Deluge

by Anne McCaffrey

  She isn’t a shifter, Murel replied.

  Static? But she wishes to be able to shift shapes? How sad she must be to be stuck in the one guise for life.

  I’m not sure that’s how she looks at it, Murel said. I think she just likes to hurt things and make them do what she wants, but I suppose I could be—partly mistaken. Maybe she has a reason. Perhaps you should ask her.

  Then Kushtaka joined them, as an otter again, and seemed more disturbed than Murel had seen her since the death of her son. Come. Prepare to move. We cannot remain here.

  I have to return to the surface if you’re leaving, Murel told her. Ronan is in another fix and I have to get him out. Then we’ve still to get Marmie and her crew and the Kanakas free, and I suppose quite a few other people.

  Are you undertaking this task alone?

  There’s Sky, and Captain Terry… she began. But otherwise, yes, pretty much alone.

  We may be able to assist you in some way, but first we must refuel, and there are no open vents here.

  I know where they are, Murel told her. The water’s a bit shallower there too, and squidless, so it would be easier for me to come and go. No offense about the squid…

  They are all that is left of our race, Kushtaka said. Once this world was so overpopulated with our kind that they would not allow us to remain when we returned from an exploratory journey to the new home. And those who are left have changed. They seem to have de-evolved.

  I certainly thought so, Murel said. I’m glad to know it wasn’t just me.

  The city began to spin again, or rather, the water around it churned into another whirlpool and then a waterspout that lifted the craft above the surface.

  You know, Murel said, there are easier and less disturbing ways to do this.

  According to our equipment, much of this ocean is too shallow to permit us to travel underwater. We need to recharge before we can fly unsupported. This is the only way.

  There’s pontoons, Murel said. She realized it was ungrateful of her to criticize how they chose to help, but the waterspout was every bit as alarming as the whirlpool. It didn’t take much imagination to picture what would happen to the displaced water in its wake. Natural waterspouts, she had read—since Petaybee didn’t have any that she knew of—were formed when cyclonic winds touched the sea’s surface and picked up droplets. The wake from these was said to be little more than bubbles and ripples. But the domed city’s fishing device alone generated a force that twirled tons of water around it. The force that first sank and now propelled the city through the air using seawater ultimately violently displaced the entire ocean for miles around. Motors, paddles even. These whirly things you do are very hard on the sea life. I ought to know.

  The dense atmosphere inside the dome kept the changes in pressure from adversely affecting anyone inside, but there was still the force of the spin pressing in on the inhabitants. Murel wasn’t sure when Sky and Tikka joined her, but by the time the city-ship ceased spinning, Sky had nestled between Murel’s flippers and Tikka was holding on to her mother’s paw.

  Balanced atop the waterspout, they could look down through the sides of the dome to the sea below.

  Murel was horrified by the view. If this was a rescue, it was worse than the original peril. The whirlpool pulled water into its radius for miles around. At one point, perhaps halfway to the island, she saw Captain Terry’s boat. It was riding the swell produced by their passage and seemed to be doing a good job of outrunning the worst of the disturbance from the waterspout. She was mesmerized by the bizarre view from the elevated city, by the coils of water spiraling away from the waterspout’s base. She couldn’t imagine what effect all of this would have on the people onshore, in the prison or on the island.

  At least four times as quickly as it would have taken her to swim the distance, the waterspout carried them within sight of the island. In the distance, tiny figures on the beach dashed about, pointing in their direction. The beach was much broader than she remembered it, stretching almost to the rocks where she and Ronan had sheltered. It looked surreal, and she knew it was wrong. Alarm bells clanged in her head, warning of danger. But the only danger she saw immediately was the pointing people. Can they see us? she asked Kushtaka.

  No, the shields mask us. All they can see is the waterspout.

  Some of the people were jumping up and down as they pointed agitatedly. They had to know this was no natural phenomenon. Why didn’t they evacuate the beach while there was still time? Someone must have the sense to realize the inevitability of disaster. Stupid, stupid, stupid, she thought helplessly. The eejits find this entertaining.

  Entertaining? Kushtaka tried to form an image around the word but failed.

  Fun! Sky translated.

  Like fish juggling? Mraka asked.

  No! I mean, yes, fish juggling is entertaining. But what’s going to happen onshore when we whirl underwater will be a catastrophe. Murel stopped. Her body, against her will, had been trying to go to sleep, but she kept jerking herself alert, moving her gaze so it didn’t become fixed on anything long enough to allow her to drift off. Seals, unlike people, tended to sleep when they needed to, not when they had nothing better to do.

  A large familiar object lay stranded, beached in the waterless expanse of sea floor that had been exposed when its waters were sucked into the waterspout.

  It’s the boat! Captain Terry’s boat! We grounded it! she told the others.

  But that was the moment the water began a downward spiral, the city sinking with it.

  We have to do something! Stop it! We can’t go down now! she cried. Our backwash will drown everyone.

  She hadn’t finished the thought before Mraka and Puk, experts with the vortex mechanism that provided so many services for the city, disappeared.

  We will do what we can, they promised.

  Their device could capture enough fish from the sea to feed the entire city. But it was also capable of ensnaring bigger prey—seals, people, whales, or even boats—by catching them up in its vortex. The same mechanism could also propel the city-vessel into space, sink it into the ocean, or, as it was doing now, drive it across the surface of the water. The problem was, the device also caused what Mum called collateral damage. The alien otters didn’t mean to cause harm, but the water displacement caused by their propulsion device was disastrous to other creatures. Now it seemed about to cause the deaths of friends and enemies alike.

  CHAPTER 19

  RONAN’S LOWER PARTS were human before he and Rory reached the door, stepping over the sleeping Kai. Mabo had torn off Ronan’s harness with his dry suit and thrown it in a corner, and he snatched it up and pulled the harness over his shoulders but didn’t bother to dress. As soon as they hit the beach, he’d be back in the water again.

  He hadn’t counted on Pele meeting them behind the lab hut, but though she couldn’t help noticing that he was naked, she paid it no more mind than if he’d still been a seal. Instead she hissed with alarm, looking at the sore places Mabo’s specimen-collecting had left on his body, and said, “You’re really hurt.”

  “Sun and salt water should do them wonders,” he told her.

  The direct sunlight seared his skin, but thanks to his Inuit ancestors on his father’s side and the Navajo ones on his mother’s, his skin bore a permanent tan that protected it, even the bits not often exposed, in human form, to the light of day.

  They dodged from one building to another, and he recalled the times he and Murel had done as much, playing at being soldiers or adventurers from some story or another. Even as seals they’d played tag and hide and seek, but this game was in earnest and he would have preferred to just run for the beach and dive into the water. He was stiff and sore and rapidly becoming so hot he felt sick and dizzy.

  The huts were set in ten neat rows of sixteen per row, eight huts back to back, each row like a spoke leading from the mountain to the beach, and one inward-facing row of eight at each side. Fortunately, the lab hut was in the last row to
the right of the compound, so no doorways looked onto the backs of the huts. Ronan and his friends could creep, slink, and dodge behind them without being spotted from within the compound. However, Rory touched his arm and pointed up into the trees. Sturdy guard towers were perched among the fronds and leaves, an armed sentry in each tower.

  The beach beckoned brightly just ahead. Ronan was anticipating the hot sand on his bare soles when Pele held up her hand for them to stop. Craning his neck, he saw a large group of kids trooping down the beach from the children’s camp, herded by the matron and the doctor.

  “Keep together, no talking, and try to march in step,” the matron told them. “If you can behave like good soldiers, they’re more likely to choose you to join.”

  “Uh-oh,” Rory whispered. “It’s later than I thought. I’m supposed to be there to meet them. Can you wait here until the beach is clear, then make it to the sea by yourself?”

  “Easy,” Ronan said.

  “Look out for the net,” Pele whispered. “I think they put it back up again, hoping to catch your sistah. I gotta go too.”

  But instead of heading back into the compound, as Rory had, she took off into the jungle, staying close to the trees and out of sight of the guard towers. He was pretty sure he was the only one who saw her run out of the jungle and onto the beach behind the other children. The matron and the doctor were not very vigilant today. If the field trip was a further attempt to recruit the kids to the ranks of the Corps, as it appeared, then they wouldn’t be too concerned with who came and who didn’t, or with security for that matter. They wanted the kids mingling around, seeing the advantages in housing and food the soldiers enjoyed, hoping those amenities would entice new recruits.

  He watched the kids scrunch past, farther down the beach, where they were greeted by a friendly adult bellow. “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Camp Kindling. How many of you already know how to shoot? How many would like to learn?”

  Enthusiastic shouts of “Me! Me!” in several different languages issued from the crowd. Ronan knew he probably should wait for dark to try to make it to the water, but he didn’t think he could stand to wait that long. The longer he stood there, the more likely it was that he would be seen. And the recruiting rally was the best diversion he would have for a while. Waiting for some of his fellow prisoners to be armed and begin target practice didn’t seem like a smart idea. He remembered some of the kids calling him a freak and laughing when he was in trouble. Besides, he was vaguely sand-colored, so about as camouflaged in the daylight as he was likely to get.

  He bent low, preparing to streak toward the water.

  But just as he set foot onto the sand, his eye fixed firmly on his watery goal, the sea seemed to inhale and sucked the water away from him, so that instead of fifty feet of sand to cross, he was looking at fifty feet of sand plus three or four times that distance of rock, debris, and stranded fish and crustaceans. The seabed was exposed all the way out to the sunning rocks. The net trap was draped over other large rocks and pieces of driftwood. They had reset it, hoping to catch Murel, no doubt, after hauling him in.

  All of this he noticed only briefly, his attention grabbed by a perpendicular whirling waterfall approaching from the direction of the mainland. The closer it came, the more the water on his beach was sucked away.

  The roar of the waterspout was deafening, drowning out the soldiers, the children, and the motor of a small boat that had been approaching but was now utterly beached when the water slid out from under its keel, leaving it apparently still running but tipped onto its side.

  Maybe they had waterspouts on this planet all the time, but to him it looked like something the so-called deep sea otters might manifest, them and their cloaked city and manufactured maelstroms and whirlpools. Murel had something to do with this; he just knew it. She was probably coming to rescue him, but she and their mutual friends had certainly complicated his own escape plans.

  He should have been prepared for the wave that began rolling toward him in a huge diagonal wall even before the waterspout started to sink, but the waterspout and its implications had hypnotized him.

  Down the beach the children had been pointing, but now the guards and the other two adults began running inland, some dragging smaller forms behind them, others running unimpeded as quickly as they could.

  Ronan didn’t see who got away and who didn’t because suddenly a strong dark arm clamped across his neck and Dr. Mabo said, “Got you!”

  Later he realized she probably saved his life. She began dragging him back up toward the top of the camp, away from the beach, while at that moment the water flooded toward them in a great towering wall at least fifteen feet high, bearing boulders and debris with it. He thought he heard screams, but they were like the fish churning in the flood, their noise overcome by the massive roar.

  Dr. Mabo lost her grip on him as he backed over her, trying to get away from the watery wall. The water knocked her down, and he grabbed for her, but his hand turned into a flipper as the water hit it.

  “WHAT THE FRAG was that anyway?” Captain Terry asked, his voice shaking as he picked himself off of the rail of his boat, where he’d been flung when the water went away. “That was no waterspout. It sucked the ocean out from under us.”

  Marmion pulled a slimy fishnet away from her face and Adrienne’s. The net, tangling around various protrusions on the boat, had saved the women from being inhaled by the waterspout. “I told you, mon capitaine, that I encountered something of the sort before. It is far more powerful than ordinary inclement weather.”

  “You can say that again,” Terry murmured, gazing with awe at the emptiness in front of them and the thick finger of water pointing at the clouds on their starboard side. Ordinary waterspouts, even very large ones, were transparent, mostly wind with a little surface water carried with them. This one had slurped the ocean up into it like a soda through a straw and whirled it in a dense shining column far above their heads.

  A pitiful meow came from inside the cabin.

  “Zuzu!” Adrienne cried, and reached for the hatch.

  Terry shook his head once, sharply, and tried to yell over the roar, a sound like houses collapsing: “Take a deep breath. Here comes the water.”

  That’s what he tried to say, at least. He was preparing to drown, wondering if he could choose which portions of his life would flash before his eyes. There were many he had no wish to relive.

  Then a powerful force hit the boat, soaking them all. He expected to be engulfed at any moment. Expected to feel the water enter his mouth and nose and force the breath out of him. Expected his fragile grip on the rail to be torn away, maybe taking his arm with it. Instead, he felt the deck come up under his feet while the cat continued yowling from the cabin. Madame Marmion was no longer staring behind them but ahead, where the beach, the huts, and the volcano in the middle of the island were rushing to meet them.

  Water wasn’t supposed to behave this way. Storms weren’t supposed to behave this way. Why, this one didn’t even seem to have wind associated with it, except to drive it in certain directions. It was as if some intelligent force had created it and—

  The boat was lifted up over the rooftops of the military huts on the island, carried beyond them, and then dropped among the trees. The sound of the wave that had propelled them, a shrill whistling roar, abruptly stopped.

  He took a breath, because he could, and looked back. What he saw was what he had expected, and also something he would never have predicted in a thousand years.

  The great cliff of water broke the back of the camp while engulfing it and the people who, for an instant, Terry had seen running across the grass beneath the wave’s cresting overhang. But as the flood claimed the village, dark shapes moved within it.

  In moments heads and bodies lifted above the floodwater. Human heads and other kinds as well, those belonging to a species unlike any Terry had seen before.

  Then a somewhat more familiar form flopped out of the
water, a small dark female form clutching it around the neck.

  The seal barked.

  Marmion called to it. “Ronan? Murel?”

  “Is that you, little girl?” Terry called, but before he finished his question Marmion and her first mate were climbing over the rail, jumping from the deck to the jungle floor, and sprinting to the wet area left in the wake of the retreating wave.

  The two women struggled to extricate the seal from the grasp of the person it had saved. Meanwhile, above the flood line, other human bodies were thrust from the water by the other, stranger species. Some were uniformed and most were children. Lloyd jumped off the boat and sprinted over to relieve Marmie and Adrienne of the small black woman. The seal waited, then was joined by the other seal and the little otter.

  One of the large creatures, the kind that did not loosely resemble squid, had reminded him of something, and now he realized it was otters. They didn’t look like the sleek little brown fellow that accompanied the gray seals. They looked like oversized sea otters, as big as men. A few of them climbed out of the water to examine the wave victims more closely, and he could see them clearly. Of the others, all he saw were the ends of tentacles as they released their burdens onto the beach.

  “Hey, wait!” he called after Lloyd and the women. “Wait for me! I’m the captain! I’m in charge!” But nobody waited. Lloyd started to lift the body of the little black woman, but Marmie said, in an uncharacteristically hard voice, “Leave her. That is Maria Mabo, and though I know not how, I can assure you she is behind much of the trouble here.”

  If Madame Marmie thought the woman wasn’t worth saving, that was good enough for Terry. He sprinted to the next unattended body and began resuscitating a black-haired little girl, fish-belly pale and limp as washed-up seaweed until he cleaned muck out of her mouth and she spit up a geyser of water and started breathing. She was followed by the next and the next and the next.

  He saw the seal twins shove the last of their rescuees to shore, then emerge from the water. The next time he looked up from sharing breath with a drowning victim, there were two black-haired kids, naked, as was almost everyone else, working over the other bodies above the flood line.