Adrift

by W. Michael Gear

  “We were watching on telemetry.” Yosh pulled over a chair and dropped into it, his eyes on her countdown to disaster where it flashed on her monitor. “That . . . thing just rose up out of the depths. We couldn’t believe the way it looked, I mean, wow, what a fantastic evolutionary solution to aquatic design.”

  “But what the hell set it off? Why’d it go for the second sub instead of mine?”

  “Best guess? The scream that ‘spear-tree’ made when you wounded it attracted the tri-lobster. Varina and Jaim panicked.” Yosh’s brown eyes softened. “From the telemetry, the thing went for them when they went positive buoyancy. Maybe it was the pumps, maybe the sound of the compressed air driving the ballast from the tanks. It could have been the movement. Did the creature think they were fleeing, so it was a predatory response? Like running from a lion?”

  “As hard as it hit us, the impact should have stunned it, slowed it down.”

  “Didn’t. We had a clear view through Varina’s cameras. It bounced off your sub, and just kept right on coming. Didn’t matter that it bent up a lot of metal, the collision just put scratches in that thing’s armor. And it hit Varina’s sub like a ram.” A pause. “That’s when the telemetry cut off.”

  “So you had nothing after that?”

  “The feed went totally dead.” He shifted on the chair. “Listen, Michaela, maybe that’s a godsend. Just between the two of us? Given what the alternatives are? Let’s hope that thing hit them so hard it killed them on impact.”

  “Yosh?”

  His gaze hardened. “You know as well as I do that if something wasn’t horribly wrong, they’d have surfaced by now. Since they haven’t, I think it’s pretty obvious they can’t.”

  She pursed her lips, struggled to come up with anything reasonable. Fact was that yes, the subs couldn’t be crushed, but if that accursed lobster thing had mauled the tanks, battery packs, lights, and propeller modules, it could very well have damaged the sub beyond any chance of survival.

  “The Seascape is the best,” she admitted painfully. “But it’s not designed for this. Who would have thought? Where the hell was the engineering that would anticipate creatures like we’re seeing here?”

  “Makes sharks, moray eels, and sea snakes almost warm and cuddly, doesn’t it?” Yosh said thoughtfully. “But there’s something else we need to be considering.” At her raised eyebrow, his tone dropped. “That thing was armored, Michaela. Like I said, when it bumped your sub, it hit it hard. So, if the lights, ballast tanks, and propeller cage didn’t even scratch that armor, what did evolution design it to be protection against? That suggests that there is some even bigger and badder predator lurking out there.”

  Michaela swallowed hard. “If there is, are we sure we even want to try and find it? I mean, damn it, we’ve lost one sub, and it’s going to take a week to repair the one we have. How do we armor it against something like the lobster monster, let alone whatever might be out there that preys on lobster monsters? Like, let’s say, that Big Mouth Thing that Kevina said she saw.”

  On the monitor, the graph showed that the missing sub could only power its way to the surface from two hundred meters.

  Michaela reached over with her good arm and turned it off. Unwilling to watch any longer.

  “These are our friends,” she whispered. “And they’re dying, one by one. We are family. All of us, we held each other together aboard Ashanti. We made it work, loved each other, forgave each other, became brothers and sisters. And now we’re being whittled away.”

  “Michaela, it’s just a string of bad luck. We’ll figure it out.”

  “Will we?” she asked hollowly. “If they didn’t die in the impact, they’re down there, Yosh. We can’t contact them. We can’t find them. And if we could, with my sub damaged, we can’t even attempt a rescue.”

  Kevina burst in the door, her frantic eyes searching the room. “Did you pull Kim off the watch upstairs? Order him down for any reason?”

  “No,” Michaela told her, shifting her broken arm as she swiveled in the chair. “He said he’d stay up there until midnight.”

  “Well, I just came from the landing pad. Kim’s gone. The glasses are still there, on their stand. Kim’s coat is hanging on the chair he took up. His cup is spilled, rolling around as the wind blows. He’d never leave that cup.”

  “He’s got to be here somewhere,” Yosh said bluffly, rising. “Come on. Let’s go run him down. Probably stopped by the cafeteria to see what Bill had left over from supper.”

  As they hurried out, Michaela fixed on the panicked expression on Kevina’s face.

  Please. Not Kim Yee. Not today.

  When Yosh got up to the landing pad, he accessed com, said the tea in Yee’s cup was still hot.

  Michaela immediately called up the landing-pad video—the images recorded by the camera that constantly monitored the pad. Once they’d watched Kalico Aguila barely survive her departure from that hovering A-7 shuttle.

  Michaela ran the feed backward to replay the last half hour, watching as first Yosh, and then Kevina appeared and hurried around in reverse, leaving the pad empty but for the rolling cup as the wind played with it. The binoculars stood on their tripod as a solitary reminder of Yee’s mission. After fast-reversing through twenty minutes, Michaela watched Kim Yee drop magically from the night sky.

  She stopped, forwarded at normal speed. And there, to her disbelief, she caught the image as something big swooped down from the night. It might have been a four-winged pterodactyl, little more than a dark image, spectral in the darkness. A sort of night-flying terror beyond belief.

  Little more than a black silhouette, it came winging in, coasting into the wind like a macabre glider. The thing impaled the unsuspecting Yee from behind, driving claws through the man’s back. Yee’s zero-g cup dropped from nerveless fingers. Then, with all four wings beating, the night creature lifted, bearing the kicking and screaming man away into the night.

  All that remained were the tripod-mounted binoculars, and the zero-g cup rolling around on the pad.

  50

  Only the faint hiss of the air conditioning could be heard in the darkness. Outside of the clock on the wall that glowed with the time—a little after two in the morning—the only illumination came from Felix’s pad. It provided just enough light to see Mother’s body. She lay on her back, the bed coverings thrown off in the warm night. Her long, thin left leg crooked at an angle. He had watched her take a pill, one that she had told him would make her sleep. She’d said it was better than crying all night. Especially since Breez was staying with them. Mother often took pills when she couldn’t sleep.

  Father was dead. Taken into the sky by some flying thing. Felix should have been sad. Instead, it just felt distant. Somehow far away. Like he was sad way down inside himself.

  He had wanted to cry, but a weird voice inside told him, “It’s all right not to.” And it was.

  He didn’t hear the Voice like a real voice. But it seemed to know things. Kind of like Mother and Father did, but it was inside, and it had started to tell him things. Like to get out of bed, and take the pad, and turn it on. When he did, he watched his fingers tap in commands that brought up images of something called anatomy.

  Breez had climbed out of bed, too. She just stared at him, and then Mother, with wide and waiting eyes.

  Felix used the pad’s glowing screen to call up the medical records about Mother’s body. Breez came over to stand beside him. She said nothing. Just looked at the pictures, and then over at Mother’s body.

  As he learned, the melody repeated in his head:

  “London bridge is broken down, broken down.

  “Namby Pamby is a clown, my fair lady.

  “Now he courts the lady fair, lady fair.

  “My fair lady.”

  The song lulled him. Felix thought he might be asleep. Maybe he was dreami
ng? It was all so clear. He stood at the side of the bed, but when his hands moved on the pad, it wasn’t him. His hands just moved on the screen by themselves. Like most of him was shut off, just watching from someplace else while his body did things he didn’t understand.

  All the parts of Mother’s body could be seen. Like looking down through the skin. He could see muscles, blood vessels, bones. Then an overlay of nerves. One by one, the organs came up: brain, lungs, heart, stomach, intestines, kidneys, liver, spleen, colon, uterus, bladder. Some remote part of his brain cataloged these things.

  Felix’s head turned, Breez’s moving the same way his did, mimicking him as she looked at the pad, and then compared it to Mother. His eyes fixed on Mother’s head. Compared it with the image on the pad. It seemed to take a long time, looking at Mother’s closed eyes, her thin nose, the way the mouth was. Then came the rounded top of her head. Like figuring out a puzzle, pieces began to fit together. Brain: Surrounded by skull. Vital and armored.

  Then Felix watched the pad shift to Mother’s pale throat. Neck: Blood vessels, air tube, and spinal cord. Vital and vulnerable. He glanced at Breez, and they both nodded in some understanding.

  And the process went on. Chest: Heart, lungs, and spinal cord. Vital and armored.

  Torso: Stomach, liver, kidneys, intestines, and bladder. Digestion. Vulnerable but not immediately vital.

  Legs: Bone and muscle. Movement. Not vital.

  Arms: Defense. Manipulation. Not vital.

  Felix wondered at the words. Sometimes the Voice said strange things.

  So was he dreaming? Was that what looking so hard at Mother’s body was all about? What was really weird was that the Voice wanted to know what was inside her. Was it because the Voice was worried about her now that Father was dead? But as he started to wonder, felt the worry and grief build, the Voice made it go away. And it was better. Really, it was a relief not to have to cry, or be scared, or be sad.

  He and Breez froze as Mother made a whimpering sound and shifted, rolling onto her side. Then her breathing deepened again.

  Felix dream-watched as his eyes compared the drawing on the pad against mother’s new position. How the Voice looked closely, twisting this way and that, bending down to stare at the round top of her head. Then how it carefully inspected her neck, fixing on the faint pulse visible at the side. Blood vessels: Vulnerable, the larger ones vital.

  Mother’s back seemed particularly fascinating as Felix’s eyes compared the glowing image on the pad. Spinal cord: Motor function. Vital. Armored.

  He watched the rising and falling as Mother breathed, could imagine how the heart was beating under the breastbone, where the lungs lay under the ribs.

  The same with her stomach. And then the legs, comparing the image on the screen with Mother’s long legs, particularly the joints of the knees. How the muscles attached to the bone, the tendons, nerves, and blood vessels, all so close to the surface.

  Breez shifted, reached for Felix’s hand. The one that didn’t hold the pad. At her grip, he felt that slick feeling as if his palms were damp and sweaty.

  We know now.

  Breez let loose of his hand, walked carefully over to the bed Mother had made up for her. She lay down, closed her eyes, and was immediately asleep.

  Felix, his body still on automatic, walked over to his bed, shut down the pad, and laid himself on the mattress.

  “Go to sleep now, Felix. Forget everything that happened.”

  And he did.

  51

  No way could Kalico get the Number Three out of her mind. Her wild imagination kept playing with her, kept intruding into her thoughts. Out of nowhere fragments of images would flit into her head: visions of Alia and Stana sitting hunched, waist-deep in cold water. Shivering. The blackness beyond pitch, so thick and impenetrable that it felt like a viscous substance. The only sound outside of their chattering teeth and gasping for fading breath was the echoing drip of water from above.

  Didn’t matter that Kalico knew they had to be dead, that not even tough old Stana Viola could have lasted this long immersed in cold water.

  Her imagination wouldn’t allow her to admit reality. It kept insisting on seeing them alive. Communicating their fear, the evaporating hope, and the sick realization that they were going to die without a single attempt to save them.

  “That’s the worst fucking part,” Kalico muttered as she skimmed her aircar through Capella’s first morning light and across the treetops on the descent from the Corporate Mine compound down to the Number Three portal. The need to go down to the Number Three had been like an itch; it had filled her dreams, left her too restless to sleep. So, first thing, after breakfast and her morning briefing on the Numbers One and Two, she’d walked out, climbed into her aircar, and spooled it up.

  As she settled onto the waste dump to one side, it was to see that another aircar had beaten her to it. Must have been that one of the crews had already arrived to check the adit.

  Spooling down, she double-checked the sky out of habit. Mobbers had almost killed her once; she never took the sky for granted. Stepping out, she left her hat and cloak in the aircar, walked past the line of ore cars, and followed the rails to the black maw of the portal.

  She stepped inside, not exactly sure why she was here. The cool air in the black shaft smelled of wet rock, seemed to cling damply to her skin. As her eyes adjusted, she pulled the flashlight from her hip and flicked it on.

  “This is fart-sucking crazy, Kalico,” she muttered to herself as she started down the rails toward the collapse. Damn it, she just had to see it for herself. So much had been wagered on the Number Three. Completing it would have solved so many problems. For all she, Ghosh, and Ituri knew, it might have dewatered the entire lower part of the mountain. Who knew what kind of wealth that might have freed up?

  Her steps echoed in the darkness, hollow-sounding as her soles grated on the broken gravel under the tracks. The light played on the shining steel rails, reflected from irregular pools of water to glow on the surrounding rock. Plopping drips of water could be heard splashing into puddles.

  She reached the first of the shoring, let her light play across the squared timbers. This was the leading edge of the shattered rock zone. Overhead, the dark lights and conduit had a forlorn appearance, as if abandoned to eternal darkness.

  Kalico chewed thoughtfully on her lips as she stepped close, studied the thick beams of chabacho. Each had been precisely milled. Fitted. Additionally, the ceiling was carefully supported by crosspieces, and in places of greater potential instability, even heavier beams reinforced any fractured head rock.

  Damn it, it all looked good. Overengineered if anything. She’d come to associate that with Talovich’s work. Since the man had looked up into the muzzle of her pistol that long-ago morning when Kalico had been ready to shoot him in the head for desertion, Sula Talovich had never, not once, cut a corner. Immaculate craftsmanship might have become a matter of honor with him. Time after time, he’d halted progress because he considered something the others thought adequate to be substandard. Kalico had always backed him on that.

  “So why did this fail?” she wondered.

  Ahead of her, she heard the characteristic clatter of rock being shifted, the rattle and hollow clack of one angular stone striking another. Someone cursed, a faint whimper following.

  Didn’t sound like a crew. Sounded like a lone person.

  She stepped forward, saw the light where it had been placed atop an inverted bucket to shine onto the slanting spill of rock that poured down from the cave-in. Splintered and broken timbers jutted out from the chaos of angular yellow-brown stone. The broken shoring, now-jagged wood, shone pale in the light with toothpick-thin splinters protruding.

  And there, a lone figure worked, tossing one chunk of stone after another as he labored futilely to remove the pile. The man wore grubby overalls, his feet clad in
quetzal-hide boots. Black collar-length hair swayed as he reached out with muck-covered-and-bleeding fingers and tried to wrestle a trapezoidal block of stone from the fall.

  “What are you doing?” Kalico demanded.

  The man froze, startled. Then he wheeled around, the loose stone shifting under his feet. He windmilled his arms for balance, slid a couple of feet lower on the unstable slope.

  Tadeki Ozawa shot her stricken look, blinded by the light. He raised a hand, tried to shield his eyes. Squinting. “Who’s there?”

  “Supervisor Aguila, Tadeki. I said, what are you doing?”

  He sniffed, rubbed a damp and grit-cover sleeve under his flat nose. “No one else is trying. That’s my Stana in there. She’s back there. I know it. She called to me.”

  “Tadeki, I’m so sorry. Listen, we’re doing everything we can. We’re—”

  “Then why aren’t you digging Stana out! She’s alive. Can’t you hear her?”

  Kalico stepped forward, keeping her light on him. “You need to get off that rubble. It’s loose, unstable. You pull out the wrong piece, and it’s all going to come cascading down. You’ll be as buried and crushed as Stana and Alia are.”

  “No! I tell you, she’s alive back there.”

  “Damn it, Tadeki! You fucking listen to me. You keep up this insanity, you’re going to pull the whole mountain down on top of you. There are tons of loose rock piled up, and all it will take is pulling the wrong stone loose. You do that, and you’ll end up just as dead as Stana.”

  Madness in his eyes, lips twitching, he glared into the light. Said, “She’s carrying our baby. Three months now. She needs me. More than she’s ever needed me. She’s my life. I have to get her out.”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  “Why aren’t you digging? Why isn’t the whole crew digging? We need everyone. All of us. We have to get to her!”

  “Tadeki, come down from there. I don’t want to lose you, too.”