Erik didn’t waste any more time arguing with her. “Jester to the Genesis with support crew, check.”
Ana couldn’t let the subject go. “But the Genesis is a sublight ship. It can’t—”
Jewel cut her off. “That will actually be an advantage if we can get beyond the slide-radius. The Armenites shouldn’t have the conventional fuel to chase us that far beyond the bounds of this system and while they can travel faster in slide space, they can’t actually reach us again until we enter another star system.”
She could see Ana’s mind spinning around the apparent contradiction that in some regards the ancient colonizer vessel was actually more flexible than modern ships.
The engineer nodded firmly. “I agree. It’s at least a chance. What else do we need to do?”
Jewel wasted no time wondering how she, the ship’s purser, had ended up giving orders to the ship’s engineer and executive officer. She was a Cartelite, and her people hadn’t made their fortunes in the tabloid-fodder parties that they’d become so famous for. They’d done it in the real world where they were smarter and tougher than everyone else in the galaxy. “Erik, you’re the exec, fully able to take over for the captain, right?”
“Of course,” Erik agreed.
“Then I need you to figure out where you think the Armenites will overtake and destroy the Euripides and plot us a course that takes us as far away from that spot as possible. We do not want to fall into Armenite missile range while we build up enough speed to escape.”
“You think they’ll fire upon the Euripides?” Ana asked in horror.
“They’re not going to let them escape from this system,” Jewel said with confidence. “They’ll fire upon us too if we let them.”
“What else?” Erik asked.
“While all of that’s being done, the rest of us are going to try to rescue our miners—”
“We’re what?” Ana asked again. Despite her broken arm, the engineer surged to her feet. “They’re out of contact a mile beneath the surface and we’ve got Armenites coming in system. I don’t want to sound cruel, Jewel, but not only do we not have time to help them, but we don’t have the ability to rescue them anyway.”
“Jester?” Jewel asked over the com. “How long to prep the Genesis for flight?”
“Nine days,” Jester promptly replied.
Ana’s face blanched in horror.
“Without all the safety protocols,” Jewel told him.
“You mean just go up to the ship and turn the engines on?” Jester asked.
“Precisely. Since the Armenites are likely to blow us up anyway, I think we can dispense with the normal cautious checklists.”
“Let me see if I have that on my slate,” Jester said. About thirty seconds later, he spoke again. “I’m not positive, but it looks like the normal warmup time for the engines is twelve hours.”
“So we have twelve hours after you reach the Genesis before the ship can leave orbit?”
“That’s right,” Jester said. “I can try and shave that down more, but it’s a good estimate.”
“We’ll need more than half that time to get off this launch and up to the star system.”
“Then I’d better get going,” Jewel said. “Arico’s still missing and we have to check on the miners.”
Ana grabbed her by the front of her coat, wincing with pain even as she tried to make Jewel listen. “You don’t even know if they’re alive.”
“That’s exactly right,” Jewel said. “But we don’t know if they’re dead either. For all we know there are twenty-two men down there working hard to make us rich and you want to abandon them because of a breakdown in communications.”
Ana let go of her. There was fear on her face, but also growing horror as the truth of Jewel’s words sank in.
“So this is what we’re going to do,” Jewel summarized. “First we push the rest of those cargo units over the edge before they batter the Tanngrisnir to pieces. Then I dive on the Jörmungadr to try to find out what happened to Strongheart and his people. And while we’re at it, let’s keep our eyes peeled for Arico, if he’s really over the edge I don’t see how we can help him, but…”
She let her voice trail off, wishing there was something they could do for the man.
Erik’s voice came over the com-link. “That’s a plan, Jewel. Let’s make it happen, people.”
* * * * *
“You do realize you’re completely insane, don’t you?” Ana asked.
Jewel and Falco had splinted the engineer’s arm and given her painkillers, so Erik’s ex-girlfriend was back to her functional, often abrasive, self. Funny that Jewel was starting to like the older woman again.
“Let me ask you something,” Jewel said as she pulled on the least battered of the all-environment suits still on the Tanngrisnir. The best suits were all currently being worn by the miners down below and this one looked like it could substitute for a patchwork quilt, but it was all that she had to work with.
Ana stopped checking the seals on Jewel’s suit and gave her her full attention. “What do you want to know?”
“If we run away from here without knowing whether those men and women down there are alive or dead, would you be able to sleep at night?”
Ana opened her mouth as if to make a quick retort, but stopped and considered the question. “Maybe not,” she finally conceded, “but I won’t be sleeping well either if the Armenites catch us.”
“Then I’d better get going,” Jewel said just before she sealed her helmet.
She positioned herself on the top of the gunnel and prepared to fall back into the waves. She was frightened—or maybe the proper term was downright terrified—but one of the things that differentiated her from the rest of her family was that she genuinely cared about people. Life could not simply be about chasing profits. She’d always believed that, much to the annoyance of her parents. Now was her chance to find out if she was the woman she wanted to be or the little Cartelite hypocrite her parents had tried to raise.
But there was one more thing she had to do before she dropped. She might find her parents disgusting. She might hope to never have the opportunity to see them again. But she didn’t hate them. And she wasn’t going to be responsible for costing the couple of hundred thousand people they directly employed their livelihoods.
Sapphire, she thought purposely using the name her mother had given the bioware. I know you can hear me, and I figure you’re the bioware equivalent of angry, giving me the cold shoulder because you don’t like my decisions. But I still have the right to give you orders and if you don’t obey this one, I swear I will find a way to rip you out of my head and stick you in an incinerator somewhere!
That would probably kill Jewel too, but that was still the way she felt about this—and Spy could tell that she wasn’t lying.
I order you to wipe out all trace of the secret you discovered in the Chief Engineer’s files so that no one else can ever learn it the way you did. And then I want you to strictly quarantine the data in your own system so that under no circumstances can you ever share it with anyone but me.
She waited for her bioware to respond, but it maintained its silence.
Jewel tried one more time. If there’s money to be made off this secret, then you know we can’t trust my parents’ judgment. They’re just too greedy. Better we never tempt them.
Spy didn’t respond, which really disappointed Jewel. But then, in the scheme of things, it probably didn’t matter. Not when Jewel was about to free dive one mile beneath an alien ocean.
Ana finished checking her seals. “This suit really isn’t in very good shape,” she told Jewel. “There’s a reason we downgraded it out of active service. Try not to do anything too rough.”
That wasn’t the sort of warning Jewel wanted to hear right now. But the clock was ticking and they didn’t really have time to try one of the other suits. And besides, hadn’t Ana already told her this was the best of the lot?
She started to lean
back on the gunnel when she realized this might be her very last chance to speak to Erik. She couldn’t pass that opportunity. It didn’t really matter if Spy heard her now, it had already figured out enough to try and sabotage her.
“Erik, are you there?”
He answered instantly, as if he’d been listening in on her and Ana’s conversation. “I’m here, Jewel. Are you sure you want to do this?”
Jewel didn’t want to justify her decision again. “Can you switch to a private channel? I’d like to ask you something.”
“Sure.” He gave her the frequency to switch to and she tuned her com to the new channel. Hopefully Ana would respect their privacy and not switch over so she could listen in.
“Look, Jewel,” Erik told her. “This dive isn’t a good idea. Remember what you told me when I wanted to do this?”
Jewel did not want to have this conversation. “I have a question for you, Erik. I need an honest answer. Can you do that for me?”
Behind her the water continued to crash against the side of the boat. Ana’s predicted storm was coming in and she really needed to get on with her rescue effort.
“Of course, Jewel. I’ll tell you anything you want to know.” Erik’s voice dropped in volume as if he understood the questions that were coming and wanted to make certain only Jewel could hear him—not that such a reaction made sense over the radio.
She wet her lips. Ridiculous as it seemed, Jewel was far more nervous to ask this question than she was to dive to the sunken mining platforms. “Erik, when you said I was special…that you’d run with me…did you…mean it? Or did you just want to have sex with me?”
She held her breath and waited.
Erik didn’t keep her waiting. “Of course, I meant it. I love you, Jewel.”
Jewel felt her heart start beating again. A tear welled in her eye. “I love you too, Erik,” she whispered. Then she tucked her head and slipped backward into the water.
* * * * *
It was dark beneath the waves—far darker than Jewel expected based on her earlier experience with deep sea diving. That shouldn’t be possible. It had been pitch black on her first journey except for the lights they brought with them and the same was true now. So why did everything seem so much blacker this time? Was it because she was alone, sinking down through the depths into the unknown without a friend and only one of the winch lines to guide her? Or was there something about this ocean that sucked the illumination out of her lights?
Her suit seemed to creak around her—something she hoped was merely her imagination and not the likely warning of her impending doom. She tried to remember why she’d thought it was so important to come down again. The miners were not her responsibility. She’d argued against them diving on this wreck. She’d argued in favor of them breaking off their mission and returning to the surface. So why did she feel she had to be the one to come find out if any of them were still alive? Why did it bother her so much to think of them swimming to surface only to find that Jewel, Ana and Falco had taken the boat and run?
A clock on her helmet faceplate ticked away the seconds as she fell. There were thrusters built into the suit that could have sped up her journey but she couldn’t quite bring herself to use them. Sinking toward the ocean floor was frightening. Shooting blindly down into the stygian darkness was another level of terror all together.
Something very large swam past her and she wondered if this was the whale-analogue she’d seen off the prow of the Tanngrisnir all those times. It was a gargantuan creature and the thought of being alone in the water with it terrified her. But frightening as that thought was, she almost hoped it was the case—rather than discover she was swimming with something truly sinister…
She fell farther, the heaters working overtime to keep her warm, the air adjusting automatically to maintain the proper pressure and composition to keep her alive.
She tried her com-link. “Strongheart? Can you hear me?”
There was no answer.
“How about you, Ana? Are we still in touch?”
“We hear you fine, Jewel,” Ana told her. “You’re about half way down, and one hell of a lot of tougher than I ever thought when I first set eyes on you.”
“I’m not feeling very tough now,” Jewel confessed. “I’m-I’m wondering what I can do to help when I get down there.”
“That’s exactly the point I was trying to make to you,” Ana said. “I guess it’s too late to worry about it now. At least we’ll know why they stopped talking in another couple of minutes.”
The big whale-thing swam by again, close enough that Jewel’s light revealed a massive eye the size of a human head above a mouth full of very sharp teeth.
“Oh, Stars,” Jewel whispered.
“What is it?” Ana asked.
“That huge fish thing that we saw when Erik came out to the Tanngrisnir is swimming around down here with me.”
“Maybe,” Ana suggested, “you should consider aborting the mission and returning to the surface.”
Jewel really wanted to do that. “How much farther is it?”
“You’ve less than a thousand feet to go,” Ana told her. “In fact, it shouldn’t be much longer until you start seeing some of the lights of the miners and the equipment they set up in the Jörmungadr II.”
Jewel scanned the darkness beneath her, eagerly searching for some sign of human activity. A bead of sweat trickled its way down her neck. At least she hoped it was sweat. It had to be sweat, didn’t it? If her suit had sprung even a tiny leak, the pressure at these depths would push the seawater in so fast that there wouldn’t be time to feel a trickle of anything.
She was having difficulty breathing—not because of any physical problem—but because of the pure psychological pressure of knowing that nearly a mile of ocean pressed down on top of her.
“Three hundred feet,” Ana announced.
Below her, Jewel could still perceive nothing but the inky blackness beyond the range of her light. “Shouldn’t I be able to see them now?” she asked Ana. Then she followed up with a plea to Spy. Please answer me! Shouldn’t I be able to see them now?
Spy didn’t speak to her, but Ana was far more kind. “I don’t know anything about visual acuity at those depths. Maybe your own light is blotting out your ability to see those of the miners.”
“You’re not suggesting I turn my own light off, are you?” Jewel asked. At the periphery of the beam the whale-thing circled her again. It was big enough, she believed, to literally swallow her whole. And while she couldn’t see it most of the time anyway, the idea that she could not hope to see it at all was too much for her to handle.
“One hundred and fifty feet,” Ana told her, before answering Jewel’s question. “It might be the only way to locate them.”
“No,” Jewel decided. She wasn’t certain it was the right decision but it was the only one she could make. She might be able to float to the ground through a mile of water by herself, but she couldn’t do it in complete darkness.
“One hundred feet,” Ana told her.
“Why can’t I see anything?” Jewel asked.
Then her light went out.
“Stars help me!” she begged before she realized that she wasn’t exactly in total darkness.
“What’s wrong, Jewel?” Ana shouted.
“Stop yelling at me!” Jewel told her. “I’m still all right, but my light isn’t penetrating very far anymore. It’s like the water got all cloudy, or inky, or…”
In the diminished halo of her light source, Jewel saw the telltale gleam of unrefined armenium floating in the water all around her.
“Oh, no,” she whispered. “The water’s full of dirt? I think the platform must have finished collapsing, or something.”
A red warning light flashed on in her helmet faceplate, but without Spy’s help, Jewel couldn’t remember what it meant.
Suddenly Jewel’s bioware was back in her mind and screaming at her. Emergency, Jewel! Your suit is losing its environmental in
tegrity. Please take your suit controls off manual and let me bring you back to the surface.
Jewel had never been the sort of person who panicked in bad situations, but Spy’s evident fear nearly paralyzed her. “But, the miners,” she said out loud.
“Jewel, I can’t hear you clearly anymore,” Ana said. “If the water’s…dirt, it won’t…safe for you…mining…back to…out of there!”
Jewel couldn’t think properly. She moved her fingers, searching for the switch to let Spy run her suit by remote. “But…”
Every moment you delay weakens my chances of rescuing you! Spy warned her.
“But—”
Freezing, muddy, saltwater burst into the suit all around Jewel, filling her mouth as she screamed Spy’s name. Her finger clutched spastically on the control opening her suit to remote control, but her brain could not figure out if the button worked.
“Erik?” she gurgled, through a mouth full of dirty sea water. She didn’t open her mouth again, but spoke through her closed lips. Her faceplate blew out, not in, as the water filled her suit and pressed out again.
Her terror spiked.
She was going to die. She lost consciousness wondering why she hadn’t just married Kole.
Chapter Twelve
A bright light shocked Jewel back into semi-consciousness. “What…where?” The pain that speaking ignited in her throat rolled out through her body. Nerve endings from her fingertips to toes fired agonizingly, proving she really was alive.
“It would appear that our purser is regaining consciousness,” the oily voice of Gunther Brüning said. “Do you want—”
“Jewel,” Erik’s voice came very close to her ear. “You’re going to be all right.”
She certainly didn’t feel all right and she couldn’t remember why. Speaking made her feel like she was swallowing razor blades and even so, her voice was slurred like she was drunk or half asleep. “What…happened?”
“We’re on the Genesis now,” Erik told her, which didn’t answer her question at all but it did trigger flashes of memory in her skull. The dive, the water, the burning agony…
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