No response.
Fred grabbed the manual latch and turned it. Though the handle bent in his hand, it still worked, and the hatch undogged and swung inward. A torrent of water poured in, knocking him over and flooding the cab. The cold water quickly reached the nano furnace in the rear and exploded into superheated steam. Fred’s suit squealed a warning, and he ducked under the rising water. He hoped Reilly’s suit could keep him from getting cooked. After a moment, the water level had risen enough for him to pull himself through the hatch. His suit now hugged his body, and a mouthpiece popped up inside his mask. He wrapped his lips around it and took a deep breath. The air gauge reset itself to account for the depth. Because of the pressure, his two hours of air had dropped to forty minutes.
Fred kicked aft to the GOV’s port side passenger door. Reilly had unlatched it, but it seemed welded to the frame. Fred grabbed the handle, braced his feet against the side of the car, and pulled. He tore the softened door from its weakened frame, and out came Reilly in a gush of steamy bubbles.
A rope of tendrils followed him out, wrapped around his knee. Behind his mask, Reilly’s mouth was stretched in agony. Fred took Reilly’s grease gun and tried to cut the tendrils, but the gun was empty. He grabbed his own gun and cut them with a ribbon of grease. The tendrils encircling Reilly’s leg, however, continued to digest his suit and send out tendrils of their own. Fred wrapped his partner’s entire knee with ribbons of grease. When he looked into Reilly’s mask, he saw that Reilly had passed out before taking the breathing regulator into his mouth. He would asphyxiate, and there was nothing Fred could do except get him to the surface as quickly as possible. He unreeled his belt tether, clipped it to the ring at the back of Reilly’s collar, grabbed him around the waist, and pushed off from the GOV. Fred kicked and paddled furiously, but it was no good: the crib suction was too strong and Reilly’s limp body too cumbersome. They continued to vector diagonally toward the big strainer at the bottom of Lake Michigan. He hadn’t even managed to pull away from the GOV.
Fred changed course. If it wasn’t possible to swim straight up, maybe he could reach the lake bed before being sucked in. There’d be less pull on the ground, and he could clamber away on the rocky bottom. His air supply alarm went off. He’d been working too hard and breathing too heavily, and his air supply dipped below fifteen minutes.
Fred relaxed completely, letting the water pull him and Reilly down. He tried to visualize all the gear packed into these HomCom blacksuits to see if there was something he could use to save their lives. It had been years since he’d certified in them, and he only got to use one every month or so. He asked himself, Do I have any spare air on board? and quieted his thoughts for an answer. He got one too, and would have slapped himself on the head if he could spare a hand. Yes, he had spare air. He had a whole freaking cassette of liquid air.
Fred tore the raft cassette from his belt and tethered it to Reilly. Now they were strung together with Reilly in the middle. When he pulled the inflate ring, the ultrathin foil billowed out into the shape of a flat donut, more deflated than inflated. They couldn’t be more than thirty meters down, about three atmospheres, but the water pressure squeezed the raft’s air to a third of its volume. Even so, the raft was buoyant enough to offset the crib suction. At least for Reilly’s weight. Fred still had to raise his own weight by swimming.
The GOV seemed to fall away below them as Fred put everything he had into his arms and legs. The mirrorlike underside of the lake surface was tauntingly close when his air supply gave out. By then they’d risen enough for the raft to fill out, and soon it was racing for the surface with the two men in tow. Fred exhaled a seemingly endless breath of decompressing air from his lungs. They were rising too fast, he knew, and might suffer the bends when they surfaced, but there was nothing to do about that now.
At least the crib was safely distant, and the GOV a mere toy car. It struck the manifold ribworks and broke apart like a rotten egg, spilling its deadly yolk into the aquifer.
Fred thought, Drink that, Chicago.
When they broke the surface, Fred opened his face mask and sucked in sweet lungsful of air. Reilly floated faceup next to him. His eyelids and lips were blue, and Fred fished in his cargo pocket for a laser pen. He would have to cut the mask off Reilly and start mouth to mouth.
Three blobs of blue fell into the water next to Fred, and it took him a panicky moment to recognize them as a Technical Escort Team in gummysuits. A decon ambulance hovered a few meters overhead. A voice rang out from it, “Relax, Commander. We’ll take it from here.”
AT THE PORT Authority Decon Unit, Fred lay at the bottom of a two-thousand-liter HALVENE tank. He had plenty of time to relax as the concentrated lipoprotein solvent permeated his body. It flushed him of the dead crap that the VIS-37 visola had killed and the live crap it had missed.
Fred lay perfectly still, not even breathing. There was no need to breathe: the HALVENE was capable of oxygenating his cells. It was best not to move at all, for the cellular bonds of his tissues were loosened. Violent motion, such as gagging or coughing, could literally shake him to pieces. Besides, it felt good not to breathe. He’d never realized what an effort breathing took.
FRED’S PALLET AT the bottom of the tank began to rise. Apparently, he was done, stripped, clean. The pallet lifted him a couple of centimeters out of the HALVENE bath and stopped. The solvent streamed out of him as though he were a sopping rag hung out to dry. He was saturated with the stuff and weighed three times normal. They’d leave him here to drip dry until his weight returned to twenty percent over normal. Then it would be safe for him to move. This might take another hour. Plenty of time for second-guessing.
Fred was besieged by self-doubt. He found himself dwelling on things he’d never given a second thought to before. Like this hinky woman, Costa.
Fred stopped himself right there. They warned you about having woodies in the HALVENE tank. You could literally burst your plumbing.
So he thought about his little private chat with Cabinet at the lake. What exactly had it expected to accomplish by singling him out? Did it actually think he would betray his duty? Russes were extraordinarily loyal to their duty. This was what made them an invaluable asset in the security sector. And it was the reason why his urbrother, Thomas A., was chosen a century ago to serve as donor for the very first line of commercially developed clones. The original russ, Secret Service Special Agent Thomas A. Russ, had thrown himself on a carpet mine in the Oval Office to save the life of President Taksayer in 2034 during the fifth assassination attempt against her in a one-week period.
The grateful president, bloodied but undaunted, scooped up a gob of Thomas A.’s brains in a cracked china cup with the presidential seal and proclaimed to the media, “If loyalty can be cloned, let this be its template.” Thus were the commercial clone treaties passed, and such was the standard every russ strove to imitate. So what was Cabinet’s game?
Obviously, the mentar was in a tight spot with Starke’s daughter; it was clutching at smoke and would do anything to protect her. But what did it mean when it said that he was an exceptional russ, that he possessed traits unusual for a russ? It should have come right out and said it—he had fallen out of type—for that was what it was implying. And Cabinet made this assertion based on what? his six-month stint in the Starke household forty years ago?
Fred shook his head, spilling HALVENE from his ears. His hunch was that it was all bluff. Cabinet didn’t really imagine that it could sway him. It was a stab in the dark. Surely, that was all it was.