War Surf (6 page)

Chad read the message aloud. “All systems normal, boss.” Those words always warmed my heart.

Reassured, I spoke to Sheeba through my helmet sat phone. “Switch on your metavision, dear. It’ll help you see.”

“Try this, Sheeba.” Winston accelerated to top speed, then stood up in his stirrups and nonchalantly crossed his arms. Breezes whipped at his surfsuit as he skimmed over the waves, steering the jet ski with his thighs. I’d seen him do this trick before.

Immediately, Sheeba followed suit. “Weeee!” she squealed, cutting a wide figure eight. For a beginner, she caught on fast. “Para-physical!”

Naturally, I had to prove I could do the trick as well. Verinne deployed her Bumblebee to take pictures, and we started bouncing over each other’s wakes and getting air, which is not as easy as it looks, standing up with your arms crossed.

“Ooh! I see it!” Sheeba pointed south.

We all slowed down and scanned the horizon. Metavision turned the muddy sea to iridescent purple, and the sky glowed gold. Yes, far to the south, there was one small speck of black.

“Right.” “That’s it.” “I see it, top,” we chorused. The seafarm.

The way Shee bounced in her saddle made us laugh. Surfing with an eager newbie gave our sport a fresh tang, and in high spirits, we raced each other across the dingy waves, then braked and coasted into the foamy lee of the giant seafarm. The solar still loomed much larger than the video had led me to expect, and the dome, coated in Gromic.Com’s gooey black paint, towered half a kilometer above sea level. We were supposed to climb that?

“Hmm.” Verinne pointed to a patchy area halfway up the dome. “Should’ve brought my cameras.”

I cued my visor for zoom, and when the image magnified, I saw the moving figures. Agitators. Twenty at least. They’d rigged flimsy rope ladders, and they were clinging to the dome’s exterior, scraping off a small swath of black paint.

“They’re not wearing surfsuits,” said Sheeba. “They’re breathing atmosphere. Doesn’t that mean they’ll die?”

True enough, they wore only their faded gray Gromic.Com uniforms. A few sported makeshift hoods, and most wore strips of cloth tied over their faces. Thin protection against poisonous atmosphere.

“Surfsuits are not standard issue for workers.” Verinne flipped open the saddlebag to get her climbing gear.

“Yeah, protes don’t go outside much,” said Winston.

“But they’re just kids.” Sheeba gazed at the workers for a long time.

I chewed my lip, wanting to advise her to look away. Negative images like that can stick in your mind for years. Like lychee nuts. Bright little red fruits. They get inside your dreams. Look away, Sheeba. I was on the verge of speaking, but Verinne beat me to it.

“Ignore them, dear. Protes never live long anyway.”

Sheeba said nothing.

The choppy waves bounced us around, and the sea-farm’s collar rose and fell with mountainous slapping quakes. I tried to lasso a cleat on the collar, but the swells kept throwing off my aim. Heat was building up inside my suit, so I checked my watch again. Almost 11:00 a.m., local time. We were behind schedule. I boosted my suit’s coolants and studied that collar of machinery. Boarding in these heavy seas would not be simple.

“I wanna talk to those kids.” Sheeba looped her tether line around her forearm and stood up in her saddle.

“Crazy girl, you’ll overturn!” I shouted.

Before any of us could react, she made a dazzling leap onto the collar, grabbed one of the oxygen mills and tied off her line. “Throw me your ropes. I’ll pull you in,” she said.

“Hey, guys, I have an idea.” Winston had been goofing around, turning his jet ski in lazy donuts among the waves. Now he spurted twenty meters away from us, then did a tight U-turn, revved up and headed straight into the collar at ramming speed.

“What is he doing?” Verinne rose in her stirrups, one gloved fist pressed to her helmeted mouth. “He minks he can jump his jet ski onto the collar.”

“He’ll kill himself,” I murmured, disbelieving.

As he roared past, he yelled, “Watch this, Sheeba.”

Winston impacted the collar just as it was rising on a massive wave. When the jet ski tumbled, Win flew over the handlebars. He whacked into the face of a solar collector, which luckily swiveled on its mount and spun with his weight. Win accelerated like a space probe looping around the sun, then rocketed off in a short parabolic arc, splashed down in the waves and sank.

Sheeba dove into the water. I was staring dumbfounded at the empty place in the waves when I heard Verinne scream. Curiously, my first thought was how rarely Verinne raised her voice.

“Stop her!” Verinne screamed again. “She’ll drown. I didn’t show her how to inflate her life vest.”

Verinne’s words incited me to inflate my own life vest. Then the adrenaline of battle kicked in for both of us, and we settled into calm, swift action. In seconds, we secured our jet skis to Sheeba’s line, then plopped into the sea and began paddling around the surface like snorkelers, peering into the deeps. With metavision, we could see hundreds of meters down. And there was Sheeba, ten fathoms below, dodging among the clabbered spirals of sea trash, kicking her strong young legs toward the surface with Winston’s inert body in tow.

When her helmet broke through the waves, Verinne grabbed her arm, and I yanked the ring to inflate her vest. She was safe. Then I felt for Win’s vest ring. His helmet appeared intact, but his body moved with the slack deadweight of unconsciousness.

“Be gentle. His back is broken,” Sheeba said. “We should call an ambulance.”

Verinne held tight to Sheeba’s arm. “This is a war zone. We’re here illegally. We never call outsiders.”

While they were talking, I speed-called Chad and reported our situation. “Chad will have an ambulance waiting for us at the pier,” I told them.

“Not good enough. We need help now!” Sheeba yelled.

“We’ll call Kat,” I suggested.

“She’s offworld test-driving her shuttle. And Grunze is having quadriceps surgery. He’s probably still under sedation.” Verinne struck the waves with her fist. “Damn. I’m not even uploading any video. Nobody watches a Class One surf.”

I tried to think. “Who else could we trust to keep this quiet?

Verinne wiped a spray of brown foam off her faceplate. “Maybe we could call someone from the Paladin crew.”

“Those pinheads? They’ll never let us live it down,” I said.

“Guys, he has a broken back.” Sheeba pushed away from us and hauled Winston toward her jet ski. “First, I’m going to stabilize him. Them I’m going to call an ambulance.”

“No, Sheeba. We have rules. You can’t—-”

A shadow passed over us, and we looked up to see the gleaming white underbelly of a World Trade Organization police cruiser. The loudspeaker blared, “Nasir Deepra, you are under arrest.”

What? They knew my name? I slapped the side of my helmet. My earlobe. I’d forgotten the magnetic tape to seal my signet implant. Brilliant. The cops had scanned my identity.

“Nass, you’re on your own. Come with me, Sheeba. Hurry!” Verinne mounted her jet ski, whipped out her knife and cut the tether line. “Sheeba, they don’t know who we are. We can still get away. What are you doing?”

Amid the rolling waves, Sheeba was lashing Win’s broken body to the side of her jet ski. She’d improvised a neck brace out of the seat pad. Clever, I noted, even as a lump of bilious dread rotated in my gut. Me, Nasir Deepra, trillionaire, chairman emeritus, member of half a dozen Com boards, I was under arrest for trespassing! The war surfer’s deepest humiliation. And on a freaking Class One surf! I called Chad to mobilize my lawyers.

“Sheeba. Come,” Verinne commanded.

“I can’t.” Sheeba finished lashing Win’s body. “Go on. Find Winny an orthopedic surgeon. And get an Isis amulet. The best ones are made of jasper.”

Verinne hesitated only a second. When she revved up her jet ski and took off, her wake splashed in our faces. Steam was rising from the ocean now, and grayish white-caps churned around the seafarm, pitching us like corks. One huge crasher drove me against Winston’s overturned jet ski. Something snapped in my shoulder, and my left thumb tingled with an IBiS alert. “Norphine!” I shouted to my suit. As the cop cruiser lowered its grappling hook, I watched Verinne disappear in the violent sea.

The WTO cops rescued us just before the afternoon twisters touched down. Climbing through the smog in their cruiser, we caught glimpses of monstrous waterspouts, and I visualized Verinne dodging through the gale. Strange providence. Our exit came just in time, but we could hardly view the World Trade Org as a savior.

The cops took the three of us to a detention center in Kobe, Japan, and by the time we got there, Chad had arranged a teleconference with my lawyers. I liked Kobe, nice restaurants, but we didn’t see much of it on that trip. Nor did we see a doctor, not even a cyberdoc. Following my cue, Sheeba steadily refused to give her identity—she giggled and played coy with the cops, treating the whole experience like a game—but that didn’t prevent them from sampling her DNA and tagging her with a trespass violation. Poor Win logged an arrest record, too, though he didn’t know it till later, when he woke up in a Nordvik health church with six spanking new artificial vertebrae.

Chad paid the fines, they let us go, and for nine days, I became the laughingstock of war surfers. Nasir Deepra jokes suffused the airwaves. Lame. Stupido. But much worse than that, the Agonist crew slipped into second place in the northern hemisphere—and that jerkwad Paladin crew took first rank!

Back home in the privacy of my condo, I tore out the signet with my fingernails. If I’d been flexible enough, I would have kicked myself in the skull. Instead, I called Shee for a therapy session. Deep-tissue massage, that’s’ what I needed. As she straddled my back on the floor mat in my observatory, I whimpered softly.

“Surfing didn’t used to be this hard. What’s wrong with me? How could I go so limp on a freaking Class One?”

“It doesn’t matter, beau. We saved Winston’s life.” Since our return, Sheeba had grown distracted and subdued, probably worried about the arrest.

“I’ll clear your record, Shee, no matter what it costs.”

She dug her thumbs into my trapezius muscles. “Do you think those kids knew they were going to die?”

“They think I’m an idiot,” I mumbled into my pillow—meaning of course my fans and rivals, not the pathetic Gromic.Com kids. I felt too chagrined to meet Sheeba’s eyes. After all the bragging I’d done about my surfer skills, what must she think of me? That arrest had wounded me in the tenderest part of my makeup.

“They were so
small
,” Sheeba said. “I’ve heard employees tend to be stunted because of their diet, but why don’t they eat better? Their food’s free.” She leaned on my back and crushed the air out of my lungs. My spine popped in three places. “And why did they go outside without gear? That was askew.”

“We’ll have to do a gnarly bold surf to get back into first place.” I chewed my pillow and brooded. “Something huge and unexpected. Maybe the
Lorelei
”

Sheeba’s fingers traced circles in my hair. “Kat mentioned a zone called Heaven.”

“Kat should keep her mouth shut.”

I twisted the pillow. Kat kept harping on the one zone we could never go near. Still, we needed to pull off a mega-mother of a war surf—and soon. What would Sheeba think if we settled for second place?

“Forget what’s past. Focus on what’s next,” I muttered, my personal motto.

“Because the future is certain, but the past can change,” Sheeba replied. Then she blew a raspberry against my neck. “It’s true, Nass. We revise our memories all the time. It’s how we stay happy. Like making up fairy tales.”

More mystical effervescence. At least she sounded more cheerful. I rolled to face her. How bewitching she looked straddling me on the mat. “Well, our future certainly has to include one huge, hairy war surf to take back the top rank.”

She grinned. “Heaven?”

“Not Heaven. You can be certain of that.”

“Ne-ver. Do I have to spell it?”

“But your lamebrain arrest doesn’t leave us any choice.”

“Katherine, that’s absurd.”

Kat and I circled each other practically nose to nose in the center of my observatory. The key to her heart bounced on its silver chain and caught the light every time she moved.

“We have to surf Heaven,” she ranted.

“No. We can surf the
Lorelei
. It’s a major Class Nine, and it’ll earn us more than enough points to take back first rank.”

The others watched from the sidelines, probably hoping for action. In our long, eventful relationship, Kat and I had more than once come to blows.

“They’re calling us dinosaurs.” Kat’s front teeth protruded dangerously over her lower lip. “They say we’re obsolete. Nasir, they’re
laughing
at us.”

As I cower here in this airless fluorescent room waiting for my future to unreel, how well I recollect our grim mood after the seafarm fiasco. My ego was rubbed raw. When a surf goes right, it’s transcendent, but if you get cocky and let details slide, you can make a royal botch of things. Kat swore we would not let that happen again. We would prepare with utmost exactitude. We would focus, pay attention, itemize.

“But that won’t be enough to get us through Heaven!” I roared.

Kat and I had been wrangling for days. She called me a mouse. I called her a redheaded fascist. I spouted breathtaking lies to scare my friends away from Heaven. My excuses ranged from limp to fairly ingenious, but I never gave the real reason. That was too shady and convoluted to explain.

Just as I was about to sputter one more annihilating insult, Verinne interrupted. “Nasir, please. I need this.”

Cara Verinne. Her chalky brows rose in two hopeful arcs toward her widow’s peak, and her dry gray eyes urged me to yield. Verinne wanted Heaven to be her swan song, her grand finale. Quietly, she coughed into her handkerchief with a hacking sound that cut through my resolve. It killed me to disappoint Verinne.

“We’ll vote,” Kat said. “Verinne and me, that’s two for Heaven. Who else?”

Grunze nibbed his bald head and gave me a sheepish grin. “I’m with the girls on this.”

“Grunzie!” Betrayed by my best friend.

“Ha, three votes. Majority rules.” Kat sashayed around my futon, gloating.

“Screw voting. We WILL NOT do this surf.” I went bonzo and started throwing cheese snacks. I threatened to lock up the tequila and cancel the Web site. I was desperate. For a fleeting instant, I actually considered telling them the truth about Heaven.

Thank the idol gods, events tend to arrange themselves by laws other man human will. That very day, an enormous CME occurred. For the uninitiated, that’s “Coronal Mass Ejection.” Basically, it’s an aneurysm on the sun. Picture shock waves of solar wind spewing out from the sun’s corona and colliding with the Earth’s magnetic field. Intense X rays blast the ionosphere, and gigatons of solar protons auger in to zap communications. Lethal radiation builds up, threatening even the most spaceworthy passenger cars and disturbing the peace of war-surfing parties. This timely CME put Heaven beyond the pale.

But the canceled trip left Verinne devastated. She tried not to show it, although even Winston noticed her long silences. By that time, Verinne was spending half her waking hours in acute bioNEM therapy, and she admitted to me privately one night that it wasn’t helping. I was the only one who knew how fast her time was running out.

To comfort Verinne and placate my crew, I offered to underwrite the full cost of surfing the
Lorelei
, a mega-challenging Class Nine rain-harvesting ship owned by Greenland.Com. Like Heaven, the
Lorelei
would be a “first assault,” meaning no other crew had tried it yet. If we performed well, the
Lorelei
would put us back on top.

Let me be frank though. My main objective was to restore Sheeba’s faith in me. That seafarm episode had left her quiet and gloomy, but if anything, it deepened her interest in surfing. She still hoped to find her dark canal, or whatever the heck it was. And I needed her approval too much to tell her she couldn’t come. I needed her to witness my boldness. And, well, if she wanted dark scenes, the
Lorelei
would fill the bill.

Bombed out, radioactive and presumed lifeless, the old rain ship drifted in the Arctic Ocean. Why, you may ask, was this disabled hulk rated Class Nine? Partly due to its high ambient radiation, but mainly because of its cargo. The
Lorelei
carried a cache of fetuses. They were frozen DNA duplicates of Greenland.Com’s senior staff—-a sort of key-man insurance policy. When the Greenland execs hid their crèche aboard the
Lorelei
, they didn’t account for the whims of the ship’s aging and poorly maintained nuclear reactor.

Its explosion gutted the ship and fried the workers en masse. Still, many experts believed the cryogenic tanks preserved the precious cargo—and talk about salvage value. If those embryos were still viable, their price on the hot market would be staggering. But no one could go aboard to check because the ship was tied up in a lawsuit, and the World Trade Org maintained a sensor-net blockade to keep everyone out. That WTO blockade pegged the
Lorelei
a Class Nine.

“Strictly speaking, it’s not a war,” Verinne pointed out. “There are no hostiles.”

“What do you call a WTO lawsuitr I argued. “Nothing’s more hostile than that. Besides, the
Lorelei
has an official zone rating. All crews recognize it.”

“But I don’t have a rad-hardened surfsuit,” said Winston.

“Quit grousing. You can afford it.” Grunze scooped up a cracker full of cheese dip and swallowed it whole, then noisily licked his fingers.

Perched on my sofa, Shee watched our faces and listened. She wore a lavender sari and a frosting of peach skin dye. Her pinwheel, turquoise-and-white contact tenses spun disconcertingly every time she blinked, and her hair was stuffed under a white knit cap, which made her look younger than ever.

Kat fidgeted beside her, flushed and ruddy, in jet beads and formfitting black suede, wrapping a strand of red hair round and round her index finger. Verinne, in her usual dun unisuit, crouched on the floor and squeezed medicinal drops in her eyes. Winston, in elegant silks, roamed aimlessly in the background, playing with my telescopes. Grunzie and I sprawled on the futon in our terry robes, near the food. We were feasting on cheese snacks, popping them into our mouths by the handfuls. Of course we all wore stomach pacemakers to control our digestion and limit caloric intake.

“The hard part is getting through the sensor net. That’s mega-sleek tech,” said Kat.

“Right. We can’t circumvent it, so we run straight through it,” I said.

Verinne wiped the excess eyedrops from her cheeks. “Run a WTO blockade? It’s never been done.”

“The trick is speed,” I said. “We’ll be in and out so fast, they won’t even notice.”

“And how do we achieve this faster-than-light velocity?” Verinne asked.

“Yeah, sweet-pee?” Grunze engulfed another cracker. “Don’t tell me you’re thinking about the
Celerity
.”

When I grinned and nodded, Grunzie flashed his teeth. Kat spat out her strand of hair and said, “Ooh.” And Verinne popped open her notebook to run a search.

Winston said, “What’s the
Celerity
?’

Win knew about the
Celerity
, but he’d forgotten. So I explained it again, partly for Sheeba’s benefit The
Celerity
was an experimental, high-speed, plasma-powered submersible. It had been developed in secret by Deuteronomy.Com, on whose board of directors I faithfully served. Taking the
Celerity
out for a recreational spin wasn’t exactly orthodox, even for a board member. But we Agonists had our ways.

“Urn, Nasir?” Sheeba actually raised her hand like a schoolgirl. Those pinwheel contact lenses made it impossible to guess what she was thinking. “This rain ship, are all the workers dead?”

“Scorched to cinders.” Grunze flexed his triceps. “The nuclear blast went through that ship like a blowtorch.”

“Hostiles won’t be a problem,” Verinne added as she browsed her search results, “although we may get some noteworthy Reel.”

Sheeba kept gazing wide-eyed, evidently hoping for more explanation, and those three adorable little furrows creased her eyebrows. I squeezed her hand.

“The
Celerity’s
docked in Point Barrow,” Verinne announced. For fast info retrieval, count on Verinne every time.

“Perfect,” I said. “It’ll be a short hop from there to the
Lorelei
, once we find her.”

Once we find her, yes. The WTO’s sensor net blocked the rain ship’s location on satellite scans. Didn’t I say this was a Class Nine surf?

But trust Verinne. In the next few days, she scanned the Arctic from coast to coast using magnetic resonance and gamma-ray triangulation. Her scans turned up a gargantuan list of submarine objects somewhat close in size to the rain ship. Then, with sublime artistry, she programmed an algorithm to sift the data based on the
Lorelei’s
technical specifications. From the two hundred thousand possibles her search yielded, we were able to pick out the
Lorelei
by exact weight.

While everyone was toasting Verinne’s success, Sheeba pulled me aside. “Nass, this rain ship rattles me. My aura’s turning beige.”

“Dear heart.” I embraced her. Despite my spine extension, Shee still overtopped me, and when we cuddled, my nose nestled sumptuously under her chin. From there, I said, “Sheeba, everybody’s spooked by a Class Nine. All you need is confidence.”

“Beau, that’s not it”

“Kat’s been needling you. Just tune her out, Shee. Confidence is a matter of acting. Strut onto the stage like you own it, and—”

She pushed away and shook her head. “We’ll find dead bodies.”

“Oh.” I patted her hand. The Reel. The thought of the rotting corpses aboard that ship gave me the willies, too. “Don’t worry, Shee. In time, you’ll learn to disconnect. It just takes practice.”

“Disconnect.” She said the word as if testing the way it felt on her tongue. After a long silence, she said, “The dark canal is meta-grievous, beau.”

Her words chilled me. I stroked her silky arm, envisioning grisly scenes. Putrid flesh, blistered bones, loose hanks of hair. Memories swirled up from the boggy bottom of my past, images I tried every day to forget. Suddenly, the taste of lychee nuts filled my mouth, and I swallowed hard.

“Darling, we can arrange not to see any dead bodies. Will that suit you?”

She seemed preoccupied, and when I kissed her, she barely kissed back.

That same hour, I rewrote our surf plan. Instead of boarding the
Lorelei
, we would plant a transponder on the exterior hull. That would verify our feat. Nothing fancy, no run-ins with scorched cadavers. No five-star Reel either, but since I was footing the bill, my crewmates had to agree. Of course, only a powerful hyperwave transponder could break through the WTO’s sensor-net blockade, and that meant a severe price tag. I sent Chad to cash some bonds.

In the tense quiet of my observatory three nights before the surf, we delegated tasks. Verinne would track the rain ship’s drifting course. Grunze and I would steal the
Celerity
. And Kat would stock our base camp—Winston’s yacht. Win would sail the vessel up from Baffin Bay, anchor off the Alaskan coast and play bartender. Winny didn’t like his role. He wanted to come on the surf. But his backbone was still healing, and besides, I didn’t give him a choice. He might screw up again.

The worst problem was, the submersible would carry only four people. So someone else besides Winston had to stay behind. When I named Grunze, he spat out his mouthful of martini and almost choked.

“You can’t pick Sheeba over me!” His meaty fist pounded the table and made our cocktail glasses jump. “You need me, Nass. Everything depends on speed, and a newbie’ll slow you down.”

“For once, I agree with Grunze,” said Kat. “Sheeba’s liable to panic. She’s too green.”

I tried to catch Sheeba’s eye, hoping my choice pleased her, but she drew back into the sofa cushions and toyed with her navel ring.

“You should have seen her at the seafarm,” I said. “She was terrific.”

“Right, the seafarm. That stellar success.” Kat flicked her nails.

Verinne remained stiffly mute.

“Grunze, it’s a four-seater.” I faked a clownish grin. “You want to sit in my lap?”

His facial musculature twisted as if he might cry. “Where are your loyalties?”

Where, indeed? Grunze and I had been friends for a hundred years. We’d shared secrets and stock tips and sexually transmitted diseases. I couldn’t answer his question, then or now. As I wait in this anteroom to die, his crestfallen gaze still skewers me. I wronged you, Grunze.

“It’s all right, beau.” Sheeba bounded off her sofa and scrambled into the hammock beside Winston. “I’ll wait behind and go next time.”

Win fondled her waist, and his lewd expression drove Grunze off my mental scope. “Sheeba, you’re coming with me.”

We didn’t draw straws or cast lots. As financier, I made the choice by fiat. Sheeba, my inexperienced newbie therapist, would take the place of our seasoned crewmate, Grunze. No one liked it. Yes, it made a rift in our group. A subtle fissure.

We left Nordvik at dawn—always dawn, that ominous hour. I checked at least twenty times that I’d locked my new emerald signet ring in my safe. I would not make mat mistake again. Grunze, still grumpy and miffed, flew us straight across the pole and landed on Win’s yacht, anchored in MacKenzie Bay. No one was surprised to find Win still snug asleep in his cabin. His bartending skills wouldn’t be needed till later.

Filching the submersible from Deuteronomy.Com proved simple enough, once Chad negotiated the various bribes. As we drove back to the yacht, Grunze hardly spoke three words. But sunlight filtered through the Arctic smog like honey, and the sub’s power hummed through the steering yoke. At the yacht, we zeroed our clocks, waved goodbye to Grunze and glided away in the sub. I used my travel mirror to check my hair. Zone rush was building around us like a static charge.