Brian D'Amato - The Sacrifice Game

“There isn’t any future.”

“Don’t you want to meet Kristen Stewart?” I asked. “We just signed her for the sequel.”

“I know.”

“Oh.” Hmm, I thought.

“Look, get your heads together and poke me on HarpoCrazy,” he said. It was an anonymous-messaging site that I, or he, had used before for talking to the posse at La Sierra. Ordinarily it wasn’t anything that the Warren code spooks couldn’t crack, of course, but he’d be covering his digital trail anyway, way before the message ever got to the site. So I guess he just wanted to make sure nobody else would come across the exchange. One thing HarpoCrazy did do well was keep their text off search engines. Supposedly the NSA has a whole division that just keeps on breaking into the site, twenty-four hours a day.

“Uh, okay,” I said. “HarpoCrazy.”

He hung up.

“What the hell are you doing?” Marena asked. “You have to keep him on the phone!”

“He just screwed up,” I said.

“How?”

“He just told us where he is without realizing it.”

“Sorry?”

“Or because he didn’t think about it. He got that Kristen Stewart post. And he wasn’t looking for it. So he must have played the Game and just found it. I mean, the weekly Grandessa Game.”

“Okay, that’s terrific, so that tells you what?”

“Well, I do that, I mean, you know, he does that right after midnight Mass. That means it’s already Sunday there.”

“Where he is.”

“Right.”

“It’s only Saturday.”

“Right, so, where does that mean he is?”

She thought for about a half-second. “So it’s super-early there? So it’s in the Pacific. Near the international date line.”

“Correct. Right here, we’re, you know, we’re Coordinated Universal Time minus five hours. But wherever he is, it’s UTC plus fourteen.”

“So it’s an island. It’s, it’s some nudibranch thing?”

“Correct. And there was a big new species discovery out there, and it came out in the JMS, uh, the Journal of Malacological Studies, in December, I mean, it was the December issue, but it got published in October. Mexichromae zenobia. That’s a kind of possibly eusocial ’branch, uh, nudibranch-”

“Right, right, so where is he?” Her thumb hovered twitchily over the CALL icon on her tablet.

“Guess.”

“Come on, don’t bust my ovaries, where where where where where?”

“Where’s Zenobia from?”

The Recent Solar Obscuration as Witnessed at Ixmul

Curious Antiquities of British Honduras

By Subscription Lambeth • 1831

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.