kill us all, Bushka thought.
"You're crazy, Bushka!" Gallow shouted.
Bushka stared straight ahead, looking for the first glimpse of bottom. At this speed, the sub would dig in and make Gallow's warning come true. Not even plasteel and plaz could withstand a twisting dive into the rocky bottom, not at this depth and this speed.
"You going to do it, Bushka?" That was Nakano, voice loud but level and more than a little admiration in the question.
For answer, Bushka eased the angle of dive but kept the hard spin, knowing his Island-trained equilibrium could better withstand the violent motion.
Nakano began to vomit, gagging and gasping as he tried to clear his throat in the heavy centrifugal pressure. The stench became a nauseating presence in the cabin.
Bushka keyed his console for display of the sub's gas displacement. Notations showed ballast was blown with CO2. His gaze traced out the linked lines. Yes ... exhausted cabin air was bled into the ballast system ... conservation of energy.
Gallow had subsided into a low growling protest while he struggled to crawl out against the force of the spin. "Not Ship! Just another damn shit-eater. Gonna kill him. Never trust Islander."
Following the diagram in front of him, Bushka tapped out the valving sequence on the emergency controls. Immediately, an oxygen mask dropped in front of him from an overhead compartment. All other emergency oxygen remained securely in place. Bushka pressed the mask to his face with one hand while his other hand bled CO2 from the ballast directly into the cabin.
Zent began gasping.
Gallow moaned: "Not Ship!"
Nakano's voice gurgled and rasped but the words were clear: "The air! He's ... going ... to ... smother us!"
***
Justice does not happen by chance; indeed, something that subjective may never have happened at all.
- Ward Keel, Journal
Maritime Court did not go at all as Queets Twisp had expected. Killing a Merman in the nets had never been an acceptable "accident" at sea, even when all the evidence said it was unavoidable. The emphasis was always on the deceased and the needs of the surviving Merman family. Mermen were always reminding you of all the Islanders they saved every year with their pickup crews and search teams.
Twisp walked the long mural-distorted hallway out of the Maritime offices scratching his head. Brett almost skipped along beside him, a wide grin on his face.
"See?" Brett said. "I knew we were worried for nothing. They said it wasn't a Merman in our net - no Mermen lost, nobody that wasn't accounted for. We didn't drown anybody at all!"
"Wipe that grin off your face!" Twisp said.
"But Queets ..."
"Don't interrupt me!" he snapped. "I had my face down there in the net - I saw the blood. Red. Dasher blood's green. Now, didn't it seem to you that they got us out of court too fast?"
"It's a busy place and we're small-time. You said that yourself." Brett paused, then asked, "Did you really see blood?"
"Too much for a few beat-up fish."
The hallway let them out into the wide third-level perimeter concourse with its occasional viewports opening out onto the surging sea and the spume flying past. Weather had said there was a fifty-klick wind today with chance of rain. The sky hung gray, hiding the one sun that had headed downward into the horizon, the other already gone.
Rain?
Twisp thought Weather had made one of its infrequent errors. His fisherman's sense said the wind would have to increase before any rain came today. He expected sunshine before sunset.
"Maritime has other things to do than worry about every small-time ..." Brett broke off as he saw the bitter expression on Twisp's face.
"I mean ..."
"I know what you mean! We're really small-time now. Losing that catch cost me everything: depth gear, nets, new stunshield charges, food, the scull ..."
Brett was almost breathless trying to keep up with the older man's longer, firmer strides. "But we can make another start if ..."
"How?" Twisp asked with a toss of one long arm. "I can't afford to outfit us. You know what they'll advise me in Fisherman's Hall? Sell my boat and go back to the subs as a common crewman!"
The concourse widened into a long ramp. They walked down without speaking and out onto the wide second-level terrace with its heavily cultivated truck gardens. Mazelike access lanes crooked their way to the high railing overlooking the wider first level. As they emerged, gaps began to appear in the overcast and one of Pandora's suns made liars out of the meteorologists at Weather.