by Tony Daniel
As if in answer, the Deeps in the water began to writhe and splash. Nurys regarded them with concern.
“What’s with them?”
Samawa laid his long paw across his furry chest.
“They feel our emotions, and possibly yours, too,” he added, tapping her on the solar plexus, “though yours are far more subtle than ours.”
Subtle! Nurys felt her temper rise. The leviathans thrashed more vigorously, sending up geysers of water into the blue sky. She dampened her feelings.
“Serene one,” she said, “if you can sense my emotions, then you know how concerned I am about your safety. I have come all the way from Earth to help you. That’s how serious your government takes this situation.”
Furuki’s voice interrupted them.
“Sir, we’ve got bogeys coming this way. Seven of them.”
Shit! The Truchs had figured out they’d been fooled. It would take them little time to search the two island groups flanking Domiri and see all the activity in the water near Sokoiri. Nurys made a decision.
“Come and get us. Shove the crowd out of the way if you have to, but get here. The harbor’s plenty deep. And keep me posted!”
“Aye, sir!”
She turned to Samawa and Corkan, willing them to understand in spite of the crude translator.
“Truch fighters are on the way. They’ve been dropping bombs on us, and they are looking for you. If you don’t want every single one of your patients blasted out of the water, get your stuff now. Just the vitals. We need to evacuate you before they get here.”
The Lits searched her face with their round brown eyes, then the group hurried back toward their encampment, all but Samawa.
“Have I brought this on my dear friends?” he asked. “Have I put them all into danger, colleagues and patients alike from the Hornets?” His expressive muzzle sagged into despair. Nurys felt genuinely sorry for him.
“Not you. The Truchs did it. Hurry. We don’t have a lot of time.”
He trundled away, far faster than she thought one of his bulk could move.
Nurys listened to the chatter coming from the Colorado as she waited impatiently for the Lits to return. In the water, she saw the stirring of the surface as the Deeps scattered.
She couldn’t help but feel pride as Colorado rose. First the UMM broke water, followed by the magnificent sail, then the near-black oblong body, long and magnificent. Nurys ran a critical eye over the length of her, and could see no flaw. The few scrapes and dents they’d taken since arriving on Monaday were superficial.
The Lits clustered at her side, murmuring admiringly.
“It looks like a Deep!” Samawa said, heaving a bulky red bag across his shoulders. “What a compliment to the denizens of this world!” He walked up and down, admiring it.
No matter what, the Lits seemed to take their own time about things.
“Sir,” Nurys said, her patience exhausted, “get on board. Now. No more arguments. If I have to carry you, I will.”
Samawa waved a paw.
“No need. I feel your sincerity. We will go.” He signed to the others. Nurys gestured toward the rubber boat, but the Lits ignored it. They ran to the water’s edge and leaped in, swimming for the hatch on their own.
The cadets were thrilled to have the Lits on board. Their disappointment at not being able to set foot on the island disappeared as they had a whole bunch of actual aliens among them. The Lits hugged everyone, not at all taken aback at entering an alien—to them—watercraft.
The moment they were on board, Nurys strode back to the bridge, Corkan and Samawa in her train.
“Helm, get us out of here,” she said, peeling out of her wetsuit. The Lits dripped water on the floor. A couple of the crew ran for mops and buckets. “Set course for our pickup point. Depth two hundred meters.”
“Aye, sir!” Esperanza said, entering the order on her controls. The bridge crew shot curious glances at their visitors as the Lits came to watch what they was doing. Colorado came about smartly, and started toward the entrance to the sheltered cove.
Bump! Nurys staggered at the impact.
“What did we hit?”
More impacts came in the wake of the first.
“It’s the Deeps, sir,” Lim said, pointing at the visuals. “They’re ramming into us. They didn’t touch us on the way in!”
“They are concerned for us,” Corkan said. “They think we are your prisoners, or your prey.”
“How can we get them to stop?” Nurys demanded. “I don’t want to hurt them.”
Samawa showed all his teeth in a humanlike smile.
“We will tell them we are safe.”
Together, he and Corkan closed their eyes. To her amazement, Nurys could feel waves of calming emotion pouring from them, like warmth from the sun. Even she relaxed a little. The faces of the bridge crew told her they were sensing the same thing. The Lits truly were empathic.
The Deeps withdrew to a few meters, giving the sub room to maneuver.
“I told them we will return,” Samawa said, opening his eyes. “Perhaps you will come back with me.”
Nurys had to think about that. But she had more pressing things on her plate at the moment.
She assigned Dodd to take the Lits to their temporary bunks and show them around. The Lits praised every part of the ship. They were even pleased with the rations in the wardroom. They asked shy questions about everything they saw, and her crew responded eagerly with detailed explanations, gesturing with hand signals where words failed. To Nurys’s surprise, she realized this was the Lits’ first contact with humans. If only it had been under different circumstances, it would have been great.
Now the Truchs knew pretty much where they were. That meant they had to keep from being pinged. They set course away from Sokoiri along the most broken, rocky, and difficult terrain that the helm could scare up, deep valleys and tightly-packed baby volcanoes along the rift. They rode the edge of thermoclines, ducking into colder or warmer water in order to break the signal when a sonar sweep came through.
The scouts passed over them again and again, always doubling back toward the island cluster. Nurys breathed a sigh of relief whenever they veered off instead of going around for a bombing run.
Two and a half days before the pickup, they emerged from a narrow rift valley, and out over the lowest terrain they had seen yet. The temperature gradient was less than five degrees from one zone to another, with no deep crevices wide enough for the sub anywhere in sight. Nurys had the helm open it up to make time.
“Sweep pattern approaching!” Lim announced.
Their luck had run out.
They heard the screech of the radar rake across them. It passed over them slightly, then reversed, staying on their location and whooping like the world’s most annoying car alarm.
“They painted us!” Bahri shouted, just before the barrage began. The sub rocked every time a charge went off close by. The Lits whimpered to one another. They weren’t used to unfriendly seas.
“Dive for the bottom,” Nurys said, her eyes fixed on the scope. “Scrape her belly if you need to.”
“Sir,” Cartwright said in alarm, “the floor is below our safe specs.”
“We have to take the chance,” Nurys snapped. “Get as low as you can. We have to minimize the damage.”
The sub creaked audibly as they descended. She could almost feel the gaskets straining against the additional pressure. Charge after charge detonated. Nurys couldn’t identify a pattern.
“Can they trace us?”
“They don’t know with certainty where you are,” Samawa said suddenly. “We can feel their confusion.”
Nurys straightened. “That’s all I need to know.”
She tuned out the depth alarm sounding over and over and concentrated on running straight for the feet of the nearest islands, through hot and cold zones. They couldn’t go silent again for hours; there wasn’t time.
Shouting erupted from the stern. Another set of sea
ls had given out, flooding a rear compartment. Engineering was on the job, doing their best to deal with that and a buckled panel. The lights on the bridge flickered and went to safeties. Rafik checked his readout and gave Nurys a reassuring nod.
“Will we die?” Corkan asked, her kindly face concentrated with fear.
“No,” Nurys said. “I’ve got you. We’re going to catch the bus home.”
Once in the midst of another island group, they had no choice but to follow the hills and valleys of the terrain. They rose above the crisis depth, but that made them vulnerable to further barrages. And barrages they got. Whenever the Truchs could triangulate on their pings, they bombed them hell out of them. Nurys realized they had observed that Samawa’s endless broadcasting had gone silent. Even a stupid alien would guess that he was on the mystery craft. Take out one, and they take out the other.
“We have got a bogey coming this way,” Esperanza said.
“Another fighter?” Nurys asked.
Her eyes were wide. “No. This one is gigantic. It’s got to be the home base for these fighters.”
Nurys concentrated on the scope. She didn’t need to ask which image he meant. One round mark overspread a quarter of the sky. The mothership was bigger than any Earth-based aircraft or spaceship, including any generation ship or aircraft carrier she had ever seen. It dwarfed Roh’s Gilik merchant. It was the goddamned Death Star, and it was coming for them.
“Do you know anything about these destroyers?” she asked Corkan. “What do we need to hit them?”
“You can’t!” the healer said. Her large brown eyes were open in horror. “They have shields against space weapons. You can’t attack them. Nothing will go through.”
“Space weapons?” Nurys repeated. “But the shields are for long-distance attacks, right? They have to have a vulnerable range inside, or they’d repel their own fighters coming in.”
Corkan paused. “I don’t know.”
Nurys glanced at her crew.
“Well, then, it’s all or nothing. Bahri, load all torpedo tubes. Make ready on my command.”
“It’s going to kill us!” Corkan gasped.
Nurys felt the sense of calm come over her that she always had when she focused on a single point.
“It’s going to try. And we’re going to try right back,” Nurys said. “Plot an intercept course. Go in at four hundred feet, then blow the ballast so we come up right under them. We want to be right in their faces to give them a proper welcome. We’re going to shoot and run. Got that?”
“Aye, sir!” Cartwright said. She plotted in the course, her eyes fixed on her screen. Nurys watched, measuring the distance with her eyes.
Wait for it . . . wait for it . . .
“Blow tanks!”
The G-force of the ship rising pressed them hard into their seats. Nurys held on, her eyes on fire control’s screen.
“Fire!”
At one hundred feet exactly, the sub shuddered as it released the four surface-to-air torpedoes, then dove for the bottom as fast as it could.
On the scopes, the rockets lit up the sky like four arc-welder flames. They zipped toward their targets, spreading out for the underside of the mothership. Nurys held her breath. Would the shields stop them? But, no, the hot blue flames kept rising, rising, rising, until they burst into blinding glory against the Truch hull. The whole world shook with the percussive impact. Nurys felt as if she had been body-slammed. Her ears popped, and she felt warm liquid pouring down her neck. Probably blood. No time to check.
They were a thousand yards away and hauling when the mothership came down into the ocean. The shock wave threw the sub forward, making the rudder stutter. Anyone on his or her feet got thrown clear across the cabin.
“Medic!” “Medic!” Calls came over the PA immediately.
“We must help,” Corkan said, unhitching herself from the jump seat in which she had been secured. She waddled out of the room, holding her bag.
Bless them, the captain thought.
Nurys checked the scope. Dozens of the fighter craft swooped helplessly around the sinking, smoking ruin of the mothership, like flies around a rotting carcass. Shrapnel flew in every direction, some of it landing in the path of the sub. Colorado rammed into a few, losing her forward starboard sensor array to the debris. Three of the screens at nav and telemetry went black. Nurys heard a screech as a long section like a girder scraped down the port side. Couldn’t be helped. Didn’t matter.
“Let’s get to the bus station,” Nurys said. “At sunset our transport lifts. We are not going to miss it.”
“No, sir!” the crew shouted.
They ran for the pickup point, avoiding pings and sweeps from the few surviving small craft. The sea bed looked like a slalom course with banked curves and a rapid current that helped push Colorado to her maximum rate of knots.
“We can make it,” Esperanza said. “Three hours at this speed.”
They stayed low and silent. After a half hour, they started hearing pinging again. The sweeps were haphazard, but they could still mean trouble.
Nurys kept the ship down as low as she could, but the sea was shallower near the archipelago where the Gilik ship lay. They avoided most of the pings and sweeps by weaving in between jagged boulders bigger than they were. Instead of retracing their outbound route, they came in wide toward the sheltered harbor on the westernmost shore of their target island. Not much more than an hour remained. Nurys felt like biting her nails. It was going to be a squeak. Her back ached from the tension. She got up to stretch, raising her arms above her head. It didn’t help. She was going to have to go for physio when this was all over. The Truchs launched random barrages of depth charges, missing them by miles.
“Sir, we’re going to have to go over that,” Lim said. He pointed at the scope.
Nurys bent over his station to take a look. A saddleback ridge, the result of two volcanic islands growing up almost side by side, lay before them, looking like a big blue jump rope. Deeper seas lay on either side of the peaks, but it would take precious minutes to go around. She had no choice. They had to risk passing over that. The sea beyond would be deeper. It was just one moment of exposure.
“Missiles ready, Bahri,” she ordered. “Take us through, Cartwright, as low as you can skim.”
“Aye, captain.” The helmswoman frowned over her controls.
Nurys watched the radar scope. Just as they crested the ridge, a sweep passed directly overhead.
“They painted us, sir!”
Shit! Within seconds, the Truchs started dropping bombs on them. One struck close enough to make all the lights go out for a moment.
“Dive,” Nurys said, sounding a hell of a lot calmer than she felt. “All the way down. We have to make this last run. Go!”
The sweeps continued, over and over. The shrieking of the signal threatened to drive her mad. The Truchs knew where they were. She thought there were only a few left, but dozens of the little ships appeared on the scope. They started bracketing them with charges, hoping to cripple them and leave them dead in the water. Nurys couldn’t hit them all with missiles, and there was nowhere else to go. All they could do was run, and hope they made it to the Gilik ship before they sank.
Boom!
Nurys looked up, her heart in her throat.
“What the hell was that?”
“It’s a herd of Deeps, sir,” Lim said. He brought up all the exterior cameras. Nurys stared in horror. They were surrounded by the leviathans, all bumping and clustering around the sub, no more than two meters off the hull. Some of these were the largest she had ever seen, even longer than the Colorado herself.
“What are they trying to do, mate with us?”
“We asked for help. They are helping.”
She turned to see Samawa smiling toothily at her.
“Why?”
“I called out to them. You are doing your best to save all our lives. They understand that. They wish to help. You are alone. The Hornets are looking
only for a single ship. These are many. The Hornets will never see you in a herd. They will support and protect us, as if this shell was a newborn or an injured adult.”
“I can’t let them do that!” Nurys exclaimed, horrified. In her mind’s eye, she saw the injured and dying Deeps on the Sokoiri beach. Samawa stretched out a comforting paw to her.
“Be at peace. They feel your passion and your sincerity, as do I.” He fixed her with his kindly gaze. “They know you want to save us. They want to help. So much is at stake, didn’t you say? They may not understand all of the reasons, but their hearts are great. Your ship is one of them now.”
Another sweep passed overhead. The shrieking went right through Nurys’s head.
As it receded, she heard something else, almost on the other side of sound, music welling up in the sea around them. The Deeps were singing.
Ping after ping struck them as the Truchs fell into a line of pickets. They spotted the pod coming toward the harbor. Samawa was right: Their sonar would reveal a pod of identical bodies, never penetrating through to see that one of their number was made of metal. They couldn’t see the Colorado, but they were trigger happy now. They dropped charges on anything that moved. Blast after blast shook them all. Rocks and debris shot up from the sea floor, battering their underside. Deeps floated away from them, obscured by a sudden cloud of dark green.
A thread of the song changed, drifting off in a melancholy note. Nurys meet Samawa’s brown eyes and knew that at least one of the Deeps escorting them had been struck. She fought back tears. Cartwright wept openly over her board.
“Tell them . . . tell them we are grateful for their sacrifice,” Nurys said at last.
“They know,” Samawa said. “And so are we.”
The captain swallowed hard.
“Maybe I will come back with you.”
With less than a quarter hour to spare, they surfaced into the open hull of the Gilik ship. The Deeps around them melted away as if they had never been there. Roh leaped down from a higher level of the hold as Nurys climbed out on top of the rising sub. Massive robotic arms and hoists reached for the sub, drawing her upward into the dry-dock cradle and securing her in place.