Spoiler :

Protagonists (More to come)

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Chef d'Escadron Azra Ahmed

Age: 38

Occupation: United Nations Special Investigator

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Dr. Hadley Mabella

Age: 37

Occupation: Computer Systems Architect

~1~

(Dr. Hadley Mabella)

Atlantis, South Pacific Ocean

09-04-2088

Emergency fluorescents flicker as nozzles spray frigid seawater into the cramped chamber. Hadley is hunched beside the control touchscreen, armwire jacked in, his consciousness a paradox of compartmentalized focus. Captured-yet-fleeting within his audiovisual manifold, he senses surveillance feeds and sentry drones and the helmet cams of the security details who patrol in force throughout the halls of the administration district.

On the far side of the titanium iris above, guards wait with weapons drawn. Through the iris below, three Manta-drones swim in lazy orbits. No longer are they hunting. They know where he is. They think they have him trapped.

He shouldn't be able to do what he's doing, locked in an airlock in the underbelly of the city, but the system has backdoors for those who know where to look. As if twitching phantom limbs, he mentally flexes through the innards of the central neural network, using code-cracking implants to bash down flimsy firewalls. He plays with Atlantis' soul as if it were his own. For it is. He designed it, after all.

He directs most of his attention on the power plant systems, but a shard of his mind notes the pink hue of the water swirling around his knees. Kay's hemo-seal spray isn't quite working. He swivels one of his eyes to her.

His niece sits slumped against the curved gray bulkhead, faintly bobbing in the rising water which already reaches her chest. She cradles her arm, and though the open wound is half-submerged, he can clearly see the shrapnel-chewed muscle and bone where the ceramic bullet struck her bicep. The trauma is deep and wet and raw, but mostly free from blood. She'll drown before she bleeds to death. Which is good, because he doesn't have anything to use as a tourniquet.

She looks at her arm and winces. "I'm cold," she says weakly, though her blue wetsuit should regulate her temperature; the stims should counter the worst of the shock.

He offers no reply, but like a tickle his social processor tells him he should reassure her. That's what uncles are supposed to do. He forgets, sometimes.

"I'm overriding the safety protocols on the fusion reactor," he explains, keeping his voice quick and shallow--he doesn't need much air; she does. He adds, "I'm going to shut down the coolant, allow it to go critical."

Somehow, she fails to appear reassured. Her head lolls. Her eyelids, shrouded by soaked black bangs, droop to half-mast. "You're . . . you're going to blow us up?"

He uses a backdoor to access the Mantas. He can't override their programming outright, but should they lose contact with AtSec . . .

To Kay, he says, "No, the shields should keep out the worst of the heat; then the backup systems should jettison the core. But during that hundredth of a second, magnetic coils are going to switch on." He makes a smile. It feels weird. "I'm going to ensure they overload. A lot."

"An EMP?" she asks. Her voice is bleary and half-mumbled, as if belonging to a toddler half her age. "That's not going to help. Security drones are hardened."

Smart girl. Like her mother. "Oh, ye of little faith," he says and tries another smile. It feels more real this time.

There's a Minnow-Class submersible docked four hundred meters southwest, outside the estimated EMP radius. Hadley remotely activates the small sub's magnetohydrodynamic drive, releases its docking clamps and locks its access to anyone but him. As a last step, he turns on the airlock's camera, looks into its lens and says in a loud voice over the splashing water, "I am Doctor Hadley Mabella, Chief Software Architect of the Atlantis Netocracy. Our police department has shot my niece and fired upon me. Currently, we are locked in an airlock which they are flooding. This illegal attack came without warning or reason and has been authorized by President Aalders. She's behind the media blackout. Here's what she didn't want you to see."

With faint, localized concentration, he sorts and attaches recently deleted surveillance feeds and emails to the data packet and seeds the message deep in Atlantis' neural network. A few hours from now, after the power returns, this will broadcast on every touchscreen, every holovid, every AR contact. Aalders will have some explaining to do.

But he hesitates. Perhaps he should have said more. Did he remember to make facial expressions? He was never very good at speeches.

But now the water is up to Kay's neck, and she groans with chem-dulled pain as she struggles to keep her head aloft. Hadley sends the final activation signals and unplugs his armwire, severing his consciousness from Atlantis' soul. Five seconds later, he hears a crash and the lights go out--in the airlock, and all across Atlantis.

Kay cries, splashes. The nozzles continue to spray. Hadley's vision switches to infrared, transforming the dark chamber into a rainbow world of blues smeared with red, orange and yellow.

Kneeling in the thigh-deep water, he fishes his hands into the inky depths until he finds the outer airlock's manual release on the edge of the floor. He opens the panel and pulls, twists. Twists, pulls. The crank remains stubborn. Fear leaks into his brain.

"This is a shitty way to die," Kay says between gasps that could be sobs. She tries to stand and almost succeeds.

Hadley shakes the crank, jerks back and forth and up and down, screaming like the wild chimp he's become. It's not fair they're going to kill her she didn't do anything we're all going to die this is bullshit. . .

But then he blocks targeted pathways in his amygdala, and the panic subsides. He proceeds with precise, exploratory force and pressure until the crank shifts and turns and the iris in the floor grinds open .

Sidestepping the new moon pool to the Pacific depths, he pulls Kay to her feet with her good arm. He grips her head and forces her to look at him. Her face is lava in midnight that trembles through his palms. Cold water cascades over them both.

"I can't see," she says.

And she can't breathe water. She has no augments of any kind. But then, she's only twelve.

"I'm going to need you to relax," he says. "Be calm, lower your heart rate. You'll waste less oxygen that way."

"Haddy, I'm scared."

He wonders why everyone doesn't have endocrine-inhibiting implants--and what to say to a frightened little girl.

"Don't worry. If you die, you won't exist, and you won't be scared anymore."

By infrared, Hadley can see the echo of a bitter grin in her shining orange flesh. "Gee, thanks," she says with a sniffle or a laugh. But she knows him. She understands.

Even standing, the water is past her waist. "You'll need to hold your breath for two, maybe three minutes. Maybe longer," he says. "Exhale. Let it all out. Do it. Now take a deep breath. As much as you can. Now hold it. Hold it! And hold on to me!"

He pulls her to him and steps over the open iris to fall into the ocean world. The wetsuit fights back the worst of the cold. The implant where half of his right lung use to be tickles as the filters extract oxygen from seawater.

He switches to light enhancement, and as expected the three Manta-drones are still swimming in slow, wavy circles--waiting, but not attacking. Disconnected from Atlantis Security, they've reverted to the secondary programming he imparted to them: Protect Dr. Hadley Mabella.

Kay hugs him in one-armed awkwardness as he tugs the armwire from his left wrist. As a Manta swims by, he grabs hold of the ventral maintenance panel, and the mattress-sized drone drags them along in its idle flight. Hadley slides the panel aside and jacks the armwire into the interface port. Its eyes are his eyes. Its mind is his mind. He takes control.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

Dangling by one hand, the other holding Kay's, Hadley directs the Mantas in a sloped dive that swoops into a level, if not steady, vector. The drones' rubbery biopolymer wings flap like seagulls as thrumming hydrojets rush them through the water until he and Kay wag like a tail behind the lead Manta.

He feels no fear but only anticipatory disquiet, for though Kay is minutes from death and he is hanging for his life from a biomechanical fish, the weaker, less augmented shards of his mind can do nothing but watch the gray and green sprawl of avenues and alleyways and power cables and water turbines pass scant meters above as the drones soar beneath the bottom half of Atlantis' cityscape.

It's a sight he's seen a thousand times; only now is it beautiful.

They pass over a pair of EMP-fried submersibles, turning and rocking as they sink slowly into the dark Pacific depths. The occupants will probably be rescued in time. Probably. Not that he's at fault. If anyone dies today, Aalders is to blame.

Hadley was born in Atlantis back when it was a few old supercarriers strapped together. He grew up here, helped it grow into the city-state before him. And now some corporate-Philistine of a President thinks he's expendable? Or a threat?

Hadley intends to find answers. The message from his sister is as good as lead as any.

The police appear from behind a corner, a hundred meters to the rear. Their hydrojet packs trailing angry bubbles, the five figures close the distance like a squad of human torpedoes. They aim gyrojet machine pistols in his direction, and he has no doubt they're target assisted.

His Manta can't outswim them, not dragging two humans, so he throws the drone into defensive maneuvers while he circles around the two wing drones to intercept. Gunfire streaks curve and crisscross in the water, but hunter-seeker bullets can only change trajectories so much, not to mention their limited propellant. The police should have waited.

His Manta banks under a hospital basement block, but he can still see the combat through the drones' eyes. The Mantas and jetpack police weave mad atomic diagrams of bubble streams as they dogfight like something out of an old 2-D war movie. Though they wear badges on their chest, the uniforms aren't the usual APD. Probably shore-based contractors. Their wetsuits are bulky enough to be armored, but when one of the cops' arms explodes from its shoulder in a flower-cloud of gore, Hadley concludes they're not spec'd against the Mantas' 11.5mm autocannons.

The Mantas aren't bullet proof either, but it doesn't matter who wins. Their sacrifice buys time, and Kay is asphyxiating, maybe drowning. He can feel her thrash in his vice grip. He wonders what he would feel if she were to die. He doesn't want to find out.

Swooping from beneath an underwater garage, their Manta arrives at the docked Minnow. More police greet them. Less than twenty meters away, the four officers float beneath the open moon pool of the docking facility, a small Sting-drone by their side. One of them points. They raise their guns.

The blocked paths in the amygdala disallow panic, but Hadley feels the transcendent rush of analysis and calculation. He triggers his neural accelerators. The world grinds to a crawl.

The police bullets plow slow gouges through the water as their rockets grant them gradual velocity. The Sting-drone sweeps left for a flanking maneuver. With an unmoving eye Hadley assess the situation and between heartbeats knows the way.

Time resumes. The Manta flips on its side and dives as he pulls in his legs and plants his feet on the drone's underbelly as if he is surfing in a crouch upside down. Kay swings from his arm at an angle that burns the tendons of his shoulder, yet he still tries to pull her close. The Manta shudders as bullets chew into its dorsal hide, and Hadley banks and soars the drone up towards the sealed moon pool of the whale-shaped Minnow.

Timing is everything. That's what his social therapist always told him. There are times when one shouldn't say certain things; there are times when one must say certain things; facial expressions should be used appropriately--people are finicky, confusing things. But Hadley understands objects. He knows the dynamics of causality, the ballet of physical interaction.

Issuing his final orders to the Manta, he unjacks his armwire from the control interface and releases his grip on the maintenance panel. Inertia carries him and his niece the final four meters to the sealed iris, and as the half-dead drone charges the police, its autocannons' deep bass shaking through the water, Hadley slams out his palm to the moon pool's touch-lock pane.

The iris opens. Hadley grips the lip of the portal, and nearly wrenches his arm from his socket as he all but throws Kay through into the Minnow's pressurized interior. The Manta offers distraction, but stray bullets buzz by like aquatic bees. He glances at the flanking Sting-drone--thirty meters away, twin guns firing- and pulls himself through.

Something like a sledgehammer explodes into his right leg, but he turns off the pain and rolls onto the rubber mat of the submersible's deck. Kay is beside him, eyes bugged from near-asphyxiation as she shivers and arcs and coughs and takes deep, heaving gasps of the Minnow's air.

But no rest for the wicked. Hadley spares a glance at his right knee and sees he doesn't have one. The shin's still attached, a little. He drags himself across the deck to the Minnow's cockpit, climbs into the seat. A worrying volume of blood flows from the stump.

The docking clamps are free, the MHD drive warmed up, and so Hadley says, "Hold on, Kay!" and pushes on the manual control stick. The Minnow sails forward with scarcely a hum. Explosive-tipped bullets tap metallically against her hull, but the submersible’s titanium-alloy armor is spec'd for oceanic trench duty. He pushes harder on the stick and feels the faint pull of acceleration. They made it. They're safe. He leans back into the chair's formfitting cushion, his head dizzy, his eyelids fluttering . . .

Splashing, a thump. His niece's cry is choked and gurgled. Hadley's arms flutter as he awkwardly turns in his seat. A police officer is halfway through the moon pool (The open moon pool! He forgot, damn it!) and is holding himself up with a hand and a swim-finned shoe on the handlebar circling the portal. The Minnow's movement sprays water around him, but that can't hide the intestines spilling through his bullet-ripped wetsuit.

Though the re-breather obscures the cop's face, there's no mistaking that annoying French accent.

"Mabella!" Security Chief Absolon gasps with a heaving breath. His free hand raises a pistol. "You blow Atlantis' power grid to save yourself? Do you think you don't deserve this? We know what you've done."

"I don't," Hadley says indignantly.

Absolon levels the gun. Hadley shrugs. His limbs feel cold, heavy.

Kay's prone kick has little strength, but it knocks aside the chief's fin-shoe. He half-falls through the moon pool, only his grip on the handlebar keeping him from dropping completely out of the Minnow. Hadley spends a dull second watching the gloved fist clench and strain before turning back to the cockpit controls. Calmly, somewhat uneasily, he jacks in his armwire, overrides the safeties and activates the moon pool's emergency containment.

The iris bangs shut. Through a trick of tension, inertia and lateral acceleration, the severed hand actually summersaults in the air before splashing into the inches-deep seawater sloshing across the deck. Hadley sets the Minnow into a gentle dive, maximum speed. He looks at his knee. Still missing. Still gushing.

"Kay? Would you mind fetching the emergency medical kit? I seem to be bleeding to death."

After a liberal application of hemo-seal and tourniquets, Hadley opens the titanium shutters guarding the cockpit windows. An aquamarine void greets them, spangled with flittering life. It may have cost them an arm and a leg, but they've made it.

But it's not over yet.

His niece sits in the co-pilot seat next to him. "Where are we going?" she asks.

Hadley would pat her arm, but it's in a compression sling. And he's too weak for the effort, anyway. He spots Absolon's handgun sloshing in the blood-pink water by his feet. Useful.

"Baghdad, honey. We're going to find your mother."