Ik leaned close to the window, peering out in an effort to spot the landers. Had they been knocked away to a safe distance? Or better yet, had they fled?
S'Cali spoke into the comm. "Neri outside the hull, please report." His voice reverberated, amplified by speakers on the outside.
An answering voice, thin and distorted: "Many injured and sick on the inside . . . unable to get away."
"We're here to stay with you," said S'Cali. "More swimmers are coming."
Before there could be an answer, a new cry came: "Landers returning!" There was a thump on the outside of the hull, and Ik glimpsed webbed Neri feet flying past the port as Neri swimmers maneuvered to greet a new attack.
S'Cali swiveled the control, and the sub rotated in place, facing outward from the wreck. A group of landers was coming in, swimming furiously; two of them raised weapons and fired darts. One glanced off the sub with a ding. S'Cali caught them in the headlight and roared out toward them. As they began to turn and disperse, he yawed the sub violently left and right, threatening to sweep anything and everything out of his path.
Ik was unprepared as S'Cali reversed thrust again, repelling the attackers with the jetwash. He was thrown forward, catching himself with one hand against the viewport. He clacked his mouth, wondering how much impact the pane could withstand.
S'Cali backed the sub toward the wreck, with Delent'l calling out directions from the stern, where he was peering out a small porthole. Out in front, though, Ik caught sight of a lander sled approaching amid a cloud of bubbles. Ik saw something erupt from the sled and streak toward them. "S'Cali!" he cried.
The Neri shouted a warning on the outside comm. "Burster coming! Take cover!"
A moment later came a flash, followed by a concussion and a clap to Ik's ears. The sub jarred, and Ik's ears were left ringing. The hull seemed to hold well enough, but as Ik shook off the effects, he wondered how the Neri outside were faring. "S'Cali, are they hurt out there?" He glanced sideways, and realized that S'Cali himself was stunned. "S'Cali—can you hear me?" He took hold of the Neri's arm.
S'Cali peered at him in apparent puzzlement, then came back to the present. His large eyes blinked, and he turned and snapped out a call on the outside comm. "Neri swimmers, what is your condition?"
The replies came in scratchily, like distant shouts. A couple of Neri had been injured, and were being helped back inside the wreck by others. But Ik realized, peering out the viewport, that several lander divers had been injured by the explosion, too. Most of them were withdrawing from the area; but one was floating not far from the sub, looking dazed.
Two Neri swimmers converged on the lander and grabbed him. "Can you have your people hold that one?" Ik urged, pointing. "Perhaps we can talk to him, find out what they want!"
S'Cali looked doubtful for a moment—but barked an order. The two Neri responded by wrestling the lander out of sight behind the sub, into the shelter of the wreck.
"What now?" Ik asked.
S'Cali had no time to answer. A shadow passed over them, moving quicky, then another. S'Cali's eyes rotated upward. "Pikarta!" he called. "Take cover! Pikarta over the site!"
Ik tensed, craning his neck to peer up. Three creatures nearly as large as the sub had sailed over, and were now circling to return. They were shaped like enormous, elongated raindrops with mouth openings on the front. In the mouth openings, Ik could see teeth. But something was odd about the teeth, some trick of the light. As the pikarta sped back toward the sub, Ik finally saw what it was: their teeth were rotating in their mouths like huge, spinning rasps.
"Is everyone inside?" S'Cali cried, maneuvering the sub to try to provide cover to the swimmers.
The first deathfish slammed into the top of the sub with a sickening impact and grinding screech—teeth spinning on metal. Its hindquarters and tail convulsed in front of the viewport; then the fish careened away. S'Cali fought to keep the sub upright. Ik could only hold on desperately, squinting out the window. The second and third pikarta veered away from the sub, seeking easier prey.
The landers were fleeing, but the pikarta were much faster. Ik watched in horror as one turned and caught a free-swimming lander. From where Ik lay, the lander was just a small, shadowy shape. Even so, he could see its body turn instantly to a cloud of blood and shreds. "Moon and stars," Ik breathed aloud, thinking with a shudder that it could just as easily have been him, or any of these Neri. He felt no better about it being a lander, for whom he held no hatred.
"They may be coming back," S'Cali said. "We've got to get inside." He touched the comm. "Is everyone in?" He was already turning the sub toward the hull breach.
"What about the Neri who came with us?" Ik asked, thinking of the swimmers on the far side of the wreck, whom they had left trying to evade lander divers.
As though in answer, he felt a sudden concussion, but muted. "Was that—"
"Landers on the other side, probably. We can't do much for our people over there now," S'Cali said. "But they know how to hide, and fight if they have to. I'd guess the pikarta are a bigger threat to the landers right now than to our people. Those bursters may have been aimed at the pikarta." He completed the turn and was directed into the hull opening by a Neri, almost invisible in the shadows of the wreck.
"Are you sure we can fit?" Ik asked nervously, eyeing the jagged edges of the opening.
Another concussion hit much closer, the shock wave nearly carrying them into the side of the wreck.
"No choice," said S'Cali. "Our wounded are inside. We can't help them from here."
True, Ik thought. It was either drive the sub in, or get out and swim. He peered close to the viewport, and tried to gauge the clearance. S'Cali was steering them expertly into the breach. The wreck loomed around them, as they moved into the near-darkness of the interior.
Then Delent'l shouted a warning from the back—and bursters started going off directly behind them. Thud! Thud! Thud!
S'Cali cried a warning—and the sub pitched nose-down, surged forward, and slammed into a heavy bulkhead. Ik was thrown headfirst into the viewport. The lights sputtered and died, and he heard water gushing into the compartment.
Chapter 16
Rings of Fire
ANTARES WAS STILL trying to learn what everything did in Kailan's chamber. It all looked so incongruous down here in the Neri realm. The instruments that the obliq had used during the breakaway habitat crisis were just a small fraction of the total. The room, a curtain-lined den filled with consoles, seemed to be a combination library, laboratory, and long-range sensor control—or, as her stones rendered it, a knowledge-center. Kailan's instruments provided a range of environmental scans. Some Kailan seemed to understand fairly well; others not at all. Who had built all these instruments? Antares wondered, and how was it that the Neri had forgotten so much about them?
Kailan and her assistant were activating the consoles one by one. "My people," Kailan said, referring to the female Neri under her authority, "have the duty of maintaining the knowledge of the Neri people. But it is difficult, in the face of failing equipment and understanding."
"Then your instruments—"
"Were provided from the beginning, to help us keep a watch on changing conditions in our world—and to maintain our scientific and historical knowledge. But many years ago, our knowledge began to disappear, partly from equipment failure, and partly from problems in organizing and retrieving it."
Antares sensed suppressed emotions tickling outward. "Who," she said carefully, "provided the equipment?"
"Those who built the city, I presume," Kailan murmured, adjusting a console. "One of the deep factories probably manufactured the equipment, though I can't even say that for sure. I'd guess that there is a lot of historical information still in the system somewhere, if we knew how to get at it."
Antares sensed regret, but no defensiveness, over the admission. "Then this began long before your time?"
"Oh yes. I have tried, like the obliqs before me, to recover and m
aintain all that I could." Kailan tapped a small unit that seemed not to be responding. "Elbeth," she said to her assistant, "there seems to be no power here. Do we have a recharged battery for this one?" As Elbeth went to check, Kailan continued, "But there is so much I don't know about the instruments and their purposes—including how they work. They are very sturdy—which is fortunate, because the changers do not have the necessary programming to repair all of them."
Kailan adjusted her shawl and peered over the top of a nearby instrument, which she had called a seismic imager, and fiddled with a connection. She looked back at Antares. "I seem to be telling you how many things there are here that are beyond my understanding. Well, I would appreciate any knowledge that you, who come from other places, or—" she closed her large eyes for a moment "—that the stones of knowing, might bring. I am already beginning to understand a few things, I think."
Antares looked around the chamber. Something had been bothering her. "Kailan, were these consoles actually made for you? For the Neri? Some of them seem—well—"
Kailan straightened up. "Awkward? Unsuitable?"
"Yes. As though they were designed for someone else's hands." Antares pushed her hair back, her empathic faculties afire, but quietly, like banked coals. She sensed that there was a stew of knowledge and emotion simmering beneath the surface of Kailan's mind.
"You are right," Kailan said. "These instruments were not designed for us, but for—" she seemed to have trouble saying it "—those who created us."
Antares stepped closer, touched by a sense of the Neri's sadness and loss. Kailan's eyes shifted and focused on the instruments, as Antares felt a strange tickle in her stones. There was an inner tension in the obliq around this question. "Those who created you?" Antares asked. Was this a religious question?
"I'm sorry, I thought you knew. I mean those who designed—changed us, to live in the sea." Kailan seemed to sense Antares' astonishment. "There are some among us now who do not wish to believe this, for whom it seems more like tale than history. They find it hard to believe, and do not want to believe it. But it is true. Whoever we were before, we were altered for this world in which we live."
"And your creators?"
"They lived on land. Before they died. Before the Maw came and destroyed them."
Antares was struggling to put this together. "Then they're not related to—the landers? The ones you are fighting now?"
The obliq made a soft hissing sound. Laughter? "Not to the landers, no." She turned back to her instruments. "Where the landers come from, we do not know. But they are not of this world. There are stories that they landed in a great fireball. That they were brought to this sea by the—" huuum "—One Who Brings All Things Together. That they spurned the gift and fled to the land. I cannot say. But they do not come from this world, of that we are sure."
Not of this world? Antares thought. Like us? No wonder we were greeted with suspicion.
"And of course, my friend-from-another-world, there is the Maw of the Abyss, which, I believe, also did not come from this world." Kailan looked up for a moment. "These matters, I am certain, are all connected. But whether they are by design, or by chance, I do not yet know." Her barely-webbed fingers hesitated, then moved quickly over the instrument controls.
Antares suddenly realized she had stopped breathing, so closely was she listening. She drew a deliberate breath.
"But now," said Kailan, "we must focus our thoughts on this thing at the bottom of the sea. We must try to learn what it is now, regardless of its origins. You and your stones must help me understand it. I believe our future rests on this—on a battle that sometimes seems as much as anything a war of the spirit." Kailan urged Antares to join her at the console. "Here, let me show you what we can study."
Antares crouched next to her, thinking, Well, friend-from-another-world, let's hope you can help . . .
*
The images reminded her of the multicolored feathers of a whoailabird back home—stirring and fluttering just before flight, when the bird would loft itself into the air like a pillar of crimson and gold flame. The preparatory flutters were less flamboyant than the actual launch, but were captivating and bewildering in their complex movements, shifting and fanning.
The images of the seafloor shifted and changed like that, as the obliq changed the processing from one mode to another, searching for meaningful patterns, but mostly just confusing her Thespi guest. Kailan would point to a shape and say, "Does this suggest anything to you?" and Antares would think a moment, then murmur in the negative, and Kailan would change to something else. It was clear that, while their knowing-stones provided them with a common language, her own lack of training in this area could not help but make matters difficult. She was looking at depictions of valleys and geologic fault lines, and graphs of seemingly chaotic forces. She could guess at the meaning of some of them, but to think that she could offer any insight was ridiculous.
Kailan was undeterred. "What I'm showing you now is background. From some intact records, we have historical seismic information—that is, about sound waves traveling through rock. We're still getting some new data, from a network of sensors put down long before I was born. Plus, we have current sonar readings—sound through water—but if we ever had historical records of that, they've been lost. Now, let me show you some visible light images of—"
"Kailan, how much of this do you actually understand?" Antares interrupted. "It all seems . . . highly specialized."
"It is," said Kailan, moving to the next console. "But if I don't try to understand it, there's no one else who will. Most of my people are busy in technical maintenance, or in the nurseries caring for the young. And the males, under Askelanda, seem to have lost their curiosity about it—and anyway, they're too busy in salvage and farming for food." She looked up at Antares. "So it's up to me and Elbeth, plus Maerta, whom you haven't met yet, who's apprenticing when she has time."
"It sounds pretty difficult."
"It is. But we're doing what we have to do." Kailan pointed to another display. "There—that's what it looks like when the rift opens. When the Maw begins to devour."
Antares watched. It was a holographic light image of the abyssal valley, as viewed from the ledge near the factory. The image was amplified and enhanced in some fashion, so that it looked as though they could peer downward through the depths for a mile or more. This was not sunlight, but monsterlight. A flicker of brightness appeared in the center of the image, and grew. She found it frightening, without quite knowing why. It seemed to be coming toward her, swelling out of the console. Suddenly it opened, like a billowing ring of fire. Amplified through the deepwater haze, it looked like a ghostly presence that was not just frightening, but threatening—as if it were attacking. She pressed her long fingers to her throat, and thought, /Please tell me—does this mean anything at all to you?/
There was no answer, but she sensed that the knowing-stones were focusing just as intently as she. Probably the image did mean something to them, but they were not yet sure what.
"Here's where the real trouble starts," Kailan said, pointing to the dark area in the center of the ring. Antares peered. What was it? She had assumed rock, but apparently it wasn't.
Kailan pointed to a neighboring screen. This one was in false colors, not a visible light image; some kind of sonar, a current-mapping thing. A flow was beginning toward the ring, and into the center. "Water currents?" Antares asked.
"Yes."
"Into the ring?"
"Exactly." The obliq touched a control, and the mapping image flicked to a topographical display, which Antares had seen before. It was changing, as she watched. Where she had just observed the current flowing, there was now an opening in the seafloor that had not been there before, like a tremendous funnel at the bottom of the ocean. It looked as if seawater was draining out of the ocean basin.
"That's impossible," Antares whispered. "Isn't it? Where's the water going?"
Kailan changed the display
again, to one showing a global view of the planet. "Watch."
Antares stared at the console. The glowing red funnel appeared to represent the Maw. Apparently the flow of water was going down into the planet, and then . . . disappearing.
"That's how it starts. But then—" Kailan touched a control to change the display. "This is actually slowing down the image, so you can see it better." Something was changing inside the planet—as if a worm were tunneling through the middle of the globe, looping and curving through an intricate tangle of pathways. When the tunneling was done, the flow was being channeled in impossible loops through the planet's interior. And then out . . .
"Back into the ocean?" Antares stared in wonder.
"Back into the sea, but not anywhere near here. Somewhere on the other side of the world."
"You're observing this? Measuring it somehow?"
The obliq brushed her finger across the globe. "Those who built our realm were very thorough. There are measuring units scattered all over the planet—far more widely than we ourselves are scattered. We only live here—" she pointed to the region near the funnel "—and in smaller settlements here and here—" she pointed to a few places north and south, not far out from the shoreline of the neighboring continent "—and a couple of outposts in the arctic zones." She touched two spots much farther north. "There were at one time splinter settlements elsewhere around the globe, but we've lost contact and we no longer have subs that can travel that far." She displayed a sprinkling of dots on the screen. "But here are the sensor locations. Most are still linked to the imagers here. As they fail, though—" she pointed to a few that were orange rather than blue "—we no longer have any way of replacing them."
Antares flared her nostrils. "What about these other settlements—the ones that are closer? Are you in contact with them?"
Kailan's answer was interrupted by the return of Elbeth, carrying a round, lozenge-shaped object the size of a dining plate. Apparently it was a battery; Elbeth lifted the top of the nonfunctioning console and removed a similar object before inserting the new one. Kailan tried the console, and nodded when it came on. "We are . . . to a degree." She looked back up at Antares. "In the past, we were cooperatively interdependent. The other settlements looked to us after their smaller factories began failing, perhaps a hundred and fifty years ago. We were not only the largest city, but the only one that could guarantee new equipment. Still, they performed much salvage of lost technology from our ancestors, and often had richer fishing grounds. The trading was mutually beneficial."
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