Bits of memories flickered into his mind. Ale. And someone ... that Shadow Panille. He remembered now. There had been an argument between Ale and someone in Merman Mercantile - the late Ryan Wang's operation. She had ended it by removing Keel to ... to ... He could not remember. But they had left Ale's complex. That much he recalled.
Thick air all around him now ... down-under air. Slowly, he tried opening his left eye. A dark shape loomed over him, haloed by a pair of bright ceiling lights.
"He's coming around."
A smooth, unhurried voice, conversational. The piercing whine in Keel's ears began to wind down. He tried opening both eyes wider. Slowly, a face came into focus above him: crisscrossed scars on the cheeks and brow, a twisted mouth. The face turned away like a receding nightmare and Keel saw streaks of green smeared up to the neck below those awful scars.
"Don't fuss over him, Nakano. He'll keep."
That was a voice edged in ice.
The scarred face regarded Keel once more - two deeply set eyes with something far back in there that refused to emerge. Nakano? Keel felt that the name and the scarred face should ignite an important memory. Blank.
"He's no good to us dead," Nakano said. "And you hit him pretty hard with that stuff. Hand me some water."
"Get it yourself. I don't tote for Mutes."
Nakano removed himself from Keel's view, returning in a moment to bend closer with a beaker and a straw. A hand striped with green paint put the straw between Keel's lips.
"Drink it," Nakano said. "I think it'll help."
Hit him pretty hard?
Keel remembered someone shouting ... Kareen Ale screaming at ... at ...
"It's just water," Nakano said. He moved the straw against Keel's lips.
Keel sucked in cold water and felt the soothing splash of it into his cramping stomach. He told himself that he should reach for the beaker but his hands refused to cooperate.
Straps!
Keel felt them over his chest and arms. He was being restrained, then. Why? He took another deep drink of the water and pushed the straw from his mouth with his tongue.
Nakano removed the beaker and released the restraints.
Keel flexed his fingers and tried to say "thanks," but the word was no more than a dry whistle in his throat.
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.