Chapter 80
The Thai neurobiologist wasn’t a great swimmer, but she knew it wasn’t about swimming at this point, just surviving.
When the lifeboat abandoned her, she removed her waterproof pack from her back and turned it around, put her arms through the straps, and pulled it close to her chest, using the pack like a float.
Her spirit sank when the lifeboat left her behind, but it was the blood loss and shock from the shrapnel wound to her scalp that shut her eyes. She fell asleep, gently rocked by the rolling waves, her head half submerged in the cool water.
She had the vague sense of floating in her dream state, but the sound of high-pitched mosquitoes whined in her ears. If the sound would just go away, she could go to sleep forever…
A hard bump against her leg jolted her awake. Her bulging eyes caught sight of the speeding shark fin racing past, spiking her heart rate to the edge of ventricular fibrillation.
She quickly spun around, roiling the water like a wounded fish. Something told her that was a dumb move. Her ears were clogged with water and her mind was fogged, but she could see she was in big trouble now.
The sight of three more shark fins confirmed it.
She tasted the blood in her mouth. She touched the scalp wound that hadn’t stopped bleeding.
In fact, she’d left a trail of blood in the water—no doubt drawing the hungry sharks to her.
Her peripheral vision caught sight of another shark fin racing toward her in the distance, but the back of her neck tingled like a burglar alarm as the distant whining grew louder.
She refused to take her eyes off the charging shark—
The ear-splitting whine of a big four-stroke motor exploded behind her. She cried out in confused terror as she felt herself yanked out of the water at speed and tossed onto the long hard seat of a big Yamaha WaveRunner that had barely slowed.
“Hold on tight, missy,” Cabrillo said as he gunned the throttle, racing away from the circling sharks and back toward the Oregon.
The girl could barely wrap her thin arms around the muscled torso of the man driving the Jet Ski. She felt the backpack pressed against her chest, forgetting she even had it. She breathed a sigh of relief.
The hard drives with all of the core Neural Reef algorithms were safely tucked inside, along with living tissue samples suspended in neuroplasm. She hoped Bose had survived, but doubted it after that huge explosion. At least the doctor’s creation would live on.
She closed her eyes again, and laid her forehead against the man’s broad back.
She was safe.