Nakano placed something on Keel's chest and Keel felt the familiar outlines of his neck appliance.
"Took it off when you puked and damn near choked to death," Nakano said. "Couldn't figure how to get it back on you."
Keel felt weak but his fingers knew this familiar thing. He fumbled over the slips and catches, putting the support into place around his neck. Two raw spots pained him where the braces met his shoulders. Someone had tried to pull it off without unfastening it.
Lucky they didn't break my neck.
With the support in place, Keel's thick shoulder muscles carried the burden of lifting his head upright. The brace slipped into its usual position and he winced at the pain. He saw that he was in a small rectangular room with gray metal walls.
"Do you have a celltape?" he asked. His voice echoed in his ears and sounded much deeper than he remembered. Keel rested his forehead in his hands and listened as someone rummaged through a case. The table that Keel sat on was much lower than he had imagined. It wasn't a gurney, but a low dining table, Merman-style, within a cluster of low padded chairs and a couch. Everything seemed constructed out of old, dead materials.
Nakano handed him a roll of celltape and, as if in answer to an unasked question, said, "We put you on the table because you weren't breathing good. The couch is too soft."
"Thanks."
Nakano grunted and sat back down in a chair behind Keel.
Keel noticed that the room was filled with books and tapes. Some of the bookshelves were packed two deep with well-worn texts of many sizes. Keel turned his head and saw behind Nakano an elaborate comconsole with three viewscreens and racks of tapes. The room felt as though it moved - back and forth, up and down. It was an unsettling sensation, even for one accustomed to riding the waves on an Island.
Keel heard a distant hissing. Nakano stood at his side then and another man, his dive suit smeared with green paint, sat nearby, his back to them. The other man appeared to be eating.
Keel thought about eating. His stomach said, "Forget it."
My medication! he thought. Where is my case? He felt his breast pocket. The little case was gone. It came over him then that this rectangular space around him actually was moving - rising and falling on a long sea.
We're still on the foil, he thought. The thick air was a Merman preference. These two Mermen had merely done something to humidify the air.
Still on the foil!
He remembered more now. Kareen Ale had taken him aboard a foil to ... to go to the Launch Base. Then he remembered the other foil. Memories came rushing at him. It had been after nightfall. He could see daylight now through louvered vents high in the walls of this room: the double yellow-orange of both suns low in the sky. Morning or evening? His body could not inform him. He felt the borderline nausea of movement, the constant inner pain of his fatal illness and the headache, now localized in his right temple where, he knew, he had been struck.
Drugged, too, he thought.
The attack had occurred after the foil in which Ale had been taking him to the Launch Base slowed abruptly. A voice had called: "Look there!"
Another foil had bobbed dead in the water with only its anchor lights glowing through the darkness. It drifted slowly in heavy kelp and was not at anchor. A spotlight from Ale's foil illuminated the identification numbers on the bow of the vessel.
"It's them, all right," she said.
"Do you think they're in trouble?"
"You bet they're in trouble!"
"I mean something wrong with -"
"They're waiting out the night on the kelp. It hides them from bottom search and they won't drift far in it."
"But why do you suppose they're here ... I mean, so close to Launch Base?"
"Let's find out."
Slowly, its jets muted, Ale's foil moved up on the other craft while four Security men readied themselves for boarding from the water.
Keel and Ale on the forward pilot's deck had a commanding view of what happened next. With only a few meters separating the two craft, four dive-suited men slipped into the water, swam the short distance and opened the main hatch on the other foil. One by one, they crept inside and then ... nothing.
Silence, for what seemed to Keel an interminable time. It ended with a jerky rocking action on Ale's foil followed by shouts from the stern. Abruptly, two green-striped apparitions burst into the pilot's compartment. One of the intruders had been a monstrous Merman with terrible scars on his face. Keel had never seen arms that thickly muscled. Both men carried weapons. There was only time to hear Ale shout: "GeLaar!" Then the blinding pain on his own head.
GeLaar? Keel prolonged his recovery period from the blow, making it appear he was still dazed. His encyclopedic memory pored over names and physical identifications. GeLaar Gallow, idealized Merman. Former subordinate of Ryan Wang. Suitor to Kareen Ale. The man at the table pushed a bowl away from him, wiped his mouth and turned.
Keel looked at him, shuddering in the cold appraising stare of those dark blue eyes.
Yes, this is the man himself. Keel thought Gallow grotesque in the cover of green paint.
A hatch to Keel's right opened and another green-striped Merman entered. "Bad news," the newcomer said. "Zent just died."
"Damn!" That was Gallow. "She didn't really try to save him, did she!"
"He was badly crushed," the newcomer said. "And she is exhausted."
"If only we knew what caused it," Gallow mumbled.
"Whatever it was," Nakano said, "it was the same thing that damaged the sub. The wonder is he got back to us at all."
"Don't be stupid," Gallow snapped. "The sub's homing system brought him back. He didn't have anything to do with it."
"Except to activate the system," Nakano said.
Gallow ignored him, turning to the newcomer. "Well, how are the repairs going?"
"Very well," the man said. "We got the replacement parts and tools aboard the Launch Base foil marked as rocket supplies. We should be fully operational by this time day after tomorrow."
"Too bad we can't replace Tso as easily," Nakano said. "He's a good man in a fight. Was."
"Yes." Gallow spoke without looking at Nakano, gesturing instead to the newcomer. "Well, get back to your station."
The man hesitated. "What about Zent?" he asked.
"What?"
"His body."
"Green Dashers are kelp food when they die," Gallow said. "You know that. It's imperative if we're to know what happened out there."
"Yes sir." The man left, closing the hatch quietly after him.
Keel brushed at his collar and the front of his jacket. He could smell the sour taint of vomit there, confirming Nakano's account of what had happened.
So, they want me alive. No ... they need me alive.
As long as he was alive, Keel could probe for weaknesses. Superstition was a weakness. He vowed to pursue this curious burial ritual that Gallow employed. Its very mention had brought a hush over the cabin. They were fanatics. Keel could see it in Gallow's expression. Anything was justified by the sacred nature of their goal. Another matter for probing. Very dangerous. But ... I'm dying anyway. Let's see how deep their need for me actually is.
"A small case was taken from my pocket," he said. "It contains my medication."
"So, the Mute needs medication," Gallow taunted. "Let's see how he does without it."
"You'll see quite soon," Keel said. "You'll have another body to feed to the kelp."
Keel swung his feet casually over the edge of the table and felt for the deck. A startled look passed between Nakano and Gallow. Keel wondered at it. There was shock in that look. Some nerve had been struck.
"You know about the kelp?" Nakano asked.
Keel said, "Of course. A man in my position ..." He waved off the rest of the bluff as extraneous.