Starfish

Fischer remembers: the medical equipment can't always do everything on its own. Sometimes, when things get too complicated, it calls up the line to a human backup.

"Wow," says the mantis. "What happened to you? No, don't answer that either. I don't want to know." An accessory arm springs into sight and passes back and forth across Fischer's line of sight. "I'm going to override the damping field for a moment. It might hurt a bit. Try not to move when that happens, except to answer my questions."

Pain floods across Fischer's face. It's not too bad. Familiar, even. His eyelids feel scratchy, and his tongue is dry. He tries blinking; it works. He closes his mouth, rubs his tongue against swollen cheeks. Better.

"I don't suppose you want to come back up?" Dr. Troyka asks, hundreds of kilometers away. "You know these injuries are bad enough to warrant a recall."

Fischer shakes his head. "That's okay. I can stay here."

"Uh huh." The mantis doesn't sound surprised. "I've been hearing that a fair bit lately. Okay, I'm going to wire your cheekbone back together, and I'll be planting a little battery under your skin. Just below the right eye. It'll basically kick your bone cells into overdrive, speed up the healing process. It's just a couple of millimeters across, you'll feel like you've got sort of a hard pimple. It may itch, but try not to pick at it. When you're healed up you can just squeeze it out like a zit. Okay?"

"Okay."

"All right, Gerry. I'm going to turn the field back on and get to work." The mantis whirrs in anticipation.

Fischer holds up a hand. "Wait."

"What is it, Gerry?"

"What…what time is it, up there?" he asks.

"It's oh five ten. Pacific daylight. Why?"

"It's early."

"Sure is."

"I guess I got you up," Fischer says. "Sorry."

"Nonsense." Digits on the end of mechanical arms wiggle absently. "I've been up for hours. Graveyard shift."

"Graveyard?"

"We're on duty around the clock, Gerry. There's a lot of geothermal stations out there, you know. You — you keep us pretty busy, as a rule."

"Oh," Fischer says. "Sorry."

"Forget it. It's my job." There's a humming, somewhere in the back of his head; for a moment Fischer can feel the muscles of his face going slack. Then everything goes numb, and the mantis swoops down him like a predator.

* * *

He knows better than to open up outside.

It doesn't kill you, not right away. But seawater's a lot saltier than blood; let it inside and osmosis sucks the water from the epithelial cells, shrivels them down to viscous little blobs. Rifter kidneys are modified to speed up water reclamation when that happens, but it's not a long-term solution and it costs. Organs wears out faster, urine turns to oil. It's best to just keep sealed up. Your insides soak in seawater too long, they sort of corrode, implants or no implants.

But that's another one of Fischer's problems. He never takes the long view.

The face seal is a single macromolecule fifty centimeters long. It wraps back and forth along the line of the jaw like the two sides of a zipper, with hydrophobic side-chains for teeth. A little blade on the index of Fischer's left glove can split them apart. He runs it along the seal and the 'skin opens neatly around his mouth.

He doesn't feel much of anything at first. He was half-expecting the ocean to charge up his nose and burn his sinuses, but of course all his body cavities are already packed with isotonic saline. The only immediate change is that his face gets cold, numbing the chronic ache of torn flesh a bit. Deeper pain pulses under one eye, where Dr. Troyka's wires hold the bones of his face together; microelectricity tingles along those lines, press-gangs bonebuilding osteoblasts into high gear.

After a couple of moments he tries to gargle; that doesn't work, so he settles for gaping like a fish and wriggling his tongue around. That does it. He gets his first taste of raw ocean, coarse and saltier than the stuff that pumps him up inside.

On the seabed in front of him, a swarm of blind shrimp feeds in the current from a nearby vent. Fischer can see right through them. They're like little chunks of glass with blobs of organs jiggling around inside.

It must be fourteen hours since he's eaten, but there's no fucking way he's going back to Beebe with Brander still inside. The last time he tried, Brander was actually standing guard in the lounge, waiting for him.

What the hell. It's just like krill. People eat this stuff all the time.

They have a strange taste. Fischer's mouth is going numb from the cold, but there's still a faint sense of rotten eggs, dilute and barely detectable. Not bad other than that, though. Better than Brander by a long shot.

When the convulsions hit fifteen minutes later, he's not so sure.

* * *

"You look like shit," Lenie says.

Fischer hangs onto the railing, looks around the lounge. "Where —»

"At the Throat. On shift with Lubin and Caraco."

He makes it to the couch.