Endless Blue-ARC

by Wen Spencer

  "We have to turn and take the wake straight on!" She shouted to Orin as the anchors ran up with a loud rattle of chain.

  He nodded his understanding and the two dories started to gently pull the Rosetta around to meet the wave straight on, instead of sideways, which could overturn the boat.

  "Brace for the wake!" Paige shouted as the dories climbed the first wave. The leading wake hit them, and the Rosetta canted hard to stern and then to bow, riding the wave. They climbed the smaller waves behind the first, slowly turning.

  In the last minutes of full light, they came about to set a straight heading for Ya-ya and started to creep forward. Then the vimana slid overhead and instantly they were in darkness. The very air seemed heavy, pressing down on them. Sounds echoed weirdly, and the ocean growled like a beast around them.

  Orin had thought to dig out their rarely used spotlight, proving why he was her second in command. The narrow beam of light played over the coral reefs ahead of them and found a break big enough for the Rosetta. Orin eased into the passage with Avery keeping pace on his starboard side. Gripping the steering wheel tightly, Paige focused on keeping the Rosetta steady as the dories towed it forward.

  The pace seemed maddeningly slow. Cloaked in the darkness of full eclipse, there was no way of telling how far they'd traveled. Paige knew they had an hour before the fall could hit them, but it seemed like only minutes before she could heard the deep rumbling noise, like-neverending-thunder.

  Kenya ducked into the bridge, seeking the harder shelter. "It's the Fall."

  "I know." Paige risked looking to her right, out of her starboard windows. The trailing edge was nearly to them. The Fall pounded down in a column of white froth, landing in a boil that grew closer. The spray kicked up by the Fall blurred the air, making it impossible to judge how close it was going to pass.

  "Is it going to hit us?" Jones's voice was tense with controlled fear.

  Paige studied the oncoming blur of mist and falling water. Through the smear of spray raining down, she could see the drop nuts hitting the ocean like small boulders, throwing up geysers of water where they struck. "No, it will miss us. We still have to worry about drop nuts though."

  The trailing edge rushed toward them. The space between water and land overhead seemed to grow as the sky rolled back open. When the trailing edge was directly overhead, there was a deep loud bang and the ship shuddered.

  "We're hit!" Almost everyone still on board called.

  "Find out where, you ninnies!" Paige snapped.

  And then the trailing edge was beyond them. Clear sky overhead. The vimana rushing away. They made it—well—they might be sinking—but they were otherwise intact. She reached out to ring the ship's bell and found her hand was shaking.

  "Please, I don't ever want to do that again." She whispered to the powers that be and rang the bell. "All clear! Orin! Avery! Bring them back in! Drop anchor!"

  Dead fish littered the vimana's wake with flecks of silver. The bodies of strange fresh water fish from the vimana mixed in among the familiar salt-water ones killed by the pounding Fall. For some strange reason, she felt like crying for the fish, killed by a force that they couldn't understand.

  She blinked away the promise of tears and went to help Orin bring the dories back on board. Becky showed up just as they were hoisting the first dory into place.

  "The drop nut went through the deck plating in the stern," Becky reported. "It took out the fresh water tank and punched a hole in the crew's quarters. But it stopped there. It didn't breech the hull."

  "Oh piss." Paige managed not to swear anything ruder in front of the eight-year old. It meant they were out of fresh water. They were days from any human landing. And their engine was shot.

  Someone had done something horrible to earn this luck.

  Hopefully it wouldn't get worse.

  Almost as if summoned by her thoughts, something came streaking across the sky, moving toward the Spin. Not an vimana. It was gleaming, all angles and smooth lines. It was heading straight for them.

  "It's a ship!" Paige cried in surprise and dismay.

  "What?" Orin looked at her instead of upwards.

  "It's a spaceship!" Paige pointed at the ship as it grew larger and larger. A frigate at least. Maybe a destroyer. No. Frigate. "There's a spaceship coming . . ."

  The rest of the words stuck in her throat as the spaceship roared over them and struck Icarus. A massive plume of dust, fire and smoke bloomed at the point of impact, obscuring everything.

  "Oh my god! Oh my god!" Orin cried. "It's coming down! Icarus is coming down!"

  It's going to hit us, Paige thought, but then that white space with all the answers in her mind denied it. The vectors were wrong. Neither the vimana or the ship could hit them. Smoke and dust still obscured most of what was happening, but Icarus appeared to be shattering as it crashed. Large, raw boulders of the vimana rock floated upwards, out of the dark roiling clouds, drifting upwards. Paige closed her eyes and let the white space work. What was happening?

  If the vimana shattered, then centuries of topsoil under the rainforest was being dumped into the ocean, all at once. It was rock thrown into a pool of water. Waves.

  "Tsunami!" Paige shouted, opening her eyes. "Charlene, Mitch, take up the anchor. Avery, swing up around and then get on board! Everyone else take cover! Anyone topside will get swept away. Go! Go!"

  "We haven't lowered the anchor yet." Charlene said.

  Well, for once Charlene's laziness paid off. "Then get below. Go!"

  "Here it comes!" Orin called. "Twenty miles and closing!"

  Paige looked Spinward again as Avery pulled the Rosetta around with the single dory tied to the bow. A massive wave was coming across the other wise calm ocean.

  "Oh god. Avery, get on board! Get on board!"

  He straightened them out, locked the tiller straight, and then dived overboard.

  "Get him up here." Paige ran to the bridge to lash down the steering wheel. There was no guarantee that the wave wouldn't sheer off the bridge. She snatched up the charts, the waveguides, the vimana indexes. What else couldn't they afford to lose?

  Orin threw Avery a line and then all but hauled him up over the railing. "Paige! Paige! Get below deck!"

  She had to go or they'd come after her. She knew her family too well. She could hear the wave as she hurried down into the darkness of the mess, pulling off her sungoggles to see in the dim light. Orin slammed the flood door behind her and wheeled the locking mechanism.

  "Brace for impact!" Manny said, peering out one of the portholes.

  Paige stumbled to a support bar and grabbed hold. Moments later, the boat dipped into the trough in front of the wall, and then the wave hit with a force that nearly jerked Paige off the bar. Something in the galley had been left unsecured and crashed with a thin metal sound. The ship shuddered as it pitched sharply to the stern, groaning as it climbed. All the portholes that should have been out of water were covered with dark green water. And then pitching downwards as the boat slid over top of the wave.

  The next wave wasn't as steep and minutes later, they were back to gentle ocean. They'd made it. The question was: did they have any hope of getting safely to a port?

  5: Land

  "What did you do? What did you do?"

  Mikhail opened his eyes to dark chaos. He lay in a painful sprawl in a well of darkness, a slit of light cutting through the black some two meters above him. An animal—an exotic bird or monkey or something—was screaming somewhere close at hand, its cry reminiscent of his Nyanya's accusing shouts.

  But it was more than just the echoing call. The memory of his childhood nursery pressed so strongly into his waking consciousness, that he could only smell baby powder, sour milk and the flowering lilac. He could almost feel the wool rug under him, and the slats of his bed over him, shielding him from justice.

  What did you do?

  "That was a long time ago." He needed the sound of his adult voice to shake himself free of the
memory. "Where am I now? Am I still on my ship?"

  The light flickered, as if a cloud had passed by, and the sense of being pressed down by his memories faded. Awareness of an ocean thundering close at hand, breaking against a shore, seeped in. The air was hot, damp and heavy with the smell of salt, torn earth, bruised green foliage, and fresh blood.

  He explored his small grave-like prison and discovered only one wall was earth. He was in the bridge lift which was half-filled with dirt. How did he get into the lift? He remembered the jump, the startling blue that enveloped the Svoboda—but then there he lost the thread of memory.

  The earthen wall was the foot of a mountain wedged into the lift, preventing the door from closing. Nor was the wall just packed mud—it was a tangle of broken branches, wet leaves, and sharp edges of torn metal. Part of the bridge must have sheered open in the impact, allowing in a mountain of debris. He was lucky to be alive.

  Cause and effect started to creep in. He sat closest to the lift. If he was alone in this dark womb, then the rest of his bridge crew was dead. Hard on that realization, he remembered that there been a fight in the red pit and then an airlock malfunction.

  Oh god, Turk.

  Turk was sturdier than he was, but Mikhail knew that Turk could be hurt, could be broken. Fear condensed into a solid cold knot in his stomach. Had anyone survived? Was he all alone?

  He fought the impulse to claw at the dirt. He couldn't move the mountain with his bare hands. More likely, he'd cut himself. He needed power tools and help. He fumbled until he found the service box, flipped open the access panel. The lift's diagnostic tests had been tripped, the amber display flashing "Danger. Door ajar. Air seal unable to activate." Using that dim light, he could make out the maintenance hatch overhead. He reached up, undid the latches and popped the hatch. The lights on the emergency release handles of the lift doors above him formed a string of red pearls, gleaming softly in the shaft of darkness. After an awkward jump and scramble, he climbed through the hatch and up the inset ladder to the hanger level.

  The blast doors stood open, filling the hanger with brilliance and the presence of the sea. Mikhail blinked back tears and shielded his eyes as he walked toward the door. The world beyond was pure dazzling light. Wind, hot, humid and stinking of salt and a billion things—living and dead—blasted through the doorway, a press of white noise.

  Part of his crew gathered at the open door, standing silent and numb, gazing at the ocean with bewildered stares.

  Lieutenant Commander Dimitri Kutuzov noticed him and saluted out of reflex. Blood trickled down Kutuzov's cheek from a scalp wound. "Captain?"

  "Are you hurt?" Mikhail asked. Kutuzov might be his new second-in-command if Mikhail lost his entire bridge crew in the crash.

  "It's nothing, sir. You know how head wounds bleed like you've been laid open."

  Mikhail opened an equipment locker, found welding goggles and a saws-all. "Find some more goggles, Kutuzov." They were going to need sunscreen in addition to eye protection against the glare, but that could wait until they rescued any surviving crewmembers off the dirt-filled bridge.

  The glare filtered away, Mikhail looked out onto endless blue. It stretched out as an infinite plain of shifting water, all the blues of the universe, seething with restless energy.

  "What is it?" One of the Reds asked. Its eyes had adapted already to the glare.

  "It's an ocean." Ensign Sergei Inozemtsev said. "A large body of salt water."

  "Salt?" The Red wrinkled its nose.

  Gripping the rail beside the hatch, Mikhail cautiously leaned out to study the water directly below. Dead fish rolled against the side of the ship with the surf. Like the fish of Volya they were mostly silver which would act as camouflage in open water. A few were brightly colored, perhaps to hide among bright coral, or were poisonous in nature. They'd landed in surprisingly shallow water. He must have been unconscious for a while—the sand had already settled and he could see straight down to the ocean floor through crystal blue water. Multi-colored coral fanned in the invisible currents. He scanned them, wondering how deadly they were, and picked out a large, dark form hiding in a crevice.

  "No one goes in the water." He studied the two Reds, trying to dredge up names for them. "Coffee and Rabbit, right?" He got a nod from them. "Secure weapons. Rabbit will be with me, and Coffee will guard this door."

  "What about Commander Turk?" Rabbit asked, obviously reluctant to take orders from anyone.

  "Until he turns up, you're taking orders from me." Mikhail shoved away the hurt. "Keep an eye out for predators."

  "Predators?" Rabbit repeated the word as if unsure of what he meant.

  "Hostiles." Mikhail scanned the gathered crew. Anyone working with the Reds needed to be large enough to be respected. Mikhail picked the largest of the men in the hanger. "Inozemtsev, brief the Reds on types of predators that can be found on planets."

  "Me?" Inozemtsev said with surprise.

  "You were raised landside, right?" Mikhail got a nod from the big man. "I want the Reds aware that life here, as small as a sea urchin, can kill."

  "The Reds will be shooting at everything that moves," Inozemtsev murmured.

  "That might not be a bad idea," Mikhail said.

  "What if some of these creatures are intelligent? What if they're friendly?" Inozemtsev asked.

  "Then they'd quickly learn we're not." Mikhail snapped.

  Kutuzov returned with the goggles.

  "Popov, Ulanova, take the goggles and come with me," Mikhail ordered. "Kutuzov, gather a team and do a sweep through the ship, starting with the lower levels. If we have flooding, we need to get everyone well above water line—this might be low tide."

  "Low tide, sir?" Kutuzov asked.

  "The water might rise several meters in the next few hours."

  Kutuzov's eyes widened and he threw a frightened glance at the water lapping against the ship. "Yes, sir."

  "See if the infirmary is above water," Mikhail continued. Should he brace Kutuzov for his possible field promotion? No. Wait and see if anyone survived on the bridge. "If the infirmary is under water, the emergency evac in the Tigertail will be the backup infirmary."

  "Yes—Yes, sir." Kutuzov managed a salute.

  Mikhail leaned out, caught hold of the service ladder and scrambled up to the top of the Svoboda.

  They were in worse trouble than he thought. True, they were in shallow water, plowing through a half kilometer of reef to bury their nose in sand, but they weren't out of the ocean. The sandbar was approximately a kilometer wide and perhaps two kilometers long. From his vantage point, he could see the whole of it. It offered no shelter, no fresh water, and no resources other than pink coral sand.

  Mikhail picked his way to the bridge.

  They'd plowed nose-first into the sandbar, burying them deep into the pink sand. The bridge was above the water-level, but torn open, leaving behind a jagged, empty half-shell. They must have lost the bridge when they struck the floating landmass, which had been green with jungle. That was the only way to account for the black dirt and broken branches which filled the back two meters of the bridge.

  In a glance he could see that he'd lost his entire bridge crew along with most of his control panels. Grief and distress solidified in his stomach with such force that he nearly vomited. He swallowed down hard on the urge and turned away from the sight.

  A large bright colored bird trashed in the wreckage, one of its wings broken. It opened its long hooked beak and screamed, "Whatdidyoudo? Whatdidyoudo?"

  Mikhail pressed his hands to his temples, trying to get control of himself. Focus, Misha, focus.

  His bridge crew wasn't a priority anymore. He had to assess damage to the ship, deal with the wounded, and start repairs. And he should promote Kutuzov to acting second-in-command.

  "Captain, this world is—wrong." Rabbit said.

  "Wrong?"

  "There's no horizon." Rabbit pointed out over the water. "And look." He swept his hand upwards to a d
ark splotch at the eighty degree point in the sky overhead. "That's a landmass. We're inside a sphere, a very large one."

  Mikhail stopped to truly look.

  Floating land masses, like one they had hit, dotted the sky. One plowed through the clouds, roiling the white into a gray. Lightning flickered in the tight knot of polarized air, like a storm inside a bottle. That island was a wedge of stone, perspective obscuring its topside. An island farther in the distance, though, showed a crown of thick green. He would only see the top of the island if it was traveling up a curve.