Drift pattern, p.37
Drift Pattern, page 37
It prickles when she swallows, and the fatigue in her muscles forces her to lay her head against the cool riveted orange metal of the craft. The ocean mockingly sloshes against her as if to remind her of its power and unforgiving strength.
“There, that wasn’t so bad, now, was it?” he asks, pulling himself to his knees on the surface of the bobbing vessel.
She wants to curse him out in English, and when she’s spent all those words, switch to Italian, but she’s too tired. Instead, she just coughs and spews a string of seawater spittle down her chin. “I . . . I need a minute,” she sputters, her teeth chattering due to the cold. “Just a moment, please.”
“I know how traumatic water is for you,” he says, beginning to pull at her, “but we need to get inside and go under before some security drone spots us.”
She allows his help, hoping, in exchange, to barter with him. “Are you’re sure that you can’t drive this thing above the water and jam a signal or something?” she pleads.
“You go in first,” he says, motioning to the portal. “Sit in the front seat. I navigate from the back.” He nudges her as he explains, “The scan-blocking device is only for sonar, so it has to be submerged to avoid detection.”
Thinking of Ish, she reluctantly descends the waist-high ladder and moves through the narrow, tube-like crawlspace to the front plastic bucket seat. Luci’s surprised that the side walls and floor of the tiny submarine are entirely transparent. While she’s certain the designers did this for the optimum viewing of the passengers, she would have preferred an opaque interior. If she couldn’t see through it, she might be able to pretend she was above the maliciousness of the ocean. She thinks about Cavazos’s boat and how he’d never fit in a space this size. This craft could be generously compared to an oversized glass bobsled with a roof or a ridiculously thin minivan. Conscious of her elevated breathing, Luci forces a few deep inhales and exhales in hopes of warding off a bout of hyperventilation; she can’t pass out in here. There’s too much is at stake for Ish. She’s got to keep her wits about her.
Beaumont quickly assumes his spot behind her, and the sub hatch slides shut above them with a muffled thud. There’s a pressurized hiss, the sound of them being sealed into this glass-and-metal sarcophagus. Luci surprises herself with a gulp that’s a lot louder in the restrictive space. She looks back at Beaumont, but he’s focused on the readouts of a glowing hologram screen that’s appeared before his face. She recognizes many of the graphics from the display on Cavazos’s boat a few hours before. She marvels at how those events already seem like a lifetime ago.
“Here we go,” Beaumont announces above beeping warning sounds and a soft automated voice reminiscent of the female speech in the longchairs. As if the change in pressure didn’t make it obvious, the voice alerts them to the fact that they’re descending.
“Just don’t look at it,” she whispers to herself. Luci takes in another deep breath and angles her head down at the small puddle of seawater collecting at her shoes until she catches a glimpse of the vastness of the ocean below.
The craft descends rapidly, and Luci is surprised when her ears don’t pop due to the sudden change in pressure. This tells her that somehow, the future interval of Relicus City has managed to solve the problem of passengers in diving crafts getting the bends. Normally, she’d have to ask about the science of such a revolutionary technology, but holding her aquaphobia in check requires her full attention. Luci realizes how good she had it as a passenger of Royse’s drobine flying over the city’s skyline days ago. She’s grateful to feel Beaumont leveling the craft off. Still feeling sick and hearing her heartbeat throbbing in her ears, she closes her eyes to self-soothe with her special number, 2012.
It doesn’t work.
A crazy thought pops into her brain. As ridiculous a notion that there ever was, it’s as if her numbers don’t work at this depth, or maybe they’ve betrayed her by staying back at Macer’s guesthouse with Shar. Maybe it was their revenge for her destroying all the calculations that she and Ish did. “You’re cracking up, Luci G.,” she mumbles to herself between staccato breaths.
“What did you say?” Beaumont asks from behind.
She gnaws at her bottom lip before asking, “How long am I going to be trapped in this thing?”
“This bnanti model can travel twenty-one kilometers per hour, which allows us to move a distance of three hundred meters in less than a minute at top speed. So we should reach our destination in about ten minutes. The craft has been rigged with a mild chrono displacement rectifier that hides our movement to any sonar scans by throwing the bnanti’s propulsion registers 172 seconds in the past.”
Her reply erupts from inside her. “I don’t care about all of those stats. I hate this thing. Do you have to go so fast?”
“Given your feelings about water, I would have thought you’d prefer as brief a time submerged as possible.”
She squirms in her seat at the term “submerged,” and again, she wants to cuss this man out. Deep down, she knows none of this is his fault, but she can’t help herself from wanting to lash out at him for subjecting her to this. The image of Shar’s once-perfect face, now disfigured, pops into her mind, and she’s reminded how this man is the girl’s uncle. And for whatever reason that he’s agreed to help Ish, Luci is in his debt. “Yeah, you’re right,” she replies in as pleasant a voice as she can fake. She can do ten minutes or so in this thing for Ish’s sake.
“I need to ask you something,” he says, displaying a hint of uncertainty in his voice for the first time. “Shar—did you make it look like you attacked her in order to break free?”
She turns to look back at him through the hologram display chart to see if he’s crying. She can’t tell because his slender, middle-aged face is partially obscured by blinking lights and changing coordinate status mappings floating in the air between them. “Yeah, she did good.” Luci swallows the lump creeping up her throat. “And I made it look good to anyone who finds her there,” she says remorsefully.
Beaumont nods slowly as if wanting to ask or say something else, but all that comes out is, “Thank you, Luci.”
Luci herself has a million questions to ask him such as where they’re headed, how they’ll free Ish, what’s to become of Shar, and the most puzzling question of all, how they knew that Ish had been taken in the first place. These questions and many more clamor around her head, but racing through the ocean like a bullet has her preoccupied. It takes everything in her to keep from coating the glass enclosure around her with vomit. Answers can wait until they’re topside again, and she estimates that to be in seven minutes or so.
She’s never given thought to what a torpedo shot through open water must feel like until now. While her rational mind knows that they truly couldn’t be going nearly that fast, there’s no sea life of any kind to focus on in order to properly gauge the bnanti’s speed.
She makes a second attempt at distracting herself with numbers. Thankfully, it works for her this time. Given her present circumstance, doing self-soothing calculations down to the date that she nearly drowned as a child isn’t very appealing to her. Instead, she invents a new game, something more positive: how many days has she lived beyond the accident? She closes her eyes to work out the problem. Halfway through, she realizes the question has two answers. Because of the leap skip, 65,244 days equal the total number of days that have transpired in real-time since August 9th of 2012, but she’s actually only lived through 7,190 days.
She’s about to repeat the game for the fifth cycle, this time calculating the hours that have passed since that fateful day on the bridge when the pitch of the bnanti adjusts steeply upward. “Is something wrong?” she asks, anxiously searching through the sides and bottom glass of the submarine for anyone pursuing them. “What’s happening?”
Beaumont responds evenly, “Nothing’s wrong. We’re almost there.”
“Where is there?” she asks.
“Up there,” he answers, throttling the engines.
Luci’s pushed back in her seat as the vessel climbs toward a red glow of shimmering light in the watery distance above them.
Objects take form overhead as the bnanti shoots through the open water toward the dancing crimson glow. She gauges the opening it’s shining through to be approximately the length of a semi-truck, if not longer. The submersible’s propellers dutifully thrust toward the underside of a large, flat metal structure of tubes and pipes. Half a minute later, the bnanti erupts through the opening.
Beaumont kills the humming engines, allowing the craft to gently sway from side to side.
Luci swallows, and asks, “Are we where Ish is being held?”
Beaumont clicks off the hologram navigation screen and pulls a lever to release the pressure lock on the hatch. “No, we’re at the halfway point to where he is.” He moves to the ladder to exit and pauses. “Listen, I don’t want to alarm you, but the people out there in the bay—”
“People?” Luci interrupts. “What people?”
“People that are going to help us to get your friend,” he continues, slightly agitated about being cut off. “They’re a little jumpy right now, so don’t make any sudden moves or anything.”
“Sudden moves? Who’s out there?”
“Friends of mine,” he says, headed up the ladder. “You’ll see.”
~ Two ~
Luci cautiously climbs the submarine’s ladder to the hatch to peek over the lip of the opening. A dank, sour smell assaults her nose, but it’s the silhouettes of churka-wielding figures in the dim red light that take her breath away. In a panic, she tries to retreat down into the sub, but Beaumont reaches down from behind and snags the shoulders of her jumpsuit. “Come on,” he says, trying to lift her up and out. “It’s alright. Like I said, they’re with me.”
Shooting a glance over her shoulder at him, she protests, “If they’re your friends, why are they aiming weapons at us?”
“They just need a minute to check us,” he says, releasing his grip. “We’re safe here, I promise. We’ll have to get back in the water though.”
“Back in? Why?”
“This place isn’t really a bnanti dock,” he informs her, “but I’ll help you.”
“Great,” she scoffs.
Her emergence from the sub makes it bob on the water more sporadically, and the bnanti sloshes a rhythmic refrain from the ocean it’s connected to below. She clamps onto the handholds on the side next to Beaumont as if her life depends on it, reluctantly inching her feet down the side of the slippery craft. Cold water from her waist down pricks her skin like tiny ice needles as she re-enters the ocean. She reminds herself that all of this is for Ish and she must press through her phobias.
“Noah?” a gruff female voice calls from the darkness.
“Yes, Ley, it’s me,” he answers in a voice loud enough to startle Luci into nearly losing her grip on the handholds. “And I’ve got the doctor here.”
“Who’s that?” she asks, awkwardly kicking her legs at the water while studying the eight or so silhouettes before them. Luci recalls a phrase from her father about shooting fish in a barrel, and now she knows the perspective of the fish. She spins to look behind at another row of ten or more targeting them from the water’s edge on the other side.
Beaumont whispers, “That’s Ley, the person that I . . . report to here.”
Still not convinced of their safety, Luci scans the area for an escape. She’s not certain how anyone would be able to make it past the group assembled before them. She and Beaumont have emerged near the end of a trough-like channel. It’s a third as long as an Olympic-sized pool lane but three times as wide. Luci winces at the realization that the only perceivable way out of here without taking a churka blast is back down through the water they’ve just come through.
“You’re certain that they’ll help us with Ish?”
Before he can answer, the woman’s gruff voice from the side calls out again, “What took you so long? Was there a problem with your niece coming through for us?”
Luci scans the row of dark statue-like figures before them for the source of the voice, but she can only approximate that it’s coming from the front right.
“Nothing’s wrong,” Beaumont replies, obviously attempting to sound upbeat while also turning to locate the unseen speaker. “Shar did what we needed.”
The unwelcome image of Shar’s bloody ear flashes in Luci’s mind.
Beaumont continues, “It just took a little longer is all.”
Luci takes a deep breath, knowing he’s referring to her hesitation to jump into the water back at the guesthouse.
There’s a tense pause until Beaumont unhooks one of his hands from the grip to hold it up with fingers spread wide. “I’m shriveling away to nothing here, and this water’s freezing. Can we get some towels and get off this blasted thing, please?”
This elicits a few stifled chuckles from the crowd, easing some of the tension. All the weapons lower as if connected to the same invisible string, all but one on the right: the churka extending from a bulky five-and-a-half-foot-tall silhouette. “Go on, Jonn, help them up,” the gruff voice commands.
One of the taller dark forms, presumably Jonn, hooks the front end of the bnanti with a long pole. To Luci, it looks a little like the Hulk fishing leaves out of a backyard swimming pool. She marvels at the strength of this guy to pull the mini-sub along with her and Beaumont dangling from the sides through the water.
“Thanks, old friend,” Beaumont says as the big man effortlessly hoists him onto the metal platform.
His massive hand pats Beaumont on the back as he says in a baritone voice, “Sorry, Noah. Everyone’s got those pre-mission nerves.”
Luci clutches the handhold while extending her other arm in Jonn’s direction. He bends and places her on the slick metal deck as Beaumont answers him, “Well, two missions means double the anxiety, right?”
“Double the victory, old friend,” Jonn replies. “Double the victory and our final stand.”
Luci wants to ask about what other mission there is besides rescuing Ish when she notices Ley’s churka still pointed at her.
There’s a beeping sound from the low, claustrophobic ceiling like a garbage truck backing in reverse. At first, Luci believes it’s an alarm of some sort until she realizes that no one is reacting to it. The seawater in the elongated channel sloshes from side to side as a series of great metal panels slide into place to seal the area off from the ocean below. Then the floor quivers as the panels fasten closed with a deep, resounding clunk.
“That’s better,” the woman with the gruff voice says as the crimson light brightens to a soft pink-white. Ley hands her churka to Jonn. “I’d like to take a look at the great Luci Gaudiano from the twenty-first century.”
The relief Luci feels that Ley isn’t pointing a blaster at her instantly fades with this impromptu inspection. Ley proceeds to stroll in a slow circle around her as Luci’s waterlogged jumpsuit leaks into a puddle gathered at her sopping shoes. The cool, sour air is not as chilling to her as feeling the uneasy mix of a drill instructor sizing up a new cadet. Ley moves like a python searching out any weakness in its intended prey.
Luci stiffens and crosses her arms. “I’m here to help free Ish Moyta. What are—”
Ley, coming back around to the front of her, halts and holds up a finger for her to be silent. “Just a moment, Doctor.” Her breath is as stale as the air in this place. “We’ll get to all of that soon enough.” The pink-white light makes her short-cropped red hair look like fire. This matches the countless freckles spackled across her face and arms. She repeats, “Soon enough indeed.”
Luci notices something that puts her off, a misshapen deformity with Ley’s right earlobe, deliberately severed like Shar’s. She shoots a glance to the unmoving crowd behind the woman. While the racial mix is as diverse as the UN from her time, they all share this mutilation. Their disfigurements have had time enough to scar over, unlike Shar’s fresh mutilation back at Macer’s guesthouse. She wonders if she misunderstood Ish’s explanation a few days ago about how Viatorios “tag audit” each resident of Relicus City and the Grange. Shouldn’t the system notice the non-operational Vitorios of each person here? She’s about to ask Beaumont how these people can operate in the confines of the city without triggering alerts to Cavazos’s security when she notices he also shares this group trait. For the first time, she’s able to get a good look at him in the pink light, and she can’t believe that she missed this on him before.
Ley returns to slowing circling her, assessing Luci. “This, my brothers and sisters, is the woman that destroyed the world.”
Before thinking, Luci tenses and responds bitterly with, “No, the world destroyed itself.”
She scoffs. “Right. I guess you feel that you only supplied the spark that lit the fuse,” Ley says, stopping in front again to face her.
There’s an odd mix of awe and contempt in the area as if both Galileo and Adolph Hitler had been transported into the abandoned machine shop. Luci feels their stares penetrating her. There’s nowhere to retreat and hide as rage bubbles up in her heart. Normally one who is collected and logical to the point of being labeled a cold-hearted fish, Luci doesn’t hold anything back from her accuser. “Can you truly be that obtuse?” she asks. Her face heats up, and her ears feel like smoldering cinders. “That’s about as moronic as saying that what the Wright brothers achieved for flight at Kitty Hawk was directly responsible for the Enola Gay obliterating the city of Hiroshima four decades later.” Her eyes lock onto a face in the crowd, a young boy of seventeen or eighteen, possibly of Asian heritage. Luci turns away from him, embarrassed for choosing that as an example.
The accusation still stings in her heart though. “My world . . . my interval was destroyed by nuclear fire, but not because of me, not because of my discovery!” Her voice is unsteady, but she’s got to get this out—all of it. “What I came across is an elegant pillar of the universe, an unparalleled, sublime discovery. And like a beautiful child stripped from his mother’s arms—a stretch, if you will—it was taken away to be abused and hardened into an unrecognizable creature engineered to kill the world and everything in it. That’s what was done with my drift pattern discovery. No, I didn’t light the fuse.”
