The Farpool (13 page)

“Angie, I’m going. It’s something I have to
do. If I don’t, I’ll be in that shop forever…I know me. I need
something like this kickstarter here on my turbo…a kick in the
seat.”

In that moment, Angie knew she would give in
and go too. For better or worse, they were a pair. His life and her
life were all tangled up like spaghetti. If you tried to unravel
spaghetti, what did you have: long strips of nothing. Mush it all
up and pour sauce on it, and then you had something you could
eat.

She knew they were about to try one hell of a
sauce tomorrow.

“Okay.” That’s all she said. That’s all that
would come out.

Chase got on the bike. With only a slight
hesitation, Angie plopped her butt in the rear seat and got
comfortable, fastening her arms around his waist. She always liked
to tickle him a little when she did that and she did that now.

He reached back and pinched her on her
thigh.

“I’ll be at your place at five a.m. sharp.
With all the gear.”

“Should I pack anything…I mean, it’s sort of
like a camping trip, isn’t it? I always hated camping.”

Chase kickstarted the bike and let the engine
rumble for a moment. They both put on their headsets.

“Pack whatever you think you need. But be
ready at five. I’ll be up the street, by that van that’s always on
the street…by the corner.”

She nodded, said nothing.

Chase gripped the handles and they scratched
off down the parking lot, skidding slightly on loose gravel, as he
turned out onto Duncan Street, heading across town to take her back
home.

Angie was glad she had a helmet on while she
was riding with Chase. The faceplate covered the tears that had
started streaming down her cheeks.

Chapter 6

Scotland Beach, Florida

July 25, 2121

5:10 a.m.

Chase was fidgeting nervously until
Angie finally showed up, hustling quickly along the curb from the
Gilliam house toward the parked van. She had a bag full of
something—
Angie, really, do you need half
the house?—
and she broke into a trot when she spotted
Chase and the bike. He had hidden it next to the van, pretty much
out of sight from the street.

“You’re only ten minutes late, girl.”

She hissed at him, intentionally slapping the
bag against him. ‘Yeah…well, it’s not every day a girl goes off
diving into some whirlpool at sea. It’s all my makeup, if you must
know.”

They both laughed at that. Angie never wore
makeup.

Chase drove them down to Sandy Beach and
parked the turbo next to the pier. They unloaded all the scuba
gear.

“I’m going to hike up to the aquarium
alongside the canal…no sense bringing my bike up there…somebody’ll
be looking for it. I told Kloosee to be ready when those sodium
lamps come on inside. Should be about seven.”

Angie was dressed in cutoff jeans and a
T-shirt. She slipped out of her flip-flops and began sorting out
the tanks, regulators, weight belts and other gear. “How are you
getting back?”

Chase shrugged. “Run like hell, I guess. Or
maybe swim.”

She looked at the tanks. “Have we got enough
air, you think?”

“I’ve been wondering about that, too.” He
shrugged. “I’m trusting our friends to help us out on that.
Well…here goes—“ He kissed her on the forehead and turned to run
off, but she grabbed his hand and pulled him back for a longer
kiss.

“You know I’m skipping school today for
this.” She rubbed his hair and the side of his face, feeling that
burr of a beard.

“I can see you’re pretty upset about
that.”

“No, really, I’m okay. I’m ready. I don’t
know what’s going to happen, but I trust you. I don’t know why, but
I do. I want to be with you, like always…even…” she indicated the
sea. “—even out there…wherever we wind up—“

“Just get the gear ready, okay. Hey, I love
you too. You’re good for me.”

She pouted a little. “Thanks. Get going, you
jerk.”

He scrambled up through the dunes, squeezed
through a row of hibiscus and scaled a fence, snagging and ripping
his T-shirt in the process. Soon enough, he landed at the loading
docks and went to the bay they had used before. The roll-up door
was still loose and he slipped inside as easily as before.

They really should get that
fixed,
he muttered.
You never
know who might be breaking in
.

His biggest concern was security…not just the
bots and the lights and motion detectors but the fear that
something had been added, something he didn’t know about. He would
have to be careful.

But nothing seemed to happen. He made the
service hall, knowing full well he was probably on video and
setting off all kinds of alarms. There ahead were the double doors
to the main exhibit hall, but he didn’t need to go out there. The
Waterflow System control panel should be to his right…he consulted
his wristpad for guidance: Angie had taken a series of pictures
when she had scoped out the area a few days before. He studied the
pix, looked around in the dim lighting….

There.

He went down the hall and found the
panels. They were even labeled
WATERFLOW
MANAGEMENT SYSTEM.

He studied Angie’s photos. Yep…this was the
place.

Quickly, he set to work. He had already
studied the gates, locks and general layout of Gulfside’s waterflow
system over the last few days. Now he studied a small
hand-scribbled list of settings he’d cobbled together. It seemed to
match the panel, which was actually a large touchscreen mimic
panel.

The panel was conveniently laid out in a
schematic view, showing all tanks, lines, valves, pumps and gates.
Chase had practically memorized the settings he needed to open the
Dolphin Gallery all the way down to the sea.

He studied the layout and began touching
buttons on the screen.

Right away, the thing asked for a
log-in and password.
Crap
, he
muttered, though he had expected just such an obstacle. He had
several possibilities he could try and right away made it through
the log-in using Dr. Josey Holland’s initials…a reasonable guess
that turned out to be correct.

Now for the password. Chase was no
hacker but he knew a few and they had always said start with the
obvious…the word
password
and
variants of that. So Chase did.

He was rewarded more quickly than he
ever dreamed possible. The password turned out to be
PssWd01
.

Really,
he
half laughed at how easy it had been.
You
guys need a little more training in better security procedures
around here.
But he was in and that was all that
mattered.

Now, Chase began setting up the valves. B1
OPEN. C2 OPEN. A1 and A2 both OPEN. L1 and L2…those were the lock
valves. A small window opened next to those valve labels, giving
him the option to select a Fill Time. He selected Max.

Now for the final step. G1 and G2 were gate
valves that opened the waterway to the aquarium channel and then to
the sea itself. He pressed G1 OPEN, but when he pressed G2, he got
a warning screen.

OPEN TO SEA…PRESS OK TO PROCEED.

He pressed OK.

At that very instant, a warning klaxon
sounded throughout the hall. Emergency lighting on the walls began
flashing like strobes. He didn’t know if it was his valve setup or
if he had triggered another alarm. He didn’t intend to wait and
find out.

Chase streaked back to the loading dock and
slid under the door. Outside, more lights were flashing and horns
going off. He heard shouts…they didn’t come from bots.
People…probably police…were coming. He could hear shouts and
footsteps, doors opening and slamming. The loading dock was bathed
in floodlights.

And through it all, he heard the sound of
rushing water. Water was flowing rapidly through nearby
channels…the connectors and aquarium channels were emptying into
the canal. He ran toward that sound and had to stop short, nearly
plunging into the foaming, hissing water in the channel.

In the glare of the floodlights, and the
first faint orange glow of sunrise, he could see humps glistening
in the water. Humps and fins and flukes. The Dolphin Gallery was
now fully open through a series of locks and gates all the way down
to the Gulf. And the residents of Tank B were noisily honking and
clicking and chattering their way downstream, toward the canal and
the ocean.

He hoped Kloosee and Pakma were among the
crowd.

Voices interrupted his efforts to locate the
Seomish.

“POLICE! GET ON THE GROUND NOW! KEEP YOUR
HANDS OUT---GET ON THE GROUND!!”

He heard the footsteps and saw half a dozen
men backlit in the glare of the lights, scaling the fence, running,
shouting, waving things.

Chase looked back. There was no going back.
He looked at the rush of water in the canal.

The decision took only a split second and the
hell of it was he had almost expected this…he had come
semi-prepared with swim jams underneath his shorts. He stripped
everything off but the jams and executed a perfect racing dive into
the canal waters.

Right away, he was bumped and thrashed by
bodies and shapes fleeing the aquarium. The water was relatively
clear, but cool, very salty and thick with bodies…flippers, fins,
flukes flashed by and he found himself pummeled and knocked about,
until all he could do was let the stream carry him on. Once or
twice, he poked his head up for air, but mostly he stayed submerged
and went with the flow.

He could tell when the ocean was near. The
water changed, it became rougher, saltier, slightly murkier. And
the press of bodies began to thin out.

Chase took a chance and dug in his heels to
stop his forward motion, clawing at the dirt walls of the canal to
slow down. He lifted himself half out and found himself falling
into sand…beach sand.

He had made it down to the beach. Then a
shout, more feet plowing and kicking and stumbling through the
sand.

Angie’s hands helped him to his feet and he
coughed and gagged and spat water for a few moments until he got
his breath.

“Where…what…?”

“Come on…” she yelled. “They’re in the
surf…in the waves…waving at us. Get up!”

Chase struggled to his feet and saw that
Angie already had her gear on. He floundered around, finding his
own gear: flippers, mask, heave up and slip on the tanks, check out
the regulator and mouthpiece. Adjust weights. Dive watch. Buoyancy
packs.

Up on shore, beyond the dunes and the sea
oats, they could hear voices, shouts, they could see flashlights
waving.

“STOP! STAY WHERE YOU ARE…GET ON THE GROUND
RIGHT NOW!!”

Chase peered out past the surf line. He could
see fins circling. It had to be Kloosee and Pakma…Scotland Beach
hadn’t seen a shark sighting in years. But still—

He grinned at Angie and grabbed her by the
shoulders. “This is it! You ready?”

She nodded, slipped her mask down. “Ready as
ever. Let’s go!”

They plunged into the surf and kicked and
scrambled their way through the breakers until they found deeper
water. They didn’t look back and soon ducked under.

There was a surprising amount of light for
early morning and the sea was clear, the seabed sand and silt calm
and generally undisturbed. Right away, they ran into Kloosee and
Pakma, huge hulking shapes easily noticed by their unusual
forepaddles, paddles with hands and fingers.

They didn’t have the echopod and both Chase
and Angie could hear the two Seomish chirping and whistling and
clacking away. They were saying something, indicating something
with their hands, but Chase didn’t understand a thing. Finally,
Pakma swooshed by and stopped, manually placing Chase’s own hands
on Kloosee’s tail flukes. By her motions, she wanted Angie to grab
hold of her flukes the same way.

They’re giving us a
ride,
he thought.
How
convenient.
I
w
onder where we’re going.

But he didn’t spend long thinking about that.
He grasped Kloosee’s tail flukes firmly and hung on.

The four of them headed out to sea
buddy-style, toward deeper water.

The trip lasted half an hour and Chase had no
real idea where they were or where they were going, though he had
dived these waters often the last few years. He looked in vain for
something familiar…a rusting car hulk, a discarded stove, an
ancient refrigerator, some sunken boulders. But he saw nothing.

Then, almost without warning, they entered a
shallow depression ringed with a fence of blue-white coral and he
saw something he had never seen before. There was the usual jumbled
pile of car bodies in the center of the depression. But off to one
side, anchored with some kind of line, floated a most curious
sight.

It was a vessel, a vehicle of some kind,
bearing more than a slight resemblance to a midget submarine. The
vessel was attached at the stern by tow line to another vessel, an
egg-shaped vessel with double rows of fins.

Chase had a feeling he knew what the purpose
of the egg-shaped vessel was.

That’s our ride to…wherever
we’re going
.

Almost as if he read Chase’s mind, Kloosee
circled the two vehicles and eventually brought them to a stop
above the egg-shaped craft. With his forelimbs, he did something to
a small panel on top and a hatch yawned open. Kloosee pointed and
Chase understood he was supposed to enter the craft, which was
barely large enough for one person, let alone two.

Pakma did the same with Angie and after a few
moments, with both Seomish pointing and clicking and whistling and
grunting and chirping, the teen-agers had figured out how to
position themselves inside, head to toe, each facing in opposite
directions.