Undersea (34 page)

Jills entered some commands into the table surface, and a blue globe appeared on its surface.

“It might buy us a few more days, and a few days may make all the difference,” he continued. “If Ralla did buy us the month it would take for the
Pop
to get from the northern hemisphere to the s-pole and back up here, then we may have a chance. From what Awbee has told me, it’s possible by that time the grown berg will be big enough to stay put on its own. If it is, and we lose the Fountain, then there’s a chance, a tiny chance that the berg will start the new cap on its own. Not soon enough for any of us to see it, but maybe the children of whoever survives this fight will. It’s really just a few days that might make the difference. We need you to be those few days, Thom. And then, when the
Pop
makes its final push against us, we’ll all fight here, together. OK?”

“I’ve got some time before I need to depart, right?”

“No more than a day, I’d hope.”

“Then consider me off your clock for that time. Something’s bugging me about that transmission, and I think Mrakas heard it too. He just died before he could tell anyone what it was. If I can’t figure it out by the time I need to leave, then so be it. But if I’m right, if Mrakas was right, and she’s alive, then we owe her—
I
owe her—something.”

“Thom. If that ship gets within half a hemisphere of the Fountain, we’re going to do everything we can do blow it out of the sea. You understand that, right? It doesn’t matter if she’s alive; there is nothing we can do.”

“A day,” Thom replied, and left without waiting for approval.

It took only three hours. Thom found Koin in his workshop, teasing a piece of carbonweave with pliers and a torch into some particular shape. He had noticed Thom’s entrance, but said nothing. Thom waited patiently for him to finish. After several moments, the carbonweave, blackened from the constant heat, bent how Koin wanted it, and the tech seemed pleased.

“What can I do for you, Thom? Sorry… Commander?”

“I’m not here on official ship business, so if you have something important to do, please don’t let me keep you from it.”

“Well, that’s just polite of you to say. Don’t worry about me. I pretty much live in here now. And with the production ramped up on the, um,
project
?”

“Project is fine.”

“…I actually don’t have a lot to do. Most of the hard work is being done upstairs by the industry boys. I’m playing around with a new kind of ablative armor for the hull. We’d need a lot more carbonweave than we have now, but it’s something anyway. What can I do for you?”

Thom filled him in on the audio cast, and his and Mrakas’s feeling that something wasn’t right. He told him of Mrakas dying. The tech seemed upset.

“That’s too bad. Mrakas Gattley was a good man. Though, I guess we’ve all been expecting this for a while now. They couldn’t exactly keep his health a secret when he’d be walking the halls. I just wish I could have done something for him. But, you know, I’m good at things, not people. People’s a different department,” he said with a forced smile. “Let’s hear this audio.”

Thom keyed into console on the table, and within a few moments the audio filled the lab. When it was finished, Koin played it again, this time leaning back in his chair, pondering.

“Well, I can’t say for sure, but you guys have a sharp set of ears.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, there’s something missing, though I can’t be positive.”

“What’s missing? Seriously, it just sounded off to me, and I don’t know why. If Mr. Gattley did, it died with him.”

“Listen to it again.”

Koin selected the gunshot portion using the console. The audio ran from the gunshot to when Oppai started speaking, then looped back. It played several times before Koin stopped it again. Thom still had a blank look on his face.

“Listen to the other sounds in the background. All the equipment hum? I’d bet a week’s pay they were on the bridge. Ours sounds exactly the same. The only other place that would sound like that would be the mainframe room, and I can’t think of why they’d be in there. I’ve never even been to ours, and I’m a tech. So if their bridge sounds like ours, how much would you assume its consoles and metal and all sorts of other official looking things are pretty much the same?”

“When I was on the
Pop
it sure didn’t seem like they had the resources to change much in the looks department.”

“Good. And they were standing close, right? You can hear her struggle as they bring her towards the mic. You can hear her voice as she gets pulled away from wherever the microphone was. Maybe on his head, or held in his hand. So we hear the gunshot, and then...”

“Him speaking.” It took a moment, but understanding swept across his face. “Just his voice.”

“Exactly. If they were that close, why can’t you hear her slump to the ground. Sorry, that’s morbid. But really? You can hear them roughing her up, why not her hitting the deck after being shot? Are the guards really still holding her? And why no bullet sound? It was obvious it was a projectile weapon from the sound. We would have heard the bullet, after it easily passed through her, hit something on the other side. But that’s not the most interesting part,” Koin said, a smile edging up the corners of his mouth. “Listen towards the end.”

He cued up the last few sentences of the cast. Oppai was rambling about vengeance. Using the console, Koin tweaked the audio. Oppai’s voice became muffled, muted. The background noise became louder. It was unmistakable.

“She’s still fighting them,” Thom said, convinced.

“That sure sounds like the exact same angry struggle from the first part. If the audio continued, I bet we would have heard her make some sort of noise. I bet that’s why it ends where it does. Like I said, I can’t be positive. There are a lot of unknowns and assumptions here. But without proof otherwise, I don’t see why it’s not possible that...”

“Ralla could still be alive.”

Back in her cell, Ralla did the best she could to sleep. Her ears rang from the noise of the gunshot, and her jaw hurt where Oppai had crushed it against the table. Both wrists were bruised from where the guards had held her. She was, however, still alive and in better shape than the guard she had bitten.

Ralla wasn’t surprised when they came to get her for work the next day, though there hadn’t been breakfast or dinner.

She settled back into the grind of welding and fear. But when the time came for the guards to take them back to their respective sleeping areas, they didn’t come. Instead the “B” team arrived, half her team’s number and even more emaciated. While all were tired, they couldn’t stop working. The water level was rising too quickly. Worse, the engines were driving hard, making it too loud to hear and nearly too hot to breathe.

The strain on the hull torqued their wall of death, and new leaks and cracks were forming by the second. Ralla toiled into the night with the combined and exhausted crews. It didn’t occur to her until hours later that everyone she knew had every reason to believe she was dead. She thought of Thom, of her father, her mother, even Cern. Her fellow laborers seemed resigned to work and die here. But in the tiny parts of her brain not occupied by stress, fear, exhaustion, and the task at hand, she was now more resigned than ever to escape, by any means necessary. This room was a bad place to die. She’d rather die trying to escape. What did it matter if she did? She was already dead.

VII

They were eight days out by the time they reached their first target. It was a huge farming dome, one of the first casualties of the
Pop
’s aggression. Nearly the size of the Garden itself, the low, wide dome glowed in the darkness from much distance.

The new
Reap
fleet was a fraction of the size of its former self: a single corvette, four torpedo subs, but more than a dozen small attack subs. The corvette had been modified with mounting harnesses so the attack sub pilots wouldn’t have to queue up for the
Reap
’s own tiny docking bay to land and use the facilities.

As a fleet, they didn’t bother with their usual caution as they approached the dome. It was clear there were no other ships around, so they dropped in from the layer above and descended to the dome en masse. There was no defense. After getting inside, Soli signaled immediately.

“Commander, I think you should come down here.”

“What’s the situation, Soli?”

“Thom...”

It wasn’t just hearing his first name, it was the tone in Soli’s voice that sent a chill up Thom’s spine.

“OK, I’m headed down.”

There were two unarmed scout subs docked in the
Reap
’s bay. They were highly modified versions of the sub Thom and Ralla had stolen months earlier. The descent was quick, as was the docking. Other than the mechanicals of the lock, there was silence as the door cycled open. The looks on the faces of the marines that greeted him were ominous. So was the smell. The thick, humid stench hit him with almost physical force. He vomited immediately, and clearly wasn’t the first.

The dome was roughly circular, with a pinched-out section at the front for the main lock, where Thom had entered. Unlike most of the domes he’d seen, this one had a very low ceiling, heavily braced and covered with lights. It was overly bright. Used to the subdued lighting on the sub, Thom squinted uncomfortably. The floor was nearly all farming space, with squat, one-story buildings in the center for the small community that resided here. Embedded in the floor were massive scrubbers to keep the oxygen/carbon dioxide mixture correct for plant and planter. Designed to work for a small group of farmers and all the crops they tended, they hadn’t worked for the opposite. Everywhere were corpses. Thousands.

On every pathway through and around the divided farming zones were bodies. Most were huddled together. Others slumped across the grates of the scrubbers in a misguided last attempt to cling to life. Large swaths of crops had been torn up to give all the refugees places to stay. It seemed at some point the equilibrium had been broken. No one had thought, or perhaps known how, to reset the scrubbers. Without the constant conversion of oxygen from the plants, and the scrubbers designed to supply mostly carbon dioxide, asphyxiation was inevitable.

Thom didn’t know how long ago the place had died, but it was long enough that the bodies hadn’t decomposed too badly, yet enough time had passed for the air to somewhat get back to normal. A visibly disturbed Soli looked at Thom for orders.

“Do a sweep, make sure there aren’t any survivors holed up somewhere. Then get back to the ship.”

“What happened?” Soli asked rhetorically. Thom shook his head, staring out at the gruesome scene.

He didn’t tell the squad their next target was also a farming dome, and he feared it wouldn’t be any different.

Sometime in the early hours of the second straight day of working, they had sealed enough of the major leaks to be able to rest. They were led back to their berths, and Ralla collapsed onto her cot entering a deep, dreamless sleep.

She did little over the next several days other than eat and sleep. Her body was slow to recover, and with little else to do, sleep was the best option. After a week, she was finally brought back to the engine room, and oddly, didn’t fear it. She couldn’t decide if her strength was returning or she simply couldn’t be beaten down any more. She leaned toward strength, because in her free time she had devised a plan for escape.

Ralla was the last to arrive, and in the noise of the room, the crew greeted one another in the sullen sign language they seemed to have invented. New materials lay on the floor for the team to use to reinforce the walls, the outer hull layer seemingly secure for now. This would be a big step. For the first time they would be laboring to get ahead of the problem instead of continually playing catch up. Ralla knew that in a week or so, the ship would be starting a search pattern, looking for a Fountain that wasn’t there. The walls would be under tremendous stress at that point. With no way to communicate all of this to her crewmates, she just pushed on with the work. She wondered if she’d have another run in with Oppai once he figured out she had lied to him.

No one noticed when she sliced off a sliver of metal from a sheet, and slid it into her pocket.

The next dome was better. There had been a shortage of food, but few deaths. They hadn’t pulled up the crops any more than they had to. The air was stale, but livable. None of techs on the
Uni
or in the dome were alive when the scrubbers were originally built, but as a group they figured out how to reset them. When the fresh, clean air started to circulate, the roughly 4,000 people in the dome cheered. Later, when Soli and his marines tried to leave, there was a small riot. The meager rations they passed out did little to assuage the tide. They pledged to send more food when they could, and promised they wouldn’t forget the refugees. Both potentially hollow promises.

After several days of wrangling, Thom was able to convince the Council to divert two heavy transports to shuttle food to this dome and any others that contained survivors. The longcomm process was infuriating, each response taking over an hour to receive and decode.

The second
Reap
fleet zigzagged its way down the world, stopping at dome after dome, each overpopulated with the refugees of the militarized
Pop
. Thousands and thousands of inhabitants, stranded in domes never meant to hold large numbers of people. They found two more domes that were morgues, two others where food riots had taken the lives of hundreds.

Oddly, none believed they were from the
Uni
. All seemed to feel that the war had gotten so bad that their Governor had had no choice but to leave them behind. Or that the evil people on the
Uni
had destroyed the transports that surely would have come. There were dozens of variations of “
Uni
bad,
Pop
good.” The marines’ uniforms wore no insignia, which was perhaps for the best. No doubt, many of the refugees would have reacted differently faced with a blatant symbol of their enemy. Thom instructed Soli to have his men mention their home causally, judge the response, and then follow up if necessary. They encountered little violence, more exhausted disbelief.