Expendable - James Alan Gardner [47]
There’d been too many deaths already. I refused to permit another.
Lifeguard
Clasping the Bumbler’s strap to my shoulder, I hit the lake running, took one bounce, then knifed out in a shallow dive while I still had momentum. For a woman brought up in the steamy tropics of Agua, the water temperature here was an education. No doubt, an ice-colony boy like Yarrun would have claimed the lake was balmy, but this was still mid-autumn at forty-one degrees north latitude. My muscles did not seize up with the cold; my lungs continued to gasp up air whenever I lifted my head from the water; but I could feel my skin pebble into gooseflesh, and had to grit my teeth to keep them from chattering.
Ahead of me, the glass coffin was nothing more than a V-shaped disturbance under the water. Before it vanished completely I took a sighting on it, trying to estimate the difference between its position now and where it was when the glass woman slipped off. Was I getting close to her? The water was certainly over my head. Trying not to think about undertows, sharks, or water-borne parasites, I swung the Bumbler around and pushed its scanner under the surface.
A visual scan would only waste time; the water was black, the target transparent. I set the sensors to look for heat and cranked up the gain. There was no guarantee the woman would be warm-blooded—who knew if glass had blood at all?—but even if her metabolism just matched air temperature, she had to be warmer than the frigid water around me. The Bumbler would pick her up if she was within ten meters.
The screen flickered then bloomed with something hot right beneath me—something alive, close and moving. My heart choked tight with fear before I realized I was seeing my own legs, treading water. Oh. Tilting the scanner outward, I swung myself in a slow circle…and tried to force from my mind the memory of doing the same when I was searching for Yarrun.
“Where are you?” I muttered. “Come on, come on….”
A bright blob flared on the bottom, only a few meters from me. Steady, steady; and in another few seconds, the Bumbler had sufficient data to resolve the image into a human shape, its arms and legs struggling futilely.
Okay. Okay.
Sling the Bumbler over my shoulder.
Take a deep breath.
Dive.
Even with the heat trace sighting, it wasn’t easy to find a transparent woman in night-black water. I swept my hands blindly for at least ten seconds before I made contact: smooth slick skin, warm but diamond-hard. Before I could decide what part of her I was touching, an arm lashed out and grabbed me, catching hold of my hair. She nearly yanked out a handful. Then we were wrestling, unable to see in the dark—the woman wild with the fear of drowning and me trying to get her in a good rescue hold.
It was a match too evenly balanced for comfort. Explorers are trained in every conceivable rescue technique, and I had the added advantage of my martial-arts work, breaking free from people who wanted to grapple. On the other hand, the glass woman was strong and desperate, with a hide like blastproof plastic. When a flailing hand caught me in the stomach, it felt like a hammer—if the water hadn’t slowed it down, the blow might have knocked the air out of me.
The slipperiness of her skin was a mixed blessing. It made things easier for me to wriggle away when she grabbed me, but she could also slip from my grip whenever I tried a rescue hold. My only edge was that she had been underwater longer than I had; and once, I even got away from her for a moment, long enough to surface for breath. I didn’t worry about losing her in my brief moment of departure—she might be hard to see, but I wasn’t. She grabbed me the second I came back within reach.
Little by little, she weakened. After a long confusion of thrashing limbs, I managed to loop an arm around her neck and drag her to the top. We both gasped, spitting and sputtering; then she lapsed into uncontrolled gagging which gave me time to haul her to shallow water. At the edge of the beach, I let her