Cracking the Sky (11 page)

TRAINER of WHALES

Kitha strained to see past the farm’s lights
, up into the darkness of the sea. Three great blue whales swam overheard, towing white nets full of sea-city products like farmed fish, sponges, and handmade jewelry. In spite of the harnesses and the bulky cargo nets trailing beside them, the whales exuded grace and power. Kitha, on the other hand, felt heavy in her farming suit, the weights around her waist holding her just at the right height to mind the deep-sea kelp that Downbelow Dome farmed. The waving multicolored fronds had once captivated her. She had made games of counting colorful engineered symbiote-fish and checking the great plants for damage and parasites, priding herself on how well she saw every detail of the beds. But now, a year into her new job, the enormity of her lost dreams was heavier than her pressurized and weighted suit.

Her sigh sent a froth of tiny bubbles up from her breather, a trail of precious air leaking along her face. She kicked hard, forcing her eyes down. It was off-harvest season, and all she had to do for the gene-engineered food crop was measure fronds and watch for broken stems and signs of disease.

A familiar attention-code sang into her ear. Kitha tongued her breather away so she could talk. “Jonathon? How was school?” They’d argued this morning, and she wasn’t even sure he’d
gone
to school.

“Boring, Mom. Can I go to Lincka’s? Her mom is home this shift and she promised to create cookies and set out a game for us.”

Kitha winced. It was good Jonathan wanted to be around an adult. If only he wanted to be around
her
as much as she wanted to be a good mother. “Sure honey. But you have to be home by seven.”

“But bedtime’s not until nine!” he protested.

Kitha would be off shift at six, and this meant she’d go home to an empty apartment. She inhaled, biting down on her breather so hard she was afraid to open her mouth in case she’d punctured the damn thing. Having Jonathon had driven her from school, from the biggest underwater city of all, New Seadon, to this god-forsaken boring job. But it paid well enough—barely—to keep her ten-year-old boy both in school and far, far away from his father. She glanced up again before she answered, but the whales had gone on, surely halfway to the next sea-city by now. She relaxed her jaw. Her breather still worked. She’d stress-fractured two of them in the last six months and was down to one spare. “Eight.”

He must have known by her tone of voice that he wasn’t about to get more time. He just said, “Sure, Mom. See you at eight.” As usual, he sounded disgusted with her.

She sighed again and dove deeper into the brown forest, brushing aside a twenty foot strand of kelp, careful not to tangle her feet. If only she’d been able to figure out how to finish school herself. She dreamed of becoming a whale trainer. Up until last year when she took this nothing job and moved to this nothing dome, she’d been on her way to a bio-trainer school. She’d read every book she could find on whales and practiced training techniques on the rather dumb dolphin-bots that watched the perimeter of the fields. She never got close enough to real whales to practice on
them
. But since she’d given up her dreams for Jonathon, she found the sight of the great, beautiful beasts bittersweet. Dreams, swimming out of her reach.

The next hour of her shift seemed to take ten. Finally, the half-shift prep tones filled her bubble-helmet. She started back, mouth watering as she thought about the roast fish that waited for her in the common shift kitchen.

Kelp slapped her all along her left side, and she swirled sideways, disoriented. Kelp slapped her right, pushing her back. A warning scream belled out of the speakers in her helmet and then went silent.

An undersea quake.

Downbelow Dome. Surely the warning would keep going off if the city was okay. Or at least an all-clear. The kelp around her still swayed back and forth as if an unseen hand shook its roots. What had her safety manual said about seaquakes?

Kitha pumped her legs, dodging kelp, telling herself it was over and long floating objects in motion tended to stay in motion.

Jonathon. She swam harder, her focus suddenly clear.

Don’t think about having just an hour of air
, she thought.
Breathe slowly
.

Her forward motion stopped, her right leg gained twenty pounds. She swiveled her head. Two long fronds had tangled and trapped her right fin. She bent in half, pulling on loose ends of green kelp that felt slimy even through her gloves.

Not enough give.

She reached for her belt knife, sawing slowly, seeing Jonathon’s sullen face like a mirror in her faceplate, superimposed over the waving kelp and a school of silver fish.

The blade made infuriatingly slow progress, the angle bad enough that she didn’t have enough traction for strength.

It slipped twice, forcing her to slow down.

A mistake could kill her.

Finally, the second frond snapped and she kicked away from danger. The freed fin had a broken spring. Her right leg had to work twice as hard as her left. Kelp beds suddenly gave way to open ocean. She grabbed the last stalk for balance, floating. Downbelow Dome glowed like a lamp against the darkness of the sea behind it, and the string of lights between the city and the kelp beds sent a line of comfort knifing through darker sea. Everything
looked
normal. But there had been no communications from the city since the first alarm. She let go of her breather and licked her lips. “Is anybody there?”

No response, until she heard a soft male voice. “Kitha?”

Her shift mate, Jai. A quiet man who’d grown up here. They’d never really connected, but he worked hard and seemed to trust her to do her part. Guilt pursed her lips. She hadn’t even thought of him, only of Jonathon. “It’s me. What happened?”

“Seaquake.”

“I figured that out. Is the city okay?”

Silence for a moment. Then, “It doesn’t look breached.”

Kitha swam away from her stabilizing kelp stem and looked back toward the wavy line of demarcation between crop and open ocean. Where was Jai?

“Look down.”

She did. Sure enough. He was even pretty close, maybe ten meters below her and a little right. She waved at the figure below her. “My son is in there.” She glanced at her readouts. “I don’t have enough air to swim the whole way. I’m going to head to the shift-break station and see if I can find some. Coming?”

Jai’s answer was to start off toward the station, just out of sight on the right. Kitha followed. “Have you been able to reach the dome?” Kitha asked.

“No. But there’s better com gear at the break-station than in our suits. Have you heard from anyone else?”

“No.” Jai’s huge yellow farm-fins were ahead of her now, at roughly the same depth. “Hey! Slow down. My right fin is zonked.”

“I’ll meet you there,” he said, and although the angle made it tough to tell for sure, it looked like the wake behind Jai’s powerful strokes increased. Was he making sure he got the first access to resources if the city was dead? She shook her head. What was she thinking? Jai’d always seemed fair. The city couldn’t be dead, because then Jonathon would be dead.

A swarm of symbiote-fish darted out, engulfing her in bright colors.

She swam around a clump of misplaced kelp, and the shift-station hung in front of her: a teardrop caught on a long line festooned with swaying nets and protective glassoleum bubbles full of farming gear. A puff of tiny bubbles jetted down below the hatch, water being forced into the sea. Her body shivered, relieved. At least there was pressure and air. Safety.

In five minutes, she dangled outside the hatch, her right hand holding her in position as she thumped for the hatch to open. She tumbled inside, waiting for the door to close behind her, then went through a second door and stood before a third. Bubbles surrounded her, pressing against each other and popping into bigger and bigger bubbles until she stood in plain air. The third door opened and she ducked through it, stripping her air bottles and fins and weights into a dripping pile by the door and gulping fresh, clean air. She kept the helmet with her, just in case the city called her name.

As she entered the common room, Jai stood by a computer terminal. He was tall and brown. Brown skin, brown hair, brown eyes. He was older than she was by at least ten years, and had worked in the kelp beds for so long that his movements were precise and studied, his voice calm. “I found a test-sequence.”

“To test what?”

“Well, for starters the shift-station is fine. It’s breathing.”

“But is the city breathing?” If the quake had damaged the dome’s six lungs, it wouldn’t be able to pull enough dissolved oxygen out of the surrounding seawater. Jonathon would run out of air, slowly, and fall asleep.

Jai pursed his lips. “I’m asking.”

Kitha took in a big breath of her own, as if it could feed Jonathon. The dome wasn’t breached. They’d have seen that right away; the glassoleum structure would have buckled and distorted. Maybe there was no immediate danger.

The tiny observation port closest to her looked out on the hundred-foot tall beds of swaying kelp that fed thousands. She walked over to another port and stared at the dome. It looked fine. Something about it felt wrong. Nothing moved. “Do the transports work?” she asked. One was scheduled to pick them up at the end of shift, but that was four and a half hours away. Normally, transports and bots and even swimmers came and went through the dome’s three-lock system doorways regularly, a stream of commerce and recreation.

Jai’s voice jolted her. “Three of the lungs are damaged. The city is in safety mode.”

So no one could get in or out. Including them. Half the lungs meant less air than the station needed. The lock-down would make it last longer. Not forever.

“Are there any transports available?”

Jai shook his head.

“Can we talk to the city?” she asked, knowing the answer was still no.

“I think the whole communications system is down. I just hope everyone inside is okay.”

She glanced over at him, furrowing her brow. “Are there casualties?”

He turned to face her. “Probably. Look, this is a pretty simple interface, but I’m no communication tech. Can you just sit down?” She must have stared at him in shock because he lowered his voice. “Please. Sit by the window and tell me if you see anything strange.”

She had no more than returned to her position at the porthole when the station silenced. The lights flicked off. An emergency tone screamed into the room, something automated. She grabbed for the wall, steadying herself. The string of lights between dome and pod had winked out. She looked behind her. The great kelp beds had faded into the dark sea.

Jai began pushing buttons. The tones silenced. Inside lights came back on, and the air circulators roared to life. The beds and the outside lights stayed off, so the dome sparkled even brighter, and seemed further away. The outside path of lights between the city and the kelp farm had felt like an umbilical cord, and Kitha gasped at the loss.

“It must have been automatic. They must have needed to save power and kept everything off.”

“Look!” Kisha pointed. Three bright lights bobbed through the darkness, heading for the dome. “The whales!”

“Sure,” Jai said, “they always come back from their run about now.”

“But . . . but they won’t be able to drop their load. No one will come outside to un-harness them if the dome’s locked down.”

He shrugged and turned back. “I’m more interested in getting there,” he said.

That suited her. She needed to find Jonathon. “Can you raise anybody yet?”

A high tense laughter escaped his lips. “I was trying. All the systems just blinked out.” He must have heard the sharp tone in his voice. More calmly, he said, “They’re coming back.”

She frowned and returned to the porthole. The three bobbing lights were almost at the dome now. Surely they’d be confused. She wracked her brain for an answer. Whale trainers and handlers talked to their charges via a translator that made haunting high sounds audible from hundreds of feet away. The whales heard better than humans. Sonar. At harvest time, the whales came all the way up to the shift-station, bumping against the rope, while nervous humans tied cargo nets to specially made plastic harnesses. So surely there was a way to call the whales here.

Before she could ask, Jai said, “The tests on the dome are complete. A girder fell on three of the lungs, and they can’t open. Diagnostics suggest they might work okay if we get the weight off of them.” He called her over to the terminal, pointing. An exterior camera showed a mess of metal fallen to the sea floor, leaning against the dome, crushing the left bank of sea-lungs. “Here.” Jai drew a circle around a spot a few meters away from the oblong bellows of the lungs where a metal spike had skewered an antenna. “This is probably what ruined their voice communication. No way to tell from here whether or not they got a mayday out.”

“But won’t the other cities come look, anyway?” she asked. “We’ll be quiet, and that will be wrong.”

“I don’t know. I don’t have any information about the seaquake. It could have damaged other nearby domes, as well.”

“We have to do something,” she said. “We might be the only people on the outside of the dome.”

“I don’t even know how to get there,” he said.

She walked over to the storage cabinet and opened the door. Racks of air bottles sat neatly stacked, ready for the next shift, and the next, and the next. They were replenished once a week, and this was only mid-week.

He grimaced. “I don’t want to leave you alone. Can your broken fin get you all the way there?”

She hadn’t even thought of that. “Maybe there’s more here.”

“People bring their own gear.”

“What about the whales? Can we call them here?”

His eyes widened. “Probably. They come for harvest. But I don’t know anything about whale handling.”

She grinned. “I do.” She glanced out the porthole. “They’re still there. Any idea where we can find a translator?”

He shrugged, then pointed toward the cabinet full of air bottles. “In there?”