What Distant Deeps

by David Drake

  Adele eyed the structure musingly. If the car had been flying toward rather than beside it when the motors failed, they would surely have been killed. Except perhaps Hogg, who had really remarkable reflexes in a crash. Though how could even he survive driving into a large mass of rock?

  “I’ve got a satellite communicator in my attaché case,” Tovera said. She must be in a great deal of pain—the redness and swelling in her thin wrists were startlingly obvious—but her voice was grimly whimsical as usual. “Which unlike the impellers will float. But where it may be floating is another matter.”

  They surveyed the undulating green landscape. It was a mile or more to open sea in the direction the aircar had been travelling when it hit the ground, but a rectangular case could have bounced in almost any direction. It depended on which corner touched down as the case spun.

  “Oh, it won’t be hard to find!” said Daniel; this time the enthusiasm sounded real. “We’ve got a fine vantage point on the tower of the castle there, fifty feet at least, wouldn’t you say? We’ll find the case and call the Sissie to come pick us up. And then—”

  His voice changed.

  “—we’ll deal with the person who sabotaged the car. Commander Gibbs, I shouldn’t wonder.”

  “Yes,” said Adele, suddenly brighter herself. “And learn why he did it, which is more important. Though perhaps not as satisfying.”

  She looked at the castle. The head of a seadragon lifted from the top of the tower and stretched toward Hogg. The creature shrieked like a stone-saw. It was by far the largest they had seen on the island, easily the thirty feet long which Adele’s records gave as the maximum length.

  Nearby was a puddle which was at least translucent if not clear. Adele stepped to it and rinsed her hands again.

  Then she took the pistol from her tunic pocket.

  CHAPTER 14

  Diamond Cay, Zenobia

  “Look at me, snake!” Tovera shouted from midway between the wreck and the base of the crystal tower. “I’m going to steal your eggs and eat them in front of you!”

  Adele smiled minusculely. She had told her servant to shout to call attention to herself. It didn’t matter what the words were or even if they were words. It didn’t surprise her in the least that Tovera was acting as though the seadragon could understand the threats, however.

  “Are we ready, then?” said Daniel. They had circled to approach the tower from the opposite side. He spoke quietly so as not to call the dragon’s attention away from Tovera’s fine performance, but his smile seemed satisfied and genuine.

  He’s really looking forward to this, Adele thought. Of course, he grew up fishing in the ocean—and Hogg was teaching him.

  Adele wasn’t looking forward to the business, though she wasn’t really afraid. If things went wrong she would probably be killed, but she thought Daniel and Hogg would be able to escape. So long as she wasn’t endangering others, the risks didn’t greatly concern her.

  “Ma’am?” Hogg said. He reached into his left pocket and lifted his pistol partly into sight. “Are you sure you wouldn’t like mine?”

  Hogg wore the steel-mesh mittens which he needed to handle his length of fishing line weighted on either end with a deep-sea sinker. The beryllium monocrystal was thin and flexible, but you could lift an aircar with it—if you attached the line to a metal part. It would cut plastic—or flesh—like a knife.

  “Yes,” said Adele. “I’m sure.”

  Though compact, Hogg’s pistol was about twice the size of her own and threw osmium slugs instead of Adele’s light ceramic pellets. It was a better choice if you were trying to knock the target down, but this seadragon was much too big for that to be possible.

  If Hogg had carried a service pistol, Adele might indeed have borrowed it. The combination of high velocity and heavy slug would shatter the creature’s skull; after that they could simply wait for the beast to die. Neither of the available pistols—nor Tovera’s, which was much like Adele’s—were sufficiently powerful, however. Therefore, she had suggested a different plan. . . .

  “I’ll feed your eggs to pigs, snake!” Tovera shouted. She had made a flag by tying her tunic to a sturdy reed. She managed to waggle it in the air by clamping her forearms together with the staff between them. “You’ll have no offspring ever!”

  The seadragon screamed at her. Its nest must be in one of the upper rooms, but it used the top of the tower as a vantage point. So long as Tovera called and capered, the beast was likely to remain where it could see her.

  “Let me get half a circuit ahead,” Adele said quietly. She stepped through the entrance and started up.

  As Hogg had noted before the crash, a helical ramp six feet wide served the tower instead of a staircase. There was no railing nor sign of where one might have been. The central well was more than ten feet in diameter.

  The ramp circled clockwise instead of being counterclockwise like a ship’s companionways. That didn’t matter in the present circumstances, but it felt subtly wrong.

  The seadragon called again. There was a hole in the roof at the ramp’s upper end. If there had ever been a door or other cover, it had vanished in the millennia since the tower was abandoned.

  Hogg led Daniel into the tower, having scrupulously waited till Adele was opposite the entrance and one level higher. The fifty-foot height was divided into eight levels, so the rooms—though spacious—were far too low-ceilinged for a human to find them comfortable. The entrances were arcs almost ten feet broad at the base. As with the roof opening, there were no doors.

  Light wicked through the tower’s walls and flooded its interior, but the refractions and reflections of the crystal created shapes and emptinesses. Their movements kept Adele on edge; but not, she judged, significantly more on edge than she would otherwise have been when approaching a thirty-foot reptile with a pocket pistol.

  Adele was wearing RCN boots. They were thin enough to wear inside a vacuum suit, but their soft soles gripped even on the oily deck plates of a starship. That was perfect for the pebbled, gently rising surface of the ramp. It circled four times from the ground-level entrance to the roof.

  On her second circuit, she reached the point where the building had been breached; had been melted away, if Daniel was correct. The room with no outer wall was brighter. By contrast, Adele could see that the light passing through the crystal had a bluish cast.

  She continued at a steady pace. She wasn’t looking directly at the roof opening: the bright light might blur her vision when the seadragon started down. Its body would curtain the hole. When the beast moved above on the roof, she saw it as shadows at the corners of her eyes.

  The floor of the tower was covered with what Adele took for broken pottery when she first risked a glance downward. No, crab shells. She had assumed that the seadragon had chosen the tower simply as a safe place in which to lay its eggs, but the quantity of debris suggested that this was a permanent lair. Its stench was noticeably different from the vegetable miasma rising with every step in the muck of the marshes.

  Perhaps they—she and Daniel—could collaborate on a scientific paper on the life cycle of the Zenobian seadragon. After the two of them retired. If they lived to retire. And of course assuming that the seadragons were native to Zenobia, though that could be hedged by modifying the title to “The Colony of Seadragons Found on Zenobia.”

  The whimsy made Adele smile. Anyway the corners of her lips twitched upward.

  She paused, half a circuit short of the tower’s roof. Hogg with Daniel behind him were another half circuit below her. They had reached the entrance to the seventh level. Hogg was spinning a yard of his line out in the tower’s well with his right hand while his left held the remainder in loose loops.

  Daniel was watched her. Adele nodded, then shaded her eyes with her right hand as she looked up at the opening. Hogg whistled, a harsh trill that echoed in the crystal cylinder.

  There was a clacking and scrabbling from the roof. The seadragon, its paddle
feet spread to either side of the opening, thrust its head into the interior of the tower.

  Adele’s pistol snapped; the dragon’s bulging right eye burst into silvery droplets. Snapped again and the left eye, the instant before an amber lantern, also splashed into darkness.

  The weight of the dragon’s shriek made Adele flinch backward. The creature lunged toward her. Its jaws were open but the small forelegs were tight against its chest. Its teeth were blunt cones that could crush a human skull as easily as they did crab shells.

  Hogg’s line looped about the seadragon’s neck. The creature took another sliding, hunching step. Hogg drew back with the full strength of his upper body; he’d looped the monofilament around his right glove and gripped the heavy bronze sinker at his end with his left. Daniel had an arm around Hogg’s waist and the other arm reaching through the doorway to lock on the wall of the room beside them.

  The seadragon surged forward. Not even those two strong men could have overcome the infuriated creature’s mass, but they pulled its blind head toward them across the tower.

  The dragon took another step and slipped off the ramp. It screamed like a siren as it plunged toward the crab shells forty feet below.

  Hogg bellowed in agony. The dragon’s cry ended in a hiss and a gout of blood that spattered the roof: Hogg hadn’t been able to release the looped line, but it had decapitated the seadragon before the creature’s weight pulled both men down with it.

  The seadragon smashed to the floor. The body flopped and flailed for nearly a minute, and for longer yet occasional twitches dimpled the ton of flesh.

  Adele knelt, waving her pistol gently to cool the barrel before she put it away. The seadragon’s jaws clopped shut and opened in tetanic convulsions.

  Adele didn’t let herself blink. If her eyes closed even for an instant, she would see that great head stretching forward to crush the fine, organized brain of Adele Mundy.

  Daniel didn’t think the seadragon had reached Adele, but the motionless silence in which she knelt on the ramp made him worry as he trotted up to her. Had the tail slapped her as the creature went over the side? He wouldn’t have noticed with all the other things that were going on at the time.

  “Perfect marksmanship, Adele,” he said cheerfully. “As expected, of course. I regret the danger to you, but you were right that there was no better way.”

  Adele put her pistol away and rose. “I wasn’t in danger so long as it was you and Hogg with the line,” she said. She sounded like her usual imperturbable self, but Daniel still had the feeling—it was no more than that—that something had disturbed her. She glanced past him and said, “Hogg? Are you all right?”

  “I won’t be shaking hands any time soon,” Hogg muttered. “Nothing that won’t heal, but it hurts like bloody blue blazes right now.”

  Daniel looked over his shoulder. He’d felt as though the creature’s weight was going to pinch off his right arm against the doorjamb he’d hooked it around. Hogg had shouted at the same time, but that had seemed a natural reaction to his effort in holding on to the line. In his concern for Adele, Daniel hadn’t realized that Hogg was injured.

  He was holding his right hand up—keeping it above his heart. He’d taken the mesh mitten off his left hand and put it back with the coiled monofilament into one of his pockets, but the mitten was still on his right. It looked as stiff as an inflated bladder.

  “It’s my own fault,” Hogg growled. “I didn’t trust to be able to just hold the sinker, so I gave the line a wrap around my hand. I figured the glove’d save me.”

  He smiled ruefully at his raised hand. “And I guess it did,” he said, “but it was a near thing. If the line hadn’t of sawed through the lizard’s neck when it did, I don’t bloody know what was going to happen.”

  Adele nodded crisply. “Thank you, Hogg,” she said. “The Medicomp should be able to take care of the problem as soon as we get you to the Princess Cecile.”

  “I’d do it the same way again, ma’am,” Hogg said with a real grin. “I still don’t trust I wouldn’t let go if I just had the sinker to hold. And Tovera’d shoot me sure as sunrise if I let something happen to you.”

  “It wouldn’t be anything so quick,” said Tovera from the outside door. She still held the flag; Daniel supposed she must have had Hogg tie it to her arms. “But I don’t expect that to happen.”

  “Right,” said Daniel, speaking more sharply than he normally would have. He really wanted to end the discussion. It hadn’t told him anything about Tovera—or Hogg, really—that he hadn’t known before, but it made him uncomfortable to dwell on it. “Let me take a look at your hand, Hogg.”

  “Naw,” said Hogg. “Let’s find the case, bring the Sissie in, and slap me under the Medicomp like Mistress Mundy says. Till then, I keep the glove on, right?”

  Daniel thought about it. “Yes,” he said, “all right.”

  He grinned as he stepped briskly up the remaining short length of the ramp. He’d been afraid he was going to lose his grip so that the seadragon would pull Hogg off the ramp. He had determined that he’d let his arms be torn from their sockets before he let his friend and servant down.

  It shouldn’t have surprised him that Hogg had felt the same way about failing Adele. The four of them functioned less as a team than as a close-knit family whose members would rather die than fail the others.

  It was a good group to be a part of. The best, by heaven!

  The tower roof was very slightly domed, and there was no coping around its edge. Rain would run off it down the smooth crystal sides, splashing on the ground fifty feet below.

  Daniel glanced back. Hogg was still inside, left-handedly cutting Tovera’s arms free, but Adele had followed.

  “I wonder if this place was built by spacers?” he said, grinning.

  She shrugged. “Or by birds,” she said. “At any rate, it doesn’t appear to be designed for human use.”

  Daniel felt his lips purse. “There are eccentric humans,” he said, “but I take your point. Still, that’s a question for the future. What we need now is to find Tovera’s case.”

  Adele unexpectedly sat on the rooftop and took out her personal data unit. She gave his puzzlement a tiny smile. “I was afraid that I might lose the control wands in the crash,” she said. “I didn’t, so I guess this was my lucky day.”

  She isn’t joking, Daniel realized. His smile spread slowly. Of course Adele hadn’t been concerned about being killed. Her troubles were over if that happened.

  He turned quickly to survey the boggy landscape. He didn’t want Adele to see the sudden grim cast of his face. Her problems might be over with her death, but Daniel Leary’s would become much worse. Perhaps insupportably worse.

  A wedge of faint violet lines, a hologram projected by Adele’s data unit, suddenly overlay the terrain before him. Its apex was the wreck of the car. He glanced toward her.

  “The axis of the triangle extends from the line between where the car hit before the last bounce,” Adele said, “to where it lies now. The edges are fifteen degrees to either side.”

  She shrugged. “That was a guess,” she said, “but I thought it might help to refine the search area.”

  Hogg and Tovera came up through the oval opening. Hogg looked pale, but his face was set in lines of glum determination.

  “Yes,” said Daniel with satisfaction. “That will help a great deal, I think.”

  He lowered the visor of his commo helmet. Its optics would give him not only magnification but other viewing options. A sweep in the infrared would make the case stand out if it were even slightly warmer or cooler than—

  “There it is,” Hogg said, pointing with his whole left arm. “Eighty yards out and behind that tussock of sedges. It looks like it’s . . . yeah, it’s floating. There’s a pond or something there, maybe a slough.”

  Daniel blinked. For a moment he felt as though he’d been insulted; then he burst out laughing.

  “What’s the matter, young master?”
Hogg said, frowning in surprise. “You see it there, don’t you?”

  Daniel lifted his visor again. “Yes, Hogg,” he said, “I see it now that you’ve pointed it out. Though I’d have found it eventually on my own, I’m sure.”

  “Of course you would’ve,” Hogg said in amazement. “It’s about as bloody obvious as a deacon in a whorehouse, isn’t it?”

  He grimaced. “Want me to go fetch it, then?”

  “One moment,” said Daniel, lowering his visor. A poacher’s experienced eye was a remarkable shortcut if you happened to have one available, but technology still had its place.

  The case was floating with only one corner above the surface of the pond; it looked like a miniature dark-gray iceberg. It was 238 feet from where Daniel stood—Hogg was slightly behind him, of course—and seven feet out from the shore.

  It was also about six feet to the right of Adele’s fifteen-degree estimate. The bank must be fairly sharp, because the vegetation cut off abruptly at the water’s edge.

  “I might be able to wade to it, I guess,” said Hogg. He knew that Daniel wasn’t going to let him and his injured hand go after the case, but he still lobbied for that solution. “Anyways, it won’t be much of a swim.”

  A seadragon slid under the attaché case and curved out of the field of Daniel’s magnified optics. It was about five feet long and had feathery gills along the sides of its neck.

  “It’s a nursery pool for the dragons, Hogg,” Daniel said as he widened his field of view slightly. The water had an amber tinge from tannin, but it was clear enough to show movement close beneath its surface. “I can see half a dozen of them. They seem to have territories.”

  “Do they come up for air, maybe?” Hogg asked hopefully.

  “No, they’ve got gills,” Daniel said. He lifted his visor and faced his servant directly. “I’ll need your knife.”

  “I could—” Hogg said tentatively, but he was reaching into a pocket. It was on the right side of his trousers, but they were baggy enough to let him tug a handful toward him.