Expendable - James Alan Gardner [79]
My head emerged into the light. Some distance away, Oar still clung to the tree trunk, her body frozen, not looking in my direction. I was about to swim toward her when something grabbed my leg.
I was dragged under again, fighting and kicking. There was time to see glass tentacles stretching from the whale-shark’s mouth to my ankle. Then I was pulled inside.
Jonah
For such a big machine, the interior was cramped—too cramped to bend and loosen the glass grip on my leg. The Bumbler pressed hard into my kidneys, the pain stinging sharp; so I wriggled and squeezed to roll the other way, facing the Bumbler instead of having it at my back. Having a Bumbler jammed against my stomach wasn’t comfortable either, but I could stand it for a while. With less than two minutes of air in the rebreather, I had worse troubles.
The whale-shark’s mouth began to close. I tried to hold it open, tried to grab its jaw and pull myself free; but the hold on my ankle was as strong as iron, chaining me in place.
Better to stop fighting. My air would last longer that way.
Concentrate, I told myself. Slow breaths. Wait.
I had no idea what I was waiting for; but no one builds a river-shark just for the hell of it—not one with tentacles for grabbing passersby. This machine was designed to capture people…and I hoped it took them alive.
Yes. Of course it must want me alive. If its purpose was to eliminate intruders, it would have killed me by now. It could have zipped out a knife to slit my throat the second I was immobilized.
Unless it wanted my skin intact. Unless the machine’s job was to supply the Skin-Faces with fresh Explorer pelts.
Concentrate! I growled mentally. Slow, slow breaths.
Somewhere inside the shark, machinery started grinding. It was an unhealthy, damaged sound—the stunner had shattered some part of the glass mechanism. Slowly though, slowly, the water around me gurgled away. The shark was pumping water out, and (I hoped) pumping breathable air in.
Taking a chance, I raised my head into the clear space and inhaled shallowly through my nose. So far so good. I completely filled my lungs and waited.
No dizziness, no sudden rush of blackness. The shark wasn’t even doping the air with knockout gas.
What a wimp-ass planet.
Pumps Clanking
The water level dropped till half the interior was filled with air. I expected the water to continue receding; it didn’t.
Why did that bother me?
The whale-shark contained no light source, but it swam close enough to the surface that weak daylight filtered through the machine’s glass hull. The dim illumination showed why the water level wasn’t dropping anymore: as fast as the pumps sucked water away, more water seeped through the cracks where the shark had hit the log. It looked like the glass bent slightly inward up near the snout—as if the water pressure outside had enough strength to buckle the hull, now that the inside was half air.
“Okay,” I said aloud, “I am now officially worried.”
Minutes passed. The grinding noise in the tail section got worse, punctuated occasionally by soft electric crackling. If that was the sound of the pumps, they wouldn’t last long.
I held the rebreather in front of my face. The gauge was hard to read in the dimness, but the little tank still held sixty seconds of air. Careful breathing could stretch that out, but not forever.
Lifting my head into the air space, I filled my lungs as deeply as I could. By the time I finished, there was no doubt possible: the water level was back on the rise.
Arrival
In an entertainment bubble broadcast, I’d be saved at the last second—just as the chamber was completely full, just as my rebreather gasped out its last molecule of oxygen. Life doesn’t match that standard: you do not find a job just as you run out of money, a couple’s orgasms seldom arrive simultaneously, and salvation may not sweep to the rescue at the point of peak drama. For me, salvation arrived with some minutes to spare—better than mistiming its cue in the other direction.
To make a long story short,