Deepsix

by Jack McDevitt

  “Pick you up in flight. I can’t explain now.”

  “I’m not surprised.”

  “We’re building a device that might work.”

  “Marcel,” said Hutch, “what’s your level of confidence in this scheme?”

  He apparently had to think about it. “Look. Nobody’s ever tried anything like this before. I can’t promise success. But it’s a chance.”

  “Right.” Kellie stared at Hutch. “Go for the tower.”

  Hutch agreed. “I think we better get the capacitors.” She leaned forward in her chair as if she could urge the spacecraft to more acceleration.

  “Hutch—” He sounded desperate.

  Kellie shook her head. Get there or nothing else matters.

  They were already at full throttle, had been since leaving the river. “How much time do we have?” asked Kellie. “Before the water reaches the tower?”

  “The tower’s getting its feet wet now.”

  “How deep? How bad is it?”

  “It’s deep enough. You simply don’t have time for this.”

  “We’re out over the plain,” said Hutch, “and we don’t see any water yet.”

  “Take my word for it.”

  “We’re going to look, Marcel. We’ll let you know.”

  Kellie went private. “We’re not over the plain, Hutch,” she said. They were in fact passing over forest and ridges.

  “We’re only a couple of minutes away.” Hutch went back to Marcel. “If it looks at all possible, we’re going to try it.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t.”

  “I wish we didn’t have to. Now tell me about the water: What are we going to see? Waves? A gradual rise? What?”

  “There’s a wave on its way. Actually, a series of waves, running close together.”

  “How far are they? From the tower? How high?”

  “High enough to submerge the capacitors. They’re at ground level, right?”

  “Yes. On a table.”

  “They’re probably already in the water.”

  “Any chance we can beat the waves? Any chance at all?”

  “You’ve got about fifteen minutes.”

  They were ten minutes away. Give or take. “Okay, Marcel. All or nothing.”

  “Speaking of which: You’re off course. Come twelve points to port.”

  Hutch moved the yoke to the left, and watched the guidance indicators. “Okay?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” he said despondently. “Looks fine.”

  Kellie listened to the steady roar of the jets and watched snow-covered ridges sweep past.

  “We did a minimum charge,” Hutch told her. “That means there’s a possibility we may have to install the new capacitors before we can get off the ground. That could get interesting. You might take a look in back. Make sure we have everything close to hand in case we have to do the connections.”

  “We going to do this in the backseat?”

  “If things get tight, yes. We won’t take time to remove the onboard capacitors. Just pull the connectors. We’ll load the new ones in back as best we can, tie them in, and get the hell away. So we’ll need electrical cable and wrenches ready to go.”

  Kellie went back and began laying everything out.

  The lander passed over the last line of hills and came out over the plain. They picked up the snow cover and the ground became ethereal, a spectral countryside of glistening trees and silver-etched shadows. Then the tones changed, and they were over water.

  It looked shallow. Shin-high, knee-high. They could still see ground shrubbery. Kellie reported everything ready in the backseat.

  Hutch watched the time and looked for the tower. “Can’t be far now.” And to Marcel: “What happens if they get wet? The capacitors?”

  “They aren’t designed to be waterproof, Hutch. If they get wet, they will have to be dried out. Maybe they’d still be usable. I really can’t say for certain, and we can’t find the information in the database. But it’s a circumstance we should have tried harder to avoid.”

  Hutch understood what he was saying. They should have walked faster. She cut fuel and dropped close to the ground. The lander slowed. “Kellie, keep an eye open.”

  Trees and hills were creating wakes. A few animals fled before the current, and a pack of the wolflike creatures they’d seen early in their trek were moving southwest toward higher country, only their heads visible above water. They weren’t going to make it.

  “Hutch.” Marcel again. “You’re coming up on the tower. Three points to port, directly ahead, about two thousand meters.”

  She killed the jets. The lander coasted through the silver light. “It might be shallow enough that we can still do this,” said Kellie.

  “I see it.” Hutch bent over the controls. “I’m going to try to set down with as little help from the spike as we can manage. We want to save enough to get us out of here.”

  She had no choice, however, but to use the system to stay aloft. power levels were therefore falling. The reactor automatically shut down while they were in flight, so available power consisted of what-ever had been stored in batteries or capacitors. And to save time they’d stored an absolute minimum.

  Marcel’s voice: “You’ve got about six minutes before the ocean gets there.”

  “How big’s the first wave?”

  “It’s spreading out. Diminishing. But at the moment it’s maybe ten meters.” Almost as high as the tower.

  “There’s our baby.” Kellie pointed. There was no sign of the chasm.

  The tower rose out of the floodwaters, bleak and cold and desolate, but still standing. It seemed to Hutch almost biblical, last trace of a vanished civilization, a final defiant rocky digit raised against the unforgiving skies.

  “Going down.” She lowered the treads.

  “We might be okay,” said Kellie.

  The lander’s lights reflected off running water. Hutch went to reverse thrust, brought the vehicle almost to a standstill, and lowered it gently toward the ground.

  To the north, she could make out a moving gray wall. “Here comes the wave,” she said, activating her e-suit.

  Hutch pushed the yoke forward and felt a mild jar as they touched down. Kellie opened the airlock and splashed out into the surge.

  The current tried to drag her off her feet.

  Hutch started out behind her, but she stopped in the airlock and watched the mountainous wave bearing down on them. Abruptly, to Kellie’s dismay, she called her back. “Forget it,” Hutch said. “There isn’t time.”

  Marcel broke in. “Let it pass,” he said. “Then try it.”

  “No!” Kellie fought to stay on her feet. The current was moving north in the direction of the oncoming wave.

  Hutch sounded cold and calm in her receiver: “It won’t do any good if we lose the lander.”

  “We won’t be able to find them afterward,” Kellie said. “Dead now or dead later: What’s the difference?” She was only steps away from the entrance, and she kept going.

  “Won’t improve things if we can’t find you either,” Hutch said.

  The wave was enormous, rising high and rising higher. A huge crest folded over and crashed down. Kellie stumbled into the tower. The capacitors lay on the worktable where they’d left them, covered by the tarp.

  The water swirled around her ankles. The roar of the on-rushing sea was deafening.

  “Come on!” Hutch let her hear a cold flat tone. “Kellie, I have to pull out.”

  She actually touched one of the capacitors through the cloth. She couldn’t leave without them. Couldn’t possibly leave without them. Just pick the thing up and hustle back with it. But she needed Hutch. Couldn’t get both of them alone.

  “…get the lander clear.”

  Kellie and the wave. It had a nice ring.

  “God.”

  She couldn’t hope to carry it, though. Not in time—

  She broke away finally and stumbled back through the muck. It was hard going, and sh
e fell at the entrance, rolled, and came up running. Hutch stood in Tess’s hatch looking back past her shoulder. Looking up. Kellie splashed across the few meters as Hutch ducked inside. She heard the engines turn over, felt the shadow of the wave. The lander began to lift. The hatch was still open, but she had to jump for the ladder. She caught the bottom rung, hung on, dangled while Tess went up, watched the wall of water engulf the tower. It crashed over it. Submerged it. They were rising too slowly and then the vertically positioned jets cut in and they soared. She clung desperately, suddenly as heavy as a load of iron. She screamed, and the wave thundered beneath her.

  The jets died, and Hutch let the lander sink a few meters. Kellie scrambled for a better grip, dragged herself up a couple more rungs, and got a foot on the ladder.

  The tower was gone. She could smell seawater.

  She fell in through the hatch and looked for something to throw at Hutchins, seated at the controls, not even looking back.

  “You were going to leave me,” she said. “You were actually going to leave me down there.”

  “I’m responsible for two more people.” Hutch’s voice simmered with anger. “If you want to kill yourself, that’s one thing. But I wasn’t going to let you kill all of us.”

  “We could have done it, goddam you.” She closed the hatch.

  Hutch finally turned and looked at her. “You had your hands full getting back as it was. What makes you think you could have done it carrying one of the capacitors?”

  “We were too slow getting out of the lander. If we’d gone in as soon as we got here. No hesitation. Just done it—”

  “We’d both be dead.”

  Hutch circled around, and they flew over a sea of rampaging water. There was no sign of the tower. And a second wave was becoming visible.

  They watched it in silence. It rolled in and swept past, higher than the first.

  “We should have tried,” said Kellie.

  She saw the tower, rising out of the flood, water pouring from its windows. Incredibly, it was still intact, other than a couple of pieces missing from its roof.

  “Next one’s three minutes away,” said Hutch.

  The third wave was the giant. It kept building, and Hutch took them higher. A few trees had managed to keep their uppermost branches out of the water. But this one rolled over them and over the tower.

  They waited, watching for the stone roof to reappear.

  Marcel asked what had happened.

  “Don’t know yet,” said Hutch.

  MacAllister and Nightingale also called in. “We may have gotten here too late,” Hutch told them.

  Hutch thought there was still a chance.

  She engaged the jets, moved into a wide arc around the place where the tower had been, and shut down the spike, conserving energy.

  “It’s over,” said Kellie. Her voice shook.

  “No. When the water subsides, we’ll go down and look.”

  But the site was now located at the bottom of a turbulent lake. The water level rose and sank as they watched. More waves thundered in. Sometimes the newly formed sea exposed large swatches of ground. But Hutch was no longer sure where the tower had even been.

  “Hutch.” Marcel’s voice. “It should start to recede in an hour or so.”

  “We’ve got an ocean at the moment,” she said. “You say recede. Is the water going to go back out?”

  “Well, not really. Some of it will. But a lot of it’s going to stay right where it is. At least for the next few days.”

  “Good,” said Kellie. “We don’t have anything better to do. We’ll just—”

  “That’s enough,” said Hutch. She continued to circle.

  MacAllister called again. “Listen, you did your best. Don’t worry about it.”

  All these people depending on her.

  Kellie gave Hutch a withering look, and Hutch was getting tired of that, too.

  Over the next forty-five minutes, more waves, large and small, swept through the area. Morgan moved silently across the sky into the west, enormous and bright and lovely.

  At last the water began to ebb, running back the other way. A wake appeared off their starboard side. It was the tower, broken and shattered.

  Cautiously, Hutch set the lander down in the retreating current and began recharging the reactor. They sat in strained silence almost an hour, until the force of the runoff had subsided. Then they climbed out into the current. The water came to their waists.

  The top of the tower and the upper chambers had been ripped off. The worktable was gone, as were the capacitors. They looked carefully at the ground floor. They even took lamps and swam down the staircase to the level below. But there was nothing.

  They searched the surrounding area, marking off sections and walking and swimming through them as thoroughly as they could.

  Jerry set, and the sun rose.

  XXV

  Luck does not come out of a vacuum. It is manufactured by organization.

  —GREGORY MACALLISTER, “The Art of Julio Agostino,” Editor at Large

  Hours to breakup (est): 60

  NEWSLINE WITH AUGUST CANYON

  “The small landing party marooned on Maleiva III lost a race with the sea hours ago when the giant tides being stirred up by the approach of Morgan’s World flooded extensive northern tracts of the continent everyone here calls Transitoria, and washed away two capacitors that would have lifted the stranded explorers into orbit Nevertheless, authorities on board the Evening Star insist they have not given up.

  “It’s the middle of the day here, Tuesday, December 5. Inside sources expect that conditions on Maleiva III will deteriorate tomorrow, and grow much worse Thursday. They are predicting that the planet will begin to break up Thursday night. A last-ditch effort is being mounted to construct a kind of sky scoop. Universal personnel will be closely involved in the attempt, and I’ll be back with details on a special broadcast later today.

  “This is August Canyon, in orbit around Deepsix.”

  Janet’s volunteers were near the end of their third day of training when word came. They would be going outside.

  Tonight.

  The reaction was mixed. The news was accompanied by a sober moment while they digested the fact that the stakes, for them, had just gone up. Janet detected a trace of apprehension, now that a serious commitment had been made. But they went back to work with a will.

  As to herself? She was delighted she’d come.

  Chastain stopped by the Bryant Auditorium to talk to the volunteers about the Flickinger field. They were now calling themselves the Outsiders.

  Only one of the thirty-odd volunteers had ever worn an e-suit before entering the training program. He reviewed how the systems worked, took questions, played a sim, and inspected harnesses. They talked about the Flickinger field, what it could do, what it could not do. He laid down some basic safety procedures, like not losing physical contact with the ship or with the alien assembly on which they’d be working.

  After dinner the outsiders were called back for an evening session, during which Janet introduced Mercedes Dellamonica, Nicholson’s executive officer. She was a cool, unemotional native of Mexico City. She, Marcel, and Janet accompanied the trainees outside in groups of fifteen, each taking five. They walked around on the hull, got used to conditions, got used to the systems, acquired enough skill with the communications package to get by, and received once again all the appropriate warnings, including a demonstration by Mercedes, who deliberately lost contact with the surface, floated off, and had to be rescued.

  They did some zero-gee welding. Afterward they were required to give a final demonstration of their skills. When they’d finished, two more were excused.

  A few tennis nets had been strung together outside, courtesy of Captain Nicholson, and those who were scheduled to work on the asteroid net got some practice climbing around on them.

  At the end of the session, around eleven, they were herded into a dining room adjoining the captain’s
own. An assortment of snacks was served, compliments of the Star. Their instructors were present, and when everyone was assembled, Captains Nicholson and Clairveau filed in. Nicholson made a short speech, thanking them for their effort, and expressing his confidence that they would succeed. Afterward they were called forward individually and awarded certificates emblazoned with an image of a woman dressed apparently for an afternoon on the links, carrying a welding torch, and sitting confidently atop two of the assembly shafts.

  Behind the two captains, stretched across the bulkhead, was a banner carrying the same image. Below the woman, dark green script spelled out Evening Star. Above was the legend The Outsiders.

  Pindar Koliescu was delighted with himself. He’d gone outside with the rest, had handled the e-suit with aplomb, had shown a decent adroitness wielding the laser. He felt he understood enough to cut and weld with the best of them. Not bad after only three days’ practice. But then he’d always been a quick study.

  He was the founder of Harbinger Management Systems, which specialized in teaching people how to supervise subordinates and oversee resources. It was mundane stuff, but it was sorely needed in the commercial world of the early twenty-third century. Harbinger had made him wealthy and allowed him to indulge his principal hobby: cruising into the unknown with beautiful women.

  His partner on this tour was Antonia Luciana, an exquisite and insatiable young Roman who had kept him in quite a good mood since the start of the voyage. Antonia had tried to discourage him from joining the rescue effort, had struggled to hold back tears when he insisted, had then suggested she would have liked to go along too but doubted her ability to learn the requisite skills within the time frame. She had also admitted that the prospect of going outside terrified her.

  In the manner of the excellent manager he was, he understood, and left her to applaud his pending heroics.

  Pindar was enjoying himself thoroughly. He’d gotten caught up in the emotional swirl surrounding the rescue effort, he had come to feel a kinship with the four people on the surface, and he understood that no display of courage and skill on his part, however memorable it might be, would be satisfying unless the rescue succeeded.