Storm Ring

by Stephen J. Carter

  *

  It was mid-afternoon when Carmen and Franklin emerged above the tree line on their climb towards the ridge. They walked in silence, the haze-hidden sun behind them.

  Their trek through the hillside forest brought them to a dip in the land, leading into a small glade. There was very little undergrowth in the shadow of the canopy of leaves. They came to a stream.

  The watercourse was strangely sluggish where the sloping hillside should have had it flowing fast. The water hardly moved in places. Carmen ran a stick along the surface – it left a wake in the water that took several seconds to dissipate. Over those physics-defying slow areas there moved small whirlpools of vapor. Carmen knelt by the stream.

  “It’s the stilling,” Franklin said, at her side.

  They watched the whirlpools, which reminded him of dry mist, a quantum hypothesis he had worked on years earlier. They skittered back and forth, in the water but not of it. The water’s viscous appearance diminished slightly after one of the insubstantial whirlpools passed. Franklin pointed to one – it had bright particles dispersed throughout. He cocked his head, considering.

  “Have you heard of quantum techne?” he asked.

  Carmen leaned forward. “That whirlpool …”

  “Is an atom,” he said.

  She looked up, and saw he wasn’t joking.

  “Vastly expanded, obviously,” he added.

  She countered by responding just as literally. “Franklin, no atom expanded to the scale of matter could exist in our space.” She smiled at how that sounded.

  He held her gaze. “What do you think your spheres are?”

  The old man stood up and walked on.

  ______________

  Emerging from the crevice back into the underwater section of the canyon, Mick looked up at the floodlit outline of the cutter above – an octagonal shadow within a much wider circle of light. They broke surface and rolled onto the craft’s stern tumbrel, which swiveled them smoothly into the craft.

  They sat looking into the darkness beyond the light’s perimeter. It was disorienting to emerge from the confined space of the tunnel into the lantern’s illusion of vast space.

  They joked to fill the gap made by the prospect of leaving the cutter behind.

  “We have a choice,” Mick had said.

  “Stay here in this lightless canyon of lost hopes and shattered dreams,” Turok said.

  “A home away from home.”

  “Or descend deeper into the belly of the beast.”

  “No contest,” Mick added.

  “The beast it is!” Turok exclaimed.

  It appeared the crevice and submerged tunnel were the only way out of this underground cavity, except of course for the falls lost to sight on the far side.

  Turok cast a long look back. “The water drains out of here down through that other tunnel. We must be way below sea level by now.”

  “That tunnel descends to the northwest,” Mick said.

  “To the ocean?”

  “Must be.”

  “But wouldn’t the tide move the current towards us?”

  Mick nodded. “So either I’m wrong on the direction, or –”

  “Or that tunnel reaches below the ocean floor.”

  That realization brought home to them just how deep their descent was taking them. They set about preparing to abandon the cutter. Mick took a mooring line and tied off one end into a wide loop. He slipped that under a flat boulder on the ledge-like shore, and cinched it tight. Turok gathered their equipment and stored it in four synthetic storage bags. He tossed all four bags overboard, and slid in after them. He attached the cords from two of the bags to his belt, popped the template in his mouth, switched the crystal lantern to forward flood, and adjusted the bags’ buoyancy. He followed them down and vanished into the crevice. The canyon was plunged into relative darkness.

  Mick tied off the two remaining bags, and by the beam of the small flashlight took a last look at the moored cutter. He exhaled a long breath into the template and let himself submerge. At the crevice he paused a moment and switched off the flashlight. He let himself feel the oppressive weight of this large cavity they were leaving, pitch-black and empty, and gladly turned into the crevice. He pulled ahead and handed to Turok the end of the disc line, and so connected the two of them.

  Within minutes they approached the T-junction. Mick was well aware the current in the transverse tunnel might rip away their gear, despite their security lines, or it might later accelerate enough to hurl them against any obstructions in the tunnel. But they had little choice.

  As they covered the last yards Mick made some final adjustments to the bag, slid the flashlight band over his wrist, and shortened the disc line. They spent a moment treading water, steeling themselves. Mick looked over at Turok and nodded, then kicked out into the faster tunnel, Turok following right behind. The disc line connecting them snapped taut as Mick was whipped ahead. As both bags impacted the wall Mick was wrenched sideways. His back slammed hard, almost knocking away the flashlight, and behind him Turok’s forward momentum was slowed for a heartbeat before shooting off again. Their speed picked up as the tunnel descended at a steeper angle; they quickly learned they could only guide themselves by pushing away from the walls with their feet. The tunnel widened out and continued on, moving steadily further down. They maneuvered into mid-channel and were able to stay clear of the walls much of the time. On several occasions they almost became entangled in their lines – Mick seriously considered cutting the disc line at one point, though getting separated would not have improved matters. He was suddenly spun around and for a moment was completely disoriented, not knowing which way was forward, or where Turok was. He shone the flashlight forward and aft.

  The force of the current was pushing Mick up, and he saw the tunnel had turned up a few degrees. He changed his angle to match its slow rise. A feeling of spaciousness caused him to look up, and he saw that above him the water had a surface again. He pressed the buoyancy nozzle and rose with the bags. When he broke surface he still didn’t see Turok, but he did see the floodlight beam wash across the ceiling from behind. He turned and saw Turok about a hundred yards back. He sighed with relief. The current had slowed, though they were still being driven forward and down again.

  The underwater tunnel had opened out into an expansive underground river. It felt good just no longer being submerged. He again checked behind, Turok was closing the gap. Looking ahead he saw that the open river continued, and widened out more, in the flashlight beam. He corrected his first observation – the regularity of the shoreline made this look more like a large canal than a river. Despite the tunnel’s recent rise the current showed this waterway had resumed its descent. He waited. The surface gradually slowed; Turok was getting nearer, and waved. Within moments he caught up, and they set about tying the four bags together side by side, forming a makeshift raft. Turok lashed the lantern upright on one of the bags, and set it to the 360-degree flood mode. The watercourse that bore them along was about a quarter-mile wide. The channel roof loomed several hundred feet above. The embankment extended up a short distance on both sides. They lay half-on the raft of bags, their legs trailing in the water.

  “We made it!” Turok said, breaking the silence, sounding mildly surprised.

  “I almost cut away the disc line,” Mick announced.

  Turok looked horrified for a moment, and then burst into laughter. Mick joined in, and the sound of it carried up, chasing away the silence of the channel.

  They floated along, a small bubble of light moving through the darkness. The channel sporadically meandered to one side a few degrees, and then swung over to the opposite side, back and forth. Time passed as languidly as did the watercourse. The darkness, the flow of the water that bore them along, and their descent – it all continued.

  After what must have been several hours, Mick raised his head and looked around. He thought he saw the floodlight catch something in its beam on the s
hore. He switched to spotlight and swiveled back. Turok pulled himself fully forward on the bags, and watched the shore. The banks had displayed shale rock with unvarying regularity leading down to the water’s edge. The shoreline was now a flat, horizontal surface, more like a wharf of interlocking slabs. Mick panned the beam slowly ahead. A long rectangular structure leapt into view. They looked further up the watercourse, and saw that the passageway the channel moved through expanded yet again. The channel was now as arrow-straight as the light beam itself. Turok whistled under his breath.

  More buildings were visible far in the distance. They were entering the environs of a subterranean city, buried in silence and darkness.

  Mick suspected that even the watercourse’s current, which never seemed to vary by much, had been engineered long ago. The miles scudded by. The landscape they were passing through, apart from the appearance of grey, dead-looking buildings, remained bland and featureless. The buildings did become more numerous, clustering in certain areas, then thinning out again. The first double story buildings marked a shift. The shoreline ahead became in fact the sides of the buildings themselves, rising straight up from the waterline, or overhanging it. Soon after that multistory buildings appeared. In the sections of lower buildings they could see far beyond the shoreline, and caught brief glimpses of a vista of buildings rising away in terraces. The sides of the passageway retreated even further, and the overhanging roof of rock lifted upward, becoming as smooth and featureless as everything else around them.

  Several hours had passed since they encountered the first buildings. The current was barely enough to move them forward, which for the moment was not such a disappointment. The truth was – they felt a reluctance to move deeper into what was evidently an underground city, and their compacted provisions wouldn’t give out for another couple weeks. Ahead they could see an enormous bridge, as white as glacier ice, above the dark water. It towered above the watercourse atop eight slender pillars, only a yard thick at their widest point. The bridge itself was easily wide enough to hold a dozen lanes. They floated along, becalmed, and kicked to move slowly towards the bridge. A desultory current came along behind as they got back into the center of the watercourse. Their speed picked up.

  Mick flopped over and looked up at the bridge’s underside. He was fascinated by its construction. The pillars’ grace held the eye, standing like eight wineglasses set in a row, their stems rising high above the channel. Above the pillars the bridge proper appeared to be one uninterrupted synthetic surface. Passing beneath Mick saw that the bridge’s surface in fact consisted of large molded sections, twenty feet square. Their floodlight raised a soft glow in the nearest pillars as they floated silently underneath.

  Mick switched the lantern to spot and full power. He swiveled it to shine directly along the length of the bridge, and they saw that its far end continued above the shoreline on that side, and into the cavern wall.

  “It must connect to another part of the city,” Mick said, “in another cavern.”

  “Or another city,” Turok replied.

  They slipped by within a few yards of a jet-white pillar. Beyond the bridge the environs of the built-up area angled off to the side. They were finally approaching a turn after hours of floating down this arrow straight marine avenue. They emerged from under the bridge, and looked ahead to the bend in the watercourse. The current picked up as the channel narrowed a bit more.

  “The current will likely carry us around the bend,” Mick said.

  “And it might not.”

  As they neared the turn the current surprised them. It continued on straight ahead, narrowing suddenly about half a mile away. They drifted in a smooth arc around the bend, then returned back onto a straight course towards the built-up area visible in the distance.

  The buildings they had seen until then did not prepare them for what they saw next. The structures ahead echoed the delicacy and flowing lines of the bridge. Terrace upon terrace, buildings whose surfaces glowed in the ambient light of their lantern, rose in graceful curves and flowing parabolas, receding to a horizon that no longer felt subterranean.

  They looked up. The roof hadn’t changed, but perhaps because of this strangely effulgent vista ahead, it had lost the quality of pressing down, of holding back the vast quantity of rock above them. They felt their hearts lift as their eyes surveyed the underground city spread out before them.

  8 | Watyra

  Using a slow dolphin kick they moved parallel to the channel shore until a dock was reached close to water level. They stood up and hauled the raft up on shore.

  “Ghost town,” Turok muttered.

  They set off towards the nearest building carrying the lantern and one small rucksack, a couple of meal-packets stuffed inside. Mick had feared they might be brought low not by any external threat, but by a simple lack of supplies. He hoped this city might take care of the latter concern. The ground they walked on had a pale incandescence. At first he thought it was a trick of their crystal lantern light, but he soon enough realized they’d activated some sort of sympathetic response in the ground and buildings. Looking back he saw that the ground they had covered, now outside their circle of light, retained the crystal’s light.

  “You’re right,” Turok said, when Mick drew his attention to it. “It’s like the ground stores the light it receives.” He shook his head. “But that’s crazy.”

  Mick knelt down, setting the lantern on the ground. He took up a handful of dirt, and let it slide from one hand to the other close to the lantern. Particles glittered brightly, and their light danced across to others, which caught and glowed even brighter. It was like holding materialized, granular light in his hands.

  Mick had a sudden idea. “Mind if I turn off the light?”

  Turok looked about to object, and Mick reached over and switched off the lantern.

  Turok was surprised when they weren’t plunged into darkness. The ambient radiance from surrounding surfaces was about sixty percent of what the crystal lantern put out. The ground at their feet and along the short route they had walked, and the walls of the nearest buildings, all shone with a muted fluorescence. Yet ahead of them, beyond the perimeter of their former circle of radiance, it was still dark. However, it was no longer the impenetrable blackness of a subterranean cavern – it was akin to being above ground at night under a quarter moon.

  “It almost seems like some mutated form of photosynthesis,” Mick said. “But instead of producing oxygen, it makes light.”

  “I wonder how long it’ll last?”

  Mick stood, brushing his hands, and gestured at the structures that loomed around them. “Let’s go inside.”

  They set off towards the nearby double doors of a building smaller than the others. The doors whooshed open smoothly as they approached. Mick peered within, and the interior lights winked on.

  “Maybe it’s more of your photosynthesis,” Turok offered.

  “If it is, then it’s being boosted somehow. No way one small lantern …” He shook his head.

  Turok shrugged. “Let’s save that worry for later.”

  They stepped across the threshold. The interior walls of the lobby did not glow as the outside walls did. Instead there was a narrow, softly incandescent panel inset in the ceiling that ran the length of the lobby. It had winked on the instant the exterior doors had opened.

  Turok strode towards what looked like a bank of elevators. Again the doors slid noiselessly open as he drew near. He held the doors, and they both turned to look around the silent, deserted, and now well-lit lobby. They stepped in and the doors slid closed. If they were to look away, it would be hard to tell exactly where the doors were, so flawless was the seal. Nor was there a floor directory on any of the walls. It was like they had materialized inside a perfectly enclosed cube.

  Moments later, to their relief, the wall opened. The ceiling light panels were already on, so Mick muted the lantern. He stepped out hesitantly, looking up and down the hall.
>
  Turok nodded at the reception desk. “Everyone’s stepped out for a permanent lunch.” He went over to the counter. “But no smell.”

  Mick glanced at him questioningly.

  “No smell of decay,” Turok said, turning around. “No smell of anything.”

  “No one’s been here in decades.”

  Mick turned and walked to a swing door behind the counter. He pushed through and found himself in a smaller, windowless room with four workstations. He sat behind one desk as Turok came in. He waved his hand in front of what looked like the monitor’s eye. Nothing.

  “Maybe it’s voice-activated,” Turok said, waiting for a response on the screen.

  Mick reached for the mouse, it pulsed once, and the monitor blinked on.

  “You have the touch.”

  A geometric pattern appeared, which seemed to serve as the desktop. Four icons appeared in a row at the center. He chose one at random and clicked on it. The monitor image had been abruptly replaced by a funnel-shaped pattern spiraling up in expanding circles. It was mesmerizing. The instant Mick’s eyes saw the pattern they seemed to lock in place – he couldn’t seem to tear his concentration away. He felt himself slipping back, falling …

  Mick was looking up as a concerned face came into focus. Turok was looking down at him, framed by the ceiling above. Mick sat up slowly.

  “What happened?”

  “You were sitting there, and then you froze,” Turok said. “I pulled you away fast.”

  “Thanks.” Mick shook his head to clear it. “I blacked out.”

  Turok rested his palm against the wall behind Mick’s head. “Mick, you were as rigid as this wall. Even your skin felt different, dry and chalky.”

  “Hmm. That doesn’t sound like a seizure.”

  “What was that spiral pattern?”

  Mick shrugged, and stood up slowly. “It just seemed to draw me in.” Leaning against the wall, he looked down at the innocent monitor. “How long has it been?”

  “About twenty minutes.”

  “Probably a security retinal scan, keyed to trigger a synaptic reaction.”

  “I guess we can forget about accessing their system.”

  Mick ran his hand along his jaw. “We’ll have to find a back door, or a public one.”

  Turok rolled his eyes. “Or – we could just leave it alone.”

  “Yeah, for now. Let’s go.” Mick got up and pushed through the door back into the reception area. The elevator door still stood open.

  The monitor had not looked exceptional. It was just one of four in that room. The same security protocol would be on every system access point in the building. Or the city even.

  Mick stepped out past the counter and looked down the hall. “There are double doors at that end. Want to check it out?”

  Turok shrugged, and they set off. They passed several closed rooms on each side. Turok tried opening several, pressing his palm against their touchpads, with no result. There was no touchpad on the double doors. As Mick stepped in front of them they separated. They looked into a room with one large oblong table in the center, and along two sides of the room were floor-to-ceiling wallscreens, an opaque grey. As they crossed the threshold the screens’ blank opacity vanished, and they found themselves standing on what appeared to be the viewing deck of a space station in high Nebura orbit. The system star was dipping below the horizon and the evening’s first stars had just appeared. After many days in confined, dark spaces it was comforting just to look out on such a vista of open, light, expansive space. They breathed easier for a few moments.

  Mick placed his finger on a touchpad a short distance from the doorway, near the corner away from the screens. The wallscreen image dissolved and was replaced by the actual cityscape below them, penumbral and lifeless, or rather what could be seen of it. A relatively narrow swathe of light cut through the darkness from the nearby canal up to this building. The buildings all along that short route they had walked gave off a soft exterior light. It was like a sword in the dark, with them standing at its point.

  Turok glanced at the lantern which they had set on the table with the backpack. “What do you say, Mick? You want to light up the neighborhood?”

  Mick’s eyes followed Turok’s. “Sure. But not from here.”

  Mick picked up the lantern and they left the room. Turning into an enclosed stairwell they climbed two flights of stairs to another door, palmed it and emerged onto the roof. Mick walked across to a low, square-topped ventilation outlet. He placed the lantern on top, switched it to maximum flood, and pointed the wide, low beam straight up. A flattened light-cone flooded a wide radius of the city around them. They stepped away from the lantern a few paces.

  The roof of rock was set in brilliant relief, and a softer glow filtered down over the buildings and streets below. The underground city had suddenly sprung out of what must have been decades of all-enveloping darkness. Within moments, however, it was no longer the lantern lighting up somnambulant buildings. The buildings and streets themselves had begun emitting a soft luminescence.

  They left the lantern where it was, flooding the cavern’s upper reaches with harsh light, and walked over to the ledge. Mick looked out over the city. The ambient light in the cavern seemed to be increasing. He leaned against the molded railing, giving his full attention to the transformation occurring around him. More buildings and throughways were becoming visible.

  “We’ll soon need a source of food and water,” Turok said.

  “Yeah.”

  “But it looks like the city will provide light, if we stay here,” Turok added.

  “Unless of course the power is programmed to shut off.”

  “Now there’s a pleasant thought.” Turok chuffed out his lips. “We need a plan.”

  Mick smiled. “For that we need information.”

  “About the city.”

  “About this planet, period.”

  “Any place with maps,” Turok said. “Maps of the tunnels, routes to the surface if any.”

  “And the people who built this place.”

  “If we can find a store or supply depot with a deep-space outfitters section, that’ll give us most of what we need.”

  “Somehow we have to get insystem,” Mick said. “One without homicidal security measures.”

  “Public insystem access.” Turok pushed away from the railing.

  Mick had returned his attention to the cavern roof. “There’s something about this self-generating light.” He glanced over at the lantern. “I think we might be in for a surprise.”

  Turok gave him a puzzled look.

  Mick walked over and moved the lantern to roof’s surface. “I want to check something. Mind if I turn it off?”

  Turok shrugged. Mick pressed a button and the cone of hard light above them vanished. Turok expected the city to form a night skyline, dark above, artificial light below. But it didn’t. His eyes were immediately drawn up to where the cavern roof should have been. Instead the surface above them had acquired a soft, light blue effulgence all its own, creating the illusion of a sky-like depth of field. It looked for all the world like an ordinary early evening under an autumn sky. The only dissonant element was the absence of a source for the cavern’s extraordinary light. He looked down and saw that the buildings too were giving off their own soft light, softer than the light in the sky.

  Turok whistled under his breath. They turned to leave.

  Moments later, standing out in front of the building Turok couldn’t take his eyes off the sky.

  “How long will it last?” he asked.

  Mick shrugged. “I left the lantern on for exactly nine minutes.”

  “It must have triggered a generating system.”

  “Some sort of cascade,” Mick agreed, gesturing to the buildings and sky. “The stored energy is being released now as light.”

  “Artificial daylight,” Turok said sourly. “So this fine bright day could vanish in a heartbeat.”

 
______________

  Franklin and Carmen supported Seamus’s unconscious body between them as they walked back along the beach towards base camp.

  Franklin trudged on brooding over the turn events had taken. He and Carmen had been walking along the ridge, taking turns scanning the horizon with the binoculars for any sign of the cutter or dinghy – with no success. Staying on the ridge they had ventured a half-mile up river, and then retraced their steps. They were following along the promontory towards their original beach landing location when they first saw the wreckage of the Boleyn.

  Carmen had stopped and raised the binoculars.

  Franklin narrowed his eyes as he followed her line of sight. He had already accepted in his own mind that the research ship was lost, but it was still disturbing to see naked evidence of that fact. A couple hundred yards out was a large section of her bow. The ship’s hull had been built with several cylindrical air pockets, dispersed at several points along the hull’s lateral seams, like ribs in a skeleton. They increased the craft’s buoyancy to such a degree that even a gaping hole below the waterline should not have sunk her. But those air pockets couldn’t prevent the boat from being shattered into fragments by the force of a storm. The separate pieces had evidently washed ashore in several locations. This bow section was one of many such fragments. He had expected this, yet something tickled at the back of his mind.

  It was then he saw Seamus. The bow had turned half around, one end lodged between rocks not far offshore. The young man was hanging on that side of the wreckage, his arm hooked behind a stanchion. Franklin’s shoulders slumped. Seamus had been in the second dinghy, which meant that the other dinghy, like the Boleyn herself, had been destroyed in the storm. Seamus must have been thrown free when it broke apart, drifted into the path of the Boleyn’s wreckage, and grabbed hold.

  Quickly stripping off tunic and boots, Franklin waded out, moving easily through the calm water. He gave a shout towards shore when he discovered that Seamus was still alive – unconscious but alive. If the young man hadn’t wedged his arm behind the bow’s stanchion he would have dropped away when he lost consciousness. Doing that saved his life. Franklin carefully floated Seamus behind him as he returned to the beach. They were able to revive him briefly, and soon after he fell into a ragged sleep. A gash in his thigh looked worrying. After loosely binding the cut, which the salt water had kept fairly clean, they roused him enough to walk with their help, his arms slung over their shoulders.

  They arrived at the camp in early evening, and Franklin saw that Marnie had returned from the seaport in the remaining dinghy. The others had deflated its lower section, flipped it upside-down, and then re-inflated all but one of the upper panels, forming an igloo-shaped tent. He called out, and Aleesha appeared in the dinghy’s open hatchway. She took one glance at Seamus and ducked back in to retrieve the first-aid. Thomas ran up and helped them carry Seamus inside. After deftly cleaning the cut, Carmen waited as the patch’s analgesic foam settled into place, doing its work of binding and sealing the wound.

  Seamus was left to sleep peacefully on the floor, his head propped on one of the smaller storage bags. It was late afternoon when Franklin and Carmen emerged to join the others sitting silently on the ground outside.

  ______________

  Mick and Turok had felt ready to return to the first building and the comfortable lounge they had discovered on the top floor, but decided to scout around for a while. Mick knew the sooner they got insystem the better. Two of the taller buildings that stood to one side of theirs had a large mezzanine level – it bridged over, forming an open, public area. They had entered the building’s lobby, the ceiling light panels winking on, and the escalators noiselessly started moving. They were soon walking along the mezzanine level. On the far side in the second building they hit pay dirt.

  They stood outside a large open café, a low-ceilinged room filled with star-like clusters of system stations, each with an 18-inch holofield cube back-projected against an opaque background in the center of each cluster. There were about thirty of the clusters. All the holofields were on, pale grayish light hovering slightly beyond and above each station keyboard. Turok smiled at the sign above the windows – Cyberia.

  Mick gave a whoop and strode to the nearest station. He dumped the backpack on a nearby café table and sat down before the keyboard.

  Mick looked up at Turok, frowning. “I’ll logon, you watch me. If I freeze –”

  “I’ll haul you out of there,” Turok said, smiling.

  Mick reached for the mouse, glancing quickly around the room. “These stations probably can’t access sensitive data-sites.”

  Turok stood stolidly to Mick’s side, looking away from the cube within the cluster.

  Mick wasn’t feeling as confident as he sounded. He clicked on one of the icons suspended in the holofield before him. It sprang to life, the cube of light expanding down and out, enveloped him. As it did so it elongated to a more opaque, oblong shape. Mick had kept up a running commentary throughout, and it abruptly ended. Turok could see his friend inside the pulsing cocoon, and was about to reach through and pull him out when Mick held up his palm. He did a thumbs-up.

  “You okay?” Turok asked through the holo surface.

  Mick touched the mouse. “Now I am,” he said. “This is supposed to happen, I think.” His voice was a little distorted, but otherwise sounded normal.

  Turok nodded. “Take it slow.”

  Mick clicked the mouse again, and the holo surface went fully opaque. It was like looking at the compressed surface of a cloud.

  “It’s okay, Turok,” Mick’s voice said.

  A few seconds later, as Turok looked on, the holo surface returned to its original transparency. Mick was not just inside the expanded, projected holofield, he was now part of it. Turok could see Mick inside, but nothing else of what constituted the terrain of that space. Clearly, though, it was visible to Mick, who had started tapping away on the keyboard. Mick turned and grinned. Turok went to sit at a nearby table, one of many such ordinary tables set out among the clusters of holostations.

  After about twenty minutes, the oblong-shaped holofield retracted. Turok heard a barely audible popping noise. Mick rose from his chair in the module and walked over to join Turok.

  “Well?”

  “At first I could see you fine,” Mick replied, “but then this fog rolled in.”

  “Yeah, that much I saw.”

  “I was inside the field terrain, no image lag or overlap. The best I’ve ever seen, in fact.”

  “Did it have the same spiral as the other monitor, a holo version of that?”

  “No. The icons were holo thumb-cells. I clicked on the one for Nebura and it brought up standard definer codes. I chose ‘History’ and it slipped me right through to the next level. I passed hundreds of sub-cells. What caught my eye were ‘Kalaali Settlement’ and ‘Siqdori Invasion’, and others going back 200 years.” Mick stood up and walked back to the holostation.

  “Recent history?” Turok asked.

  Mick looked into the six neutral cubes of pale light that formed the center of the cluster of six stations. “A sub-cell named ‘Surface Evacuation’,” he said, turning around. “From what I could see, Turok, everyone left, more or less. Most went to other worlds, many to underground cities.” He nodded to the café entrance. “This city, Watyra, was the main one.”

  Turok leaned forward. “Why? Why evacuate?”

  Mick sat on the edge of the module. “They had the same two global problems as now. A new disease and a slowing environment.”

  “What happened to those who didn’t leave?”

  “It didn’t say. The record is incomplete.”

  “I’ll be joining you next time,” Turok replied.

  Mick looked down, distracted.

  “What is it?”

  Mick shrugged. “Every day … I wonder if they made it.”

  Turok took a deep breath. “It’s the same for me.”
<
br />   They rose and made their way back to the first building.

  ______________

  Nebura swung away from the sun, and night fell over Inuvoro’s western coast. In an isolated lagoon six hundred miles south of Polarica the small group sat around a dying fire.

  Carmen and Franklin had described to their shipmates how they found and rescued Seamus, who at that moment was sleeping soundly behind them inside the dinghy-tent. Then Thomas and Aleesha tersely told of finding Giorgi’s body. Franklin stood up and walked off towards the beach. Carmen was about to get up to follow him when Marnie touched her arm. They exchanged a glance, and Carmen reluctantly sat back down.

  Everyone knew there would be no additional survivors of the second dinghy.

  Seamus stood in the dinghy’s doorway, and cleared his throat. He approached the fire and sat down slowly.

  “What about Mick and Turok?” he asked.

  Carmen explained about Oscar waiting at the rendezvous point, the seaport. “If they show up there, he’ll fire off a flare, and a second one after sundown.”

  “Good,” Seamus said.

  “We’ll continue our search tomorrow,” she said to everyone. “And let’s go further.”

  Thomas stoked the fire. “We can focus our search on the area south of here, beyond where Giorgi … And also up the river.”

  “Two search parties, same as today,” Carmen concluded. She turned towards Seamus. “We’ll need someone to stay here and watch the dinghy.”

  He looked about to protest. “We do need this dinghy, I guess.”

  As the others sat around the fire, talking quietly, Carmen’s thoughts returned to the small skittering whirlpools she and Franklin had seen in the stream that day. She worried that the stilling might arrive sooner than Franklin expected.

  ______________

  Emerging onto the up ramp from an underground garage the two high-powered scooters banked smoothly onto one of Watyra’s feeder roads, and after a couple blocks swung down towards the channel side road.

  At Cyberia Mick had learned that a bank of access elevators in the city’s northwest sector rose straight from Watyra through Nebura’s crust to a large ocean-floor transshipment facility for submarine traffic – Oceangate.

  He and Turok spent much of the next day in Cyberia. Finding out about Oceangate was surprise enough. Then they learned of a cargo conduit from there to a seaport on the ocean surface. Turok had terminated his session and pounded on the panel of Mick’s holostation.

  “The seaport is the same one Thomas set as our Plan B rendezvous!” he said eagerly.

  Not really expecting to find a clear route to the surface, and their lost shipmates, they hadn’t hesitated. Laughing at their surreal good luck, they had packed one of the bags from the cutter, and set off for the access elevators.

  Watyra was roughly circular in shape, resembling a stemless mushroom. While it still suggested depth and distance, the roof’s perimeter – Watyra’s horizon – had a slight wrinkle, like a fold or desert heat ripple. It didn’t unseat the illusion, however.

  It took about twenty minutes to drive to the city’s outskirts. Mick idly wondered how the Watyrans had accommodated population growth. ‘Urban sprawl was one option they didn’t have,’ he thought. Unless the original Watyra, the inhabited part, had started out smaller, concentrated in one part of this cavern, and then gradually spread out. Or maybe they built other underground cities as the need for more space had developed. He had so many unanswered questions. He’d like nothing more than to spend weeks insystem, specifically in the ‘History’ sub-cells. The era of Kalaali settlement, when the original settlers arrived, must have occurred much earlier than two centuries before.

  They took a series of ramps to the freeway’s lowest level, and stopped at the top of a ramp that fed down into the tunnel which, according to the schematic, led to the Oceangate elevators. Turok glanced over at Mick, and grinned as they set off, accelerating together down the ramp. Mick watched as his friend rode into the dark mouth of the tunnel, and followed seconds later. This two-mile straightaway led directly to both the passenger and cargo-handling areas, with no turn-offs to any other destinations. He noticed that many of the tunnel lights were not working. It was unnerving to leave a well-lit section of road, his scooter moving like a bullet of light through a shaft of claustrophobic darkness.

  Mick wondered why the Watyrans had placed the elevators so far from the city. Nothing in the text sidebars on any of the maps had answered that question. Either it was so self-evident that Watyran authorities had seen no need to mention it, or the reason was not generally known. But secrecy works best when those who lack specific knowledge aren’t aware of that lack. Mick assumed it had to be the former.

  The end of the tunnel came within sight, but it was pitch black. The last working tunnel light was about a hundred yards from a large, high-ceilinged area adjacent to a circular carousel of loading bays. Mick’s headlight had not triggered any cascade reaction since entering the tunnel. Turok, still ahead of him, rode a full circuit around the loading carousel and parked in one of the bays. Mick pulled in beside him as Turok lifted the crystal lantern out of his bike’s basket. He turned it on, adjusting to forward flood.

  Double doors at the back of the bay, like the buildings in Watyra, weren’t locked. Once inside none of the interior lights self-activated. Enclosed in the center, beyond the walls of the cargo-handling core, lay the hub of elevators.

  Without a power source Mick wondered if the elevators would even work. He was trying to remember if the schematic had shown any stairs leading to Oceangate, though a five-mile climb would take days. It hadn’t occurred to them back in Watyra that power might be a problem.

  Making their way in from the loading bays they soon reached the enormous elevator doors. They walked slowly across, their steps loud in the large, empty space. They made a quick circuit around the pentagonal hub. A single, wide elevator door was on each of its sides. Stopping opposite one of them, Turok walked right up and stood bare inches from the door, waiting. He turned and shrugged, glancing back at Mick.

  Mick was scanning the walls all around the door. “There must be a way to trigger the power. We could spend days trying to find it.”

  Turok glanced at his watch. “Unless … “

  Mick looked at him expectantly.

  “This section’s power is controlled from up on the ocean floor, in Oceangate.” Turok nodded towards the ceiling. “There’s only one way I can think of to override their control. Release an evacuation protocol insystem.”

  “Would that really work?”

  Turok reached into the small backpack and retrieved a palmtop. “I sent the protocol to Oceangate.” He held it up. “It’ll only be released if I send a formatted message.”

  Mick was impressed, but then he saw the what-if. “It will feed back to Watyra.”

  “Yes. And Watyra likely has post-evac systems in place. It might seal up the city.”

  “Or worse.”

  “I figured this would be a last resort.”

  “Is there any way to keep the evac orders restricted to Oceangate?”

  Turok shook his head. “Crisis orders are meant to be system-wide. That’s the point.”

  Mick smiled. “Not if it’s a drill.”

  Turok hesitated.

  “Can you change the protocol from here, make it obviously a drill?” Mick asked.

  “Uh – no.” Turok smiled as he activated the palmtop’s mini-holofield. “What I can do, though, is make Oceangate think it’s a drill.”

  “How?”

  Turok tapped in a series of commands. “There, done.”

  “Don’t tell me,” Mick said. “I think I’d rather not know.”

  “And now here goes the message.” Turok tapped a single keystroke. He closed the lid of the device, and looked up.

  9 | The Column

  For several seconds nothing happened. All along the tunnel carousel the lights flickered on. Then th
e large doors in front of them slid silently open. The elevator’s lights were not yet on – it was like looking into a cave. Then they too winked on, revealing the elevator’s vault-like interior.

  The chamber was about twenty feet on each side. Again, as in the Watyran building’s elevator, there was no control panel. The doors closed behind them as quietly as they had opened. The lower half of the chamber gave off a fairly strong luminescence, but not uncomfortably so. The top half of the chamber, from waist-level to the ceiling, pulsed brighter for a moment, and then dimmed by half. Suddenly the upper section and ceiling went transparent, and they could see the sheer, smooth rock face of the walls of the vertical shaft. The walls of rock outside began sliding by. Except for the evidence of their eyes, it was mildly disorienting to feel very little sensation of movement.

  They still found it hard to believe just how far away the surface was – four miles up to the ocean bottom and Oceangate. And from there another full mile to the surface of the ocean.

  Mick turned on the crystal lantern, set to high spot, and the shaft leapt higher, extending through the Neburan rock as far as the beam reached. As they ascended the walls of the shaft rushed past in a ceaseless flow. Beyond the light’s limit was utter blackness above. They stood there looking up, transfixed by their passage through successive strata of Neburan rock.

  Minutes later Turok turned it off. They sat on the floor by the wall. It was like riding in the softly-lit gondola of a large, open-air balloon as it rose into the night. Only a few minutes had passed, though it felt longer. Mick leaned his head against the wall and continued looking up. He was fascinated by the blurring of the walls outside. Suddenly up ahead he thought he saw a sort of expansiveness, an opening out. He again turned on the lantern. The end of the beam shone off into an emptiness, a space with no walls. Mick scrambled up as their chamber suddenly pulsed out into a seeming void. Mick placed one hand against the transparent wall and adjusted the lantern from up to forward flood. It pierced out into the blackness. He switched it to high spot and down. They were startled to see a rolling terrain of dark buildings, reaching far off into the distance.

  Turok was not looking at the city. “What’s holding us up on this vertical path?” he asked in a small voice.

  Mick shook his head. “Some kind of beam. Magnetic phase, maybe.”

  “Whatever.” Turok smiled weakly, and sat back down.

  Mick looked out again over the city. He was intrigued that this second subterranean city appeared to have been abandoned much longer than Watyra. The buildings were shorter, smaller, and there was no visible channel or other body of water. Yet it was clearly a much larger cavern. Then he realized what the biggest difference was. He shone the beam towards the ceiling of rock that overarched the city.

  “This cavern looks natural.”

  Turok looked up. “You’re right.” He paused a moment. “And I bet they didn’t have an artificial sky here.”

  They had almost reached the cavern’s ceiling. They could see no opening in the uneven surface above them. Turok groaned again, and closed his eyes. “Tell me when we’re back inside the tunnel.”

  Then Mick saw the shaft’s opening directly above. Six seconds later they passed through. “We’re in.”

  Turok opened his eyes, and sighed. “I much prefer this,” he said, “though I guess, technically, we’re rushing blindly through a hole in the rock.” He stood up.

  “Yes, this feels much safer,” Mick agreed. They laughed.

  Mick glanced at his watch. He could scarcely believe they had left the transshipment carousel only ten minutes earlier. He looked up into the enclosing darkness. They were ascending about one floor’s height every second – he estimated another twelve minutes or so to reach Oceangate.

  They were pensive, keenly aware how far they had come. Mick tried to visualize any of the subsurface worlds he had heard of, where settlement patterns had pushed world development deeper within the planet with each successive wave of migration, in several cases to as deep as 0.8 miles, 4,200 feet, harboring as many as 250 levels. As terraforming techniques had been introduced and gradually improved, however, subsurface settlement – never a popular solution to hostile atmospheric environments – was abandoned. Mick tried to visualize that – 1200-plus levels of hive-like humanity – on this world. The image this called up left him dizzy.

  When another ten minutes had passed Mick stood up. He could see a faint smudge of light high above. It could only be Oceangate. A freeze-frost had begun coating the upper part of the elevator. It went opaque for several seconds, then returned to the neutral off-white interior it had had when they boarded. They couldn’t tell if the elevator had stopped. The interior luminescence of the chamber’s lower section brightened, and a chime sounded. The wall unobtrusively slid back. They peered out at a curving corridor, higher and more spacious than the carousel four miles below. They stepped out of the chamber and hesitantly looked around. It felt like they had been inside for an hour. The doors closed behind them. They walked along the hallway, and came to a set of escalators. They rode up into a large, open, high-ceilinged space of what could only be the arrivals and departures terminal of Oceangate.

  It reminded Mick of an orbiting spaceport, where wide gates led from a hub to docking berths for the feeder ships that ferried cargo and personnel to and from the starships berthed nearby. In Oceangate’s case, Mick assumed the gates served large submersible craft. It was humbling to think that traffic through this terminal had once been heavy enough to require such enormous, elaborate facilities, which also meant there must be other cities like Watyra, deeply subaqueous and subterranean, dispersed across this world. His curiosity about Nebura continued to grow.

  They didn’t have a definite location for the conduit to the ocean’s surface. They hadn’t even found much detail about what form it took. They imagined an elevator similar to Watyra’s, ascending from here into the interior of the seaport. They walked across to the largest viewing area. The transparent synthetic material of the windows was about eight inches thick, reaching to the ceiling. They were a uniform, impenetrable black. Mick shone the lantern’s spotlight through one of them, and it reached about forty or fifty feet out into the ocean gloom. At an ocean depth of a mile visibility was low, but they could see that the scale of Oceangate was less like a starship spaceport than a 21st century Earthside airport, even smaller in fact. Just within range of the lantern light they could see the nose section of a submersible. The craft, probably a twelve-seater plus cargo, was lying on its side on the tarmac. There was a lateral gash in its partly visible fuselage. At the next berth a tail section could be seen. What they could see of it appeared intact. They suspected there must be many other vessels outside the range of the lantern, in much the same condition. The berths, where the caterpillar-like, extendable corridors would snake out to meet the docking craft, were about thirty feet above the tarmac, made of some hardened foam-like material. Alongside the berth were large hydraulic support cradles to hold the docking submersibles in place.

  They decided to walk a full circuit of the hub. They also wanted to check the other viewing lounges that fronted each gate corridor, and perhaps make it down to the end of a few of the gates. Turok was hankering to see if any of the submersibles had survived better than this one.

  ______________

  Carmen and Franklin were walking along the escarpment above the river; the ocean was some distance behind them. The vista inland had a much closer horizon with no nearby buildings. From their current height they could see how the river banked in a feint to one side then made its way back. The promontory they stood on fronted the river on the side nearer their base camp; further along on the other side stood an even higher, narrower promontory, breaking their view into two halves. The region beyond the other promontory fell away in a series of low hills, eventually reaching a flat plain where the river widened out.

  They first saw it on the inland horizon, hovering over the river – the stillin
g sheet.

  Franklin involuntarily stepped back. It was a mobile glacier-like front of pent-up energy, spreading and descending towards the coast. So far it had remained with the river.

  Quite separate from the sheet, and descending rapidly in their direction, were swirling waves of motion – birds without number. Flocks of birds were passing above them. The nearest flock banked over the far side of the river, heading north away from the sheet.

  Carmen turned and walked woodenly back from the edge, joining Franklin.

  “It’s coming,” she said, “slow and steady.”

  The old man continued watching its progress, his expression one of resigned curiosity. It had arrived sooner than he’d expected.

  “What does it do to the land, really?” she asked.

  He leaned back and looked straight up. “It intensifies the slowing.” He swiveled down to look at the horizon. “Even molecular oscillation slows.”

  “We need to evacuate – today,” she resolved out loud, then asked: “How slow?”

  “The affected areas retain enough molecular momentum so they continue as – matter.”

  Carmen laughed nervously. “Franklin, you say the most … Aren’t you scared?”

  “I’m terrified,” he said, looking at her. “Who wouldn’t be?”

  “How long do we have?” she asked.

  “This river and the coastal upland may hold it for a while, but likely it’ll reach here in a matter of hours.” He turned and took a last look. “I agree. We need to go.”

  “We can be offshore within the hour,” she said.

  He nodded wearily as they quickly set off towards base camp.

  _______________

  Knowing they couldn’t explore the facility to its full extent, Mick and Turok focused on looking for the conduit and inspecting the submersibles. Even so, for two hours they walked through empty, echoing hallways, pausing in several of the observation lounges to check down random gate corridors, returning repeatedly to the hub. Mick never forgot he was passing through the scattered evidence of a far more dynamic era of Kalaal history. There had not been wholesale destruction on Nebura, however. The people had simply left, and the material layers of technology, buildings, roads, and the like had so far resisted deterioration.

  Mick knew that the residents of Nebu City – and hundreds of other surface cities across the planet – must be the descendants of those Kalaal who had chosen to stay behind, or even scattered Siqdori from the war who had been left behind. After only a few generations their numbers were minimal, and declining.

  Turok was disappointed that few of the submersibles had been intact, and even fewer still remained in their mooring cradles. They entered the observation lounge and Mick shone the lantern out the window. The nose of a submersible hove into view. The fuselage was intact, and rested exactly where it should be – in the berth’s cradle. Turok admitted he hoped to find one intact enough to explore inside. What he hadn’t admitted was his even wilder hope that one might be salvageable. He had walked ahead and was peering through the windows at the sleek craft about thirty feet away. Several thick cables, which must have worked loose from the superstructure above the berth, were lying across the tail section. The craft had a ghostly look in the beam of his flashlight. Mick caught up to him and swung the strong beam of the lantern along the submersible’s length. It looked to be in surprisingly good shape.

  Turok nodded at the tail of the craft. “I bet ship’s systems registered the presence of those cables, and sealed itself off as a safety measure.”

  “That could be what saved it. Whatever happened to all the others didn’t seem to affect this one.”

  Turok grinned. “Passenger access is still hooked in. Let’s check her out.”

  They made their way down to the gate boarding area. At the pressure-lock door they peered through. The access corridor had been flooded long ago – the round portal just aft of the submersible’s bulkhead could be seen sixty feet away. The water inside the access corridor, though stagnant, didn’t have the turbid look of the ocean outside. To Mick it looked lighter, less opaque somehow.

  “Why would they flood the corridor?” Turok asked.

  “Security. With dozens of access corridors up and down all these gates, the only failsafe would be to flood each corridor when they’re not in use.”

  Turok stepped back and looked again at the thick doorway, scanning the wall all around. His eyes settled on a 12-inch diameter half-circle on the floor nearby, abutting the wall.

  Turok knelt down and ran his hand over the wall, pausing over a slight thumb-sized nodule. When he pressed it the half-circle on the floor lowered slightly and slid into the wall, revealing a small dark pocket below the floor.

  In the bottom was a crank wheel, which apparently had to be turned manually. He reached in and gave it one revolution. Nothing happened, so he turned it again. After eight full turns it stopped. He stood up and shook his head. They heard a slight popping from inside the access tunnel. They looked in again, but nothing seemed to be happening.

  “Sounds like the tunnel is being drained,” Turok said, “but not very quickly.”

  Agreeing to return later to check it out, they set off to have a quick look at the remaining eight gate corridors they had yet to explore. Back in the rotunda they skipped several gates, choosing one where many of the lights had not come on, on the assumption that a power outage must have a source that might prove useful. They soon noticed that this gate apparently had no submersible access corridors like those that lined all the others. After walking for about five minutes they were sure they had passed beyond the quarter mile length of the other gates. At ten minutes the corridor turned off at a slight angle, and soon after they came to a series of viewing portholes.

  Turok angled the lantern spot through to the end of the gate. The corridor turned sharply about a hundred feet ahead. A catwalk of white, horizontal, tubular beams with diagonal supports loomed out of the surrounding ocean darkness. At the end above that was an elliptical column, faintly glowing, housed within a thick, transparent outer shell. The column made its way straight up into the ocean darkness. The catwalk-like facility ended about fifty feet up – above that the transparent skin of the column disappeared into the inky depths.

  Turok turned to Mick. “I think we just found the conduit.”

  The glow of the transparent column was too faint to be visible for any distance. Above the white tubular structure the column looked to be empty, except that clearly it was filled with water.

  The lights were out in the last short section of the gate corridor beyond the sharp turn ahead. The lantern cast a harsh glare over the open latticework of tubular beams ahead, which lay behind a thick, transparent wall that closed off the end of the corridor. They slowed as they neared the enormous wall. It arced out before them in a smooth convex surface. Beyond that the tubular structure rose a height of three floors, just within the lantern’s range.

  The transparent, ellipsoidal column did not touch the rounded end of their corridor at any point. There appeared to be no means of access between the two.

  Mick looked through the convex wall to a round white surface fifty feet up, with a transparent wall. “The column must rise up from that deck.”

  As they approached the side wall a large section of the floor slid back, revealing an escalator down, which soundlessly started moving. They boarded and rode it down, then walked across and boarded an identical escalator that apparently rose to the deck. They emerged on deck, shocked into silence.

  The ceiling of the deck resembled the surface of a pool – suspended upside-down. Like the apex of an ancient temple, a series of stepped levels led up literally into this upside-down surface. The uppermost three levels were immersed in this inverted surface of water. They started up. Half-way up they reached a wider step, a landing, and circling round they looked out past the latticework to the column’s transparent skin and the ocean beyond. They continued up, walking almost to the
top, and paused.

  “It’s like a plasma field,” Mick said, visualizing the radiant corona of an atom’s wall.

  An energy surface at the subatomic level was one thing, but this was just ordinary water. Mick looked over as Turok pulled from his pocket a floppy piece of yellow synthetic, a balloon, which he started inflating. Mick raised his eyebrows.

  Turok held up a finger as a bright yellow elastic globe expanded in front of him, and tied it off. He walked up a few more steps so he stood just under the water. Then he held up the balloon and gently passed it into the water, then let it go. Mick watched as the yellow globe rose. Within seconds it had risen about sixty feet through the chamber, and then stopped. Turok turned around and smiled. “It hardly expanded at all. The water pressure up there appears to be at a normal atmospheric level, for surface depth.”

  “How is that possible?”

  Turok shrugged. “Maybe there’s another surface like this one, up where the balloon is. Another plasma field … then another, sixty feet above that.”

  “And another, and so on all the way up!”

  Turok descended a few steps.

  Mick continued watching the small yellow balloon. “So, hypothetically we could swim up 5200 feet to the surface.”

  Turok laughed. “Hypothetically.”

  “Does it strike you as kind of elaborate?”

  “What, as a way of having access to the surface?”

  Mick nodded.

  “Well, a water-filled column like this wouldn’t drift much. Plus that material,” Turok said, nodding to the elliptical tunnel’s wall, its thick outer skin, “is pliable enough that the column could bend itself into a pretzel and still not be stressed.”

  “And it solves the water pressure problem, if people had to escape without pressure suits …”

  “Of course we’d have to use oxygen templates.”

  Mick grinned. “We would.”

  “There must be eighty sections like this one,” Mick said. “Maybe three minutes to transit each one, we’re looking at almost three hours.”

  They looked again at the small yellow balloon bobbing sixty feet above. Mick tried to imagine this mile-high column, enclosing a stack of such plasma skeins, one atop the other, maintaining water pressure only slightly more than 1.0 atmospheres all the way from the ocean floor up 5200 feet.