“Yeah,” she managed. “Peachy.”
Watching the optical feed from the mini-KH package in the UMB’s bay was like looking at a room through a strobe light. Zen’s head and upper body pitched slightly with each image, responding to the pulse like a dance moving to a beat. He stared at the images so long and so hard he found the radar, and even the video from the plane, disorienting. The computer could take care of everything else; he had to scan the images, examine each one, dance with the darkness between them.
“Dreamland Command to B-5. Zen, how are you doing?” asked Colonel Bastian over the Dreamland circuit.
“We’re on course.”
“Good.”
Bastian’s voice betrayed no emotion; he could have been asking if the garbage pickup had been made yet. Zen wanted to curse at him. Didn’t he feel anything for his daughter?
No one did. She was already dead as far as everyone else was concerned. He was just looking for bodies or debris.
But Zen knew she was there. He was going to find her.
“Keep us apprised,” said the colonel. “Dreamland Command out.”
Yeah, out.
Something tapped him on the shoulder. “You okay?” said Jennifer, leaning close and talking to him.
“Not a problem,” said Zen.
“Want something to eat? I smuggled in some cookies.”
Talking threw off his beat, and that made it harder to concentrate.
“No,” he said, willing his eyes back to the task. He pushed forward harder, scanning the emptiness below him.
This is what God sees, someone had told him once. It was an orientation flight in the backseat of an SR-71. They were at eighty thousand feet, looking down at Dreamland on a clear day.
Picture, new picture.
Here was something in the right corner of his screen, the first thing he’d seen in fifteen minutes.
The rail of a ship.
The fantail of a ship.
A trawler, the radar was telling him, or rather the computer was interpreting the radar and telling him, in its synthesized voice.
He locked it out. He had to concentrate.
One of the Taiwanese spy ships.
“You’re getting the ship?” Jennifer asked over the interphone, back at her station. Even though they were physically next to each other, she couldn’t get the photo or radar feed until it was processed and recorded by C³, which took a little over five seconds. At that point, it was available to Dreamland as well.
“One of the Taiwanese ships,” said Zen. “Maybe they’re on to something.”
He was past them now, still pulsing over the empty sea. Picture, new picture. Picture, new picture.
“PacCom checking in,” said Jennifer a few minutes later.
Picture, new picture.
“Anything you want to ask them? Or give them a lead or something?”
Picture, new picture.
“Zen?”
“No.”
Picture, new picture. He glanced down at the lower portion of his screen, reading the instruments — the fuel consumption was nudging a little higher than anticipated, but otherwise everything was in the green. He selected the forward video — nothing there, of course, since he was coming through sixty thousand feet — then went back to the routine.
Picture, new picture. Picture, new picture.
“Jeff, one of the Navy planes thinks it picked up a radio signal. We’re going to change our course and see if we can get over there,” said Major Alou. “It’s going to take us toward your search area. It’s about two hundred miles from our present position. So it’ll be a bit.”
Yes. Finally.
“Give me coordinates,” he said.
“I ill when we have them. we’re going very close to the Chinese fleet,” added Alou.
“Okay.” Zen reached to the console to pull up the mapping screen — he’d need to work out a new pattern with the team back at Dreamland, but he wanted a rough idea of it first. Just as his fingers hit the key sequence, something flickered at the right side of the picture.
“Dreamland is wondering about the performance of the number-two engine,” said Jennifer. “They’re worried about power going asymmetric.”
Asymmetric. Stinking scientists.
The map came up. Zen’s fingers fumbled — he wasn’t used to working these controls, couldn’t find the right sequence.
Picture, new picture.
“What should I tell them?” said Jennifer.
“We have a good location on that signal,” broke in Alou. “I’m going to turn you over—”
“Wait!” said Zen. He pushed up the visor and looked at the keyboard, finding the keys to bring the picture back up. “Everybody just give me a minute.”
As he leaned down toward her, something caught his attention. Stoner looked toward the horizon. There was something there — or he thought there was.
“Water,” she said.
He reached for the small metal bottle, gave it to her. She took half a gulp.
She was so beautiful.
“It’s almost empty,” she told him.
He nodded, took his own small sip, put it in his pants leg. “We have another,” he said.
“Where?”
Where? He didn’t see it.
She lifted up, looking.
It was gone. They must have lost it when the sharks attacked.
The radio was gone too. They had an empty water bottle and an empty gun.
“It’s all right,” he told her. “It’s okay — look.”
“What?”
He put his arms around her, then pointed toward the horizon.
“I don’t see anything.”
“Look,” he said. Stoner put his head on her shoulder, pointing with his arm. His cheek brushed hers. “There,” he said.
The resolution of the optics in the UMB’s belly were rated good enough to focus on a one-meter object at an altitude of 22,300 miles, roughly the height necessary for a geosynchronous orbit. A number or variables affected that focus, however, and the designers at Dreamland had found it more expedient and meaningful in presentations to say that, at any altitude above twenty thousand feet, the camera array could see what a person with 20/10 vision could see across a good-sized room. The metaphor was both memorable and accurate, and often illustrated with the added example that a person with that vision could read the letters on a bracelet as she reached to embrace and kiss her lover.
Zen saw it as clearly as that.
The edge of a raft. A foot. A leg.
Then bodies entwined.
Their cheeks were together — had they just kissed?
“I have them,” he said, mouth dry. “Here are the coordinates.”
“Don’t,” said Breanna, in a soft, hoarse voice.
“No?”
She could feel his heart beating next to hers. Desire began to well inside her, pushing her toward him. She needed him, needed to feel his arms wrapping around her, feel his skin on her skin. She needed to feel him push against her, wrap her legs around his.
“No,” she said.
“It’s there,” Stoner told her. She couldn’t tell whether he meant the ship he’d seen, or his feelings for her, or his lips. Suddenly she had an urge to throw herself into the water, just dive in. she started to move upward. Perhaps sensing her thoughts, he grabbed her; she slid into his arms and then said “no” again, the pointed.
Now she saw it too, a ship.
“The flare gun,” she said.
“We don’t have it,” said Stoner. The words emptied his eyes.
She’d seen the same blankness in Zen’s face when he told her she’d known for weeks, that he couldn’t feel his legs and would never feel them again.