AllFreeNovel
Share Us
He sealed Ben’s suit and inflated the collar, just in case. When Rico turned to Crista Galli, he saw that she was crying. Her red-rimmed, swollen eyes stared at Ben’s deathlike form on the galley deck. She seemed to be conscious and aware.
“Can you understand me?” Rico asked. In spite of her restraints, he remained well out of reach.
She nodded.
“Yes.”
“Have you ever had this reaction before?”
“Yes.” Her voice was slurred. “Once. Before shots. I spit out pills.”
“What will happen next?”
She tried a shrug. “More same. Maybe seizure. Takes … while.” She added, in a slurred whisper, “Ben made me feel human being.”
Rico noticed that the pupils of her eyes dilated and constricted wildly. Must be some potent drugs, he mused. Damn that Flattery.
“We are in the open,” he explained, “and helpless. You need to have a dive suit on in case we go into the water.”
It flashed on him then what Flattery must’ve realized all along, what Operations warned in their instructions: “Do not let her into the water. Do not let her contact the kelp.” This was speculation, precaution. If Vashon security showed up, they’d have no other choice.
No point worrying about it.
“I can help you with it if you can’t do it yourself. I’m sorry to say this, but I’d rather not touch you,”
He held the suit out to her at arm’s length.
“Can’t get out harness,” she said.
Rico tapped the quick-release mechanism and she was free. He recoiled from her, partly as a reflex, partly because the foil pitched his way.
At this, she cringed away from him, her face even more pale and her jaw set. Some coordination was coming back.
“And what do you think I am?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Do you?”
“I know that I don’t think … I can’t think that I do this …” She gestured limply at Ben. “It can’t be me!”
“It’s the drugs,” Rico said.
He tried to keep the anger out of his voice. She needed reassurance, not another enemy.
“Remember, the drugs are Flattery’s doing, not yours.”
Her tears, the way she looked at Ben seemed like the genuine article.
But look at what happened to Ben, he cautioned himself.
“Get your suit on,” Rico said. “We don’t have much time.”
Crista had to slip out of her dress to don the dive suit. Rico knelt beside Ben, a hand on his forehead. He moved a little, and Rico took it for a good sign. His breathing was much stronger.
Crista did not seem modest at all, nor did she look like a monster. Probably spent so much time as a lab animal she didn’t have a chance to get shy.
Rico, like Ben, had been raised among Islanders, a generally shy lot. Rico admitted to himself that Crista had the best-looking legs he’d ever seen. Again, he thought of Snej back at Operations, and sighed. He planned to send a message to her, too, along with whatever he’d think of to say to Operations. He turned back to Crista Galli.
A little pale, he thought, even for her.
She seemed very weak, and struggled just to pull her suit on and fasten the seals. Her breathing was rapid and shallow. Her forehead beaded sweat and her eyes were doing their dilation trick again.
“Can you get back into your harness?” he asked.
She shook her head.
“No,” she said, her voice weaker now.
“It’s starting …”
She was drifting out again. She slumped down on her couch, eyes still open.
“Are you still with us?” he asked. “Can you hear me?”
“Yes,” she said, almost a sigh. “Yes.”
Rico still didn’t want to touch her. Whatever it was, it had nearly killed Ben and he wasn’t about to let the same thing happen to himself. He reached around her carefully and snicked the harness into place, then snugged it up with a jerk. He pushed the head of the couch back so that she lay flat. By then Crista was unconscious again.
Rico hurried into his own suit and noted that the seas had calmed somewhat. He heard the thump and scrape of Elvira at the hull ports, and hoped that the kelp wouldn’t set her hallucinating as it did some people. She seemed to have been all right before.
“It’d be just our luck,” he muttered to himself. “Best damned pilot in the whole damned world thinking her gauges are grapefruits.”
A very loud scrape, more of a long, slithering rasp across the top of the foil. Then another. It was the same serpentine sound that the kelp had made when it grabbed them. Rico jumped for the cabin, but he was too late.
The whole foil tipped on its side and he was slammed against the port bulkhead so hard it knocked the wind out of him. He saw, through the swarm of black amoebas across his vision, that they were airborne. He was jostled again, not so much this time, and as the bow of the foil tilted upward he saw them being pulled up into a mass of hylighter tentacles.
“Shit!”
He struggled to his knees and crawled the upended bulkhead to the command couch under the plaz. He could flip open a port and get a shot at it with his lasgun …
Then he saw how big this hylighter really was. He guessed it at a hundred meters across, with its two lead tentacles, which gripped the foil, at nearly that length. Even the smallest tentacle was thicker than Rico.
Already they dangled a hundred meters or so in the air, and rising. That pitch back there, he thought, it must’ve dumped a helluva ballast to be able to pick us up. Then he thought of Elvira, and scrambled for a view of the seas below. She was there, dive suit inflated, floating on her back. She must have seen him, but she didn’t wave.
“Damn!”
He couldn’t drop her a flare, he couldn’t try the engines. Either of these might touch off the thousands of cubic meters of hydrogen in the monster hylighter. It tucked the Flying Fish
upside-down against its great orange belly. Rico had never been this close to a hylighter before, but he’d seen them explode. A hylighter considerably smaller than this one had flattened the first tiny settlement at Kalaloch. Six hundred people cooked alive in that firestorm. He and Ben had covered that one, too.
The living were the worst. He remembered that Ben wouldn’t settle for the easy story, the inevitable films of cooked flesh on living bone, shaking chills, vomit and screams.
“Just shoot their eyes,” Ben had told him. “Leave the rest to me.”
Ben asked them about their lives, not about the blast. The dying and near-dying filled eighteen hours of tape before the dashers hit. Rico’s footage of the team fighting for their own lives against a dozen hunts of dashers in a feeding frenzy chilled the holo audience worldwide.
Rico saw that the coast was coming up fast and black weather pushed behind them. He hoped that the weight of the foil wouldn’t pull the hylighter too low to clear the gray bluffs ahead. He worked his way back to the cabin along the ceiling and sat below the command couches. This coliseum of a hylighter had a destination in mind, and that destination was land. If it didn’t bash them to bits against this cliff face it would blow them up inland.
Rico reviewed their odds and didn’t like what he came up with, though he was sure he’d rather clear the cliff than not. He wondered whether Operations had a code provision for this one. He hoped that Operations could beat Flattery’s people to Elvira. Rico refused to mull over the consequences if they didn’t.
Just off the cliff face the daily afternoon squall whipped up. The sky punched down on them without warning, clouds churning in their typical black and lasgun gray.
No lightning, Rico prayed to himself. We don’t need lightning.
They did need the cloud cover, this he knew. With good cover more overflights and Flattery’s spies in the Orbiter would be worthless. The ride got bumpier as the squall moved inland with them. Rico was close enough to the face of the bluff to see the markings on the back of a flatwing when an updraft sank his belly. They almost cleared the top, he saw that clearly, but the stern of the foil caught the lip of the bluff, cartwheeling the bow of their craft deep into the leathery belly of the hylighter.
