Neurolink (8 page)

Dominic assumed the
Benthica
was hiding directly below. He studied the ship for markings. If only he could get a fix on the location. But Major Qi had made sure he couldn’t do that. “You’ve known the submarine’s coordinates all along,” he shouted.

She drew away and eyed him with a smirk. Then her long fingers circled the back of his neck, and she pulled him close again so she could speak in his ear. “What would you do with the coordinates, Nick? Let your bit-brain send his guards?”

Dominic jerked away from her, angry that she’d already guessed his intentions. “Whose side are you on?” he said. His throat felt raw from shouting, and the roar made his head ache. He yelled, “This situation is destabilizing the markets, and we’re here to shut it down. Am I right or wrong? Tell me now.”

She shook her head and put her mouth to his ear again. “How close are we to the ship’s boil line? I don’t want those current mills to suck us in.”

Dominic glanced at the water. Their raft was drifting a good hundred meters from the factory’s booming wake, safe for now. He shouted, “You’re changing the subject.”

He felt a sharp tug at the back of his waistband. The naked boy was standing beside him, balancing on the raft’s edge and pointing into the water. Beneath them, the ocean suddenly lifted in a mighty swell, and Dominic grabbed the boy to keep him from falling overboard. All around, water welled up and doused them with filthy spray as a decrepit metal sphere popped up beside their raft like a toy balloon. It was a bathysphere, old and dented, a submersible shuttle craft of the type used for short runs to and from an undersea facility. Dominic saw plainly where the
Benthica
logo had been scraped off.

“Our taxi has arrived,” Qi shouted over the roar. “Benito, help your grandmother.”

The boy squirmed out of Dominic’s arms and scampered over the barrels.

“This is what we’ve been waiting for, Nick.” Qi indicated the bathysphere with a nod, as a man with a sunburned face and short, hairy arms emerged from the hatch and lowered a ladder to the waterline. In one of the other boats, two women started paddling toward him with their hands.

Qi leaned against Dominic and draped an arm over his shoulder. He could feel her thigh rubbing his. She touched her mouth to his ear. “Since you ask, I don’t know the
Pressure’s
position. I only know this rendezvous point. From here on, we’re entering unknown territory.” She took Dominic’s hand and laced her long, dark, graceful fingers through his short, thick, pink ones. “I can’t tell you what to expect, Nick. My bit-brain master limits my info. Trust me. We’re going to need each other.”

Dominic smiled grimly, recalling the NP had used those very words. He would have said something sarcastic, but he was tired of straining his throat. So he turned away and watched the little boy, Benito, help his grandmother to crawl over the barrels.

One by one, the tattered fleet of boats transferred their passengers to the bathysphere. The pilot shuttled eight full loads of people down below the gray waves before Dominic’s turn came. Without his wrist node, it was hard to measure time in the perpetual Arctic day. Usually he stayed live-linked to the Ark and got market news every ninety seconds. Now he wasn’t even sure of the date. He tried to time the first shuttle run by counting seconds, but he was bone weary, and the factory ship’s racket numbed his senses.

He spread his short fingers and checked for skin rash, the first symptom of toxic exposure. Nothing yet. Then he lay on his back and gazed at the clotted smog. Was the NP watching? Even metavision had limits. Without that transponder in his hip beaming up his identification, he’d be just one more heat signature lost in the infrared blur of this factory ship. He squeezed his eyes shut. Never had he felt so cut off in his life.

He awoke with Benito sitting on his chest. When he moved, the boy grunted and dove into the water. The grandmother was already climbing the bathysphere’s ladder a couple of meters away. More boats had joined the little fleet—over fifty vessels. And the northern horizon glowed liverish red again. Another midnight had come around.

Qi sat beside him and kicked at the water. “Ready, Nick?”

“You didn’t bother to ask me that before.”

Above the breathing mask, her eyes narrowed to merry slits. “It’s a rhetorical question.”

Dominic made a running leap to reach the bathysphere—it was either that or swim through the foul, oily ocean. He banged into the ladder and scraped his shins and bit back the oath he wanted to yell. Inside, the shuttle’s tiny cabin stank of prote. The moment he entered, he could smell their wretched breath and body dirt through his mask. Even the toxic atmosphere had smelled fresher than this. Fifteen people, counting the pilot, were packed into a space meant for six. When the hatch clanked shut, the noise of the factory ship abated, and Dominic sensed a faint humid breeze. An air exchanger was laboring to blow filtered air into the cabin and displace the toxic atmosphere. But the smell didn’t improve. A green indicator light flashed overhead, and the pilot said it was okay to remove face masks. Dominic kept his on.

If there had ever been seats in this crude little craft, someone had ripped them out. The passengers sat in each other’s laps on the bare metal floor. Dominic would have preferred to stand, but the pilot ordered him down, so he squeezed in next to the old woman, Juanita Inez. Benito sat on his other side, scowling as usual, with arms crossed defiantly over his narrow young chest. A tiny girl climbed into Dominic’s lap. The girl’s nakedness embarrassed him, so he took off his silk undershirt and helped her put it on. It swallowed her small body, but she toyed with the sleeves and seemed very proud of it. Before he could stop her, the little girl squirmed onto his shoulders, locked her ankles under his chin and clenched his hair with her sticky little fists. From the other side of the cabin, Qi winked and blew him a kiss.

“Thank you,” Juanita said, touching her granddaughter’s new silk shirt. “Our clothing fell apart. It wasn’t made for the surface.”

She drew the clear plasticene a little tighter around her body like a shawl, and Dominic wished he had more to give her. It wasn’t seemly, a woman of her age with nothing to cover herself. Most of the other protes were naked, too, or nearly so. What kind of clothing did they wear that disintegrated so easily? Their commissaries must be run by swindlers. His silk underwear was holding up just fine.

As the shuttle bobbed downward, the cabin temperature began to rise, and he decided nakedness might be an advantage. The shuttle’s cooling unit evidently wasn’t sized for this load. In no time, the air grew suffocatingly hot, and everyone sweated. More than once, Dominic wiped salty drops out of his eyes, and finally, he took off the hot face mask. The cut on his knee throbbed.

Despite everything, the protes kept talking. They wouldn’t shut up. In their gutter accents and awful grammar, they told jokes and congratulated each other and passed around a bottle of sour-smelling wine. They imagined this stinking little bathysphere was their salvation. Damp, musky flesh pressed in on Dominic from every side. He hated this closeness. If only they would stop talking!

He closed his eyes and fought down his disgust. This was taking longer than he’d planned, but soon he would board the
Benthica
. Only now, thanks to the major, he couldn’t call the bank guards to get him out. Well, hadn’t his father schooled him to be resourceful?

First priority, find and disable the miner’s Net link. Second, get back to the surface and hail the NP. He’d memorized the submarine’s layout, so he knew the Net link was housed on the bridge. He could use any heavy object to smash the vulnerable electronics. Stewing in his own sweat, he imagined scenes of hand-to-hand combat with a desperate mob, and he was suddenly glad the major had insisted on disguise.

Escape—how could he manage that? Again he thought of stealing Qi’s earplug to call the NP. Or maybe—a new inspiration struck him—maybe he could hijack this very bathysphere and get back to the surface. Medical attention. Decent air. A very long, very sanitizing bath. Yes, hijack this shuttle craft. That’s what he’d do.

He began to feel optimistic, but the little girl on his shoulders kept yanking his hair and making his eyes water. He could tell the shuttle was going deep because his eardrums ached, so he held his nose and blew hard to equalize the pressure in his middle ears. Next, an infant started crying. That was just one too many sounds.

Dominic reached through the crowd and tapped the young mother’s shoulder. “Give it something to chew. Make it swallow,” he said. “Haven’t you got something to give it?”

When the young woman shook her head in confusion, Dominic raised his voice to be get everyone’s attention. “Who has some food or water for this baby?”

For a moment, the other passengers stared at him without speaking. The infant began to scream.

“Speak up. This baby needs to swallow to clear its ears.”

The grandmother, Juanita, was the first to react. From the folds of her plasticene shawl, she drew out Qi’s water sack—still two-thirds full. A moment later, other people brought forth treasures. A bit of moldy bread. Some kelp juice. A tube of nutrient paste. Someone offered half a bag of hard caramel candy. The mother gave her baby a little water, and the crying subsided. Dominic smiled with sardonic pride. At least he’d achieved one objective.

The bathysphere plowed interminably on, sometimes dropping, sometimes rising, and Dominic guessed the pilot was hugging the contours of the seafloor to avoid detection. Apparently, the
Benthica
had not been hiding under the factory ship. When the little girl slid off his shoulders, sound asleep, he handed her over to her grandmother and stood up to stretch. He craned to see over the pilot’s shoulder, hoping the console gauges would yield some clue to their location. The pilot must have noticed his interest because he stepped aside so Dominic could see everything. The gauges were all in Spanic though, a language Dominic had never bothered to learn.

“You’re an educated man, yes? I hear it in your voice. What is your training?” The pilot’s face was creased and pitted with black grit, and three of his front teeth were missing. He garbled his words with the same syrupy American drawl the old woman used.

Dominic hesitated. Should he say he was a banker and let the man think he dispensed coins for a living? In the periphery, he saw Qi smirk. Some of the others were looking his way. He had to say something. “I’m a negotiator.”

“Ah.” The pilot wrinkled his forehead and nodded sagely, though Dominic doubted he understood the term. “Whatever your training, you are welcome here. We need many skills. Many. My name is Estaban.”

The pilot stuck out his hand to shake, and Dominic felt obliged to introduce himself. But he had no lie ready. Major Qi should have prepared him. What kind of covert agent was she? Thinking his hesitation might raise distrust, he shook hands and improvised. “I’m Nick. I came with those people there.”

When he pointed to the old woman and the grandchildren, the boy Benito flashed him an angry glare that radiated the pure antagonism of the innocent. Dominic knew the boy had caught his lie, and for an instant, he felt a curious pang of guilt. But the boy said nothing, and the moment passed.

“See, here she is.” Estaban pointed with pride to a blurry round screen in the center of his console, and Dominic stepped over the seated bodies for a closer look.

On the screen, in the false colors of metavision, an extraordinary image was coming into focus. Dominic had to study it for several minutes before it made sense. Below them, where the seafloor flattened to a broad, sloping plane, lay a mountain range of garbage. Peak after peak, the mountains stretched as far as he could see in every direction. Estaban moved his control yoke, and the shuttle banked and dove between two ridges. Its running lights flickered against the mountainsides, revealing twisted girders, crushed vehicles and abandoned machinery. Methane bubbles rose in sluggish columns. Shreds of plastic and fabriglass blew in the current like flags.

This was a solid-waste site, Dominic realized, probably the dumping grounds for some coastal city. As the bathysphere wound through the V-shaped valley, Dominic studied the cliffs of cast-off debris with amazement. So much of it. He’d never realized how large these dump sites could be. The shuttle cruised just meters above the junk, and he noticed that Estaban showed real piloting skill following its jagged contours. They rounded a bend, dropped into a deeper gorge, and there behind a cone-shaped mound of rock crouched a familiar bottle-shaped vessel. The
Benthica
!

This close, the submarine looked larger than Dominic had expected. Its belt-driven treads were mired so deep in bottom debris, it couldn’t possibly move. He studied its shape, looking for the bridge. Yes, there on the forward section, at the very top, he saw the lookout dome. That’s where the Net link would be.

Then he observed something more astonishing. Other ships also loomed in the rubble. Dominic had to squint to make sure he was seeing accurately. At least six other vessels lay scattered close to the crawler. They were wrecks, all of them. Their hulls were rusted, gashed and riddled with holes, and they lay at odd angles just as they’d fallen. One old barge stood on end with its bow buried twenty meters deep.

As the bathysphere descended, Dominic began to make out small figures in diving suits swimming through the wreckage. Blue-white flashes sparked around them, and it took Dominic a moment to realize the divers were using underwater welding torches. He motioned Qi to join him. Estaban was clearly enjoying his reaction.

“The
Pressure of Light
,” Estaban announced.

At those words, a hush fell over the cabin. The passengers all turned to look at the pilot, and even though they couldn’t see Estaban’s little screen, they stared reverently in that direction. Dominic watched the divers moving among the wrecked ships. When he sensed Qi standing beside him, he traced their outlines with his finger. “Did you know about this?”

She shook her head and studied the screen in frank wonder.