Undersea (19 page)

“Yes, only because I don’t think it will be as risky as you think. Getting onboard will be fairly simple. Getting back out again, presuming we have the right equipment, will be just as easy. I’m not suicidal, Proctor Jills. I believe I can do this.”

“Then work out the details and report back to me. We’ll proceed from there.”

“Proctor Jills, I would like to request to be a part of Lieutenant Vargas’ team,” Cern said placing both hands on the table.

“No. Thank you, Thom. Please start your preparations.”

Cern, startled, looked about to object, but it was clear Jills had ended the discussion. The meeting broke up as quickly as it started.

As Thom waited for the elevator down to the marine barracks, Cern caught up with him.

“That was pretty impressive back there. Were you really working on that plan for the past few weeks?”

“Of course I wasn’t.”

VII

It had been two days and Ralla could tell the tension in the room had built to a peak. What must have been squalid conditions weeks ago grew only worse as new prisoners were added to the mix twice a day. Groups started to congeal out of the crowd. Voices were raised. Angry glances were aimed at the guards. It wasn’t long before the number of visible guards doubled. Then tripled. When soldiers came with food the next morning, the air was thick with the potential violence as people shoved their way towards the vats of gruel.

That evening, the guards with food came with shocksticks, and tapped out anyone who got too animated. This had the opposite effect as was surely intended. After the soldiers left, people became apoplectic. Ralla and Dija watched as a shoving match ensued. The tension was palpable, even among those too weak or too scared to get involved.

“I wish they would calm down,” Dija said, sounding terrified. She had tucked her knees into her chest, and had resumed rocking. “I wish... I wish someone would say something.” She rocked harder, gripping her legs so tightly that her fingers went white.

When the fight broke out, Ralla didn’t see who threw the first punch. Fists flew, people tripped over others, who quickly joined the brawl in agitation. The fight spread like fire through the room. Ralla watched in horror as the guards fled, sealing the doors behind them. Dija buried her head between her knees and rocked violently as the room devolved into full-blown riot.

Ralla was only a few paces from the knee-high stand that only moments ago held the vats of food that triggered this mess. She closed her eyes and took a slow breath. After giving Dija a comforting pat, she got up, walked to the stand, and stood on it.

She stood there, took another deep breath, and for the first time in her life exorcized a piercing, terrifying scream—not a scream for attention, nor one borne out of excitement. This was a scream of high-pitched, unadulterated terror. She took a moment to mentally thank her middle school acting teacher. The room stopped. No less than 6,000 eyes, all on her. She looked back at Dija. Across her gripped legs, she flashed Ralla an astonished smile.

“Can everyone hear me?” she said, projecting to the back of the room. She heard murmured affirmatives. “My name is Councilwoman Ralla Gattley. I represent the people of District 1. I took this role after my father, Mrakas Gattley, stepped down from the Council five months ago.” As she suspected, she could hear her father’s name whispered through the crowd.

“We need to stop fighting each other. Our enemy is outside these doors. So from this moment on we work together to help our wounded and to help each other. We will stop this fighting. The men and woman you see around you are in the same situation as you and I. We are prisoners, but we will not behave as such. We will not behave like any less than we are: Citizens of the
Universalis.
Now, I want everyone to sit down. Sit!” She stifled a laugh as the brawlers immediately plopped down where they stood, like obedient school children. “OK, now I want everyone with any medical training to come up here and make yourselves known. Everyone else, introduce yourself to your neighbors. The only way we’ll be getting though this is together. OK, medical training, up here. Let’s go!”

Ralla stepped off the stand and stood in front of it. Dija gave her a quick thumbs up. She saw people making their way through the seated crowd. Thanks Dad, she thought.

“It’s a semi-rigid drysuit,” the tech said, taking one off the rack. It hung in his hands like the carapace of an insect roughly Thom’s size. The suit itself was black, while the armor pieces were a dark gray. It looked like scraps of a cut-up hardsuit grafted onto a normal wetsuit. Fitting, since Thom knew from a brief he’d read a few weeks earlier, that’s pretty much exactly what it was. The tech rapped on the chest armor with his knuckles, proud of its apparent strength.

“It’s non-conductive,” he continued, “so if they hit you with any electrical weapons, you’re safe. It’s ablative, so you’ll take the impact, but not the round. It’s coated with light-absorbing paint, so it should take a few hits with laser weapons, no problem. All the angles were designed by computer to reflect the lowest amount back to the enemy’s sensors. A squad of you guys in these would look no bigger than a shark. The suit underneath is pressurized, so you’re good down to shelf depth, without a sub.” At this Thom’s eyes widened a bit. That was new. The tech spun the suit around. “The rebreather and pressurization unit are integral to the suit, obviously, and here at the lower back, under the breathing gear, are two small impellers to aid in swimming. Should be a little faster than swimming with fins, but for any real speed you’re going to want one of our upgraded pullers. Would you like to see that?”

Thom shook his head. “What about the helmet?”

The tech showed a flash of personal pride and placed the suit back on the rack. From the shelf above, he brought down one of the helmets. It was of a similar angular aesthetic as the suit. The front was permiglass, as expected, but it was oddly rectangular on the sides, the top the only curve. With a final check to make sure he had Thom’s total attention, the tech pressed a large flat button near where the ear would be. Instantly the face mask and entire front portion of the helmet retracted back into itself. The permiglass went up, the side pieces and bottom slid off to the sides. The tech was obviously pleased at Thom’s amazement.

“It folds back so it’s almost completely out of your peripheral vision. The whole helmet sits on watertight rollers, so you can turn your head while you wear it. It’s about as close to not wearing a suit as we could figure out how to make.” The tech hit the button again, and the mask snapped shut like the mouth of some freakish three-jawed beast. “It won’t open without a voice override if it detects any pressure, so don’t worry about bumping your head and popping it open.”

“I have to tell you, Koin, this is amazing. How did you come up with this so quickly?”

The tech let out a little laugh that sounded like a small burst of air escaping from his nose.

“We’ve been working on the designs for years. Something we did in our free time, when we were bored, that kind of thing. There are some parts of this suit my father came up with when he had my job. There just hasn’t been any need for it.”

“Glad I could give you the need.”

“Yeah! Well, no. I mean, you know what I mean.”

“I do. How many of these do you have?”

“Seven is all we could build so far, but we’re getting access to a manufacturing bay in a few days, so we should be able to equip two platoons’ worth in a few weeks.”

“Seven is good; I’ll only need five. Let’s talk weapons.”

The tech motioned him into the next room of the lab cluster. When he looked past Thom to the door, Thom turned to see Cern standing in the doorway eyeing the suits.

“Koin, can you excuse us for a moment?” Thom said, not looking back at the tech. The man nodded unseen, and closed the door after him.

“I need to go with you.”

“I don’t think so, Cern.”

“I can help. I need to go.”

Thom looked him over, as if sizing him up for the first time. Cern was tall and well built. It was the kind of well built that showed he exercised and lifted weights. But there was a softness about him, not the kind of high muscle/low fat build someone would get as a byproduct of hard work. He moved with the relaxed manner of someone who had never been near any sort of danger.

“On the whole,” Thom said finally, “I have to tell you, you’re not much worse than the marines I’m paired up with. They all have this strutting macho attitude I'm positive is just show. I’m sure they'll wet their suits if we get into anything serious.”

“Does the suit not handle that?” Cern said, nodding at the armor behind Thom.

“If it doesn’t already, I’m sure Koin and his team could come up with a way to make piss into a weapon.”

“That’s comforting.”

There was an uncomfortable silence again. A little piece of Thom wanted to be the one to rescue Ralla. The little boy inside him told him to say
no
. He recognized this as a little crazy, and a lot selfish.

“Thom, I’m sorry I reacted the way I did before. I understand now the situation you were in. Can I ask you to let me plead my case for a moment?”

“OK.”

“Before you left, Ralla ended things between us.”

Thom’s heart jumped a double beat. There
had
been something there on the station.

“So you see, I need to come with you. I need to show her she was wrong. I know she needs me, Thom, and it’s killing me. I have to save her.”

Thom tried to mask his frustration. Of course he didn’t want Cern to go, but clearly it was because he wanted to do exactly what Cern claimed
he
needed to do. If he said no, would it be on purely selfish grounds? On the other hand, if he said yes and Cern did save her, would that ruin whatever chance he might have with Ralla? He couldn’t say no just because of that.

This was asinine, Thom realized. Ralla was incredible because she was a strong, intelligent woman. The core of the matter was that she needed rescuing; the rest they could work out later.

“I don’t suppose you’ll be officially going,” Thom said rhetorically.

“Of course not.”

“As far as the marines know, our mission is to poke some holes in the
Pop
. That’s not why
I’m
going, of course. I guess it’d be smart to have someone back me up while I find Ralla.”

“Any thought on how you’ll do that?”

“Well, the plan is two groups of two, with me tagging along as an ‘observer.’ While they do what they do, I’m going blunder about calling her name. How’s that sound?”

“So I’m in?”
“Why not? But we’re going to need one more person in on our insanity.”

“Who?”

“Koin, can you come in here for a second?”

The door opened and the tech entered. His long face showed suspicion.

“Koin, why don’t you close that door and talk to us about your two extra suits.”

Koin was a small man, but unlike many of his colleagues, he was kempt. His clothes and uniforms were always neatly pressed and he kept an antique brass comb with him. He would run the comb through his salt and pepper hair so often it had become something of a joke in his lab. He played it up, in on the joke, but even when no one was looking, he did it anyway. Such was the comfort it created. He stood by the heavily modified transport as a squad of men wearing his armor crossed the empty bay. He couldn’t help but smile. They stood before him, mostly because he was blocking the rear ramp of the transport.

“Lieutenant Vargas, I just wanted to be here to see you off, and to say ‘good luck’,” he extended a hand to Thom, who shook it, the gray armored hand making Koin’s seem like a small child’s. “Your two packages are already on board,” he said, motioning over his shoulder. “It’s going to be a little rougher than we figured originally. We had to rip out most of the insulation and paneling so it would be buoyant with all the extra fuel and supplies.”

“Thank you for all your help,” Thom said, placing his gloved hand on the small man’s shoulder. Koin moved aside and Thom followed the five marines up the ramp, closing it behind him. As he suspected, Sergeant Tegit had found one of the packages and was already livid.

“Who the hell is this?” he barked at Thom. At the beginning of training the Sergeant had thanked Thom for saving him in the sub a few months earlier. That thankfulness had lasted no more than a minute as the machismo and pride in his service took over. He hadn’t been unpleasant, but that wasn’t saying much. Right now his round face was flushed with anger.

“He’s coming, end of story. You can complain about it when we get back.” Thom pushed pass Tegit and the other four marines on his way to the cramped cockpit. There were two seats, but one person could easily touch the opposite side of the cockpit with his outstretched arm. The transport was meant for extended range missions, but that didn’t mean the crew got any comforts. With all the modifications on this sub, the cargo wouldn’t either. Flipping the toggles for the engines and systems, Thom hoped Tegit wouldn’t notice the over-stuffed black satchel under Cern’s seat. 

The dead had been their first demand. When the soldiers ignored them, they lay the bodies by the door. As expected, the guards made it a priority to remove the corpses.

It had taken the rest of that night and nearly all the next day, but their ballroom prison was starting to show some levels of organization. The wounded were clustered in a corner, near one of the entrances and the water. There were only a few cots left over, so Ralla had Dija organize a lottery where each winner would get a night in a cot instead of the floor. If the winner wanted to give up the cot to another, they got extra rations for the next two meals. Ralla was surprised by people’s enthusiasm. Making the ballots was the hard part, not least of which finding enough material to write on, and then wading through the room to collect all the names. It took Dija and a dozen helpers nearly the entire day.