neck for a half-nelson wrestling hold. As I struggled to get control, I looked up to see Yenza on the skimmer, with her rifle up and aimed… at us. I didn’t care how good of a shot she was, she could easily have hit me instead of the dado. I opened my mouth to yell at her to stop. Too late. She fired. I flung myself off the dado to protect myself.
It was the wrong move. Yenza wasn’t shooting at the dado. Behind me I heard an explosion, and one of the big spotlights from the gunship went dark. Yenza was shooting out their eyes. Of course, I didn’t know that and had let go of the dado. Oops. He was now coming at me. He launched, I spun away, but kept my arms out in front of me. I grabbed the guy by his bogus aquaneer uniform and kept him moving forward and right over the edge.
“Shoot him!” I shouted before he even hit the water.
The result was way more dramatic than I had expected. BOOM!
A shot was fired that was bigger than anything that had come from either rifle. A second later the water erupted not five feet from me. A wave hit the skimmer and nearly knocked me off my feet. What the heck was that?
“Hobey, Pendragon! Jump!” Spader shouted.
He had finally lost his cool. That meant trouble. A quick glance toward the gunboat told me why. The shot hadn’t come from a water rifle. We were in the sights of the ship’s big guns. I dove off the skimmer as one of them fired again. I was still in the air when the little skimmer exploded. I ducked under the water to protect myself as sharp pieces of destroyed skimmer flew all around me. I felt the sting as they hit me, even underwater. Then I felt somebody grab my ankle from below.
The dado was back.
He held me underwater, pulling me farther down. Did dados need to breathe air? Could this guy stay under, holding me down until I drowned? I didn’t take any chances. I coiled my other leg and kicked down on his arm. Hard. The force made him lose his grip, and I swam for my life.
“He’s pulling me down!” I yelled as soon as my head broke the surface.
I looked about frantically, trying to sight Spader and Yenza. The sea had turned violent. Explosions kicked up everywhere. There was so much smoke I couldn’t see my friends.
“Hey!” I shouted.
No response. Had they taken off? Worse, had they been hit?
I heard one smaller pop, after which another light went out. My heart raced. Though I couldn’t see them, Yenza was still shooting. A few seconds later another pop came and another light was out. The last one. We were in the dark, but that didn’t stop the raiders from trying to blow us out of the water. They knew where we were, more or less. I didn’t know which way to swim, because I didn’t know where my friends were. I decided to tread water and let them find me…
And got pulled under again. This time the dado yanked on my Second Earth khaki’s, pulling himself up. Or me down. Whatever. He had me in a bear hug several feet below the surface. There was nothing skillful or clever about his attack. He was going to hold me down until I ran out of air. I struggled to get free, but it was no use. He held me tight from behind, with his hands locked in front of me. There was nothing I could do but drown.
I felt a short, violent lurch, as if the dado’s body had been hit by something. He instantly released his grip. I pushed myself away from him, kicked for the surface and spun around, ready for the robot to come after me again. He didn’t. He couldn’t. He no longer had a head. The thing floated there with its arms out. Dead. Or turned off. Or incapacitated. Or whatever it is that happens to a dado when the lights go out. It may have been a mechanical device, but it was still a gruesome sight.
I felt a strong arm grab the back of my sweatshirt. A second later I was lifted out of the water onto the deck of Spader’s skimmer. Spader stood over me. Yenza was next to him, holding her rifle, smiling.
I guess she was a better shot than I thought.
“He won’t be talking to the raiders anytime soon,” she confirmed.
Explosions continued to churn the water around us. Spader dropped to his knees and opened up the hatch of the skimmer. He pulled out three round air globes.
“We’ll have a better chance in the water than on the skimmer,” he said.
I hadn’t put on an air globe in a very long time, but I knew how they worked. The clear shell made a form-fit over your head. The small silver device at the top took oxygen in from the sea and allowed you to breathe. And speak. It was an amazing device. It looked as if we were going to have to rely on them to save us.
“We’ll swim back to Grallion,” he said. “Let them keep pumping shots at the skimmer. We’ll be long gone.”
We barely had time to put the globes on when the water next to the skimmer began to boil. All three of us looked in wonder at what could be causing it.
“That’s not from the guns,” I declared.
Yenza realized the truth first. “No,” she bellowed. “No! No!”
I didn’t know what she was getting all bent about, until I saw a large, clear dome break the surface of the water. If we were anywhere else in Halla, I would have been panic stricken, thinking it was some kind of sea beast. But we were on Cloral. I knew what it was.
“They shouldn’t be here!” Yenza shouted.
It was a hauler submarine. Inside the dome I saw the faces of three scared individuals. It looked to be a family. A man, a woman, and a little girl that couldn’t have been more than four years old. The man was at the controls. He waved frantically, motioning for us to get inside the sub.
The barrage of water-cannon fire stopped. There was a strange calm.
“Did they give up?” I asked.
A moment later we were again bathed in light as multiple spotlights from other gunships hit us. During the confusion two more gunships had drifted closer. We were now surrounded on three sides by raider ships, all with their lights trained on us and all with their guns locked in. They had hit the jackpot. They no longer needed information from the dado aquaneer. They had us. They had the hauler. They had the exiles. We were seconds away from being turned into liquid.
Spader leaped from the skimmer onto the body of the hauler, behind the cockpit bubble. He motioned to the people inside to dive.
“Down!” he screamed. “Down! Down!”
The pilot wasn’t sure what to do. He wasn’t an aquaneer. He probably had only learned to drive a hauler that day. He looked to Yenza. Yenza made the same move.
“Dive!” she shouted, and jumped on the back of the hauler.
I did the same. There wasn’t time to board the craft. We were about to go for a ride. Bubbles boiled up from around the vehicle as the hauler began to sink. The back of a hauler had plenty of places to grab on to, so I grabbed. Tight. No sooner did my head go below the water than I heard the sounds of cannon fire. I was nearly ripped off the hauler by the force of the multiple impacts. The vehicle twisted and spun, but continued to dive. Yenza pulled her way forward along the back of the hauler to the cockpit bubble. She banged on the glass to get the pilot’s attention and motioned for him to continue down. The water was deep around Grallion. If we got enough depth, there was no way that the water-cannon fire could reach us. I looked above to see the surface explode in a brilliant kaleidoscope of light from the ships. As we dropped farther away, the muffled explosions grew more distant. My confidence grew. We had escaped.
Yenza looked back to Spader and me. We could hear her clearly through the device on top of her air globe. “They could drop depth charges.”
Oh. We hadn’t escaped.
Yenza knocked on the hauler bubble again. The pilot turned to look, and Yenza made a motion in the direction she wanted the guy to drive.
“Uh, that’s back toward Grallion,” I announced.
“I’m hoping they’ll think we broke for open water,” she said with confidence. “If we hide below Grallion, it will be harder for them to find us with their deep scan.”
I looked to Spader and shrugged. “Sounds good to me.”
The hauler was nearly on the ocean floor. We moved swiftly and silently across the sandy bottom until everything grew dark. I figured that must have been because all light from above had been blocked by the massive barge city of Grallion. We traveled a few more minutes, with Yenza scanning the surface ahead while riding on top
