Brian D'Amato - The Sacrifice Game

Get ready to rumble, I thought. A flock of sphinx moths fluttered around in my stomach.

Even when we got close to the targets, and even though the system knew Jed 1 ’s height and weight, they probably wouldn’t be physically different enough for us to tell one from another. Which was the reason we weren’t carrying underwater firearms, although they do make guns that shoot steel rods instead of bullets and Megalon even had some. But there wasn’t any point when the mission was to bring the subject back very alive. So that was that.

Yesterday we’d gone over our moves with one of us holding the target from behind and the other tying him up, I could at least see how it could be done. In fact, they said, more manpower would be superfluous. Still, there Gonnng!

It meant everybody was ready and all was clear. There was a pause and then it gonged again, higher, meaning “Let’s go.” I twisted the handlebar and felt the vibration of the silent propeller and, sluggishly, the DPV started to move, dragging me behind it. Forward, I thought. Once more into the breechclout. Stick your courage in the screwing place. I settled into the slipstream. The ridged silt bottom scrolled under me faster and faster. A school of emerald-green palometas darted in front of us and turned around and away, in sync, like trained pigeons. Forward. The current seemed stronger than the arm thing said it was. Or maybe I’d just gotten soft. Spending all that time counting money. During the test runs the SBS guys had been pretty dismissive of my diving skillz. But since they’d all spent more than a couple tours defending our freedom by slogging through ninety-degree half-crude-oil diarrhea in the Persian Gulf and digging unexploded ordnance out of boiling wreckage, I’d tried to take it in stride. Thank God Marena didn’t have enough diving experience to play SEAL. Still, she’d refused to stay onshore.

Come on. You can do this. No sweat, blood, or tears. Forward! Forward drag! Trails of water swooshed around me like Japanimation speed lines. When you head into pure blackness you start to feel that you’re not going horizontally, but falling. Moving, moving… youch.

Damn. Still having crotch trouble. Ignore, ignore.

Okay. Think. Jed 1 ’s boat’s set up for diving. So the support line’ll probably come off the windward side. The port side. Hmm.

Mainly by luck, the two guys Ana called her “conventional tecs”-that is, digital-and-paper-trail investigators-had gotten us a good picture of the Megalon. They’d gone over a list of all the over-thirty-footers registered in Jed 1 ’s “active zone,” the area he could reach in less than a day of surface travel, and they’d come up with sixty-eight possible boats and their locations. And I’d just cross-checked those with the biomaps and in less than five minutes I’d picked out the right reef. It was a not-very-well-known stand of Dendrogyra cylindricus, that is, pillar corals, which are food sources for a few types of nudibranchs, including Lasidorus greenamyeri, the possibly eusocial type that Johnny Greenamyer had first described in the June issue of the Journal of Malacological Studies. Anyway, then Ana’s tecs interviewed some local skippers and they’d said that most of the reefs had died over the last ten years but there was a half-mile or so at the southern end of one of them, three miles offshore, that was still alive and almost pristine. Then the ex-SBS people had taken the Gotengo out there and after only forty minutes of eavesdropping Ogra’s voice print had turned up on the wave-form monitor.

We were all pretty thrilled, considering. Megalon was glad that Jed 1 would be diving and not just sunbathing on deck. “It’s a lot safer to grab him underwater,” he said. “Most of the issues occur during boarding attempts.” Also, when he’d asked whether it was possible that Jed 1 would kill himself rather than get captured, I’d said it was a possibility. So they didn’t want to give him any time.

Megalon said that in the old days-meaning, say, ten years ago-it would have been tough to pinpoint a human target in such a large area of dark ocean. But now the Boat Service was using piezoelectric transducers that sent the data to a Kurzweil program that zeros in on human-made sounds, specifically on the distinctive rhythm of UBA breathing. Unless they held their breaths, we’d know where they were.

The Blue Sun wasn’t a known smuggling boat and nobody on board was likely to be armed. Even so, Ana had started off insisting that I couldn’t go along, and there’d been a lot of back-and-forth about how my Sacrifice Game skills were too valuable to warrant putting me at risk and everything. But I kept sticking to my spiel about how my Game stuff wouldn’t be valuable for very long if the whole planet got sucked into nonexistence, and how Jed 1 ’s interrogation was still in the future, and if something went wrong with it we’d need all the other information we could get. If Jed 1 spotted us and got back to his boat and we had to try to negotiate, he’d respond better to me than to anyone else. Maybe he’d even let us take him in. Or even if Jed 1 resisted to the bitter end, he still might blurt out something to me that he wouldn’t say to other people, or-and of course this was grabbing at straws-maybe I’d just notice something that the others wouldn’t pick up on, something in his behavior that might give us a wisp of a hint of a ghost of a clue to the Domino Cascade.

Falling behind. Keep up. I twisted the left handlebar for a burst of speed and got back into the formation. Come on. Run silent, run deep. My heads-up display said we’d gone two thousand and fifty feet, so the Blue Sun was three hundred thirty-four feet away. Megalon sent out a series of short, A-flat beeps repeating a 2-3-2, 2-3-2 pattern. Damn, forgot what that meant. Getting groggy. I touched the SONIC CODES LIST button on my Dick Tracy Two-Way Wrist TV. DESCEND, it said. I let some gas out of the buoyancy compensator and sank about ten feet. There was that cozy feeling of the sea hugging me closer. If you could just stay down here, you wouldn’t need the Celexa. Ahhhhh.

Around here the tips of the corals were usually about twenty feet from the high-tide surface, so Jed 1 would probably be down at this level or lower. Or he Bling grong, Megalon said. Time to switch off the headlights. We all slowed to a crawl. Jeddo-Sub-One probably wouldn’t even turn on his spotlight. It’s better to check out the nudis in the natural chemoluminescence of the ambient plankton. I switched off the lamp and the night-vision goggles automatically swung into position on the front of my mask, lighting up the silty seabed in that granular green.

Hmm. Not okay, I thought. “Not okay,” I beeped. The rows of red numbers on my mask’s heads-up display were way too bright. I fiddled with the keys. Hell. It’d take me more than a minute to type out the whole question “How do you turn down the bloody lights in your eyes?” in words. The keys were big, of course, like on a toddler’s keyboard, and each one had a distinctive shape that you could pick out with your fingertip, which, by the way, you could easily slip in and out of a slit in the thoughtfully designed electrically warmed glove. But the damn thing was still impossible. Should’ve brought slates. More than half the time new gadgets just slow you down. I typed another likely command. Nothing. Breep djoong breep, Megalon went in my ear, telling me to get it together. Breep breep breep breep breep, I typed back, meaning, roughly, wait a goddamn second. Jeez, this show’s running Marena about fifteen thousand dollars a minute, she’d just said she’d sold her last points in the movie, including sequels, video, most of the computer-game rights that weren’t based on the earlier Neo-Teo world, and she was still going into debt, so financially, at least, the EOE would work out for her, and then you don’t even tell us Oh, Okay. Got it. I dimmed the heads-up so that I could barely see it and ran through two reps of rage-abatement breathing. Cancel, cancel. Everybody’s doing their best. They’re professionals, they’re doing a good job, you’re doing a good job, you’re capable, you’re resourceful, and people like you. Okay.