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CHAPTER 5
FLOATING EXCHANGE

THEY sailed steadily westward toward the booming roar, shading their eyes and squinting into the horizon. In the distance, a slate gray object projected from the ocean, and Dominic saw it gleam intermittently between swells. The roar gradually resolved into a loud pulse of churning waters, and the closer they approached, the larger the object grew. By the time they came within half a kilometer, the din was deafening, and the structure loomed up like a colossal black wall blocking half the sky.

The noise drove Dominic to cover his ears. He stared dumbfounded. The ship was so enormous, it could have held a city. Its gargantuan rust-streaked hull was shaped like a drum, squat and cylindrical with a flat top, and there were no portals or openings. Just below the waterline, a ring of slime-crusted machinery circled the drum, slurping up water and rapidly spewing it out again. This action caused the ring to revolve briskly around the hull, creating a dangerous wake of boils and whirlpools. Their little raft was sailing straight for it.

When Qi hauled the sail down, Dominic sprang forward to help. At last, he recognized the strange craft. It was a factory ship. He'd seen them in holographs on the Net. These titanic vessels lumbered at the edge of swift ocean currents and generated power from hydrodynamic differentials. At the ship's core whirled a thick column of turbines, and inside its huge hold, robots and protected employees manned the revolving rings of production lines powered by the turbines. Such a ship could manufacture anything from cars to caffie pots. But the factory ship wasn't alone.

Clustered in its shadow, just beyond reach of its treacherous wake, Dominic saw a mat of floating debris, and as they glided closer, the flotsam resolved into the outlines of fragile little boats. Junkers they were, cobbled together from polyfoam crates, PVC tubing, plastic jugs and billboard panels. Beer logos and snippets of advertising copy slanted across their sails in a bright linguistic patchwork. Dominic even saw a hazardous-waste tank lodged among the trash. There must have been fifteen or twenty of these boats, each with its crew of men, women and children, exposed to the atmosphere, worn-out, beaten down and clinging—like animals, he thought.

"Runaway protes," he said aloud.

Qi couldn't have heard him over the din. When she finished tying down the sail, she stood and shouted, "This is our rendezvous."

It took Dominic about a second to grasp that the protes were sheltering in the factory's infrared shadow to hide from satellite scans. A fairly clever idea. He wondered who thought of it. At the top of his voice, he yelled, "What Com owns this factory? Are the executives complicit in this?"

Qi put her mouth close to his ear. "Don't get your shorts in a wad, Nick. There's only one exec on board, and he stays zonked twenty-four/seven on Mellow Yellows. That exec doesn't even know we exist."

Dominic assumed the Benthica was hiding directly below. He studied the ship for markings. If only he could get a fix on the location. But Major Qi had made sure he couldn't do that. "You've known the submarine's coordinates all along," he shouted.

She drew away and eyed him with a smirk. Then her long fingers circled the back of his neck, and she pulled him close again so she could speak in his ear. "What would you do with the coordinates, Nick? Let your bit-brain send his guards?"

Dominic jerked away from her, angry that she'd already guessed his intentions. "Whose side are you on?" he said. His throat felt raw from shouting, and the roar made his head ache. He yelled, "This situation is destabilizing the markets, and we're here to shut it down. Am I right or wrong? Tell me now."

She shook her head and put her mouth to his ear again. "How close are we to the ship's boil line? I don't want those current mills to suck us in."

Dominic glanced at the water. Their raft was drifting a good hundred meters from the factory's booming wake, safe for now. He shouted, "You're changing the subject."

He felt a sharp tug at the back of his waistband. The naked boy was standing beside him, balancing on the raft's edge and pointing into the water. Beneath them, the ocean suddenly lifted in a mighty swell, and Dominic grabbed the boy to keep him from falling overboard. All around, water welled up and doused them with filthy spray as a decrepit metal sphere popped up beside their raft like a toy balloon. It was a bathysphere, old and dented, a submersible shuttle craft of the type used for short runs to and from an undersea facility. Dominic saw plainly where the Benthica logo had been scraped off.

"Our taxi has arrived," Qi shouted over the roar. "Benito, help your grandmother."

The boy squirmed out of Dominic's arms and scampered over the barrels.

. "This is what we've been waiting for, Nick." Qi indicated the bathysphere with a nod, as a man with a sunburned face and short, hairy arms emerged from the hatch and lowered a ladder to the waterline. In one of the other boats, two women started paddling toward him with their hands.

Qi leaned against Dominic and draped an arm over his shoulder. He could feel her thigh rubbing his. She touched her mouth to his ear. "Since you ask, I don't know the Pressure's position. I only know this rendezvous point. From here on, we're entering unknown territory." She took Dominic's hand and laced her long, dark, graceful fingers through his short, thick, pink ones. "I can't tell you what to expect, Nick. My bit-brain master limits my info. Trust me. We're going to need each other."

Dominic smiled grimly, recalling the NP had used those very words. He would have said something sarcastic, but he was tired of straining his throat. So he turned away and watched the little boy, Benito, help his grandmother to crawl over the barrels.

One by one, the tattered fleet of boats transferred their passengers to the bathysphere. The pilot shuttled eight full loads of people down below the gray waves before Dominic's turn came. Without his wrist node, it was hard to measure time in the perpetual Arctic day. Usually he stayed live-linked to the Ark and got market news every ninety seconds. Now he wasn't even sure of the date. He tried to time the first shuttle run by counting seconds, but he was bone weary, and the factory ship's racket numbed his senses.

He spread his short fingers and checked for skin rash, the first symptom of toxic exposure. Nothing yet. Then he lay on his back and gazed at the clotted smog. Was the NP watching? Even metavision had limits. Without that transponder in his hip beaming up his identification, he'd be just one more heat signature lost in the infrared blur of this factory ship. He squeezed his eyes shut. Never had he felt so cut off in his life.

He awoke with Benito sitting on his chest. When he moved, the boy grunted and dove into the water. The grandmother was already climbing the bathysphere's ladder a couple of meters away. More boats had joined the little fleet—over fifty vessels. And the northern horizon glowed liverish red again. Another midnight had come around.

Qi sat beside him and kicked at the water. "Ready, Nick?"

"You didn't bother to ask me that before."

Above the breathing mask, her eyes narrowed to merry slits. "It's a rhetorical question."

Dominic made a running leap to reach the bathysphere— it was either that or swim through the foul, oily ocean. He banged into the ladder and scraped his shins and bit back the oath he wanted to yell. Inside, the shuttle's tiny cabin stank of prote. The moment he entered, he could smell their wretched breath and body dirt through his mask. Even the toxic atmosphere had smelled fresher than this. Fifteen people, counting the pilot, were packed into a space meant for six. When the hatch clanked shut, the noise of the factory ship abated, and Dominic sensed a faint humid breeze. An air exchanger was laboring to blow filtered air into the cabin and displace the toxic atmosphere. But the smell didn't improve. A green indicator light flashed overhead, and the pilot said it was okay to remove face masks. Dominic kept his on.

If there had ever been seats in this crude little craft, someone had ripped them out. The passengers sat in each other's laps on the bare metal floor. Dominic would have preferred to stand, but the pilot ordered him down, so he squeezed in next to the old woman, Juanita Inez. Benito sat on his other side, scowling as usual, with arms crossed defiantly over his narrow young chest. A tiny girl climbed into Dominic's lap. The girl's nakedness embarrassed him, so he took off his silk undershirt and helped her put it on. It swallowed her small body, but she toyed with the sleeves and seemed very proud of it. Before he could stop her, the little girl squirmed onto his shoulders, locked her ankles under his chin and clenched his hair with her sticky little fists. From the other side of the cabin, Qi winked and blew him a kiss.

"Thank you," Juanita said, touching her granddaughter's new silk shirt. "Our clothing fell apart. It wasn't made for the surface."

She drew the clear plasticene a little tighter around her body like a shawl, and Dominic wished he had more to give her. It wasn't seemly, a woman of her age with nothing to cover herself. Most of the other protes were naked, too, or nearly so. What kind of clothing did they wear that disintegrated so easily? Their commissaries must be run by swindlers. His silk underwear was holding up just fine.

As the shuttle bobbed downward, the cabin temperature began to rise, and he decided nakedness might be an advantage. The shuttle's cooling unit evidently wasn't sized for this load. In no time, the air grew suffocatingly hot, and everyone sweated. More than once, Dominic wiped salty drops out of his eyes, and finally, he took off the hot face mask. The cut on his knee throbbed.

Despite everything, the protes kept talking. They wouldn't shut up. In their gutter accents and awful grammar, they told jokes and congratulated each other and passed around a bottle of sour-smelling wine. They imagined this stinking little bathysphere was their salvation. Damp, musky flesh pressed in on Dominic from every side. He hated this closeness. If only they would stop talking!

He closed his eyes and fought down his disgust. This was taking longer than he'd planned, but soon he would board the Benthica. Only now, thanks to the major, he couldn't call the bank guards to get him out. Well, hadn't his father schooled him to be resourceful?

First priority, find and disable the miner's Net link. Second, get back to the surface and hail the NP. He'd memorized the submarine's layout, so he knew the Net link was housed on the bridge. He could use any heavy object to smash the vulnerable electronics. Stewing in his own sweat, he imagined scenes of hand-to-hand combat with a desperate mob, and he was suddenly glad the major had insisted on disguise.

Escape—how could he manage that? Again he thought of stealing Qi's earplug to call the NP. Or maybe—a new inspiration struck him—maybe he could hijack this very bathysphere and get back to the surface. Medical attention. Decent air. A very long, very sanitizing bath. Yes, hijack this shuttle craft. That's what he'd do.

He began to feel optimistic, but the little girl on his shoulders kept yanking his hair and making his eyes water. He could tell the shuttle was going deep because his eardrums ached, so he held his nose and blew hard to equalize the pressure in his middle ears. Next, an infant started crying. That was just one too many sounds.

Dominic reached through the crowd and tapped the young mother's shoulder. "Give it something to chew. Make it swallow," he said. "Haven't you got something to give it?"

When the young woman shook her head in confusion, Dominic raised his voice to be get everyone's attention. "Who has some food or water for this baby?"

For a moment, the other passengers stared at him without speaking. The infant began to scream.

"Speak up. This baby needs to swallow to clear its ears."

The grandmother, Juanita, was the first to react. From the folds of her plasticene shawl, she drew out Qi's water sack—still two-thirds full. A moment later, other people brought forth treasures. A bit of moldy bread. Some kelp juice. A tube of nutrient paste. Someone offered half a bag of hard caramel candy. The mother gave her baby a little water, and the crying subsided. Dominic smiled with sardonic pride. At least he'd achieved one objective.

The bathysphere plowed interminably on, sometimes dropping, sometimes rising, and Dominic guessed the pilot was hugging the contours of the seafloor to avoid detection. Apparently, the Benthica had not been hiding under the factory ship. When the little girl slid off his shoulders, sound asleep, he handed her over to her grandmother and stood up to stretch. He craned to see over the pilot's shoulder, hoping the console gauges would yield some clue to their location. The pilot must have noticed his interest because he stepped aside so Dominic could see everything. The gauges were all in Spanic though, a language Dominic had never bothered to learn.

"You're an educated man, yes? I hear it in your voice. What is your training?" The pilot's face was creased and pitted with black grit, and three of his front teeth were missing. He garbled his words with the same syrupy American drawl the old woman used.

Dominic hesitated. Should he say he was a banker and let the man think he dispensed coins for a living? In the periphery, he saw Qi smirk. Some of the others were looking his way. He had to say something. "I'm a negotiator."

"Ah." The pilot wrinkled his forehead and nodded sagely, though Dominic doubted he understood the term. "Whatever your training, you are welcome here. We need many skills. Many. My name is Estaban."

The pilot stuck out his hand to shake, and Dominic felt obliged to introduce himself. But he had no lie ready. Major Qi should have prepared him. What kind of covert agent was she? Thinking his hesitation might raise distrust, he shook hands and improvised. "I'm Nick. I came with those people there."

When he pointed to the old woman and the grandchildren, the boy Benito flashed him an angry glare that radiated the pure antagonism of the innocent. Dominic knew the boy had caught his lie, and for an instant, he felt a curious pang of guilt. But the boy said nothing, and the moment passed.

"See, here she is." Estaban pointed with pride to a blurry round screen in the center of his console, and Dominic stepped over the seated bodies for a closer look.

On the screen, in the false colors of metavision, an extraordinary image was coming into focus. Dominic had to study it for several minutes before it made sense. Below them, where the seafloor flattened to a broad, sloping plane, lay a mountain range of garbage. Peak after peak, the mountains stretched as far as he could see in every direction. Estaban moved his control yoke, and the shuttle banked and dove between two ridges. Its running lights flickered against the mountainsides, revealing twisted girders, crushed vehicles and abandoned machinery. Methane bubbles rose in sluggish columns. Shreds of plastic and fabriglass blew in the current like flags.

This was a solid-waste site, Dominic realized, probably the dumping grounds for some coastal city. As the bathysphere wound through the V-shaped valley, Dominic studied the cliffs of cast-off debris with amazement. So much of it. He'd never realized how large these dump sites could be. The shuttle cruised just meters above the junk, and he noticed that Estaban showed real piloting skill following its jagged contours. They rounded a bend, dropped into a deeper gorge, and there behind a cone-shaped mound of rock crouched a familiar bottle-shaped vessel. The Benthica!

This close, the submarine looked larger than Dominic had expected. Its belt-driven treads were mired so deep in bottom debris, it couldn't possibly move. He studied its shape, looking for the bridge. Yes, there on the forward section, at the very top, he saw the lookout dome. That's where the Net link would be.

Then he observed something more astonishing. Other ships also loomed in the rubble. Dominic had to squint to make sure he was seeing accurately. At least six other vessels lay scattered close to the crawler. They were wrecks, all of them. Their hulls were rusted, gashed and riddled with holes, and they lay at odd angles just as they'd fallen. One old barge stood on end with its bow buried twenty meters deep.

As the bathysphere descended, Dominic began to make out small figures in diving suits swimming through the wreckage. Blue-white flashes sparked around them, and it took Dominic a moment to realize the divers were using underwater welding torches. He motioned Qi to join him. Estaban was clearly enjoying his reaction.

"The Pressure of Light," Estaban announced.

At those words, a hush fell over the cabin. The passengers all turned to look at the pilot, and even though they couldn't see Estaban's little screen, they stared reverently in that direction. Dominic watched the divers moving among the wrecked ships. When he sensed Qi standing beside him, he traced their outlines with his finger. "Did you know about this?"

She shook her head and studied the screen in frank wonder.

"All this metal. How could satellite scans miss this?" he asked.

"It's the will of God," the pilot Estaban declared with a broad smile.

Behind Estaban's back, Qi shrugged and shook her head again. Her surprise seemed genuine, but Dominic knew better than to trust her. He remembered the sonic noise field. "Gig's cloaking our position," she had said earlier. Could the Orgs generate a sonic field large enough to hide all this? Who knew what those quasi-biochemical computers might dream up in their spare time?

Dominic leaned on his knuckles and peered at the sunken ships. The divers' suits looked like relics from the twentieth century. Old-fashioned air tanks hung in external harnesses on their backs, and they used fins to kick through the water. Evidently, they had no internal recycling systems because every time they exhaled, tiny bubbles of air rose above them in wavering fountains. Inefficient resource use, he noted.

Then he took a closer survey of the cone-shaped mound next to the submarine. The mound wasn't made of junk. It looked like a fresh pile of rock and mud. All at once, he recognized what it was—mine tailings thrown up by an underwater drilling rig. The miners must be digging a tunnel under the trash. What next?

As he studied the tailings, three divers passed right across the bathysphere's screen, giving him a close-up view. They were hauling a cargo net filled with jagged sheets of steel. Now he understood what the welders were doing. They were cannibalizing some of the wrecks to patch the others. The miners were building a town!

But these derelict hulls were rusted and damaged beyond repair. Didn't they see that? Why else would the ships have been junked? He couldn't believe the immensity— and utter futility—of their enterprise. Protes. What could you expect?

The screen blurred as they neared the Benthica. When the shuttle jolted hard, passengers tumbled into each other, and one beat late, Estaban said, "Take hold!" They had docked with the submarine. Estaban opened the hatch and climbed through, and the passengers began helping each other out. Dominic held Qi behind. "We need to talk," he whispered.

"This isn't the time."

She moved around him toward the hatch, but he grabbed her arm, and in his anger, he sprayed saliva when he spoke. "Gig's sonic field is hiding them."

She glanced at the thick fingers circling her biceps. "Maybe no one thought to look in the junk pile. It could be that simple."

"Ask him!" Dominic hissed. "I know about your ear-Plug"

"Actually. . ." Qi tilted her head to one side and pointed to a tiny, perfectly square bruise behind her earlobe, just a shade darker, than her skin. Dominic saw the dusky smooth curve of her throat before he noticed the bruise. Not an earplug. It was a surgical implant. How was he going to steal that?

She said, "Gig tells me only what he wants me to know."

"You've been hiding these protes all along. Why?" he barked in her face. "I thought the WTO wanted these people silenced. You have to explain this to me now."

All the passengers had climbed through the hatch, but Benito's head reappeared in the portal. The boy watched them with narrow, distrustful eyes.

Qi said, "C'mon, Nick. We'll talk later."

Dominic blocked her way and gripped both her arms. "Why are the Orgs hiding these protes?"

"Freaker, keep your voice down! I don't know anything. Do you think I asked for this preter-lame assignment?"

With a move that seemed easy, Qi freed her arms and flung him backward. He'd forgotten how strong she was. He just managed not to fall.

"This is how Gig does things. Neither of us has a choice." She rubbed her arms where he'd gripped her, and her black eyes blazed. Then, with a show of exaggerated cheer, she turned to the boy. "Lead the way, Benito."

Inside Dominic's jaw, a small bone popped against its cartilage. He pushed out of the bathysphere like a newborn— red and furious and somewhat deformed. The first person he saw inside the submarine was a barefoot old man wearing nothing but a pair of stained trousers, and waving a spoon. The man said, 'Welcome, friend. You want soup?"

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