Deluge

CHAPTER 10

WHEN YANA’S TEAM passed the engine room, they shed a member, Rick, who entered the room as if reporting for his shift, going straight to the duty station as they had planned and saluting the man already there. That man returned the salute, made an about-face, and headed gratefully for the crew’s quarters.

There would not be a lot going on in the engine room while the ship was docked, and they were counting on the crew being bored and somewhat slack.

After Rick left, the team had five minutes to reach the bridge. Yana had not been on a troop ship for more than a decade, but she was relieved to find that this was a vintage model that dated back to her days in the Corps. Same dingy beige paint, same sharp corners and textured metal corridors, same gridded stairs. She would have expected to feel right at home here, on the same sort of vessel where she had spent much of her career, but despite the familiarity, she found it oppressive and confining. Her entire cabin on Petaybee would have fit in a small section of the ship’s main corridor, but she’d grown used to windows and a door she could walk through to the outdoors.

Or maybe it just had to do with the fact that she was no longer on a ship full of comrades. Except for the four people with whom she’d boarded, she was surrounded by enemies. In her experience, that tended to make one feel confined.

Crew members had passed them without a second look so far, but she knew it was just a matter of time before someone who was looking for distraction from routine duties would realize they were not the people their name tags claimed them to be.

Pet Chan marched into the security control center, where cameras, monitors, and extra weapons were kept.

The bridge was in sight when Raj Norman took his planned detour and disappeared through a starboard hatch. This would be where the backup generators for the bridge were located.

Yana and Johnny stopped and positioned themselves on either side of the entrance to the bridge as if standing sentry. With a slight crackle and a loud hum, the lights went out. A series of blips preceded someone on the bridge saying, “Captain, the computers are down.”

It would take a few moments before they felt the temperature dropping. Meanwhile, they would have other problems.

With intercoms, computers, and lights down, as well as backup generators, Yana’s team was betting it would take some time for the various sections to communicate with the bridge. The crew would be equipped with glows and battery-powered torches, and presumably had enough survival clothing to weather the storm. Their air supply was warm enough and should be sufficient for their needs. The team could not tamper with the ship’s oxygen mixture without suiting up in full space kit, which would have aroused too much comment before they could put their plan into action. Besides, none of them wanted to kill anyone-at least, Yana thought grimly, it hadn’t yet come to that-but they did need to distract the enemy crew and cause as many to leave the ship as possible.

The darkness would make finding the root of the malfunctions more difficult for the crew, and would also help conceal the hopeful saboteurs.

For further distraction, hoping to drag the command staff from the bridge, they relied on another old standby.

“Fire!” The bellow was Raj Norman’s, with just the right degree of panic in it, enough to bring everyone running to where he had set a dramatic but not-too-harmful blaze.

People poured past Yana and Johnny into the corridor, their glows showing them to be the captain, first mate, navigator, and com officer. Good. That should be everybody. With the ship docked, there was no reason for anyone to remain on the bridge, though under normal circumstances protocol dictated that they do so.

Yana and Johnny slipped inside. Cursing came from down the hall as the officers and crew fought with the fire. Yana hoped Raj hadn’t done too good a job of setting it. A shipboard fire was always dangerous, and if it got out of hand, even a little, it could damage something vital. They needed the ship operational when they were ready for it to be.

The crackling of flames was quickly drowned out by coughing, swearing, and one male voice saying, “Too bad we had to put it out. It’s starting to get bloody cold in here. What the frag is taking Engineering so long, anyway?”

“Sorry, Lieutenant, there was this fire…” a reedy voice, not without sarcasm, replied.

“And now there’s not!” the officer bellowed. Uh-oh, one of those, Yana thought. At least his lousy disposition made him easy to hear from a distance.

She sat down at the comoff station, which she and Johnny had not rearranged, and recorded and directed several messages to be sent automatically at regular intervals once the ship was outside Petaybee’s magnetic field. Such automatic messages were not something a com officer would ordinarily detect, since security software concentrated on incoming messages or possible tracking devices but not actual outgoing communications of a routine nature.

With that precaution in place, she joined Johnny under the consoles, where he was busily rearranging critical connections, swapping chips, disrupting circuits, wreaking selective and highly specific damage within the delicate web of wires. From the shadows cast on Johnny’s face by her torch and his own, it seemed he was entangled, head first, in the trap of a giant arachnid.

Although they aimed to cause as much chaos as possible, Yana had a particular goal in mind. Dating from the days when Petaybee was the property of the company, equipment had been installed at Space Base to facilitate takeoffs from the usually frozen surface. Ships docked on Petaybee in specific places. The three docking bays contained sockets into which, in winter, the ships could insert their sterns and keep their hulls free of ice, thanks to built-in radiant thermal units. This arrangement was not unique to Petaybee. The company controlled many planetary properties with harsh and frigid conditions, and their installations on all of them contained the same sockets-nicknamed “bun warmers”-so company ships and others with reasons to take off and land there were equipped with special controls to activate the coupling. The bun warmer’s controls on company ships were linked both to the bridge and to engineering.

Locating the underside of the bridge-control panel, Yana disengaged the coupling, then pocketed the chip critical to its operation, grinning evilly to herself. This was the part of the plan that should empty the ship of personnel so her team could hijack it.

Rick and Pet were also busy making life difficult for the ship’s crew. Raj’s plan was to leave the firefighters to it while he merrily raided the ship’s armory, diminishing its number of incendiary devices and purloining much of the ammunition. That should further slow the crew’s undoing the damage the team was wreaking on their vessel without announcing the presence of intruders.

Pet now quietly reconnected the main corridor’s security cameras and microphones. Without lights, the cameras picked up only the disembodied glows moving eerily if swiftly down the corridor in the direction of Engineering. Their havoc wreaked, Johnny, Pet, Raj, and Yana ran down the corridor to hide in plain sight amidst the crowd outside Engineering.

The crowd, including the officers, commented on the suddenness of the power outage, the lack of lights, the lack of heat and what to do about it, and cursed Petaybee roundly for its storm, its winter, and its general lack of hospitality. Funny how, although most of the troops had lived a good part of their lives in space, many of them born on stations or ships, there was still that atavistic part of human nature left over from long-ago Terra that associated bad storms with loss of power, or at least lost amenities such as heat and lights. In space, the ship was a biosphere, totally self-contained. When docked, except for the bun warmers, the same was also true. An earthquake might topple or swallow the ship, a flood could cover it, but blizzards normally would have no effect on internal functions. With all of them distracting one another while the captain attempted to deploy specific people to fix specific problems, no one was addressing the problem the saboteurs wanted them to worry about.

Yana gave a huff of impatience and saluted the captain, her borrowed uniform and correct military demeanor her best disguise. It was a bit risky but they could hardly wait for the crew to discover the larger problem for themselves. In the blizzard raging outside, the hull would be iced over in a few minutes and it would be impossible to leave the ship, much less the planet. “Sir, the hull is freezing.”

“Engineer, get those generators back online. Our connection with the bun warmer must have been broken when the power went down. Meanwhile, all personnel not essential to reestablishing interior function suit up for the outdoors and bring all handheld torches and thermal devices you can find to thaw the hull.”

Troops ran in all directions, and Yana ran toward the air lock with them. This was the part of the plan where she was to return to Petaybee, while Johnny, Rick, Pet, and Raj took the ship and the few remaining crew members into space. For a hastily devised plan, it wasn’t bad. It should work.

WE HAVE A couple of days until they bathe again, Murel said finally. So we should plan what to do until then.

After such a long stretch of doing nothing while in the brig aboard the ship, she felt anxious to get started with the heroic, rescuing part of their mission. But they needed to understand where they were and what went on here before they blundered back onto shore.

We could try infiltrating the soldiers’ camp, Ronan suggested. One bald kid probably looks pretty much like another to them, and we could suss out the com situation.

Yes, but if we get caught doing that, it’s all over. Besides, that camp is pretty remote and there doesn’t seem to be a proper docking bay for a full-sized ship. Anyway, I didn’t spot one from the air. I’ll bet the long-distance relay equipment is back on the mainland. Instead of hanging out here until the next bath day, let’s see how far it is from here to the mainland and if we can swim there and back before we try to meet Rory again. It didn’t take all that long to get here by flitter, but it’s probably farther than the average human can swim safely or it’d be no good for isolating the kids, would it?

Odd, when you think about it, she added. Why are they keeping the kids so far from the parents? If they mean to use families as leverage to get information from prisoners, you’d think they’d want their hostages handy, wouldn’t you? I don’t think we are meant to be hostages, actually. I think they’ve got some other purpose, but I’m beached if I know what it is.

We’ll know more once we talk to Rory again, Ronan said, poising on the ledge and leaning forward, nose down and ready to dive. For now, last one in is shark bait!

Except for being warmer, the sea here was much like Petaybee’s; it was especially similar to the part near Petaybee’s new volcano. Only a few leagues from their rock the smell of sulfur grew strong as the sea floor began spiking black smokers, the chimneys made from the hardened mineral content of the subterranean gases escaping through the crust. The creatures dwelling there paid them no more mind than did the giant white clams and crabs on Petaybee. Bouquets of red and white tube worms blossomed on the outer slopes of some of them and lined crevasses in the floor. They evaded the worst of the superheated, acidic waters by swimming close to the surface, working their sonar, alert for sharks, whales, other seals, or schools of tasty fish.

There were a lot of fish, but they detected no other marine mammals whatsoever, much less sea monsters.

That’s a bit odd, don’t you think? Ronan said.

Not really, Murel replied. Remember that everything-well, almost everything-that came to Petaybee was stocked there by the company. Maybe they didn’t see any reason to put seals here, or whales or the other species.

There goes our clever disguise.

Maybe, or it could be everything migrates away from here about now, or there’s mating going on elsewhere, or any number of reasons we don’t know about. Murel was actually relieved that they hadn’t had to explain themselves to the resident sea creatures yet. That was always assuming the creatures shared thought patterns in similar language-she had read somewhere that long ago, on Terra, when the world had grown up of its own accord, the animals of the seas were thought to speak languages as varied as the peoples on the land. But she thought that if the company had stocked all of its client worlds, surely all of the creatures would speak a version of Standard, similar to the universal human tongue. She wondered if they’d think she and Ro spoke it with a Petaybean accent, or dialect. Even if they could understand each other, that didn’t mean that the animals here, including seals, would be friendly. Most species were at least somewhat territorial, and families of seals would not necessarily welcome interlopers such as themselves.

Then there were the leopard seals. They didn’t have them on the northern pole of Petaybee, but the southern pole did, and she had heard tales of how they ate other seals and anything else, including humans sometimes. What had the company been thinking to let them on Petaybee? Da would say everything had a place and a purpose, but she couldn’t think of any reason for such nasty animals except maybe for parka covers.

They continued to swim across the water from the island in the direction of the mainland, hoping their headings would fetch them up there. The water was far warmer than they were used to and made them feel sluggish.

There’s land around here somewhere, Ronan said, sounding exasperated. We know that much, but I could use a nice little rocky island to sun on for a bit now. This is farther than I thought.

It probably won’t seem so long once we know our way, Murel answered.

Their sonar picked up the landmass long before they could see it across the heaving hillocks of the sea.

On the whole, the water was reasonably calm. What swell there was they could easily circumvent most of the time by swimming beneath the surface, where the eating was better anyway. Also, staying underwater gave them the opportunity to study the topography of the sea bottom in order to identify reference points that would make finding their way back and forth less chancy.

There was actually a range of underwater mountains a couple of miles offshore, and a corresponding deep valley or trough. They dove down the far side of a mountain to suss it out.

Through the darkness and the murk they saw ghostly pale, waving tendrils with what looked like leaves on the ends of very long stems. As they drew nearer, they could see that the stalks grew from beds of shorter stalks, like grass, all of it waving, rising out of the deep ocean to meet them, seeming to reach for them.

Seeming nothing! Before they had quite seen enough to be able to count the number of blades in each cluster or how many clusters there were, they were staring into huge bulging eyes.

Hello, Ronan greeted them. What are you called? We’re selkies, seals right at the moment, as you see, but often human beings. We’re from a planet called Petaybee and we don’t have anyone like you there. What are you?

Hungry. The thought was not in any language they knew but the sentiment was perfectly clear. The leaf ends of the long tentacles were close enough now for them to see the suckers on them, and the barbs in the suckers. Four pairs of huge unblinking eyes grew even more huge as the creatures rose up.

Okay, Murel said to Ronan, we’ve seen that there are large animals. You’ve introduced us properly and said hello. Now let’s get out of here, shall we?

Why should they attack us when there are all of these lovely fish around? Ronan asked, but it was a rhetorical question, as he had already turned his nose toward the surface.

Before she could reply, she saw a whiplike movement from the corner of her eye, and a tentacle lashed out and dragged Ronan backward. He screamed.

His captor’s other tentacle was engaged in fending off its three companions, who seemed momentarily more interested in demanding that it share Ronan than in capturing Murel. Nevertheless, she shot toward the surface. She couldn’t do Ro any good if she was in the same position he was. Two of the creatures abandoned the one who had Ro and followed her at a distance, but when she was about halfway to the surface they fell back.

She broke through the water, caught her breath, and dived again, but Ronan and his captors were nowhere to be found. Frightened, she called to him, using her sonar. Hold on, Ro, I’m coming!

It’s dragging me down, he replied at last, and through him she sensed the painful suckers that held him in the constricting grip of the large tentacle pulling him toward the thing’s beak.

Can’t you slip out somehow?

No. It’s like being bitten by a school of sharp-toothed fish hanging on for dear life.

Bite it!

Can’t reach…

Murel’s sonar homed in on him and helped her evade the tentacles that were attempting to snag her flippers or head. One passed close to her nose and she snapped at it, tearing away a rubbery writhing chunk. It tasted like cat pee smelled, strong and full of ammonia.

Another tentacle had begun reaching for her, but when she bit the first one, the second one contracted as if with the pain, and the creature gave off a squeaky-feeling subvocalization. So it had a central nervous system of some kind. Good. She meant to hurt it until it turned her brother loose.

Suddenly the water around her grew even darker and she could no longer see the creature, though her sonar told her it was there and she paid very close attention to where its appendages-and its friends-were.

She had to reach Ro before the monster pulled him to a depth where seals could not survive.

Swimming through the opaque water, she dove nose first into Ro, who was being dragged toward the creature and the bottom at the same time.

She wished she were in human form and had hands and maybe a knife or a harpoon as well.

Ronan felt her coming and sent a warning, full of pain and fear: Look out for the hooks. If you bite it, the barbs will sink into your mouth and it’ll have you too.

Using her sonar more precisely than she ever had before, she maneuvered around the tentacles, out of reach of the waving arms and away from Ro, caught the creature’s fin in her mouth, then pulled her flippers forward and raked the body with her claws. Petaybean seals had long, strong, curved claws at the ends of their flippers to break through the ice on rivers or haul themselves onto icebergs. Hers came in handy for climbing higher onto the squidlike creature, giving her teeth another place to bite it as she worked her way toward the eyes, clawing and biting tracks and holes in the soft flesh as she went. Its eyes were at the front of this solid bodylike part, and she knew that its brain probably was too. One long tentacle was occupied with trying to feed Ro to the body. She just had to stay out of the way of the remaining tentacle and the arms and tear her way through to something vital or sensitive enough to make it release Ro and- Mine! Ro’s captor broadcast the distinctly possessive thought.

The club end of the tentacle of another squid lashed down at Murel, but she threw her weight sideways, still hanging on with flippers and mouth. The barbed and suckered appendage grazed her face on the side. Her fur provided some small amount of protection, but pain still shot through her cheek and into her eye socket and head. She rolled over and over with the squid’s body in her grasp, while the long, barbed tentacle rolled too, a loop of it wrapping around her shoulders, its suckers latching onto her hide.

Mine! the second squid echoed as it unwound itself slightly. Murel felt Ronan’s relief as he slipped from its slackened grasp. It flailed out to recapture him, the tentacle bobbing and weaving like a huge snake confused about where to strike, but he propelled himself upward and avoided the clubbed feeder tentacle, which instead connected with the other attacking squid.

Let go, sis, I’m free. Ro’s thought-voice penetrated her concentration. Let go and surface. It’s diving!

Can’t. I’m caught, she said. Between the tentacle and alien body compressing her throat and the pressure of the dive, the breath she’d stored was being squeezed out of her. Bite the one attacking me in the butt, Ro, but look out for other tentacles.

Let go of her, you multiarmed freak! She heard Ro’s challenge as if it came from far away. Another tentacle lashed out from somewhere but she was so weak she could no longer tell which of the two monsters it belonged to.

Soon she would not have enough breath to surface. Could seals drown? She felt light-headed already.

For a moment longer she was dimly aware of Ro’s thought-voice, and then her mind suddenly went as dark as the ink-stained water.

FLOATING ON THE surface, drifting on the sluggish tide, riding the crest of the swells and wallowing in the troughs without volition, the two battered seals washed slowly toward the shore. One had patches of fur ripped from his side, the other had a bare raw patch on the side of her face and angry-looking circular sores across her upper back. One of her claws was gone, while the male was missing a piece of a rear flipper.

Sis?

She opened one eye. The other was swollen shut. Ro? I had the worst nightmare.

Sorry, wish it was, but we’re not out of it yet.

Something was dragging us down. I was about to pop for want of air and-ow, my face and back!

I remember. The monsters.

Squid, I think, he said. Like in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, remember? We watched it at Marmie’s once. Then I read the book. Now we’ve been attacked by some. I must say I preferred both the vid and the book to the actual experience, but at least we’re alive to make the comparison.

I remember the squid, but how did we get away? You had to be as weak as I was.

Pretty much, yeah, though I didn’t get choked like you did and I managed to bring my hind flipper up enough to keep the tentacle from crushing me before you made it let me go. It was the other squid attacking that freed us. Well, I did have to bite through the tentacle the second squid had wrapped around you, but it was busy fighting off the one that had had me, so it wasn’t really paying attention. I think squid one thought squid two attacked it to take its prey-that would be me, and probably you for afters. When you attacked it and then the other squid nailed it too, it released its grip on me enough that I bit myself free. Those things taste like cat piss, did you notice?

Yeah, she agreed, and if she’d been in human form she would have made a face.

Then while they were slapping at each other, I got you loose and swam for it with you. The others had lost interest in us or were placing bets on who’d win the fight, I don’t know, but nothing followed us to the surface.

She spotted something and rolled to one side. I think you’re wrong about that. Look. Two bloated-looking bodies, one with scratch and bite marks along the length of it, the other with similar but not as severe marks, bobbed up a few feet away from where the twins floated. The arms and feeder tentacles drifted listlessly, washing to and fro with the roll of the waves.

Either squid can play possum or they’re dead, Ro said. Do you think we killed them, or did they kill each other?

I don’t think we made much of an impression. But maybe their struggles with each other wounded them, or maybe they tried to follow us too close to the surface. Other ones started to but turned back before they caught me the first time I surfaced. They’re deep water creatures. Must be. If they live down in that abyss, they may not have been able to withstand the depressurization of lesser depths.

I wonder if they’re really dead, he said, and started to swim toward them.

Ro, don’t you dare! Murel told him.

He flipped in the water and came back up beside her. Just teasin’ you, lassie. I wasn’t really going to.

I’m in no shape to rescue your slippery butt this time, she told him, then added with a groan, I hate to think what we’re going to look like as humans. Everything hurts.

I’m just glad shaving our heads didn’t make us furless seals. If it wasn’t for our fur, we’d have been hurt a lot worse. As it is, I hope losing this chunk out of my flipper doesn’t make me walk funny.

We found where the large animals were hiding anyway, she said. Maybe they ate everything else.

Or maybe the company only imported these as a kind of living barrier-the prisoners might escape from the prison but not from the squid.

As if to confirm that last guess, they heard a boat motor and the water around them began thrashing, splashing over them counter to its natural heave and roll.

“Cap’n, would you look at that?” a man hollered across the waves. “There’s two that’ll never dine on Gwinnet brisket again.”

“Musta got a piece of Clem Packer,” the captain guessed in a more thoughtful tone. “A guy who massacred everybody on a freighter and ate them when the nutrient bars ran out probably tasted pretty rank, and may have picked up some kinda poison from those dead bodies too.”

“Could be,” the crewman agreed. “Wouldn’t have killed a demon like Packer, but played hell with the sensitive innards of our underwater garbage disposals here. They’re wildlife, y’know, and them things got delicate innards.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t blame ’em. It made me sick just looking at the slimeball,” the captain said. Then he added, “Speaking of wildlife, what are those?”

Before the wounded seal twins could dive, the bow of the utilitarian-looking boat sliced through the water, bearing down on them.