Free Neurolink by M. M. Buckner

red again. Another midnight had come around.
    Qi sat beside him and kicked at the water. “Ready, Nick?”
    “You didn’t bother to ask me that before.”
    Above the breathing mask, her eyes narrowed to merry slits. “It’s a rhetorical question.”
    Dominic made a running leap to reach the bathysphere—it was either that or swim through the foul, oily ocean. He banged into the ladder and scraped his shins and bit back the oath he wanted to yell. Inside, the shuttle’s tiny cabin stank of prote. The moment he entered, he could smell their wretched breath and body dirt through his mask. Even the toxic atmosphere had smelled fresher than this. Fifteen people, counting the pilot, were packed into a space meant for six. When the hatch clanked shut, the noise of the factory ship abated, and Dominic sensed a faint humid breeze. An air exchanger was laboring to blow filtered air into the cabin and displace the toxic atmosphere. But the smell didn’t improve. A green indicator light flashed overhead, and the pilot said it was okay to remove face masks. Dominic kept his on.
    If there had ever been seats in this crude little craft, someone had ripped them out. The passengers sat in each other’s laps on the bare metal floor. Dominic would have preferred to stand, but the pilot ordered him down, so he squeezed in next to the old woman, Juanita Inez. Benito sat on his other side, scowling as usual, with arms crossed defiantly over his narrow young chest. A tiny girl climbed into Dominic’s lap. The girl’s nakedness embarrassed him, so he took off his silk undershirt and helped her put it on. It swallowed her small body, but she toyed with the sleeves and seemed very proud of it. Before he could stop her, the little girl squirmed onto his shoulders, locked her ankles under his chin and clenched his hair with her sticky little fists. From the other side of the cabin, Qi winked and blew him a kiss.
    “Thank you,” Juanita said, touching her granddaughter’s new silk shirt. “Our clothing fell apart. It wasn’t made for the surface.”
    She drew the clear plasticene a little tighter around her body like a shawl, and Dominic wished he had more to give her. It wasn’t seemly, a woman of her age with nothing to cover herself. Most of the other protes were naked, too, or nearly so. What kind of clothing did they wear that disintegrated so easily? Their commissaries must be run by swindlers. His silk underwear was holding up just fine.
    As the shuttle bobbed downward, the cabin temperature began to rise, and he decided nakedness might be an advantage. The shuttle’s cooling unit evidently wasn’t sized for this load. In no time, the air grew suffocatingly hot, and everyone sweated. More than once, Dominic wiped salty drops out of his eyes, and finally, he took off the hot face mask. The cut on his knee throbbed.
    Despite everything, the protes kept talking. They wouldn’t shut up. In their gutter accents and awful grammar, they told jokes and congratulated each other and passed around a bottle of sour-smelling wine. They imagined this stinking little bathysphere was their salvation. Damp, musky flesh pressed in on Dominic from every side. He hated this closeness. If only they would stop talking!
    He closed his eyes and fought down his disgust. This was taking longer than he’d planned, but soon he would board the Benthica . Only now, thanks to the major, he couldn’t call the bank guards to get him out. Well, hadn’t his father schooled him to be resourceful?
    First priority, find and disable the miner’s Net link. Second, get back to the surface and hail the NP. He’d memorized the submarine’s layout, so he knew the Net link was housed on the bridge. He could use any heavy object to smash the vulnerable electronics. Stewing in his own sweat, he imagined scenes of hand-to-hand combat with a desperate mob, and he was suddenly glad the major had insisted on disguise.
    Escape—how could he manage that? Again he thought of