There was a kind of comfort in that.
‘Alright then.’ I drew air, harder than necessary. ‘Let’s do this.’
I took bearings on the lights at New Kanagawa’s southern tip, then the black stack of Rila, twenty klicks beyond. Then I sank back into the sea, turned lazily over and began to swim.
Brasil had taken us as far south of the general traffic as was safe without attracting attention, but we were still a long way off the Crags. Under normal circumstances, getting there would have been a couple of hours’ hard work at least. Currents, sucked south through the Reach by the maelstrom, helped somewhat, but the only thing that really made the scuba approach viable was the modified buoyancy system. With electronic security in the archipelago effectively blinded and deafened by the orbital storm, no one was going to be able to pick up a one-man grav engine underwater. And with a carefully applied vector, the same power that maintained diver flotation would also drive us south at machine speed.
Like seawraiths out of the Ebisu daughter legend, we slid through the darkened water an arm’s reach apart, while above us the surface of the sea bloomed silently and repeatedly with reflected angelfire. The Anderson rig clicked and bubbled gently in my ears, electrolysing oxygen directly from the water around me, blending in helium from the ultracomp mini-tank on my back, feeding it to me, then patiently shredding and dispersing my exhaled breath in bubbles no larger than fish eggs. Distantly, the maelstrom growled a bass counterpoint.
It was very peaceful.
Yeah, this is the easy part.
A memory drifted by in the flashlit gloom. Night-diving off Hirata’s reef with a girl from the upscale end of Newpest. She’d blown into Watanabe’s one night with Segesvar and some of the other Reef Warriors, part of a mixed bag of slumming daddy’s girls and Stinktown hardboys. Eva? Irena? All I remembered was a gathered-up rope of dark honey hair, long sprawling limbs and shining green eyes. She was smoking seahemp roll-ups, badly, choking and wheezing on the rough blend with a frequency that made her harder-edged friends laugh out loud. She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.
Making a – for me – rare effort, I peeled her away from Segesvar, who in any case seemed to be finding her a drag, parked us in a quiet corner of Watanabe’s near the kitchens, monopolised her all evening. She seemed to come from another planet entirely – a father who cared and worried about her with an attention I would have jeered at under different circumstances, a mother who worked part-time just so she doesn’t feel like a complete housewife, a home out of town that they owned, visits to Millsport and Erkezes every few months. An aunt who had gone offworld to work, they were all so proud of her, a brother who hoped to do the same. She talked about it all with the abandon of someone who believes these things to be entirely normal, and she coughed on the seahemp, and she smiled brilliantly at me, often.
So, she said on one of those occasions, what do you do for fun?
I, uh. I. Reef dive.
The smile became a laugh. Yeah, Reef Warriors, somehow I guessed. Go down much?
It was supposed to be my line, the line we all used on girls, and she’d stolen it out from under me. I didn’t even mind much.
Far side of Hirata, I blurted out. You want to try some time?
Sure, she matched me. Want to try right now?
It was deep summer in Kossuth, inland humidity had hit a hundred per cent weeks ago. The thought of getting into the water was like an infectious itch. We slipped out of Watanabe’s and I showed her how to read the autocab flows, pick out an unfared one and jump the roof. We rode it all the way across town, sweat cooling on our skin.
Hang on tight.
Yeah, I never would have thought of that, she yelled back, and laughed into my face in the slipstream.
The cab stopped for a fare near the Port Authority, and we tumbled off, scaring the prospective customers into a clutch of mannered yelps. Shock subsided into mutters and disapproving glares that sent us reeling off, stifling cackles. There was a hole in harbour security down at the eastern corner of the hoverloader docks – a blind spot torn by some pre-teen for-kicks hacker the previous year; he’d sold it to the Reef Warriors for holoporn. I got us through the gap, sneaked us down to one of the ’loader ramps and stole a real-keel tender. We poled and paddled our way silently out of the harbour, then started the motor and tore off in a wide, cream-waked arc for Hirata, whooping.
Later, sunk in the silence of the dive, I looked up at the Hotei-toned, rippling surface and saw her body above me, pale against the black straps of the buoyancy jacket and the ancient compressed-air rig. She was lost in the moment, drifting, maybe gazing at the towering wall of the reef beside us, maybe just luxuriating in the cool of the sea against her skin. For about a minute, I hung below her, enjoying the view and feeling myself grow hard in the water. I traced the outlines of her thighs and hips with my eyes, zeroed in on the shaved vertical bar of hair at the base of her belly and the glimpse of lips as her legs parted languidly to kick. I stared at the taut muscled belly emerging from the lower edge of the buoyancy jacket, the obvious swelling at her chest.
Then something happened. Maybe too much seahemp, it’s never a smart idea before a dive. Maybe just some fatherly echo from my own home life. The reef edged in from the side of my vision, and for one terrible moment it seemed to be tilting massively over, falling on us. The eroticism of the languid drift in her limbs shrivelled to sudden, cramping anxiety that she was dead or unconscious. I kicked myself upward in sudden panic, grabbed her shoulders with both hands and tilted her around in the water.
And she was fine.
Eyes widened a little in surprise behind the mask, hands touching me in return. A grin split her mouth and she let air bubble out through her teeth. Gestures, caresses. Her legs wrapped around me. She took out the regulator, gestured for me to do the same, and kissed me.
‘Tak?’
Afterwards, in the gear ’fab the Reef Warriors had blown and set atop the reef, lying with me on an improvised bed of musty winter wetsuits, she seemed surprised at how carefully I handled her.
You won’t break me, Tak. I’m a big girl.
And later, legs wrapped around me again, grinding against me, laughing delightedly.
Hang on tight!
I was too lost in her to steal her comeback from the roof of the autocab.
‘Tak, you hear me?’
Eva? Ariana?
‘Kovacs!’
I blinked. It was Brasil’s voice.
‘Yeah, sorry. What is it?’
‘Boat coming.’ On the heels of his words, I picked it up as well, the scraping whine of small screws in the water, sharp over the backdrop growl of the maelstrom. I checked my proximity system, found nothing on grav trace. Went to sonar and found it, south-west and coming fast up the Reach.
‘Real-keel,’ muttered Brasil. ‘Think we should worry?’
It was hard to believe the Harlan family would run real-keel patrol boats. Still—
‘Kill the drives.’ Sierra Tres said it for me. ‘Go to standby flotation. It’s not worth the risk.’
‘Yeah, you’re right.’ Reluctantly, I found the buoyancy controls and shut down the grav support. Instantly, I felt myself starting to sink as the weight of my gear asserted itself. I prodded the emergency flotation dial and felt the standby chambers in the flotation jacket start to fill up. Cut it as soon as my descent stopped, and floated in the flashlit gloom, listening to the approaching whine of the boat.
Elena, maybe?
Green eyes shining
The reef tipping over onto us.
As another angelfire blast cut loose, I spotted the keel of the vessel overhead, big and sharkish, and hugely misshapen on one side. I narrowed my eyes and peered in the postblast gloom, cranking the neurachem. The boat seemed to be dragging something.