by Paul Chafe
“I’m going.”
Khalsa grabbed his arm. “You don’t understand. Our ship just committed to direct descent. This is an unauthorized reentry; if we abort we won’t be able to do it again. When it gets here, we’re getting on and going. It can’t wait around, not five minutes.”
“Put it on hold.”
Khalsa met his gaze, saw the determination there. He clicked keys on his beltcomp, waited, clicked more keys. “No answer. It must already be into ionization blackout.” He looked at Tskombe. “Whatever it is, it’s not important enough.”
Tskombe shook away the restraining hand. “Believe me, it is exactly that important. I’ll be back in thirty minutes.” He left at a run, before dolphin or human could say anything else. He ran on the slidewalks, heedless of cameras, his breathing deep and rhythmic, synchronized with the long, steady stride he learned in the infantry school. In fifteen minutes he was at a familiar doorway.
“Hey friend…” Tskombe ran past the door hustler and into the brothel before he could start his pitch. Moira was still there.
“Hello, soldier. What can I do for you?”
“Is Trina available?”
“She’s got a client.” Moira tut-tutted. “But don’t worry, your appointment is confirmed for tomorrow evening.”
“I need to see her now.”
“You can’t. Now let’s not be troublesome.” The words were gentle, but an edge of steel came into Moira’s voice that belied her matronly demeanor. A brothel would have problems, now and again, and the madam had to have means of dealing with them. “Let me get you another girl.”
Tskombe ignored her and ran up the stairs to room five. The door was closed, and locked when he tried it. Behind him he could hear footsteps on the stairs, Moira and possibly the doorman, doubtless armed. He wouldn’t be the first client to make trouble over one of their whores, wouldn’t be the last. He slammed his shoulder against the door, but it was steel and didn’t budge. He slammed it again and pounded, and then Moira was there, a mercy gun in her hand.
“Stop that, soldier.” Her voice was tense. “Or you’re going to wake up in an alley with a headache.”
“Look, I need to talk to Trina.”
“We all need something…” She stopped as the door opened to Trina’s client.
“What the hell is it?” The man was naked, and visibly annoyed. He was Tskombe’s age, but unlike Tskombe he looked it, partially bald with a bulging belly. His glistening, half-erect penis protruded obscenely.
“Excuse the interruption.” Moira’s voice was warm and soothing. “My friend here was just leaving.”
“Trina!” Tskombe called her name without taking his eyes off Moira’s.
“What are you doing here?” He flicked his eyes sideways for a second. She was at the door behind the man, naked also.
“I’m going to Wunderland, Trina. No idents required. You can come if you want.”
“She can’t leave.” Moira’s voice was flat and emphatic.
Trina ignored her. “When?”
“Right now. I came back to give you the chance. It’s up to you. I won’t be back tomorrow.”
“What’s going on?” The doorman had come up the stairs behind Moira.
“She can’t leave!” Moira was starting to lose control.
Trina looked at Moira, looked at Tskombe. “I’m going.”
“You can’t.” Moira waved her weapon, her voice shrill. “You, soldier, you’ve got ten seconds to get out of here and never come back. Trina, get back in your room.”
Tskombe kept his eyes on the madam, spoke slowly and firmly. “I’m going to take your advice, and I’m leaving in ten seconds. If Trina comes with me you’ll never see us again. If she doesn’t, I’ll be back in thirty minutes with fifty ARM troopers. Shoot me full of mercy needles and I’ll be back in the morning and I won’t be happy. Kill me and it won’t be the ARM, it’ll be half of Strike Command, out of uniform and looking for payback. Take your pick.” He locked eyes with Moira, daring her to call his bluff. She raised the gun and he watched her finger tightening on the trigger. For a long moment the tableau held, and then she lowered it again.
“Take her. She’s trash anyway.” Moira’s voice was thick with rage. She turned and stormed down the stairs, sweeping the doorman in front of her.
Tskombe turned to Trina, but his eyes found her client, his face red with anger. “Hey! I paid…” Tskombe’s fist smacked into the fat man’s face with the sound of an axe hitting wood, cutting him off in mid complaint. He staggered back, blood streaming from a broken nose.
“Work it out with Moira.”
“Let’s go.” Trina was already dressed in a black jumpsuit, a small pack over one shoulder. They left the fat man there, walked out through an empty lobby. Tskombe checked his beltcomp. Twenty-three minutes gone, seven to make it down to the flood wall to catch the ship.
“Why did you come for me?”
“Someone had to. Are you always packed and ready to leave?”
“I packed after you left.”
“Why did you do that?”
“It was time to go. I always know when it’s time to go.”
He didn’t argue, there wasn’t time. There was an ARM cruiser patrolling the slidewalk level, and another one higher up, while a swarm of hoverbots whirred overhead. In his reckless run on the slidewalk level Tskombe had surely been picked up by several cameras.
No sense in wasting time. Tskombe put one hand over an eye, as if he was injured and waved wildly at the nearer cruiser. It was a calculated risk. The cruiser’s AI might bust him anyway, but in the dark with half his face covered it wouldn’t have much to work on. The cruiser slid over and grounded and the driver got out.
“What’s the problem?” The cop reached out.
With combat-trained reflexes Tskombe grabbed the cop’s offered hand and pulled, overbalancing him. He stepped back as the man fell forward and rotated his hips, brought his other hand to the man’s shoulder in one fluid motion, then used both hands to drive the cop to the ground with his own stiff arm as a lever. The cop grunted in pain and Tskombe dropped down with one knee in the small of his back. Using his left hand to control the trapped arm he grabbed the cop’s mercy gun from his holster. The cop’s partner was already on her way out of her side of the cruiser and Tskombe locked his eyes on her, bringing the weapon up to his line of sight until the line of the barrel intersected his target. He pulled the trigger and the weapon sprayed slivers of anesthetic. She went down, instantly unconscious as they dissolved in her bloodstream.
The cop under him surged and struggled to get to his feet and Tskombe put a burst into him as well. The heavy body relaxed and he looked up. Two hoverbots were already closing in. They probably hadn’t tagged his ident yet, but they were responding to the violent scene and they’d be reporting the situation to their controllers as they moved.
“Get in the cruiser” he yelled, but Trina was already running. He ran after her and dived into the driver’s side, slamming the door shut just as a spray of mercy needles splattered against the glass. Ahead of him the other cruiser switched on its patrol lights, flashing red and blue. They were on to him, and with ARM officers down they wouldn’t be alone for long. Dispatch would already be vectoring other units on to him. Most gravcars could only fly automatic over the city, but an ARM cruiser would have an override, hopefully already engaged. He punched the cruiser’s throttle and polarizers whined as they shot forward. So far so good. They blew past the other cruiser and it pivoted to follow them. Tskombe took them into the bottom of the eastbound traffic level. Traffic was dense and he edged up through it.
“What are we doing?” Trina’s voice was remarkably level, given the circumstances.
“Getting out of here, hang on.” The other cruiser was in the traffic pattern behind them. There was an intersection ahead and he pulled the cruiser up to the top of the eastbound level on the right-hand side. As they entered the intersection he pulled up and canted the thrust side
ways, whipping them around a tight left-hand curve and up into the bottom of the northeast-bound level into the northbound level. He held the thrusters there, dodging through holes in the traffic pattern until they broke out the top of the northbound level and plunged into the bottom of the northwest-bound level, still within the confines of the intersection. They missed a heavy transporter by inches, and a second later there was a heavy, jarring bang as they collided with a building. The cruiser kept flying, though, and then they were into the westbound level, merging again to the southwest-bound level, merging with the heavy flow heading down and across the river. Tskombe looked around but the ARM was nowhere in sight. The main worry was that they’d shut down his controls and take the car on remote, but there would be some confusion in the dispatch center, and it would take them some time to figure out just which car he’d taken. That wouldn’t last long, but he only needed a couple of minutes. He scanned the skies.
There! A vertical streak in the sky, like a shooting star in slow motion, falling away from the full moon overhead. He banked the thrusters and pulled the car up, taking it out of the traffic flow and over the city in a ballistic curve. Down below he could see dozens of flashing red and blue lights. The ARM were out in force, on full alert. He concentrated on the glowing line as it plunged to the waterfront, adjusting course to intersect its projected endpoint.
“They’re behind us.” Trina was looking backward, still sounding calm.
“How close?”
“Maybe a minute.”
“They can’t do anything until we stop.”
“Let’s hope not.”
He could see the ship now, a rapidly growing cross at the end of its ionization trail, almost directly overhead in its vertical descent trajectory. It was impossible to tell at that distance, but he guessed it would be a courier, the same type of ship as the Swiftwing he’d stolen to escape from Kzinhome, but with the straight-angled lines of human design. He turned his eyes back to the ground, searching along the south Manhattan shoreline for the container terminal. They were less than a minute away. More flashing red and blue lights lifted out of the traffic pattern, rising on intercept trajectories. It was going to be a very close race between the ship, themselves, and the ARM.
The courier ship was just touching down as they came in to land. To shave seconds Tskombe didn’t decelerate as they fell toward the rendezvous. That turned out to be a mistake. The cruiser didn’t have the power reserves of the combat cars he was used to. He dumped full power to the polarizers at the last instant before touchdown but it wasn’t enough to fully arrest their descent. The cruiser hit the top of the seawall hard and slid, plasmet crumpling. An instant later they were airborne again, arcing out over the water. Instinctively he fed power to the polarizers to prevent a second impact but they were wrecked, scrubbed off the bottom of the vehicle when they hit. The water came up hard and they were stopped. There was a second’s pause while the vehicle rocked and the spray of their impact rained down around them, and then he felt water swirling around their feet. The car was sinking fast, bubbles already boiling up from the shorting forward batteries. He undid his harness buckle, realizing he didn’t remember doing it up in their flight, and then reached over to undo Trina’s.
“We’re going to have to swim for it.”
“I know.”
But there was already too much water pressure against the doors to open them, and the windows wouldn’t open without power. The river swirled over the front of the canopy as the vehicle nosed down and under. Frantically he kicked at the windows but the transpax didn’t yield. The pale moonlight faded and turned murky as they slid beneath the waves and the water boiled up higher inside.
“We’re going to drown!” For the first time Trina’s voice held an edge of fear.
Tskombe started to say something reassuring, was cut off by a hard bang as the overloaded batteries exploded. The shock drove his head against the canopy and when he looked up he felt wetness on his face, whether blood or water it was now too dark to tell. “We just have to wait for the pressure to equalize.” He managed to keep most of the panic out of his voice, pushing hard on the door as he spoke. It might as well have been welded to the frame. The pressure wouldn’t equalize until they were sitting on the bottom. How far down would that be? They couldn’t be that far from the seawall, but the ship channel was dredged deep to clear the hulls of the superfreighters. The seawall sloped at forty-five degrees; every meter away from the shore meant another meter down. Too far down and they had no hope of survival. That thought galvanized him and he slammed his shoulder hard against the door, but it didn’t budge. They were angled steeply forward, and the water in the foot wells was halfway up his thighs.
“Remember to breathe out all the way up. If you hold your breath you’ll rupture your lungs. You’ll have lots of air.” He breathed deep himself, trying to sound calm. “I’ll say ready, and you’ll have time for three deep, quick breaths to get lots of oxygen into your blood, and then I’ll say go. We both open our doors then. Just swim up and keep breathing out.”
“Okay.” Trina’s voice was calmer, but the fear was still there. His ears popped painfully. It was totally dark now, and the pressure was still going up. How far had they bounced from the seawall top? He tried to think back. It was ten meters at least, maybe more than twenty. From ten meters they might make it, from twenty they probably wouldn’t. There was a sharp, metallic spang overhead and his ears unpopped. Reflexively he put his hand up in the darkness, to discover the gravcar’s roof bowed in from the inexorably building pressure. He shoved against the door again, but it didn’t move. At this depth the water pressure against the door would be measured in tonnes. If the vehicle weren’t flooding fast enough to counterbalance some of it, that pressure would have already crushed the passenger compartment like a mealpack under a boot.
How far to the bottom? Even as he thought it they grounded with a jarring thump and tilted backward, the water sloshing around his chest. He expected them to settle to an even keel but they didn’t, a second, softer jolt halting their descent still pitched steeply nose down. Why was that? An instant later a grating sound and a lurch told him the reason. They had landed on the steep sloped seawall, slick with mud and algae, and now they were sliding down it. The door was still held closed by the water, but they would slide more slowly than they sank, slowly enough that the pressure would equalize and they could get out. Maybe.
The water was up to his chin when he felt the door give a little. “Trina, ready…” He heard her breathe in-and-out, in-and-out as he did it himself. On the last breath he said “Go!” and shoved his shoulder hard against the door. There was a rush of bubbles and the dark water flooded into the tiny remaining airspace. He pushed out hard into the blackness to clear the car so he wouldn’t get snagged on anything. His feet found the seawall and he kicked up, breathing out and swimming hard. How far to the surface?
Something whip thin and steel strong grabbed him by the arm, wrapping around it tight enough to hurt and pulling hard. He screamed, precious air bubbling free, grabbing at it with his free hand. Another something wrapped itself around that arm and then he was being hauled through the water fast enough that the current sucked his jump boots right off his feet. With strength born of the drowning terror he fought against whatever it was. His foot connected with slick flesh over powerful muscles, but that made no difference at all to whatever had taken him.
Suddenly light blazed and he broke the surface, splashes echoing close, something solid against his belly. Whatever had him by the arms let go and he fell forward, breathed deep and opened his eyes. He wasn’t on the surface, he was in a transpax sphere better than two meters across, lit from above and full of air, open to the water at the bottom, a diving bell. Outside it a tooth-grinned face operated a large buttoned control panel. Dolphins! The dolphin was wearing a set of dolphin hands, but used its nose to run the panel. An instant later Trina arrived in another splash, thrust into the bell by the manipulator tentacles
of another set of dolphin hands, a dolphin trilling behind her, as it pushed her up the bell’s side enough to hang on. A second later it vanished with a splash. Was that Curvy? Did she anticipate this outcome in her strategic matrix and have help standing by, or was the dolphin dive crew there anyway? Trina coughed and gasped, shaken but alive. The dolphin controlling the bell nudged a lever with delicate precision. A motor hummed and bubbles began to spill out the bottom of the bell as it rose through the murky water. There were no handholds; the bell was simply a place for dolphins to grab a breath while working on a deep-water site. They were forced to brace themselves awkwardly on the slippery, curved sides on the bell to stop themselves from falling into the water. A large, mechanical shape loomed in the murk and vanished again—some other piece of dolphin hardware, maybe a submarine. It occurred to Tskombe that the dolphin world was one where ARM not only had no control but had almost no knowledge. Their civilization numbered in the millions and occupied three quarters of the planet’s surface. What did they do with the technology they bought?
His ears popped again, and overhead light began to filter in from the surface. They seemed to be rising slowly, but their ascent rate would have been enough to kill them both with the bends if they’d been under pressure any longer than a few seconds. How long were we down? How deep? He’d never know the answer. Deep enough that we would have died without the dolphins. The top of the bell broke the surface and city light flooded through the transpax. The bell’s waterline was well above his head, so he couldn’t see what direction they were moving, but then his feet touched solid ground, hard and slippery. They were back to the seawall. The bell driver touched the control panel again and they stopped. End of the line. He looked across to Trina, saw her nod in understanding, and ducked back underwater and out of the diving bell. He floundered up the seawall slope, found himself alone.
For a second panic gripped him. Trina! But Trina was out on her side and coming up, coughing and cursing. He grabbed her and hauled her up, the fibercrete tearing at his bare feet. The courier was there, its underhull glowing red and radiating palpable heat, actually floating over the water, its boarding ramp extended to the seawall. A big empty bowl had formed in the river beneath it where the polarizers were holding back its weight in water. He ran for the ramp just as the first of the ARM cruisers braked to a stop on the top of the seawall, blinding spotbeams swinging to pinpoint them. An amplified voice demanded that they halt, and an instant later Trina collapsed. Without breaking stride he picked her up and ran. He slipped and fell on the steep, slick surface, tearing flesh while mercy needles spattered where he would have been if he hadn’t fallen. He picked her up again and ran for the courier as more ARM cruisers dropped to the seawall top. He was actually on the boarding ramp when a dozen wasp stings stitched across his back. Numbness spread where they hit and he felt his knees going weak. He staggered forward a few more steps and then collapsed, spilling Trina onto the rough-surfaced metal. Everywhere he looked there were blinding spotbeams. He squeezed his eyes shut and crawled up the ramp, trying vainly to roll Trina up the slope. There was a roaring in his ears, and in the distance the sound of barked commands. He couldn’t make out what they were saying, and darkness fell.