Deepsix

by Jack McDevitt

  She could see no way off the iron. The rock wall was smooth. The few bushes clinging to it would never support her. There was a tree above and not far to one side. It looked old and scrabbly, and she thought it had all it could do to hang on itself. Furthermore, it would have been a long jump, one she was pretty sure she couldn’t make.

  Kellie was constantly on the circuit, between bursts of interference checking on her, asking whether she was okay.

  The rain battered her. The suit kept her dry, but it was hard to see.

  “You’re sure there’s no way you can get off the iron?” Kellie asked.

  Hutch shook her head wearily. They’d been over it and over it.

  “That settles it.”

  “No. Don’t come up. Wait it out.”

  “But—”

  “I’ll find a way to get clear. My best chance is for you to stay put.”

  Another bolt exploded overhead. She jumped and would have fallen off her perch had she not been secured. She’d almost gotten used to the constant fear, which left her feeling numb and exhausted. The tree sagged in the heavy rain.

  The gridwork trembled. Quake or thunder, it no longer seemed to matter. She looked off to the east. Jerry would be rising soon, although the sky would be too heavy to allow her to see it. Thank God for small favors.

  When the lander began to drop, Kellie had accelerated, gained altitude, and returned to the mountaintop, hoping that they might be able to find a way to effect a rescue from above. But the peak was still blanketed with fog, despite the heavy winds. The electrical activity had knocked out communication with Wendy, so there was no one to guide them in. When MacAllister urged her to try anyhow, she’d prudently pointed out that getting them all killed would do nothing whatever for Priscilla Hutchins.

  Instead, she’d opted for a shelf halfway down the mountain. They could hear the ocean coming in, so she wanted to stay high.

  MacAllister stared morosely out the window into the flickering darkness while rain hammered at them.

  They growled at one another and complained about sitting and doing nothing. Late in the evening Mac finally fell asleep. Nightingale, having no one left to argue with, sat morosely in his chair until Kellie wondered whether he was awake. At about midnight, she lost communication altogether with Hutch.

  The lightning continued through the night. She slept fitfully, and woke once to overhear a whispered conversation between her passengers. Nightingale was confessing to having delayed the rescue, was taking responsibility for Hutch’s situation on his own shoulders. She could imagine what he was thinking: Priscilla had stayed behind so he could get off. Once again, a woman had rescued him at the cost of her own life. To her surprise Mac told him it could have happened to anybody.

  He was hard to figure, that one. Mac characteristically turned a cynical face to the world. Yet he had urged her to try for the rescue, even when she told him it couldn’t be done, not in the dark, not in this wind, that they’d only be throwing their lives away.

  He’d said very little since Hutch and Nightingale had left that morning to explore the hexagon. It must be hard on him, she thought. He’s used to center stage. Everybody takes him seriously, hangs on his every word. He stays at the best hotels, enjoys media attention everywhere he goes. Now suddenly he’s reduced to survival mode, hang on to your tether, life and death in the balance. And nobody gives a damn who he is. The only issue for the past twelve days has been: What can he do? And the reality is, he’d been able to do more than she would have thought.

  When they got home, she decided, if they got home, she was going to ask Marcel to give Mac a commendation. That would be something worth seeing, Gregory MacAllister showing up at the Academy to receive an award. He’d never complained, other than to yell at inanimate objects, like Jerry. He’d done everything possible within his physical limitations, and he’d not turned out to be the general pain in the rear she’d expected when they began.

  “My God,” he said. The cabin brightened and darkened. Thunder ripped through the night.

  “That one hit the elevators,” Nightingale said.

  “Hutch!” Mac tapped his commlink and spoke into it. “Priscilla. Answer up.”

  It was close to dawn, five hours to rendezvous with Marcel’s scoop. But there was as yet no break in the darkness. Nightingale was sitting despondently, listening to the wind. MacAllister was bunched up behind him, his teeth clenched against every lightning strike.

  MacAllister had never been comfortable with the sobriquet Hutch. It was a warehouse worker’s name, utterly inappropriate for a gallant, if foolhardy, young woman. He wondered if all these people had tin ears.

  He’d begun composing a tribute to her. It would appear in The Adventurers’ Quarterly, the publication he’d edited for six years, and which still featured his occasional contributions.

  “Anything?” he asked Kellie, who’d been trying the commlink again.

  She shook her head. Just the heavy crackle of interference.

  “It must be time,” said Nightingale.

  “Not yet,” she said.

  MacAllister went back to his project. Priscilla was from a small town in Ohio.

  Where was she from? He’d have to look that up. It didn’t make any difference, of course, whether it was Ohio or Scotland. Or even whether it was a small town.

  Priscilla was from the lower Bronx.

  It played just as well.

  She worked for the Academy of Science and Technology, a pilot collecting standard pay, making the wearying runs between Earth and the dig site at Pinnacle or the black hole at Mamara.

  Twenty years ago she was part of the expedition that discovered the Omega clouds, those curious constructs that erupt in waves from galactic center to attack swimming pools and twenty-story buildings. While everyone else on that mission wrote a set of memoirs, Priscilla Hutching simply went back to piloting.

  We forgot about her. And we might never have noticed who she really was. Except that eventually they sent her to Deepsix.

  He made a noise in the back of his throat and scratched out galactic center. It sounded too much like a park.

  Nightingale got up and made for the coffee dispenser. Kellie had been trying off and on to read, but he could see she was making no progress.

  Mac had almost finished when she straightened up. “Okay,” she said. “The wind’s down a bit. Everybody belt in.” It was, he thought, brighter outside, but not by much.

  He heard the whine of the engines and drew his harness down over his head. Panel lights blinked on. “Hang on,” she said, and MacAllister felt the vehicle lift into the storm. In the same instant Kellie flicked on the running lights. They rose past walls and driving rain and writhing trees.

  The lander fought its way into the sky while Nightingale tried again to raise Hutch.

  Mac gazed hopefully out at the precipice. Occasionally, when the angle was right, he could see the gridwork. “Do we know where to look?” he asked.

  “She was on the far left,” said Kellie. “At sixty-three hundred meters.”

  Mac took to watching the altimeter.

  In front of him, Nightingale was barely breathing.

  “Elevator’s gone,” Kellie said. That was no surprise.

  Nightingale swept the gridwork with binoculars.

  “Any sign of her?” asked Mac.

  “I’ll tell you if I see something,” he snapped.

  Kellie stabbed at her link. “Hutch, you out there?”

  The static broke momentarily, and they heard her voice!

  “—Here—”

  They all tried to talk to her at once. Kellie got them quiet. “Where are you?” she asked.

  “Where you left me.” The transmission broke up. “—see your lights.”

  “Okay, hang on. We’ll be right there.”

  “Good. I’d be grateful.”

  “Hutch, what’s your situation?”

  “Say again?”

  “What’s your situation?” />
  “I’m okay.”

  “I see her,” said Nightingale.

  “Where?” Kellie asked.

  “There.” He jabbed his finger.

  She was dangling from one of the crosspieces. Mac took only a moment to look, then reached behind him for the cable. He looped one end around the seat anchor and pulled it tight. Nightingale opened the inner airlock.

  “Don’t forget yourself,” said Kellie.

  He hadn’t. Not after last time. He retrieved his own tether and tied himself firmly to the same base.

  Kellie reminded them also to activate their e-suits. She matched air pressure. “Ready to go,” she said.

  A gust of wind hammered the lander, and Mac crashed to the floor. Nightingale helped him up.

  Kellie opened the outer hatch. Wind and rain spilled into the airlock. And Mac saw why Hutchins was still alive. She’d converted her rope into a sling, looped under thighs and armpits, and lowered herself off the girder. Away from the metal.

  “Hang on, Priscilla,” he told her, though he knew she could not hear him over the roar of the storm.

  “Are we close enough?” asked Kellie. The lander rose and fell.

  “No,” he cried. “We’re going to have to do better than this.”

  “I don’t know if we can.”

  The cable was general-purpose lightweight stuff. Something to be used for securing cargo or possibly marking off a dig site. In this wind he wanted something more like Hutchins’s heavy vine.

  He missed a couple times, and then shut off his e-suit long enough to remove a shoe. He tied the cable to it and waited for the right circumstances: a drop in the wind and the lander in close. When it happened he threw the shoe and the cable. The shoe sailed over the crossbar. Hutch swung back, swung forward, grabbed the line. She hauled it down and looped it around her middle and secured it under her arms.

  Mac took up the cable and got ready.

  “Hurry,” Kellie pleaded, while she fought the storm and the downdrafts.

  The laser appeared in Hutch’s right hand. She showed the laser to them, signifying what she was about to do.

  Mac glanced at the seat anchor, and tightened his grip. Nightingale, standing in the hatch, was not tethered. Mac pushed him back, out of harm’s way.

  Priscilla cut the vine and dropped down out of sight. The cable jerked tight. Mac held on, felt Nightingale move in behind him, and they hauled her in.

  When she was safely on board, a wave of laughter engulfed them. Priscilla hugged Mac and kissed Nightingale. Kellie accelerated and shut down the spike to preserve its power supply. Then Hutch embraced her, too. They were happy, exhausted, tearful. She thanked them, wriggled out of the rope and cable, expressed her unbounded joy at being back in the lander, and hugged everybody again. She untied Mac’s shoe and returned it ceremonially.

  “Welcome home,” said Kellie.

  Mac eased himself into his seat. “Nice to have you back, Priscilla,” he said.

  She collapsed beside him, rubbed her thighs where the vine had supported her, and closed her eyes. “You wouldn’t believe how good it is,” she said, “to be here.”

  Kellie had been climbing steadily. Suddenly they emerged above the clouds. The air was less turbulent, but Nightingale caught his breath. He was looking up.

  Mac followed his gaze. They could see the vast arc of the onrushing planet. The entire southwestern sky quailed beneath that purple monster. They could see into it, into its depths. Mac felt chilled.

  “What now?” he asked. “Do we make our rendezvous?”

  “Not yet,” said Hutch. “It’s too early. We’ve got more than four hours left.”

  He grimaced and looked down at the boiling clouds. “Do we really have to go back down there?”

  Bill and Lori surprised the staff by showing up in tandem onscreen on the Star bridge. “I’m pleased to announce that maneuvering is complete,” said Lori. “No further power applications need be made. Alpha will arrive at the designated point over the Misty Sea in the proper alignment at the specified time.”

  “Well done,” said Bill. He seemed quite pleased.

  Kellie found high ground near the base of the mountain, and set down.

  Hutch went back into the washroom. When she came out a half hour later she looked scrubbed down, and she was wrapped in a blanket, waiting for her clothes to dry. “I hope nobody minds the informality,” she said.

  “Not a bit of it,” said MacAllister, with a leer.

  They passed around one of the bottles she’d salvaged from the Star. The wind blew, the rain fell, but for the moment at least, all was right with the world.

  XXXIII

  As there are some professions that demand believers in the amity of Providence, like those who work among the downtrodden, or who teach adolescents, there are others for which atheism is desirable. I am thinking particularly of pilots. When you are adrift among the clouds or the stars, you want someone in the cockpit who has as much to lose as you do if the party goes down.

  —GREGORY MACALLISTER, My Life and Loves

  Hours to breakup (est): 20

  Miles Chastain returned with Phil Zossimov to the net. This time he had his gear, a couple of assistants, and a load of material on two shuttles. Drummond waited with an Outsider team.

  Miles had been piloting superluminals for almost four years, the last three for Universal News. It paid well, and equally important at this stage of his life, the job took him to places where something was usually happening. He had, for example, hauled a news team out to Nok, the only world known to have a living native civilization, just in time to see the first shots fired in the latest round of an early-twentieth-century-style war. He’d accompanied the investigators to Kruger 60 when the Aquilar returned from the first probe across the Orion rift without its crew. He’d been the pilot when Universal did its award-winning special on the antique alien station orbiting Beta Pac III.

  Now he was helping orchestrate the rescue off Deepsix. Not bad for a kid from a Baltimore row house.

  He arrived within minutes after receiving the news that Alpha was on course, and no additional course changes would be needed. That meant Phil’s team could begin its phase of the mission.

  To release the asteroid, Drummond had cut the net almost three-quarters of the way around its circumference. The net now drifted glittering in the sunlight, two halves, partially entwined, a kind of bright tattered banner trailing from a very long post.

  Their first objective was to finish what Drummond had begun: complete the cut. Get rid of one of the two halves.

  Drummond’s shuttle inserted itself within the drifting folds. One of his Outsiders exited the airlock and tied a cable to the half designated for disposal. He then returned inside the shuttle, which began to move away, straightening that portion of the net to prepare it for a laser cut.

  Miles approached in the second vehicle and sliced through it until it was cleanly separated. Now Drummond’s pilot dragged the severed portion away and released it to find its own orbit.

  He returned and secured the remaining half to the shuttle. Then he gradually braked, drawing it out. When he was satisfied, he released it.

  Miles moved in again.

  The idea was to convert the remaining section into a sack. The part of the net attached to the plate would, when it was lowered into the atmosphere, constitute the top of the sack; the opposite end, the former south pole, would become the bottom. The task facing Miles’s team was to join the severed sides near the bottom and bind them together, forming an area which would hang down toward the planetary surface, and into which, in just over six hours, the lander could descend. Or crash-land, if need be.

  The shuttles took up positions on either side of the net, approximately one hundred meters up from the “bottom.” Miles and three of the Outsiders climbed onto it and used the shuttles to help draw the lower sections together.

  The rest of the Outsider team, which totaled eight in all, joined the effort. They’d be
en drilled specifically for this operation, but Miles never stopped worrying. They’d practiced on the Star’s tennis nets, but that hadn’t been the most realistic simulation.

  He watched his people move out across the narrow space between the net and the airlock onto the metal links floating nearby. They connected their tethers as they’d been instructed, removed from their packs the clips which Marcia Keel had manufactured from chairs and coffee machines and cargo shelving, and began the process of binding the lower section of the net back together.

  One advantage, at least: no lasers were in use. He’d hated putting lasers in the hands of the people along the assembly, and would have flat out refused to do it on the net, had he been asked. Fortunately, it wasn’t necessary.

  He was the only person out there with a go-pack. It was his responsibility to navigate along the edges, and to draw them close enough together that the Outsiders could connect them permanently. Only one drifted off during this phase of the operation, and Miles was quick to retrieve him.

  He was uncomfortable about this aspect of the strategy. “This sack is three-quarters of a kilometer in diameter, Marcel,” he said over a private channel. “It wouldn’t take much for it to get tangled up. Then you’d have nothing.”

  “What’s your suggestion?”

  “I’d prefer to cut the thing down to a manageable size. Say 150 meters. Certainly no more than that.”

  “How long would it take you to do it?”

  He looked across the hundreds of square meters of drifting net. They’d have to go back inside, do some complicated maneuvering, do the cutting, come back out, splice it together. “Twelve hours,” he said.

  “So that shoots it, no?” He could hear Marcel’s impatience. “Do it as planned.”

  The Outsiders finished, and the bottom one hundred meters were stitched together into a sack. When they’d finished, Miles’s shuttle picked them up.

  Now it became the Phil Zossimov Show. Phil had brought along some tubing, cut and shaped like a ring. Miles admired the young Russian. He’d made it clear an hour earlier that the thought of going outside onto the net terrified him. But he showed no sign of reluctance as he stood in front of the volunteers and activated his e-suit.