Archaea 3: Red (47 page)

“I haven’t been swimming since I was a kid, Yak”, I said
, hopping a little bit across the pebble strewn shoal with the current. He pulled himself free of the crab and touched down.

“Nothing to it, Jane… but I don’t think we’re going to need to swim. Shouldn’t we move in on lifters?”

As he said it, he immediately lifted off the surface, bobbing slowly with the current past me.

“Well, if you say so…” I replied, and raised myself up to his altitude and followed behind him. “Maybe we can swim on the way back?”

“You can swim all you want, I’ll meet you there”, he laughed. We waved at the captain and Pauli, looking out at us from the crab, and moved on into the murk.

Ahead and around us, fantastic tendrils
woven into intricate structures slowly undulated with the current, dancing. For a while we passed through them in silence, but then a quick flash of motion at their bases caught my eye.

“Captain, did you see any critters on your way in?” I called on comms.

“Nothing big, Shorty, though I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that the closer you get to the shallows…” he trailed off.

“I don’t think there’s anything here that can really threaten us, Jane”, Yak chided good naturedly, waving an arm expansively.

“Well, of course not… I was just curious, that’s all.”

“Well, there were some sort of little scuttling things in the rocks, and we saw some… ah… fish, I guess. They weren’t fish of course, but they were… well, not swimming. I don’t really know how to describe what they were doing…”

“They looked like orchids, and they looked to me like they were jetting, sir”, Pauli added helpfully.

“Yeah, that makes sense. I didn’t get a good look. They were mighty pretty Shorty, keep an eye open… I think you’d like them.”

I was really overwhelmed by the majestic beauty of this undersea landscape, the thought of orchids jetting around amidst these towering silent tendrils didn’t seem in the slightest bit out of place.

We passed through a deep canyon, clearly scored with erosion, drainages… deep under water now, barren and rocky. At the far edge, a low hillock at the upper end suddenly had a spray of what looked like glass shards knifing out of it. Just as rapidly, it vanished into the ground again.

In a phased burst of static, Captain Smith called out on suit comms, “Kids, it looks like the Revenge has hove to in orbit above, though they may need to make another turn before they drop on your position, over.”

“Copy that, sir”, Yak replied.

“
Yak, do you copy?”

He tried again. “Sir, copy… we’re getting some interference…”

“There you are. I can hear you, but not very well. Probably signal attenuation…” a hissing burst of static washed him out completely, “…might lose contact. How copy, over?”

“
Partial copy, sir… we’re about 1200 meters from the station; we just passed an umbilical, over.”

I looked back, trying to spot what he meant.

A rising hiss of static played on in comms for a moment, with some words at the end that almost sounded like ‘good luck’.

“Sounds like we’re on our own here, Yak”, I said as bravely as I could.

“Well, that umbilical leads somewhere… there are people out there, Jane.”

He paused for a moment as we cut through a larger collection of boulders. “
It has to be better than mud, right?”

Shifting through various wavelengths of light as I tried to
spot what he was talking about, I was frustrated that in the dense gloom near the ocean floor, there was no way to see. I wondered if there was some sort of active sonar that might help, and the suit instantly surprised me with an active layer of what appeared to be a vector analysis plot from sonograpic data. Immediately, I was able to spot the line tracing through the sediment along the bottom.

Ask, and she shall receive!

The way these suits worked continued to surprise me. We were constantly finding out new capabilities, new ways to see, hear, and move. Their mode of operation, based on intent, meant that unless we knew what it was we needed them to do, we’d never find out.

That
might present a challenge, but as luck would have it, both Yak and I were incredibly needy, information-hungry soldiers, so we both had a continual, nearly overwhelming flow of information. Ranges, heat signatures, fine-resolution magnification, delivered at the speed of thought.

The way the suits imaging system worked was quite disorienting, however – it was going to be a while before I completely got used to being able to see anything without moving my head. I could look directly behind me, to the side, up, and so on… all without moving a millimeter.
Doing it was another matter. I felt like I was losing my mind.

Yak didn’t seem to have any problems with it, so I wasn’t going to complain… it’s a capability I knew we needed, but that didn’t make it any easier to undo a lifetime’s worth of moving my head around. I would probably never really get used to it.

As we passed through a thicker section of the tendrils, an opening beckoned ahead of us, lit by the pulsating glow from the waves rolling by overhead, much closer now than before. We were at the bottom of an increasingly sandy, rippled slope, rising gradually from the depths towards what looked like an underwater plateau. That was our destination, marked by the crashing whitewater of the waves breaking across the supports of the platform.

Suddenly, without warning, enormous orange flashes of light sent rays down towards us, stabbing through the murky night water.

*****

“Hold”, I hissed, and dropped slowly down to the sandy slope below us. Jane drew up as well, and we both took a knee.

“Something happening up there, Yak”, she said quietly.

“Yeah… should we get closer?”

“Maybe a little, they’re probably pretty busy. They won’t notice us down here.”

“You’re probably right”, I agreed, as I looked upward at the flashing blasts of light reflected through the rolling waves.

We made our way the last few hundred meters to the bottom of the station, marked by a massive ring of supports driven deep into the bedrock of the submerged atoll we had climbed. As close as we were to the surface, the view above us was not encouraging.

“How do you want to play it, Yak?” Jane asked softly. “It looks distinctly violent up there.”

I thought for a moment. “True, Jane… but we’ve essentially completed our mission. We know now that the Revenge is not playing nice out here.”

“With Red in command, I think we all knew if we found him, it’d be a pretty bad
situation, Yak.”

I thought again. “Jane, I know what you want to do… I want to do it as well, but we can’t just blow our cover here. The Archaea is aground, Jane, the Captain is out there in a crab, and that ship in orbit has more than enough resources to scan us up out of here
and turn the surface of this planet into glass.”

It was her turn to sit quietly, the flashes above casting dancing points of light across the sands below. They abruptly ceased, casting us again in deep shadow.

When she replied, her voice had a cold edge. “I say we go full mimetic, Yak. Just slide up out of the water and take a better look. Might be something we can do…”

I took a deep breath, watching the waves above roll past, swirling
clouds of shimmering bubbles tracking their path. “We might as well, Jane. We’re ghosts in these suits.”

We started to ascend
along the closest support, when the bodies started to fall into the surf above us, splashes of water followed by clouds of red.

*****

“Oh Yak”, I said softly.

My heart was breaking at the thought we were close enough to make a difference, but our mission, our continued survival required that we maintain cover.

We couldn’t risk exposure. As we approached the surface, the bodies were tossing around in the waves, older people, grey hair and soft skin. I thought about Gene, and realized if I don’t control myself here, it could be him floating forever in these endless waves.

“Jane… easy”, cautioned Yak as we slowly broke the surface. The support nearest to us continued on another 20 meters or so before a lower set of decks fanned out from the central base.

“I have nothing on thermal, Yak. I think we’re clear to climb.”

“I agree, but we need to take it easy. Stay inside of this support, in case they show up.”

“Roger that, moving up”, I replied, lifting clear of the water, willing myself to lift for the platform above. I could see the water streaming from Yak, but that was it, he was invisible.

“Yak, I can’t see you… and that’s not a good thing if we have to get rowdy.”

“You can’t see me? I can see you, easy. And we’re not going to get rowdy, Jane.”

“You can’t see me…” I said confidently.

“The hell I can’t. You can see me too, if you want to.”

I looked over, prepared to scoff, and was rewarded by a halo outline of his suit, perfectly highlighted. “Hey… I can see you!”

“Yeah, all you had to do was want to see me. I noticed that right away, when we were playing around in the cargo bay. I thought you knew as well, the way you were tracking me.”

“No, stinky,
I smelled you.”

He chuckled softly, as we came to the first platform. Despite our casual conversation, we were both very much on the job. I waved him to stop, and slid slowly up past the decking to look across the platform.

“Nothing here, Yak… the next level up, maybe?”

“Yeah… listen, here’s a thought. Rather than come up right along the edge, what do you think about us easing back a few hundred meters
before coming up? We’re pretty well impossible to spot, unless they smell us.”

I smiled, “
They won’t smell me, stinky… but I’d rather come up close enough to risk detection, rather than float into an active fire-control radar. Remember, M2 is here, Yak. We’re just meat and bones, wearing fancy pants. There’s a damned machine up there.”

“Good point, Jane. Okay, let’s go up.”

As he spoke, movement caught our eye, as another series of bodies fell from the platform above us. Without a word, we both rose up to the next level, watching in anguish as the bodies fell to the depths below.

There was no way in hell I was going to let this continue.

“Easy Jane, nothing we can do…” he said softly, but I could tell from the ice in his voice, he was every inch as ready as I was to make this all go away.

“The hell there isn’t”, I hissed, and pulled myself slowly along the edge, looking for some cover. A few meters to the side a box of some sort was set closer to the platform railing, and I floated along the bottom to that location, before I waved Yak up from the support below us.

He ascended along the edge of the box for a peek.

“Jane, this looks bad”, he
whispered, sighting across the platform from the corner of the box. I floated right below him, a black seething pit in my stomach.

“I
can’t look, Yak.”

He thought for a moment. “
You need to, Jane.”

I floated up behind him, placed a hand on his shoulder, and took a brief look.

*****

“Sir, we need to move closer
!” Emwan called out.

I was purging the lock and moving us across the rocks before I knew what was happening. I was keyed up, we all were. Pauli and I had been sitting in the dark watching shadows, both waiting and hoping for this moment.

“How much closer do we need to be, Em?”

“We need to make network contact with the platform, sir. We need to be within a few kilometers, as soon as possible.”

I raised an eyebrow all the way to the surface, hauled back on the yoke, and followed it up.

“Aren’t they going to see us, sir?” Paul
i gasped, as we were clearly on a skyward track.

“Son, Em says
we need to be there as soon as possible. You and I may have different interpretations as to what that means, but because I’m the Captain, let’s go with mine. I am going to be in range… as soon as possible.”

We broke the surface in the trough between two enormous waves, only to be submerged and twisted by a smash from the following sea. I fed power to the lifters, and as soon as I had us reasonably stable above wave height, I
punched it, ripping spray off the waves as we shot into the night.

*****

I could hardly see. I had tears flowing like water down my cheeks, and the pit in my stomach was big enough to swallow the universe. Yak’s hand shook in mine, as we took in what was happening on the platform.

A coldly analytical, detached part of my mind worked through the information I had, while the rest of me ran screaming into the depths of my soul. There were very few remaining survivors, kneeling in a huddled mass across a blood-strewn deck, surrounded by 10 heavily armed
men.