Pandemic Page 27

Breath frosting from their mouths, Cooper, Jeff, José, Steve and Steve’s buddy Bo Pan stood in a loose circle, staring down at the cargo they’d hauled out to the middle of Lake Michigan.

When Steve Stanton had spoken of his ROV, Cooper assumed he knew what to expect: a boxy metal frame, about six feet wide and tall, maybe ten feet long, yellow ballast tanks on top, a couple of turbines in the back and a pair of robotic arms in the front. Throw in a camera suite and a long-ass cable, and you were in business.

But this?

For starters, it wasn’t yellow. It was covered in elephant-gray material studded with little points, kind of like acoustic foam. Ten feet long, sure, but there was nothing boxy about this contraption. The ROV’s front end came to a streamlined point. From there, it flared wide with the outline of a fish before tapering down again to a pair of flippers in the rear, like those of a Cape fur seal. On each side was a wide fin, like that of a penguin.

Jeff stared down at it. He crossed his arms, frowned.

“It’s fuzzy,” he said. He looked at Stanton. “You made an ROV with fur?”

“It’s an antiturbulence material,” Steve said. “Helps adjust the water flow for greater speed. Once it gets wet it looks very different.”

Cooper reached down and gently poked one of the furry points with a finger — felt like a stiff foam.

Steve shot out a panicked hand. “Please don’t touch!”

Cooper stood, held up both hands, palms out. “Wow, sorry.”

The kid blinked, looked around, saw that everyone was staring at him. He forced a smile.

“The material is just delicate is all,” he said. “My bad, I should have asked everyone not to touch it earlier.”

Cooper felt Jeff glaring at him. Jeff had that suspicious expression on his face again — the ROV was beyond state of the art, something altogether new, and that bothered him. Jeff subtly held up his hand, thumb rubbing against his fingertips: that thing looks like big money.

Cooper nodded. Of course Steve had money; he was part of some lawyer’s class-action lawsuit. Millions of dollars on the line. Cooper felt bad for the people who now ran Delta Airlines; this was going to wind up being one high-toned bitch of a lawsuit.

José craned his head around, looked at the ROV from all sides.

“Hey, Jefe Steve,” he said. “Where do you connect the control cable?” José insisted on calling everyone jefe, Spanish for boss. He looked around the deck, as if he suddenly realized he was missing something. “And where is the cable? Is that in the other box?”

He started toward the smaller of Steve’s two boxes, the one still strapped to the deck.

“Please don’t touch that one, either,” Steve said. Again, the words were rushed, nearly panicky.

Jeff glared. Cooper felt uncomfortable — the customer was acting very strange.

Steve shook his head, forced another smile. “There isn’t a cable. The Platypus is remote controlled to some extent, but mostly autonomous.”

Autonomous? An unmanned underwater vehicle; a robot. Cooper winced: that meant it cost exponentially more. He looked at Jeff, who was already shaking his head, lips pressed together in held-back anger.

“You told us you had an ROV,” Jeff said. “Now you’re telling us this is a UUV?”

Steve’s eyes widened. He glanced over to Bo Pan, just for the briefest second, but Bo Pan kept staring at the deck.

Cooper was losing his patience. Jeff could still blow this job if he kept being difficult.

“Jeff, it’s all good,” Cooper said. “UUV, ROV, ABC, whatever, let’s just get it in the water, okay?”

Jeff looked at Cooper, looked at the machine. He nodded.

“Yeah, okay,” he said quietly. Then, his booming I’m the boss voice returned. “Cooper, man the crane. José, get ready to get wet. Mister Stanton, if you’ll point out the right way for us to hook up your machine so we don’t break it, we’ll get her in the drink and you can do your thing.”

Everyone moved into action. Everyone except for Bo Pan. As Cooper headed to the Mary Ellen’s crane, he noticed Bo Pan watching Jeff, then watching José. Then, his eyes locked with Cooper’s.

For just a moment, Bo Pan didn’t look like the old man who had come aboard. His eyes were hard, cold … dangerous. Then the expression vanished — he looked out to the water, hawked a huge loogie and spat it over the side.

Just some old dude along for the ride. Right?

Cooper felt a shiver that wasn’t from the cold. He shook off the sensation, then got to work.

KILLER MATH FOR $200

Testing units weren’t the only thing that had changed in the last five years.

Margaret stood in the second airlock with Tim and Clarence. The three of them wore BSL-4 suits.

At first, the suit had seemed familiar. Like those she’d worn before, it was made of airtight Tyvek, a synthetic material. A heavy-gauge seal secured the oversized helmet onto the suit, and the helmet itself had a tall, wide, clear, curved visor that gave her full range of vision.

The visor itself, however, was something out of a movie.

“This is crazy,” she said. “So much information.”

“You’ll get used to it,” Tim said. “Before you know it, it’ll be second nature.”

She looked at him. She could see him through her visor, but her eyes also tried to register the information playing on the inside of it — the visor was a full-on heads-up display, scrolling data about the airlock and a medical report about the two divers in observation. She was wearing a computer screen in front of her face.

Chapter end