by Ginger Booth
Tarana pointedly turned to regard the platform, already on stilts and framed but missing most of its decking, a generous 80 by 50 feet, the same as the one built for Merchant’s container array. “It looks perfect for a lake platform.”
“Not what I meant,” Sass clarified. “I mean, yes, it might be a nice size. We could try one smaller first. The problem is that the only way to get such a platform from here to the lake, is for Thrive to carry it. But Thrive can’t carry it until we set down our containers.”
Tarana nodded thoughtfully. “Although Thrive could, say, put the containers down temporarily. Then fly the platform to the lake. Then retrieve the containers. Wouldn’t that work?”
Sass pursed her lips. “It’s a lot of work loading and unloading those containers. Hours. And that platform was designed for a different purpose. Darren might need to re-engineer it for a floating platform.”
“But it’s still early in its construction. So he probably could.”
“I could ask,” Sass allowed. “But in general, Tarana, I’d strongly prefer it if we agree to help you with a project. And then we proceed to completion. And I’m not sure this is the time to split our forces between two camps. We don’t have Sylvan One fully operational yet. You just got your cook tent up last night.”
“Mm. But this is my decision. Fail fast, captain. I want to test the lake concept. And I wanted to ask you. I understand you went downriver and found a broader, mellower part of the river, with fish. Would it be better to establish the floating settlement in the Melt Lake,” this had become a proper place name, “or the river bay?”
Sass thought fast. “I’m not sure. The river is more sheltered. But it supports unknown wildlife. Which could be a problem. We saw one merman –”
“A what?”
Sass pulled out her tablet to show Tarana a picture of the creature who swiped at Kassidy. “And very large fish.”
Tarana shrugged. “Normally aquatic species aren’t much interested in things outside the water. Two separate worlds.”
“We don’t know that. We also don’t know whether the forest creatures swim.”
“Most do,” Tarana agreed. “On Denali at least. Earth too, didn’t they?”
“Yeah, if they had to. Or thought there might be easy pickings to eat.”
“Will you speak to Darren, then? Or shall I?”
“You will always go through me,” Sass growled. “Darren Markley is my crew.”
“No offense intended.” Tarana spread her hands. “Your hierarchy concept and ours don’t quite match. Thank you, captain.” And the Selectman breezed away to find her next victim.
Stop that, Sass ordered herself. Tarana was a leader, same as herself, and a boss, same as Ben. She made the call and issued orders. Nothing good came of copping an attitude toward the boss.
“I’ll tell Darren,” Clay offered, and headed for the platform in progress.
Sass sighed and considered how to tape off Ben’s parking spots before Tarana reassigned the space. Non-negotiable. Whatever crisis might draw Ben’s ships back, lighting a forest fire on the way down wouldn’t help. But she could already see the writing on the wall. Guess where her containers would likely get dumped? “Yes, captain. But since we haven’t called Spaceways back, we know we don’t need those parking spaces today. So we can temporarily…” Sass confidently expected to hear that argument again.
And she couldn’t fault Tarana’s reasoning. Ben’s parking spot just made her feel safer, like a security blanket made of mud. She hadn’t admitted until just now that she expected the expedition would need a Spaceways bailout.
Then I should have left with them.
And for a few more hours at least, until he reached the ocean for liftoff, that remained an option. She could change her mind and cry uncle. After that, Ben lacked the fuel to land again this side of Mahina Orbital, or he’d strand them all on Sylvan, which helped no one. In 12 hours or so, he’d light the warp gateway and transit 40 light years away.
Dammit! She’d be second-guessing herself all day.
But everyone on her crew who stayed, chose this. She held tight to that one proof of conviction.
Maybe she could hold emergency air bubble drills with the farmers today. Doing something constructive to allay her fears always beat worrying about them.
24
In the event, Sass began moving the lake platform a full two weeks after Tarana ordered her to do so. When she went to Darren Markley, he simply vetoed the plan. Thrive’s containers could not be placed on the ground because they still contained all the star drive fuel reserves for her return to Mahina space. If that stuff went boom! they were all dead. A little water was enough to set that off.
So she got her container parking platform first after all. And then the first farming platforms with their painstaking bio-locks needed building before they lost the cool northern summer.
They were all getting royally sick of the day-long hammering of nail guns at Sylvan One. But the platform village was growing nicely. Tarana also accepted the logic of maintaining their miniature spaceport. Sass took advantage of a rainstorm to burn a controlled firebreak around a major annex, to double their cleared land, then burned the rest out the next day. With a minor hill in the middle of their spread, and her containers parked, she could no longer see the far side of the village from her ship.
This roominess was mostly illusion. Her morning run took 6 laps of the periphery. But what a great way to start the day! And with platform construction a bottleneck, she took her time scouting in her shuttle for the lake village location.
And she finally found the banks of the river and lake. They’d been right there all along – drowned about 3 meters down. This entire region was currently in a flood state, gradually exiting Melt Lake through underground rivers and the forest soil.
Darren decided this meant that instead of corner poles for the floating platform, they needed a colonnade, marching to deeper water. Though of course Tarana said they only needed four poles driven to start. Sass arbitrated a compromise position of eight, and scouted where to place them so that the lake level could fall 4 meters before the floating town was grounded.
Even Thrive couldn’t pick up that platform again once it was water-logged and built upon.
So on the appointed day, Sass began by shedding her bio-lock next to her containers, a fiddly detail that added a couple hours to the work day. Then she grappled her eight poles to the bottom of the ship. Then her hunter outriders clambered on to the cargo ramp, lowered to the horizontal. Zan rode out there with them to ensure everyone clamped on properly.
She lumbered along at a slow walk for the safety of her riders, to the jaw-dropping gorgeous chosen bay of Melt Lake. Here she dropped the logs on the jumbled trees along the shore. The hunters climbed off after them, to wait and entertain themselves scouting the woods.
The theory was, she would burn a starter hole with her main plasma gun. Then a sharpened pole would slip in as a very tight fit. Then they’d essentially hammer it, like a nail into a pre-drilled hole. They hadn’t quite figured out how to accomplish that last bit yet maintain a strongly-driven pole.
The first step she understood quite well, though. Not using any of the final positions, she drilled two test holes in shallow water at different diameters. Then she slipped the first pole into each of them. From this test, Darren determined the best diameter hole relative to the breadth of the pole. The next three test holes were all at the same breadth, but different depths. Good news there, the deepest worked for the engineer. That would save them some hammering. She put the pole back in its pile to wait for its true destination.
At that point, she and Clay put on their dive suits.
Sass squeezed into the shuttle airlock with Clay, as Nico steadied the shuttle. She cycled the lock, then asked him to bring the craft within a meter of the water. Then she unfurled the rope ladder.
In a society so firmly wedded to gravity generators, it took poor Floki hours to track down
that dusty item, last spotted a decade ago and buried under Sass’s gardening storage.
Clay shot her a grin, and headed down the ladder, stubby-toed flippers under his arm. These dive suits were another buried souvenir. After they raised Nanomage from the ocean floor, sinking down the sea slope from the abandoned city of Neptune, they never returned their suits. He paused a moment to pull on the abbreviated flippers, still above water, then looked up.
“Not a fish in sight,” she reported. “And the water here was safe when Eli tested it the first time.”
“Good enough,” her beloved agreed. He held to the ladder until waist-deep, Sass still watching for wildlife. But she gave him the all-clear, and passed him the telescoping sensor wand.
Their engineer Darren needed to know how deep the silt was and when bedrock began in the pole hole. Silt wouldn’t anchor a floating town. And bedrock required a plasma drill all the way down. Looser ground or gravel beneath the lake called for the hammer treatment, was also iffy for stability. They dove to probe the deepest test hole and find out.
Holding tight to her own gear, Sass clambered down, Clay sculling backward on the surface to give her room at the bottom. Her suit made for Denali’s warm ocean, Sass was shocked when her suited feet hit the icy sunlit waters. She glanced at Clay’s feet, idling below him. The turquoise waters were nearly as clear as air. She wasn’t about to give up her harpoon, though. Some of the greatest predators on Earth roamed its coldest oceans. Steeling herself, she sloughed backward to float, kicking away from the shuttle. She told Nico to lift up a few meters, giving him leeway to deal with sudden gusts of wind.
And with a quick up-rump, she dove into wonderland. She spun to look for the ladder’s extension into the water, and spot the shuttle above them. Ripples from their dive still shimmered the silver surface, with a whitened version of the purplish sky above.
“Collier, let’s do this thing,” Clay prompted.
She chuckled and flipped face down again. They dove deeper, their regulators easily managing the air pressure. They made quick work of the 15 feet of water to the bottom. There Clay cast around with powerful headlamps, because playing with the test pole had kicked up too much of the white silt. He paused to capture a sample in a jar. The white sand beaches of Earth’s tropics came from ground seashells. Melt Lake was something else.
She spotted a darker ring. “There, Clay.” He swam closer and confirmed that was it. She settled to the lake bottom only a few feet away, facing him, to watch his back. She practiced a few head-turns to watch her own as well, because he’d be focused on the instruments.
She turned off her headlamp to be one with the lake, and found it a major improvement. The distances at her height were deepest blue, the surface sapphire, and the settling silt beneath her flippers aqua.
Behind her right shoulder she spotted something. Whitened driftwood? No. “Clay, I’ve got a fish inbound at my 120 degrees.” She watched it another few seconds, then realized the crystalline waters were tricking her eyes. She stiffened. “Sturgeon size.”
“Don’t hurt it if you don’t have to,” Clay reminded her. “Blood in the water never helps.” He calmly added another six inches to his pole and probed. “Darren, I’ve got readings.”
“Go ahead, Clay. Remember to call off the depths.”
Sass watched everywhere but Clay as that tedious process unfolded. Two more sturgeon appeared from different directions, one almost directly behind him. But the first beast eventually turned aside. Rego hell, that thing’s the size of a dolphin! And shaped like a barracuda, straight between head and tail.
The cold began to seep into her joints. She checked her med read-out, but it claimed her body temperature held steady. Unlike their spacesuits, these didn’t report back to the ship. Or rather, they attempted to report to a dive master in Neptune, collapsing into an ocean 40 light years from here. “How are you feeling, Clay?”
“Cold.” He paused to check his own tell-tales. “Not too cold. Oxygenation 100%.” He resumed his soundings. He’d already found the end of the silt, a gravel layer, and bedrock beneath in a wide-grained survey. Now he was repeating to get a precise read on the gravel layer’s thickness.
Sass resumed her spotting rounds through 360 degrees, moving slowly and methodically. The sturgeon at 250 degrees was either getting awfully close, or was huge. Hopefully not both. “Clay, be advised, I’m advancing on a sturgeon.”
Suddenly a school of fish enveloped her, ranging from the size of her hand to double that, swimming furiously. She flinched, then crouched. “Clay, hunker down!”
“OK. Why?”
“Sturgeon –” She stopped in mid-breath as the barrel tummy of a massive fish swam above her head, darting side to side as it snapped at snappers.
“Ow!” Clay complained. She glanced to see him shove the side of a huge fish that shoved him. The predator, probably surprised, proved able to turn within less than double its length, that being longer than Clay. “Don’t, Sass!”
Because she was taking aim. But it was hard to see, or even hold the harpoon gun steady, as the fish school’s silvery mass continued to pour through. And the harpoon was not a quick weapon. She had to have a steady bead on the thing for a good couple seconds.
But instead Clay planted his feet and shoved the thing again, managing to evade its gaping maw. It retaliated with a flick of its tail, half its mass behind the blow. That overcame Clay’s footing and sent him floating backward, attempting to scull himself back down to the lake floor.
But the massive sturgeon spotted Sass now. She decided to honor Clay’s no-blood wishes, though she still didn’t know whether that was good advice. She reversed her harpoon gun to use the stock as a stick, rather than the business end, and lunged to poke it in the first gill set.
It didn’t like that at all. Suddenly it lifted. She caught a swat of its tail as well, but more a glancing blow by accident as it hastened away. The school of snappers had cleared out. She gazed around and saw no sturgeon for the moment. “You OK?”
Clay was already back to his soundings. “Fine.”
“Darren, how important is greater detail?” she inquired.
“Diminishing returns,” he admitted. “Clay, up it to 10 cm between readings. Maybe two more.”
“Alright,” Sass ruled. “But Clay, if another school like that arrives? Head straight up.”
“Aye, cap.” In a couple minutes, he completed his readings and collapsed the sensor. “Done. Sure you don’t want to swim around?”
“Absolutely sure. Aren’t your knees aching.”
“Elbows,” Clay confessed. “Nose is starting to drip, too. Heading up.”
“Nico, shift downward.”
She gave her lover a head start, then followed. No need for decompression on this shallow dive. She waited while he doffed his flippers and made it halfway up the ladder. Then she climbed on, but only far enough to get her whole body out of the water. There she hung and took stock, searching the rippled waters for the flash of fleeing fish hitting the surface by accident. She didn’t find it, so she stared down.
“Sass?”
“I want to see what happens if I harpoon a sturgeon.” Not that this fish was really a sturgeon.
Clay sat heavily on the airlock threshold above. “Possibilities. You miss your shot, no harm done. You hit it, then you’ve got blood in the water, and we learn how other fish react. But you lose the harpoon gun, because you can’t reel in a sturgeon. So you throw the gun into the water. Hopefully before you also fall into the water in the midst of a feeding frenzy. That I then somehow extract you from. Bottom line, honey, please don’t.”
“Point,” Sass conceded. “Your reasoning is impeccable.”
To her surprise, Nico spoke up. “I brought a couple Denali sonic guns. I don’t know if they’re immersible. But it rains on Denali, so they must be fairly waterproof from the surface.”
“Oh, clever boy!” Sass purred. “Clay, go fetch, would you?” He growled. “They’re dan
gerous! If people are going to live here, we need to know how to fight them off.”
He gave in and retrieved the sonics. By the time he returned, with guns, Sass had spotted two schools of fish and three sturgeon. One set came back around, and Clay shot into them. He held the trigger for several seconds for a long pulse.
That was interesting. The school of fish ceased to act like a school, rapidly wandering off in different directions instead of playing follow-the-leader. The sturgeon ate a couple, but then continued in on its current bearing instead of turning to give chase. Another sturgeon wandered into view. Clay held the trigger longer this time. It quit moving, and gradually tilted onto its side. Then it seemed to shake off its paralysis, and turned to escape, still swimming slowly.
“OK, I’ll admit,” Clay said. “You have good ideas sometimes. I meant you, Nico, not Sass.”
She laughed at his grin, and grabbed his foot for purchase.
“Wait!” he barked suddenly. “What’s with the hunters?”
She turned to look to the shore. The hunters converged at the edge of the water, hitting something with sticks. “Nico? Let’s get closer!”
25
“Zan, what’s up?” Sass hailed him, as the shuttle swung around. Clay grabbed her arms and hauled her up to sit beside him.
“Testing the suits,” he replied. The hunters wore experimental wet-suits today, developed on Sardine while the Denali technicians were stuck in orbit. They’d been honed through a few iterations since then, and proved less bulky than a space suit for a day on the nail guns. “Crocodile came.”
Nico swerved the shuttle about three meters above the water, to give them a perfect view. “I have a sonic gun and harpoon with me,” Sass offered, still tying to make sense of the splashing humans below. They clambered along a tangle of whitened driftwood trunks leaning into the water. Something large struggled between them.
“Sonics work,” Zan concurred. “And we got ’em.”
