His voice sounded sullen to Stella and she suspected from the tightening of his jaw that if there was one thing Alek Dexter did not allow in his presence it was sullenness.
"Then buy one," he snapped. "Shops are open until curfew, and the market's only a few blocks away." He waved his hand in dismissal. "Take it out of petty cash. Change your attitude or change jobs."
The hatchway behind the driver framed a small street scene capped with a tumultuous sky. Two guards faced the street with their backs to him. A third tilted his head at the sound of three tones that came from the messenger on his belt. He picked it up, spoke into it, then hurried inside. His face seemed to pale more with each of the five steps that brought him to His Honor's side. Their conversation was brief and whispered, but Stella heard every word.
"Code Brutus standby warning, sir. Do you want to secure here or at the compound?"
"Shit!" Alek Dexter said, and he turned his face away as though he'd been slapped. He, like Mr. Wittle, was a possible successor to the Director. He rubbed his forehead while a trackful of security emptied itself out front. His face was as pale as his guard's. He watched the security squad fan out from the track and take up positions outside. A half-dozen armed men covered with grime and streaming sweat shouldered by him and stationed themselves about the reception.
"These ours?" he asked his guard.
The guard shrugged, his lasgun gripped white-knuckle tight in his shaking hands. "Don't know, sir."
"Humph," he grunted. "Guess it's hard to know what side they're on if we don't know what side we're on. Just a warning, you say? Flattery's no..."
"Yes, sir, a warning. Flattery issued it."
"We'll wait here," Dexter said. "If we're going to find ourselves stuck somewhere, I'd prefer it to be with this lovely young woman."
He bowed, took Stella's hand and kissed it. Then he strolled inside to the hostess and her guests, passing the long table set with an array of the most beautiful fruits and seafoods that Stella had ever seen. The centerpiece was a meter-high chunk of ice carved to represent a leaping porpoise.
The fighting sounded closer, and the security quietly closed the double hatch. Stella was more than a little afraid.
Not once had Dexter glanced at her orchids.
***
To be conscious, you must surmount illusion.
The series of explosions dropped by Flattery's Skyhawks from the surface wounded the green kelp in sector eight, killed tens of thousands of fishes and a pod of bottlenose porpoises and roiled up enough sediment to clog submersible filters for a fifty-click radius. A huge stand of blue kelp neighboring sector eight retracted all of its fronds instinctively and clamped itself as tight around its central lagoon as possible. In this configuration, its leaves were packed so tight that it could barely breathe. Feeding was out of the question.
The blue kelp, when fully deployed, reached a diameter of nearly one hundred kilometers. Its outer fringes bordered domestic kelp projects for nearly 280 degrees of its circumference; the rest faced open ocean and some of it was growing daily at a visible rate. For its own safety, it kept out of contact with the domestic kelps. These were slaves to the humans, bound to the electric whip, this much the blue gathered from the dying shards that drifted its way. There would be many such shards soon. Kelp death always followed these explosions. Other deaths followed, too, at times feeding the blue kelp into an incredible spurt of growth.
This day something else drifted in on the currents. Something like an aura, a fragrance, something that kept the kelp from hugging itself too tight, too long. Something stirred this blue kelp deep within itself, setting its genetic memories tingling. Nothing would quite come to the fore. Soon, the blue could no longer help itself and it opened its fronds wide in hopes of a good strong whiff.
***
Feed men, then ask of them virtue.
Turbulence from the blasts hadn't settled yet when the Flying Fish pitched, helpless, to the surface. Rico's eyes teared instantly in the sudden glare of afternoon sun that jammed the cockpit. He groped for his sunglasses and tried to blink away the afterglow. To starboard, he saw a long gray line that must be the coast. To port, two or three kilometers away, the surface seethed with a mean white froth as far as he could see.
A puddle of seawater widened into a pool beneath Elvira's command couch. Her nosebleed was slowing and she shook her head, trying to clear the concussion that had hit her with the first of the depth-charges.
Anybody but Elvira would've been scrat bait out there, Rico thought.
Somehow she'd made it back into the engine-room airlock by herself, though stunned and quivering from the blast. There were many other blasts, too many to count.
"That goddamn Flattery's answer to everything is to blow it up," he grumbled.
Kelp lights winked out all around them as the sea was glutted with shredded fronds and torn vines.
"Sister Kelp," Elvira said, following his gaze across the tumultuous surface, "she retracts, saves herself."
"Elvira, I don't want to hear that 'Sister Kelp' crap. I want to get us out of here."
"Overflights!" she warned, and pointed to two specks at ten o'clock off the port cabin. Her hands automatically worked the dive sequence, but the engines remained still.
"Jammed," she said, her face impassive and dazed. "Silt an... kelp in the niters."
"Don't sweat it, Elvira," Rico said. He patted her arm. "They're the ones who dropped the charges. If they carried all that payload, they're short on fuel. At least we're not dealing with a bunch of mines out here."
Rico unharnessed himself and got Elvira a towel out of one of the lockers.
"Here," he said. "Dry yourself off, change into a new dive suit. We might be here awhile and there's no sense you getting sick."
She took the towel, and it seemed to Rico that her senses were coming back.
"Flattery can track a one-seater coracle from port to port with the Orbiter, anyway," he said. "These guys can't set down out here, and with Crista Galli aboard they don't dare blow us up. Meanwhile, we've got to get her and Ben to some big medicine, and fast."
Two sonic booms rocked them further as the overflights dove in on them and pulled out. Rico could make out the pilots' faces as the tiny aircraft flashed past.
"They're young, Elvira, did you see that? With their whole lives ahead of them they chain themselves to Flattery." He fisted the arm of his couch and grumbled, "Why do they do that? They should be out cuddling some young thing in a hatchway somewhere. Didn't their mothers teach them any better?"
"Their mothers are hungry, Rico, and they're hungry now."
Rico glanced at Elvira with surprise. He was accustomed to speaking to her but getting nothing but grunts for reply. She was already out of her restraints and fighting the toss of the foil, making her way to the aft lockers.
"You're not going out there again," he said. "The seas are a mess, nothing can get through here."
"You will calm down," she said, and it sounded like an order. Elvira peeled off her dive suit and toweled off her finely toned musculature with the candor typical of Mermen. "Care for the others. I will clean out the filters."
As she slipped into a fresh suit, Rico realized he'd been aroused at the sight of Elvira's pale body. Even her thumb-sized nipples seemed muscular in the chill. He would never approach Elvira, both of them knew that, but the surprise of his arousal reminded Rico of Snej, and how much he'd missed her.