The Pandora Sequence: The Jesus Incident, the Lazarus Effect, the Ascension Factor (27 page)

Chapter 45

Avata informs through the esoteric symbols of Avata’s history reduced to dreams and to images which often can be translated only by the dreamer, not by Avata.

—Kerro Panille,
History of the Avata

T
HERE’S NO
reason to panic yet
, Waela told herself.

Other subs had lost their LTAs and survived. The drill was spelled out by those experiences.

Still, she found herself trembling uncontrollably, her memory focused on her escape from the depths at the south shore of The Egg.

I escaped before. I’m a survivor. Ship, save us!

Save yourself.
That was the unmistakable voice of her own Honesty. Certainly. She knew how to do it. She had taught the procedure to Thomas by repeated drill. And Panille appeared to be a cool one. No panic there. He was watching the screens, estimating the extent that the downed LTA bag was covering them.

Strange that it drifted straight down.

“There has to be a vertical current in this lagoon,” Panille said, as though answering her thought. “See how the fabric has draped itself over us.”

Thomas had watched the fabric cover them, sinking all around the sub to enclose them in an orange curtain which cut off their view of the kelp.

There’s no way the LTA could have been brought down by lightning, he thought. The bag was grounded to its anchor cable. It was compartmented. Breaking half the compartments would not have brought it down. There still would have been enough lift to take off the stripped-down gondola.

Somebody doesn’t want us back.

“I think we could begin cutting away the fabric now,” Panille said. He touched Thomas on the shoulder, not liking the way the man sat staring fixedly at the screens.

“Yes . . . yes. Thank you.”

Thomas lifted the nose of the sub then and extruded the cutters. Whiplike arc burners, they slipped from hull-top compartments and began their work. The plaz dome above them glowed with silvery blue light from the burner. Thomas saw the orange curtain part and drift down, stirring up a fog of sediment.

“Do you want me to do it?” Waela asked.

He shook his head abruptly, realizing that she too must have noted his funk. “No. I can handle it.”

The procedure was direct: release the slip-tackle which linked them to the anchor cable, fire the blast bolts which freed the command gondola from the carrier, blow the tanks and ride the gondola to the surface. Once on the surface, the gondola would stabilize automatically. They could fire their radiosonde then and set their locator beacon. From there, it was a matter of waiting out the arrival of a relief LTA.

The sense of failure was large in Thomas as he began the escape procedure. They had barely started the communications routine . . . and the plan had been a good one.

The kelp could’ve answered.

They all felt the jolt of the blast bolts. The gondola began to lift from the split carrier.
Rising out of it like a pearl from an oyster,
Thomas thought.

As they lifted, the kelp lights once more came into view through the open areas of the plaz walls.

Waela stared out at the winking lights. They pulsed and glowed in spasmodic bursts which sparked a memory just at the edge of awareness.

Where have I seen that before?

It was so familiar! Lights almost all green and purple winking at her . . .

Where? I was only down in the . . .

The memory returned in a rush and she spoke without thinking.

“This is just like the other time when I escaped. The kelp lights were very much like that.”

“Are you sure?” Thomas asked.

“I’m sure. I can still see them there—the kelp separating and opening a way to the surface for me.”

“Hylighters are born in the sea,” Panille said. “Maybe they think we’re a hylighter.”

“It may be,” Thomas said. And he thought:
Is that what we were supposed to see, Ship?

There was a certain elegant sense in the idea. Colony had copied the hylighters to give the LTAs free access to Pandora’s skies. Hylighters did not attack an LTA. Perhaps the kelp could be fooled in the same way. It would bear investigation. There were more important considerations of survival right now, however. Suspecting sabotage, he had to share that suspicion with his team.

“Nothing ordinary could have brought down that LTA,” he said.

Panille turned from looking out at the firefly lights of the kelp.

“Sabotage,” Thomas said. He produced the arguments.

“You don’t really believe that!” Waela protested.

Thomas shrugged. He stared out at the descending cables of kelp. The gondola was almost into the biologically active zone near the surface.

“You don’t,” she insisted.

“I do.”

He thought back through his conversation with Oakes. Had the man come out to inspect a sabotage device? He certainly had done nothing discernible. But there had been discrepancies in his responses—lapses.

Panille stared out through the gondola’s plaz walls at the enclosing cage of kelp. Illumination was increasing rapidly now. The surface dome of light expanded and expanded as they entered sun-washed waters. Swimming creatures darted out of their path and circled close. Dazzling rays of light shot through the enclosing kelp barrier. The flickering nodules dimmed and were gone. Within a few heartbeats, the gondola broke free on the surface.

Thomas activated the surface program as the gondola began to bob and turn in the currents of the lagoon, rising and settling on a low swell. The sky overhead was cloudless but a mass of hylighters could be seen downwind.

A sea anchor popped from its external package below them, spread its funnel shape and snubbed the capsule around. The plaz-filtered light of both suns filled the gondola with brilliant reflections.

Panille exhaled a long sigh, realized he had been holding his breath to see if they really had stabilized on the surface.

Sabotage?

Waela, too, thought about Thomas’ suspicions.
He had to be wrong!
A few remnants of the LTA bag drifted in the kelp leaves around the downwind edge of the lagoon. It was all consistent with a lightning strike.

In a cloudless sky?

Honesty would have to focus on the big discrepancy!

The hylighters, then?

Hylighters do not attack LTAs. You know that

Thomas armed the radiosonde, punched the firing key. There was a popping sound overhead and a red glow arced over them, swerved left and dove into the sea. Boiling orange smoke lifted from the water where it had gone and was whipped toward the mass of hylighters tacking across the downwind horizon.

They all saw the kelp leaves twist and lift in agitation where the radiosonde had gone.

Thomas nodded to himself.
A faulty radiosonde.

Waela freed herself from her seat restraints and reached for the release handle to the top hatch, but Panille grabbed her arm. “No! Wait.”

“What?” She twisted free of him.

It embarrassed her to touch him after that scene the previous nightside. She found her skin glowing a hot and velvety purple which she was unable to control.

“He’s right,” Thomas said. “Touch nothing yet.”

Thomas unlocked his own seat restraints, found the gondola’s toolkit and removed a unipry. With the unipry, he began removing the cover to the hatch mechanism. The cover came off with a snapping sound and fell to the deck below. They all saw the odd green package nested in the controls where it would be crushed by a lever when the hatch was undogged and opened. Thomas took nippers from the toolkit and released the green package. He handled it gently.

Very amateur work
, he thought, recalling the training which his Voidship crew had undergone in detecting and defusing dangerous devices. Ship did much better than this even before it was Ship. That had been good training and necessary. There had been no telling how a rogue Voidship might attack its umbilicus crew.

Did we create a rogue Voidship of more subtle powers?

The evidence of sabotage which he had seen thus far did not feel like Ship. It reeked of Oakes . . . or Lewis.

“What’s that package?” Waela asked.

“My guess is it’s a poison vapor set to start fuming when we tried to undog the hatch,” Thomas said.

Handling it with caution in the bobbing gondola, Thomas set the package aside and returned his attention to the hatch controls. The system appeared to be free of other tampering. Slowly, gingerly, he undogged the hatch, folded down the screw handle and began turning it. The hatch lifted to expose the rim of gaskets and a sky unfiltered by the enclosing plaz.

When he had the hatch fully open, Thomas took the green package in one hand, climbed part way up the ladder and threw the package downwind. When it touched the water, lime-yellow smoke erupted from it, was caught by the wind and blown across the kelp-covered waves. The surface leaves writhed away from the smoke, curling and withering as he watched.

Waela clutched a stanchion for support and put one hand across her mouth.

“Who?”

“Oakes,” Thomas said.

“Why?” Panille asked. He found himself more fascinated than fearful at these developments. Ship could save them if it came to that.

“He may want no more than one Ceepee alive in Colony.”

“You’re a Ceepee?” Panille was surprised.

“Didn’t Waela tell you?” Thomas came back down the ladder.

“I . . .” She blushed a deep purple. “It slipped my mind.”

“Perhaps The Boss has his own plans for the kelp,” Panille said.

Thomas pounced on this. “What do you mean?”

Panille repeated what Hali Ekel had told him about the threat to exterminate the kelp.

“Why didn’t you tell us?” Waela demanded.

“I thought Hali might be mistaken and . . . the opportunity to tell you did not arise.”

“Everybody stay put,” Thomas said, “while I see if there are any more little surprises in here.”

He bent to his examination.

“You seem to know what you’re looking for,” Waela said.

“I’ve had some training in this.”

She found this a disturbing idea:
Thomas trained to locate sabotage?

Panille listened to them with only part of his attention. He released himself from his seat and looked up at the open hatch. There was a sweet smell to the salt-washed air blowing in the hatchway. He found the smell invigorating. Through an unblocked area beside his console, he could see the flock of hylighters tacking closer across the wind. The motions of the gondola, the smells—even the survival from the perils of the dive—all charged him with a sense of being intensely alive.

Thomas finished his examination.

“Nothing,” he said.

Waela said: “I still find it difficult to . . .”

“Believe it anyway,” Panille said. “There are things happening around Oakes that the rest of us are not supposed to learn.”

She was outraged. “Ship wouldn’t allow . . .”

“Hah!” Thomas grimaced. “Oakes may be right. Ship or the ship? How can we be sure?”

Such open blasphemy intrigued Panille. From another Ceepee, too! But it was the old philosophical question he had debated many times with Ship, merely cast in a more direct form. As he thought about this, Panille watched the approach of the hylighters, and now he pointed downwind.

“Look at those hylighters!”

Waela glanced over her shoulder. “A lot of them and big ones. What’re they doing?”

“Probably coming to investigate us,” Thomas said.

“They won’t get too close, do you think?”

Panille stared at the orange flock. They were alive, perhaps sentient. “Have they ever attacked?”

“There’s argument about that,” Waela said. “They use hydrogen for buoyancy, you know, very explosive if ignited. There have been incidents . . .”

“Lewis argues that they sacrifice themselves as living bombs,” Thomas said. “I think they’re just curious.”

“Could they wreck us?” Panille asked. He stared all around the horizon. No land in sight. He knew they had food and water in the compartments under their feet. Waela had inspected those before takeoff while he held a handlight.

“They could blacken the gondola’s skin a bit,” Thomas said. He spoke while working at his console. “I’ve activated the locator beacon, but there’s a lot of static on those frequencies. Radio appears to be working . . .”

“But we can’t punch past the interference without the ‘sonde,” Waela said. “We’re marooned.”

Panille, holding himself against the pitching of the gondola, climbed several steps of the ladder until his shoulders cleared the hatch. One glance showed the hylighters still working their way toward the gondola. He turned his attention to the ‘sonde-release package attached to the plaz beside the hatch.

“What’re you doing?” Thomas demanded.

“There’s a lot of the ‘sonde’s antenna wire still in its reel.”

Thomas moved to the foot of the ladder, peered up. “What’re you thinking?”

Panille stared at the hylighters, at the wind-whipped sea surface. He felt an unexpected freedom here, as though all of that time confined in Ship’s artificial environment had merely been preparation for this release. All of the holorecords, the history and the intense hours of study could not touch one blink of this reality. The preparations had, however, armed him with knowledge. He looked down at Thomas.

“A kite could lift our antenna high enough.”

“Kite?” Waela stared up through the plaz at him. Kites were carrion-eating birds.

Thomas, knowing the other meaning, looked thoughtful. “Do we have the material?”

“What are you talking about?” Waela demanded.

Thomas explained.

“Ohhh, festival flyers,” she said. She glanced around the gondola. “We have fabrics. What’re these?” She unsnapped a sealing strip from an instrument panel, flexed it. “Here’s material for the bracing.”

Panille, looking down at them, said: “Then let’s . . .” He broke off as a shadow passed over him.

They all looked up.

Two large hylighters passed directly over the gondola, some of their tendrils tucked up while others held large rocks in the water to steady them. The ballast tendrils of one hylighter rubbed across the gondola, rocking it sharply.