Deepsix

by Jack McDevitt

  Connect the tether.

  He had to let go with one hand to do that. Impossible.

  He concentrated on the links, on the smooth burnished surface of the chain, on the way they were fastened. On getting secured to the net before Hutch came out of the airlock.

  On anything other than the open void that yawned all around him.

  He pried a hand loose, gathered up the tether, which dangled from his vest, and hooked it to a link. Pulled on it. Felt it lock down.

  The net was moving up, accelerating. He was getting heavier. Below him, Hutch came out of the lander, tumbling.

  He lost sight of her. Loose cable spilled into the sky, and he slid both arms into the links, grabbed hold of Hutch’s line, which was tied securely around his middle, and braced himself. “I’ve got you,” he told her.

  The jolt ripped the cable out of his hands and yanked hard at his midsection. It dragged the loop down past his beltline to his knees, tore his feet off the cable, and for a terrifying moment he thought they were both going to take the plunge. But his tether held. He grabbed frantically for her line and clung to it with one hand and to the net with the other.

  Someone was asking whether he was okay. Hutch’s line was slipping away, and he gathered his nerve and let go of the net to get a better grip. He looked down at her swinging gently back and forth above the cloud tops.

  He was afraid his own tether would part under the strain.

  “Hutch?” he cried. “You okay?”

  No answer.

  She’d become an anchor, a deadweight, and he couldn’t hold on, couldn’t hold on. He squeezed his eyes shut, and his shoulders began to hurt.

  He tried to pull up, tried to figure out a way to fasten her to the net, but he couldn’t let go with either hand, or he’d lose her.

  Kellie was asking for a goddam status report. “Hanging by my fingernails,” he told her.

  “Don’t let go,” said Mac. Good old Mac, always full of obvious advice.

  His arms and shoulders began to ache. “Hutch? Help me.”

  Stupid thing to say. She was swinging back and forth, God knows how far below the bottom of the net, and she obviously couldn’t help herself.

  Why didn’t she answer? Was she dead? Killed in the fall? How far had she fallen anyhow? He tried to calculate, to give his mind something else to concentrate on.

  “I can’t hold her much longer,” he screamed at the circuit, at anyone who was listening. He was bent over and she weighed too much and he couldn’t get her line up any higher. “Please help.”

  Marcel came on. “Randy, don’t let go.”

  “How much longer?” he demanded. “How much longer do I have to hang on?”

  “Until you’re in orbit,” he said. “Fourteen minutes.”

  His spirit sagged. Never happen. Not close. Fourteen minutes. I might as well drop her now.

  Hutch had gotten the breath knocked out of her when she fell. She’d heard the voices on her circuit but they’d been distant and unintelligible until that last.

  “Randy, don’t let go.”

  “How much longer?”

  She looked up at the line, arcing overhead for what seemed an interminable length, up to the net. Up to Nightingale, twisted and hanging on. Reflexively she thought about trying to climb it, to get to safety, but it was a long way. She couldn’t manage it under these circumstances, and she didn’t want to put additional pressure on Nightingale.

  “I’m okay, Randy,” she told him.

  “Hutch!” He sounded so desperate. “Can you climb up?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Try.”

  “Not a good idea,” she said.

  “All right.” He sounded so tired. So scared.

  “Don’t let go, Randy.”

  “I won’t, Hutch. God help me, I won’t.”

  “It’s because we’re lifting you out,” Marcel told him. “Hang on.”

  “What do you think I’m trying to do?” He delivered a string of epithets, howling curses at tethers and landers and starship captains.

  “Randy.” Marcel’s voice, cutting through his rage.

  “Yeah? Goddam, yes, what do you want?”

  “We’re going to try something.”

  Oh God, he wanted to let go.

  “Thirty seconds,” said Marcel. “Just hold her for thirty seconds more.”

  His arms and back were on fire.

  “She’s going to get heavier,” Marcel continued. “But only for thirty seconds. Hang on that long, and it’ll be okay.”

  “Why? What?”

  “On a five count. One.”

  “For God’s sake, do it.”

  He waited. And abruptly the net jerked up. The line tore at him. Tore the flesh off his hands. Cut to bone.

  He whimpered. He screamed.

  He hated Hutchins. Hated her. Hated her.

  Let go.

  Please God let go.

  The line curved away from him, disappearing under the net.

  Won’t.

  Voice in his head or on the circuit telling him to hang on.

  Any moment now.

  We’re almost there.

  Won’t.

  Won’t pass out. Won’t let go.

  Mac’s voice, but the words unintelligible.

  Not this time.

  Not this time.

  And suddenly the weight vanished. For a terrible moment he thought she was gone. But he floated free. Weightless. Zero gee.

  He still held on.

  “Randy.” Marcel now. “You have about forty seconds. Tie her to the net. Tight. Because it’s coming back. The weight’s coming back.”

  His fingers ached. They refused to open.

  “Randy?” Kellie now. “You okay?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Do what they tell you.”

  “Half a minute, Randy. Get it done.” Marcel sounded desperate.

  There was no down anymore. He drifted peacefully through the sky, waiting for the agony in his hands and shoulders to subside.

  “Randy.” Hutch’s voice sounded small and far away. “Do it, Randy.”

  Yes. He pulled slowly, painfully on her line. Hauled it in. Looped it through the net. And tied it. Knotted it. Square knot. Never come loose.

  Not in a million years.

  They were moving again, rising, the weight flowing back. “It’s okay,” he said. “I’ve got her.”

  He hurt. Everything he had hurt.

  But a joy unlike anything he’d ever known before washed through him.

  XXXVI

  Most of us sleepwalk through our lives. We take all its glories, its wine, food, love, and friendship, its sunsets and its stars, its poetry and fireplaces and laughter, for granted. We forget that experience is not, or should not be, a casual encounter, but rather an embrace. Consequently, for too many of us, when we come to the end, we wonder where the years have gone. And we suspect we have not lived.

  —GREGORY MACALLISTER, Deepsix Diary

  “Hey!” Mac sounded frantic. “What just happened?”

  “They went to zero gee,” said Kellie. “To give Randy a chance to get himself together.”

  “How’d they do that?”

  “You understand they were never trying to pull the net straight out of the atmosphere, right? You understand that?”

  “Not really. But go ahead.”

  “They had to angle the extraction, to get us into orbit. That neutralizes gravity and allows them to pick us up. They were probably turning into a parabola right from the start. What they must have done was to pick up the pace. Remember how heavy you got?”

  “I have a vague recollection, yes.”

  “That gains time. Then they cut the engines. In all four ships.”

  “What’s that do?”

  “The whole system begins to drop back. It puts us in free fall.”

  “Did we want that?”

  “Zero gee, Mac. It makes everything weightless. Until they restar
t the engines, which of course they had to do pronto. But it gave Randy time to get Hutch aboard.”

  “I’ll be damned.”

  “Probably that, too.”

  One of the shuttles moved in just ahead of the Star and used a laser to cut through the Alpha shaft. This divided the system into two sections. The Star and Zwick remained attached to the trailing portion, whose length was reduced to a more manageable eighty kilometers; the other two vessels remained connected to the balance, which was over two hundred kilometers long, and which they could not hope to control. But other shuttles rendezvoused fore and aft to set Wendy and Wildside free, leaving the separated pieces spinning off into the dark.

  The Star and Zwick, carrying what remained of the shaft, the net, and its four passengers, continued maneuvering cautiously toward orbit.

  Hutch was still trailing behind the linkage. “Randy,” she was saying, “you did a helluva job.”

  Nicholson came on the circuit to inquire after the welfare of his passenger Mr. MacAllister. And belatedly of the others. Whoever they might be, thought Kellie. The Star was planning a celebration in their honor.

  Canyon showed up, en virtuo, to inform Kellie she was on live, and to ask if she was all right.

  “Pretty good,” Kellie told him. He tried to conduct an interview, and she answered a few questions, then pleaded exhaustion. “Mac would enjoy talking to you,” she added.

  When at last they achieved orbit, they didn’t need anyone to let them know. Their weight simply melted away. This time for good.

  Marcel, sounding as cool and collected as he had through most of the crisis, congratulated them on their good fortune. “I thought,” he said, “you might like to hear what’s going on in the main dining room.”

  They listened to the sound of cheers.

  The sky was black. Not the smoky debris-ridden sky of the dying world below, but the pure diamond-studded sky that one sees from a superluminal.

  Nightingale, still cautiously hanging on to the net, gave her a nervous little wave, as if he didn’t want to show too much emotion.

  She was drifting toward him. “Hi, Hutch,” he said. “I didn’t freeze.”

  No, you didn’t, she thought. And she said: “You were outstanding, Randy.”

  “Welcome to the accommodations, Hutch,” said Kellie.

  And Mac: “Nice to have you aboard. Next time you’ll want to reserve a better seat.”

  Lights moved among the stars.

  “You all right?” risked Nightingale. He reached for her, and she felt a sharp pain in her left shoulder when she responded. But what the hell.

  “I’m fine,” she said.

  “I’d never have dropped you.” Nightingale’s voice sounded strange.

  She nodded yes. She knew.

  “I’d never have let you go. Not ever.”

  She took his head in her hands, gazed at him a long time, and kissed him. Deep and long. Right through the Flickinger field.

  “There they are.” Embry pointed at the screen and Frank enhanced the picture. They were still far away, but she could make out Hutch, even amid the tangles. One of the others, Kellie probably, waved.

  Frank set course and reported to Marcel that he was about to pick up the survivors.

  Embry had already been on the circuit with them. “Be especially careful with Hutchins,” she said. “I think she’s got a problem.”

  “Okay, Doc,” said Frank. “We’ll be careful.”

  They closed on the net.

  “Get Hutchins first. Just pull up alongside her. I’ll bring her in.”

  “You need help?” asked Frank.

  “It wouldn’t hurt.”

  The situation demanded a human pilot, so Frank looked around for a volunteer. He’d gotten the impression, from bits and pieces of things said, and from nonverbal clues, that Drummond didn’t like the idea of going outside. Janet Hazelhurst caught his eyes and eased out of her chair. “Just tell me what to do,” she said.

  Drummond tried to look as if he’d been about to offer, but had been too late.

  Hutch watched the lights coming. It was okay to relax. She closed her eyes and floated. The shuttle came alongside, and she could hear voices on the circuit. Somebody was cutting through the tether, taking her off the net.

  The pain in her shoulder got worse. Now that she was safe.

  Hatches closed somewhere. More lights appeared. Bright and then dim. Lowered voices. Pressure on the injured shoulder. Restraints. A sense of well-being flooding through her.

  Somebody was telling her it was over, she was okay, nothing to worry about.

  “Good,” she said, not sure to whom she was speaking.

  “You look all right, Skipper.”

  Skipper? She opened her eyes and tried to pierce the haze.

  Embry.

  “Hello, Embry. Nice to see you again.” Randy was still there, off to the side, staying close. Then he became indistinct, as did Embry, the restraints, the voices, and the lights.

  From Nicholson’s bridge, Marcel directed the fleet of shuttles. They deployed near the Star and Zwick and cut them free of the shaft. At Beekman’s suggestion, they salvaged six samples, each four meters long. Five were intended for research, and one would go on display at the Academy. At Nicholson’s request a smaller piece was picked up and earmarked for exhibition on the Star.

  Another shuttle approached the connecting plate and separated it from the net and from the stump of the Alpha shaft. It hovered momentarily while its occupants inspected the symbols engraved across its face. Then they cut it neatly into two pieces of equal size. Shortly thereafter, Wendy approached and took both pieces into her cargo hold.

  The remaining fragments of Alpha, and the net, floated away into the dark.

  Because time was pressing, no immediate attempt was made to return the captains to their respective ships. Miles, in fact, was retained as acting captain on Wendy. Hutch, of course, was in no condition to be sent back to Wildside. Guided from the bridge of the Star, the shuttles were taken into whichever bays were convenient, and, with little more than a day remaining before the collision, the fleet began to withdraw.

  By then conditions on the planetary surface had become so turbulent that the orbiting vehicles were themselves at hazard. Marcel guessed that much of the data coming in from the probes had been lost after Wendy’s communications went down. This assumption was confirmed by Miles. “They are not a happy group over here,” he said.

  Beekman sympathized. “You can’t really blame them. Some of them have been preparing twenty years for this mission, and they lost a substantial piece of it.” He gazed steadily at the banks of screens, which displayed views of the impending collision, taken from an array of satellites.

  Marcel really didn’t give a damn. He’d been through too much over the two weeks. He was tired and irritable, but they’d gotten Kellie and the others back, and that was all he cared about. Chiang Harmon had died down there. One of Hutch’s people had died, one of Nicholson’s passengers, and one of his crew. One of Nicholson’s pilots had died during the rescue. In the face of that, it was hard to work up too much regret that they had lost some details on the formation of high-pressure fronts during a planetary traffic accident. “We’ll do better next time.”

  Beekman pursed his lips and looked thoughtful. “There’ll be no next time. Probably not in the life span of the species.”

  Too bad, thought Marcel. But he didn’t say anything.

  It seemed as if the entire atmosphere of Deepsix had become one massive electrical storm. Blizzards swept the equatorial area, and giant hurricanes roared across the Coraggio and the Nirvana. A mountainous tide soared thousands of meters above nominal sea level. The range along the northern coast of Transitoria, which had held back the tides so long, vanished beneath the waters.

  The worlds moved inexorably toward each other. But it was a mismatch, thought Hutch, a pebble falling into a pond.

  She watched from her bed in the Star’s dispensa
ry. She’d required minor surgery for a torn muscle and a broken rib, and they didn’t want her moving around for a bit. With his hands wrapped Randy sat off to one side, wearing a shoulder brace. Mac was off somewhere giving an interview; and Kellie was down getting some goodies at the snack bar.

  Hutch’s link chimed. Canyon’s voice: “Hutch, I’ll be down to see you later. Meantime, I thought you’d like to know we’re a big hit back home. They’re a couple days behind, of course. Last we heard, the whole world was listening while the tide broke through and got the whatchamacallits. They think you don’t have a chance now. Wait till they see the finish. You guys will be celebrities when you get back.”

  “Nice to hear,” grumbled Nightingale.

  “Anyhow, our numbers are through the roof.”

  “Sounds as if you’ll do pretty well yourself, Augie,” said Hutch.

  “Well, I can’t see that it’ll hurt my career any.” His eyes literally flashed. “Wait until they get to the lander!”

  “Yeah,” said Nightingale. “That sure was a hoot.”

  Canyon kept going: “Incidentally, you folks have acquired a sobriquet back home.”

  “I’m not sure I want to hear what it is,” Hutch said.

  “The Maleiva Four.”

  “By God,” said Nightingale, “who thought that up? Magnificent, August. My compliments to the cliché unit.”

  When he was gone, she looked at Nightingale severely. “You were awfully hard on him. He means well.”

  “Yep. But he’d have been happier if we’d fallen off the goddam thing.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “Better story.”

  Mac came into the room, carrying flowers, which had been grown in the Star nurseries. He beamed down at Hutch and held them out to her. “You look good enough to have for lunch,” he said.

  She accepted a kiss and smelled the bouquet. They were yellow roses. “Gorgeous. Thanks, Mac.”

  “For the Golden Girl.” He gazed at her. “What are they saying? The medical people?”

  “They’ll let me up tomorrow.” She turned her attention back to Nightingale. “You,” she said, “should ease up. Let people do their jobs and don’t be such a crank.”

  “I enjoy being a crank.”