Deepsix

by Jack McDevitt

  Roiling clouds of immense proportions billowed out of Maleiva III’s atmosphere. Fireballs erupted and fell back. And erupted again. The entire black atmosphere seemed to be expanding, fountaining into the sky, a burning river beginning to flow toward the placid disk of the gas giant.

  “Here it comes,” said Mac.

  Nightingale nodded. “Everything that’s loose anywhere on Deepsix is being ripped out now and sent elsewhere.” His voice was quiet. Resigned.

  Mac shifted in his chair. “There’s no point getting sentimental over a piece of real estate,” he said.

  Nightingale stared straight ahead. “I was thinking about the lights.”

  “The lights?” Hutch’s brow furrowed.

  “I don’t think we told you. Forgot in all the rushing around. At Bad News Bay. We saw something out in the water. Signaled back and forth.”

  “A boat?”

  “Don’t know what it was.”

  Steam was pouring off Deepsix. Fire and lightning swirled across the vast expanse of its clouds.

  Kellie came back with donuts and coffee.

  MacAllister was still there a half hour later when Marcel, Nicholson, and Beekman came by to see how she was doing. Hutch thought all three looked tired, happy, relieved. They shook hands all around. “We’re glad to have you back,” Marcel said. “Things looked a little doubtful there for a while.”

  “Did they really?” asked Mac. “I thought we had it under control all the way.”

  Nicholson beamed at him. “We’re planning a little celebration tomorrow,” he said. Hutch caught the flavor of the remark, that dinner with the two captains was an Event, and that they should all feel appropriately honored. But he was trying to do the right thing. And what the hell, it was a small enough failing.

  “I’d be delighted to attend,” said Mac.

  “As would I.” Hutch gave him a warm smile.

  Marcel introduced Beekman as the manager of the rescue operation. “Saved your life,” he added.

  Hutch wasn’t sure what he meant. “You mean all our lives.”

  “Yours, specifically. Gunther came up with the zero-gee maneuver.”

  Tom Scolari called, and his image formed at the foot of her bed. He was wearing dark slacks and a white shirt open to his navel. Sending somebody a message, looked like. “Glad you came through it okay,” he said. “We were worried.”

  “Where are you now, Tom?”

  “On Zwick.”

  “Good. Did you get interviewed?”

  “I don’t think there’s anybody out here who hasn’t had a chance to talk on UNN. Listen”—his eyes found hers, and glanced over at Mac—“you guys put on one hell of a show.”

  “Thanks. We had a lot of help. Not to mention your own. I understand you’re a pretty good welder.”

  “I’ll never be without work again.”

  “Next time you tell me not to do something,” she added, “I’ll try to take you more seriously.”

  He grinned and blew her a kiss. “I doubt it.”

  She woke up in the middle of the night and noticed they were no longer accelerating.

  It was, finally, over.

  EPILOGUE

  Cataclysms too vast to be defined as quakes threw forests and mountain ranges skyward, as much as twenty thousand meters, where they were caught between competing gravity wells, and eventually swept off. Tidal effects literally ripped Maleiva III apart. The swirl of gas and debris surrounding the world had become so thick that it blinded the opticals. The placid snow-covered plains around the tower, the baroque temple that had seemed almost Parisian, the lights at Bad News Bay, the memorial and the hexagon, all disintegrated in the general ruin.

  Wherever fractures or faults existed, the rock was shredded, torn free, and hurled upward. The planet bled lava. The mantle disintegrated, exposing the core. Energy release was so titanic that it could not be viewed directly. Scientists on board Wendy, finally able to concentrate on the event they’d come to see, cheered and began to think about future papers.

  Shortly before the collision, Maleiva III exploded and burned like a small nova. Then the light dimmed, and it dissolved into a series of individual embers curving through the night, falling finally into Morgan’s cobalt gulfs, where they left bruises.

  Within hours, the shower of debris was gone from the sky, and only the bruises remained to mark the incident. Meantime, Morgan would continue on its way, barely affected by the encounter. Its orbit would not change appreciably. Its massive gravity would eventually scramble a few moons elsewhere in the system. But that was a couple of centuries away.

  Hutch had assumed the dinner was to be in honor of the Maleiva Four. At first it seemed that way. They were introduced to the crowded main dining hall individually, applauded, and seated at the captain’s table. Everyone wanted to shake their hands, wish them well, get their autographs.

  They were invited to make speeches. (“But we’d appreciate it if you kept your remarks to five minutes.” When Nightingale ran over, Nicholson took to glancing ostentatiously at the time.) And everyone got a picture taken with one or another of the rescuees.

  There were also pictures from the adventure itself, and hundreds of these were put forward to be signed. Some were of the Astronomer’s Tower (which no one was any longer calling Burbage Point), others were from the interviews on the ground conducted by August Canyon, still others of the long empty corridors in the hexagon atop Mt. Blue. Here was Nightingale seated beside a campfire early in the trek, and Hutch hanging from the net as seen through the telescopes on the rescue shuttle. There was Gregory MacAllister shaking hands with well-wishers on their arrival at the Star. Someone had gotten a portrait of Kellie posed against a sky overwhelmed by Morgan’s World. She looked beautiful and defiant, and it rapidly became the favorite of the evening. Eventually, it would become the jacket for Deepsix Diary, MacAllister’s best-selling account of the episode.

  Despite all this, the evening belonged, not to the Four, but to their rescuers. The three captains, Marcel, Nicholson, and Miles Chastain, took round after round of applause. Beekman and his team were credited with working out the general strategy. John Drummond, who did much of the orbital calculations, took a bow. And the cheers for Janet Hazelhurst were deafening.

  The Outsiders were invited to stand, while the band played a few bars from a military anthem. The shuttle pilots were introduced. And Abel Kinder, who was credited with keeping the weather sufficiently calm until the rescue could be effected. Phil Zossimov, who developed the collar and the support rails that would have made things so much easier. Had they, as he commented wryly, only had an opportunity to work.

  And there was finally a moment to remember those whose lives had been lost. Colt Wetheral, pilot of the Star lander. Klaus Bomar, the shuttle pilot. Star passenger Casey Hayes, who, as MacAllister pointed out, had died trying to salvage one of the landers. Chiang Harmon of the science research team. And Toni Hamner, who would not have been there at all, said Hutch, except that she stayed with a friend.

  They set up a buffet. The ship’s best wines were uncorked. And Captain Nicholson announced that TransGalactic would pick up the tab. Passengers and guests were responsible only for whatever gratuities they might choose to leave.

  Late in the evening, Hutch found herself alone on the dance floor with Marcel. When she’d arrived, fourteen standard days before (had it really been so recently?), he’d been only a colleague, an occasional voice in the cockpit, a person she’d seen at a seminar or two. Now she thought of him as the Gallant Frenchman. “I’ve got some news for you,” the Gallant Frenchman said. “We got the results back on the scan of the shaft. It’s three thousand years old.”

  She was in his arms, in the exotic style of the time. Everybody’s arms felt good, his and Mac’s and Kellie’s and Tom Scolari’s and Randy Nightingale’s. Especially Randy Nightingale’s, the man who would not let go.

  Three thousand years. “So we were right.”

  “I’d say so.
It was a rescue mission. The hawks were doing what they could to get a nontechnical people out of harm’s way. Or at least to give their species a chance to survive elsewhere.”

  “Where, I wonder?”

  Marcel placed his lips against her cheek. “Who knows? Maybe one day we’ll find them.”

  Hutch recalled the predator appearance of the hawks. “They did not look friendly.”

  “No. I thought not either.” Her lips found his. “Shows you how looks can deceive.”

  There was, inevitably, a sim. Hutch was played by Ivy Kramer, an actress of truly magnificent proportions. Mac appeared in a cameo, not as himself, but as Beekman. The drama portrayed Erik Nicholson as the true hero of the rescue. This interpretation of events might have been influenced by the fact that the production company was owned by the same multinational as TransGalactic.

  It introduced persons on board the Star who tried actively to sabotage the effort for murky reasons never quite made clear, and it depicted the crew of the Boardman striving heroically to retrieve their lost lander so they could come to the rescue. Hutch and Nightingale were tracked relentlessly through the hexagon by a shape-changing thing.

  There were books, other than Mac’s. Action figures appeared and sold briskly. All four survivors were subjected to extensive interviews, and Kellie eventually became the official representative for Warburton, a company that manufactured sports equipment. E-cards featuring her with a set of golf clubs have since become a collector’s item.

  An effort was made to get Nightingale to run for governor of Georgia, but he declined. His onetime wife, the daughter of a retired Academy director, made several unsuccessful attempts to renew their relationship.

  Mac continued to write scathing commentary on assorted hypocrisies in high places and low, without which hypocrisies, he cheerfully conceded, civilized life would be impossible.

  Hutch remained in the service of the Academy.

  They all profited from the action toys, from the games, from various kinds of sports clothes, and also from the sale of a line of Deep-six Four (the name change to Deepsix had been urged by the action toy company) long-stem glassware, which inevitably featured a female figure dangling from a tether that disappeared into a cloud—an artistic embellishment—and the motto, Nunquam dimitte. Never Let Go.

  Never Let Go.

  It is now the official motto of at least three specialized military forces in Germany, China, and Brazil.

  They named a high school in New York Park South for Kellie, a mall in Toronto for Hutch, and a Lisbon zoo for Nightingale. There is now a Colt Wetheral Memorial Library off Fulham Palace Road in London, and a Toni Hamner Science Museum in Hamburg. The Winnipeg space flight school in which Klaus Bomar used to teach now has a wing named for him. Mac received no such accolades, although he claimed that the local bishop had wanted to put his name on the new Correlates Religious Studies Center in Des Moines.

  Awards were passed to almost everyone involved in the rescue. The most heavily recognized was Erik Nicholson, widely credited with persisting during the darkest hours of the effort. Beekman received the Conciliar Award for Science, usually reserved for those instances when humanitarian applications of a breakthrough can be shown. Marcel was given a formal commendation from the Academy and became a figure of interest to the corporate world. Within a year, he’d been offered, and had accepted, a director’s post with TransGalactic. He’s now a vice president, makes more money than he ever dreamed possible, and talks a lot about the good old days. When he’s pressed, he admits to being bored.

  Kellie, Hutch, Randy, and Mac continue to get together whenever occasion permits. They are frequently joined by Marcel, and occasionally by Janet Hazelhurst, the world’s most famous welder, and by one or another of their rescuers. Last year they took eleven members of the Outsiders to dinner at Iceman’s in Philadelphia.

  Iceman’s is more than simply the finest restaurant in the Delaware Valley. It’s also on the ground floor.

  AFTERWORD

  STATEMENT BY GREGORY MACALLISTER

  From Deepsix Diary

  Let me stipulate that, while the questions raised concerning the failure of the Athena Boardman to come to the assistance of the vessels at Maleiva III were legitimate, they were not initiated by me, as has been charged by officials at Kosmik, Inc. In fact, they grew out of a reaction to the sim, which portrayed the Boardman captain in heroic terms. This in turn sparked an investigation, originally for the implied purpose of handing out awards. My only connection with the proceedings arose from the fact that I happened to be one of the persons left to do as best we could when Boardman went missing in action.

  The problem for Kosmik quickly became one of potential liability, and they consequently reacted to the initial inquiry by doing what large corporations always do: First they stonewalled, and then when they realized that wouldn’t work, they found a mechanic at the Wheel and blamed the incident on him, citing failure to inspect a faulty RX-17 black box that rendered the launcher unstable. They gave him a formal letter of reprimand, fired him, and released his name to the media.

  This was too much for Eliot Penkavic, the ship’s captain, who called a press conference, admitted to lying about the incident, and blamed the entire unhappy episode on Ian Helm, Kosmik’s new director of operations at the Quraqua terraforming unit.

  Helm has denied everything, and Penkavic now faces prosecution.

  But company spokesmen have had a difficult time explaining just what Penkavic hoped to gain by failing to assist when it was clearly in his power to do so, or why he had agreed to come to the rescue, then apparently changed his mind.

  To get a clearer picture of what must actually have transpired, one has only to ask the basic question any policeman asks when faced with conflicting stories: Who stood to profit? The pilot to whom it made no difference whatever whether he went to Maleiva III or to Quraqua? Or the company big shot anxious to get to his new position with a shipload of time-sensitive personnel and supplies?

  As I write this, Penkavic’s trial is less than a week away I am pleased to report that, since the arrival on the case of Archie Stoddard, the lawyer hired by this publishing house and best-known for securing substantial judgments against corporate scofflaws, rumors have begun to circulate that the so-called in-house investigation by Kosmik has taken on new life. And that Helm may be thrown to the wolves to head off the legal action that would clearly follow a finding of not guilty in the Penkavic case.