Space Sharks, page 2
“You ever miss it? The old life?” Rob stepped gingerly into the water. It came up to his ankles. “Aw, hell. It’s cold as shit. Probably full of shark shit. I hate ’em, Charlie.”
“Why? They’re just animals.” Charlie followed him into engineering.
“You see this?” Rob held up his cybernetic arm. “I wasn’t born this way. I used to be whole. When I was young, growing up in Hawaii, I used to go surfing with my brother. We were black and Jewish, and we didn’t have a whole lot besides each other.” He wouldn’t meet Charlie’s gaze. “One day in midsummer, we were out catching breakers and shooting tubes. A damn shark attacked my brother. I went back to help him but it was too late. It bit both his legs clean off and he bled to death in seconds. All that blood in the water, well, we might as well have just rung a chuckwagon bell. Next thing you know I was in a feeding frenzy.”
Charlie gasped in sympathy.
“They tore apart my brother’s body, fighting over the pieces like a pack of wild dogs. I barely managed to get away, but not before one of those bastards took my arm.” He grimaced. “I never surfed again. And now here we are, transporting sharks like we’re a goddamn taxi service.” Rob wiped his eyes with his organic hand. He wasn’t precisely crying, but he looked pretty weepy nonetheless.
Charlie touched his cyber hand and smiled. “Does it ever hurt?”
“Sometimes,” Rob admitted. “I’m just used to it now, I guess. It’s been a part of me for fifteen years.”
“When I was still a sexbot, a lot of customers who came in were cyborgs. People don’t have problems having sex with a machine, but a meld of machine and human, well, that was perverse. So for a lot of cyborgs, the bot brothels were the only places they could catch a little tail.” She reached out and touched his face, gently like a balloon kiss. “Did you ever?”
Rob looked away.
Charlie took his hands, one warm flesh and the other cold metal, and put them on her breasts. They might have been heated silicone bags over a metal frame with cloned skin over them, but to Rob, they felt beautiful and natural.
They forgot about the leak, and the deadly cargo, and instead fell against each other in a carnal melding. Soon, the sound of Charlie’s soft cries carried through Engineering in perfect synchronization with Rob’s thrusts. As he neared his climax, her programming identified what would please him, and she dug her nails into his back, raising welts that oozed blood droplets with his pumping heart. When he came, muscles clenching and squeezing Charlie’s artificial frame, several drops fell unnoticed into the water below his feet where they swirled like tiny clouds dispersing, spreading.
* * *
Dr. Henriksen eyed Terri Reid as she squeezed her lithe form into a wetsuit but said nothing. He was too old for such shenanigans, he thought. Not when there were sharks to be checked. And other things to take care of as well. He pulled a slim case from his discarded clothing and removed a hypo-injector from it while Terri was busy with the seals on her wetsuit. He held it up to his neck and sighed as the chemicals within it hissed into his bloodstream. It was his own special blend, a cocktail of pharmaceuticals to bring back his youthful vigor.
Terri straightened up and sealed her helmet. “Ready?”
“Yes, of course.” He examined the list of RFID chip tags and noted that several were absent from the ship’s current inventory. “It looks like some of the children preferred to snack on their companions than on the smelt we provided.”
“Sharks are cannibals?” asked Terri.
“Most predatory creatures have the capability to hunt, kill, and eat their own kind,” said Henriksen as he fastened his own wetsuit. “Even humans have been known to do so, although that’s exceedingly rare.”
“That’s awful.”
“That’s Nature, and Nature isn’t awful. It’s beautiful. Perfect. Like my children below.” Henriksen activated the Nautical Immersion Control Cage. In it, they could descend into the shark tanks themselves while remaining safe from hungry great whites and makos.
“Why do you call them your children? Do you have any real children? I mean, humans, not sharks.”
“I never married. I’ve devoted my life to studying God’s most perfect creations, here in the tank with us.”
“Didn’t you alter them for Poseidon’s biosphere? Are you saying you improved on God’s handiwork?”
Henriksen smiled, feeling younger and stronger than he had since they awakened from suspended animation. “One does what one can with the tools one has at hand. Now then, we’re off.”
Terri would have been perfectly happy to examine the cargo population remotely, but Henriksen insisted upon the NIC Cage for a real hands-on experience. The NIC Cage moved through the water using six small electric propellers with Henriksen standing at the control box. Terri stayed as far away from the edges of the cage as she could, not wanting to leave anything sticking out where a shark might be tempted to take a bite. “How many sharks are missing?” she asked, the radio speaker making her voice sound tinny in her own head.
“Seven,” said Henriksen. “Five makos and two great whites. Hmmm. That’s rather a lot.”
The cage floated through the dark, murky tank. Its lights diffused quickly in the water, transforming the sharks into indistinct shadows. Suddenly one cruised right past the cage, making Terri jump. “Oh!”
“Relax. You’re perfectly safe here in the cage,” said Henriksen. “Look there at that animal.” A great white emerged from the murk with dark red scarring across its flank. “She’s been fighting, the naughty girl.”
“How can you tell she’s a girl?” asked Terri. “They all look the same to me.”
“Her RFID tag, for one. And the way she moves, for another. Female great whites are smoother in their travels. More dangerous. A male will bump you a few times before attacking. A female, though, you’ll never know she’s there until her teeth close on you.”
“That’s awful,” said Terri.
“You may as well condemn mosquitoes for biting you, or termites for eating wood. It’s just their nature. Perfect hunters.”
“You can keep them. I’m just here to examine the biomes of Poseidon.” Another great white nosed into the Cage, shaking it. Terri shrieked.
Henriksen reached out and struck the shark forcefully on its snout. It backed off and dove lower into the murk. As it descended, it snapped at a passing mako. “The sharks seem agitated today,” said Henriksen.
“As opposed to most days when they’re friendly?” Terri watched as the water around filled with swirling sharks. She was careful to keep her hands and feet well inside the NIC Cage, holding onto the interior framework. She worried that a young mako could slip between the bars.
“I’m sure they’re curious. It’s been months since they’ve seen anything like us. They’ve only had themselves as comp—” Another Great White banged against the Cage, mouth open, trying to get some purchase on the Teflon-coated bars. It had come at them like a ghost and hit the Cage hard enough to set off a warning indicator. Henriksen punched it in the nose and it swam away.
The Cage shuddered and Terri turned to see a mako with its snout halfway between two bars, right behind her head, thrashing the water full of bubbles as it tried to force its way in. She screamed and shrank back against Henriksen.
“Strike them,” he said. “Their noses are sensitive, and they’ll leave. There’s got to be something in the water that they can smell.”
Terri shook her head. “It’ll bite me.”
“It can’t get through the bars.” Henriksen leaned past her and punched the shark. It withdrew and the scarred great white rose from below and bit the mako right in half.
The water around the Cage exploded in a frenzy of sharks bulling into one another, snapping like angry dogs, and churning bubbles and streamers of blood from the mako. The heavy bodies jostled the Cage and its inhabitants like popcorn in a hot pan. Terri wrapped both her hands and legs around the Cage’s central pillar to keep from being dashed to pieces against the exterior titanium bars.
Then Henriksen’s leg slipped between the bars and the scarred great white took it off in one sudden lunge.
Henriksen screamed as his blood formed a scarlet cloud in the frothy water. His suit was a ragged mess below the knee, and his shattered fibula and tibia were so bright white that the splintered ends almost glowed in the murk.
If the sharks had been swarming before, it was a sedentary pool party compared to the frenzied chaos that erupted when they got a sniff of Henriksen’s blood. Terri hit the Emergency Return button on the console and the NIC Cage shuddered as it pushed its way through the pod of blood-maddened sharks.
Inside his helmet, Henriksen had gone ghostly white and Terri knew that he had only moments to live unless she could stop his blood from escaping into the water. She didn’t have anything handy to use as a tourniquet, and the Cage’s first aid kit would be useless underwater. She took the diving knife that was a standard part of any underwater suit and sliced all the way around one leg of her suit. Then she slit it down to the ankle, giving her a long piece of tough, rubberized fabric to work with. She’d expected the water of the cargo pod to be icy cold but instead it was warm as a summer day against the smooth tan of her nude leg. She cut a strip from the piece of her suit, wrapped it around Henriksen’s leg just above his knee, and tied it as tight as she could. The Baldwin’s autodoc could save him if she could keep him alive long enough to reach it.
Outside the Cage, the sharks continued to batter it and each other. Another mako met its fate in the teeth of a great white and the others fought for a taste, except for the scarred shark who’d bitten off Henriksen’s leg. She stayed clear of the fray for the most part, only snapping when other sharks swam too close to her. Instead, she cruised after the Cage, as if she knew that it would lead her to sweeter meat.
Chapter Four
Interstellar Transport Baldwin
T-Minus 8 hours to Poseidon
Captain Tina Thomersen gazed at Dr. Henriksen, enshrined in the cybermechanical embrace of the autodoc, and wondered what was going to happen when her insurance company found out about the accident. Space travel was inherently dangerous enough. Freight shipments made it even more so, due to most freighters running understaffed and under-maintained to save crucial deci-credits wherever possible. Hazard and casualty insurance was a necessary evil for any independent freight operation, and Tina paid out the ass for it.
Literally, as Casper’s brother was her insurance agent.
“How is he?” she asked Terri. “And how are you?”
“I’m fine, I guess,” said Terri, although her lips were quivering like she might break down any moment. “You hear the words feeding frenzy, but nobody really understands what it means. I do.” She shuddered. “I’ve never been so scared in my life.”
“Sorry about that,” said Tina. “I’m just glad you weren’t both hurt. It’s bad enough that one of you was.” She watched as the autodoc worked its magic, capping off damaged blood vessels and nerves for the future possibility of either a cybernetic or biological replacement lower leg.
The shipwide intercom beeped for attention. “Captain?” called Rob Perlman.
Tina moved to the wall and pressed the button. “Thomersen here. What’s up, Perlman?”
“Captain, we’ve got a situation down in the engine room. There’s got to be a slow leak in one of the shark tanks, and I’ve got several centimeters of water in Engineering. And it’s rising. If we can’t stop it before it hits the batteries, we’ll lose it all. Power, life support, engines, communications. We’ll be dead in the water.”
Tina shivered. A general electrical failure often meant death for an entire crew unless they could address it quickly. “Understood. What do you need?”
“Charlie and I are already working on erecting some emergency bulkheads around the sensitive equipment, but we’re going to have to pick and choose what to save first besides the batteries. Long as we can protect them, we’ve got a fighting chance to fix anything else that goes down.”
“Life support, then communications, then engines,” said Tina. “What else?”
“I’ve identified which tank is leaking, but someone has to go into it to find the leak and fix it.”
“All right.”
“And there’s more. I also need someone in the maintenance tubes to seal where water is coming into Engineering. If the tank repair doesn’t take, or takes longer than expected, we’ve got to divert leakage into non-crucial areas of the ship.”
“Non-crucial? What the hell is non-crucial on my ship, Perlman?”
“Crew quarters, mainly.”
“You flood my bedroom, and you’re going to be sleeping in the airlock, Perlman.”
“Understood, Captain.”
“I’ll get those repairs going right away.” Tina left the intercom. “Dr. Reid, I’m not going to ask you to go back into that tank, but I’m afraid I will still need your help to fix my ship. I just don’t have enough hands.”
“I’m a biologist, not a mechanic, Captain.” Terri folded her arms. “But I get that you need the help. What do you need me to do?”
“You and I are going to tackle the maintenance tubes. I think you’ve had enough of sharks for today.”
* * *
“I’m sorry, Captain, it sounded like you told me to go swimming in a shark tank,” said Howard Clintock. “I don’t believe that’s in my job description.”
“Mine either,” said Brion. He leaned back in his pilot’s seat and laced his fingers behind his head. “I don’t swim.”
“And I can’t swim,” added Howard. “I’m useless when it comes to anything that doesn’t involve, you know, computers.”
“I’ve taken those factors into consideration,” said Tina. “And I ignored them. This is no mere maintenance request. This is the safety of the Baldwin and everyone on it. If there was any other way, believe me, I would take it. Putting my life and the lives of everyone else into the hands of you two clowns is already giving me indigestion.”
“But—” began Howard.
“You want to live or you want to die?” Tina stuck her finger in Howard’s face. “This is an emergency. All hands on deck. You hear me, Clintock?”
Howard stammered out an affirmative.
“Good. Send a message to Poseidon Station and inform them of our emergency. They might be able to dispatch a shuttle to meet us in case we run into the worst-case scenario.”
“Yes, Captain.” Howard turned to his comm console. “Poseidon Station, this is the Baldwin reporting an emergency maintenance situation with possible power loss. Over.”
“Captain, you sure you can’t get someone else into that shark tank?” asked Brion. “I’m allergic.”
“To dive suits?”
Brion grinned. “Shark teeth.”
“Suit up, buttercup. Being a pilot isn’t going to do you any good if the ship falls apart.”
Brion sighed. “Yes, ma’am.”
Tina left the bridge.
Brion looked over at Howard. “I hate that woman sometimes.”
Howard broke the connection with Poseidon Station, having issued the SOS and gotten a satisfactory reply in return. “You’re just saying that because she won’t sleep with you.”
“And I just don’t understand why. I’m young, fit, good-looking.” Brion flexed his biceps.
“Maybe it’s because you’re a dick.”
“No idea what you’re talking about right now.”
“Exactly,” said Howard.
* * *
Rob and Charlie worked feverishly to try to beat the rising water level in Engineering. Despite having been designated previously as a sexbot, Charlie still had the enhanced musculature and reinforced frame of all androids at her disposal, and she was able to manhandle the large sections of plating that Rob was cutting from nonessential bulkheads. Engineering was full of the acrid stink of hot metal and welding gases.
Rob hadn’t bothered to put a shirt back on. Between the sparks from the cutting torch and the sparks from the welding unit, it wouldn’t have lasted more than a few minutes if he had. He hissed as sparks hit his naked skin, but to dress in full protective gear would have taken more time than he feared they had to spare. He made his final cut and a large rectangle plate fell from the interior bulkhead with a huge, hissing splash. Steam burst upward and he turned his face away so not to be scalded any worse. Sweat poured off him as steam condensed against the ceiling, making it seem like it was drizzling all over.
“Bring that magnet over,” said Rob. “This one I think will be too heavy even for you.”
Charlie raised the crane controls and a large magnet on a cable rolled across its framework on the ceiling. “I might surprise you. I’m pretty buff, good-looking.”
“You’re pretty, at least.” Rob wiped sweat from his eyes. His dreadlocks felt like a cluster of wet tentacles against his back.
Charlie smiled at him, still pretty despite the soot on her cheeks and a large, bloodless gash on one arm where a sharp edge had torn open her artificial skin to expose the pink-dyed silicone jelly beneath it. “Stop, silly boy. Time enough for that after we save the ship. You don’t want to fall for me. I’ll just break your heart.”
“Maybe I’ll just take that chance.” Rob grinned at her. His Star of David pendant sparkled in the lighting. “Let’s get this plate moved and then we can talk it over.”
She lowered the magnet into the water and Rob bent down to affix it to the plate he’d just cut loose. Charlie worked the crane controls and pulled the plate from the water. They guided it into place beside its ragged-edged brethren. It would form the last piece of the temporary shield they’d erected around the batteries.
Rob pulled on a heavy work gauntlet over his organic hand. He leaned his shoulder against the plate to help move it into an upright position. It was so heavy that he realized right away that it outmassed him. He gasped as it started to tilt toward him. “Charlie… help…”
