Sebastian of Mars (9 page)

I climbed down, and investigated the rest of
my prison, which was about fifteen feet across. The level floor had
been built about one third of the way up the sphere.

There was a puffing sound behind me, and my
strange companion entered through a doorway which quickly irised
closed behind him. I had not seen this entrance.

He held something long and wriggling up
triumphantly and grinned, showing a row of startlingly sharp
teeth.

“Fishhhhh!”

For a moment I had the horrid thought that he
was going to bite into the still living creature, but instead he
grasped it in both hands by the tail and quickly brought its head
down on the floor. The fish went limp. He laid it out gently on the
floor and seemed to pray over it for a moment, then produced a long
rod from his tunic and drew it over the dead creature from end to
end.

In a moment the fish began to take on the
odor of...cooked fish!

“How did you do that?” I asked.

He ignored me, looked at the wand and then
put it back into his tunic.

“Eeeeat!” he said, moving his large paw over
the feast.

He dug his fingers into the steaming flesh of
the creature, which was white and flaky.

In a moment my hunger overcame me, and I was
squatting beside him, scooping pawsful of the feast into my
mouth.

In between mouthfuls I said, “They’ll be
coming for me, you know.”

He ignored me, continuing to eat with a
slurping sound I found immediately distasteful.

“Half the population of Olympus Mons are
looking for me by now. Thomas will sooner or later figure out where
I went.”

He paused, slowly blinking his huge eyes at
me.

“Thommmmas?”

“My friend. Counselor. My . . .
guardian.”

His eyes, which resembled two huge watch
crystals, with steel gray irises themselves larger than my own
eyes, blinked again.

“You’ll see,” I said.

“No one will commmme,” he said simply, and
went back to his meal, which was almost gone.

The way he said it, the certainty, sent a
chill through me.

“What do you mean?”

I had hesitated, and he had quickly finished
off the last of the fish, pulling it from the bones and pawing it
into his mouth, chewing it with that sucking sound.

He pushed the carcass aside and regarded
me.

“One wants to see youuu.”

“Who the devil is One?”

He turned away from me, cleaning up the
remains of the fish and walking to the spot in the orb where the
door had opened.

When the iris appeared I rushed past him
through the opening, along with the fish he tossed through.

I stood frozen in place, gasping. For a
moment I thought I had stepped into blue nothingness, and held my
breath. I was surrounded by water, and the shimmering light of the
sea itself. A fish, much larger than the one we had just eaten,
tailed lazily by and then turned to regard me dispassionately.

It bumped its snout on something invisible
between us, and then turned haughtily and swam away.

“What . . .”

I reached out and touched what enclosed and
protected me – a bubble of what felt like glass.

I turned around to see my companion regarding
me curiously in the still-open doorway.

“Why did you stepppp into the lockkkkk?”

“Where are we?” I asked, still stunned.

He spread his hands. “Not topside, not
downside. Travellll to see One.”

“Beneath the ocean?” I said. “But we were in
the bowels of Olympus Mons last night! How could we be here?”

He gave me a long, slow, blink. “Travelll,”
he explained, then turned away.

I brushed away the fish remains which had
adhered to me when I made my heroic escape, and stepped back into
the sphere. My companion had hauled himself into the center chair
on the far side of the craft. He turned and when he saw that I was
once more inside he hit a button and the iris closed behind me. I
heard a soft whirr.

“Fishhh gone,” he said simply, and then
turned to the huge circle in front of him.

He pulled a lever, pushed another button, and
this opened, pulled back into two parts, revealing a huge window
onto the sea.

Mesmerized, I climbed up into the chair to
his right and stared out at a glowing blue world. The water grew
lighter above us, but I could not see the shimmer of the
surface.

“How deep are we?” I asked.

“Manyyy feet.”

“And where –” I began to ask, but was so
overwhelmed with the possibilities that I couldn’t continue.

“Olympus Ocean,” he offered. “Downside.”

Which meant that there was an ocean deep in
the bowels of Olympus Mons itself!

“Where is One?” I inquired.

“Continue downside. Arsia Mons.”

“Do you mean to tell me that this body of
water continues underground and that Arsia Mons has its own
underground sea?”

He nodded slowly.

“What is your name?” I asked.

He blinked. “Quiffff.”

“Quiff?”

He nodded.

“And where is One?”

This time he shrugged,
which told me nothing.

W
e ate, and slept, and repeated the process. We ate
more fish, which Quiff caught by merely opening the airlock and
waiting for one to swim in. He then closed the airlock and opened
the inner door. It was the easiest sort of fishing I had ever
seen.

We ate, and slept, and ate and slept. Once we
surfaced, which filled me with excitement until I saw through the
window that we were in a cave half filled with water. The ceiling
was only a few feet above our heads. Quiff opened a second airlock
at the top of the sphere, accessed by a retractable metal ladder. I
heard a deep hiss and the cabin was filled with fetid air.

In a few minutes we were underway and
underwater again, with no explanation, but I determined on my own
that it had been time to replenish our internal air supply. I
wished it had been of a fresher sort.

I began to lose track of the days, and took
to studying the fish. This is what I thought Newton would do in the
same situation. There were many (and I consumed some of them) that
I did not recognize, some with no eyes and others that glowed from
within, like toy lanterns. One was nearly the size and shape of our
vessel, but it proved timid, its flat black eyes filling with
fright as it sought desperately to get out of our way.

And then we came across something nearly as
large, and not at all timid.

I had been lulled into such a lax state by
the sameness of our surroundings that when true danger came I did
not at first realize it. I should have known when my companion
became agitated all at once, and began to push buttons and pull
levers at an alarming rate. We began to rise – too fast I thought –
but then I saw why. The view port in front of us was abruptly
filled with something roiling and black.

“What is it, Quiff?” I asked.

He only shook his head and bared his teeth. I
saw true fear on his face.

“What can I do to help?” I asked.

“Nothingggg,” he spat, yanking a lever toward
him violently, which threw us to the right and almost on our
side.

The black roiling focused into a monstrous
long black thing peppered with large suckers every three or four
feet.

“What in the name of –”

At that moment we were taken hold of and
shaken, as a kit shakes a rattle. I saw one huge sucker adhere to
the face plate of the porthole window, at the same moment something
slammed us from the opposite side of the craft. I could feel us
being squeezed, and heard the crack and creak of stressed
metal.

“How much of this can we take?”

Quiff’s eyes were impossibly wide, staring at
the port window, which had begun to splinter in a series of
hairline cracks. The thing stuck to it was flexing casually, like a
muscle.

“What does it want?” I shouted, over the
increasing sound of screaming metal.

“
Fooood
!” my companion hissed.

“Isn’t there anything else we can do?” I
asked.

His fright-filled eyes blinked once, slowly,
and then he turned to me and said, “Yesss.”

He brought his cooking wand from his tunic
and handed it to me. He pointed at the cracking view window and
said, “Cooook!”

He climbed from his chair and went to a wall
panel, pushing the button next to it. It popped open and he drew
out three more of the wands. He threw one to me and cried
frantically, “
Coooook!
”

I suddenly got his meaning, and thrust the
two wands toward the glass of the port window. I held one in each
hand, moving them frantically this way and that.

There was a shudder, but the sucker did not
loosen.

Quiff had opened the airlock. I saw a drizzle
of water on the floor, and something thick and then tapered, the
end of a massive tentacle, wrapped around the clear enclosure.
There were cracks all around it.

He pushed his own two cookers at the glass,
and began to move them around rapidly.

I continued my own assault. The thing on the
other side of the glass was taking on a red, unhealthy color, but
still it didn’t budge. Then I saw a curl of smoke rise from its
center. It convulsed suddenly, pulling away for a moment before
finding purchase again. I ran the heat bars over the same spot in
the center, concentrating both of them in the same spot.

The sucker pulled loose, and the entire craft
moved away from it with a massive shudder.

I went quickly to the air lock. The tentacle
was wrapped tightly around the glass bubble in a coil. I put my
cookers in one spot, moving them quickly back and forth until the
sucker reddened. The tip of the tentacle pulled away from the
glass, then regained purchase. I continued on the same spot, and
then my companion saw what I saw doing and did the same in another
spot. Water was dripping from a score of cracks.

The spot before me glowed red, redder–

And then suddenly we were free!

Quiff instantly dropped his cooking tools and
ran to the control panel, jumping into his chair.

He pulled levers frantically and we rose,
pulling away.

I turned around and saw with horror that the
airlock, weakened from the battle, was collapsing inward before my
eyes. I jumped back and pushed the button closing it as it
imploded, throwing a cascade of water at me.

The iris whined, hesitated, and then closed
all the way.

I went to the front window and looked out
through the cracks.

Something monstrously large, black, with two
red eyes and one impossibly long tentacle, stared balefully up at
us from below as we retreated.

The tentacle shot out tentatively up at us,
and then recoiled, and I could have sworn the monster was nursing
the spot near the end where we had burned it.

It sank from view, becoming part of the
roiling sea beneath us.

I turned to look at my companion, but found
to my horror that he was inert in his chair, his huge eyes
closed.

He looked as though he was dead.

T
he ocean sphere
continued to move without guidance from my seemingly dead
companion. I checked him for a pulse, and found none. When I tried
to lift the massive lid on one of his eyes it would not budge. No
breath moved in his lungs.

I wondered where the uncontrolled craft would
take me. Had it been predetermined? Or was I at the whims of the
currents in this underground sea now, doomed to travel aimlessly
until the power source of the sphere was depleted?

I had observed Quiff moving various levers,
and determined to try them myself. I moved his body from the center
chair into one of the flanking ones, and, now captain of my own
ship, tried to affect its course. But the levers would not budge
for me, and the buttons were ineffective. I did notice that certain
levers moved by themselves every once in a while, which gave me
some hope – perhaps this craft was in an automatic mode after
all.

I looked at my companion, and despite all the
anger I had felt at my abduction, I felt some measure of sympathy
for his loss. After all, he had done nothing to directly harm me.
He had, as far as I could determine, only been following orders of
some sort. There was a certain pet-like quality to him that I found
I already missed.

With these depressing
thoughts in mind, I found that I was tired.The captain’s chair was
comfortable, and with the gentle sigh of moving water against the
hull in my ears, and the vague hum of unseen machineries, I was
soon lulled to sleep.

I
dreamed of my
mother. Though I was a kit barely weeks old when she was taken from
me, I still had a hazy picture of her in my mind, my own bare
recollections augmented by the photos I had seen. In the dream I
was in my kit basket and she was leaning over me. She was smiling,
her beautiful face lit from within.

“You will be a great King, Sebastian,” she
said.

I looked up at her, and tried to speak, but
my mouth would not open and I could say nothing.

I began to panic, and reached my paws up to
her.

But then she was pulled away, and another
face was there, that of Frane, the usurper. Her almond-shaped eyes
glowed red, and her whiskers were pulled back in a hiss, showing
sharp teeth. She turned her head to the side as she regarded me, as
if I was a bug or something else to be trampled.

She reached down toward me, her short claws
emerging from the ends of her fingers. They had been chiseled to
needle points. She opened her mouth in another hiss and touched
me–

I gasped, feeling her touch, and started
awake.

There was a real touch on me. I pulled back,
and saw the face of Quiff not two inches from my own. I could still
smell fish on his breath. His eyes blinked ever-so-slowly.