Crawlers by John Shirley Read Free Book Online

might be thirty feet long, all told. Nothing much to hook on in the exposed surfaces. Dirkowski had said it was shaped like a cylinder, with communication extrusions and rocket vents. The parts projecting out of the sand looked fragile, like they’d just break off. He was going to have to dig out around it, find something sound to grapple. Maybe have to loop some chain over those pylons first, pull them away from the thing for clearance. He hoped he didn’t have to use a sand sucker. He’d have to borrow one from the Maritime School.
    Nick swam closer, into another, heavier fold of water pressure, and into colder water, within reach of the bottom. A single, sickly, hand-size fish darted past his mask.
    He thought he saw a bright metallic movement within the jagged crack along the top of the satellite’s hull. His light flashing off its parts, he supposed.
    All in all, though, it was surprisingly intact. But from what they’d told him, it’d come down at a shallow angle. Maybe this satellite
had
sort of chosen this place—because he’d heard Dirkowski say something about “firing orbital control rockets” as it came down. And how it hadn’t received orders to do that.
    Nick had heard that a lot of the more expensive satellites had small rockets on them, used for correcting orbital position. But from what he’d read, the correctional rockets weren’t designed for atmospheric reentry. Weird that the satellite had “decided” to fire rockets to slow an entry it probably wasn’t designed to make.
    Questions rose in his mind like the streams of bubbles around him. Had the DIA themselves fired those rockets remotely, brought it to this spot? Had they slowed its descent so it’d come down intact? Was it even an American satellite, or some kind of stolen Russian bird?
    But then he saw the markings. Those weren’t Cyrillic letters. He could make out some of the part that wasn’t hidden by sand and cloudiness:
    NATIONAL AERONAUTIC S
    Below that:
    DEPARTMENT OF DE
    And the usual enigmatic array of numbers and letters that must mean something to some bureaucratic bean counter somewhere.
    So this is one of those NASA-military collaborations.
    As he thought all this he flippered close enough to brush sand away from the edges, looking for a fixture to hook. Just pulling it out of the sand might tear off any part he grappled to, though. Sand liked to hold on to things, once it had them. No, they’d have to dig it out.
    He was floating almost upside down, angling his feet upward over the satellite, kicking now and then to keep from being nudged back up by water pressure. The lights from above danced around him, wavering in surface moil and splitting on the sand, on the metal edges of the satellite’s shining fracture.
    Dirkowski had said the radiation level was negligible, but best not to touch the thing with his bare hands.
    Still, he could save time if he could get the grapple into that crack, grip some of the superstructure under the hull. He reached into the crack.
    He felt around. Something . . .
    It felt like something was reaching up, in response, from inside the satellite. A string of bubbles, maybe—but like it was feeling around. And its touch stung very slightly. Could be he was feeling some sort of residual electric charge.
    The stinging passed. Then he felt something else, almost like a girl touching his palm teasingly with her soft fingers.
    Testing, tentative, almost playful.
    A second dark helicopter, marked only with D-23, had to wait for the first to take off before it could land. Major Stanner jumped down before the Blackhawk had quite set down, and—instinctively ducking under the whipping blades, one hand securing his hat against the rotor blast—he jogged over to the ruined docks.
    Sergeant Dirkowski was there, talking into a cell phone. Stanner knew him from the DIA; he’d gone out on some black ops in Pakistan Stanner had helped plan.
    The Green Beret broke the cell phone connection and saluted