Castaway Planet (7 page)

“Looks good,” Laura said, and Whips, after examining it himself, agreed. “All right, everyone, dump the first load here. Whips, that means the winch and such too, even though I’m pretty sure we’ll be bringing it down near the water’s edge again.”

He complied gratefully; the little winch was still pretty heavy, and all the cable—neatly tied or not—was clumsy. He noticed small shapes scuttling away from their feet and gear, lashed out and caught one.

The thing had a shell shaped like the shields of knights that Sakura had showed him in one of her books, and pulled its limbs and head under the shell when he grabbed it. What he could see indicated eight limbs and the head showed glints of sharp-edged mandibles or something like it. Some of the ventswimmers were similar. “I think we need to make sure our stuff is protected soon. These things might be able to dig through the packaging.”

“Spread out the shelter,” Melody suggested, plopping down with exaggerated exhaustion on the ground. “We have to do that anyway to let it set itself up properly. We can put all our other stuff on top of it until we trigger the setup.”

“An excellent idea, Melody,” said Akira. “Hitomi, can you and Melody start doing that?”

“Why
me?”
asked Melody plaintively.

“Because the rest of us have other work to do, like running all the way back to the shuttle for more supplies, and figuring out how we’re going to move it,” her father said.

Whips felt a grin ripple across his back as he watched Melody glance down the long stretch of somewhat broken terrain back to the shuttle and then up the several-meter-high climb to the airlock. “Okay,” she sighed. “Come on, Hitomi.”

“Akira, hon, I want you and Caroline to stay with them. Sakura, Whips, and I will go get the rest of the stuff. I don’t want Hitomi left with just Mel, and with Caroline the two of you will be able to get some of the preparation work done.”

“All right.”

The three of them started back. “Sakura, have you any idea what happened to your guidance app?”

His friend shook her head. “Not really, Mom. What I got after we landed and I queried the data made no sense. It claimed that the points I designated weren’t the same points, that they had different geometry than the original points, and the same thing happened when I told it to reacquire. It tried to follow them but couldn’t hold a lock. Something had to be wrong in its calibration or something.”

“Whips? Any thoughts?”

He dug through his knowledge of the assisting app they’d devised for the landing. “I don’t know, Dr. Kimei. We designed that app to be close to foolproof, but I suppose it’s possible we missed something about how perspective affected the apparent distances. I
thought
we had that all nailed down, but . . .”

Laura nodded. “Well, I don’t suppose it matters right now.” She stopped by the water’s edge and looked up, studying the shuttle as it stood, tipped to one side, in the water; it looked somehow slightly more tipped than it had been, but he couldn’t be sure. “Whips, I think we need to know what’s holding her up—and especially if there’s anything under her that might catch on her when we try to pull her off.”

That did make a lot of sense. He could see her looking at him uncertainly, and understood. “No problem, Dr. Kimei.”

“Oh, please, Whips, I know I’m your best friend’s mother, but please stop calling me ‘Dr. Kimei.’ Call me Laura. We’re going to be stuck here for a long time no matter what, we don’t need that much formality.”

“Okay, Laura.” It sounded a little strange, but he could understand getting tired of formality. “It’s okay, Laura. None of you could do that a tenth as well as I can, and if there
is
anything dangerous down there, well, I’m still the one you want.” He flickered a smile. “Besides, I really want to go in and swim. I haven’t done that for like a
year
.”

“All right, then. Get in, do a quick check around the base of the shuttle, then come back and report.”

“Yes, ma’am!”

He slid easily into the water, retracting his arms for minimum friction. The exciting, tingling smell refreshed him and the cool water buoyed him up. All his senses were now on full alert, especially the skinsight that was by far the most powerful sense his people had in the water. Oh, you could get a lot from acoustics—soundsight—and from eyesight, from smell, and so on, but the electromagnetic skinsight—analagous to the lateral-line and ampullae of Lorenzini found on Earthly sea life—was the most useful of all underwater. In the air it was barely active, with a range usually of only a meter for minor things, but in water . . .

Now he could sense movement, living things moving throughout the lagoon. There seemed to be nothing very large, at least not moving, and no strong signals of something bigger than he was. But there was a dead zone—near the ship, not surprisingly.

Whips jetted slowly off the ridge and down to the deeper areas. As he got lower, he could see what appeared to be a
very
steep dropoff below the mangled jets; it seemed to be a trench, broadest just under the shuttle and narrowing to either side. He hesitated, eyeing the shuttle. There was the faintest grinding resonance, as though the shuttle were shifting against the rock, but it seemed stable enough.

In and out quick, then. If it started to fall, he was plenty fast enough to get out from under it as long as he paid attention. Just duck into that gap and get a look, then get out.

He pulled in plenty of water, then jetted forward and down, flipping his body so he streaked vertically into the crevice beneath the shuttle.

For a moment, he was simply too stunned, too disoriented, to make sense of everything. There were no returns from his quick soundpings, no safe aligning of walls and surface with depth once he passed a scant few meters, barely more than a few body lengths. Sounds and skinsense and sight scanned down and down and sideways and sideways and on and on and on, and found nothing except above . . .

And then there
was
something below, something rising, rising
fast
, and the soundpings returned slowly, yet faster, and he could not grasp, not even with all arms, what it was he was feeling because it made no
sense
. . .

Then it
did
make sense and horror struck him, overwhelmed him with utter, unreasoning panic. He spun about, jetting frantically, streaking upward, past the tail of
LS-5
, up, up, so fast that he flew across the dry sands, almost bowling over Laura and Sakura.

As he left the water, he shouted, trying to tell them, and scrambling with tail-anchors and arms to push himself farther up, farther. “No
bottom
, a void, so huge, nothing, something
coming!
”

Sakura stared, confused, but Laura seemed to understand his panic, if nothing else, and snatched up her daughter, ran, up the slope, passing him even as he grasped in desperation and pulled himself another meter forward.

The ground quivered.

At the same time, three
somethings
erupted from the water, gray-blue-green, stretching up, pointing to the heavens like curved daggers as they rose, trailing foaming water into the air with them, towering up, far, far above
LS-5
. Even as they reached their apex, casting sharp-edged terrifying shadows across the three refugees,
LS-5
tilted sideways, falling . . .

And the far side of the lagoon, too, slid sideways
.

Whips froze alongside his friends, unable for a moment to grasp what he was seeing. The towering . . . claws? Tentacles? Fingers? . . . were subsiding into the water, but
LS-5
was bobbing in the disturbed water, its airlock now flooding (
but the inner door’s closed, that should be fine . . . )
, but what held their gaze in disbelief was the far side of the lagoon, the shore that had been just a hundred meters or so distant, rising now into the air, higher, revealing a craggy, dark, weed and growth-encrusted underside, rising higher as the farther end, the very tip of the land on which they stood
sank
, and as it dropped the portion near them continued to rise, fifty, sixty, a hundred, three hundred, almost five hundred meters towering into the sky, pouring a cascade of dirty water and squirming, chittering, shocked creatures down into the sea below. Then a part of it broke, and began to fall with exaggerated apparent slowness.

“RUN!”
Laura screamed, and Whips was galvanized back into desperate motion, climbing up, up, have to get
higher—

A two-hundred-meter mass of stone, shedding greenery as it plummeted, landed squarely on
LS-5
, piledriving it into the impossible depths below, sending a huge wave thundering outward and up, inundating the shore. Whips gripped a rock with his tail anchors and reached out, catching hold of Laura and Sakura with one arm even as the other two realized there was nowhere to run, then latched onto everything around him with the other two arms and held on.

The water rumbled up and over him, clawing at him madly, but somehow he kept his grip against that titanic force—barely—and then it began to recede, slowly running back. Blinking his eyes clear, he saw to his relief that the wave had not managed to reach the rest of the family, nearly a kilometer distant.

But the
LS-5
was gone, gone as though she had never existed at all . . . and everything she had held was gone with her.

Chapter 10

Laura stared in uncomprehending shock. Bobbing ever so slightly, the vast wall of dark, wet stone still loomed up less than a kilometer distant. The piece that had fallen from it—a solid mass the size of a skyscraper—should have been towering over them even nearer. There was no
possible
way that the lagoon before them could have been two hundred meters deep, no, not even a
tenth
of that!

Yet that monstrous fragment had plunged down effortlessly, irresistably, neither slowing nor pausing, and taken their hopes with it into the impossible deep.

Even as she thought that, the seething water bubbled more, darkened, and that same fragment surged from the depths, shedding water and stripping itself of soil, a massive bulwark of varicolored stony outcroppings and dripping mud. It bobbed slowly, rising and falling in diminishing cycles. She hoped against hope that she might see something else, smaller but oh so very much more valuable, also bob to the surface . . . but there was nothing more coming from the mysterious depths.

Sakura was clinging to her with a deathgrip, and Whips’ tendrilled arms were only just beginning to relax. Slowly Laura forced herself to stand. “Are you all right, Sakura? Whips?”

Sakura managed a tiny nod of her head, eyes so wide that white showed all the way around them. She was otherwise silent, and did not release her grip.

Whips buzz-clicked something in his native language before catching himself. “I . . . I am all right, Dr. Kimei . . . Laura,” he said slowly, uncertainly.

Her omni buzzed. “Laura!” came Akira’s shaking voice. “Are you all okay?”

“We’re . . . fine, Akira. But . . .”

“We saw,” he said. “
LS-5
is gone?”

“It . . . looks like it. I don’t know if there’s anything to salvage. Whips is the only one who might be able to even try.”

The big Bemmie—only an adolescent, but still outmassing her by at least two to three times—shuddered, a rippling motion accompanied by jangling, discordant patterns of light and color in his skin. “I’m . . . not sure I can.”

Laura knelt next to Whips. “Harratrer, honey, I know that must have scared the wits out of you. But I really need to know exactly what you saw, what it means, and that might mean you have to go down and really
look
.”

His back quivered under her touch, and she wondered for a moment . . . but the clenched tendrils relaxed slightly. Then he heaved a long, wet—sounding breath and shook himself something like a long, flat dog. “You’re right. No one else can do it, you don’t have the senses or the equipment to do it right. And I . . .” a quick flash of bright patterns that were like a chuckle, though a very nervous one, “. . . I really
didn’t
understand what I saw, and I have to see it again to really know.”

“If you’re afraid of that . . .
thing
we saw—”

“A little, but really, something that big isn’t going to bother coming after something like me unless I make myself an obvious nuisance. I think.”

Laura bit her lip. Maybe this was a stupid idea. “On second thought . . .”

“No, I’m doing this.” Whips turned and moved back towards the former lagoon. “You’d do it, if you were me.”

Laura couldn’t argue. “But you’re . . .”

“. . .
Bemmius novus sapiens
,” he said bitterly, and she understood now what drove him.

“No,” she she said, and put her hand on the base of one of his arms; Whips twitched, but didn’t move away. “I was going to say, you’re not an adult yet, you’re like one of my own children, and I wouldn’t force them to go.”

His discordant colors quieted, went to a calm blue-green. “Sorry . . . Sorry. I just . . . this is what we have to do, isn’t it? Do what we can? If I don’t . . . if I can’t
. . .
then maybe they’re right about me, about
us.
” He contracted, then raised himself up. “I can’t be afraid to go in the water. I’m still fast, I’m still smart, I can’t let this keep me out. And if I don’t go in now, it’s because I
am
afraid. And I am. I really, really am.” He shuddered again. “But I’m not going to let that stop me.”

With a swift, decisive movement, Whips sent himself sliding over the edge and into the water.

Sakura finally let go. “M-Mom? What happened? That didn’t make any
sense
, the whole end of the . . . the land, it tipped
up
, and it’s over
there
,” her voice was rising higher and shaking, speaking faster, “like, floating, and the
LS-5
, it was hit and then it’s gone and we’re—”

“
Sakura
.” She spoke her daughter’s name firmly but quietly, taking her by the shoulders, looking her in the eye. “Sakura. Stop.”

The girl’s brilliant blue eyes locked on hers. With an obvious effort Sakura forced her mouth closed and stood there, shaking, then closed her eyes. Slowly they opened again, but they were less wide, more focused, more
there
, and Laura let herself relax a tiny bit. “Sorry, Mom.”

“It’s okay, honey. We’re all near that panic. We just can’t let it catch us. And I have no idea what happened.”

There was a splash, and they saw Whips emerging from the water. “I’m back, Laura.”

The dull colors on his back echoed his tone of voice. “I still can’t believe what I’ve seen.”

There were sounds of running behind them, and she turned to see Akira, with Caroline, Melody and Hitomi close behind. They came here as fast as Hitomi could run, she guessed.

She took a moment to hug her other daughters and take a rib-straining one from her husband. Then she turned back to Whips, whose colors were now brighter but slowly rippling. “All right, Harratrer, what did you see?”

“A lot. But . . . I don’t know exactly what it all means.” He took an audible breath. “Once I get out past where you can see the shallow water, it just . . . drops away. Farther than I can ping. Even when I shout as loud as I can, there isn’t a return from the bottom.”

“But . . .” Melody started, then stopped.

“Go on, Melody,” Laura said.

“But . . . I thought your people could ping to the bottom of the Europan ocean.”

“Some of us can. I couldn’t manage that, but . . . there are other noises. I think the bottom’s a long,
long
way down below even that level.”

“We’re sitting on a cliff
tens of kilometers
high?” Caroline said in disbelief. “That’s impossible. Even underwater that should—”

“Not a cliff,” Whips said, cutting her off. “I don’t know what we’re standing on, but . . . once I get down maybe thirty meters or so, there’s nothing but water in
all
directions. Well, that’s not true, I detect
some
stuff in the direction that’s, well, inland, but there’s always water in that direction eventually.”

Laura and Caroline exchanged disbelieving glances. “Whips, are you saying that, well, there’s nothing supporting the land we’re standing on?”

“Nothing as far as I can tell.”

For a moment they all stared at each other, trying to come to terms with that ridiculous, impossible statement. Laura turned and looked back at the immense stretch of land behind them, vanishing into hills on the horizon, then over to the black wet towers of what had been the land across from them. “You looked at that piece that . . . well, is floating there?”

“Yes. It
is
floating. Nothing under it anywhere.”

“Coral,” Caroline said slowly. “The rock . . . I noticed it looked rather like coral. But I never thought . . .”

“Coral?” repeated Melody incredulously. “But shouldn’t that
sink
?”

Caroline bent over, searching, and found a chunk of rock that had been broken off by
LS-5
in the crash. Laura watched as her oldest daughter flung the rock far out into the water.

The white-pink rock plunged into the sea. And a moment later, bobbed to the surface.

“There were cases of floating coral on Earth,” Caroline said, her voice starting to become more animated, excited, “and some pieces could drift for hundreds of kilometers, last for many months. Mom, Dad, this is amazing. If Whips is right, we’re floating on an ocean so deep that no landmass
could
rise out of it, not for more than an eyeblink on a geologic scale, because you can’t
get
that many kilometers of rock to stick up above the rest. There are plenty of water worlds out there, some of them with oceans over fifteen
hundred
kilometers deep, so deep that geological forces probably can’t even make themselves felt on the surface. Since this one has life like ours, though, trace elements, some kind of active geology just
has
to be working here to get all of that into solution. But with the gravity here, by the time you get a hundred kilometers down it’ll be all solid, ice-six, maybe ice-seven, but then there’s heat from below . . .”

She broke off. “Sorry, got carried away. Anyway, something must have evolved here to keep itself up on the surface, where it got the advantage of all the light energy from above, or maybe harvesting things like diatoms or whatever that did use the light energy . . . maybe also keeping it away from a lower-down ecosystem like the one on Europa, where everything revolves around the vents. And that turned into colonies, and then other things started taking advantage of the colonies to support them . . .” She looked back inland, eyes shining. “We’ll have to get samples, get a look at the actual geological history . . . only it’s not really geological, it’s . . . coral-ological? Alcyoneological?”

“
That
’s why the guide app got confused,” Sakura said suddenly. “It was
right
. The geometry shifted. We assume that land doesn’t shift detectably over any reasonable timescale—a few centimeters per year, right, Caroline?” Caroline nodded. Sakura went on, sounding finally like her regular self. “But these things aren’t land, they’re
floating
. Floating islands—floating
continents
—and they’re moving with wind and currents, so they must’ve been drifting at centimeters per
second
, maybe even more, and so the guide app lost certainty on the targets because it was like trying to get a fix on . . . I dunno, a set of waves or something. The app and the sensors could see small changes that I couldn’t with my eyes.”

Laura was still trying to grasp it.
Floating islands . . . floating things hundreds,
thousands
of kilometers in extent?
Her mind balked momentarily at the idea. The material in question would have to remain buoyant for a timescale of . . . how long? To build something that huge, get
forests
growing on it? How strong would it have to be, how flexible, to keep from shattering into pieces at the first storm and waves flexing it?

“That
is
fascinating, Caroline, Sakura,” Akira said after a moment. “And we will of course be studying this as time goes on. But I think the first order of business is survival, and I don’t think it matters, for that, whether we’re on regular land, an island of floating coral, or the back of a giant turtle.”

Laura couldn’t keep from smiling at the last, and the others burst out laughing; even Melody ended up grinning. “No, love, you’re right. We’ve lost
LS-5
, but we haven’t lost any of
us
, and that’s the important thing. This isn’t going to be easy,” she said, looking at her family steadily, reassuringly, “but we
will
survive.”

Akira took her hand, and the others—even Whips—gathered around for another hug. “Now, everyone—let’s go back to our camp and figure out what we need to do next.”

Inside, Laura was still shaking, still worried. But she could see her family—including, now, one juvenile Bemmie—straightening up, wiping away tears, taking that new breath and focusing on the moment, ready to face whatever Lincoln held for them, and that was all that mattered.
If Akira and I stay strong, they’ll be strong. And that’s what we need right now.