“It’s an antiturbulence material,” Steve said. “Helps adjust the water flow for greater speed. Once it gets wet it looks very different.”
Cooper reached down and gently poked one of the furry points with a finger — felt like a stiff foam.
Steve shot out a panicked hand. “Please don’t touch!”
Cooper stood, held up both hands, palms out. “Wow, sorry.”
The kid blinked, looked around, saw that everyone was staring at him. He forced a smile.
“The material is just delicate is all,” he said. “My bad, I should have asked everyone not to touch it earlier.”
Cooper felt Jeff glaring at him. Jeff had that suspicious expression on his face again — the ROV was beyond state of the art, something altogether new, and that bothered him. Jeff subtly held up his hand, thumb rubbing against his fingertips: that thing looks like big money.
Cooper nodded. Of course Steve had money; he was part of some lawyer’s class-action lawsuit. Millions of dollars on the line. Cooper felt bad for the people who now ran Delta Airlines; this was going to wind up being one high-toned bitch of a lawsuit.
José craned his head around, looked at the ROV from all sides.
“Hey, Jefe Steve,” he said. “Where do you connect the control cable?” José insisted on calling everyone jefe, Spanish for boss. He looked around the deck, as if he suddenly realized he was missing something. “And where is the cable? Is that in the other box?”
He started toward the smaller of Steve’s two boxes, the one still strapped to the deck.
“Please don’t touch that one, either,” Steve said. Again, the words were rushed, nearly panicky.
Jeff glared. Cooper felt uncomfortable — the customer was acting very strange.
Steve shook his head, forced another smile. “There isn’t a cable. The Platypus is remote controlled to some extent, but mostly autonomous.”
Autonomous? An unmanned underwater vehicle; a robot. Cooper winced: that meant it cost exponentially more. He looked at Jeff, who was already shaking his head, lips pressed together in held-back anger.
“You told us you had an ROV,” Jeff said. “Now you’re telling us this is a UUV?”
Steve’s eyes widened. He glanced over to Bo Pan, just for the briefest second, but Bo Pan kept staring at the deck.
Cooper was losing his patience. Jeff could still blow this job if he kept being difficult.
“Jeff, it’s all good,” Cooper said. “UUV, ROV, ABC, whatever, let’s just get it in the water, okay?”
Jeff looked at Cooper, looked at the machine. He nodded.
“Yeah, okay,” he said quietly. Then, his booming I’m the boss voice returned. “Cooper, man the crane. José, get ready to get wet. Mister Stanton, if you’ll point out the right way for us to hook up your machine so we don’t break it, we’ll get her in the drink and you can do your thing.”
Everyone moved into action. Everyone except for Bo Pan. As Cooper headed to the Mary Ellen’s crane, he noticed Bo Pan watching Jeff, then watching José. Then, his eyes locked with Cooper’s.
For just a moment, Bo Pan didn’t look like the old man who had come aboard. His eyes were hard, cold… dangerous. Then the expression vanished — he looked out to the water, hawked a huge loogie and spat it over the side.
Just some old dude along for the ride. Right?
Cooper felt a shiver that wasn’t from the cold. He shook off the sensation, then got to work.
KILLER MATH FOR $200
Testing units weren’t the only thing that had changed in the last five years.
Margaret stood in the second airlock with Tim and Clarence. The three of them wore BSL-4 suits.
At first, the suit had seemed familiar. Like those she’d worn before, it was made of airtight Tyvek, a synthetic material. A heavy-gauge seal secured the oversized helmet onto the suit, and the helmet itself had a tall, wide, clear, curved visor that gave her full range of vision.
The visor itself, however, was something out of a movie.
“This is crazy,” she said. “So much information.”
“You’ll get used to it,” Tim said. “Before you know it, it’ll be second nature.”
She looked at him. She could see him through her visor, but her eyes also tried to register the information playing on the inside of it — the visor was a full-on heads-up display, scrolling data about the airlock and a medical report about the two divers in observation. She was wearing a computer screen in front of her face.
“My eyes are trying to focus on two things at once,” she said. “It’s giving me a headache. How do I just get rid of it for now?”
“Just reach up and grab it,” Tim said. “Then swipe it to the side.”
She reached up to grab something that wasn’t there, and she felt ridiculous doing it, but when her hand “closed” on the display window of airlock information, that window trembled slightly, indicating she had it. She moved her hand to the right, out of her range of vision, and let go. The window was gone. She repeated the process for the medical report.
“Wow,” she said. “That’s easy.”
Tim nodded. “I’ll walk you through menu selection in a little bit. Any data we have in the system, you can call it up right in front of you. There’s even an all eye-track mode, so if you’ve got your hands full, you can still get whatever you need. A blink-pattern lets you record video, another lets you send it my way. You can even send me dirty movies, if said movies have some scientific importance.”
How nice: even in the middle of nowhere with a scientist who clearly respected her, Margaret still got harassed. She decided to chalk it up to an inappropriate sense of humor. What choice did she have, really? Tim would be working at her side for the indefinite future. She had dealt with shit like that all of her professional life. If he did more of the same, she’d say something, but for now she wanted all of their focus on the problem at hand. She let it go — Clarence, though, did not.
“Nice comment, Feely,” Clarence said. “You know I’m standing right here, yeah?”
“Like I could miss it,” Tim said. “Okay, time to see the good stuff.”
He opened the internal airlock door and they stepped out. In here, it was even harder to remember she was inside a ship.
On her right, she saw the three long, modular lab trailers. They were lined up length-wise, side by side. Sealed corridors connected them, both on the near side and on their far ends. At the end closest to her, another trailer ran horizontally, atop and across all three.
Tim pointed to the three lower trailers, calling out names as he did. “Closest to us is the miscellaneous lab, where you’ve got a little bit of everything. The one in the middle is for tissue, chemical and metallurgical analysis. That beauty on the end is the morgue — what I lovingly call the hurt locker. That’s where the bodies of Candice Walker and Charlie Petrovsky are stored.
“Walker was almost dead when they brought her in. It was too late to help her. I was able to isolate crawlers from her, though, and some of them are still alive. Petrovsky’s are all dead, but I have samples isolated for you just the same.”
He pointed to the trailer lying crosswise atop the other three. “That’s a control room. From there, you can see down into the other three. The control room also has a mini airlock and its own wee little bathroom, so if Secret Agent Man wants to stay involved but take off his suit, he can do that in there. Shall we start with the bodies?”