I was accustomed to trusting her judgment amid bomb blasts and Sunjet fire on seventeen different worlds, but something didn’t ring true here. Virginia Vidaura was as used to virtualities as any of us. Dismissing what went on there as not real struck me as an evasion.
Certainly felt pretty fucking real while we were doing it.
Yeah, but you came out of that as pent-up and full of come as when you started. It wasn’t much more real than the daydream fantasies you used to have about her when you were a raw recruit.
Hey, she was there, too.
After a while, Sierra stood up and stretched.
“Vidaura’s a remarkable woman,” she said cryptically and wandered off toward the stern.
• • •
A little before midnight, Isa cut loose of Reach traffic control and Brasil took the con from the fair-weather cockpit. By then, conventional fireworks were already bursting, like sudden green and gold and pink sonar displays, all over the Millsport skyline. Pretty much every islet and platform had its own arsenal to fire off, and across the major landmasses like New Kanagawa, Danchi, and Tadaimako, they were in every park. Even some of the boats out in the Reach had laid in stock—from several of our nearest neighbors, rockets trailed drunken lines of sparks skyward, and elsewhere rescue flares were put to use instead. On the general radio channel, against a backdrop of music and party noise, some inane presenter warbled pointless descriptions of it all.
Boubin Islander
bucked a little as Brasil upped her speed and we started to break waves southward. This far down the Reach, the wind carried a fine mist of droplets thrown up by the maelstrom. I felt them against my face, fine like cobwebs, then cold and wet as they built and ran like tears.
Then the real fireworks began.
“Look,” Isa said, face lit up as a bright cuff of childlike excitement showed momentarily under her wrappings of teenage cool. Like the rest of us, she’d come up on deck because she wasn’t going to miss the start of the show. She nodded at one of the hooded radar sweeps. “There go the first ones. Liftoff.”
On the display, I saw a number of blotches to the north of our position in the Reach, each one tagged with the alarmed red lightning jag that indicated an airborne trace. Like any rich man’s toy,
Boubin Islander
had a redundancy of instrumentation that even told me what altitude the contacts were at. I watched the number scribble upward beside each blotch, and despite myself felt a tiny twist of awe in my guts. The Harlan’s World legacy—you can’t grow up on this planet and not feel it.
“And they’ve cut the ropes,” the presenter informed us gaily. “The balloons are rising. I can see the—”
“Do we have to have this on?” I asked.
Brasil shrugged. “Find a channel that’s not casting the same fucking thing. I couldn’t.”
The next moment, the sky cracked open.
Carefully loaded with explosive ballast, the first clutch of helium balloons had attained the four-hundred-meter demarcation. Inhumanly precise, machine-swift, the nearest orbital noticed and discharged a long, stuttering finger of angelfire. It ripped the darkness apart, slashed through cloud masses in the upper western sky, lit the jagged mountain landscapes around us with sudden blue, and for fractions of a second touched each of the balloons.
The ballast detonated. Rainbow fire poured down across Millsport.
The thunder of outraged air in the path of the angelfire blast rolled majestically out across the archipelago like something dark tearing.
Even the radio commentator shut up.
From somewhere south, a second set of balloons reached altitude. The orbital lashed down again; night turned again to bluish day. The sky rained colors again. The scorched air snarled.
Now, from strategic points all over Millsport and the barges deployed in the Reach, the launches began. Widespread, repeated goads for the alien-built machine eyes overhead. The flickering rays of angelfire became a seemingly constant, wandering pointer of destruction, stabbing out of the clouds at all angles, licking delicately at each transgressive vessel that hit the four-hundred-meter line. The repeated thunder grew deafening. The Reach and the landscape beyond became a series of flashlit still images. Radio reception died.
“Time to go,” said Brasil.
He was grinning.
So, I realized, was I.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
The Reach waters were cold, but not unpleasantly so. I slid in from
Boubin Islander
’s dive steps, let go of the rail, and felt the jellied cool pressing me all over through the suit’s skin as I submerged. It was an embrace of sorts, and I let myself sink into it as the weight of my strapped weapons and the Anderson rig carried me down. A couple of meters below the surface, I switched on the stealth and buoyancy systems. The grav power shivered and lifted me gently back up. I broke the surface to eye level, snapped down the mask on the helmet, and blew it clear of water.
Tres bobbed up a few meters away. Raised a gloved hand in acknowledgment. I cast about for Brasil.
“Jack?”
His voice came back through the induction mike, lips blowing in a heartfelt shudder.
“Under you. Chilly, huh?”
“Told you you should have laid off the self-infection. Isa, you listening up there?”
“What do
you
think?”
“All right, then. You know what to do?”
I heard her sigh. “Yes, Dad. Hold station, keep the channels clear. Relay anything that comes in from the others. Don’t talk to any strange men.”
“Got it in one.”
I lifted an arm cautiously and saw how the stealth systems had activated the refraction shift in the suit’s skin. Close enough to the bottom, standard chameleochrome would kick in and make me a part of whatever colors were down there, but in open water the shift system made me a ghost, an eyeblink twist of shadowed water, a trick of the light.
There was a kind of comfort in that.
“All right then.” I drew air, harder than necessary. “Let’s do this.”
I took bearings on the lights at New Kanagawa’s southern tip, then the black stack of Rila, twenty klicks beyond. Then I sank back into the sea, turned lazily over, and began to swim.
Brasil had taken us as far south of the general traffic as was safe without attracting attention, but we were still a long way off the Crags. Under normal circumstances, getting there would have been a couple of hours’ hard work at least. Currents, sucked south through the Reach by the maelstrom, helped somewhat, but the only thing that really made the scuba approach viable was the modified buoyancy system. With electronic security in the archipelago effectively blinded and deafened by the orbital storm, no one was going to be able to pick up a one-man grav engine underwater. And with a carefully applied vector, the same power that maintained diver flotation would also drive us south at machine speed.
Like seawraiths out of the Ebisu daughter legend, we slid through the darkened water an arm’s reach apart, while above us the surface of the sea bloomed silently and repeatedly with reflected angelfire. The Anderson rig clicked and bubbled gently in my ears, electrolyzing oxygen directly from the water around me, blending in helium from the ultracomp mini tank on my back, feeding it to me, then patiently shredding and dispersing my exhaled breath in bubbles no larger than fish eggs. Distantly, the maelstrom growled a bass counterpoint.
It was very peaceful.
Yeah, this is the easy part.
A memory drifted by in the flashlit gloom. Night-diving off Hirata’s Reef with a girl from the upscale end of Newpest. She’d blown into Watanabe’s one night with Segesvar and some of the other Reef Warriors, part of a mixed bag of slumming daddy’s girls and Stinktown hardboys. Eva? Irena? All I remembered was a gathered-up rope of dark honey hair, long sprawling limbs, and shining green eyes. She was smoking seahemp roll-ups, badly, choking and wheezing on the rough blend with a frequency that made her harder-edged friends laugh out loud. She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.
Making a—for me—rare effort, I peeled her away from Segesvar, who in any case seemed to be finding her a drag, parked us in a quiet corner of Watanabe’s near the kitchens, monopolized her all evening. She seemed to come from another planet entirely—a father who cared and worried about her with an attention I would have jeered at under different circumstances, a mother who worked part time
just so she doesn’t feel like a complete housewife,
a home out of town that they owned, visits to Millsport and Erkezes every few months. An aunt who had gone offworld to work, they were all so proud of her, a brother who hoped to do the same. She talked about it all with the abandon of someone who believes these things to be entirely normal, and she coughed on the seahemp, and she smiled brilliantly at me, often.
So,
she said on one of those occasions,
what do
you
do for fun?
I, uh. I. Reef dive.
The smile became a laugh.
Yeah, Reef Warriors, somehow I guessed. Go down much?
It was supposed to be my line, the line we all used on girls, and she’d stolen it out from under me. I didn’t even mind much.
Far side of Hirata,
I blurted out.
You want to try sometime?
Sure,
she matched me.
Want to try right now?
It was deep summer in Kossuth, inland humidity had hit 100 percent weeks ago. The thought of getting into the water was like an infectious itch. We slipped out of Watanabe’s and I showed her how to read the autocab flows, pick out an unfared one, and jump the roof. We rode it all the way across town, sweat cooling on our skin.
Hang on tight.
Yeah, I never would have thought of that,
she yelled back, and laughed into my face in the slipstream.
The cab stopped for a fare near the Port Authority, and we tumbled off, scaring the prospective customers into a clutch of mannered yelps. Shock subsided into mutters and disapproving glares that sent us reeling off, stifling cackles. There was a hole in harbor security down at the eastern corner of the hoverloader docks—a blind spot torn by some preteen for-kicks hacker the previous year; he’d sold it to the Reef Warriors for holoporn. I got us through the gap, sneaked us down to one of the ’loader ramps, and stole a real-keel tender. We poled and paddled our way silently out of the harbor, then started the motor and tore off in a wide, cream-waked arc for Hirata, whooping.
Later, sunk in the silence of the dive, I looked up at the Hotei-toned, rippling surface and saw her body above me, pale against the black straps of the buoyancy jacket and the ancient compressed-air rig. She was lost in the moment, drifting, maybe gazing at the towering wall of the reef beside us, maybe just luxuriating in the cool of the sea against her skin. For about a minute, I hung below her, enjoying the view and feeling myself grow hard in the water. I traced the outlines of her thighs and hips with my eyes, zeroed in on the shaved vertical bar of hair at the base of her belly and the glimpse of lips as her legs parted languidly to kick. I stared at the taut muscled belly emerging from the lower edge of the buoyancy jacket, the obvious swelling at her chest.
Then something happened. Maybe too much seahemp, never a smart idea before a dive. Maybe just some fatherly echo from my own home life. The reef edged in from the side of my vision, and for one terrible moment it seemed to be tilting massively over, falling on us. The eroticism of the languid drift in her limbs shriveled to sudden, cramping anxiety that she was dead or unconscious. I kicked myself upward in sudden panic, grabbed her shoulders with both hands, and tilted her around in the water.
And she was fine.
Eyes widened a little in surprise behind the mask, hands touching me in return. A grin split her mouth, and she let air bubble out through her teeth. Gestures, caresses. Her legs wrapped around me. She took out the regulator, gestured for me to do the same, and kissed me.
“Tak?”
Afterward, in the gear ’fab the Reef Warriors had blown and set atop the reef, lying with me on an improvised bed of musty winter wet suits, she seemed surprised at how carefully I handled her.
You won’t break me, Tak. I’m a big girl.
And later, legs wrapped around me again, grinding against me, laughing delightedly.
Hang on tight!
I was too lost in her to steal her comeback from the roof of the autocab.
“Tak, you hear me?”
Eva? Ariana?
“Kovacs!”
I blinked. It was Brasil’s voice.
“Yeah, sorry. What is it?”
“Boat coming.” On the heels of his words, I picked it up as well, the scraping whine of small screws in the water, sharp over the backdrop growl of the maelstrom. I checked my proximity system, found nothing on grav trace. Went to sonar and found it, southwest and coming fast up the Reach.
“Real-keel,” muttered Brasil. “Think we should worry?”
It was hard to believe the Harlan family would run real-keel patrol boats. Still—
“Kill the drives.” Sierra Tres said it for me. “Go to standby flotation. It’s not worth the risk.”
“Yeah, you’re right.” Reluctantly, I found the buoyancy controls and shut down the grav support. Instantly I felt myself starting to sink as the weight of my gear asserted itself. I prodded the emergency flotation dial and felt the standby chambers in the flotation jacket start to fill up. Cut it as soon as my descent stopped, and floated in the flashlit gloom, listening to the approaching whine of the boat.
Elena, maybe?
Green eyes shining.
The reef tipping over onto us.
As another angelfire blast cut loose, I spotted the keel of the vessel overhead, big and sharkish, and hugely misshapen on one side. I narrowed my eyes and peered in the postblast gloom, cranking the neurachem. The boat seemed to be dragging something.
And the tension drained back out of me.
“Charter boat, guys. They’re hauling a bottleback carcass.”
The boat labored past and faded northward on a bored drone, listing awkwardly with the weight of its prize, not even that close to us in the end. Neurachem showed me the dead bottleback in silhouette against the blue-lit surface of the water, still trailing thin threads of blood into the water. The massive torpedo body rolled sluggishly against the bow wave; the flukes trailed like broken wings. Part of the dorsal flange had been ripped loose at some point and now it flogged back and forth in water, blurred at the edges with ragged lumps and tendrils of tissue. Loose cabling tangled alongside. Looked as if they’d harpooned it a few times—whoever had chartered the boat clearly wasn’t that great a fisherman.
When humans first arrived on Harlan’s World, the bottlebacks didn’t have any natural predators. They were the top of the food chain, magnificently adapted marine hunters and highly intelligent, social animals. Nothing the planet had evolved recently was up to killing them.
We soon changed that.
“Hope that’s not an omen,” murmured Sierra Tres unexpectedly.
Brasil made a noise in his throat. I vented the emergency chambers on the buoyancy jacket and snapped the grav system back on. The water seemed suddenly colder around me. Behind the automatic motions of course check and gear trim, I could feel a vague, undefined anger seeping in.
“Let’s get this done, guys.”
But the mood was still with me twenty minutes later when we crept into the shallows at the base of Rila, pulsing at my temples and behind my eyes. And projected on the glass of my scuba mask, the pale red route pointers from Natsume’s simulation software seemed to flare in time with the ratcheting of my own blood. The urge to do damage was a rising tide inside me, like wakefulness, like hilarity.
We found the channel Natsume had recommended, eased through with gloved hands braced against rock and coral outcrops to avoid snagging. Levered ourselves up out of the water onto a narrow ledge that the software had tinted and flagged with a slightly demonic smiling face.
Entry level,
Natsume had said, shedding his monkish demeanor for a fleeting moment.
Knock, knock.
I got myself braced and took stock. Faint silvery light from Daikoku touched the sea, but Hotei had still not risen and the spray from the maelstrom and nearby wavecrash fogged what light there was. The view was mostly gloom. Angelfire sent shadows scurrying past on the rocks as another firework package burst somewhere to the north. Thunder rippled across the sky. I scanned the cliff above for a moment, then the darkened sea we’d just climbed out of. No sign we’d been noticed. I detached the dive helmet’s frame from the mask and lifted it off. Shed my flippers and flexed the toes of the rubber boots underneath.
“Everybody okay?”
Brasil grunted an affirmative. Tres nodded. I secured the helmet frame at my belt in the small of my back where it wouldn’t get in the way, stripped off my gloves, stowed them in a pouch. Settled the now lightweight mask a little more comfortably on my face and checked that the datafeed was still securely jacked in. Tipping my head back, I saw Natsume’s route march off above us in clearly marked red hand- and footholds.
“You all seeing this okay?”
“Yeah.” Brasil grinned. “Kind of spoils the fun, doesn’t it? Marking it out like that.”
“You want to go first then?”
“After you, Mister Eishundo.”
Without giving myself time to think about it, I reached up and grasped the first indicated hold, braced my feet, and heaved myself onto the cliff. Swung up and found a grip with my other hand. The rock was wet with maelstrom mist, but the Eishundo grip held. I brought a leg across to fit against an angled ledge, swung again, and grasped.
And left the ground behind.
Nothing to it.
The thought zipped through my mind after I’d gone about twenty meters, and left a slightly manic grin in its wake. Natsume had warned me that the early stages of the climb were deceptive.
It’s apeman stuff,
he said seriously.
Lots of wide swings and grabs, big moves, and your strength’s good at this stage. You’re going to
feel
good. Just remember it doesn’t last.
I pursed my lips, chimpanzee-like, and hooted gently through them. Below me, the sea smashed and gnawed restlessly at rock. The sound and scent of it came bouncing up the cliff face and wrapped me in windings of chill and damp. I shrugged off a shudder.
Swing up. Grab.