Cutting Edge (2002) Read online

  Cédric was thoughtful. “We need to have a look at what’s agitated it.”

  “Are you sure? I don’t know I’d want to approach the creature if it was in a sedate mood.”

  “We saw a repeater in the cable about forty meters back. They’re spaced fifty meters apart. Unless my estimate’s off by a long throw, we’ll find another over by the shark.”

  “You think that could be what’s making it act up?”

  Cédric’s shrug went unseen inside the bulky aluminum alloy shell of his hardsuit.

  “The laser pump’s an expensive contraption, Marius. I’d just as soon spare it from becoming an hors d’oeuvre,” he said. “Besides, it may be holding a residual charge. That could prove your idea about the cable attracting it to be half right. Or less wrong, anyway. And I figure you’d enjoy the chance to call me an ass.”

  “In this case, I’ll settle for thinking you one.”

  Cédric chuckled a little. “Is your POD toggled on?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Then we won’t have to get too close. You saw how it turned from us before.”

  Marius fell silent, conversely indicating his doubts weren’t at all quieted. But Cédric was reassured by how well the protective oceanic device had performed on the goblin’s approach. Designed to irritate the same sensory organs that allowed sharks to home in on their kills, the POD emitted a 360-degree electrical field that had apparently caused their unwelcome welcomer sufficient distress to make it avoid them.

  “Come on,” Cédric said. “I’ll lead the way so you won’t be the first of us to get chewed to pieces.”

  Before Marius could finish voicing his sarcastic thank-you, Cédric depressed the pedals inside the hardsuit’s oversize Frankenstein boots—he’d never been told what to properly call the encasements for his feet—and activated his thruster unit.

  Its motors engaged with a gentle kick. There were two blade-driven thrusters oriented for horizontal movement, another pair for vertical propulsion, any of which could be used singly or in combination to allow full omnidirectional control. Now all four whirred to life at once.

  As the motor vibrations steadied to a faint pulse, Cédric lifted off the seabed in underwater flight, his body remaining in an upright position. Marius swept along behind and to port, careful to stay wide of his backwash.

  They closed distance with the shark in a rush and immediately caught its awareness. It withdrew from the sandbank and swung around to regard them, its small round eyes cold and alert, gleaming in its ghastly head like chips of black mirrored glass.

  The men assumed stationary hovers, their horizontal propellor blades slowing.

  “Why hasn’t your friend left?” Marius said.

  “Our friend,” Cédric amended. “Give it a chance to react to our electronic security blanket.”

  The shark kept watching them, turned in their direction, stilled by their intrusive presence.

  After several long moments it lunged.

  Cédric released a gasping exhalation. He heard Marius blurt a stream of invective in his earbud. Its stiletto-toothed mouth agape, the shark came on fast, straight—and then veered away with a lashing herky-jerky motion barely three meters from where the two men hung suspended over the sandbank.

  Cédric watched it disappear from sight, felt the knot in his stomach loosen, and took a deep breath of the hardsuit’s recycled oxygen.

  “Tell me something,” Marius said. The scratchy tremor in his voice was not due to any transmission breakup. “What’s the effective range of our PODs?”

  “Seven meters.”

  “The shark should have been informed of that specification, don’t you think?”

  Cédric grunted in response and thrust forward through the water. Marius followed. Seconds later they reached the churned up patch of seabed that had been the target of the goblin’s battering frenzy, eased off their footpads, and made a floating descent.

  Cédric had scarcely alighted when he saw evidence that his suspicions had been on the mark. Plucked from the unsettled deposits was a cable segment with a lumpish bulge in it, often described as resembling a snake that had swallowed a rodent—a repeater case. It must be what had aroused the goblin’s attention, he thought. No great surprise there, though Cédric made a mental note to corner one of the ship’s cable technicians and find out for sure whether the component could hold a charge despite a widespread systemic power failure.

  He was still examining the length of cable when something unusual did catch his eye. Very unusual, in fact.

  Cédric looked down at it a moment, baffled. Not far from the repeater, a section of the cable remained partially buried under a thin layer of sand and clingy vegetation. He reached down to clear the material away with his robotic prehensor claws, his fingers working actuators inside the manipulator pod. Then he scrutinized his discovery from a graceless bent-at-the-knees position—the hardsuit’s limited number of hydraulic rotary joints did not permit bending at the waist.

  “Marius, come have a peek,” he said.

  Beside him, Marius assumed a comparably awkward stance to look at the watertight rectangular box.

  “A splice enclosure,” he said. “I didn’t know the wire had old repairs.”

  “It doesn’t. Or it shouldn’t. None.”

  “You’re positive?”

  “None,” Cédric repeated. “You can take a look at the grid charts once we’re back on the ship. But trust me, I’d remember. I’ve been maintaining the cable almost since it was laid.” He carefully extracted the splice housing from the mud with his prehensors. “Something else. The enclosure doesn’t look like any type Planétaire’s used in the past. It’s very similar, yes. Not identical.”

  Marius produced a confused frown. “Do you think it has some connection to the service failure?”

  “No. You saw where a dredge frame tore up the cable. That was unmistakable.”

  “Then what are you trying to say?”

  “I’m not certain.” Cédric paused. “But this is a damned mystery.”

  Marius’s frown deepened. “Do we tell Gunville about this now or later?”

  Cédric silently withdrew a hand from the sleeve of his hardsuit and flipped a switch on the radio console illuminating its inner hull’s chest piece. The diver-to-surface channel opened up with a faint hollowness that he always associated with holding a paper-cup-and-string telephone to his ear in childhood.

  “Now,” he said at last. “We’d better let him know right away.”

  In the Africana’s monitoring operations room, Captain Pierre Gunville already knew.

  His eyes circles of bright green fire in a smooth, mocha brown face—at fifty-two years old, Gunville was sufficiently vain to pride himself in a complexion free of lines, wrinkles, or sagging skin—he stood watching an alarm light flash on a signal column in front of him, sliding his right forefinger over a rudimentary mustache, and silently mouthing the words to a folk ballad he’d learned long, long ago. Its expression of a heart captured by desire, of grace through love’s devotion . . . not in the five hundred years since the song’s composition had anything surpassed it.

  “Belle qui tiens ma vie, captive dans tes yeux, wui m’as l’ame ravie, d’u souris gracieux . . .”

  “Sir, Dupain’s hailing on the transceiver.” Seated with his back to Gunville, one of the half dozen handpicked crewmen at the consoles glanced over from the marine radio’s surface station, his earphones pulled down off his head. “How do you want me to respond?”

  The red alarm light continued its steady blinking. Gunville stood in his customary place at the operation room’s rear, moved his finger back and forth over the faint dash of hair above his upper lip, and whispered remembered verses of song. He’d been growing the mustache for less than a week, and it was at the irksome stage where it was neither here nor there—an adolescent’s whiskers. But Jacqueline had told him she found mustaches appealing on men of his type, though she hadn’t elaborated on just what typ
e that was, and by her lack of specificity might as well have said she found it appealing on a mulâtre . Gunville could read between the lines and accept social enlightenment for the theatrical prop it was. Still, he had to admit to being beguiled by the siren. And everything balanced out in the end. Gunville would show her the fullness of his passion, then leave her stung by his spite.

  “Sir—”

  “I know. Dupain calls.” Gunville was disappointed by Andre’s skittishness. The find below had been anticipated. Only its timing had been at question. “You can tell him I’m busy with a mechanical problem at the aft crane. Or in the engine room. Or that I’m holding a conference, or napping in my cabin. I don’t care what you say. Just stall until this problem’s been solved.”

  “Yes.”

  Gunville looked at him.

  “Another thing,” he said. “Contact the tether winch detail. I want to be sure there are no unassigned hands on deck except the tenders. No witnesses, comprendez-vous ?”

  After a moment’s hesitation, the radio man nodded, put the cans over his ears, and returned his attention to the console.

  Gunville studied the back of his head. Andre was a likeable sort. Married, young children. Of Bantu descent, as had been Gunville’s mother. And he’d worked aboard the Africana for years. But the nature of the ship’s business had rapidly evolved, and it seemed Andre had failed to adapt. Gunville himself felt a great deal of stress, but also realized that he simply had to bear it, putting confidence in his new business alliance and their joint ability to execute contingency plans.

  It was sad, he thought. So sad.

  Andre would have to go, but at the same time he could not be allowed to move on elsewhere. Leaving him to become a casualty of change. A failure of evolution like poor Cédric and Marius.

  Gunville took a mournful breath, reached down into his memory, and again began to move his lips in a low whisper: “Libre de passion, mais l’amour s’est fait maitre, des mes affections, et a mis sous sa loi . . .”

  Immersed in the song’s romantic sentiment, finding comfort in its lyrics and melody, he soon felt very much better.

  The yacht rolled over the calm, dimpled sea between the quays of Port-Gentil and the long band of oil platforms extending southward off the Gabonese coastline. These resources, trading port and near-shore petroleum fields, framed an economic success that gave the little nation’s citizens average head-for-head incomes surpassed only by South Africans among their territorially advantaged regional neighbors.

  Though of high style, the yacht, or superyacht—as the vessel’s 130-foot length, structural enhancements, and sophisticated onboard technologies truly classed it—was not at all a conspicuous sight as it ran a gentle northerly course toward the Gulf of Guinea, waters abounding with giant blue marlin, tarpon, and other potential brittle-scaled, rubber-finned sportfishing trophies. Individual opulence sparkles amid general prosperity, and the few may taste rare luxury where there is common satisfaction—the queen bee in her honeyed chamber knows.

  Inside the Chimera’s four spacious decks, every detail was of plush yet tasteful elegance. There were lacewood and sycamore finishes, walls covered with embroidered Canton silk damask, marble veneers imported from the stone quarries of Pordenone, Italy. On its exterior starboard quarter, a single touch of ostentation flared at the eye: a decorative painting of the ship’s mythological namesake, a creature with the head of a lion, body of a goat, and a sinuous serpent’s tail. In this particular depiction, the monster was shown breathing flames.

  The owner of the yacht had an appreciation for fables, relishing the age-old stories for their grand scope, color, and subtext. He had much the same fondness for word-play. Constrained in manner, offering a dispassionate face to the world, he was a man who privately enjoyed the artful lark, the inside jest, the nuanced turn of phrase.

  Etymologically, Chimera is the word root of chimerical , an adjective that can be used to describe something—or someone—of a nature that is deceptive and slippery to the mind.

  In ichthyology, Chimera is a genus of fish, distantly related to the shark, that has existed in the world’s oceans for four hundred million years—a phenomenal triumph of survival attributed to its swimming at great, lightless depths beyond the safe reach of those who would hunt and trap it.

  In genetic science, a chimera is defined as an organism spawned of two or more genetically distinct species. Chimeral plants are propagated by horticulturists and fancied by collectors. Laboratories have created mixed-species test rodents in vitro. Fueled by calls for artificially grown transplant organs and tissues, recombinant-DNA technologies have produced the means to spawn human-animal chimeras through manipulation of embryonic stem cells. Some have been given European patent approvals.

  A man of disparate business interests, the yacht’s owner was the prime, and silent, financial backer for a Luxemburg-based biotech firm that held two species-joining patent claims. It was a minor gamble for him, a diversionary fling, but one that might yield profit over the stretch. And in this adventure, too, he saw subtle shades of meaning. Sometimes in his secret reflections, he would imagine himself the spawn of a paternal pig and mother rhea, a flightless bird of garish plumage. On these instances, he saw the comedy of life to be blacker than clouded midnight and as fiery-sharp as the point of a cauterizing needle.

  Now he was a tolerable distance from such thoughts. On the large flying bridge of the Chimera he sat on an elevated mango-colored sofa to one side of the pilot-house, his right leg hung over his left, his thin fingers laced together on his lap, watching the slow slide of sea and shore through a panoramic curve of windows. He was dressed lightly for the torrid heat in a pale blue, short-sleeved, collared shirt; cream trousers; and tan deck shoes. Around his neck was a mariner link necklace with a small pendant charm, both of them hand-tooled out of silver from Bolivia’s cooperative Cerro Rico mines. Another of his quirkish notions, the ornament was a representation of the miner’s god, whose shrine occupied a niche behind the entrance to every dangerous sulfur-stinking shaft—a horned, squatted, vaguely wolfish being with a phallic thrust between its thighs, said to hold the power of life and death over the impoverished, ragtag campesino workers who labored to extract his mineral bounty, placating him with gifts of coca, tobacco, and pure-grain alcohol and honoring him with orgiastic celebrations of vice and excess.

  Like many gods and monsters of folklore, this lord of the underworld was known by more than one name. Mountain villagers descended from the Inca called him Supai. Most Bolivian peasants knew him as El Tío. The sly uncle who cast a neutral eye on virtue and sin, caring only for tributes offered. A demon that desperate men had sainted in exchange for his inconstant favors.

  The owner of the pleasure yacht knew, and he well understood.

  He looked out the bridge’s sweeping windows, past the stations where his helmsman and engineers sat in their epauleted white uniform blouses. Looked out at the sun-stippled water and the crowded international harbor and the fixed oil platforms standing with their tall booms, derricks, and wellheads.

  Here was wealth, he thought. Tremendous wealth, all visible right on the surface. But none of it interested him. The treasure that had made his migration to Africa something more than a flight from the wide nets of his pursuers, the continent’s greatest bounty, was the light pulsing through fine veins of glass that ran deep where the sun did not reach.

  There was no chance in the world that he would let anyone stop him from tapping it.

  “Casimir,” he said, his tone soft. “Are you ready?”

  His pilot had a brief exchange in the Bandgabi tribal dialect with a man at the console beside him. Then he nodded.

  “Yes,” he said, switching to English. “We’ve completed a modem upload-download test . . . real-time streaming telemetry and multimode sensors are online . . . everything checks.”

  “Why haven’t you deployed, then?”

  “Gunville. We were waiting for his confirmation.”

/>   “And he’s given it?”

  “Just now,” the helmsman said. “His men are in position aboard the Africana.”

  The yacht’s owner unlaced his hands and fluttered one in front of him. He was eager to be rid of those glorified utility workers below.

  “Take us on to the next stage,” he said. “Please.”

  An instant later he felt the mildest of bumps run through the yacht, and focused his eyes on the monitor boards.

  The killfish had launched from its chamber.

  The deployment chamber in the Chimera’s lower starboard hold was little different from a torpedo tube, but the minisub housed within bore no resemblance to a conventional weapon or remote underwater vehicle. Nor was there was anything conventional about it.

  What it looked like before ejection was a metal shoe-box with a considerable distension around the middle, as if it had been overfilled until its sides were pushed outward. As it left the chamber and its lateral, rear, and top stabilizer/orientation fins unfolded, its appearance grew closer to that of a fish with an egg-swollen belly.

  Each of these comparisons was appropriate.

  The killfish was full and, after a fashion, pregnant.

  “What’s holding up Gunville?” Marius said.

  “I don’t know,” Cédric replied. They were back on their closed voice link. “Andre told me that he’s gone to the engine room. Some kind of problem.”

  “Bullshit. They’ve got phones in there, and he could reach for one if he chooses,” Marius said. “I’ll bet that son of a bitch is on the pot with his trousers around his ankles, serenading his true love.”

  Cédric grinned. And fondling it, no doubt—l’e petite amour. He wasn’t about to argue Gunville’s case, though.

  “We’ve been down at extreme depth for almost four hours,” Marius said. “Why push things to the limit? We should video the splice and call it quits.”

  “Let’s not work ourselves into a premature snit. Five hours might be pushing.” Besides, Cédric thought, the repair technicians might prefer to receive live imagery from them, observe his curious find from angles of their own choice before lowering their grapple to raise the cable. “We’re bound to hear from the songbird any minute. Meanwhile, we can still do what you suggest, take some pictures—”