Kodjo Asante can see again: a high sun in a hard blue sky. A flat far horizon. Columns of oily smoke rising from wrecked machinery.
Bodies.
The air cracks a few centimeters to his right. He drops instinctively to a deck slippery with blood and silver scales, gags at the sudden stench wafting from a slurry of bloated carcasses crowding the surface of the holding pen just in front of him. (Coho-Atlantic hybrids, he notes despite himself. Might even have those new Showellgenes)) A turret on treads sparks and sizzles on the other side, a hole blown in its carapace.
A shadow blurs across Asante’s forearm. Tiwana leaps across the sky, defractors high on her forehead, eyeballs dancing madly in their sockets. She clears the enclosure, alights graceful as a dragonfly on one foot, kicks the spastic turret with the other. It sparks one last time and topples into the pen. Tiwana vanishes down the nearest companionway.
Asante gets to his feet, pans for threats, sees nothing but enemies laid waste: the smoking stumps of perimeter autoturrets, the fallen bodies of a man with his arm blown off and a woman groping for a speargun just beyond reach. And a small brittle figure almost fused to the deck: blackened sticks for arms and legs, white teeth grinning in a charred skull, a bright half-melted puddle of orange fabric and PVC holding it all together. Asante sees it all. Not just snapshots glimpsed through the fog: ZeroS handiwork, served up for the first time in three-sixty wraparound immersion.
We’re killing children …
Even the adult bodies don’t look like combatants. Refugees, maybe, driven to take by force what they couldn’t get any other way. Maybe all they wanted was to get somewhere safe. To feed their kids.
At his feet, a reeking carpet of dead salmon converge listlessly in the wake of the fallen turret. They aren’t feeding anything but hagfish and maggots.
I have become , Asante reflects numbly. He calls up BUD, ignores the unreadable auras flickering around the edges of vision, selects GPS.
Not off Honduras. They’re in the Gulf of Mexico.
No one in their right mind would run a fish farm here. The best parts of the Gulf are anoxic; the worst are downright flammable. Caçador must have drifted up through the Yucatan Channel, got caught in an eddy loop. All these fish would have suffocated as soon as they hit the dead zone.
But gylands aren’t entirely at the mercy of the currents. They carry rudimentary propulsion systems for docking and launching, switching streams and changing course. Caçador‘s presence so deep in the Gulf implies either catastrophic equipment failure or catastrophic ignorance.
Asante can check out the first possibility, anyway. He stumbles toward the nearest companionway—
—as Tiwana and Acosta burst onto deck from below. Acosta seizes his right arm, Tiwana his left. Neither slows. Asante’s feet bounce and drag. The lurching acceleration reawakens the pain in his temple.
He cries out: “The engines …”
New pain, other side, sharp and recurrent: an ancient weight belt swinging back and forth across Acosta’s torso, a frayed strip of nylon threaded through an assortment of lead slugs. It’s like being hammered by a tiny wrecking ball. One part of Asante wonders where Acosta found it; another watches Garin race into view with a small bloody body slung across his shoulder. Garin passes one of the dismembered turrets, grabs a piece with his free hand and keeps running.
Everyone’s charging for the rails.
Tiwana’s mouthpiece is in, her defractors down. She empties a clip into the deck ahead, right at the water’s edge: gunfire shreds plastic and whitewashed fiberglass, loosens an old iron docking cleat. She dips and grabs in passing, draws it to her chest, never loosening her grip on Asante. He hears the soft pop of a bone leaving its socket in the instant before they all go over the side.
They plummet head-first, dragged down by a hundred kilograms of improvised ballast. Asante chokes, jams his mouthpiece into place; coughs seawater through the exhaust and sucks in a hot lungful of fresh-sparked hydrox. Pressure builds against his eardrums. He swallows, swallows again, manages to keep a few millibars ahead of outright rupture. He has just enough freedom of movement to claw at his face and slide the defractors over his eyes. The ocean clicks into focus, clear as acid, empty as green glass.
Green turns white.
Seen in that flash-blinded instant: four thin streams of bubbles, rising to a surface gone suddenly incandescent. Four dark bodies, falling from the light. A thunderclap rolls through the water, deep, downshifted, as much felt as heard. It comes from nowhere and everywhere.
The roof of the ocean is on fire. Some invisible force shreds their contrails from the top down, tears those bubbles into swirling silver confetti. The wave-front races implacably after them. The ocean bulges, recoils. It squeezes Asante like a fist, stretches him like rubber; Tiwana and Acosta tumble away in the backwash. He flails, stabilizes himself as the first jagged shapes resolve overhead: dismembered chunks of the booby-trapped gyland, tumbling with slow majesty into the depths. A broken wedge of deck and stairwell passes by a few meters away, tangled in monofilament. A thousand glassy eyes stare back from the netting as the wreckage fades to black.
Asante scans the ocean for that fifth bubble trail, that last dark figure to balance Those Who Left against Those Who Returned. No one overhead. Below, a dim shape that has to be Garin shares its mouthpiece with the small limp thing in his arms. Beyond that, the hint of a deeper dark against the abyss: a shark-like silhouette keeping station amid a slow rain of debris. Waiting to take its prodigal children home again.
They’re too close to shore. There might be witnesses. So much for stealth-ops. So much for low profiles and no-questions-asked. Metzinger’s going to be pissed.
Then again, they are in the Gulf of Mexico.
Any witnesses will probably just think it caught fire again.
Lady
