“Let’s not show our tiles before we play them.”
“Do we... think this plant is a Tiles player?” Maldynado asked.
“It’s proven itself far more intelligent than any other plant I’ve met,” Starcrest said, “if that word can be applied to plants.”
“Not generally,” Mahliki said, “though they have demonstrated sophisticated behaviors for propagation and self-defense. They’re able to sense and respond to many environmental variables, and some scientists have suggested that some brain-like system may exist for processing information and coordinating a plant’s behavioral response.”
Maldynado eyed Sespian, wondering if these spoutings of biological babble would make him second-guess his interest in spending extended periods of time with the girl, but he seemed... enraptured.
“That’s with plants from our world though,” Sespian said. “I assume this one breaks the rules.”
A thud came from the side at the same time as the submarine lurched, the deck tilting. Maldynado grabbed the ceiling to catch himself. “It’s breaking something.”
“One of those vines has wrapped around us,” the engineer called from the back.
“This is opportune,” Starcrest said and flipped a switch.
“Opportune,” Maldynado muttered. “Not the word I would have chosen.”
The hair on his arms stood up. A faint blue glow seeped through the viewing display. The air crackled with energy, and Maldynado was certain he could have given someone an electrical shock without shuffling his socks along a carpet.
Mahliki jumped from her seat to dart between Maldynado and Sespian. She ran to a porthole cover on the side of the craft and unbuckled it.
The deck shifted back to level.
“That did it,” Mahliki called. “It let us go.”
“Does it appear damaged?” Starcrest asked.
“You can’t really see any charring, but it’s... limp.”
“Good. I’m hoping that as we go forward, it’ll learn to avoid us altogether, maybe even part for our passing.”
That sounded optimistic, but Maldynado would hope for the same thing. A smooth slaying of the giant plant and home for breakfast would be fine with him.
“Were you this idealistic when you were commanding vessels at sea, Father?” Mahliki asked.
“No, but the men who served under me were prepared to die every time they left port. I didn’t have civilians on board whose spirits I needed to keep up.”
“Are you talking about me or Maldynado?” Mahliki asked.
“My spirits are just fine,” Maldynado said. “Sespian, do I not look like I have spiritual fortitude?”
“It’s possible he’s judging you based on your... fortitude level when you had that little vine wrapped around your ankle,” Sespian said.
“It wasn’t little. It was like a boa constrictor, thank you very much. And wait. President Starcrest wasn’t there. How could he know?”
“The colonel may have whispered a report in his ear.”
“I knew I didn’t like that man,” Maldynado said.
The submarine shuddered.
Maldynado gripped the ceiling again—with fortitude. “Another vine?” He kept his voice casual. He wasn’t worried, not him.
“It brushed us and jerked back,” Starcrest said.
“You’re leaving the hull electrified?” Mahliki asked.
“We’re moving into the thick of them now, so yes.”
“Does it... take a lot of power?”
Maldynado glanced toward the engine room where the machinery hummed. Nothing sounded strained, but who would know with these fancy new upgrades? Only Starcrest.
“Yes,” Starcrest said. “But we have it.” His voice lowered and Maldynado almost missed the rest. “For now.”
Nothing but green stalks and swaying tendrils occupied the water beyond the viewing port now. They were floating along near the surface, but the verdant jungle made it impossible to see more than a few feet ahead. The taps and bumps of the plant brushing the hull—testing the hull—were audible inside. Maldynado found himself holding his breath to listen, concerned some crack or other weakness would be discovered and those tendrils would damage the craft irrevocably. It had grown silent all around, and he had a feeling everyone was listening.
Though sweat glistened on his forehead, Starcrest’s face remained calm as he alternately watched the route ahead and checked his gauges.
If he was calm, then there shouldn’t be any reason to—
The submarine lurched. Bubbles rose outside the viewport.
“We’re descending,” Mahliki said. “Rapidly.”
“They’re pushing against us from above.” Starcrest’s fingers flew across the controls, prodding levers and turning a small wheel. “Attempting to compensate.”
The hum from the engine room increased to a loud thrum. The deck vibrated beneath Maldynado’s feet. A thump coursed through the craft, and they stopped descending. The submarine had struck the bottom of the lake.
“Did the electrical hull thing stop working?” Maldynado asked.
“It’s still active.” Starcrest pointed out the front, even as a six-inch-thick vine slapped down, cutting the view in half. Blue electricity crackled around it, and it grew charred. While it withered before their eyes, three more vines landed atop it. Then smaller ones swept across from the sides. The interior grew darker as the illumination from the running light was snuffed out. “It’s dropping on us in layers,” Starcrest said. “Sacrificing the vines closest to the hull to immobilize us.”
“My Lord President,” called the engineer from the back. “We’re overheating. We can’t move with all of this atop us. The ballast tanks are completely full of air, but it’s not doing anything.”
“Turning off propulsion.” Starcrest pulled another lever. “We’ll have to find a way out of this snarl before we try moving again.”
“We can do that, right?” Maldynado asked. “There’s a plan for this, isn’t there?”
He didn’t like the grim looks that Starcrest and Mahliki exchanged, not one bit. Oh, how he wished he were in bed with Evrial right now, somewhere far, far away from sentient plants. Her quaint little village, perhaps. Why had he ever thought that place too dull for his tastes?
Chapter 27
After the submarine launched and disappeared from sight, Tikaya followed the men back to the lorry. With no further reason to defend the warehouse, the soldiers piled into the bed of the vehicle. Tikaya joined Dak in the cab, along with the same corporal who had driven before. It felt too spacious, too lonely, without Mahliki, Sespian, and even complaining Maldynado in there with them.
She dug into her backpack to pull out the communications orb. It glowed a soft yellow, and the corporal gave it a few uneasy glances. She thought about testing it, but Rias would be busy—and focused. She didn’t want to be a distraction. She would simply keep it close in case he chose to send them a message. And he better.
“To the new headquarters, sir?” the corporal asked.
“Back to the hotel,” Tikaya said.
“Er?”
Dak raised his eyebrows at her.
“I need to find Amaranthe and Sicarius,” Tikaya said. “They’re the ones I tasked with finding a cure for that poison.” Among other things, she admitted. What were the odds that they had figured everything out in a few hours? “I don’t know where they are, but they’ll check in back at the hotel when they have something.” What was left of it...
“The poison isn’t what’s on Rias’s mind right now,” Dak said.
“It may not be on his mind, but it’s taking effect in his body.”
He frowned at her. “You’re sure?”
Tikaya rubbed her fingers where she had touched his face. “Yes.”
“I’ll need to get to the new headquarters,” Dak said, “but we can drop you off at the hotel.”
“That’s fine.”
It would have to be. But what would she do if Amaranthe
and Sicarius weren’t there? How long could she wait? If the entire intelligence office hadn’t been blown up, she might have continued to research on her own. Maybe she could have come across some hint of what poison had been used. That alone would give her the information she needed to find out if there was an antidote or not. She knew some of his symptoms. Perhaps she could research in a book. But those symptoms... they were vague. Surely thousands of viruses and poisons could cause them.
“It looks like they’ve got the fire out,” Dak said, rousing Tikaya from her thoughts.
They were already turning up the street to the hotel—to what remained of the hotel. Two fire brigade vehicles were parked in front of the gate with smoke billowing from their stacks, but the roiling black clouds pouring from inside the compound had disappeared, and night’s shadows had returned to a block previously alight with the flames. There were also medical vehicles, and Tikaya spotted Basilard near one, his buckskin clothing standing out among all the black uniforms. He was trailing a pair of medics carrying a stretcher. Was that his translator lying on it? If the woman had been caught in the explosion or fire, Tikaya hoped she would recover.
“Stop right there, Corporal.” Dak pointed at the front gate.
Tikaya expected to be discharged and left on her own at that point, but a soldier jogged out of the compound, heading straight toward them.
“Sir!” he called, veering toward Dak’s side of the cab. “You’re back! I have a message.”
“From whom?” Dak leaned out to accept the folded note.
“Sicarius.” The young soldier’s face blanched, as if dealing with the assassin had been a heart-stopping experience.
Dak opened the furnace door to read by the light. Tikaya leaned over his shoulder, clenching her fingers into fists to keep from ripping the note from his hands.
“Amaranthe has been kidnapped by a group of priests,” Dak said. “They took her to Edgecrest Orchards. I am following.” He lowered the paper, his brow wrinkling. “Edgecrest Orchards?”
“Is it far away?” Tikaya asked. If the priests had their headquarters there, maybe information about the poison would be there too.
“Not that far. That’s where the vice president went tonight. I wondered if I should have had him followed, but—gah.” Dak scowled down at the letter. “Maybe Sicarius should be Rias’s right-hand man.”
“You’re not experiencing feelings of inadequacy, are you?”
“Of course, I am. Haven’t you read my files?”
“No.”
“No?” Dak asked. “I thought that would have been one of your first stops, me being a suspect of late.”
Ah, he had figured that out, had he? “I’m sure I would have gotten to them if the building hadn’t blown up. Are you still going up to headquarters?” Tikaya tapped the note. If he was, she would request a vehicle and a driver who knew where these orchards were.
Dak read the words again, then prodded the driver. “Take us out of the city, Corporal.”
“Yes, sir.”
• • • • •
The crackle of electricity beat against the hull of the submarine like rubber bands snapping. Mahliki could feel it on her skin and in her mind, almost like the sensation one received from the mental sciences being plied nearby. Two types of energy, both inadequate against those vines, at least on such a grand scale. For every charred husk that floated away from the viewing windows, others pressed in to replace it.
“I have batteries I can deploy,” Father said, “but I wanted to wait until we reached the harbor.”
“I know,” Mahliki said.
“We’re on the lake bottom now. I have digging tools. Will the roots here be susceptible?”
“They should be.” Mahliki wasn’t as confident as she sounded—after all, she had only tested one small section of a root bulb—but she hoped her words would prove true.
“I’ll see what I can dig up with all that greenery smothering us.”
Father left his seat, passing between Maldynado and Sespian to access the small science station nook between navigation and the engine room. Controls there allowed for the collection of specimens. Mahliki hoped the drill would be up to the task of piercing the layers of protection that would exist above the root. When she had collected her sample, she had struggled to pry her way past not only earth but a filmy yellowish-green shield around the subterranean nodules.
“Are we going to need to go out in the suits soon?” Sespian asked. “I’m sure you remember that it takes a while to put that cumbersome gear on, so we’ll need a little warning.”
“Don’t sound so eager,” Maldynado whispered.
“I didn’t think I was.”
“Well, maybe I assigned you eagerness based on the fact that you brought it up at all. Going out there looks like suicide to me.”
“Sitting down here would eventually be suicide too,” Sespian pointed out. “When we run out of air.”
“While you’re at it, why don’t you say a few more things I don’t want to hear?” Maldynado asked. “Such as that Evrial will never come back to me, and I’m destined to live a lonely and unfulfilled life. All thirty minutes of it that are left.”
While they sniped at each other, Mahliki leaned back in her seat, twirling the end of a braid around her finger and searching the control panel for inspiration. She thought about sending Maldynado back to help the engineer—somehow his babble was more distracting than Sespian’s—but Major Rydoth had problems enough already.
“You can’t go out there until we’re back on the surface,” she said. “We don’t have a lock-out chamber on the Explorer.”
“So there’s no way to get out there without flooding the whole place?” Sespian asked.
“Right. The big research submarines Father has built have them, but this is our little family exploration craft. We didn’t—”
Something snapped in the rear of the sub.
“My Lord,” the engineer called.
“I see it. Mahliki, you’ll have to handle the drilling.”
“Got it.” She jumped out of the seat. “You two, watch the gauges and holler if you see any trouble—any more trouble than we’re already in.”
Maldynado pointed. “Like that gauge with the needle bouncing around the red?”
“That’s our current trouble,” Mahliki called back as she ran to the science station. “I’m only interested in new trouble.”
Air hissed somewhere in the rear, but Father could handle the problem better than she. If it could be handled. She had no idea how much pressure that plant was exerting but wouldn’t be surprised if it equaled that of water in the deepest parts of the ocean.
Mahliki slid onto the edge of the seat and checked out the viewport above the narrow control panel. Green vines plastered the glass. She was glad that glass was a Made item, reinforced to withstand deep-ocean pressures. Even so, she wondered how long it could hold up under this assault.
“Concentrate on your task and get rid of the plant then, eh?” Mahliki checked the drill. Father had already deployed it from the hull, but he hadn’t turned it on yet. The tool dropped out from a compartment below the science station, so it wouldn’t have to pierce the vines. It would have to dig through the lake floor and pierce the protective film around the roots.
She pressed the power switch, and the whirr of the rotary blades hummed beneath her. With the viewport covered, she couldn’t see a thing, but a gauge next to the controls displayed the tool’s depth. The bit burned through the first four inches of earth without trouble, then slowed down and halted. The blades kept spinning, but they stopped making progress. She let the drill continue for a few more seconds—she had cut through coral and rock before with this bit and knew hard substances took time—but then turned it off, letting it cool for a moment. Normally the chill water would keep the friction from heating to dangerous levels, but she wasn’t sure how it would handle beneath the earth. With the submarine pressed to the bottom, there might not be any water seep
ing into that hole.
The low voices of Father and the engineer drifted to her ears. They were talking too quietly for her to make out the words, but the urgency didn’t fail to come through. They needed this to work so they could get out of this vile embrace.
Sespian crouched beside her. “Any progress?”
Mahliki glanced at him, shook her head, and flipped the switch to try again.
“Maldynado is watching the gauges. Forgive my intrusion, but I thought if the drill didn’t work, there might be a way to...” Sespian held up the black dagger. “Replace the bit?”
“There is a way to bring the tool inside to change out broken bits,” Mahliki said, “but that’s not exactly the right shape. I don’t know if we could figure out a way to clamp it on there. I would hate to lose it.”
“—have to do something, My Lord President,” the engineer was saying.
Mahliki tapped the drill gauge. “It’s sunken in another quarter of an inch. It’s making progress. If we can just—”
A dull snap echoed from below.
“Blighted banyan sprites,” Mahliki growled. “The bit snapped.”
“Bring in the tool. We’ll try the dagger.”
“It’s not going to fit.” Mahliki reeled in the drill—she had to change out the bit, regardless. “Unless you brought some extra strong water-proof glue.”
“We’ll improvise.”
“The force applied to the drill will ensure a shoddy improvisation will simply snap off.”
“I wasn’t planning to improvise shoddily,” Sespian said a little stiffly.
She gave him an exasperated look. Anything they tried to do out here in the field would be shoddy.
“Just let me look at it,” he said.
Mahliki drummed her fingers while the small airlock that allowed the tools to be changed out and for specimens to be brought in ran through its cycle. They were only twenty feet below the surface, if that, and she wasn’t worried about water pressure or making a puddle on the floor. The machinery cycled as precisely—and slowly—as ever, and Maldynado had time to make a few moans and groans from the front before she could get her hands on the drill. The needle on that gauge up there must be getting worse. Or maybe needles on more gauges had pressed into the red.
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