"We're all set," Ness said. "Still quiet up here?"
Sam shifted her binoculars further inland. "So far."
He shifted his feet. "I've been thinking. Maybe it would be a good idea if some of you started learning how to talk to Sebastian."
Tristan tucked stray hair behind her ear. "We can do that already. He writes English pretty well."
"Yeah, but that's pretty slow. You get into the thick of things and you don't want to be messing around with pens and paper."
"You want us to learn your sign language?"
"Not right this instant. But the next time we've got some down time."
She glanced his way. "What prompted this?"
"Recent events. What if something happens to me? You all might have a tough time communicating for a while. Especially if it's the middle of some shit, the team could fall apart in a hurry."
"You make a good point."
Ness chuckled uncertainly. "This is the part where you're supposed to say, 'Oh Ness, nothing's ever going to happen to you.'"
"You're right, though. Something could happen to any of us. If it does, we need to be prepared. Whenever I have free time, I'll learn from you and Sebastian."
He nodded. He should have felt good about it, but it kind of felt like discussing the terms of his will.
He got out his binoculars and took a look around the shore. Other than the bombs, which kept dropping every minute or so, hitting buildings to the north, east, and south of the airport, it was perfectly still.
"Contact," Sam said. They were in the middle of the channel running north-south down the center of the marina; she pointed northeast to a wide pier a hundred yards ahead. There, a silhouette stared out at the waters.
"Cover me," Ness said. "I'm gonna go say hello."
Before anyone could tell him different, he climbed down the side of the sub and plunked into the water. He grunted. Colder than he expected. He paddled toward the nearest pier eighty feet away. Behind him, Sam whistled. He turned, but she was signaling to the silhouette on the far dock.
Ness located a ladder at the pier's end and hauled himself out, dripping water everywhere. The person on the other dock lifted a sword above their head, which instantly identified them as one of Raina's. Ness headed to the base of the pier, doing his best to dodge the accretions of bird turds spattering the platform.
The trooper jogged south to meet him. As was often the case, the soldier turned out to be a woman a few years younger than Ness. Her dark hair was cut short. Face paint ringed her eyes and striped her cheeks.
"Tell me it's not as bad as it looks," Ness said.
She glanced toward the airport. "How does it look?"
"Like we're getting our asses kicked."
"Then it's as bad as it looks."
"What's going on?"
"Don't know. We pulled out right before the battle was supposed to start."
Ness crinkled his forehead. "You retreated? Looks like somebody went ahead with it anyway."
"We had orders to withdraw," the girl said. She had the same lean, distance-runner frame as Tristan. "Then the jets came."
"I'm guessing you want a ride out of here?"
"Got space for forty?"
"That's all of you that's left?"
"The bombs cut us off from the main retreat," she said. "The others might have made it out. And there were two smaller groups who split from us before the attack."
Ness nodded. "Had any contact with them?"
"If they're not here now, then they're either retreating overland, or they're already dead. My people are only a few blocks from here."
"I'll go with you." He got out his damp walkie talkie, which he'd long ago made sure was waterproof. "Tristan, we got forty passengers nearby. I'm gonna go help bring them in. Back in ten."
"Got it," Tristan replied. "Move fast. Sprite says Sebastian's getting antsy."
He wanted to inquire more, but asking questions wouldn't get Raina's soldiers out of harm's way. The girl was already looking at him like she was about to shove him off the dock and hijack the sub.
"Lead on," he said. She took off at a jog. He matched pace. "You got a name?"
"Lena," she said.
Three blocks later, Lena headed into the rear of a fancy glass-faced hotel and entered the ground floor. Forty people waited in the dark lobby. They smelled like sweat and dust, but they looked okay. And eager to get out.
Yet again, Ness found himself in the uncomfortable position of leading a big group of people. This time wasn't so bad—all he did was walk with them back to the sub, explain the rules, and help them onboard, a process that took no more than fifteen minutes. Routine as it was, and despite the fact he knew he was doing invaluable work by getting these people out of a jam, he looked forward to the time when it was just him and the other four members of the ship's crew again.
Once everyone was settled in the galley and the storage rooms around it, Ness hunted down Lena.
"We ready to head out?" he said. "Or do you want to stick around and see if anybody else is out there?"
She lowered her brows. "Why should we wait?"
"It's going to take at least two hours to get back to San Pedro. It'd be another two to return here. I doubt anybody's going to stick around that long."
"They'll find another way home. We're trained to do that. We're ready to go."
"Gotcha."
As Sprite chatted with the soldiers, Ness headed down to the control room and let Sebastian know they were ready to depart. The sub rocked, burbling away from the dock. Sebastian backed them away and swung to face the mouth of the giant marina. As they came to the center of the channel, the water deepened, allowing them to drop a few feet below the surface. Sebastian ramped up the engines and forged into the bay.
The sea around them was shallow. They stuck to the channel carved in the ocean floor feeding out from the marina. With no one around to maintain it, parts of the channel had silted over and Sebastian slowed, maneuvering carefully. Twice, he had to pop the sub above the surface to cruise over fat deposits of sand. As soon as they cleared the shallows, Sebastian swung southeast toward the peninsula, scooting along beneath the waves.
When they were still less than half a mile out from the marina, Sebastian went still. His head swiveled from screen to screen. On the monitor dedicated to conditions outside the sub, an orange light flashed.
"What's that?" Ness said. "Never seen it before."
"WE HAVE BEEN PINNED"
"Pinned?"
"AS IF BY SONAR"
"Pinged," Ness signed. "Uh…by who?"
Sebastian shot him a quick glance. "ANOTHER SUB"
Ness' stomach flopped. "Know if it's human? Or alien?"
"OF MY PEOPLE"
He examined the screens, but everything looked normal. "Well where is it?"
"I CAN'T SEE THIS," Sebastian gestured, tentacles flicking peevishly. "IF I MAKE IT SO THAT WE CAN SEE THIS, THEN THEY WILL SEE US AS WELL"
"So we can't use active scans. All right, we know there's an enemy sub out there, we don't know where it is, and it probably knows we're here. What the hell do we do?"
"IT HUNTS AS WE DO. BY THE FEEL OF ELECTRICITY." Sebastian clicked his claws together.
"What's so funny about being hunted?"
"BECAUSE WE ARE NOT EASY PREY." The alien's tentacles danced over the controls. "AND NOW WE BECOME AS SNEAKY AS THE FLOUNDER"
The sub's engines cut out. The lights flipped off. Ness heard a distant scream from one of the passengers. The lights returned, the dim orange of the emergency system. The ship slowed, yet the displays indicated they were still moving on their own power.
"You must have missed something," Ness gestured. "We've still got engines."
Sebastian swung his head side to side. "PASSIVE MOTORS. THEY ARE SUCH AS A…" He cast about, searching for the words. "A WINDUP SPRING, WHICH IS TIGHTENED AND THEN RELEASED. IT SPINS OF ITS OWN POWER. NO ELECTRICS"
"Well, that's a neat trick. How long will
it run for?"
"THIRTY MINUTES OR PERHAPS FORTY. IF WE HAVE LUCK, THIS WILL BE ENOUGH"
Ness glanced from screen to screen, but their sensors weren't always great under normal circumstances. With all non-critical power shut down, they were totally blind.
"How much trouble are we in if they spot us?"
"MUCH TROUBLE," Sebastian gestured. "THERE ARE SOME DEFENSES, BUT NO WEAPONS. WE MUST HIDE OR WE MUST FLEE"
Tristan's voice crackled over the walkie. "What's going on down there? Did we lose power?"
"Come to command," Ness said. "And quit using the walkie."
Seconds later, feet smacked down the hall. Tristan swung through the door. "Well?"
Ness explained. As he finished, a second ping flared on the readouts.
"And we have no idea how close they are?" Tristan said.
"Nope. Figuring that out will expose us for sure."
She eyed the scanner. "How small of an electric signal can this thing detect?"
Ness translated to Sebastian. Sebastian signed, "IT MUST BE LARGE. THAT OF AN ENGINE. AS FOR ANIMALS, IT WOULD DETECT A WHALE. PERHAPS ALSO A GROUP OF DOLPHINS OR LARGE SCHOOL OF FISH"
Ness passed this along to Tristan. "Why do you ask?"
"Because if it comes down to it," she said, "we might have to bail out and swim away."
Ness blinked. "What about our passengers?"
"We better hope they can swim, too."
"Suppose we ought to warn them?"
"Let them know we're on ninja mode. If they have any electronics, they can't use them. We think we'll be in the clear in a few minutes, but have them sit down and hold on to something."
She jogged off to spread the word. The sub cruised along. A minute later, there was another ping. Five minutes after that, when Tristan returned, they still hadn't been pinged again. The passive motors weren't good for more than a walking pace, but by the time twenty minutes had gone by since the initial ping, they'd made it a good two miles southeast of the marina, following the slant of the shore. They were running fifty feet deep, and as the sub increased its interior pressure, Ness had to pop his ears.
"THE PASSIVES ARE HALF SPENT," Sebastian signed. "YET I THINK WE SHOULD KEEP GOING UNTIL THEY ARE ALL SPENT"
Ness nodded. "No sense saving juice if there's a chance the enemy sub is still out there. Let's get as far as we can before switching back to main power."
Minute by minute, the passive engine's spring ticked down. By the time it dropped to 5%, they'd made it five miles from the marina. They were now south of the airport and burbling past the beach cities.
"NOW I END THE PASSIVES." Sebastian reached out and did so. The ship went deathly quiet, drifting to a stop. They hadn't been pinged in over half an hour, but Sebastian gave it another minute before spooling up the main engines.
The sub plowed forward, hull humming. They soon reached cruising speed. Ness kept his eyes fixed on the displays, which they'd augmented with human-friendly programming. Even without the English text, though, he'd learned to interpret much of the general meaning of the alien symbols.
A ping flashed on the screen, brighter than ever before.
"IT WAS SNEAKING AS WELL." Sebastian's tentacles thrashed out the words. "LURKING AS THE MOON BEHIND THE CLOUDS"
He flipped on the active scanners. An orange dot cohered behind them, less than two miles away. Claws clamped tight, he shoved the engines up to max power. The enemy sub pinged them again, righting its course and increasing speed.
"Did they find us?" Tristan said. "Can we hit them back?"
Ness swore. "We don't got any weapons. All we can do is run."
He'd no sooner spoken than a smaller orange dot winked onto the screen. Sebastian stiffened. "INCOMING"
Ness' throat tightened. The dot zoomed toward them. Sebastian's limbs whipped across the controls. Readouts Ness had never seen before accumulated on one of the screens. Defensive measures?
"IT WILL COME CLOSE," Sebastian signed. "FIND SOMETHING TO HOLD AND HOLD IT HARD"
"Brace for impact," Ness said to Tristan. He threw himself into a chair and strapped in. She did the same.
On the scans, the orange dot came closer and closer. Ness wanted to close his eyes, but he couldn't look away. The orange dot whisked past them. It bloomed wide. A hollow, crumping blast sounded through the hull, rattling Ness' teeth. The passengers shrieked, muffled by the bulkheads.
Sebastian slumped in his seat, limbs lolling.
Ness tore off his buckle and ran to the alien's side. "Sebastian!"
He jostled the alien's body, but Sebastian was as limp as when Ness had had to put his childhood cat Butterball to sleep. Horror slammed through his nerves.
"He's okay!" Tristan bent beside Sebastian, pointing to his smooth, leathery belly. "See? His heart's still beating."
"Then what happened to him? That torpedo barely budged us!"
"Maybe it wasn't supposed to blow us up. Maybe it's nonlethal—but it only knocks out Swimmers."
Ness lifted his chin. "They think aliens from the first invasion are crewing this thing. If they think they just knocked us out, they won't know someone's still in control."
"For now. Another minute, and they'll realize they haven't stopped us. We can't outrun them."
"Then what the heck are we supposed to do? Surrender?"
"Not yet." She pointed to the sub's topological map of the ocean floor. For the most part, the sea bed was pretty flat and not terribly deep. A short way ahead, though, a massive crack ran perpendicular from the shore, hundreds of yards across and equally deep. "Drop into that canyon and kill the engines. Maybe we can lose them there. Or they'll think we crashed."
"Drop into the canyon? Like I've ever done anything like that before?"
"Now's your chance to learn." She grabbed his shoulders, locking eyes with him. "You're the only one who can do this. Just think of it like when Han took the Millennium Falcon into the asteroid field."
Ness choked with laughter. "Help me move Sebastian so I can get us away from that Star Destroyer."
Quickly as they could, they unbuckled him. Sebastian weighed a good three hundred pounds, but his tentacles made excellent handholds, allowing them to drag him to the side of the command room. Ness plopped into the seat, buckled in, and took up the controls.
They were approaching the canyon from the side. No good; they'd crash right into the far wall. With a single jerk of the main control stick, he heaved to starboard, hoping their pursuit would think an unconscious Swimmer had collapsed against the dash. The sub curved around, lessening the angle between itself and the rift.
The canyon neared. Its walls were stark drops into deep water, ragged stone that looked eager to rip the guts out of any ship dumb enough to test it. Bit by bit, Ness shut down the electronics. As he sailed over the edge of the descent, he gave the sub one last nudge, straightening it, and killed the engines.
Almost all the scanners went dead, including the one keeping track of the vessel behind them. The dim orange emergency light kicked in, making it look like everyone and everything had fallen asleep in a tanning booth. With the active sensors down, he no longer had an updating radar image of the map of the canyon. Just the ship's best internal estimate of where it was versus its understanding of the map.
He flooded the ballast tanks—with luck, the Swimmers would think the escaping air was due to the submarine getting torn open. The ship sank into the yawning crevice. Ness drew on what little was left of the passive motor, pushing them down faster.
A knife-like ridge extended beneath them. The map didn't seem to think they were going to hit it, but he thought they'd turned further than indicated. Pulse beating in his ears, he adjusted their yaw, pulling the tail away from the impact he suspected was coming.
Metal grated on stone, so painful and deafening it was like his eardrums were being scraped against the ridge. He braced himself for the crash. The grating diminished, then stopped. Ness eased back on the passives, letting the ship's decreased buoy
ancy take over the descent.
"Nice work," Tristan said. "If you hadn't given us that nudge, we'd have been ripped open like a can of Spam."
He pulsed the passives, leaning them away from an approaching wall. Their depth readouts, being based on water pressure, were entirely mechanical, meaning they continued to work despite the other sensors being shut down. At that moment, they were 150 feet deep, with another two hundred feet of water before they hit the bottom. And as the canyon extended to the west, the floor only dropped further.
Sam poked her head into the room. She glanced at Sebastian's body. "Oh no."
"He got knocked out by the torpedo," Ness said. "But he's breathing and stuff."
"Back up. The torpedo?"
He summarized the situation. Sam took it with her typical stoicism, which was to say that Ness might as well have been talking about what they planned to eat for lunch.
"If we got down here, so can they," she said. "We're going to need more than deep water to hide us." She leaned close to the map. "There's space beneath that shelf. Think you can take us in?"
"I'll have to turn on the cameras," Ness said. "But I can try."
He switched on the lenses in the nose. The main screen showed nothing but darkness. Had they been damaged in the scrape? Panic rising, he double-checked the cameras' status. Supposedly, they were fully functional. With a pang of embarrassment, he realized it was the middle of the night and they were two hundred feet below the surface. There was no light whatsoever.
Unsure how much electricity he could burn before they'd become visible to enemy pings, he upped the lights to a low setting. A small cone of light sprung from the front of the ship. Tiny white flakes of organic debris whirled like a dandruff snowstorm. The ledge Sam had indicated was several hundred feet ahead. Ness dived deeper, pushing forward with the passive motor. Small squid swam everywhere, jetting away from crabs scuttling across the rocks. Yellow-brown ropes of kelp clung wherever they could find purchase, swaying in the currents, extending upward for a hundred feet or more.
As Ness closed on the ledge, he shut down the propulsion. The sub coasted to a stop halfway beneath the ledge. He nudged the boat beneath the jut of rock, confirmed they were holding steady, and shut down all non-emergency systems.
Blackout Page 17
