by M M Buckner
Suddenly our screen view of the Lorelei vanished behind a wave, that rose like a lathery claw. Its foamy white fangs crashed on our hull and hammered us nose down. We rolled and cartwheeled in the depths, and I had to wrestle the steering yoke and restart the CPU to get us moving upward again. When we surfaced, our distance to the Lorelei had widened.
“Ninety-four seconds till the cops come,” Sheeba said. She’d set a stopwatch.
“Open the cockpit, and I’ll fire the transponder,” Verinne shouted. Then another wave bashed us, the sub lurched, and Verinne dropped her gun. “Fuck all.”
That’s when the certainty hit me. Verinne would miss. In this churn, she couldn’t possibly hold her aim steady enough. After all this effort and expense, we would blow the surf. Again.
Had we, the almighty Agonists, degenerated into a gang of bumbling old farts? How could that be? The idea almost panicked me. Then sheer determination and a reckless will to spend money kicked in, and I resolved to take back the lead.
“We’ll board the Lorelei’s hull,” I shouted over the muddy ringing rain. “We’ll plant the transponder by hand!”
Verinne stated the obvious. “That means more surface time. Your sub will take major damage.”
When I turned to check Sheeba’s reaction, Kat grabbed my hair and wrenched me around to face her. “Deepra, what about the freakin’ cops?”
“We’ll be quick,” I said. “Everybody suit up.”
An electric charge of haste spiked through the cockpit as we scrambled to zip our rad-hardened suits, and I put the submersible in a fast sideways skid, keeping just below the surface to avoid the worst of the rain. When we thwacked hard against the rain ship’s flank and bobbed to the surface, the savor of dry fear tingled the undersides of my tongue.
“Nasir, your helmet’s loose.”
Sheeba leaned over my seat, and Kat grumbled, “You’re in my way.” But dear Shee persevered and helped me lock my neck ring.
“Double-check your cameras. This is one surf for the record,” I said with a shiver. My radiation gauge was already measuring a 40-mrem dose. Pretty hot. Sheeba’s badge read the same. I squeezed her hand, then popped our cockpit cover.
Blinding waves sloshed into the cockpit and smeared my helmet visor. The muddy rain hurt, even through our surfsuits. I thought we’d reach out and slap the transponder on the hull in one second flat. But the swells were huge. They’d already separated us from the ship by a good ten meters.
“Thirty-five seconds,” Sheeba said through the helmet sat phone.
Mud coated my visor, and the waves tossed us around like a circus ride. In the distance, we saw the strobing flash of an approaching WTO cutter. As the rain pelted us, Verinne tried again to load the transponder into her compression gun, and Kat and I both reached to help. Then the ocean rose around us like a mountain range, and a wall of water knocked my head against the console.
Perhaps time flowed through a mobius loop. In those pendulous thirty-five seconds, events propagated in ever-widening spheres of probability. Was I the first to unbuckle my seat belt? Did Verinne throw the transponder into the ocean, or did she drop it by accident? What words did Kat scream, and who grabbed my arm? Did I dive for the transponder, or did I fall overboard?
The cops fished me out with a gaffer’s hook and reeled me onto their cutter. They blared orders through a megaphone. Kat and Verinne were already onboard, handcuffed together, hanging on to some kind of aerial and trying to stand upright on the rolling deck. And Sheeba?
“Where’s Sheeba?” I coughed up sea fluid, then gripped the rail and peered into the rain-whipped swells. Had the Celerity sunk? Was my darling girl lost beneath the waves? Can you conceive my white-hot fugue of fear and guilt?
“Don’t say anybody’s name,” Kat warned over our sat-phone connection. “The cops have probably hacked our conference call.”
“It’ll take the cops two seconds to sample our DNA,” I yelled back with the bleak voice of experience. One of the peace officers was trying to cuff my wrist, but I tore away and elbowed him in the groin. “What happened to Sheeba?”
“Shut it,” Kat snarled.
“She’s still on the sub,” said Verinne.
The guard twisted my arm painfully behind my back and snapped on the bracelet. He was about to cuff me to the aerial when a mighty blur of light and spume burst from the sea and arced over our heads. The guard and I hit the deck in unison. Above us, the apparition sailed over the WTO cutter and splashed down on the other side like some mythical seagoing goliath.
“What the fuck is she doing?” said Kat. “She doesn’t know how to drive the sub.”
My guard forgot about cuffing me and rushed to the rail with his comrades to see where the bizarre phantom had gone down. Seizing the moment, I staggered to my knees and crawled across the pitching deck to where Kat and Verinne were jerking each other by their mutual chain.
“That was the Celerity?’ I whispered.
“Stupido. They’ll overhear you.” Kat shook her fist in my face, yanking Verinne’s handcuffed arm. “That neophyte threw off our timing. I’ve never been arrested in my life.”
Verinne rubbed her bruised wrist. “Considering your age, Katherine, that’s rather sad.”
Before Kat could sputter a comeback, the Celerity arced out of the ocean again and spiraled in a high, dizzy parabola several meters off the port bow. When it plummeted into the swells, its wake of sea spray exploded across the deck and washed us against the base of a gun mount. Then the cutter’s engines powered up, the deck heaved, and the cops gave chase.
The cutter swung to port and sent us rolling. They were probably tracking Sheeba on sonar. When the cutter swung again, Kat grabbed me to keep from bashing into a ladder. “I told you she’d panic.”
The ship turned hard to starboard, and we tumbled back toward the gun mount. Verinne’s words came out garbled. “She’s too young for this level of intensity.”
I said, “At least she’s making evasive moves.”
“She should dive,” said Verinne.
“She’s outta control,” Kat muttered.
All at once, the sub leaped over the cutter’s sharp pointed bow and grazed the hull. Sparks flew, and the friction burned off paint. Through veils of rain, blue smoke curled off the deep gash in the Celerity’s keel before she vanished into the ocean again.
Kat snickered. “Didn’t I read somewhere that sub cost 14 billion deutsch? Hope your little tart gives you your money’s worth.”
“Shut up, Katherine.”
“Admit it, she’s making a dunce of you,” Kat went on. “Nubile young flesh, ha. A woman’s not worth two cents till she’s past fifty.”
Then Verinne pointed into a deep black wave trough. “The transponder. Look.”
Kat and I jostled against each other just in time to see it sink under a monstrous brown wave. The spray knocked us backward.
As Verinne pushed up from the deck, a gust of wind plastered her suit against her skinny chest. She said, “The Paladin crew will keep the lead.”
“They’re already calling us has-beens.” Kat hugged the gun mount. “They say our surfing style’s outmoded.”
Verinne bowed her helmeted head. “I never dreamed we’d end this way.”
I reached for her ankle. “Cara mia, this is not your fault.”
Picture us clinging to the rail, huddled miserably in the rain, waiting for the inevitable arrest, fines and public humiliation. Had we reached the final fade-out? Ye graven icons, I hated for Sheeba to witness our demise.
Nothing’s more fragile than the conceit of an old man who believes he’s young. Sheeba had once called me a seeker. We were seeking the dark, she said. Mystical fizz, but it sounded brave and heroic. Picture me slanting bravely against the winds of reason and sound judgment. Imagine me jutting out my chin, pounding my pectorals and declaiming mat I, Nasir Deepra, would show these bums something to remember. Hear me shouting like a vain old cockatiel through the roaring storm.
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“We’re still the best, and we’ll prove it. We’ll surf Heaven!”
Verinne crawled toward me. Behind her faceplate, her eyes darkened with hope. “Nasir, do you mean it?”
“Look around you,” Kat yelled. “We’re finished. We’ll never see Heav—”
A thunderous wave drowned Kat’s last sentence as the Celerity surged up onto the deck right beside us. We stumbled backward as the sub skidded over the rail, drenched us in sea fluid and bumped sideways into the gun mount. While the sub was still sliding, the cockpit cover retracted, and Sheeba yelled, “Hurry! Jump in!”
At first, no one moved. Nanoseconds streamed like light-years as rain bounced against the dented, blackened hull of the most expensive submersible ever built.
“Come on!” Sheeba yelled
The cops raced toward us. Verinne got to the sub first and hauled Kat in by brute force while I made a running jump for the dorsal elevator. The instant Sheeba saw me take hold, she powered up, slued across the deck and crashed through the opposite rail. When we hit the waves, she let go of the steering yoke to pull me inside. It was Kat who climbed into the driver’s seat, closed the cockpit and took us down.
“Shee-Shee-Sheeba,” Kat stuttered, wrestling the yoke and trying to catch her breath. “You did—that was—well-done!”
6
DOES IT ALWAYS JERK LIKE THAT?
“It to easy to believe that life is long and one’s gifts are vast-easy at the beginning, that is.”
-ALFRED ADLER
Sheeba’s stunts with the submersible saved us from mortifying public arrest and finally earned her full-fledged acceptance by the Agonists. But our Lorelei surf was still a debacle. This new failure cost us more precious status points—not to mention a tanker load of my hard cash. In fact, our crew slipped from second rank in the northern hemisphere to fourth. After that, we needed Heaven badly.
Heaven. The zone of zones. It was to be our proof of prowess, reprieve from shame, ticket back to glory. And it scared me to death.
“Don’t tell Shee that I, uh…that I’m connected with Heaven,” I discreetly asked my crewmates.
We’d just finished a cheesecake binge in my observatory, and Kat was downloading her cardio stats through her IBiS. “You mean Shee doesn’t know the cultured Mr. Deepra’s a warmonger?”
“Slippery Nass.” Win sucked his fork. “You want her to think your hands are clean.”
“I’m just saying”—I glanced in my travel mirror and flicked an errant crumb from my lip—“Sheeba has some dewy ideas about business. So keep it mute, okay?”
Grunze buckled electronic pec-flexers across his beefy chest. “We got it, sweet-piss. We’ll give your tart the snow job.”
Five days later, we met again in my condo to run our first virtual-reality scout. The orbiting factory called A13 was not a typical satellite. For one thing, it did not travel in the G Ring with other Com traffic. In that dense belt of geosynchronous satellites circling Earth’s waist, not only factories but also broadcast stations, resorts, private homes and science labs vied with each other for trajectory slots. Everyone wanted a site in the G Ring. By contrast. Heaven took its own strangely perturbed polar orbit, steering high and clear of shuttle lanes and distancing itself from neighbors.
Under my observatory dome, Win mixed the margaritas while Chad projected holographic images of A13, deviously lifted from a secure Provendia server. One way my firm controlled costs was by building its factories from the remains of old spaceships. They’d fashioned Heaven from an enormous, bullet-shaped fuel tank. Dented, corroded and weakened by radiation, the old fossil must have been drifting for over two centuries when Provendia resurrected it.
The bullet-shaped tower housed a complete five-story production line with two hundred live-aboard workers. Four lower decks held living quarters and support equipment, while the cavernous fifth deck occupied the tank’s upper height—all the way up to the tapering bullet point. This fifth deck housed the food-brewing vats.
Now picture the tank’s bullet point linked by a long, flexing tether to a colossal counterweight made from a rough-cut ball of asteroid. Can you see the tank and counterweight whirling around each other in space like a pair of figure skaters? That’s it. Three revolutions per minute created enough centrifugal force in the tank’s base to approximate Earth-normal gravity.
Verinne emailed us long boring descriptions of A13’s artificial gravity, including its weird Coriolis effects. Personally, I didn’t browse her text messages because we weren’t going to dock with Heaven. Our war zone would be strictly outside the satellite. On no account would we go aboard.
Why did this particular war break out? It had been running for nine months, but Verinne’s research uncovered no explanations. Provendia kept A13 confidential, and since I owned a majority share of the company, Grunze badgered me for inside dirt I put him off, claiming the nondisclosure clause. Finally, I hinted that the protes wanted more vacation time. Well, that was one way to express their grievance. I couldn’t tell Grunze the truth.
The first act of war had occurred when A13’s resident workers sabotaged their own docking port Since men, they’d been fighting off anyone who tried to board—a rather self-destructive act because that meant they couldn’t take on supplies. Provendia’s gunship was strafing the tank with small mass-to-target noisemaker missiles—irksome and debilitating but not powerful enough to rupture the hull. A13 represented, after all, a valuable piece of real estate. Still, one of those noisemakers could frappe a human body if it detonated close enough. That fire zone between the gunship and the factory, that would be our war surf. We planned to space-dive straight through the middle, wearing nothing but armored EVA suits. Vicious bold.
“Tell me again, what’s the weekly rental on an EVA suit?” I asked. My crewmates were scarfing snacks, and I was totaling expenses in my head. Lately, I’d been husbanding my pence and pesos with more care.
“Don’t go cheap,” Grunze said through a mouthful of Cheez Whiz. “We need the high-performance thruster packs and full armor.”
“Besides, we have to look sexy on our video. This is our big comeback, and we have the Agonist image to uphold.” Kat licked fudge icing from her arm.
“Then you cough up the change,” I said.
“Play nice.” Verinne wiped crumbs from her lips and printed out the price sheet. Now that her dying wish was about to come true, she made every move with edgy restraint, as if one wrong gesture might jinx the surf and cause another delay. Delay was one thing Verinne could not afford.
Near the south window wall, Winston and Sheeba erupted with peals of laughter. They were goofing around with my telescopes, pretending to hunt for stars through the heavy Norwegian smog. We all heard Win stage-whisper in Sheeba’s ear, “What does EVA stand for?”
Kat and Grunze rolled their eyes. I said, “Win, you need to check your plaque levels again. You’re getting that dementia glaze.”
Grunze added, “Yeah, Winny, your wetware needs a pressure wash.”
“I meant to install another upgrade last week,” Win said with a crooked grin.
“They’re just peeved because you’re so gorgeous.” Sheeba wrapped her arms around Win. When she kissed him on the mouth, I crushed a shrimp canape’ in my fist, and tiny bits of pseudo-seafood rained on the carpet.
Then Sheeba lowered her voice. “EVA stands for extra vehicular activity. That means spacewalking.”
I ground my fake molar implants and watched her blow a raspberry in his hair. She pities the old bugger. She’s always drawn to needy people, I rationalized. Way too tenderhearted, that girl. I joined them at the window and offered Shee a fried wonton.
“No thanks, beau. I’m not hungry.”
“You’ve hardly eaten anything.” I held her waist and pushed the snack playfully against her lips.
“But I don’t—” She laughed and tried to brush my hand away, but when I insisted, she finally opened her mouth and took the food from my hand. Afterward, the
re was an awkward silence.
“We’re leaving early tomorrow,” Verinne finally said. “Let’s go home and rest.”
“Sleep here,” I whispered to Shee, “in the small bedroom if you like.”
Sheeba loosened my arm from around her waist. “No, I’m too rattled to sleep.”
Her answer disappointed me, but I understood how she felt. Heaven rattled me, too, more than any of them could know. Nevertheless, I was committed. My surfer status was on the line.
Chad reserved suites for us at the Mira Club, an elegant resort hotel hovering in G-Ring orbit, thirty-six thousand kilometers above the Amazon delta. We checked into our rooms twenty hours before Mira’s path crossed under A13’s peculiar trajectory, and we used the hotel’s powerful telescopes to watch the Provendia gunship firing on the factory. Did I mention that, in the entire nine months since this war began, no one had penetrated Heaven’s zone? Did I mention why?
First, space-diving through hard vacuum is no evening at the opera. You need precise skills and very expensive equipment. Second, even the best pro-line body armor will not block a noisemaker missile. If anyone in our crew took a direct hit, no amount of nanocellular repair could reconstitute the gory chunks of flesh into a living person. But there was a third and more critical reason why this surf surpassed all other Class Tens ever recorded in surfdom archives.
Provendia’s management (i.e., myself and my board) had spread a warning that this zone was forbidden to surfers. We announced that violators would be prosecuted, fined, disenfranchised and possibly fired from their jobs. For an exec, getting fired was a catastrophe too dire to speak aloud. It meant demotion to the level of a prote.
Provendia’s warning was not an empty threat, either. I signed the order myself. All I could do was trust that my chairman emeritus position—and Chad’s draconian bribes—would protect us. More important, our surf route would not take us inside the factory. We would remain outside at all times. I thought that would keep us safe.
On June 6, 2253, local Mira time, we piled into Kat’s space shuttle and lifted off. I kept offering Shee little attentions to make her comfortable, and once when I was readjusting her thruster harness, she snapped at me. Pre-surf jitters. Everyone had them. Almost at once, her good humor returned, and she apologized. I gave her a special present I’d been saving, a gold wrist-watch with a pearly pink glow-screen, inscribed with her name, the date and the word “Heaven.” She slipped it on with a melancholy smile, and I couldn’t tell if she liked it or not. Choosing the right gift for Shee was always so difficult.