HERETIC
Only six meters down. The light shimmered from above, glinted weakly off the hardware on their suits. Loinnir Whitby held tight to the anchor line of the Fallen Angel and looked through gray-blue water and her face plate and another at the boy who'd reminded her of Robert Capa. A first rule: the ocean was for all practical purposes as cold as space, and just as uncaring, and those who dove the depths had to keep their hearts just as cold. She hadn't. And now she was about to suffer for it.
Twenty minutes into their last staging stop, she signaled their ascent. She saw Teddy McElhone's blue eyes widen in panic. She held up a warning hand, shook her head.
You brought it on yourself, lad.
They were nearly out of tri-mix. He was breathing off her spare tank; he had no choice but to follow her. She told herself as they pulled themselves up, along the line, that it wouldn't be so bad. Not so bad, at least, as popping for the surface from sixty meters down. Nothing could be as bad as that. His first deep dive, the boy's, and Ari McElhone had lied, had bloody well lied, to her: his nephew was no more ready than McElhone was ready to take him down, and Whitby like an idiot had offered to partner with the boy--
Fouled his tank and his mix, McElhone's nineteen-year-old Teddy had, shouldering out of a wreck, a scuttled World War II merchant ship, all clumsy, panicked stumbling in the sudden blackout rise of silt. Tangled his line, bunged his tank, blown his air, and all the rules said she was to leave him, and he was to accept being left, to the cold and current, to the lost darkness at the bottom of the sea. But something in her wouldn't permit it. She managed to calm him; she managed to patch her spare tank to him. In the time it took to patch, she as much as doomed both of them, and she knew it.
Some twenty-seven minutes short. Better from nearer the surface than too far below. They were the last up. She could see the hull of the Fallen Angel outlined darkly above their heads, a single angel's wing silhouetted against the glare of the sun.
They broke the blue-gray roil of the surface. Beside her, Teddy McElhone grunted in pain and panic. She released him. The suit floats would hold them. The sun filled her eyes, and then a heat like acid gnawed into her arms and legs and torso. DCS. Fiery hell. Decompression sickness.
The bends.
"Ah, fuck--" she groaned. The dive boat was less than ten meters off, and it might have been a hundred, for all the pain in her joints and muscles and lungs as she started to paddle. Richie was leaning off the side, her brother, the big galoot, his wild pepper-and-salt hair windmilling in the gusty air. He tapped his head, a dive gesture, while the remainder of the divers and the crew aboard the Fallen Angel looked on; he shouted the words as well:
"Are yeh okay, Annalee--?"
He knew as well as she did even before Teddy, choking on a mouthful of salt water, yelled in reply: "No! Fuck, no--!"
"Prick, yeh-- Fuckin', fuckin' prick--" Whitby gasped, at the boy, at herself, while her pressure-sickened limbs swatted at the sunlight glittering on the gray waves and the pain flowed like lava through her gut and lungs and Richie dropped into the cold water with orange life rings and swam their way.
"You're a bloody stupid woman," Richard Whitby said.
The Olsen Marine Biology Centre had the finest decompression facilities on the west coast of Scotland, and that's where Whitby and Teddy McElhone had been flown, via Sea King, once Richie had fished them from the Atlantic. Four hyperbaric chambers, spacious and modernly outfitted, and since Whitby was the one who'd ultimately be footing the bill, Richie had secured two of the white spheres instead of one. He sat now on a folding chair within speaking-- or shouting-- distance of the comms panel on the chamber housing his younger sister.
"I know it, Richie." Whitby didn't bother looking at her brother through the thick glass of the chamber's observation window. She curled in on herself, her lanky body poorly housed in a heavy blue hospital gown, and pressed her aching head against the white poly-cotton coverlet on the chamber's thin mattress. "How's Teddy?"
"More alive than he deserves t' be."
It hurt too much to flinch. Whitby blinked slowly at the glass, just short of Richie's loving but justifiably critical eyes. Blinking hurt, too. "Is Mace here?" she asked.
"Comin' in. He'll be here in under an hour."
"Shoulda told him not t' bother."
"He's your fella, Annalee. Fellas like t' be on hand when their girls go an' try t' kill themselves. All part of the package."
"He's not--" She stopped. He was her fella, Mace was, and she was his girl, and she had neither the right nor the spunk to argue it. Least of all from where she was, and least of all with Richie. "I wasn't trying to kill myself."
"'Cause as you know, and I know, there are cheaper, quicker, an' far more pleasant ways of doin' it, right?"
"Right."
Richie asked, more softly: "So why'd you do it, Annalee? Why'd you bring him up? Teddy was dead t' rights. Told me himself."
A wave of weariness joined itself to the burn remaining in her muscles. Her thoughts seemed to be a step behind; the words for the moment were as much a revelation to her as they had to be to Richie: "He reminds me of Robert."
"As in bloody stupid? Not an ounce of sense--?"
"No." Whitby frowned thoughtfully out through the glass, picturing in her mind the two of them, Teddy McElhone and Robert Capa, angelic, deceptively delicate-seeming, one, as she'd just learned, less tough than the other. "Just the youth of him. It's the eyes. Y'know: that clear-eyed thing."
"Cradle-snatcher," Richie muttered. He half-smiled.
Whitby smiled the other half, without offense.
"Where's Pete got off to?" she asked.
"Gave him some money for the machines." Richie glanced off behind himself, casting a look for the Pete who wasn't there, his nephew, his sister's son, just shy of twelve years old. "Boy went nearly two hours without eating, y'know. Was practically gnawin' the furniture."
She chuckled, and that hurt, and it brought her back to where she was. She went still against the mattress, the pressure of the chamber whispering like a tide in her ears. "Ah, hell, Richie, I'm sorry for puttin' you through it."
"Well, you're on break now."
"Sure."
"Doc says you might want t' lay off the deep stuff, at least until the baby's born."
"Sure," she echoed, more softly, a little sleepily. Then, abruptly, she was full-on focused and half off the mat, and she was staring at Richie and not noticing the pain or the pressure or the exhaustion banked well down in her body as she snapped: "What fucking baby?"
"The one wedged in yer guts, yeh stupid--" Richie's wild dark eyes went wide. "Y'mean you didn't know--?"
"Know what?"
Another voice, a man's, a manly man's, from beyond Richie's orbit. Whitby's heart, despite shock and better sense and the unspoken wishes of her sore, repressurizing chest, thrilled. On the portal's other side, Richie rose from his folding chair and made way for the most handsome man in Scotland. Tall, square-jawed, square-shouldered. Brown hair in a tidy buzz. Eyes, one real, one not, in sapphire blue. Scars along his right temple and cheek that made him that much more good-looking, at least to Whitby's way of thinking (and, she would like to know, and fiercely, too, who the hell else's way of thinking mattered where he was concerned?).
"Hello, there, Mace," Richie was saying. "Come t' see the sardine?"
Mace grinned, though the space about his eyes stayed serious. "Sure did." He rapped on the glass, looked in at Whitby. "What the hell were you trying to pull, woman?"
Whitby smiled for him a thin-lipped smile and hoisted painfully and affectionately the middle finger of her left hand.
Richie hoisted his eyebrows. "You two have things t' discuss. Obviously." He gave Mace and then Whitby a look shot through with pyrite sparks and added, ambling for the door, "Think I'll go an' assist Peter with molestin' the snack machines."
You didn't find many front porches on houses in Scotland. The Whitby house had one. Impracticalities, the intractable weather, be damned: Richard Whitby said the air and space helped with his writing. (His wife Mary said it helped him with sneaking the pipefuls of spicy tobacco he poorly kept secret.) The house, large and white, stood on a low rise a klick or two outside Mulvern, facing the western ocean. Stephen Mace stood on the porch looking out across the rocky beach between him and the darkening water at the setting sun.
He closed his flesh-and-blood eye, stared westward with his prosthetic. He had largely mastered its functions, the limitations and, better, the wonders of the device; now it showed him the sun much as he had seen it through the observation portal of the Icarus II: spectrographic churnings, color rather than blinding white glare, a corona of radiation invisible to normal human vision. It was beautiful.
But he was deeply, elementally glad to be home. Eighteen months had passed since they'd returned to Earth, he and Whitby and Capa and Trey, the four survivors of a desperate but successful mission to rescue the world from eternal winter. Eighteen months, and before that fifteen months post-mission in a lifepod. He and Whitby were here, stationed, at their discretion-- really, the four survivors of the second mission of Project Icarus were the greatest heroes in humanity's history, all modesty aside, and they could go where they pleased on the planet they had saved-- at the Royal Air Force base at Prestwick, while Capa and Trey prowled the halls of science and academia in the United States.
Capa, the sunmaker. Scrawny, scruffy, blue-eyed Brainiac, lording it over geekdom with Cassidy-- Cassie, the mission's original pilot before Whitby had replaced her, for a reason of tender indiscretion on the part of then-Dr. Capa and Cassie herself, which reason's name was now legally Charles Robert Capa, aged four-- at his side. Whitby and Mace had jump-flighted to San Diego for the wedding, eight months back. To their credit, they'd made it through the ceremony. They'd made it through less than all of the reception that followed. Mace grinned, remembering--
Now that was a brawl.
He re-opened his organic eye and looked bi-optically at their resuscitated local star. The sun cast a path of gold toward him, across the dark march of the western waves. The wind was rising, blowing up off the cooling water, and Mace shivered, though not with cold, not with fear or worry. A reminder, more: the world at large had changed, and now his own world, his life, was changing. Whitby was here, at home, in the house on whose porch he stood. She was still weak; she was still sore, and ornery for it; she was upstairs, asleep, in the room she and Mace shared when Richard Whitby's family was all under one roof.
Family, Mace thought, the one word, at the setting sun.
"Are yeh marrying Mum?" Peter Whitby asked.
He wasn't trying to creep up, Mace knew: Pete was a quiet boy by nature. Pretty much the polar opposite of his crazy uncle and a weight of calm that balanced his mother's sometimes bristling intensity. In a way, he reminded Mace of Capa. A little older than his years, a little too thoughtful, maybe. But Mace liked the kid.
"Did Richie tell you to ask me that?"
"Nope." Pete watched him with his serious dark eyes. "Nor Mum neither."
Mace smiled. "You're looking out for her."
"Uncle Richie says it's my-- my--"
"Duty?"
"Aye."
"That's good, Pete. Duty's good."
The sun vacated the sky, leaving behind its path of light, dimming now to bronze, and a clear soft glow in the west. Overhead, the stars were coming out. Mace and Pete stood quietly together, watching the horizon go dark.
"Are yeh, then? Marrying her?"
"You think she'd go for it?"
"I do."
"How about you?"
Pete took his time thinking. "Be my dad then, wouldn't yeh?"
"Would you be okay with that?"
He saw, from the corner of his eye, the shy smile on Pete's face.
"Yeah."
"Peter Mace," Mace said thoughtfully. "Or Peter Whitby-Mace."
"Peter Mace. That'd be wicked."
Mace grinned, gently cuffed the back of Pete's head. "We'll see what she says, okay?"
"Okay."
The door behind them opened, and Richie stepped out onto the porch.
"Finish your homework, Pete?" he asked.
"Not yet, Uncle."
"Get to it, then." Richie held the door for him. Light and warmth spilled onto the wooden floorboards of the porch. "I need t' have a word with Mace."
"Okay." Pete looked to Mace, then went inside. Richie shut the door.
"Here?" Mace asked.
"Naw." Richie pulled himself up, shook his shaggy head. "I was thinkin' down t' the pub. An' it might be better if we walked. If yeh don't mind the exercise."
"If I don't mind staggering home half-bombed at two a.m., you mean."
Richie snorted at him and walked down the porch steps toward the road to Mulvern. Mace shook his head and followed.