Chapter One

~ Garrett and Tess ~

 

Garrett felt the station lurch under him, and knew that something had broken. He grabbed the computer on his desk to check sensor readings. Numbers were clean and safe. But the floor had tilted, Tess ran in shouting, and the opened door behind her showed the howling wind and waves of the hurricane.

“What happened?” asked Tess. The sight of her gave Garrett a stab of worry and guilt. She’d signed up to spend this summer, before her senior year of high school, helping with his little science project. She’d insisted; he should have refused.

He owed her the truth. “Looks like float cylinder six failed.” He reached for his scuba gear and hardhat. “Where’s Alexis?”

“I said, I tried radioing her. And Lark. They’re not answering!”

Garrett paled. The cylinder had to be fixed, right now, or they were all sunk. Unless they abandoned Castor Station, and threw away the dream he’d bought at the cost of his family business, his whole inheritance. No! He put his hands on the girl’s shoulders. “They should’ve come in by now. I need you to take the boat and find them.”

“Out there?” She looked through the doorway to the deck of their little concrete platform, surrounded by nothing but thrashing ocean.

“Please, Tess. I need to dive and fix things. If the others are still outside, they need help. You can do this. Don’t make me give up just when we’re getting started.” The floor tilted another degree.

Tess shivered, wide-eyed. “For you.”

Splitting up was their best chance. Garrett forced a smile, nodded, then stepped outside with her. They saw watery grey hell. The sea was waiting for them.

* * * *

Tess forced her way through the wind, across the station’s topdeck. She wouldn’t be useless! She wouldn’t go back! Her boots pounded bare concrete now that the solar panels and stuff had been cleared away. She got to the railing and looked down on the angry sea. It wasn’t like the computer sims she’d played with at home, or like her diving lessons in Chesapeake Bay, or like the high school she’d escaped from. There was nothing safe for miles around. Only a concrete building, a few stories high, surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean.

She climbed down into the station’s empty concrete halls. Garrett had obsessed over how to build this place, and it was still new, just crates and strung-up lights. Whatever was broken wouldn’t sink them yet, not with Garrett here to fix everything.

Three floors below, she hauled open the steel doors to the dock, and stared. The water hissed and crashed everywhere. “This isn’t real,” she murmured to herself to make herself move. She wasn’t really going to go out there. Her hands unhooked the little inflated boat and let it flop into the sea, shadowed by the concrete wall of Castor Station. No way was she getting into that dinky raft.

Then she saw Alexis. The bossy botanist who’d been hanging on Garrett’s arm all month was an orange dot with one hand waving frantically. Tess got into the boat and gunned the engine, looking only ahead.

Tess wanted to rescue Alexis just to show her. A hand splashed up, fumbled on the boat’s side and slipped off before Tess could help. Nobody grabbed the paddle when Tess dipped it in - wait, there! Salt stung Tess’ eyes but she felt Alexis clutching the oar. The lady came up gasping, a horrible fishy gulp sound. Tess wasn’t strong enough. The woman was sliding away and was too dumb to put her scuba mouthpiece back in. The water clutched them like cold hands.

A loudspeaker boomed. “I need assistance.” Tess spared a glance and found Lark’s grey plastic body drifting on the waves. Nearby, the dock’s twin lamps burned in the fog.

Tess grimaced. “You can float! Help her!” She didn’t have time to think for the weird robot.

“Yes,” said Lark. He slid along the surface and grabbed the botanist’s flailing arms. Shivering and soaked, Tess helped heave Alexis onto the boat. They were going to make it!

Then a wave picked them all up and smashed them into concrete.

* * * *

Garrett took the outside stairs down. His scuba tank bounced on his back and coppery hair flopped over his eyes. He thought of the other disasters in his life. The car wreck that’d cost him his original legs, and the stupid accident that’d taken his father and wondered what Dad would’ve said about this one. “Cowering won’t get you anywhere. Make it work.”

He thought about nice, clean blueprints to distract himself from the thrashing sea around him. It was stupidly dangerous to be out in a storm, breathing cold, dry air from a machine. He’d made his choice. He clutched his toolkit, leaned backward, and let himself fall into the water.

Now he was under his new home. Giant pipes jutted down from the concrete bottom, like a jaw full of hollow teeth. Every wave squashed air inside them. The cylinders were supposed to funnel that air back and forth through hoses like a bellows, stabilizing the station and harvesting energy, but now the whole building leaned and twitched. Garrett lit his hardhat lamp and swam into the dark forest of machinery. Every few seconds the cylinders bit down and flooded the space between them, then rose with a sound like waterfalls.

There! He was sure from the pressure readings that it was pipe six. Probably cracked but he could unlink it. But when his eyes traced the giant fangs overhead, the chill of the sea suddenly got to him. It wasn’t just the one cylinder. He floated at the waterline just feet below the concrete, and stared. Hoses had snapped free, knocking loose a crucial junction box he’d overlooked. Stupid of him not to use stronger clamps. He started pointlessly recalling the shear equations, then shook his head and worked. The water lapped over his head and back down, and the whole roof shuddered. Garrett yanked hoses back into position, braced his feet against a pipe, and patched the damage with tape and a wrench. It might work! He felt a hose twitch as air started flowing again, and it held.

A groaning current stole Garrett away, whirling him backwards and smacking his helmet. He flailed and found he was in darkness, inside one of the cylinders. He grabbed his lost scuba mouthpiece and shoved it between his aching teeth, but the air didn’t flow right. He’d traded the station’s breath for his own! He felt water flooding the tube around him. Now he could wait and hope the sea would pull him back out, or risk fighting the current with his last breath.

Aren’t the kind that can ever stop moving. Family curse, maybe, his father had said. You and I aren’t the kind that can ever stop moving. Family curse, maybe. His hands had twitched when he said that, eager for a new boat to build or new lands to survey.

To hell with waiting, Garrett thought, and kicked down into deeper water where he might get free.

* * * *

Tess’ bleeding fingers were clutching something. Her brain was fogged. She could feel her hands slipping on a tire that padded the dock’s edge. She clawed at it, not thinking, hauling herself out of the water to collapse on concrete. There was hair in her eyes and snot on her face and bruises everywhere.

“Alexis?” she said. “Lark?” The storm had conquered the sky so that she hardly heard herself. They’d bob to the surface any moment now. But waves hissed and beckoned to her. You’re next.

Tess shouted and yanked at the dock’s door until it opened. A swell washed over the dock and clutched her foot. She threw herself inside, banged into crates, and saw a gun clatter down. Flare gun! She took it and ran upstairs, away from the water. Someone had to help. Garrett could! She was on the topdeck now and the pistol froze her hands. When she fired, it made a blazing arc in the sky. She shot spare charges too, blasting the storm. Tess threw down the flare gun as if for momentum as she ran. She went down into the sturdiest room she could find and screamed with no one to hear.

* * * *

Garrett kicked a stray hose from his leg. No air. Which way was up? Every part of him demanded to move in a different direction. His training flashed back to him and he bubbled “Ooooo” from his mouth, easing the urge to gulp water. The bubbles rose...that way! And he swam, too stubborn to let the sea prove him a failure yet. He gasped at the surface. Just then something exploded. A sun-bright fire shot from the sky. No, from the deck of his own station. Who, why? Someone needed him. Someone was alive and fighting. More flares streaked overhead. Garrett swam home to Castor with what he thought was the last of his strength, when really it was only the first.

* * * *

They sat in a storeroom all night while the storm passed. Tess huddled in a blanket while Garrett studied not his blueprints, but his cartoons. He’d voiced a ‘toon fox back when he was a kid, a cripple. The world had felt bright and simple then, and other kids had wanted his autograph. They’d been surprised to learn the voice-actor couldn’t walk, couldn’t really be a hero. He watched his younger self bouncing around on a screen, ‘saving the world’ in a way that never hurt and couldn’t get others killed.

Tess whimpered. Garrett stood first, hearing the whirr of his prosthetic legs below the knees.

“Come on,” he said. “We need to work.” It’d be good to get moving.”

“I killed them,” Tess said.

“You did what you could.” He offered a hand. “You can have the shower first. I need to go topside and inspect the damage.”

“Don’t go!” She looked haunted. He shouldn’t have let her take the summer and the fall semester off from high school, especially not to be part of his initial skeleton crew. He’d assumed that her skills and eagerness would be enough.

Garrett waited for her to get cleaned up. Meanwhile he checked the computer network she’d built and found it mostly intact. He failed; he wasted the money he had gotten from his father’s will and from selling the family business.

When he went up top with Tess and fixed a snapped antenna, the radio squawked immediately. “Hello?”

It was Martin, the other man whose cash he’d poured into the sea. “Mister Fox! By God, you’re alive!”

“Alexis isn’t. I ruined everything.”

There was a pause, and then the radio shouted. “Shut up, Fox! You didn’t say that. Admit no liability, understand? I’m on my way there. How bad is it otherwise?”

Garrett exchanged a haunted look with Tess. He had to go on, but how could he? “The platform. It’s still afloat, and...Alexis got our farm equipment in, even though we were hit faster and harder than the weather report said.”

“So was Bermuda, and the hurricane’s on to America now. But we both pledged our fortunes to this little sea-farm and I’m not throwing mine away. Are you still going to work, or do I need to find some other captain?”

Garrett felt his face grow hot. Castor was his! He’d dreamed about it since he got his first MIT engineering degree. “I’d sooner sink Castor than see someone else run this place! But Martin, the project–”

“Is going on, with or without you. Are you in?”

His father’s will had told him to do something great. If those words hadn’t been there along with the money, he might’ve told himself that crazy projects were for cartoon characters. And if he stopped moving, he’d always wonder what could have been.

“I’m in,” he said. He’d stick to his nice, clean engineering and let Martin handle the legal liability and other junk.

“Good. Captain Fox, I’ll be there soon. Pray for us.”

Garrett shut off the radio, feeling deflated. “I’m sorry, Tess. We’ll send you home.”

“No! It’s not all broken, it’s not over! Look out there.” She jabbed a finger toward a side railing, where a forgotten solar flex-panel rippled and dangled from its cord. Garrett stared at it. So that explained the trickle of charge the batteries were getting. Even after that nightmare of a storm, one piece of hardware was hanging on like a flag. He supposed he should, too.

* * * *

Tess and Garrett toured Castor, finding no major damage. The building’s three stories of concrete made it ugly and dull compared to his sleek first designs, but sturdy enough. After a while Tess looked up from a computer screen, a wild stare on her face. “Lark’s not gone! I didn’t really get him killed!”

“The robot?” asked Garrett.

“The AI. The body doesn’t matter. He made a backup of his mind.”

Garrett’s legs itched despite being made of plastic and circuits. “Like a virus, you mean, infecting the network.”

Tess glanced away. “I mean I made the backup. But he’s alive, see?” She pointed to the screen she’d unrolled on a table.

Garrett looked over her shoulder and saw a virtual laboratory with Lark in it. Same grey robot body with a mouthless, expressionless face looking out at him.

“Hello,” it said in Lark’s dull steel voice. “Oh. This means I am the backup.”

“You’re here!” said Tess, leaning over the screen. “It was terrible. There was a hurricane and I couldn’t do anything, and I thought I’d totally failed and we were all going to die.”

Garrett watched her talking with the digital ghost. A former classmate named Valerie had given him the robot for his ocean project, saying that it might be useful. He’d had trouble gauging the thing’s intelligence. But it could turn a wrench, and he’d been busy enough to accept the help without asking too many questions. He found it eerie to have this machine existing when Alexis would never hold him again.

“Enough,” he said. “We’re clearing away rubble already, so delete this thing and let’s move on.”

Tess looked up at him, astonished. From the screen Lark said, “Captain, please do not kill me.”

He leaned back. Had he been proposing to sweep away trash, or murder one of his crew? “Tess, how much of the ‘bot is real? Not just an act to fake a conversation?”

“You tell me,” said Tess. Valerie had shown him things in college, little AI projects with a subtle spark to them.

“Sir, if you let me live, then I will help you,” Lark said. “Even without a body I can be useful.”

“All right,” he found himself answering. Alexis didn’t get that escape from death, but why should he destroy this thing out of spite, when it could think well enough to beg for protection? “You can stay.”

Garrett walked away, letting a relieved Tess go on talking with Lark. No harm in her having something—someone—else to talk to.

* * * *

Martin arrived beneath a blazing noon sun. Garrett met his boat at the dock and shook his hand.

“Chin up,” said Martin. “You have a call to make, I assume.”

Garrett did, and they had only the short-range radio here until Tess fixed some other hardware. So he’d go to Bermuda, where he needed to pick up more supplies anyway. “Alexis’ family. I don’t know what to tell them.”

The financier looked wistfully up at the station they’d built. “You were so eager when you first came to me, looking to trade your inheritance for this.” The sea breeze stirred his monk-like corona of white hair.

Garrett nodded. “So was she, when she asked to come along.” What a kiss, too. In time, things might have gone farther, but now...

Martin clapped him on the shoulder, and Garrett was glad for the distraction. “Tell them that. It should ease your own heart, too. But remember, you can’t admit mistakes were made.” Garrett grimaced at that, but Martin went on: “She knew the danger. We have too much to achieve here to let lawyers sink us.”

Garrett relented with a sigh. He reminded himself he was an engineer, and that he should leave the distractions to the money man.

“We’ll get through this,” said Martin, and opened the dockside door. “When you come back, we’ll attend to the crew problem.”

“We’re still going to expand?” said Garrett.

“Of course!” Martin said with a smile. “Your friend’s early results with the algae production were wonderful, a tribute to her. Next comes the commercial scale. The start of big things.”

* * * *

While he sailed, Garrett thought about those “big things,” the biofuel and food production they were hoping to build at Castor. The dream and the wind calmed him. No need for engines today. The storm had passed and white sails rippled at his touch. He was glad Martin had brought Constellation safely back to him; she had been Garrett’s father’s.

Bermuda was a few dozen miles away from Castor. Close enough that Martin had gotten a license from confused officials, who didn’t quite know what a ‘seastead-based aquaculture operation’ was. As Martin had cheerfully explained, that helped him get as vaguely-defined a permission slip as possible. Now the island rose from the sparkling horizon. Bermuda, an archipelago like a jeweled earring, looked to him like a ridge of pastel houses and...toppled trees.

Dirt crunched under Garrett’s boots, making him look down. There wasn’t much other sound. Workmen were winching a palm tree that had crashed into a church and left stained glass in the street. Random bits of the beautiful island had been hurled and cracked as though destroyed by an angry leviathan.

The quiet town seemed appropriate for the call he was putting off, and his phone had reception out here. Garrett hauled an overturned park bench back into place, sat, and dialed. It was hard to be sincere while doing what he was told. Admit nothing. The conversation made him dig knuckles into his eyes, but Garrett came away thinking, he had to keep going. He couldn’t let it be for nothing.

Then before he could run away, back to his real work, he called Valerie Hayflick, Lark’s maker. In a way this was a condolence call too. A machine answered the Hayflick Robotics phone, but then Val herself grabbed the line. “Hey, Garrett, you survived?” He told her about the disaster, but Valerie interrupted. “Take a breath.”

Garrett realized his hands were shaking and that he could picture Alexis drowning, or Valerie, or Tess. “I’m sorry.”

“Quit beating yourself up.” She’d told him that back at MIT too. “There are worse things going on.”

He had to tell her the rest. “Lark was destroyed. The body, I mean. There’s an AI backup.”

She was quiet for a moment, and a little less energetic when she answered. “Death’s not the same for him. Nothing is. But thanks for telling me. Can you send me a report?” In return for the gift, she’d asked for updates on how he was doing. For business reasons of course.

“Sure.”

“Good luck, then. Go forth and conquer.”

He walked the eerily silent streets, with his hands still shaking in his pockets. He found the diving-gear shop by the sign saying ‘You’re Going Down,’ and hurried in for the sake of seeing something comforting and familiar.

At least the shop was the same. Garrett browsed rubbery wetsuits, pausing to feel one that was just like Alexis’. A bumper sticker nearby asked, ‘Remember when sex was safe and diving was dangerous?’ A set of knives glinted under glass.

He was talking with the shop owner when five young people in the latest fashions came up to him. “You’re Garrett Fox, aren’t you?” one said. “The ocean platform guy?”

Garrett nodded. One of them tapped the fancy video headset she wore and grinned, saying, “Was looking up people’s faces and recognized yours. When’s the next tour?”

Garrett stared at the trendy little group. They looked like nothing was wrong in the world. “Tour? It’s a private, experimental facility and it just got hit by a hurricane.”

“So?” said one of the others. “We came to Bermuda with wreck diving in mind.” He saw Garrett’s stricken expression and said, “Platform diving. And we can pay.”

“It’s not safe. I can’t.”

The divers left him alone, but then the shopkeeper started in on him. “What’s wrong with you? Times are tough and you refuse people waving money?”

“I can’t protect people there!”

“So don’t try. Make ‘em sign a waiver. Look, I want your pockets deep, so you’ve gotta’ swallow your pride and make money instead of just doing science.”

“But I do want to make money.” Damn it, the man was right. “Excuse me.” Garrett ran out of the store, trying to find the divers. He’d do what needed to be done to stay afloat. Still, he felt like he was putting off something yet worse.