Deepsix

by Jack McDevitt

  She’d considered not renewing every time extension came up. But she’d never taken that fatal step because her husband had loved her. He’d remained faithful, God help her, and had always remembered birthdays and anniversaries. They’d had two good children, and he had been an exemplar of a father. She could not have failed to renew without devastating him, and there was no way she could have brought herself to do that. So she’d stayed with him, bored and yearning for excitement, through all those long years.

  Everyone thought they were an ideal couple. I wish my George were more like your Will. Will had even retained his good looks, although the smile had lost some of the old electricity. When an undetected aneurysm killed him, she’d mourned for an appropriate period, and then boarded the Evening Star, as she told her friends, to try to get past her loss.

  Her fellow passengers knew nothing of all this. Janet had discovered that she loved her newfound freedom, and she’d been having a pretty good time.

  Now she had an opportunity to call on an old skill and do something heroic.

  She was charged with the responsibility to train the volunteers in welding and cutting techniques.

  Marcel had sat with her, and they’d planned how they would handle the operation.

  She started by asking who knew what a weld was.

  She demonstrated by joining two pieces of metal. “Simple,” she said.

  She let one of the volunteers do it.

  The trick to achieving a proper weld, she informed her students, was to get intimate contact between the two surfaces. Expose clean metal. Then the atoms can be joined properly. Intimately. It was her favorite term. When we’re finished, the atoms in the two pieces will be as close to each other as the atoms in either piece are to each other. That was the goal.

  She explained proper technique, demonstrated, let them try it, and kept them at it until they could do it without thinking. They practiced cutting up shelving that was no longer in use, taking apart storage bins and slicing cabinets. Then they put everything back together.

  “It’s easy to do in here,” she warned them. “When you get outside, you’ll find you have a lot to think about. But the job is the same, and the technique is the same. Just do not allow yourself to be distracted.”

  She had some pieces of what they all called impossibilium, the material from which the assembly was made. They practiced cutting it and welding it back together. She emphasized safety, and booted three who were too casual in their approach. “Mistakes will cost,” she told them. “Careless will get you killed. Or will kill someone else.” And later: “It’s really not hard. But you have to keep your mind on what you’re doing.”

  She sent them off to dinner and brought them back for another round.

  This time, when she gave them a chance to leave, everyone stayed.

  They worked until almost 11:00 P.M. Then she thanked them for their attention, dismissed them, and told them they would start next day at six. “We’ll be working in our e-suits tomorrow,” she said. “I want you to get used to them.”

  Someone wanted to know whether that meant they were going outside after all.

  “No,” she said. “Not yet.” And she was pleased to hear them grumble.

  The Evening Star offered a handful of compartments to Marcel’s team. Unfortunately, no VIP accommodation remained available for the captain himself. Nicholson offered, in the time-honored tradition, to donate his own quarters to his visitor. Marcel, as was expected, replied that would never do, and that he would be pleased to take whatever could be had. A cot by the forward mixer, he said, would serve the purpose. He received a unit on the port side amidships that was far more comfortable, and more spacious by half, than his quarters on Wendy.

  It was late morning when he left the welders, and he’d been up all night. He climbed out of his uniform and lay down, planning to nap for a half hour before returning to Nicholson’s bridge. He’d barely closed his eyes when his link chimed.

  “Marcel?” It was Abel Kinder’s voice. Abel was the senior climatologist on Wendy. He was heading a team monitoring conditions around Deepsix for signs of planetary disintegration.

  “Hello, Abel,” he said. “What do you have?”

  “Some serious storms, looks like. And an intensification of seismic activity.”

  “Any of it in the tower area?”

  “They’re going to have some movement, but the worst of it should be northeast of them. At sea.”

  “What about the storms?”

  “Big ones are developing. What’s happening is that the atmosphere responds to Morgan’s gravitational pull just the way the oceans do. So you have big slugs of air and water moving around the planet. Everything heats up from the tidal activity. The normal scheme of things is becoming unhinged. Cold water shows up in warm latitudes, the high-pressure areas over the poles get disrupted…”

  “Bottom line, Abel?”

  “Hard to say. The weather machine is being turned to soup. Anything can happen. You’ll want to warn your people to be on the lookout for hurricanes, tornadoes, God knows what. We don’t have enough sensors on the ground to be able to monitor everything, so we can’t even promise an advance warning.”

  “Okay.”

  “They’re just going to have to stay loose.”

  “Thanks, Abel.”

  “One more thing. These storms’ll be big. Unlike anything anybody’s ever seen at home. Category seventeen stuff.”

  XXI

  Memorials are polite fictions erected in the general pretense that we are selfless and generous, compassionate to those in need, brave in a just cause, faithful unto death. To establish the absurdity of these conceits, one need only glance at the conditions which inevitably erupt whenever police protection, however briefly, fails.

  —GREGORY MACALLISTER, Gone to Glory

  Hours to breakup (est): 107

  They recorded eighteen kilometers before quitting for the day. When Canyon reappeared to conduct his interview, he told them to relax, that he’d do all the work, and that when they got home they’d discover they were all celebrities.

  It was in fact simple enough. He tossed them softballs. Were they scared? What had they seen that most impressed them? Were there things on Deepsix worth saving? Who was this astronomer in the tower he’d heard about? What was the biggest surprise they’d seen on this world?

  Hutch knew what hers had been, but she talked instead about the giant dragonflies.

  He asked about their injuries. None major, said MacAllister. Just a few cuts and scratches. But he admitted to having learned a bitter lesson about keeping in decent physical condition. “You just never know,” he said, “when you’re going to be dumped into a forest on a strange world and made to walk two hundred kilometers. I recommend jogging for everyone.”

  Later, when Jerry Morgan rose, it was almost the size of Earth’s moon. It was, of course, still at half phase, where it would remain. The upper and lower cloud belts, somber and autumn-colored, were flecked with gold. A broad dark band lay at the equator. Hutch could pick out the altitude in the northern hemisphere where Maleiva III, Transitoria, and the tower would make their fatal plunge.

  Under other circumstances, it would have been a strikingly lovely object.

  NEWSLINE WITH AUGUST CANYON

  “Earlier today, I spent some. time with the five brave people who are stranded on Maleiva III while the giant planet named for Jeremy Morgan bears down on them. Four are scientists. The fifth is the celebrated writer and editor, Gregory MacAllister. They’re trekking overland in a desperate effort to find a spacecraft left here twenty years ago. It’s their only hope for getting off the surface before this world ends, which it will do in six days.

  “Will they succeed? Nobody knows, of course. But we’ll be talking to them in a special broadcast this evening. And after you’ve met them, I think you’ll feel as I do, that if it can be done at all, these five people will bring it off—”

  Marcel and Beekman increasingly gave
way on the radio to surrogates, who kept them on course. Left to themselves, traveling through unfamiliar country, without identifiable landmarks or indeed landmarks of any kind, they’d have become hopelessly lost. There were jokes about Hutch’s ability to guide them by the position of the sun, which was nil. Even at night, with clear skies and rivers of stars, she’d have been helpless. If there was a marker star, either north or south, she couldn’t find it. She doubted that such a star would even be visible from the equator.

  But it didn’t matter. Somebody was always on the circuit. Guide right.

  Angle left.

  No. Not around the hill. Go over it.

  Then, without warning, Marcel had a mission for them: “There’s something up ahead. It’s not at all out of your way, and we’d like you to take a quick look.”

  “What is it?”

  “We don’t know. A structure.”

  Hutch begrudged every minute spent off-trail. She glanced at the others, soliciting opinions. They were willing to indulge a minute. But only a minute. Nightingale thought it was a good idea. So long as it was indeed nearby. “Okay,” she said. “We’ll take a peek, let you know what it is. But then we’re moving on.”

  It was on the shore of a lake, tangled deep in old-growth trees and shrubbery. They could see only a few glints of metal, and were unsure it was a structure at all, so completely had the forest embraced it.

  They cut down some bushes, and Hutch’s first impression was that they’d found a storage dome. Until they uncovered a line of windows. Most were still intact. Kellie walked around to the rear. “It’s got a tail,” she reported…

  “A tail?”

  “Twin tails, in fact. It’s an aircraft.”

  It had a flared bottom. Symbols were stenciled on one side, so faint as to be barely noticeable. There was a windscreen up front. The vehicle was about the size of a commuter airbus. But it had no wings. Ground transportation, decided Hutch, despite the tail. Unless they had antigravity.

  Judging by the trees that had engulfed it, it had been there for centuries. Hutch paced it off, and they relayed visuals back to Wendy. Thirty-eight meters along its length, probably six in diameter. Crumpled severely to starboard, somewhat less on the port side.

  Chiang climbed a tree, produced a lamp, and tried to look inside. “Nothing,” he said. “Get me a wet cloth.”

  Kellie broke off a few flat-bladed leaves, soaked them cautiously at the edge of the lake, and handed them up. Chiang wiped the glass.

  “You know,” said Kellie, “wings or not, this thing does have an aerodynamic design. Look at it.”

  She was right. It had flowing lines and was tapered front and rear.

  “What’s happening?” asked Canyon. They knew he habitually listened in on the allcom, and on conversations between the ground party and the orbiting ships.

  Hutch brought him up to date. “I’ll give you the rest when we know what it is,” she said. “If it’s anything.”

  Chiang had his lamp pressed against the glass. “There are rows of seats inside. Little ones. They look a bit thrown about.”

  “Little seats?” asked MacAllister. “Same gauge as back at the tower?”

  “Yes. Looks like.”

  “Now that’s really odd.”

  “Why?” asked Hutch.

  “Look at the door.” It was hard to see behind the tangle of growth, but it was there. Hutch saw what was odd: the door was about the right size for her.

  It was almost at ground level, and it even had a handle, but when MacAllister tried to open it the handle broke off. So they cut a hole through it.

  The interior was dark. Hutch turned on her lamp and looked at roughly thirty rows of the small seats divided by a center aisle, five on either side. Some had been torn up and lay scattered around the cabin. She saw no sign of organic remains.

  The floor creaked. It was covered by a black fabric that was still reasonably intact.

  The bulkheads were slightly curved. They were water-stained and, toward the front, broken open. There were scorch marks.

  The cockpit supported two seats. But unlike those in the body of the craft, they were full-size, large enough to accommodate her. One was broken, twisted off its mount. There was also some damage to the frame that supported the windscreen. She looked down at what had once been an instrument panel.

  “Crashed and abandoned,” said Kellie, behind her.

  “I think so.”

  “What’s with the big seats?” asked MacAllister. “Who sat in them?”

  Nightingale swept his light from front to rear. “It’s pretty clear we have two separate species here,” he said.

  “Hawks and crickets?” suggested Hutch. “They’re both real?”

  “Is that possible? On the same world?”

  “We have more than one intelligent species on our world. What I wouldn’t expect to see is two technological species. But who knows?”

  They examined a lower compartment that must have been used for cargo, but it was empty. And the power plant. It had employed liquid fuel to power a jet thrust. Air intakes. Plastic skirts around the base. Hutch got Beekman back on the circuit. “Are we sure,” she asked, “the locals never went high-tech?”

  “That’s what the Academy says.”

  “Okay. When you talk to the Academy again, you can tell them there’s a hovercraft down here.”

  “Let’s go,” said MacAllister. “No more time to dawdle.”

  Hutch stripped off a piece of a seat and put it into a sample bag. They removed a few gauges from the instrument panel and bagged those as well. None had legible symbols, but it should be possible eventually to enhance them.

  Chiang took Hutch aside. “There’s something else for you to look at. Over here.” In the woods.

  He’d found a black stone wall.

  It was about six meters long. And engraved. It had several rows of symbols, and a likeness of the hovercraft.

  Hutch could assume that the rock had once been polished, that its edges had been sharp, that the inscription had been crisp and clear. But the weather had worn it down. And the inscription ran into the ground.

  She checked the time.

  “It’ll only take a minute,” said Chiang.

  She nodded, and they dug it out while MacAllister urged them to move on. Two deeply etched parallel lines of symbols were engraved across the top, over the likeness of the wrecked vehicle. But this one was lean and powerful, undamaged, and she knew that the sculptor intended that it be perceived as hurtling through the sunlight.

  Below the image of the hovercraft, two groups of characters, side by side, had been carved using block bold symbols. And beneath those two, another series, much more numerous, smaller, ten lines deep. Four across except the last line, which had only three. These might in fact have been using a different alphabet altogether. It was impossible to know because they were not block letters. Rather they had a delicate, complex character.

  “What do you think?” Hutch asked. “What’s it say?”

  “‘Ajax Hovercraft,’” said MacAllister, who was fidgeting off to one side. “The two groups near the top constitute regional distribution centers, and these”—the smaller groups—“are local offices.”

  “Anybody else want to try?” asked Kellie.

  “We really should get moving,” said MacAllister.

  Nightingale joined them. “Its proximity to the wreck,” he said, “suggests it’s a memorial.” He stared thoughtfully at it. “These”—the lines at the top—“are the names of the pilots. And the others are those of the passengers.”

  “What about the top line?” asked Kellie.

  “If it’s a memorial,” said MacAllister, “then it’s a salutary phrase, Stranger, Tell the Spartans, something on that order.”

  “So what was going on here?” asked Chiang.

  “Pretty obviously a traffic accident,” said Nightingale. “A wreck.”

  “Of course. But where were they going?”

  “M
aybe,” said MacAllister, “they were migrant workers of some sort. Farmhands. Indentured labor.”

  “Slaves?” suggested Chiang.

  Nightingale nodded. “Maybe.”

  “Do you put the names of slaves on a memorial?” Hutch shook her head. “That doesn’t sound right.”

  “In human history,” said MacAllister, “people sometimes had great affection for their slaves.” He shrugged. “Who knows what an alien culture might be up to?”

  They pressed forward late into the evening. When at last they’d made camp for the night, they did more interviews with Canyon. Chiang enjoyed the opportunity to perform on an international stage, to look heroic, to say the things that were expected of him. We’ll get home. Smile into the scanner. There are a lot of people rooting for us. But every time he glanced over at Kellie he thought he detected a trace of mockery in her smile.

  When he’d finished he was embarrassed.

  The others were just as shameless. Nightingale’s voice got deeper, MacAllister tried to suck his belly in, Kellie talked as if they didn’t have a care in the world. And even Hutchins, their forthright captain, couldn’t resist preening. They were for the moment famous, and it was affecting them.

  Canyon talked to them individually. As he finished with them they drew around the fire and tried to pretend that nothing unusual had just happened. He was still on the circuit with Kellie, getting what he liked to call context.

  Chiang disliked the forest at night. There was no way to maintain security. It would have required three guards to keep the possibility of a surprise attack to a minimum.

  This was their eighth night out. He thought the count was right, but everything was beginning to run together and he was no longer sure. To date, no predator had tried a night assault. The probability, therefore, was that, if it were going to happen, it would have already occurred. Nevertheless, Chiang worried and fretted, as was his nature.