| Aaron
Tolingford pitched forward off the rounded bow of E-76, their borrowed
US Army E-boat for the day, splash-rolling smoothly in a powerful underwater
kick toward the coral reef lying deep below them in the calm lucently azure
waters of the Mid-Pacific atoll. Schools of brilliant-green parrotfish
shuddered and fled at the sound of his approach, their triangular fins
beating truculently in syncopation. In seconds Aaron hovered at 85 feet
below the surface, hanging on a steeply pitched wall soaked in clown fish
and anemone, 1000 fathoms of deep blue sea below him. He adjusted his BC’s
fit with a quick wriggle, trimmed himself with a spurt of air from the
whip and checked his gauges, waiting for the others.
Aaron
was more than just another recreational diver, spending his days after
work at the remote Eyrie Army missile test range, exploring this magnificent
coral reef.
Much
more than that, he fluffed himself, watching exhaled streams of bubbles
glisten up towards the descending shadows of his two dive buddies, Melissa
and Ragnar. I’m the Chief Architect.
Not
that it made any difference to those he dove with. Most people on the atoll
thought Aaron was just an overly cautious, pompous ass of a diver, with
limited patience below water and too much mission-orientation above. But
if they had room on their boats, what the heck, adding him helped pay for
rental and gas. It wasn’t like you had to be friends with the guy, right?
So Melissa had asked Aaron if he’d like to come along Saturday, after work,
cruising the drop-off for sharks.
Even
though they were a team, Aaron waited until Friday late, just so he wouldn’t
seem too eager. And in his own mind, it wasn’t pride that made him hold
back.
He
was, after all, a very busy man.
Their
new temporary duty (TDY) assignment had brought them here to this remote
Pacific military base as representatives for Kestrel Technology Corporation,
creators of the Theatre Pre-emptive Downrange Loiter (TPDL) program, its
ultra-high-altitude (UHA) soaring aircraft, and developer for all in-flight
programming and avionics systems design.
Aaron’s
associates at Rocket Propulsion Lab (RPL) had adapted and advanced experimental
plasma engines at his direction, and then naturally Boray-McMartin, as
the largest defense conglomerate in the world, seized the contract to build
those Kestrel’s, the testbed, their launch vehicle, and to operate all
the launch facilities. There were billions, and ultimately trillions of
dollars at stake in the deployment contracts, if all went as planned.
Their
Kestrel group would be posted here just long enough for the Strategic Missile
Defense Command (SMDC) dual test launches, then back Stateside for the
debriefing. So this was their last fun before the mission began in earnest.
Aaron smiled serenely as the other two divers approached. As TPDL’s founding
father, he’d been given the honor of choosing the program’s codename, and
after thrashing around over weeks for something truly appropriate, a
bird? a demi-god? a remote galaxy?, he’d stumbled across an obscure
science report in
Nature.
"Gentlemen,"
Aaron announced to the joint-chiefs, "They’ve discovered a new South American
butterfly, Ithomiidae Semaphora azulvilar, which spends its entire
life cycle in the tops of the tallest trees in the tropical cloud forest.
Let’s
name our warbird program after that high-flyer’s, using Semaphora’scommon
name."
So
TPDL came to be known as ‘ Trinidad Blue ’.
SMDC
dubbed Kestrel’s spectacular rapier-winged warbird after the Semaphora
too. 'Tacit Trinidad', all gossamer-and-titanium sleek 58.3 meters of her,
the most lethally brilliant forwardly-deployed anti-ballistic missile (ABM)
system ever devised. An UHA loiterer, like her kestrel hawk namesake, with
all-seeing eyes the twin sub-millimeter XS-band radar arrays at Atacama
and Arunachal, Tacit Trinidad stood ready to pounce on a terrorist nation’s
just-launched ICBM, plummeting to impact like Thor’s thunderbolt even before
the ICBM had completed second-stage burn, sending a blazing cloud of radioactive
debris falling back on the rogue aggressor, in a deliciously ironic postpartum
of death.
Now
they were here, in this far-off place, to fuse together Aaron’s master
vision of programming code and aerospace technology, a plan to give its
owner the mythic power that mankind had sought for ages.
Eminent
domain over the very heavens above!
•••
Melissa
leveled off in front of Aaron, and flashed an "OK", her long blond hair
billowing out, setting off the florescent green Titan skins that clung
to her sweet curves. A long drink up on land, Melissa was a real siren
song underwater, and Aaron ached to chase close in and personal. But Ragnar
was her lover, and he settled in behind her like a dark cloud.
Ragnar
carried that big triple-band Procyon speargun of his, and as the point
swung past Aaron’s face, Ragnar seemed to hesitate. Aaron felt his sack
twinge, and a cold shiver ran up his back.
Let’s
have no misunderstanding.
Melissa
brought her new Sondheim dual-strobe underwater camera, slung under her
left arm like a shopping bag. She’d told Aaron last week at the Eton Beach
party they wanted to take some stop-action photos of big-tooth tuna spearfishing,
maybe draw in a lone hammerhead shark or even a tiger, once they’d tasted
the fresh blood. Aaron, not wanting to wimp out in front of her, had over-acted
his part, unable to resist.
"You
need a man who’s not afraid of a little action to frame the shots for you,"
he boasted, yet at the same time, dreading his machismo in front of the
others.
"They
say the best dive-action photos have one or two divers framing them," Melissa
had agreed, turning away, "Ragnar and I would sure appreciate your help."
So
he’d volunteered for ‘point’, as that looming background silhouette. Never
mind he’d always be on station in front of her lens, never able to check
over his own shoulder. At least he’d always be in her sight, and she in
his. Maybe later the spark to her tinder, first rushes in the darkroom,
groping together, hot passion under that red light. Jeez, I’ve got a
boner! Aaron blushed behind his mask, as they cruised south towards
Gea Pass, where the tiger sharks like to play.
At
85 feet underwater in the tropics, with crystal clear sea both above and
below you, the surface seems much closer than it really is, way up there,
looking like frost on a silvered window pane. If anything goes wrong, you
know, you can still make an emergency ascent, as long as you weren’t breathing
too hard to start with, and remembered to exhale on the way up.
Otherwise,
forget it. Blackout... Pneumo... Death.
With
some 6000 feet of abyss below you, those depths appear like a glacial blue
lens, your own sun-shadow rippling fingers of darkness down through a deeper
cryptic indigo, into which your eyes can’t really penetrate. Only drifting
on the edges of your vision, darkly silent shapes, swimming leisurely,
ultramarine against cobalt. Razor-teethed sharks that’d jink toward you
in a heartbeat, terrible jaws wide-gaped.
That’s
what makes it fun, the beauty and the terror, Aaron thought to himself.
Colors so luminously florescent that no film emulsion could reproduce them,
and intricate patterns of lights and darks so cleverly scaled on even the
tiniest creatures, that surely there must be a God. Yet you’re immersed
in an ocean-sea filled with monstrous beasts so apex-fierce they’d rip
your head off, and the ever-present slap-in-your-face reality that Man
can’t naturally breath underwater!
Melissa’s
lithe viridian shape shot past, bringing him abruptly out of his little
reverie, and for a moment he stared after her like a great mako shark himself,
feeling the desire to chase, and catch, that dancing green lure. But Melissa
was intent on the edge of a grotto ahead, her camera raised, as silver-blue
and yellow fishes danced around the shredded coral-pink remains of a leopard
cowry some dark octopus had punched open and then abandoned. She wheeled
just outside the melee, strobes flashing repeatedly, her thumb working
the wind, her left hand screwing the focus knob. Again and again lightning
froze the bright fishes’ yellow and blue silhouettes, as they swirled and
churned for the sweet bits of flesh.
Just
over Melissa’s shoulder, a shadow passed, and suddenly Ragnar slammed Aaron’s
shoulder with his thrashing fins, bursting by on intercept trajectory.
That pale torpedo was a dark-blue and silvery big-eye tuna cruising the
drop-off like a gray wolf, silent, and swift. His speargun raised in one
smooth motion, Ragnar rotated vertical for stability, and fired a dart.
The
line spit out into the blue like a cobra, flash-on-flash as it hit, but
the tip just raked the dorsal ridge above the tuna’s tail, and glanced
off. Missed! Aaron snorted. But Melissa was all sad for Ragnar,
shrugging ‘oh-well’ hand signs, and then the two of them swam off,
leaving him to play catch-up, alone.
He
checked his computer, tank gauge at 1800 psi, depth blinking 75 feet, 12
minutes ‘til deco, so Aaron arc’d upward a bit to 50, staring obliquely
down on Ragnar and Melissa as they powered away toward the edge of the
pass. Let them go into decompression, I’ll have the longer dive,
he smiled, and swung left to check a surge channel for cowries. A school
of bright blue tangs fluttered before him like butterflies, and every crevice
in the coral walls seemed to hold some never-before seen rainbow creature.
Abruptly
he remembering his promise to them, and gulped at the distance he’d have
to make up, lunging forward with strong sweeps with his arms and legs like
some fabled Atlantean, into the liquid azure distance. Faint shapes coalesced
ahead. Aaron spotted Melissa hanging by a tabletop coral, camera raised
as Ragnar fumbled a darted parrotfish off his spearpoint, pale fishblood
clouding the water around them. A bullet-headed seven-foot female blacktip
circled nervously, sleek, golden, waiting, and then a second, smaller male,
then more, jinking, lunging toward the pair. Melissa threw a quick glance
over her shoulder for Aaron, pointing jabs toward his distant mark. Ragnar
backpedaling fast away, as the mob of sharks rioted over the still twitching
fish carcass.
Aaron
circled out and behind the melee, and took his position as diver silhouette.
The frenzied feeding blocked Melissa, Ragnar invisible, stalking more bait.
[Flash!] The camera pulsed in her hands, strobbing the frantic sharks
into still life. His eyes momentarily clouded, an orange blot in his retina
fading to foam green. [Flash!] Thoughtless of himself, he tried
hard to hang on-station to her curt hand movements this way or that, but
his vision was blurring through lozenges of morphing color. [Flash!]
He
caught Ragnar’s form out of the corner of his eye, approaching, stalking,
spear held out, toward a fat chocolate and blue-spotted grouper skirting
the edge of the coral wall. The two forms vectored toward him on collision
tangent, then abruptly the gray shape of another shark glided right in
front of his face. [Flash!]
Ragnar
steadied his speargun to fire.
In
an instant, the reef shark jinked, reversing course, sandpapering across
Aaron’s naked legs, throwing him offbalance. At that same moment, Ragnar
switched his aim from the grouper to the shark, his finger jerking hard
on the trigger in protective reflex.
Aaron’s
body wracked sharply around as the spear pierced first the shark, then
on through his chest, skewering out below his armpit with a dark puff of
blood. His mouthpiece spat freeflow as he screamed in pain, eyes saucered
blank, unbelieving. Frantically man and shark writhed in throes of agony,
pinned together by the dart. Ragnar dropped his spear gun, stunned in shock.
Melissa hung still in the water, auto-flashing picture after picture, recording
the fearsome sight before her in a catatonia of disbelief.
Aaron’s
hands flailed, bubbles and foam, dumping his weights as he thrashed upward.
[Flash!] The two forms propelled away, hogged-tied together by the
trailing spear line, struggling for the surface. [Flash!] The wildly
thrashing shark knocked the regulator from his mouth, and then tore the
mask from his face. He fought the fierce urge to inhale, ignoring the barrel
tightness in his chest as the pair rose like rockets, focused only on the
bright wave-rippled sky above.
Then
his screaming lungs, hyper-inflating, burst forth misty belches of pinkish
foam, streaming on out of his sinuses and bulging eye sockets in a dark
blush of blood. The shark arc’d weakly, then twitched and hung limp in
death, stomach prolapsed from its jagged jaws.
Aaron’s
pale lips softly kissed the sun-mirrored undersurface of the sea, and gulps
of clotted red burst through his clenched teeth with a great sigh.
His
ascent reversed, glissando,
back into the deep.
Entwined
bodies, ichthyoste and merman, spiraled gently down, palimpid in death,
fading, dappled in sun and shadow, on down in a slow gyre. Ghosting past
Melissa and Ragnar, their tangled forms rolled softly over the wall edge
and free-fell through the indigo blue vastness, disappearing at last into
the depths below, beneath a tumultuous swirl of dark ravening shapes.... |
"Trinidad
Blue" by Peter Torbay
is near-future action-adventure at its best,
