by Mark Wandrey
“I know,” Terry said, grabbing a rebreather and sliding into the water. “Explain it to them.” He pointed out through the lock where the four massive orcas were watching intently. Terry smacked the water several times. “Come on, Pōkole,” he said gently.
The baby orca, who was already 3 meters long and over 500 kilograms, spun around and shot toward Terry. His mother gasped in alarm. Terry turned sideways and reached out with a hand, catching the orca’s dorsal fin as it slipped by, allowing himself to be propelled along with the powerful strokes of the calf’s flukes.
“Atta boy!” Terry cried, smacking the young orca’s side affectionately. “You know what’s going on, don’t you?” The orca slipped out of Terry’s grasp, dove down, then shot straight up. Not quite managing to clear the water, he crashed down on his side with a huge wave. It was a pretty good approximation of the adult cetaceans’ spyhopping, a behavior meant to get a look around the surface.
“Wow!” Dr. Hernandez said.
“Indeed,” Dr. Patel agreed.
The calf calmed and allowed Terry’s mom and Dr. Jaehnig to come closer. He rolled on his side and looked at them with one of his big eyes.
“He’s thrived,” Dr. Jaehnig said, slipping a stethoscope against Pōkole’s middle. “Thanks to you, of course.”
“He’s strong and smart,” Terry said. “I just gave him some love.” He looked at his mom and winked. She beamed in reply. “Should I feed him real quick before he goes out? In case he doesn’t come back for a bit?”
“Good idea,” his mom said. Dr. Hernandez went over and got a bottle from the holding rack, and brought it to Terry. It took him a couple of tries to get the calf to eat—he was too excited— however, eventually food won out. The orcas outside continued to watch patiently.
Every few minutes a plume of bubbles would expel from their rebreather domes. The timing was good; the rebreathers would need new power cells within a couple of days. The nearest breathable air for the orcas was two kilometers straight up, a trip none of them would survive if they did it in less than a week to allow for decompression.
Pōkole only drank half of the fifteen-liter bottle before he wouldn’t sit still anymore. “Good enough,” Dr. Jaehnig said. “The little rascal doesn’t want to wait.”
“I can see that,” Terry’s mom said as the little orca did a quick lap, then stopped next to the lock. “Goodness, he knows how to get out.”
“I told you,” Terry said, “he’s smart.” He looked at the controls. “Can I do it?”
“Let’s doublecheck pressurization first,” she said, and Dr. Orsage walked over to examine the control panel.
“Am I late, Madison?” Doc asked. He was standing next to the moon pool entrance.
“Right on time,” she said. “We’re about to open the door.”
“Pressure is within 20KSI,” Orsage said. “Well within tolerance of the moon pool.”
“Okay, Terry,” she said, and nodded to him. “Go ahead.”
He grinned widely as he swam over to the lock. It was situated a meter below the surface of the pool. It used the natural pressure of the room to keep water from flooding in when the door was opened. He’d learned how it worked days ago in preparation for this day.
He turned the key, bringing the mechanism to life. A horn sounded, then a click as the room’s exit locked. If it were opened while the outside lock was open, the dome could partially flood. The status light turned blue, meaning all was well. He pressed the OPEN button, labeled with tape in English, and the lock ground into motion.
The door was a six-meter-wide iris valve. It began to cycle like an eye’s iris opening wide for a dark room. A stream of water came in from the outside, raising the moon pools level a couple centimeters. Then it stopped, the pressure sufficient to keep it where it was. Pōkole looked at Terry as the door opened. “Go ahead,” he said and pointed at the door. “Go see your mom.”
Pōkole gave a screeching click and flipped over, diving down and rocketing through the door. In an instant, nine adult orcas surrounded him as he nuzzled up against his mother. The pod was whole again. Terry was grinning from ear to ear when he popped his head out of the water and shook the hair and water out of his eyes.
“You’re not going out, too?” his mom asked.
“I can?”
“He’s your responsibility,” she said. “I think you’re half orca by now anyway. We haven’t seen anything dangerous, so just be careful.”
Terry laughed and grabbed his suit helmet from next to the moon pool. It only took a few seconds to connect the power supply and activate the integrated heads-up display. The helmet had its own built-in rebreather, two LED lights, and the drysuit’s integrated heater worked with it as well. Adding a pair of flippers and gloves completely insulated him from the bitter cold seawater outside. Doc handed him an equalizer belt for buoyancy and a dive knife.
He gave Doc and his mom a wave, flipped over, and dove down underwater. After hundreds of hours in the water, he was an incredibly powerful swimmer, and he was through the lock in a couple of seconds. Pōkole swam over and offered his dorsal fin. Terry took it, and he was quickly pulled over next to the other orcas. My god, they’re big, he thought. He’d forgotten how much larger they were than Pōkole. Moloko gently brushed him with the dome of her head, and he felt a slight bump as she used her sonar on him.
“Thank for care,” she said, Terry’s translator pendant speaking inside the helmet for him to hear. “Pōkole happy. Pōkole strong!”
“I’m happy to help. We all love him,” Terry said, again his translator booming the orca’s reverberating vocalizations through the water. “Thank you for trusting me.”
“Part of pod,” Kray said. He was Pōkole’s father. “Want to fast swim?”
“Not this time,” he said. He couldn’t explain that he wouldn’t be able to tolerate the bitterly cold water for long. Despite the drysuit, he was already shivering. “Soon, maybe.”
“Terry Warden welcome always,” Moloko said. Pōkole shoved him playfully, then the entire pod turned and swam away. The all-encompassing darkness of Hoarfrost’s ocean swallowed them in seconds. Terry turned to swim back and stopped.
Templemer was a shining, multifaceted ruby with a thousand glittering points of light. He’d never seen it from the outside like this. When they’d come down, it had been completely dark; Honcho had homed in on a solitary sonar beacon. All lit up, it was one of the most beautiful things he’d ever seen. Seeing through to the inside was kinda hard, but he could see his mother waving him back.
The cold was really biting, so he swam toward the dome. On the other side of the ruby wall, he could see Doc running toward the moon pool, pulling off his light jacket as he ran. What’s he running for? Terry wondered an instant before something slammed into him, and everything went black.
* * * * *
Chapter 3
Templemer, planet Hoarfrost, Lupasha System, Coro Region, Tolo Arm
January 13th, 2038
Pain. Soul-searing pain and the relentless rush of icy water over his body was all Terry felt. The headset inside his rebreather helmet screamed an alarm, and the little heads-up display showed his drysuit heater was failing. He felt ice-water needles spreading along his back, and ripping pain in his side and left leg.
What’s happening? he thought, struggling to understand. One moment he’d been swimming toward the dome, the next something hit him. Water was rushing past him, and he was bent over backward. Something had his side and leg. He struggled to look down. He was in near absolute darkness, only the two wildly spiraling LED lamps in his helmet providing any illumination.
A dark mass to his left blocked the light. He turned his head and saw an eye looking at him. His mind cleared with an electric jolt of adrenaline. Something had him in its mouth! For a split second his darkest fear came to life. One of the orcas had attacked him. Then his pain-fogged mind focused on the eye enough to discern details. It was silvery in color, with a red rim and two
irises. Two irises! Selroth-native species had two irises.
It’s gotta be an Oohobo, the little part of his brain still working on a logical level thought. None of the other Selroth-native carnivorous species were big enough to do more than nibble your toes. The water between him and the huge eye was momentarily tinted red. Blood. More specifically, Human blood.
“Not all aliens have red blood,” Doc had pointed out anecdotally during an MST class discussion. It was one of those talks the other teachers back in Molokai wouldn’t have approved of, but had the normally bored students on the edge of their seats.
He shook his head to clear it. The pain and cold were making him drift. Hundreds of hours of diving with Doc had driven home many lessons. One of them was, when you lost concentration, you were in the most danger. Another was sharks. The predators weren’t common in the Hawaiian waters. However, Doc said the smartest thing to do was to avoid them. They were usually more scared of you than you were of them. But if they tried to attack, hurt them.
He couldn’t use his left hand; it was pinned to his side. His right hand was free, and he stretched down. Tearing pain shot through his left side. He screamed and reached anyway, bending his right leg back to meet his hand. Fingers numbed with cold felt something hard, and he wrapped them around the object and pulled it free.
His vision was beginning to swim, and water was trickling into the helmet. The seal was failing. Terry fixed his grip on the handle, brought it around, and plunged the dive knife into the eye with a visceral scream and all the strength his 12-year-old, cold-deadened muscles could manage, driving it in to the hilt with a Chunk!
There was an explosion of pain, and he was flung free of the Oohobo’s grip. A second later, the pain was mostly gone, replaced by the numbness of extreme cold. His suit’s air heater had failed. He shook his head again, trying to clear his vision. The heads-up said the heater was out, buoyancy stability was unresponsive, power was down to 29%, and backup power was automatically tied into rebreather functions. Bad news all around.
He looked down, his helmet lights panning over his body, and gasped when he saw his left leg. The suit was torn, and shredded tendrils of flesh floated like ghostly fingers. Despite the training, panic hit him. He tried orienting with kicks of his legs, and the left one wouldn’t respond. The panic grew into terror. He swung his head around, searching for the Oohobo. He found it only a few meters away.
The monster was easily 10 meters long, longer than an orca, but thinner. It reminded him of an alligator with an overly-long mouth full of too many teeth, and three sets of flippers instead of limbs. It was shaking its head furiously, trying to dislodge Terry’s knife, which was still lodged in the beast’s eye. Purple fluid jetted from the wound.
As it floundered, it turned onto its right side, and its good eye caught sight of him. Instantly it stopped shaking and locked eyes with him. Despite the pain, the fog in his brain, and the icy cold threatening to consume him, he fought the panic away and prepared himself as best he could. The Oohobo opened its mouth and shot toward him, but blurs of black and white rocketed past him to either side. A pair of 10-ton missiles composed of flesh and bloody vengeance collided with the Oohobo like hurtling freight trains. Brilliant white teeth flashed and tore at the monster.
Terry sighed and began to float downward. He feebly tried to correct his orientation to what felt like up and down, but failed. His arms didn’t seem to want to follow his instructions. Traitors, he thought. The heads-up display said power was zero, all systems failing.
Something warmer than the water, a huge, soft pillow with dull, pointy edges gently engulfed him, and he felt the icy water begin to rush past.
“Have you,” he heard. “Safe.”
“I’m already dead,” he whispered, and the darkness took him.
* * * * *
Chapter 4
Templemer, planet Hoarfrost, Lupasha System, Coro Region, Tolo Arm
March 19th, 2038
“Must wake.”
Leave me alone.
“Must wake, or die.”
I’m already dead, leave me alone.
“Not dead, but be dead if not wake.’
He struggled up a little and the pain tore at him. No, it hurts.
“All life hurt. Life better than die. Hurt better than not. Mother needs you. Wake.”
He felt himself pushed from behind, pushed up toward the light despite himself.
* * *
Terry choked and gagged around the tube in his throat, and his arms flailed.
“Grab him!” someone yelled.
“I got him, someone tie his leg down. Jesus Christ, what happened?”
“I don’t know, he was spasming and talking gibberish!”
“Brain function?”
“Wait...oh, it’s back, I don’t know how, but it’s back!”
“Impossible.”
“You think I don’t know?”
“Thank god, however it happened. Get that IV stabilized and give him a quarter grain of Isoflurane on a float drip.”
Terry fought against the pain and confusion for another second until he felt a numbing coldness begin to spread through his mind. Then he was back in the darkness.
This time it only felt like a few seconds before consciousness returned. He opened his eyes and panicked when he couldn’t see anything. After a second he began to make out details, and a face. His mother was standing nearby, and she was crying.
“Mom?” he said, his voice so raspy it didn’t sound like his own. He coughed. Surprisingly, he wasn’t in any pain, but instead felt all floaty.
“Terry,” his mom cried and came closer. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine.” The room was slowly coming into focus. He could see various medical equipment, as well as Dr. Jaehnig and his assistants. As slowly as his focus was returning, he realized they were there to take care of him. “I was dead,” he said.
His mother collapsed, falling to her knees and nearly out of sight, completely racked by sobs and sounding of utter despair. “I’m so sorry,” she said repeatedly.
“We really blew it.”
Terry turned his head to see Doc on the other side of his bed. “I can’t remember what happened, except I was dead.”
“We want to get you better before we go into it,” Dr. Jaehnig said, coming over to examine something Terry couldn’t see. “Do you feel any pain?”
“No,” Terry said, “but I want to know what happened.” He closed his eyes and tried to concentrate. His brain felt like it was full of cotton candy. An image came to him of looking through Templemer’s dome from the outside into the moon pool room. His mother with a look of stunned horror on her face, and Doc running toward the moon pool, stripping off his jacket and yelling soundlessly. The memory cut off as suddenly as it had returned.
“Sleep for now,” the doctor said and nodded to the side. Terry opened his mouth to complain, but couldn’t manage to say anything before darkness took him back.
* * *
“How you doing, Terry?”
He opened his eyes and blinked. Dr. Jaehnig was watching him a short distance away, holding a slate and glancing at its display every few seconds.
“Tired of sleeping,” he said. Terry didn’t know how long they’d kept him asleep, only that he’d been out for some time. His back hurt in the way it did when he’d been in bed too long. Despite just waking up again, he yawned. “Why do I still feel tired?”
“Your body’s been busy healing,” the doctor explained, again examining the slate.
“What are you monitoring on the slate?”
“Your blood chemistries. You see, we’re trying to understand some things.”
“Like?”
“Well, how you’re alive mostly.”
Terry nodded and felt something attached to his head. He also realized he was strapped to the bed. “I was dead, wasn’t I?”
“Yes,” the doctor said. “Dr. Clark doesn’t agree with us discussing this, but she’s
not your physician.” He shrugged. “It was obvious to me, you know. Frankly, I’m amazed and want to maybe understand how you came back.”
“Can I have something to drink?”
“Of course.” Dr. Jaehnig went to a nearby table and returned with a clear cup. There was a straw in it, and he put it to Terry’s lips.
He wasn’t happy with being fed like a baby, but he was too thirsty to argue, and he took a big drink. The doctor pulled it back far sooner than Terry would have liked.
“Let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves, shall we?”
“First, tell me how long I’ve been in here, please,” Terry said. “My back is sore, and nowhere in the habitat looked this good in my memory.”
“No, it wouldn’t,” the doctor said. “You were injured 65 days ago.”
The air went out of Terry’s lungs with a whoof. He tried to comprehend what he’d just been told. Two months? He’d been hurt two months ago? “What have I been doing all this time?”
“You were in a coma with steadily decreasing brain functions.” Dr. Jaehnig turned the Tri-V on for his slate and showed a date-indexed recording of graphs. As time went by, the numbers steadily decreased until it reached zero. “You reached zero a day ago, which was when we decided to...terminate life support.”
“Let me die?”
“Yes,” he said. “No brain functions. You were already dead. The fading of your higher brain functions was indicative of a cascade failure.”
“Why,” Terry said, not wanting to hear more about how they’d been going to let him die. “Why was my brain failing?”
“Do you remember what happened to you?”
“Only being out with the orcas, and something happened.” His brow furrowed as he tried to remember.
Dr. Jaehnig nodded and tapped on his slate. “Understandable.” He stopped and locked eyes with him. “Are you sure you want to see this?” Terry nodded emphatically. “Very well.” He clicked on the slate, and the Tri-V came alive.
He was watching himself swimming out from the dome holding Pōkole’s dorsal fin. The view was from a security camera, and he wasn’t perfectly in frame as he met with the orca pod and watched the reunion of Pōkole with his mother and the rest of the pod.
