Cutting Edge

quirkish notions, the ornament was a representation of the miner’s god, whose shrine occupied a niche behind the entrance to every dangerous sulfur-stinking shaft — a horned, squatted, vaguely wolfish being with a phallic thrust between its thighs, said to hold the power of life and death over the impoverished, ragtag campesino workers who labored to extract his mineral bounty, placating him with gifts of coca, tobacco, and pure-grain alcohol and honoring him with orgiastic celebrations of vice and excess.

Like many gods and monsters of folklore, this lord of the underworld was known by more than one name. Mountain villagers descended from the Inca called him Supai. Most Bolivian peasants knew him as El Tio. The sly uncle who cast a neutral eye on virtue and sin, caring only for tributes offered. A demon that desperate men had sainted in exchange for his inconstant favors.

The owner of the pleasure yacht knew, and he well understood.

He looked out the bridge’s sweeping windows, past the stations where his helmsman and engineers sat in their epauleted white uniform blouses. Looked out at the sun-stippled water and the crowded international harbor and the fixed oil platforms standing with their tall booms, derricks, and wellheads.

Here was wealth, he thought. Tremendous wealth, all visible right on the surface. But none of it interested him. The treasure that had made his migration to Africa something more than a flight from the wide nets of his pursuers, the continent’s greatest bounty, was the light pulsing through fine veins of glass that ran deep where the sun did not reach.

There was no chance in the world that he would let anyone stop him from tapping it.

“Casimir,” he said, his tone soft. “Are you ready?”

His pilot had a brief exchange in the Bandgabi tribal dialect with a man at the console beside him. Then he nodded.

“Yes,” he said, switching to English. “We’ve completed a modem upload-download test… real-time streaming telemetry and multimode sensors are online… everything checks.”

“Why haven’t you deployed, then?”

“Gunville. We were waiting for his confirmation.”

“And he’s given it?”

“Just now,” the helmsman said. “His men are in position aboard the Africana.”

The yacht’s owner unlaced his hands and fluttered one in front of him. He was eager to be rid of those glorified utility workers below.

“Take us on to the next stage,” he said. “Please.”

An instant later he felt the mildest of bumps run through the yacht, and focused his eyes on the monitor boards.

The killfish had launched from its chamber.

* * *

The deployment chamber in the Chimera’s lower starboard hold was little different from a torpedo tube, but the minisub housed within bore no resemblance to a conventional weapon or remote underwater vehicle. Nor was there was anything conventional about it.

What it looked like before ejection was a metal shoe-box with a considerable distension around the middle, as if it had been overfilled until its sides were pushed outward. As it left the chamber and its lateral, rear, and top stabilizer/orientation fins unfolded, its appearance grew closer to that of a fish with an egg-swollen belly.

Each of these comparisons was appropriate.

The killfish was full and, after a fashion, pregnant.

“What’s holding up Gunville?” Marius said.

“I don’t know,” Cedric replied. They were back on their closed voice link. “Andre told me that he’s gone to the engine room. Some kind of problem.”

“Bullshit. They’ve got phones in there, and he could reach for one if he chooses,” Marius said. “I’ll bet that son of a bitch is on the pot with his trousers around his ankles, serenading his true love.”

Cedric grinned. And fondling it, no doubt—l’e petite amour. He wasn’t about to argue Gunville’s case, though.

“We’ve been down at extreme depth for almost four hours,” Marius said. “Why push things to the limit? We should video the splice and call it quits.”

“Let’s not work ourselves into a premature snit. Five hours might be pushing.” Besides, Cedric thought, the repair technicians might prefer to receive live imagery from them, observe his curious find from angles of their own choice before lowering their grapple to raise the cable. “We’re bound to hear from the songbird any minute. Meanwhile, we can still do what you suggest, take some pictures—”

Cedric became distracted by a sudden movement at the far right periphery of his vision. He cocked his head inside the dome port for a better look, but it reduced his field of view just enough so he realized he’d have to turn his whole body.

He applied the slightest bit of pressure to his left footpad for a thruster assist and was nudged the opposite way.

A quick spin of his blades, and Marius shifted to face in the same direction. “Don’t tell me the shark’s returned in spite of our PODs being activated.”

“Probably not. Whatever I glimpsed didn’t seem that large.”

Cedric was quiet for a moment. There weren’t many forms of aquatic life down here that presented even the slightest hazard, but he was always on the lookout for an unusual specimen, making him an underwater equivalent of a bird-watcher, he supposed. Though it seemed a stretch to believe he’d have two exceptional sightings in a single dive, maybe he’d gotten fortunate. The Ogooue Basin was stocked full of unique tenants, including deepwater octopuses and nautiluses.

He scanned the underwater dimness, kicking his shoulder lamps to their brightest settings with the touch of a switch inside his hardsuit. Then his gaze fixed on a speedily approaching object about six meters distant at three o’clock.

He raised an arm to point. “Marius—”

“I see it,” his partner said. “What the hell is that thing?”

Cedric’s silence did not stem from any lack of desire to respond. He simply hadn’t the vaguest clue.

For an instant he entertained the thought that he really had lucked into another sighting. That whatever was coming toward them was a strange, wide-bodied fish to be imaged and subsequently identified for his personal archive of marine animals. As it got closer, however, he realized it was neither fish, nor cephalopod, nor any other type of living creature.

“I think — Marius, it looks like some kind of unmanned probe.”

“But that doesn’t make sense… we’d have been informed if one was operating in this area.”

Cedric was silent again. Marius was right, it didn’t make sense. Just as a splice that shouldn’t have been in the cable made no sense. Yet there it was lying uncovered on the seabed only a few steps from where he stood. And there in the bright fan of his lights was an autonomous underwater vehicle unlike any he’d seen in his entire diving career.

Then it struck him that it did resemble something he’d seen before — and that flash of sudden recall instantly branched off into another like electronic data through a signal splitter. Cedric’s first clear memory was of a fish he’d often spotted skimming through the sea grass while on a year-long Planetaire telecom project in the Caribbean. His second was of an article he’d read mentioning the same creature — a fish, family Ostraciidae — in one of the scientific monthlies he read with compulsive diligence. National Geographic’s French edition, perhaps, but that didn’t really matter. The important things for him were that the boxfish was distinguished by the hard outer carapace that deterred predators but also made its body rigidly inflexible… and that the boxfish’s means of locomotion, which gave it exceptional stability and maneuverability despite the unbending armor, had been studied by American military researchers interested in using it as a model for the steering and propulsion systems of future generation AUVs.

All this passed through Cedric’s brain in milliseconds, flashing along parallel but independent paths of recollection toward a sharp, startling convergence as he focused on the robotic craft bearing toward him. If he’d had time to consider them, the implications of what he saw might have caused a slow trickle of fear to filter through his surprise — but he didn’t.