressing by hundreds of years.

  In the meantime, the display cases held several marine chronometers, a name that sounded fancier than the reality: analog clocks in wooden boxes. After winding them
, he discovered two that still worked. The next day, he calculated local noon and reset the clocks.

  They began to run low on food. Ness and Sprite tried the jungle east of the marina and returned with wild breadfruit and some kind of citrus that resembled a lemon but tasted like an orange. In their absence, Sebastian had caught five yellow-striped fish, but the alien returned from his swim with something much more valuable than meat: an idea.

  He refused to explain, gesturing vaguely about the tests he'd need to run first. Ness rolled his eyes and got back to practicing with his navigational gear. The following morning, as he slept beneath a tarp on the boat's deck, he was jolted awake by the rumble of its engine. He leapt to his feet, feeling the vibration in his soles, and ran to the cabin, where Sebastian was clicking his claws in high amusement.

  "What are you doing?" Ness gestured in the darkness; it wasn't yet dawn, but the cabin was illuminated by the glow of readouts and instruments. "You can't put ethanol in this engine!"

  "Not ethanol," Sebastian said. "Diesel."

  Ness scanned the panels, but there were no obvious red lights, and he supposed the fact it was running was proof enough. "Where'd you find the fuel?"

  "Yesterday I fished. To catch the fish, I followed them to the places fish go but humans can't." Sebastian spread his tentacles as if to say voila.

  "I have no idea what that means."

  "Underwater!" the alien signed. "They hide in the boats that are under the water."

  While hunting fish, Sebastian explained, he'd noticed them congregating around sunken vessels. As he contemplated how happy Ness and Sprite would be to have fresh fish, Sebastian had then made an intuitive leap: the sunken boats, out of reach of human efforts, might still have fuel in them. Few did, and what little Sebastian had managed to find turned out to be gasoline, but then he'd remembered another source: the container ships at the industrial port they'd seen from the island.

  The previous night, Sebastian had swum to them. Via a process involving his laser and some other business he couldn't explain well enough for Ness to grasp, he had cut into one of the behemoth boats and collected a few gallons of fuel before resealing it. That was what he was using to power the yacht they were presently standing on. Thus all they needed to do was figure out a way to bring up the diesel in quantity.

  "Which is not as easy as it sounds," Ness told Sprite after relaying Sebastian's scheme. "No siphoning. Gravity's working against us."

  Sprite lifted a derisive eyebrow. "You're forgetting this is a marina. One of those aquatic ones. There's a jillion water pumps around here."

  A slow grin spread across Ness' face. "Suppose we can find one that'll run on ethanol?"

  Finding one was as simple as searching the warehouse next door. To better the chances it would be able to work so far underwater—according to Sebastian, the submerged fuel tanks were at least twenty feet below the surface—they went with the largest pump they had the strength to move. Sebastian cleaned it up and flipped it on. The engine rumbled across the warehouse. The sound would be a problem. To get an idea of the time frame they'd be operating on, Ness tested the pump on water and discovered it was good for something like thirty gallons per minute.

  That was highly promising. He didn't know how much the yacht's tanks held, but it had to be at least two hundred gallons, maybe a few times that much. With the pump operating at full power, they wouldn't have to run it any longer than ten or twenty minutes. Finished with his figures, Ness sat back at the warehouse table, highly pleased with himself, until he realized he was a fucking dunce cap and that it didn't matter how loud the pump would be when it would be muffled by twenty feet of ocean.

  The penultimate piece of the puzzle lay in figuring out how to pipe the diesel to the surface. Ness cracked that one by making a trip to the airport and returning with a cart loaded up with one of the lengthy hoses they'd once used to gas up the jets.

  All that left was getting the yacht from land into the water. That consumed two complete days by itself, a chain of events that felt like a living Rube Goldberg device. Locate the biggest pickup truck they could find. Push it down to the marina. Replace its corroded battery with one from a garaged car. Rig that battery up to the boat's longer-lasting marine battery for a jump. Hook the truck to the yacht trailer. Finally, lower the trailer down the steep, deepwater ramp.

  At that point, with the trailer all but submerged and the boat halfway launched, the truck's brakes had given out with a squeal. Ness was forced to fling himself out the door as the trailer and pickup were sucked into the sea, never to ride again.

  After his initial horror dimmed, he started laughing instead. He swam to the boat, climbed its ladder, and joined the others in the cabin. "I don't think we did that right at all!"

  Tentacle on the throttle, Sebastian flipped on the engine and backed the boat away from the ramp. Once he'd cleared it from the marina and the bevy of half-sunk ships clogging its waters, he cut the engine while Sprite adjusted the sails. Silently, they made speed into the bay and hove due west toward the giant port.

  As they neared the warehouse-crusted docks, Sprite struck the sails. They drifted closer, bleeding speed, and dropped anchor, watching the port for motion while the current finalized their position. They found they weren't directly above the sunken cargo ship, but there was enough length to their jet fuel hose that it didn't matter.

  They winched the pump over the side of the boat, then Sebastian slid down the ladder beside it. They disappeared into the water together, the alien guiding the machinery into unseen position while Sprite fed the hose into their fuel tank. Several minutes later, the hose twitched. A stream of diesel gurgled into the tank. The tang of fuel overwhelmed the smell of the sea.

  Seven minutes and thirty-two seconds later, according to Ness' chronometer, the first lantern appeared on the dock. The owner adjusted its beam to point directly at the ship.

  19

  She ran straight to the creek and up into the jungle. Ke sat on the front porch watching the approach. As soon as he saw her, he popped to his feet and jogged down the steps.

  "Stop." He lifted his hands to a guard. "And get that look off your face. You don't get to be angry."

  For a moment, she wasn't, too confused to have room for anything else. "What are you talking about?"

  "You...threatened her. Told her you'd eliminate her. I should be the one coming for you."

  Her face burned, but she refused to lower her eyes from his. "I was angry. That wasn't serious."

  "How more serious can you get?"

  "If I'd truly believed it, she would never have heard me say it out loud."

  His glare lost its hard edges. "I don't know what it says about you that I believe that."

  "Don't pretend you're any different." She moved toward the stairs.

  Ke didn't move. "He doesn't want to talk to you."

  Tristan raised her eyebrows. "He doesn't get a choice."

  "What are you going to do, knock me out and drag Alden off by his hair? You can't win this, Tristan. You have to back off. Let him be his own person."

  "Says the guy who intended to knock Alden out and drag Robi away when she wanted to make her own decisions."

  "That helped teach me how dumb I was being." He glanced up at the house, smiling vaguely. "So have the past few weeks. I've never seen her more happy."

  "Is he that mad?"

  "He's pretty mad. Two people as close as they are, something like this gets them spinning like a bolo."

  She clenched her hands. "I can't leave him alone, Ke."

  "You won't," he said, touching her upper arm and withdrawing contact quickly. "I'll be here."

  Part of her wanted very badly to trample him and storm the steps and kick down the door. Instead, she deflated. Anything she did would only extend the rift between herself and Alden. There was only one route left for her: walk away. Give him time. And watch over him from afar.

  She turned back down the path. Once the trees took her, she heard the
front door creak open. She slowed, hoping to make out their words, but they spoke too softly for her to pick up.

  Back by the sea, the house felt so silent she couldn't stay inside it. She went down to the shore and ran for miles, going barefoot so her mind would be forced to occupy itself finding safe footing. She was gone more than an hour and hardly had the strength to keep going through the final stretch back to the house. It was still hardly ten in the morning by the time she returned and scrubbed herself down. The rest of the day loomed ahead.

  She worked on the garden, hacking at weeds, churning dirt, inadvertently scaring lizards into the trees. It was useful work, particularly if Ke had underestimated the amount of extra food he'd need to support a new member of the household. More importantly, it ate up her time as hungrily as a man who's been lost at sea, and left her tired enough to fall asleep as soon as the sun was down.

  She woke in the darkness. Once she was awake enough to use it, she got her machete and chopped open a coconut to flavor her poi. She was hiking up the stream to Ke's before the east began to turn the clouds blue. She waited in the woods with binoculars. Morning birds peeped. Wind touched the fronds. A light rain pattered through the leaves. By the time the kids got up to use the latrine, the clouds had dispersed and the sun was up. They returned to the deck to sit in the shade, waking up and eating breakfast. They worked the garden for an hour before walking down the creek to the pools to swim. Tristan followed, easing through the boisterous undergrowth.

  Over the next few days of shadowing them, she learned two key truths. First, they were incredibly boring. Most of the time, they sat around with their arms around each other. Sometimes they looked at things. At other times, they talked, usually too softly to hear. When she could make out their words, it was always about their future together: gauzy voices describing the house they would build, the garden they would tend, the animals they would find and husband. There was never any mention of Ke or Tristan in this future.

  The second thing she learned was that they were having an incredible amount of sex. It seemed to be able to happen at any moment: whenever one accidentally touched the other the wrong (or right) way, or whenever the silence dragged on for more than a few minutes. Beside the pools. In the jungle. On the beach. Tristan set down her binoculars at these points, but remained in place, not wanting to stir the brush and alert them. She had never felt as much passion for anyone as they flung at each other. Had she never found the right person? Had she been too unwilling to step out of herself and into abandon? Or were they the freaks?