She lodged her hands against his chest for balance. She could feel the ridge of muscle beneath the layer of baby fat. Sure boss, she gasped, then rammed into the thicket where she yanked at her pants and crouched. She pressed her lips together to keep from moaning while the stench rose around her.
When she returned to the truck Rand was already suited, rig readied and waiting upright on the truck’s gate. Bowman held Rand’s harness straps and he hunkered in and adjusted and slogged out of sight. Bowman dragged her doubles and gear box from the back of the truck, then wordlessly scrutinized her preparations before helping her into her harness, his legs straddling hers as he tented open the straps. She let him attach her suit whip to her intake valve over her left breast and gently press it in place. Then he clapped his palms to the side of her face. You’re the boss, he said, lips close to hers. Don’t you forget.
A tremendous drowsiness hazed her head. She should call this one. For real. He hooked his hands under her armpits and guided her to the side of the truck’s gate. Sit pretty for a minute, he told her, and busied himself with his own equipment.
Sweat splashed her eyes and black rings floated across her vision but a single thought lit her head. Wait, she said. Did Jane forget?
He snapped his valves and clipped his lights, then steamed full speed into the bracken. Marilyn trundled after him fast as she could without risking a fall.
Bowman bumped up and down in front of her. A tough nut, he called back after a moment, and then he disappeared, as did the path.
She stopped. Jealousy stirred her acid gut now. What couldn’t Jane do? Just as suddenly, Marilyn felt ashamed. She wobbled a few steps and clung to a tree then let go to shaky-leg down an incline and finally arrive at the sinkhole’s soup of algae and dead leaves. Perhaps twenty feet from the low bank, the men bobbed side by side. Gripping first a tree trunk and then its exposed roots and then sparse tufts of reedy grass, she backed into the basin and paddled out. As if saluting each other, they all three raised their arms to vent the air in their wings—and descended to sixty-five feet where, feeling cooler and far less burdened, she knelt on the coarse bottom. She fiddled with her gages and futzed with the strap attaching her primary computer to her forearm, and on second thought tightened it. She checked her gages again, recalculated her turn-pressure—as an inflowing spring Cleargate required a rule of fourths, not thirds. But then she forgot the new numbers, and then the new-new numbers also thrashed from her brain. She was losing precious time, she knew. But still. Things weren’t right and she needed to fix them. Then Bowman rapped her mask. He thrust an okay at her. She tried to gather a quick response but he tried again, and before she could throw an okay back at him he stuck his thumb up. Dive’s over. Now she mustered an emphatic O with her thumb and first finger. He shook his head. No. She held his stare until his expression grew more quizzical. He raised his hand horizontally in the water and fluttered it side to side. Something wrong? She shook her head, then gave an exaggerated shrug and pointed first one direction and then another. Which way? Bowman stared another few seconds and then signalled a different direction. There. Where ten feet away, tops, Rand waited and watched.