ARC: Under Nameless Stars (21 page)

TWENTY-FIVE

“Seriously?” Liam said, unable to control his disbelief. “A dolphin who can’t swim?”

“It’s not his fault.” Zenn was in full protective mode now, standing next to the quivering dolphin with her hands on his heaving flank, hoping her touch would calm him. “He just told you. He was taken from his family right after birth. He’s spent his entire life in walksuits.”

“The institute thought it would be counterproductive. To the walksuit program. If my body got used to swimming. They wanted me to learn walking. I learned very well, you have certainly seen. Walking I can do.”

“There is no time for this, dolphin.” Treth waited until Jules met her gaze. “We have only one escape path.” Jules stared, imploring, at Zenn, then looked back at Treth again, and his trembling seemed to diminish. Zenn could sense him struggling with his fear.

“If you can’t do it,” she told him, “we won’t think badly of you.”

“No, of course we won’t,” Liam said, but his nervous laugh betrayed what he was really thinking. “But, um, you
are
a dolphin, aren’t you? I bet you’ve got the lungs for it. What if… What if I bet you? How’s this – five units says you can do it.”

“Liam,” she scolded.

“Hey, it worked before.”

“Jules,” Treth said. “We understand. It is no easy task we set before you. We will not think badly of you. But it is the only way out for us.”

“I have practiced at holding my breath,” Jules said, as if admitting a secret. “Simply to see how long I could do it.” Treth cocked her head at him, waiting for him to come to his own decision. “Swimming would be like that, yes? Holding my breath, I mean, and… moving… through the water.” He gave his tail fluke an experimental twitch, glancing back at it uncertainly.

“Yes, something like that,” Treth told him. Zenn gave the Groom a look, and Treth added, “It could be more involved than just holding one’s breath.”

Jules looked at the pressure chamber as if it was the mouth of a large, hungry animal.

“Will it be a complicated journey – getting through the water to the sub?”

“No. It is a straight route to the other side,” Treth said.

“Jules.” A thought had occurred to Zenn. “Do you know how to echolocate?”

“Yes, I have done that.” Some of Jules’s former enthusiastic tone returned. “I often put just my head below the surface of the pool at the institute. I could sound-see many yards into the water and learned to recognize many things.”

“Sound-seeing is good, Jules,” she told him. “That will help you navigate inside the ship. It will be dark.”
“Oh? Very dark?”

“Yes,” Treth said. “At least until you reach the sub. It is illuminated. Swim to that light.” Treth opened the hatch leading into the pressure chamber and told Jules the manual key code he would need to detach the mini-sub’s umbilical from its outer hull. The keypad was designed with large pressure pads, and she thought he would be able to manipulate them with his beak. She made him repeat the code to her. Then, she said, he must turn around and come back quickly before his breath ran out.

The equalization chamber was dank and smelled of mold and seawater. Jules hesitated a few seconds, then crossed the threshold and turned to look back at them.

“When the water is halfway up the wall, release your walksuit and let yourself float up as the level rises,” Treth told him. “Just before the water reaches the ceiling, take your last breath, a big breath, and prepare to swim out of the exit hatch when we open it. Ready?”

He gave the hatch leading into the
Tson
one last, apprehensive look.

“I am ready.”

“Jules,” Zenn said. “I know you can do this.” He bobbed his head at her in reply, then the hatch swung shut, and Zenn could hear the sound of a rushing torrent as the chamber filled.

Treth brought up an image on the monitor, and they all watched as the foaming water quickly mounted up along Jules’s mech-legs, then up over his body, until with a twist, he pulled himself free of the walksuit. As if reluctant to get his face wet, he held himself in a rigid vertical position, keeping his head well out of the rising flood. But when the water was almost to the ceiling, he had no choice. He took his last breath, and his smooth form ducked beneath the surface. Treth touched the panel, and the chamber cam showed the hatch opening into the
Tson
. It yawned wide, an oblong hole of perfect blackness.

After a glance back at the camera, Jules flicked his tail, tentatively at first, and then, with a single powerful thrust, he arced gracefully down toward the open hatch – and slammed into the wall a foot from the opening. Floating stunned and motionless for a second, he gathered himself, rotated in the water and tried again, this time moving carefully through the hatch until his tail flukes vanished into the lightless interior of the watership.

Treth punched up the cam shot of the distant sub again.

“He is a brave one, your dolphin,” she said to Zenn.

A sudden tide of emotion made it impossible for Zenn to reply, and she stood with the others, silently watching the image on the monitor, waiting for Jules to swim into sight. Zenn realized she was holding her own breath and forced herself to relax. After what seemed like much too long, a shadow flicked past the camera.

“Look,” Zenn said, pointing.

Then, there was another movement on the monitor. A long, slender object, undulating across the camera’s field of view.

“That him?” Liam said, squinting at the screen.

“No. Loose wiring. Or debris…” Treth didn’t sound convinced.

“That’s not debris,” Zenn said. Then a huge, flattened, saucer-shaped body glided past. There was no mistaking the tapered wing tips and leopard-spot markings. “Lurker!”

“A what?” Liam asked.

“A black-smoke lurker. Hydrothermal vent predator. Big, really big, like a giant manta ray, with feeding tentacles. Smart. And mean.” Zenn felt numb, her mind spinning back to the lurker they had treated at the clinic. It was an immature female, small for its age, just a bit over fifteen feet in diameter. But the memory of its vicious nature and lethally effective feeding tubes had made an impression even on Otha. The creature was almost impossible to approach, let alone work on. And it was a small specimen. An adult lurker could stretch fifty feet from wingtip to wingtip, with feeding siphons that extended twice its body length.

“Will it interfere with him?” Treth asked. “Will it prevent the dolphin from accessing the sub?”
“It could kill him,” Zenn snapped, unable to disguise her anger and fear.

“Then why do they let that thing swim around in there?” Liam asked. “The
Tson’s
a passenger ship, isn’t it?”

“Guard dog, I would assume,” Treth said. “Let loose by the Khurspex to prevent ship-to-ship crossings. As they did with the fire-mites in the
Prodigious
.”

The lurker, in fact, was the perfect choice for protector of the
Tson’s
pitch-black depths. Zenn could imagine it on patrol, its immense, lidless eyes sifting the darkness for any stray photon, for the faintest trace of prey. And Jules, with no idea what awaited him, was swimming straight toward it.

Abruptly, a familiar torpedo shape glided in and out of frame. Then Jules’s smiling face filled the camera shot. He bobbed his head up and down excitedly and, Zenn thought, proudly. Her heart was pounding and she wanted to shout at him to swim away, to hide.

They watched Jules go to the docking control panel next to the sub. He poked the buttons with his snout but got the sequence wrong, or pushed too many keys at once, because the umbilical remained firmly attached.

Hurry, Jules! she thought.

He paused, then started again. This time, he got it right. With a flurry of bubbles, the umbilical popped off and the sub was floating free.

“Yes,” Liam shouted, pumping a fist into the air. “He did it.”

Come back – get out of there,
Zenn thought, imagining the lurker gliding toward her friend, silent, hungry.

Treth keyed in a sequence at the control panel, and the sub’s lights blinked to life. Its props spun into motion and it propelled itself out of the cam’s range. Jules flashed his smile to the cam again.

“Jules,” Zenn shouted at the screen. “Watch out!”

The feeding tube was rising up from the darkness below the dolphin. Moving with the speed and agility of a snake, it circled his body, drew itself tight, then jerked him down and out of sight, leaving only a swirling vortex of dirty green water.

“No,” Zenn gasped. “He’ll be killed…”

This time, the storm of warmth and dizziness enveloped her more quickly than ever before. Her vision telescoped to a vanishing point, then went black. All sound ceased, her body’s warmth replaced by a wet, freezing cold, a cold that penetrated like needles all over her. Then the silence was invaded by a curious, rapid-fire clicking and a more distant cacophony of other indistinct, water-borne sounds.

Zenn knew instantly this was unlike the earlier linkings with other animals. Something even more powerful and disconcerting was happening to her. Consciousness began to slip away, lifting like a paper-thin tissue of thought that threatened to be carried off on a cresting current. She fought to stay in control, to keep her thoughts her own and, for a moment, it seemed she could do this. But it was too difficult; it took more strength than she had. A confusion of unnamable emotions broke through, flooded her mind, and the blackness around her began to shimmer and vibrate with shapeless images that almost came into focus before receding back into shadow.

A painful tightness gripped her lungs, a force that grew more unbearable with every second, increasing its hold, compressing the very bones of her ribcage. Another pressure was also building, inside her head, growing slowly, then expanding faster, rippling outward, now feeling like a flower opening in her brain, now exploding like fireworks in a starless sky. Then the energy pulsing out of her mind cut itself loose from her, grew beyond her. She felt it push out of her head somehow, felt it advance like a widening, laser-hot circle of light moving through the skin of her face, or what should have been her face but wasn’t. It expanded across her strange-feeling skin, along the projecting beak where her cheeks and jaw should be, down along the extremity where her legs should be but weren’t. It then leapt away from her, leaving her-body-not-her-body and continuing to expand into the water beyond her, a cast-off skin of pure light. She now knew the energy wasn’t expanding out of her own mind and physical self but out of a different body – Jules’s body! She was inside of Jules’s mind, looking out through the dolphin’s eyes.

She saw the expanding circle around her as a fiery globe of energy now, rippling out to surround her body, Jules’s body, which hung in the center of it, like a sculpture on display, an ornament in a glass bubble, all bathed in the hazy dream-light of the green-black water.

She understood then – the pressure on her chest, on Jules’s chest, was one of the lurker’s feeding tubes, constricting in a muscular loop. She watched in growing terror as another slender appendage tipped with rasp-like teeth undulated toward her, toward Jules, searching, scenting molecular clues as it wove its way through the water. The feeding siphon.

The grip of the lurker was unbreakable, and Zenn could feel the life being squeezed from the lungs of the body she inhabited. A darkness blacker than the watery gloom began to creep in around the edge of her vision. Jules was losing consciousness. Zenn knew with a chilling clarity that when that spark was gone, it would not return. Her paralyzing sense of helplessness spiraled up into impotent fury.

And then another consciousness was there, pushing into her mind, joining with her in the searing cold and suffocating dark. Like a doorway spilling out warmth and light, the other mind opened up into her own mind, shining its uncanny consciousness into hers. She knew immediately what it was. It was the Indra, the same stonehorse whose thoughts she had shared aboard the
Helen of Troy
. Now Zenn was suspended between Jules and the Indra, her own mind becoming a doorway too, a connecting thread, a conduit for the Indra’s unfathomable intentions. And she knew… no, didn’t know… she felt that if she tried hard enough, if she gathered all the will she could find within her, she could help Jules. Or be the instrument, the channel, of the action that could help him. Yes, just a little more… more intention, more willing that it happen, even if it hurt her, even if this action cut the tenuous bond tethering her to her own body and her world, even if she never found her way back from the place she floated now, just a little more… With a sharp spasm, she was pierced by a lance of burning pain and brilliant, arcing light. And it was over.

TWENTY-SIX

When her vision returned, Zenn hadn’t moved from where she’d been before. She was crouched stiffly in place in the
Dancer’s
lock, just outside the equalization chamber leading into the
Tson
. Her body was shaking, and pain hammered between her temples. Liam held her close against his chest. Treth’s face was next to hers.

The Groom was saying something, but Zenn couldn’t make it out; there was a ringing, hissing sound in her ears, as if she’d been deafened by a loud explosion. On the floor of the chamber, something lay in a pool of water. A dolphin! Jules was arching his back in small movements, trying to orient himself so that he faced her. There was something coiled around his torso – the lurker’s feeding tube, or what was left of it. Still and lifeless, it ended in a stump that appeared to be cleanly cut, the raw edge sealed shut as if cauterized by intense heat.

Treth’s voice came to her faintly, as if from far away. “…feeling? Are you injured?”

“I’m good. Jules… is Jules…”

“The dolphin is unharmed. Mostly.”

Zenn worked to focus on him and could see raw red patches where the lurker’s grip had abraded the skin.

“But he was caught.” Her words were coming more easily now, though her head continued to throb. “How did he… get back here?”

“You experienced some sort of… seizure,” Treth said. “There was an atmospheric disturbance. It enveloped you. When it subsided, the dolphin was here.”

I did it! I helped him I thought it, and it happened.

“It was the Indra,” Zenn said, trying to comprehend what has just occurred. “The
Helen’s
Indra. She did it. Through me.”

The idea was almost enough to make her forget the excruciating pressure in her head.

Treth tapped Liam on the shoulder, gestured at the equalization chamber. “Assist me,” she said.

“You OK?” he asked. “Can you stand?”

“Yes. Go help Jules,” Zenn replied.

He left her side and went to help Treth drag the walksuit to where the dolphin waited on the floor.

“On the
Helen
, you said you sensed the Indra,” Treth said, as she and Liam helped Jules into the contraption. “You knew she was about to tunnel. This thing that just happened – was it the same?”

“I think so, sort of,” Zenn said, but already the event was receding, dreamlike. “I’m sure it was her. I was in Jules’s mind, then the Indra was in my mind. It… wanted to help. No, it knew that I wanted to help and–”

“Scarlett,” Liam said as he cinched up the body harness on the walksuit, “you saying an Indra read your mind and… zapped Jules back here?” He seemed unable to suppress his disbelief. “That’s some pretty hefty magic.”

“But I believe this is so,” Jules said, adjusting his Transvox connections. “I felt Zenn Scarlett’s thoughts. I felt her thinking – planted inside my head. It must be the Indra brain-cell material inside of
her
head. That is what saved me from that hungry swimming thing.”

“Indra link with each other,” Treth said. “There is no mystery to that. Impulses are sent by sub-quantum carrier wave. The science is known. But this event…” She looked at Jules, then at Zenn. “Matter transphase executed through another life form? Is this possible?”

“Yeah, well, I guess anything’s
possible,
” Liam said. “I’m just pretty damn impressed. Whatever it was.” He patted Jules’s side.

An insistent beeping came from the control panel on the wall.

“The sub,” Treth said. A few more keystrokes from her and the circular hatch in the floor leading down to the submersible irised open with a gust of pressurized air.

“The dolphin will be a tight fit,” Treth said, going to the open hatch. “We will need to assist him.”

“Right,” Liam said. “You first, Scarlett. Guide his legs down the ladder.”

“I think you’d better go first,” she said, still shaken from what just happened to her. “You’re stronger. Go ahead. I’ll help from up here.”

“Hey, you’re the boss,” he said as he vanished into the hatch. “I’ll save you a window seat.”
“Here,” Treth said, following him down the ladder. “We will both take the weight of the dolphin from below.”

“Zenn Scarlett,” Jules said, approaching the hatch. “I tried to call out to my First Promised inside that water-ship. As I was swimming. I thought she might be there and hear me.”

“Good idea,” Zenn said, trying to keep his walksuit arms from getting hung up on the hatch as he descended into the sub. “Did you get an answer?”

“I am not certain. That hungry swimmer made a loud noise. It was violent and unpleasant.”

Zenn was about to follow Jules into the sub when she heard a trilling sound behind her. Across the room, she saw Katie, sitting up, holding the severed length of lurker feeding tube in her two front paws, nibbling eagerly.

“Katie,” Zenn said.

“Come on, Scarlett,” Liam yelled up at her. “We’re all set down here.”

“Give me a second,” she said into the open hatch, then ran over to scoop the rikkaset into her arms. “Bad girl…” Zenn whispered, hugging the animal to her. She’d just reached the hatch when something hit the sub hard from outside, the impact knocking Zenn off her feet. She scrambled up again just in time to see the hatchway to the sub begin to close.

“The hatch – it’s sealing,” Liam yelled from inside the craft.

“No! Wait,” Zenn shouted. Holding Katie in one arm, she ran for the hatch, only to lose her footing on the water-slick floor. She scrabbled ahead on knees and one hand, but was too late. Liam was fighting his way back up into the hatchway, arms reaching out toward her, when the hatch irised shut above him.

Leaping up, she skidded over to the control panel. Katie jumped from her arms to sit on the console. What Zenn saw on the view screen made her faint with fear. The lurker had its tentacles wrapped securely around the sub, its feeding tubes scrabbling against the hull, trying to force a way in. A second later, the creature gave a powerful flap of its winglike fins. With a loud sound of rending metal, the craft was torn from the docking port. Another push from its wings and the lurker vanished down into the inky depths, pulling the sub behind it.

Zenn hunted for the comm button but couldn’t find it. Wild with panic, she pounded at the panel with her fists.

“…taking on water – turn that valve.” It was Treth’s voice. “No, that one, dolphin. Move aside, let me – no, no, I can’t…”

The voice was drowned out by the sound of rushing water, then a confusion of garbled voices shouting, static, and silence. She strained, waiting to hear a voice, waiting for a sound, a signal. There was nothing.

A loud scraping came from behind her. Zenn knew without looking what it was: the
Dancer’s
airlock door being forced. Pokt and the Khurspex.

“Katie, in,” she signed, and Katie burrowed into Zenn’s backpack. With a grinding of metal on metal, the door swung open. Zenn turned to face them.