Deluge (9 page)

Adrienne!
she cried, recognizing her human’s voice. It did not sound like pain so much as rage, but she felt that that would soon be altered.

Sharks?
Sky asked anxiously.

Worse!
Zuzu told him. Allez, allez,
sky otter. My Adrienne is about to be tortured.
But as she tried to run forward, she found that she and the otter were confined within a rectangular tube just big enough for each of them to pass through singly.
Alors! We find ourselves in the conduit for the air,
she told her companion.
This affords us less freedom of movement than I would wish, and is somewhat disorienting, but my sense of direction is very keen, and aboard the
Piaf,
I have often traveled in narrow places without losing my composure. The chamber de torture lies this way.

What is torture?
Sky asked, his long body rippling along behind hers.

When people claw and rend other people whose claws are sheathed so they cannot fight back. I saw Monsieur Steve when he had been tortured. He looked like a rat a moment before I am done with it, but they did not finish him with a quick bite to the neck.

Not sharks, then,
Sky said, sounding relieved.
Sharks have hundreds of sharp teeth. They kill quick.

They found the grid covering the opening of the vent into the chamber.

Within the room, they saw the bound feet of Adrienne being circled by the deliberately slow and taunting footsteps of the interrogation officer. The cruel voice droned on and on, saying dreadful things. The essence of the tormentor’s message was that Adrienne was a bad cat who peed upon upholstery and produced hair balls in inconvenient places, that nobody liked her and she deserved punishment from which she could only redeem herself by cooperating with her captors. Zuzu heard nothing from Adrienne but assumed her poor
amie
was capable of hearing or the voice would not continue droning.

That human is no friend,
Sky observed.

The feline had no inclination to discuss the obvious.
We must act quickly, otter. But how to make them leave her alone? You saw how they pursued and threatened you, who had done them no harm. They have no respect for those with the correct number of legs. We must send them a message, but they do not speak our language.

Otters send messages.

But how? How will you make them understand it? Make them
leave?

They will not understand it because they are not otters and do not know the scent signs. But they will leave.
He shook his tail and ripples ran down his sleek body as he expelled what was left in his digestive system.

The smell was overpowering in the enclosed space. From some central place within the system a fan enhanced the otter’s odiferous efforts. Zuzu set to work augmenting the otterly offerings with her own.

The man’s voice broke off. He sniffed, he gagged, he coughed, then the door slammed again and he bellowed down the hallway, calling for his underlings, demanding to know what stank so badly.

Zuzu feared that such bad men would lack the sensitivity to have their evil work disrupted by little more than noisome piles of poo, but as the man stomped into the hall, he called back to Adrienne. “Sit there and choke on the stench, bitch. I’ll deal with you later.”

Otter, you are a creature of great resourcefulness. Never did I know that otter excrement smelled bad enough to drive away evildoers.

It isn’t just the scat, cat. Otters use scent for messages. I sent the man a very angry message and told him to stop hurting your friend. I do not think he understands otter scent messages, but he seems to have understood that one.

CHAPTER 10

W
HEN
Y
ANA’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.

W
E 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.