“Half the population of Olympus Mons are looking for me by now. Thomas will sooner or later figure out where I went.”
He paused, slowly blinking his huge eyes at me.
“Thommmmas?”
“My friend. Counselor. My . . . guardian.”
His eyes, which resembled two huge watch crystals, with steel gray irises themselves larger than my own eyes, blinked again.
“You’ll see,” I said.
“No one will commmme,” he said simply, and went back to his meal, which was almost gone.
The way he said it, the certainty, sent a chill through me.
“What do you mean?”
I had hesitated, and he had quickly finished off the last of the fish, pulling it from the bones and pawing it into his mouth, chewing it with that sucking sound.
He pushed the carcass aside and regarded me.
“One wants to see youuu.”
“Who the devil is One?”
He turned away from me, cleaning up the remains of the fish and walking to the spot in the orb where the door had opened.
When the iris appeared I rushed past him through the opening, along with the fish he tossed through.
I stood frozen in place, gasping. For a moment I thought I had stepped into blue nothingness, and held my breath. I was surrounded by water, and the shimmering light of the sea itself. A fish, much larger than the one we had just eaten, tailed lazily by and then turned to regard me dispassionately.
It bumped its snout on something invisible between us, and then turned haughtily and swam away.
“What . . .”
I reached out and touched what enclosed and protected me – a bubble of what felt like glass.
I turned around to see my companion regarding me curiously in the still-open doorway.
“Why did you stepppp into the lockkkkk?”
“Where are we?” I asked, still stunned.
He spread his hands. “Not topside, not downside. Travellll to see One.”
“Beneath the ocean?” I said. “But we were in the bowels of Olympus Mons last night! How could we be here?”
He gave me a long, slow, blink. “Travelll,” he explained, then turned away.
I brushed away the fish remains which had adhered to me when I made my heroic escape, and stepped back into the sphere. My companion had hauled himself into the center chair on the far side of the craft. He turned and when he saw that I was once more inside he hit a button and the iris closed behind me. I heard a soft whirr.
“Fishhh gone,” he said simply, and then turned to the huge circle in front of him.
He pulled a lever, pushed another button, and this opened, pulled back into two parts, revealing a huge window onto the sea.
Mesmerized, I climbed up into the chair to his right and stared out at a glowing blue world. The water grew lighter above us, but I could not see the shimmer of the surface.
“How deep are we?” I asked.
“Manyyy feet.”
“And where –” I began to ask, but was so overwhelmed with the possibilities that I couldn’t continue.
“Olympus Ocean,” he offered. “Downside.”
Which meant that there was an ocean deep in the bowels of Olympus Mons itself!
“Where is One?” I inquired.
“Continue downside. Arsia Mons.”
“Do you mean to tell me that this body of water continues underground and that Arsia Mons has its own underground sea?”
He nodded slowly.
“What is your name?” I asked.
He blinked. “Quiffff.”
“Quiff?”
He nodded.
“And where is One?”
This time he shrugged, which told me nothing.
We ate, and slept, and repeated the process. We ate more fish, which Quiff caught by merely opening the airlock and waiting for one to swim in. He then closed the airlock and opened the inner door. It was the easiest sort of fishing I had ever seen.
We ate, and slept, and ate and slept. Once we surfaced, which filled me with excitement until I saw through the window that we were in a cave half filled with water. The ceiling was only a few feet above our heads. Quiff opened a second airlock at the top of the sphere, accessed by a retractable metal ladder. I heard a deep hiss and the cabin was filled with fetid air.
In a few minutes we were underway and underwater again, with no explanation, but I determined on my own that it had been time to replenish our internal air supply. I wished it had been of a fresher sort.
I began to lose track of the days, and took to studying the fish. This is what I thought Newton would do in the same situation. There were many (and I consumed some of them) that I did not recognize, some with no eyes and others that glowed from within, like toy lanterns. One was nearly the size and shape of our vessel, but it proved timid, its flat black eyes filling with fright as it sought desperately to get out of our way.
And then we came across something nearly as large, and not at all timid.
I had been lulled into such a lax state by the sameness of our surroundings that when true danger came I did not at first realize it. I should have known when my companion became agitated all at once, and began to push buttons and pull levers at an alarming rate. We began to rise – too fast I thought – but then I saw why. The view port in front of us was abruptly filled with something roiling and black.
“What is it, Quiff?” I asked.
He only shook his head and bared his teeth. I saw true fear on his face.
“What can I do to help?” I asked.
“Nothingggg,” he spat, yanking a lever toward him violently, which threw us to the right and almost on our side.
The black roiling focused into a monstrous long black thing peppered with large suckers every three or four feet.
“What in the name of –”
At that moment we were taken hold of and shaken, as a kit shakes a rattle. I saw one huge sucker adhere to the face plate of the porthole window, at the same moment something slammed us from the opposite side of the craft. I could feel us being squeezed, and heard the crack and creak of stressed metal.
“How much of this can we take?”
Quiff’s eyes were impossibly wide, staring at the port window, which had begun to splinter in a series of hairline cracks. The thing stuck to it was flexing casually, like a muscle.
“What does it want?” I shouted, over the increasing sound of screaming metal.
“Fooood!” my companion hissed.
“Isn’t there anything else we can do?” I asked.
His fright-filled eyes blinked once, slowly, and then he turned to me and said, “Yesss.”
He brought his cooking wand from his tunic and handed it to me. He pointed at the cracking view window and said, “Cooook!”
He climbed from his chair and went to a wall panel, pushing the button next to it. It popped open and he drew out three more of the wands. He threw one to me and cried frantically, “Coooook!”
I suddenly got his meaning, and thrust the two wands toward the glass of the port window. I held one in each hand, moving them frantically this way and that.
There was a shudder, but the sucker did not loosen.
Quiff had opened the airlock. I saw a drizzle of water on the floor, and something thick and then tapered, the end of a massive tentacle, wrapped around the clear enclosure. There were cracks all around it.
He pushed his own two cookers at the glass, and began to move them around rapidly.
I continued my own assault. The thing on the other side of the glass was taking on a red, unhealthy color, but still it didn’t budge. Then I saw a curl of smoke rise from its center. It convulsed suddenly, pulling away for a moment before finding purchase again. I ran the heat bars over the same spot in the center, concentrating both of them in the same spot.
The sucker pulled loose, and the entire craft moved away from it with a massive shudder.
I went quickly to the air lock. The tentacle
was wrapped tightly around the glass bubble in a coil. I put my cookers in one spot, moving them quickly back and forth until the sucker reddened. The tip of the tentacle pulled away from the glass, then regained purchase. I continued on the same spot, and then my companion saw what I saw doing and did the same in another spot. Water was dripping from a score of cracks.
The spot before me glowed red, redder–
And then suddenly we were free!
Quiff instantly dropped his cooking tools and ran to the control panel, jumping into his chair.
He pulled levers frantically and we rose, pulling away.
I turned around and saw with horror that the airlock, weakened from the battle, was collapsing inward before my eyes. I jumped back and pushed the button closing it as it imploded, throwing a cascade of water at me.
The iris whined, hesitated, and then closed all the way.
I went to the front window and looked out through the cracks.
Something monstrously large, black, with two red eyes and one impossibly long tentacle, stared balefully up at us from below as we retreated.
The tentacle shot out tentatively up at us, and then recoiled, and I could have sworn the monster was nursing the spot near the end where we had burned it.
It sank from view, becoming part of the roiling sea beneath us.
I turned to look at my companion, but found to my horror that he was inert in his chair, his huge eyes closed.
He looked as though he was dead.
Thirteen
The ocean sphere continued to move without guidance from my seemingly dead companion. I checked him for a pulse, and found none. When I tried to lift the massive lid on one of his eyes it would not budge. No breath moved in his lungs.
I wondered where the uncontrolled craft would take me. Had it been predetermined? Or was I at the whims of the currents in this underground sea now, doomed to travel aimlessly until the power source of the sphere was depleted?
I had observed Quiff moving various levers, and determined to try them myself. I moved his body from the center chair into one of the flanking ones, and, now captain of my own ship, tried to affect its course. But the levers would not budge for me, and the buttons were ineffective. I did notice that certain levers moved by themselves every once in a while, which gave me some hope – perhaps this craft was in an automatic mode after all.
I looked at my companion, and despite all the anger I had felt at my abduction, I felt some measure of sympathy for his loss. After all, he had done nothing to directly harm me. He had, as far as I could determine, only been following orders of some sort. There was a certain pet-like quality to him that I found I already missed.
With these depressing thoughts in mind, I found that I was tired.The captain’s chair was comfortable, and with the gentle sigh of moving water against the hull in my ears, and the vague hum of unseen machineries, I was soon lulled to sleep.
I dreamed of my mother. Though I was a kit barely weeks old when she was taken from me, I still had a hazy picture of her in my mind, my own bare recollections augmented by the photos I had seen. In the dream I was in my kit basket and she was leaning over me. She was smiling, her beautiful face lit from within.
“You will be a great King, Sebastian,” she said.
I looked up at her, and tried to speak, but my mouth would not open and I could say nothing.
I began to panic, and reached my paws up to her.
But then she was pulled away, and another face was there, that of Frane, the usurper. Her almond-shaped eyes glowed red, and her whiskers were pulled back in a hiss, showing sharp teeth. She turned her head to the side as she regarded me, as if I was a bug or something else to be trampled.
She reached down toward me, her short claws emerging from the ends of her fingers. They had been chiseled to needle points. She opened her mouth in another hiss and touched me–
I gasped, feeling her touch, and started awake.
There was a real touch on me. I pulled back, and saw the face of Quiff not two inches from my own. I could still smell fish on his breath. His eyes blinked ever-so-slowly.
“What–?” I asked.
“Awakkkke?” he asked.
“Yes. I thought . . .”
He cocked his head to one side, just as Frane had done in the nightmare, but there was no malice in his look, only curiosity.
“I thought you were dead!” I blurted out.
He pulled back and stood before the captain’s chair. He shook his head. “You sleeeep, I sleeeep.”
“But you weren’t breathing!”
He nodded. “Wassss. Sleeeep breeeeathe . . .”
“And your pulse –”
Quiff held out his arm, and put my finger on it, at the crook of the elbow, instead of at the wrist, as I had done.
There was a pulse, low and steady.
He blinked at me, ever so slowly.
My attention was drawn away from his vital signs by a distinct bump on the bottom of the vessel.
He looked nonplussed.
There came another bump, more pronounced, and then other sounds from outside: a hum and rattle, the wash of draining water.
“What–?”
“Arrivvvved,” Quiff said, simply.
He stepped away, and I saw through the huge port window the beach of the lapping sea behind us, and a track, which we obviously were on, leading back to the shoreline. Beyond was a massive cavern, which made the one I had seen on first entering the bowels of Olympus Mons a cave, its ceiling lost in dark clouds. Creatures resembling ivory white birds flitted here and there. What looked like a rainstorm raged in the distance, and I heard a booming crack of thunder.
I thought I saw, just at the limits of vision, a single long tapering tentacle uncurl, and then slide beneath the waves, as if in farewell.
In the foreground, as another bump sounded, the sand of the shore turned to rock, and then we were swallowed by a tunnel. The opening appeared, shrinking to a lighted hole, and then there was nothing but darkness.
“Now what?” I asked.
Quiff settled into the chair next to me, and shook his head.
“How long?” I inquired.
In answer he closed his eyes, and once more feigned death.
I determined to stay awake, if only to avoid nightmares. It was not hard, for I was very hungry again, and knew that fish would not be an option. The clack of the rails below us was soothing, however, and I drifted into a doze which became, thankfully, a dreamless sleep.
Once more I was awakened by the touch of my companion.
“One is waiting,” he explained.
I had a hundred questions, and asked some of them, but now he would say nothing.
We had stopped. The port window was now closed, but light of some sort filled the row of windows near the top of the ship.
My companion walked to the airlock, and opened it.
It was framed in broken glass, but provided egress from the ship.
I blinked as I stepped out. For a moment I was sure that we had either never left the cavern I had originally entered in Olympus Mons – or, perversely, that we had merely circled the great sea and returned to our starting point. The huge rock room I found myself in was exactly like the one I had left, filled with wondrous machines as far as the eye could see. There was even an opening in the far wall that exactly resembled the tunnel opening which had led me to this place.
I turned to my calm friend. “Where are we?”
“Arsia Monssss,” he answered.
“We’re in the bowels of another volcano?”
He nodded, and blinked slowly.
“One wants to see you,” he said, and began to walk.
Before we did so, I took Quiff’s arm lightly and said, “Even though you basically kidnaped me, and I’ve been in nothing but danger since, I want to thank you.”
He blinked at me slowly, then again, and then, strangely, bowed.
“You’rrrre welcommme!” he said.
I followed
him through a maze of marvelous machines. There were those – huge sleek needles and long wedges with bare wings and massive blackened round openings in their afts – that looked like they had been lit with fires like the sun and that could only be used for flying in space. There were long segmented tubes that resembled the chimneys at the oxygenation stations Newton and my mother had studied. There were monstrous boxes shined to brilliance without a break in their surfaces, and numerous smaller machines with strange dials and white clock faces circled with hundreds of unknown symbols. Things with coils. Broken things, open with shining innards of colored weird parts. A long tube, the only thing that I had seen that looked vaguely familiar . . .
We wove our way to the edge of the room. There was a door in the rock wall which opened silently in the middle as we approached. It closed behind us. We were now in a passageway with a high rock ceiling and lit at intervals by illuminated bars. They looked like larger versions of my companion’s cooking tools, attached to the ceiling. They gave an even, pleasing light.
There was another door ahead of us, and it opened at our approach, sighing shut behind us.
Now we were in near darkness. The light was purple and faint. There were shapes that appeared as shadows. High near the ceiling something revolved slowly. There was a faint hum in the room, which sounded like vast energies elsewhere filtered into this place.
Something moved in the darkness ahead of us – a shape in what looked like a throne or chair set on a high pedestal.
“Approach,” a startling, loud female voice spoke.
My companion stayed rooted to his spot, but urged me along, pushing me gently with his large hand.
I looked back at him.
He blinked once, slowly, in the dimness.
“One,” he whispered.
“Approach, please,” the too-loud voice said.
I turned and walked toward the pedestal.
The purple light intensified. Beneath my feet the walkway glowed, the same color. The pedestal took on inner light, also, as did the throne.
The figure remained in shadow, an outline.
I stopped at the pedestal, which, I saw, had a shallow set of steps built into it.
“Please, come all the way up.”
Sebastian of Mars Page 7
