by Ginger Booth
Karin snorted. “You do realize that’s for 12-year-olds. Right? What, you survived a single night outdoors alone?”
“Hey, it was scary!” Eli objected. “I’m a Mahinan in my forties! We have no wildlife on Mahina.”
“Huh,” Karin acknowledged. “I’m ordered to transport the accused to Hermitage.”
“Karin, your orders are dishonorable!” Eli attempted. “Contemptible! Who would follow such an aardvark?”
“Really sounding like a 12-year-old,” Karin judged. “Look, they’re accused of a crime. It’s for the courts in Hermitage to decide. Otherwise I’m ordered to fire at you.”
Abel reasoned, “While we cannot shoot back. If we do, you’ll claim our ship in recompense, and we’re stranded here for life. Back down, Karin!”
Eli winced and squeezed his arm. Abel glared at him.
“You back down!” Karin screamed. “Target their –”
A shot to the ash in front of Koala erupted in a cloud. Ben held his hands up in surrender. I didn’t do it!
No, Nanomage did that, banking in to take station at Karin’s 4’o’clock, far enough back to clear Ben’s aim.
“Another shot behind them? Box them in?” Wilder suggested over the comm.
“Just stay put,” Abel instructed. “Her move.”
Wilder argued, “Abel, if that bitch fires on you, I fire back!”
“Hold, dammit!” Abel ordered. “Karin, this is unreasonable. I suggest we all step back from the brink before we do something we’ll regret –”
“Truer words are rarely spoken,” cut in another voice on the channel. “This is Selectman Aden of Waterfalls.”
“Thank heavens, Selectman,” Abel breathed. “We need –”
“You will surrender your two accused engineers to Koala,” Aden continued. “Or you will have no safe harbor on this planet. Waterfalls will withdraw its hospitality. Abel, be reasonable. They are accused of stealing valuable property –”
“We salvaged that ‘valuable property’ from the bottom of the sea!” Abel countered. “You lost it, we retrieved it. You have no way of using it, and we needed it! The captain salvaged that ship at great personal risk.”
“Yes, and all of these things will be taken into account at the trial,” Aden replied smoothly. “But first you must surrender your personnel. Then – and only then – the rest of you can return to Waterfalls as our guests. Abel, you have no choices here.”
Abel fumed a couple seconds. Eli and Ben made motions to suggest they had ideas, but he ignored them. “Why, Aden? Why would you sell us out like this?”
“I don’t perceive that you have been treated in any way unfairly, Abel. The innocent have nothing to fear from Denali law, I assure you.”
“I’ll surrender them in Waterfalls, not to Hermitage,” Abel countered. Ben looked outraged beside him. “Only after we complete our relief mission – in progress! And I demand to speak to Selectman Gorey.”
“Gorey is no longer in charge of the Denali Prime rescue operation,” Aden replied in his unflappably self-satisfied tone. “Selectman Diego of Hermitage gave your captain orders, which she sadly chose to ignore. Where is the lovely Captain Sass, by the way? I am not accustomed to speaking with underlings.”
Abel flipped his middle finger at the console. “Sass is actively engaged in a rescue.” He fervently hoped that was true, that the captain was saving herself from an underground river as they spoke. Because he sure as hell wasn’t doing her any good.
“Hm. May I speak to Clay?” Aden requested.
“Clay is off-ship with Sass.” Abel checked a camera. Clay appeared to be rigging ropes and preparing to dive underground. He pointed to the image and mouthed Stop him! to Ben.
“You may speak to me,” Eli offered. “Dr. Eli Rasmussen. Selectman Aden, you are risking a severe interplanetary incident. My government on Mahina will be deeply disturbed. I urge a pause to consult with Mahina, reflect, complete our current rescue mission, retrieve our personnel on the ground, and then return to Waterfalls for discussion.”
“I’m afraid Koala has already received orders to fire upon you by Hermitage,” Aden replied. “If that should transpire, the situation grows unmanageable.”
Abel growled, “We are not responsible for those foolish orders!”
“You are now banned from Waterfalls,” Aden replied. “Surrender your men, and you will be restored to guest status. Fail to surrender your engineers, and your ships are forfeit, your entire crew criminals. Aden out.”
“Dammit!” Abel pounded the dash, and pressed another button. “Aurora, I need to talk to Gorey, immediately!”
“I’ve secured the prisoner Copeland,” Aurora replied in a subdued voice. “Send Ben to the cargo hold and land, Abel. We can straighten this out, I promise. But first we have to turn them over.”
Beside him, Ben hastily selected a camera in the hold. Aurora held a knife to Cope’s throat. The engineer held his hands up. Kaz and Cortez leveled guns at each other.
“I’ll give myself up,” Ben volunteered. “Don’t let them hurt Cope.” He rose from his chair and headed for the hold.
“I’ll go along,” Eli offered. “As their advocate on site. Abel, you’ve got to contact Hunter Burke and Guy Fairweather on Mahina. And Gorey. I can’t believe he’d be party to this.”
“That’ll take hours!” Abel argued.
“Yeah. It will.” Eli pressed his shoulder. “Land the ship.”
Dr. Tyler stood, arms crossed, watching Aurora and Kaz take the engineer hostage, Dr. Yang spell-bound by her side. They were preparing for the intake of new refugees, and instead this happened.
Tyler quite liked young Copeland. From the first he treated her as a person instead of a nuisance. He knighted her with an ice wand. Though harried beyond belief, the engineer always put appropriate priority on her requests from medical. The tableau before her made no sense whatsoever.
“Eli!” she cried, as the botanist and the cheerful junior engineer started down the thrumming steel stairs from the catwalk, hands raised in surrender. “What is happening?”
“Aden of Waterfalls demands we surrender our engineers to Diego of Hermitage,” he replied. “Or Waterfalls will retract their sponsorship of us. We’d have no home port here. I’m going along as their spokesman.”
“No one else!” Aurora argued. “Just… The two.”
“Aurora, what the hell?” Tyler demanded, alarmed. “And you, Kaz! How could you possibly take part in this?” She’d heard tales of the prison in Hermitage, bad ones. She added in a murmur to Dr. Yang beside her, “Necrotic bakkra. Do you have countermeasures?”
His eyebrows raised. “That’s not just a story?”
“Not from what I’ve heard,” she returned grimly. She turned and beckoned Eli to her.
Ben continued across the floor to Cope. “I surrender. Get that knife off his neck. We’ll go quietly. Won’t we, Cope?”
How gallantly foolish, Dr. Tyler feared, worrying her lip. She shoved Eli toward the med bay. “Hurry!”
“I obeyed orders from my captain,” Cope argued. “We retrieved valuable machinery from the ocean floor that would have been lost forever. A tragedy for the entire Aloha system, not just Denali. And now the Denali steal back from us, and call us the criminals?”
“Easy, buddy,” Ben urged. “We cool our heels in Hermitage for a while, and the captain will get us back. No one’s leaving the planet without us.”
Eli emerged from med bay, far more somber and thrusting ampules into his pockets. He nodded to Tyler in thanks. She joined him to retrieve proper face masks and air tanks for the three transferring to Koala.
“I said Eli stays here!” Aurora repeated, securing Copeland’s wrists first.
“I refuse to do that,” Eli returned. “I will not allow our crewmen out of my sight.”
Was it Tyler’s imagination, or did Aurora sound increasingly uncomfortable with her role in this?
“I’ll do that,” Kaz declared. “I will watch the Hermitage and
ensure your people are treated fairly.”
“I am supposed to accompany them,” Aurora countered.
“Then we shall be five,” Eli insisted.
“We shall not!” Aurora cried, frustrated.
Eli simply proceeded to step into the airlock with masks and tanks for five, unbudging. Glaring at him, Aurora brought along her hostages. Young Kaz wore a stone face as he helped affix masks and tank harnesses to the bound engineers. Tyler and Dr. Yang drifted along to watch and foil Cortez’s aim, lest she attempt anything rash.
As the door began to hiss closed, Kaz grabbed Aurora’s shoulders, and kicked her out with a boot applied to her butt. Tyler grabbed her and pulled her aside. Dr. Yang gave her a shot. “Flaccidone,” he explained.
Tyler smirked back. The drug was a powerful muscle relaxant.
“Counter-hostage,” she explained to Aurora. “And you will tell us everything about what’s going on, you shameless weasel.”
But the other four were gone.
35
Sass held onto the broomstick for dear life, as the current claimed her and tumbled her. The stream tried to suck her breath mask off her face. She clamped that with the other hand. Instinct made her hold her breath, and squeeze her eyes shut. Both were silly. She opened her eyes onto a confusing orange cauldron. The pull of the water was so strong that she had no sense of which direction was down. But the lighter orange of the sky rolled past a couple times, interspersed with dark shades.
With a presence of mind owed to recent long hours on the ocean floor, she hauled her stout boots to point downstream. Those were the part of her best equipped to withstand impacts and fend her off the rocks.
She seemed to be rotating around something smooth and hose-like. She prayed it wasn’t a snake. With no hands free, she clamped a knee around it. Almost immediately, her efforts were rewarded by that knee smashing into a boulder. Screw that. She was attempting to catch it under her arm-pit when suddenly the sun blinked out.
The churning maelstrom spit her into the air. What direction was down was now obvious. She flailed while she fell. She caught just a glimpse upward of the dyed-orange sunlight before she hit the underground lake below the waterfall in a flat-footed pencil dive.
Plunging meters deep, she almost lost her mask. But her feet hit the bottom. She spring-boarded back to the surface with all the power one leg could muster. Her bashed left knee contributed a lackluster performance.
Nevertheless, she bobbed to the surface. The heavy shower zone pelted her. A few strong kicks propelled her free of that. Fortunately this waterfall formed no whirlpool below it. She still felt the insistent tug of a current, but she was a strong enough swimmer to kick herself to quieter waters even with both hands full.
The other end of her broom bore no passenger. She was in an underground cavern. The glaring Denali sun, even filtered through a narrow hole and orange water, still cast a circle of light. As her eyes adjusted, Sass caught sight of the man she was trying to save, bobbing face-down across the current less than 10 meters away.
She tucked the broom under her arm and let go of the mask, in no present danger of losing it. A dozen swift sidestrokes brought her to the guy, whom she quickly rolled face-up. His breath mask was gone, possibly to the same cause as the gash across his forehead. She transferred her own onto him. In the process of shifting behind him, her boot hit the ground. She could stand. That made things easier.
As well as she could around his prodigious backpack, she got her arms around his diaphragm and thrust, hard, trying to empty his lungs. The drowning danger was obvious. Less so, one of the killing features of Denali’s atmosphere was an extremely high argon content. Heavier than oxygen, the stuff pooled low in the lungs to drown a human just as surely as water did. As Sass had noticed when they first found Nanomage, though, argon didn’t seem to trouble her nanites.
Being dead makes me hard to kill. She firmly ordered herself to shut up about that for the millionth time.
On the third sharp bear-hug, the man coughed, splattering the face mask. She gave him one more, and he seemed to rouse. Unfortunately, Sass began to feel the familiar wooziness of hypoxia sneaking upon her.
She pulled him around to face her, and grabbed the mask. She had to dunk it first for cleaning because he’d advanced to the vomiting phase, returning all the stream water he’d swallowed. With a couple sharp out-breaths, Sass forced argon out of her own lungs, then enjoyed a half dozen deep breaths of better air. Then she handed the face mask back to him just about the time he began looking frantic for it.
“Empty your lungs first,” she reminded him.
Sheepishly, he yanked up the mask to blow out, then gulped clean air in relief, off of her bottles. Then he seemed overtaken with panic, trying to get his backpack off. Sass helped, unsure why this made him frantic. He pulled out a spare face mask and tried to plug it in. Much easier for her behind him, Sass completed the hookup, then swapped masks.
“Sass Collier, captain of the Thrive spaceship out of Mahina,” she introduced herself, finally taking a moment to take in the boy before her. She doubted he was even 18. His bakkra colors were indeterminate as to his guild. Aside from a few intact farm domes, most survivors in Denali Prime had worn a mix of hunter bakkra and the sort that seemed to like volcanic ash, an olive drab melange that reminded Sass of military camouflage. On Earth, at least – camouflage on Mahina would be mushroom-colored, were there any point to wearing it.
“Teke,” he replied. “Technician with AML – the Advanced Materials Lab. Something broke our comms line to the bunker. I came back to repair the line.” He held up his cable.
“Is that what that is,” Sass murmured, her ‘snake’ exposed. She gazed up the 3-meter peach waterfall in its beam of orange glow. The cable still stretched above them. “So Teke. You know any way out of here?”
“Sure,” the teenager replied. “Climb the cable.”
Sass shot him a look of disbelief.
He grinned. “Or there’s a staircase.”
“You’ve done this before,” she accused with pointed finger.
“Love it!” he agreed, white teeth flashing. “This way.” He started splashing back across the current. He lost the bottom and had to swim a few strokes, but soon found footing again on the other side.
Sass paused to try her comms, to tell everyone she was OK. But she wasn’t surprised to find they didn’t work. She hastened to catch up to Teke as he sloshed ahead, now only waist deep in darker waters.
The cavern was growing dim indeed by the time they waded up a steep rock. Teke waited to help her down onto a dry shelf. “Fish around my backpack for a light?” he requested.
Sass envied the Denali that, how easily they called on each other for help. With no real belongings, they likewise dispensed with personal boundaries regarding them. “What shape?” she asked, as nothing tubular came to hand upon groping through the top layers.
“Ball, size of a mango,” he replied.
“Got it.” Sass had already felt that one, but skipped over it. Unable to find an ‘on’ switch, she simply handed the fruit-sized orb to him. He smacked it sharply on his knee, and a wide beam came on, of bluish light.
“Are you a hunter, Teke?”
“Technician,” he corrected plaintively. “Why does everyone ask me that? Plan to be an engineer. Here we are.” His light displayed a glass brick wall which bisected a couple round pools about the size of the diving exit Sass used at Neptune.
“I carved those with skyship fuel,” her guide confided. “Awesome stuff!” He started stripping off his backpack, then his sodden clothes, and all but one of his air tanks. These he dropped into the left-hand pool. “Gear,” he explained, dunking his backpack under the glass brick partition. Apparently it extended partway below the water surface.
“And we dive under the wall in this other pool?” Sass guessed, pulling off her own gear. He nodded. “Teke, do the grownups know about this bio-lock?”
“‘Grownups’?” he as
ked, faintly offended. “My boss would kill me. But it’s fine. The left pool is 50% peroxide. The right is 10%. I’ve got gargle and stuff on the other side. Bakkra detector, too. I’m not breaking bio-containment. You met Cora yet? She’s my boss.” His face betrayed great sorrow at this fact.
“What about the cable?” Sass asked, just as he got the dratted backpack tucked under the submerged wall.
“Dammit.”
She jumped in and retrieved it for him. While she was there, she quickly dunked her own belongings to the far side. Poor Teke stood frozen in horror, waiting to see what would happen to a human immersed in strong hydrogen peroxide solution. Even the 10% version was painful.
Sass hopped out of the pool, took in his expression, and muttered, “I’m tougher than I look.” To her surprise, her bashed knee didn’t even hurt. She glanced down at it. Black and blue, but no skin broken, at least not anymore. A flex test showed its springiness on the mend.
Teke accepted the backpack and squatted, scenically naked, to fish out wire-cutters and clip the cable. Then he shrugged and pragmatically decided to just bring the backpack with him via the weaker pool. He gazed at Sass searchingly. “I wouldn’t leave my eyes open.”
“No,” she agreed. That would cause damage. But not beyond healing. She really didn’t want to have this conversation with a teenager. She needed communications re-established with Clay before her lover decided to dive down a waterfall after her, alone and searching. “Can we speed this up?”
He gazed at her another moment, head cocked, then nodded. He slipped through the peroxide bath and out the other side as quickly as he could. Unencumbered, Sass beat him out the other side into pitch dark. The peroxide did indeed sting when she opened her eyes. Fortunately, he soon flopped out beside her and turned on a shower. This one was pure water. Within a couple minutes they performed all the basic ablutions and rinsed their gear. As usual, Sass’s comm tablet didn’t pass the bakkra test.
Neither did Teke. He eyed her nervously as he downed the booby prize medication to clear the digestive tract, then spritzed stuff into his ears, nose, and mouth.