Read Online Vitals by Greg Bear - Free Book Online Page B

There I was, the closest thing to an outsider on the Sea Messenger, right in the bull's-eye. Why would Mauritz want to shoot me? He hardly knew me. Why would Dave Press want to drown me and wreck the DSV? The DSV was everybody's baby. Pilots would cross swords for the privilege of taking Mary's Triumph down to the vents.
    None of it pieced together. Without a rational explanation, even the smartest of scientists reverts to a tribal suspicion of bad juju.
    Exhaustion slammed up against emotional shock. I couldn't keep myself from shivering. Alone in the mess, waiting for the agents to work their way down the list and talk to me, I worried about the specimens.
    Jason came in and stared at me. "You all right?" he asked.
    "Fine."
    "Owen called Captain Burke and asked about you. He said take care of you and your work. I moved your specimens over to the aquarium. They're okay, I think."
    Unspoken, Jason was saying that what Montoya asked for, he got, even in the face of a police investigation. But Jason did not have to approve. "Owen knows about us, about the ship," he continued. "It's on TV. You sure you're all right?"
    "Thanks for moving them," I said, nodding like a fuzzy dog in a car's rear window. I could have hugged him just for bringing good news.
    "What'd you find?" he asked, and bit his lip, nodding along with me. We wobbled our heads, matching rhythm, and that was too weird. I stopped.
    "Xenos," I said.
    "Right. You were diving for xenos. Look like chidarians to me, though. You sure you got what you were after? Dave grab them, or you?"
    "I used the suck tube," I said.
    "Do you know Dr. Mauritz, off the ship?" Jason asked.
    "No," I said.
    "Why did Dave go overboard?"
    "I don't know," I said.
    "You didn't hurt him and push him over, just to hide it? You didn't fight, I mean, and hurt him. Self-defense?"
    "No. He did it all."
    "Did he say he wanted to kill you?"
    "No, he just started ..." I sucked in my breath. "Trying to curse and not doing a very good job. Kind of funny, but scary, too. I better wait for the police. Don't want this to seem rehearsed."
    "Right," Jason said. He got up and stuck his hands in his pockets. "We found Max. He's dead, too. Nadia's severely shook."
    I just stared at him. "I'm really sorry," I said, as if it were all my fault.
    "Yeah."
    Jason left, and a tall man in a blue parka came in. He was forty or forty-five, dressed, beneath the unzipped parka, in a wool sweater and khaki cargo pants, damp with sea spray. He was an FBI agent out of the Seattle Bureau, he said. His name was Bakker and he asked a lot of questions, some of which did not make sense until I realized he didn't know I had been on Mary's Triumph when Mauritz flipped. As well, Agent Bakker had not been informed Dave Press was missing and presumed drowned.
    The news seemed to confuse him, so he turned back his pages of notes and started over.
    "What in hell is a DSV?" he asked.
    By the end of the interview, I was ready to collapse. Bakker folded his notebook. None of the pieces fit for him, either. In his experience, scientists didn't just go around killing each other.
    After he left, I stretched out on the long, padded bench behind the main dining table and blacked out. I should have dreamed of falling through ink, this time without the bubble, drowning in endless, stinking night. Instead, I dreamed of being out in the desert, walking beside a guy with bushy white hair, wearing a long gray shirt.
    SEATTLE, WASHINGTON
    The ship returned to the Port of Seattle the next morning and agents and Coast Guard investigators swarmed over her. Diligent men and women marched aboard and began stringing yellow tape and ribbon. A dozen agents with digital cameras and crime-lab kits took samples. We were instructed not to move anything, certainly not to remove anything.
    Jason intervened with the agent in charge, and he allowed Nadia and me to go down to the lab and check the specimens taken during the dive. We were accompanied by a young female