TideBreakers: Death On Foils

by Duncan Stockwell

TideBreakers Prologue Story:

  Death on Foils

  By Duncan Stockwell

  Copyright 2015 Duncan Stockwell

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  TideBreakers Prologue Story:

  Death on Foils

  By Duncan Stockwell

  Quick-Navigation:

  Part 1

  Part 2

  Part 3

  Part 4

  Part 5

  End Notes

  -1-

  The Pelletier Hotel was a Marino city native. Built early in the previous century, it was one of the first buildings in the Catham Coast to use a steel-frame construction. At twenty-four storeys high, its sandstone walls and deco-styled facades had been a noble fixture of the skyline and even now the hotel's name was displayed proudly upon the original rooftop scaffold in ten-foot tall letters.

  The ocean was now at the building's seventeenth floor.

  Two vast concrete platforms protruded away from the building three storeys above the water's surface. Supported on a lattice-work of steel, they were half-built on the rooftops of the hotel's east and west wings and half on towering legs secured in the remnants of the city street far below the waves.

  Like the rest of the flooded city around them, both of the Old Pelletier's platforms were a hive of frenetic activity: their surfaces were divided into the neatly organised rows of rectangular docking-stages. A towering gantry crane trundled along the edge of the wharves, carrying a Zaratan racer from its berth to the service-shed shutters cut into the wall of the hotel's central building. Cargofours drove along their yellow path-lines carrying loads of powercores or tanks of coating-fluid. Fluorescent-jacketed dock-workers loaded trucks, consulted reports on holo-hinges or operated lift-panels.

  There was an excited throng of people crowded around the double-doors labeled 'To The Pylon Club'. Questions were being shouted in a loud chaotic confusion; on a tangle of outstretched arms there were cameras clicking and handphones were thrust palms-upwards to record anything and everything possible. A few of the dock-workers looked up from their tasks to cast uninterested glances at the demanding masses, before tutting once and returning to their work with a shake of the head.

  The Old Pelletier Dock's control-tower, an inverted cone of plate glass, surveyed the surrounding waters from the northern corner of the west-wing platform. A banner spanned its full height, boldly proclaiming "Welcome to Marino Bowl, the home of Series Alpha-Plus Sub Racing!" as it rippled in the breeze.

  Even though the majority of Marino was now under seventeen storeys of water, the city's vibrancy lived on. The buildings that still had upper sections above the waterline all had expansive verandas suspended from their sides, the open-air bars and restaurants bustling with grinning people that drank wine with their breakfasts. Huge pier-like structures were built from the tops of the now-submerged buildings, linking up in several places to form gigantic connected boardwalks with shining pavilions and boutiques. Distant music spilled from the building tops and the blast of engines echoed around the walls as glistening sports-subs skated along the avenues between the city blocks on hydrofoils. Everything about Marino spoke of wealth and frivolity.

  Neil maneuvered his sub far below the surface of Marino. It was the slow, boxy form of a Redstart Mercury and it was plastered with the neon green and purple of the DiveWings Magazine livery. He could see the base of the Old Pelletier building in the water up ahead as he made his way through the chasm-like channel of tower-blocks. His holographic-sonar display projected bright wireframes onto the inside of his bathysphere glass, picking out the forms of the building fronts, the windows, the various detritus that floated in the water. There were no other subs below the surface.

  "Ok Rebecca." Neil was saying. "I'll try." He was half looking at the face of his editor in the handphone display projected between his thumb and forefinger, and half keeping an eye on where he was going, struggling to control the sub with just his right hand in a throttle palette.

  "It's just," Rebecca replied, "the review you did of that Triton last month seemed… flat." She spoke with a saccharine sort of reluctance; a voice better suited for a child. "The readings from your EmoteLive made it seem like you were bored. I don't want you to be bored, Neil." She pulled an exaggerated sad-pout, her bottom lip all the way out.

  "Ok," he said again. "This one will be better."

  "Good!" she beamed. "You'll be going near the Pylons club, too. You must be excited about that! All those racing pilots."

  "Well," Neil said with a thoughtful nod. "I suppose, yeah."

  "Good. Good." Rebecca gave another bright-but-vacuous smile. "Well I'll be keeping an eye on your EmoteLive read-out." Neil noted just an edge of a premonitory tone to her voice. "As will all of your readers – who love you, Neil! They want you to have fun, too!"

  "Righty-oh," he said.

  There was a laborious pause.

  Finally, Neil said "I'll talk to you later then?"

  "Alright, Neil. Bye-bye!" Rebecca's face disappeared from his handphone screen and he was left with just the glow of the holoso wireframes and the rays of light from the water's surface above. "You must be excited about that, Neil!'" he repeated to himself, mockingly. "'They love you, Neil!'" He shuddered.

  His handphone beeped and he glanced at it; a line graph labeled 'Neil's EmoteLive mood' was shown – the line was steadily dropping over time. Turning his hand over to look at the small square EmoteLive unit, he slipped his right-hand out of its throttle palette just to shake a fist at its little blinking light. Looking back at the graph again, he noted that the line representing his mood had dropped another notch. He tapped his thumb against his little finger twice to turn off the handphone's holographic display.

  He sighed and glanced at the small print-outs of film posters he'd stuck to the sub's console: Yolande Albright's The Window's Rain; Young Stratton's Second Rung; Deon Kirkland's Penultimate. He blinked hard, before looking back up at the docking platform above.

  Slipping his hands back into the throttle palettes, he clicked on his coms channel. "This is Redstart Mercury Romeo-Niner-Tango-Whisky to Pelletier tower: requesting docking instructions."

  The traffic-controller's voice came back through his headset speaker immediately. "We have you, Tango-Whisky. Please confirm your bearing." He spoke with the clipped and polite professionalism of a concierge.

  "Approaching at brace-four, east-bound at Nixes 8." Neil peered out of his bathysphere to try and find a street sign in the murky water. "Kilburn Avenue, I think? Pilot: Neil Ramsgate."

  "Understood, Tango-Whisky. Please confirm your purpose in Marino."

  "I'm a journalist," Neil said with a weary familiarity. "I'm booked to berth at the east-wing platform to meet the Lockman-Bracker representative Matilda Boston. I'm reviewing a sub for – "

  He was cut off by what sounded like a snort of laughter.

  "…Hello?" he said, cautiously.

  There was a pause, in which the controller was apparently trying to disguise more laughter by clearing his throat several times. "Thank you, Mr Ramsgate," he said eventually, his voice wavering slightly. He took a breath before he continued. "We have your booking, but unfortunately due to an incident last night your berth is on the west-wing platform today."

  "Oh." Neil said, still distracted by the controller's apparent amusement. There was a small blip from the EmoteLive unit.

  "Could you confirm your docking requirements please, T
ango-Whisky?" The controller asked, his composure finally regained.

  "Uh, sure," he said. "Two-thousand-two-hundred kilograms displacement, seven meters – "

  He stopped again as he heard muffled whispers from the controller, who was saying something like: "He's meeting that rep from Lockman-Bracker." There was then a loud "HA!" from someone else in the tower and several barely-concealed chortles.

  "Is there a problem?" Neil asked.

  "Sorry, Tango-Whisky. It's just that – " The controller trailed off into a breathy laugh once again. "Right, yes." He coughed. "You're meeting… Matilda Boston." He cleared his throat a final time, before speaking with the same cut-glass tone as before. "Your berth is on the western platform, Tango-Whisky. I'm transmitting the approach to your holoso now.

  "Right, thanks."

  "Please can you confirm your sub's access-code?"

  "Of course," Neil said, relieved. "It's 'Fruitcake'."

  There was an immediate explosion of raucous, hooting laughter and the sound of the controller falling off of his chair. Neil shifted impatiently on his control-board. He rolled his eyes once again and took another long look at the surrounding buildings. His EmoteLive chimed and he checked his handphone; the line-graph had descended by another couple of marks.

  Eventually his bathysphere glowed a low white as the holoso displayed a short loading bar on the glass in front of him. When it was complete, a golden guideline