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Star Crossed Page 178

by C. Gockel


  “That was tide?”

  “I don’t know, but if so it was a long way from the sea, and it had to be bigger when it started up the river. Canoes aren’t made for wave action,” he added. “They capsize.”

  “Wouldn’t someone have thought about that?” She instantly answered her own question. “More obvious things have been overlooked. I know who’ll know.” She opened a new vocal link to the crew deck Upside, and got somebody named Lary to talk to her. She asked him if a tide could come into a river all at once.

  Lary said, “Off the top of my head, I don’t know. I’m from Mars, you know.”

  “Look it up! Joe, tell him what you saw.”

  Joe described his wave, his recall, as always, perfect.

  From Upside, the reedy voice said, “Uh-huh. Yes. Tide sometimes comes in the form of a wave front, which nicely matches what you saw. It’s called a bore.”

  “They’ve got people in a canoe,” said Joe. “If that happens, how big could the bore be where they are right now?”

  “That’s a tough one. It’s a complex function of hydrology and position of the moon. . . .”

  “The moon how?”

  “Bores are biggest at spring tide. Sometimes a river produces a bore only at spring tide, i.e., full moon or new moon. The spring tide at new moon is the heftier of the two—the sun is on the other side of the moon and they pull together. The blue moon’s new now, of course—”

  “Check the observatory. Can’t you look this way?” Catharin asked.

  “No can do, the Ship is a hundred degrees away from local zenith.”

  A different voice, male and gravelly, came over the link. Joe recognized Captain Bixby’s voice. “Somebody in trouble down there?”

  “Maybe, Bix,” she replied.

  Lary said, “Here, I’ll review the old footage.”

  Bix said, “For a good reason, I can blast open the emergency channel.”

  “Stand by,” Catharin replied.

  Joe paced, thinking about Wing in the fragile canoe. Lary muttered over the footage. “The day the boat was christened was overcast, no pix. But we’ve got radar mapping images from then. Nobody’s reviewed the radar for that, of course.”

  “Well, do it now,” said Catharin, with an edge to her voice.

  “I don’t know enough about tides,” said Joe.

  “Nor do I,” Catharin said.

  “That’s a high bank on both sides of the river—why’s it so damned high?”

  She understood what he meant. “Good Lord, I hope not.”

  The planetologist mumbled, “Your river is arranged for bores, all right. Its mouth is funnelshaped. On Earth it’d produce a noticeable bore on occasion, a few inches high. Hang on, I’m visualizing the radar footage from the day Toronto saw the bore in the river.”

  “They’re fifty or so yards behind the boat,” said Joe. “Maybe they should just pull the canoe out of the water.”

  Catharin murmured, “One of the expedition protocols is to keep people out of the biological gunk on the edge of the water.”

  “The gunk might be safer than getting capsized.”

  Lary transmitted an image that showed the river in gray tones, a funnelshaped estuary and thinning river-ribbon winding into the hills. At a glance, the picture told Joe nothing about a bore. But Lary crowed, “This is a radar image from about half an hour before Toronto saw his wave near Camp Darwin, and there’s a bore all right! It’s several miles inland. So is Beagle at present.” Joe made out a thin, wavering line across the river, above the estuary. “Let me just calculate how high . . . .”

  “We’re onto something,” Joe muttered. He and Catharin traded tense looks.

  They both jumped when Lary screeched, “Five meters! Something like that could—”

  Bixby drowned him out, opening the emergency channel, starting with the shrill allattention signal. “Beagle, Bixby, go to the ‘Bravo’ river tributary at top speed, you’re in imminent danger.”

  The river looked peaceful enough in its wide, smooth, bluegray extent, but Wing steered the canoe prudently, not drifting too close to the ragged rocks below the bank except when they nosed into the bank to sample the worms. Careful not to touch the creatures or the rich black slime of the river’s bottom, Tezi Young deftly scooped worms into collecting vials.

  Wing heard the surf in the distance. It surprised him that the sound carried so far inland on the wind from the sea. High overhead he noticed the moon, a bright bent wire of a crescent. He spared only glances for the moon, keeping his main attention on safe travel as he steered the canoe. Tezi powered it with firm strokes. The sun glistened on the dark brown skin below her shirt sleeves.

  Beagle maneuvered at onequarter of its engine power, with depth soundings and water flow readings in all directions. The canoe kept up without difficulty, well to one side of the riverboat and behind its wake.

  “Hey, look at the worms,” said Tezi. The creatures were contracting themselves into chinks in the rock, an amazing act of strength for such gelatinous beings.

  “Anticipating the tide?” Wing hazarded.

  “Could be. These buggers are fragile. They might break in the turbulence as the water rises over them. Look, each worm has its own little home hole.”

  “We are falling behind. A bit more speed, please,” Wing said politely.

  But Beagle pulled away faster. Judging by the wake that spilled out from its tail, those on board had revved the engine up to full. The wake rolled back toward them. As the canoe bobbed, their two-way crackled to life. Sam’s voice said with urgency, “Tezi and Carl, get out of the river! Abandon your craft if necessary, but get out, and go up the bank!”

  Wing aimed the canoe for a niche among tumbled blocks and boulders. There would be no way to port a canoe up over those obstacles, so Tezi stuffed her pockets with samples as she prepared to spring out of the canoe. “What’s the problem?” she asked through the two-way.

  “The tide’s coming in as one big wave!”

  Shocked, Wing instantly recognized the concept. Old China had a river where sea-tides came in as one enormous wave. That was bookish knowledge; he had never seen the thing himself. Tezi hauled the canoe up onto the rocks with Wing still in the stern. He leaped out into shallow rocky water.

  “I’m bigger. Go first,” said Tezi.

  Wing found the rocks slick with residue left by the worms. His feet slipped. He fell, painfully striking his shin on the rocks.

  By dint of bruising scrambling, Wing got over the rocks and started up the smoother part of the slope. Here the worms grew thick as grass. And their secretions made the bank impossibly slippery. Wing could get no traction and find no handholds. He slithered down in a heap. Even when Tezi braced herself and pushed his feet, the effort failed. “We can’t climb out,” she transmitted back to Beagle, which had vanished around downriver. “The bank is too slimy!”

  “You’ve got to!” Sam answered harshly. “The tide is coming in one wave as high as the bank! Forget the canoe! Get out!”

  Their struggles only bruised and slimed them. Panting, tumbling down again onto the rocks, Wing heard the surf. It sounded louder. Closer. Not surf at all but an approaching tidal wave. Desperately he looked around at the piled rocks, too obviously tumbled and splintered. The wave and the rocks would pummel their bodies to pieces. “Back to the canoe!” Wing yelled.

  “What?!” Tezi screamed back.

  “It is about waves! Safer in middle of the river!”

  Tezi had not lost her wits. She held the bow as Wing piled into the craft. Then she dove into the canoe herself and thrust it away from the shore. “Paddle like hell and we might make it!” she called out.

  The river looked as calm as ever. But its banks were bare of green. The clever worms had all hidden themselves. That wire-thin moon watched everything from high in the sky, as implacable as the lidded eye of a dragon.

  With all their strength, they stroked to midstream. Wing hastily cocked the canoe’s bow toward the se
a.

  “Here goes.” Tezi pulled the cord to inflate her life jacket. It puffed up into a carapace around her. “Keep the bow into the wave.” She poised, paddle at the ready, muscles on her arm bunching under streaks of slime and blood.

  Wing’s own arms quivered with terror. He nearly overcorrected for the canoe’s bow shifting in a vagary of the water. The bow must face the wave.

  Kyrie eleison.

  It came upon them, sudden and fearsome, twin mountains of water. At either side of the river a moving mountain erupted foam and stirred great rocks with a roar. Between the double peaks lay a saddleback ridge of clean wave with gleaming flanks and a crest of foam. The canoe, no more than a stick in the water, bravely pointed into the face of the great wave.

  With an edge of panic on her voice, Tezi called, “Been nice knowing you!”

  The great wave pushed air ahead of it like a gale. The canoe pitched up. For a transfixed instant, Wing looked up at the wave’s curled peak, translucent water like glass, a crown of foam that blew and shook like fire. Then the canoe shuddered as foam poured down around his ears.

  At the wave’s crest the canoe slipped out of line with the wave. Foaming water overturned it. Thrown into the cold torrent, Wing tumbled like a leaf. He struggled to swim up to the surface. At the end of his breath he reached the air.

  The canoe wheeled by his head, upside down with its bow clear out of the wave, spilling water. He ducked to save his skull.

  The whole mass of water moved with a mighty pull and turbulence that threatened to drown Wing for good. He seized the gunwale of the canoe. Floatable material, it would stay near the surface, swamped or not. And so he hung on. He felt the great wave’s wake churning upstream, carrying him with it.

  “Tezi!” Wing screamed. He thought he heard a strangled reply, but the voice or the lungs were drowned in the raging water. After a turbulent eternity the water smoothed and slowed. “Tezi! Tezandra!” he called out, uselessly.

  The water was bitter tasting. Wing desperately wanted to get out of it. He let go of the canoe and swam to shore.

  A batteredlooking tree perched on the rim of the bank. The water had risen so high that Wing floated within reach of the tree’s roots. He grabbed at the roots and sobbed with relief when his hand closed around the sturdy vegetable matter. He crawled up the roots, pulling himself out of the water, shivering as the air met his soaked clothing.

  Dazedly Wing looked around. His eyes burned and watered. He rubbed them, blinking to force vision through them. He could see no sign of Tezi or of Beagle. In the river, the overturned canoe bobbed heavily, low in the water, floating away.

  Sudden nausea wrenched Wing’s stomach. He vomited up water. When the racking sickness passed, he stood up. He swayed. He meant to start walking downstream. He had to find Tezi.

  He had walked up to Unity Base from the earlier disaster, the crash of the shuttle. This time, he could not walk away from ruin. He was too sick. Stripping off the life jacket, he hung it on the bare tree by the water. Then he collapsed onto the ground, convulsed by another bout of sickness.

  22 Nightmare

  Joe outran everybody else and reached the hangar first. As Joe skidded in through the door, Domino Cady confronted him. “We need Becca, and she’s not here. She told me she’d be in the moss dell, and you know how to get there.” Cady’s “you” had the force of a curse.

  Taking the straightest course down the mountain by leaps and bounds, Joe raced through the pines and jumped over the stream’s crooks. He heard Becca’s flute. Panting, Joe skidded to a stop on the brink of the dell. Becca was already scrambling to her feet, flute in hand and a startled look on her face. “We’ve got people missing in the river!” Joe held out his hand. She took it and he pulled her out of the dell.

  The helicopter sat in front of the hangar with its main rotor circling slowly. Aaron and Catharin were climbing in. Over the rotor’s thump-thump, Becca told Joe, “You’re a swimmer. Get in!” Joe took a place on a bench against the bulkhead between cabin and cockpit beside Catharin, who was belting up.

  “Got your black doctor bag?” Joe asked Catharin. She nodded curtly.

  Wearing a headset, Becca had the copilot’s seat. She leaned out of the cockpit toward Joe to hand him a headset of his own. “You do know that when a copter tips its nose down, that’s what it has to do to fly up, and it’s not going to crash?”

  “Thanks for the warning,” Joe said.

  Lifting up off the ground, the Starhawk pitched forward so drastically that Joe was tossed against the bulkhead behind his back. He tightened his seat belt. The copter hurtled away from Unity Base. It was a big, powerful flying machine in a hurry. Alarm shot through Joe’s nervous system, and old pain flared in his shoulder.

  Aaron leaned toward the cockpit in anxiety, even though that didn’t help Domino hear better through the headset. “The wave would carry the canoe upstream for some distance. Then the current reverts to normal, and they’d come back downstream.”

  “Is Beagle watching for them?” Domino asked.

  “I’ll ask,” said Becca. The background noise in Joe’s headset changed to open-line hiss. “Beagle, Starhawk. We’re on the way. Are you where you can watch the river in case it carries Carl and Tezi past your position?”

  The voice of Sam Houston answered. “Negative. We’re stranded in a mess of weeds in shallow water.” Her voice sounded ragged. “I can’t send anybody through the muck to get closer to the river. There’s a built-in homing signal in the life jackets, but we haven’t received either of them since the wave.”

  “The usual frequency?”

  “Yes!”

  “Head zero eight seven,” Becca said to Domino. “Directly toward Beagle.” The copter tilted. Joe sagged against his belt.

  Catharin did not seem troubled by the copter’s motion. She must have done some training in this kind of machine. Her mouth was a level line, her attention absorbed in her own thoughts, probably rehearsing medical procedures.

  Becca said, “We better think about rescue tactics for somebody in the water. We’ve got a hoist, cable, and rescue collar on this bird. We can drop it down to anybody in the drink. They have to be able to put it on, though. Either that or somebody jumps in to help them, and I think that’s Joe. And I think you better show him how to use it, Domino.”

  “I’m flying.”

  “I can fly a helicopter in a straight line.”

  Domino came out of the cockpit. With no headset, he didn’t bother to talk. He quickly unstrapped a piece of gear from its rack on the back bulkhead and demonstrated it to Joe, pulling it on himself. Collar goes over the shoulders. Chest straps secure like this, tighten this clamp. Domino easily kept his balance even though the copter was tippier than it had been when he was flying. Crotch strap fastens like this, and make it good and tight. Understand?

  Joe nodded. Domino rapidly unfastened the rescue collar and ducked back into the cockpit.

  “If it comes to that, don’t ingest any of the water,” said Catharin. “There might be something toxic in it.”

  “There’s Beagle!” Becca sang out. Catharin and Aaron leaned into the cockpit door to see ahead. Joe peered out of a little window on the Starhawk’s side. As the copter swerved—Domino at the controls again, making a smooth and drastic turn parallel to the river—Joe glimpsed the riverboat wallowing in a backwater full of ropy water-weed, like noodle soup. He tried not to think about Wing and Tezi and the fragile canoe in the teeth of a monster wave.

  Suddenly, voices clamored, Becca’s higher than the rest. “We’ve got a homing signal!”

  “Look, international orange!” Aaron pointed. “Ahead—out of the water—in a tree by the water! It’s a life jacket hanging in a tree!”

  “There’s no sign of the canoe,” said Becca.

  “There’s somebody! There’s somebody by the tree!” Aaron almost yelled.

  The helicopter tipped its nose up, and Joe felt his stomach lurch. The copter plummeted toward landing.


  “He’s not moving!” Aaron exclaimed.

  Joe heard the dismayed intake of Catharin’s voice. He jabbed her with his elbow. “Dead men don’t hang their life jackets in trees.”

  The copter settled on the ground, its noise shutting down drastically as the rotor slowed. Aaron sprang out with Catharin on his heels, Joe behind them. Domino and Becca began unstowing equipment. For a moment, Joe stood under the copter’s coasting rotor to get his balance and his stomach back. Domino had picked a relatively flat spot in otherwise rolling, shrubby terrain. Under a scrawny tree about a hundred feet away, Wing was curled up, looking small and still.

  Aaron and Catharin reached Wing in moments. Joe, walking on unsteady legs, took longer to get there. Domino shoved past him, arms full.

  Wing was alive. He had been sick, and stank of vomit. Heedless of that, Catharin was checking his vital signs. Squeamish sometimes, Joe thought. Not now. She was totally focused. He doubted that a small explosion behind her would have distracted her from the patient.

  Domino unfolded a collapsible stretcher. Catharin directing them, Domino and Aaron lifted Wing onto it. Wing’s face was pale, the color of ivory.

  “Joe! Joe!” Becca stood on the crest of a low hill beside the river, gesturing toward the river. “I see her!”

  Joe sprinted to the nearest spot on the river’s edge. At the foot of a long bank, the river stretched out light green and lazy to the other side. Out in the middle of the water bobbed the orange of a life jacket. Its wearer’s head lolled, uncoordinated or unconscious, stiff black hair plastered over her face.

  Joe calculated the distance and the speed of the woman’s drift while he flung off shirt, pants, and shoes. He evaluated the contours of the water. No whirlpools, no rapids—current wide and steady—to his Earth-born eyes, it looked like an honest river. He slithered down the bank, slipped in over his head in the cool water, and started stroking hard.

  The water surged around his shoulders. Joe found a bitter, salty taste on his lips. He spat.

  Becca had spotted Tezi just in time—if Joe swam fast enough. He swam hard , demanding top speed of muscles that hadn’t handled water for months. No, a millennium.

 

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