"Go. Take Kona with you. Feed him. Hose him off."

"Nope, if you're not coming, I'm going solo. Tell Clair hi for me."

"Go."

He looked back at the computer, looked past the window at the brilliant Maui sun, then shut the computer down, feeling very much as if nothing he did mattered or would ever matter again.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Scooter Don't Meep

The whale tossed like a roller coaster moving through tomato soup — great gut-flopping waves of muscular motion. Quinn rolled to his hands and knees and urped his breakfast into a splatter pattern across the rubbery gray floor, then heaved in time with the rhythm of the whale's swimming until he was empty and exhausted.

"Hurl patrol," came a voice out of the dark.

"Flush and gush, boys, the doc blew ballast back here," came another voice.

Quinn rolled onto his bottom and scooted away from the voices until he came against a bulkhead, which was warm and moist and gave at his touch. He felt huge muscles moving behind the skin and nearly jumped. He scooted away, then sat balled up near where he'd been sick. Cold seawater rolled down from the front of the whale and over his feet, taking his recently vacated breakfast with it. His ears popped with a pressure increase, and in a second the water was gone.

The interior of the whale looked like a bad van conversion done by a latex freak: damp, rubbery skin over everything, lit by a light blue haze coming from the eyes up front, the rest dimly lit by bioluminescent strips of green that ran over the top of the teardrop-shaped chamber. At the front of the chamber, on either side by the eyes, two things sat in seats that wrapped around their bodies. Quinn didn't know what they were, and his mind felt as if it were ripping open trying to grasp the whole of the situation. Details like nonhuman humanoids decked out in gray skin couldn't register enough space in his consciousness to be examined or analyzed. In fact, he could keep his eyes open for only a few seconds before the nausea returned.

Inside the whale smelled like fish.

Standing, or sort of standing — riding was a more appropriate term, as everything inside the whale was moving — behind the seated creatures were two men, one about forty, the other twenty-five, both barefoot but wearing military khakis without insignias or any badges of rank, but the older man was obviously in command. Quinn had tried for five minutes to ask them the questions coming into his mind, but each time he opened his mouth, he had to stop himself from throwing up. He'd always considered himself pretty seaworthy until now.

"What…?" he managed to get out before his gorge rose again.

"It really helps with the incredulity if you accept that you're dead," said the older man.

"I'm dead?"

"I didn't say that, but if you accept that you are, it sort of quells the anxiety."

"Yeah, if you're already dead, what bad can really happen?" said the younger guy.

"Then I am dead?"

"Nope. Breathe and go with the motion," said the older guy. "It's not going to stop, so if you fight it, you'll lose."

"Your lunch," added the young guy, and then he let loose a giggle at his own joke.

"There's less motion toward the front. The head tracks close to level. But you knew that."

Quinn hadn't been able to apply any of his analytical powers to the situation because he flat couldn't accept it. Yes, in another world he realized that he knew that the whale's head would have less motion than the tail, but he'd never even considered that he might be thinking about it from the perspective of an internal organ.

"I'm inside a whale?"

"Ding, ding, ding, he's gotten the bonus answer." The young guy leaned back against the back of the seat where one of the gray creatures was sitting, and a chairlike protrusion rose out of the floor to catch him. "Tell him what he's won, Captain."

"Hospitality, Poe. Help the doctor up to the front so we can talk without him tossing his cookies."

The younger guy helped Quinn to his feet and across the undulating floor to the chair thing that had risen behind one of the gray creatures facing the back of the ship. Once close to the creatures, Quinn couldn't take his eyes off them. They were humanoid, in that they had two arms, two legs, a torso, and a head, but their heads were like that of a pilot whale, with a large melon in the front — for transmitting and receiving sound underwater, Quinn guessed — and their eyes were set wide to the side, so the creatures would see with binocular vision. Their hands were inserted into consoles that rose out of the floor and appeared to have no instrumentation whatsoever except for some bioluminescent nodules that looked like cloudy eyeballs and emitted different colors of light. The creatures appeared as if they had become part of the whale.

"We call them the whaley boys," the older man said. "They pilot the whale."

"The one directly behind you is Scooter, the other one is Skippy. Say hi, guys."

The creatures turned as far as the chairs would allow them and made clicking and squeaking noises, then seemed to smile at Quinn. While smiling they showed mouthfuls of sharp, peglike teeth. With the teeth set against their dark gray skins and the melon above, the whaley boys put Quinn in mind of more cheerful versions of the creature from the Alien movies. Scooter saluted Nate with a hand consisting of four very long webbed fingers and only the suggestion of a thumb.

"They say hi," said Poe. "I'm Poe. This is Captain Poynter." Poynter, the older man, tipped his hat and offered a hand to shake. Quinn took it and waggled it limply.

"The whaley boys don't speak English as we know it," Poe said, "although they have a few squeaks that come out like words. They're tapped directly in to the whale's nervous system. They steer it, control all the processes at any given time. We can't do much on the whales without them. Certainly could never drive one. The whales and the whaley boys are made for each other."

Poe pushed against the back of Skippy's seat, and another seat formed out of the floor to cradle him as he leaned back into it. "I love that," Poe said.

Poynter backed up to a rubbery bulkhead, and a seat formed out of the wall to catch him as well.

"If they're paying attention, they'll never let you fall." Poe grinned. "Of course, almost everything in here is soft — child safe, don't you know — except the spine, which runs over the top, so you wouldn't be hurt if you did fall. But just the same, we're secured when they're doing maneuvers. You think you're sick now — wait until we go for a breach. Don't freak out." Poe turned to the whaley boys. "Secure the doc, boys." The arms of the seat shape wrapped over Quinn's lap. Parts came over his shoulders and fused across his chest, then around his hips and over his lap. Quinn freaked out.

"Get it off me! Get it off me! I can't breathe!"

"Prepare for breach," said Poynter.

Scooter chirped. Skippy grinned. Similar restraints extruded from all their seats, securing them.

The attitude of the whale changed, going up at a nearly sixty-degree angle — and then the angle went sharper as they moved. Quinn was looking backward at the tail section of the teardrop interior. The lurching movement of the luminescent strips was starting to nauseate him. He could feel his internal organs shifting with the acceleration, and then the whale ship went vertical and airborne. At the apex of the motion, Quinn's stomach tried to escape through his diaphragm, then shifted as they fell sideways. There was an enormous concussion as the ship hit the water. Slowly the whale came back around, and they were horizontal again.

The whaley boys chirped and clicked gleefully, grinning back at Quinn, then at each other, then back at Quinn, nodding as if to say, Was that cool, or what? Their necks were nearly as wide as their shoulders, and Quinn could see heavy muscles moving under the skin. "They love that," said Poynter.