Asher cursed, watching as a small shark tore the bait from his trace line while the larger of the finned predators, Asher’s intended quarry, circled lazily beyond camera range. Asher waited, recalling holograms of the sharks in Earth’s oceans. The beasts before him were not quite the same. As of yet they had no species designation, but from the first they had demonstrated the look, aggression, and guile of sharks. It was easy for the name to stick.
Much like their earthly counterparts, the sharks of Xiros propelled arrays of teeth and knife-sharp, bone-edged fins through the sea with torpedo-like speed, using muscles seemingly forged from spring steel. A medium specimen could rend and swallow a diver whole, gear and all. The big ones reached nine meters. The extinct Great Whites of Earth would have been proud.
Without warning, the large one rocketed at its feeding cousin, too rapidly for the remote camera. Rows of serrated teeth decapitated the smaller predator before it could retreat.
The camera did adjust, catching the monster as it swept past Asher’s cage trailing its victim’s bleeding entrails. The severed head had dragged out meters of internal organs, but before the gutted body had a chance to sink more than a few meters, another gray torpedo materialized to snap at the still quivering carcass.
Asher shuddered as more of the huge denizens circled, their gills flaring. Their instinctive, involuntary lust for food had taken hold, and they began to dart around, over, and under the cage. One of the beasts slammed against the metal basket, and Asher’s body was thrown against its titanium bars.
The impact winded him, but Asher reached for his infrasonic repeller as another shark plummeted toward the top of the enclosure. This was the moment he had waited for. The repeller was what he had been sent to test. Without a working repeller, extermination alone would clear the seas of Xiros for exploration, but mankind had an acquired abhorrence for extermination.
Asher pressed the activator pad a split-second before the monster jack-knifed against the suspending shackle. The cable held, but the shackle and three titanium alloy bars separated from the cage with a reverberating clang.
In the moment of silence that followed, Asher realized his safety-cage was in free fall. It began settling toward the empty blackness, where, unchecked, it would soon plunge to meet the seabed two kilometers below.
The sharks continued to circle.
As the natural light waned, an auto floodlight flared, catching the sclera of a shark’s eye as it passed the trapped diver. The beast nosed the bars, but as Asher depressed the activator pad again, his repeller proved dead. Now, even if he could escape the cage, how would he pass safely through the ranks above? Tier after tier of circling, blood crazed sharks.
This wasn’t how his day was supposed to play out. Would his support team even know the repeller had failed?
The breached cage continued to sink as Asher forced himself to think beyond panic and toward mechanisms and safety protocols every diver on Xiros was schooled in again and again. Safety cages of this make were equipped with water ballasts and extra air tanks. In a pinch, air could be diverted to blow the ballast. It took no more than a moment’s fumbling, even with shaking hands, to set his self-rescue in motion. Inrushing air displaced water from the ballast tanks and, at forty meters, the death-plunge slowed. Then, with camera and lights still lively, his damaged underwater haven began to rise.
Fifteen meters below the surface, a sudden, inexplicable shift in the water jolted the cage. The sharks, ordinarily spooked by nothing, broke away and vanished into the emerald distance. It felt like another of the minor sea quakes they had been having lately, but Asher concerned himself with it only in so far as it had done the job his repeller could not.
Asher found himself trembling, partly in reaction to events, but also from an extraordinary conviction that had accompanied the shift in the sea. It was as though something beyond his perception was observing his every action. Along with this new sensation came an overriding calm. A settling effect. Despite the evidence of the damaged cage and his own pounding heart, Asher felt certain he had never been in any real danger. No danger at all.
Reason told Asher he had come close to plunging to his death. At least if the sharks had gotten him his death would have made more sense than a plunge to the seabed. Only a few days before, when they had pulled his friend Pete Stevenson’s body from the lagoon, there had been nothing to show for it. No malfunction, no violence, no sense to Pete’s death at all. Even the strange specimen in his friend’s collection basket had offered no clues.
Already the tender was alongside with grapnels secured. They had wasted little time making for the bobbing cage. Asher turned the malfunctioning repeller over in his hands while he was being winched aboard. The unit had tested fine before the dive but had failed when his life could have depended on it.
“Yo, Ash. The cage is a write-off,” the crane operator shouted. “Thought we’d lost you, bucko!”
Asher nodded. “If I hadn’t blown the ballast, you would have,” he replied. “Did you feel that surge while I was coming up?”
“What’cha talking about, Ash?”
“Felt like another one of those quakes. I guess someone will have it on scope, if it was anything.”
“I didn’t feel a thing,” the crane operator assured him.
“Forget it. Tell Ferris to meet me in my cabin as soon as Doc’s de-gassed me.” Matt Ferris was a newly licensed engineer assigned to the tender as its technical properties master. Except for the actual engines, Ferris kept everything working around the clock, including his mouth. Asher disliked the inordinately chatty young man. He was still thinking of ways in which today’s predicament might be Ferris’s fault when he jumped from the swaying cage onto the deck.
A strong arm hit him mid-chest and pushed him back.
“What the hell were you doing down there without me?” asked a belligerent voice. It was his diving partner: Yolanda Nevic, and her first words held no hint of concern. Her eyes were ablaze with anger. Nevic was one of the rare compensations offered by Asher’s assignment on Xiros. She was an expert diver, a lively personality, and all together beautiful. Asher could not have been teamed up with a more appealing partner. She hit him again.
“It was a camera check,” Asher said lamely. “We’re not on for another half hour! I just couldn’t sleep anymore, so I got an early start.”
A sharp jab to the ribs made him wince. “Did you tell the sharks it was only a camera check? You moron. Commander. Sir.”
“I’ll admit adding the bait was a bad idea,” Asher said, avoiding his partner’s eyes. “But, the camera checked out. I can’t say as much for the cage, or these repellers we’re supposed to be testing.” He started to walk away, realizing immediately the mistake he had made.
“I’m not finished with you, Asher!”
As Asher had no wish to offend Nevic in a manner that might endanger their dinner date at the end of the week, he stopped and turned, grinning sheepishly. “And I look forward to my punishment,” he said, deserving every bit of it. “But right now the nitrogen in my blood is yelling louder than you, Yolanda. Please come at me again in a few, and don’t hold back.”
Twenty minutes later, Asher’s body was verified as clear of excess dissolved nitrogen, and he placed the opened repeller unit on his desk in front of engineer Matt Ferris, their young technical officer. The man stared at the imploded power cells in disbelief.
“How did you do that?” the thin-faced Ferris asked. He ran a hand through thick, disheveled hair. “You know I have a friend over on Noble Island whose boat battery melted right through the hull last year; looked worse than this, but whenever you start dealing with high voltage potential…”
“Just the facts,” Asher interrupted, his annoyance growing. “What happened?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea, Mister Asher. It tested okay this morning while we were dockside. This is from the latest model run, one of the best the lab has had in six months. Do you want to see the paper on it? I mean, Mister Asher, there’s paper on this that fills a whole filing drawer. I have to sign off on most of it, and then there’s the chief engineer’s signature, and the captain…”
“I’ll have to, Matt. Look, don’t take it like someone’s after your hide.” Asher hoped he didn’t sound too convincing. “They’ll be looking into the cage specs too, but this repeller is what we’re here for.”
“Well, let me take a closer look at it,” Ferris reached for the unit, but Asher pulled it back. “I mean, I’m good at looking at things, you know. I fixed that re-breather problem Yolanda was having last week.”
“I know. Just let me hang onto it while you collect the checklists and such,” said Asher.
Though Ferris frowned, Asher persisted, his hand never leaving the casing of the repeller. “Now, not to hurry you, mate, but could you get on it for me right away? Thanks, Matt.”
With Ferris gone to explore his files, Asher studied the collapsed cells of the damaged repeller carefully. He dictated a report and filed it with his dive video on the Xiros Oceanic Research net. By the time he was finished, the nervous energy had drained from his mind and body both, and Rowan B. Asher returned to his bunk and collapsed across it into a dreamless sleep.
Xiros would not have made anyone’s first choice in colony worlds, but the expense of interstellar travel was a short leash. Along with less than half a dozen other planets in the near neighborhood, it would have to do.
With its algae-rich, globe-spanning ocean, the young planet had everything the colonists could hope for: except land. On a geological scale, Xiros coincided roughly with Earth’s late Devonian Period. Among its sparse land masses were a handful of islands inhabited on a first-come, first-served basis. Everyone else made do on open water, or lived in shallow, underwater enclaves built along what passed for continental shelves.
Altogether, the world was blue, sunny, and wet. Man had known it for less than a generation. Time enough to establish a conflict between the aquaculturists, determined to balance ecology and human habitation, and those who looked at things with more entrepreneurial flair.
Asher worked for Oceanic Research, an arm of the Xiros planetary government, whose bureaucratic weight still leaned in favor of the aquaculturists. For more than a year now, dealing with the sharks had loomed large on the agenda. After the deep-sea famers learned the sharks could overwhelm the defenses of their fish farms, finding a working repeller became the number one priority.
Then Oceanic Research began to lose personnel. And it didn’t seem to be the sharks.
The bright, cratered moon of Xiros hung almost full above the horizon in the late afternoon as Asher walked to the hurricane-proof administration blockhouse of Oceanic Research. Headquarters inhabited a craggy island jutting from the edge of a double lagoon five degrees below the equator. The lagoons were the remains of twin, primordial impact craters. For Asher, this region was home.
He strode briskly into the foyer of the administration complex and smiled as the sliding doors adjusted their response to his pace.
“Go straight in. Admiral’s expecting you,” the desk clerk muttered.
The door to the Admiral’s meeting room was open. Asher entered and stood before the wide, mock-ebony table. The door sighed shut behind him.
“I have the results of this morning’s tests, Ma’am,” he said.
Recently promoted, Admiral Tricia Freeman had been seconded from the New Systems Federation transit fleet as administrator for Xiros Oceanic Research. These days very little happened on Xiros without her approval; NSF signed the checks, while XOR carried out feasibility studies and acted upon the recommendations of its own experts. Right now, the loss of personnel was her biggest concern, and the reason Freeman had replaced her not so hands-on predecessor.
To Asher’s discomfort, the Admiral had a reputation for selling out to the highest bidder, often quick with whatever answers might further her career. That wasn’t always the same as looking out for the people who needed looking after.
Combing her nails across a scalp hidden by luxurious, red hair, Admiral Freeman leveled her clear blue-green eyes directly at Asher.
“No need to be formal, Ash. Call me Tricia.”
“Yes, Ma’am,” Asher said, smiling. He handed over the repeller unit he had brought from the ship.
Freeman reached out and took the repeller. “So, this it? Have a seat, I’ve already run your report and the dive video. By the way, why aren’t you on report for that solo dive?”
“It was just a camera check,” Asher said innocently. “It got out of hand. And my backup has been on me about it all day. She might yet put me on report.”
Asher sat and watched as the admiral opened the unit and probed the components with her perfectly manicured nails. Freeman scratched at all the right places and even sniffed the capacitors.
“You’ve handled these?” Asher asked.
“Take it apart blindfolded if necessary,” Freeman said absently.
“No need. It’s just, well, Admiral Gray was more of a wine and cheese commander, if you know what I mean.”
Freeman ignored the comment about her predecessor. “No other fault—apart from the power cells?”
—
“None, Ma’am.” Conscious of the woman’s eyes asking their own penetrating questions as she watched him, Asher continued, “The cells appear to have caved in under pressure, yet before the dive they worked fine, rated for much greater depths.”
“A shame,” she said. “I thought they had something with these. I’ve seen the papers from your ship tech too.” She pursed her lips as though it was another mystery she did not need. “I’ll have my staff check the cells and get back to you. I’m not so worried about the wrecked cage. The shark that hit you could have sunk a battleship, figuratively speaking. But if the repeller worked we wouldn’t need cages, now would we. Anything else I should know?”
“There was a surge, a shift in the water just before I surfaced.”
“We saw it in the dive video. Corresponds to a small sea quake, about two on the Richter, from a volcanic fissure west of here.” Once her hands had given up on the damaged repeller, Freeman’s eye never left Asher. “Something else bothering you, Ash? What’s up?”
“I’ve been wondering if the MO’s come to any conclusion on Pete Stevenson’s death?”
“Friend of yours?”
Asher stared blankly in return, suddenly quite uncomfortable under the Admiral’s inquiring gaze.
“I just ask,” the Admiral sighed, “because Pete’s is not the only file on my desk. Mister Stevenson appears to have died suddenly. His circulatory system stopped. An unexplained failure of the autonomic nervous system.”
Asher swallowed, then asked, “What about the fish? Could it have been toxic—poisoned him in some way?”
Freeman shook her head. “The one he had in the capture netting? Completely harmless as far as could be ascertained, just a dravid.”
Hydravids, shortened to dravid, had been Peter Stevenson’s particular obsession. They boasted a complex system of skin pigmentation, expanding and contracting their chromatophores: individual cells that enabled them to change their color and pattern at will.
It was nothing new. Earthly squid and cuttlefish had perfected a similar camouflage before their extinction, but hydravids could handle any background to the point of reproducing animated images of sea grass and waving light patterns in the water.
Some, the bigger ones, were known to sport unusual pectoral fins too, almost prehensile.
“I’d still like to have a close look at it,” Asher offered. “I’ve never caught more than a glimpse of them in the wild, and then it’s always been hard to tell whether they were really there.”
“Umm. It’s the best dravid specimen we have, and the lab boys are keeping it under lock and key. At least Pete’s last dive gave us that.” She sat back and took a long pause. “Best I can do is a definite maybe on a lab pass, but it won’t be soon. I can’t see you getting more than an impatient tour. I understand your feelings though.”
“What about his dive recorder? Anything on the video?” Asher asked.
“Only that he got too far away from his backup. If that could have helped. He was close in on some formation—probably a giant coral skeleton, when a dozen or more dravids passed in front of the camera. No camouflage, just blues and reds in the clear. The last image shows a wall of fish between him and the coral. Then he lost focus. That’s when it happened. Can’t tell a damned thing more. It’s things like that keep me awake at night.” Apparently tiring of his company, Freeman turned to her computer and began to key rapidly as she turned to the next task on her agenda.
“That’s all for now, commander,” she said without looking back. “I’d like to give you a day off after your little shark treatment, but I don’t have the luxury. We have fish farmers from here to the 30th parallel screaming for a dependable repeller. I’ll have the Stevenson video made available to your terminal if you want. And don’t get more than two meters away from your backup in any direction. I’d like you to consider that an order: Dismissed, commander.”
In the tender’s machine shop Asher pored over notes and schematics for the repeller unit well into the night. The cells, rated at seven atmospheres, had not been subjected to more than four at the limit of his plunge, so there was no obvious reason for their failure. The unit had remained pressurized with its internals dry. The fault had to be in the power cells themselves.
At some point in the quiet hours, the door opened slightly to admit the head and shoulders of Yolanda Nevic.
“Oh, it’s you, Ash. I wondered who was burning the midnight oil.” She stepped over the hatch sill and stood looking over his shoulder.
He inhaled her perfume, enjoying her carefully calculated closeness.
“Are you through with flailing me or did you bring a pound of salt?”
“I’m still thinking of reporting you, Ash, but then who else would do the work around here? Besides, you’re supposed to be the wise old man, not me.”
“I’m not going to touch that line with a ten-foot repeller, Yolanda. Look, I’m just about done here, but I still don’t have a clue about these defective cells.”
“A shipment of lemons?” Nevic conjectured. “That idiot Ferris not sealing them properly?”
“Ferris isn’t an idiot; he’s just young. Well, maybe he’s an idiot. Hmm, I’ll charge another unit tonight and pressurize it in the morning.” He picked up a new repeller unit and stepped across to the charger. When he opened the indicator cradle, he frowned.
“What now?” Nevic asked.
“I’m not sure. This thing’s still warm. Should be cool by now even if someone was using it just before. Something else for Ferris to look at, I suppose.” Satisfied that the reading on the input meter and the readout from the auto-check were correct, he turned to smile at Yolanda. “Got time for a nightcap?”
“Mornin’, Ash. You have a visitor,” the crane attendant said as Asher stepped from his cabin. “He’s talking with Yolanda in the galley.”
“Visitor?”
“Haven’t seen him before. Boat’s over there.” The attendant nodded toward a pristine corporate cruiser tied in the next berth. “Noticed him snooping around, looking for you as soon as he cleared the deck rail.”
Asher ignored the implied urgency of the summons, ducking his head as he entered the tender’s machine shop. The charger had apparently shut down, its meter was blank. He removed the repeller unit and felt the charger’s cabinet, then looked at his chronometer. Although it should have been off for at least four hours, it was quite hot. He flipped the toggle at the bulkhead power jack and the charger immediately began clicking as the inductors cooled. He left a note for Ferris to check it later.
The stranger in the galley, who was showing more than a casual interest in Asher’s diving partner, was not one of the local krill or fish farmers. He wore off-planet silks and a jacket trimmed in silver threading. Asher strode directly to the coffee dispenser.
“Morning,” he said over his shoulder. “Row Asher’s the name. You want to see me?”
“Ah! Mister Asher. I’m Gordon Hewitt. Sorry to drop in unannounced, but there’s something I must discuss with you.” The stranger stepped up to offer his hand.
Keeping the cup in his right hand, Asher side stepped Hewitt to take the spare seat. They had never met, but Asher knew the name: Hewitt was a manager with the outfit on the far end of the island, some capital venture that seemed to have a lot of pull with the New Systems Federation. Oceanic Research had tried to evict them under the rules of eminent domain but failed.
“You’ve caught me at a bad time, Mister Hewitt,” Asher said coldly, “I’m very busy this morning, and I have to make a dive before lunch. Please be brief.”
He frowned as Yolanda rose and began to leave the galley, but his mood lightened when she turned at the door, winked, then blew him a kiss.
Hewitt got straight to the point: “Great, I wanted you alone for a moment. If not here, then on my boat.” Asher said nothing at first, sipping stolidly at his bitter drink. “I understand you’re testing shark repellers for XOR,” Hewitt continued.
“The fish farmers need something,” Asher opened his arms in an expansive gesture. “Right now, the wolves can do as they please with the sheep. And it’s illegal to kill a wolf.”
“Oh, they kill them when they can,” Hewitt assured him. “But a dead shark just brings more sharks in from the deep. How soon will you have something working? Something ready for the, ah, field?”
“I don’t see what this has to do with you, Mister Hewitt, but for what it’s worth, we ran into some new problems yesterday. Why do you ask?”
“We are looking to hire you, Mister Asher.”
“We? Who are we, Mister Hewitt?” Asher had already told the man more than he wanted known, so he decided to play dumb.
“By we, I mean Subaqua Refining.”
“Yeah. XOR keeps trying to kick your sorry butts off the island. I don’t even know what the hell it is you do.”
“Thanks for asking. We make xirium, a high-temperature superconductor. It’s great stuff. Far superior to cuprates. Ironically, this ball of water you live on is rich with lanthanum and other rare earths.”
Asher did his best to look unimpressed.
“Xirium. Named it after the planet.”
“I picked up on that.” Asher remained impassive.
Hewitt took the bait: “NSF needs the technologies xirium makes possible, and our terms are to their liking. However, they have this ill-conceived colonial covenant with XOR under way, and they can’t back out. Unless XOR defaults.”
“You mean the failure of the entire colony?”
“More or less,” Hewitt nodded. “As a colony, one set of rules apply. As a designated federal resource, the rules change. Let’s just say we’re too restricted under XOR regulations.”
“Why tell me this?” Asher asked. “I thought I made it clear we tried to kick you off the island.”
“That’s not going to happen, Mister Asher. Your Admiral Freeman is determined that XOR will supply the protein requirements for the next phase of the colonial settlement. Our proposed operations on this island would conflict with that goal.”
“A conflict you embraced,” Asher observed.
“It’s a matter of economics, Mister Asher. Aquaculture seemed fine, until NSF learned these oceans contain the means to power interstellar clippers—at a fraction of the current cost. As a first step, Subaqua plans to crack hydrogen from the seawater to power our expanded refining plant, but we need land to build it on. Building it here simply has the added benefit of slowing up XOR. Neither of us can afford to move operations and still meet our contractual deadlines.”
“What’s my part in this?” Asher asked directly. “Why the hell are you talking to me?”
Hewitt looked around for any sign of those who might overhear. Satisfied yet cautious still, he lowered his voice to a whisper. “Succinctly, Mister Asher, a fast and hasty deployment of the repeller is not in our interests, or yours. Oh, we don’t mind you finishing it, even making it work. But once that happens—in a few weeks, a month perhaps—any request on your part for more engaging employment would be looked at with exceeding generosity.”
“The repeller fails and you win?” Asher asked incredulously.
“Nothing so dramatic,” Hewitt assured him with a smile. “You act as if I had offered you a bribe. I merely expressed my concern that a project as important as the repeller should not be rushed. In the struggle between XOR and Subaqua, there are many factors at play. The repeller is among the half dozen or so that are my direct responsibility.”
Asher felt his anger rising. The perceived potential wealth of Xiros was already inspiring the same greed that had gutted the home planet. No, he would not let it happen again, not here. NSF must be forced to support the initial scheme for an aquaculture-based economy. In that at least, Asher dreamed the dreams of utopians everywhere.
“There are tens of thousands…” The words came out before Asher could stop them, but even as he spoke Hewitt smiled at the anticipated objection.
“It’s not like they’ll be evicted,” said the man in silks and silver. “The character of the colonization will change, slowly. Xiros will be more like an exclusive, company town. And with a resource designation for Xiros, the rules on handling indigenous lifeforms will change. You won’t need a repeller to get a shark out of your way.”
Asher had lost all taste for his coffee and the conversation. “Please excuse me, Mister Hewitt, but I’m too busy to waste any more of your time.” Asher stalked back out onto the deck, fists clenched as the salt air washed over him.
On Asher’s order, Matt Ferris stripped the charger down and discovered that the over-charge detection and auto-shutdown had failed. The malfunction had also caused the digital warning to remain blank, so to all appearances the charger had switched off automatically. Ferris ordered a replacement for the faulty module and returned to his normal duties without bothering to tell Asher about the problem.
For their part, Asher and Nevic tank-tested the freshly charged repeller unit, and their instruments registered the required frequency and output levels. However, when they pressurized the unit an ominous click was the only response to the trigger, no matter how many times Asher pulled it in frustration.
They found another set of collapsed power cells when they opened the device.
“What the hell’s wrong with these cells? They just won’t stand any pressure!” Asher complained. He removed a fresh clip of replacement cells from the overhead locker and was about to slide them into the repeller when a familiar voice called from the deck.
“You there, Ash?” It was Admiral Freeman.
Yolanda stifled a profanity, and muttered, “The Admiral? The Admiral comes looking for you? What’s up with her, now?”
“Too many people looking for me these days,” Asher answered under his breath. “Let’s show her in before the entire NSF Board of Directors stops by. Shall we?”
Nevic ushered the Admiral into the workshop, complimenting the head of XOR on her choice of casual dress. “Is this the Admiral’s day off?”
“In a manner of speaking,” Freeman answered. “At least there’s only one thing on my agenda for the day. Mister Asher, how’s it going?”
“Ma’am, we’ve just tested another unit. The cells worked fine until we pressurized, then phutt! No-go.”
“That brings me to why I’m here, Ash. The lab checked the cells you returned yesterday, and wants the entire consignment brought in. They’re all suspect, might even be dangerous. Can you get the lot of them over to my runabout, commander? I just need the cells.”
Asher covered Yolanda’s muttered derision with a cough.
“Admiral, if you remember, you promised to make the video of Pete Stevenson’s dive available to me? I checked earlier and…”
“Someone must have forgotten,” Freeman interrupted. “I’ll check for you when I can, Commander. Now, I apologize for being in a hurry, but…”
Asher helped Freeman to her runabout and stowed the collected power cells in the small hold, then sighed with relief as she jetted away from the tender.
When Asher rejoined his co-diver, he could tell she was simmering. He quipped, “Thank you for keeping your claws sheathed, Yolanda.”
“Nice of you to notice, Ash,” she said, imitating Tricia’s breathy way of accenting his name. Changing the subject with more serious intonations, Nevic asked: “What’s all that about Stevenson’s dive videos?”
“Just one of a dozen things bothering me, Yolanda. What’s Pete, the sixth diver to turn up dead this year?”
“Hits you close when it’s a friend, doesn’t it?”
“Close enough. I just want to see the video footage, that’s all.”
“Oh, dear me! ” Yolanda exclaimed, her voice rising with breathy excitement. Nevic patted her throat with fingers spread out like a fan. “The Admiral must have overlooked a couple of those darn cell packs!” She pulled them from beneath an inflatable life raft, using sufficient effort to convince Ash she must have wedged them into hiding with a powerful but stealthy kick. Taking on a more serious tone, Nevic added, mischievously: “Ash, do you have any idea why the Admiral paid you, er, us a personal visit? In plain clothes, I noticed.”
“Not really. I have an idea she might be under a lot of personal pressure on this. But right now, I don’t know who from. She either has reason to want these repellers online even worse than we do, or she knows someone who would like our tests slowed down a bit.”
“What are you talking about? Does this have anything to do with that Hewitt character?”
“Hewitt’s an asshole. But I’ll reserve comments on our new Admiral for a while longer.” Asher smiled. “But good of you to hold back on those cells. I trust our take on things more than the lab’s. Let’s get back to work. We have some more tests to run.”
At that moment the tender rose on a large swell, as if a surge from the deep ocean had washed into the docks, where it had no place to go but up. Asher bumped into Nevic, pinning her against the bench.
“Why, Mister Asher, you sly devil. I’ve heard about the old rocking the boat routine—but how did you manage that?” She pushed the commander away with a strong shove then turned to look out the hatchway over the gunwales, but there was nothing to be seen beyond a few waves slapping at the hull.
Asher was too preoccupied to react to Yolanda’s chiding. Was the wave that had just passed beneath them related to the sea shift yesterday, when the sharks hightailed it away from his rising cage? He was thinking about checking the dockside seismograph, but if they didn’t stay focused on the day’s checklist, things would get away from them all too quickly.
“Forget it. I want to know what’s up with these repellers,” he said.
In the next test, the fresh, uncharged cells remained intact when they were pressurized, so Nevic slipped the unit into the charger, and selected fast charge.
“We should be able to get a dive in with this one before lunch, Ash.”
“Why am I unconvinced they’ll work next dive, even half charged? Look, while we’re waiting for the charge, I’m running dockside. Something is bothering me about that wave that tossed us, and it’s not the part where our eyes met. I want a look at the seismograph.”
“I guess I can trust you with that,” Nevic admitted, batting her eyes playfully. “I’ll pretend to do something useful too, like run a functions analysis on the engineering specs for the power cells. Maybe it’s a math screw up, one we keep missing.”
“Explicit bounds for the departure from normality of sums of dependent random variables,” Asher said, referring to some of Yolanda’s favorite bedtime reading. “All that stuff scares me. You get right to it. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
There had been seventeen small shocks over the previous 24 hours, and they had been increasing in frequency. It was the strength of the shocks that seemed random, going up and down without any pattern Asher could discern.
But the instruments talked not only of yesterday and today, they flashed with reports that the crew of the tender must already be dealing with. The building’s automatic hurricane shutters were poised to move into place, and the barometer had fallen sharply since the previous evening. Outside the windows the sky was clear, but a big storm was working up out at sea.
What the iniquitous Mister Hewitt could not do, at least with Asher’s help, the weather might. An early start to the hurricane season would provide just the delay that Hewitt was hoping for.
The afternoon’s test dive, if they were to get one in at all, would have to be made in the lagoon. No skipper would risk sailing beyond the reef with a storm brewing. After the dive, Asher would take the findings directly to the Admiral, and if the results did not interest her, he expected word of Hewitt’s attempt at bribery would.
At least, he hoped so.
The charged repeller unit survived the quick pressure test, so they climbed into the spare shark-proof cage, tested their seacom units, then signaled to be hoisted over the side. As they swung above the deck, Asher watched as a small hydrofoil laid a foam wake across the lagoon, turning out through the gap as it headed west toward the open sea where ominous clouds and dappled lighting awaited.
“Who’s that fool?” Asher pointed.
“Don’t know. I have fools enough to worry about right here,” Nevic answered.
The tender maneuvered just inside the entrance to the lagoon where sharks would follow the schooling fish through the gap. The water was only slightly choppy, so the cage was lowered into the water and halted at twenty meters. Yolanda spoke over her seacom: “The feeder alarm should go off any minute.”
—
The alarm would bring a rush of schooling fish and other marine opportunists, including the sharks into the lagoon.
Right on schedule, the alarm sounded. Its pulsing thrum, audible for over ten kilometers underwater, announced the daily release of concentrated krill by the XOR aquiculture team. This normally spurred a reflex action in the local fish population, and huge schools would begin streaming into the lagoon. Because the piscine life of Xiros was just smart enough to be conditioned like this, deep sea fishing fleets would forever be unnecessary and unprofitable. Growing krill was cheap. And the herds of the sea volunteered for slaughter.
If only the sharks hadn’t caught on.
But today something was amiss. After five minutes they logged only a few fish darting furtively between the algae encrusted ramparts of the reef. And there were no sharks anywhere to be seen.
“Something’s wrong,” said Asher, unable to avoid mouthing the obvious. There should be millions of fish passing by. The tide was running, yet the signal failed to bring any response. For a long moment, they hunkered down in the bottom of the gently swaying cage and watched the empty water begin to fill with clouds of uneaten krill.
Suddenly the cage rose and slammed them against its floor. The tender holding them listed, tilting the cage over at an angle of twenty degrees. Water began to rush between the bars with terrifying speed.
While they struggled to hold their faceplates on against the powerful drag of the water, the action reversed, and they began hurtling in the opposite direction, toward the reef. Asher could see the tender riding a huge swell above them. The small ship was behaving like a surfboard, and they were helpless, trapped against the bottom of the cage as the tender rushed seaward with its rudder flapping uselessly beneath the water line.
“Tsunami!” Nevic’s strained voice warned over the seacom. “Get us loose!”
Rushing headlong toward a wall of razor coral, the cage rose clear of the submerged reef by less than a meter, the wave carrying the tender lifting them miraculously over and into the deep water beyond.
Understanding his partner’s urgent plea, Asher fought against the force of the water to reach the line-release. If he could free them from the pull of the helpless tender they might ride the cage to the surface or leave it behind all together. It was the second time in two days he would have to escape from an errant cage, and he felt practiced.
In their present predicament they would be unlikely to survive for more than a few minutes. Their bodies were already stressed to the limit. If they lost their breathing units in the crushing rush of water…
Asher caught the release lever and tugged. They broke free with the sudden weightless feeling of freefall. The weight of the water eased immediately, but within a heartbeat the cage had begun to sink. Asher’s spirits followed the downward plunge when he opened the ballast valve. Air roared from the main compartment where the air line had torn loose. There was no blowing the ballast now and no choice. After fumbling briefly with the mechanism, Asher kicked the cage door aside and turned to pull Nevic free of the sinking enclosure.
The woman was already in motion, helping by pushing Asher unceremoniously through the open bars. A heartbeat later Nevic was treading deep water beside him.
Below them, the floodlights flared into life, trying valiantly to color the encroaching darkness as the cage sank quickly from sight, until only the dimming starlight of the floods was left to mark its descent. They had lost their best protection and were left with only one dubious repeller, courtesy of Yolanda’s quick thinking.
“We’re on our own and somewhere beyond the reef,” Asher said solemnly over the seacom. “Better get to the surface and see where we are. See what’s left.”
“How long until the sharks recover from that wave?” Yolanda asked, only to finish a moment later with “Never mind. Here they come…”
