The Farpool (16 page)

“What are those, Kloosee?”

…tillet…this is a regular
run…pack animals…carry goods from kel to
kel…
tilletshook’let
is ahead
of us…the lead animal…I will activate your pod…

Chase motioned Angie to come closer, hoping
she could hear as well. The echopod was not only a translator but
an encyclopedia as well. It spoke in neutral tones….

…the
tillet
is a pack animal used mainly
for transporting cargo. It is about one-tenth beat in length, black
on top and white on the bottom, with a belly pouch for storing
goods and products. The
tillet
is a fairly docile beast, engineered to herd and home
on
oot’stek
repeater signals
and travel many thousands of beats completely untended. There is a
worldwide ban on hunting the
tillet
, as they are extremely valuable in commerce among the
kels….

Angie looked at Chase. She had managed to
hear enough to get the idea and nodded back.

Kloosee explained
further…
we follow tillet through the
Gap…they know the way, know the currents…they will guide
us…

Chase found the beasts fascinating,
especially the fact that they travelled long distances completely
untended.

They settled into a steady droning cruise a
few hundred feet behind the last of the animals, vibrating slightly
in their wake as they cruised the Pomt’or Current across the
northern waters. Occasionally, the control panel made higher
pitched pinging sounds. Kloosee explained that the sled was
detecting loose pack ice to their north. The polar ice cap wasn’t
far away.

Chase was about to inform Kloosee that
he and Angie didn’t have much air left, when Kloosee suddenly
stiffened and started playing his fingers over the sound membranes
on the control panel. Ahead of them, the
kip’t
sounded treacherous currents. Two tillet
were directly ahead of the sled, their pouches bulging with cargo,
yet they had shown no signs of fatigue. But now they were starting
to lag behind the rest of the herd. Even Chase could hear their
nervous clicks. Their tails, normally supple and whipping back and
forth, had become stiff and rigid.

…they are afraid of something…perhaps the
cross currents around the T’kel…the mountains bend up ahead…but
that should not affect them…something else…

That was Pakma…from the transfer pod they
were towing behind. She had been communicating with Kloosee from
the beginning.

Kloosee slowed the
kip’t
even more. The tillet off to port seemed
ready to bolt. It was a massive creature, a quarter beat or more in
length and fat through the middle, with its genetically engineered
cargo pouches protruding just aft of its pectorals. The pouches
quivered with a peculiar rocking gait that indicated anxiety, as
the tillet undulated alongside and ahead of them. Like the rest of
the herd, it was trained to follow the scent of the pack leader and
never strayed more than a fraction of a beat from the pack. Now,
however, something was frightening them.

A sharply sloped ridge came into view
and Chase and Angie were both awed at the near-vertical slopes of
the mountain chain.
T’kel
,
Kloosee called it. He nosed the sled upward to clear the tops of
the summits. As he did so, the sled’s sounders got as better angle
on some movement just beyond the nearer peaks, in a ravine. A burst
of clicks exploded inside the cockpit—the sounders couldn’t cope
with all of them. Kloosee cut the jets completely, just in time to
see both tillet break and scatter, lumbering away from the
kip’t
as fast as they could. They
left a trail of terrified squeaks behind.

“Kloosee!” Pakma’s voice came through the
echopod loud and clear. “Kloosee, look! Ahead of us--!”

Pakma’s cry filled the cockpit with
horror. Rising from the ravine was a dark swarm of
mah’jeet.

They billowed out of the mountains, staining
the sea a deep crimson, swelling like a wave across the crests of
the hills. It was as if the oceans had shuddered, and shaken
trillions of dirt clods loose. The swarm spanned the whole of
T’kel’s outthrust slopes, for as far as they could pulse in either
direction.

“It’s a full bloom of them!” Kloosee cried.
He re-fired the jets, to back them out before they drifted into the
middle of it, but he had waited too long. The tillet had distracted
him and now the jets were getting clogged. They sputtered and died
off noisily.

Their own momentum was carrying them
into the very heart of the bloom. Already, streaks of crimson had
splattered the bubble of the cockpit. Frantically, Kloosee flushed
the intakes with water from inside, then shut them tight. That
helped to expel any of the creatures that might have drifted into
the circulator. But they were closed off from a fresh source of
water now; the supply in the cockpit was
litor’kel
and useable, but it wouldn’t take long
for it to foul, with the circulator off. Three people would deplete
it in less than a day, even if two of them were breathing
Notwater.

He had no propulsion. They were at the
mercy of whatever stray current might come along and it seemed they
could not avoid drifting deeper into the bloom. There was an
agonized silence—and the scent of helplessness—as the
kip’t
went deeper and deeper. Soon,
the veil had been drawn.
Mah’jeet
crushed against them, crinkling, scraping, grinding, the
weight of trillions upon trillions of them squeezing the cockpit,
bleeding their deadly purple toxin in rivulets over the
bubble.

They were trapped in a sea of death.
The slightest leak would be fatal and Kloosee and Pakma both soon
imagined scores of them. Every thump and hiss and click and whistle
of the
kip’t
was magnified,
the sound reflected off the
mah’jeet
veil back into the little
craft.

Kloosee listened, dreading what he knew had
to come, avoiding the frightened stares of their human passengers.
How big the bloom was he couldn’t say. It might reach for hundreds
of beats, maybe thousands of beats, along the spine of the T’kel.
It might be only a local upwelling, a result of the seething
volcanoes to the south. He forced himself to remain calm, to hear
none of the sounds that played around them. It was critical that he
recall what he knew about the creatures. If he could distract Chase
and Angie from their worrying too, they would all have a much
better chance to survive.

…unicellular microscopic
organisms…
he told Chase, sounding to his own ears like
an encyclopedia…
the
mah’jeet
cluster in vast fields in
equatorial waters, often near active
ve’skort,
where they can feed on rising columns of
mineral-rich water…

Angie spoke into the echopod, folding her
hands around Chase’s as they both clutched the device. “Are they
dangerous?”

Kloosee was watching the spreading
purple stain slowly envelop the cockpit bubble…mah’jeet
are mildly irritating to most Seomish in small
numbers…but they tend to swarm…in large numbers, they are
deadly…

He told them through the echopod that the
toxin worked on the nervous system. It could cause convulsions,
breathing difficulties, heart attacks and finally death. In these
concentrations, the slightest exposure to the toxin that oozed
outside the cockpit would kill them in minutes, if not sooner.

Kloosee hoped the explanations would
help but he pulsed the humans and he saw they were verging on
panic. He knew that
mah’jeet
patches could be enormous, and last for many mah in some
places. They were known to horde along the southern rim of the
Ork’nt and in the Pulkel waters. But T’kel was thought to be free
of them, at least of the larger patches. That was why tillet pack
trains often used these waters. The Pomt’or current should have
swept them away from these ridges. But it hadn’t.

He had no way of really knowing where
they were, or where they were going. The
kip’t
sounders worked, barely, but the constant
low clicking was deceptive. If they had drifted deep into the
patch, it was likely the
mah’jeet
themselves were so thick they would affect the echoes. And
even if he had known precisely where they were, he could have done
nothing.

The
kip’t
jets were effectively dead.

Pakma’s voice came through the cockpit,
emanating from the transfer pod they were towing. She seemed on the
verge of panic herself, which surprised Kloosee.

“What can we do, Kloos? Is there anything…are
we going to—“

“Pakma, be quiet. You pulse like a
lost
pal’penk
…you’ll frighten
the humans.” Kloosee studied the useless instruments before him.
Idly, he tried the throttle; it burbled, sputtered, gagged, then
quit. Nothing he did could make it work again. “The jets are
completely clogged.”

“We’re trapped, aren’t we?” Pakma said it
with a strained calm in her voice.

Kloosee hesitated before replying. He glanced
back at the humans. Chase and Angie were clearly worried…he could
pulse that in their guts, with all the churning and bubbling,
though he didn’t know if humans reacted the same way as
Seomish.

“For the moment,” he finally replied.

Pakma was inside the transfer pod at the end
of the tow line but the two of them could still talk. She seemed
satisfied by Kloosee’s answer. “Shooki has turned the currents
against us.”

Kloosee wanted to argue but decided against
it. Pakma was like that. Arguing with her would change nothing and
he couldn’t change her mind anyway. He was glad the humans couldn’t
eavesdrop on their conversation.

“Is there nothing we can do?” she went
on.

“Pakma, the way I pulse it, we have
several choices. There is a possibility that we haven’t drifted
very far into the
mah’jeet
patch. We might still be on the fringe of it. I don’t know
that for sure. But it’s possible.”

“You think we could roam through this…you’re
crazy, Kloos. You can’t mean that. Look at the poison.” Inside the
cramped confines of the pod, Pakma rubbed the porthole gingerly
with an armfin, as if she were afraid it would burst on contact.
“Death flows all around us.”

The echopod chirped. It was Chase. “Anything
we can do to help? Are we stuck here?”

Kloosee turned to regard the taller
male human. …
we have encountered
mah’jeet…very deadly…must stay inside…work on getting us
out…

Chase could see how the purple stain
had now completely covered the
kip’t
cockpit bubble.
“Kloosee, I don’t want to bother you but Angie and I are down to
about two hours of air…what you call Notwater. Is there another
supply onboard somewhere?”

…Notwater in containers in pod…(shkreeeah)…we
cannot leave kip’t while inside mah’jeet patch…working on getting
us out….

In other words, leave me
alone and let me think
, Chase said to himself. He
caught the look on Angie’s face. She was scared and her face mask
and mouthpiece couldn’t hide it. He tried to put up a brave front
but Angie wasn’t fooled. She held his hands tightly.

Kloosee turned back to their predicament and
contacted Pakma. “I have something in mind. It involves a grave
risk…it might not work.”

“What is it?”

“Remember how I flushed the circulator
when he first entered the patch? To keep any ‘
jeet
from seeping in here? I had to use this
water to do it. We lost a good bit doing that but it gave us some
time.”

“How much do we have left…the pod is separate
from your supply anyway.”

Kloosee did some quick checking. He sniffed
the water for pressure, then said, “Since I had to turn the
circulator off to seal the bubble, we have no intake of fresh water
now. I’ll consume all the oxygen in the water in about a day, maybe
less. The pod isn’t even being re-circulated at all.”

“A day,” said Pakma. “A day to dream.
If we had
tekn’een
, we could
remember everything, re-live it, in a day….”

“I want to do more than re-live it. I could
try flushing the circulator again, with this water. If we aren’t
too deep in the patch, the force of the water being expelled might
push us out of it. Of course, it might push us in deeper as well.
And we’d have less water than before. That’s the risk.”

Pakma contorted herself in the cramped
confines of the pod, pressing up against the porthole to see out.
She wondered what the humans thought about all this. “The bloom’s
too thick. Even if you used all the water in the
kip’t,
the
mah’jeet
are too dense. We wouldn’t move a
quarter beat, if that much.”

“Well, there is another way. An
alternative.”

“Yes…?”

Kloosee ran his fingers over the circulator
handle, feeling it give slightly. He was keenly aware how closely
the humans were following everything he did. “I could flush the
cockpit more slowly….”

Pakma thought she had misread the sounds. The
bloom did distort echoes. “You mean….”