Extremis (46 page)

Li’s eyes—hard and unfriendly—flinched away from the back of Jennifer’s head. “I’ll tell you later.”

“Okay. Well, it’s time to go.” McGee raised his voice. “Everybody ready. Exfil in fifteen seconds.” He toggled back to Chakrabarti—and got what sounded like a mix between a car crash and a firefight. “Bog in heaven—Chakra, report. Chakra?”

“Sarge—damn, shit. Sarge, I’m—” Then a gasp, a roar of rotary machine guns at close range…and static.

McGee swallowed and closed the link.
My one second—the one second that couldn’t hurt anyone—just cost Chakrabarti his life.
McGee turned away from his team, his loves, himself. “Everyone down.” He nodded at Kapinski and Battisti. “Blow the valve.”

As Kapinski sprinted away from the valve—but staying close against the wall in which it was mounted—Battisti shouted, “
Clear! Fire in the hole!”
Battisti pressed a button on his wrist-comm. A circular blast sent fragments of plaster, paint, and plasticrete jetting against the inner glass of the empty tank, cracking and star-shattering it in a dozen places. A roughly circular part of the wall tipped forward, slowly at first, and then faster as the weight of the water behind shoved it out of the ragged gap. Kapinksi and Battisti snugged their diving masks back down and attached their thirty-minute chemical rebreathers. McGee rose. “Everyone stand. Up the ladder into the pool. Marines—dump your weapons and assault gear. Now it will only slow us down. We’re getting the hell out of here.”
All except Simonson and Chakrabarti, that is.

All except for the Marines I failed.

* * *

Jennifer hugged the evac ball—usually used on spacecraft—tightly and used her fingers to grope and locate Zander’s head within it. She told herself he was just drowsy, not suffocating in the half-inflated sac which, if fully deployed, would have been about the size of a medicine ball. The infant sedative—its safety assured by the pediatrician’s labwork—was just doing its job, she told herself, and forced her attention back to the tasks of their escape.

Which was terrifying enough. Although never claustrophobic, Jennifer had been ready to vomit as they went, one by one, breathing apparatus on, into the dim tunnel and cold water that, according to the maps, would ultimately lead them out into Salamisene Bay. Jennifer’s mouth had become dry with fear as they began to navigate the narrow, blind passageways, but the Marines seemed both able to see in the dark through the monocles inside their masks and were fully conversant with their exit pathway. Also, no one was required to swim: the entire party had been broken into four equal groups, each towed like a string of sausages behind one of the sea-scooters that the Marines had brought with them. It was slow going in the tight tunnel, but other than holding hands with two people, and using one’s own feet to keep a little distance from the walls, the tasks were not particularly strenuous or complex.

The underwater caravan turned right twice, left once, and then Jennifer lost track. But eventually they came to a thin-barred grate, covered with tide-moss. Beyond it, the water was blue and the light was dappled. The sea? Salamisene Bay? Two Marines went ahead, placed charges, and then led everyone back around the last corner they had turned. The same Marine who had overseen the demolitions in the empty sea-life tank—Battisti—manipulated the buttons on his wrist-comm again: there was a sudden backrush of water along with an uncomfortably loud—yet muffled—blast. Harry led them back around the corner and toward a now-jagged opening where the thin-barred grate had been. They kept their bodies well away from the twisted metal fangs that were the remains of the grate and then were out into the waters of Salamisene Bay. And there, barely visible farther down in the dark blue water and somewhat offshore, was a small submarine. Well, what a neat escape plan.

As they approached the sub, Jennifer saw that its hull was equipped with racks carrying larger versions of the sea-scooters that were towing them now. But, rather than preparing to enter the sub, the Marines unlatched the sea-scooters. There were enough so each two persons could share one—and in the case of the artists, each one of them was teamed up with a Marine.

Sandro got Jennifer to hold on to a handrail on the side of the scooter and then carefully situated her and the baby so that he could see and reach out to them with maximum ease. He held up his left hand, waited until all his Marines had seen him and done the same, and then aimed his sea-scooter down into the depths. Jennifer looked behind and then forward, confused and a little scared: they were moving away from the sub and down into the benthic dark. Why?

As they descended, Jennifer looked back again. The sub was now moving, gaining speed as it headed out to sea on a shallow but steady dive. Then, rather suddenly, the dark blue around her deepened into near-black and blotted the vehicle from sight. She shut her eyes against the sensation of being sucked down into the watery pit of a submerged hell.

She didn’t know how long she kept her eyes closed; it seemed like hours that she clutched the increasingly restless Alexander closer and closer, even as the water grew colder and colder—and then they stopped. Using a sense she was not aware that she possessed, nor could have named, she felt quite sure that they had reached a sheer wall of some sort, that they could not swim farther south.
We’ve come to the foot of the bay,
she thought, just as a dim blue light seemed to flare out of the darkness beside her. It was Harry Li, opening what looked like a black-painted hatch. At first it appeared to be a doorway into the cliff-face itself. But closer inspection revealed that it was centered in a bulge protruding from a gap in the stone: an inset habitation module? Probably so, because Sandro’s large hand—gentle on her elbow—began to tow her toward the light.

Moments later, Jennifer swam into the pressure lock of the cylindrical habitat module and waited while the others maneuvered in after her. The walls of the module were festooned with various military markings and stenciled haphazardly with emergency procedure lists. Then the outer hatch closed and there was a slow gurgling noise. Centimeter by centimeter, the water level dropped lower and lower, and when it went beneath his waist, Sandro tore off his mask, and then gently removed hers. He took the rebreather out of her mouth—only to put his lips where it had been. “Jen,” he sighed, holding an arm in either bearish paw, staring intently as if to make sure it was really her.

“Yes, Sandro, it’s me. But where are we?”

“Marine Reserve training modules. They didn’t start out that way, of course. They were put here when the first colony built the fusion plants and had to monitor and routinely repair the coolant pipes and other open-water interfaces. Then the habmods were shut down when they put the old reactor in mothballs—and we took them over for training purposes.”

“Training?”

“Yeah, sure. If we’re issued new EVA qualification standards, we come down here first to train with the real gear in the pseudo-weightlessness you get with submerged neutral buoyancy. And we also come down here to maintain our readiness for actual undersea assault ops. The regular-duty Marines used the really nifty facilities out in Camp Gehenna. We Reserve grunts in Melantho and the Big Three had to make do with these. They’re not too pretty, and they smell awful—but they’ll be fine for the next seventy-two hours.”

“And then?”

“Then, in twos and threes, we return to Melantho. First, an easy swim beneath the bay. At the end of that, we come up under the docks, dump our gear, change into the clothes waiting there, and blend back into the street. Before we relocate.”

“Relocate?”

“Jennifer, this city—this entire metro area—is no longer safe for me, or for you, or for…” And he looked down with a wide smile.

Jennifer wanted to tell Sandro that she couldn’t leave Melantho, not now, not when she and Ankaht were making such progress. But she also wanted to let that urgency fade for just a moment, to steal a private moment from the respective duties of their lives, and so, instead, she undid the seams of the emergency ball. Barely audible whimperings became infant squallings—that faded just as quickly when Zander’s small hands reached up and found his mother’s familiar and beloved nose. Sandro made a noise that sounded like something between a gasp, a sigh, and a wordless prayer. Jennifer smiled at him. “Sandro, I’d like to introduce you to our so—”

At that moment, there was a dull
thrump
against the outer hatch, even as the last of the water was gargling its way out of the chamber. “Have they found us?” Jennifer asked, fearful but strangely glad that if she and the baby and Sandro were to die, they would do so together. It didn’t seem quite so bad that way.

But Harry shook his head. “No, but they found the sub.”

Jennifer looked back at Sandro. “And so—”

“And so they’ve destroyed it—and think they’ve destroyed us.” He smiled. “Which is just the way we want it.”

15

Save in His Own Country

A prophet is not without honor, save in his own country.
—Matthew 15:57

Prisoner Holding Facility, Resistance Regional Headquarters, Charybdis Islands, Bellerophon/New Ardu

Jennifer woke up, moved languorously…and found nothing in her arms—

Zander!
She sat bolt upright, arms sweeping a desperate circle around her—the circuit of which knocked over the glass of milk they had given her: half finished, she had returned it to a precarious perch half on and half off the coaster. Yeah, they had drugged her, all right: had put something in the milk to knock her out. She remembered barely getting the glass back to the night table. Folding her arms, she sardonically hoped one of the Marines was also a wet nurse or that they had some baby formula in stores, because she was not about to allow Zander to suckle on her barbituated breast milk for at least forty-eight hours.

If, of course, they returned Zander to her at all.

Some welcome for the homecoming hero,
she thought. But then, she had returned with attitudes and knowledge they really hadn’t wanted to hear. Harry and the team that had rescued her—and almost killed Ankaht—had been kind and savvy enough not to say anything about what had happened while the Marines and rescued artists spent their time crowded in the hab module embedded into the side of the Drop at the foot of Salamisene Bay. That had been the happiest of times, just watching Zander play with his dad, evincing that fast, almost mystical affinity that infants have for a parent they have not yet met. There had been no talk of war or captivity: just of the three of them, as if they were suspended safely in the timeless moment of a perpetual Now. Jen and Sandro had even, fleetingly, readopted the personas they had played long ago in a historical-reconstruction troupe: she the brassy tavern wench Bess, he the ne’er-do-well Highland border reiver Ruari Mac Ruari. It had been sheer silliness and sheer bliss. No one tried to debrief her; no one pierced the invisible social cocoon that the little family had spun about itself.

But then the time to complete the after-action exfiltration had come, and, in pairs and threes, the artists and their Marine escorts had begun the two-kilometer swim to the docks of East Shore Melantho. There they would transform back into civilians and immediately make for destinations far outside the area of influence projected by the planetside Arduans—whom the Marines and Resistance still insisted on calling Baldies.

Jennifer and Sandro had been the fourth group to go, with Zander sedated again. Up until a year ago, the two of them had swum frequently in the summers, so they knew the local waters and each others’ pace pretty well. It was an uneventful crossing.

And it was the last uneventful activity that Jennifer had been a part of. As they reached the docks, Harry Li—who had been the first to swim back—was on hand and pulled Sandro aside. Meanwhile some other folks—dressed as surveyors and inspectors from the Public Works Department—not only fitted Jennifer out with new clothes but with all the mommy gear that she needed: a baby backpack, diaper bag, umbrella. In five minutes, they had her looking like a semistylish, middle-class
hausfrau
-in-training, rather than the edgy, funky Earth-Mom she would have opted for if left to her own devices.

But they were not leaving her to her own devices—in any fashion. She looked around for Sandro—saw him being “invited” into the back of a big-wheeled overland rover. She and Zander were guided to a taxi with two female fellow-shoppers: taciturn and smileless bodyguards who treated her as if she were one-half foreign dignitary, one-half death row inmate. Nothing was said—indeed, conversation remained at the level of monosyllables—but the vibe was unmistakably cold and suspicious.

And it remained so until, after six switches between cars, overland cargo-haulers, buses, ATVs, and a two-day hydrofoil journey, she and Zander were deposited—most unceremoniously—in this plain room here on Hylas Island. She had asked to take a walk. Request denied. Swim in the local waters. Request denied. Permission to contact her family, to let them know she was okay. Request denied. To see Sandro, damn it. Request under consideration.

And when the questions started—posed by a weak-chinned, officious popinjay called Heide—she realized that she’d already been judged and tried by the opinion of the Resistance and thereby determined unreliable, certainly a collaborator, maybe even a traitor. The questions that Heide insisted on asking—about numbers and locations and force dispersals in Punt—were not the right ones to be asking her, which she kept trying to point out. They only wanted to know how best to kill the Baldies; she wanted, strove, to tell them that not all the Arduans were hostile and that the whole war—the whole thing—was just a big mistake. Their looks only got harder, their questions more clipped, their eyes more distant. And last night, they had come and taken away her baby. She hadn’t seen that coming: after all, were any of them trained in Close Quarters Mommy Ops? Judging from their looks when she changed Zander’s diapers, efficiently cleaned his spit-up, or even breast-fed him, she thought not. Well, these
Marines lead the way!
bitches and bastards had better be “leading the way” regarding the needs of her son, or she was going to—