Cut Off (45 page)

"Why did they come here?" she said on the third day of their journey.

Ness glanced her way. "Do you want the real reason? Or the reason they tell themselves to feel better?"

"The real one."

"To take it for themselves. Sebastian doesn't like to talk much about offworld business, but I get the impression the crew who came here weren't exactly the prom kings back home. More like the Puritans. Right down to the bit about taking a new world from the undeserving natives."

"How ordinary." She brushed back stray strands of hair and re-tied them behind her head. The ceaseless wind was the worst part of sailing and she was giving serious thought to chopping her hair as short as Ness'. "So what's the justification they tell themselves?"

He shrugged his bare shoulders. At least he'd replaced the diaper with a pair of Hawaiian trunks. "Religious. But more philosophical, like one of the Eastern ones. Or the old Greek schools."

"In other words, no white-bearded squid-god looking down from his throne on high. So what
do
they venerate?"

"Life. And for the ability of non-living matter to organize itself as life. They see this as the ultimate will of the universe. That's why, whenever possible, they incorporate living organics into their buildings. All that blue and orange crap. Supposedly it's a whole lot wilder back on their homeland, but out here on the hardscrabble frontier, they got to stick with more primitive stuff like plastic and metal."

He twiddled with his octant. He had a habit of avoiding eye contact. "Anyway, that's like their One Commandment. Their Prime Directive. Meanwhile, humans were doing everything they could to
destroy
life. To convert the living world into a parking lot wrapped around a skyscraper. Knocking us out was portrayed as a moral imperative."

"Seriously? That all sounds so Captain—"

"—Planet. I know. Huggin' trees and buying local. Like the Sierra Club's Final Solution. Or a Japanese anime movie, the outsiders come to punish humans for their misdeeds against the environment. But that's really not where it comes from."

She laughed. "You're getting kind of worked up about this. Don't tell me you're a believer."

He got a look on his face like when she'd been in her freshman year and a black person or a gay man had been asked to share their experience as such. "We don't venerate life for its one shared soul or some shit. Rocks and dirt, they don't got anything to lose. Life is the only thing in the universe that can have something taken away from it. It has to fight for its existence every single day.
That's
what we respect. Worship, if you want to call it that."

"They may not have a God," Tristan said. "But the cruelty of it certainly sounds Old Testament."

He laughed, flushing. "Well, most schools aren't so militant about it. Problem is, the ones who made this little trip were the fanatics."

They kept a steady course east-northeast. With nothing but open water between themselves and the mainland, they sailed day and night, sleeping in loose shifts to have one of them up and watchful at all times. With almost no actual work to do, Tristan had hour after hour to think, yet she found herself spending most of her time staring out to sea with no thoughts at all. She felt good. That was all.

On the afternoon of the eleventh day from Hana, Ness lowered his binoculars from his face, squinted, raised them again, then whirled with a grin. "Land ho!"

As they came nearer, their eyes showed them something the alien map didn't: a trio of small, ridged islands separated from the endless mainland of North America, situated in the very spot the plague lab was supposed to inhabit.

Sprite thumped over to the railing to gaze at the brown islands. "So which random patch of ocean do we search first? And how many years of searching do you think we can pull off before they spot us and launch the virus?"

"It won't be that bad," Ness said. "I'll get Sebastian to overlay our coordinate system on the aliens'. While he's working on that, drop me on one of the islands so I can figure out our exact location. Bet I can narrow it down to a square mile or three."

"That's an incredible amount of ocean!"

"Check between the islands," Tristan said.

Faces swung her way. Ness said, "Remember something?"

"When I was down there, I saw fish. Much more of those near land than out in the middle of nowhere."

Sam scanned the waves through her binoculars. "Would provide protection from storms. Lots easier to build in shallow water, too. Say Ness, ask your buddy if the installation has the sensors to register our presence?"

Ness gestured back and forth with Sebastian. "If we get close enough, they'll know it. What say we park ourselves off the tip of the island there and have a look around?"

They anchored, loaded up their landing canoe with their breathing equipment, and paddled to shore, leaving Sprite to man the yacht. The island was a narrow strip, dusty and brown, patchy with dull green grass, and swarming with shrieking birds. The cliffs were eroded in terraces that made the hike easier than it had looked from the water. They climbed to the topmost ridge. On the island's west side, the waves thrashed the shore; on the east, they barely lifted their heads. Up north, the shallow bottom hosted an undersea prairie of green kelp.

Further east, though, the sun shined on something else: orange swathes deep below the surface.

30

He plunged into the water. Bubbles swirled around his face. He sucked on his regulator, panicked by the sudden cold of the water. He could no longer tell which way was up. His breath hissed and echoed. It felt far too loud, like his head had been jammed into a bowl and all the oxygen would be gone in another second. And then it was—he was still breathing, but there was no
air
in the air—and he had to breathe as fast as he could just to get any oxygen at all. His head went light, fluttery. His chest clamped down on itself, as if he was not five feet under water but five thousand. He needed to get above the water and get his mask off, but he still couldn't tell where the surface was.

The bubbles. A column of them streaming from below as Tristan descended into the black. That was down, then. Something more: that was Tristan. Alone. Sprite couldn't possibly be down here—maybe once he'd had months to rebuild his strength. Sam had offered to come, but she was the only one with expertise of the explosives. There was zero chance she could be placed at risk. Sebastian would have been the most obvious candidate for the underwater venture, but his injury wasn't fully healed, and his last attempt to swim had stressed it badly.

That left Ness and Tristan. She seemed competent and a half, yet even now, he hardly knew her. And if something happened to her—a failure in her equipment, an attack from the lab—he would be the only thing remaining between the virus and the world.

His breathing had calmed enough for him to know he wasn't about to suffocate. All that remained was to trust that he could do as he had trained to do. What humanity and the Way required of him.

Below, Tristan stopped and kicked around to face upward, gesturing at him. He held out his hand, raised one finger. A few moments later, he gave her the okay symbol. She flashed it back, spun around, and swam toward the shapes in the darkness.

He followed.

The top of the installation was nearly forty feet down, rising thirty feet from the sea bed. The structure was Y-shaped, three fat tubes jointed together in the middle, each branch forty feet across and a hundred long. Tristan claimed there were windows in the structure, yet the lighting inside was so dim he could hardly discern it from the moonlight until they'd descended halfway to the lab. A black blot drifted by his face. He swatted at it and the fish burst away. He gave his heart a second to quit thundering, then kicked to catch up with Tristan.

She broke toward one leg of the Y. He angled toward another, stopping halfway down its length. The sides were rounded, but the top was flat enough to walk on. Starfish hugged the dull metal, sliding over barnacles and mussels. Small fish twitched away from his presence. Ness unsnapped the bag slung around his middle, withdrew a plastic box, and extracted the first charge. He pressed it snug to the top of the tube, molding the explosive into the jagged carpet of mussels, careful not to dislodge the detonators.

Again, he had to wait for his heart to slow down. His mask smelled like his own sour breath and the tang of salt. He kicked toward the central hub, placed a charge in the seam between it and the tube, then swam to the next leg of the structure and did the same. By the time he placed another charge, Tristan was swimming over from the third leg of the Y. She flashed the okay sign. Together, they kicked away from the lab toward the shore. It was all Ness could do not to scream. Once the bottom climbed to meet them and they were less isolated in the open water, they hooked south along the shore, paddling over tendrils of kelp and schools of palm-sized fish, their bright colors muted in the night.

On the long swim back to the yacht, he had a thousand visions of being snagged by a tentacle and dragged down into the crushing deep, or of being bitten in half by a cruising Great White. Then he was at the ladder at the back of the ship, climbing shakily, feeling ten times as heavy the instant he pulled himself from the water. As he stripped off his gear, Tristan dragged herself to the deck.

"Well?" Sam said.

Ness peeled his wetsuit down his legs. "It's done."

"No sense waiting. Might want to get down."

He gestured to Sebastian, who crouched and threaded his tentacles through the railing. Ness got down beside him. Tristan tromped next to him and knelt close enough that he could feel the warmth from her skin.

A button clicked in Sam's hand. Waves sloshed against the hull, the only sound in the gentle night. Ness began to shiver—it was early December, and though the Mexican coast was a long, long ways from freezing, months in the tropics had spoiled him. He glanced at Sam.

As soon as he shifted his eyes, light flashed beneath the water three hundred yards away. A giant spout erupted from the surface, mushrooming upward, the sea collapsing into the momentary crater in the waves. The moon glittered on the artificial rain spattering down from the clear skies.

A sharp wave of force struck the yacht at the same moment they heard the muffled, hollow boom. Ness shouted, holding tight to the rail. The ship rocked, settled. The rain ceased, its hiss replaced by that of strong waves rushing against the rocky shore.

"That," Sam said, "is how you blow something up."

Tristan jumped to her feet. "
Fuck
those motherfuckers!"

Sprite threw himself down the stairs from the cabin, somehow keeping hold of his balance. "Does this make us heroes? Can we go to Tijuana and demand a parade?"

Ness laughed. "This was the only other source of the virus. At the very least, we deserve a vacation."

Tristan tipped her head. "After you've lived in Hawaii, where
do
you go for vacation?"

"Las Vegas," Sam said. "Our ninth island."

"Hell no," Ness said. "No more deserts for me. Not unless they got working AC."

Across the sea, the calming water began to boil. A line of steam vented into the night. The others fell silent, watching.

Ness mushed his brows together. "Is that one of the charges?"

"Those would be rather more expressive," Sam said. "Could be a secondary explosion. Chemical fire or something."

Sebastian shook his head, jabbing a tentacle straight forward. He signed, "Start the boat and make it go now."

"What for?" Ness said. "We're safe here."

The alien shook his head wildly. "Make us go!"

Ness turned to Sprite. "Fire up the engine."

"Huh? I don't want to sail around these rocks at night. We'll tear ourselves in half."

Out to sea, the cloud of steam was moving away from them, straight toward the mainland. Sam had her binocular clamped to her eyes. "That's a
ship
."

Sprite's mouth fell open. He whirled and stomped up the steps. The motor roared to life, the anchor line clunking as it withdrew into the boat.

"We got to stop them," Ness simultaneously said and signed. "If they managed to get out with a copy of the virus, Tijuana's not ten miles from here."

The yacht was already swinging about, lumbering away from the rocky spine of the island. Tristan ran to the sails, hauling on lines to tighten them against the wind. Sebastian joined her.

"Thing's got a tower sticking from it," Sam said. "Hardly any deck at all."

"It's a submarine," Ness said. "We used to have one just like it. It must have been hidden beneath the lab."

"Is it supposed to be smoking like that?"

Ness accepted the binoculars. The sub's top was clear of the water, the steam replaced by thick black smoke whirling from its front. Dark shapes scurried around the tower. "Must have knocked a crack in them. That's what forced them to surface."

They were several hundred yards away and the engine was already blatting at full power. For a minute, they held distance; Sprite angled with the wind, Tristan and Sebastian tightening the sails. They began to close.

Sebastian returned to the rail. Sam ran into the cabin and emerged with a long-barreled sniper rifle. She set up across the railing, eye to the scope, adjusting patiently to the pitch of the ship. Ness got out his laser. For the moment, the aliens on the top of the sub were too preoccupied with their own seaworthiness to have noticed the yacht.

"Don't suppose you got a bazooka in the cabin," he called to Sam.

She didn't look up from her scope. "Left it on Maui, I'm afraid."

"What, didn't foresee the possibility we'd wind up in a race with a crippled submarine bristling with alien marines?"

Sam smirked. Ahead, the sub continued to spew smoke into the air. The yacht was plowing ahead as fast as they'd ever managed, but Ness knew it wouldn't have been enough if the sub hadn't been crippled by the destruction of the lab. By the time they were two miles from the islands, they'd pulled within two hundred yards of the enemy vessel.