Cut Off

by Robertson, Edward W.

  They anchored, loaded up their landing canoe with their breathing equipment, and paddled to shore, leaving Sprite to man the yacht. The island was a narrow strip, dusty and brown, patchy with dull green grass, and swarming with shrieking birds. The cliffs were eroded in terraces that made the hike easier than it had looked from the water. They climbed to the topmost ridge. On the island's west side, the waves thrashed the shore; on the east, they barely lifted their heads. Up north, the shallow bottom hosted an undersea prairie of green kelp.

  Further east, though, the sun shined on something else: orange swathes deep below the surface.

  30

  He plunged into the water. Bubbles swirled around his face. He sucked on his regulator, panicked by the sudden cold of the water. He could no longer tell which way was up. His breath hissed and echoed. It felt far too loud, like his head had been jammed into a bowl and all the oxygen would be gone in another second. And then it was—he was still breathing, but there was no air in the air—and he had to breathe as fast as he could just to get any oxygen at all. His head went light, fluttery. His chest clamped down on itself, as if he was not five feet under water but five thousand. He needed to get above the water and get his mask off, but he still couldn't tell where the surface was.

  The bubbles. A column of them streaming from below as Tristan descended into the black. That was down, then. Something more: that was Tristan. Alone. Sprite couldn't possibly be down here—maybe once he'd had months to rebuild his strength. Sam had offered to come, but she was the only one with expertise of the explosives. There was zero chance she could be placed at risk. Sebastian would have been the most obvious candidate for the underwater venture, but his injury wasn't fully healed, and his last attempt to swim had stressed it badly.

  That left Ness and Tristan. She seemed competent and a half, yet even now, he hardly knew her. And if something happened to her—a failure in her equipment, an attack from the lab—he would be the only thing remaining between the virus and the world.

  His breathing had calmed enough for him to know he wasn't about to suffocate. All that remained was to trust that he could do as he had trained to do. What humanity and the Way required of him.

  Below, Tristan stopped and kicked around to face upward, gesturing at him. He held out his hand, raised one finger. A few moments later, he gave her the okay symbol. She flashed it back, spun around, and swam toward the shapes in the darkness.

  He followed.

  The top of the installation was nearly forty feet down, rising thirty feet from the sea bed. The structure was Y-shaped, three fat tubes jointed together in the middle, each branch forty feet across and a hundred long. Tristan claimed there were windows in the structure, yet the lighting inside was so dim he could hardly discern it from the moonlight until they'd descended halfway to the lab. A black blot drifted by his face. He swatted at it and the fish burst away. He gave his heart a second to quit thundering, then kicked to catch up with Tristan.

  She broke toward one leg of the Y. He angled toward another, stopping halfway down its length. The sides were rounded, but the top was flat enough to walk on. Starfish hugged the dull metal, sliding over barnacles and mussels. Small fish twitched away from his presence. Ness unsnapped the bag slung around his middle, withdrew a plastic box, and extracted the first charge. He pressed it snug to the top of the tube, molding the explosive into the jagged carpet of mussels, careful not to dislodge the detonators.

  Again, he had to wait for his heart to slow down. His mask smelled like his own sour breath and the tang of salt. He kicked toward the central hub, placed a charge in the seam between it and the tube, then swam to the next leg of the structure and did the same. By the time he placed another charge, Tristan was swimming over from the third leg of the Y. She flashed the okay sign. Together, they kicked away from the lab toward the shore. It was all Ness could do not to scream. Once the bottom climbed to meet them and they were less isolated in the open water, they hooked south along the shore, paddling over tendrils of kelp and schools of palm-sized fish, their bright colors muted in the night.

  On the long swim back to the yacht, he had a thousand visions of being snagged by a tentacle and dragged down into the crushing deep, or of being bitten in half by a cruising Great White. Then he was at the ladder at the back of the ship, climbing shakily, feeling ten times as heavy the instant he pulled himself from the water. As he stripped off his gear, Tristan dragged herself to the deck.

  "Well?" Sam said.

  Ness peeled his wetsuit down his legs. "It's done."

  "No sense waiting. Might want to get down."

  He gestured to Sebastian, who crouched and threaded his tentacles through the railing. Ness got down beside him. Tristan tromped next to him and knelt close enough that he could feel the warmth from her skin.

  A button clicked in Sam's hand. Waves sloshed against the hull, the only sound in the gentle night. Ness began to shiver—it was early December, and though the Mexican coast was a long, long ways from freezing, months in the tropics had spoiled him. He glanced at Sam.

  As soon as he shifted his eyes, light flashed beneath the water three hundred yards away. A giant spout erupted from the surface, mushrooming upward, the sea collapsing into the momentary crater in the waves. The moon glittered on the artificial rain spattering down from the clear skies.

  A sharp wave of force struck the yacht at the same moment they heard the muffled, hollow boom. Ness shouted, holding tight to the rail. The ship rocked, settled. The rain ceased, its hiss replaced by that of strong waves rushing against the rocky shore.

  "That," Sam said, "is how you blow something up."

  Tristan jumped to her feet. "Fuck those motherfuckers!"

  Sprite threw himself down the stairs from the cabin, somehow keeping hold of his balance. "Does this make us heroes? Can we go to Tijuana and demand a parade?"

  Ness laughed. "This was the only other source of the virus. At the very least, we deserve a vacation."

  Tristan tipped her head. "After you've lived in Hawaii, where do you go for vacation?"

  "Las Vegas," Sam said. "Our ninth island."

  "Hell no," Ness said. "No more deserts for me. Not unless they got working AC."

  Across the sea, the calming water began to boil. A line of steam vented into the night. The others fell silent, watching.

  Ness mushed his brows together. "Is that one of the charges?"

  "Those would be rather more expressive," Sam said. "Could be a secondary explosion. Chemical fire or something."

  Sebastian shook his head, jabbing a tentacle straight forward. He signed, "Start the boat and make it go now."

  "What for?" Ness said. "We're safe here."

  The alien shook his head wildly. "Make us go!"

  Ness turned to Sprite. "Fire up the engine."

  "Huh? I don't want to sail around these rocks at night. We'll tear ourselves in half."

  Out to sea, the cloud of steam was moving away from them, straight toward the mainland. Sam had her binocular clamped to her eyes. "That's a ship."

  Sprite's mouth fell open. He whirled and stomped up the steps. The motor roared to life, the anchor line clunking as it withdrew into the boat.

  "We got to stop them," Ness simultaneously said and signed. "If they managed to get out with a copy of the virus, Tijuana's not ten miles from here."

  The yacht was already swinging about, lumbering away from the rocky spine of the island. Tristan ran to the sails, hauling on lines to tighten them against the wind. Sebastian joined her.

  "Thing's got a tower sticking from it," Sam said. "Hardly any deck at all."

  "It's a submarine," Ness said. "We used to have one just like it. It must have been hidden beneath the lab."

  "Is it supposed to be smoking like that?"

  Ness accepted the binoculars. The sub's top was clear of the water, the steam replaced by thick black smoke whirling from its front. Dark shapes scurried around the tower. "Must have knocked a crack in them. That's what
forced them to surface."

  They were several hundred yards away and the engine was already blatting at full power. For a minute, they held distance; Sprite angled with the wind, Tristan and Sebastian tightening the sails. They began to close.

  Sebastian returned to the rail. Sam ran into the cabin and emerged with a long-barreled sniper rifle. She set up across the railing, eye to the scope, adjusting patiently to the pitch of the ship. Ness got out his laser. For the moment, the aliens on the top of the sub were too preoccupied with their own seaworthiness to have noticed the yacht.

  "Don't suppose you got a bazooka in the cabin," he called to Sam.

  She didn't look up from her scope. "Left it on Maui, I'm afraid."

  "What, didn't foresee the possibility we'd wind up in a race with a crippled submarine bristling with alien marines?"

  Sam smirked. Ahead, the sub continued to spew smoke into the air. The yacht was plowing ahead as fast as they'd ever managed, but Ness knew it wouldn't have been enough if the sub hadn't been crippled by the destruction of the lab. By the time they were two miles from the islands, they'd pulled within two hundred yards of the enemy vessel.

  On the sub's top, one of the aliens went still, facing them, lit by flickering orange. It gestured exaggeratedly to the others.

  "Incoming!" Sam said.

  She pulled the trigger. Her gun jolted her back, its shot roaring above the engine. In response, a laser beamed from the sub, crackling through the smoke in the air, followed by an ongoing flurry of shots as the alien's comrades joined in. Ness installed himself behind the rails and fired back. The beams lanced through the night crazily, skewed by the motions of the yacht. The sub provided a much steadier platform. A laser slashed into the ship, smoldering the canvas, smoke trailing across the deck. Another beam struck the railing and held long enough to melt a quarter-sized blob of solder before it blinked off. Sam's fourth shot spun an alien off the deck and into the sea.

  A glaring white point lifted from the sub. It climbed high into the air, hung at its apex for a single second, then leapt forward. Someone shouted, possibly Ness himself. The rocket sizzled over the yacht, the heat of its engine baking Ness' skin. It struck the water behind them and vanished in a bloom that lit the sea for hundreds of yards. A hot wind rushed over the yacht. Tristan raced to the jib with a tub of water and sloshed it over the smoldering canvas. Lasers diced the air around her.

  "We have to get closer!" she shouted. "So they can't use the missiles without blowing themselves up, too!"

  She'd no sooner said this than a second launched from the sub, arced upward, and streaked toward them. Ness threw himself flat. The rocket spun past, its smoky contrail corkscrewing behind it, and impacted into the water just behind and to starboard. The burst rocked the ship, the heat stinging Ness' eyes, the boom ringing in his ears. The engine coughed, burbling, then quit. Blue lights cut through the sudden quiet. The sub began to outpace them.

  From the cabin, Sprite screamed a litany of obscenities. The engine sputtered, then revved back to the fullness of its power.

  Ness gestured jaggedly to Sebastian. The alien nodded. A third rocket whoomped from the vessel, climbing, stalling. As it peaked, Ness and Sebastian fired a skein of blue lines, lashing wildly as the yacht rolled. The rocket jumped forward, crossing right through one of the bolts. The explosion flowered to all sides, pummeling the submarine's deck, washing it with fire.

  Ness dropped, struck down as much by his blindness as by the hammer of the shock wave. He pressed his forearm over his eyes. Sam and Tristan were yelling back and forth with Sprite. Ness felt the boat tip beneath him and slapped his arm to the deck to hold on. The inverted colors of the burst floated in his vision, but he could see the world, too, at first in charcoal shapes, then in increasing levels of resolution.

  "Are you not hurt?" Sebastian signed to him.

  "I made the mistake of looking where I was shooting," Ness signed back. "I take it everyone's alive?"

  Sebastian shook his head. "Not on the submarine."

  The smoke was even thicker yet, but they were close enough that Ness didn't have to use his binoculars to see the top of the sub had been scorched empty by the blast. The sub sped on unperturbed. Through gaps in the smoke, the mainland loomed nearer.

  "We board," Sebastian said. "I will look as their own."

  "You sure you're ready for that?"

  "I am sure."

  "Then let's tear this mother down." Ness ran down the deck and swung into the bridge. "Take us right up beside the sub. Me and Sebastian are going in."

  Sprite's teeth flashed. "Aye aye, Captain!"

  Ness returned to the prow. The other three were there, all eyes on the sub. "We're going to seize the sub. Sam, I'd like you to cover us from up here. Tristan?"

  Tristan swept her hair from her face. "There's no use for me up here."

  The yacht edged closer. The smoke around the sub cleared, dampened by the constant spray from the tower. Guided by Tristan's hand signals, Sprite maneuvered the yacht to the side of the submarine and eased down the throttle, matching speed. The sub's back was barely clear of the water. One slip, and they'd be cast into the sea to pray they weren't about to be chopped to chum by the yacht's prop.

  Ness moved to the railing, gazing down at the dark platform six feet below them. Before Ness could sign that he was ready, Sebastian was flying over the side. Ness laughed and tossed himself over.

  Sebastian landed with a whump, tentacles slapping the damp hull for support. Ness hit the deck in a crouch and toppled to the side. A gentle claw snapped around his arm, arresting his fall. Tristan landed, pitching forward and catching herself on her palms.

  The door to the ramp at the top of the tower was open. Sebastian led the way down. Inside, the lights were flickering. The air stunk of Swimmers and smoke. At the bottom, Sebastian moved into the central hallway bisecting the top level. Blue flashed from the dimness. An alien slumped across the floor. Sebastian scuttled ahead, then beckoned. Ness and Tristan jogged out from the ramp.

  "It is standard standard," Sebastian signed. "Control room first. Then room by room."

  He turned and ran, passing the vacant galley. He swung down to the control room, Ness and Tristan trailing twenty feet behind. Sebastian burst into the chamber, silhouetted by the monitors, then came to a stop, tentacles raising in confusion. Behind him, an alien emerged from the shadows and leveled a pistol at the back of Sebastian's head.

  Everything in Ness' vision disappeared but the claw, the gun, his friend. He planted his feet, gesturing broadly at Sebastian with one hand while leveling his pistol in the other. Sensing his motion, the Swimmer twitched. Sebastian threw himself to the side. Ness fired. The alien pitched forward, its laser burning through a gap between two of Sebastian's limbs. Sebastian shot the Swimmer as it fell, but it was already dead, smoke curling from a hole in its head.

  "A good shot," Sebastian signed. He slung himself into the chair before the monitors and began to bring the sub to a stop.

  Ness moved into the room and turned to cover the door, Tristan moving to the other side. As it turned out, the rest of the vessel was vacant. Once they had cleared it, they headed up top. The sea air tasted sweet. The yacht looked less sweet: burnt sails, a scorched and dented side from the second missile strike, slashed rigging swaying from the masts. Its idling engines fluttered in and out.

  "That's just great," Ness said. "We prevent a second Panhandler, and all we've got to show for it is two busted ships."

  "Wrong," Tristan said. "We've got a fleet."

  Sprite leaned his elbows on the railing. "Only if we patch these babies up. Right now, they're more messed up than I am."

  Tristan gazed to the north. "San Diego's only a few miles from here. Naval base. One of the biggest ports on the West Coast. We could try to fix them up there."

  Ness laughed. "It's either that or say hello to your new home in Tijuana."

  "San Diego's my vote." She slitted her eyes. "We'll have to be on watch.
Last time I was there, a real asshole had seized the throne."

  Back in the control room, they discovered the submarine would no longer start. With much swearing, they lashed the sub to the yacht and towed it to the coast north of the border. During the long, slow ride, which threatened to burn out the yacht's engines more than once, Sebastian tapped into the sub's network and discovered the ship was carrying a sample of the virus sealed in a semi-opaque plastic tube.

  As soon as they made it to shore, Sam rigged another charge. Sebastian wrapped it around the tube and set it in the sand. They retreated down the beach. Sam thumbed the button. One last boom rolled across the night.

  "I never thought I'd say this," Sprite said. "But I think I've seen enough things blow up today."

  "Is that the last copy?" Tristan said.

  "According to their records." Ness lifted his eyes from the smoking crater to the clear stars. "But the aliens don't have one big network. They're fractured."

  "Like us."

  "Thank goodness we're still busted up," he said. "Otherwise, they'd have released that thing and finished us off a long time ago."

  Unwilling to trust that the yacht was entirely seaworthy, they located an old ranger's station on the beach and spent the night inside it. In the light of day, Sebastian took a look at the sub and declared he could have it running by noon. He was wrong; it took him until nearly 3 PM. But with the sub able to operate under its own power—and its weapons system active—they entered San Diego with far greater confidence, tying up at a commercial pier.

  Sam threw herself at fixing the engine on the yacht while Sebastian got busy on the sub. Ness and Tristan provided security and supply runs. Sprite spent a lot of time walking around the docks and downtown. Ness assumed that was to rebuild his strength and acclimate to the strap-on wooden peg he insisted on using even now that they were in a city full of hospitals with prosthetics. He was proven completely wrong when Sprite returned one evening to announce that he'd met with a local tribe, who'd been watching them, and had negotiated a treaty and free passage through the city on the grounds they were accomplished alien hunters.