Deepsix

by Jack McDevitt

  She gave up finally, pulled herself into a sitting position, and wrapped her arms around her knees.

  “Did you love him, Kellie?” The voice startled her. It was MacAllister. He was lying with his back to her, but he rolled over now. His face was in shadow, and she couldn’t make out his expression.

  “No,” she said. And, after a moment: “I don’t think so.”

  “I’m sorry.” He sat up and reached for the coffeepot.

  “I know,” she said. “We’re all sorry.”

  He poured a cup and offered her some. But she declined. She didn’t really want to put anything in her stomach.

  “Sometimes,” he said, “I think life is just one long series of blown opportunities.”

  She nodded. “You know what I really hate,” she said. “Leaving him here. In this godforsaken place.”

  “It’s no worse than any other, Kellie. He’ll never know the difference.”

  She felt empty. “He was a good guy,” she said, biting down a wave of anger and tears. Suddenly the grief rose in her, and she couldn’t contain it. She clamped her teeth together and tried to hold on. MacAllister took her in his arms. “Let it come,” he said.

  Hutch was talking to someone. Kellie had collected herself, tamped down the storm, and was feeling drained. She poured herself some water.

  Hutch stiffened. Lifted her arms in frustration. Kellie knew the gesture, and it raised the hair on her scalp.

  The conversation ended, and Hutch strode swiftly into the ring of the campfire. “Let’s move, folks. We’re down to our last day.” She knelt beside Nightingale and gently shook him.

  “That can’t be right,” said MacAllister. “They told us we had until tomorrow night.”

  “They’ve changed their minds. Come on, we have to get rolling.”

  Mac needed no further prompting. He was searching for his toothbrush. “How far do we still have to go?” he asked.

  “Thirty klicks,” she said. “Give or take.”

  “In one day? We’ll never make it.”

  “Yeah, we will.”

  “Hutch,” Mac said privately, “it’s not as if we’re going to get there and you can turn the key and start the damned thing. How long’s it going to take to get it up and running? Assuming we can do it at all?”

  “A few hours,” she admitted.

  He looked at the approaching sunrise and rubbed his feet. “Then we have to get back to the tower and recover the capacitors. By what time?”

  “Late tonight. Around midnight.”

  He held out his hands helplessly. “We need to go to Plan B.”

  Nightingale was watching while he tried to pull himself together. “What’s going on?” he asked.

  She explained.

  “I’ll be with you in a minute.” He limped down to the creek to wash his face in icy water and brush his teeth. Mac went with him.

  “You okay?” she asked Kellie.

  Kellie was fine. Kellie would never be better. “You and I are going to have to do a sprint,” she said.

  “I know,” said Hutch.

  “We’ll have to leave them.”

  “Mac’s already been suggesting that.”

  The tides were loud in Bad News Bay. They came out onto a promontory and looked out over the water. It was a vast inland sea, the far shore lost in the distance.

  “Ground gets rough to the south,” Marcel told them. “Angle off your present course and head southwest for about a kilometer. There’s a small lake. Circle the lake and keep going, same direction. It looks like easier country.”

  “Okay.”

  Far below, the bay was peaceful. Gulls skimmed along the surface, and Hutch saw something that looked like a large turtle basking in the rising sun.

  They turned and faced each other. “We’ll wait for you here,” said Nightingale.

  Hutch nodded.

  Kellie was looking from one of them to the other. “We’ll be back as soon as we can.”

  They had checked with Marcel. They were on high ground, and should be safe from the tides.

  The four of them walked together along the rim until they found an open area that would be wide enough to set the spacecraft down. “Since time’s pressing,” Hutch said, “we’re going to go to the tower first. Then we’ll be back for you.”

  Kellie looked down the face of the cliff. “Don’t wander around in the dark,” she added.

  “We won’t.”

  Mac shook himself and rubbed his spine against a tree, not unlike an elephant, Hutch thought.

  “I have to tell you,” he said, “I love this plan. Anything that gets me off my feet.” He extended his hand and his voice softened. Became personal. “Good luck, ladies.”

  Kellie pushed past the hand, embraced him, and planted a large wet kiss on his lips. “You’re a jerk, MacAllister,” she said. “But you’re worth saving.”

  Hutch looked at Nightingale, hesitated, told herself what the hell, and repeated the ceremony.

  Kellie, amused, shook her head. “Love fest,” she said. “Who’d’ve thought?”

  Kellie and Hutch followed the shoreline for a time, angled away from it when Marcel told them to, and struck off again to the southwest. The land was heavily forested, marked with ravines and ridges, with rocky bluffs and narrow waterways, and with occasional mountains.

  A herd of gray creatures with faces like camels and long floppy ears rumbled past in great ground-eating leaps and disappeared behind a line of hills.

  Marcel sent them around a mountain and across a trail. Animal or something else? Of course, in a world in which flying creatures attacked in synchronized squadrons and hunting cats walked erect, the line between sentience and pure animal behavior had grown a bit murky.

  They kept moving.

  At about noon, in the middle of a forest, they came upon a balustrade. Above it, Hutch saw a coved dome. Two domes. Twins.

  “By God,” said Kellie. “Look at that thing.”

  The domes were connected by a cornice.

  “It’s a temple.” Hutch stopped in her tracks and stared.

  It had six columns. They were fluted and supported a triangular pediment, on which a frieze had been carved. The frieze depicted two crickets, one seated in a shell of some sort, the other standing. The one in the shell was handing something, a cylinder, to the other.

  No. On closer inspection Hutch saw it was a scroll.

  “Lovely,” said Kellie.

  Hutch was glad for the excuse to stop moving for a minute. “It’s baroque,” she said. “Very close to eighteenth-century Parisian. Who would have thought…”

  She could see an entrance hidden among the columns, and marble steps leading up to it. Kellie started toward them.

  “No time,” said Hutch.

  “There’s more over here.”

  A cylindrical structure was set at right angles to the temple. Pedestals projected every few meters, and a sculpted frieze circled as much of the building as she could see. It had a polyhedral roof supported by braces, and was adorned by roll molding and a small dome. The figures in the frieze seemed to show crickets in various poses, talking, reading, picking fruit from trees, playing with their young. Some were on their knees before a sun symbol.

  There might have been an entire city hidden within the trees. She caught the outlines of majestic buildings, resplendent with arches and rounded windows and parabolic roofs. With galleries and buttresses and spires. And overgrown courts and abandoned fountains.

  It was not a city that had ever known artificial lighting or, probably, a printing press. But it was lovely beyond any comparable complex Hutch had seen before. The detritus of centuries had blown across it, burying it, encasing it within a tangle of branches and bushes and leaves. But it nevertheless made her blood run to stand before the silent structures.

  It might have been that the unearthly beauty of the place was enhanced by the encroaching forest, or by the sense of timelessness, or by its diminutive scale.

 
They stood entranced, relaying the visuals to Wendy. This time only silence came back. No one was asking them to take a moment to explore.

  They spent less than two minutes at the site. Then they hurried on.

  A rainstorm washed over them. Black clouds rolled in, and lightning bolts rippled down the sky.

  They lost contact with Marcel for almost two hours. The rain continued steadily, then changed to sleet. Tremors periodically shook the ground, severely enough to throw both women off their feet.

  “Lovely day for a stroll,” Kellie commented.

  A line of trees appeared ahead. They plunged in. Something in the shrubbery went into a series of frenzied clicks. Hutch, in no mood for problems, and not wanting to give anything a clear shot at them at short range, cleared out the section with her laser. There were screeches, crashing around, animals charging off into the bush. They never got a good look at anything.

  Marcel came back. “Bad weather?”

  “Electrical storms.”

  “We see them. But you’re doing fine. You should be there by early evening.”

  “I hope so.”

  “Hutch, I have another message for you from the Academy.”

  “What’s it say?”

  He hesitated. “It says they want you to take all precautions to avoid any further loss of life.”

  “Good. Tell them I’d never have thought of it myself.”

  “Hutch.”

  “Tell them whatever you like. I don’t really care, Marcel.”

  The sun broke through. The sky cleared, and they hurried on. Something they couldn’t quite make out tracked them for a while from the tops of a series of ridges. It ambled in the manner of an ape, but it apparently thought better of attempting an attack and eventually dropped out of sight.

  “Scares me a little,” said Kellie.

  “Why’s that?”

  “At home, a cougar or a tiger or a gator, if it was hungry, would go for you. Most of these critters keep their distance.”

  “You’re suggesting…”

  “They’re bright enough to know we’re more dangerous than we look.”

  By late afternoon, when the light began to change, they were out in open country again. “Almost there,” Marcel said. “Five klicks.”

  The ground was uneven and covered with thick grass. Hutch was spent. Kellie, with her longer legs, was managing a bit better. But she, too, looked weary.

  Periodically they talked to Mac and Nightingale. They were, they said, enjoying the view. There’d been a high tide at about midday, and the water had come well up the cliff face. But they believed they had a substantial safety margin. MacAllister commented that he was more comfortable than he’d been since leaving the Star and didn’t know whether he’d ever get up on his feet again.

  The sky turned purple and threatening.

  “Three klicks.”

  It was impossible to miss the worry in Marcel’s voice.

  “If you can move a little quicker, it would be a good idea.”

  The splotch of light that represented the sun sank toward a line of hills. Rain began to fall.

  The lander, cold and silent, stood on the banks of a river so narrow it scarcely deserved the name. It was, in fact, an idyllic scene: a line of trees, a few rocks, the river, and the dying light. The trees marked the edge of the forest into which Tess’s crew had disappeared on that long-ago morning.

  It seemed almost to be waiting for them. Hutch was pleased to see the old logo, the scroll within the orbiting star still defiantly crisp on the hatch. The lander was green and white, the colors all the Academy’s vehicles had worn in the early days. And the legend ACADEMY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY shone proudly on its hull.

  They jogged across the remaining ground, not all-out because they couldn’t see the holes and furrows. But Hutch remembered the voracious redbirds and glanced uneasily at the woods. “We’ve got Tess,” she told Marcel.

  Marcel acknowledged, and she heard applause in the background.

  Fortunately the hatch was closed. The ladder was still in place. Hutch climbed it, opened the manual control panel beside the airlock, pulled out the handle, and twisted it. The hatch clicked, and she pulled it open.

  So far, so good.

  They wasted no time getting through the inner door into the cabin. A layer of film and dirt covered the ports and windscreen, darkening the interior. Hutch sat down in the pilot’s seat and scanned the console. Everything appeared to have been properly shut down.

  In back, Kellie opened the engine panel in the deck and exposed the reactor. “Do we know what we’re doing?” she asked.

  “Find the boron. I’ll be right there.”

  “Where are you going?”

  She held up the collapsible container she’d taken from the Star lander. “Down to the river to get some water. You look for the boron.”

  Hutch wished that the pilot twenty years ago had had the foresight to land at the water’s edge. The river was fifty meters away. She hurried down to it, filled the container, and dragged it back. When she got to the lander, Kellie showed her a canister.

  “White powder?” she asked.

  “That’s it.”

  “So what now?”

  “We start the reactor.” A metal cylinder about the size of her arm was attached to the side of the device. The cylinder was equipped with a small crank.

  “How do we do that? Is there a switch?”

  “We’ll have to jump-start it,” Hutch said. She shut down her e-suit and removed the Flickinger generator. “I’ll need yours, too.”

  Kellie complied, turned off the power, and handed it over.

  Hutch dug into her pack. “I have a connector cable here somewhere.”

  Kellie disappeared in back for a moment and returned with one. She held it up for inspection. “Two inputs?” she asked.

  “Perfect.” Hutch tied it to both generators and attached the other end to a post on the reactor. Then she detached the cylinder and poured a half cup of water into it. She turned the crank several times and reconnected the cylinder to the reactor. Then she added a spoonful of boron. “Okay,” she said at last. “I think we’re ready to go.”

  “Glad to hear it.”

  “The system has a built-in Ligon roaster. All we have to do is start it.” She pressed her thumbs against the ignition switches for the Flickinger generators and pushed.

  A yellow lamp on the reactor began to glow. Hutch’s spirits went up a notch.

  “Now what?” asked Kellie.

  “Be patient. It’s going to roast off a few impurities and give us enough hydrogen to run the reactor.” She closed her eyes and added, to the god within, I hope.

  Kellie poked her. “Hate to wake you, Hutch. But we’ve got a green light.”

  The reactor was running on its own.

  Hutch squeezed Kellie’s arm, went back into the washroom, poured some river water into her hands, and washed her face. “It has to charge,” she said. “That’s going to take a while. And there’s nothing we can do to speed things up. But so far we’re doing pretty well.”

  She went outside, and Kellie boosted her up onto the hull. Hutch knelt beside the comm pod. The laser cut was clean, but she was able to replace damaged parts with the pieces she’d recovered from the Star lander. She rewired everything and, when she was satisfied it would work, climbed back down and returned to the pilot’s seat.

  She waited a few more minutes. Kellie paced the cabin nervously. “We don’t have a lot of time, Hutch,” she said. It was getting dark.

  “I know.” Hutch propped her chin on her palm and scanned her instruments. “All right, Collier, if you’re feeling lucky, let’s see if we’ve got some power.” She put the vehicle into a test mode. Indicators and gauges jumped. “That’s my baby. Internal systems look good.”

  “What’s next?”

  “Fuel.”

  The rain had stopped, but the sky was still thick with clouds.

  Hutch emptied the rest of the w
ater into the fuel tank. They found a pump and hose for the tank, but the hose was only twenty meters long. “A bit short to reach the river,” said Kellie.

  Hutch handed her the collapsible container. “File a complaint when we get home.” She removed the lander’s drinking water tank, which was not collapsible, and cradled it in her arms. “We need a lot,” she said.

  “What’s the reactor actually do to the water?” Kellie asked as they hurried toward the river.

  “It electrolyzes it. Separates the hydrogen and oxygen and gets rid of the oxygen.” And of course the lander would then run on the hydrogen.

  They hauled water through the dark for the better part of three hours. They emptied each container into the fuel tank, hurried back to the river, refilled, and unloaded again.

  When they had enough power to get some lift out of the spike, Hutch eased into her seat, murmured a prayer, and pressed a stud. Her control panel came to life, and she raised a joyous fist. “On our way, baby,” she said.

  She opened the command menu and pressed the green field marked Tess. Nothing happened except that the charge level dipped.

  “Tess?” Hutch said. “Are you there?”

  A status line appeared on the AI monitor. It was flat.

  “Looks as if Tess has gone to a happier world,” said Kellie.

  “I’d say.”

  “Try again?”

  “No point. It just eats up power.” She extracted the control yoke from its bin and locked it into position.

  Now she took a deep breath and started the turbines.

  They sputtered, coughed, tried again, and finally staggered into life. She talked to them and coaxed them along until the power flow became smooth. “I do believe we’re in business,” she said.

  “Do we have any lift?”

  “Let’s find out.” Hutch directed power into the spike. The gauges quivered and moved up a few notches. They were getting about twenty percent. Actually not bad, considering the age and probable condition of the capacitors. Not enough to get them into orbit, of course. Not nearly enough. But enough to get them off the ground.

  Hutch opened the manual start-up compartment and activated the flight systems. Several lamps blinked on, gauges that would indicate airspeed, altitude, fuel mixture, engine temperature.