“What’s the length of the tunnel?” he asked.
“Fifty meters. Why…” Then sudden comprehension. “Oh, right. Your breathing equipment is broken.”
“We’ll manage it, Kendra. I’ll make contact when we’re in.”
“You be safe,” she said.
He nodded, giving her a cocky smile. Then when she clicked off he turned to Darla. “Can you hold your breath that long?” Scotty was already peeling off his pants.
“Hey, cowboy. I’m a mermaid, remember?”
Together, the two of them stripped until Darla was pink plumpness in panties and bra, and Scotty buff in briefs. “Fifty meters,” Scotty said. “That’s Special Forces stuff.”
Darla poked a finger at his gut. “Ow. Smuggling drywall there? Good swimmer?”
“Yeah.” He could hear the voice in his head clearly: But are you that good?
She nodded. “All right. Hyperventilate to get your lungs full. The trick will be to stay relaxed. Don’t panic, and we might just get through this. We have to swim it, get into the chamber, and trigger the cycle. Can you do that?”
“Easy,” he lied.
“Not to be a wet blanket,” Mickey said. “But what if they’ve sealed the door? Or you can’t open it?”
“Then we’ll have to swim back,” Darla said.
Her smile didn’t mask the fear in her eyes. And suddenly, Wayne’s heart broke.
Standing there in her underwear, shivering in the cold, Darla seemed so brave, so strong, so very beautiful to him. He went to her and held her. “When this is over. If we’re still-”
“When this is over,” she said. “I’m coming back.”
“Right,” he said. “Right.” Wayne scratched his head, sighing. “Look. I don’t know if it would make more sense for me to invite you down, or you to invite me to stay up here for a while. But I think… I think I’d like to find out what there is between us.”
She laid the softness of her palm along his cheek, a fond gesture. “Sex,” she said. “And right now, I could use a lot more of that. We’ll work out the details later.”
He sighed, deeply. “You’ve got it,” he said.
And kissed her. And no kiss of his life had ever been sweeter, or more sincere.
For three minutes Scotty had been breathing deep and exhaling shallow. He gulped air, exhaled half of it, took another and then another until he felt full almost to bursting, and light-headed. Let it out. Then inhaled deeply again.
He and Darla nodded to each other, waved to their companions, and then dove.
The water was chilly but not freezing. If the power had been off here, the cold might have given him muscle- lock. The aquifer was intended for recreation. They must have sealed off part, and warmed it with induction coils.
He followed Darla’s lead, diving deep into the pool, strong smooth strokes taking them down. His ears didn’t hurt. Lunar gravity made for less pressure. The blue lights were mounted at the bottom, down through a forest of what simply had to be fake coral.
A startling sight: Seahorse-type creatures as big as real horses, anchored deep, motionless, waiting to play.
Ali’s horses. Briefly he wondered: What was supposed to have happened here? How would the game have gone, barring pirates?
No time. He swam on: Darla was an eel, thank God, and seemed to know just where she was going, down into a tunnel halfway to the bottom. Fifty meters. All right…
He clamped his mind down on doubt and swam on.
Angelique clapped her hands together. “All right, everyone! We can’t just wait for help. We need to prepare, in case the pirates arrive before the marines.”
She looked up into the Game Master’s cloud. “Xavier-what do we have in terms of control?”
“Just about everything,” he said. “Including a few things that you would have picked up along the way.”
“Good,” she said. “I need all the help you can give us. We want to make the next few minutes absolute hell for the pirates, and hope that that’s enough. It should be easy. When they drop into the water they’ll be dead meat.”
“Hold up a minute, love. I can’t see them in the ‘Little Wars’ scenario. They may have used the other mirror.”
“Other mirror?”
Something alive and frantic kicked in Scotty’s chest, struggling to win freedom. Not pain. Not yet. But pain was on its way. And soon after pain, panic. Then blackness, and death.
Hewn from bedrock, the underwater tunnel seemed to go on forever, little rows of blinking yellow lights lining the sides like reflective speedbumps on an endless desert road. Fifty meters? Seemed more like five hundred. The more they swam, the farther away that door seemed. Had to be an oxygen-debt hallucination, but still he wondered: Could Kendra have been wrong? Was it possible she had misread the specs, sending him and Darla to their deaths?
Then he saw the end of the tunnel, blessedly close at hand.
Darla scanned it briefly, then punched in a code.
Every disastrous scenario imaginable flashed through his mind in those seconds. She had the wrong code. The pirates had sabotaged the door, McCauley had lied about their intentions. He would drown here in this tunnel, his lungs exploding as he The door slid open. They entered, and the door slid shut behind them. The world spun, darkness and blood pounding at his vision. When the water began to drain from the chamber he braced his arms and legs against the walls, lifted his head up above the level of the water, sucked, spat, and gulped air.
Damn, that tasted good. If he’d been the first man to drown on the Moon, Saint Peter might have laughed him out of heaven.
As the water was pumped out through the floor grill, Darla was already crouched at the inner door, studying a package composed of a bundle of red clay-like bricks bound with wire and anchored to the door with some kind of clear, hard resinous substance. A dial the size and appearance of a wristwatch was set into it, anchored with wires and covered with more of that clear resin. Darla’s expression was glum indeed.
“Well?” Scotty asked.
“With the right tools… maybe. But I’m not sure at all. This isn’t makeshift, like I’d hoped. McCauley said they’d smuggled up some kind of fancy timer, and he’d spliced it into a bundle of mining explosive.” Darla had spoken with McCauley for almost a minute, and one tense, terse conversation it had been. “Someone knew exactly what they were planning to do, and smuggled a piece of equipment up from Earth. This”-she pointed at the watch-“started life as a wristwatch. The display is wonky. It’s been seriously reprogrammed. They turned it into a movement sensor. I’m guessing that it’s also sensitive to a range of other stimuli. Pure pro.”
“Can you beat it?”
“Maybe,” she said. She felt around her belt pod, extracted her multitool. “I’m not sure. Judging from this readout… I’d say it’s not very forgiving.”
“What can I do?” Scotty asked. “Is there anything I can do?” He was feeling useless, and there was no worse feeling in a crisis.
“Yes. Get the hell out of here,” she said.
Scotty pressed his face against the fist-sized viewport. Through inches of composition plastic, he waved at the room on the other side.
A flurry of movement, and Max Piering appeared on the window’s far side. Despite the tension, Scotty smiled, recognizing Professor Cavor’s face shorn of facial hair. Piering motioned down to the communications link on the inner door.
Scotty felt nervous about triggering it. “Darla?”
“Go for it. I think McCauley told the truth about this whole setup.”
He turned it on.
