Chapter 14

Jo knew she was about to die. She could see no way out of this situation. She was strapped into an aircraft below the surface of the Pacific Ocean more than one hundred miles off the coast of western Tasmania. The cabin was filled with water and if there were any pockets of air, she couldn't see them or reach them. Her seatbelt harness was jammed shut and, while ordinarily a cognate's basic physical strength was enough to rip your average seatbelt right out of its mounting, both of her wrists and both of her lower legs had been shattered by the impact of the crash. She could feel the bones starting to re-knit themselves back together, could feel the ripped and torn muscles and tendons reconstituting, but the process was too slow. There were too many injuries for her body to deal with at one time and there was no supply of oxygen to help feed the hypermetabolism required. She would die of hypoxia long before she could heal herself enough to break free. And what was worse, the aircraft was sinking lower and lower every second. She could feel the water pressure pushing harder and harder against her, could see the way the light was rapidly fading. Already, less than a minute after the crash, she had to be down at least fifty feet, maybe more.

This is the end, Josephine, she told herself, more out of sadness than panic. Everything else had gone according to plan. But it would now end in tears because of one minor miscalculation at the last second. What would become of Ken and Meghan? Would Mom and Dad find someone else to propagate them? Or would they have to be killed as threats to the Subterfuge? Was there even a precedent in cognate law for this sort of thing?

She went deeper. The light grew dimmer. Her body cried out for oxygen. For a cognate, dying of hypoxia was not the same as it was for a human. She would not gradually fade out. She would remain conscious and aware up until the moment all the oxygen stored in her cells was exhausted. At that point, her brain would shut down and she would die as her cells began to self-destruct. She was in a hydrogen rich environment. It would probably only take her a matter of seconds to completely self-destruct into nothing.

And yet, despite the lack of fresh oxygen for the cells, despite the complete lack of any hope to escape this situation, she could still feel her body at least trying to heal itself. Her heart was pounding furiously in her chest. She could feel the curious draining sensation in her abdomen, breasts, and buttocks as building materials from her liver and fat layers were dissolved and shipped to the site of the injuries. It was a futile effort, of course, but at least it was eating up stored oxygen. It would make the bitter end come that much sooner.

If only I wasn't so badly injured, she told herself. If only my body wasn't trying to heal everywhere at once. If I could just direct all of the healing energy to my right arm and hand, maybe it would heal fast enough to ... to...

With a start, she realized that as she had been thinking that thought, it started to happen. The bones in her lower leg and left arm suddenly stopped knitting back together. There was an extra surge in her abdomen and breasts and then she felt it. Her right wrist and hand started healing faster—at a rate that was nearly frantic. She tried to tell herself this was some sort of hypoxic delusion, but it wasn't. It really wasn't!

Holy Jesus! she thought in wonder. It's doing it. I thought about it and it's doing it! Selective healing! I've never heard of anything like this!

Meanwhile, she continued to descend. The plane dropped below one hundred feet and Jo felt both of her eardrums rupture from the pressure. She tried her best to ignore the hideous pain that shot through her head as this happened. Keep healing that right wrist and hand, she thought. Right wrist and hand. Right wrist and hand. Nothing else matters right now!

The healing process continued. The wrist suddenly popped straight and the hand opened up. She could feel the muscles rebuilding, stretching, joining to the tendons. She tried flexing the hand. It hurt and it hurt badly, but it was functioning. The healing process was far from complete, but she didn't have the time to wait any longer.

She reached down and pushed the button on the seatbelt harness. It would not push no matter how much pressure she exerted on it. It really was jammed. So she wrapped her partially healed hand around it and pulled, using every ounce of strength she could muster. She felt the snap of several bones and tendons fracturing again, felt the ripping of muscles, the popping of tendons, felt fresh horrible pain go shooting up her arm, but the clasp separated with a jolt. The seatbelt fell away and she was free. Free of the seat anyway. She was still upside down in a plane more than a hundred feet below the surface.

She twisted her body around—causing more pain from her broken legs—and reached for the door handle. If it was jammed as well then it really was all over because there was no time to wait for a fresh re-healing. The handle was not jammed but it still took every ounce of energy and willpower to manipulate it. She felt bone ends grinding and more muscle fiber ripping before she felt the click of the mechanism releasing. She let go of the handle and pushed the door. It opened almost as easily as if she'd been on the ground. She reached out with her right hand and grabbed the edge of the doorway. She almost didn't have the strength to pull herself out, but somehow she tapped into some hidden reserve and out she went.

Her legs collided with a part of the airplane as she drifted free—it felt like a broken piece of the wing strut—sending more pain through her body. She ignored it and tried to twist into a face up orientation to help her get completely free of the plane so she wouldn't get entangled in it. This turned out to be a hopeless cause because she was so spatially disoriented she had no idea which way was up. She would just have to rely on luck from this point on.

She reached down and found the grommet and pin on her PFD belt. Her hand and wrist were throbbing so badly that she had trouble telling if she had a proper grip. Nevertheless she gave a pull. Her distal radius fractured in three places for the third time in less than three minutes but the pin came free. The bags started to inflate from the CO2 cartridges installed in them but they did not simply spring to full inflation in less than a second like Ken and Meghan's had. She was now approaching two hundred feet of depth and the pressure was so severe that they expanded slowly, like a small child blowing up a balloon with a bicycle pump. She would never know it, as she was already 167 feet deeper than the device had been designed for, but had she been another twenty-two feet down, they wouldn't have inflated at all.

Slowly, agonizingly slowly, she began to rise and the PDFs, as the pressure dropped, began to get bigger. Her ascent began to speed up, foot by foot that she came closer to the surface. By this point, all healing activities had shut down as her body realized it was about to die of hypoxia. Jo knew enough about cognate physiology to know that this was a very bad sign.

What about the bends? a part of her mind wondered. Do cognate get the bends? If we do, can our bodies recover from it? She didn't know. Cognate were not generally stupid enough to put themselves into a position where the bends was a problem. As if she didn't already have enough to worry about. How ironic would it be to escape the sinking aircraft and surface before hypoxia took her, only to have her body and brain destroyed by expanding nitrogen bubbles from the decompression?

She braced herself to feel the horrid pain in her joints that she knew was the first symptom of the bends, but it never came. She continued to rise and she could now see blue some indeterminate distance above her.

The sky, she thought. I never thought I'd be desperate to see a bright sunny sky.

She broached the surface four minutes and eighteen seconds after her plane had first sank beneath the waves. Pain ripped through her body as her fractured arms and legs were tossed around in the swells. Her skin was an even darker shade of blue than the sky. She took in great gasping breaths of air, inhaling as deeply as possible and then blowing off acidity and a level of carbon dioxide that, had it been measured, would have made a doctor think the equipment was malfunctioning. There had been recorded cases of cognate being submerged for almost fifteen minutes and surviving, but those cognate had not been severely injured and forced to use much of their cellular oxygen for healing. Again, Jo would never know it, but she had come closest to the brink without actually succumbing to death as any cognate ever had in the entire Earth history of the cognate. Had she been unable to breathe for just twelve more seconds, the amount of time it takes to raise a glass of water, drink from it, and put it back down, her cells would have begun to burst open and self-destruct and she would have died.

For the better part of three minutes she could do nothing but loll helplessly in the swells, her crash helmet still on her head and draining water. She couldn't speak, couldn't move, could hardly even think. For a time she didn't even know where she was or what had happened to her. All she could do was breathe, gasp in and out and feed her oxygen-starved tissues. Finally, her head started to clear. Her vision started to sharpen back up and the throbbing in her head went away. She felt the draining sensation start in her chest and abdomen once again and she felt her injuries starting to heal—everywhere at once this time, and not selectively.

"Alive," she whispered to herself. "I'm alive."

Still, her body had been severely weakened by the ordeal and she knew it was going to be quite some time before she could even take off the damn crash helmet, let alone pull out her radio and successfully use it.

She looked around. All she could see was ocean. The fishing trawler was nowhere in sight.

It turned out that Ken never had to use his GPS or his radio. He had come down less than a kilometer from the luxury, sixty-foot private fishing trawler called John's Little Hobby. The trawler chugged right over to him and reached his position in less than five minutes. A man stood on the deck. It went without saying that he was cognate based on the fact that he was participating in The Mission at all, but even without that, Ken would have pegged him as one because he was dressed head to toe in foul-weather gear despite the bright sunny day and he had on dark shades, a life-jacket, and was tethered to the rail with a safety line.

"Ahoy, mate!" the man called out when the boat was close enough for verbal communication. "You would have to be Ken Patterson, would you not?"

Ken felt an absurd urge to say no, that he had never heard of anyone named Patterson. Were you expecting someone by that name? It was an urge he suppressed. "I am," he called up. "Are you my ride?"

"Unless you'd like to wait for something better to come along," the cognate said with a chuckle.

"I guess you'll have to do," Ken said.

"Are you injured in any way?"

"Not in the least," Ken told him. "Although I do seem to be missing both of my shoes and one of my socks."

The cognate nodded. "Well, let's get you out of there before the sharks decide to have a nibble." He tossed out one of the vessel's lifesaver rings tied to a rope. It splashed into the water less than four feet from Ken.

Ken paddled over and grabbed the ring. He pulled it over his head and threaded his arms through it. The cognate on the deck then began to haul him in, pulling the rope hand over hand. When Ken reached the side of the boat the cognate simply continued this hand over hand action, pulling Ken up and out of the water with seemingly no effort, despite the fact that with all the equipment he was wearing and the seawater soaking his clothing, he had to weigh well over two hundred pounds.

"This is technically a Subterfuge violation," the cognate said as Ken's feet came clear of the water and his head approached the level of the deck railing. "Humans are not supposed to see cognate strength at work. But since you're about to become one of us anyway, it doesn't really matter, does it?"

"I won't tell anyone," Ken promised, reaching out with his hands and grasping the deck railing. Once he got one of his feet onto the deck surface he was able to pull himself into a standing position. The parachute harness and the PFDs and the lifesaver ring kept him from being able to get over the rail on his own, however. The cognate let go of the rope and grasped him by the back of his pants. Ken was lifted up and over with ease—as if he was no heavier than a child.

"Welcome aboard John's Little Hobby," the cognate said.

Ken could now make out enough details of his face to see that he looked young, which meant he had not propagated. "Are you John?" he asked.

"I am not," he replied. "I'm Steve. Gant is the last name I'm using these days. My mate up there in the bridge house is Gary Longwell. We're both cognate police out of Hobart. We are, in fact, the whole bloody Tasmanian Cognate police force, so hopefully no one but myself is breaking the Subterfuge right now."

"You can't imagine how nice it is to meet you," Ken said, holding out his right hand.

"And you as well," Steve said, shaking with him. "It's always a pleasure to help out with a propagation—even if we do have to go two hundred bloody kilometers out in the Pacific in some rich prick's watery deathtrap."

"You borrowed this boat?"

"You know it," Steve said. "Old Owen and Margaret out in the strait notwithstanding, most cognate stay well clear of the deep water and won't go on any vessel that leaves the sight of the shore. This vessel belongs to John Haverty III, CEO of the Tasmanian Trust Insurance Company, arguably the richest human in Hobart. He's a fishing fanatic whose idea of a good time is going five or six hundred klicks out into the open ocean and hauling in whatever it is that swims out there. He's also a closet homosexual, so it didn't take much for him to agree to let us use his boat for a few days."

"Is he aboard?" Ken asked.

"Alas no," Steve said. "He would have grown too used to our pheromones during the trip and would have retained memory of meeting you. I'm assuming the whole pheromone thing was explained to you during your Disquisition?"

"Yes, it was," Ken said.

"Well there you have it then," Steve said. "No humans aboard except you and your wife, which really is a pity as Gary and I haven't had a bite since sunset last night. And it'll be damn close to sunrise before we make it back to Hobart. And speaking of such, we really ought to start working on collecting the rest of your party." He walked over to an intercom panel on the bulkhead and pushed a button. "One male human aboard and uninjured. Do you have contact with the other two?"

He released the button and another male voice spoke from the speaker. "I have radio contact with the human female. She's down safe and uninjured. No visual on her but she gave me her GPS posit. She's just over two klicks ahead of us. No communication yet from the cognate."

"He hasn't heard from Jo?" Ken asked, alarmed. "She has to be down by now."

"Relax, mate," Steve said. "No sense jumping to any conclusions just yet. She might be a bit out of range of the VHF radios. They're not very potent you know." He pushed the intercom again. "Do you see the human's parachute canopy floating just off the port stern?"

"I see it," the voice said.

"Maneuver us over there and I'll snag it with the gaffing hook. After that we can head for the human female's position."

"Righty-O," the voice replied.

The boat immediately began to put on speed and turn to the left. The pitching in the swells became rolling. Ken grabbed the deck rail to steady himself. "We're going to waste time picking up my parachute harness?" he asked. "Meghan is floating around out there all alone! Didn't you say there are sharks in the water?"

"As long as she stays still as instructed, she'll be fine," Steve said. "It should only take us a few minutes to pull in that canopy. It might not be traceable to you particularly, but it is traceable to whatever cognate purchased it on your behalf. Common sense dictates we recover it if feasible. Now hand me that gaffing pole over there, will you?"

Ken didn't like this, but he didn't argue. He walked over to where the pole was mounted on a bracket. It was twelve feet long and had a wicked looking hook on the end. Designed for gaffing fish that had been pulled close to the boat with line and hook, it would undoubtedly serve to hook into the floating parachute canopy quite nicely.

"Thanks, mate," Steve said when he handed it over. "Why don't you go inside that door there and get rid of some of your gear? Keep the PFD on in case you go overboard, but you can probably lose the harness and the gloves now."

"Right," Ken said. He went through the door and found himself in a small dining area. There was a tile floor and two tables, each with four chairs bolted to the floor around it. He went to work removing his parachute harness. It took him a few minutes as he didn't have his sea legs and kept stumbling. By the time he was finished and went back out on the deck, Steve had hauled the canopy aboard and was folding it into a semi-neat package. The boat had turned and was now heading back toward the southwest at full speed.

"We'll destroy it when we get back to Hobart," he said, handing the folded canopy to Ken. "For now, just stow it with the harness. We should reach your wife's position in about fifteen minutes."

It actually took only twelve. Ken went up the bridge of the boat and met Gary, who was an amicable enough vampire who also, based on external appearance, had not yet propagated. He did happen to mention that he had taken his first feeding in Wellington, New Zealand shortly after the armistice that had marked the end of "The Great War", as he called it.

"I was a double propagation, just like you and your wife," he told Ken.

"You were?" he asked.

"Well ... not exactly like you and your wife," he admitted. "My brother was my propagation mate."

"Your ... your brother?" Ken said uneasily. Did that mean that Gary and his brother were ... were...

Gary saw what he was thinking and burst out laughing. "Nothing like that, mate," he said. "Jerry and I were not involved with each other. We did happen to both get involved with a certain woman we met over in France during the war. She couldn't choose between us so we ended up in ... well ... a rather interesting and bizarre quadrangle."

"Quadrangle?" Ken asked.

"She was already involved with another woman," Gary said. "Lesbo, you know. Mum Laura wasn't full-blown lesbo but Mum Sandra was. There were some fierce arguments over that one for a bit, but in the end it all worked out."

"They were both cognate?" Ken asked, just for clarification.

"Oh fuckin' A," Gary said. "And Jerry and I eventually grew on Mum Sandra although she never did the nasty with us ... at least not until our propagation."

Ken was still trying to filter all this through his head when Gary spotted Meghan in the water. "There she is," he said. "Two hundred meters ahead, just off the starboard bow."

Ken looked and, sure enough, he could see his wife's brown hair bobbing up and down in the water.

"Go give Steve a hand and we'll bring her in," Gary told him. "As soon as that's done, we'll start trying to pin down the crazy flying cognate who is planning to propagate you. Truth be told, I'm starting to get a little worried we haven't heard from her yet."

"Yeah," Ken said. "Me too."

It took about ten minutes to get Meghan aboard. Ken was there mostly for moral support. It was Steve who threw out the lifesaver ring and Steve who hauled her in. Ken helped lift her over the rail once she was lifted free of the water, but this help was merely a symbolic hand beneath her arms. It was Steve's unnatural muscle power that actually provided the lift.

"Thank God you're safe," Ken said as he took her into his arms. He kissed her face, her neck, her lips. He held her wet body tightly against his.

"I felt something brush against my feet while I was out here," Meghan said with a shudder. "Something smooth and ... and big."

"Probably a manta ray," Steve told her. "There's a bunch of 'em out here. If it had been a shark you would've felt rough skin."

"Whatever it was, it scared the piss out of me," she said. "Quite literally."

Steve laughed. "Fortunate you were in the water then, wasn't it?" he asked.

Meghan gave a weak smile. "You're okay?" she asked Ken.

He nodded. "Came down neat as you could please," he said. "I was in the water less than fifteen minutes before they got me out."

"What about Jo?" she asked next. "Do we know where she is?"

Ken's face said it all.

"You haven't heard from her?" Meghan asked, suddenly scared.

"No," he said. "Not yet."

"God," Meghan said, worried. "I hope she's okay. I saw her descending over the water as I came down but I lost sight of her as soon as my feet hit the waves."

"I'm sure she's fine," Ken said.

"Yeah," Meghan said, although she seemed far from convinced. "Me too."

They were unable to see Meghan's canopy so they didn't bother looking for it. Gary turned the boat back onto a heading of two hundred degrees and put on the power. Steve kept an eye out on the bow. Gary continued to call Jo on the short-range radio every minute. Meghan quickly took off her harness and her gloves and then joined Gary on the bridge.

"Are you afraid of heights, mate?" Steve asked Ken after twenty minutes of nothing.

"No," Ken said. "I'm a pilot, remember? And I just jumped out of an airplane."

Steve nodded. "Maybe you'd better grab a set of binoculars from the bridge and head up to the top of the radar mast. Obviously we're not going to locate her with the radio. You'll have a better field of view from up there."

"Right," Ken said, turning and heading for the bridge.

Less than three minutes later, he was climbing the ladder attached to the main mast. Step by step he went upward until he was almost fifty feet above the top of the bridge. The radar antenna was spinning less than three feet above him. He began to wonder just how wise of an idea this really was. Though the view was impressive, the swaying of the mast in the swells was downright frightening. He would swing backward about forty degrees and then pitch forward at least thirty with each swell, an arc that was considerably more than it had been down on the deck. And he had nothing to secure himself with other than his right hand on the ladder rung.

They plowed onward for another ten minutes, Ken's eyes searching in all directions. Finally it was the same thing that had helped him locate Pinnacle Pleasure from the air that helped him find Jo. He spotted the faint rainbow colors of a floating fuel slick. It was off to the left of the boat, maybe a mile away, and he only saw it on the back side of the swells as they rolled through that area. He quickly brought the binoculars to his eyes and looked, spending a few nauseating moments learning to steady them before spotting a piece of debris in the water—it looked like a chunk of wing. He continued to search through the area, spotting a few more pieces of debris, some oil, and then, just for a second, what might have been an overly large human head shape.

He took the binoculars away from his face and let them dangle from his neck. He then pulled out the short range radio and keyed it up. "Gary, I have a debris field and a fuel slick in view at ten o'clock, maybe two thousand meters out. I thought I might have seen a head bobbing up and down too."

"Right," Gary's voice said. "Turning to port. Hang on and tell me when I'm on course."

Ken hung on. The boat turned beneath him and the bobbing of the radar mast grew truly frightening as they were now going over the swells at a forty-five degree angle. "You're on course," he said. "I'll keep searching."

"Right," Gary replied.

Ken put the binoculars back to his eyes and fought back seasickness as he panned through the area where the debris was. "There shouldn't be debris," he muttered, feeling more and more dread as he spotted more and more floating wreckage. "Not if she came down like she was supposed to." He tried his best to put this out of his mind. It refused to go.

They grew closer and, just when Ken was about to vomit from the motion sickness, he spotted a glimpse of something round and black for just a second as it crested one wave and started down the other side. He trained the binoculars where he'd seen it and, a few seconds later, it appeared again. This time he was able to get a positive identification. It was Jo, still wearing the crash helmet, her head slumped forward, her shoulders held up by the PFDs in her armpits. He tried to spot any sort of movement from her but she was still.

"I see her!" he said into the radio a moment later. "She's in the water, the crash helmet still on her head. She appears unconscious or ... or..." He couldn't bring himself to say it.

"If you see her body she's not dead," Gary responded. "She's cognate, remember? If she were dead, the body would be gone."

Oh yeah! Ken's mind said happily. He'd forgotten about that! "I'm coming down," he said into the radio.

No one told him that he shouldn't.

By the time he made his way down the mast and back to the front of the boat, Jo's bobbing head and shoulders were clearly visible. Her head would loll lifelessly back and forth with each swell. Her hands would bob up and down and not move. She did not look up or try to signal the boat as it approached her, despite the fact that Gary blew the air horn several times in an attempt to get her attention.

"I'm going in after her," Ken said when Gary maneuvered close enough for that to be an option.

"Right," Steve said, holding up the lifesaver ring. "I'll toss this in once you reach her."

Gary slowed the engines down to a crawl and Ken climbed up onto the rail, holding onto Meghan and Steve's hands for support. Once he was upright atop the rail, he jumped, falling eight feet into the water. He only went under for half a second or so before his PFD bobbed him right back up. He began to swim, covering the ten yards between the boat and Jo's lifeless body in about thirty seconds.

He reached her and pulled the chin of her helmet upward, lifting her head. Her face shield was still down so he lifted it. He could see her face now. She was pale, almost ashen. Her eyes were open and aware, but only dimly so. She was breathing, but rapidly and deeply. "Jo?" he asked. "Are you there?"

Her eyes slowly looked at his face. "Hi ... Ken," she muttered. He understood her words more by reading her lips than by hearing them.

"Are you hurt?" he asked. He leaned in closer, putting his ear into the opening of the helmet in order to hear her.

"Yeah," she breathed. "Came down ... hard. Broke my bones. Arms, hands, legs ... feet. Went ... went under. Eardrums ruptured. Body tried to heal but ... but ... used up everything. Too weak ... to move."

"What can I do?" he asked.

"Get me ... aboard the ... boat," she whispered.

"What about your bones?" he asked. "Will I injure you more?"

"No ... the fractures healed ... just ... just don't have anything ... left. Couldn't even ... answer the ... radio."

"Okay," Ken said. "We'll get you out of here." He reached up and touched her nose gently. "I love you."

"Love ... you," she responded.

He looked up at the boat. "She's alive but very weak!" he yelled. "Throw me the ring!"

Steve threw him the ring. It took ten minutes and the effort of Meghan and Steve to get her up and over the rail, but they got her aboard.

Seven hours and forty-five minutes later, the sun went down, bringing darkness to the patch of ocean where John's Little Hobby was plying through the swells at her top speed of eleven knots. She was now ninety-six kilometers east southeast of where Jo had been plucked from the water. She still had over a hundred kilometers to travel before entering Hobart Marina. In her hold, where the fish caught by her were normally stored on ice from the automatic ice machine, were over thirty kilograms of debris from the Cessna, including a section of the tail and six other parts that would have been easily identifiable as having come from that aircraft. Gary and Steve had trolled around for the better part of an hour picking up every little piece they could find.

"The bends," Jo had asked Steve as soon as she'd been brought aboard. "Can ... can cognate get ... the bends?"

"Indeed they can," he told her. "Did you go under a bit before you got loose?"

"At least ... two hundred ... feet," she replied.