by Eric Flint
Then Caroline and Akira, and finally Laura was there, standing in the almost-empty raft shelter. “Ready, Whips?”
“Whenever you are, Mom!”
Laura gathered herself to jump—
And the raft suddenly whipped sideways, the vicious motion hurling Laura Kimei far out into space. Whips was frozen in shock for a moment, seeing the raft continuing, racing off, tilted backwards against the force that was dragging it…
Dragging it?
Whips dove then. He needed clarity in his sonar, both to look up and see if he could spot Laura…
…and to look down.
He felt an electric tingle of horror go through him, but at the same moment his senses managed to extract the silhouette of a human form fifty meters off. He burst back to the surface and drove for Laura, who was barely keeping her head above water. “Island-eater!” he shouted into his omni. “Small one, I think, but caught the sea-anchor as it cruised by!”
He reached Laura and pulled her up onto his back, as Akira cursed. “Of course, broken island pieces must mean island-eaters nearby. And even hundred-meter waves would mean little to them.”
“Did you say island-eater?” demanded Lieutenant Fisher.
“Yes, he did,” Laura gasped. “First one we saw took out LS-5. First one the sergeant saw almost took out him and LS-88.”
“How big are these things?”
“Unknown,” Akira said, voice somewhat less tense after hearing Laura speak. While Whips helped Laura into the harness, he went on, “Fragmentary images we have gotten and so on showed us that they have three forward…jaws, ramming pincers, something of that nature—which measure perhaps up to a kilometer in length. The size of the body behind those…I can only hazard a guess.”
“A kilometer?” Susan Fisher repeated. “That’s almost—JESUS!”
One of the island fragments nearby shuddered and split, towering dark spines ripping through it like knives through a layer cake, monstrous chunks of the island and all remaining on it plummeting into a yawning abyss between the three Titan-sized daggers. The island-eater settled back majestically, unaffected and uncaring of the storm and waves about it.
“Laura Kimei is strapped in and I’m clear!” Whips said. “And that wasn’t the one I just sensed—there’s more than one of those things here!”
Whips heard one of the crew of Watson muttering in a different language, what he thought was a prayer. “Retracting harness now.”
“I’m heading over to Raft Two. I also sensed another island fragment or two not far off.” He extended his sonar senses more carefully. Where there were island-eaters…
Screaming vents, I hate being right. There were other, smaller shapes moving through the water—the scavengers and, perhaps, lesser predators, looking to take advantage of the scraps of the island-eater’s meal. He could definitely make out several of the raylamps, and other shapes.
That’s an island-eater…but so small. I mean, relatively. A baby? Is it with its mommy, learning how to wreck entire habitats, or do the big and small ones coexist as different species? Akira would love to study this.
Still, the “small” eater was probably three times the length of the largest whale Earth’s oceans had spawned, several times larger than the orekath that dominated Europa. And there were other things moving in the depths…
He surfaced again. “Watson, Raft Two, be advised we’ve got a lot of predator and scavenger activity. I’m probably safe, but humans in the water will be in severe danger.”
“Of course, Lincoln ain’t letting us go easy, is she?” the sergeant said with a resigned air. “Then let’s try to stay out of the water as much as possible.”
“Si, I want to do that, sir,” Francisco said, trying to sound funny and failing because his voice was shaking.
“Laura Kimei is safe on board,” came Susan’s voice. “Raft Two, I am now positioning myself as close as I can to you.”
A few moments of careful maneuvering passed; Whips was awed by how steadily Lieutenant Fisher was able to hold Watson in the face of the winds that were now gusting to a hundred and fifty kilometers per hour. Even with automatics, that had to be tough. “Rescue harness away.”
“Same order? Youngest to oldest?”
“You better believe it, son. If I could figure a way to work it, you’d go up before me, but I can’t see that.”
“No, you can’t, and there isn’t one. Francisco, come on!”
With the practice of the prior rescues, Whips caught Francisco perfectly and conveyed him to the harness. One up, five to go. Plus me.
Raylamps drifted in his direction, closing in on the mysterious floating object; Whips submerged and bellowed at them, full-power acoustic pulse tearing apart the nearest one and repulsing the others. “Maddox, make it fast!”
Two safely in, but the dead raylamp had attracted others, and his motion back-and-forth was clearly drawing attention. Through the hiss and growl and rumble of the storm came another booming, shuddering crash, and distantly living mountain-knives reared and settled back, consuming uncounted tons of literally living rock and whatever lay within and atop.
Tavana dove in to meet him, knife out; he had glimpsed dark shapes in the water nearby. But somehow Whips got him to the harness without any incident.
Now it was Xander’s turn, and Whips realized Hitomi had been merely pale, not white. A raylamp broke the surface and scrabbled at the liferaft, barely failing to get a purchase, and Xander stepped back.
“Xander! You have to jump! I know what it’s like, but there’s no other way!”
“I…can’t. I can’t!” The older boy’s voice was filled with a sickening combination of terror and self-loathing. “I’m trying, but my hand won’t let go!”
Whips dove and bellowed again. “They’ve backed off for a minute—you have to go now, Xander!”
He could see Xander’s eyes, so wide that white showed around them all the way around.
“Captain Xander Bird, god-damn you, JUMP!” bellowed the sergeant.
Maybe it was the reminder that the sergeant had given him that title and stood by it; maybe it was the drill-sergeant tone in the order; or maybe Xander had, himself, just finally found the self-control he needed. But whether it was one, two, or all three, at that shout Xander leapt from the shelter.
It was at the peak of a wave, and for a moment Xander Bird imitated his namesake, flying through the air, before landing directly atop Whips.
Whips grunted in pain at the impact, but at the same time he felt a grin flicker across his skin. That put Xander in the safest possible place.
The next one after Xander was Lieutenant Haley, which went smoothly and quickly. One more strapped in, and Whips turned, sensing the chaos about him—and sensed a strange motion below. Diving, diving deep…turning…
Oh, no.
“Sergeant! Sergeant, jump now!”
Whips was certain, even as he shouted, that it was too late; the rescue harness hadn’t even been dropped back yet, predators or scavengers surrounded the shelter, and it would take time, time for anyone to understand the warning, gauge the situation, and decide that, even so, they had to move.
But Samuel Morgan Campbell didn’t hesitate for the smallest fraction of a second; at Whips’ desperate cry the sergeant sprinted and bounded from Raft Two, slamming his suit helmet shut even as he did.
A trio of red-streaked ebony knives rivaling small skyscrapers speared from the water, encircling Raft Two and sending it—along with raylamps and other creatures surrounding it—into the cavernous mouth between them. The wave that thundered outward from its passage caught the sergeant as he fell, washed him away, as the baby island-eater subsided into the depths.
“Holy Mother, that was close, son.”
Whips caught the sergeant with one arm and jetted for the harness as it finally plunged into the sea nearby. “Close but he missed! Get up there, Sergeant!”
The passage of the island-eater had driven the other predators away for
the moment; Whips watched as the sergeant disappeared into the rescue shuttle, and then waited, tensely scanning the waters.
Once more the immensity of the big island-eater moved, and this time Whips could see the entirety of the thing as it dove in preparation for another run, incomprehensibly huge flanks streaming by, a sense of ridges of scars along that mountain-wide body, a lobed tail moving with lazy, unstoppable power as it drove the thing downward.
Then a splash, and he reached out, twined all three arms around the harness. “I’m on!”
And with a hum and whine of motors, he was pulled from the sea of Lincoln, ascending towards the sky.
Chapter 58
In the rear view of her omni, Sue saw the three-armed, torpedo-shaped body of the Bemmie clear the door on the harness. Sergeant Almeida caught the harness, pulled hard, dragging Whips to the side and letting the door finally shut. “Last one in, Lieutenant!” she shouted.
“Get him secured! We’re leaving as soon as everyone’s strapped in!” she said, then turned her chair to face the cabin.
It was the strangest group she’d ever seen in one room, she had to admit. Sergeant Campbell’s group didn’t look too odd—they were wearing the suits they’d been issued, since they hadn’t lost their shuttle until the end. But the Kimeis were dressed in a motley collection of clothes, some obviously reworked clothing from LS-88’s stores, some remnants of whatever they’d had when the disaster happened…and some completely different. Homemade leather, some kind of…cloth?…that was now coming apart after a severe soaking in the ocean, shining modern omnis next to hand-carved tools. And then, of course, there was Whips, the juvenile Bemmie wearing its own harness that was filled with tools that had never seen the inside of a factory.
“Welcome aboard Watson, all of you.” She saw the glittering of tears in the eyes of most of the castaways, the half-joyous, half-unbelieving looks showing that they had given up on rescue and were still wondering if this was real. “And say goodbye to Lincoln, because we’re about to depart.”
Seeing her own crew now strapping back in, she spun around. Behind her, she heard whispered goodbyes to the world that was lashing them with storm—a storm still rising in intensity. “Sherlock, this is Watson. All castaways are safe onboard. We are departing for orbit and should rendezvous in an hour or so, depending on just how we get through the first stage; conditions are worsening here.”
“Great news, Watson,” responded Captain Ayrton instantly. “Now get out of there and come home.”
Sue touched the controls and began guiding them in a curve, looking on radar and satellite view for the best route.
There wasn’t, honestly, a “best” route, only a number of routes that might be slightly less dangerous. The storms were organizing everywhere, intensifying at an absolutely terrifying rate. Best to just get enough altitude to clear most of it. “Hold on, everyone—this is going to be a little rough.”
Then she pointed Watson’s nose skyward and shoved the throttle towards maximum.
Three gravities and more shoved her down into her seat; she eased off, remembering that they had a Bemmie passenger and they were not as resilient to acceleration. But even so, Watson thundered into the heavens, tearing through the lowering clouds. Lightning flashed, a sharp report even through the armored soundproofing of the shuttle, and she saw a thousand crawling filaments of light spread across the forward port and vanish, but the rescue shuttle ignored the strike. Dark mists streamed by, and suddenly there were faint hisses and then larger rattles as they passed through hail, ice circulating in the updrafts; one of the nuclear jets hiccupped, apparently striking a particularly dense patch, but then roared back to normal.
Without warning, the gray-blackness lightened and then flared brightly, Watson now flying free into a deep blue sky with the sun shining down on her. “We are above most of the weather, Sherlock,” she said, feeling able to, finally, relax a bit. “Setting controls to home and dock. ETA…one hour, eleven minutes from mark.” The acceleration continued, but no longer at the punishing levels of before. The nuclear jet would take them hypersonic and do most of the work of getting them to orbital speed, with only a moderate rocket burn in about twenty minutes or so.
“Roger that, Watson. See you soon. And to all of you from LS-5 and LS-88…looking forward to seeing you.”
“As are we, Captain!” Laura Kimei said, and the others burst out laughing.
When that died down, Pearce Greene Haley caught Sue’s eye as she turned her chair back around. “Lieutenant Fisher, do you know…I mean to say, how did you find us?”
“I’m betting Outward Initiative,” Sakura said. “She made it back, right?”
Sue nodded. “Yes. She was badly damaged, but Outward Initiative did make it back into port. And from that we figured out what happened to the ship.”
She outlined the research and their results, gaining some mostly blank stares from the younger children but everything from thoughtful nods to a shake of the head and a “Wouldn’t that figure?” from Campbell when he realized that it had been Outward Initiative’s superior attention to maintenance that had actually doomed her.
“But that was…so you didn’t start a rescue after that?” Hitomi asked finally. “It sounds like you had this big meeting and that was it. That couldn’t have been it! You sent this rescue ship, right?”
Sue smiled ruefully. “At first, no, Hitomi. We couldn’t figure out exactly where in space your lifeboats would have been—even if they were intact, and even if everyone on them survived, and there was a lot of reason to believe that that wasn’t the case. And if you had survived, it made much more sense that you’d come to Orado, not go to an unexplored system that might not even have a planet to live on.”
“She’s right, Hitomi,” Tavana said. “Space, it is bigger than we can imagine. And what we did…it only makes sense if you know all the reasons that we did it. So of course they wouldn’t have sent anyone else right then.”
“True,” agreed Xander. “So what changed your minds?”
“What changed our minds was LS-42 showing up months later,” Sue said, remembering.
“Damnation. They made the trip we couldn’t.”
“And they almost all died,” Sue said. “That told us a lot—the possible ways that the shuttles could have failed, and so on. And then one of them mentioned a star that shouldn’t have been there.”
“New to you people at Orado too?” Caroline asked. “It wasn’t on our charts, but those were Earth charts.”
“It turned out it was on our local charts, but no one had bothered doing cross-matches to find that there was one extra star in our sky,” Sue said.
The rockets ignited, and the sky finished its shift to black, stars now covering the dark velvet of space. “We could see, from Orado, that there was a habitable planet, so taking all that together…I thought it was just possible one or both of your shuttles could have ended up there.”
“So,” said Ayrton’s voice—he had obviously been listening, “she convinced Portmaster Ventrella to suggest a survey expedition, with a secondary search-and-rescue function. Thus, Sherlock.”
Laura and Akira Kimei exchanged glances. “Then we have you to thank for our rescue.”
“Well…” Sue shrugged. “A hell of a lot more people had to make the decisions. I may have talked Ventrella into the idea, but he still had to convince the money people, and then there were the shipbuilders…I just get a small part of that credit.”
Before they could contest it, she grinned. “To be honest, give yourselves all the credit. All we did was show up with a ride more than a year afterwards; you people figured out how to rescue yourselves.”
That got another laugh from the whole group, including the unmistakable hooting laughter of a Bemmie.
“And believe me, everyone is going to want to hear your stories. You’ll be in the books right next to Nebula Storm, with Madeline Fathom and Helen Sutter and Joe Buckley and all her crew.”
The two
crews of castaways were momentarily silent. Then Melody just said, “WOW.”
And once more laughter filled the cabin of Watson, as the clean, bright lines of Sherlock grew ahead of them.
Chapter 59
Tavana flopped full-length onto the bunk, luxuriating in the softness, the smoothness, the resilience of an actual, honest-to-goodness bed. Not a shuttle acceleration couch, not a sleeping bag, not even a woven bag stuffed with driftseed fluff or the feathery fur from some of Lincoln’s animals, but a smooth, luxuriously clean, dry, and firm mattress on a level, even support.
That felt so good that he got up and flopped down again. And a third time, just to be sure it was all real.
“Mon Dieu, it is real,” he whispered to himself.
It was astonishingly hard to believe, to accept, that they’d been rescued, that Sherlock was, even now, entering Trapdoor Drive for the less-than-two-month journey back to Orado.
He smiled faintly; Both Laura Kimei and the sergeant had apologized for interrupting the survey, even tried—though not too hard—to convince them they should continue their work. “After all,” Akira Kimei had said, “We can live quite comfortably here.”
But Captain Ayrton had—thankfully—insisted they all be returned to civilization. “I appreciate the offer,” he’d said, “but rescued civilians are to be returned immediately to the nearest reasonable port. And aside from Sergeant Campbell and Lieutenant Haley, you’re all definitely civilians.”
He rolled over and looked up at the clean, smooth ceiling, currently colored a relaxing blue and glowing with pure white light. I want to touch all of this ship just to keep telling myself we’re really saved.
They’d really accepted at the end that they were on their own. Whether threatened by disease or stinging giant worms or falling asteroids, they’d all known they were alone, that the thirteen of them were the only help and only family and only friends they could ever expect to have.
It was…a little disorienting to find they’d been wrong.