by L. Brown
“For now,” Logaht agreed.
“Hah!” Dahkaa rejoiced, now slapping the windscreen glass.
“Hey!” Garth shouted, waiting for the crack.
But Dahkaa just chuckled, stretched out his arms. “It’s obvious, David, don’t you see? We’re safe and alive, you’re supposed to survive!” And with that, he slapped the glass twice more. “Now, we’ll just hide for a while, make no sound, and when it’s clear — in a few hours more, we’ll ascend. You hear it, Logaht? The river’s far call?”
“What I hear—” Logaht cocked his ear toward a faint alarm. “Is the state of our fuel, we don’t have a few hours more. At best—”
“River?” interrupted Garth. “What river, what do you mean!”
“With our current reserves,” Logaht resumed, paying no heed to Garth, “we can only stay submerged for, as of now, twenty-two minutes.”
All levity pierced, Dahkaa turned to Logaht.
“I’m sorry, old friend.” Slumping now, Logaht kneaded the damp wrap on his brow. “But as I warned, our evasion depleted our fuel, and down here, we waste even more. So, our choice? We either stay here and sink, or in twenty-two minutes—” He checked a gage. “Now twenty-one, we execute a maximum profile ascent — and hope his every shot will miss.”
Nothing left to argue or add, the craft went quiet except for the nag, the persistent brap of the low-fuel alarm.
Yet as Garth stood there, tried to comprehend, an odd thought ricocheted in, a stray bullet from a boxed set of Treks. “Shields,” he blurted, the solution suddenly clear. “Can’t we just increase them, divert everything, route all power to the shields?”
But Dahkaa just stared, looked entirely perplexed.
“He speaks,” Logaht sighed, “of his fictions, the brightly colored books.”
Understanding now, Dahkaa slumped against the windscreen. “Shields, David, stop only swords. And as for this craft — it was built for spying and stealth, we sail unarmed.”
Stunned by the response, by an alien ship devoid of weapons and shields, Garth searched for a fallback. “So that’s it, we either stay and sink or ascend and explode?”
Dahkaa didn’t speak, but the slump of his shoulders said it all.
“Then what about talking,” Garth pressed, now flashing back to some long-ago class. “Can’t we just — negotiate?”
The arch of his back now losing its slump, Dahkaa glared at Garth.
“Harrgh,” came Logaht’s response, and though it sounded like gargle, Garth suspected a laugh, perhaps as close as a G’mach might get. “So, this is him, Dahkaa, the Promise foretold? The boy who would lead will first have us beg?”
Dahkaa ignored, just looked at the iceberg above, its overhang of crush. “He has no interest in words, David. Atta Ra — wants your mind.”
About to ask what he meant, Garth held back, for eyeing the iceberg from the bottom-up, he knew the moment was quite bad enough.
“He wants your mind because he wants you secrets,’ Dahkaa went on, “whatever you know. And for reasons neither Logaht nor I understand, Atta Ra gives weight to our ancient Promise, how in our darkest hour, we’ll be saved by a great Savakerrva. Moreover, this same Son of a King was also foretold to possess a certain — knowledge.
Garth went weak, didn’t want to ask. “About?”
“About the only thing that matters to everyone alive,” said Logaht. “And that would be death.”
Befuddled by the answer, Garth waited for more, but Logaht now seemed distracted, glanced between data streams on free-floating screens.
“In short,” Dahkaa resumed, eyeing the iceberg up in the murk, “Atta Ra and his G’mach seek the knowledge of not just how to delay death, but forever, so to speak, put it to rest. And that wisdom, this secret? They call it their Quest.”
Garth heard Dahkaa, even vaguely understood. But why anyone would assume some kid from Detroit might know how to dodge death left him not just confused, but deeply, densely fogged.
“And as their Quest continues,” Dahkaa went on, “as Atta Ra invades more worlds and builds more J’kel’s, they extend their reach and expand their search.”
“A search,” Logaht mumbled, focused on a particular screen, “that perhaps never ends.”
“Or perhaps,” said Dahkaa, “that ends with him.”
And though Dahkaa looked back, Garth avoided his eyes to instead just think, just peer through the gloom at the mountain of ice and wonder how it all happened, how real life became so not.
“A last deception, old friend?” asked Dahkaa, and turning to Logaht, he eyed the screens.
Garth exhaled. No longer the center of attention, he tried to forget everything just said. And for a moment, he nearly did, because one of Logaht’s screens now flashed images from — a satellite? Not the usual pictures, no weather fronts or Albanian news presenters animated the screen, no, these images suggested a more military orbit, photos of sea bases and ships.
“No last tactic,” Dahkaa sighed, “some clever trick?”
“Tricks, Dahkaa—” His tone flat, deadened with defeat, Logaht viewed sectors of apparently empty ocean while wondering, idly, what they all meant. “Are rarely clever, particularly to a Ninth Progress G’mach. So if we ascend — given our fuel and best possible speed — I expect he’ll find our track roughly ten miles up, and then we’ll be captured or—?”
Pausing now, magnifying an empty sector of ocean, Logaht puzzled over an icon labeled K-114.
“There’ll be no capture, we won’t be taken alive,” said Dahkaa, now cleaning the tip of his curved-blade knife. “So, diversion or not, we’ll ascend. And if he sees us—”
“And if he can’t?” The defeat in his voice not quite as strong, Logaht touched the K-114 icon, an action extracting reams of Russian Cyrillic text. “If we could muddle his view, obscure our trail—”
Curiosity piqued, Garth watched Logaht touch the Russian text, an interaction transforming the Cyrillic letters into unrecognizable — words? — a gibberish possibly G’mach.
“Boy!” snarled Logaht. “You know about Russians, their undersea craft?”
Mystified, Garth questioned if the stress was excessive, if Logaht was losing his mind.
“A chance?” asked Dahkaa, crouching beside the G’mach.
“Not much,” Logaht mumbled, thoroughly consumed with the streaming text. “We’d need ciphers, decryptions, classified codes—” But as Logaht’s fourteen fingers played the virtual screens, Garth watched them scroll with circuit diagrams and software code, the granular DNA of Russian ballistic missile submarine K-114.
“This vessel, David,” said Dahkaa, “you know it?”
“That?” replied Garth, an odd foreboding starting to rise. “A submarine, why’s he looking at that?”
“I’m looking,” said Logaht, “for surprise. Now, do you know anything about Russian submersibles, their methods and ways? How to spark an unauthorized launch?”
A question never before imagined or heard, Garth felt like an ox, a brute simply dumb. “Huh?”
Logaht ignored. Lost in his screens, in migraines of circuits and triple-encrypted code, he looked, to Garth, like a Boolean guru in a transcendent state, a being united with the zero and one. “Our window is small,” Logaht mumbled. “But if we could briefly disrupt, blind his guns when they find our track—”
“We could make it?” asked Dahkaa.
“Make what!” Garth fumed. “What’s happening, what—?” But then he couldn’t help it, could do nothing but watch as Logaht pulled apart the three-dimensional view of a submarine control room, a projection shadowed with bodies, apparently the actual crew. Then with subtle quivers from his fingers, those blighted digits excessively long, Logaht focused on a control console; and just like his invasion of the binder of grades, he peeled back layers to reveal what hummed within, the cables and wires and circuit board bits.
“You — you’re in the sub?” gasped Garth.
“Physically, no,” Logaht answered
. “But yes.”
His contradiction hanging, hurting Garth’s head, the G’mach extended two fingers over a circuit board image, over the silver contacts of a power transistor switch.
“But as for the result,” said Logaht, “what happens next?” Touching both contacts with his fingers, he began to narrow the gap. “Live or die, we’re about to find out.”
Not possible, just couldn’t be, but when both fingers touched, the virtual circuit made an actual click.
Captain Lenko collapsed on his bunk. Finally unwinding, sinking toward sleep, the K-114 commander gave a last, gaping yawn.
“Captain?”
Hating the interphone, Lenko just groaned.
“Sorry to bother, but something, ah, we have an odd—”
“Armed!” shouted a background voice. “Missile One just armed!”
Lenko opened his eyes at this, but he didn’t stir, didn’t do anything but marvel at the reality of this fatigue-driven dream.
“Missile countdown!” cried another voice. “It’s going to launch!”
“David!” shouted Dahkaa, now muscling open a deck hatch. “Here, down here, get in!”
Garth glimpsed the under-deck hold. A pod-shaped trunk with the room of a hatchback and the smell of a dump, it stunk of dead bear.
“Forty seconds!” Logaht barked. “Get him in!”
“No!” Garth protested. “Not till I get an answer, are you taking me home?”
“Home, yes, you’re going home!” said Dahkaa, yanking him toward the hold. “But until a boy becomes a man, the land of his father is his home. And since you’ve never seen it—”
“Thirty seconds!” Logaht announced.
“It’s time you did!” shouted Dahkaa, and with a pivoting shove, he stuffed Garth into the hold.
Captain Lenko charged into the madhouse, recently his control room. “Status!” he yelled.
“Missile One active, all warheads armed!” cried his exec.
“We’re running checklists, but it doesn’t respond!” hollered someone else. “Ten seconds to launch!”
An impossible assertion now confirmed by the countdown clock, Lenko watched nine seconds tick to eight as his boat prepared a ballistic missile launch. “Cut power!” he ordered.
“Unable!”
“Then deny guidance!”
“Unable!”
“Lock outer door, full starboard roll, emergency dive!” Lenko screamed.
“Unable-unable-unable, we’ve lost all control!”
“Impossible!” Captain Lenko raged. “It must be an exercise, a test, no missile will launch!”
Defying the Captain with a quiver and whoosh, Sineva ballistic missile Number One departed submarine K-114 without approval or command. Yet it didn’t travel alone, and as it broke from the waves and thundered for sub-orbital sky, it also carried its payload, four nuclear bombs.
“Dahkaa!” Locked in the hold, feeling their craft now buoyantly rise, Garth pounded the hatch’s porthole glass.
“No choice, David!” Scrambling fast, Dahkaa dove into his control pit. “Stay in this world, and Atta Ra would find you, you’d never be safe!”
“Twelve seconds to ascent,” Logaht declared, glancing between screens. “Deception up — masking up—” He lifted his thumb over a control yoke switch. “Departure profile — extreme.”
Clicking the switch rumbled the craft and shook Garth to his bones. Alone in the hold and dreading what next, he shivered at the light, the indigo glow charging the air.
“Home, David!” Dahkaa cinched a harness over his chest. “Starting now—”
“Ascend!” Logaht roared.
“You’re going home!”
Departing with a blast, a sustained feral din, Garth gasped from the slam now distending his face and mauling his flesh, the ballistic insanity of shooting straight up. Then out of the sea with a hot lick of steam, the small V-craft rode a shock of velocity into high, arctic sky.
Instantly aware, Atta Ra saw the waves part, yet he and his gunship were already too late. The V-craft excelled at deception, and for the moment, it left no trace.
But moments pass fast, and as gunship sensors began to catch up, flickers of data lit the gloom of Atta Ra’a perch. Success assured, ready to disable the craft and capture the boy, he watched, preternaturally calm, as the deceptions appeared, ghostly decoys shaped like V’s.
Expected, Atta Ra’s thought. Showing no hurry, he grabbed a floating wire, then guided its connector toward the port in his skull. The wire seated with a metallic tick, and immediately, his gloved fingertips gleamed. At one with his gunship, with every sensor and weapon aboard, he reached into the swirl of decoys, the flock of V-shaped craft. And whichever he touched, they dissolved, just melted like snowflakes as he slowly, methodically, reduced their count.
Garth grimaced in his tiny hold. Flogged by acceleration, he watched through his porthole as Greenland just shrank.
A flash interrupted, then several more, lances of light now swept from behind.
“Searching!” shouted Dahkaa. “A few seconds, he’ll find us, where’s your trick!”
Logaht’s eye started to twitch.
“Speak, Logaht, we have no time!”
Twitch increasing, Logaht now noted movement on a screen, four radar-like blips approached from the right. “Your eyes!” Logaht yelled. “Don’t look!”
Logaht turned away and Dahkaa shut his eyes, but Garth, sensing the worst, did both.
Sweeping away the last few decoys, Atta Ra cleared every V-shaped deception until just one remained. No more icy evasions or chasing false tracks, this was it, the actual craft, and every probability suggested the boy was aboard. The last Savakerrva now within reach, Atta Ra knew if the myth proved true, if the boy held the secrets to the way around death? Then this was it, the end of the Quest. Nothing remained but to disable their engine and capture the boy, so Atta Ra found a brass trigger and started his pull.
Then paused at a warning, a proximity alarm announcing something ahead.
Debris, the probabilities suggested, scraps of a satellite in terminal decay. But when a cursory scan revealed four warheads packed with fissile plutonium, Atta Ra’s eyes, what once were eyes, surged with an intensity implying surprise; and when the realization hit, so did the blast.
Four-hundred kilotons blowing into a small ball of sun, the nuclear flash scorched the gunship. And though the metal held, ever sensor lit from the surge, a radiative blast overloading the circuits and racing through wires straight for Atta Ra’s brain.
“Clear!” shouted Logaht, his screens devoid of warning and whelp. “Search broken, he no longer hunts!”
Roused by Dahkaa’s celebratory shout, Garth opened his eyes. And promptly forgetting the agony of the ascent, he gaped, incredulous, at flung buckets of stars. Far beyond Greenland and way past Detroit, the boy without destination or course sailed into space.
“There!” Dahkaa exulted, pointing from his pit. “Ahead, David, you see it?”
Mugging his porthole and angling for a view, Garth saw only uncounted stars. Then, strangely, he saw a few less, because directly ahead, a dark, curving thread snuffed some out. Unnatural and unsettling, it reminded of a coal black stream, an infinite Nile into uncharted night.
“The River,” Dahkaa rasped, that ebony thread now growing in size. “And for better or worse, it was created by the G’mach, by their demonic J’kels.”
“Which now number twelve,” added Logaht. “Twelve J’kel created, twelve worlds shorn of all life — this ‘River Afar,’ as Dahkaa calls it, allows travel through space in near-zero time. Though in the minds of some, the time never ends.”
Typically cryptic, Garth wondered what he meant.
“And though the channel before us lacks depth,” Dahkaa continued, “can float nothing larger than Atta Ra’s ship, well, that’s why he invaded, why his G’mach ravaged my world and built another J’kel.”
“And should they finish it,” said Logaht, “if Atta Ra succ
eeds—”
“But he can’t, Logaht, your Ninth Progress has finally lost! Do we not have the last Savakerrva, are we not returning with the Promise foretold?” And though Dahkaa looked triumphant, Garth showed only shock, the unfocused gaze of the unanchored mind.
“To the river, old friend!” Dahkaa called out. “Home, Logaht, take us—?”
Shredding the moment, an alarm re-awoke with ear-piercing tones.
“Closing,” said Logaht, checking his screens. “The blast gave us time, just not enough.”
“It’s never enough,” Dahkaa sighed. “He has our track?”
“He will if he persists, and at this rate—” Logaht blinked now, tried to stop the return of his twitch. “We’ll have a minute, not much more.”
The light was weak, but to Garth, Dahkaa seemed to pale.
“Our time to the river?” Dahkaa asked.
“With evasion, two minutes.”
“Without evasion?”
“He’ll discern our track, disable our drive, and then we’ll be killed,” Logaht replied. “Except, of course, for him.” But when he nodded toward the hold, the boy in the porthole found his voice.
“Out!” Garth demanded, pounding the hatch. “Let me go!”
Dahkaa didn’t move. Reeling from the turn, from success cracking into defeat, he knew the river was a bridge too far. But as Garth protested, out-shouted alarms, Dahkaa turned to the boy with a startling thought; and wondered if — instead of three escaping, if fate only had plans for one.
“Logaht!” Dahkaa shouted, pointing toward Garth in the hold. “It releases?”
The moment too crowded, the question too vague, Logaht just stared.
“The hold, Logaht! Can we drop it, release it, send him through?”
The yellow eye widened. “Alone?” asked the G’mach.
“Our task is done, old friend, all that matters is him! But could he make it, could he survive?”
Logaht hesitated. “I don’t know, Dahkaa. Could you?”
Alarms wailed. Neither spoke. And Garth, stuck in a trunk of stink and meat, just pounded the hatch. “Open it! Let me go!”
About to bloody his fists, Garth stopped when the hatch swung out.