9.

Becket: Pasaje oscuro

Another bullet hit the water short of them, but the angle was so shallow that it ricocheted, tumbling back up into the air with a buzzing sound, and passing close enough overhead that Thomas could feel the wind of it against his face. He took alast deep breath and pushed himself under with his arms, then tucked and dove.

He had to clear his ears twice on the way down, then intercepted the plate below with his hand, scraping it on an outcropping of mussels. No beach matting here.

He followed the current, keeping off the seacrete itself, and when the current suddenly shifted, pulling him down, he let it take him, under the edge and into pitch dark only occasionally broken by specks of phosphorescent green, as he wondered where Patricia was.

Trust her. She's better at this than you.

He let himself rise up, occasionally touching the beach plate overhead. He could feel it vibrate as the surf broke upon it above. His lungs were begging for air and, in the dark, he could see red spots swimming before his eyes.

I'm not going to make it, he thought, and then his hand broke into air and he kicked up, desperate to inhale, but the clearance was less than six inches and he slammed into the concrete above with his head, hard enough that he sensed unconsciousness threatening. He fought it off and rose again, more cautiously this time, sticking his face up above the water and taking whooping deep breaths. The water dropped momentarily, then rose all the way to the ceiling, and he kicked hard, finding the air interface farther in. He took another breath and waited to see if the water would obliterate the air space again, but though the water rose, it didn't rise all the way to the ceiling.

Now that he wasn't in danger of drowning, the bump on his head reclaimed his attention. "Ow, ow, ow, ow!" He touched his forehead and it stung, the skin clearly broken.

Out of the darkness came laughter and he felt overwhelming relief, strong enough to bring tears to his eyes. God, I thought I'd lost you. He swallowed before saying, "You have a very different way of showing sympathy, Patricia."

He turned toward her voice and saw her move toward him, a splotch of dark outlined in swirling phosphorescence. He reached out and met her hand.

"Must've hurt." She giggled again. "Come on, the overhead opens up the closer we get to the hex."

He thought about the slope of the beach plates. Makes sense. He stayed close enough to her to feel the eddies of her strokes and occasionally her legs brushed his arms, reassuring him. He wasn't sure of his direction, but when he checked overhead, the ceiling was steadily rising and soon was out of reach.

Ahead he heard Patricia say, "Ah," and he stopped swimming forward, treading water instead. Thomas cautiously approached and found her waiting beside a vertical wall.

"No handholds, I take it?""You said you could tread water."

He couldn't help laughing. "God, you sure know how to show a guy a good time!"

She started to laugh, then went into a fit of coughing. "Dammit, you made me blow water up my nose."

He caught a glimpse of light overhead, a thin crack of moonlit sky, and he said, "I thought this air was trapped under here, to float the plates."

"No. The plates hang off the seawall, but it's not airtight. That's why the water is rising and falling in here. If it had been day, you would've seen where the water sometimes shoots up between the cracks."

Thomas put an arm around her waist, treading water with his other arm and his feet. For a brief moment she let herself mold to him, her hips pressing his, but then they started to sink, and she pushed off slightly to keep treading water.

"Their timing was really awful," Patricia said.

Thomas groaned. "I was so mad, if I'd been armed I would've done something really stupid."

"Todas las cosas tienen su tiempo," Patricia said.

Thomas half-laughed, half-growled. "As long as that time is soon!"

She touched him, tracing her finger down his stomach and across the front of his boxer shorts, then kicked away when he reached for her. "Soon. Right now we need our energy for something else."

"I'm listening." I'm aching.

"This wall goes down about thirty feet. Fortunately, you only have to come up about fifteen feet on the other side before you hit the air/water interface. It wouldn't be a big deal with fins on, but-"

"How thick is the wall?"

"About four feet at the bottom. It gets thicker as it rises, but it's mostly straight up."

"Why don't we just work our way south under the plates?"

"The current's wrong. When we hit the hexes that support the Playa del Mar sand beach, we'd still have to duck under. We can't swim back out to the edge of the beach plates. The current is too strong. Going under the seawall, the current works with us."

Thomas nodded in the darkness. "Got it."

"Be sure to keep a hand on the wall going down. It's very easy to becomedisoriented in the dark. When you reach the bottom edge, you'll feel the current."

Thomas let his hand stray to her shoulder. "I feel every foot of that mile of water below us. It shouldn't feel any different than swimming in eight feet of water, but it does."

"We'll go together. You won't have to worry about cracking your head on the other side. The ceiling should be over twenty feet high."

"Very funny."

"Kiss for luck!" She found his face with her hands and kissed him long and hard, depending on his efforts to keep their heads above water. "Now," she said, breaking off. "Deep breaths-four should do it."

He listened, timing his breaths with hers, then ducked when she did, lifting his legs above the water to drive down, kicking and pulling with his arms. The first twelve feet were the hardest, but then the volume of air in his lungs compressed enough that his buoyancy went negative, and he worried less about making it down to thirty feet than stopping once he got there. He concentrated on keeping his ears clear, to avoid stopping.

He could feel the eddies from Patricia's strokes beside him, reassuring, a connection of pressure waves, no less real than reflected photons.

The current was even stronger than he remembered, perhaps because they were well below the beach plates and any conflicting eddies. He didn't so much turn to go under the wall as he was swept, pulled below the edge, scraping his leg on the concrete. He began kicking upward almost immediately, desperate for air.

He broke water before he expected it, relieved, then terrified. When he tried to take his first breath of air, it wouldn't go in, as if his lungs were paralyzed.

Desperately, he tried again, and his throat, seemingly stuck closed, opened just enough and the air rushed in. After that, it was easy, deep breaths.

He heard Patricia break water, and he listened for her breaths. They came, like his, after an odd pause, a wheezing intake followed by more normal breaths that echoed oddly in the space above them. He spotted the glow from her watch face, distorted by water, moving with her hands as she tread water.

"Roll call," he gasped.

"Present and accounted for." She hardly sounded breathless at all.

They moved together through the phosphorescence. "This is a lot of work, you know," he said.

"Well, I think it beats playing catch-the-bullet with your head."

"Uhm. Can't argue with that. What's with that first breath? I nearly couldn't take it when I surfaced."She put a hand on his shoulder. "I suppose I should've warned you. We've got half an atmosphere pressure differential going here. When you first surfaced, the volume in your lungs was substantially reduced from what it had been on the surface, almost pulling a vacuum, and your throat was squeezed shut by external pressure. Takes a bit of effort to get it open. Much deeper and we couldn't have."

"Oh." He shoved the resulting image firmly out of his head. "What now? I don't suppose there's a ledge under here where we can rest."

She sighed. "No. There isn't."

He groaned. "Of course there isn't. What do you suggest we do now? Beside treading water, that is."

"Well, I've been thinking about that. It won't be any big deal to swim across this hex, then duck under to the other. It's only fifteen feet down and fifteen feet up, and the air pressure will be about the same. Then we swim across that one, and we're at the lagoon. But our friends up above have a-"

"-boat out there. And they might have an IRIAD aboard, even if those guys didn't bring one ashore."

"And what's an IRIAD? I wondered about that."

"Infrared Image Acquisition Device. It's a set of fat binoculars that sees body heat. Live bodies in the water show up quite well on them. They're standard INS equipment."

Her voice came back smaller. "Oh. I was afraid of that, what with their 'aye, aye, Chief' and 'squad' and 'the old man is going to rip me a new one.' "

Thomas growled in the dark. "Yeah. That's my impression, too. It'll be interesting to find out if Sycorax is docked down at the Abattoir." He took another deep breath, trying to maintain some buoyancy. "Whatever we're going to do, we need to do it soon. I'm getting tired."

"Okay. I think we should work our way north, under the seawall, moving from hex to hex. This will get us away from their boat and we won't have to go too far to reach the populated edges of Matagorda Subdivision-about a half mile. If you can swim that far."

"I can try. What's the alternative? Cross over and let those bastards shoot us? Or perhaps stay where we are until we're so tired we just sink?"

"We have another limit on how long we can stay in here," Patricia said. "In five hours we'll pass the no-decompression limits for this depth and when we surface, we can get the bends."

Thomas laughed. "Five hours? I'm looking at drowning long before that."

"Okay. Let me find out where we are." She clapped her hands together once,sharply, surprising Thomas. Before Thomas could ask her what she was doing, Patricia touched Thomas's arm and pulled it. "Swim that way. It's parallel to the closest wall and that should be the one we just went under."

Thomas had heard the difference in the echoes, but interpreting the information gained was beyond him. He started sidestroking in the direction she'd pulled and whistled a light and bouncy phrase of music before the demands of swimming made him concentrate solely on breathing.

"What's that?" Patricia asked, keeping pace beside him.

"It's the overture to Die Fledermaus."

"The flying mouse? Ah. Bats. Echolocation. You should see me with a sonar set and a good pair of headphones."

"I look forward to it." I want to see everything you do.

He stopped talking then and concentrated on long, gliding strokes. It was much easier than treading water and they came up against another wall in just a few minutes.

"Oops. Wrong wall," Patricia said.

"How do you know?"

"We hit it at too great an angle. We're probably just short of the corner. We just follow along." She started swimming along the wall and sure enough, they came to a corner almost immediately.

"There. This is the wall we want. There's another hex on the other side, like this one. All right, the easy part is that it's only fifteen feet down, okay?"

"Hmph. I have a feeling that I'm not going to like this next part." He had the feeling that she was smiling, but it was just a feeling. All he could make of her visually was an area of increased phosphorescence with a dark shadow in its midst.

"It's not so bad. It's just that when you put two hex walls next to each other, the thickness at the bottom is going to be eight feet, not four. Also, you're going to be swimming across the current, down there, instead of with it. It won't hinder, but it won't help either."

"How many times do we have to do this?"

"Uh, I'd say we were more than a quarter mile from Matagorda and less than half a mile. Call it seven to ten hexes. So, seven to ten times."

"Better sooner than later." The steady swim across the hex had actually helped him. Swimming was easier than treading water, and his muscles were loosening up.

She slipped closer to him and said, "Another kiss for luck."He pulled her closer. "I don't need the luck, but I want the kiss." He did scissors kicks to keep afloat.

Patricia broke off after a moment. "I'm supposed to feel breathless after we dive under the wall. Not before."

"Suffer. And a one, and a two, and a-." He took two quick breaths and dove.

It wasn't nearly as bad as the earlier dive. He turned over on his back as he swam under the wall, touching the concrete above to find its end. It felt as if the entire structure above was sliding through the water rather than the current pulling him sideways, but it helped him orient himself, and he swam perpendicular to the motion.

He found the other side and ascended comfortably. He had no trouble breathing in after breaking the surface.

Patricia came up beside him, actually contacting his legs as she rose, and guiding herself clear with one extended hand, which he captured as she broke the surface.

"Roll call."

"Aye, aye. Six or so more to go."

They moved back to the wall and pushed off perpendicularly. His eyes were adjusting to the extreme dark and the phosphorescence seemed to be getting stronger and he thought he could actually make out the far walls, not by where they were, but by where the faint green glow ended.

He swam sidestroke, which let him keep one ear out of the water and talk, after a fashion. "What do you love?"

Patricia sputtered and broke her stroke.

He kept swimming and talking. "When I'm investigating somebody, if I can find out what they love-what they love to do, what they love about life-then I've taken a big step toward understanding who they are and what they're likely to do."

She was even with him again. "Are you investigating me?"

"Passionately."

She laughed softly in the dark. "What do I love? Hmmm. That's hard to say."

"You don't know?"

"That's not what I said."

Oh. It's hard to say. "Okay. What do you like?"

"Coffee."