What Distant Deeps-ARC

by David Drake

  "The island has the ruins of a Pre-Hiatus building," Adele said aloud. "Nobody is sure what it was intended for. The structure is rock crystal, not diamond, but that's how the island got its name. Some of the commentators claim that the so-called building is a natural outcrop, in fact."

  Daniel continued to increase his magnification; the eight-digit designator indicated a square three feet on a side, directly in the center of the glittering mass.

  "That's no natural outcrop!" he said in disgust. "Did whoever said that ever take a look at the site?"

  "Probably not," said Adele. The image clearly showed a tower at one corner of a hollow square; not, as Daniel had said, anything that nature could have contrived. "There's no reason to go there except the ruins, and they don't repay close study, according to the three personal accounts that I've located."

  Daniel chuckled, but his face fell back into crisply intent lines. He wore a smile, of sorts; but it made Adele think of a hunter waiting for just the right moment to squeeze his trigger.

  "There's supposed to be a portable landing beacon here, Adele," he said, "but I can't seen anything except the rocks. Can you . . . ?"

  "Would it be manned?" Adele asked as she began combing data according to new criteria. Daniel hadn't finished his question, probably because he didn't know how to go on, but he had provided her with sufficient information to make a start.

  "Umm," he said. "Normally, yes, but I suppose it wouldn't be necessary if the ships to be landed were already equipped with the code set. That isn't safe—there's a chance of a reciprocal, among other things. But you could."

  "Star travel isn't safe," Adele said. "But I take your point. I asked because none of my imagery shows any visitors whatever to Diamond Cay in the past thirty days."

  She fanned the images in two rows across the top of his display. They overlapped slightly: there were twenty-one of them. The quality ranged from fairly good to low-resolution black-and-white, but even the worst would show movement.

  "Where did you find these?" Daniel asked in delight. "Zenobia doesn't have surveillance satellites, does it?"

  "No," said Adele, trying to keep pride out of her voice. Otherwise she would be bragging. "But I've extracted imagery from the logs of all the ships in harbor that have recorders. Some of the smaller country craft do not, of course. The result isn't comprehensive, but twenty-one random checks is a good basis for confidence. If there was a human crew, one of these would show signs of their presence."

  "But there's something . . . ," said Daniel, expanding one of the videos. "And here, on this one too—what are these? They're not people, but they're something!"

  Adele brought up the zoological database she had loaded for this voyage. She had done it because of Daniel's personal interest, not because she expected to need it in their mutual work. That they did need it provided further support for her belief that there was no useless information.

  "I have an answer to that too," she said, smiling a little more broadly than usual.

  * * *

  Daniel stared in delight at the image which Adele placed in the lower right corner of his display. He immediately expanded it to full size, save for the left sidebar on which the Sissie's diagnostics ran. The latter weren't going to show anything important with the ship on the surface and most of her crew on liberty, but he would have worried if he didn't have them available.

  He smiled at himself. Besides, if the fusion bottle suddenly lost its magnetic field or an outrigger strut cracked, he wanted to know about it instantly.

  "The local name for them is seadragons," Adele said. "They're only found on Diamond Cay, so they're not very well known even by Zenobians. They're supposed to get as long as thirty feet."

  "Oh, this is very interesting . . . ," Daniel murmured, speaking more to himself than to Adele. "This is remarkable."

  The seadragon had a lizardlike body. Its head was long and broad, and the eyes were on the extreme sides of the skull. The creatures had four stumpy legs with paddles instead of feet; imagery showed that they could make quite good speed over soft ground. From the base of the short neck sprang a pair of arms barely long enough to transfer items to the jaws with prehensile fingers.

  According to the written description which sprang to life when Daniel highlighted an icon, the seadragons spent most of their lives in water but came out to breed and hatch their eggs. The adults shared the work of guarding the clutch.

  "The only thing they eat are pin crabs," said Adele, adding another image—also in the lower right, from which Daniel had expanded the seadragon. "And those live only in the shallow water around the cay. The dragons might be able to cross deep water, but the crabs can't."

  Daniel expanded the new image to the right half of his display. The 'crabs' looked more like toy balls, slightly underinflated and covered with spines which pivoted at the base but didn't bend.

  Video showed a crab the size of a pomelo staggering across the sea floor while spiking bits of food—both weed and smaller animals—which it transferred toward its mouth at the front with rhythmic pulses of its spines. When the morsel reached the vicinity of the mouth, the crab's gullet everted around the food, then withdrew to digest within the protection of the hard shell.

  "Adele," Daniel said, scrolling through further information on the biota of Diamond Cay, "please connect me with Commissioner Brown. And you'll loan me Tovera to fly the Commission aircar, will you not?"

  In past years, he might have said, "Can you connect me?" as though there were doubt as to whether Adele could enter the civilian telecommunications system from the Sissie's bridge. What would pass unnoticed as a figure of speech with another signals officer struck Adele as an insult—albeit an unintended one.

  "Tovera can drive the vehicle, yes," Adele said tartly as her wands moved. "But it appears to me that if there's a piece of electronics hidden on Diamond Cay, my skills are better chosen for finding it. As well as the matter being more within the scope of my duties."

  Switching to a clipped, almost disinterested, tone, she said, "Commissioner Brown? Hold for Captain Leary, if you will. Go ahead, Captain."

  "Commissioner?" Daniel said, keeping his tone buoyantly cheerful. "My officers appear to have the rerigging well in hand. I was hoping you could lend me your aircar to do a little exploring and maybe even some hunting. I'll get stale if I don't take a break away from the ship for a day or two, you see."

  "Why, my goodness, Captain," Brown said. "I didn't realize that this terminal was linked to the communications net. But yes, certainly. Would you like Master Gibbs to drive it? I'm afraid I can't myself. And to tell the truth, I'm more comfortable in an office than I would be in the wilds."

  "That's no trouble at all," Daniel said heartily. "We've got a number of drivers aboard the Sissie who'd like to get some fresh air also. Ah—could we pick the vehicle up as early as six-hundred hours tomorrow, do you think?"

  "Why, yes, certainly," Brown said. "I'll tell Gibbs to make sure that the batteries are fully charged."

  He paused, then added, "He's really a very able man, you know. Gibbs is. But I can't imagine what he's doing in his present position in Representation."

  "I can only assume that our lords and masters in the ministries had their reasons, Commissioner," Daniel said. "At any rate, thank you again. I'm really looking forward to getting away."

  He felt a tiny twinge as he broke the connection. Should he have told Brown about Gibbs' background? But it wasn't as though Clothilde Brown couldn't spot and deal with a womanizing scoundrel without her husband's help, assuming that she wanted to; nor that the Commissioner would be much help. Warning Brown would just make him uncomfortable without changing the result.

  Daniel thought for a moment, then looked across the compartment toward Adele's profile. Smiling at his image on her display, she said sardonically, "We have a number of aircar drivers? I'm trying to remember a landing by Barnes that I didn't consider a controlled crash. And as for Hogg, the modifier 'controlled' might be ex
cessive."

  "Well," he said mildly, "I didn't want to be too forthcoming about our intentions. Brown probably has some notion of what Tovera is. Or thinks he does."

  Daniel called up the visuals of Diamond Cay again, this time focusing on the terrain. Musingly, he said, "We'd best land as close as we can to the castle or whatever it is. That seems to be high ground and ought to be firm, but the rest of the island is marsh or at best a mudbank. You know, we might be better off going in the Sissie herself. The pontoons wouldn't care how thin the muck was."

  "It might be a little hard to explain using a corvette for a leisure trip," Adele said dryly. "But I suppose a bluff, honest naval officer wouldn't be concerned about that."

  Daniel laughed, though of course he hadn't been—really—serious. Sobering slightly, he said, "So? Would you like to go hunting with me and Hogg in the morning?"

  "Certainly," said Adele. "I continue to believe that this is more a matter for me—and Tovera—than for you."

  "If this were a matter of duty alone," said Daniel, returning to imagery of seadragons paddling with slow menace through the shallow water, "that might be true. But there's something else that you may not have noticed. The seadragons have arms and four legs."

  "Yes," said Adele, frowning slightly. "But six-limbed animals aren't unusual. I recall that some of the birds at Bantry had legs and four wings."

  "So they did," said Daniel. "All the native vertebrates on Cinnabar have six limbs. But the native species here on Zenobia have four. That means that the seadragons came from off planet, and from someplace—because I checked the very complete zoological database which my signals officer thoughtfully equipped the Princess Cecile with as soon as you showed me the images—which hasn't been discovered."

  Daniel brought up a close-up of the crystal structure. "You mentioned that the castle is Pre-Hiatus," he said. "I'm wondering now if it might not date from before the human settlement of Zenobia."

  He grinned like a child holding a toy he's always dreamed of.

  CHAPTER 13: Over the Green Ocean, Zenobia

  Daniel leaned out the port side of the open aircar, angling his face slightly backward so that the 200 mph airstream didn't slap his helmet broadside. It wasn't a lot more comfortable that way, but it helped a little.

  "The water's changing color from gray-green to bottle green!" he shouted. "And the weed here looks different too. See, bunches branch from one root instead of floating in single long strips the way what we saw off the continental coast did. I wonder if the weed is extra-planetary too?"

  Ordinarily a car travelling at this speed would be closed up, but Daniel liked to be able to look straight into the sea a hundred feet below. Hogg and Tovera in the cab hadn't complained, and Adele didn't seem to care.

  She was looking at her data unit's display. She'd set it to be omnidirectional, probably to forestall the curiosity that she knew Daniel would feel even if he didn't ask her directly. The hologram was a real-time image of the sea ahead of them. She must have linked to the car's bow camera rather than look at the landscape with her own eyes.

  Daniel smiled, as much at himself as at his friend. What Adele was doing actually made more sense than him being buffeted into a headache by the airstream despite his helmet. But their choices were personal ones which had very little to do with logic or reason. He and Adele complemented one another perfectly.

  The car had slowly been tilting its starboard side downward. Tovera corrected with a violent lurch that would have thrown Daniel out if he hadn't been used to that and worse every time he brought a starship shudderingly down through an atmosphere.

  Hogg grunted and tapped the steering yoke in front of his—co-driver's—seat. Shouting to be heard over the windrush, he said, "Look, you're probably tired. Want me to take over?"

  Daniel looked forward and said, "That won't be necessary, Hogg. Besides, we're almost there."

  In truth, Tovera wasn't a particularly good aircar driver: she drove by the book and tended to overcorrect when real conditions varied from what the book expected. Furthermore, the present vehicle had been run hard by the Land Forces and had gotten a minimum of maintenance after it had been transferred to Commission ownership.

  Having said that, Hogg was a simply terrible driver, a fact he would never admit and which he probably didn't believe. He'd been driving ground vehicles through the woods and pastures of Bantry before he was a teenager, and for that sort of rough-and-ready service he was the right man.

  Hogg tried to drive aircars the same way, however. In the air, his ham-handed seat-of-the-pants style combined with recklessness to make him not just dangerous but suicidal. If he drove at low altitude, he hit the ground. The one time Daniel had allowed him to go well up above the treetops with an instructor, he set the vehicle oscillating so wildly that he would have crashed tumbling if the instructor hadn't grabbed the controls, landed, and adamantly refused to go up with him again.

  When Daniel glanced forward to squelch Hogg, he saw Diamond Cay through the windscreen. The crystal building was unmistakable, but the heavy vegetation of the shoreline was hard to separate from the weed-choked green waters. The island seemed to be a mudbank. If storms of any significance crossed the Green Ocean, they must sweep over the land without even slowing down.

  "Throttle back, Tovera," Daniel shouted. "And when you get closer, start to circle with the castle on my side."

  An aircar could hover, but he doubted whether Tovera's skills were up to the task. If this had really been merely a sightseeing expedition, Daniel would have borrowed Gibbs to drive for them. He didn't particularly like the commander, but the man had driven with smooth skill when he picked up Brown and his family.

  A seadragon had been coiled around a clutch of eggs. It raised its long neck from a bed of reeds and challenged the car's fans with a steam-whistle shriek. Though the creature was ten feet long, its wet-looking, mottled green scales were a close enough match for the vegetation that Daniel hadn't noticed the creature until it moved.

  "That's a ramp inside the tower, not steps," Hogg said, pointing left-handed. He had a stocked impeller upright on the seat beside him, his right hand on the grip just in case he needed—wanted—to throw the weapon to his shoulder. Daniel's similar weapon—they were supposed to be hunting, after all—was on the rear-facing seat ahead of him. "Unless they're really worn, maybe?"

  Tovera had reduced speed to about 40 mph. She was holding the car commendably steady as she circled a hundred feet out from the crystal structure. One wall of the square was puddled, and part of the tower's adjacent side had been sheared away. Through the gap, Daniel saw a ramp curling around the axis of the tower to serve rooms against the exterior walls.

  The damage seemed to have been caused by melting, though for the life of him Daniel couldn't imagine what had done it. A plasma cannon would have had a shattering effect, very different from what he saw. He didn't know of a weapon that could provide enough sharply focused heat to turn rock crystal liquid.

  "I don't see equipment inside the tower," Hogg said. "Just trash washed in on the tide, it looks like."

  The car continued to circle. They were on the undamaged side by now. A seadragon called from out of sight, deeper in the swamps.

  "The rooms at the top weren't torn open," Tovera said. "Should I land?"

  "Not yet," said Daniel "I'd like to stay in the air as long as we can. Adele? Does your data unit have enough power send a signal on four-point-one-three-five into the building from here, or do we have to be inside? That's the frequency that switches on the beacon, so we'll know it's there. Well, the default frequency, but nobody bothers to change them."

  "I can relay it through the car's transceiver," Adele said, doing something with her wands. "One moment."

  The transceiver in the forward cab popped, then exploded into hissing blue sparks. Three of the four fans shorted out simultaneous. The car started to flip over.

  * * *

  The bang! of the exploding transceiver startled
Adele. Regardless, she slipped her personal data unit into its pocket without bothering to shut it down; the wands went in beside it instead of being properly clipped to the housing. They might very well jostle loose, but she could use the unit's virtual keyboard if they did.

  And anyway, she probably wasn't going to survive more than the next few seconds. None of them were.

  Blue sparks blew from the fascia plate, filling the cab. Hogg slammed off the power switch on the console between him and Tovera, then stood. He hauled back on his control yoke with his whole strength.

  Three drive fans had shorted out when the transceiver did, but the right rear unit had continued to run until Hogg shut it off by the quickest means possible. The asymmetric thrust would have flipped the aircar over and down, sending it tumbling into the ground instead of just crashing.

  "Lean right!" Hogg bellowed. "Hell bugger us if you don't all lean right!"

  Because Hogg had cut the main switch instead of trying to find a specific toggle on an unfamiliar control panel, he didn't have servo motors to help with the controls. He was fighting the airstream, using sheer brute force to force the pivoting surfaces on the underside of the vehicle to bite against the dive.

  Tovera hauled on her yoke also, copying Hogg. He was the one who'd known what to do, though. The countryman had more experience with vehicles that were just beyond the edge of control than almost anyone else you could name.

  Adele smiled faintly. Just as there was no useless information, it appeared that there was no useless experience.

  She gripped her side of the car with both hands and leaned as far out as possible. Daniel sprang across the cabin to do the same. The aircar didn't have belts or harnesses for the passengers; given that the vehicle was ex-military, it may never have had them. In the present circumstance, that was good because it allowed those aboard to instantly throw their weight against the vehicle's tilt.

  Adele watched the ground coming up—rotating up counterclockwise—fast, but the car was more or less on an even keel: her weight and Daniel's, and the drivers' efforts, had stabilized them. That didn't repeal the law of gravity, of course, and without power the vehicle had more resemblance to a brick than to a glider.