The Sacrifice Game (58 page)

Get ready to rumble, I thought. A flock of sphinx moths fluttered around in my stomach.

Even when we got close to the targets, and even though the system knew Jed
₁
’s height and weight, they probably wouldn’t be physically different enough for us to tell one from another. Which was the reason we weren’t carrying underwater firearms, although they do make guns that shoot steel rods instead of bullets and Megalon even had some. But there wasn’t any point when the mission was to bring the subject back very alive. So that was that.

Yesterday we’d gone over our moves with one of us holding the target from behind and the other tying him up, I could at least see how it could be done. In fact, they said, more manpower would be superfluous. Still, there—

Gonnng!

It meant everybody was ready and all was clear. There was a pause and then it gonged again, higher, meaning “Let’s go.” I twisted the handlebar and felt the vibration of the silent propeller and, sluggishly, the DPV started to move, dragging me behind it. Forward, I thought. Once more into the breechclout. Stick your courage in the screwing place. I settled into the slipstream. The ridged silt bottom scrolled under me faster and faster. A school of emerald-green palometas darted in front of us and turned around and away, in sync, like trained pigeons. Forward. The current seemed stronger than the arm thing said it was. Or maybe I’d just gotten soft. Spending all that time counting money. During the test runs the SBS guys had been pretty dismissive of my diving skillz. But since they’d all spent more than a couple tours defending our freedom by slogging through ninety-degree half-crude-oil diarrhea in the Persian Gulf and digging unexploded ordnance out of boiling wreckage, I’d tried to take it in stride. Thank God Marena didn’t have enough diving experience to play SEAL. Still, she’d refused to stay onshore.

Come on. You can do this. No sweat, blood, or tears. Forward! Forward drag! Trails of water swooshed around me like Japanimation speed lines. When you head into pure blackness you start to feel that you’re not going horizontally, but falling. Moving, moving . . . youch.

Damn. Still having crotch trouble. Ignore, ignore.

Okay. Think. Jed
₁
’s boat’s set up for diving. So the support line’ll probably come off the windward side. The port side. Hmm.

Mainly by luck, the two guys Ana called her “conventional tecs”—that is, digital-and-paper-trail investigators—had gotten us a good picture of the Megalon. They’d gone over a list of all the over-thirty-footers registered in Jed
₁
’s “active zone,” the area he could reach in less than a day of surface travel, and they’d come up with sixty-eight possible boats and their locations. And I’d just cross-checked those with the biomaps and in less than five minutes I’d picked out the right reef. It was a not-very-well-known stand of
Dendrogyra cylindricus,
that is, pillar corals, which are food sources for a few types of nudibranchs, including
Lasidorus greenamyeri,
the possibly eusocial type that Johnny Greenamyer had first described in the June issue of the
Journal of Malacological Studies
. Anyway, then Ana’s tecs interviewed some local skippers and they’d said that most of the reefs had died over the last ten years but there was a half-mile or so at the southern end of one of them, three miles offshore, that was still alive and almost pristine. Then the ex-SBS people had taken the
Gotengo
out there and after only forty minutes of eavesdropping Ogra’s voice print had turned up on the wave-form monitor.

We were all pretty thrilled, considering. Megalon was glad that Jed
₁
would be diving and not just sunbathing on deck. “It’s a lot safer to grab him underwater,” he said. “Most of the issues occur during boarding attempts.” Also, when he’d asked whether it was possible that Jed
₁
would kill himself rather than get captured, I’d said it was a possibility. So they didn’t want to give him any time.

Megalon said that in the old days—meaning, say, ten years ago—it would have been tough to pinpoint a human target in such a large area of dark ocean. But now the Boat Service was using piezoelectric transducers that sent the data to a Kurzweil program that zeros in on human-made sounds, specifically on the distinctive rhythm of UBA breathing. Unless they held their breaths, we’d know where they were.

The
Blue Sun
wasn’t a known smuggling boat and nobody on board was likely to be armed. Even so, Ana had started off insisting that I couldn’t go along, and there’d been a lot of back-and-forth about how my Sacrifice Game skills were too valuable to warrant putting me at risk and everything. But I kept sticking to my spiel about how my Game stuff wouldn’t be valuable for very long if the whole planet got sucked into nonexistence, and how Jed
₁
’s interrogation was still in the future, and if something went wrong with it we’d need all the other information we could get. If Jed
₁
spotted us and got back to his boat and we had to try to negotiate, he’d respond better to me than to anyone else. Maybe he’d even let us take him in. Or even if Jed
₁
resisted to the bitter end, he still might blurt out something to me that he wouldn’t say to other people, or—and of course this was grabbing at straws—maybe I’d just notice something that the others wouldn’t pick up on, something in his behavior that might give us a wisp of a hint of a ghost of a clue to the Domino Cascade.

Falling behind. Keep up. I twisted the left handlebar for a burst of speed and got back into the formation. Come on. Run silent, run deep. My heads-up display said we’d gone two thousand and fifty feet, so the
Blue Sun
was three hundred thirty-four feet away. Megalon sent out a series of short, A-flat beeps repeating a 2-3-2, 2-3-2 pattern. Damn, forgot what that meant. Getting groggy. I touched the
SONIC CODES LIST
button on my Dick Tracy Two-Way Wrist TV.
DESCEND
, it said. I let some gas out of the buoyancy compensator and sank about ten feet. There was that cozy feeling of the sea hugging me closer. If you could just stay down here, you wouldn’t need the Celexa. Ahhhhh.

Around here the tips of the corals were usually about twenty feet from the high-tide surface, so Jed
₁
would probably be down at this level or lower. Or he—

Bling grong,
Megalon said. Time to switch off the headlights. We all slowed to a crawl. Jeddo-Sub-One probably wouldn’t even turn on his spotlight. It’s better to check out the nudis in the natural chemoluminescence of the ambient plankton. I switched off the lamp and the night-vision goggles automatically swung into position on the front of my mask, lighting up the silty seabed in that granular green.

Hmm. Not okay, I thought. “Not okay,” I beeped. The rows of red numbers on my mask’s heads-up display were way too bright. I fiddled with the keys. Hell. It’d take me more than a minute to type out the whole question “How do you turn down the bloody lights in your eyes?” in words. The keys were big, of course, like on a toddler’s keyboard, and each one had a distinctive shape that you could pick out with your fingertip, which, by the way, you could easily slip in and out of a slit in the thoughtfully designed electrically warmed glove. But the damn thing was still impossible. Should’ve brought slates. More than half the time new gadgets just slow you down. I typed another likely command. Nothing.
Breep djoong breep,
Megalon went in my ear, telling me to get it together.
Breep breep breep breep breep,
I typed back, meaning, roughly, wait a goddamn second. Jeez, this show’s running Marena about fifteen thousand dollars a minute, she’d just said she’d sold her last points in the movie, including sequels, video, most of the computer-game rights that weren’t based on the earlier Neo-Teo world, and she was still going into debt, so financially, at least, the EOE would work out for her, and then you don’t even tell us—

Oh, Okay. Got it. I dimmed the heads-up so that I could barely see it and ran through two reps of rage-abatement breathing. Cancel, cancel. Everybody’s doing their best. They’re professionals, they’re doing a good job, you’re doing a good job, you’re capable, you’re resourceful, and people like you. Okay.

I smell ’branchs, I thought. Can’t see anything that small, though.

Hmm.

On my heads-up display the six blue dots, my own team, were forty feet west, that is, behind me. Adequately close, I thought. The divers from the
Blue Sun
were too far away to separate and were just one big orange dot.

I switched off the night vision.

Making things out on a lampless night dive is like—hmm. Well, if you’ve done it, it’s like that. Otherwise I guess it’s a bit like standing at an open door in the dark with the light behind you and calling your dog, and somewhere he turns around and, maybe not over-hurriedly, ambles back, and you first make out the dirty emerald green of his eyeshine. Here I could just glimpse the peaks of a few digitate spires, the foothills of the sierra of sleeping coral.

Closer. Hold still.

Nudibranchs.

In the barely two lumens of light they looked dull blue with black stripes, almost exactly like
Tambja mullineri
.

But they were moving differently from any ’branchs I’d seen before. Almost like a school. I dropped one of my two-pound weights and let myself drift in the school’s—or schoolette, or I guess we can call it a class—I let myself drift in the direction they were headed, southeast, toward the tip of the reef. A little tune, soft but angry, started up in my ear, meaning that I was letting myself get unforgivably separated from the rest of the team. If—

Hmm. Orange dashes on my mask screen. What does that mean? No, wait, they’re out there. Streaks of lights, evenly spaced, and not—

Whoa. It was the support line from the
Blue Sun
, marked with a glowstick every fathom. Yikes. I put the DPV into reverse, backed up twenty feet, angled the thing down, and descended ten feet, toward where I guessed the anchor would be—

BEEP. DONG. DONG-DANG, BEEP.

Danger.

( 90 )

O
n the heads-up screen the three orange-for-hostile dots had separated into a wide triangle, with the closest vertex about twenty feet off. But they were also blinking, which meant that the divers’ locations were only approximate.

Coral giant’s-fingers about three yards high. Down another five feet. Colder. Following an undercurrent. I used the old trick of making my eyes like a microscope, crawling over the coral as if it were feeding time, going at it as if I were sucking out the polyps. A little on the late side, I was realizing that Sic’s unfamiliar body wasn’t used to diving, and wasn’t responding the way my original body would have, and so my kicks were awkward and out of sync with my amateur-night spasmodic-ass breathing. I focused on my heads-up display. The rest of the team was falling behind. The farthest of the dots was in a hard-to-read cluster that might have been hostiles. What were they up to? Still dealing with the guards? From the beeping I guessed that they thought I’d ditched my minder intentionally. But why weren’t they talking to me? Was I getting set up by my own team? No, too elaborate. They could’ve gotten rid of me anytime they wanted. Maybe one of them was working for the other side—some other side—and was going to assassinate me? It didn’t seem reasonable. More likely, the guard is more trouble than they’d thought. Or maybe some other people from Jed
₁
’s boat had showed up? That would explain the dot—

Huh.

There was a dark shape against the dull green coral. In wordless thought and in less than a second, I realized that he was less than five feet away, that he was facing me, that he saw me, and that he was reaching toward me, and, not from his masked face or his head, which was hooded, but just by some hitch in his movement that was as unmistakable and indescribable as the signature rhythm of your mother’s footsteps, I knew that it was Jed
₁
.

And almost before I knew it, we seemed to be hugging each other, slipperyly. I dropped my DPV but the harness was still attached. I got a hand on him. I couldn’t stop thinking of the scene in one of the later Oz books where the Tin Woodman meets his head. Don’t get distracted. That’s your problem, Jed, you’re always fuguing into a digression at the worst possible—Cancel that. Keep your eye on the bling. Supposedly it was another pretty big problem people had in combat, where they start thinking about some book or running some song they like or whatever and the next thing you know you’re sticking your head out of your trench. Coolitz, I thought. Strength and guile, I thought. In fact just guile.

Where was the rest of our team? Damn, the DPV was dragging us down. I managed to get my left hand in there and get the ’bener off and detach myself and slip partly loose from Jed
₁
. There was mist in my mask now and I couldn’t see the heads-up stuff clearly, but I could still infer from the shapes and from the sound cues that Jed
₁
was finning the two of us away from the rest of the divers, his and mine, away from the reef, out into the deep water. I followed. I guess it’s pretty bathetic to say it was weird, but it was, I mean, there was this person with my mannerisms and my face, who was more obviously me than I was—

Click. He’d found my channel on his com link.

“You got me,” Jed
₁
whined in my old voice. He kicked away from me.

“Come on in,” I said. “Seriously, they won’t torture you, they—”

He dove, deep. I followed. He’s killing himself, I thought. He’ll get down to sixty or so and then pull his mask off and blow up his head. It’s a quick way to go, like a hand grenade.

Going down, it gets dark fast. But the pressure tightens up even faster. A crunch echoed through my head with a noise like Serpentine Glacier calving into Prince William Sound. Breathe, I thought. I breathed. I already felt like a cork in a wine bottle. Breathe. Down. Breathe. Actually, the rebreather should work better lower down. Except Jed
₁
might’ve packed some deep-sea nitrox mix just in case. If he did, then he’ll do better. Down.

“This is so fucked up,” I said, in that Alvin-and-the-Bathymunks falsetto you get below four fathoms.

“Yeah,” he agreed.

I got the light on him. I blasted what air was left out of my buoyancy compensator. I finned down. There.

I got him.

It wasn’t a fight. At best it was a grapple. Maybe because long ago I’d read too much doppelgänger fiction, I’d expected it to feel like I was fighting with a mirror image of myself, but it didn’t, and not just because he wasn’t reversed. He’d changed. He had short hair. And there was the mask. And his expression, from the little I could see of it, was so I don’t know what . . . and I’d do something and he wouldn’t, and then he’d strike out with his left hand, say, and I’d catch myself trying to do the same with my right hand, as though somehow the right thing to do was to keep up with the mirror theme, but then I’d realize how stupid that was. Just stick to the factuals. Just keep him here, keep him away from the boat, Ana’s going to get here any second, she knows what to do, just hang on. I hit him in the stomach but I wasn’t sure it had a lot of effect. There was a sort of bonk on my mask. Yeowch. Salty. Hell. Blood. I’d bitten off a little part of my cheek. Damn it. Supposedly there were hammerheads in the area, and they’d come in shoreward at night. And they’re like aquatic tracking hounds. If there was even a thread of the shit leaking out of my mask they’d be able to smell it all the way to Cuba. Yum yum, guys. Hell—

Jed
₁
twisted and nearly got free. My left hand hung on. I finned and got my right hand onto his belt. Hang on. Regroup. Okay.

Attack.