The Farpool (70 page)

Kloosee honked back at him and they argued
for a few moments.

Chase was curious, a little apprehensive. The
Omtorish all seemed fidgety, anxious lately. Quick to snap at each
other. He’d seen the same thing all about the city.

“What was that all about, Kloos?”

Now, Kloosee turned serious. “He was
reminding me that we have to be at the Metah’s chambers very soon.
All the Metahs will be there.”

Chase was always nervous around higher
authority. “What’s it about?”

Kloosee said, “The Metahs want to know your
plans for rebuilding the Uman machine. Re-starting the
Farpool.”

That’s when Chase fingered the amulet
now wrapped around his neck. The stone ring gave him a gravitas he
didn’t feel.
Plans?
What plans? How did I become the main man here?

From selling T-shirts on Shelley Beach to
saving a world of intelligent fish from a sun about to go
blammo…Chase’ head spun.

Angie, I don’t know where you are now, but I
need help.

They left for the briefing. Kloosee had to
practically drag Chase along with them.

Chapter 23

Seome

Above Likte Trench

Time: 769.3, Epoch of Tekpotu

Chase was
tekmetah
to the Metah of Omt’or, now a
free-bound, credentialed subject of Her Majesty Iltereedah, sworn
into Kelk’too, and given the mission of re-creating the Farpool,
and saving the whole planet. It was a job he didn’t ask for. It was
like when his Dad had told him he was going to be doing inventory
every Sunday afternoon at the shop. Chase hated doing inventory.
Sunday afternoons were for beach-combing. Diving. Swimming.
Flirting. Anything but inventory.

They had a big machine to put together. And
nobody knew, least of all Chase Meyer, if the damn thing would
generate another Farpool or not.

It was kind of like doing a set with
the Croc-Boys. You started a number, you finished it. No halfway
stuff. The
go-tone
only made
music if you plucked it, if you stayed with it. Even when your
fingers were cut and bleeding and your wrists ached from all the
practice, you stayed with it.

Chase had to talk himself into his new role
as chief engineer, project manager, head kelke and General of the
Army. He knew he wasn’t up to any of those roles. But you stayed
with it. That’s what the Croc-Boys always did.

The assembly expedition returned to Likte and
resumed work. A small contingent of workers had been left on site
when Chase and Kloosee had gone back to Omsh’pont. Now, as Chase’s
kip’t nosed over the edge of the chasm of Likte Trench, he saw the
sections of the Twister laid out like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle on
the seabed, slings and nets full of chronotron pods, mooring
cables, foundation pads, all the parts that somehow, they had to
put back together.

Not to mention raising the singularity engine
in its crate from the bottom of the trench, the thing that powered
the Twister.

Straight away, the workforce set to work.

For many days, they worked long hours.
Chase was everywhere, using the memory tab Lieutenant Golich had
given him, to guide the process…
put this
here, attach that there, plug this into that and I think these fit
like this
...only when fatigue set in and he could no
longer keep his eyes open, did Chase relent and rest. He slept
every night, fitfully, in the back of Kloosee’s kip’t. But never
more than a few hours and when he could no longer sit still, driven
by the knowledge that so many kelke, indeed the Metah herself, and
probably the whole planet and all its kels, were depending on him,
he left the kip’t and sometimes roamed alone about the worksite,
just watching.

Seome had become a gigantic Turtle Shop and
he was now the manager. He didn’t know if he liked it or not but
he’d discovered more about himself in these days than for his whole
life before. Reserves of strength and stamina, reserves of
resourcefulness, a well of determination and pure grit that no one,
least of all Chase Meyer, ever knew was there.

First came the foundation pads, buried deeply
in the seabed and supported by rock and anchors securing them to
the hard limestone of the Likte plain. After the foundation pads
were in place, anchors for mooring cables were set in place. Then
the sections of the Twister’s outer shell and casing were towed by
kip’ts and attached to the cables. Fasteners were a puzzle. The
Umans had left some but the Seomish didn’t like them or understand
them. Instead, a paste mixed of korpuh blood and sand was used to
secure the casing sections to the mooring cables.

“Very strong,” insisted one Sk’ortish
engineer. “Flexible and tough…we use them for pal’penk trains…the
animals can still maneuver but it gives them enough room to move
with the currents.”

Chase had little choice to but to let
the kelke with the real knowledge do their jobs.
Chase’s First Rule of Management:
get good people and get out of the way. He figured if he ever
got back to Scotland Beach, he’d lay all this management knowledge
on his Dad and get that T-shirt shop humming like his old Suzuki
bike.

After the casing sections had been towed into
place and fastened to their moorings, the sections had to be joined
together. More korpuh blood paste. Then came the chronotron pods,
rounded up from their holding nets and positioned on top of the
Twister, the part that rose above the surface. Here Chase, a
creature of the Notwater, did much of the precision work, shoving
and heaving the pods into their mounts and securing them with
korpuh paste and an odd Orketish joint called seamother’s teeth.
Not actually teeth, though Chase wondered, but composite hinged
claws and grabbers that clenched opposing sides of a structure just
like a mouth filled with teeth clenched its prey.

After many days of exhausting work, it was
time for a brave crew to dive into the deepest part of the Likte
Trench and retrieve the singularity engine.

Chase decided that he would lead the crew. To
help him, he chose Kloosee and two others: a Ponkti weaver named
Kuktor and a Sk’ortish technician named Yaktu. And right away,
Chase saw that there would be problems. Kuktor and Yaktu couldn’t
get along.

It started when the crew was staging a vast
sling and float device. The sling was woven of tchinting fiber,
Kuktor’s specialty. The Ponkti weaver was very protective, even
defensive, of his work. Yaktu struggled with the fiber, trying to
bend it far enough to form a knot of sorts, something to cinch up
two ends and close a loop so the sling could be fastened to a
float. The plan was to attach the sling ends to the singularity
engine pallet and float it out of the trench, indeed all the way to
the surface. There, Chase and Kloosee, clad in a lifesuit, would
climb up onto the Twister deck, drag the pallet to the central core
tube of the Twister and deposit the engine in its bay there.

“This blasted fiber’s too tough,” Yaktu
complained. “The weave’s too tight…I can’t bend it. If you’d done
your job right, this wouldn’t be happening.”

“If you knew anything about tchin’ting,”
retorted Kuktor, “you’d know where to make your bend. Nothing wrong
with the fiber…it’s the joiner who doesn’t get it!”

The argument had been flaring for hours,
until Yaktu couldn’t take it anymore. He dropped his end and went
right at Kuktor and a full-fledged brawl ensued. Before Chase heard
it and came as fast as he could, more had joined in. A cat fight of
tumbling, slashing, stabbing bodies flashed before him. Grabbing
several others, Chase waded in to the tussle, got a beak in the
face, and was slapped silly by someone’s tail. It took Ponkti
prods, strong words, curses and determined referees from Eep’kos
and Sk’ort to finally break the fight up.

The battling kelke separated reluctantly and
hovered nearby, glaring at each other. Chase stayed in the
middle.

“That’s enough!
Enough
of this…all you guys do is bicker and
argue and fight.” He hoped his echopod was conveying his disgust
with the whole situation. “You want to come with me to the Notwater
and see with your own eyes why we’re here? Your world’s falling
apart. That sun up there’s dying. The water’s getting colder,
saltier. Stop this bitching and moaning and jabbing at each
other…you guys aren’t enemies. The real enemy’s up there—“ he
pointed toward the Notwater. “The real enemy’s the assholes who
slammed your sun. Don’t you get it…no sun, no Seome. How about a
little shoo’kel, for once, huh?” He didn’t even know if he’d
used
that
word right, but at
least no one was snickering. “Now, let’s get back to work and get
this job done.”

Little escapades like this happened every
day.

The singularity engine was gingerly floated
out of the trench and rose like a fistful of whirlpools up toward
the surface. Chase and Kloosee, along with Yaktu and Kuktor, helped
guide the ascent, pulling and manipulating on steering cables, to
keep the thing straight. Still fastened to its pallet, the engine
couldn’t actually be seen for all the foam and froth its currents
generated. Rising steadily, the engine looked like a big mobile
water drain, currents and waves and white-hot steam bubbling in a
stewpot of turbulence. It seemed to be sucking in all the water
around them and Chase ordered all non-essential kelke to back off a
good distance.

When the pallet broke the surface, it vented
and hissed and crackled like a lightning bolt, churning the seas
around it for dozens of meters. Yaktu had designed a hoist
arrangement to haul the crate up onto the Twister deck and across
its outer shell to the core tube at the apex of the huge
dish-shaped structure. The maneuver took several hours but when the
singularity engine was unhooked and slid off its pallet into the
tube, Chase, Kloosee and Yaktu all cheered, though their cheers
were muffled from within lifesuits.

The wormhole generator slid down roughly into
its tube, still crackling, venting and hissing and was gone.

Now, to hook it all
up,
Chase told himself,
and
flip the ON switch
.

While precariously perched on the slope of
the Twister deck, some twenty meters above the surface, Chase took
a moment to study his surroundings.

It was clear, in comparison to his last trip
topside, that the light level had dropped considerably. Seome was
always cloudy but this was more like twilight. The winds howled and
the surf was rough, throwing ten-meter waves over the edge of the
Twister deck. Chase couldn’t see Seome’s sun through the gray scud
but, if this was midday—and there was no way to tell, really—then
the amount of light trickling through had fallen off. He knew what
Golich and the Umans had told him…that the Coethi enemy had done
something to the sun and it might not survive long. The Coethi
starball weapon knocked stars off their normal sequence, sending
them to their deaths, often by supernova if they were big
enough.

And the effects of the damaged star-sun Sigma
Albeth B on Seome were already well apparent to everyone.

Kloosee struggled to hold on to cleats and
other projections on the Twister deck. Chase heard a muffled shout.
Kloosee was pointing through heavy surf. Chase looked. It was a
seamother, several in fact. Their slick gray-black humps floated
like small islands, perhaps a few hundred meters away. And, as
Chase watched, they made no movement at all.

Kloosee dragged himself up to Chase’s
level, near the apex. “They’re dead, both of them.” It seemed to be
true. There was no apparent life in the beasts. “A sad time,”
Kloosee’s voice came through the echobulb with emotion.
“They
are
magnificent beasts,
even if dangerous.” Chase knew Kloosee’s own em’kel had been
created to study the creatures. “Perhaps, once the Farpool is
working, we can find a calf and take it through. See how it does in
your oceans. Pakma would like that too…she could create more
scentbulbs…listen to Puk’lek bellowing in new seas. She’d like
that.”

Chase thought the idea unlikely. The two of
them clambered down off the Twister deck, submerged and returned to
the work crew.

Re-building the Twister took several
more
emt’emah
, maybe a month,
by Chase’s reckoning. There were more fights, insults, brawls and
there were days when Chase felt like something between a referee
and a harried mother. But through it all, the Twister came
together, the singularity engine ticked over in its core and, at
last, the day came when the first startup test was planned.
Everything seemed ready.

A control center of sorts had been
constructed inside a small cavern, really a collapsed lava tube,
just above Likte Trench. Cabling to the Twister was run and the
machine was ready to be powered up. Chase drifted nervously about
the control center, with his chosen startup crew, carefully
selected to make sure no kel was slighted or insulted. He had
become much more nuanced and sensitive to kel politics since
leading the Twister project.

Kloosee was there, along with Tamarek,
longtime friend of Longsee. From Ponk’t, Loptoheen, the
grizzled
tuk
master was also
present, growling and scowling like usual. The other kels also were
represented.

The plan was to perform the powerup procedure
that Chase had extracted from Golich’s memory tab and carefully
monitor the results. For safety’s sake, the rest of the crew had
been ordered back several beats, in case the Twister hiccupped or
did something unexpected.