“So,” I said, testing her waters, “how goes life in the village?” When she gave no answer, I turned to face her. “Do they know you be here?”
Her translucent inner lids shut and opened rapidly as she closed her lips together. “No,” she whispered.
Only one person would have enough reason to stop her from coming here tonight and I couldn’t think about Tamn without switching my gauntlet to its highest setting and burning the white gills off his pale skin. I looked back at the fire and tried to focus some of my rage into it. We had learned how to not act like the barbarians the Royals treated us as. But that didn’t mean the instinct to lash out wasn’t still brewing inside us.
She surprised me when she spoke again, stronger this time. “Arvex and Ta—the others, are still looking for the adults. After saving us from the Var, they still have not returned. Ta—Min and Corrie have been worried.”
I nodded. “After watching them spear old Battleaxe, I would think you would be brainless not to fear.” It still burned me to think of the loss of Old Brien’s son. He had been the expert at turning Adi’s chole dust into an alternative fuel source. We quickly learned that a relatively small amount could power a ship for at least ten leagues, while the old filsh only lasted not even a pinch of that. And I couldn’t deny the fact that, once again, one of my people had sacrificed themselves for a Royal. It seemed our lot in life.
Qeya had grown quiet again, drawing into herself and I shifted closer to her, wishing I could carry her with my strength. Had I not known that other Royal was better for her than me, I would have asked her to come back to the caves with Adi and me, and ignored the leaking consequences.
Never talking about old pale-gills Tamn again would have been just fine with me. But he had not died in the last attack, against the wishes of my darker side. And I stupidly hoped if I spoke of him, she might feel safer with me, might hover longer. So I said, “How be your Tamn?” I watched carefully as her lips parted slightly and her inner lids blinked.
“He’s swimming along well enough. I healed the last of his injuries. But,” she hesitated and then said, “He has been affected by this, in more ways than the children. The things the Pioneer crew saw and endured were different. We had hope that they might be out there still. He didn’t.”
“And, how was the bonding ceremony?” I tried to calm my waters when I said this, but it wasn’t easy. I couldn’t have cared less what Tamn and the other Royals went through. Not with the memory of those nights I spent looking after her and the children she had mentioned. Never in all my life would I have expected to grow close to any Royals. But I too mourned the death of Menai, who had wanted so badly to look like me. Of all the memories I carried from that time, the crash and finding the caves, Menai’s death and running from those leaking sentient forest devils, watching Qeya run into Tamn’s arms, had wounded me most.
“There was no ceremony. Hasn’t been one yet at least,” she said softly and infused me with a hope I hadn’t known since our ship came crashing down and my only wish came true.
My hand grasped hers, turning her towards me and bringing her body so it caved into mine. My chest burst with feelings. I could hear her pulse pick up and then everything about her seemed heightened to my senses, the feel of her smooth skin and the way her eyes blinked up at me with uncertainty and something more. My eyes fell to her lips and I remembered the last time I had tasted them. I wondered what she would do if I tried to claim her again. She might have every right to push me away.
But she came here for more than a primal need to say farewell to her past. I trusted this instinct as I leaned over her and lightly pressed my mouth to the gills fluttering against the side of her neck. She gasped and her fingers tightened against my arms. I didn’t know if she was pulling me to her or pushing me away and I didn’t get the chance to find out.
Adi’s voice carried through the ship’s metal casing long before she came rushing out of the opening. “Dugong cows! I can’t believe my eyes!”
Qeya jerked out of my embrace and I stubbornly kept her hand enclosed in mine. I wasn’t planning on letting go of her again until I knew for sure she could say no to me forever.
Adi’s arms were coated in slick white goop from the ship’s wiring and some had been wiped on her biosuit. In her hands, she held a scanner, the surface of which was casting her face in red and black lights. It was the happiest I had seen her since the day she discovered chole dust on our first expedition on the gas giants beyond the core worlds. “Ohre!” She was practically laughing when she came bounding up to stand between us, her eyes aglow with a blue sheen. Spending too much time in dark places tended to do that to my kind. And we had engineered our technology so only our special vision could comprehend all its parts. “Here!” she said, thrusting the scanner into my free hand. For once, she didn’t glare at my red-haired Royal.
“Look! Can you see it? Right there! I found this old thing fully charged and resting in a panel underneath the main controls.” Narrowing her eyes with self-satisfaction at Qeya, she added, “Shame you Royals never thought to look for this. It was set with coordinates to the Pioneer. Tamn must have planted this on your deck before we left. None of the rest of them would have thought of a backup plan, in case something ever went to the bleeding pits.”
Qeya’s fingers tightened on mine and her other arm shifted so she could clutch the retractable scythe blade on her tool belt. After sharing a secret grin with the flustered orona, I lifted the scanner for my own inspection. Using our infrablue vision, I saw past the crude outlines of the shallow sea we were camped beside. The tunnels beneath our feet brought the sea through caves that eventually bled into the mountain range, eventually spilling into freshwater rivers.
“Here it be, at last!” I said with a growl. “You were marked for sure about it being so close by.” Adi flashed me another grin, but not before I caught her disturbed glance at Qeya’s hand trapped in mine.
Snatching the scanner from my hand, she walked around the death pit and closer to where the water washed over the wet sands. “It shouldn’t be far. Just a quick swim in the deep and we can snatch what we need.”
I only felt a brief pull on my hand before Qeya followed me past the fire and to the shoreline. The wind made the sea choppy and unpredictable. We didn’t know these currents, but already I had tasted the mineral-rich waters. This world was filled with dangers we had only begun to grasp. My gut told me the worst be underneath those waves. But Tamn had shared the unexplained things they had seen during their escape from the sinking Pioneer.
And what did he mean by untold treasures?
As if she had reached into my mind, Adi turned around to face me, her eyes glowing like twin rocks of chole. “You know the best time to hunt for us is in the night.” Ignoring her charge emitter, she pulled her gloves from her hands to reveal her clawed nails. Only I knew just how deadly a scratch from those nails could be. When they wanted to, our females could numb the body of a beast twice their size on contact. The hunt was ingrained in us, whether we were raised in the caves of home world, or sailing the heavens in our ships.
I nodded and used my thumb to switch my gauntlet to another setting. The blade hidden within was also tipped with poison. But my real strength under those waters would come from my fists. Our people came from the deepest places. We learned how to be fast in a place where only the strongest survived. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t looking forward to fighting some real devils again. They would hunt at night, always at night. That was, after all, when we preyed on the weaker species.
“Adi, you will stay with the camp.”
She hissed and charged me. “You are not my father, or my mated! I make my own choices, bottom dweller!” Before she could make the first swipe, I ducked and snatched her wrist, pressing my thumb down so my blade emerged. If she so much as breathed it would tear through her suit and pierce her chest. Her eyes blazed with fury, but she was directing it past me this time, and at the Royal she hated most.
> “I need at least one of us to watch camp. We still don’t know if there are any of those Var on the beach. You must watch the pit. Besides,” I paused long enough to remove the blade and shove her onto the sand, then turned my attention to Qeya. “This Royal has gifts neither of us can claim. She must be the one to come below.”
II
Descend
Adi stalked off to the camp and the ruined ship to continue her search after throwing the scanner onto the sand at my feet. I was satisfied she would take her fire out on tearing the deck apart. Meanwhile, I readied Qeya for our journey. The best defense in alien waters was not our biosuits, which were designed for heaven and hostile environments. But her eyes grew to new depths when I told her to strip down.
She subconsciously covered her chest. “I’m not taking this off. And I need my tool belt anyway.”
I had already stripped away the outer gray layer of my suit and disconnected the helm ring. Shrugging, I teased, “After living in a cave with me for so long, you still be a fretful creature.”
As I predicted, Qeya huffed and then uncrossed her arms. With a determined glare, she peeled off her boots and placed her web-toed feet onto the sand.
I smirked and took off the synthetic skin beneath that, revealing my scars and the tattoos that ran down my neck, over my shoulders and down my back. This action was far more intimate than I was letting on. Truth be told, I was trembling in my boots, showing her the amount of scars and lack of markings I still wore. I was decorated just as much as the average miner. But my tattoos were not in honor of the discoveries I had made. Instead they told the story of unnecessary fights and demerits for putting my gills where they didn’t belong. Where they connected at the top of my spine, the tattoos told of my origins, of the clan that no longer existed.
I was a wildling, once. It is known that my clan abandoned their servitude in favor of the open seas. And I was the only thing that was left of them: a scavenger, feeding off whatever prey I could find. As a youngling, I had lurked in the abandoned Royal palaces. That was where their scanners picked up my signature. Old Brien claimed me; only he and his generation remembered my clan. He told the others I had left the pod and come below where I shouldn’t have been lurking.
He adopted me, never giving me the chance to try and find my clan. I guess he thought he was saving my hide. But I never got used to life in the caves and the memory of the above-ground palaces still makes me cringe. I was fastest in the waters I’d been born to, and I returned often enough to never climb high in the ranks. I think Brien put me on Datura 3 hoping to cure my wild ways by sailing the heavens.
Qeya was still the most beautiful creature I had ever seen, above or below the waves. The bare skin of her arms and neck gleamed like the translucent wings of the sea angels. I had only ever seen them once as a boy, but never forgot the rarest fish in the deep. Qeya’s skin was not marked by tattoos, and only littered by a faint scattering of scars and gills. And because I knew her well, I recognized that her lack of injuries was a sign of her skill with the scythe blade she insisted on bringing along. If my people were the fastest creatures of the deep, then hers were quick as steam breezing past your fingertips. They could move so quickly in the shallows that my people had aptly named them ghosts, ages before.
She stood almost naked in nothing but the wrappings around her breasts and hips. I fought my reaction to her with all the mettle in my bones. She needed to trust me, where we were going, not find more reason to fear. Her hands twitched restlessly in an effort to busy themselves. She seemed uncertain as to whether she should hold onto the tool belt now tied to her waist, or dig her fingers nervously in her red hair. I wondered if she had ever exposed herself so thoroughly to another of her own kind.
This kept me confident as I strode up to her and took her hand again. “Come on, Navigator. Ready to face some new monsters?”
Qeya rolled her eyes and grinned up at me, then unhooked her retractable blade to press the end into my hard stomach. “Are you sure you can keep up with me in the shallows?” she asked, knowing full well I could see much better in the dark. She screamed when I swept her off her feet and ran until I was waist deep in the waters and threw her into the waves.
All seas are essentially the same, made up of water or something just as fluid. We were lucky the sea on this world was not made up of toxins. But I was surprised by how familiar this one felt. Besides a stronger presence of an alien mineral I didn’t know the name of, it even smelled the same. Each kick of my legs made me feel stronger, every pass of water through my gills made me faster. Qeya’s form curved and bent in angles mine could not, slightly ahead of me. She held the scanner in her hand, using it to light her way, while I trusted my gut and the infrablue vision my ancestors had passed down to me.
We cut through the waters in a way that would have slowed us down on Datura. Yet here, we soared.
For the length of a league we saw nothing but dim shadows marking the ocean floor. Nothing stirred in the deep to give away the position of approaching gill breathers or beasts, making me even more suspicious. Just because nothing stirred the waters did not mean they weren’t below, watching us. But if there was truly nothing here, I had to wonder why.
Qeya’s hand squeezed mine and energy traveled from the sensitive nerves in my fingertips and up my arm. I turned to follow her pointed gaze, noticing the increased pulse of the scanner in her hands. With my infrablue vision, I saw what her eyes couldn’t. I saw past the flat seabed to the caves underneath it and wondered just how deep this ocean went. Did it extend to the core? And as I was beginning to doubt we’d ever find Pioneer, or that at least it would be best to turn back and try again tomorrow, Qeya threw her body erect before me and froze. I righted myself quickly and followed the direction of her outstretched hand, where the scanner was now flashing wildly.
Her glowing golden eyes were wide with something that smelled like fear as she spoke into my mind, “Look…”
The seabed that had been bare several strokes back was now littered with sea grass. Before we came across the grass, I had begun to wonder if this was another dead sea after all. But grass meant food, which in turn meant life. Hopefully we wouldn’t find any on this trip. When I followed the trail further, I realized it stretched on into the distance into an endless forest. Just below us, I could make out the silvery shell of the Pioneer, no bigger than the end of my thumb from up here. When I looked up to check the scanner, Qeya was already looking back at me, waiting for instruction.
“Let’s go,” I whispered the thought into her mind. She led the descent.
Water pressed against us from all sides the deeper we kicked toward the fallen Pioneer. I could see the strain in her limbs as she struggled to push past the growing pressure. My kind craved the skull-pounding weight of the deep and I grinned as I swam ahead, pulling her with me.
It was hard to tell how bad damage to the hull was just yet, but I was confident we could easily gain entry. The shuttle wasn’t my main concern, though. Rather the bubbles I kept seeing in the waters around us, and though she couldn’t see them yet, the abandoned dwellings hidden in the forest.
So there’s life below after all, or least there used to be.
I didn’t realize she’d heard my thought until she looked up at me strangely and then pretended she hadn’t.
Qeya reached for the latch on the outside hatch until I grabbed her hands. Her eyes blazed and threw scythes into mine, no doubt for daring to challenge her strength. I released her before reaching for the hatch myself. Even with my doubled strength it wouldn’t budge. When she saw me activate my wristblade, a flurry of bubbles were left in the wake of her kicks to escape the blast she knew was coming.
This was one invention of mine I was proud to claim. Old Brien used to say I was a fool for taking scrap metal apart and piecing it together again. Turns out my troublemaking had some benefits.
The Royals liked my inventions so much, they made their own version of my wristblade. Not my fault they wer
e weaker and tended to shut down after a season. It was their fault for not putting a filthy miner in charge. My wristblade had evolved over the seasons and I was in the habit of adding and modifying its many features. The hidden blade was only one weapon and the blaster another personal favorite of mine. But the power pulse I used to bust us out of Second Deck last season. At this depth, it seemed the best choice to reverse and use to drag Pioneer to the surface. I felt a boost to my malehood when the Royal Princess backed off. She had seen what I could do.
In the water, everything was different. I couldn’t move as quickly as I could on land. When I brought my two middle fingers to touch my palm and the tracer hidden against my skin, the propulsion forced me to kick hard, just to keep from careening back into Qeya. I’d used some of my last personal stash of chole dust to power up my blade earlier that day. Hopefully I wasn’t going to regret wasting it on this hunk of scrap now. The cool water heated up quickly as the glowing rope latched onto the hull like a sticky web. This was Adi’s compound at work. When set to the right pressure and heat, it made a goop that could be made into a rope stronger than the tightest cables.
We used a similar technology to move object of much greater size when mining. The shield didn’t need to make a rope. It could be rounded out to encase the space around it as well. And this shield was what allowed us to fly in the heavens in the first place. I wasn’t supposed to steal the secret to crafting our shields. Only the elders were given the knowledge of how we survived so deep in the core of our water world.
I turned back to Qeya and found her closer than I had expected. She had her back to me, her red hair loose and fanning like liquid flames in my face. When I reached to touch her shoulder she whipped round so fast her image blurred before settling. Her eyes were wide and frightened and I knew then she must have seen the abandoned dwellings as well.
Ohre (Heaven's Edge) Page 2
