The Farpool (6 page)

When he turned back, he spotted
one
eekoti
who wasn’t
fleeing. This one was taller, probably an adult. He was running
toward them, waving some kind of handheld device, perhaps a
welcoming gift.

Shots rang out. Loud, popping noises: one,
two, three, four of them. Sharp cracks.

Kloosee felt a sharp pain in his side. He
reached for the pain, and found the lifesuit had been holed,
life-giving water was already spilling out, a steady stream. Then
another shot came and more sharp pain. Kloosee’s limbs buckled and
gave way. He fell headlong into the sand.

As he fell, he saw Pakma was in trouble
too…she was staggering sideways, pitching forward and she fell as
he did, heavily, awkwardly, plowing face first into the sand.

What had happened? Was it the
eekoti
? Was it the
lifesuit?

Kloosee struggled to move, but the water was
leaving him and already breathing was hard…they had backup systems
but—the hole grew darker, larger and he soon disappeared into the
black tunnel, slipping into unconsciousness, spinning spinning
spinning and was sucked in.

Sergeant Carl Wolcott had been with Scotland
Beach’s Uniformed Division for seven years, half of them with the
Beach Patrol Squad. It was interesting work, interesting in the
same sense his pathologist friend Wally Ng talked about dead
bodies…conversation you didn’t want to have at the local coffee
shops, not if you wanted people to stick around. Cops and
pathologists…Carl had often joked with Wally about what it would be
like to attend a pathologist convention, with all the slide shows
and the jokes and the conversations in the hallways over bagels and
coffee.

“Yeah, probably like a proctologist
convention,” Wally always came back. “I’d pay
not
to attend one of those.”

Wolcott had never seen anything like it in
all his years on the Beach Squad. One minute, kids were building
sand castles and teenagers were necking and Moms and Dads were
dipping Junior in the kiddie waves along Shelley Beach and the next
moment, two wackos who looked like creatures from the Black Lagoon
were waddling up out of the ocean, scaring the bejeezus out of
everybody.

He’d fired several shots and the
creatures…things…whatever the hell they were—had gone down fast.
Now they lay writhing in the shallows and beachgoers were starting
to gather.

“Stay back
!
Stay back…it’s still moving—get way back there!”

The crowd pulled back about fifty feet, while
Wolcott crept forward, his gun still in firing position. The nearer
creature was moving, it sounded like squeals or clicks or
something, thrashing about in the sand and water, flinging up dirt
as it writhed. The farther one was mostly in the water, smaller in
size, but still--

Wolcott came up.
What on God’s green earth
--?

The beast—for that was what he had started
calling it in his mind—was not a dolphin. It wasn’t a shark. It had
legs and arms and what looked like armor plating. It had holes in
the armor and water was spouting out of the holes. The beast
squealed some more. And the smaller one down by the waterline
actually seemed to be whimpering.

Wolcott got on the radio, ringing up
Dispatch.

“Kitty, this is Beachside Two-Five…I got some
kind of disturbance down here on Shelley Beach…I don’t know how to
describe it…I have fired several rounds—need backup immediately…and
something else: would you call Gulfside? That’s the Aquarium…we may
need one of them down here…Shelley Beach, just a hundred yards west
of Turtle Key Surf and Board—“

Ten minutes later, Scotland Beach PD’s Beach
Patrol Squad had mustered four officers. They surrounded the
beasts, laying down strips of crime scene tape to form a defensible
perimeter. Two officers—Vang and Nettles—were working the crowd,
trying to keep the curious back out of the way.

A small pickup from the Aquarium pulled up. A
woman in blue scrubs jumped out of the passenger’s side. Wolcott
recognized her. Dr. Josey Holland, Aquarium chief veterinarian.
Holland was tall, gawky, long blond hair—she wore some kind of
denim wrap around her scrubs. She jogged up, went right to the
larger beast and knelt down.

“Careful, Doc…it’s still alive—I dropped it
with two shots—“

Holland was poking and probing around its
neck, or what she thought was a neck. “Barely alive…I’ve never seen
a creature like this before---not a dolphin, not a porpoise…and
this skin, it looks like—“

“Armor,” volunteered Wolcott. He hovered over
her right shoulder, fingers tickling the handle of his revolver,
just in case.

Holland made a decision. “We need to get both
of them into the med pool. I’m calling Nautilus.” She pecked a few
keys on her wristpad, spoke into it and added, “Hurry, will
you…these creatures are dying fast…we need to get them
stabilized—“

Ten minutes later, a specially outfitted
flatbed truck came grinding along the beach, easing past the
growing crowd, hand-waved on by several officers to the downed
creatures. It was the Aquarium’s Nautilus…mounted on top of the
flatbed was an open water tank, a fiberglass pool like you might
find in a backyard, but big enough to hold large marine animals in
a wet environment, while they were in transport.

“Come on,” Holland said, lifting the larger
beast’s legs, “help me get ‘em up and in.”

Wolcott looked on doubtfully. “You want us to
actually grab that thing?”

“I want us to get him and his buddy into the
tank, Sergeant. They’re dying…you can see that, hell, you can hear
it…hear that wheezing? He needs to get into some water—“

So Wolcott, Nettles, Vang and Joiner helped,
along with some burly beachgoers, including one bearded pot-bellied
fellow in a wetsuit about three sizes too small. Pot-belly wouldn’t
pass for a body-builder but he seemed strong as Hercules.
Single-handedly, he hoisted the limbs of the smaller creature and
dragged it through the sand to the truck.

Fortunately, there was a small lift at the
rear.

As soon as both creatures were safely in the
tank of the Nautilus truck, Holland climbed in the cab and motioned
the driver to go. Wolcott decided he’d better follow; he worked out
an alternate duty shift with the other officers and ran for his
motorcycle, parked up next to Lumpy’s Crab Shack by the dune
fields. Seconds later, Wolcott’s police bike was pulling in behind
the Nautilus, as it skidded out onto Citrus Boulevard, heading for
Duncan Street and the right turn into the Aquarium lot.

Inside the cab, Holland was thinking out
loud, as much to herself as to her driver, vet tech Rob
Stauffer.

“We’ll have to put them in Tank B, Rob. And
get the med pool going, make sure it’s up to temperature, salinity,
O2, you know what to check—“

“Yes, ma’am. What are those things…some kind
of orca?”

Holland just shook her head. “Hell if I
know…we may have a new species here…Meier will love that. But first
things first: we have to get them stabilized. Wolcott said he fired
several rounds. And I saw multiple entry wounds in that skin…that’s
the craziest skin I’ve ever seen. Contact Joe Earl too…he’s not a
marine animal guy, but he‘s got a pathology background, he knows
animal surgery…he may have some ideas.”

They turned into the Aquarium parking lot and
headed for the back entrance.

Tank B was one of several holding pools
that Gulfside maintained away from the public areas. It was just
beyond the Penguin Pavilion and Swamptown, behind locked doors and
connected by a narrow channel to a smaller surgical pool, equipped
with all the medical gear that Gulfside could afford, which wasn’t
much. Holland always sighed when she saw the layout inside the med
pool suite.
If only we had more
donors
, she would say to herself, and to anyone else
who would listen.
A few more rich
benefactors. And about a hundred million in loose change would
help. Then we could really fly.

She felt sorry for the dolphins in the
Dolphin Gallery and the belugas and the penguins and seals and
especially, Ernie, the tiger shark, who was one of Gulfside’s more
popular attractions. They deserved better. A lot better.

Holland supervised off-loading the
creatures—already she had named them in her mind Ralph and Alice,
thinking of the Kramdens and the Honeymooners—and immediately
changed into her wet gear. She entered the medpool and laid out all
her instruments, tugging up the medbot unit, with its containment
tank full of nano-critters and a control panel, even a small
joystick for flying through the innards of her marine animal
patients. Holland wasn’t too sure about driving the small flotilla
of medbots and surgicytes—she’d skipped the detailed training the
manufacturer offered because Gulfside wasn’t the Georgia Aquarium
or the Shedd Aquarium and money didn’t grow on trees.

Holland helped her intern Tracey Rook and her
technician Rob maneuver Ralph into the pool, positioning him as
best they could in the float sling, then securing the animal with
straps and hooks.

Rob just shook his head, looked up
quizzically. “
Tursiops
truncatus
, do you think, Doc?”

Holland shook her head, sizing up the animal
with her hands and fingers. “Doesn’t look like it to me…but this
guy must be twelve, maybe fourteen feet long, weigh a ton or
more.”

Tracey Rook sniffed and ran her fingers
lightly over the skin. “This skin is weird…feels like chitin, like
some kind of composite—“

That’s when they found the fasteners.

To Josey Holland’s ever-lasting surprise,
what she had thought was a particularly tough outer skin membrane
turned out to be a suit of some kind, like a wet suit. By pushing
and pulling, struggling and heaving, grunting and straining, the
three of them were able to pull the suit off Ralph and see what the
creature really looked like.

Tracey put hands to her mouth. “My God—“

Longer and bulkier than a dolphin, Ralph had
a beak, a melon, forelimbs and rear limbs, like a dolphin. He had
dorsal fins, in fact two of them. Tail flukes. Medial notch in the
rear flukes. But it was the hands. The forelimbs, with fingers. Six
in all, a thumb and five metatarsals.

No one said a word for a full minute. They
all just stared in awe.

Holland took a deep breath. “Okay… so we have
a new species here…Gulfside may have a new exhibit. Now, we just
have to keep him…and his mate—alive.”

Ralph was starting to thrash about in the
sling, so Rob immediately pulled up the anesthetics shelf. It hung
down from an articulating arm over the pool. “What do you think,
Doc? Sodium pentathol with halothane?”

“I’m thinking…I’m thinking…let’s see, I make
him about a ton…two thousand pounds, make it three, set the dose
for that. And let’s do a separate dose cocktail of fentanyl and
sevoflurane. Right there, anterior to the pectoral fin—“She
indicated a spot below one of Ralph’s fins. “Hopefully there are
veins nearby—“

Tracey was pulling up another piece of gear.
“I’ll get URI ready.” URI was the Ultra Resonant Imager. “If I can
fit the thing over top of him—“

Anesthetic was administered to both Ralph and
Alice at the same time. From an exterior view, it seemed that
Ralph’s injuries and wounds were more severe. “We’ll start with
him,” Holland decided.

The scanning was done in silence, only
briefly interrupted by a few
mmm’s
and
wows
and a lot of
head scratching and throat clearing. Someone threw in a
‘
What the hell is that
?,
too.

Holland did her dictation to URI’s recorder.
“I’m seeing things I have no idea what they are…lesions in what I
think is the reticulum…possible enteric vein damage…if this is the
stomach area like I suspect. Extensive tissue damage to what looks
like the caudate lobe of the liver, also suprarenal glands and
gastroplenic ligaments—“

“Those could be shell fragments in and along
the pyloric sphincter,” offered Rob, studying the images. “Severely
detached mucosae—“

“And there’s no blowhole,” said Tracey.
“Neither of them—they’re not mammals at all. Pure water
creatures.”

“At least, we won’t have to worry about
aspiration. Let’s get the big one prepped immediately. I’ll fire up
the bots.”

Ralph would need surgical intervention right
away.

The medbot insertion went well enough
and Holland quickly warmed to the task.
It’s like learning to ride a bicycle,
she told
herself.
Except I don’t recognize anything
in here
…Still she was determined and she set to work
grimly, cauterizing, slicing, re-sectioning, stitching and
patching, using the bots and a handful of other endoscopic
tools.

The surgery lasted almost two hours. When she
figured she was done and Ralph was sown up and the bots had been
extracted, she told Rob to lower the float sling.

“I want him completely submerged while he
recovers. Leave him in the sling. And get Alice prepped too.”

The surgery on Alice was less involved; her
wounds were less severe. Holland finished with her in an hour and
ordered the same post-op procedures.

Two hours later, Rob stood next to Holland in
the medpool, putting instruments away and securing the containment
cylinder, the URI probe and the instrument trays.

“Now we wait,” Holland muttered. “We’d better
get cleaned up.”

“I’m thinking this is a completely new
species,” Rob said. “Think what that could mean for us.”