[Original Novel] Metal Fever 2: The Erasure of Asherah, Part 34

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Part 33}

Of course the inside was jam packed with drugs. Neatly packaged into shrink wrapped white bricks stacked up to my eyeballs, from the front of the hull to the back. I yanked the hatch shut, spun the wheel until tight, then climbed over the chieftess to get at the controls.

The sub hull rang like a bell when the first bullet impacted it. Must be thicker than I imagined if it repelled bullets of that calibur, but I didn’t care to find out how much of a beating it could take before springing a leak.

Immediately, I blew the ballast tanks and we sank out of sight. The filthy green water afforded zero visibility through the modest acrylic bubble in front, but the sub was also equipped with an impressively modern hydroaccoustic underwater mapping system.

Sonar technically, but able to generate a pointcloud of the seafloor just fifteen feet beneath us. Detailed enough that I was able to avoid scraping against rocks and other debris as I departed the mangrove swamp.

The hydrophone also picked up the sounds of bullets cavitating through the water as the VTOL, still hovering overhead, continued to fire on the sub’s last known position. The chieftess held a single finger up to her mouth as if to hush me. Not sure why, but I had more important things to focus on right then.

After navigating the claustrophobic canal for what felt like hours, we at last emerged into the clear blue waters of the open ocean. I heaved a sigh of relief. The chieftess still looked sullen. I could guess why. Whatever remained of her people were now scattered to the winds, having been decimated by the inevitable intrusion of the metal world into her cloistered paradise.

There was nothing I could possibly say to heal a wound that severe, so I didn’t try. Instead I began wracking my brain for an alternative plan of action, now that hijacking the other VTOL was off the table. The sub had a pre-set course for smuggling runs in its computer, which would get us to the US.

What it couldn’t do was take me to Dad. With one enforcer still out there, at the helm of a flying death machine, our escape now felt like a pyrrhic victory. As I sat deep in thought, the sub lurched suddenly, a dull thud sounding through the hull as we ran into something.

When I returned my attention to the bubble cockpit in front of me, I could scarcely believe my eyes. A dolphin! It emitted a muffled series of chirps and squeaks which my implant translated as “Do you fucking mind? I’m swimming here!”

...That voice. It can’t be. Not way out here, can it? “R...Remble? Is that you?” The streamlined, muscular gray marine mammal hesitated...then swooped back around for a closer look. Floating so close that the tip of his beak nearly touched the viewing dome, he snorted a few bubbles out of his blowhole.

“Pardon my language. Fancy meeting you here! With a lovely lady, no less.” He winked at the chieftess and blew a bubble ring, which dissipated harmlessly against the dome. She managed a feeble smile and waved at him.

“The hell are you doing off the coast of South America?” I demanded. “I thought you were on a business trip” He shook his bulbous melon. “Not even a little bit. No business, purely pleasure. I’m on vacation for the next six days.”

Dolphins go on vacation? I didn’t voice the question, lest he lecture me for an hour about my insulting preconceptions. Instead, as he hovered there just outside the sub with beautiful moving patterns of light cast down onto his body from the surface, I told him everything.

How I was forced into a VTOL at gunpoint. The crash. The village, and finally our escape from the final survivor of the six enforcers sent to search the crash site for survivors. He emitted another puff of bubbles, what might’ve come out as a whistle on the surface.

“You know there was an attack on the space elevator, right?” he chirped. I nodded and asked how the rest of the world reacted. “Reacting, present tense. The uproar still shows no signs of dying down. I’m glad I took my vacation days when I did, with any luck it’ll have petered out by the time I have to go back to work.”

Still a weird concept for me that dolphins have to work for a living. There’s no escaping the system, whether you’ve got flippers or fingers. If you have a complex enough brain, it’ll find a way to extract surplus value from you.

Sensing my confusion, Remble filled in the gaps for me. “There’s no part of the ocean that isn’t owned by somebody. Mostly humans, I might add. The only parts of it I can use for free are the fin reservations, and public submarine travel lanes.”

I cringed, suddenly wishing the chieftess weren’t here. She now listened with rapt interest, occasionally glancing over at me in disgust, as if I were personally to blame. “So now you’re stranded, right? No GPS until they launch the core of the new counterweight satellite, and begin manufacturing the new tether on orbit.

But maybe I can help. Where are you trying to get to? I’ve been coming out to these warm, sweet waters twice a year for the last decade. Pretty much since I got the promotion that let me afford to, haha. I’m sure you know what that’s like.”

Again I cringed, this time because I realized Remble still had no idea that I’ve never held down an honest job in my life. “Y-yeah...anything to get away from the rat race, am I right? Heh heh…” I fumbled with the sub’s nav interface for a bit before turning the monitor to face the viewing dome, so Remble could see it.

“It won’t accept the coordinates? If it has an offline map, it should at least be able to…” I shut him down, explaining that I’d already tried that. “Hmph. Well my implant has one. It’s a few years old but I doubt the coastline of South America has meaningfully changed shape in that time. Let me take a look.”

I sent the coordinates to his implant using the hydrophone as an accoustic modem. Upon receiving them He didn’t give me but a few seconds to react, just turned tail and darted off into the blue. I directed the sonar system to lock onto him, and set the sub’s navigational software to auto-follow at a distance of 0.1 nautical miles, matching his speed of 6 knots.

With nothing demanding my immediate attention any longer, there was at last room to breathe. To decompress, and begin to process everything I’d been through over the past few weeks. I felt utterly drained...but also transformed.

Cleaner, leaner, and radiating with health undreamt of back in Shenzen. Hollowed out by the experience of killing for the first time, but emboldened as well. Above all else, having been touched by cosmic gentleness, I knew I would never be the same again.

How, after I witnessed and felt such indescribably beautiful things, could I return to my old life? To the empty pursuit of money and pleasure, not so much a man as a collection of appetites. But what else can I do to put food in my stomach and a roof over my head? The hustle is all I know.

A field of brittle, dead coral passed lazily beneath us, visible through the dome window as I contemplated life. Reordering my values in light of everything that transpired back in the jungle, charting a new path into an unknown future. One where my primary concern would no longer be increasing a number on a screen representing the quantity of imaginary tokens in my possession.

It occupied my mind completely enough that hours passed like minutes. The next thing I knew, Remble was bidding us farewell as the sub approached the coordinates I supplied him with. “You ought to consider revisiting these waters some time. Hear me out! It’s much nicer when you’re not being shot at.”

I fibbed that I’d think about it, then waved at him through the dome as he pumped his tail, accelerating into the blue haze until he passed out of visible range. I fiddled with the delicate controls, scooting the sub gently up to the underwater supports of the dock before surfacing.

I half expected the shooting to resume. But when I popped the hatch and warily stuck my head out, shielding my tender eyes as they adjusted to sunlight once more...the skies were clear. Probably he was still back at the mangrove swamp, shooting at phantoms.

“May they haunt him for the rest of his days” I grumbled. The chieftess asked me to speak up. “It’s nothing. Come on, I want you to meet my Dad.” I tied the sub to the nearest dock post as she clambered out of the cramped little vessel, swearing in her native tongue a few times when she bumped a knee or an elbow in the process.

The cabin was not out on the beach, but a couple hundred feet into the jungle, beneath a deeply eroded rock overhang which looked as if it had once been a sea cave. There I found a weathered looking wooden geodesic dome cabin, badly in need of some fresh paint.

“Not another step” a familiar voice barked at us. Dad emerged from the cabin with his trusty old shotgun pointed our way. “It’s me Dad, put it down.” The portion of the armor comprising my helmet peeled away, revealing my face.

He gawked. “No fuckin’ way! What’s your gear made out of? Is that the new cool thing that everybody’s into now? For fuck’s sake, I feel like I just went fullmetal yesterday and now there’s some new thing I gotta buy.”

I reassured him he was looking at the only two prototypes as he welcomed us inside. The cabin did prove to be much homier inside than out, apparently owned by some kind of new age fruit. When I asked Dad about it, he filled me in.

“It belonged to a college buddy of mine. Way into chakras, colonics, homeopathy, all that garbage. He did turn me on to organic farming though, even a stopped clock is right twice a day. He formed a little...group of friends...who came out here to live with him when the government started paying too close attention to his operation.”

Must’ve been growing more than organic veggies, I’d wager. An aspiring cult leader too, by the sound of it. The center of the cabin’s interior was dominated by a seven foot tall cylindrical acrylic aquarium with a spiral staircase leading up around the back side to a platform at the rim.

From there, a ladder descended into the tank itself, mounted to the inside surface. A scuba regulator on the end of a ten foot hookah line dangled from the little platform, covered in cobwebs from disuse. I gestured to the setup and raised an eyebrow.

“Oh, that!” Dad chuckled. “He had some unusual ideas about meditating while immersed in salt water. Said that it acted as a psychic radiation blocker, and that normally we are so swamped by the thoughts of ten billion other humans that we can’t make any of it out. It’s just relentless background noise that makes us neurotic. Even wrote a book about how his meditation tank replicates the conditions in the womb, where our psychic abilities first develop.”

Hoo boy. One of “those people”. Dad went on to lament that he was convicted on a predictable collection of charges nearly twenty years ago, whereupon his followers moved out of this cabin, returned to the US and went on with their lives.

“Before enlightenment, chop wood and carry water” Dad recited. “After enlightenment? Chop wood, carry water.” My ears perked up. It felt deeply relevant for some reason. But then it could just be the sort of hokey pablum that appears profound just because it’s cryptic.

I spent the next hour recounting everything that’s happened to me since Shenzen over piping hot drinks. The chieftess brought them with her, something which closely resembled an unripened coconut. She advised me to twist the stem and pull it off, which she said would start a chemical reaction inside.

I did so, and a few seconds later, fragrant steam wafted up from the small opening. Dad was understandably a lot more reluctant to drink it than I. “You mean to tell me she’s got a plant for every purpose we built a machine for? Houses, clothing, tools...it all just grows right out of the ground?”

Even after finally drinking the steaming contents of his own fruit, he struggled to wrap his head around it. “Boy, some crazy shit happens out in the jungle, don’t it.” I answered that I couldn’t have put it better myself, then asked if he had a boat stashed someplace.

“It’s under some camo tarps behind the cabin. Why?” I told him about the narco sub. He pounded the table. “That’s my boy! Always gotta do one better than your old man, don’t you? But I ain’t complaining, now we can slip out of here under the radar.

That spook whose buddies you iced could still be out there looking for you. Alls he’d have to do is follow the coastline far enough north to spot the dock. I only didn’t take it down ‘cause I figured you might need it to find me.”

The notion sent chills down my spine. “We’d better not waste even another second then. Have you got everything you want to bring with you?” Dad pointed a thumb back over his shoulder. “There’s about a year worth of MREs in the sailboat. How much is there room in your little sub for?”

I estimated at least half of it ought to fit after we dumped out the drugs. Dad whistled. “That’s a lot of money to just go and dump in the ocean.” He wasn’t wrong, but I couldn’t bring myself to sell any of it. Not having seen what it turns people into.

So it was that the three of us spent half an hour emptying the neatly packaged bricks of white powder out of the sub, and loading in the replacement cargo. I eyeballed the fuel gauge. Still full, didn’t even use any yet on account of escaping from the swamp submerged, under battery power.

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^{Stay Tuned for Part 35!}