Crawlers by John Shirley Read Free Book Online Page A

as Stanner approached. Stanner returned the salute. “Sergeant. That doesn’t look like a Navy SEAL vessel.”
    “No, sir, the SEALs couldn’t get a man here with the equipment in time. This man said someone had called him to replace the SEAL diver—”
    “What man, where?”
    Dirkowski nodded toward the water. “He’s already down there, sir.”
    Stanner’s mouth went dry. “Dirkowski . . . you tell this man that there was . . .” He couldn’t remember if Dirkowski had been briefed on this bird. He thought not.
    “I warned him there was some radiation danger—not to touch the thing directly.”
    Stanner grunted, shaking his head. So he hadn’t been briefed. Great.
    Stanner walked over to the gently lapping shingle by the wrecked dock. He watched the diver’s bubbles on the water. As he watched, the bubbles stopped coming up.
    Standing at the rail on the deck of the
Skirmisher
, Cal squinted down into the murky water. He couldn’t make out much of anything, despite all the light from the surface. Sometimes he saw his Dad’s spotlit shape, in wallowy outline, but then he lost it again as the light broke up on the dark waves.
    Cal had let
Skirmisher
drift in the rising tide toward the crash site, so he was nearly over the top of it, as Dad had instructed him. Dad’s cable had paid out for a while, and then stopped moving.
    Minutes passing.
    More minutes. Nothing from below.
    He’d been waiting too long, hadn’t he? He tugged on the cable, sharply, two times, to let Dad know he was asking if all was well.
    He waited, his hand on the cable, so he could feel the slightest twitch of response.
    Still nothing.
    Dad had geared up with only a single tank of air. It was one of the small tanks—an inspection tank, he called it—for ease of movement. For a quick look around. Fifteen minutes. It had been that already, hadn’t it? And he couldn’t see Dad’s air bubbles anymore.
    That Air Force officer seemed concerned, too. The guy who’d come on the second chopper. “Hey, kid!” The officer shouted at him, from the shore. Looked like a captain or a major or something. “He supposed to be down there that long for a first inspection?”
    “Uh, no! You got any divers here?”
    “We got a rescue diver over here!” one of the coastguardsmen yelled from the boat. “You want him to suit up?”
    Cal hesitated. It would tick Dad off big-time if Cal sent a rescue down when Dad didn’t need it. He looked down into the water— just darkness and wavering light. He wished Dad had taken a mask with a headset in it, so they could stay in radio contact—but theirs was broken, and they couldn’t afford to get it fixed. And Dad had wanted to get down there fast, to make the job his own.
    He looked at his watch. Definitely—he was down there at least two minutes past his tank’s capacity.
    “Fuck,” he muttered, looking around for a mask and tank. He was going to have to go down himself.
    He figured he knew what’d happened. The satellite had smashed into the dock, which meant a lot of heavy broken timbers down there—shit too heavy and waterlogged and mired in the muck to float up. Some beam from the dock might’ve fallen in on Dad.
    He could be screaming for air right now.
    Feeling tears burning to escape, Cal pulled a mask on, shouting to the coasties, “I’m going down—be good if you send a man down—”
    “Send a man down to what?” came a voice from the water.
    Cal leaned over the railing. There was Dad’s pale face against the dark water, looking up at him, his mask pulled onto the top of his head.
    “What the hell, Dad! You know how long you were down?”
    “So it was a few minutes extra, so what. I know how to conserve air after all these years.”
    Cal looked at his watch. More like five minutes extra, he thought. Damn, his old man had
mad skills
.
    But five minutes without air? That wasn’t really possible, was it?
    Suddenly Dad was there, vaulting over the railing onto the deck like a young