Nothing Is Ever Simple (Corin Hayes Book 2) Read online

  “You’re very good,” I said to the old man. “Thanks for the help.”

  When he turned his eyes to me, I had to fight the urge to take a step back. There was nothing human behind them. A total absence of emotion, of fear or anger. He exuded a feeling of calm and death. It was strange. I’ve seen dead people. Killed a few myself, never with joy or exultation. Maybe one. But this was more than that. It was scary.

  “I came for the seal,” he said in a flat, toneless voice.

  “You can have it,” I said, raising my palms, “as soon as these folks go away.”

  “Qín zéi qín wáng,” the old man said.

  “What?” I kept a careful eye on the five men still standing. They didn’t seem eager to attack, but were probably just building up the courage. Telling themselves, they were five against two. No doubt, one of them explaining that, just a moment ago they had been eight versus two and it hadn’t gone so well.

  “Defeat the enemy by capturing their chief.” His eyes turned back to the five men. He raised the walking stick before his face and turned his hand so the stick moved into a horizontal position. “They have already lost.”

  “They’re still here,” I said. With no idea what he had planned, I decided to strike my own pose. It consisted of raising both fists in front of my face, a boxer’s stance. Lost every bout during my military career.

  The old man moved slowly, gracefully. His free hand came up to grasp the shorter end of the walking stick and pulled. There was a whisper, a susurration, a kiss on the non-existent breeze and I held my breath. It was bright silver, double-edged and looked sharp. Beyond razor sharp, I’d bet that sword could split atoms.

  His left foot slid forward, turning his body side on to the enemy. The scabbard, still held in a reverse grip, provided the guard and the sword swung back, the tip pointing away from the thugs and towards the floor.

  In a moment of utterly unexpected wisdom, the five men, as one body, turned and fled up the corridor.

  “No courage anymore.” The old man flicked the sword round and slotted it back into the scabbard with a final click.

  “Well,” I said, lowering my hands, “thanks again.”

  “The seal, Mr Hayes.” An open palm was extended towards me and I fumbled in my jumpsuit.

  “How did you know I’d taken it?” I put the seal into his outstretched hand. “And how did you find me?”

  “Technology is all very well and good,” he said, wrapping the seal in a deep red silk cloth. “But the old ways still work.”

  “They do?” I had no idea what he was talking about.

  “Mr Hayes,” he shook his head, “how did you ever defeat my grandson? I have seen your skills in action. I must confess, I am not impressed.”

  I shrugged. “Luck?”

  “A powerful ally, Mr Hayes. We will not meet again, I think. My suggestion would be to hurry to your destination. The Lady and Mr Rehja are not known for their forgiveness.”

  He bowed and left.

  “Thanks,” I called after him, before turning in the opposite direction and racing for my Fish-Suit.

  Chapter 50

  As the first drop of Oxyquid dribbled down my throat, it occurred to me I might actually get out of this alive. The flood of warm liquid that followed, the gagging, hacking and stamped feelings of panic were just part of using a Fish-Suit. It no longer held much fear.

  The green glow of the HUD flickered into life and I scrolled through the menus to the navigation and maps. Selecting the point, outside the city boundaries that Derva had given me, I plotted a course. Decision time; go online and get the map updates, current transport schedules and transponders or not? Not had a lot going for it. By staying out of the City systems, I would be harder to track and you can bet your last bit of oxygen that they were looking for me.

  I checked the clock, I had time to take it slow and avoid being hit by a transporter or other sub coming out of the darkness. Plus this close to the city, the lights would give me enough vision. Of course, that meant I could be seen, but compared to everything else out there I was tiny.

  A twitch of the motors and I was out of the airlock. The sound of the ocean surrounded me and it felt a lot like home. One that would kill me without a second’s hesitation and no regret, but a home nonetheless. The City-AI would be notified about the airlock cycling and would send a team to check it out. You had to be able to open them from the inside without the AI’s interference. A safety feature, but that didn’t mean it was done very often.

  I let myself sink to the sea floor, a mostly flat plain surrounding the city. Most of the big ones were built where it was flat. The process was easier and cheaper that way. Some cites were built in mountains or trenches. I’d heard of a few that had been tunnelled into the side of some really deep valleys. Expensive, but built far enough away from a subduction zone they’d be safe and sound. The map and compass pointed the way and I set off, walking with just a little help from the motors.

  A few small detours around struts, debris from construction, the odd rock that it was just too much of an effort to go over, and rare wreck of a sub was all I needed to do. The constant whirr and hum of power plants, machinery and the sounds of the ocean were hypnotic. You can lose yourself in the monotony of walking. Once you’re outside the range of the city lights and the darkness envelops you, you fixate on the map and the green glow of the HUD. It all becomes a mind numbingly boring trudge. Some folks go mad out here. In the loneliness. It suits me just fine. I can switch off and stop thinking. I won’t say it’s better than the alcohol, but it doesn’t give me a hangover.

  The sounds of the city disappeared into the background. Never totally vanishing, sound travels well in the oceans, but becoming background noise. The music of the sea took over. All the biotic sounds filtered through the suit and Oxyquid into my ears. A rumble I could feel, perhaps a far off earthquake. A series of whines and clicks, dolphins near the surface maybe. The growl and groan of a bigger whale. A whirring hiss, a small vehicle or an ROV. All those sounds could come from kilometres away, even hundreds of kilometres. The sea is a soundscape as well as landscape.

  At which point I uttered an expletive, which couldn’t be heard because of the Oxyquid, and wrenched my body around. Flicking the control surfaces to get a boost from the motor, but it was too late. The single-person sub slammed into me, and two robotic arms reaching out with their pincers. Behind the Plexiglas window, I saw Rehja’s face. A manic smile of victory and bloodlust.

  You can’t move fast, not with all the water resisting your movement, so you have to think a few seconds ahead. Not easy when you’ve just been stupid. I slapped my hand down on one of the arms, engaging the magnets in the palms. It saved me being swept away and out in the open. The single-seater sub was faster than me, a little less manoeuvrable in tight spaces, but even pushing my motors to the full, I wasn’t going to get away.

  The second arm came round. Typical worker sub construction. Cheap and effective for its designed job which wasn’t assassinating a lone Fish-Suit user. The arm was made of strong metal, two struts with a wire down the middle which operated the pincer. A separate motor would rotate the claws. I fired up the cutting torch on my wrist and let the arm come.

  It would be too strong for me to fight, but the hot torch made quick work of the wire. Even in the deep, I heard the crack and twang as the metal strands, under tension, parted. Now the arm was a battering ram and no longer able to grab me. It would still hurt if it hit me at speed and the pincers could still slice my suit open. At which point, if I couldn’t reach the rip, I would be dead soon after.

  Rehja moved the arm I was attached to. Lifting me out in front of the Plexiglas window, so he could see me. I bet he was enjoying this a lot more than I was. He smiled. I flipped him, in slow motion, the middle finger. The snarl on his face was petty revenge, but at the moment it was all I had.

  The other arm moved in again, aiming at my midriff. Rehja had brought his sub to a standstill, easier to move th
e arms and hit me. I watched it come, its movements jerky as if the operator wasn’t used to working it. He probably wasn’t. It didn’t matter, when it hit me it would hurt.

  Simple options, in the deep, are either the best or the most dangerous and I wasn’t faced with many choices. I switched the magnets off and gunned the engines, straight at the pilot’s bubble. A look of amazed fear passed over Rehja’s face. I’d have laughed if the Oxyquid allowed me to and the arm hadn’t caught the back of my suit as I moved.

  A small mistime of the escape and it cost me. The green of the HUD changed to red, flashing up alarms. Suit breach. Exoskeleton damage. Electrical faults. Not good. Any of it. I feel the cold of the ocean through the rent in the suit and the Oxyquid was trying to escape. The pressure of the water surrounding me slowed that down. It wouldn’t last.

  Ignore it for moment, I told myself and gave another kick of power from the motors. The power levels were fluctuating but the engines still worked. It carried me up and over the bubble, out of Rehja’s line of vision. There would be cameras along the hull, but that didn’t worry me much. He could look all he wanted to. A vengeful, demented, impotent voyeur.

  His sub moved and that helped. It passed underneath me and I clamped a magnet hand onto the hull. It hit with a clang that he would have heard inside. A solid thump which would echo in the tiny chamber of the little sub. Let him worry for a moment. The arms couldn’t reach me and I was safe for a moment. Except for the hole in my suit.

  I manipulated the control surfaces in my gloves, skimming through the menu to the emergency systems. The damage report was bad. Oxyquid would leak out at an increasing rate as the pressures equalised and I would die. I’ve had worse. I slipped the patch out of a pocket on my suit’s belt and tried to reach round for the hole. It was difficult. I was aiming blind. No sense of touch in the gloves and this was delicate work.

  The only way to find the right spot was to hold the patch over a spot on the suit and watch the readouts. If the flow of Oxyquid slowed I was in the right spot. On the left side of my HUD was my Oxyquid reserve meter, a bar that was sinking a lot faster than I wanted it to. Next to it, the readout gave the rate of discharge. Also way too high.

  Five moves and five minutes of waiting for the readout to change. Nothing. No slow of flow and I was beginning to panic. Rehja had pushed the sub’s motors as fast as they could go and was heading back to the city. If he got there, he might well find my dead body attached to the hull by the magnets in my palm. On the sixth go I found it and attached the patch. The flow slowed, but didn’t stop altogether. That would take a while. The patch was a good system. Over time it expanded and bound the edges of any rip together. Some sort of Nano thingy that followed the chemical markers in the Oxyquid. I didn’t have to understand it to know it worked and be grateful.

  I’d live, but I was going the wrong way.

  Chapter 51

  There is one fact you cannot escape when you pilot a small sub. The motor will always be accessible from the outside. And so it was with the one man version Rehja was in, the one taking me back to the city. I still couldn’t drop off and escape. Even without the arms he could ram and kill me.

  Using the magnets in the gloves, I dragged myself along the hull towards the motors. The Oxyquid levels were still dropping, but the hole would be sealed soon and there should be enough, by my reckoning, to see me safe to Derva’s location. The power levels were fluctuating and that was more of a concern. If the power died, the exoskeleton wouldn’t help me breathe, the navigation would give up the ghost and the Oxyquid would stop circulating. At that point, I’d have no choice but to go back into the city. The one place I didn’t want to go.

  Every time my hand slapped down on Rehja’s sub, a hollow clang sounded. I could hear it and so could he. The camera’s would tell him where I was going and he’d have a damn good guess at what I was about to do. A good pilot might have tried to scrape me off against a strut or another part of the city. That would take a cool head and careful piloting. I’d seen his face, the anger and desire for revenge. I was safe, for the moment.

  The motors, the ones that provided all of the forward thrust, not the smaller, fine movement ones, were right ahead. Two large circular casings shielded the propellers within. There were mesh grills on both sides to prevent anything from getting stuck in them. Safety first.

  It didn’t matter. The magnets and the force of the water held me in place, even as I freed one hand. The hot torch sprang into bright life and my visor darkened to filter the light. A Fish-Suit, apart from being a high end piece of military hardware that, and this is key because I’d signed a contract that set out the punishments quite graphically, was on permanent loan to me as long as I answered the call should it come, was also used for construction and demolition. They could get into the places where no one else could. Once there, they could build or destroy. I came to destroy.

  The welding, or cutting in this case, torch made short working of the housing that surrounded the cables and engine that drove the propellers. Electricity can be dangerous underwater. So with great care, I cut the wires and watched the propellers slow.

  With no forward thrust across the lift planes, Rehja’s sub sank to the sea floor. The smaller propellers and thrusters could hold it up. They could even move it forward, at an exceedingly slow pace. I wanted him stopped. Powerless. Helpless. At the mercy of someone else, of the elements around him. He was so used to being in charge, to being powerful. It would do him good to know how it felt to be at the other end of the spectrum.

  Sea water is a good conductor of electricity. A battery exposed to salt water dies quickly and small subs had their batteries located where they could be easily reached and changed out. On this model just behind a thin, but watertight, panel which came off easily under the ministrations of the torch. The sea water flooded in and I backed away.

  Sparks, a hiss and fizz of water as battery reacted with water and gave birth to a million bubbles of gas. The outer lights of the sub flickered and dimmed. Pincered arms, dangerous at the time, fell limp to the side of the sub. I shut the torch off and checked the power levels. Enough left. Hopefully.

  With the power of my legs and the assistance of the exoskeleton, I waded through the fine sediment of the ocean floor to the front of the sub. The inner lights had died and only red emergency lighting remained. He was there. I could see him checking every dial, pressing every button he could reach. Panicking. Scared. Not comprehending.

  I tapped on the thick Plexiglas. He turned. I must have been outlined in the dim red lights of his sub and the low lights of my own suit. It was enough for him. The expression on his face made me smile. The anger was still there, but now fear was the over-riding emotion. I pressed my helmet close to the glass just to make sure he could see it was me.

  I gave him a wave and a smile. The anger flared, so I waved again. Something was missing. It wasn’t quite enough. I drew back and pondered. Soon he’d remember the emergency beacon. The active ping of the subs sonar set to send an SOS signal. When he hit that they’d come for him. He could sit in that tin can coffin for a good eight or nine hours before the carbon dioxide built up enough to kill him.

  The torch flared into life once more and I applied it to the Plexiglas.

  Chapter 52

  Beer. Surely one of civilisation’s greatest inventions. Not only did it, in the old world above, provide a drink that was free from most of the deadly parasites and bugs, but it produced, in the human brain, the pleasant buzz of dislocation.

  My seat was still my seat. The bar hadn’t changed.

  My shoulder still twinges in the morning, but the rest of my wounds had healed up nicely.

  “I suppose you are happy with yourself?” Derva said from her side of the table.

  “It all worked out,” I answered, gesturing at the clips screen that was showing a news story. Apparently a financial scandal had erupted in a city to the south and led to the collapse of some small companies and the arrest of a hig
h powered executive along with members of her management staff.

  In company cities you could beat someone up, murder someone, steal an item or two and the security forces would do their best to solve the crime. But steal money, in the millions, from people who already owned billions and nowhere was safe from their wrath.

  On the screen, the executive, the lady, had lost her haughty expression when the sentence had been read out. I can’t imagine her life expectancy on a waste barge was too high.

  But it was the other face that made me smile the most. Rehja, shorn of beard and newly healed scar on his forehead. Apparently he’d been discovered in a small, damaged, sub trying to escape the city. Strangest of all, the words ‘arrest me’ had been melted into the pilot’s bubble. He still looked angry, but it was an impotent anger. The anger of us, the small people who could do nothing about the world and its inequalities.

  Well, some of us couldn’t, some of us got lucky once in a while.

  “Another beer?” I smiled at her.

  Acknowledgements

  Writing any book is a struggle. The person that tells you different isn’t being truthful. It is fun, exhausting, exciting and boring, an effort and a pleasure all rolled together and it changes from moment to moment.

  Now, finishing a book that is a different matter. There is no feeling in the world like it. It is a rush, a high, and a thrill that gets heart pumping.

  Releasing a book is just an exercise in fear. Will anyone buy it, will anyone like it, review it and tell their friends to buy it? I really hope so and that’s about all I can do now.

  Except, that is, really say thank you to the members of the Treehouse who’ve given me advice and guidance, been free with opinions and support.

  Thank you to my mother for her support and first reading.

  To Julia, a treehouse member, for beta-reading, editing and suggesting improvements.