Brightness Reef (55 page)

It was the strangest thing any of us had ever encountered. And don’t forget, I’ve heard a g’Kek umble and witnessed a traeki vlen.

“Is it Buyur-uyur?” Pincer asked, superstitious awe invading his voice vents, along with a returned stammer.

“I bet a pile of donkey mulch that’s not Buyur-made,” Huck said. “What do you think, Ur-ronn?”

Our urs pal stretched her neck past Pincer, her muzzle drying a patch of the bubble window. “No way the Vuyur would’ve vuilt anything so frightful-ghastly,” she agreed. “It’s not their style.”

“Of course it’s not their style,” Huck continued. “But I know whose it is.”

We all stared at her. Naturally, she milked the moment, pausing till we were on the verge of pummeling her.

“It’s urrish,” she concluded with a tone of smug conviction.

“Urrish!” Pincer hissed. “How can you be so-“

“Exflain,” Ur-ronn demanded, snaking her head to peer at Huck. “This ovject is sophisticated. Uriel could forge nothing like it. Not even Earthlings have such craft.”

“Exactly! It’s not Buyur, and no one currently living on the Slope could make it. That leaves just one possibility. It must have been left here by an original sooner star-ship, when one of the Six Races-seven if you include glavers-first arrived on Jijo, before the settlers scuttled their craft and joined the rest of us as primitives. But which one left it? I’d eliminate us g’Keks on account of we’ve been here so long that I’ll bet the jack would’ve moved a lot farther into the Rift by now. The same probably holds for glavers, qheuens, and traeki.

“Anyway, the clincher is that Uriel knew exactly where to find it!”

Fur riffled around the rim of Ur-ronn’s nostril. Her voice turned colder than the surrounding ocean. “You suggest a conspiracy.”

g’Kek stalks twined, a shrug.

“Not a horribly vile one,” Huck assured. “Maybe just a sensible precaution.

“Think about it, mates. Say you’ve come to plant a sooner colony on a forbidden world. You must get rid of anything that’d show on a casual scan by some Institute surveyor, so your ship and complex gear have to go. Nearby space is no good. That’s the first place cops’d check. So you sink it amid all the stuff the Buyur dumped when they left Jijo. Sounds good so far.

“But then you ask yourself-what if an unforeseen emergency crops up? What if someday your descendants need something high-tech to help ‘em survive?”

Ur-ronn lowered her conical head. In the dimness I

could not tell if it denoted worry or rising anger. I hurried to cut in.

“Hr-rm. You imply a long view of things. A secret kept for generations.”

“For centuries,” Huck agreed. “Uriel no doubt was told by her master, and so on back to the first urrish ancestors. And before Ur-ronn snaps one of my heads off, let me rush to add that the urs sages showed great restraint over the years, never seeking to use this cache during their wars with qheuens, then humans, even when they were getting their tails whipped.”

That was meant to calm Ur-ronn? I rushed to save Huck from mutilation. “Perhaps-hrm-humans and qheuens had their own caches, so there was a standoff.” Then my own words sank in. “Maybe those caches are being sought now, while we serve as Uriel’s dipping claw, in search of this one.”

There was a long silence.

Then Pincer spoke.

“Sheesh-eesh-eesh. Those aliens up at the Glade must really have the grown-ups spooked.”

Another pause, then Huck resumed. “That’s what I’m hoping all of this is about. The aliens. A mutual effort of the Six, pooling resources, and not something else.”

Ur-ronn’s neck twisted nervously. “What do you nean?”

“I mean, I’d have liked Uriel’s word of honor that we’re down here seeking powers for the defense of all the Commons.”

Not simply to arm urrish militia, in some of the grudge fights we’ve heard rumors about, I thought, finishing Huck’s implication. There was a tense moment when I could not predict what would happen next. Had tension, worry, and Tyug’s drugs strung our urrish friend to the point where Huck’s baiting would make her snap?

Ur-ronn’s neck slowly untwisted. An effort of will, I saw by the dim light of the phosphors. “You have . . .” she began, breathing heavily. “You have the oath of this urs, that it will ve so.”

And she repeated the vow in Galactic Two, following it with a laborious effort to spit on the floor, not an easy act for one of her kind. A sign of sincerity.

“Hr-rm, well, that’s great,” I said, umbling for peace. “Not that any of us ever thought any different. Right, Huck? Pincer?”

Both of them hurried to agree, and some of the tension passed. Underneath, however, seeds of worry had been laid. Huck, I thought, you ‘d bring a jar full of scorpions in a lifeboat, then drop it just to see who swims the best.

We got under way again and soon were near enough to see how big the jack really was. Each of the bulbous balloonlike things at its spiky tips was larger than Wuphon’s Dream. “There’s one of the cables Uriel talked about,” Pincer announced, waving a claw toward one spike, from which a glossy black strand made a relatively straight line, though buried in places, aimed north, in the direction we had come.

“I bet anything that line’s broken somewhere tween here and the cliffs,” Huck ventured. “Prob’ly used to go all the way to some secret cleft or cave near Terminus Rock. From there the cache might’ve been hauled in without an urs ever having to get her hooves wet. That end point may’ve gotten cut in an avalanche or quake, like the one that killed my folks. This jack thing is a backup, so the cord can be picked up again, even if the first end point is lost.”

“Good thinking. It does explain one thing that had me puzzled-why Uriel had so much equipment on hand. Stuff that proved so useful for diving. In fact, it makes me wonder why she needed us at all. Why didn’t she have a hidden bathy of her own in the first place?”

Ur-ronn was getting over her funk. “A g’Kek accountant inventories the forge warehouse regularly. He’d notice anything as un-urrish as a suvnarine, just lying around, ready to ve used.”

Her voice was sarcastic. Yet Huck agreed.

“The difficult parts were there, the pumps and valves and gaskets. I’m sure Uriel and her predecessors figured they could whip up a hull and the rest in a matter of

months. Who ever expected an emergency to strike so quick? Besides, we bunch of crazy kids offered a perfect cover story. No one will associate us with god-caches from the Galactic past.”

“I prefer to think,” Pincer interjected, with a dramatically miffed tone of voice, “that the real reason Uriel begged pretty-please to be allowed to join our team was the superior design and craftsmanship of our ship-hip.”

We quit bickering to stare at him for a moment-then laughter filled the tiny cabin, making the hull vibrate and waking Huphu from her nap.

The four of us felt better then, ready to get on with the mission. The hard part was over, it appeared. All we had to do now was order Ziz to attach a clamp to the cord on the jack’s other side and signal Uriel to haul away. There would then be a long wait while we slowly rose up toward the surface, since g’Keks and urs are even more likely than humans to get the bends if air pressure changes too rapidly. From books we knew it’s an awful way to die, so a tedious ascent was an accepted necessity. We had all packed snacks, as well as personal articles to help pass the time.

Still, I was anxious to get on with it. Claustrophobia was nothing compared with the ordeal that would commence when everyone onboard-each in his or her unique way-started feeling the need to go, as some Earthling books politely put it, “to the bathroom.”

There would be, it seemed, one slight difficulty in clamping on to the second cord.

We saw the problem at once, upon rolling around to look at the Jack’s other side.

The second cord was missing.

Or rather, it had been cut. Fresh-looking metal fibers waved gently in the subsea currents, hanging like an unbraided urrish tail from one of the jack’s spiky ends.

Nor was that all. When Ur-ronn cast our beams across the ocean floor, we saw a wavy trail in the mud, meandering south, in which direction the cord apparently had been dragged. None of us knew how to tell if this was done days, or jaduras, or years ago. But the word recent came to mind. No one had to say it aloud.

Electric sparks flashed as Ur-ronn reported the situation to those waiting in the world of air and light. Surprise was evident in a long delay. Then an answer came back down, crackling pulses across the tiny spark gap.

If in good health, follow trail for two cables, then report.

Huck muttered. “As if we’ve got any choice, with Uriel controlling the winch. Like a little case of narcosis or the cramp-jitters would make a difference to her?”

This time, Ur-ronn didn’t turn around, but both tails switched Huck’s torso sharply, just below the neckline.

“Ahead one half, Alvin,” Pincer commanded. With a sigh, I bent over to begin again.

So we set forth, keeping one beam focused on the snake-trail through the mud, while Ur-ronn cast the other searchlight left and right, up and down. Not that seeing a threat in advance would give us any kind of useful warning. There was never a vessel as unarmed, slow, and helpless as Wuphon’s Dream. That severed cord we had seen-it had been made by beings using Galactic technology, intended to survive millennia underwater and still retain immense strength. Whatever had sliced it apart wasn’t anything I wanted to make angry.

A deeper, more solemn mood filled the cabin as we crept onward. After cranking for more than a midura against the ever-changing traction of slippery muck, my arms and back were starting to feel the stinging tingle of second-stage fatigue. I was too tired to umble. Behind me, Huphu expressed her boredom by rummaging through my backpack, tearing open a package of pish fish sandwiches, nibbling part of it and scattering the rest through the bilge. Splashing noises and a wet tickling on my toe-pads told of water accumulating down there- whether.from excess humidity, or some slow leak, or our own disgusting wastes, I didn’t care to guess. The aroma inside was starting to get both complex and pretty damn ripe. I was fighting another onset of confinement dread when Pincer let out a shrill yell.

“Alvin, stop! Back up! I mean engines back full!”

I wish I could report that I saw what caused this outburst, but my view was blocked by frenzied silhouettes. Besides, I had my hands full fighting the momentum of the crank, which seemed determined to keep turning in the same direction despite me, driving the wheels ever forward. I held the wooden rods in a strangle grip and heaved with all my might, feeling something pop in my spine. Finally, I managed to slow the axles, then at last bring them to a stop. But for all my grunting effort, I could not make them turn the other way.

“I’m getting a list!” Huck announced. “Tilting forward and to port.”

“I didn’t see it coming!” Pincer cried out. “We were climbing a little hill, then it just came out of nowhere, I swear!”

Now I could feel the tilt. The Dream was definitely tipping forward even as Huck frantically pumped ballast aft. The eik beams seemed to flail around the darkness up ahead, offering an unsettling view of yawning emptiness where before there had been a gently sloping plain.

I finally managed to get the crank turning backward, but any sense of victory was short-lived. One of the magnetic clutches-attached to a wheel salvaged from Huck’s aunt, I believe-gave way. The remaining roller bit hard into the mud, with the effect of abruptly slewing us sideways.

The beams now swung along the lip of the precipice we were poised upon. Apparently, what we had thought was the main floor of the Rift had been but a shelf along the outskirts of the actual trench. The true gash now gaped, ready to receive us, as it had received so many other things that would never again partake in affairs up where stars glittered bright.

So many dead things, and we were about to join them.

“Shall I cut ballast?” Huck asked, frantically. “I can cut ballast. Pull the signal cord to have Ziz inflate. I can do it! Shall I do it?”

I reached out and took two eyestalks, gently stroking them in the calming way I had learned over the years. She wasn’t making any sense. The weight of all the steel hawser we trailed was greater than a few bricks slung under the belly of Wuphon’s Dream. If we cut the hawser too, we might rise all right. But then what would keep the air hose from tangling and snapping as we spun and tumbled? Even if it miraculously survived, unsnarled, we would shoot up like the bullet-ship in Verne’s First Men in the Moon. Even Pincer would probably die of the bends.

More practical with death looming before us, Ur-ronn fired off rapid spark-pulses, telling Uriel to yank us home without delay. Good idea. But how long would it take, I wondered, for the crew above to haul in all the slack? How fast could they do it without risking a crimp in the air hose? How far might we fall before two opposite pulls met in a sudden jerk? That moment of truth would be when we discovered just how well we’d built the Dream.

Helplessly, I felt the wheels lose contact with the muddy shelf as our brave little bathy slid over the edge, starting a long languid fall into darkness.

That, I guess, would be a nice, dramatic place to end a chapter, with our heroes tumbling into the black depths. A true-to-life cliff-hanger.

Will the crew ever make it home again?

Will they survive?

Yeah, that’d make a good stopping point. What’s more, I’m tired and hurting. I need to call for help, so I can make it to the bucket in the corner of this dank place and get some relief.

But I won’t stop there. I know a better place, just a bit farther down the stream of time, as Wuphon’s Dream slowly fell, rotating round and round, and we watched the eik beams sweep a cliff face that rose beside us like the wall of an endless tomb. Our tomb.

We dropped half of our ballast, which helped slow the plunge-till a current yanked ahold of the Dream, dragging us faster. We dropped the remainder but knew our sole chance lay in Uriel reacting perfectly, and then a hundred other things working better than there was any hope of them working.