The Sacrifice Game

(89)

Google-Earth “Palmyra Atoll” and at first you won’t see anything there, but if you zoom down to the maximum you’ll bring up a linked pair of tiny islands, looking up at you like a white domino mask. If we’d had to stick to commercial travel, it would have taken us eighty-one hours to cover the 6,750 miles. But Marena’d been mending some fences with Lindsay and Boyle and she’d convinced them to lend us one of his Gulfstreams and a crew of three. They took us from Orlando to Twentynine Palms in five hours, and from there we got on one of their decommissioned C-17 Globemasters and flew to Wheeler Base in Wahiawa, in the center of Oahu, in eleven hours, and from there it took five and a half hours to get to Kiribati. We took a cigarette boat to Palmyra and met Ana’s crew, who were on a stealthier boat called the Gotengo, just before sunset.

As I’d explained, a bit breathlessly, to Marena, Jed 1 had to have used the Game to find that hidden post on Kristen Stewart. And he said, “I just got that,” which meant he’d found it during his Game of the Week. Which he does on Sunday night at seven P.M. And the only place where it was already seven o’clock was in the Line Islands, which are practically sitting on the international date line. And the most interesting spot in the Line Islands was Palmyra Atoll, because that’s where the newly discovered possibly eusocial nudibranchs were. Although when you spell it all out it seems a lot less magical.

The Gotengo rode low in the water, and weirdly slushily, I guess because it was some new kind of stealth thing, all Kevlar and carbon fiber. It was forty-two feet, which would normally seem like a lot to a reef bum like me, but most of that was under the waterline, and the eight of us-Marena, Ana, and five male security contractors, or let’s just be blunt and call them mercenaries, and me-kept bumping each other as we squatted in the ungenerous deck space. Actually, Gotengo wasn’t the boat’s real name, or rather it didn’t have a name, just numbers and a two-terabyte spec disk that told you things like how it was built by VT Halmatic and that it was tested for ninety knots, which is huge. But we wouldn’t be doing any racing.

“They’re talking about the storm,” Megalon said. Of course, “Megalon” wasn’t his real name, which I didn’t know. I did know, though, that he was an ex-commodore in the SBS, that is, the Special Boat Service, which is like the UK version of the Navy SEALs. He spoke in that low-key-but-still-working-class way British grunts all have, with a vestige of Australian. He was big and naturally jovial and he’d let his hair grow out a bit now that he was in the private sector, but he still had what they used to call military bearing and a tattoo with a stubby gladius and a banner that said something like B Y S TRENGTH AND G UILE. Good plan, I thought. He was talking about the people on Jed 1 ’s charter, the Blue Sun, or rather I should say the Matango. You couldn’t see it from here, but the sonar said it was right out there, three thousand and twenty-eight ESE. Oh, and Megalon was telling us because he was talking on his in-ear phone to our audio lady, who was below with the captain and another IT person. Audio Lady-well, let’s use her dumb alias, Mothra-seemed really good. I’d tried listening to the raw audio coming in from the Matango, but it just sounded like a hyena in a wind tunnel. You had to be a veteran sound geek to take the stuff off the three differently tuned parabolic microphones, sort it out, denoise it, interpret it, and summarize it for the likes of the rest of us.

“Reptar wants him to come up in a half hour. Ogra says no.” “Reptar” was the skipper of the Matango. Ogra was Jed 1.

“I used to like to go in a little after sunset,” I said. Most ’branchs don’t roll out of their crooks and nannies until dark. “Except-”

“Hah!” Megalon went. “Okay, there they go.” He said that Ogra had gone in with two other divers, possibly bodyguards, and they were swimming south, without tow sleds, toward the extreme tip of the reef. “Eighteen minutes.” We wanted to spend as little time in the water as possible, and I’d said how my average dive was about seventy minutes. So if we could get there in forty-two minutes, and we wanted to catch them toward the end, when they were tired. I shifted on the little drop-down seat. Eeekch. My tow-harness’s crotch strap was chafing the tenderest segment of my perineal raphe, but I didn’t want to unzip and grub around in there in front of Marena and Ana. A trio of brown pelicans shuffled over us, boogying west. Way off in the east, a low scroll of clouds was turning to what Joseph Conrad had called “that sinister olive.” I checked the little screen on my left wrist. It was six minutes to sundown on Friday, December 2, that is, sixty-three hours after we’d ID’d the boat. Weatherwise it was sixty-four degrees, with seventy percent relative humidity, wind southeast at eighteen miles per hour, and cloudy with a chance of annihilation. Tide was high water minus one hour and waves were two to three feet SW, and choppy. The clouds in the east were part of a late tropical storm building up over Antigua, forty miles away, and according to the Meg man they could be a problem-or “issue,” which I guess was worse than a problem-but it wasn’t yet.

“So why’s he got guards unless he’s expecting us?” Marena asked.

“Maybe it’s just for safety,” Megalon said. “With the current. Or maybe they’re just friends.”

“Friends?” I asked.

“Do you not have any friends?” he asked back.

“No, it’s-I mean, haven’t we been monitoring all my friends? Like, all one of them?”

“Yeah, we have,” Ana said. “Then they’d have to be new friends,” Megalon said. He pulled on a full face mask-yellow fiberglass face complete night-vision goggles and bolts at the temple. It had an exposed wire breathing apparatus that curved around from his neck and made him look like the Vincent Price Fly wearing a supersized Essix retainer.

“That doesn’t sound likely,” I said. Must readjust groin area, I thought. Megalon’s voice sounded beefy and determined even over the com link. “Even if they’re females, we’re going to treat these friends as armed frogmen,” it said. “Grab, contain, and retrieve.”

Sir, righto sir, I thought. Someone handed me a BandMask ^ ®, Bandkeepers ^ ®, and a SuperFlow ^ ® regulator. I started strapping the gear on, expertly, until Ana just took it from me and strapped it sadistically tight. ITCH! OUCH! IOUTCH! MUST! ADJUST! NOW! A glint of yellow flashed on the underside of the green cloud front just as my full face mask was closing down on me. Not a good sign. Marena was looking at it too so I half-stood up and sneaked my hand into the old crotch area behind my harness. Ahh. A little more. Damn, she was looking at me. What the hell. I sat back down, bobble-heading heavily under the mask.

“Let’s hook on,” Megalon said. I found the ’bener on my harness-the one gouging my crotch-and clipped it onto a nylon line that went over the side and down and aft, leading to my designated tow sled, or Diver Propulsion Vehicle, henceforth referred to as a DPV. There were seven of them trailing behind us in a long line. They were big-or, it seemed to me, gigantic-but supposedly any other models were way too noisy and the Matango’s hydrophones, if any, would pick them up in a second.

Ow. The adjustment hadn’t been entirely successful. All the stuff down there had just better smooth out in the water or “Let’s go,” Megalon said. He tipped backward and slid discreetly into the sea.

I flipped up my seat and sat on the gunwale. Ana went next, making a little more noise, but nothing to be embarrassed about. I started hyperventilating. The other combat swimmers dropped in, three, four, five, six. Okay. Breathe. In. Out. In. Now. I leaned backward, fell, and heard the beginning of an amateurish splash. Then even with the Jack Browne drysuit, there was that zap of almost-insupportable cold that, like always, was over almost before it registered, and then the gradual melting into equal buoyancy and that moment where-no matter how big a sack of bad is going down-every diver in the world ever, in the wooshiest, most cliched possible way, feels, for a few seconds, at one with the all-embracing wine-dark brine-mother. This time it reminded me of how Koh had told me she remembered breathing saliva in her mother’s womb, listening to the hairdressers’ muffled singing in the red twilight. Okay, focus. I sucked in two lungsful of ntitrox. Ahh. There was an extra eight percent of O 2 in the mix, enough to give you a little extra moxie but not enough to make you silly. Okay. Step two. Claim your DPV. I got hold of the tether line and followed it aft, pulling myself along upside down, until my head hit the vehicle. I got in position, dropped the tether, and clipped my harness to the cleat on the back. You could ride the thing hands-free if necessary. In fact, if, say, you got knocked unconscious, the crew on the boat could remote-drive it back to the boat, trailing you along. I got into position behind the thing-you could feel the motor purr through the handlebars, but you couldn’t hear it-and let myself hang with my head down, soaking up the growing warmth and listening to that different underwater-world five-thousand-feet-per-second sound, with critters clicking like fairyland stone marimbas. I thought. Okay. I switched on the DPV’s headlight. Damn. The visibility was lower than the thingy’d said it was, barely five yards, I guessed. Way too much phytoplankton. Maybe it was because of the storm. As always, I twisted around for a useless look over my shoulder. Nothing. Brrrrr. No matter how many night dives you’ve done, there’s always a shudder-and-chill when first you feel that immensity of dark below and especially behind you, which your amygdala helpfully populates with peckish hammerheads, cardiolethal box jellies, the last surviving Carcharodon megalodon, snaggle-fanged Xibalbans, and a couple Spawnlets of Cthulu.

I stretched my arms and let myself settle into the soothing pressure, about a foot under the surface. Ahhhhh, that’s better. Enough of that gravity bullshit. I balled myself into a fist, counted to four, straightened out, and shook my legs. Damn. Mobility problems. Too much crap. Which, naturally, the SBS guys called “systems.” Of course, gear doesn’t weigh anything once you’re in the water, but there’s still a limit to how many protuberances you want on your eighteen square feet of body surface. The closed circuit rebreather-which didn’t make any tattletale bubbles-was lighter than a normal tank, but it was big, and they’d loaded me up with all this other gear, including a full-face mask by Ocean Reef-I think we can call it a helmet-with unslashable woven steel hoses and securing straps around your forehead so enemies couldn’t yank it off. There was also a night-vision system with protruding flylike eyes that swiveled in and out of my field of view. It seemed jerry-rigged and jury-built, and my whole left forearm was covered with what looked like a black-jade scaled wrist cuff, with the OLED screen and big keys with excitingly geometrically styled raised icons. The trickiest deal on it was the synthetic aperture LIMIS, that is, Limpet Mine Imaging Sonar. The speakers were on the Gotengo, of course, but each of us could see the picture on our heads-up screen, shifted so that it corresponded to our own point of view. Supposedly the pings were disguised, and too low for most countersonar systems to hear anyway. Still, the resolution was great. You could see, or rather hear, a beer can on the ocean floor a quarter-mile away. Then there was the adaptive-beamformer communications system, and the beacon system that ID’d and located me, which also included five ’trodes taped to my chest that monitored my heart rate and blood pressure and, for all I knew, my sperm count. And they’d mandated those new tiny thin superspringy fins that kill your knees, and then the worst thing was that the supposedly ballistic wetsuit was way too stiff. Don’t worry about it. Breathe. Ahh. Okay. Depth fourteen feet, temp sixty-four degrees, and pressure 1.3 ATM. Check, check, and check. Location, 17.22° North, 63.1° West. Current, east by northeast at five miles per hour. Littoral floor depth, thirty-one feet. Estimated travel time to the reef was creeping up on fifty minutes. I squinted at the heads-up display. It showed a hundred-foot area in three dimensions, on an xyz axis with me at zero. There were four views, like on 3-D AutoCAD software. And right now it showed way too many blips. Lots of snapper around. I switched it to standard mode, which was supposed to edit out anything under shark size, and everything disappeared except the six blue dots for the other divers and the big green one for the Gotengo.

Djoong djoong dhoong djoong, Megalon went. Get in formation, he meant. Djoong djoong djoong djoong. I finned myself to the right and forward. Three blips came up even with me, as though I were the leader, although I wasn’t. Ana was the nearest on my left and Megalon was nearest on the right. Breeeeep, Ana’s wrist thing went in my ear. It meant, “Jiga here, all okay.” I hit two keys meaning “Jed 3 here, all okay.” The others sounded off.

Get ready to rumble, I thought. A flock of sphinx moths fluttered around in my stomach.

Even when we got close to the targets, and even though the system knew Jed 1 ’s height and weight, they probably wouldn’t be physically different enough for us to tell one from another. Which was the reason we weren’t carrying underwater firearms, although they do make guns that shoot steel rods instead of bullets and Megalon even had some. But there wasn’t any point when the mission was to bring the subject back very alive. So that was that.

Yesterday we’d gone over our moves with one of us holding the target from behind and the other tying him up, I could at least see how it could be done. In fact, they said, more manpower would be superfluous. Still, there Gonnng!

It meant everybody was ready and all was clear. There was a pause and then it gonged again, higher, meaning “Let’s go.” I twisted the handlebar and felt the vibration of the silent propeller and, sluggishly, the DPV started to move, dragging me behind it. Forward, I thought. Once more into the breechclout. Stick your courage in the screwing place. I settled into the slipstream. The ridged silt bottom scrolled under me faster and faster. A school of emerald-green palometas darted in front of us and turned around and away, in sync, like trained pigeons. Forward. The current seemed stronger than the arm thing said it was. Or maybe I’d just gotten soft. Spending all that time counting money. During the test runs the SBS guys had been pretty dismissive of my diving skillz. But since they’d all spent more than a couple tours defending our freedom by slogging through ninety-degree half-crude-oil diarrhea in the Persian Gulf and digging unexploded ordnance out of boiling wreckage, I’d tried to take it in stride. Thank God Marena didn’t have enough diving experience to play SEAL. Still, she’d refused to stay onshore.

Come on. You can do this. No sweat, blood, or tears. Forward! Forward drag! Trails of water swooshed around me like Japanimation speed lines. When you head into pure blackness you start to feel that you’re not going horizontally, but falling. Moving, moving… youch.

Damn. Still having crotch trouble. Ignore, ignore.

Okay. Think. Jed 1 ’s boat’s set up for diving. So the support line’ll probably come off the windward side. The port side. Hmm.

Mainly by luck, the two guys Ana called her “conventional tecs”-that is, digital-and-paper-trail investigators-had gotten us a good picture of the Megalon. They’d gone over a list of all the over-thirty-footers registered in Jed 1 ’s “active zone,” the area he could reach in less than a day of surface travel, and they’d come up with sixty-eight possible boats and their locations. And I’d just cross-checked those with the biomaps and in less than five minutes I’d picked out the right reef. It was a not-very-well-known stand of Dendrogyra cylindricus, that is, pillar corals, which are food sources for a few types of nudibranchs, including Lasidorus greenamyeri, the possibly eusocial type that Johnny Greenamyer had first described in the June issue of the Journal of Malacological Studies. Anyway, then Ana’s tecs interviewed some local skippers and they’d said that most of the reefs had died over the last ten years but there was a half-mile or so at the southern end of one of them, three miles offshore, that was still alive and almost pristine. Then the ex-SBS people had taken the Gotengo out there and after only forty minutes of eavesdropping Ogra’s voice print had turned up on the wave-form monitor.

We were all pretty thrilled, considering. Megalon was glad that Jed 1 would be diving and not just sunbathing on deck. “It’s a lot safer to grab him underwater,” he said. “Most of the issues occur during boarding attempts.” Also, when he’d asked whether it was possible that Jed 1 would kill himself rather than get captured, I’d said it was a possibility. So they didn’t want to give him any time.

Megalon said that in the old days-meaning, say, ten years ago-it would have been tough to pinpoint a human target in such a large area of dark ocean. But now the Boat Service was using piezoelectric transducers that sent the data to a Kurzweil program that zeros in on human-made sounds, specifically on the distinctive rhythm of UBA breathing. Unless they held their breaths, we’d know where they were.

The Blue Sun wasn’t a known smuggling boat and nobody on board was likely to be armed. Even so, Ana had started off insisting that I couldn’t go along, and there’d been a lot of back-and-forth about how my Sacrifice Game skills were too valuable to warrant putting me at risk and everything. But I kept sticking to my spiel about how my Game stuff wouldn’t be valuable for very long if the whole planet got sucked into nonexistence, and how Jed 1 ’s interrogation was still in the future, and if something went wrong with it we’d need all the other information we could get. If Jed 1 spotted us and got back to his boat and we had to try to negotiate, he’d respond better to me than to anyone else. Maybe he’d even let us take him in. Or even if Jed 1 resisted to the bitter end, he still might blurt out something to me that he wouldn’t say to other people, or-and of course this was grabbing at straws-maybe I’d just notice something that the others wouldn’t pick up on, something in his behavior that might give us a wisp of a hint of a ghost of a clue to the Domino Cascade.

Falling behind. Keep up. I twisted the left handlebar for a burst of speed and got back into the formation. Come on. Run silent, run deep. My heads-up display said we’d gone two thousand and fifty feet, so the Blue Sun was three hundred thirty-four feet away. Megalon sent out a series of short, A-flat beeps repeating a 2-3-2, 2-3-2 pattern. Damn, forgot what that meant. Getting groggy. I touched the SONIC CODES LIST button on my Dick Tracy Two-Way Wrist TV. DESCEND, it said. I let some gas out of the buoyancy compensator and sank about ten feet. There was that cozy feeling of the sea hugging me closer. If you could just stay down here, you wouldn’t need the Celexa. Ahhhhh.

Around here the tips of the corals were usually about twenty feet from the high-tide surface, so Jed 1 would probably be down at this level or lower. Or he Bling grong, Megalon said. Time to switch off the headlights. We all slowed to a crawl. Jeddo-Sub-One probably wouldn’t even turn on his spotlight. It’s better to check out the nudis in the natural chemoluminescence of the ambient plankton. I switched off the lamp and the night-vision goggles automatically swung into position on the front of my mask, lighting up the silty seabed in that granular green.

Hmm. Not okay, I thought. “Not okay,” I beeped. The rows of red numbers on my mask’s heads-up display were way too bright. I fiddled with the keys. Hell. It’d take me more than a minute to type out the whole question “How do you turn down the bloody lights in your eyes?” in words. The keys were big, of course, like on a toddler’s keyboard, and each one had a distinctive shape that you could pick out with your fingertip, which, by the way, you could easily slip in and out of a slit in the thoughtfully designed electrically warmed glove. But the damn thing was still impossible. Should’ve brought slates. More than half the time new gadgets just slow you down. I typed another likely command. Nothing. Breep djoong breep, Megalon went in my ear, telling me to get it together. Breep breep breep breep breep, I typed back, meaning, roughly, wait a goddamn second. Jeez, this show’s running Marena about fifteen thousand dollars a minute, she’d just said she’d sold her last points in the movie, including sequels, video, most of the computer-game rights that weren’t based on the earlier Neo-Teo world, and she was still going into debt, so financially, at least, the EOE would work out for her, and then you don’t even tell us Oh, Okay. Got it. I dimmed the heads-up so that I could barely see it and ran through two reps of rage-abatement breathing. Cancel, cancel. Everybody’s doing their best. They’re professionals, they’re doing a good job, you’re doing a good job, you’re capable, you’re resourceful, and people like you. Okay.

I smell ’branchs, I thought. Can’t see anything that small, though.

Hmm.

On my heads-up display the six blue dots, my own team, were forty feet west, that is, behind me. Adequately close, I thought. The divers from the Blue Sun were too far away to separate and were just one big orange dot.

I switched off the night vision.

Making things out on a lampless night dive is like-hmm. Well, if you’ve done it, it’s like that. Otherwise I guess it’s a bit like standing at an open door in the dark with the light behind you and calling your dog, and somewhere he turns around and, maybe not over-hurriedly, ambles back, and you first make out the dirty emerald green of his eyeshine. Here I could just glimpse the peaks of a few digitate spires, the foothills of the sierra of sleeping coral.

Closer. Hold still.

Nudibranchs.

In the barely two lumens of light they looked dull blue with black stripes, almost exactly like Tambja mullineri.

But they were moving differently from any ’branchs I’d seen before. Almost like a school. I dropped one of my two-pound weights and let myself drift in the school’s-or schoolette, or I guess we can call it a class-I let myself drift in the direction they were headed, southeast, toward the tip of the reef. A little tune, soft but angry, started up in my ear, meaning that I was letting myself get unforgivably separated from the rest of the team. If Hmm. Orange dashes on my mask screen. What does that mean? No, wait, they’re out there. Streaks of lights, evenly spaced, and not Whoa. It was the support line from the Blue Sun, marked with a glowstick every fathom. Yikes. I put the DPV into reverse, backed up twenty feet, angled the thing down, and descended ten feet, toward where I guessed the anchor would be BEEP. DONG. DONG-DANG, BEEP.

Danger.