Greg Bear - Vitals

I fumbled with the ship-to-ship, changing frequencies, and finally a breathless voice answered.

‘Messenger here. Is that you, Dave?’

I recognized Jason, the controller and mission planner for the DSV. I pressed the mike switch. ‘It’s Hal. Dave flaked. He’s over the side. Get a Zodiac out there – he might still be afloat.’

‘Shit.’ Jason held his mike open and I thought I heard sobbing. ‘Are you driving the sub?’

‘She’s on autopilot.’

‘Hal, we have a bad situation. Someone’s shooting up the ship. We may have casualties. Hal?’

‘I’m here.’

‘Paul and Stan went aft about ten minutes ago. We can’t go back to the crane until they check in.’

‘Dave went nuts, Jason,’ I said, eager to make clear my own tale of woe. That seemed too much for him to absorb, and I decided to skip it for the time being. ‘Just get me back on the ship.’

‘I don’t know how long that will take. Hang on. We’ll do our best.’

‘Yeah,’ I said, and braced my hand against the inside of the pressure sphere. The sub almost rolled over.

I buckled myself in and gripped the mike like a lifeline.

Nadia herself bobbed in the water next to the DSV and tapped the frame with a grappling hook. I waved, and she gave me a strong chin-nod back, wet black hair peeking out from under her hood, black eyes distinct even behind the mask. She made the hook fast on a lift ring and swam out of sight. When she was done with the other hooks, she clambered up on the frame. I peered up over my shoulder to see her. Behind her rose the dark stern of the Sea Messenger, and the outline of the big red crane mounted aft of the helicopter pad. I saw Jason step into a little booth out of the weather, which was getting worse.

Then the rain sheeting down made seeing outside impossible. I felt the submarine rise from the waves, felt the waves hold us back, and with a jerk, the sub leaped out of the suck of the sea and swung in open air. Paul and Stan waited for me on the sled and prodded the Mary’s Triumph onto her skid. The sled withdrew into the stern with a grind of gears.

Nadia jumped down to help Jason fasten the sub to the docking frame. I climbed out of the hatch with her help.

‘We can’t find Dave,’ she said, her lips almost blue with cold. ‘Gary is out there now in a Zodiac.’ She looked ill, but stood straight and spoke clearly. I fell in love right then and there, with relief and admiration and more than my share of near-death giddiness.

‘I’m sorry. What happened?’

‘We’re a mess,’ Nadia said. She climbed the ladder out of the well.

‘Dave went a little nuts down there,’ I said. ‘He tried to kill me.’

She gave me a level look at the top of the ladder. ‘How do you mean, nuts?’

‘He tried to sabotage the sub. Ripped out the control stick and used it to punch the sphere.’

‘Jesus,’ she said, but she didn’t sound surprised. Maybe she was in shock. She leaned against the bulkhead. ‘Dr Mauritz slipped a gun on board. He killed Thomas and Sylvia. Paul and Stan tackled him right here, where we’re standing. He’s tied up in the sick bay.’

I had spoken with Mauritz for a couple of hours the day before yesterday. ‘That’s stupid,’ was all I could manage to say. I looked around and saw dark red spatters on the deck and across the bulkhead under an emergency light. Blood dripped from the light cage. The sight knocked me off-balance and I groped with my outstretched hand to find a clean space on the wall.

Nadia grabbed a towel from a deserted lab, returned to the passageway wiping her face and hair, and threw me an odd, blameful look.

I felt like a Jonah.

‘I can’t find Max,’ she said, and tossed the towel back into the lab. We both heard the helicopter at the same time. She turned away with an exhausted slump of her shoulders, eyelids drooping, and said, ‘That’ll be the Coast Guard.’

‘Nadia, I have specimens,’ I called out to her as she wobbled up the ladders to the bridge.

‘Fuck the specimens,’ she shouted. ‘People died, Hal! Don’t you get it?’ She paused at the top and her red-rimmed eyes bored into me. ‘Mauritz was looking for you. He wanted to kill you.’

A 250-foot Coast Guard cutter pulled up alongside the Sea Messenger. The Bell helicopter strapped onto the pad had carried two FBI agents. They were currently gathering evidence and interviewing Stan and Paul.

Dr Mauritz was hauled up on deck in a stretcher, past the crew mess, strapped down securely and talking a mile a minute, trying to explain that he was all right, they could let him go now. Mauritz was big-domed and balding. He had a kind of aristocratic English accent, and frankly he looked like a mad scientist. But he sounded apologetic and confused.

He had put up a stiff fight. Stan and Paul had banged him around hard. His head was covered with bandages.

I didn’t know how long the specimens would last in the sub. I knew they’d be kept pressurized and at the proper temperature for at least another four hours – unless something went wrong. I didn’t want to take that chance, but I also did not want to seem an insensitive asshole. The mood on the ship, understandably, was not good.

I waited in the crew mess, sipping a Diet Coke.

The Jonah feeling is indescribable. It’s about nothing you’ve done personally. It’s about a shadow hanging over you, an unshakable association with shit that no one understands. There I was, the closest thing to an outsider on the Sea Messenger, right in the bull’s-eye. Why would Mauritz want to shoot me? He hardly knew me. Why would Dave Press want to drown me and wreck the DSV? The DSV was everybody’s baby. Pilots would cross swords for the privilege of taking Mary’s Triumph down to the vents.

None of it pieced together. Without a rational explanation, even the smartest of scientists reverts to a tribal suspicion of bad juju.

Exhaustion slammed up against emotional shock. I couldn’t keep myself from shivering. Alone in the mess, waiting for the agents to work their way down the list and talk to me, I worried about the specimens.

Jason came in and stared at me. ‘You all right?’ he asked.

‘Fine.’

‘Owen called Captain Burke and asked about you. He said take care of you and your work. I moved your specimens over to the aquarium. They’re okay, I think.’

Unspoken, Jason was saying that what Montoya asked for, he got, even in the face of a police investigation. But Jason did not have to approve. ‘Owen knows about us, about the ship,’ he continued. ‘It’s on TV. You sure you’re all right?’

‘Thanks for moving them,’ I said, nodding like a fuzzy dog in a car’s rear window. I could have hugged him just for bringing good news.

‘What’d you find?’ he asked, and bit his lip, nodding along with me. We wobbled our heads, matching rhythm, and that was too weird. I stopped.

‘Xenos,’ I said.

‘Right. You were diving for xenos. Look like cnidarians to me, though. You sure you got what you were after? Dave grab them, or you?’

‘I used the suck tube,’ I said.

‘Do you know Dr Mauritz, off the ship?’ Jason asked.

‘No,’ I said.

‘Why did Dave go overboard?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said.

‘You didn’t hurt him and push him over, just to hide it? You didn’t fight, I mean, and hurt him. Self-defense?’

‘No. He did it all.’

‘Did he say he wanted to kill you?’

‘No, he just started…’ I sucked in my breath. ‘Trying to curse and not doing a very good job. Kind of funny, but scary, too. I better wait for the police. Don’t want this to seem rehearsed.’