Free The Watchers: A Space Opera Novella by Jeffrey A. Ballard

water out of the way. The air pocket could collapse before entry. The subroutine that mixes water and air for the controlled deceleration may miscalculate and flatten me into a shark pancake. Almost a hundred different ways to die in under a tenth of a second. I love it.
    Then it passes and we're down fifty feet underwater and descending. Only when the static of the comm comes online through my earpiece, trying to make a connection, do I remember to breathe. The rush of the entry fades into focus on the job at hand.
    Another fifty feet later, we stand on an exit ramp from I-95 and the rookie, Winn, brings up the holo-map with incomplete sonar data overlaid. Hurricane Gretchen passed through last night and did us the favor of muddying up the waters, an expected development—the Feds are just as blind.
    "Lovers, you're all clear." I can hear the smirk in Puo's voice, ten thousand feet above in the Seagull and driving north in the South Florida Memorial Airway.
    "We descended four miles too far to the east." Winn points at the blinking dot on the holo-map. "I think we'll need to jetflow. Listen, about last night—"
    The flow jets will make too much noise; the squiddies are tuned to it. Its only purpose is to outrun the damn things. "No, we'll have to jump, skip, and hop to the site. It's quieter and doesn't disturb the water as much. Adjust your buoyancy in rhythm to your jumps and try to keep up." I initiate my jump subroutine and leap.
    Puo. That nosy punk's always got to stir the pot. I land forty feet away at an intersection and wait. Let Winn struggle; I'll send over the subroutine after he falls several times. It's just a fling. My father always said we Schmidts think with our cocks. Well, in my case, insert the female equivalent.
    Winn is still just standing there. "Rookie, what's taking you so long? Let's move."
    "I'm writing a subroutine to automatically manage the buoyancy adjustments. I can transmit it to you when I'm done."
    "That's very kind of you, Rookie," Puo breaks in. "Don't you think that's nice, Isa?"
    "Puo—" He is so going to pay for this. "—focus on our pickup. Rookie, nice thought, here you go. I don't have time to wait for you to flounder through it." I transmit the subroutine.
    Soon enough he's leaping as well. I keep one leap ahead of him as we make our way to the destination. What's left of the urban sprawl of South Florida passes by in blue-green shadows. Most of the buildings are intact, some are collapsed, but all of them are still. They seem to defy the churning of the water from the hurricane that passed through.
    With less than a mile to go, alarms start going off: squiddies—the autonomous eyes and ears of the Federal Government below the waves.
    I cancel the subroutine and look for a place to hide. There's a Chick-fil-A thirty feet away. I glide through a broken window and hug up against the ceiling in the play area. Hopefully, Winn's done something similar.
    What are the squiddies doing this far west and north? There's nothing out here they should care about. The juiciest loot is in Miami and along the old coast. South Florida isn't even in the top ten of the most federally protected underwater sites.
    I move smoothly between the top of the slide and the roof, trying not to stir any silt. The more obstacles between me and the squiddies, the better the chance their sonar can't find me, particularly after a hurricane.
    A tense half hour later Puo says over the comm, "It's gone. It's two miles south and continuing to move in that direction."
    "It was supposed to be clear," I say.
    "They changed the modulation on the carrier frequency." His voice is agitated. "I got it now. There's definitely a swarm of them farther north than normal, but they're hanging out by the old coast. The President must be looking for some electoral year victories or somethun'."
    Catching grave robbers of the sunken state is definitely a low-risk, high-profile political victory. Too bad we don't have enough