Curse of the Iris

by Jason Fry

  “You okay in there, Tyke?” Yana’s voice asked over his radio. He knew she was close enough to grab his foot. But it already felt like she was perilously far away.

  “Just getting my bearings. The main pipe’s clear—all the filtration equipment retracted successfully. Ask Aunt Carina to deploy the platform.”

  “Copy that.”

  Something hummed, and a broad metal disk emerged from the side of the pipe about half a meter below, filling all but a few centimeters of the shaft. It rotated and locked into a narrow track.

  “Looks good,” Tycho said. He reached down and shoved at the disk. It didn’t move.

  It was too narrow to turn around in the maintenance shaft. Tycho wormed backward and popped up in the familiar surroundings of Darklands, with his family gathered around him. Behind them, Parsons was clearing the breakfast dishes.

  “You okay?” Diocletia asked. “You’re sweating.”

  “I’m fine. I’ll have plenty of time to rest in a minute. Who’s got the scanner?”

  Carlo handed it over. Tycho turned it on, verified that the readout was working, then turned it off and secured it to his chest with a loop of hook-pile tape.

  “All right,” he said. “Let’s do this.”

  Yana reached out and put her hand on her brother’s faceplate, followed by Mavry, Carlo, Diocletia, and Carina. Tycho smiled up at their assembled hands, though he was mildly alarmed when Huff tapped his forearm blaster cannon against the helmet.

  “Be safe, Tycho,” Diocletia said. “Wait. Honestly . . . now there are handprints all over his faceplate.”

  She cradled his helmet against her side and swiped her sleeve repeatedly across the faceplate, which allowed her a chance to give him a private smile.

  When his mother let go, Tycho lowered himself into the maintenance shaft again, scooched backward, and dropped down onto the platform.

  “I’m in the pipe,” he said. “Push the impeller sled over to me.”

  He guided the sled into position, the platform momentarily bobbing beneath him. It was a tight fit—he could barely extend his arms without touching the walls on both sides.

  “Ready to go,” he said, hoping he sounded more confident than he felt. “Send the platform down.”

  “Starting sequence,” Yana said. “Talk to you in a couple of hours.”

  The maintenance shaft vanished into darkness, replaced by a featureless circle of metal as the platform accelerated and the walls became a blur.

  Tycho had heard of spacers’ children who panicked in tight spaces, rendered helpless by some ancient instinct left over from the time when humans roamed the vast plains of Earth under endless skies. He wondered how they’d react if they found himself where he was now.

  Fortunately, he was a Hashoone and a born spacer—from her berths to her ladderwells and gunnery bays, the tight confines of the Comet had always felt comforting, not confining. He looked around once more, verified that everything was as it should be, then shut off his helmet’s work light to save power. There was no sound but his own breathing as the platform hurtled through the darkness toward the hidden ocean far below.

  “Tycho, do you read me? Tyke?”

  Startled, Tycho looked around before he remembered there was nothing to see. His sister said his name again, concern creeping into her voice.

  “I’m here. What’s going on?”

  “Did you fall asleep?”

  “No,” he lied.

  “Unbelievable. You should be nearing the bottom of the pipe.”

  “Got it,” Tycho said, his brain still a little foggy.

  A few moments later, something beeped in the darkness, the noise surprisingly loud. Tycho turned on his work light, blinking at the glare. The platform came to a stop, then began to creep downward again. Water appeared around Tycho’s feet, followed by a circle of darkness. The platform was descending into Callisto’s hidden ocean, moving along a guide that extended below the pipe’s terminus.

  Tycho forced himself to relax. Your suit’s buoyant, he reminded himself. And you have a jet pack. You’ll be fine.

  The water rose to his chest, then his neck, then his chin. Then he was completely submerged.

  The platform stopped. His feet were trying to float. He grabbed hold of the guide connecting the platform to the pipe, then looked up. The end of the main pipe was above his head, a bright circle in the beam from his work light.

  “I’m in the water,” he said. “I’m all right. I’m going to set up the sled.”

  The sled demagnetized from the platform with a clank and unfolded itself, deploying floats with a puff of bubbles. Tycho unspooled a cable from its front housing and clipped it to the platform guide.

  “I’m going to have a quick look around before I activate the nav unit,” he told Yana.

  Still gripping the platform guide, he looked up and let his work light play over his surroundings. Half a meter above his head, the main pipe emerged from the hard-packed rock and ice of Callisto’s crust, which formed the ceiling of an immense underwater cavern. Off to one side and extending below him was the dim shape of the pipe’s siphon, which had been rotated out of the way by great geared wheels. On the other side of the pipe, a cluster of antennae and probes and sensors had been rammed into the crust above and trailed down into the water.

  Tycho let his feet rise until he was floating, activated his maneuvering jets, then tentatively let go of the guide and drifted in the water. A tap on the jets sent him gently away from the pipe, past the impeller and the siphon, until there was nothing but rock and ice above his head.

  He tapped the jets again, a bit too hard, and found himself shooting upward. Instinctively he flung up his arm to protect his head. His arm and shoulder mashed into the cavern’s ceiling, which gave slightly under the impact. He squeezed his fingers, and gray mud squished out between them. He dug tentatively, and bits of rock and muck came free, clouding the water around his helmet.

  A chunk of bright white rock slipped from his grasp and he looked down, following its descent as it fell. The water was crystal clear—he could see every detail of his boots where they hung below him. The falling rock slowly shrank to a dot, then a bright pinpoint, caught now and again by the fading illumination of his work light until it was finally swallowed up by the vast darkness below him.

  Tycho heard his breath quickening and realized he’d shut his eyes. Directly above him lay the unimaginable weight of two hundred kilometers of ice and rock; directly below him lay the unfathomable abyss of two hundred fifty kilometers of water. He was in the heart of a moon, suspended between two enormities his mind could barely grasp.

  “Tyke? You okay?”

  His sister must have heard him gasping.

  “I’ll be all right,” Tycho said, eyes still shut, arm still braced against the cavern roof.

  “Have you turned on the scanner?”

  “No. Uh, I was about to.”

  He forced himself to open his eyes, then to push himself down, away from the ceiling. He let some air bleed out of his tanks, sinking a couple of meters. Being away from the cavern roof made him feel a little better—this was almost like the familiar, floating feeling of a space walk. He reached down and unfastened the scanner, reminding himself to focus on it and not on his feet or the yawning dark below them.

  “Okay,” he said, hefting the device. “Turning it on. It’s working.”

  “And?” Yana asked, excitement leaking into her voice.

  “I’m not receiving anything,” Tycho said, peering at the readout to make sure the scanner was functioning properly.

  “Let me sweep it around,” he said, firing his maneuvering jets to turn himself in a slow circle.

  There was nothing. The scanner was silent.

  “No signal anywhere,” he said, frustrated.

  “You’re probably just out of range,” Yana said. “Activate the sled’s nav unit so you know you’re pointing the scanner in the direction of the Unger homestead.”

  �
�Right,” Tycho said. “I can do that.”

  The impeller and the equipment platform were on the other side of the siphon. He tapped his maneuvering jets and craned his head, looking for the outline of the sled or the bright circle of the pipe.

  Among the sensors and antennae he saw four rectangles, one on top of the other. Tycho fired his jets and moved closer, trying to make sense of what he was seeing. The rectangles were greenish gray, each separated by a short length of cable. He looked up and saw that the cable was shackled to a clump of instruments, secured by its own weight.

  “Strongboxes!” he yelled.

  He heard Yana gasp, then her muffled voice telling the others.

  “And the signal?” she asked.

  “No signal,” Tycho said, pointing the scanner at the boxes until it nearly touched them. “That’s strange.”

  “Are you sure it’s the treasure, then? I mean, why leave it right under Darklands and not tell anybody?”

  “I don’t know. But there’s nothing else it could be. Four strongboxes—I can see where the chain holding them was welded to the machinery.”

  “Amazing. You were right, Tyke.”

  Grinning, Tycho tapped the jets and drifted around the boxes, examining them from every angle.

  “The boxes are corroded—so’s the cable—but they’re intact,” he said. “They look too heavy to move to the platform all at once. I’ll work from the bottom and cut them free one at a time.”

  He reattached the scanner to his suit, then tugged the cutting torch free of a pouch on his leg and thumbed the igniter. The torch blazed like a star in the water, which began to boil around the superheated arc of plasma.

  Remembering his simulation exercises, Tycho bled some air from his tanks, sinking to the level of the last strongbox. A loop of cable hung below it, hanging free in the water. Above it, another cable attached the box to the next one in the chain. Tycho grabbed the loop of cable at the bottom, clambered awkwardly onto the lowermost box, and looked for the best place to cut the cable.

  Then he was tumbling head over heels, moving very fast, with his breath hammering in his ears. The torch pinwheeled away from him, a spark of brilliant light in the darkness.

  “Tycho!” Yana yelled.

  Somehow the cable had snapped above him. The boxes were plummeting into the abyss on a one-way trip to the moon’s distant core—and they were dragging him along like an anchor.

  His body thrashed back and forth as he plunged deeper into the ocean. The suit was rated for three hundred meters—below that, his faceplate would crack and he would die.

  “Tyke! What’s happening?”

  He managed to get his head pointed up, still clutching the loop of cable that was now at the top of the chain of strongboxes. It felt like his arm was going to rip free of its socket. He fumbled with his other hand for the jet-pack controls, missed them, then found them on the second try. The maneuvering jets roared to life on full blast, trying to push him back up.

  He was still plummeting downward. He had no idea how deep he was.

  “Come on come on come on come on come on . . . ,” he gasped.

  He was still falling, though he thought he was slowing down. Or perhaps that was his imagination.

  “TYKE!” Yana was screaming.

  “COME ON!” he yelled.

  No, he was definitely slowing. The pain in his shoulder was excruciating. He got his other hand on the loop of cable, trying to distribute some of its weight.

  “Tyke! Talk to me!”

  “Cable . . . broke,” he managed to say. “Still got . . . boxes.”

  His descent had slowed to a crawl. But he was still going down.

  “Let go!” Yana yelled.

  “No.”

  Tycho hung in the water, the jet pack’s force having finally counterbalanced Callisto’s gravity and arrested the strongboxes’ plunge. The jet pack was hot against his back. Tycho prayed it wouldn’t burn out or run out of fuel.

  As he slowly began to rise, he heard a tiny sound inside his helmet, above his eyes.

  A small crack appeared at the upper left corner of his faceplate, where it joined the helmet. A faint whiff of ammonia reached his nose.

  He was rising more quickly now, the pain in his shoulders running down his arms into his hands. Sweat was pouring down his back. His sister was screaming at him.

  The small crack suddenly zigzagged halfway across his faceplate. He tried to will the jet pack to propel him faster. A tiny drop of water formed at the center of the crack, on the inside of his faceplate. The droplet hung suspended for a moment, trembled, then hit him in the nose.

  Something gleamed above him. It was the siphon. There was the sled, floating in the water next to it. And there was the platform.

  He shut off the maneuvering jets and almost smashed into the platform as he shot past it, crying out as he let go of the cable with one hand. His hand was numb and spasming. He started to sink again, but the third strongbox hit the edge of the platform and stuck there, the top two boxes settling atop it with a clank. The fourth strongbox hung just below the platform. Exhausted, Tycho wrapped his arm around the platform and shut off the jet pack. His back was burning.

  “Remind me never to do that again,” he told Yana between gasps.

  15

  THE IRIS CACHE

  Tycho knew he must look terrible, because even Yana was able to contain her impatience, waiting to ask about opening the strongboxes until Tycho had had a hot shower, put ointment and a dressing on the blisters on his back, and devoured an entire bowl of hominy and a plate of soft tack.

  It was like Christmas morning, he thought, enjoying his sister’s exasperation as he accepted Parsons’s offer of a second cup of tea.

  Finally feeling somewhat restored, he pushed his chair back from the table and turned to look at the corroded strongboxes, now sitting side by side in the living area of Darklands, next to the sled and his muddy suit and damaged helmet.

  “We broke the locks but didn’t open them,” Carina said. “Tycho, you do the honors.”

  Tycho crouched down in front of the first strongbox, amazed at how tired he was. He looked up at the Hashoones surrounding him, smiled, and threw back the lid.

  The first thing he saw was the jewelry—there were necklaces, and brooches, and things he didn’t know the names of. Diamonds and rubies and tigereyes gleamed amid loops and curls of gold and silver.

  “Oh my goodness,” Yana said.

  “Arrr, ain’t that a beautiful sight,” muttered Huff.

  Tycho put his hands in the box, pushing them inside until he was up to his wrists in wealth. He stared at the rest of his family in wonder.

  They opened the rest of the boxes, exclaiming in amazement at a bag of uncut emeralds, a diadem that glittered and flashed like a comet, old-style watches and pendants and a hundred other astonishing objects.

  “It’s a pirate hoard of old,” Mavry said. “There’s five or six million in livres here at least. Sometimes the legends are true.”

  “Hate the thought of givin’ part of it to that blasted Oshima,” Huff growled.

  “We can spare it,” said Diocletia, sounding giddy.

  “And Mox’s share?” asked Carlo, grinning as he showed off two hands festooned with rings.

  “Arrr, I vote we jes’ shoot that one this time,” Huff said. “Even my generosity has its limits.”

  Tycho laughed along with the rest of his family, but all the while he was looking for something out of place—something that would quicken the pulse of a Securitat agent with an interest in old secrets.

  He spotted it in the third box—the black square of a data disk, almost invisible beneath a spill of golden coins. He palmed the disk quietly and pointed at a necklace of lapis lazuli Yana had just held up triumphantly, and when heads turned toward his sister, he slipped the disk into the pocket of his jumpsuit.

  And then he realized how desperately he needed to sleep.

  This time all Yana had to do to wake h
im was poke her head into his darkened room.

  “Dinner’s almost ready. We would have let you sleep, but Aunt Carina wants to discuss tomorrow’s meeting at Ganymede.”

  Tycho forced himself upright in his bunk, groaning at the ache in his shoulders and back.

  “Okay, I’m up,” he said. “What else have I missed?”

  “Not much. Mr. Knackert’s going over the valuables downstairs, figuring out what they’re worth.”

  “And is it good news?” Tycho asked anxiously. His last thought before vanishing into sleep had been a flash of paranoia that the jewels would somehow turn out to be fake.

  “Very good news. Knackert’s about ready to drown in a puddle of his own drool. He’s thinking eight million. Maybe more.”

  Tycho relaxed and grinned at his sister.

  “We found it—we really found it! Everyone thought the Iris cache was gone, or an old legend, or cursed, but we found it.”

  “You found it,” Yana said.

  “We all helped. Without you we wouldn’t have gotten Lord Sicyon’s and Loris’s shares.”

  Yana snorted. “I’m sure you’ll insist that Mom note that in the Log alongside all the details of your triumph.”

  “Of course I will,” Tycho said, suddenly serious.

  Yana shook her head, but she was smiling.

  “You know what? I believe you,” she said, turning to go—but then she turned back.

  “Something’s bothering me, though,” she said, looking at him gravely.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s about what was missing from the treasure.”

  Tycho froze. He had been sure no one had seen him pocket the disk.

  “We never found the quantum signal,” Yana said, and Tycho was suddenly able to breathe again.

  “Maybe it fell off when the chain broke,” he said, flexing his abused shoulders.

  “Then the scanner would have picked it up before that. No, I don’t think the signal was there in the first place. That’s strange, isn’t it?”

  “It is. But everything to do with the treasure has been strange.”

  “That’s true. Anyway, you’d better hurry if you want any candied yams,” Yana said, and the door shut behind her.