Gaspard cleared his throat. “The question is, how did Mr. Danysh come to have it in his possession?”
Hwang’s tone was deferential but firm. “I must once again point out, Ambassador, that it is impossible to verify Ms. Veriden’s account of how she came to possess this vial. It is possible that she, not Danysh, was in possession of this vial.”
Gaspard nodded impatiently. “So, lacking any concrete evidence, Captain do you suspect that other saboteurs are involved, or is it possible that Danysh was working alone?”
“Let me answer your last question first, Ambassador. Since we can’t know that Danysh was working alone, then we have to presume he wasn’t—and so we have to remain alert for further sabotage. Beyond that, too many details at the crime scene almost shout ‘set up.’ For instance, those two handguns I discovered along with the bodies: we’re presuming they were the weapons used. Just as we’re presuming that any of those three people used them. It’s entirely possible that there was a fourth person — the real shooter — who killed them all and staged it to look otherwise. And it does make operational sense that there would be a second saboteur, one unknown to Danysh.”
Hwang nodded. “That way, the second agent could kill Danysh and thereby prevent us from acquiring any knowledge about how he crippled the shift-carrier, how he received the orders to do it, or from whom. The other two victims might just have been convenient means of misdirecting us, of allowing us to presume that Danysh had been working alone.”
Whether by spoken or silent consensus, the searchers were now returning, their duty suits soaked. One person remained in the water, as far to the rear of the wreck as the encroaching lily pads allowed: Hirano Mizuki. Of course. Despite her mild demeanor, she had a stubborn streak a mile wide. She wasn’t about to give up on her notion of finding the missing food, not until someone made her do so, Caine realized. He stood up: “Ms. Hirano!” She either could not, or chose not, to hear him.
Riordan walked down to the water’s edge. “Ms. Hirano, you’ve done everything you can. There’s nothing to find.”
She half-turned. “I think I feel something, just down here.” She had made the same claim three times in the past ten minutes. She pointed further aft. “I am going to take one last look.” The others on the shore had stripped out of their duty suits; they’d dry faster that way, and the air was warm.
Caine put his hands on his hips. Although tempted to order her out of the water, he held back. He’d get compliance, but that might also start stratifying this overwhelmingly civilian group into sharply defined leaders and followers, and to disincline spontaneous sharing of ideas while simultaneously stirring up resentment. No reason to go that route until and unless it was absolutely necessary. “Ms. Hirano, we’re going to—”
But she didn’t hear him as she ducked under the water. The vermillion lily pads bobbed in unison with the ripples made as she passed under them in an effort to get further back along the hull. And they continued to bob. Even once the ripples had subsided.
Before he knew why he was doing it, Caine was sprinting into the water: “Ms. Hirano!”
A meter beyond where Hirano had ducked under, her head burst through the lily pads, sending up a spray of water and a piercing scream. The water around her churned in fine, ferocious agitation, as if a pot teeming with minnows had been brought to a sudden boil.
Riordan hardly heard the shouts from the shore—“Mizuki!” “No, Caine!”—as he ploughed through the water, saw red blood on the orange water-lilies. Covering her head and her hands, small wormlike fish writhed and burrowed in desperate, ravenous delight. She flailed to break free of the twitching, clutching water plants, went under—
Just as Caine got close enough to plunge his arm under the surface, and — careful to keep the neckline of his duty-suit out of the water — grab for her. He got a handful of hair and pulled upward as more of the ferocious creatures swarmed out from under the water-lilies with which they evidently had some kind of symbiotic relationship.
Hirano Mizuki came up, shrieking, sputtering, gagging. Riordan felt the flutter of the small fish all along his body, felt them pressing and gnashing at his duty suit. He got an arm under hers, started to haul her toward the shore, felt the first stinging nips breach the legs of his suit. Macmillan, Salunke, and Xue were splashing out to meet him, arms outstretched for Hirano, whose face and neck were still speckled with the quivering, fry-sized carnivores, but it was unclear if they would get her to shore in time. Or if he would, either: Riordan could feel more of the piranhalike minnows sawing through the legs and waist of his suit—
On the far shore, a dim form rose up in the mists, sending a swift, powerful ripple across the river’s central currents. It was five; no, eight; damn, maybe ten meters tall — and it emitted a strident, higher-pitched version of the same hoot the group had heard earlier.
The piranha-minnows immediately sprang off Mizuki Hirano’s savaged flesh and dove deep into the water. Riordan let the rest of the team take her from him, as the strange shape, a gargantuan badger on heavy stilts, hooted again, even more stridently. Riordan felt the insistent rippling of the worm-fish against his duty suit diminish rapidly; the sensation was gone by the time he had reached the knee-depth shallows. The lily pads, their coordinated undulations working like a wave-generation machine, began to back away from the wreck and push out into the downsteam current. As they did, the immense silhouette across the river sunk down and disappeared back into the mists.
As Caine staggered up the bank, Gaspard was there to take his arm and help him up the slight slope. “Mon Dieu, you are mad, brave, or both, Riordan. But heroics are not your place; you cannot lead us to safety if you are dead. What were you thinking?”
Caine stared at Gaspard, shook off his hand. “I was thinking of saving my team member’s life.” And he stalked up the silt to where Hirano Mizuki was screaming in agony.
Chapter Thirty-Four. SOUTHERN EXTENTS OF THE THIRD SILVER TOWERBD +02 4076 TWO (“DISPARITY”)
Unable to move Mizuki, the group had to stay put for the rest of that day. Her screams diminished into sobs by dinner, and then soft moans when she began drifting off to sleep and losing conscious control over the pain. Besides widespread wounds that looked like horribly pulped flesh, one of the piranha-minnows — or, now, pirhannows — had bored partway into her left eye, breaching the sclera.
During the night, they rested in shifts, each armed watch staring out into dark brush that blinked, waved, and rippled with bioluminescence, particularly at dusk and dawn. Just as dim light began brightening the sky, and the presunrise bioluminescence began to subside, Ben Hwang sat down beside Caine. “Ms. Hirano’s eye could become necrotic if it is not removed.”
Sitting only two meters away, Xue leaned toward them and whispered. “How could that be done? Such a surgery would require anesthetics.”
“Or she would need to be restrained,” Hwang murmured.
Caine looked out at the river. The sky was beginning to reflect in it as a light gray-green-blue. “Mr. Xue, can you give us another option?”
“I can attempt to pack the wound in between irrigations, but I am still unable to determine if the blood supply remains intact throughout the sclera.”
“Let’s say you do that. How much warning will you have if you ultimately need to operate?”