The door was locked. Curtis must have locked it, to keep anybody from stumbling in there unawares. But it only stymied Manville for a second, until he thought, This door isn’t locked against me. I already know what’s in there.
I’m not violating anything if I ignore the lock.
In one pocket, Manville kept a card that gave, in black letters and numbers on white, equivalences: pounds to kilos, quarts to liters, that sort of thing. It was about the size of a credit card, but thinner, more supple. Manville took it from his pocket, slipped it into the crack between door and jamb, and slid back the striker on the lock.
The door eased open, darkness within. Manville stepped inside, switching on the light, leaving the door open. And there she was, in the bed, on her back, covered to her chin.
That was the first oddity that struck him, that her face wasn’t covered. Then he realized the room wasn’t at all cool, it was warm; the air conditioner hadn’t been turned higher at all.
Somebody’s mistake, obviously. Somebody on the crew had misunderstood Curtis’s orders. So it was a good thing Manville had come down here, or things might have got very unpleasant.
He was going to turn the air-conditioning up, but before that, he thought he should cover her face. And look at her, and offer his belated and useless apology.
He stepped closer to the bunk, and looked at her, and she was really very good-looking. And young. Twenty?
There was even, somehow, faint color in her cheeks.
No. That made no sense at all. Manville, not wanting to, reached out to touch that cold stiff cheek and it was warm and yielding.
He pulled his hand back as though he’d been burned. She was alive, not dead.
How could Curtis have made such a mistake? Or Captain Zhang, he was the one who handled medical duties aboard the ship. Couldn’t they tell the difference between her being alive and her being dead? It made no sense, no sense at all.
Unwillingly, Manville found his methodical mind giving him the answer. Richard Curtis had several times in the last months told Manville that he had a nemesis in the ranks of the environmentalists, a fellow named Jerry Diedrich. Why Diedrich had that special hatred or rage toward him, Curtis professed not to know; he only knew, with certainty, that it was there. He’d told Manville a week ago that he half-expected Diedrich would try to make trouble at today’s experiment, and in fact Diedrich had.
And then the diver had happened, and Diedrich was on the defensive. The diver had happened, and Curtis had immediately made it clear he would use the incident to defuse the problem of Diedrich. He’d left no doubt that he had no sympathy to waste for the diver, that the diver’s dead body would be the centerpiece of a legal action to get Diedrich out of his way forever. Because...
Because there was something else coming, something larger. “We’ll be using this soliton thing again,” Curtis had told him, “and in a much more significant way, you wait and see.” And that was the project Curtis wanted to keep Diedrich away from, for some reason desperately needed to keep Diedrich away from.
Desperate enough for him to make certain he had a dead body to deliver to the authorities in Australia? Manville knew Curtis was a hard man, in business he was famously ruthless and cold, famously hard. But was he that hard?
Could he be?
Manville looked at the girl. Her breaths were shallow, but regular. She was not dying, but mending.
He didn’t know what to believe, or he was afraid to know what to believe. It was better now, at least for now, that nothing made sense.
He turned away at last, switched off the light, and left the cabin, letting the door snick locked again behind him. As he’d promised himself, he went straight from there to bed, but it was hours before he got to sleep.
14
Snick.
That was the first sound since the shock wave had taken her that penetrated into Kim’s stunned brain, to bring her up from the cocoon she’d been pending in. Her brain heard the sound, tried to process it, failed to give the sound a meaning, and the resulting unsatisfied curiosity, unanswered question, drove her up closer to consciousness, and more bewildering sense impressions. Her body felt a thrumming vibration, like a ship, but very unlike Planetwatch III. The sheets above and below her were a texture different from what she was used to. The faint odor in her nostrils was like polished wood (the odor on Planetwatch III, not that faint, was of diesel oil). Confused, troubled by the incomprehensibility of where she was, she came closer again to consciousness.
And memory. That great underwater blur roared toward her again, and her eyes popped open, and she was terrified.
Now it came in a rush, just as the shock wave had done. She’d been on deck, on Planetwatch III, and she’d listened with the others to the ship’s PA system relaying the debate between Jerry and the people on the yacht. She’d realized they weren’t getting anywhere, she’d believed Jerry’s insistence that there had to be a way for Curtis’s people to halt the experiment, and she’d finally decided the only way to force the issue was to throw herself in harm’s way. Like the student who’d stood in front of the tank in Tiananmen Square.
In the water, just beneath the surface, she had at first swum strongly toward the island, seeing the jagged landscape of coral below her. But then she’d decided she shouldn’t get too far from the ship, she should stay close enough so they could signal her when the experiment was called off, so she turned about and headed back, arms at her sides, flippered legs scissoring in strong rhythm as she looked down through the facemask at the coral seabed, receding in bumps and jags as she moved into deeper water.
Some trembling in the sea around her made her look over her shoulder, and at first she couldn’t understand what she seemed to see back there. It was like trying to watch a movie with the projector out of focus. It was a blur, a thick gray-blue-silver-black blur, fifteen or twenty feet from top to bottom, as wide as the whole ocean, and it was rolling at her like an avalanche, like a bulldozer burying an anthill.
In panic, seeing that thing hurtle on, she yearned upward, and her flippers gave one strong kick to propel her toward the surface before the blur caught her and shook her like a puppy shaking a rag doll, and her last thought was, Stupid me, now I’ve killed myself.
She stared upward in darkness in this strange cabin, reliving the moment, clutched by the panic, unable to think, barely able to breathe, living that panic and that surge of impossible power all over again, her entire body clenching until the pain in her chest forced her to let go, to ease back, to take a long slow (painful) breath and get that terrified butterfly brain inside her head to slow down, slow down, settle, settle.
I’m in a bed, she thought. I’m in a cabin on a ship, but not my own ship. The yacht? Why didn’t my own people rescue me?
She turned her head, and her neck and back gave her twinges of pain. In the thin light that seeped into the cabin under its door, she looked at where she was, simple and plain, but also elegant. She thought to roll onto her side, so she could get up and go over there to open that door, but when she made her first move everything gave her a jolt. The fiercest pains were in her chest, as though she might have broken some ribs, but everything else hurt as well. It was like the soreness after too much exercise, but magnified a hundred times.
She couldn’t move. The effort made her dizzy with the pain. She very slowly turned her head back to where it had been. She felt weak, groggy. She was afraid she might lose consciousness again. She breathed slowly, carefully, trying to avoid the whip-stroke of pain that came sometimes to her chest, and again she remembered the blur, how fast it came, how immensely powerful it was, unimaginably powerful.