Curse of the Iris (24 page)

“No,” Carlo said, looking away. “Why should it?”

“Because they're our parents?” Yana said, incredulous.

“They are, but we're a starship crew. You heard what Dad said earlier—we have a job to do. So let's do it.”

“Oh, cut it out, Carlo. It's
us
—you can get upset about something without its going in the Log.”

“I'm not upset,” Carlo said, crouching down to hook up the armor's diagnostic ports.

“Right. I forgot, you're above all this. None of it means anything to you—not Mom and Dad fighting, not what Oshima said about Grandpa and the software program, not the idea that our parents were going to break up the clan. . . .”

Carlo got abruptly to his feet, the armor's ceramic chest plate clattering on the floor.

“What about it?” he demanded, his scar white against a face gone red. “It's all ancient history! Haven't you had enough living in the past, trying to measure up to the glory of the great Jupiter pirates? I'm tired of Grandfather's story, of Aunt Carina's story, of Mom and Dad's story. It's time for us to write
our
story. Why don't you see that?”

“Because there is no
their
story and
our
story!” Tycho burst out. “It's the same story!”

Carlo shook his head. “You just keep telling yourself that, Tyke. You keep telling yourself that and see how far it gets you.”

If there were more arguments during the night, they took place behind closed doors. When Tycho sat down for breakfast, Diocletia and Mavry were in their usual places, not chatting like they usually did, but no longer projecting a prickly hostility.

Carina, however, looked up from her mediapad and nodded at Tycho pleasantly enough.

“So are you ready to go down the pipe and see if you're right about the location of our treasure?” she asked.

“Sure,” Tycho managed to say. His eyes jumped instinctively to his father, but Mavry was studiously focused on chosing his next scone, while Diocletia stared fixedly into her teacup. Whatever drama had happened to change her mind, he'd missed it.

Tycho was briefly elated but wished his aunt had waited until after breakfast—his hunger had vanished, replaced by anxiety as pieces of simulator exercises unspooled in his head.

After breakfast, Carina called up the rarely consulted manual for Darklands' filtration system, a humming assemblage of machinery built around the homestead's hulking steel water tank.

“All right, let's review,” she told the assembled Hashoones. “This hatch leads to a short maintenance shaft that enters the main pipe here. The main pipe runs nearly two hundred kilometers down to the ocean, beneath the crust. When I shut down the pump and filters, it will take about twenty minutes for the water to drain.”

Carina pulled a key from a pouch on her belt and opened a panel on the side of the filtration machinery. She checked her mediapad, then tapped a combination of buttons. A red light began to blink, and a moment later the hum of the equipment rose in pitch, then abruptly ceased.

“It's so quiet,” Yana said. “Feels creepy.”

“Let's hope it's not for long. Now listen. The main pipe is a little over a meter wide. There's a detachable platform at the top that's used to ferry equipment up and down—such as the impeller sled and, in this case, one brave midshipman.”

She smiled at Tycho, who smiled back.

“Once the pipe's drained, Tycho will ride the platform down with the sled and the scanner. Tycho, you and Yana work well together, so she'll be your point person for communications—but all of us will be here to help with anything you need.”

Yana fitted her headset over her dark hair and nodded at her brother.

“We'll be fine. I've got plenty of experience telling Tyke what to do.”

“Yeah, right,” Tycho said.

“You've gone over how to use your equipment in the simulator, correct?” Carina asked.

“Tyke got perfect marks last time,” Carlo said.

“Good to hear,” Carina said. “The ocean is salty and mixed with a small amount of ammonia—that keeps it from freezing. Your suit was designed for these conditions. It's rated for three hundred meters of water pressure, but you won't need to worry about that—if the treasure's down there, it's almost certainly floating or anchored to something. Anyway, if you need it, you know how to use your suit's jet pack.”

“Arrr,” Huff said. “Terrible being down there under all that rock. Like a tomb—”

“Why don't we leave the briefing to Carina?” Mavry suggested.

“It's all right,” Tycho said. “I'll be fine.”

“I know you will be,” Carina said. “The biggest uncertainty is signal range. We don't know how close the scanner has to be to the signal to detect it. We've loaded the coordinates of the old Unger homestead into the sled's nav unit. Once you're in the water, it should be about ten kilometers away.”

Tycho nodded.

“Now listen carefully, Tycho. You have three days' worth of air. That's for safety, not exploration. You know everything that's happening with the Jovian Union these days and with this family. The last thing we need is to launch a rescue mission on top of everything else. Do not be reckless.”

“I understand,” Tycho said. He blew his breath out in a long exhalation. “And I'm ready. Let's do this.”

Once Tycho put on the bulky underwater suit, the hatchway looked a lot narrower. And the maintenance shaft smelled terrible—an acrid mix of ammonia and other chemicals.

“Ugh,” he said. “How long is the trip down?”

“Oh, only about five hours,” Mavry said with a smile.

Tycho gave the pipe another unhappy sniff. “I'll use my suit's air. Besides, if something's wrong, better to know at the top than at the bottom.”

Carlo and Yana helped Tycho fit the helmet onto its collar and lock it. He adjusted the controls on the suit's wrist pad, his breath loud in the confines of the helmet, and air began to flow.

“You read me, Tyke?” Yana asked, the words coming a beat behind the sight of his sister's lips moving.

“Loud and clear. Do you read me?”

“All green,” Yana said, giving him a thumbs-up. “First thing is to make sure the maintenance platform works.”

Tycho stepped into the hatch and sank to his knees, ducking his head to crawl forward. After a meter, the maintenance shaft intersected the main pipe at a right angle. Tycho crept to the end of the shaft and activated his work light. Below him, an O of metal plunged straight down into darkness.

It was some two hundred kilometers to the ocean below. Tycho wondered how long it would take him to fall if he should slip.

“You okay in there, Tyke?” Yana's voice asked over his radio. He knew she was close enough to grab his foot. But it already felt like she was perilously far away.

“Just getting my bearings. The main pipe's clear—all the filtration equipment retracted successfully. Ask Aunt Carina to deploy the platform.”

“Copy that.”

Something hummed, and a broad metal disk emerged from the side of the pipe about half a meter below, filling all but a few centimeters of the shaft. It rotated and locked into a narrow track.

“Looks good,” Tycho said. He reached down and shoved at the disk. It didn't move.

It was too narrow to turn around in the maintenance shaft. Tycho wormed backward and popped up in the familiar surroundings of Darklands, with his family gathered around him. Behind them, Parsons was clearing the breakfast dishes.

“You okay?” Diocletia asked. “You're sweating.”

“I'm fine. I'll have plenty of time to rest in a minute. Who's got the scanner?”

Carlo handed it over. Tycho turned it on, verified that the readout was working, then turned it off and secured it to his chest with a loop of hook-pile tape.

“All right,” he said. “Let's do this.”

Yana reached out and put her hand on her brother's faceplate, followed by Mavry, Carlo, Diocletia, and Carina. Tycho smiled up at their assembled hands, though he was mildly alarmed when Huff tapped his forearm blaster cannon against the helmet.

“Be safe, Tycho,” Diocletia said. “Wait. Honestly . . . now there are handprints all over his faceplate.”

She cradled his helmet against her side and swiped her sleeve repeatedly across the faceplate, which allowed her a chance to give him a private smile.

When his mother let go, Tycho lowered himself into the maintenance shaft again, scooched backward, and dropped down onto the platform.

“I'm in the pipe,” he said. “Push the impeller sled over to me.”

He guided the sled into position, the platform momentarily bobbing beneath him. It was a tight fit—he could barely extend his arms without touching the walls on both sides.

“Ready to go,” he said, hoping he sounded more confident than he felt. “Send the platform down.”

“Starting sequence,” Yana said. “Talk to you in a couple of hours.”

The maintenance shaft vanished into darkness, replaced by a featureless circle of metal as the platform accelerated and the walls became a blur.

Tycho had heard of spacers' children who panicked in tight spaces, rendered helpless by some ancient instinct left over from the time when humans roamed the vast plains of Earth under endless skies. He wondered how they'd react if they found himself where he was now.

Fortunately, he was a Hashoone and a born spacer—from her berths to her ladderwells and gunnery bays, the tight confines of the
Comet
had always felt comforting, not confining. He looked around once more, verified that everything was as it should be, then shut off his helmet's work light to save power. There was no sound but his own breathing as the platform hurtled through the darkness toward the hidden ocean far below.

“Tycho, do you read me? Tyke?”

Startled, Tycho looked around before he remembered there was nothing to see. His sister said his name again, concern creeping into her voice.

“I'm here. What's going on?”

“Did you fall asleep?”

“No,” he lied.

“Unbelievable. You should be nearing the bottom of the pipe.”

“Got it,” Tycho said, his brain still a little foggy.

A few moments later, something beeped in the darkness, the noise surprisingly loud. Tycho turned on his work light, blinking at the glare. The platform came to a stop, then began to creep downward again. Water appeared around Tycho's feet, followed by a circle of darkness. The platform was descending into Callisto's hidden ocean, moving along a guide that extended below the pipe's terminus.

Tycho forced himself to relax.
Your suit's buoyant
, he reminded himself.
And you have a jet pack. You'll be fine.

The water rose to his chest, then his neck, then his chin. Then he was completely submerged.

The platform stopped. His feet were trying to float. He grabbed hold of the guide connecting the platform to the pipe, then looked up. The end of the main pipe was above his head, a bright circle in the beam from his work light.

“I'm in the water,” he said. “I'm all right. I'm going to set up the sled.”

The sled demagnetized from the platform with a clank and unfolded itself, deploying floats with a puff of bubbles. Tycho unspooled a cable from its front housing and clipped it to the platform guide.

“I'm going to have a quick look around before I activate the nav unit,” he told Yana.

Still gripping the platform guide, he looked up and let his work light play over his surroundings. Half a meter above his head, the main pipe emerged from the hard-packed rock and ice of Callisto's crust, which formed the ceiling of an immense underwater cavern. Off to one side and extending below him was the dim shape of the pipe's siphon, which had been rotated out of the way by great geared wheels. On the other side of the pipe, a cluster of antennae and probes and sensors had been rammed into the crust above and trailed down into the water.

Tycho let his feet rise until he was floating, activated his maneuvering jets, then tentatively let go of the guide and drifted in the water. A tap on the jets sent him gently away from the pipe, past the impeller and the siphon, until there was nothing but rock and ice above his head.

He tapped the jets again, a bit too hard, and found himself shooting upward. Instinctively he flung up his arm to protect his head. His arm and shoulder mashed into the cavern's ceiling, which gave slightly under the impact. He squeezed his fingers, and gray mud squished out between them. He dug tentatively, and bits of rock and muck came free, clouding the water around his helmet.

A chunk of bright white rock slipped from his grasp and he looked down, following its descent as it fell. The water was crystal clear—he could see every detail of his boots where they hung below him. The falling rock slowly shrank to a dot, then a bright pinpoint, caught now and again by the fading illumination of his work light until it was finally swallowed up by the vast darkness below him.

Tycho heard his breath quickening and realized he'd shut his eyes. Directly above him lay the unimaginable weight of two hundred kilometers of ice and rock; directly below him lay the unfathomable abyss of two hundred fifty kilometers of water. He was in the heart of a moon, suspended between two enormities his mind could barely grasp.

“Tyke? You okay?”

His sister must have heard him gasping.

“I'll be all right,” Tycho said, eyes still shut, arm still braced against the cavern roof.

“Have you turned on the scanner?”

“No. Uh, I was about to.”

He forced himself to open his eyes, then to push himself down, away from the ceiling. He let some air bleed out of his tanks, sinking a couple of meters. Being away from the cavern roof made him feel a little better—this was almost like the familiar, floating feeling of a space walk. He reached down and unfastened the scanner, reminding himself to focus on it and not on his feet or the yawning dark below them.