Starfish (54 page)

Off to the southwest, a small orange sun was rising. Patricia Rowan sagged to her knees on the pristine carpet. Suddenly, at last, her eyes were stinging. She let the tears come, profoundly grateful;
still
human
, she told herself.
I'm still human.

The wind washed over her. It carried the faint sounds of people and machinery, screaming.

The ocean is green. Lenie Clarke doesn't know how long she's been unconscious, but they can't have sunk more than a hundred meters. The ocean is still green.

Forcipiger
falls slowly through the water, nose-down, its atmosphere bleeding away through a dozen small wounds. A crack the shape of a lightning bolt runs across the forward viewport; Clarke can barely see it through the water rising in the cockpit. The forward end of the 'scaphe has become the bottom of a well. Clarke braces her feet against the back of a passenger seat and leans against a vertical deck. The ceiling lightstrip flickers in front of her. She's managed to get the pilot up out of the water and strapped into another seat. At least one of his legs is definitely broken. He hangs there like a soaked marionette, still unconscious. He continues to breathe. She doesn't know whether he'll actually wake up again.

Maybe better if he doesn't
, she reflects, and giggles.

That wasn't very funny,
she tells herself, and giggles again.

Oh shit. I'm looped.

She tries to concentrate. She can focus on isolated things: a single rivet in front of her. The sound of metal, creaking. But they take up all her attention, somehow. Whatever she happens to be looking at swells up and fills her world. She can barely think of anything else.

Hundred meters
, she manages at last.
Hull breach. Pressure— up—

Nitrogen—

—
narcosis—

She bends down to check the atmosphere controls on the wall. They're sideways. She finds this vaguely amusing, but she doesn't know why. Anyhow, they don't seem to work.

She bends down to an access panel, slips, bounces painfully down into the cockpit with a splash. Occasional readouts twinkle on the submerged panels. They're pretty, but the longer she looks at them the more her chest hurts. Eventually she makes the connection, pulls her head back up into atmosphere.

The access panel is right in front of her. She fumbles at it a couple of times, gets it open. Hydrox tanks lie side-by-side in military formation, linked together into some sort of cascade system. There's a big yellow handle at one end. She pulls at it. It gives, unexpectedly. Clarke loses her balance and slides back underwater.

There's a ventilator duct right in front of her face. She's not sure, but she thinks the last time she was down here it didn't have all these bubbles coming out of it. She thinks that's a good sign. She decides to stay here for a while, and watch the bubbles. Something's bothering her, though. Something in her chest.

Oh, that's right. She keeps forgetting. She can't breathe.

Somehow she gets her face seal zipped up. The last thing she remembers is her lung shriveling away, and water rushing through her chest.

* * *

The next time she comes up, two thirds of the cockpit is flooded. She rises into the aft compartment, peels the 'skin off her face. Water drains from the left side of her chest; atmosphere fills the right.

Overhead, the pilot is moaning.

She climbs up to him, swings his seat around so that he's lying on his back, facing the rear bulkhead. She locks it into position, tries to keep his broken leg reasonably straight.

"
Ow
," he cries.

"Sorry. Try not to move. Your leg's broken."

"No shit.
Oww.
" He shivers. "Christ I'm cold." Clarke sees it sink in. "Oh Christ. We're breached." He tries to move, manages to twist his head around before some other injury twists back. He relaxes, wincing.

"The cockpit's flooding," she tells him. "Slowly, so far. Hang on a second." She climbs back down and pulls at the edge of the cockpit hatch. It sticks. Clarke keeps pulling. The hatch comes loose, starts to swing down.

"Wait a second," the pilot says.

Clarke pushes the hatch back against the bulkhead.

"You know those controls?" the pilot asks.

"I know the standard layout."

"Anything still working down there? Comm? Propulsion?"

She kneels down and ducks her head underwater. A couple of readouts that were alive before have gone out. She scans what's left.

"Waldos. Exterior floods. Sonobuoy," she reports when she comes back up. "Everything else is dead."

"Shit." His voice is shaking. "Well, we can send up the buoy, anyway. Not that they're about to launch a rescue."

She reaches through the rising water and trips the control. Something thuds softly on the outside of the hull. "Why wouldn't they? They sent you to pick us up. If we'd just gotten away before the thing went off..."

"We did," the pilot says.

Clarke looks around the compartment. "Uh—"

The pilot snorts. "Look, I don't know what the fuck you guys were doing with a nuke down there, or why you couldn't wait a bit longer to set it off, but we got away from it okay. Something shot us down afterwards."

Clarke straightens. "Shot us?"

"A missile. Air-to-air. Came right out of the stratosphere." His voice is shaking with the cold. "I don't think it actually hit the 'scaphe. Blew the shit out of the lifter, though. I barely managed to get us down to a safe level before—"

"But that doesn't— why rescue us, then shoot us down?"

He doesn't say anything. His breathing is fast and loud.

Clarke pulls again at the cockpit hatch. It swings down against the opening with a slight creak.

"That doesn't sound good," the pilot remarks.

"Hang on a sec." Clarke spins the wheel; the hatch sinks down against the mimetic seal with a sigh. "I think I've got it." She climbs back up to the rear bulkhead.

"
Christ
I'm cold." The pilot says. He looks at her. "Oh, shit. How far down are we?"

Clarke looks through one of the compartment's tiny portholes. Green is fading. Blue is in ascension.

"Hundred fifty meters. Maybe two."

"I should be narked."

"I switched the mix. We're on hydrox."

The pilot shudders, violently. "Look, Clarke, I'm freezing. One of those lockers has got survival suits."

She finds them, unrolls one. The pilot is trying to unhook himself from the seat, without success. She tries to help.

"
Ow!
"

"Your other leg's injured too. Maybe just a sprain."

"
Shit!
I'm coming apart and you just stuffed me up here? Didn't the GA even get you medtech training, for Christ's sake?"

She backs away: one awkward step to the back of the next passenger seat. It doesn't seem like a good time to admit that she was narked when she put him there.

"Look, I'm sorry," he says after a moment. "It's just— this is not a great situation, you know? Could you just unzip that suit, and spread it over me?"

She does.

"That's better." He's still shivering, though. "I'm Joel."

"I'm Cl— Lenie," she replies.

"So, Lenie. We're on our own, our systems are all out, and we're headed for the bottom. Any suggestions?"

She can't think of any.

"Okay. Okay." Joel takes a few deep breaths. "How much hydrox do we have?"

She climbs down and checks the gauge on the cascade. "Sixteen thousand. What's our volume?"

"Not much." He frowns, acting as though he's only trying to concentrate. "You said two hundred meters, that puts us at, lessee, twenty atmospheres when you sealed the hatch. Should keep us going for a hundred minutes or so." He tries a laugh; it doesn't come off. "If they
are
sending a rescue, they'd better do it pretty fucking fast."

She plays along. "It could be worse. How long would it last if we hadn't sealed the hatch until, say, a thousand meters?"

Shaking. "Ooh. Twenty minutes. And the bottom's close to four thousand around here, and that far down it'd last, say it'd last, five minutes, tops." He gulps air. "Hundred and eight minutes isn't so bad. A lot can happen in a hundred and eight minutes..."

"I wonder if they got away," Clarke whispers.

"What did you say?"

"There were others. My—friends." She shakes her head. "They were going to swim back."

"To the mainland? That's insane!"

"No. It could work, if only they got far enough before—"

"When did they leave?" Joel asks.

"About eight hours before you came."

Joel says nothing.

"They
could
have made it," Lenie insists, hating him for his silence.

"Lenie, at that range—I don't think so."

"It's
possible
. You can't just—oh,
no
…"

"What?" Joel twists in his harness, tries to see what she's looking at. "
What?
"

A meter and a half below Lenie Clarke's feet, a needle of seawater shoots up from the edge of the cockpit hatch. Two more erupt as she watches.

Beyond the porthole, the sea has turned deep blue.

* * *

The ocean squeezes into
Forcipiger
, bullies the atmosphere into tighter and tighter corners. It never lets up.

Blue is fading. Soon, black will be all that's left.

Lenie Clarke can see Joel's eye on the hatch. Not the leaky traitor that let the enemy in past the cockpit; that's under almost two meters of icewater now. No, Joel's watching the ventral docking hatch that once opened and closed on Beebe Station. It sits embedded in the deck-turned-wall, integrity uncompromised, the water just beginning to lap at its lower edge. And Lenie Clarke knows exactly what Joel is thinking, because she's thinking it too.

"Lenie," he says.

"Right here."

"You ever try to kill yourself?"

She smiles. "Sure. Hasn't everyone?"

"Didn't work, though."

"Apparently not," Clarke concurs.

"What happened?" Joel asks. He's shivering again, the water's almost up to him, but other than that his voice seems calm.

"Not much. I was eleven. Plastered a bunch of derms all over my body. Passed out. Woke up in an MA ward."

"Shit. One step up from refmed."

"Yeah, well, we can't all be rich. Besides, it wasn't that bad. They even had counsellors on staff. I saw one myself."

"Yeah?" His voice is starting to shake again. "What'd she say?"