Brian D'Amato - The Sacrifice Game

I smell ’branchs, I thought. Can’t see anything that small, though.

Hmm.

On my heads-up display the six blue dots, my own team, were forty feet west, that is, behind me. Adequately close, I thought. The divers from the Blue Sun were too far away to separate and were just one big orange dot.

I switched off the night vision.

Making things out on a lampless night dive is like-hmm. Well, if you’ve done it, it’s like that. Otherwise I guess it’s a bit like standing at an open door in the dark with the light behind you and calling your dog, and somewhere he turns around and, maybe not over-hurriedly, ambles back, and you first make out the dirty emerald green of his eyeshine. Here I could just glimpse the peaks of a few digitate spires, the foothills of the sierra of sleeping coral.

Closer. Hold still.

Nudibranchs.

In the barely two lumens of light they looked dull blue with black stripes, almost exactly like Tambja mullineri.

But they were moving differently from any ’branchs I’d seen before. Almost like a school. I dropped one of my two-pound weights and let myself drift in the school’s-or schoolette, or I guess we can call it a class-I let myself drift in the direction they were headed, southeast, toward the tip of the reef. A little tune, soft but angry, started up in my ear, meaning that I was letting myself get unforgivably separated from the rest of the team. If Hmm. Orange dashes on my mask screen. What does that mean? No, wait, they’re out there. Streaks of lights, evenly spaced, and not Whoa. It was the support line from the Blue Sun, marked with a glowstick every fathom. Yikes. I put the DPV into reverse, backed up twenty feet, angled the thing down, and descended ten feet, toward where I guessed the anchor would be BEEP. DONG. DONG-DANG, BEEP.

Danger.

On the heads-up screen the three orange-for-hostile dots had separated into a wide triangle, with the closest vertex about twenty feet off. But they were also blinking, which meant that the divers’ locations were only approximate.

Coral giant’s-fingers about three yards high. Down another five feet. Colder. Following an undercurrent. I used the old trick of making my eyes like a microscope, crawling over the coral as if it were feeding time, going at it as if I were sucking out the polyps. A little on the late side, I was realizing that Sic’s unfamiliar body wasn’t used to diving, and wasn’t responding the way my original body would have, and so my kicks were awkward and out of sync with my amateur-night spasmodic-ass breathing. I focused on my heads-up display. The rest of the team was falling behind. The farthest of the dots was in a hard-to-read cluster that might have been hostiles. What were they up to? Still dealing with the guards? From the beeping I guessed that they thought I’d ditched my minder intentionally. But why weren’t they talking to me? Was I getting set up by my own team? No, too elaborate. They could’ve gotten rid of me anytime they wanted. Maybe one of them was working for the other side-some other side-and was going to assassinate me? It didn’t seem reasonable. More likely, the guard is more trouble than they’d thought. Or maybe some other people from Jed 1 ’s boat had showed up? That would explain the dot Huh.

There was a dark shape against the dull green coral. In wordless thought and in less than a second, I realized that he was less than five feet away, that he was facing me, that he saw me, and that he was reaching toward me, and, not from his masked face or his head, which was hooded, but just by some hitch in his movement that was as unmistakable and indescribable as the signature rhythm of your mother’s footsteps, I knew that it was Jed 1.

And almost before I knew it, we seemed to be hugging each other, slipperyly. I dropped my DPV but the harness was still attached. I got a hand on him. I couldn’t stop thinking of the scene in one of the later Oz books where the Tin Woodman meets his head. Don’t get distracted. That’s your problem, Jed, you’re always fuguing into a digression at the worst possible-Cancel that. Keep your eye on the bling. Supposedly it was another pretty big problem people had in combat, where they start thinking about some book or running some song they like or whatever and the next thing you know you’re sticking your head out of your trench. Coolitz, I thought. Strength and guile, I thought. In fact just guile.

Where was the rest of our team? Damn, the DPV was dragging us down. I managed to get my left hand in there and get the ’bener off and detach myself and slip partly loose from Jed 1. There was mist in my mask now and I couldn’t see the heads-up stuff clearly, but I could still infer from the shapes and from the sound cues that Jed 1 was finning the two of us away from the rest of the divers, his and mine, away from the reef, out into the deep water. I followed. I guess it’s pretty bathetic to say it was weird, but it was, I mean, there was this person with my mannerisms and my face, who was more obviously me than I was Click. He’d found my channel on his com link.

“You got me,” Jed 1 whined in my old voice. He kicked away from me.

“Come on in,” I said. “Seriously, they won’t torture you, they-”

He dove, deep. I followed. He’s killing himself, I thought. He’ll get down to sixty or so and then pull his mask off and blow up his head. It’s a quick way to go, like a hand grenade.

Going down, it gets dark fast. But the pressure tightens up even faster. A crunch echoed through my head with a noise like Serpentine Glacier calving into Prince William Sound. Breathe, I thought. I breathed. I already felt like a cork in a wine bottle. Breathe. Down. Breathe. Actually, the rebreather should work better lower down. Except Jed 1 might’ve packed some deep-sea nitrox mix just in case. If he did, then he’ll do better. Down.

“This is so fucked up,” I said, in that Alvin-and-the-Bathymunks falsetto you get below four fathoms.

“Yeah,” he agreed.

I got the light on him. I blasted what air was left out of my buoyancy compensator. I finned down. There.

I got him.

It wasn’t a fight. At best it was a grapple. Maybe because long ago I’d read too much doppelganger fiction, I’d expected it to feel like I was fighting with a mirror image of myself, but it didn’t, and not just because he wasn’t reversed. He’d changed. He had short hair. And there was the mask. And his expression, from the little I could see of it, was so I don’t know what… and I’d do something and he wouldn’t, and then he’d strike out with his left hand, say, and I’d catch myself trying to do the same with my right hand, as though somehow the right thing to do was to keep up with the mirror theme, but then I’d realize how stupid that was. Just stick to the factuals. Just keep him here, keep him away from the boat, Ana’s going to get here any second, she knows what to do, just hang on. I hit him in the stomach but I wasn’t sure it had a lot of effect. There was a sort of bonk on my mask. Yeowch. Salty. Hell. Blood. I’d bitten off a little part of my cheek. Damn it. Supposedly there were hammerheads in the area, and they’d come in shoreward at night. And they’re like aquatic tracking hounds. If there was even a thread of the shit leaking out of my mask they’d be able to smell it all the way to Cuba. Yum yum, guys. Hell Jed 1 twisted and nearly got free. My left hand hung on. I finned and got my right hand onto his belt. Hang on. Regroup. Okay.

Attack.

And I guess the deal is that when you fight with someone at the terminal level, when you’re really trying to kill, when you finally contact flesh and really get your hands in there, they seem so delicate and squooshy, and you can feel them react to the pain, and so if you’re not a natural sadist, which I guess this proved I wasn’t, you naturally pull your punches. Except you can’t pull back. In my overactive but currently not-terribly-original imagination he still seemed like he was me, like I was fighting a gooey mirror, and that made it Oops. Nearly got away there. Hang on. Just another minute. Hang. On. Ha. Ng. Where were they? The cavalry wasn’t showing up. And we were still going down. Even through the thick neoprene the water here felt about ten degrees below zero. Sic’s body was bigger and stronger, but he wasn’t a diver, so the deeper we got, the less well I could deal with it than the good old Jed 1 body could.