Julia Ecklar - Tide of Stars

The phone fell out into the water with a plop. She snatched it out of the brine before it even hit the bottom and shook it open. Beneath her, Paval shuddered weakly.

The line opened after only half a ring.

“Rahel…” Nils’s sigh blended neatly with the surrounding roar. “I don’t know how you can expect me—”

“Nils, shut up! We’ve got an emergency.”

He cut himself off, and the skate passed between the straits and into a wall of shadow, slicing Rahel through with chill. “Paval?” Nils asked in a more contrite tone. He could at least put two-and-two together.

“Hydrogen sulfide.” Rahel thought she still felt the rotten sting at the back of her nose, but knew that must be her imagination. “I don’t know how bad it is—he’s still breathing.” Barely. She shifted position on top of him and forced that thought aside. “I promise you the hotel medic can’t take care of this.”

Nils’s voice seemed to rise in pitch even as it blurred beyond understanding. He must have lowered the phone away from his mouth, cradling it against his shoulder, or his lap, or his chest while he shouted to someone farther away. The skate etched a neat pivot just beyond the mouth of the strait, ejecting them from shadow into blinding sun, and bucking Rahel off Paval into the swamped skate bottom. She twisted to keep the mask still on him and still connected to her own suit. Water made suits and deck slippery, and the primitive sense of shoreline flashing by on their left made Rahel’s head ache. Picking the phone up out of the water was barely an afterthought.

“All right…” Nils, of course, had no idea they’d been interrupted. “I’ve talked to Huan. He says he can ’link the continent directly and have someone fly out for pickup. It shouldn’t take more than twenty minutes.”

From time of contact or time of launch? The answer wouldn’t change things, so Rahel didn’t ask.

“What happened, Rahel? Hydrogen sulfide? How on Earth did he get exposed to that?”

Spatters of green broke up the hurried movement of hotel turquoise down to the Startide docks. Rahel watched both Greens and reporters gather morbidly at the back of the waiting medic team, and hatred and rage burned a hole straight through her. “How do you think?”

She didn’t really care to hear Nils’s answer.

Jynn killed their velocity with a stomach-dropping growl; the skate thudded the dock so loudly a dim echo lapped back at them from off the hotel’s face. Hands grabbed her, grabbed Paval, rocked the skate and shivered the planking as they helped Rahel to the dock as much as they hindered her. When she stumbled beneath the pressure of tangled bodies, a strange, cool openness whispered across her front, and Rahel realized that Paval’s body had slipped away from hers. A shock of panic jerked her to her knees. “Wait! My mask—!”

Was connected to her skinsuit, which was no longer in the water it needed to extract oxygen. She let her mask dangle underneath her chin, both hands still gripping the wet edges. The medics swung Paval onto their litter without pausing to acknowledge her cry.

Security closed in behind them like cells reknitting a wound. Only then did Rahel remember Paval’s bandolier of sample flasks, and the potentially lifesaving water trapped inside them. She jumped to her feet and glimpsed a flash of pale, glistening skin, heard the ghost of a sobbing gasp, before litter, team, and apprentice all melted beyond her sight. It didn’t matter—Paval’s skinsuited chest was empty, his bandolier lost somewhere between the jellyfish breeding grounds and home. Rahel hadn’t even noticed it was missing before now. The dock beneath her feet seemed very hard, the sun beating down on her shoulders bright and cruelly hot.

How was she going to tell Saiah?

“Proctor Tovin, I’m sorry but…”

She turned a look behind her, almost expecting to find Huan the Robotic Bellboy hovering behind her. Certainly no human being would dare approach her now with such an empty, idiotic palliative.

The dark-haired reporter behind her swept a minicam in front of her face and asked placidly, “Is this the first apprentice you’ve had die while you were on safari?”

Rahel hit him.

First with her elbow as she finished her turn, then with her fist, and her knee, and anything else she could reach him with as he scrambled back away from her with the minicam constantly circling them and his arms laced over his head.

But it was the green-clad arm that reached out to block her from the reporter that focused her anger with the strength of a well-aimed laser. “You bastard.” The cold lucidity of her own voice made her even angrier, so she grabbed the interfering Green by the front of his emerald jerkin and shoved him to the ground. “You son of a bitch! How could you do something like this? How could any of you?”

“Rahel!” Nils, suddenly beside her, fumbled for a hold on her arm. He wasn’t serious enough, though, and she pushed him away without even turning.

“What did he ever do to you? Did he ask Sadena to set up shop here? Did he decide by himself to make the stellar jellies die?” She kicked the downed Green once, maybe twice, then arms more determined in their grabbing snaked around her and dragged her backwards down the dock. Her feet skipped between puddles and dry spots as she scrabbled for footing on the Earth-imported boards. “He was just a kid, goddamn you! Just a stupid kid!”

“Proctor Tovin, stop it!” Keim forced her way between two of the hotel security, taking hold of Rahel’s diving belt while she shoved the rest of the restrainers away. As if her grip and earnest scowl could hold Rahel more securely than physical prowess.

Rahel knocked Keim’s hand aside and stepped back before she could grab her again. “Keep out of this, hypocrite. You and your netlink headlines have done enough harm already.”

Keim pulled her chin up in surprise, and hurt glinted briefly in her eyes. In a way, it both relieved and disgusted Rahel to know she could still inflict damage with just the sound of her voice. It seemed the only power left her right now, and even that was pathetic and small. It couldn’t have stopped anything that happened today.

Rahel stooped to fling first one, then the other flipper in no particular direction, and jumped off the dock’s shore-side into sand barely deep enough to take her landing. The pain that jolted up her back as a result seemed appropriate somehow. On her left, a breeze that couldn’t cut the heavy warmth of the sun feathered in from over the ocean, and timid waves licked the farthest fringes of shore, afraid to slide even as high as her shoes.

A dead jellyfish rode in and out on the tideless waves, and, somehow, that seemed appropriate, too.

No one came looking for her, and for that she was obscurely glad. She slipped into the ocean between glossy, muddy boulders that had rolled into the water years before from a cliff face high above, and let the slow, silent lives of plankton and pelagia float her anger away. Some numbed, removed part of her realized that it took an uncounted number of hours; a haline spider had furred nearly half her left shoe with uprooted hydroids before the angle of sunlight squeezed down too low to stimulate the little insect, then abandoned her to curl into its rock igloo and wait for morning. Loathe to destroy an entire day of spider work, Rahel eased her foot out of the flexible slipper and left the shoe behind.

The evening air felt deceptively chill on her face, the rough sand inappropriately warm between her bare toes. Moisture-rich clouds smeared the sun the color of ferrous clay. Even greenhouse planets breathed and cooled during the long, dark nights, Rahel told herself. And even Noah’s Ark proctors could succumb to hypothermia. Peeling off the skinsuit mask with a sigh, she wiped salt water from her cheeks and turned to look back toward the indiscernible hotel. Out of sight, out of mind. If only that were true. The Startide and what she’d left there were all she’d been able to think about since retreating into the ocean. It had more to do with her returning than any true thoughts for her own safety.