She tugged one leg of the suit up under her skirt, then the other. Ooooh. No, these suits were nothing like those things she’d worn during dive training. This was like burrito-ing herself in warm satin. She suddenly coveted a whole closet full of these things. In all different colors. This could become an addiction worse than shoes.
“Of course fear is stupid,” she said. “Any time you know intellectually that a thing is safe but you run from it anyway, that is stupid.”
“See now, it ain’t, though. The difference between bravery and cowardice doesn’t have anything to do with brain capacity,” he said. “It’s more about trust. Faith. That kind of thing.”
The smartfabric dive suit slid on a lot easier than older kits, but it still took her a few minutes to get the longjohns up, then step out of the skirt. She folded that item, too, and went around to the passenger side to set her dry things in the car and fetch a couple of items she wanted to take in her dry pack. Yoink watched her avidly but didn’t so much as nose her for a pet. Suspicious cat, possibly judging her.
When Angela came back around to the glare of headlamps, Kellen was already working the diagonal press seam across his chest.
All covered up again. Bummer.
But also, he was watching her with the kind of intensity that made her wonder briefly if the dive suit was electrified. Certainly, when their gazes met, she felt a jolt of something hot and wild sizzle through her body.
“I trust you,” she told him in a voice that had gone husky. “And those dolphins. Let’s go.”
• • •
The thing “the intruder” had wanted Yoink to do, the thing that freaked the poor kitty out so hard, was to put her furry little body in the water and carve out a diving path for her two humans.
Clearly, whoever was out there in a submarine talking to dolphins didn’t know shit about cats and water. Especially this cat. Yoink was cool under most pressure—hell, could fly above the ionosphere deck in that spaceplane without a single complaint. But she was not going into the ink-black, death-filled ocean. Not one hair on her fluffy feline ass.
And Kellen didn’t blame her one bit.
Truth was, Kellen wasn’t looking forward to dunking himself in there, and he sure as hell didn’t want Angela to go in. She never had liked the water, and he watched her closely for signs that it still made her nervous.
He had guessed, based on her tight-lipped remark, that Daniel Neko had been a proponent of the flooding technique of getting over phobias. Not Kellen’s favorite process. He didn’t want to think of Angela shoved into a fear cage and kept there till she learned to calm herself. He wouldn’t do that to an animal and sure as shit not to a person. No less the woman he loved.
But if she said she was good to go now, he had no choice but to believe her. She’d used the t-word again. Trust.
Now, he had complete faith in the ocean critters to warn him of any danger, but Angela? She wouldn’t know about all that going on beneath the water’s surface. All she knew was what he’d told her, what he’d implicitly promised. And she had believed him. She trusted him.
Lord, don’t make me a liar. Only let this go off good.
He’d done dive training years ago, for rescue missions, but he didn’t go underwater that much, certainly not for fun. He felt like a novice out here, press-seaming a serious-looking suit they’d bought used from one of Dead Fester’s buddies. He also felt like a fraud forced to play expert to a suddenly calm Angela.
Come to think of it, a way too calm Angela. Eerily so. Like she’d tucked a tranquilizer meltaway under her tongue while he went back to fetch their gear. She’d just stood there staring while he got changed, and for a minute, he worried he’d have to dress her himself like a doll.
Actually, he thought about that a little too much, the idea of dressing her. And undressing her first. Out in the cold winter night.
Or no, he’d have to haul her back into the warmed-up car, somehow keep the cat distracted, strip her down, reverse-peel the smartsuit up her body, and the whole time manage somehow not to say fuck it to this whole mission and just cover every inch of her skin with kisses instead.
And then she’d snapped out of it. She’d stripped down fast, almost too fast for him to see. Not that he wasn’t peeking. Not that he wasn’t wishing. Not that he hadn’t spotted her nipples perked up like goddamn mountain peaks, chilled candies just waiting for a tongue to swirl ’em.
Way too soon, she was looking let’s-do-this serious, snapping their tanks into D-rings, pulling on a BCD, tucking their dry clothes into the back seat. All business, all badass. Thank God she knew what she was doing and all, but he couldn’t help thinking sort of wistfully about the warm car and a quick fuck. Or a long one. He wouldn’t mind taking his time.
She would mind, though. Focused. She was focused as a space telescope, pinpoint and true. Brain on, now. Get yo shit together.
He skimmed through the data streams coming in from Yoink, relayed in her familiar not-quite-language. Mostly they consisted of blip coordinates and a rundown of the animals who’d be looking out for him down there in the ocean.
He and Angela tethered themselves to each other, attached dive lights to their gloves, did a quick buddy check, and laid a line out from the car, still with its headlights on, in case the visibility was so bad they had to walk it back. And then they dove.
Or, without a boat to dive from, they ended up mostly butt-scooting from the water line right up to where the land gave out. The BCDs were weighted, so when they moved off the broken bridge, they tucked right into the ocean, into darkness broken only by their dive lights.
Murk was a mercy, shrouding the ruins beneath them as they moved, the rotting, swaying shells of buildings or cars or trees. Or people.
Of course, he knew all that was down there. Close by. Ghosts watching them pass.
The water pressed in, burying them alive. Some folk had described night diving to him once as akin to floating in space. Well, he’d done the latter, more than a few times, off the Chiba Station, and it was nothing like this.
The ocean black was impenetrable, a tomb with ancient, unbreathable air. The actual air, the stuff he could inhale safely, came through his regulator, scrubbed and scented but just enough not-right to remind him he wasn’t supposed to be here. He wasn’t aquatic. He was as much an intruder as the person in the submarine, and the ocean didn’t want either of them.
He and Angela headed in the direction of the sea monster/blob/submarine, and it wasn’t long before they could make out its strobe.
Turned out the sub floated near the surface, only partially submerged. There was probably some nautical term for the way it sat in the water, but Kellen didn’t know. Looked like a sub in a movie, and there were handholds up the side. He climbed.
There were no rails atop the sail, and even though he couldn’t see the main body of the craft to check for viewing ports, the anechoic plating indicated this wasn’t a typical disaster-porn shallow-depth sightseeing boat. This one was military or had been in a previous life. Strange. But the relayed messages from the sea critters repeated that the sub wasn’t armed. How they could tell, he did not know, but animals had better senses than people gave them credit for. Especially when it came to things that could kill them.
Kellen shone his dive light on the top hatch and had just about figured out how to open it when it did so on its own, releasing the seal with a short hiss. Inviting golden light bathed the inside of the sub. ’Course, almost any indoors would be warmer than the chill November sea. He had to keep in mind that sunshine color and cozy-making heaters didn’t mean this place was safe. In this case, it meant anything but.
He unhooked the dive tether and headed down first. He didn’t wait for Angela to take the lead, because he knew she would, and damn it, he hadn’t been just flapping his jaws when he swore he wanted her safe. He was relieved when she didn’t argue thes
e small gestures, like going first into possible danger. She left him his pride, at least. He couldn’t hope for her to recognize that it was more than pride that made him want to be her shield against the world. That it was, in fact, love.
At the bottom of the ladder, he looked around for hatch controls. Apparently there weren’t any, or he didn’t need them in any case, because the hatch closed itself, slowly, deliberately, as soon as Angela was clear of the ladder. A light embedded in the wall shifted from red to green, indicating that the seals were set.
There was an exit seal down here as well, and he was just starting to get nervous it wasn’t going to open after all when little doors in the wall opened and spigots protruded. He had just enough time to close his mouth before the detox spray pelted him. It smelled like gardenia and vinegar. He looked over at Angela, hoping she hadn’t taken one of those sprays directly in the face, and she half shrugged.
“Standard protocol,” she said. “Most of the world is water, and most of the water lately is contaminated. Believe me, I’ve been in worse detoxes.”
Sometimes he forgot how much she’d seen, how hooked into the world she’d become. And then other times reminders hit him smack over the head, unlooked for and raw.
The lower seal undid itself and rolled back, revealing a twisty passage heading forward from the sail. Kellen doffed his BCD and tank, clipped his mask to a D-ring, and stowed the lot at the bottom of the stairs. Angela did the same, though she also unclipped her dry bag and brought it along.
They worked in tandem, wordlessly, like they could read each other’s minds. In his case at least, the wordlessness, the waiting for her to descend, the patient comfort he offered at the ready in case she needed it, the stalwart resistance to his own near-overwhelming need to take her in his arms and kiss the fuck out of her the moment the seal engaged—all that was a function of who he was and what he did. He was a caregiver. And he loved her.
He didn’t want to speculate on her motivations.
In any given sub, the control room was generally under the sail, so it should have been close, visible from the stark, airtight room they found themselves in. Kellen peered forward down the narrow corridor but didn’t see anything looking remotely like a control room ought. Didn’t hear anything either, other than the soothing hum of a machine underway.
Big fucker, too. Sub like this ought to have a crew in the dozens, even with a remote rig. But Yoink’s relay insisted there was only one person on board, other than Angela and him.
The atmosphere was creepy in here. And too, too quiet.
As if the silence weren’t bad enough, the surfaces on this boat were strange, not like any sub he’d ever seen, not even the ones he’d only experienced on VR tours. Space was typically a premium on a submarine, so controls and monitors and storage compartments honeycombed the walls, making every available centimeter also a useful centimeter. This thing, in contrast, was built more like a commercial jet. It did not intend for its inhabitants to make themselves useful. It intended for them to be docile. To passively soak in information or entertainment.
Sleek molded wall coverings in bright institutional white shielded who-knew-what. Instead of amine from the CO2 scrubbers, the treated air in here smelled like a hotel: plastic and cool and lemon with just a faint underwhiff of industrial cleansers. He half expected a chatbot to appear on one of those white-molded panels and offer him a bath towel or a virtual daytrip to some exotic locale.
“Well, this is unexpected,” Angela said, echoing Kellen’s thoughts.
“Try freaky,” he agreed. Neither of them gave breath to the phrase they both were likely thinking: ghost ship. If nothing on board was breathing, that didn’t necessarily mean it never had. “Stick close to me?”
“Oh yeah. I got your six, cowboy,” she said, but her voice was light.
He turned and looked, only to find her smiling.
“Sorry, I know, mixed metaphor. But there’s no reason you can’t be a cowboy and a special ops hero. It’s my imagination, and we’re trapped underwater in a titanium death can, so shut up and let a girl play.”
It was on the tip of his tongue to say this wasn’t a good time to play, that nothing about this mission was fun. Except it was. Being with her, bickering or bantering or whatever they did as a regular habit, that shit was fun. Not as fun as fucking, but fun. And he had missed it.
He had missed her. Even though he doubted he’d be able to keep her.
She had started a ball rolling with Dead Fester. Coming back from the dead. That’s what she wanted, what she was planning: her life before. The life without him. He wouldn’t stop her from grabbing what she needed, but he needed to keep his own brain zoomed in on the right now.
He had, what, maybe a day left with her wanting to be with him, pressing up against him, stripping down before his eyes and letting his gaze lick her like a hot candypop? And all he needed to do was make this time count, store up memories.
He would need them later, when she left.
The corridor bent like a serpent and led not to a control room but to a lounge. Weird sucker, too. An oval arrangement of low, cushioned benches and matching glass-topped end tables was sunk into the center of the floor, and dark wood paneling and back-lit cabinetry with curved glass doors ringed the chamber.
Was that…were there liquor bottles behind one cabinet door? And old leather-bound books, their spines stamped in gilt, behind another? Soothing recessed lighting made it sort of difficult to pick out details, but the combined effect was like a teak-paneled Victorian gentlemen’s club and a twentieth-century Japanese sake bar got together and procreated. On a submarine.
All along one curved side was a giant picture window, plastene and thick, like the multistory glass wall at the Pentarc. Stark lights speared through the murky ocean beyond, picking out ghosts.
And atop a cushion in the lounge’s rim, a lone figure perched primly, one dark-clad knee hooked over the other. He faced away from Kellen and didn’t speak when they entered, even though he had to have heard the ruckus they made in boarding. He had fluffy, coiffed black hair and was wearing some kind of neo-chinoiserie sateen smoking jacket.
No shit, a smoking jacket.
And that hair? Could belong to only one man. Damon Vallejo. All alone, no witnesses.
If somebody else had come on this mission with Angela, somebody like that hellcat Mari or even Fan, that shiny, dark beacon of a head would surely present a temptation. Blowing it to red, wet pieces wouldn’t take good aim nor even a particularly steady hand. Point and shoot. End of a whole lot of menace in a matter of seconds.
Probably it was a damn shame for the rest of the world and human history that Kellen wasn’t a person who could murder on impulse like that. Or that he’d deliberately not fetched the gun earlier when he retrieved his equipment from the car.
“Damon Vallejo?” he said, though he didn’t really need the confirmation. That hair was justifiably famous.
“How lovely to be identified, even when you cannot see my face,” the mad scientist said. He sipped something amber-gold and bourbon-like from a crystal bulb. “I don’t suppose you would like to return the favor? No? Oh well. The place is loaded with indulgences. Help yourself, whoever you are.” He gestured to one of the glass-doored cabinets.
Angela emerged from behind Kellen in the corridor, brushing past him, charging hell with a bucket of ice water, right into the center of the room. She planted her feet, arched one perfect, nightwing eyebrow, and faced the evilest villain in the history of evil.
“Spare me the Southern charm, Damon. I know you’re all alone on this boat, but I am not, and I’m armed. Also pissed. Start talking.” She stared her enemy the hell down.
Oh yes, sir, she did. His Angela did.
Chapter 13
Damon Vallejo was smaller than she remembered. Or maybe it was just that he was seated and dwarfed by this freaky-ass
room that belonged anywhere but on a submarine cruising ruined sunken cities in the middle of the night. Cities that he himself had sunk. He absolutely deserved all the filthy names people could fling at him, but looking at him right now, Angela couldn’t figure how naming and shaming would solve anything at all.
Everything to be said to such a human had already been said so many times, the words no longer had weight. Horrible. Shocking. Cowardly. Despicable. Unprovoked. What all his detractors failed to mention was the lively intelligence of his eyes, the smile that made one want to lean closer to hear what wisdom might fall from his lips.
Damon Vallejo was one engaging little monster.
Capture, incapacitate, or kill, she reminded herself. Either way, this threat ends tonight.
He patiently met her eyes and smiled slightly. “Ah, Angela Ne—no, Senator now, right? It has been too long. As you are not the jailer I was expecting, could it be possible you and your bespoke plaything have come to rescue me instead?”
Vallejo set his drink down on the ovate table between them. The liquid amber surface tilted off true about ten degrees. The sub was descending.
“The mech-clone you sold me has been disabled,” she said. “And I’m not here to play nice. I’m here to serve justice.”
“Too late, dear would-be sheriff, though the role does suit you. Alas for you and role-playing, I’ve been under the cruel thumb of justice for a long time. Imprisoned by it even.” He held up his wrists as if they were weighted by invisible shackles. “And now, because of your aforementioned desire for vengeance, you are doomed to share my opulent cell, unless you have some plan to get us out of here. Please say you do.”
He was bluffing. Angela narrowed her eyes. “Imprisoned by whom?”
“You ought to know, Senator.”
Yeah. She ought to. Why didn’t she know? What clues had she missed? What was she missing right now? There was nothing worse for a politician, a former diplomat for fuck’s sake, than to go into a negotiation without all the facts. Panic wetted the edges of her mind, and she struggled to stay sharp. Find the nerve corridors, dull the autonomics. Steady, slow breaths. This is all conscious.
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