by Eric Flint
Sue Fisher shrugged. “It is creepy, yes.”
The sharp eyes appraised her. “You’ve got more.”
“Well, more what I don’t have. I don’t know what’s hidden it from Earth, or whether it’s still hidden—though it probably is, since the latest data from Earth I have is only about seven years old and it still doesn’t show this star. But we also are still missing two lifeboats.”
Ventrella stared at her. “You cannot be serious. Why in the name of all that’s holy would any of them have headed for some unknown star when Orado was only ten light-years off? Isn’t it much more likely that, for whatever reason, they just didn’t make it here? After all, LS-42 barely did.”
“I know, Portmaster. I have no idea why they might go towards a different, unknown star. Well, one, perhaps, in the case of LS-5; they had limited consumables and one of their passengers was a Bemmie who simply wouldn’t survive a long trip without appropriate water treatments that they couldn’t give inside the craft, and that family had a particular connection with that Bemmie. That would still seem crazy to me, but then, I know all sorts of things the passengers of those two shuttles might not have.
“And yes, of course it’s much more likely that they simply didn’t make it—died minutes or hours or maybe weeks after most of their systems went down and they just couldn’t make enough of it work to get home on.” She drew in a breath. “But maybe…just maybe…they didn’t.”
“I can’t authorize a faster-than-light jaunt on ‘just maybe,’ and for something like that, you’ll want something like…” his eyes narrowed, then a grin flashed out. “Oh, clever.”
“I thought you’d like it.”
“You want to send a survey team there, ostensibly to examine this impossible new system and see if they can find out anything unique that might explain why it’s been apparently invisible for centuries, but also because a survey team’s going to have the best chance of finding any trace of castaways.”
She nodded.
“Well…that is a thought. And I suppose you want to go with the survey group.”
“Technically it could still be a search-and-rescue. Though I’d be the only person who officially knows that.”
“Hmph.” He couldn’t hide the smile that remained behind the neatly-trimmed beard and mustache. “I will…consider it. You’ve got a decent case. I’ll see if there’s the right personnel for this wild-lifeboat hunt, and the resources to support it.”
“It might be possible to—”
“Officer Fisher, don’t say anymore. Let me look at the possibilities and figure things out on this end on my own.”
“Yes, sir.”
Ventrella gave her another smile, though a small one. “I’m on your side, Sue, but even if you’re right, this isn’t a trivial expedition you’re talking about. I’m not sure we’ve got an appropriate Trapdoor-capable vessel around right now, and outfitting a new one would take months. We might have to wait that long before it’s practical.”
“All right, Portmaster,” she said, and forced herself to relax. “There’s no rush; If they made it to a livable planet and they’re still alive now, I can’t imagine a few days or even weeks make much difference.”
Chapter 22
Even without Whips’ terrifying message, Laura would have known that something was horribly wrong. With no visible warning, the quadbirds and other flying creatures suddenly burst from their perches and flew away, whistling and hooting and screeching, all in a mingled, multicolored mass that arrowed off to the south.
Almost in the same moment, she could see movement on the ground and the trees—animals large and small running, scuttling, swinging through the branches, and all going in the same direction. A herd of capys hurried straight through the center of the clearing. As Akira came up next to her, she saw a tree kraken bound through the area from tree-trunk to tree-trunk. She released her grip on the sill, realizing her hands ached from the tension. “The other girls—”
“All safe.” She heard the rapping of feet coming up the stairs; at the same time she heard the rapid dialogue between Whips and his crewmates.
Then she couldn’t believe what she was hearing. That crazy boy is trying to save the engine when a tsunami is coming!
It took both her and Campbell to get Whips to accept that there was no sense in this quixotic attempt and concentrate on getting himself inside and strapped down.
Sakura was next to her now, and her face was white under the dark tan. “Whips…” she whispered.
“He’ll be okay, honey,” she said, trying to convince herself. “Those shuttles are tough and he knows enough to strap in well.”
“Emerald Maui isn’t configured for a Bemmie passenger,” Akira said quietly. “I hope Harratrer had time to—”
“Hold on!” came Whips’ voice—and then a rumbling roar that cut him off.
Sakura didn’t scream, but her grip on Laura’s arm was tight as a tourniquet.
Then Laura heard a noise—a hissing that became a rattling, rushing sound, and a deep rumbling underneath.
A brown-gray carpet burst into view, enveloping, tearing and crushing the undergrowth, grinding it down and sweeping the remains up into the tide of destruction that was already more running mud and debris than water. Laura heard screams of disbelief, some of them her own, as the tsunami surged across the clearing below. The temporary shelter that had been their town square, their meeting place and theater, was torn from the ground, its solidly-anchored pegs no more able to resist that savage torrent than they could a bulldozer. Over the public channel she could hear Tavana’s disbelieving curses in three languages; Xander was murmuring “no, no, no” over and over, and she could hear Pearce praying.
The tsunami flood reached Sherwood Column, and Laura gripped the sill harder as she felt it, felt the vibrating impact of water, mud, and debris being dragged and ground against the base of their home. “My God, Akira, will the column hold up?”
Akira’s face was pale, but he answered, “Of course it will. Remember how hard it was to cut into.”
But his eyes met hers, and Laura shivered, seeing the real answer: I don’t know.
The water was roaring now, a snarl and a deep basso thunder and a shrieking hiss all combined. The level rose higher, a wave in truth, driving hard against the trees and columns, sending fountains of spray a dozen meters into the air. There was a groaning crack, then another, and now trees were falling, torn from their roots and then dragged down, to collide with other trees or the bases of columns and be stuck, barricading the flow until its implacable force tore the trunk to splinters.
A screeching, grinding sound from below, and with horror Laura saw the ramp-door to the column ripped away, drowned and destroyed in the black-brown flood. “Is everyone upstairs?” she demanded.
“We’re all here, Mom,” Caroline said, her words shaking like the column itself.
The sound of rushing water was coming from inside now, the water pouring into the lowest section of their house, the foyer. “If this keeps rising—”
“—then there’s nothing we can do,” Akira said grimly. “All we can do is—”
There was a sudden shock that transmitted itself through Sherwood Column, and now the water was thundering inside. For a crazy instant Laura harbored the insane conviction that the water was coming up the stairs, charging up for her and her family.
But the water levels weren’t nearly that high yet, so what…
“The bottom floor—it’s gone!” Melody shouted. “We’re hearing a waterfall going down through our house into the island!”
“Naturally,” Campbell’s tense voice said. “Get that many tons of water and who-knows-what on that one floor, it had to give way.”
“Ours, it has a solid bottom,” Tavana added. “That will not happen here.”
A third time the water rose, and more of the trees—wooden and otherwise—leaned and fell with groaning, splintering sounds that blended with the growling thunder of the tsunami. A w
rithing shape was briefly visible in the horizontal cataract—an immense wormlike thing, twin to the creature that had nearly killed Whips on one of their first nights on Lincoln. But huge as it was, its strength meant nothing to the meteoric flood; it was dragged back under, hammered against stumps, crushed and swept out of sight, farther into the flooded woods.
Sherwood Column thrummed like a bass string being struck by an angry god-child; another of the columns they could see shuddered visibly and then tilted, fell. The girls screamed, even Caroline; Laura only kept herself from doing so by clamping her mouth shut, and she could see the fear in Akira’s eyes when she glanced to her husband. None of us will survive if the column falls into the flood…
She closed her eyes and held on, hoping that she would not feel the terrible disorienting sensation of the room she stood in tilting…
Then Laura became aware that the roaring was diminishing, more a grumble and hiss, and even that fading. She opened her eyes and looked down.
The water had stopped its headlong flight; for a few moments it eddied in seeming confusion, and the sound of their indoor cataract ceased. Then the water began to recede, flowing away, dropping down.
In a few minutes, there were only scattered pools across the devastated floor of the forest.
Laura glanced around, assuring herself that all of her family—minus Hitomi and Whips—were there and safe. “Sergeant, are you all okay?”
Campbell’s shaken voice replied after a moment. “Except for our boy on Emerald Maui, all present and accounted for. You?”
“Everyone’s fine here.”
“Then we’d better go check out our columns pronto; you saw that one fall, right?”
Laura understood his point. “All right, everyone grab your go-bags and get outside now…wait.” Realization struck her. “Sergeant, we may have a problem.”
“Dammit, yes,” Campbell said. “You might not have a floor to walk out with, just a long drop to nowhere.”
“I’ll go check it out,” Sakura said.
“I will do it,” her father said, his voice iron-hard in a way it very rarely was; Laura saw Sakura freeze, then nod.
In a few moments Akira was back. “The whole bottom floor is gone, including storage. The steps end hanging in midair, a long way from the entrance.”
“You have any rope?”
“I will check, but most of that was stored on that floor.”
“We’ve got some, so no biggie. You’ll have to go out your largest window. Wait a few and we’ll be along to help.”
“Understood. We’ll wait.” She raised her voice. “Whips? Hitomi? Francisco? How are you?”
Moments stretched out, and there was no answer.
“Whips? Answer immediately! Hitomi, are you there? Francisco?”
But no matter how many times she, or the others, repeated the words, the airwaves remained silent.
Chapter 23
Hitomi gripped the arms of her seat tightly, focusing on the panels in front of her. She had to concentrate, because if she didn’t, she’d skip from thought to thought to thought in a blur, and it would be scary. Way too scary.
Whips was still out there, and the wave, the wave was coming, a big wave, they said. No, wait—she heard the dragging sound of the big Bemmie moving fast behind her.
“Are you both strapped in?” he said, his voice having that hooting undertone it got when he was breathing hard.
“Yes!” Hitomi answered, feeling relieved that big brother Whips was onboard. She heard Francisco also answer, from his acceleration seat nearby.
“Good,” Whips said absently. She heard him fumbling with the straps, and for a moment she could see the straps in her mind, remember the exact position of every strap and fastener, and she swallowed hard. They weren’t right for a Bemmie.
She heard a rippling rumble that she knew was a Bemmie bad word, and the whispering of the straps and the muffled jingle of fastenings intensified. She tried to turn her head to look, but the seat wouldn’t let her. Of course not, she thought, remembering the diagrams in the emergency courses, arrows and vectors showing how sitting the wrong way in the seat could hurt you bad.
“Get ready, Francisco, Hitomi!”
Hitomi heard it now, a faint whisper like a stream…but a stream that from the sound was passing under them. She couldn’t see it, not from where they sat, but the water was coming. But this didn’t sound so bad…
The light from the port dimmed, and her gaze snapped up to look.
Her first thoughts were that it was beautiful; a massive green wall streaked with foam moving in almost-patterns across it. The focused part of her started trying to count the lines of foam and see if they came in patterns.
But then Francisco screamed, and suddenly Hitomi felt as though something had switched on in her, and her focus was gone. Now she could see it coming, a monstrous wave that was blotting out the sky. A spurt of cold-spiky terror ripped through her, stealing her breath; she couldn’t make a sound.
Lines creaked behind her, the sound of Whips’ arms entwining themselves tightly around them. “Hold on!”
The wave began to curl, and Hitomi’s terrified memory replayed another book, a chart of a wave, hitting shallows, oh, yes, the skirt-shelf that sticks out from the island, and at the same time all she could do was gasp in and then hold her breath, redoubling her hold as the whole world turned green-white-black—
A gigantic hand slammed into Emerald Maui, skidding the lifeboat sideways with a grating, ripping screech, but still, that wasn’t so bad, if the hull held out everything would be fine—
And then Emerald Maui tipped and began to spin, tumbling over and over, smashing randomly into things now caught up in a murky blackness that enveloped them. Hitomi did scream now, feeling the pain of the high-pitched sound in her throat but hearing none of it over the roaring, grinding, grating thunder that beat on the ship’s hull from every direction.
Something flew over her head and hit the wall with a thud that was barely audible in the din, and then it flew past again, striking with a deep, pained whoop.
It’s Whips! He’s…he didn’t get strapped down enough! She cringed as far down into her seat as she could, trying not to think about what would happen if Whips fell on her.
The tumbling and crashing went on, spinning them around and around, and Hitomi was getting dizzy, her stomach starting to protest as the ship not only rolled but whirled around, nose to tail again and again and then flipping end over end before going back to rolling, and all the time hitting things, grinding-growling battering, and poor Whips tumbling around like a pebble in a can.
Then, without warning, the tumbling slowed, steadied. The ship was still careening and bounding along, but she rolled once more, righting herself, Emerald Maui finding her natural pose. She was rolling and rocking in what had to be waves, but smaller waves, waves underneath her. Light began to return, the splash and ripple of waves clearing the blackness from the front port.
But…
But there was nothing out there. With a creeping horror Hitomi stared at the port. Instead of waves or the waving trees of the island, or even wreckage, there was nothing, just a…a milky whiteness. For a moment she wondered if it was a cloud, fog, thick fog, but the day had been clear. And this didn’t have the look of fog. It was somehow swirled yet unmoving, her eyes just able to sense some kind of texture to it, but it was a texture that looked like…like…
“The port,” Francisco said, and his voice seemed loud in the ringing silence. “It has been clouded. Like the glass on the shower doors at my old house.”
Hitomi gave a huge sigh of relief. Now that Francisco had said it, it was obvious. The front window of Emerald Maui had somehow become the color of milk. Light sort of came through, but not images.
And hearing Francisco talk made her feel better too. They’d come through that disaster. “Whips? Are you okay?”
Silence.
She remembered the thudding tumble and swallowed, then unstrapp
ed herself. “Whips!”
The Bemmie was sprawled against the back wall, arms splayed and crumpled under him. She could see that he was badly hurt, there were lumps and twisted parts that just didn’t look right, and…
“Hitomi…he is not breathing,” Francisco whispered.
“Oh no…Mom. MOM!” she shouted. “Mom, Whips is hurt, he’s not breathing, what do I do, Mommy?”
There was no answer. Hitomi heard herself starting to breathe faster, panic creeping up behind her like a monster, as she realized that her connection was dead. Her omni showed the red slash symbol that meant no connectivity to the main net. And a red slash through all her family’s icons. Only Francisco’s and Whips’ were still green and ready.
“They can’t hear us,” she whispered, and heard her voice squeak as she did. “Whips isn’t breathing and they can’t hear us!”
“Dios mio,” Francisco said. “Then…then we’re alone.”
That thought, and the terror in Francisco’s voice, was almost enough to bring the monster panic down on her. Alone, with Whips dead or dying, no way to talk to anyone…
But then she remembered all the other scary days, and Mom and Sakura and Dad saying that the most important thing was not to panic…and most of all she remembered her sister Sakura on one of those days—sitting herself in the pilot’s chair and trying to land LS-5 by herself. She remembered every detail of that moment, just like she could remember almost everything, and she saw her sister’s face, turned to look to the side, so pale it was almost white, and it finally really dawned on Hitomi how scared Sakura had been.
So scared.
But she had done it. She had taken LS-5 from the depths of space all the way to the surface, flown them through a storm, and landed them. Crashed…but they’d lived. Because Sakura hadn’t let being scared stop her.
Hitomi closed her eyes. Focus. Focus on something. Think. Think. Think. What do we do?
