I hit the Send button with a fist.
“What the hell’s going on!” I shouted, six hours later when I finally got Andrea online. “After all I’m doing for you …”
Her response was immediate: “You did it for yourself.”
I stared at the shape of the computer as if it were another squid, my thoughts layered and conflicting.
“For the fame,” she continued. “The adventure.”
“For the money, Andrea! I’m doing it for the money!”
“Would you have let them cut you up if they were going to turn you into a desk, Carlos? You did it for the chance to finally be a fish.”
Its prow into the wind and waves, the barge lowered two turbines on cables, one off of each side. Just hoisting the house-sized cylinders from the deck and hitting the water had taken two slow, exacting hours. The descent itself required five more. During snags and rest breaks, I inspected the squat towers that would cradle the turbines, darting under and around their angled beams, even though we’d already completed our structural tests.
But there was no escaping my thoughts.
Leaving now — quitting now — would be crazy. Reverse surgery and rehab would take almost a quarter of the time left in my contract, and I’d forfeit everything but the signing bonus. We’d lose the home, our future, and find ourselves back in the city scrambling for wages…. And I would never work for Aro Corp. again in any capacity. Even their competitors would have no reason to rely on me, a hard truth that always led me back to the same worry:
Can I ever trust her again?
The weather had been cooperating, but even nineteen-ton hunks of metal will act like sails in deep currents, and close to sundown we realized there had been a miscalculation. Some pendulum swinging had been accounted for — it was a drop of four hundred feet — but instead of a near-simultaneous mounting, we had a double miss.
Each elevator platform had jets which I could use for final adjustments, but they weren’t powerful enough to muscle the turbines twenty meters against the current.
“We’re twenty east,” I said. “Let’s elevate forty. Bring ’em back up.”
The nearest turbine was a smooth sculpture caught in a web of cables that led upward as far as my sonar reached. ROVs, remote operated vehicles, scooted about or hovered patiently nearby. And when I switched briefly to my fuzzy, nearsighted normal vision, the busy sea became busier, shot through with the ROVs’ beams of light. All of this generated surprisingly little noise: the whirring of ROV props, the harp vibrations of the current against the cables.
The first explosion sounded like God had slapped the surface, a bass thunder that reached me an instant after the VLF net surged with voices.
“Was that the engine?”
“Fire! Fire!”
“Number two crane’s lost all exterior cables—”
The last bit of information I personally witnessed as the turbine sagged in its web. If it fell, it would roll into the cradle tower and ruin weeks of hard labor.
I swam closer, thinking I might use the platform jets to keep it afloat or ease it to the bottom, but two ROVs tumbled into my path as their operators lost contact. I kicked left. One struck my scarred shoulder and numbed my arm.
I had been assigned an emergency frequency to connect me directly to Stenstrom. Would he be there? The way the ROVs had shut down, the comm room might have been destroyed. I said, “This is Garcia—”
He was near panic. “Can you stabilize number two?”
“I’m on it. What’s happening?”
“We’re under attack, speedboats, they’re widecasting some Animal Earth crap!”
Three small cylinders lanced into the far range of my sonar, moving fast. Smart torps. They were beautiful in the way that sharks can be, sleek and purposeful, a hard swarm of warheads chased by their own turbulence.
I probably wouldn’t attract their attention, not being a power source or made of metal — not much metal — but the concussive force of a detonation anywhere nearby would kill me.
I dug and kicked down, down—
Tightness in my bad arm made my effort lopsided, slowing me. The buzzing torpedoes grew very loud.
The rift wasn’t deep compared to the plunging valley where I’d encountered the squid, but at its edge was a thick bulge of carbonate. I ducked past, scraping my hip.
That rock saved me by taking the brunt of the explosions, then nearly killed me as parts of it broke away. I was stunned and slow to move.
Animal Earth. The rant-and-slants they’d posted during our efforts here had been based on a refusal to accept our stated purpose. They were Greens. They should have supported us, but frothed instead about the blatant destruction of ocean habitats…
I stayed in the rift for two hours, watching, listening, afraid to broadcast on any channel in case there were more hunter-killers waiting to acquire targets. The attack had stopped after five minutes, but our radio communications remained incoherent. Stenstrom tried miserably to raise me on the emergency link again and again.
He tried the general frequencies, too, even sharecasting his public response to the attack. One of the speedboats had been apprehended by Japanese military aircraft, and suspects were in custody. Given the armament involved and the coordination of the assault, Stenstrom suggested that the whole thing was a cover for our competitors in the nuclear or oil industries, and already there were conflicting denials and claims of solidarity from Animal Earth spokespeople.
Finally I began my ascent, goaded by the constant dig of the voices in my cheekbone. At one hundred feet I saw a man, a body, deformed by violence and twisting loosely in the current. We hesitated together in the dim, penetrating glow of the sun.
Then I turned my back on him.
Andrea and the boys were well provided for, and she obviously didn’t need me. Brent had never needed me, and Roberto… Roberto was young enough to forget and move on. Let them think I was dead, lost to the tide. The insurance payouts alone would be a fortune.
Four miles proved to be the radio’s range.
I kept going into the beautiful dark and never let anyone intrude on my world again.
About the Author
Jeff Carlson is the international bestselling author of the Plague Year trilogy, Long Eyes, and Interrupt. To date, his work has been translated into fifteen languages worldwide.
He is currently at work on a new thriller novel.
Readers can find free fiction, videos, contests, and more on his website at www.jverse.com including a special Europa-themed photo gallery featuring images from the Voyager 1, Galileo, and Cassini probes.
Also included in the Galleries is “The Making Of Alexis Vonderach,” where award-winning artist Jacob Charles Dietz has arranged a spectacular art sequence. It shows his initial concept work through the final cover of The Frozen Sky.
Jeff welcomes email at jeff@jverse.com.
He can also be found on Facebook and Twitter at www.Facebook.com/PlagueYear and @authorjcarlson
Reader reviews on Amazon, Goodreads, and elsewhere are always appreciated.
Other Books by Jeff Carlson
Interrupt