Brian D'Amato - The Sacrifice Game

“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.