~3~

(Dr. Hadley Mabella)

Lau Basin, South Pacific Ocean

09-10-2088

"You're going to have to stay awake while I'm gone, Kay," Hadley says in a helium-shot rasp. "Do you think you can do that?"

His niece is slumped in the co-pilot seat. Her moan is a squeak.

Built for deep-sea habitat maintenance, the Minnow is stocked with construction supplies. Undeniably useful, but more power would have been nice. And food. And medicine.

But in these gloomy depths, Hadley makes do.

Already he's installed the pods with burst transmitters. Next comes the thermite. With amplified sight and trembling hands, he slides stylus-sized charges into the beacons which clutter the small submersible's currently tilted deck like so many aluminum cantaloupes.

The Minnow is all but shut down. Only passive sonar. No heat, no lights. A thousand meters of cold sea creaks against the hull, but their skinsuits stave off hypothermia. High-pressure nervous syndrome will kill them before they freeze.

Kay complained that they didn't need to do this: why torture themselves with chems and super-dense air when the sub can just as easily maintain a steady 1 atm? But they would never reach Fiji without recharging, and being wanted for who-knows-what, it's not like they can stop by any atoll station. To get what they need, he must go outside and crawl where the sun never shines. And the Minnow doesn't have an atmospheric diving suit.

So, for the last week they've taken the Barilex pills while gradually pressurizing the sub with heliox. But despite the saturation-accelerating drugs, human tissue is not meant to absorb gas so quickly. The tremors and myoclonic jerks aren't bad yet, but even with his many cognitive-augments, he grows disoriented.

A couple of days ago, he wandered the cabin awake but unresponsive, clawing at bulkheads and pressing buttons at random. Fortunately, Kay was in one of her lucid moments and managed to trip him.

It's affecting her worse, but Hadley keeps his amygdala blocked; he can't afford to worry.

But just one quick venture outside, and then they can begin the slow decompression and shed this mad atmosphere.

He primes the last pod and dumps it on the deck where its metallic roll reverberates in the cabin's thick air. From the nearby medical nook he retrieves a syringe (a hypospray won't work in 33 atms) filled with a prepared cocktail. Bracing for the sub's slant, he props himself up and limps to the cockpit with his peg-leg.

The exploding bullet had already done most of the work, so the amputation was no more than sawing through a meat rope. The hemo-seal and bandages took care of the stump, and with some spray-foam, nylon straps and an aluminum-alloy pipe, they crafted a serviceable, if unbending, prosthesis. If it weren't for his beta-endophine blockers, he'd be screaming with every step.

But Kay can't turn off her pain, and the morphine ran out four days ago. Paracetamol keeps down the fever; fluxacillin slows the infection, but what she needs is a surgical unit to remove the ceramic dust-shards polluting her thin bicep. It may be too late to the save the arm.

He leans by her side and brushes a wet, pallid cheek with a trembling hand. In the pale blue glow of controls, her young face is a despairing capture of his sister when she was a child.

"I've been saving this," he says in a high-pitched but hopefully gentle tone. He holds the needle before her. "It's part stimulant, part analgesic. It won't last long, but it'll keep you functional. And I need you, Kay. I need you."

Her cynical, helium laugh belongs to a dying mouse. Hadley taps the syringe, squeezes out a drop and jabs the hypodermic into her good arm. She screams, thrashes, gnashes her teeth. Brown pupils roll in wide white.

He waits until she calms down, her mental fog clearing.

"I'm headed to the station," he says. "There's a fair chance I'll be spotted. Keep radio silence. Watch the passive-sonar. If you see anything, move to pick me up. Drop beacons if they launch."

Shaking, she stares at him with a slack jaw and unfocused eyes, and at first he thinks she doesn't understand. But then she nods.

"I'll . . . I'll try my best."

He doesn't need his social analyzer to know his niece needs encouragement. He's not very good at this, but settles with, "I know you will. I'm proud of you. And I'm sorry."

Her lank, black hair is greasy against his kiss. He says nothing more, gives her no final glance.

He pulls on a hood, goggles and gloves, and, almost as an afterthought, straps Absolon's gyrojet pistol to his side with a nylon sheet. From a maintenance locker he retrieves a tarp of phase-change material. Designed to minimize thermal wear from underwater power plants, the PCM will mask Hadley's heat signature.

With the press of a dully lit screen, the deck's door sleepily irises opens to slosh frigid seawater into the cabin. Clasping it to his neck, Hadley wraps himself in the tarp as if it were a cloak and crawls through the portal into the Pacific depths. His filter implant tickles to life as he breathes ocean. From the curved ventral hull of the sub, he pops open a small hatch and tugs loose a retractable superconducting cable which will allow a speedy recharge of their lithium-air batteries.

So far down, the noon sun is but a twilight suggestion, but his light enhanced eyes can see well enough. The Minnow is perched near the craggy ridge of a long dormant volcano festooned with tumorous barnacles and anemones whose spines coat rocks like stubble. A sloping, two thousand meter abyss gapes to Hadley's left, beyond which lies a gnarled mountain range that he makes out only as blue-fogged teeth, godlike and rotted dark.

Out of nearby stones, a whale ribcage reaches like frozen claws. A spidercrab bigger than Hadley's head pinches at the tarp. Hadley moves on.

About forty years ago, there was an energy crisis. Too many adolescent nations, not enough power to feed the growth spurts. Many hadn't even been weaned off fossil fuels.

There was a few brushfire wars, a few economic rollbacks. Some countries looked to the sea. Advances in materials science allowed deep underwater construction, prettying up the long-puffed pipe dream of hydrothermal generators.

The Lau Basin is dotted with these installations which harness subterranean heat to power half the Pacific Union. Hadley heads towards one of their relay stations. Unmanned, hopefully unwatched.

But a vain hope, surely. The Minnow had only the range to reach three such nodes, and only this one sits near Fiji. Though passive sonar failed to detect their subs, Hadley knows Atlantis is waiting.

It's a two hundred meters along the ridge, and Hadley crawls like a crippled sloth as his peg leg scrapes against stones. The cable is attached to a belt hoop so that he can better keep the black, crinkly PCM over him at all times. Not that there feels like there's any heat to hide. Even through his skinsuit the icy cold leaves his body dead numb, and in some near-fugue state he catches himself staring at his slowly trembling gloved hand and wondering who it belongs to. Strange aquatic baritones sing to him in gurgles.

The tower appears on the volcanic horizon like a fairy tale lair. Ocean blurs its thorny edges, but with a zoomed eye he sees the plethora of black electrical cables which stream in every direction as if the tall needle structure is the hub of a vast undersea spiderweb.

He reaches its base and finds a portal alcove embedded in structural latticework. After plugging the power cord into a charge outlet, he reads the weathered instructions (written in ten languages, five of which he knows) before pressing buttons on the ancient touchscreens which flood the airlock. Once the process is complete, he opens the door and half-crawls, half-swims into interior water.

A necessary evil: in his highly gas-saturated state, regular air pressure would burst him to blood sausages.

Waterproof florescents flicker on.The control room is a short titanium tunnel almost too low to stand in. Tarp floating around him like a toga, Hadley jacks his armwire into the relay mainframe as it stutters in the first boot-up it's likely seen in years. Moments later, his consciousness embraces the Web.

He and his niece have been cut off for a week. He scans the news. Implants in his hippocampus and prefrontal cortex translate data into semantic bites: Atlantis scientist head of child prostitution ring. Escapes arrest, kidnaps niece. Mass power outage. Three police wounded in shootout. Atlantis Security Chief Absolon vows to bring Dr. Mabella to justice.

Video feeds accompany the headlines, and as they stream through his audiovisual manifold, he realizes he should have anticipated this outrage. Of course they would lie. But why ruin his life? And what does any of this have to do with his sister in Baghdad?

The news includes a short clip of a distraught Kay describing the terrible things he made her do. The CGI is pixel perfect and would fool almost everyone, but to Hadley the teary brown eyes lack that inner luster.

Someone will pay for this, he decides, but then strangles his anger and gets to work.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

He could have done this in the Atlantis airlock, but from the inside it would have been too easy to detect: he's no ace hacker. He pauses, allowing himself to plan, to prepare. He knows enough to hide his address behind multiple proxies. That will buy him a few minutes. He hopes it's enough.

He accesses Atlantis' network, slips through a backdoor and triggers his neural accelerators. With compartmentalized precision, imagination and speed, he conjures his and Kay's new lives: names, places of birth, Global Security Numbers. He forges and backdates financial and medical records and, after using his ICE implants to crack the personnel database, authorizes his creations and disperses them to government offices throughout the world.

The false identities won't stand up to scrutiny, but it's the best he can do.

~You disappoint me, Dr. Mabella, says a voice in his auditory cortex. A ghostly face appears, a transmitted hallucination seeming to hover before the bulkhead's antiquated controls. The man is bald, nut brown and smiling with the confidence that comes from knowing one holds the high water.

~I expected a game of cat and fish, he continues, yet you swam right into the net.

Hadley uses the tower's dish to relay his reply. ~Have you come to murder me, Lieutenant Darmadi?

The Atlantis naval officer feigns a hurt expression. His cybernetic eyes are a wrong baby blue that even Hadley knows is out of style. The coffin-sized bridge of an attack midget-sub crowds his background.

~I've come to arrest you. You're a sick man, a pervert.

~If you believe that, I have a beanstalk to sell you.

A rueful laugh. ~Well, whatever it is you did, must have pissed off the President--or her handlers. It happens. You and Kay come out, and I'll pick you both up. We'll return to Atlantis and figure things out together, all right?

No reason to blow up a relay tower to kill one man. That's the only reason Hadley's still alive. Hopefully, Darmadi doesn't see the Minnow. Or the power cord.

The passive sonar reveals four small drones diving, circling. Still linked to the Atlantis network, Hadley triggers a second neural accelerant (the nootropic rush leaves him lightheaded and shivering) and scours its database for anything related to 2050s-era hydrothermal generator safety overrides. Two seconds later--and after a slew of bashed firewalls--he finds what he needs.

~We're on our way out, Hadley says as he monitors the drones' progress. Less than a hundred meters away, like birds of prey they swoop on the hatchway, ready to shoot as soon as he appears. To stall, he adds, ~My niece is really hurt. Do you have a medical bay?

~We'll take care of her. Just come on out.

The drones stop and float expectantly at fifty meters. That'll have to do.

The relay tower is outfitted with a simple shock defense, just enough to discourage any overlarge and over-curious marine life. The circuit is routed through a transformer which dampens the charge to a reasonable voltage. Hadley doesn't want reasonable. He inputs a code into the mainframe. The transformer shuts down.

The interior should be insulated, but then again, the tower is nearly forty years old. But if the insulation fails, Hadley will never know and therefore he need not worry. With a thought, he activates the defensive grid.

Seven hundred thousand volts. A muffled pop as fuses are blown, then darkness. No more Web. Hadley retracts his armwire and adjusts his eyes to thermal, rendering the lifeless maintenance room in mechanical blacks and blues that smother residual yellows. Half of Fiji may be without power.

He works the airlock's small emergency lever with a wired, trembling diligence that doesn't quite ignite into panic. The drones may still be active. If not, the midget-sub will doubtless avenge them with a torpedo barrage.

With a watery clank, the portal door slides open, and Hadley pushes himself outside, awkwardly banging his peg-leg on the titanium frame. He switches back to light-enhancement: the drones are fried; they drift and sink stiffly like a quartet of petrified mantas.

Now is not the time for stealthy crawls, so he swims between clumsy hops and hobbles across the rocky undersea terrain. The cold gnaws at him. His tarp is the ludicrous cape of a failed superhero.

For all his augmented intellect, he laments that he stumbles crippled on an ocean floor, seconds from obliteration. He will die without answers. His only chance now is his stim-cranked, half-dead twelve year old niece.

He wonders if he dies and she surrenders, would Darmadi let her live? Hadley thought the man was a toady lick-spittle, but he never struck him as a child murderer. On the other hand, Darmadi wouldn't have to worry about any lingering feeling of guilt. There are pharmaceutical solutions for that.

Hadley crests a boulder and sees in the midnight blue a pale whale coasting towards him. No! he thinks but cannot cry. Run away! Run to Fiji!

The Minnow veers to starboard and out its open moon pool drops three small pods that glimmer like pearls. A heartbeat, and they erupt into tiny, blazing white suns wreathed in steam.

As if from nowhere, two torpedoes streak by meters above his head, their bubbly contrails swerving wildly as the homemade ECC beacons' heat and radio noise scrambles their guidance. Something rumbles the earth, and Hadley looks back to witness the relay tower's death throes. Light and frothed water burst the maintenance room and surrounding latticework to tumbling scraps. Only fifty meters away, the tall, pointed spire begins a slow, twisting topple. Towards Hadley.

Another explosion. Closer. A giant scalding hand slaps Hadley into rocks, and he bounces up dizzy and spinning in an outer space of fire and ice.

His goggles are shattered, and in the frigid water his bleeding blinks scratch polymer shards against artificial eyes. His skin blazes with agony. His ribs ache; his lung implant shifts loose and wet. He can't quite breathe.

The pain and fear he shuts off, but he still doesn't know up from down. Through pink fog he watches oceanic pressures stunt nearby blasts to flashy muffles. Void and lights swirl. Shockwaves dance him like a submerged marionette.

Something sleek and looming slams him in the side, and he slides along smooth, hard ice. A small hand tugs weakly at his shoulder. He reaches out, finds a cold metal bar and pulls.

The inside of the Minnow is dimly lit and tilted, part-flooded from the open moon pool. Knee-deep in water, eyes red from crying, Kay grabs him in a one-armed hug and with slipping feet tries to drag him aboard. He grips the deck-grates, tugs off his hood and coughs blood. He shuts down his lung implant and hopes that's enough.

The craft trembles from nearby shockwaves.

"More torpedoes are on the way!" Kay cries in a helium-shriek as she tosses another beacon into the portal, dramatically, as if spiking an American football. She dumps another one. And another.

Her bandaged, aching arm leaves her limping Igor-like as she splashes to the cockpit and sits in the pilot seat. The sub's starboard lean quickens the gush through the deck's gaping door.

"Close the iris!" Hadley shouts high-pitched as ocean smacks him against the bulkhead. The door snap shut. His peg-leg is loose like a tooth, so he doesn't bother standing but rather claws forward and climbs to sit beside his niece.

He jacks in his armwire, takes control and switches on the evac-pumps, but the cockpit's still half-submerged as the Minnow dives along the northern slope of the volcano. Good thing the controls are waterproof. Through sonar he watches debris from the smashed tower pursue downward like a slow-motion meteor shower. A cluster of smaller dots outpace them, but the beacons do their job. One by one the torpedoes swerve, flash and disappear.

Hadley waits until they're coasting along one of the Lau Basin's many narrow, twisting canyons, about 3,500 meters down, before deciding they're relatively safe. He takes stock of the situation.

First or second degree burns, probably. Maybe some broken ribs, internal bleeding. He'll need stitches for his eyelids. As for the sub, the tower's electrical surge damaged the battery, but the charge is enough that they should make it to Fiji if they're careful.

He powers down until they run all but silent.

Reclined in the foam chair, Kay's thin legs shiver. Her teeth chatter. Her eyes jitter and weep in the near-darkness. Hadley allows himself the feeling of guilt because he knows he deserves it. The amphetamines must be a nightmare for her young neurochemistry.

"You saved my life. Thank you," he says and gently ruffles her hair. Then, "I've started our decompression. Your ears may pop for a while, but in a week we'll be ready for normal air pressure. The HPNS-symptoms should subside, and of course we'll stop sounding like chipmunks."

That last part was intended to be humorous. It doesn't work.

"What about food?" she asks bleakly. "We're almost out."

He nods back at the freezer, where his severed leg and Absolon's hand are stored.

Her helium-laugh is a kitten's sneeze.

"Haddy, that's gross!"