Reefsong

by Carol Severance

  When he joined her on the back of her ray, she pointed to where the blast had occurred and then toward the sub, making the motions of activating a detonator. Then she pointed back to Sale Fe'e. “Get everyone out,” she called. “Hurry!”

  Pili's eyes darkened as he caught her meaning. He clicked his nails in rapid sequence, and before she could thrust Little Ten into his arms, he kicked back to his own ray. They swept away.

  Directly toward the sub.

  “No! Pili!” she cried, but she had no air to force the warning out. She watched helplessly as Pili and the ray raced on a collision course toward the unsuspecting minisub. In the last instant before they struck, the ray flicked Pili from its back. The boy tumbled away in the current as the giant ray smashed into the sub's side.

  The observation bubble popped free, and a great gout of air burst upward and shattered into bloodstained effervescence. The sub's stabilizing engines ripped away. The ray's force carried its body almost through the sub. Had it been just a little stronger, it might have actually shaken the jagged metal container free of its wings. But a long gash had been opened along the ray's underside. It lost strength quickly as dark fluid poured into the sea. The tangle of dying ray and twisted metal sank together into the cold sea.

  Another ray swept close to Angie. Both Toma and Pili were riding its back. Urgently, she waved them back toward Pua and Klooney. With her extreme focus, she could just see them. The man and the girl were still fighting. The rays took them closer, circled, but still did not interfere. Pua had weakened greatly. Her movements grew slower and slower. She could not find a way to reach fully beyond Klooney's guard.

  Klooney recognized that, too, and increased his own faltering efforts to kill her. The water swirled with their blood. Angie released her hold on the ray and would have gone to Pua's aid despite Little Ten, but the ray swam beneath her again and bumped her up and away. A second ray glided close to her side, and Angie shivered at the flash of exposed teeth. Toma, too, tried to reach Pua, but was restrained by both the rays and Pili.

  Suddenly, Pua tensed. She glanced around and quickly backed away. She took the knife from between her teeth. Klooney grinned. He had her now—even from a distance, Angie could see triumph light his eyes.

  A shrill whistle screamed through the sea, then a series, a multitude, of high-pitched whistles. Even Klooney spun back to face the sound.

  “Suckersharks!” Angie breathed.

  A dense black cloud was boiling from the mouth of the tunnel.

  It expanded as it reached the open water. It paused, then condensed again and turned toward the human swimmers. Sucker-sharks, drawn all the way through the reef by the smell of blood. The waterworlders raced toward Sa le Fe'e's entrance. The rays swept among them, scooping up those too slow and the injured, Earther and waterworlder alike. They deposited them at the channel entrance. Despite Toma's protest, his mount bore him and the boy that way, as well.

  “Pua!” Angie screamed.

  The girl was almost motionless in the water. She paddled slowly with her wide, webbed feet. She watched without apparent concern as the black cloud swept closer and closer.

  At the same time, Klooney was panicking. He was already covered with bleeding scratches, and he knew he had no chance of survival. He flailed at the converging sharks with his knife. He fought them away, one by one, then by the dozens. But for every one that he killed or scraped away, another found some unprotected place on his body. They pulled themselves tight with their suckered mouths, then extended their ragged, hollow teeth through his skin. Klooney screamed airlessly into the sea.

  Pua reached down and scraped one of the suckers from her own slick skin. Her movement was slow and spoke of great pain. Angie could taste Pua's exhaustion riding on the swirling eddies.

  At last, Angie's ray moved. It glided down, then rose under Pua so that Angie could reach her with her injured hand. She pulled Pua to her side, keeping the baby between them, and the ray slid swiftly away. A suckershark attached to the ray's forward wing, but Pua reached out with her knife and flicked it away.

  Pua shifted so she could see Little Ten, then sighed and closed her eyes.

  A tiny flood of warmth pooled against Angie's chest. ‘Umi Iki was releasing seawater back into the sea. Pua's mouth opened slightly; her tongue flicked out. She grinned without opening her eyes.

  When they reached the reef face, Angie slid from the ray's back. Toma was there to take Pua; Pili took the infant. They disappeared immediately into the dark entrance to Sa le Fe'e.

  Angie glanced back once at the raging bioluminescent sea, shadowed now by the roiling cloud of rapacious sharks. Le Fe'e rumbled and roared.

  “I don't know what you are,” Angie whispered. “I'm not even sure if you are. But you sing a fireloving fine song.”

  She followed the others inside. Midway through the dark channel, she realized that her terror of the closed, wet space had disappeared.

  Chapter 29

  “You should have seen Papa Toma jump out of the lock, Auntie Puhi,” one of the twins said. Angie was not sure which was which. They both sat cross-legged in front of her. One had a patch above his left eye; the other, a bandage wrapped around his knee. Both wore braided moss around their ankles.

  “He looked like a skudder jumping out of a puhi hole,” the other one said, and they both laughed. They had told her the story half a dozen times already, and each time it became more exciting and dramatic.

  “Boys, leave the warden alone. Let her rest.”

  Nola spoke from across the nursery. It was the area that had sustained the least damage from the fighting and the blasting and was being used now as a makeshift infirmary. Injured Earthers and waterworlders lay side by side on the moss. Nola's splinted leg was stretched in front of her on the floor. ‘Umi Iki was at her breast. The infant, at least, seemed none the worse for her adventure into the storm.

  “It's all right,” Angie said. “I can't sleep anyway.”

  She glanced down at Pua. The girl had not stirred since she had been brought into the cave. Not even when Toma examined her and then splinted her broken left forearm and taped her ribs. Sa le Fe'e was well equipped with medical and diagnostic equipment, and after running a series of scans, Toma assured Angie that Pua had sustained no serious internal damage.

  The friendly vines, tattered and torn though they had been, had saved the girl from the worst of Klooney's knife attack, but her skin was still crisscrossed with bloodied markings. After peeling the vines away, they had immersed her in the nursery pool so her skin would continue excreting its protective and healing mucus coating.

  Fatu had appeared sometime during the night, at what sounded like the height of the storm. He did not say how he had gotten there. It must have been via the rays, but there was something in his expression that encouraged Angie not to ask. When he arrived, there had been a pneumatic dart-tip imbedded in his chest. Toma had cut it neatly away.

  Now Fatu was sitting beside the pool, chanting and stroking Pua's injured arm, rocking to the cadence of the diminishing storm.

  Angie's own injury had been bandaged and a pain-control patch applied to her wrist. There was little more that could be done. The fingers would regenerate, both Toma and Nola had assured her, and be just as strong as before.

  One of the boys touched her injured hand. “I lost a tip once,” he said. It was Keha, she decided, because he was the most talkative of the two. “It hurt.”

  “He cried,” Kiki said.

  Keha frowned.

  “But not much,” Kiki added quickly.

  “How come you have hands like ours?” Keha asked. “We thought only kids—”

  “Come on, you two.” Toma, hollow-eyed and pale with exhaustion, tapped the boys’ behinds with his foot. “Go help at the thermal pool. They need somebody small to carry rocks through the pipe.” He shooed the boys from the nursery.

  “Sleep,” he said to Angie.

  She nodded, and tried. It was useless.

 
; She could still feel the storm. It roared and rumbled and shivered through the solid stone. It must be deafening where Mariko and the rest of the kids are, she thought. A slide, caused most likely by the Earthers’ blast, had blocked the outlet pipe from the hot tub, so they were weathering the storm in the small outer cave where Angie had first seen them.

  They were known to be safe, because Pili had led Zena, the smallest of the adults, through a maze of narrow cracks and hidden pools to a place where they could communicate with the stranded group through the children's click-talk. A crew that occasionally included Kiki and Keha worked to clear the blockage. Others searched Sa le Fe'e and the surrounding reef for the remaining explosive charges the Earthers had set.

  Pua's eyes opened. She woke in that strange way of hers—all at once, without any prior movement. She blinked and tried to sit up.

  “Ooow!”

  And dropped back underwater. She blinked again, more rapidly, as she fought away tears. Her eyes widened slightly when she saw Fatu. He and Angie reached into the water to help, and this time Pua made it upright. She winced and grimaced. She grunted a few times, but she didn't cry again.

  “'Umi?” she asked as soon as she had breath. She stared straight at Angie. Watching to be sure I'm telling her the truth, Angie mused. Spit, but she loved this little waterbrat. Never get too close, her rational side intervened. But it was much too late.

  “'Umi Iki's fine,” she said.

  “And Pili and—”

  “They're all fine. Kiki and Keha each have a bandage, but their injuries are small. They just wanted to look like the rest of us.”

  Pua's look dropped to Angie's hand, then shifted across the room. “Oh, Auntie Nola,” she whispered. A tear sneaked out then.

  Nola shifted Little Ten to her other breast. “Don't you worry about me, Pualei,” she said. “I could still catch you if I had to.”

  Pua smiled and turned back to Angie. “Did we do it, Mountainlady?” she asked with that same direct look.

  Angie nodded.

  “Ha!” Pua said softly.

  Then she demanded food and a full recounting of all that had happened during the night. When she heard of the ray that had died along with the minisub, she cried again.

  They all listened with rapt attention as Fatu described Crawley's questioning back at the burial cave, and Pua nodded her approval when he admitted to sharing her story of Le Fe'e and the greedy moons. Like Angie, she did not ask Fatu how he had gotten from the burial cave to her side.

  Kiki and Keha had raced back to the nursery as soon as they learned Pua was awake, and once again they shared their own adventurous tale. Keha was particularly proud, because his small injury, made larger by the story, had occurred when he slipped while throwing a rock at Klooney.

  “Pua,” Angie said. “Why didn't you use your knife when you fought that man?”

  “Why would I use a knife when I have my hands?” Pua replied.

  “Well, then, why did you carry it in your teeth all that time?”

  “When they talk, nobody ever answers,” Kiki explained to a nearby swimmer.

  Pua laughed. “Because I knew I'd need it to scrape the suckers off after the fight, and the sheath strap got cut while we were still with the Old Man.”

  “But why wouldn't the rays, or even Pili, let Toma and me help you?” Angie asked.

  Pua's eyes darkened. She was quiet for a moment. Then she said, “Because Klooney was mine.”

  Angie did not question her further.

  Some hours later, an opening was made through the slide, and Mariko and the rest of the children were brought back inside. They were fed, and Mariko's injury was cared for, then all the stories were told over again.

  No one even spoke of leaving Sa le Fe'e until a full day had passed. Then they timed their departure to take advantage of the changing tide. They waited until the racing storm current gave way to the more orderly tidal movements through the barrier reef channel. Pili and Pua called the rays to the fishing exit gate, and all but Nola and the younger children, and four Pukui adults to help her care for them, made their way back into Pukui Lagoon.

  Even underwater it was clear that the unprepared farm had been destroyed. Tattered shreds of netting hung from pens that had not been lifted before the storm. The barge was nowhere to be seen. Several full lengths of cold-water pipe had been torn from their mountings and lay bent and broken across the reef flats.

  Great boulders of coral had been carried on the storm surge all the way to the inner lagoon. Later, some were found well inland on both Home and Second islands. The smaller, more fragile coral had fared worst. Brilliantly colored shards were scattered everywhere, and skims of dark, dead algae streaked the rubbled surface.

  Pua spotted a giant grazer caught in a tangle of netting and insisted they stop to free it. She refused to allow the fish to be taken back to the island for food and had them bring it to her to kiss before they set it free.

  Out of the water, the devastation of the farm was even worse. The main dock was gone, along with all the crews’ quarters and science and production buildings. They lay in scattered heaps across the perfectly manicured lawn. The grass seemed not to have suffered at all.

  Pua cried out in shock when she saw the main house, or what was left of it. Only the first-story floor remained, incongruously surrounded by the undamaged lanai railing. A few upright posts and a portion of the stairs remained, but the rest had been scoured clean. It was wind damage, because the sea had not reached that high. The rain had washed the floor clean.

  The cookhouse and Katie's small cottage had disappeared, and the housekeeper had set up temporary residence under the main house floor. She had already gathered a small pile of broken artifacts from Lehua's prized collection. Only the farm control shed remained intact. Some strange quirk of the storm had left it almost unscathed.

  Crews were already at work cataloging and sorting the damage, digging through the collapsed buildings for salvage. The deep-water pumps had all been shut down, and the lines were being inspected. There was no division between Company and non-Company crews, just as there had been none among the waterworlders who had fought outside Sa le Fe'e. This was a waterworld tragedy, and on this job they worked as one.

  When word spread about Crawley and Waight and how Zed and Lehua had died, Sally had to set extra guards to keep Crawley from being torn apart by his own Company swimmers. The Earther waterguards, those few who were left alive, were locked inside the cave to wait for the first transport off Pukui and the planet.

  Pukui's freshwater pools flowed stronger than ever after the downpour of the storm, and the sea still provided its bounty of food. Windfall in the jungle provided enough edibles for a week of feasting. The waterworlders and the much subdued U.N. inspection team settled in for the cleanup.

  By the second morning, airborne crews from Landing arrived. They set about cleaning up as much of the dead algae as possible from the inner reef. Later in the day, three hydrobuses loaded with relief supplies and additional crews came through the pass.

  It was on that day that Angie found Nori Yoshida, still secured under the dripping, moss-hung ledge where the swimmers had put him the night of the storm. They had fed him since, but otherwise left him alone. Although he had been protected from the worst of the weather, a muddy runoff of jungle sludge still oozed past his feet. His uniform was torn and filthy, and when he saw Angie, he cursed and swore and threatened dire revenge.

  Angie watched him for a moment, finding it curious that the pain of his betrayal and the rage she had used to protect herself from it no longer existed. She felt nothing toward him but disgust.

  Later, she suggested to Sally that Nori would make a good companion for Crawley when the disgraced Company man was transferred to his new permanent assignment on Mensat.

  “Nori has a strong back,” Angie said, “and they say that after the first decade or so, Mensat settlers hardly notice the guano's stench.”

  When Sally's second U.N
. inspection team arrived that same day, Pukui's entire story was told one more time. This time it was formally recorded.

  Angie watched the proceedings, but allowed Sally to lead them. She refused to reveal the site of the missing TC enzyme records until Pua and the children's indigenous-rights claim had been settled. Pua roamed in and out of the burial cave while the discussions were taking place, usually with Pili at her side, and the Earthers from both inspection teams paid her very careful respect. She finally decided their deference was funny, and began smiling again.

  Late on the fourth day, Sally called Angie and Fatu to one side. “We need to talk,” she said. Grayson, the U.N. team leader, joined them, as did Toma and Pua.

  Angie sat at Sally's urging. Something else had gone wrong. She could see it in Sally's eyes. Fatu leaned against the wall. He had grown even quieter since the storm. Calmer, Angie thought. At peace with himself in a way he had not been before. Angie looked forward to a time when they could sit together privately and speak of the things they had done and seen the night of the storm. She wondered if he understood them any better than she.

  “World Life has formally filed to reclaim all Pukui leases,” Sally said, pulling Angie back to the present with a thud.

  Fatu straightened. “What?”

  “They can't—” Angie began.

  “The reef has been seriously damaged,” the U.N. leader said, “and the farm has been completely destroyed.”

  “It can be rebuilt, Mr. Grayson,” Fatu said. “There's no live algae out there to bloom, so—”

  “It can't be rebuilt without major financing,” Grayson said. “The combined assets of Pukui's current leaseholders aren't nearly enough. If the partial harvest could have been saved, it might have made a difference, but the processing plant and all its contents were destroyed.”

  “Surely Pukui can get a loan against the expected profits from the TC production,” Angie said.