Elvira's plan was the logical thing, he knew. He ticked off a list of priorities.
Ben and Crista, he thought. Keep them breathing. Monitor the radio, prepare for surprises by Vashon security.
Elvira swept past him to the hatch without so much as a glance. Rico fought the pitch and roll of the foil to the lockers and pulled out three more dive suits. He worked himself along by handholds in the bulkhead back to the galley. On his way, he listened to the crackle of the radio and the report from the overflights.
"Skywatch leader to base. Charges away. We have your fish, over."
"Roger, Skywatch. We mark your position. Our bird is launched. ETA thirty minutes. Status report."
Thirty minutes! Rico thought.
Their bird must be a foil, and a fast one.
Not room for a lot of hardware or a lot of bodies - good. We might have a few surprises for them.
The radio continued to chatter about the condition of the Flying Fish and speculation on the occupants, but they were quickly out of range.
Rico bent over Ben and saw that he was immobile, his chest was not rising and falling, but his color wasn't bad. He put his cheek to Ben's mouth and detected the slightest breath. Checking the pulse at Ben's neck, he noted that his partner's heart was beating, but only a few beats per minute, His eyes were open, but still. They looked dry, so Rico opened and closed the lids a few times to lubricate them, then left them closed.
He unhooked the restraints and struggled to get Ben into one of the dive suits.
"We're topside," he said, hoping Ben could hear. "They threw some charges at the kelp, but I think it's just surface damage. Elvira's out there unclogging the intakes. Flattery's people have a foil on our tail, they'll be here in no time. We may have to go over the rail."
He heard a groan from Crista Galli, and saw that she was trying to sit up against her restraints.
"Your girlfriend's coming around," he said. "I'll get her into a suit, then get into the code book and let Operations know what's going on. Everybody else seems to know where we are."
He sealed Ben's suit and inflated the collar, just in case. When Rico turned to Crista Galli, he saw that she was crying. Her red-rimmed, swollen eyes stared at Ben's deathlike form on the galley deck. She seemed to be conscious and aware.
"Can you understand me?" Rico asked. In spite of her restraints, he remained well out of reach.
She nodded.
"Yes."
"Have you ever had this reaction before?"
"Yes." Her voice was slurred. "Once. Before he gave me shots. I pretended to take pills, spit them out later."
"What will happen next?"
She tried a shrug. "More of the same. Maybe seizures. It take... a while." She added, in a slurred whisper, "Nobody's ever made me feel like a human being except Ben."
Rico noticed that the pupils of her eyes dilated and constricted wildly.
Must be some potent drugs, he mused. Damn that Flattery.
"We are in the open," he explained, "and helpless. You need to have a dive suit on in case we go into the water."
It flashed on him then what Flattery must've realized all along, what Operations warned in their instructions: "Do not let her into the water. Do not let her contact the kelp." This was speculation, precaution. There would be no other choice if Vashon security showed up, there was no point worrying about it.
"I can help you with it if you can't do it yourself. I'm sorry to say this, but I'd rather not touch you,"
He held the suit out to her at arm's length.
"I can't get out of this harness," she said.
Rico tapped the quick-release mechanism and she was free. He recoiled from her, partly as a reflex, partly because the foil pitched his way.
At this, she cringed away from him, her face even more pale and her jaw set.
"And what do you think I am?" she asked.
"I don't know," he said. "Do you?"
"I know that I don't thin... I can't think that I do thi..." She gestured limply at Ben. "It can't be me!"
"It's the drugs," Rico said.
He tried to keep the anger out of his voice. She needed reassurance, not another enemy. "Remember, the drugs are Flattery's doing, not yours."
Her tears, the way she looked at Ben seemed like the genuine article.
But look at what happened to Ben, he cautioned himself.
"Get your suit on," Rico said. "We don't have much time."
Crista had to slip out of her dress to don the dive suit. Rico knelt beside Ben, a hand on his forehead. He moved a little, and Rico took it for a good sign. His breathing was much stronger.
Crista did not seem modest at all, nor did she look like a monster.
Probably spent so much time as a lab animal she didn't have a chance to get shy.
Rico, like Ben, had been raised among Islanders, a generally shy lot. Rico admitted to himself that Crista had the best-looking legs he'd ever seen. Again, he thought of Snej back at Operations, and sighed. He planned to send a message to her, too, along with whatever he'd think of to say to Operations. He turned back to Crista Galli.
A little pale, he thought.
She seemed very weak, and struggled just to pull her suit on and fasten the seals. Her breathing was rapid and shallow. Her forehead beaded sweat and she was still more pale than when Rico had first seen her in the village. Her eyes were doing their dilation trick and he noticed an uncontrollable tremor in her legs.
"Can you get back into your harness?" he asked.
She shook her head.
"No," she said, her voice weaker now. "It's startin..."
She was drifting out again. She lay down on her couch, eyes still open.
"Are you still with us?" he asked. "Can you hear me?"
"Yes," she said. "Yes."
Rico still didn't want to touch her. Whatever it was, it had nearly killed Ben and he wasn't about to let the same thing happen to himself. He reached around her carefully and snicked the harness into place, then snugged it up with a jerk. He pushed the head of the couch back so that she lay flat. By then Crista was unconscious again.
Rico hurried into his own suit and noted that the seas had calmed somewhat. He could hear the thump and scrape of Elvira at the hull ports, and hoped that the kelp wouldn't set her hallucinating as it did some people. She seemed to have been all right before.
"It'd be just our luck," he muttered to himself. "Best damned pilot in the whole damned world thinking her gauges are grapefruits."
There was a very loud scrape, more of a long, slithering rasp across the top of the foil. Then another. It was the same serpentine sound that the kelp had made when it grabbed them. Rico jumped for the cabin, but it was too late.
The whole foil tipped on its side and he was thrown against the port bulkhead so hard it knocked the wind out of him. He saw, through the swarm of black amoebas across his vision, that they were airborne. He was jostled again, not so much this time, and as the bow of the foil tilted upward he saw them being pulled up into a mass of hylighter tentacles.
"Shit!"
He struggled to his knees and crawled the upended bulkhead to the command couch under the plaz. He could flip open a port and get a shot at it with his lasgu...
That was when he saw how big this hylighter really was. He guessed it at a hundred meters across, with its two lead tentacles, which gripped the foil, at nearly that length. Even the smallest tentacle was thicker than Rico.
They were already a hundred meters or so in the air, and rising.
That pitch back there, he thought, it must've dumped a helluva ballast to be able to pick us up.