The Danger

CHAPTER ONE

Star Ling came awake with a start, and stared at her unfamiliar surroundings. The room was an undecorated stark white, with one bed — her in it — and one chair — empty. An antiseptic smell permeated the air.

A hospital?

Investigating a stinging feeling, she noted that her hand was bandaged, and a tube protruded from the taped wrapping. Her eyes followed it all the way up to a plastic bag of clear fluid that hung from an IV pole by the side of the bed. She also felt the pure oxygen being administered through a nasal tube.

Am I sick?

There was a whoop in the hallway outside. “She’s awake!”

In barged Bobby Kaczinski, Dante Lewis, and Adriana Ballantyne — Star’s dive partners. The sight of their familiar faces triggered an avalanche of memory.

Their summer internship at Poseidon Oceanographic Institute had led the four teen divers to the site of a seventeenth-century shipwreck off the Caribbean island of Saint-Luc. When their discovery pointed to the existence of a second wreck in much deeper water, they had gone to investigate in Deep Scout, Poseidon’s research sub.

Star remembered that. And then… the accident. She closed her eyes tightly to keep the tears from coming, and knew the answer before posing the hopeful question:

“Did I dream it all? The captain?”

“It was no dream,” Kaz confirmed sadly.

Captain Braden Vanover had been their friend and mentor. When everyone else at Poseidon had treated the interns like unwanted excess baggage, he had spoken up for them, taken them under his wing. He had been at Deep Scout’s controls when the submersible had failed. It was due to his skill alone that any of them had survived.

“Did we kill him?” moaned Star.

“I ask myself that a thousand times an hour,” said Adriana in a broken voice. “I haven’t got an answer.”

Dante was devastated. “It’s my fault. I’m the one who found the first wreck — and the trail leading to the second one.” Dante’s unusually sharp eyesight was the result of his color blindness. He saw only black, white, and shades of gray, but very little escaped him.

“Don’t flatter yourself, Dante,” Star told him in a voice that was weak, but very much her own. “You’re not that important.”

He looked down, embarrassed, and mumbled, “It’s good to have you back. They said you might not make it. And after what happened to the captain—”

Star had a vision of Vanover’s drowned body, sinking slowly. She had not known that he was already dead. Her attempts to save him had drawn her too deep for too long. An emergency ascent had brought on decompression sickness — the bends — the most deadly of all diving hazards.

Star could not remember what happened after that. “Where am I?” she asked.

“Brace yourself,” Adriana advised. “You’re about sixty stories above the open ocean, in the infirmary of the main oil-drilling platform. They brought you here by helicopter to a decompression chamber.”

“Well, it worked,” said Star. “Believe it or not, I feel pretty good — except I have to go to the bathroom, big-time!”

She swung her legs over the side of the bed, and stepped down to the floor. The room spun, and she hit the linoleum, face-first.

Adriana screamed loud enough to wake the dead. “Nurse!”

White-coated staff came running.

Star sat up, her eyes wide and frightened. “I can’t walk!”

The doctor on duty was the last to appear. “Ah, you are awake.”

Two orderlies lifted her bodily and put her back onto the bed.

“Doctor, what’s happening to me?” Star cried out. “My legs won’t work!”

“Your legs are just fine,” he soothed. “It is your brain where the problem lies right now.”

“What?” Star was aghast.

The doctor explained that the brain controls the body by sending signals along neural pathways. With the bends, the body is invaded by tiny bubbles of nitrogen gas that block some of the pathways. “Your brain will attempt to develop new ones,” he concluded. “In some patients, this is more difficult than in others.”

“What do you mean?” Kaz asked anxiously. “She’ll walk again, right?”

“It is impossible to determine at this time,” the doctor replied. “It depends on the individual and the degree of neurological damage.”

“But I’ve got cerebral palsy!” Star blurted. “I limp already!”

The doctor blinked. He hadn’t been on duty when Star had been treated. “And you’re here on a dive internship?”

“She’s the best diver around!” Adriana put in. “I mean, she was—” She fell silent.

The doctor considered this information. “It may complicate matters,” he admitted. “Then again, perhaps the same tenacity that made you a diver despite the odds will help your recovery. But your diving career is at an end. You understand this, yes?”

No more diving! Right now it didn’t seem like such a big deal, in view of Captain Vanover’s death, and with her own future in doubt. But diving had always been more than a hobby for Star Ling. Once in the water, she had no handicap. Without her diving, she would be nothing more than the girl with the limp.

Stop it! she ordered herself. Be happy. You’re alive! You could be dead like the captain….

“And now,” said the doctor to the three visitors, “I think it is time to let your friend get some rest.”

Shattered, Kaz, Dante, and Adriana headed for the door.

“We’ll be right outside,” promised Adriana. “Just call—”

“Actually,” the doctor interrupted, “I believe Dr. Gallagher wants you back at Poseidon.”

“That would be a first,” Kaz said bitterly.

In the fluorescent-lit corridor, Adriana let out a long breath. “Wow.”

“She’ll walk again,” Kaz vowed, convincing himself as much as the others. “Star’s tough. I’ll bet she’s more upset about not being able to dive.”

“No diving,” echoed Dante. “Where do I sign up? I will never dive again. I might not even shower!”

“Like Poseidon would even let us dive,” snorted Kaz. “What do you think Gallagher wants with us? To give us the boot, that’s what.”

“We should just leave anyway,” muttered Dante. “Save them the trouble of kicking us out.”

“I have no place to go,” offered Adriana in a thready voice. “My parents are jet-setting around the Black Sea, and our house is closed up for the summer.”

Kaz stuck out his jaw. “I’m not leaving till they force me out. I don’t want that treasure anymore, but I’m sure not going to let Tad Cutter take it. If Cutter’s team comes up with that loot, I’m going to be right here to shoot my mouth off to every newspaper and TV station from Martinique to Mars!”

Tad Cutter, from Poseidon’s head office in San Diego, was officially the scientist sponsoring the teen internships. But really, Cutter and his two partners were treasure hunters. These people had turned the entire internship program into a smoke screen to cover their hunt for the wreck of the Spanish galleon Nuestra Señora de la Luz.

“I don’t want that treasure, either,” said Dante. “I mean, I still sort of want it. But it’ll kill me if Cutter gets it.”

“Gallagher thinks he’s such a genius,” Adriana put in angrily, “but he’s too dumb to notice there’s a team of treasure hunters right under his nose. That’s the guy who’s going to make decisions about our lives.”

“Gallagher’s a total idiot,” Kaz agreed grimly. “It’s nuts even to waste our time talking about him. Who knows what could be going on in his very small mind?”