Starfish

"I mean, what's the cargo?"

"Passengers," said the voice. "Goodbye."

Joel stood there a moment, feeling his erection deflate. "Time." A luminous readout appeared in the air above Preteela's right shoulder: thirteen ten. He'd have to be on site a half-hour before liftoff, and Astoria was only a couple of hours away…

"Lots of time," he said to no one in particular.

But he wasn't really in the mood any more. Work had a way of doing that to him lately. Not the drudgery, or the long hours, or any of the things most people would complain about. Joel liked boredom. You didn't have to think much.

But work had gotten really weird lately.

He pulled the eyephones off his head and looked down at himself. Feedback gloves on his hands, his feet, hanging off his flaccid dick. Take away the headset and it really was a rinky-dink system. At least until he could afford the full suit.

Still, beats real life. No bullshit, no bugs, no worries.

On impulse, he rang up a friend in SeaTac — "Jess, catch this code for me, will you?" — and squirted the recognition sequence Hongcouver had just sent.

"Got it," Jess said.

"It's valid, right?"

"Checks out. Why?"

"Just got called up for a midocean run that's going to peak around three in the morning. Octuple pay. I just wondered if it was some kind of cruel hoax."

"Well, if it is, the Router's developed a sense of humor. Hey, maybe they've put in a head cheese up there."

"Yeah." Ray Stericker's face flashed through his mind.

"So what's the job?" Jess asked.

"Don't know. Ferrying something, I guess, but why I have to do it in the middle of the night is beyond me."

"Strange days."

"Yeah. Thanks, Jess."

"Any time."

Strange days indeed. H-bombs going off all over the abyssal plain, all this traffic going to places nobody ever went to before, no traffic at all in places that used to be just humming. Flash fires and barbecued refugees and slagged shipyards. Chipheads with rotenone cocktails and giant fish. A couple of weeks back Joel had shown up for a run to Mendocino and found some guy sandblasting a radiation hazard logo off the cargo casing.

The whole bloody coast is getting too dangerous. N'AmPac's gonna burn down way before it ever floods.

But that was the beauty of being a freelancer. He could pick up and move. He would pick up and move, leave the bloody coast behind — shit, maybe even leave N'Am behind. There was always South Am. Or Antarctica, for that matter. He would definitely look into it.

Right after this run.

Scatter

She finds him on the abyssal plain, searching. He's been out here for hours; sonar showed him tracking back and forth, back and forth, all the way to the carousel, out to the whale, back again, in and around the labyrinthine geography of the Throat itself.

Alone. All alone.

She can feel his desperation fifty meters away. The facets of that pain glimmer in her mind as the squid pulls her closer. Guilt. Fear.

Growing with her approach, anger.

Her headlight sweeps across a small contrail on the bottom, a wake of mud kicked back into suspension after a million-year sleep. Clarke changes course to follow and kills the beam. Darkness clamps around her. This far out, photons evade even rifter eyes.

She feels him seething directly ahead. When she pulls up beside him the water swirls with unseen turbulence. Her squid shudders from the impact of Brander's fists.

"Keep that fucking thing out of here! You know he doesn't like it!"

She draws down the throttle. The soft hydraulic whine fades.

"Sorry," she says. "I just thought —»

"Fuck, Len, you of all people! You trying to drive him off? You want him blasted into the fucking stratosphere when that thing goes off?"

"I'm sorry." When he doesn't respond, she adds, "I don't think he's out here. Sonar —»

"Sonar's not worth shit if he's on the bottom."

"Mike, you're not going find him rooting around here in the dark. We're blind this far out."

A wave of pistol clicks sweeps across her face. "I've got this for close range," says the machinery in Brander's throat.

"I don't think he's out here," Clarke says again. "And even if he is, I don't know if he'd let you get close after —»

"That was a long time ago," the darkness buzzes back. "Just because you're still nursing grudges from the second grade…"

"That's not what I meant," she says. She tries to speak gently, but the vocoder strips her voice down to a soft rasp. "I only meant, it's been so long. He's gone so far, we barely even see him on sonar any more. I don't know if he'd let any of us near him."

"We've got to try. We can't just leave him here. If I can just get close enough to tune him in…"

"He couldn't tune back," Clarke reminds him. "He went over before we changed, Mike. You know that."

"Fuck off! That's not the point!"