The frowning man looked up from his palmcomp. “I’m Dr. Vavuniva, the chief technician here. You are Mr. Dorn?”
“Just Dorn.”
“Dorn,” the chief technician said. “No first name?”
“Not anymore.”
The tech’s brows shot up and he cast a questioning glance at the woman. She said, “It’s all right. We have his dossier. All the data we need is on file.”
Turning to Dorn, she said, “You’ve been briefed, I presume.”
“Fully,” he said. She was on the tall side, he noted, barely a couple of centimeters shorter than he. Oval face, with a discreet tattoo of a flower on her left cheekbone.
“Is that a dahlia?” Dorn asked her.
She smiled. “Yes. My given name is Dahlia.”
“I have no given name,” he said.
“So I see from your dossier.”
The chief tech said, “Well, let’s get on with it.” He turned to the younger technician. “You wait here. We might need you to help bring him back.”
The kid nodded. He looked nervous, Dorn thought.
The woman said, “You understand that you’re going to be immersed in liquid perfluorocarbon. You’ll be able to breathe it just as you breathe air.”
Dorn stepped to the railing at the edge of the tub. “I’ll be immersed in there? Fully immersed?”
Dahlia smiled at him. “It’s quite deep.”
The chief tech said, “The tank goes down twelve meters. You’ll be in over your head, don’t worry.”
Following their instructions, Dorn took off his robe while the youngster opened the gate in the railing. Dorn saw the three of them gazing at his body. They’re trying not to stare, he realized. But his half-metal body seemed to hold their eyes like a magnet holds iron filings.
The young tech wondered, “How will the gunk react with … uh, with his…”
“Shouldn’t be a problem,” Dr. Vavuniva said. “The perfluorocarbon won’t react with his metals, we checked that several times.”
Dahlia picked up a belt of weights from the deck and offered it to Dorn. “You’ll need this,” she said.
“You’ve got to go down to the bottom,” the chief tech explained, “and stay there for at least fifteen minutes.”
Dorn nodded and accepted the belt from Dahlia, with a murmured, “Thank you.” He fastened it around his waist.
“The belt has a built-in phone. Once you’re fully immersed you’ll be able to speak almost normally. And with the phone you can talk to us while you’re down there.”
Dorn thought, Call for help, she means. But she’s too kind to say it.
Vavuniva turned to a screen set into the chamber’s curving bulkhead. He touched it once, and a display of alphanumerics lit up.
Nodding as if satisfied, he turned back to Dorn and said, “Very well then, in you go.”
Dorn saw that there was a ladder built into the side of the tank. He stepped into the perfluorocarbon, prosthetic foot first.
Dahlia leaned over the rail. “You’ll gag on it. Everybody does, at first. It’s a reflex. Don’t panic.”
Dorn smiled at her as best as he could. “Thanks for the advice. I’ll try not to panic.”
He climbed slowly down the ladder. The liquid felt cold, slimy to the human half of his body. Up to his waist. Up to his shoulders. Another step and the liquid rose over his head. He held his breath automatically. Down another step. Immersed in the liquid, Dorn could hear the tiny whining of the servomotors that moved his mechanical half. But the noise sounded deeper, lower.
He couldn’t hold his breath any longer. His lung was burning. He couldn’t help himself, he sucked in a deep breath. And gagged. Don’t panic! he commanded himself.
For ageless moments he hung on the rungs of the ladder, feeling the cold oily fluid in his nose, sliding down into his lung. He closed his human eye, gripping the ladder, shuddering as he tried to breathe the liquid. His prosthetic hand bent the rung’s metal.
With dogged resolution Dorn pushed himself off the ladder completely and slowly sank deeper into the tubular tank. His feet touched bottom, his knees flexed slightly.
And he was breathing. It wasn’t pleasant, but Dorn found that he could breathe almost normally in the all- pervading liquid perfluorocarbon. The fluid was almost as transparent as air; he could see the welded seams of the tank’s metal walls quite clearly.
“I’m at the bottom,” he said, his voice sounding strangely deep and slow in his ears.
“Fifteen minutes,” came the chief tech’s voice, also distorted. “Starting now.”
Dorn waited, trying not to think about the past as the minutes ticked slowly by. When you go into Jupiter’s ocean in the submersible you’ll be immersed in this liquid, he thought. You’ll have to spend days breathing this slime.
Unbidden, memories of his past life surged to his consciousness. His first raid, when he was twelve, destroying the village, killing everyone, everything, even the cattle and dogs. Strange that the mangy, half-starved dog still stuck in his memory. He had tried to kill it cleanly, with one shot, but only crippled its hind legs. The mutt crawled painfully away, yowling until he emptied the whole clip of his assault rifle and blew it to bloody scraps.
Dorn’s pulse was thundering in his ears when at last the chief tech announced he could come back up.
Dahlia’s voice added, “Climb the ladder slowly. Don’t try to float to the surface, please.”
Dorn followed her orders, glad to have something, anything, that papered over the memories of his past. When he broke to the surface, he gagged again. He began to cough uncontrollably as the younger technician leaned over the railing to help him out of the tank. Dahlia reached out both her arms to help steady him. Dorn’s body spasmed. He bent over and coughed up oily, greenish liquid.
“You must lie down now,” the chief tech said sternly. “We have to pump the perfluorocarbon out of your lungs.”
Lung, Dorn replied silently, his body racked with coughing. I only have one lung.
The pumping procedure is worse than the immersion, Dorn thought. But at last it was finished and he was breathing air once again. His chest hurt, his head was spinning, but he was breathing normally at last.
As he got slowly to his feet the chief tech looked at him unhappily. “Good enough for the first time,” he said, as if it hurt him to admit it. “Tomorrow we start the high-pressure tests.”
Even Dahlia looked sorrowful at that.
Linda Vishnevskaya pushed herself wearily from the control center’s main console.
“That’s it,” she said, loudly enough for her six teammates to hear her even through the earbuds they were wearing. “The bird’s on automated programming now. She’s on her own.”
It had been another routine day, which somehow made her all the more tired. Sitting at the console yesterday while
Then came the entry into the ocean. Even that had been virtually letter perfect. And exactly as calculated,
“She’s on her own,” Vishnevskaya repeated, in a muttering whisper.
She looked across the chamber and up to the empty visitors’ gallery. Empty except for one person: G.
