Seas of Ernathe

by Jeffrey A. Carver

  Racart smiled shakily. "She was one of the ones I was afraid would not be too sympathetic to your cause. Don't worry, you'll like her, but it might take a while." Seth accepted that noncommittally; he wondered just what Racart's relationship with Mona was, but decided to ask at another time.

  Later they went topside to watch the departure. Seth felt a sense of loss in watching the lights of the colony recede against the shore; Lambrose was his only point of reference on this world. Racart was glad to be back at sea, and Seth envied his enthusiasm; it was the way he felt when lifting for a new flight on Warmstorm. The air was breezy and cool at the rail, and he was glad Racart had advised him to wear a jacket. Ardello quivered, its great scoop nose plunging through the sea. The electroturbines powering the ship were quiet, but there were the many noises of the sea as well as of ventilators and creaking steel. Few of the sounds were immediately identifiable to Seth; this was so wholly unlike what he was accustomed to calling a ship that he had to listen carefully to pinpoint the sources of the noise. Ardello thundered and thrommed, and rolled slightly, its spotlighted structure moving ponderously against the nighttime horizon.

  Racart took him to the port side and pointed across the water to the south. "That's Lernick," he said. Seth squinted and stared before finally pinpointing a faint haze of light beyond the end of the visible shore. Lambrose, in contrast, was still an intricate assortment of lights behind the stern. Ardello was moving across the bay to the west and south, toward the "open sea"; the mouth of the bay was only a blur of deeper darkness against the mixed shadows and grays of the horizon. The sky was mostly cloud-obscured, but the starry brilliance of the surrounding globular cluster backed the clouds with a baleful, ghostly sheen that appeared to waver and crawl as the clouds shifted across the sky. Toward the west, a rift opened in the clouds: an open doorway into the jeweled darkness of the Cluster.

  Seth leaned over the rail, breathing the wet, briny air. It had been a long day, and the salt air was a potent refresher. Along the rushing prow, there was a constant sparkling green phosphorescence from plankton caught in the turbulent slipstream. Everywhere he looked, it seemed, light sparkled or shone on this world, whether from the sky or the sea.

  "Let's head below," Racart said, and Seth followed him astern and down the companionway to the crew's cabin. Most of the off-duty crew were asleep, and Seth was more than ready to follow. He hardly noticed the cramped quarters as he climbed into the high bunk. Once he was off his feet, his muscles grew leaden with relief, and he stretched on the simple foam mattress with a great feeling of luxury.

  As he was beginning to doze, it occurred to him that he had failed to learn from Racart what had happened that afternoon. He opened his eyes, and focused for a moment on the ceiling just over his head. Well, he thought with some difficulty, tomorrow will be in plenty of time. His thoughts faded, and he slept.

  Chapter Four

  Ship routine was well underway when Seth ventured topside in the morning. He felt that he could sleep easily for another eight hours, but a hot brew from the galley and a generous porridge breakfast revived him to a semblance of consciousness. The deck was drenched with morning sunshine. Moving quickly in high altitude winds were a few clouds, and a steady breeze cooled the deck. The ship was cruising slowly parallel to the coast, in what was called the "outer sea"—actually just the next sea, of several, out from the bay of Lernick and Lambrose. The coast, to starboard, was a green gray margin binding the sky with the sea. Seth was disconcerted to notice its slow rise and fall as the ship rolled steadily through the waves.

  Racart called to him from the bridge, and he climbed the wheelhouse steps to join him. Ardello's captain was there, a short, silver-blond man named Sergei Fenrose, who greeted Seth with sober enthusiasm. "If you can make some sense of this craziness," Captain Fenrose declared, "you'll be doing better than the best of us. That business last night, back in the town—no good. You don't go around shooting people, even if it's by accident. No one's been shot like that for as long as I can remember, sea-people or otherwise. Don't even know why we keep weapons on the planet." Shaking his head, he turned for a moment to watch the sonar display beside the pilot. He issued instructions for a course change, and then turned again to Seth, with a humorous wave. "Oh, I know, I know, we need them in case we need them. But the Nale'nid seem to be getting more target practice with the big guns than our own folks." His eyes sparkled, a touch of silver glitter in their green irises.

  Seth answered dryly, "I noticed." He liked the man at once, decided that he was quite a bit like Jondrel Gorges—a good man to have on his side.

  Fenrose chatted genially for a few minutes, then said, "Bonhof—you going to show him the ship's operations?" Racart bowed low and set about showing Seth the equipment on the bridge—the ship-control systems first, then the water-sampler readouts and sonar water-probe and bottom tracers. When everything in sight had been pointed out, he suggested that they go below to observe the actual harvesting.

  They walked the ship from prow to stern and keel to topdeck, Racart pointing and naming, and Seth asking questions of his friend or of the other crew. The ship was filled with noises and smells and drafts of air, something different in each compartment. Even in the lowest decks, Seth smelled the salt dankness of the sea; and the coated metal gleam of the compartments and passageways could not entirely alleviate the feeling that in this vessel he was exposed to elements he could not control nor quite trust. Every movement of the deck, every shudder, every thrum of unfamiliar machinery was a reminder that only an allosteel hull shielded him from the elements of the sea and the wind. The same could be said of Warmstorm and space, of course, but space was different—he knew space but he did not know the sea.

  Racart interrupted his thoughts. This is the station I'm usually working." They were amidships on deck C, where the water feed was diverted into filtering channels; inside the pressure-tight clearplex housings, moving turbinelike membranes shunted plankton-thick seawater from channel to channel, concentrating it into a slurry for transfer to the cargo tanks. A young woman monitoring the operation stepped aside to let Racart demonstrate the controls to Seth. "The valves here—" he pointed to a set of servo-knobs—"control the income and outgo flows. This is one of four parallel stations, so if you're going to make any drastic changes in flow rates, it has to be done in coordination with the others." Ahead of the filtering station in the intake line was the fish harvest stage, where edible fish drawn into the system were sorted and retained. They had already seen that. Behind the plankton-filter stage was the mineral-extraction stage, which produced small but usable quantities of heavy metals from the water to supplement that produced at the shore stations. They had already seen that, too. Seth suspected that Racart had saved his "own" station for last, so that he could discourse at length about it. The place was noisy with rushing water, both beneath the hull and in the clearplex plumbing. Other pipework ran overhead, in fact all around the wide compartment; the operator smiled at Seth as he looked all around, half listening to Racart's lecture. "The pitch of the filter membranes increases when the ship is passing through plankton-thin water—are you listening?" Seth nodded absently and grinned at the woman.

  Eventually, Racart tired, and they went to get some lunch.

  The day passed quickly enough for Seth. The harvesting sections ceased work shortly after sundown, and the ship slowed for transition to its nighttime bottom-sounding activities. Though most of the plankton in the sea actually rose nearer to the surface at night, a few species, including mynella, descended out of reach of the harvester.

  Most of the day crew gathered after hours in the mess, and when Seth arrived he found himself drawn almost at once into a lively, and uncomfortable, discussion. Mona Tremont was disagreeing vehemently with a statement Seth had missed; she barely glanced at him as he and Racart took seats nearby. But when she spoke he knew that she was in large measuring addressing him. "We don't need a lot more people coming in, trying to outwit them. What we
need is less confusion—and less trouble. We've had enough trouble." She suddenly fixed Seth with a discomforting stare.

  Seth raised his eyebrows; this was the first overt hostility he had encountered from an Ernathene, and he wasn't quite sure what to make of it. "Have we done anything yet to cause more trouble?" he asked, thinking it a safe, if noncommittal reply. He glanced at Racart but could not read his expression.

  Mona simply stared, her eyes glazed with heat or cold—he could not be sure which. When she looked away, finally, she spoke with an indifferent tone of voice: "A Nale'nid was killed yesterday. I call that trouble."

  Seth considered that. Was she holding him personally accountable? He asked, not only of Mona but of all the handful of crewmembers listening, "Was your relationship with the Nale'nid really better before Warmstorm came?" He sensed, gratefully, that Racart approved of that tack; but he studied the other faces carefully, gauging their reactions.

  One crewmember, a man in his thirties, nodded soberly—a long, slow nod directed at no one in particular. "Once," he said, "we didn't bother the Nale'nid and they didn't bother us. That was quite some time ago, now—and things have changed—suddenly, but not too suddenly. That's surely not this man's fault, and maybe not our own, either. But then, who knows what's gotten these sea-people riled?"

  Mona glared at the man. "Okay, Joe," she grumbled.

  He continued, "Consider, years ago, it was a rare thing for a sea-person even to be seen by a human. When Nale'nid were sighted, they almost always disappeared. Without a trace. No interest, it seemed, in communication. So later, when there was occasional contact, it was a special sort of thing. Peaceful. At least, no madness and no shooting.

  "It never happened often. And never any actual communication. But at least there were times when people saw the Nale'nid, and the Nale'nid saw people, and nobody was hostile. Now? Heavens—who knows?"

  Mona's manner, now, had changed. She said, "I saw one myself—oh, two years ago. On the outback east of town. A single sea-man, walking along a lagoon like a bit of mist, and I stepped away from the people I was with and went to a place where the sea-man would pass, and when he did he—" she stopped suddenly, searching for words, "he gave me a look that told me he meant no harm, and he seemed to shimmer for a second, as if he were—somewhere else at the same time—and he gave me what might have been a smile—and then again it might have been a laugh or a frown, really." She paused, and Seth thought she was finished, and then she said, "Whatever it was, it was neither unfriendly nor troublesome, and I choose to believe that it was a gesture of . . .?" She shook her head in confusion and left the sentence unfinished. She was watching Racart, now, whose face was impenetrable, his eyes focused elsewhere.

  "Is that the only contact you've had yourself?" Seth asked, drawing her attention back.

  Mona shrugged. "Until the trouble started, yes. Since then we've all seen them—but of course that's different. Something has turned them destructive. Our harvesting, maybe? Our building? Our presence?" She was mild for a moment, wistful.

  "There were attempts to communicate, weren't there?" Seth asked. "Didn't the original colonists try to determine if they were intruding on the Nale'nid?"

  "Try, try," Mona scoffed, eyeing him intensely again. "So no one ever got through to them—that should be our problem, not theirs. And here we are, mining a drug for your people and now fighting with the Nale'nid and probably set to go after them for good. Are you going to try and tell me differently?" She accused him with a stare.

  Something ticked in his head, and he realized that Racart, the day before, had asked him very nearly the same question. Apparently, judging from the faces around him, there were many here who felt as Mona did. Finally he said quietly, "I don't know."

  Silence blanketed the room, and he was suddenly conscious that virtually everyone in the room was listening. Eventually, the conversation picked up on other topics, and Seth excused himself. He walked outside on the deck for a while, thinking, and finally gave up and went to bed.

  * * *

  He slept poorly, tossing until morning. When he awoke, he discovered that the ship, as well, was unsettled. He took only a light breakfast and went topside. The weather had turned threatening; the sea was gray and kicked with chop, and Ardello shuddered audibly through the white-capped turbulence. Great sheets of foam thumped and plunged continually from the bow. The wind chilled him immediately, and he headed directly for the bridge.

  There it was warmer, but not much quieter. Captain Fenrose was busily snapping orders, as the pilot crew was in transition from mapping chores to harvesting. Fenrose nodded to Seth without pausing. "Danjy, what have you got for me on the phones?"

  "Scattered, Skipper—no mass yet." The man speaking had his head encased in earphones, a tiny mike at his throat.

  "Helm, come ten degrees starboard."

  "Aye."

  "Skipper, tracings on the wide-scan, roughly a kilometer straight starboard," said another engineer, hunched over a printout bank.

  "Resolution?"

  "Not yet, clearing a bit, now."

  "Steady straight, helm."

  "Bright echoes, now, Skip—pelagic, thin population."

  "Tracing confirmed now. We've got density ahead. That is confirmed. Recommend starboard zig commencing one-half kilometer."

  "Range, MARK."

  Seth stirred, watching the relaxed calm in the crew's concentration. Captain Fenrose gazed forward, scanning every dial from what Seth would have called an impossible distance. The hull noise increased, as if the ship had encountered greater turbulence, and Seth thought he detected a rise in the sound of the wind outside.

  "What's the surface condition, Lon?"

  "Increasing to five, Cap'. Wind speed hiking—Skipper, we're losing right rudder control."

  Fenrose turned sharply. "Servo? Hydro?"

  The helmsman stabbed several buttons in rapid sequence. "All clear on servo and hydro." He flipped off the test lights and tried again; same result.

  Fenrose was already on the phone. He spoke for a moment, listened, then barked to the Second Officer: "Coley, we've got a broken rudder linkage in the engine room. They say a piece is missing. I don't know what the hell that means, but get on down there and find out! And I think Mr. Perland would like to go with you. Right, Seth?"

  Startled, Seth agreed and hurried after Coley, who had darted from the bridge. The wind assaulted him the instant he was out the door, and he nearly stumbled down the wheelhouse steps with the ship's roll. The sky was angry, dark, and clearly worsening. He passed Racart, heading the other way, but had no time for more than a shout and a head-shaking glance overhead. He followed Coley down a rear companionway, shivering, thankful to have walls around him again. In fact, if there was going to be a storm, he would be happy to stay as far below decks as possible.

  The ship heaved suddenly; his foot touched the bottom step and then skipped past it to meet the rising deck with a spine-jarring thump. He did not lose his balance, quite, but he collided with Coley and knocked the other man into a bulkhead. The engineer shot Seth an alarmed glance and said, "That was a power cut! Let's go!" Coley literally dove down the passageway and the remaining stairwells. The General Quarters klaxon hooted deafeningly.

  The engine room was in chaos, crewmembers shouting and dashing about in apparently total confusion. Power was gone in the starboard engine, and that, with the loss of one rudder control, had crippled the ship's maneuvering ability. The Engine Chief was raging. "Damn them!" he shouted, with only a glance at Coley.

  The deck groaned as the ship slewed sluggishly. The telephone was flashing, and Coley slipped past several confounded crewmen to answer it. He shouted to the Chief over the clamor, "Can you shut power to the port engine?"

  "What?"

  "Bridge has lost control over both engines!"

  "Hell, all right—I don't know if we can shut it off or not, they've scrambled the whole works!" the Chief bellowed, and disappeared across the engine room.
/>
  There was a pop and a purple flash, and ozone stung the air. When the Chief returned, his face was white. He clutched a stanchion and caught his breath. "They've shorted that, too—I could have been fried! Carlo, hit the main breaker—kill everything in here, and get the emergency lights on!" There was a chunk, and the lights shut down; then a pinkish-orange glow filled the darkness. "All right," the Chief growled, "let's stop those bastards before they take the ship apart!"

  Seth got it into his head, finally, that the sea-people were at work. It seemed they had caused a link in the starboard rudder control to disappear, just like that, just a sea-man hunched over a steel rod and, zam, both gone. But after that there was no shortage of Nale'nid popping up, vanishing, fooling with equipment and generally raising an incredible commotion. Coley was trying to relay this information to the bridge now, but he slammed the receiver furiously; the connection had been lost.

  "Coley, get down here and help!" the Chief shouted. He was squeezed midway between the massive servopower unit and a gearbox below deck level. Seth followed and squatted, wondering what he could do to be useful. The Chief had his head up under the servo, and was trying to point something out to Coley.

  The deck suddenly shifted, catching Seth utterly off balance. He banged headfirst into the servo, and then tumbled backwards across the deck, and slammed up short against a far bulkhead. He lay breathless, reeling, pain splitting his head. The commotion told him nothing; but the ship was listing, and it showed no signs of righting.

  He edged painfully across the deck. "Coley! Chief! Are you hurt?" A gasp told him that someone was hurt, and then he saw that the Chief was already out from under the machinery and was steadying Coley. The officer was holding his head, grimacing.

  "Get the medi—" the Chief started.