Jeff Spock is a full-time writer of video games and speculative fiction. He attended the Clarion West Writers' Workshop in 2004, previous to which he spent over fifteen years in the computer industry always wondering if there was something more fun out there. He currently resides in the south of France. Visit his website at jeffspock.com.
I was five meters down and in the last stage of decompression when it struck. I hadn't seen it coming; I had been looking up at the sun's rays on the face of these olive-tinted alien waters. The thrill of discovery, the freedom of moving weightlessly -- that's what I had been thinking of.
_Wham_. A giant hand reached up from the depths and jerked me down. Valves in my Eustachian tubes compensated for the sudden pressure change as I flailed. I felt a chill wave as my drysuit pumped drugs into me.
I tried to roll and kick myself down to see what had happened, but my balance was off. I saw a dark trail in the water and traced it to the stump where I had just had a right leg.
_Fuck_. An enormous flat darkness passed below me. It was a carpet of scales with incongruous fins; a Great White run over by a truck. I had been attacked by a Kotanchik's Shark, the largest predator in the galaxy. There shouldn't have been one there. They're deep water. They're territorial. Abunay would have known it. He wouldn't have told me to search here. He ... It was coming back. Twenty tons, twenty-five meters, six rows of dull teeth.
I yanked the emergency dongle on my buoyancy compensator. The BC inflated, blasting me straight up to the surface. The bends they can cure, I thought. Death is tougher.
I scrabbled for the flare gun and fired wildly into the sky. I pulled the other dongle that spilled fluorescent chemicals and triggered a homing beacon. Where was Abunay's ship? I spat out the regulator as my drug-addled eyes closed in the too-bright sunlight. I heard myself screaming but it was distant, distorted.
_Fucked_. It struck again. My lower torso was gripped in a door-sized maw. I wanted a weapon but my knife was on my right leg, somewhere in its stomach. It chewed as it swam and I pounded on its wet-leather skin. I slipped and my right arm went into its mouth and came out shorter.
I gagged on the blood-drenched salt water that filled my mask. More technology kicked in. Every closed cell in the drysuit inflated for buoyancy; the edges grew like a fungus to contain my fluids and close ruptures. Nanosyringes in the BC drilled into my aorta to supply oxygen. I was drowning, but the drugs kept me awake.
The beast chewed methodically, working its way through my hipbones and the bottom of my spine.
Not my cock, not my cock, I thought as I felt the nails-on-chalkboard sensation of my own bones being ground by cartilaginous teeth. I felt internal organs rupture; balloons of heat filled with nausea. Batteries fired electrodes to keep my heart beating.
Another chill wave. Trauma drugs turned my rage into melancholic discontent. So sad...
A spacecraft, a Wepper ship, had crashed centuries ago. The government had searched for it but the seas -- ninety-five percent of this planet -- were too large, and the cost was too high. It had taken Abunay five years and a hell of a lot more money than the government.
The Kotanchik's finally sawed me in half and my remains shot surface-ward, pulled by the inflated drysuit. I don't know how deep it had dragged me but I spun forever on my way up. The cracked face of my mask splintered.
I popped out, arcing through the air trailing a long streamer of gut. The sun faded.
I wept for my body, my temple. I remembered the adrenaline crack of the sails, windsurfing off Hookipa Beach; the exaggerated scream of the winch pulling me deeper as I free dove off Toulon; the warm currents like breezes that caressed me wreck diving in the Caribbean. The coconut scent of sun tan lotion, the salt sandy bodies of women.
Everything was dark, numb. Electrical charges triggered muscle contractions that would keep oxygenated fluid circulating in my skull. I bobbed, directionless, cursing the drugs that kept me alive, the shark that had taken everything from me, and the investor who had hired me in the first place. For without investors, there are no treasure hunters.
I floated; I dreamt.
Twice now in my life I had felt that rush of discovery, that ball-tingling sensation of glory. The first time was two years ago, on Earth. I had blown off three hundred and fifty years of Mediterranean silt and there, in the light of the spots, the piles of gold bars from the HMS Sussex had gleamed like so many golden fingers. And again, now, the lost Unidentified Extraterrestrial Predecessors' -- Weppers' -- craft.
Treasure found, but everything else lost...
The smell of technology. Ozone, plastic, disinfectant.
"Jesus Haitch!" Female; concerned.
"Aaaamen. Shark, probably a Kotanchik's -- ah! Look at the bite radius." Male; nauseated.
"Brain dead?"
"Of cou -- No! Check the suit out."
Sounds of cutting, ripping, smell of burning rubber.
"Great stuff! Fibrillator, pacemaker, oxyboost, integrated compensator, sure as bollocks not Orrin-made. Look at the pharma kit! Shite, that'll be a messy blood sample -- "
"We're going to need a spectroscope to -- "
"Yeah, yeah. Let's plug 'im up, shall we?"
Tugging, jerking, and strange waves of nausea. I remembered the attack. Sport, sex, even basic mobility -- everything was gone. I had no stomach and I wanted to puke. I passed out.
"...did you sy your nime was?"
"Abunay. I'm his next of kin -- "
"No he's not," I wanted to say, but couldn't move my jaw or vocal cords.
" -- and we're arranging a private clinic."
(No no no!)
"Got the CW-1806 forms?"
Papers shuffle. (I don't trust him!)
"Looks good. Leave your number, we'll contact you in eight, ten days. The MOEA will get the first shot at 'im when he can talk."
Pause.
"Marine and Oceanic? Why?"
"Standard. The poor bastard got nibbled by a Kotanchik's. They'll want to follow up. Marine life management, predator tracking."
Silence.
The doctor with the funny accent was in charge of my case. Australian, she had done her residency on Orrin. I guess she had liked it, because she had gone local in the way that only Orries can. Her hands -- and probably her feet -- were partially webbed and she had pale, vat-grown skin that would reduce heat loss in the water. I could see rows of rib gills as parallel lines beneath her scrubs, and the shape of thick, strong legs.
"Right, Mr Russo. The lab has grown bone, skin, muscle, and a few meters of ligaments for you. We've managed to clone your internal organs. That's the easy paht."
"What's ... hard ... part?"
"My part. Neurophysiology. Connecting everything to the brain. Re-wiring the nervous system, basically."
"You can...?"
"We can do a lot, Mr Russo -- "
"Pete."
Her translucent skin was both intriguing and repellent. Her hair was grayer than I liked, but she had a killer smile that she did with just a corner of her mouth.
"Okay. Pete. I'm Dr Weber, but call me Maggie. Here's the deal. You'll certainly walk again. Eating, basic body functions ... all that should come back."
"What about ... what about..."
"Plenty of time to worry about the rest later."
Abunay came to visit. Charcoal gray suit with platinum pinstripes, collarless cobalt-blue shirt, matching platinum cufflinks. His skin was pale but everything else was dark.
"Good afternoon, Mr Russo."
"Mmph."
"How are you feeling?"
"Mmph." Thanks to painkillers, I mostly felt warm.
"The MOEA will want to see you. We should ... come to an understanding."
"You want ... lie to them?"
He adjusted his shirt cuffs and looked up at the hexagonal white tiles of the ceiling that were iridescent with nanosilver disinfectant. I stared at them too, but because I had to -- no stomach muscles. He turned to me.
"Did you find it?" His voice was a library whisper.
"Not ... question. Question is ... can find again? Yes ... not where you thought."
His hands clenched, then relaxed. "Very well. How -- "
"You ... not ... next of kin." I stopped; it was exhausting.
He nodded, slowly, then pulled a chair next to the bed.
"I have learned about you since your accident, Mr Russo." He was whispering, close to my ear. "You're not some danger junkie beach bum. You found the Sussex."
"So ... don't need your money."
He grinned this awful grin; all teeth and no humor.
"Incorrect. So far, the medical work has cost six hundred and forty thousand. And you know what? You were diving without permission or a valid licence, using uncertified equipment." He put his lips right next to my ear. "Your insurance doesn't cover this. I do. Or I don't."
I shivered. Suddenly it felt cold in the room, and the effort required to concentrate drained me.
"Why should I hide ... info ... from Marine and -- "
"You will have a common room. A different doctor. You will be a charity case. Cheap materials, quick fix. What kind of body do you want to spend the rest of your life in, Mr Russo?"
I closed my eyes.
"Working alone," I said, "...attacked ... no reports of Kotanchik's ... looking for cinder coral ... Wuchte's abalone."
I waited for his reply, but when I opened my eyes I was alone.
Maggie removed the bandages from the epiderm on my right forearm, then stepped back.
Blood pulsed deep red under the clear skin. I had become quality tenderloin. I watched the muscles and tendons work as I twisted my wrist and moved the fingers. In a way it was cool; mostly it was repulsive.
"How's that?" she asked.
"It works." I turned away from her. I had to get used to being ugly, and that was better done alone.
"Hey, that's okay," she said. "It's a hard thing to do -- "
"No, no ... I'm ... it's fine."
She left and I was lying in bed, squeezing a blue rubber ball, when two MOEA agents came in. A tall woman named Odenny, and a short man named Chusagi. Both had Orrie modifications and wore green shirts with the MOEA fin-and-trident on the pocket.
We shook hands, though in my case it was more like fondling. The pleasantries were brief.
"Mr Russo," she said, "you have our sympathies. We understand that you have suffered a terrible trauma."
I gave her my best, "Mmph."
"It's our job to follow up on marine accidents, and as we understand it you were diving without permits or licenses. MOEA takes this sort of thing very seriously."
"I have done over fifteen hundred dives," I said, and let that sink in. The number was astronomical for a guy my age, even for a professional. "I have done free diving down to eighty meters. I have worked as a commercial diver and in commercial salvage."
They were listening and nodding, concentrating on me while recording the conversation.
"Then you, of all people, should have known better," said the little guy.
"I did know better!" They were acting like the shark was the victim, not me. "How many people in the whole fucking galaxy could have come up alive, huh? How many would have had the technology and experience and conditioning?"
"If you want our congratulations, you got 'em," said Odenny. "But we're more interested in what you were doing -- "
"Looking for cinder coral, okay? And Wuchte's abalone, if there are any along the shelf. But I have a question for you guys. Where the fuck did the Kotanchik's come from? They're territorial, right? Deep water? I was at forty, fifty meters. Believe me, if I'd thought there was a Kotanchik's around I sure as hell would have stayed away." I remembered the slimy feel of its skin and my new hand spasmed.
"We agree on the Kotanchik's. We want to figure out why the attack happened. We have their ranges marked; the nearest one should have been, oh, six kilometers away."
I sat back. Fine. Let them go pester the damn fish.
"Mr Russo, please just answer our question. What were -- "
"Cinder coral. Wuchte's abalone."
We regarded each other for a few seconds.
"Mr Russo," started Chusagi, "can you tell us about the relationship you have with Mr Abunay?"
I blinked. "He and I, we have, uh, discussed salvage."
More waiting. Cops do that everywhere; try to make you uncomfortable with silence.
"Could you tell us more?"
I shook my head.
"You didn't deal with him when you worked on the Sussex?"
"Huh? He's always been here on Orrin, right?"
"One of his companies is called Aqueous. You probably used their equipment."
I had, in fact. They made state-of-the-art sonar, radio, and underwater signaling gear. "Really? Aqueous? Sure, we used some of their stuff. I didn't know it was his."
We waited some more. Companionable.
"Nothing else to say?" they asked. I shook my head.
"My partner looks stupid, Pete, but I'm not." That was Odenny. Chusagi rolled his eyes. "The only thing that Abunay cares about is finding that Wepper ship. If you're in on it you need to remember one thing. He does not like to lose; he does not like to share."
I shrugged. "Two things."
Chusagi snorted. "Look, Mr Russo, we're not the bad guys. We don't want to see you get hurt."
"What?" I laughed, which ripped some of my new stomach muscles and set off the painkillers. "You're a few days too late for that, huh?"
They were annoyed, but I was too drugged to care. After a whispered conversation they got up to leave. Odenny paused at the door. "Stay in touch, Mr Russo. Sooner or later we may look like the best bet for a losing hand."
"Mmph."
I got the nurse to bring me the remains of my suit and BC, and spent some time picking through them. I wondered what I had taken on that dive. The drysuit was mine, a custom job from a shop in Antibes. But the BC had been Abunay's, and one of his site beacons was still attached to it. Everything was slick -- blood, guts, and mucus or saliva from the shark. It stank. I bagged it and sent it as a CARE package to Odenny.
I was using a walker to work my way across the room; a whole host of filaments and sensors ran from my neck to a ceiling track. They hadn't gotten to my skin yet, so I looked like a walking anatomy textbook.
After four meters I had to stop. Legs, chest, stomach, back -- everything hurt.
"How's ... that ... Maggie?"
She smiled. "Great stuff. You're the stah patient. This is unbelievable for six weeks. It's lucky you were in such good shape beforehand."
"Good shape?" I tried to laugh but I couldn't avoid the anger. "I was a fucking god. Shit, my right leg hurts."
She was working on a tablet, drawing and dotting with the stylo as she regarded the monitors and the holograms of my nervous system. The pain eased.
"Feel bitter?"
"Of course I'm bitter. That fucking fish ate my life! I'm geriatric, a geek, a gomer. I -- "
"No, bet-ter," she said. "Feel bet-ter?"
Where I had skin I blushed. "Uh, yeah."
"Good," she said, looking at me. "Look, there's something you might want to think about. It's the perfect time. Have you thought about Orrie enhancements? Chest gills, heat conservation -- "
"A Fishhead? You think I want to be a fucking fish?" I leaned heavily on the wall. "It's bad enough that I look like the garbage bin behind a butcher shop. You think -- " The look in her face made me stop. White skin glowed pink.
I closed my eyes. "Shit. I didn't mean -- it's just that I lost everything. All I want is to get back as much as I can."
She ran some more tests. Every set of muscles from my scalp to my toes flexed, one after the other. Weird. Her mouth was an angry thin line.
"Pete, it's time to think about this. You have to face it. You won't have what you had before. Never." I stared at the floor.
She walked over, grabbed my head with both hands, turned it, made me look at her. It hurt my neck.
"Say it in the mirror. Accept it. You will never be the same. You are going to be different."
She let my head go. "The question you need to answer is this: If you're going to be something else, what do you want to be?"
She finished checking me and left, offended. I worked my way back to the bed and fell on it.
I hadn't considered the adaptations. It made sense -- I could never face Zoe or Junko or Katrina in this Frankenstein body. Ditto the Cadiz Mafia -- the gang that dove with me on the Sussex. Everything that I ever was had been ruined. Chewed, digested, shat out. Earth was nothing but faded memories of a life that was definitively over.
I had no interest in being Pete, the rebuilt freak show from Orrin. But the thought of Pete, who grew up in the sea and could now spend hours in it -- that was something new. Something amazing.
I felt a weird feeling there, that I hadn't felt in a while, and I dozed off pondering it.
I felt hope.
When I woke up Abunay was there again.
"Mr Russo."
"In the flesh. Visibly."
"Are you in a mood to talk about things?"
"Things...?"
"The bill is over a million dollars now. My philanthropy only goes so far."
"First, let's discuss Wepper ships."
He shot out his cuffs, played with his cuff links.
"Wepper ships have camouflage. Not visual, like a chameleon, but electromagnetic. If you go looking for them with radar, or an electromagnetic pulse, the ship registers the direction and frequency of your incoming signal. Knowing what its background looks like, the ship returns a signal on the same frequency -- with a picture of that background. All you'll see is the ground or the stars behind it. Simple, efficient, effective. Easily done with quantum computing. Understood?"
I nodded.
"But they can't camouflage themselves against vision. It's passive; there's no incoming signal. So the way to find the ship that crashed on Orrin is to try to guess where your signal has been faked, and then send a dive team down."
"Why not cameras?"
"They need batteries, maybe ... who knows. They don't work. If they did, you and I would never have met."
"And wouldn't that be sad."
He made a dismissive gesture. "Let me ask you something, Mr Russo. Why didn't you drop the beacons?"
He had asked me to do that -- several times -- when I sighted the wreck.
"I was off the edge. No point dropping them in a thousand meters of water. So what? You know where I was. Why don't _you_ go take a look?"
He leaned closer.
"You see my eyes? These eyes." He opened them wide, staring at me. "Eight million dollars. I can see from ultraviolet to infrared. Read your pulse, your blood flow. They're lie detectors. _Nobody_ reads people like me." He stood up, kicking the chair aside. "Nobody can touch me in a conference room, in a board presentation. I own every negotiation before it even begins. I read an audience the way you read the waves."
He put a finger to one eye and tapped on it. I flinched for him.
"But they're active. I can't see a Wepper ship."
I nodded. "Still one question though."
"Yes?"
"Why the Kotanchik's?"
"I wish I knew. I'm paying three marine biologists to figure it out."
Hmmmm. So he says.
"Mr A, would you be willing to front the cost of my getting Orrie adaptations?"
He didn't need to reply; I saw the gleam in his eye. "Why, Mr Russo, what a novel idea. What an expensive idea."
I waved my hand. "You can take it out of my share."
"So you want me to fund this in exchange for what is currently ten percent of nothing."
"Oh, it's fifty percent of something." We smiled at each other. I watched as his pupils dilated, shrank, turned iridescent.
"Very well. Here's to a profitable partnership."
We shook hands, and he left.
I sighed, loud and long. The adaptations made sense. Maggie was right. After that meeting with the Kotanchik's everything was going to be different anyway. If I became a Fishhead it could be, just maybe, in some ways, even better.
I had never before been in a place as amazing as that goddamned hospital.
Three days later Maggie brought in a specimen transport box the size of a small suitcase. I was sitting up, mastering the herculean task of eating fish steak with a knife and fork. My fingers slipped on the knife, and ached doing it. I didn't notice her at first, because I was reading a note from Odenny about the beacon Abunay had given me to mark the site.
"Why are you grinning?" I asked.
She flipped open the catches and gave me a peek inside. Refrigerated in the moist foam was a penis.
"Used to be bigger," I said, hope leaping within me.
"Not according to your DNA," she said, smiling. She lowered my bed to horizontal. Two people dressed in scrubs came in, wheeling equipment. Disinfectant misted the room. "But you can keep the catheter if you prefer."
"Very funny. Look, Maggie, I've been thinking."
"Mmm?" Her mind was elsewhere as she prepared her computers and filaments.
"I think ... I'd ... like to try the enhancements."
Those nimble fingers, so adept with fiber optics and probes, paused. "Really?"
"Yes."
"Well, we can start with the gills -- they're the most important, and take the longest. Insurance won't cover it."
"That's okay," I said. "For the moment, anyway."
"Great stuff." She nodded abruptly, pausing in the preparations for stapling my dick back on. She looked at me. "Great," she said again, quietly.
It felt stapled. For three days the pain was excruciating. Maggie said that she could deaden some of the nerves, but that sounded like a bad idea. When the pain eased they went to work on my chest. Which also hurt.
In a moment between bouts of surgery I called Odenny.
"We were hoping to hear from you. What's up?"
"The Kotanchik's. They're sort of tribal, right? How do they communicate?"
"Huh. Well, loose family groups. They hunt things that are bigger than they are."
I shuddered; she kept talking.
"They use ultra low frequency -- ULF -- waves. They can't speak quickly, but they can do it over kilometers of ocean. There's lots of info on the MOEA site."
"I'll check it out. But I still have a question. Big question. Why was it there? Could Abunay have called it?"
She pondered for a few seconds. "Huh. Hard to say. I guess it's not technically impossible, but linguistically ... All I can say is maybe. Or let me put it this way. When you find out, let us know."
"Thanks a ton -- "
"Hey! One other thing. Where did you cross the haapala?"
"The what?"
"It's like a free-drifting anemone. A haapala. Looks like a big shaggy blond wig. Kotanchik's adore them. You had secretions from it all over your BC."
Ah.
"Yeah, maybe ... I came in from the trench to the shelf -- maybe that's where I crossed it." Like hell. I had seen nothing at all like that, unless the trauma had really screwed up my memory. "Could you send me a sample of the stuff?"
"Sure."
"Thanks. By the way, where do you guys stand on this?" I asked. "Discovery, salvage?"
"The law on salvage ops is crystal clear. It has to be declared, and permits have to be filed."
"Sounds simple."
"Let me shatter your illusions. Ownership of the Orrin seas is a technical nightmare. Have you ever seen a map of an electoral district? Insanely chopped up little blocks of real estate? It's like that, but in three dimensions. No. Actually four dimensions -- it changes over time."
"Well, what if a lone diver, casually swimming about, comes across something?"
I could hear her smile. "They come back, fill out the forms, and get their fair share."
"So I throw myself on the mercy and charity of the government?"
"Do you have a better idea?"
Actually, I didn't.
When the procedures were finally finished I decided to ask her out.
"Maggie."
"Hmmm?" She was in charts and technology mode, testing the flex and control of my newly-webbed toes.
"I want to celebrate. How about dinner one of these nights? You and I?"
She pretended to be doing something but her stylo had stopped; I couldn't see anything beyond her gray hair because her head was bent forward.
"Let me think." She paused. "You like barbecue?"
"Do I? I love it. Can the stomach handle it?"
"We'll see. Your schedule's fairly open, right?"
"Sure, as long as the doctor lets me leave."
"Tomorrow?"
"Super." Hot damn. A date.
Like most Orries, Maggie had an underwater apartment. The lobby had an entry airlock and lots of glass. I descended in a transparent elevator whose lights illuminated the gray-green water. Clouds of glittering flea-like creatures chased the lights; larger things that looked like finned yellow scorpions came to feed on them.
"Wow," I found myself thinking, "what a beautiful planet."
She greeted me at the door of her apartment, wearing a green knit dress and not much else. She seemed shorter and stockier than she did at the hospital, but rounder and more feminine, too. She stood on her tiptoes to give me a brief kiss and I felt, for the first time in ages, a stirring in my crotch.
"Please please please," I thought to myself.
I had brought a bottle of champagne, and after half a glass had to sit on the couch.
"New liver," she said, smiling. "It'll take some time."
Mild as it was the sauce on the fish was still too hot for me, and I had to scrape it off while she laughed. I regaled her with stories of a Thai beef salad in Bangkok so hot that it made me hallucinate.
"Not medically possible," she said.
"Just wait. When I'm back up to speed I'll make it for you."
After dinner she had a brandy while I just sat on the couch, letting my stomach work. On the TV was a looping picture of Maggie with a guy, laughing in bathing suits on a beach. It seemed so alien, this vision of white sand and blue sky and yellow sun and tan skin and colorful clothing. My world was only white and green and gray.
"Who's he?"
She looked at the picture, her head cocked. "I'm not sure that I know anymore," she said.
"Where does he live?"
"On Earth. He's there, and I'm here."
"Really? Where on Earth?"
"He's there," she repeated. "I'm here."
I figured that it was a good time to shut up. I turned my attention to the picture window. The balcony was an artificial coral reef and we lay back on the couch, watching the fish in all their flickering beauty.
I kissed her slowly and carefully, the coolness of our Orrie skins and lips fascinating and new. The dense muscle of her Orrie-enhanced thighs was firm and sleek; I thought of seals and mermaids. We undressed, hurriedly and awkwardly. I wasn't used to moving like that but I was willing to put up with the pain.
I went down on her, and she on me. To no avail. We tried body massages, hand lotion, and even inserting my limp dick into her. None of it worked. My cock sat flaccid, uninterested; no amount of joy or desire seemed to interest it. She still seemed to have fun, and held me afterwards. I thought she was asleep when I started crying, but I guess I woke her.
"God's sake, Pete, don't worry about it."
"Easy for you to say."
"Shut up. I know these things -- _I'm_ the doctor. It's a pretty complicated combination -- hormone, muscle, erectile tissue, emotions ... It'll take some time for your body to sort all that out."
"Huh."
"Huh back at you. Look, it would have been something close to a medical miracle if it had worked. But it should work. It will work. We -- you just need time."
I watched a fish that looked like a metallic green shuriken arc past the window. "How long?"
"Three months? Six?"
"Six more months in the hospital? Fuck, I don't think I can -- "
"Forget the hospital. I'll release you tomorrow. Do you have anywhere to go?"
I thought she might offer that I come to her place, and I didn't want that. Or, more accurately, I wanted it more than anything else, but not until hot water circulated in my plumbing.
"Yeah, I have a place to go," I said, thinking over options. "Don't worry about me."
She snuggled her head in against my neck and said something that sounded like, "I might anyway."
I left the hospital the next evening by taxi, after a final set of check-ups. It bobbed away from the dome of the hospital complex, then lifted on hydrofoils and raced off to a v-shaped pattern of lights at the edge of town -- Abunay's villa.
His set-up made the most modern hospital on Orrin look antiquated. I had a private room, a private physical therapist, and a doctor. I swam four times a day as I worked my strength back up and practiced with the gills. In between those sessions I walked through virtuality maps of the area that I had been diving in, triggering memories. I studied sea life, currents, charts. I was in my element.
It was a surprise and pleasure when Maggie called.
"Hey, how are you?" I asked. "I was going to call you ... after..."
"After you went and did something really stupid. You're not ready."
"Hey, it's _my_ life. Don't tell me what I can't do."
"Look you idiot, I am not only your doctor, but about the only person on the planet who gives a damn about your welfare. Your therapy's not finished."
"I'm doing it here. The medical facility -- "
"I'm sure it's top-notch. But how do you know that the doctors will say you're ready based on your condition, and not Abunay's demands? Can you trust them?" Her voice was not just angry, but worried and uneasy.
"What? He'd never -- "
"Of course he would."
"Okay. You're right. He would."
"And me? You trust me?"
"Of course I do. Absolutely. Still, we shouldn't have..." She let me hang out there, waiting to hear what I would say. Hardass. "Look, it didn't work out. I'm sorry."
"What didn't work out?"
"You know what I mean. The old purple-helmeted love soldier slept through reveille."
"Jesus. Guys. Look, I had a nice night. I would even do it again some time. That whole part ... that's not the most ... Shite." Her voice was wavery -- not at all Maggie.
I had absolutely nothing to say, so I said it. I heard her take a deep breath.
"Pete?"
"Yeah, yeah. I'm here."
"Take care. Will I ... will you be back to the hospital for a check-up?"
"Yeah. Of course," I said. Her words finally sunk in. "Really?"
"Yes. Bye."
I hung up the phone and wandered in a daze along shag-carpeted hallways that smelled like Mediterranean herbs. I understood nothing. Not me, not Maggie, not what I had or hadn't lost. Zero.
But somebody had figured out something, because Abunay caught up to me about an hour later. I was standing at an undersea window, watching a flock of rays glide past. They looked like birds, flying and banking with liquid ease.
"Dr Burke informs me that you're ready to dive."
I didn't have to feign enthusiasm. "It's about time. When do we go?"
"Tomorrow. We'll take the launch out to where you -- out to the site."
I slept badly, and the day dawned gray. We left after breakfast on a hydrofoil launch that required no crew. I thought about Maggie, but also about Odenny's words. Only Abunay and I would know where the site was.
An hour or so later we hove to, bucking in the waves. Abunay accompanied me down to the tail of the launch -- real actual teak from Earth -- and watched me prepare.
I pulled on drysuit leggings over thermal underwear. A custom jacket, open over the rib cage, went on next. Then my weight belt, a new knife, several pouches of gear, and the fins. Abunay held out a BC, identical to the one I had worn before. I pulled out a bottle that contained the haapala extract from Odenny.
"Kotanchik's repellent," I said. "Got it from the MOEA." I smeared it all over my BC. "Where's your BC? When you come down you'll want to be protected." He was regarding me, carefully. I turned away from those eyes and slipped the BC on. My jaw clenched as I thought of what I was going to do.
"Come on!" I said. "Gimme your damned BC. You don't want to risk this."
He pulled it out of a built-in locker that was a perfect, seamless white, and handed it to me slowly. I grabbed it and smeared on the extract.
"You can thank me later if this saves your life."
I checked the camera clipped to the BC's left shoulder and the beacons to mark the site.
"See you in an hour, a billion bucks richer," I said as I forced a smile.
We nodded good-byes and I stepped to the ladder. The water was cold, colder than the sea near his villa where I had been practicing, but it felt great -- salty, invigorating. I put on my mask. As the sea rose to my torso I began to move my new sets of secondary muscles. A cool, clean flavor spread across my chest as I began to gillbreathe. _Righteous_. Abunay handed me a communications filament and I attached it to the suit. Thread-thin and essentially unbreakable, it would network all of my gear with the yacht.
I put in the regulator and fell backwards. More fish than man I ignored the drive to breathe, letting the gills do the work. I pulled the sea sled off the fantail and flicked a switch. The electric motor whirred to life. Silent, motionless, breathless, I descended.
It was cold, and darker than I remembered. I dropped through a school of gold-scaled flatfish who formed a frightened bagel around me then zipped off. Great sheets of algae marked a thermocline at twenty-five meters, and masses of little crab-like creatures swarmed on them. In the light of my lamp they looked violet and yellow.
I checked my GPS and depth gauge. Lower I went, into darkness, where I stopped even the occasional breaths from my regulator. I let it trail behind me, unwanted, as I gilled the oxygen-rich waters. I already trusted Maggie's adaptations more than the technology that I had been using all my life.
I saw fluorescence which meant that I was near the bottom; near the shelf where the sea floor dropped from seventy meters to hundreds and thousands. Luminous plants and the animals that lived on them thrived there, in the mingling of cooler and warmer waters.
Visibility was good but not great -- about ten meters. The fissures and rocks were unfamiliar. I checked the compass and the GPS again and swam east. It took fifteen minutes to find a hand-shaped rock formation that I remembered. The sled pulled me around the far side.
_Bang_, there it was.
Years of sea growth had covered the zeppelin-like form with strange appendages. It was twenty meters in diameter by sixty in length. Vanes and fins of inexplicable purpose spiked out; two fat tubes hung from the cylindrical body over the side of the shelf and down into unfathomable depths. Suspended between awe and glory, it took me a long time to hear the crackle of the phone, fed down the filament that trailed behind me.
"Is it there? Have you found it?"
I put in my regulator so I could speak to him. "I'm still looking," I said.
"But you're on the bottom."
He knew exactly where I was.
"Hold on."
"Drop the beacons and turn on the camera. Drop the damned beacons!"
"If you insist." I nestled the sea sled next to one of the fins, then planted a beacon at either end of the craft. The beacons were the key -- they marked the site but also interfered with the Wepper camouflage. As soon as the second beacon was down strange noises emanated from the speakers nestled into my hood.
"Oh ... oh ... ohhhh. So ... beautiful. It's enormous. Enormous! Bigger than the station they found on Adonis III's moon! Oh! Ohhhhh..." This went on as I swam, looking for the Kotanchik's.
"Oh my. Ohhh ... Yes. Oh. Um, Mr Russo. Could you take a swim around the perimeter? I'd like to get clear images of the craft from all angles."
I tried to remember how long I had been down last time before the shark had arrived. I hurried to finish the tour.
"Well done, Mr Russo. Brilliantly done. The investment in your rehabilitation has been amply repaid. Do you mind collecting a few samples? I'd like to run some tests on them."
I was sure he had lots of meaningless tasks to keep me busy until the beast got there. Even so, I was staying. This was not scientific, or financial. This was personal.
I swam, breathing through my gills. Something that looked like an inflated blowfish drifted by on the current. I couldn't identify eyes or a mouth. I followed its path over the wreck as it bounced and drifted aimlessly in the direction of the city, fifty or so kilometers away.
I turned my head back to look over the shelf. The Kotanchik's was there. It had come from the north, out where the ocean went deep and black. In the limited light of the ambient fluorescence its mouth was a great black tooth-lined semi-circle, coming for me.
_Not this time._
I doused the camera as I kicked and moved out of its attack line. "Sorry Mr A," I said. "Snagged the camera."
The head seemed to fold and the rest of the body followed in its path as if around some invisible obstacle. I kicked again, and it followed again. There were now two folds in the body, and the long lateral fins moved as the body followed precisely in the course set by the head -- straight across the wreck, then up, then sideways.
It was long, fluid, and beautiful; it turned corners like a ribbon. I could never imagine beauty to be so terrifying.
"Mr Russo, is everything okay?"
"Just fine," I gasped. I had the advantage of two oxygen sources -- gills and regulator. The way I was swimming I needed both.
"No sign of ... danger?" he asked innocently.
I was too busy to answer. It looked like a good guess that Abunay's beacons had summoned the Kotanchik's. Combined with the haapala secretions on the BC it was as close to a death warrant as you could concoct on Orrin.
I kept swimming, taking sharp angles, kicking as hard and as fast as I could, my new legs boosted by the best fins that money could buy. I felt the scales of the shark brushing my calf, removing a layer of skin. I turned, it turned. Another fold.
"Nope. Coming down?"
"What? You're sure?"
"Twenty-five meters?" Short sentences. Breathe. "Billion teeth?" Breathe. "Not here."
Kick. Not fast enough. Shit. _Kick_. Angle around a stalk of coral, through a too-small hole. Enormous gash down my right arm. _Fold_. The Kotanchik's couldn't follow so it angled up, to the side, looking for a new trajectory.
"I'll come up if you don't want to -- "
"Wait!" The ultimate bait. No way he wouldn't take it. I checked the gauges. Yup. He was on his way down, following the communications filament. My feeling of triumph was cut short by something jagged touching my leg. Fuck. Kick. It got a piece of my swim fin. I lost power, and the gouge in my fin made me cut a sudden arc when I kicked. It missed me.
_Fold_.
One arm at a time I shrugged out of the BC and the tank, then jerked the emergency inflation dongle and punched the panic button that would reel the communication filament back to the launch. The whole bundle snapped upwards on an angle.
_Kick_. Muscle cramp. I spun into a ball.
_Fold_. That mouth came into view, gaping wide, and suddenly I was calm. I had rolled the dice, and it came up snake eyes. That's life. Well, at least this time I had my knife. I pulled it, ready to take a piece of shark with me.
_Fold_. It followed the bundle with the BC.
I kicked after it with my good leg. I could dimly see the bundle, when suddenly the Kotanchik's turned away from it.
What? I was so sure that --
A jagged scream that went on and on broke through the speakers. I stopped swimming. The Kotanchik's disappeared from my sight, like some flat javelin on a perfect trajectory.
I gave myself slight negative buoyancy, drifting back down to my sled by the wreck. The noise in the speakers had stopped by the time I arrived. I slapped medical tape on my arm and leg. Damn Orrie skin sloughs off too easily.
I took a few deep gills, letting the oxygen and the cool water calm me down. About forty-five, fifty kilometers, I figured. It would make for a few cold hours even with the sled, and the odds weren't necessarily in my favor, but I didn't care. I'd make a stop at the MOEA to report the wreck, and then, well ... As long as I could work out things with Maggie, I'd have everything that matters.