in front of him. "Incompetents," he muttered. "Everything's right here if you just ask for it." Chart-reading instructions scrolled upward on his screen. Bushka bent to read them.
"Ship's balls!" Twisp shouted. "What's that?"
Through the spray-drenched plaz ahead and to his left, Brett saw a great splash of bright orange, something floating a wave out there. He bent forward to peer through the salted plaz. It was a long orange something that stretched into the anonymous gray of the storm. Kelp lay tangled all around it.
The foil was coming up on the orange thing fast, bringing it close to their port side.
"It's an LTA bag," Bushka said. "Somebody's gone down."
Chapter 25
"Can you see the gondola?" Twisp asked. "Brett! Stay downwind from it. The bag will act like a sea anchor. Don't get fouled in it."
Brett swung the foil to the left and it wallowed in a trough, rocking dangerously at the crest, then into the next trough. At the following crest, he saw the gondola, a dark shape awash in the long seas. The orange bag trailed out behind it with kelp laced across it. The gondola was coming up on their right. The seas were smoother there, flattened by the great spread of the bag. Another crest and Brett saw faces pressed against the gondola's plaz.
"There are people in there!" Twisp shouted. "I saw faces!"
"Damn!" Bushka said. "Damn, damn, damn!"
"We have to take them off," Brett said. "We can't leave them there."
"I know that!" Bushka snarled.
Scudi took this moment to begin muttering ... words Brett couldn't understand.
"She's all right," Twisp said. "She's coming out of it. Bushka, you come back here and look after her while I get a line aboard that gondola."
"How're you going to do that?" Bushka asked.
"I'm going to swim it over! What else? Brett, hold us steady as you can right here."
"They're Mermen," Bushka said. "Why can't they bring a line to us?"
"The minute they open their hatch, that gondola is going down," Twisp said. "It'll fill like a punctured float."
Scudi's voice came clearly then: "What's ... what's happening?"
Bushka released his safety harness and made his way back to her. Brett heard the hatch open and close. Bushka's voice, quite low, gave Scudi her answer.
"An LTA?" she asked. "Where are we?"
"Near Outpost Twenty-two." There was a scuffling sound and Bushka's voice: "Stay down there!"
"I have to get to the controls! It's shallow here. Very shallow! In these seas -"
"All right!" Bushka said. "Do what you have to do."
Scuffing footsteps on the deck, then water sloshing from a wet dive suit. Scudi's hand gripped Brett's shoulder. "Dammit, but my head hurts," she said. Her hand touched his neck and he felt a flash of pain on the side of his temple. It was a throbbing pain, as though something had struck him there.
Scudi leaned across him, her hand over his shoulder to steady herself. Their cheeks touched.
Brett felt something flow between them, creating a moment of panic followed by a sudden inrush of awareness. His neck hair prickled as he realized what had happened. He felt that he was two people become one but aware of the separation - one person standing beside the other.
I'm seeing with Scudi's eyes!
Brett's hands moved automatically on the wheel, a new expertise he had not known he possessed. The foil gentled its way close to the gondola and hung there with just enough headway to counteract the wind.
What's happening to us?
The words formed silently in their minds, a simultaneous question, shared in an instant and answered in an instant.
The kelp has changed us! We share our senses when we touch!
With this odd double vision, Brett saw Twisp swimming now, moving through a channel in the kelp and very close to the gondola. Faces peered out through the plaz. Brett thought he recognized one of those faces and, with that recognition, came a bursting daydream, instantaneous - a sense of people talking inside the gondola. The sensation vanished and he was left staring at white-whipped waves breaking across the LTA, Twisp clinging there while he fastened his line to a handgrab beside the plaz lock.
Scudi whispered to Brett: "Did you hear them talking?"
"I couldn't make out the words."
"I could. Gallow's people are in there and they have prisoners. The prisoners are being taken to Gallow."
"Where is Gallow? Here?"
"I think so, but I recognized a prisoner - it's Dark Panille, Shadow. I've worked with him."
"The man who treated me in the passageway!"
"Yes, and one of the captors is that Gulf Nakano. I'm going