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Storyworks Posse

# Storm Ring

Zero Point Light 1

Copyright 2014 Stephen J. Carter

Smashwords Edition

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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**Table of Contents**

1 | Landfall

2 | Levrok's Compound

3 | Rainer

4 | Flight

5 | Lightsphere

6 | Storm Ring

7 | Parting

8 | Watyra

9 | The Column

10 | Tulvar

Review

About the Author

Other Titles

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Preview: New Siqdor
1 | Landfall

The convoy of three shuttles drifted along at factor 2 FTL. All three needed several months in a maintenance facility, and only one had any crew on board – the Arcturus-4.

The Arc-4 had entered the local star system several months earlier. It had become little more than a silent sentinel orbiting the planet below once every thirty-three hours. The ship's life support systems were operating in _stasis hibernation_ , barely enough to keep the bodies in its care alive. In fact atrophy had claimed much of each body's systems, yet not irretrievably so. The six in stasis had a few weeks until they passed the point of no return.

The ship's thousands of other internal systems were no less busy. The ship's computer, Trinh, had decided it was time to wake her human cargo. Tentacles of phosphorescence writhed along the surface of the six pods, which technically were not material in constitution, nor did they have a stable, continuous shape. Each pod was an energy field with a body suspended inside. Each individual thus housed was not unlike each enveloping pod, a body not fully _there_ , not quite possessing the integrity of matter. Waking up was more than reaching consciousness; each person in effect re-manifested into material form. Briefly intensifying its symbiosis with its human guest, the phosphorescence of the pod dilated and faded. The pod itself seemed to vanish into the body manifesting under its care. One of the six empty pallets was now replaced by an opaque, cocoon-like bubble.

When Mick's increased metabolism breached stasis, his bubble receded. He stretched and awkwardly sat up. Reaching back he picked up a robe from an inset wall shelf. As he struggled to pull it on he glanced at the five remaining, _empty_ pallets. A miniature electrical storm was visible through the screen of Turok's bubble – his friend would join him soon. The others had not yet begun. He stood up unsteadily.

"Good to have you back, Mick," the ship's computer said.

"Thanks, Trinh."

"How do you feel?"

"I've felt better." He walked towards the holo-monitor. "It's good to be back."

"Prepare yourself, Mick," Trinh said cryptically.

"Why?" he asked, as a projection of their region of space took form around him, the lights in the cabin simultaneously dimming. Mick looked at the sun on the event horizon, perspective adjusted for its proximity. He turned and looked into several points of the digital 3D compass. His brow creased in confusion.

"Amplify," he said.

Three star clusters in two of the densest regions of deep space dissolved, then leapt nearer. Mick rubbed his eyes.

"What the–" he said.

He walked closer to one of the brighter star systems. "It can't be."

"What can't be, Mick?" Turok said as he walked slowly into the holofield, his robe flapping as he tied it.

Mick was shaking his head. "You tell me."

The other hiberstasis crew members emerged from the alcove behind Turok, and stood outside the holofield. Carmen, who had changed into her ever-practical shorts and T-shirt, crossed to the wall monitor. Aleesha, immaculate in a tan sleeveless turtleneck, stood in the doorway. Bringing up the rear was Sorel, who stopped and leaned against the wall by the doorway.

They all watched, glancing nervously at each other, as Turok stood beside Mick near the projected star cluster. Turok shrugged and walked ahead into the cluster. He whistled. "Mick, this isn't where we're supposed to be."

"No, it's a different quadrant."

"How?" Turok asked.

"Explain, Trinh," Mick said.

"Our present location," the ship's computer said, "is a distance of 93.6 quadrants from our pre-hiberstasis location."

"Hey guys, don't mind us," Giorgi said as he entered the holofield.

Carmen activated the wall monitor, and a 2D image of the planet appeared. "Trinh, one question. Are we now looking at Ramses?"

"No," the computer answered.

Mick interrupted quietly, "How long were we in hiberstasis?"

"185 days."

"Six months? Come on, no way!" Turok objected.

"Tell us everything," Carmen asked, a touch of fear in her voice.

"After the incident on the _Surprise_ ," Trinh began, "my new subroutine prime became – seek a habitable planet."

The room fell silent.

"What incident?" Mick asked.

"The _Surprise_ came under attack. The six of you were already in hiberstasis for the excursion to Ramses. But after Ramses was impacted –"

The six survivors gave a collective gasp.

"What do you mean 'impacted'?" Carmen repeated.

"A force of unknown nature and origin," Trinh said, "struck Ramses, instantly causing a global tsunami that flooded 80% of the planet's exposed landmass."

"Nothing survived?" Carmen asked, in a barely audible voice.

"What about the _Surprise_ , and the convoy?" Turok added.

"Unknown. I'm sorry."

"Trinh, this force," Mick said, "... you must have some ... the fact you can identify it means you observed _something_."

"No, Mick. I observed a disturbance in space-time which seemed to approach Ramses just prior to the impact. I infer this disturbance was the force I referred to."

They kept trying to take it in.

Turok spoke brusquely. "Speculate from what you observed. Could this force have been a naturally-occurring event?"

The computer hesitated a moment. "Improbable."

"So it was very likely a weapon of some sort," Turok said.

"Yes, that's plausible. If I speculate beyond given parameters," she added, "its _behavior_ suggests it could be a life form."

Turok shook his head.

"Let's set that possibility aside for now," Mick said. "Trinh, for an observer in the nearest inhabited system, how would this event appear?"

"It would appear as a natural disaster."

"Like a large piece of space debris impacted the planet?"

"Yes, or a similar event."

Mick had walked out of the holofield and brought up a 2D file image of Ramses on the holoscreen. "Was anything missing in this disturbance? Was anything absent that should have been there?"

"Charged ions," the computer answered. "The disturbance was briefly empty of all ions."

"An ion hole in space-time?" Turok said.

"Yes. I surmise that is what caused our current neutronics malfunction."

Turok groaned. "We've lost neutronics?"

"Yes, it's rapidly degrading."

Trinh tasked an image of the planet they now approached, a corner inset in the Ramses image.

The room fell silent.

"I determined that this planet, Nebura, was the nearest. I brought us here."

"Trinh, let me ask again," Carmen said, still shocked by the implied fate of their convoy. "What are the ... odds ... that any of the convoy ships survived?"

"They were not in the immediate vicinity of Ramses. It's possible they survived." They could almost feel the shrug behind her words. "I must add, it disappeared from my sensors at the exact moment of impact. The probability of survival is low. I'm sorry, Carmen."

Sorel pushed away from the wall. "So you were cruising along towards Ramses, and slam!" he said, bringing his hands together in a loud clap. "Then you brought us here. Brilliant!"

"That is an accurate summary, Sorel," Trinh replied, immune to sarcasm.

"So there's nothing for us to return _to_."

Carmen whirled around. "Is that all you can say!"

"Deal with it," Sorel said under his breath.

"Look," Mick said. "The people on Ramses. It could be they had time to get off world safely. We don't know."

Turok nodded. "Let's not jump the gun."

"And we don't know what's happened to the convoy," Mick continued. "Until we know different, let's not assume the worst."

"When we left the mother ship," Trinh interrupted, "I attached two additional shuttles, Arcturus-5 and 6."

"Why attach two more shuttles?" Giorgi asked, puzzled.

"It increased our energy supply by 130%," the computer said.

"Well, that's good news," Mick said. "How much do we have?"

"At our current rate of consumption, it will be exhausted in 3.4 months."

Turok groaned.

"It is one reason I woke you," Trinh said.

Mick walked to the holo-array and touched the pad. The holofield dissolved and the lights came back up. Turok sat in one of the chairs by the elevator.

Trinh outlined their options. "You can return to the _Surprise_ 's last known location. Or –touch down on this planet, establish a base, and determine a way to secure a rescue. The data is incomplete, but Nebura is definitely G-class, habitable. It appears to have been settled almost three centuries ago."

"But not by the Alliance," Mick added.

"No."

"Not much of a choice," Giorgi said.

Mick considered the planet on the monitor. "We have a decision to make. There's enough fuel to get back."

"A one-way trip?" Sorel said. "I vote we take our chances here."

Carmen shook her head. "I vote we turn back. The others may need our help."

Mick turned to Aleesha and Giorgi.

Aleesha shrugged. "The _Surprise_ should be doing the rescuing, not us. I vote we sit tight here on this world. And wait."

"Giorgi?" Mick asked.

"Frankly, I look at that landfall," he said, "and it's a total blank to me. I vote we turn back. The _Surprise_ is probably looking for us. We'll likely meet them on the way back."

Turok spoke up. "Well, I can't wait to get off this bucket! I vote we set up base."

They all looked at Mick.

He was still looking at the planet. Turning away from the monitor, he faced the others. "Our first priority has to be our survival. I vote we establish a base on this planet."

_______________

Fine-tuning their orbital heading and uncoupling but not separating the two piggybacking shuttles had taken most of that day. Some of that time had been spent drawing up and revising a list of gear to take. They all knew this could very well turn out to be an extended stay on the planet. The other shuttles were shells, their energy stores depleted.

Arc-4 pulled away from the other shuttles to begin its descent to the greenish-blue surface below. The two drogued shuttles receded smoothly, and continued on their programmed orbit of Nebura against the infinite backdrop of deep space.

Trinh inserted the ship at the correct angle to the planet's atmosphere, and the Arc-4 rode the turbulence as the exosphere's density grew. A long thirty seconds later they were through. The ship's artificial gravity disengaged as the planet's pull increased. The ship leveled off at an altitude of thirty miles. They were searching Nebura's temperate regions for a relatively flat plateau, preferably one on the outskirts of a heavily-populated or built-up area, and if possible, near a large body of water linked to the surface water system – the oceans – that skirt the globe, much like Earth.

Mick turned off the opacity of selected panels out on the forward bulkhead. Although such real-space windows, which showed their progress above the planet, were technically inferior to the virtual viewing monitors, Mick preferred them. Land soon appeared on the horizon. The silence stretched out again as Trinh cruised lower, soon reaching an altitude of ten miles. As the Arc-4 swung over the coast they could more clearly make out Nebura's landscape.

"Correct me if I'm wrong," Turok said conversationally. "But isn't that a city?"

"Sure looks like it," Carmen agreed, "which makes no sense at all."

"No surface comm systems down there?" Turok asked.

"Nope, nada," Carmen replied. "I tried the full spectrum. Nothing."

"Maybe their power grid is down," Mick suggested.

"Even so, I should have got something. There was nothing on any bandwidth, not a whisper."

"A city equals people," Sorel said. "And people equal communications links. You must have jimmied it somehow."

Carmen addressed the computer. "Trinh, can you detect electronic activity anywhere on world?"

"Negative, Carmen."

Carmen gave Sorel a level stare. He shrugged and returned his attention to the window.

"Maybe there are no active comm systems," Giorgi said, "because nobody's left alive."

"Speculation is good, but that's morbid," Aleesha said.

The landscape rolled majestically by beneath them.

They all watched as Trinh banked Arc-4 in a slow turn, bringing them in over the coast towards a river's estuary north of the city. A plateau appeared as they descended through low-lying clouds.

"Anyone mind if I pilot her down?" Mick asked the others.

"Take us in, Mick," Turok said.

______________

The Arc-4 sat perched in the rough center of the plateau, a shelf that leveled off half-way up a gently sloping hill. Mick had brought them in without incident.

They were all standing at the port hatch, small backpacks slung on their backs.

"Everyone ready?" Mick asked.

They all nodded. "Is this world ready for us?" Turok said.

"Do it, Mick," Carmen said.

The hatch irised open, and they stepped into the airlock. The outer hatch opened after the inner one closed, and they walked out into the midday glare. Mick stepped out and paused, letting the others walk ahead. He looked affectionately at the exterior of the shuttle. He thoughtfully palmed the hatchway icon's default code. As he walked away the ship settled back, its portals went opaque, and its unfettered exterior evanesced behind an energy field. The Arc-4 looked like an elongated egg resting on the stubble grass of the plateau.

Turok had quickly covered the twenty yards to the crest overlooking the plateau's northern slope. The city was to the south, on the other side of the hill. Turok called from the crest. Mick turned and strode towards the others. They faced out over the land that fell gently away to the ocean. Mick followed their gaze, but saw nothing out of the ordinary.

"Do you see it?" Turok asked after a moment.

"See what?"

"Just keep looking."

Mick glanced at the others, then turned back to the horizon. "Looks peaceful," he said.

"Yeah, you could say that," Sorel said.

Mick shrugged. "What am I looking for?"

"The ocean, Mick," Turok said.

Mick's eyes scanned the coast, then stopped. "What –"

"What do you make of it?"

"It's like looking at one big holofield – on _pause_."

Turok nodded. "No wind." He tilted his head. "No sound, no taste. No nothing."

"And no waves," Carmen added.

The ocean was like a sheet of tinted glass extending as far as the eye could see. They exhaled slowly at the strangeness of it.

"So much for this being a normal G-class planet," Giorgi complained.

Carmen knelt down and ran her hand across the surface of the grass. She pulled out a clump, exposing the soil. Mick leaned down beside her. Taking up a handful of the soil he held it a few inches from his face. Carmen dipped her finger in the soil in Mick's hand, then inclined her head slightly and tasted it.

"Seems normal enough," Carmen said.

"So the water is probably okay," Turok added.

"But obviously it's not," Aleesha said impatiently, still looking at the horizon over the ocean.

Mick shrugged. "It's like this world's climate metabolism has somehow slowed down."

"Or this could just be a season here," Turok said. "A weird time of the year when everything kicks back ..."

Rolling her eyes Carmen dusted off her hands and stood. "Well, I'm stumped."

"Turok could be right. Maybe this is how it's always been here," Giorgi said.

Sorel stretched his arms back. "I don't see how any of it matters now."

"Listen," Turok said suddenly, cocking his head to one side.

What sounded like maser fire suddenly echoed from the other side of the hill. The sound had a metallic, shallow quality in the late afternoon stillness.

"We have company," Turok said quietly.

"Come on," Mick said, breaking into a jog back towards where the Arc-4 sat perched in the grass.

Turok pulled up alongside Mick. The others followed.

The plateau didn't extend around the south side of the hill, but the slope wasn't steep, so they crossed the hillside's southern incline on a diagonal, running hunched over. A deep bass growling came from the street below them, a sound like feral dogs cornering their prey. The six observers ducked into a hollow behind a scree on the lower bank of the hillside and lay on the ground. They could just see over the rim.

The commotion came from an area of tall buildings about half a mile away in what appeared to be the city's central district. In the courtyard of the nearest building about twenty people were standing in a rough circle. Ten dogs roamed about five yards outside the circle, leaping up, threatening, but as yet not attacking. Suddenly one dog came at them fast – impossibly fast – springing forward, forelegs outstretched. Three of the people shot at the same instant, and a hole appeared in the dog's side. Its momentum carried the dog, and its body landed on one of the smaller figures, a youth of slight build. The masers fired again, and two more of the dogs were lifted off the pavement to fall in a drooping tangle of entrails and blood. The rest of the dogs hung back for a moment, and seemed about to surge forward again, but then turned and ran. Not one of the dogs had made any sound during the attack. The people had also remained silent throughout.

Two of the boys walked forward and lifted the dead dog off the adolescent. They helped him up, and he staggered along between them as the others turned and calmly started walking toward one of the buildings.

"What the hell was that?" Sorel whispered.

Turok shook his head. "I'm in no hurry to go down and meet the locals."

"Why is it so quiet?" Giorgi asked. "The only sound I heard was the masers."

"More company," Mick whispered. He had turned around, and was looking up and to the side, towards the coast.

The others turned and stared. Eight figures were walking in single file along the hill's ridge. They dipped down and vanished over the other side, towards the Arc-4.

"This place is getting weirder by the minute," Carmen said.

Mick half-crouched. "Come on, but stay out of sight." They ran back the way they came, and soon reached the eastern edge of the hill where it leveled off on the plateau.

Mick cautiously came around to within sight of the shuttle, and crawled the last few yards. The eight figures, males about their age, were about 20 yards from the ship, walking towards it. The Arc-4 was secure.

Mick motioned for the others to pull back, and scrambled back to them.

"It's probably best if we just leave for now," he said softly. "We can come back later."

"We might as well make our way down into the city," Carmen suggested.

"And the dogs?" Aleesha asked.

"Think happy thoughts, Aleesha," Carmen said.

Turok had walked back further than the others from the embankment. After approaching a clump of bushes he suddenly reached in and pulled out a gangling tangle of arms and legs. Turok held the stranger's arms behind his back.

Mick looked inquisitively at Turok.

"First contact," Sorel said drily.

"He's been shadowing us for a while now," Turok said.

The youth looked up and saw the eight figures suddenly appear on the crest of the hill above them – a look of fear crossed his face. Their own movement must have caught the attention of the eight, who stopped dead and stared down at them. As the figures broke into a sudden run along the crest the adolescent's struggles acquired a renewed urgency. Any moment the figures would veer down and cross the hillside to intercept them.

"Come on, down this side," Mick said.

Turok shrugged and released his captive, who tore off at a diagonal to the direction Mick had indicated. They hesitated, and Turok gestured after the fleeing youth. "Follow him?"

"Yeah," Mick nodded, and they sprinted after him. The eight had veered down from the crest. Mick and Turok surged forward, Carmen and the others a few steps behind. Carmen turned and saw Giorgi not far in the rear. They piled down a set of concrete stairs set into the side of the hillside. The nearest tallish building was scarcely a quarter-mile away, down one street and half a block over. Its windows all along the ground floor had been shattered.

Turok nodded to the building, "There?"

Mick nodded.

"That hellion can run!" Turok said admiringly, grinning.

Their guide was setting quite a pace. As they clambered down into the street they heard their pursuers behind them hitting the stairs. Carmen turned again and saw Giorgi stumble on the stairs. He fell hard, but staggered up quickly. In a matter of seconds the eight pursuers surged around him, two of them pinioned his arms behind his back.

Carmen knew it was too late to turn back to help, but she hesitated. The others were twenty feet ahead of her, pelting down the street's first block. Tears appearing in her eyes she reluctantly tore herself away and set off after the others, giving no heed to the empty lots and nondescript two-storey buildings she passed.

The others up ahead of her cleared the corner and caught sight of their guide as he ran past the building that Mick had pointed to. They slowed as they reached the building – Turok pointed as the adolescent disappeared inside another building about the same height as theirs but lacking ground floor windows. Carmen ran up and joined them.

"They got Giorgi!" she said, her voice breaking.

"But he was right behind us," Mick said.

"I know," she replied. "He didn't make it past the stairs."

Turok glanced back as a pack of dogs cleared the corner. Their eight pursuers were nowhere to be seen. "Can we talk about this later!" Turok said quickly.

They set off again when Mick gestured grimly to the building their guide had vanished into. Within seconds Carmen and the others went pounding in through the doorway behind Turok and Mick. Sorel leaned over with his hands on his knees, gasping. The others stood, their chests heaving. The youth was standing at the side opposite the door, looking oddly composed, only mildly winded. He reached up and depressed a switch on the wall that had been jury-rigged below the lobby's electrical panel. They watched, astonished, as steel blinds clattered down over the entrance. The building looked to be effectively sealed, at least on this floor, unless there was another entrance in the rear. They heard the arrival of the silent dogs outside.

Their guide turned and started up the fire stairs. Turok followed without a word, the others falling in behind. The building had four floors. The adolescent climbed to the third and exited into the elevator lobby. He turned down the corridor and waited on the far side of a heavy steel fire-door that stood ajar. Motioning for them to join him, he hit another jury-rigged switch, this one set next to a fire-hose panel. The fire-door swung slowly closed with an odd suction sound and a series of clicks. He turned his expressionless face on them, nodded and walked away. He turned in at an open doorway about half-way down the hall.

Mick looked at the others, and shrugged. Sorel grabbed Mick's sleeve, "Exactly why did we follow this guy? It could be a trap."

Their guide's head loomed out of the doorway and nodded once in their direction.

Turok smiled, and walked up the corridor towards the doorway. Mick and the others fell in behind, Sorel pulling up the rear. The youth ushered them in and activated an energy field, shielding the door. At the sound of their entry a young man walked in from an adjoining room, maybe a couple years older than their guide.

"Seamus, what is this?" the second one asked.

"Strangers. They were being chased by Levrok's men."

"And you followed Seamus here," the older one said flatly, turning to Mick and the others.

"Yes. Uh–we're grateful," Mick said.

The young man shrugged. "I am Joel," he said, coming forward. He shook hands all around. "This building and room are secure." Turning to Seamus, he said, "Franklin was right."

"Franklin?" Mick asked.

"An old friend," Joel replied. "And a scientist. He has helped us survive."

"He's being held by Levrok," Seamus added.

Their two hosts moved to one side and sat on the floor. Mick and the others followed suit. Turok stayed by the window, listening.

"Who's this Levrok?" Carmen asked when they were settled.

Joel looked across at them. "A man with big plans," he said, looking out the window. It was early evening. "The _mutes_ outside will leave eventually. All we can do is wait."

"Mutes?" Mick asked.

"Partial-synth mutants, posted here by Levrok's men."

"Posted ... why?"

"To prevent you from following them."

"So the men will return," Aleesha said.

Joel shook his head. "Levrok must know your ship arrived. How could he _not_?" He shrugged sympathetically. "He probably sent his men to bring one of you in – to question."

Mick looked up and caught Turok's eye.

"Is Giorgi in danger?" Carmen asked.

Joel turned and looked at Seamus.

"Well?" Mick asked, an edge in his voice.

Seamus leaned forward. "Your friend is probably safe enough, for now. Levrok hasn't harmed anyone so far. But he's getting–"

"Unpredictable," Joel interjected. "More so with each week the _stilling_ advances."

"The stilling?" Mick asked.

Joel gestured out the window to the early evening dusk beyond. "You must have noticed?"

Turok spoke from the window. "We did. The ocean especially."

"That surreal calmness," Joel said quietly. "It comes and goes. Each time it deepens, lasts longer."

Seamus had stretched out beside Joel, and lay his head on his folded arms. Joel glanced down at his younger friend, and then leaned toward his guests. "Tomorrow you can come to our base. It's unfortunate you can't speak with Franklin. He could tell you more."

Mick nodded. "Thanks."

Joel glanced at them a last time, as if deciding it was safe, and closed his eyes.

Carmen looked at the others, and whispered, "Let them sleep."

Mick nodded and stood up. He joined Turok by the window, which looked out over the dark street they had entered from.

"Anything?" Mick asked.

Turok shook his head. "I can't see them," he said. "But they're so quiet, I wouldn't want to risk it."

"They chased us like we were _prey_ ," Aleesha said, shivering.

"The mutes or the men?" Turok said.

"Both."

Turok nodded towards Seamus. "Lucky for us we followed him."

Mick leaned his hand against the energy shield blocking the window. "Tomorrow we'll talk with this Levrok. Let's hope he listens to reason."

"Why wouldn't he?" Aleesha said. "Once he sees we pose no threat."

Turok looked sidelong at Mick. They said nothing.

2 | Levrok's Compound

In the morning all was quiet when they emerged from the front of the building.

"I know where there are some scooters," Seamus said casually.

Turok turned. "Things are looking up."

Joel quickly led the way across the street and down an alley, the others following. He entered a warehouse through a side door, and passed thousands of empty pallets stacked within a scaffolding of ceiling-high alloy girders along the far wall. They exited the building at the rear and immediately entered another, lower structure – this one filled with moldering boxes stacked within a similar assembly of grey plastic tubes. The shelves sagged; a thick coat of dust covered everything.

Emerging into bright sunlight Mick thought he could smell the sea. That puzzled him for a moment, then it clicked – there had been no smells since leaving the ship. 'Part of this strange climate,' he thought idly.

They turned up yet another alley, which spilled out into a street of much taller buildings. Joel stopped at a light metal door; it swung inwards when he pushed it. He stepped inside and latched the door open. Turok followed him in, and Mick heard him whistle. Stepping into the gloomy room Mick saw rows of low-slung scooters parked neatly along all four walls.

"Pick any machine," Joel said. "I disabled their security systems months ago."

Turok was walking down the nearest row, shaking his head in disbelief. "I never thought I'd get the chance to ride again." He stopped beside a midnight blue machine with tongues of orange flame painted on its side. "Hey, baby," he cooed.

"Just press the ignition switch on the right handlebar, near the grip," Joel explained.

Turok's midnight blue machine purred to life. In one fluid motion he swung his leg over, released its kickstand and powered it up. He drove it out the door seconds later and parked it on the street. Sorel and Aleesha were sitting on two machines, both bright white with one diagonal black stripe down their sides. They followed Turok's lead, though they had to manhandle their machines out into the aisle first. Mick chose a light green scooter with a sidecar. Joel nodded, and gave a thumbs up in approval.

Mick started his machine and drove it out onto the street.

"Training wheels, Mick?" Sorel asked.

"Yeah, and for storage," Mick explained, resting his hand on the sidecar. "We'll have stuff to carry."

"Our practical leader," Sorel said.

Mick ignored the taunt.

"Frankly, guys," Sorel added. "It we're stuck on this world, what _I_ want is a way to defend myself."

Mick and Turok exchanged a glance and nodded, conceding the point.

"Which way, Joel?" Turok asked.

Joel had driven his smaller scooter out onto the road, followed by Seamus on an identical machine. He nodded up the street between the towering buildings as Seamus moved off ahead. Joel swung his machine in an arc, and took off.

Turok grinned at the others, "Follow the hellions!" He gunned his machine once and stepped it into gear, moving off up the street. The others followed, Mick bringing up the rear. They turned onto a road that hugged the waterfront. His gaze wandering out over the shoreline, Mick noticed that the water was no longer as stationary as it had been the day before. There were waves, sluggish and small, like on a lake in the still moments before a spring storm.

They turned again, this time away from the sea, and passed more buildings. He made a quick examination of several ground floor lobbies. What made it spooky, he realized, was the absence of people everywhere. It made the city unreal, like he was riding through a dream. They turned onto a road next to an open field across which Mick could see the hill where they had landed. The upper outline of the Arc-4 was briefly visible. They came to the largest street they had seen so far, six lanes. They turned again, this time uphill until they reached what looked to Mick like a department store. The others parked.

Mick did a three-point turn and backed in. They looked at him quizzically.

"Good for a quick getaway," he joked.

Joel hurried through the open front doors, Carmen following.

"I'll stay out here," Sorel said.

Mick and Turok entered the building and moved immediately towards the motionless escalator that Joel and Carmen had walked up. They trotted through sections devoted to household effects, and could see the two ahead passing the neutronics counter. They caught up with them as they were turning onto a 2nd floor pedestrian walkway that connected the two buildings. They saw the bodies on the floor in front of a set of half-open double doors. The two mutes, their limbs splayed, lay just outside a security field. They hadn't been shot – the field had brought them down.

They moved ahead quietly as Joel went to a panel in the wall. He gestured to Seamus that the field was down, and Seamus slipped stealthily around the door. He called out for the others to join him. They found him standing motionless, looking down at a young man's body. The corpse was face down, a maser hole in his upper back. Joel brought over a light sheet from one of the beds and covered their friend as the others looked on.

Mick took in their surroundings quickly. The wide corridor was filled with furniture from the adjoining store – beds, tables, desks, chairs, computers, lamps. Both ends had security fields; the main entrance at the other end had also been physically barricaded.

Joel stepped over to a desk and sat down heavily.

"Levrok's people must have taken them," Seamus said, his voice cracking. He sat on the floor by the covered body.

Mick and Turok wandered away, moving among the mismatched pieces of furniture.

"Call me a jerk," Turok said quietly, "but this world is turning out to be trouble."

Mick nodded, and looked again at the flotsam of furniture. "Looks like ten or so people were here."

They walked to the far end, and saw that the intruders had managed to breach the security field there.

Joel walked over, his face set in a look of determination.

Mick looked up and nodded. "Let's go, Joel," he said.

"Where?"

"To get Giorgi and your people back."

The young man's eyes lit up.

"You know where they were taken?" Turok asked.

"Yes, the same place they're holding Franklin. But it's well defended."

"So?" Turok said. "We like a challenge."

"Defended with mutes."

Mick ran his hand along the surface of a table. "They killed those mutes yesterday without much problem."

"The ones at their compound are a lot worse than what you saw yesterday."

Carmen came up and gave them a questioning look.

"Look, I know a gun shop," Joel said suddenly. "We can suit up before we go."

Turok nodded with approval.

"Joel, can you draw us a map of this compound, the grounds?" Mick asked.

The young man nodded.

"While you're doing that I'll go to this gun shop," Turok said. "That is, if Joel can tell me where it is."

"Sure."

"Sorel should be happy," Mick added drily.

______________

Turok pulled up at a nondescript storefront followed by Sorel and Aleesha. It had no sign, and was graced with an alloy mesh that lay behind the disabled holodisplay.

He removed a loose brick above the wall-mounted mail slot, and reached in. His hand emerged with a flourish holding a key. The shop they walked into looked like it had been undisturbed for decades. Small animals' telltale tracks crisscrossed the dust on the floor and countertops. The shop's current visitors' footfall created dust clouds in the enclosed space. Empty shelves gaped on both sides of every aisle; shelf tags indicated they had once held the usual array of low-level masers, stun charges, and approved low-density pulse guns. There apparently wasn't a weapon left in the store.

Turok walked to the rear wall, as Joel had explained, and found two release latches concealed within the underside of the wall-mantel. A section of the wall swung aside to reveal a pitch-black interior – a set of stairs led down. Bowing towards Sorel and Aleesha he held out a hand towards the passageway.

Sorel crossed his arms. "After you," he said. Aleesha smiled.

Turok shrugged as he reached for another switch. Bright fluorescents flickered on and he started down the stairs.

"Funny guy," Sorel said.

Aleesha stepped through. When Sorel hesitated Turok walked through. Sorel looked back suspiciously towards the street, then he too started descending the stairs. When he was half-way down he heard the wall section above him re-seal, clicking into place. He swore, and was about to turn back.

Turok called out, "I just closed the door from down here. Come on down."

Sorel trudged loudly down the stairs.

Turok and Aleesha stood in front of a thick, round, transparent panel. They looked through into the room beyond. Modular shelves formed several wide aisles that extended back to a rear wall. On the shelves row after row of destructive hardware glinted and gleamed within the manufacturers' lightweight, transparent, vacuum-sealed bags.

"The _sanctum sanctorum_ ," Turok said.

He flicked another switch. The panel irised open. They stepped through into the low-ceilinged grey room.

Sorel scooped up one of the bags off the nearest shelf, and examined the maser rifle inside. "This one's been modified," he said.

Turok walked down the same aisle, glancing at the multiple sizes of semi- and fully-automatic masers and pulse guns. Aleesha stayed in the lateral row at the head of the aisles. She picked up one of the bags, surprised at its lightness. "This one has a _kill_ setting," she said.

Turok nodded. "Looks like they all do."

"So these are illegal?" Aleesha asked.

"On Earth, yeah," Sorel said with a laugh.

Using pulse or maser weapons to kill had been so successfully stigmatized centuries earlier that statutes against their use had been passed in most jurisdictions.

Sorel hefted a _Heckler and Koch EM Particle Beam Weapon System_ , better-known as an HK Maser Rifle, or simply a _maser_ , and slung it over his shoulder, cinching the strap on its acrylic bag.

"Let's take one each for all seven of us," Turok said, gesturing at the masers, "and better grab some palm masers and pulse pistols too." He looked around. "But what we really need ..." He set off down the aisle.

Sorel picked up more of the bags while Aleesha gathered up seven of the smaller pulse bags. She also scooped up a dozen disposable palm masers.

"Back here," Turok called out.

As the others trotted awkwardly down the aisle he lifted a gleaming black, ancient but lethal ballistic gun – a fully automatic, very compact, _FN_ sub-machine gun.

"It's a relic," Sorel said. "Leave it."

"No, it's exactly what we need," Turok said.

Sorel looked hard at Turok. "Why?"

Turok shrugged. "We don't know for sure. Mick thinks the slowing environment might affect the planet's EM field, and that might affect–"

"Conventional weapons," Aleesha said.

Turok nodded.

"Well, as of now," Sorel said, "I'm officially in charge of quality control." He activated the release seal on the bag, lifted out the maser, raised it and let off a burst. It left a discolored splatter on the ceiling.

"That proves nothing," Turok said.

"Looks fine to me," Sorel said, hefting the maser appreciatively. "Of course, a living target would tell us for sure."

"Safety it and stow it," Turok said.

"Oh?" Sorel asked.

"These weapons are for survival."

Sorel smiled, secured the rifle, and slung it over his shoulder.

Aleesha gestured to the ballistic gun Turok was still holding. "How many of those do you want?"

"Only a couple," Turok said with a smile. "I'll get the ammunition."

"Anything else?"

"One more thing." He ambled off towards an adjacent aisle.

A few minutes later the three emerged back into the upstairs front room. Turok activated the two switches and the missing wall section swung back in, sealing off the now-darkened stairs.

"Come on, let's go get Giorgi," Turok said.

______________

The five and their two guides stood in the street by the parked scooters, directly across from the park entrance. Seamus had insisted on riding shotgun behind Mick, the guns and gear stowed in the sidecar.

They had spent two hours at the mall sanctuary going over the holomaps of Levrok's swamp compound, considering and discarding options, before downloading the map into the optical display drives in their balaclava synth-helmets. Then another half-hour bled away putting on the protective beamsuits, a quarter-inch of liquefied titanium set between creosote prophylaxes of pressurized albumen, hyper-elastic, and virtually impregnable to any low-density beam weapon on the market. Seamus pulled two bags out of the sidecar and set them on the ground. In the larger were the maser rifles and side arms, and the smaller held the ballistics. The others walked over and retrieved a maser each. Turok strapped one of the 14-inch submachine guns in a back-holster, and over that slung a compact, cylinder-shaped device. Finally he picked up one of the rifles to carry.

"It's just a city park," Carmen said.

"It _was_ a park," Joel said. "Now it's–" He shrugged, at a loss for words.

"They only have pulse rifles inside?" Mick asked.

"As far as we know," Seamus said.

"What about laser platforms?" Turok asked. "We saw a few of those at the gun shop. Real behemoths." He slipped on his helmet, which instantly expanded and molded to the shape of his skull, small ridges appearing over his ears.

"They could have platforms anywhere, all automatic," Joel said. "Mostly on the hammocks, but they could be in the water too. Stationary ones."

"Our remote motion sensors should help with that," Turok said, pointing at the convex bubble of his visor.

"The platforms we can handle," Mick said. "What I'm worried about–"

"The mutes," Aleesha said quickly.

Mick nodded.

"The mutes patrol," Joel said. "They attack without warning, and in total silence." He didn't need to say any more.

Seamus watched as Turok helped Joel pull on his helmet. The young Neburan opened out the strange piece of material and pulled it over his head like a diving mask. Seamus was surprised again to see it inflate into the same helmet-like shape as it had for the others. The faceplate section of the visor turned transparent as small whorls of green light crisscrossed its surface.

"How are the optics?" Turok asked.

Joel held up a thumb, grinning through the faceplate.

Seamus repeated the same steps, and Turok stepped over and tapped a knuckle on his faceplate. He reached around to activate the optics stud. Seamus nodded.

"Your suit will absorb any beam for about 3 seconds max," Turok explained. "After that it'll burn through. And once through it's so fast you won't even know you've been hit. But you'll know later."

Seamus shuddered.

"Play it safe and dive fast if you feel even a tickle on your suit," Turok added.

They set off in single file along the embankment then down into the water, and walked a short distance along its ridge. The pond, originally the central feature of the park, was now supplemented by all the flooded, low-lying areas which had transformed the area into what on Earth would be a tropical marsh. Seamus looked out across the bog that completely surrounded Levrok's compound, not visible from where they were. Mick took the lead. They turned down and walked slowly out into the cord grass bordering their side of the water. The deep verge was broken here and there by skeletal-shaped swamp trees, their aerial roots twisted up out of the ground.

"It likely won't be more than waist-deep in even the worst areas," Joel said over his shoulder, though the others weren't particularly reassured.

Mick stepped gingerly into the water, his foot sinking about two inches as mud rose up and enveloped his feet. He took a few tentative steps further out. It remained about the same depth.

Speaking from the rear, Turok had them spread out.

"Carmen, when should I start with the happy thoughts?" Aleesha joked half-heartedly.

"Now would be good."

The small troop moved forward in an elongated zigzag pattern, the top of the _Z_ narrower than the bottom. Mick and Joel had point. The lateral bottom, with Turok at the extreme open end, had Carmen and Aleesha walking side by side about two yards apart. The others walked on a diagonal connecting the top and bottom lateral lines.

Everything was quiet; the swamp seemed indifferent to their presence. After a quarter-mile Seamus started to relax. Just concentrating on setting one foot after another was calming, and he ignored the turbid brown water. The others, anything but calm, were constantly scanning their section of the zigzag.

Spearworts prowled the surface around Mick's waist, spreading their long stringy mass of thin leaves. To Seamus it looked like a watery graveyard, the long hair of submerged corpses reaching up to them. His vision went blurry, the sky tilted, and he felt Turok's hand on his shoulder.

"Steady on, Seamus," he said.

Seamus clenched his fists and breathed in deep to clear his head, and resumed walking. He thought he saw movement beneath a bog willow that rose up from a large hammock directly ahead. Twining supplejack swayed slightly within the drooping foliage of the tree, wrapped round and round the tendril-like branches that stooped into the brackish water. Seamus's eyes scanned the shoreline, trying to identify the movement. It must be the weight of the vines shifting, he decided.

"What is it, Seamus?" Turok said behind him.

Seamus realized he had stopped walking. "Nothing," he said, and started walking again.

The mute exploded from the middle of the bog willow's mass of drooping branches, as though part of the tree itself had suddenly come to life and launched itself at them. Two maser rifles swung up, their particle beams exploding through fur sent a stream of entrails out the mutant's other side. It fell into the water about a yard in front of Mick and sank slowly out of sight. It left a slick of blood on the surface.

Mick stood as if paralyzed. "Thanks, guys," he muttered.

Carmen cleared her throat. "Joel, how much further?" she asked.

He shrugged nervously. "We're about half-way. This park is eight miles long, and the compound is dead center."

Mick looked back at Turok, who pointed off towards the center of their section of the swamp. Mick nodded, and began moving away from the hammock. There was a similar landmass further along, and bigger.

As they trudged on Seamus looked down and realized he could see his feet – the water was getting clearer. The mud turned to pebbles that rolled underfoot, and a few yards further on these turned to larger rocks, slick and slippery. They slowed. Mick veered again, and they were past the hammock. They were nearing the bigger one, moving alongside it, but kept their distance. There was another bog willow near the water's edge, its trunk gripping tenaciously to a sheer side that fell into the water.

They brought up their maser rifles as they pulled alongside the tree. All was quiet except for the sound they made schlepping through the water. There was no movement around the tree. Turning around another bend took them past the second hammock. Suddenly they could see the compound. Maybe it was the distraction of the buildings, or they were just getting tired, for they _heard_ the mute before they saw it. It came from behind a large boulder and went straight for Aleesha and Carmen in the bottom line. Aleesha froze as the sleek form's shadow sailed across the water towards her. Turok's maser caught it behind the shoulder, burning a hole through its ribcage. Its momentum carried it on until it slammed against Aleesha's side, driving her down underwater. Turok was surging forward to help when another mutant sprang down the slope, its forelegs and paws landing on the same boulder, compressing and crouching, and then it was a blur shooting up and out, a stronger leap, faster. But they had had more warning. Mick and Sorel turned around and shot their masers simultaneously, yet inexplicably both had missed. Its shadow passed over Aleesha, its outstretched forepaws reaching for Carmen. She had seen the shadow and her rifle was up. Its barrel wavered as she slipped on the slick rocks. As she fell the trigger was depressed and the beam shot out, catching the mutant full in the chest and passing down the length of its body. Its fully-extended claws raked against her beamsuit leaving narrow grooves from her shoulder down past her solar plexus. Two of the claws managed to pierce the suit's outer dermis, driving in and down.

Carmen looked down in shock. A gash about four inches long blossomed red across her left upper chest, just below her shoulder.

Mick was at her side, ripping open one of the flat mediseal sheaths he retrieved from an inner pocket.

"Sorel, her suit!" Mick said.

Blood was pumping from the wound.

Turok had pulled the first mute's corpse off Aleesha, and she came up spluttering. As Sorel activated two of the release valves on Carmen's suit, its upper section opened. Mick placed the mediseal firmly over the three parallel incised wounds, surprised by their surgical straightness. The sheath expanded, and made a slight hissing sound as pressurized antisepsis rippled beneath the seal, molding itself to the contour of her traumatized upper body, and then became still. Mick reactivated the valves and her suit resealed itself, though he couldn't do anything about the tear in the suit.

Carmen seemed groggy, then came round. "What–?"

"Carmen, that was close," Mick said. "Can you keep going?"

She nodded, and brought her right arm up close to her chest. There was no pain, though she felt a little light-headed, but even that was passing. The auto-release of field-meds surging through her body numbed her right upper chest and shoulder. She could still move her shoulder, even flex her right hand, but there was little sensation in either. She wondered idly if this was how the world felt for a _synthetic_.

Mick had moved back. He and Joel still had point, and were pushing forward again. Seamus tried not to think what they would do if there were more attacks. They slogged on. It seemed to Seamus that they were moving slower now, but in fact it was the opposite. Believing they had seen the worst, the uncertainty that had dogged their progress began to lift.

The spearwort gave way to horsetails as they pulled alongside the last large hammock between them and hard ground, about fifty yards away.

Joel pointed ahead. "See those small black swamp trees," he said, as they all stopped.

The outline of gnarled black limbs didn't quite look right.

Mick peered ahead. "Yeah, except they aren't swamp trees, are they?"

"No. Those are laser platforms." Joel looked worried.

"What's the matter?" Mick asked.

"They've been set up in a ring. I didn't think they would have them that close to the compound."

"Remote or automatic?" Mick asked.

"Does it matter?" Sorel muttered.

"Automatic. See the sensors?" Then he smiled, "They aren't mobile, though. Their wheels are all gone."

"You still don't think we can trick their sensors?" Turok asked.

Joel shook his head. "We have to take them out."

"But how?" Mick said. "They'll rip into us once we're within range."

They broke formation, Turok advancing to stand beside Mick and Joel. Turok placed a hand on Joel's upper arm.

"If those turrets can't move, and we destroy two of them–" Turok said.

Joel nodded. "Yeah, then we could walk through." The three smiled.

They moved forward cautiously, uncertain what the range of the compound lasers was. They came parallel to a section of bulrushes that arced out from the compound's side, and Mick nodded towards the flat section of the shore. There at the base of several of the squat, ugly platforms grew a rich bank of swamp taro. "Those two, with the flowers. Let's hit those." He glanced at Turok.

Turok unslung the one explosive-charge weapon they had brought along. He unfolded the stock from the shoulder-rest, released the safety, raised the lightweight _Bofors_ _Anti-armor_ _Grenade_ _Launcher_ to his shoulder, and took aim. Seamus covered his ears, half-expecting to see the primitive weapon explode and tear away Turok's shoulder. But it gave a quick, sharp bark, and a fraction of a second later one of the platform turrets exploded.

"One down," Turok said.

Another two mutes appeared. They came from behind the building that reached closest to the water's edge, gathering speed as they sped forward.

Raising the Bofors Turok fired again, destroying the other turret. Mick had brought up his maser and sent a beam ripping through the throat of one of the mutants, its head flopping back and down as its front legs crashed into the ground. Sorel caught the other above and behind its sleek muzzle, a hole instantly opening out on the other side of its skull, as it too crashed into the hard shale-like sand.

They were kneeling, the water reaching to mid-chest. They looked in all directions. When the third came it was completely unexpected. It had crept forward in the water through the sedge and rushes. It bolted awkwardly, up and out, rising about a yard in the air, water dripping from its light pelt of luminous grey. It landed on Joel, its powerful jaws closing around the boy's throat, slicing through his suit. Joel thrashed once, tried to bring up his rifle, and then fell limp. The others stood paralyzed until a beam from Carmen's maser ripped through the beast's arched back, immediately severing its spine. The mutant's jaw shuddered open and Joel's body flopped down into the water, blood surging from his throat. His head, hanging at an unnatural angle, floated for a moment as the body sank, then it too sank to the shallow bottom.

They were all shaken out of their shock by the screaming, including Seamus. He was even more shocked when Turok slapped him hard, twice. The screams stopped. He shuddered, heaved in a ragged breath.

"—Do you hear me!" a voice shouted at him. He looked up. Turok was holding his shoulders, staring at him with a fixed intensity. "Seamus, we need you to walk now." Then Turok's hand was on his back, pushing him firmly forward. So he walked. He looked down and was surprised to see the maser in his hand – _the_ _maser_ _he_ _hadn't_ _fired_. As he stumbled forward, he glanced to his side and saw what remained of his friend. He bit down hard as the memories resurfaced, until his jaws hurt. He kept walking.

Turok had unzipped the upper half of Joel's suit, pulled the hood insert up over the boy's head and reactivated the front seal. The beamsuit looked more like a body-bag now. He held it about where Joel's upper chest was, and dragged it along as they moved forward. They were at the shore in moments. Turok pulled Joel's body up on the shore. Seamus looked again, and the numbness he felt was almost a relief.

The other platform lasers registered no reaction to their presence. They walked quickly between the two destroyed platforms.

Three connected buildings stood directly before them, an open-ended lopsided rectangle – the longer side almost reached the shore. As they walked past that building, avoiding the open end, the hard sand turned to a rough turf with clumps of cord grass. They crossed over behind the side building, placing themselves outside the inner courtyard. Seamus noticed that this close to the building the ground was a greener, healthier-looking grass, almost a typical park lawn.

This building and the ones beyond were as quiet as everything else. Seamus supposed they had originally been park administration buildings. He wondered if the numbness he felt was being extended to everything else, to these new friends, this swamp – everything.

They were nearing the rear, exterior, wrought-iron fire stairs that led to the roof that Joel had told them about. He insisted there was an old rooftop patio with a set of stairs down to the kitchen. They had been suspicious of such an easy entry. But Joel had explained that Levrok's slack security team didn't expect anyone would ever get past the swamp, the mutes, and the lasers, or come to that, even attempt it. They quickly clambered up the three flights of stairs and jumped down onto the flat roof. There was a low partition separating this end closer to where they had waded ashore. They stole a quick look over the partition, and the far end looked empty.

They crossed the roof towards a small closed-in patio that abutted the sidewall overlooking the courtyard. About half-way along this long building a dozen rusted, rickety tables and chairs filled the patio. At the back, set into the corner between the sidewall and the partition, was a dumbwaiter – a small service elevator. Beside that was the door to the stairs, which Mick discovered was locked. The dumbwaiter, however, was not. He opened the vertical panel to the box and saw it was operated by a hand pulley.

Mick turned to Seamus. "Are you up for it?"

"Guess so," he answered. "How much do you think it can take?"

"Fifty kilos, easy."

"And if the stairs are blocked? What if the lock on the other side can't be released?"

"And what if downstairs is the gateway to Hell," Turok said.

"You never know," Seamus said.

"It's probably just a dead bolt," Mick said.

"If it isn't," Turok said, "just knock on the box a couple times and we'll haul you back up."

Sorel had walked into the patio area, and was sitting with his back against the cooler.

"I'm small enough," Carmen said. "I'll go."

Mick and Turok exchanged a glance. "You sure?" Mick asked.

"Yeah," she said, holding her palm over the mediseal patch. "I won't be able to do much else for a while. But I _can_ do this."

Seamus looked over at the patio's low sidewall. "Somebody should keep a lookout." He walked over and crouched by an overturned dessert cart. Mick watched him, and hoped the boy would have the chance to get past his loss.

Mick turned, glancing back along the route they had just taken. "Somebody should watch the back stairs too."

"I'll go," Aleesha said, and she scrambled away.

"You realize they know you're coming," Sorel said to Carmen.

She turned to Mick and Turok. "I figure they've barricaded themselves in the far building, the one furthest from shore. Wouldn't make sense for them to have anybody here."

Mick nodded. "If you hear movement, don't go in. We'll haul you back up and find a different way."

Turok opened his beamsuit and reached into his chest-holster. "Take a palm maser," he said. "The rifles won't fit in the box." He handed her the sidearm.

"Relax, guys," she smiled, slipping the gun inside her suit. "You're making me nervous."

Mick lifted the panel and held it up as Carmen turned around, stepped up with a wince, and scooted in. She pulled her knees to her chin and scowled out at them.

"Lower away," she said.

When Mick moved to scroll down the box panel, she placed her hand over his. He smiled and left the panel open. He grabbed the thick cord and started lowering her down, hand over hand. Sorel and Aleesha stood up. Aleesha walked over to crouch behind Seamus.

"All quiet?" she asked.

The adolescent nodded. He wasn't comfortable being up here. He had the feeling it made them exposed, on the other hand he liked the clear line of sight it gave on the three quadrangle buildings.

Moments later Mick slowed his hand-over-hand movement. He stuck his head in the chute and heard a muffled scrabbling, followed by a soft thump.

He withdrew his head. "She's in," he said.

Sorel came over and leaned by the door to the stairs. They listened for the sound of her approach. The seconds ticked by. Mick leaned back into the chute, listening for telltale knocks. Nothing.

"What's she doing?" Sorel said.

Seamus called softly to them from his position by the sidewall. His expression looked tense as he beckoned at Mick and Turok. Mick couldn't leave the chute. He nodded at Turok quickly, who scrambled over. The two looked towards the far building. Four of Levrok's men had come out a side door and were moving along the wall towards the rear of their building.

"If there's a door at the far end of this building–" the youth shrugged, not taking his eyes off the two figures below.

"They could swing round behind us."

Seamus nodded – it was what he had feared. The four figures dashed across behind the far end of this building.

Turok swore, and quickly returned to the dumbwaiter.

Seamus glanced over as Turok and Mick fell into an animated exchange. He exhaled slowly and resumed his watch over the courtyard – all quiet now.

Mick leaned forward inside the dumbwaiter and looked down.

Sorel, crouching by the door, turned to Turok. "If they were barricaded safe inside the other building, just waiting for us to show up, then why send four guys over _here_?"

"A diversion," Turok said.

Mick was about to climb in and shimmy down the dumbwaiter cable when they heard a door below at the far end being forced open. Mick leaned back. "She's nowhere near the box down there." The sound of pulse fire exploded at the stairs door. It was a sound differently-pitched than the masers, a result of the different backwash the pulse produced.

Aleesha called out softly from her position by the stairs. "Two coming!"

They heard Carmen's voice through the door. "You guys there?"

Turok stepped over to the door. "Yeah. It sounds like they're breaking in down there!"

"Thanks for that bulletin, Turok."

Mick leaned close to the doorjamb. "Can you open it from there?" Sorel picked up his maser and moved off towards the stairs.

"No," her voice said. "Dead bolt and a remote lock."

"Then get back to the box, _now_!"

"Right." And she was gone.

Mick waved once at Seamus, motioning for him to stay where he was. He turned quickly to Turok. "Bring her up."

As Mick turned and dashed off towards the stairs he heard the impact of pulse beams against the side of the building. Sorel was crouched against the sidewall by an inner railing at the stairs, looking like he had no intention of going anywhere. Mick sped past him to the outer railing – flat alloy slats encased the stairs that ran down the side of the building. Mick glanced over and saw Aleesha standing motionless on the landing, her legs spread apart. She fired her palm maser between the slats. They heard a grunt and the sound of a body thumping against the steps as Mick took the steps down two at a time, staying close to the wall. He came up beside her. A pulse ripped past Aleesha's shoulder. Another grazed her upper arm, the beamsuit repelling it easily.

Mick put a hand on her shoulder. "Overlapping fire, then down one by one." She nodded.

She fired a couple bursts before Mick leapt down, touching three steps on his way to the next landing. He stopped and fired off two bursts as she came up, touched his shoulder and sped on to the next landing. A pulse caught Mick's leg for a full second as he dodged ahead past her. It felt like his leg had gone asleep, then a tingling sensation as the circulation returned. Mick favored that leg as Aleesha joined him, now only one flight of steps above ground.

Their sustained fire caused the second man to reconsider – he hastily retreated to ground level. A body lay on the ground one floor below them. The second man turned the corner at the end of the building.

"Follow him?" Aleesha asked.

Mick nodded, and made his way down the steps, limping slightly. She hit the ground a moment before him and crept beside the building as he stumbled along behind.

She moved quickly around the corner and down to the side door.

Mick drew up beside her. "There are two inside. More might be coming from the other building."

"I'll stay."

Mick smiled, nodding.

She watched as Mick stole across the threshold, his limp mostly gone.

3 | Rainer

Carmen turned away from the locked stairs door, moving down the steps silently and quickly despite her numb chest wound. She knew she had only moments before whoever had broken down the exterior door showed up in the center of the building. Half-way down the steps she froze.

She saw flakes of crystalline, synthetic bitumen on the floor below, and heard a telltale footfall. She steeled herself, descended a few more steps. Taking a breath she leapt off, careened off the opposite wall – veering right she launched herself through the door into the kitchen, the door swinging closed behind her. Pulses blasted the doorjamb above and behind her sending a plaster shower down into the corridor she had just left. She felt her chest wound seeping again, and a dull ache blossomed. In a half-crouch she pivoted sideways round the second corner, and was up and running for the large walk-in freezer half-way down the kitchen. She snagged its handle, pulling hard as she passed. Pulses slammed into the open door. She heard their steps and reached her hand out, firing a maser burst. She heard a body fall, followed by the sound of feet rushing up the corridor.

Not more of them!

She almost collapsed with relief when she heard her friends' maser beams.

"Hey guys," Carmen called weakly.

More pulses spat and sizzled against the freezer door. She left it ajar and moved on.

She backed away slowly, stepping sideways, her back against the freezer. She was looking for a service door into the dining room, which faced the courtyard. She slipped around a protrusion and skittered sideways against another cooler. Beams bit again into the freezer door, far behind. She heard a crash in the back corridor she had just passed through, turned and saw another of Levrok's men come barreling through into the far end of the kitchen. She looked to her other side past the cooler, and saw the dining room door. She reached it in a half-crouch, slivered it open and pushed through. There was no way of locking it.

She had entered what looked like the dining room of a shipwrecked luxury liner, at rest on the ocean floor. Tables lay upended, chairs thrown back, broken glass and porcelain were everywhere underfoot. She crossed towards the wall that led out into the courtyard, its length broken up every few yards by French windows. She looked up, suddenly aware of daylight from above, and was surprised by a skylight, shaped like the end of a flattened cone. Dust motes danced in the daylight streaming down. It occurred to her that the building couldn't be easily secured, not with so many points of ingress. She was half-way across to the nearest window when she heard the kitchen doors swing open. She froze, a low laugh made her shiver, and she swung around.

A man stood watching her, motionless. She glanced back at the windows, and from the corner of her eye it was like he _slid_ _away_. She looked back and he had not moved. She was aware of the maser in her hand, and fired a burst. He stepped lightly to the side, and laughed at how far off she was. She was shocked to see a distortion of his movement repeating in its wake. She tore her eyes away, and again it was like he retreated inward. She swiveled her eyes back in his direction. His stillness was absolute, yet his eyes glittered with alert malevolence. She felt a tightening, a bunching hot sensation in her chest. She couldn't think straight, she kept having the same thought over and over, kept seeing the same movement shorter and faster each time, a stuttering dizzying vanishing-point repetition. 'He's there,' she thought, 'and he's somehow also where he _will_ _be_.' She shook her head to clear it. He reached back over his shoulder, his arm moving as if in a loop, and suddenly a knife appeared in his hand. He started walking towards her, his footfall beating a heavy tap-dancing tattoo in her ears that made her want to laugh ... and through it all she saw that he was walking _slowly_.

Carmen heard the crash as if from a distance. Dazed, she raised her head, and saw Turok struggling on the floor with her attacker. The knife – a column of knives – lanced upwards in an arc toward Turok's lower chest, as his hand slammed into the man's arm, their arms overlapping. Turok gripped the man's wrist and wrenched it to the side and down, the elbow of his other arm fishtailing up into the man's face, moved as though passing _through_ the face and suddenly bouncing back as blood welled from the man's nose. Turok slammed the man's knife-hand down on his knee, and a receding flurry of knives skittered along the floor. The man looked up into Turok's eyes, a note of surprise, uncertainty there. Turok released him and staggered back, dropping into a crouch.

Turok didn't turn towards Carmen, but she felt his attention prickling her skin.

She closed her eyes and focused on a sound echoing in her ear.

"Shoot the one in front," Turok was saying urgently. It felt like he'd been saying it for minutes.

Her eyes sprang open and she saw him dropping into the crouch, not a crouch _like_ before, but in the self-same crouch, somehow occurring now. Without thinking she drew her palm maser and fired just as the man lunged forward. Carmen felt the clustering heat again in her chest.

The beam hit the man square in the forehead, sheering away the top of his skull. He stood suspended, swaying, as though awareness still pulsed in his eyes, weakening, flaring, and then – gone. He fell heavily.

"Not a moment too soon," Turok said, catching his breath.

Carmen lowered her arm, the maser dropping to her side. She looked dully at the body on the floor. "How did you–? What just happened?"

"You shot him, Carmen."

"What?"

"When he moves, you focus on the leading edge," he said, shrugging. "That's what Seamus said."

"I don't understand."

He smiled. "I don't either. _Time_ _radiation_ , he called it."

They heard the deadbolt on the kitchen door give way. There was a scuffle of footsteps as Mick and Aleesha came barreling in. They stopped dead, glancing quickly at the body on the floor.

Mick exhaled heavily, and just shook his head.

"Did you guys lose your way?" Turok joked.

"We went for a stroll in the swamp," Mick replied.

Turok laughed as Mick crossed the room to one of the covered floor-length windows.

"It's very quiet all of a sudden," Turok added.

Mick pried back the corner of a plank obstructing the window. "It's as you said, Carmen. The rest of them are holed up in the next building."

From across the courtyard came the sound of hinges creaking open.

Mick looked out. "It's Giorgi." The others rushed over to Mick's side.

"It's okay!" Giorgi shouted, waving, and walked towards them.

"Seamus, how does it look?" Mick called up to the roof.

"It's clear," Seamus replied, his voice carrying easily, "one of them came out and ran off into the swamp out behind."

Mick nodded to the others.

They all stepped hesitantly out into the courtyard. Giorgi crossed the grass, a smile spreading across his face.

As the others walked forward Mick turned and looked up at Seamus, who still stood on the roof, his rifle half-down, his eyes scanning.

"He's probably long gone," Mick said. "You might as well join us down here – if you want."

Seamus shrugged, and then volunteered to recon the area behind the building. Mick sensed the adolescent's real reason was just to be alone. An image of Joel's body on the shore flashed into Mick's mind. He nodded to this new friend, and suggested he wait for the others before venturing into the swamp. Seamus turned away.

Mick joined the others, clapping Giorgi on the back. "You okay?"

"Never better!" he declared, despite looking a little disoriented.

As they trooped behind Giorgi into the building's wide vestibule Mick glanced back and saw Sorel join them. The vestibule opened out onto a landing before a wide staircase. Giorgi started up the stairs.

"Are you and Franklin the only ones left here now?" Mick asked.

"And Rainer," Giorgi said. "He's from the south, not Nebu City. And ... he's dying."

He pointed to a door down the hall. "That room at the end was where they kept us, the three of us. Double-locks on the door, bars on the windows, the whole nine yards."

Turning away he set off down the long corridor. "They've been dumping the bodies into the swamp," he said as he walked.

"What bodies?" Carmen asked.

He turned. "Many of Levrok's men, and Rainer's people before that, died of the CTT."

"CTT?" Mick asked.

" _Cellular_ _temporal_ – something. Rainer's name for some local disease."

He stopped in front of a large double door, and pulled it open. They peered into a long room with high windows, bright with late afternoon sunlight. Off to the right, seated on a bench and silhouetted against one of the room's two windows, a haggard figure in his early 60's turned and looked in their direction.

"Are these the offworld visitors?" the old man asked.

"Yeah," Giorgi answered.

"Well, come in," he said mildly.

Mick and Turok glanced about as they entered the room.

He stood and crossed toward them. "I am Franklin," he said.

The others introduced themselves.

"What do you think of our world?" Franklin asked, gesturing out the barred window.

"We've seen better," Turok said.

"I don't doubt it. But to be fair, we aren't seeing her at her best. Far from it."

"What was her best?" Carmen asked, curious.

He shrugged. "What she was – before. The normal cycle of seasons before the stilling began." He raised a hand, as if to push away their questions, and cast a searching look beyond them. "Excuse me. Where are Joel and Seamus?"

Mick cleared his throat. "Seamus is outside. I'm sorry, but Joel was killed in the swamp."

Franklin inhaled abruptly, and looked away. "How?" he asked softly.

"One of the guard animals," Mick said.

"A mute." He seemed to gather himself. "I must speak with Seamus."

"He's in the grounds out back," Mick said.

Franklin nodded, and glanced towards a low partition that extended out from the furthest window, near the corner. "Rainer is resting there," he said. "He wants very much to speak with you." The old man walked out of the room.

The others looked at each other. They walked across to the corner. "Hello," Carmen said from their side of the partition, "can we do anything for you?"

A mild voice addressed them. "No. But please, come around so I can see you."

Carmen stepped past the partition, Mick and Turok following behind. A middle-aged man lay in a low bed – it stood away from the wall to catch the light from the window. The bed was more of a cot, easy to move from room to room. There was little else, except for the analgesic patches laid out on a side table. The man turned as they approached.

He waved off their introductions.

"You know that I am Rainer," he replied. "I heard you and Franklin. He's not half as frail as he appears." He smiled. "Or as – unhelpful." He looked again out the window. "In fact, he may be more help to you, eventually, than you can imagine."

Carmen knelt by his bed.

"I am from south of here, from a much larger city than this," he said without emotion. "Before I left, most of my people had succumbed to Nebura's – unique disease."

"Cellular temporal – ?" Mick said.

" _Tetraparesis_ _._ CTT," Rainer said, nodding. "Or more prosaically, bioatomic paralysis. It cascades, reaches groups of cells, then specific cells." He looked at the ceiling, and seemed far away. "As the Kalaal had to adjust, so have we, their descendants. Levrok found that amusing." He turned to look up at them. "The Kalaal settled this world almost three centuries ago." He seemed absent for a moment, then resumed. "Nebura has had no rainfall for some time. Even the ocean is affected."

Mick nodded, thinking of the waveless harbor and ocean, the windless skies. "When did it start?"

"A few months ago," Rainer said. "In my father's day there were some who spoke of ... the _slowing_ , they called it. No one but they could sense it, so their warning was ignored. To be sure, the effects were minimal." He shrugged. "No one wanted to believe the same phenomenon of two centuries ago had returned."

"How many of you are there?" Carmen asked.

"Down south, very few. Here–?" He shrugged. "Why do you ask?"

"Maybe we can join forces," Mick said. "There are six of us, and three of you held here."

Rainer nodded.

"There are others, from Seamus's group," Mick added. "Hiding somewhere in Nebu City."

The invalid turned his face to the window. "So many were lost. When we arrived we hoped these people, and Levrok, would help." He looked at the buildings around the courtyard. "They did, at first ... or pretended to. But over the weeks the CTT took most of them." He sighed. "Levrok blamed us. He is of the Siqdori, ancient enemies of the Kalaal."

"We've only been here a couple days," Mick said.

"Ah, your starship."

"A launch shuttle," Mick said.

The other smiled at him.

Feeling he could trust this man, Mick added: "And two others the same size in orbit, but their reserves are finished."

"So you're marooned here."

"For the present, yes."

"You hope for rescue," he said, nodding. "A neutronics beacon won't work in Nebura space, but I suppose you found that out. There may be an alternative. The Kalaal, ever resourceful, developed a form of holoreal technology – on the cusp between material and virtual."

Carmen leaned forward. "Is there nothing we can do for you?"

He shook his head. "Let me warn you. If your people fall ill – there's a time of false recovery. Walking ghost phase. Ten to fourteen days after onset, you would die."

Mick wondered if some of what the dying man said was the product of this disease.

"It could be worse," Rainer continued. "Some, after walking ghost ..." He paused to catch his breath. "Disorientation, aggressive neurosis, body shifting ... A few of Levrok's men were like that."

Turok glanced at Carmen. "Time radiation?"

Rainer looked at him sharply. "The weapons of two centuries ago ... were proscribed." He fell into a sudden fit of coughing.

When the spasm passed the wizened man shrugged. "The last phase you see before you – lasts two or three days."

A brightness had entered his eyes. His throat muscles constricted suddenly, as he clutched Carmen's arm. "The stilling ... _swallows_ _worlds_."

His shoulders sank slowly. His locked throat seemed to send a roiling wave down through his body. His eyes locked in place, unseeing.

Carmen placed a finger on his neck. "He's gone."

*

With a heavy heart Turok started digging graves for Joel and Rainer, and gradually everyone joined in, taking turns digging. The reunions with Giorgi and Franklin were subdued. It was a chance to take their first tentative steps in adapting to the trials that the coming months, or years, would bring. The labor of digging graves was not demoralizing, quite the opposite. The fears they had been suppressing over the vanished convoy re-surfaced. They refused to lose hope, but now the images of absent faces skirted their thoughts. Part of the burden of unshed tears was lifted.

Each group felt the other's loss almost as intensely as its own. They looked hesitantly at each other, waiting for someone to volunteer a few words. It was better for anyone to say anything, Mick knew, than to let the awkwardness become something worse. He remembered his grandfather's favorite Psalm, which he had said at his grandmother's funeral. He couldn't remember all of it. But no matter, better to start, he told himself.

He said the familiar words.

Carmen almost whispered the next line of ancient verse. They felt the rightness of it, and wended their way haltingly through the lines, offering up phrases, verses, or just single words. It went around the small gathering several times.

Finally it reached Seamus. "Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life," he said.

A silence settled over them.

The distant call of a seagull dragged Mick's eyes up. The bird stood out nakedly free in a landscape where they had heard nothing – not the call of any living thing – since they had disembarked from Arc-4 two days earlier. He turned away from the twin graves. Turok fell in quietly beside him.

They left Carmen and Seamus kneeling by the graves.

______________

Mick watched as their bedraggled group of eight emerged from the fetid water of the swamp. Though it was only a few hours since they had last stood on this embankment, it felt like days ago. They were almost surprised to see the scooters were as they had left them. Their beamsuits, unsealed during the walk back, were quickly removed. Mick and Turok finished first, and after stowing the guns and other gear in the sidecar, the line of scooters moved swiftly out of the park precincts.

Thinking back on their last hour at the compound, Mick felt a renewed gratitude for Franklin's idea about the mutes. The old man had taken Mick and Turok to the mutants' control array. They had huddled together in the small ground floor room, puzzled by what he was showing them. He'd been right that the console was not shielded by security protocols. Standing behind Franklin, they had watched as he brought up the screen showing the twenty-one cybernetically-altered animals dispersed about the swamp, still patrolling.

"Like I said, we can't reprogram their target parameters," Franklin said.

"But you can turn them off?" Turok asked.

"Yeah, this will erase their target and attack subroutines."

With a flourish he pressed a key on the keyboard, and the red and yellow icons on the inset map of the park grounds winked out, leaving the light green markers for each of the animals.

"Look at that!" Turok said, as each of the markers suddenly stopped dead. What had been the smooth, purposeful patrolling movement of twenty-one deadly mutants was transformed.

"What'll happen to them?" Mick asked.

"I have no idea," Franklin admitted. "They weren't just genetically altered. They're true hybrids, organic _and_ synthetic."

"Won't instinct take over?" Mick asked.

"What instinct? These animals couldn't occur in nature. They've never existed independent of their programming."

"But if they're partial organics," Mick mused, "no amount of genetic overlapping could erase inherited instinct entirely."

Carmen ducked her head into the room. "Hey guys," she said.

Engrossed by the image on the monitor, Mick and Franklin nodded without turning around.

"Or not," she said, smiling, and was gone.

Mick was abruptly brought out of his reverie when he was forced to bank his scooter around a tight corner. He reminded himself Seamus was in the lead. Franklin had said Seamus's band was not brought to the compound. He hoped they were still alive. He knew what Seamus believed: that Franklin's people had repelled the attack by the men Levrok sent, then rescued Seamus's friends, and fled to some new, unknown location. Seamus was now taking them to where he thought that might be. But after seeing two safe-houses in the past thirty minutes, neither of the two groups had turned up. They were headed now to a rundown section of lower town near the waterfront.

4 | Flight

Driving along a coastal road they passed long-abandoned warehouses, marinas, fish packing plants, and maintenance facilities. They pulled into a dry dock complex that skirted an embankment, running further inland to a pool of green, brackish water. Seamus led them along a parallel low ridge that ran to the pool's far end. At that end a large channel tunnel, blocked by an ancient metal gantry, provided egress to a filtration station and the ocean beyond. Seamus came to a stop.

Judging from the thick coating of algae on the pool's surface, the filtration system had stopped working long ago. Mick watched as Seamus approached a double set of heavily mildewed doors near their end of the pool. Seamus inserted a key and swung the door in. A dark corridor sloped upward into darkness.

He disappeared inside without a word, the others following.

Mick entered, pulled the door closed, and was plunged in darkness. A flashlight came on ahead of him; he locked the door and dropped a latching bar in place. Turok handed him a second flashlight he had retrieved from a shelf behind the door.

They reached the bend and soon after came out inside a circular channel, about the size of a subway tunnel. Sunlight streamed in from the side through the gantry over where the channel fed into the pool. The others were waiting for them on a walkway that followed along the side of that section of the sewer line.

"There are maintenance rooms further up from here," Seamus was saying, "at a junction."

"And that's where they are?" Aleesha asked.

He shrugged. "It's the only safe place left I can think of."

"Maybe there _never were_ any others," Sorel said.

"I'm not lying," Seamus said, a dangerous calm in his voice.

Sorel looked with scorn at their guide. "Just the two of you hiding out down here – like rats."

Despite his slight build, Seamus suddenly sprang at Sorel, bringing down the lanky man ten years his senior.

"Get this runt off me," Sorel screamed, fending off most of Seamus's blows.

Turok reached down and calmly pulled Seamus back. Sorel scrambled up, glaring at his attacker.

"Still the same hellion." Turok grinned, and held Seamus to the wall. "Stay!" he barked good-naturedly.

Seamus looked over at Sorel with an odd equanimity. He nodded at Turok, who tentatively released his grip. Seamus made no move.

Mick stepped forward as Sorel said evenly, "He's leading us into some trap!"

"Seamus more than proved his loyalty today," Mick said.

"If I may," Franklin said from the back, and stepped forward. "Although I don't know where the others are," he said, glancing at Sorel, "I can assure you there _are_ others. And we certainly mean you no harm."

Ignoring the old man Sorel retreated sullenly a few steps up the channel.

"Thanks," Mick said to Franklin.

"Someone does mean us harm, all of us," Seamus said neutrally. "Levrok."

"What do you think he has in mind?" Mick asked.

"He might bring more mutants against us," Franklin observed.

"I thought we fried their search and destroy commands?" Turok said.

"Yes, the ones at the park are harmless now. But there are others – mutes and full synthetics. They'll likely have dormant target and attack subroutines which Levrok could activate."

"How many could he bring against us?" Mick asked.

Franklin shrugged. "He already gathered most of them at the park, so we're not talking that many. Maybe ten or so."

Seamus nodded. "It's why I wanted to stop him."

"Guys, you could have mentioned this before," Turok said.

"We all had other things on our minds," Franklin said mildly.

"Why is he after us, anyway?" Carmen asked.

"He is after _me_ , actually," Franklin said. "Haven't you wondered why I was kidnapped?"

"Frankly, no," Turok said. "But I'm wondering now."

Franklin smiled. "Well, he thinks I can assist him."

"In fighting this stilling?" Mick asked.

"No, in using it, harnessing it."

"How?" Mick asked.

"At a minimum he hopes to use it to prevent any pushback against his forces."

"Do you think he'll make another grab for you?" Mick asked.

The old man shrugged. "I was less than cooperative."

"Then he might have something worse in mind," Carmen said.

Franklin nodded. "He may seek reprisal against – all who have harbored and helped me."

"Let's get back to your people," Mick said. "We can sort this out later."

Turok said, "Seamus, my man, lead on."

The group set off up the tunnel. As they turned round another bend the tunnel's last faint ambient light vanished entirely. They rounded a third, sharper turn. Eight flashlights bobbed in the dark, reflecting off the inky black water to one side. The channel was silent and motionless. There was little run-off due to the degraded precipitation cycle. Further inland streams had dried up; rivers had contracted to a series of millponds. The convection of air around the globe had slowed, ocean currents were increasingly sluggish. With such a reduced flow of water, air, and other organic material the sewers had a stronger smell of decay. Clearly this would have been their last choice for a safe-house.

Mick and Turok walked beside Seamus. "Is there any way Levrok could send his pets down here?" Turok asked.

"A month ago I would have said no," their young friend replied. "But he keeps altering their capability. Only last year ... they wouldn't even enter the water."

"They sure overcame that fear," Turok said dryly.

Seamus gestured behind them. "We have that barred door back at the holding pool. And there's another just before the maintenance rooms up ahead."

"What about the water outlet," Mick asked. "Where the fence reaches down into the water?"

"The gantry reaches right to the bottom of the channel. Nothing could get through there."

"Sounds good," Turok said. He turned to Mick. "Nothing to worry about as long as we stay down here."

"Knock on wood," Mick said.

"Levrok will likely find a way in, sooner or later," Seamus said

After walking for about fifteen minutes they saw a faint light appear in the distance ahead.

"Home sweet home," Sorel muttered from the back.

"They won't shoot, will they?" Turok asked.

Seamus stopped. "Turn off your flashlights," he said. When only his beam was left, he waved it in a broad arc over his head, then turned it off and on, alternating three long with one short. "Now they won't," he said. "You can turn yours back on."

A few minutes later they entered the spill of light around another gantry of iron bars. This one spread out like a wall before them. An inset cell-like door barred their way.

Three figures stood beyond the partition, looking out at them. They were older than Seamus.

"Seamus, where's Joel?" the tallest of the three asked.

"Dead," Seamus said.

The man flinched, turned, and walked back into an adjoining room.

"At least they're here," Turok said quietly.

A middle-aged man was approaching the gantry. He smiled when he saw Seamus.

"Hey, lad," he called out. "Am I glad to see you!"

"Hi Thomas," Seamus said, relieved.

He grabbed the keys and unlocked the door. He grabbed Seamus and pulled him into a hug. "Come on," he said, rubbing quickly at one of his eyes, and turned to the others. "The rest of you come along too."

They followed him through several rooms, around corners, and another secure metal door. They passed under a wide archway and into what had once been a large maintenance room, heavy machinery throughout. Lighter equipment in one area had been pushed to the side, clearing a space for a few tables and chairs that must have been scrounged from other rooms. It appeared to be the biggest room, with the best ventilation. A sofa stood against the wall opposite the door. Mick noted there were seven in the room, including Thomas and the tall sentry from the gate. With the two others back out there, he thought, that's nine in all.

"Everyone listen up," Thomas said, standing next to Seamus in the middle of the room. "As you can see, Seamus has returned!" Several voices called to Seamus in welcome. "He has bad news for us, about Joel." Thomas stepped away, and nodded to Seamus as he eased his bulk into the sofa.

"A mute got him as we crossed the swamp," Seamus said simply. "I'm sorry."

"It wasn't your fault, so don't apologize," Thomas said from the sofa.

"Unless –" the tall man from the gate said.

"Unless what, Afflek?" Thomas asked, giving him a hard look.

"Unless – there's anything more we haven't heard."

"Well?" he said, turning back.

Seamus nodded wearily. "It came out of the quadrant that we were watching. I should have gotten a shot off. I should have –" he broke off.

"We all should have," Mick said.

"No one is to blame," Carmen said gently. "Especially not Seamus." She looked at the others. Several murmured their agreement. She noticed Giorgi look away restlessly.

"Does anyone else think," Thomas asked, looking at Afflek, "there's more we need to hear?"

When no one spoke up Afflek looked uncomfortable.

"We buried Joel," Seamus said quietly. Mick was startled at what Seamus said next, it seemed comically out of context. "I heard a sea gull," he said.

Thomas sat forward. "Are you sure?" he asked.

The adolescent nodded.

Thomas looked at the others.

No one had noticed Franklin standing by one of the pieces of heavy machinery. "And here I thought I'd imagined it," the old man said, his voice echoing slightly. "Seamus is right. It was truly a beautiful sound. Especially after so many months."

Thomas turned to Franklin. "Could be the stilling is starting to recede."

The old man shook his head. "Like I said before, the more direct threat is the return of the CTT."

"This stilling – why do you call it that?" Mick asked.

A young woman sitting on the floor by the sofa, her back against the cushions, said abruptly, "Because that's what it does. It _stills_ everything – the wind, the sky, the ocean." She turned to Franklin. "And us. It's stilling _us_."

"Eventually it will," Franklin added mildly, "as Nebura's environment collapses. But the stilling is _not_ causing the disease."

"We've seen the effects on the ocean," Mick said, "and the lack of animals. But we have no clear idea what it is."

"No one does," Franklin admitted. "We only know it's affected most of Nebura. While I was Levrok's guest I was allowed access to databases in the southern cities, and the observatories." He glanced around at the young faces. "It appears that this system's star, and Nebura, are in the middle of a very unusual ion cloud."

He was chagrined by their lack of reaction.

"The sun itself," he continued, "for reasons I can't fathom, has generated an invisible cloud of ions, evenly dispersed throughout this system. Its density has increased over time ... roughly matching the slope of the stilling's spread."

"So this ion cloud could be causing it?" Mick asked.

"Perhaps," Franklin said. "Or all three, the ion anomaly, the stilling, and the disease might be shared effects of something else entirely. It's too early to isolate what's causing what."

Marnie turned again to Franklin. "You said that as the stilling has advanced, the disease cycle, once it takes hold in a body, unfolds faster. What does that tell you?"

"The same thing it tells you," he answered. "The stilling appears to make us more susceptible."

Marnie shrugged. "Either way we're running short of time."

Franklin nodded as he crossed the room. "I'm afraid I have more bad news. It's affected now about 60% of the world. The hardest-hit area is a wide band at the equator, diminishing gradually as you go north and south. Only the poles are unaffected."

This produced a shocked silence.

"The poles are unaffected?" Mick asked. "Completely?"

"Yes."

"But it will just spread to the poles too, won't it?" Marnie asked.

"So I assumed. But now I wonder." He paused. "If it doesn't –"

"If it doesn't," Mick said suddenly, "then that's where _we_ should be. We should have our base at one of the poles!"

The old man nodded, encouraged by Mick's enthusiasm.

______________

Carmen walked behind Marnie. The main sewer line would take them to within half a mile of a concealed lookout post located high on an escarpment that marked the southern limits of this part of the city. The sewer ran parallel with a valley that skirted the base of the escarpment. The valley's western end emptied into the water filtration station, and four miles inland its eastern end swung north following the line of the valley and escarpment. The walkway widened and Carmen moved up to walk beside Marnie.

The discussion had continued long into the evening. It culminated with Thomas offering the use of his 80-foot fishing boat moored in the river three miles to the north. They agreed to set out for the northern hemispheric pole, roughly 1500 miles away. Few expected that moving there would save them from the stilling and the disease, whichever got them first, but even just delaying that day was clearly reason enough to go. All in the Arcturus group except Sorel had been excited by the idea, and agreed almost immediately. Thomas and Marnie were as eager as their new friends; several others were neutral, but raised no objections. Mick thought they might have agreed just for the change, to get away from Nebu City. Who could blame them? They ended the evening by resolving to leave within two days. Afflek and one other from Thomas's group had resisted the plan, and only agreed when Thomas had pointed out they were free to stay.

Walking side by side, Marnie laughed when Carmen asked about the lookout. "It's just a flatbed truck up on the escarpment. We added thick sides."

"And what are we watching for?"

"Mutes of course. And Levrok. And any others who've joined him."

Carmen shivered. "I was hoping we'd seen the last of them."

"I doubt it."

The sewer tunnel sloped upwards. Carmen was worn out from being constantly on the move. "I could sleep for a week," she said. "I'll be glad to get on board that boat."

Marnie nodded as she stepped over a dead cat. "It's time to try something new."

Carmen thought of the whirlwind of changes they had set in motion. It was now 5 in the morning. She looked at the channel water – it had a bit of current due to the incline. "It's weird how the north pole here has no snow or glaciers."

Marnie hooked her fingers in the rifle strap so her maser rested more easily against her chest. "No tilt in this planet's axis, so we have no seasons." She shrugged. "I've gotten used to it."

Carmen thought of the fishing boat. "You aren't frightened of sailing north?"

"I remember fishing with my uncle and grandfather, back when the oceans were normal. I know it won't be the same, but I'm still looking forward to it."

"So your people really want to leave?"

Marnie looked sideways at Carmen. "I don't know. We were so looking forward to Franklin's disease."

Carmen laughed.

She had been relieved to hear the boat was in good condition. Apparently it only required a few minor changes, and refueling. Two of the men in their group had already left to retrieve the keys from an office at the same dock, and set to work getting the boat ready.

Marnie absently hitched up the gun strap again. "Did you know Levrok was once one of us?"

Carmen paused in mid-step. "No."

"Yeah, he was the one who found the park when we first came here a few years ago."

"What happened?"

Marnie stopped beside Carmen. "The stilling happened. He wanted all of us to move there. Especially Franklin."

"He mentioned that."

"Yeah, so Levrok got weird – about his family's ancient Siqdori past. Most of us didn't like it." She shrugged. "Ten of our people went with him, but the rest of us stayed together."

"But not here?"

"Here. And other places." She started walking again.

They turned another corner. Marnie stopped at a ladder set in the concrete wall. "This is it."

Carmen pulled out her palm maser.

Marnie looked back over her shoulder as she stepped onto the first rung. "Watch your head."

They emerged into a maintenance bay at the back of a bus terminal. One of the building's support columns had partially collapsed, leaving two adjoining beams jutting out a few feet above the manhole.

They crossed from this building into the main terminal, which led to a covered pedestrian stairway that climbed like a set of fire stairs up the side of the escarpment behind the terminal. Marnie started taking the stairs two at a time. She paused on the fourth landing to catch her breath. Carmen slogged along behind her.

Moments later they were at the truck. Its back end was rammed up against the end of the stairs. It occurred to Carmen that at no point during their walk had they been visible to the street. They climbed a loading pallet propped against the back of the truck, and stepped in. Two others on lookout duty glanced up as they entered. Eager to get back they picked up their satchels, nodded, and were gone.

______________

Levrok and Wahid rode along the high escarpment that ran parallel with the coast, about 4 miles inland. Their motorcycles were loud in the early morning. Levrok preferred the larger bikes. Behind them rode a third man, and behind him were six pairs of mutants. They moved forward in flawless formation, their lithe padding stride made them like a company of superbly-disciplined, quadripedal infantry. Levrok glanced in his bike's rear-view mirror and admired the muscular pistoning motion of the animals' short legs. He admired even more the Siqdori ingenuity that had bio-engineered such efficient killing machines out of what had once been scavengers! Their genetic mapping, however, had degraded over the years, and with it their efficiency. 'They die too easily now,' Levrok thought sourly.

It was impossible to speak with Wahid over the roar of the machines, which suited Levrok. He turned in at a viewing area by the side of the road that overlooked the city below.

Beyond Nebu City the ocean lay coiled on the horizon, an inert heaviness that seemed to jealously smother the last unraveling shards of sound from the bikes. The labored breathing of the troop behind them only emphasized the stillness of the morning. Levrok liked the stillness, it calmed his restless mind. The two looked around. The mutants stood at ease, their legs half-bent, eager to resume the morning's jaunt.

With some regret Levrok broke the silence. "It's essential that we kill the good doctor."

The subordinate turned to Levrok. "Yes sir."

"Tell me, Wahid. Do you understand _why_ it is necessary?"

He hesitated. "The old man escaped."

Levrok laughed. "True. And that indeed is reason enough. But there are other, better reasons."

"Dr. Varo seeks to end the cleansing."

Levrok looked at the deathly still ocean. It never failed to calm him.

He released the bike's kickstand, and leaned back. "True again. And we do need a cleansed world, if our plans are to proceed. What else?"

"He concealed the regrav element which the Kalaal – "

"Don't speak of that vile entity."

"Sorry, sir."

"He concealed vital information," Levrok agreed, nodding slowly, clenching his leather-clad hand into a fist. "The weapon system is coming along nicely, despite his _sabotage_. And for that, he must die."

"Yes, sir."

Levrok turned his attention to the city below. "We've searched the last two places they went to ground in. What's left?"

Wahid turned and looked south along the coast. "A few months ago two of them got lost in the sewer complex. Dr. Varo mentioned it once."

Levrok had looked away, noting that his assistant failed to see the ocean's stilled purity. "Move into the sewers?" he asked.

"It's a possibility."

"Okay. What's the best way in?"

Wahid pointed to the water filtration building on the coast. "We can gain access over there, at the outflow."

Levrok nodded.

They powered up their bikes and set off for the escarpment road that led down into the city.

______________

As Mick, Turok, and Thomas crested the hill the early morning sun was in their eyes. They walked forward and their gaze fell on the egg-shaped outline of the Arcturus-4 shuttle. She lay in the shadow of the hill behind her, undisturbed.

Thomas sighed, a look of quiet appreciation on his round face. "What a beauty."

When the aperture opened a short stairway scythed out, unfolding smoothly to the ground. They climbed up and entered.

Mick walked immediately into the control suite, as ship's systems came up from dormant to active. The shuttle had enough power in her liquid crystal energy cells to maintain all ship's modalities, except propulsion, for several months.

Thomas stood with Turok just inside the aperture. He was visibly impressed as his eyes adjusted to the muted lighting. "So you can't communicate with the ship's computer on the other shuttles."

"No, the neutronics are still down. Something Trinh said about the EMA." Turok saw the questioning look. "Electromagnetic anomaly."

Thomas nodded. "The ion cloud."

Turok led him forward, nodding towards the rear of the ship. "Back there is the galley, and what we call the _Node_ , for meals and the like. Bathrooms and sleeping pallets are back there too. And hiberstasis, of course."

They passed through Operations, two of the walls lined with one continuous workstation, looking very lived-in. Mobile keyboards jostled among handwritten notes, below fixed 2D screens.

Turok nodded at one separate station. It had a fixed multilevel keyboard below a dark inset cell. "Navigation. There's no synthetic onboard. But there _is_ a regular shuttle computer, of course." He nodded at the cell. "Holographics."

"Can we access the regular shuttle computer here?"

Turok shrugged. "Sure, but there's no access to Arc-5 or 6."

Mick came in. "There's something I'd like to ask Trinh too." He swiveled, half-turning towards the bulkhead. "Voice code authorization. Hello, Trinh."

The computer's familiar voice spoke to them from a disembodied audiofield position a short distance in front of them. "How are you, Mick," she replied.

Thomas smiled, shaking his head; he sat at a nearby console.

"I'm fine. Look, Trinh, I realize neutronics are still down."

"That is correct."

"So deploying a satellite, assuming there was enough energy on Arc-5 or 6, would be impossible?"

"Yes."

"A synthetic pulse buoy?"

"Although it has no neutronic components, several of its other systems would be affected by this anomaly. I'm sorry, Mick."

"Thanks."

The computer made the chirping sound of signing off.

'Rainer was right,' Mick thought. He turned to Thomas and nodded at the controls. "Normally Arc-5 and 6 would be patched into the helm here."

Turok took out the list they had prepared. "First up. Pressure suits. Let's take them all. Medikits. Two satellite notebooks, and the energy sticks." He nodded at Thomas. "Your boat has no neutronics, so we'll need the notebooks. I'll get those."

"I'll get the medikits and suits," Mick said.

Turok consulted the list again. "More notebook attachments. Navigation, comm links." They stood up and set out, leaving Thomas in Operations.

After collecting the half-dozen other items they met at the aperture.

Turok was sporting a Blue Jays baseball cap and carrying a long black haversack.

"Anything else?" Mick asked.

Turok held up the list. "No. That's all of it."

Mick palmed the aperture. As Turok and Thomas trooped out Mick realized how calm he felt, just being back on board. He'd almost forgotten how urgent their situation was. He turned and said to the empty ship. "Bye, Trinh."

"Godspeed, Mick."

Mick smiled as he emerged from the Arc-4. They descended the hill to their scooters.

_______________

Carmen was impressed by the view from the escarpment – this meant excellent surveillance, she realized. From the truck's perch overlooking the city, she could see part of the north side of the hill, where they had left Arcturus-4. She knew that beyond the hill, only a mile further up the coast, was the river where the fishing boat was moored. In the same direction, closer at hand, though most of it was concealed behind tall tropical trees, she could see the edge of the park-swamp. 'From up here it looks innocent enough,' she thought.

Marnie was leaning back in one of the molded chairs her group had originally brought up from the terminal. She gave her attention to the city below as Carmen scanned the horizon. There was not the slightest wisp of cloud in the sky.

Marnie saw her looking up. "Is there any hope of contact with the other shuttles?"

Carmen shook her head. "Not with this ion cloud ... unless Trinh finds a way. And there's the energy factor too."

"Trinh is the AI pilot?"

Carmen nodded. "Mick's bringing the notebooks so we'll have satellite uplink if she does manage it."

"Being on Polarica might make a difference, same as how the stilling is absent, or weaker there."

"Apparently all the planets in this system are affected."

"Maybe that's what's made this world go haywire."

Carmen shrugged. "Without a comm link, we may never know."

Marnie sat forward quickly. She looked through the binoculars at the sewer outflow area. "Looks like Levrok is knocking at our front door," she said, her voice flat.

Carmen swore. "So he knows."

Marnie nodded. "Franklin went voluntarily before, to keep the peace. We won't let him go this time."

"I wonder how Levrok takes disappointment."

There was a sudden flash of light at the tunnel entrance, followed by the sound of an explosion.

Marnie was instantly on her feet. "They're using ballistics! I don't believe it."

Carmen snatched up the one backpack they had brought. "Let's go."

They were out of the truck and down the escarpment stairs in moments. They retraced their steps through the terminal and down into the main east-west sewer line. The sound of another, much louder explosion reached them. It must have been inside the tunnel, much closer.

"They must already be at the internal gate." Marnie sounded shaken.

They could hear a distant roaring sound. They couldn't identify it, the tunnel's acoustics distorted and amplified the sound in unpredictable ways.

Marnie stood still, straining to hear. "It sounds like our scooters, but down here?"

"They're driving up the tunnel!" Carmen laughed in spite of herself.

Marnie turned. "If they're all coming this way, we should head back." They began jogging back up the tunnel.

"Can we get all the way to the river on the scooters, through these tunnels?"

"No. But this line hooks up with a dried-out canal. There's an exit there, past the terminal."

They ran ahead as the sound grew louder. They passed the ladder to the terminal, Carmen nearly falling as they came around a tight bend. The echoing roar increased. The sides and ceiling of the tunnel were suddenly awash with the bouncing lights of many bikes. They came to a heavy grating. Marnie lifted a latch and they manhandled it to one side. They leaped down about 18 inches onto the concrete bed of the canal. The bobbing lights drew closer.

Aleesha was on the lead bike, Carmen saw. She exhaled in relief. Aleesha's scooter hung suspended in the air before landing smoothly on the canal surface. One after another the other bikes followed her out, spinning into a ragged semicircle, their engines idling.

Carmen watched as Aleesha alighted from her bike and spoke quickly to Marnie. Aleesha jumped on the back of another bike.

Marnie retrieved a tablet from under the seat ... and keyed in a quick command. She swung on the bike she would ride alone, and looked calmly around at them. They heard the distant roar of pursuing scooters in the tunnel. They all looked over as Marnie nodded quickly, and tore off.

Everyone knew where they were heading. Seconds later an explosion behind them reverberated through the canal's concrete bed. Carmen glanced back at the tunnel entryway, which was engulfed in a cloud of smoke and dust.

______________

Mick had set the notebook case on the boat's ancient map table.

Turok was rooting through the boat's map stores, pulling out transparent acrylic tubes, each containing a rolled-up _paper_ map. "Wow, the owners used real hardcopy maps!"

Thomas was sitting on a stool before the map table. "It's worse than that. There's no computer on this tub."

Mick and Turok turned and looked at their host. He was grinning.

Mick smiled. "But why? Fish bait would cost more!"

Thomas held up his hands, palms out. "Many of the settlers from Earth have a mild Luddite streak." He stood and crossed to the pilot-house window, scanning ahead of the boat's bow towards the mouth of the river. It looked as still as the ocean, like an icebound inland fjord back on Earth, except there was no ice here. Just as there were no seasons.

Thomas was interrupted by the heavy thump of an explosion, like someone slammed a heavy steel door a few feet away. He gripped the narrow ledge below the window with both hands.

Mick stepped forward, regaining his balance. "That came from the sewer tunnel." He crossed to the door as Turok grabbed his gun off a side-shelf. "Let's go!"

Thomas whirled round. "No!"

Mick stopped in mid-step. "What do you mean?"

The two young men they had met when they boarded were standing in the open doorway. One of them turned to Thomas. "We're set to go. You ready here?"

Thomas nodded, and stepped over to the pilot's chair.

Turok's voice filled the room. "What are you doing!"

Thomas spoke as he turned the ignition switch. "It's our back-up plan." The ancient engine roared to life. "They'll meet us at the bridge upriver."

Mick and Turok were unconvinced. "What if they're pinned down in the tunnel?"

Thomas left the engine in neutral. "They won't be. We never planned on making a stand in the sewer. It's a way to trap them while we get away. Right now all our people should be driving back through the tunnel to the canal." He drummed his fingers on the engine gear lever.

Mick stepped in close to Thomas. "Scooters – in the tunnel?"

"Yes!"

"How long?"

"In nine minutes they should be at the bridge. We can be there in half that."

"You go ahead, Thomas," Mick said, as he reached down in the weapons bag Turok had left by the door. He scooped out a maser rifle and opened the door. "We'll see you there." He stepped out of the door and swung over onto the dock. Turok was close behind, carrying a larger pulse rifle.

The man standing in the bow waved at them as their bikes roared to life. As Mick and Turok drove along parallel to the dock a short distance, their rifles slung on their backs, they turned and saw Thomas pulling into the middle of the river. The boat accelerated smoothly, its bow rising in the water. It was half-planing the surface when they turned onto the city road that led to the escarpment.

______________

Marnie crested the top of the feeder road, clearing a few inches above and landing on the shoulder. The others followed in a straggling line behind her. She sliced out across a field. Moments later they pulled up onto the escarpment road.

'The mutes are either inside the sewer, trapped or dead, or they managed to get out,' Marnie thought. 'If they're out, they'll be in the canal looking for the exit.'

She had left the canal by careening up a sloped section that reached to the canal-bed – an old boat-launch and dry dock yard. She came round a bend and saw an overpass up ahead, the last landmark before the bridge where Thomas should be waiting. That was a mile further on, she knew. She narrowed her eyes and saw two bikes approaching from beyond the overpass, coming on as fast as she was. They slowed and stopped, on her side. They each reached back and pulled out rifles. Then seeing it was Mick and Turok, she laughed, swearing as she geared down and came to a halt beside them.

Mick looked at her. "The mutes?"

She nodded. "Maybe two minutes behind us."

"You go ahead," Turok said. "We'll follow."

The others came roaring round the bend, moving faster now, she noticed. Slipping her bike into gear she nodded ahead. "Is Thomas up there, in the boat?"

"He should be," Mick said, slinging his rifle back over his shoulder.

She nodded, gunned her engine and was off. Turok hesitated, then slung his rifle as the others went tearing by, fear raw on their faces.

Turok slid his bike into gear, and took off, protecting their rear.

*

Mick gave one last look behind, and followed, keeping a lookout in his rear-view mirror. When he was a few hundred yards past the overpass he glanced behind and saw the mutants come pounding around the bend, their legs stretching and landing, relentless. He wrenched his eyes to the road ahead, and opened her up. The others were at the bridge, maybe five hundred yards ahead, where they had dropped the bikes at the side of the road. He imagined them scrambling down the embankment to the boat waiting below, tossing their backpacks in as they clambered over the gunwale.

He looked back again and saw their tireless pursuers were only a couple hundred yards away now, closing fast. The six bikes that followed the pack of mutants were far behind, crossing under the overpass.

He turned and saw that Turok had stopped in the middle of the bridge. He had his gun up and was taking careful aim. Mick heard the shot and instinctively ducked. He heard a body thump hard on the concrete behind. He glanced behind again and saw the other mutes had veered to both sides to avoid the dying animal. They weren't fast enough and were now cart wheeling over the corpse. He was fifty yards from the bridge when he heard another shot, and another mute was down.

He saw Turok climbing the bridge parapet, the rifle slung back over his back, and jumped. It was only twenty feet to the river below. Mick squealed his bike to a long fishtailing stop, and dived for the parapet. He clambered up, stumbled, and pulled himself up and over the side.

The fall seemed further than twenty feet, then the river closed over him. Such silence, blessed peaceful silence. He hung suspended as the water surged around him, then Turok was at his elbow, pulling. He kicked and felt himself rise, slowly. Everything had seemed to slow down. He kept rising, and broke surface. The boat had pulled away from the riverbank, shored up with pilings along this side of the bridge. Arms reached for him from a wide stern boarding ramp. He pulled himself up and fell onto the ramp, the boat's deck three feet above them. He watched Turok follow up in one slow fluid motion. He heard Thomas gun the engine and they were moving again.

Mick looked back and saw the mutants on the bridge. It struck him as funny. The half-animal, half-synthetic predators stood quietly waiting. They were _not_ pacing or growling, or leaping up and down. Several had placed their forepaws on the parapet and were calmly watching as the boat pulled away.

Carmen leaned over the stern and looked down at them. "Come on! Those riders won't be long."

As they climbed the ladder up into the stern, a pulse blast struck the transom four inches from Mick's hand, leaving a small inch-deep crater in the wood. He reached up, pulled himself over, dropping in behind the thick transom. Turok and Carmen looked at him and laughed. Another pulse hit the roof of the pilot-house, sending a shower of wood splinters that were whipped away immediately by the breeze. A few blasts went wide, leaving green contrails in the water. A minute went by with no more shots.

Mick leaned up and took a quick look back over the transom. The bridge was half a mile away, probably out of range. He leaned back against the gunwale, and the world drifted away.

**5 |Lightsphere**

Mick woke to the distant sound of cheers. He opened his eyes and looked round, but all was darkness. He wondered if Thomas had sailed his precious fishing boat into a cave, maybe in a cove somewhere along the coast. The sound of another cheer startled him fully awake. He didn't move, and the sound receded. Silence enveloped him again. He turned and looked up. A canopy of stars rocked gently above. He closed and opened his eyes rapidly. It felt as though the space around him was pressing tightly against him. He tried to shout, but his throat was going still. He felt himself falling back, somersaulting over and over. Something was flowing past him, as though a pale copy of the events of his life were glowing in the darkness as they passed him. He desperately opened his eyes.

A face was looking down at him. Its mouth moved mockingly, like a fish. He saw it was Carmen, she was moving so slowly, swimming in and out of view, now back again, faster. Sound burst around him suddenly.

"Mick! Mick!" she was saying.

Her head turned away, and more sound filled the night. Thomas was suddenly there at his side, the tightness in his throat eased, and a delicious coolness spread down his throat.

His voice came to his own ears as a shout. "Carmen."

But she hadn't heard him. He shouted her name again, and she leaned in towards him. "Carmen!" She smiled.

He groaned with relief – she could hear him. His throat tightened one last time, and a rack of coughs coursed through him. And finally the enfolding tightness was gone.

His voice came again, and he heard it now as a whisper. "Thomas!" Both faces were smiling at him.

He tried to sit up and a heat shot down his left arm. He gasped, and Carmen's hand was on his right shoulder, pushing him down.

"Lie still. You were shot."

He fell back, and the faces of the others were now hovering over him. He smiled weakly. 'I was shot?' he asked himself. And then he remembered the lance of pain that hit him just as he jumped from the bridge. In the water the pain had been sucked away, and he had climbed into the boat, and then the sudden throbbing, and the darkness had swept over him.

Hands gently lifted his head and he looked around. He looked down and saw that his shoulder had been tightly wrapped in a medisheath. A glass was at his mouth again, and the delicious coolness spread down his throat.

He nodded. They were all coming back into the stern. Some sat down on the deck, others leaned against the high gunwale.

Turok lifted him up slowly. "Welcome back, amigo!" Mick wavered, and suddenly they were all laughing as Turok helped ease him back into a low folding chair.

Mick laughed weakly with them. He was never so glad to feel surrounded by familiar faces. "Looks like we got away safe."

Turok nodded, and looked out across the gunwale. "What a night!"

"How long has it been?"

"About ten hours."

Mick looked off into the night that seemed to envelope the boat. The engine wasn't running, they were drifting. The blackness was impenetrable, all-encompassing. "This is stranger than being adrift in space."

Carmen leaned back and looked up into the sky, shivering. "I know. It's like being in the bottom of a well. Looking up helps me."

Mick leaned back, looked up, and exhaled easier.

"Better?"

He nodded.

Turok rubbed his hands together. "Our midnight dinner, ladies and gentlemen, is served."

Everyone clapped, and rose with him. Franklin walked over to Mick. "How are you feeling?"

"Much better. How bad was it?"

He nodded at Mick's shoulder. "The pulse went clean through. Just sizzled the bone a touch."

"Thanks. But I meant – how did it go getting away? Will they follow, do you think?"

Franklin shrugged, and nodded to Thomas. "Here's the man to ask."

"They might," Thomas said. "Levrok likely wants your ship, and he still needs Franklin."

"True," the old man agreed.

Several of them lingered on deck, listening to the sounds of dinner below.

"Levrok lost a lot of his people to that disease," Carmen said. "He needs to regroup."

Thomas nodded. "If he does come after us, it won't be right away."

Mick flexed his shoulder, gauging its resilience.

"Well, thanks again for patching me up," he said to Franklin.

The old man half-turned to Carmen. "My new assistant did the actual splicing and sewing." Mick widened his eyes in feigned shock.

Carmen laughed. "Splice and dice. That's me."

Franklin stood further aft, looking out into the night. "I've never seen such darkness," he said.

Mick nodded. "It's like a black wall has dropped down around us."

Franklin made a shivering laugh. "Look at this," he said as he led Mick to the transom. He clambered down to the stern ramp, surprisingly agile for a man his age.

He looked back at Mick. "If you can manage it."

Mick sat on the gunwale and swiveled his legs over.

Franklin knelt on the ramp, his attention focused on the water. He pulled a flashlight from his back pocket, extended his other arm below the surface to his elbow, and shone the beam along his arm. Mick couldn't see beyond three inches down the old man's arm.

Mick got on his hands and knees. They were kneeling only inches above the surface of the ocean. He looked across the surface. It had a surreal flatness. Franklin shone the beam along the surface, they could see about two yards.

Carmen stood shivering up on deck behind them.

Franklin turned off the flashlight. The glow from the pilothouse made the boat an oasis of light in the blackness. He stood up.

Mick looked up again at the stars. "Is it the water – a different refraction of light?"

"It's everything, Mick. The ocean, sky, air, and light. Even the _absence_ of light seems different."

"Let's join the others," Carmen said.

Mick took a last look out into the night, it felt like being suspended in nothingness. He turned with relief to the ladder, and Carmen helped him over.

Mick wouldn't have thought sixteen people could fit in the common room below. It had the galley up forward, and four bunk beds aft, one along each side and two against the bulkhead. The area between the two ends was half-filled by a long collapsible table. In the center of the table was a round pillar, running from the upper deck down through this lower level.

As Mick pulled out a folding chair, it struck him how stable the boat felt. 'Or how little the boat is moving,' he corrected himself. 'We could be sitting in dry dock.'

Turok plopped a large covered dish in the middle of the table, and lifted the lid with a flourish. The darkly pungent aroma of chili wafted through the room. Conversation ebbed as they began to eat.

Mick took great comfort in being below deck in a well-lit, lived-in room, cheek by jowl with the same faces he had woken up with back on Arc-4, and the new faces of others who were practically friends already. What he had so recently experienced outside receded. Here, on this boat far from shore, there was no need to be ready to run at a moment's notice – that felt good. The chili was worse than cafeteria leftovers, but none of them seemed to notice. He looked forward to sailing north along the coast of this continent, _Inuvoro_ according to the maps, and then across the open sea to Polarica – almost 4000 miles in all to that distant shore. This is our reprieve, he thought.

"–we couldn't have made it." Thomas was looking at him, smiling.

"Sorry, Thomas, I was gathering wool." The others laughed.

"What I was saying ... is that without you and Turok we wouldn't have made it."

Mick shook his head. "And without you, we wouldn't be safely here at sea. And without Carmen, my shoulder wouldn't be crying blue murder at me right now," and he made a mock-grimace as he stretched his arm up.

Carmen called down the length of the table. "And without Marnie and her bat-out-of-hell driving, we'd still be back on that road." Several hands pounded the table.

Thomas looked around slowly. "As long as we keep helping each other like we have, we'll get through this. And if we don't –" He shrugged. "I can't think of a better way of facing it." Voices quietly agreed up and down the table.

Thomas held up one hand briefly. "There are a few things I should say. About _Boleyn_ for one. The engine – there are two – should give us no problem."

Sorel asked, "What's her top speed?"

"Now? About eight knots. That's what she ran at today."

The faces around him looked disappointed. "Look, the old sailing vessels, with all their sails out, didn't do much over four knots. Eight is smoking!"

"If you say so, skipper," Turok called out.

"I do say so." Faces smiled up and down the table. "When my dad ran her years ago for the fishing she could do maybe four knots on a calm day. And by the time he changed her over to a research ship, about five years ago, she was only doing half of that. He overhauled her to the lean, mean, mile-crunching machine you see today." The others laughed. "She _will_ get us to Polarica."

Carmen looked around the table. "What about sailing in sight of land?"

"What about it?" Thomas said.

"How about we do that?" she said flatly.

Thomas smiled. "In fact, I agree with you. With this calm water ... frankly, I'd feel better seeing land." He glanced at the deck above. "But don't forget, when we eventually cross the Polar Ocean, we'll be in the open sea for four, maybe 5 days."

Mick looked up from his coffee. "How long till we reach that leg of the trip?"

"Five weeks overall. In a month we should be in position to start the crossing. Knock on wood."

Marnie tapped her spoon against her cup. "Thomas is too easy-going to bring this up, so I will."

"Easy-going?" Turok asked in an innocent voice.

"In the coming weeks," Marnie continued, "during this trip, I move that Thomas have captain's authority." She looked at the nodding faces around her.

"I second Marnie's motion," Mick said. "Thomas should be in charge."

Thomas smiled. "On one condition."

"Floggings at nine every morning?" Turok called out.

"And attendance will be compulsory," Thomas added. "Apart from that, I only need authority over what directly affects the _Boleyn_. Whatever doesn't concern her, and your safety on board of course, would not be my responsibility."

Marnie revised her motion accordingly, Mick seconded it, and the vote was unanimous.

"One last thing," Thomas added. "By necessity, we'll be navigating by the stars, and that means night sailing." He looked up towards where the pilot-house was, above deck. "Giorgi and I, and three volunteers, will take turns at the helm. But we can work that out over the next few days." He paused. "So far voting on the choices to be made has worked fine. But the day may come when we have to elect a decision-maker. Just keep that in mind."

Franklin stood up, smiled, and said a quiet goodnight. "No," he protested, "you young people stay and talk." He was bunking with Thomas and Giorgi in a small cabin in the bow. They all waved him goodnight.

Marnie glanced at the antique barometer on the wall. "Maybe the instruments will work when we're closer to the pole?"

Mick pushed his spoon round the top of his mug. "There's a good chance Nebura's polarity is holding off the ion cloud from the poles. If so, then yes, the neutronics should start working again as we move north."

Marnie rubbed her forehead. "From what Rainer told us ... the effects we're seeing up here are nothing compared to what's happening at the equator."

"What difference does any of it make?" Sorel said quietly. He drank off the last of his coffee and set his mug down carefully on the table. "Dead is dead!" He stared at the faces around him. "This world's falling apart. We're just buying ourselves a few extra months. The less we know about this heap of a world, the better. It'll make dying easier."

The table fell silent. Marnie pushed her chair back. "If I die here, I want to understand why."

Carmen looked at Sorel as though for the first time. "You've already given up."

Sorel stood up suddenly, almost knocking over his chair. "I'm a realist. We're kidding ourselves." He appeared indifferent as he looked around at friends who avoided his eyes. He walked off to the end of the room and swung down into one of the lower bunks.

The mood was broken. The fifteen travelers broke into several desultory conversations. A few in Thomas's group silently shared Sorel's assessment, if not with the bitterness behind his words.

Carmen and Marnie rose a short while later and made their way to the second cabin in the bow, next to Thomas's. Aleesha followed not long after. Across the corridor from the common room another cabin amidships held five more from Thomas's group, including Afflek. The rest of them found places among the four double bunks at the end of the common room.

Despite his aching shoulder, Mick went up on deck. For some reason the night seemed less frightening than it did only a couple hours before. He sat looking at the star-filled sky, spread out like a banquet for his eyes alone.

Another figure stood at the other end of the boat, his feet spread on the rock-still deck. Sorel's upturned eyes looked into the same sky, yet for him it held only an uninviting, indifferent emptiness. To his way of thinking this diseased world would eventually crush him, and not even realize it. This boat, all those sleeping so naively below, and himself – were as nothing. And nothing was all that awaited them.

______________

By late afternoon the next day Thomas had taken them a further 150 miles north. They stood about ten miles offshore, staying in sight of land as Carmen had wanted. Inuvoro was a roughly triangular continent, with its southern coast as the longer, transverse side. Its two diagonal sides that met in the north pointed towards the small polar land mass of Polarica. An added advantage of coastal sailing was that navigating by the stars was made unnecessary. They could just follow the broad outline of the coast north. Everyone liked the tradeoff – a few extra days sailing in exchange for staying in sight of land. Thomas had cautioned, however, that once they reached the Polar Ocean they would need to resume blue water sailing.

After a week of this the islands between the _Boleyn_ and the coast became a vast archipelago – they passed hundreds of such islands. It had one undeniable benefit: they could stand out much further from the mainland. The dispersed islands were strung along the coast like a string of emeralds, each one a different shade of green.

Carmen, Marnie, and Aleesha brought folding chairs up on deck from the galley-lounge. Their feet up on the stern gunwale, they sat gazing to starboard as the shore slid past. They imagined they were becoming seasoned sailors, which amused Thomas no end. That morning he had announced that they sailed nearly seven hundred miles in the last week, and was disgruntled when this news brought no hearty cheers.

Nothing broke up the monotony of islands, trees, and ocean. The only movement was the wake of the _Boleyn_ itself. It was like crossing an artist's seascape, or being trapped in a child's snow globe, with the artificial snow removed.

It was late afternoon, and Thomas had shut off the engines, which needed several down hours a day. The silence was a relief at first, but soon the stillness around them became oppressive, as it always did. Mick came on deck and strolled to the stern. His injured shoulder was healing quickly, and he hardly noticed it as he leaned on the transom, then swung carefully down to the platform as he had every day since leaving.

Carmen joined him as he knelt by the water. "Any change?"

He looked up, and nodded. She leaned down beside him, and fully extended her arm under the water's surface. She could only about a hand-span down.

Mick cupped water in his hand. "It could just be the difference of daylight."

"We can check again tomorrow." She smiled. "Don't be a skeptic, Mick."

"Not a cynic?"

"No. A skeptic wants to believe, and waits for proof. A cynic won't believe even when there _is_ proof."

He shook the water from his hand. "So what are you?"

"Guess."

He gazed across the water, then turned back. "There isn't a word for it. You have the gift of belief."

She leaned back against the stern. "Is that a good thing?"

"Faith can move mountains, they used to say." He looked back at her. "Sometimes I think the real world is the one in our minds."

She gave her attention again to the water. "I have a game I play. Sometimes I know things. I just _know_." A feeling now, about the water, was hovering just out of her reach. She kept looking, waiting. She leaned to the side of the platform, and lowered her face almost to the water line.

Mick watched her. "What is it?"

"The water is changing," she said softly.

The _Boleyn_ rocked slightly, just the innocent rise and fall that a mild swell might cause. The boat rocked again. He looked on deck and the others appeared unaware of it. He turned and looked out to the open sea, and saw the change.

"Waves," he said. "From the north."

Turok leaned out over the stern and pointed without a word towards the coastal horizon. They followed his gaze. A V-formation of birds very high up was crossing a little forward of them, heading northeast. "Back on Earth those would be a migrating species," he said.

Thomas stepped out of the pilot-house, and wandered over. He too looked at the distant flock. "First birds I've seen in more than a year."

Carmen shielded her eyes from the glare over the water. "They're fleeing the stilling." They watched until the flock merged with the northern horizon.

______________

After dinner the others brought more folding chairs up on deck. They sat along the port gunwale and watched the sunset together in silence. But it was a different kind of silence. The changes they were seeing were minor, perhaps insignificant, yet it gave them a welcome lightness of heart. They wanted to believe the further north they went the more Nebura would heal itself, but they knew this was not in fact happening. This region, this latitude, was simply succumbing at a slower rate. A flickering hope joined them in a fragile weave of emotion that no one wanted to see unwind.

Dinner had started out quietly, until their curiosity had got the better of them. Turok had asked the question that was on all their minds, whether the stilling was in fact getting worse. Franklin conceded that, on a global basis, it most certainly was. He explained that at the equator the sky and ocean were affected differently than back in Nebu City.

"It is far worse there," he said quietly. "I doubt whether anyone is left alive south of thirty degrees North."

Marnie twisted a biscuit in half. "From thirty North to thirty South ... nothing?"

Franklin nodded grimly.

"And it's spreading?"

He nodded again. "Although it doesn't literally _spread_. The same forces that produce it there – are causing it to occur everywhere else. It happened faster there."

"And you really have no idea what's causing it?"

The old man turned to Mick. "Your observation of a dispersed ion cloud is almost certainly part of it. What else did your ship's _synthetic_ say about it?"

"Trinh didn't say much," Mick admitted. "Though I suppose she might have learned more over the past couple weeks." He shrugged. "I assume this star's emissions – its ions – are subtly different from what it sent out before, and the ion cloud seems to be a result of that."

Marnie impatiently finished her biscuit. "Mick, I'm sorry, but that doesn't tell me a whole lot."

Mick plowed on. "The anomaly could be many things, such as more frequent density waves from the sun."

Turok leaned back, exhaling loudly.

Franklin interrupted. "Waves of ions, stripped hydrogen atoms, more tightly packed than normal."

Marnie picked up another biscuit. "What else?"

Mick ran his finger along the outer edge of his plate. "Increased ion levels. Even if that has no effect at all, it tells us a lot about this sun. For instance, there are likely more surface ejections than normal, when plasma explodes out through the corona."

"Sending out bigger ion waves?" Marnie said.

Mick nodded. "And other solar material. There also may be something happening with the photosphere – the actual surface of the sun beneath the corona. It's very thin, only a couple hundred miles thick. All the visible light from the sun is produced there. Everything begins, here, with that light." He placed his hand flat on the table. He looked up. "Or it could be something different from ions or light. Something may have affected the burning of hydrogen deep inside, at the sun's core."

Marnie sat back. "I'm almost sorry I asked." She nodded at Mick. "But thanks."

Franklin looked round at the glum faces. "A lot of possibilities ... don't necessarily mean a complex problem. _One_ of those possibilities, under specific conditions, is what's causing this. When we find that –" He stood up. "Let's not lose hope."

To Mick's surprise, the dinner had not ended on an entirely pessimistic note.

______________

The weeks followed lazily one after another. The coast on their right slipped by, its forested cover growing more sparse with each passing day. This wasn't to be explained by any climatic shift as they went north – the temperature had dropped only a negligible amount. Franklin believed the soil itself was responsible, as they had soon discovered during a brief onshore excursion. Not only was the soil thinner, its chemical makeup was substantially different. The trees appeared in lonely clusters, oases of green on an otherwise finely-ground, shale-like surface that stretched far back from the shoreline.

They were within days of reaching the northern tip of Inuvoro, the Cape, and would officially begin their crossing of the Polar Ocean later that day. Thomas would soon be readying for the turn away from the shoreline – the long weeks of their coastal passage were coming to an end.

A dozen folding chairs had been left out on deck from that first week. They had often sat out together after meals and during pilot-house shift changes. It was a couple hours after sunset and Carmen was sitting alone near the stern. She got up, swiveled smoothly over the transom and landed on the platform. Lying out with her head on folded arms, she looked over the side, her face barely inches from the water. She enjoyed watching the small wavelets, maybe eighteen inches from crest to crest and a couple inches deep. They gave her a strange longing. She hadn't realized how oppressive the stillness and silence would become. Light from the quarter moon reflected off the surface of the water, making it appear opaque again. She knew of course that even under very normal conditions, water was only transparent about a couple feet down, but once submerged you could see a distance of several yards, and often much further. She suddenly wondered how transparent this water was. She felt a sudden desire to be submerged in it, and find out.

Her eyes darted among the constantly shifting reflections of moonlight on the low crests and troughs of the waves. The moonlit-dappled surface was so near – she felt as though she was sinking into it. She felt adrift, and the sinking sensation pulled some more. There was an odd glow below her, in the shape of a large sphere. It came closer. It was like a pale bubble of light moving through the water, except the light was contained.

It appeared to project no aura.

She heard her name being called, and snapped her head up. She saw Marnie standing up on the stern. Carmen looked back in the water for her phantom sphere of light, but it had vanished.

"Carmen," Marnie said again, looking down at her.

"You look like you've seen a ghost," Marnie said as Carmen joined her on deck.

Carmen shrugged. "No, just the opposite. Sometimes this water seems intensely _alive_ to me."

Marnie looked at her strangely. "We need you below – something's wrong with Giorgi."

Moments later something pungent flared in her nostrils as she went below-deck behind Marnie, who looked at her sidelong as they walked down the corridor into the common room. The ship's company was clustered around one of the lower bunks at the far end. The others parted as she approached.

A wan face looked up at her. She couldn't believe Giorgi could change so much in only a few hours. His skin was pale, splotchy, and small lesions had appeared around his mouth, nose and eyes. Mick was at the head of the bed, kneeling with his back against the wall, his expression unreadable as he nodded at Carmen.

Giorgi's eyes opened at the sound of her approach. He smiled crookedly. "Thomas's cooking ..."

His voice was cut off by a wet-sounding peal of coughs that locked down his throat, the muscles beneath his jaw clenched briefly in a spasm. The coughing passed. His heaving chest subsided, his throat slackened. His pulse was visible now in his tightened throat; his mouth hung open.

Her mind flashed back to Rainer. She balled a fist and suppressed the memory as she leaned by the bunk. "What's this, Giorgi?"

He lifted his shoulders imperceptibly.

"You're alarming everyone, you know," she said, in a schoolroom tone. "I haven't seen people looking so grim since the last time you beat up on poor Mick."

He grinned weakly as Carmen was joined by Marnie carrying one of the ship's medical kits. Carmen looked up at Mick. He turned and nodded to Turok, gesturing at the bunk. "Let's get this top bed off, give him more air."

The bed's catches were released and the top bunk was lifted away. Rummaging in the bag, Carmen pulled out a pressure-release hypodermic. After checking his temperature she punched in those symptoms she had seen and guessed at, and waited as a midlevel meds cocktail slotted itself in the pressure chamber.

Carmen leaned back over him. "Time to dream your cares away, Giorgi," she said, smiling, and held up the hypo. He nodded. "Is there anything else we should know ... did anything out of the ordinary happen to you in the last couple days?"

He paused. "I felt dizzy a lot ... a few blackouts."

She nodded. "I need you to stop alarming everyone. Promise?"

He smiled, lifted a hand off the bed sheet, and raised his thumb. She placed the pressure-release hypo against the pulse in his neck and depressed the nozzle. A sibilant release sounded, followed by a slight surging visible beneath his skin. She packed away the hypo, waited a moment, and then looked up at the others. He was already snoring softly.

"He should sleep for ten hours or so. Let's keep him covered."

She withdrew and joined the others standing in a small clot at the galley end of the room. No one uttered the words, but there was little doubt the CTT had reappeared. They thought they had left it behind.

______________

Giorgi's condition worsened the next day. Carmen and Mick jury-rigged a battery of pharmaceuticals from the _Boleyn's_ medical stores after consulting a scaled-down medical synthetic on the notebook holofield. His fever abated, but little else – the coughing and vomiting continued. They all contemplated, privately, the possibility that there would be no cure for Giorgi's illness, just as there was none for the stilling that laid siege to Nebura itself.

It was almost six AM, and Thomas was nearing the end of his four-hour piloting shift. Mick had volunteered for the next four-hour stint, and was making his way to the pilot-house carrying two steaming mugs of coffee.

Thomas gladly accepted the mug held out to him. "I could smell that through two sets of doors," he said, smiling, and sipped loudly. They settled into a companionable silence.

The sun was edging above the eastern horizon, spreading an orange fire along Nebura's rim.

Seeing the sunrise was the high point of Thomas's day. "The first settlers called this planet Kalaalit. You know why?"

"New Kalaal," Mick replied.

Thomas nodded, and looked awkwardly at his friend. "Mick, we all accept what is happening." He nodded at what lay beyond the pilothouse windows. "No one is to blame for that."

Mick gazed at the horizon without really seeing it. "I hate feeling helpless."

Thomas sipped again meditatively. A short time later he formally handed over piloting duty to Mick, 'the ritual of transfer,' he had grandly called it, in their first days at sea. He closed the door quietly behind him. Mick was alone with the stunning sunrise, and his thoughts.

As Thomas had taught them, Mick ensured the bow was aligned with two specific, barely visible stars, in different constellations. It wasn't really necessary with the coast still in sight. He checked that the _Boleyn's_ centerline angle against an agreed, far-off landmark was correct. Providing the stilling's effects dissipated as they moved north, he and Turok hoped to soon have the neutronics back up. It was comforting just to hold the wheel, and feel the ever-present, slight shudder coming up through the deck from the engines. They didn't really hear them any longer. When the engines were shut off that first day, everyone had been spooked by the silence. Mick's eyes returned to the bow.

They had removed Giorgi from the large bunkroom, joined as it was with the common room, and moved him into one of the forward cabins. Mick dreaded to think how that cabin might become their sick bay, and saw in his mind a progression of patients moving through it over the coming weeks. 'We'll be a death ship,' he thought bitterly. He suddenly cursed this world – this Kalaalit – that Trinh had brought them to. There were times he felt angry at the indifferent control Nebura had over their lives. He tried to remind himself that this world itself was suffering as well. He eased back in the high piloting stool, leaning into its comfortable wraparound back, and looked off into the sky. He saw wisps of white very high up. They were too distant to seem like clouds, though their presence at all was a move in the right direction. Until a few days ago the skies had been unvarying expanses of cloudless blue.

He thought of how Carmen had so uncomplainingly taken charge of Giorgi's treatment. 'Every symptom is like a message,' her actions seemed to say. And once understood, might lead to a solution. He reproached himself for having let his determination slide recently. They faced three problems: finding a way off the planet, Rainer's CTT disease, and the stilling. He wondered what their message was.

He was glad to reach the end of his shift. He was tiring more easily in recent days. The muffled sounds of sliding doors below and water being drawn wafted up through the deck – the _Boleyn_ was waking up. He turned off the engine – silence enveloped the morning. They drifted forward gently, and came to a gliding stop. He slipped the leather catch over a wheel spoke, to hold the rudder in place. He unlatched the door, slid it open, and froze.

He was certain he had felt a slight puff of breeze. He stepped fully out on deck. There it was again, a telltale bit of wind. He looked up at the wind-vane on the stump of mast above the pilothouse. It wasn't turning at all. He stepped back in and saw it was locked in place. He released it and stepped out. Again, nothing. He felt foolish. He looked up and saw the lateral cups were now slowly rotating. He looked forward to a day of incremental changes: small waves, clouds, and wind.

______________

Carmen again looked in on Giorgi before joining the others for breakfast. She had spent much of the night monitoring her patient. His original symptoms, dizziness and blackouts, had progressed to a fever and delirium. Rainer's words kept coming back to her.

She stepped into the small cabin and was shocked at Giorgi's high color, his labored breathing. At his collarbone she saw a strange lesion, like nothing she had ever seen. Within its red rim the skin had a cloudy texture. She pulled back the bedcover to reveal several more of the fiery discolorations on his chest. She felt his forehead, and saw the bed sheet was soaked with perspiration. Then the cloudy opacity of the lesion at this collarbone _cleared_ – for a moment she thought she could see right through Giorgi's body, then the swirling cloudiness returned. She hastily pulled the bedcover back up. Maybe if she brought down the fever the lesions might recede. They had tried everything else.

There was only one thing she could think of doing.

______________

Four of Thomas's men emerged on deck carrying Giorgi's prone body. Carmen was already on the stern platform, in cutoff jeans and a T-shirt. Another of the men had hold of the sick man's upper body as Mick, who was holding his legs, slid down the transom and landed lightly on the platform. He swayed there for a moment as Carmen slipped a life preserver over Giorgi's shoulders and zipped it closed.

Moving to the platform's edge, she nodded at Mick, turned and slid smoothly into the water. After levering Giorgi over the side of the platform Mick joined Carmen in the water, where they held the unconscious man easily between them. The water had a surprising buoyancy.

Carmen was grateful when one of the others handed her a life preserver. "He feels cooler already. I should have thought of this before."

As an inflatable Dacron stretcher was tied to the side of the platform Mick looped two life preservers to the ends. Carmen brought Giorgi forward and they rolled him onto the webbing. The stretcher had holes activated by a nozzle – she made it somewhat less buoyant. He was about 75% submerged, his head held high on the stretcher's headrest. She noticed that his lesions remained opaque. They receded noticeably over the next ten minutes, growing first filmy, and a much healthier-looking pinkish crust began forming. The cooler temperature and the water made a surprising difference.

Mick pulled at the stretcher, testing how secure the ties were. He looked over at Carmen. "How long?"

She shrugged. "Let's try 30 minutes at first. See if it brings down his fever."

"We could set up a cot in the stern."

She considered. "Yeah. That should work." They looked towards the shoreline about three miles away. She felt tired from her long night at Giorgi's side."Mind if I swim around a bit?" she asked.

He smiled with surprise. "Go ahead. You've earned it."

She nodded and drifted lazily away. She swam about twenty yards from the _Boleyn_. The water was much clearer now, almost normal. She unzipped her life preserver and let herself submerge a few feet. Bending at the waist she scissored her legs, pushing herself down. She was surprised that she could see about ten yards now, easy. The stilling had definitely reached here. It flashed into her mind that only a few weeks earlier she had been onboard the Arc-4, in orbit around this planet, and here she was now, swimming through clear, emerald-green waters. She smiled at the incongruousness of it.

She was down about twenty feet. Rolling over, she was about to scissor her legs and make for the surface when below her appeared an out-of-place _glowing_. It was like what she had seen before. She stroked sideways, pivoted, and saw it again. It looked to be a fairly strong reflection of light, about twenty feet further down. She looked up, saw that the sun was directly overhead – about noon, she thought. 'Where is it being reflected from?' she asked herself. She looked down again, and it was clearer now – a definite sphere-shaped bubble of light. But she needed air. She kicked twice and felt herself float peacefully up. Breaking surface, she saw Franklin on the platform talking with Mick, who was still in the water holding the stretcher. Aleesha and Marnie were over on the far side of the pilothouse, looking towards shore. She took a deep breath, and dived again.

Using long strokes she slivered her lean body deeper, and the sphere loomed swiftly into view. She slowed and hung suspended several feet above it. Kicking sideways she moved in towards it on a half-parabola, and felt herself slowly drawn closer. She stopped again a few feet away. It was beside her now – a perfect sphere of light. Looking at it was disorienting, like being back up at the surface, as though the _Boleyn_ would hove into view at any moment. She looked up and saw the sunlight reaching down, fading into a grayish-green relative darkness above her. The sphere was maybe thirty feet in diameter. She looked down between her gently kicking legs, white against the inky blackness below. She looked ahead into the light, trying to see inside. But there was nothing to see, it appeared empty. She tentatively pulled herself forward with short, paddling strokes, until she got herself within an arm's length of the bright surface. When she reached towards it there was a slight tingling on her fingertips, as though the effervescing bubbles from a carbonated drink were tickling her skin. She again felt the need for air. When she stroked with her other hand her fingertips touched the surface of light, and broke through. Her fingertips were no longer tickling, they felt warm. They seemed to have broken through into a place empty of water.

A touch of vertigo stole in. The need for air scrabbled around inside her like a live thing. She yanked her hand back from the sphere. Flailing, she backed away and kicked for the surface. Her hands reached through and she felt flooded with relief as her head broke above the welcoming light-dappled surface. She was about to call out to the boat – but it wasn't there. Turning rapidly in every direction, she couldn't see it. She floundered and suddenly realized she couldn't see the sky, in any direction. She knew a moment of pure terror. All she could see was a bright concave surface of water, in every direction. She willed herself to be still. She looked down at her body, which was projecting part-way out of the water, and she wasn't falling back down into it. A hysterical laugh burst from her lips, and she clamped her mouth shut. She thought quickly, realized she must have got disoriented and swum right back into the sphere. She was hanging inside an _inside-out_ world of water, and was breathing air! Then she understood there was no gravity pulling on the upper half of her body. Suddenly she didn't want to be half-in and half-out of whatever this was, and quickly kicked her legs. She felt herself suddenly shoot forward into the sphere. Her whole body was inside. It felt like a surreal version of a space-walk. Water-droplets were spooling off her skin in every direction, she was in a shower of suspended drops, which were gliding back towards, and flowing into, the globe of water that enveloped her. Then the fear returned – she was shocked into immobility by its _size_.

She very deliberately closed her eyes. She lifted her heavy arms to cover her chest, and keeping her legs straight she crossed one ankle over the other. Her breathing slowed, and she took in one great lungful of air after another, and tried to clear her mind. She was sure. The sphere extended several hundred feet across, many times the distance the sphere appeared to be from outside.

She didn't want to think of that, so she asked herself to solve this problem. When a laugh bubbled up, she grabbed hold, and then started giving back her solutions. 'One, crush this panic.' She kept her eyes firmly closed. 'Two, get outside.' She felt her skin drying quickly. 'Three, get back to the surface.' She opened her eyes, and looked at the silvery blue lightsphere of water around her. It was like being inside a zero-G stadium of light. The surface was now further away, and bringing on a renewed vertigo. She breathed deep. If it's further away, she thought, then I must be moving. She loosened her ankles and made a tentative kick. Nothing. She scissored her legs. Again, nothing, except she did seem to be moving deeper into the sphere's center. Then she just stopped fighting it, and let herself drift. She reached out above her head. Minutes passed. Tears were coursing down her cheeks. It felt like the split-second before some terrible accident, a segment of time stretching out before the moment of impact. She screamed when the tingling suddenly started in her toes. She couldn't look. Then a sensation of wetness was climbing up her feet, on her shins now. She wrenched her eyes open and saw she was sluicing out through the sphere's surface. She had floated right across it. She clamped her mouth shut as the water climbed up her chest, wrapping round her neck and chin. Water closed over her head. She was out, enveloped in water again.

She kept her eyes closed. She let herself drift for several seconds, feeling the wonderful relief of being pulled by gravity. She welcomed its heavy embrace. She kicked away from that direction, lifting her face and arms. Finally she opened her eyes, and saw the surface rising, or dropping, towards her. She wasn't sure, she hesitated – then decided she didn't care. She broke through and moaned with relief when she saw the sky above her. She turned and there was the beautiful _Boleyn_. Suddenly the sound hit her: the world's sound, the sound of air in her ears. So loud. She couldn't seem to speak. She had no idea how long she had been gone, and was exhausted. Franklin was leaning over talking to Mick, as he had been before. She lifted a hand and waved weakly. She rolled onto her side and scissored her legs. Glancing at the pilot-house, she saw that Marnie and Aleesha were still talking, as before. She felt weak, and kicked again to keep herself above water. Mick was calling to her, but she couldn't get any words out. The water closed over her head.

Suddenly Mick was at her side. Arms were reaching down. The world faded.

**6 |Storm Ring**

Aleesha looked at her reflection in the mirror. There was no mistaking that as far as her looks were concerned, the flaws were clearly winning the battle. Not that it mattered, of course. She could look at herself without a micron of vanity, without expecting to see anything in particular, perhaps because others felt vain on her behalf, by their focusing on one aspect of her person to the exclusion of all else. It freed her to look at herself impartially, clinically. This led to an inevitable conclusion: what others considered she possessed – beauty – was something she felt completely indifferent to. If she _was_ beautiful, she reasoned, her feelings should reflect that. But they didn't. So to her mind her beauty was a sham, a thing that only existed for others. And by thinking it, she thought, they make it real; and by thinking the opposite, I make the opposite real, for me. This understanding could one day produce in her an awakening, though that hadn't happened yet. She was only beginning to see that by controlling her thinking, her expectations, she was deciding in advance what her world _would_ _be_.

She finished washing her face, made her way to the galley where she grabbed a mug of steaming coffee, and climbed to the main deck. It was about seven in the evening. She sat on the deck, her back against the pilothouse, her legs stretched out so her feet were resting on the gunwale. That day the sky had had honest-to-goodness clouds. They were larger than any they had seen in weeks, and were lower in the sky. The breeze that moved the clouds had picked up too – if you turned away and looked back a minute or two later, their position would have changed. A gentle breeze was blowing even now. Aleesha looked around, and it occurred to her they might be leaving the stilling behind. Nebura was beginning to feel like a normal world. 'Well, almost!' she thought, as her eye fell on Carmen standing in the bow, looking intently into the dark water.

Aleesha hadn't known what to make of Carmen's swimming outing a few days before. Or more to the point, her wild report of an underwater sphere of light. The others' reactions hadn't helped matters. Franklin had been politely skeptical, Sorel scornful, Marnie had clearly wanted to believe her, but in the end, hadn't. Mick had come the closest of any of them to doing so. 'Our not believing her,' Aleesha thought, 'has made Carmen herself less able to believe it.' Aleesha smiled. 'Maybe she and I aren't so different.' Carmen had spent much of that day resting in her cabin after Mick had brought her back.

Giorgi's illness had receded after two hours in the water, then leveled off. His body's lesions had rapidly crusted over after several hours lying on a cot in the stern. He had looked peaceful under his umbrella. Then in the late afternoon he had woken and hobbled around the stern, breathing deeply. Yet everyone suspected, including himself, that he was one of Rainer's 'walking ghosts'. He seemed oddly reconciled.

The one thing Carmen had said that piqued Aleesha's interest was when she showed her wristwatch to them at dinner. It was one of several fairly expensive marine watches – from _Boleyn's_ glory days as a marine research vessel – that Franklin had handed out in their first week on board. Carmen's watch had unaccountably been fifteen minutes ahead of the others. She said in no uncertain terms that she had spent fifteen minutes inside the sphere, and concluded the sphere carried within itself some sort of time distortion. 'You go, girl!' Aleesha said to herself. Add that to the space distortion which Carmen had enlightened them about earlier. 'A more plausible theory,' Aleesha thought, 'is she has Rainer's disease, and it's on a wild romp now in the sunny uplands of her mind.' Aleesha was not particularly curious about this world. 'But what if Carmen's right?' she asked herself. 'Nebura had delivered up some rich weirdness so far. Why not marine globes of light with a terminal case of space-time curvature?' The engine had been shut off. She jumped at the sound of Carmen's voice. Carmen was pointing frantically at something in the water.

Aleesha stood up and walked over. Mick had joined Carmen a while earlier and was looking at whatever Carmen was so excited about. They were _both_ getting excited now.

About a hundred feet off to the side, and fairly deep, maybe forty feet down, was a pronounced glowing in the water. 'Is that Carmen's sphere?' Aleesha asked herself.

Carmen had turned to Mick. "It's bigger," she said. She was almost bouncing from foot to foot with excitement.

Mick stepped up onto the gunwale while holding a shroud that stretched down from the _Boleyn_ _'s_ unused half-mast. "You went inside that?"

Carmen shook her head. "This must be a different one. It looks bigger, and deeper."

Marnie and a couple others came on deck, Franklin among them. "It could be something on the bottom, some light-absorbing surface," the old man said, dropping into a squat. "Strange it would emit light this late in the day, though."

Carmen turned to Seamus in the pilothouse. "How deep is the bottom here?"

"Hundred and fifty feet, give or take."

Carmen turned back to the water. Aleesha hadn't been expecting it, but she realized afterward that it made sense. Carmen needed to prove to herself that she wasn't losing her mind. She stepped up onto the gunwale beside Mick, who stood on the other side of the shroud angling for a better look. Without warning, she bent at the knees and torpedoed in. Marnie shouted and the others came forward to where Mick still stood on the gunwale. It was at most five seconds after she dove that Mick too launched himself from the side of the boat, slicing cleanly into the water.

Aleesha was shocked by the risk her two shipmates had taken, and leaned her head against the pilothouse doorjamb. She almost didn't want to watch. Carmen was clearly visible. She had reached the depth of the sphere, and hovered about fifteen feet to one side as Mick joined her. They had been down for close to a minute now. They hesitated, it seemed as though Carmen was gesturing to Mick, explaining something. Treading water side by side, Carmen reached out and took hold of one of Mick's hands. They started off and swam straight toward the sphere. Without slowing they passed straight into its bright surface.

______________

Mick had been half a second behind Carmen when she passed into the light. He closed his eyes and felt the tingling in his hands travel down his arms. When they had set out from their underwater perch outside the sphere, they had made several strong kicks and built a fair momentum. They hit the sphere surface with their arms thrust out before them. Once his hands entered the surface, they vanished from sight like the light had absorbed them. Then his arms were vanishing too, as though being slowly swallowed. His arms felt light, and then the top of his head was tingling, and a single flash pressed against his closed eyelids. The tingling tickling sensation traveled down his body, reached and passed through the soles of his feet, and then it was gone. He opened his eyes.

He was still holding Carmen's hand; she squeezed his hand almost painfully. He looked behind at the retreating wall of light, and turned to look at her. She was watching him closely.

When he smiled weakly back at her she gave him a thumbs-up. "Mick?"

It was like she had spoken in a vaulted cathedral. Her voice filled the space, yet it didn't lose any of its quality of quiet nearness. He cleared his throat. "We did it!"

She looked ahead, then turned back. "How far do you think it is?"

He looked past her, judging the distance, and shook his head. "But how? It shouldn't be more than fifty feet."

"Yeah, I know."

He glanced around at the perfect symmetry of the sphere. "You really think this is a curvature of space."

She nodded. "Or else it's a shared illusion."

"No." He breathed out heavily. "Truth doesn't play favorites. I can't deny what I see."

She smiled. "I've been doing just that, to myself, these past few days."

They fell silent. He wanted to move faster, and tried a few experimental kicks, but it made no difference. They continued gliding through the seemingly weightless environment of the sphere.

"It's better just to relax. We'll reach the other side eventually."

He looked at his watch, and estimated they had been inside the sphere for about seven minutes.

He couldn't see her face when she spoke again – she was looking ahead to the other side. "When I was in the other one," she said. "I mean after the vertigo wore off, I felt better than I have in years." She paused. "How do _you_ feel?"

"Not bad, actually. It's like the perfect space-walk." He bent his knees, brought his legs up, and crossed his ankles. He felt ridiculous, and didn't care. "I haven't felt this great in years." He laughed, and the open sound of it was a surprise. He laughed again, louder, and then shouted.

Carmen laughed along with him. She reached out towards the other side, as though she wanted to embrace all of it, and then brought her hands down to rest on her shoulders.

Mick let loose with another shout, his voice somersaulting down into a tenor warble of sound that rolled forward through the sphere. Carmen clapped and let out a long pealing whistle. They glided on, filling the sphere with their shouts.

As their laughter faded Mick looked at Carmen's watch. "Does your watch have one of those miniaturized holofields," he asked suddenly.

The question took her by surprise. "Uh, sure, I guess so. Why?"

Mick reached down and pulled a palm maser from his belt clip. "Take the back off your watch."

She looked at him quizzically, took off her watch, deftly pressed on the center of its back plate, then the outer edge. She did it again, and the plate levered up. In the meantime Mick had adjusted his maser to a half-inch long, laser-narrow beam. He slipped Carmen's watchband over the maser, held it in place, and then sent a two-second beam into the micro pulse cylinder inside the open watch. For two seconds a small holofield cube, only a couple inches on a side, was emitted from the watch's front face plate.

"Bravo!" Carmen said.

"Wait," he said.

He adjusted the maser-beam wavelength all the way down, and toggled another control. Then he sent a continuous beam into the back of the watch. An image cube sprang into life above Mick's lap, about thirty inches on a side. It showed an opaque region in the bottom center – _Polarica_ , he assumed. He turned off the beam and the holocube image continued on. Surrounding that landmass was the Polar Ocean, and surrounding that was an irregular circular obstruction – a ribbon of what looked like volatile atmospheric activity. Polarica itself, and the ocean around it out about 200 miles, appeared to be entirely free of any disruption. Looking at the area of atmospheric turbulence they saw whorls of horrendous winds and spinning tsunami-like waves crashing against each other – it formed a two-mile wide perimeter that, like the wall surrounding an ancient fortress, completely encircled the relatively small polar continent. It appeared to extend vertically right up into the outer edge of Nebura's troposphere.

"It's like a maelstrom," Carmen said. "A very controlled maelstrom."

"A ring of storms."

"A _storm ring_ , yeah."

"Look at how defined its perimeter is, outside and inside."

"It could be artificial," Carmen said.

"Looks that way. Or maybe nature on Nebura just appears to us, at times, artificial." He reached up into the holofield and ran his finger along the dancing light that formed the storm ring perimeter. "I wonder if it might be part of the stilling – like its front line. Or maybe it's the planet's reaction to the stilling?"

"Defending Polarica?" Carmen said with a smile.

Mick withdrew his hand, and looked up again at the symmetrical concave space around them. They had moved more than half-way across now. They weren't entirely weightless, he noticed, because he could change his posture even though there was no counter-force for him to push against. None of their movement altered their trajectory across the empty space of the sphere. Being there produced a startling feeling of contentment.

Carmen was peering closer into the holofield. "Your storm ring has no break, no gap that I can see."

"Right. How do we get through it," Mick agreed. "I can't imagine sailing the _Boleyn_ through that."

"Look, over here. This section seems less volatile."

Mick expanded the holofield's interior. "You're right. It's like a parting of the storms. Narrow though, about a thousand feet maybe."

"How far away is it?"

"Thirty miles west of here."

They looked for a while longer.

Mick snapped off the holofield and leaned back. He felt stronger than he had in weeks, since receiving that grazing wound back on the bridge in Nebu City. It wasn't just a feeling; his muscles did seem stronger, his breathing deeper, his thinking clearer.

They were mere feet from the surface of light. The tingling and tickling touched again his outstretched hands, traveled down his arms, the feeling of pressure and wetness enveloping them suddenly as they broke through. His head was through, immersed again in water. He opened his eyes and watched his body and legs steadily re-appear as if they were re-materializing, emerging from a bright hole in space. Carmen was ahead of him, fully out, waiting for him, smiling. She nodded and pointed to the surface. They kicked and slowly rose above the sphere, back into darkness.

When they were less than ten feet from the surface Carmen touched his arm. He turned and saw her staring intently off to one side. He followed her gaze and saw there was another sphere about half a mile away, apparently hovering half in and half out of the water. He glanced back at her. She looked as excited as he was by the prospect of seeing a half-sphere of light above the surface. They kicked, and keeping their eyes on the distant sphere, broke surface. Where the second sphere should have been was just a normal clear day – there was no half-sphere above the surface.

Their shipmates were leaning over the gunwale. "Come on!" Aleesha called again.

Mick and Carmen took one last puzzled look, turned and swam towards the _Boleyn's_ stern ladder.

______________

Aleesha sat in the galley lounge across from Mick and Carmen. They had just finished describing what happened inside the sphere. The whole ship's company sat around the room. Aleesha was not surprised at the lack of response.

She shivered when she remembered what she had seen only minutes earlier – Mick joining Carmen down by the sphere, and then both of them swimming directly into it. Carmen had been slightly ahead of Mick. When her arm passed through, Aleesha had caught a movement on the other side of the sphere. She glanced to the other side and saw an arm emerging from that other side. She shifted her eyes quickly back and saw Carmen in down to her waist, and Mick's head was just entering. She shifted again back to the other side and saw Carmen was _half_ _out_ of the other side, and Mick's head was just breaking through. She gasped and looked back, just catching sight of Mick's feet vanishing inside. When she looked back, they were both out. They had looked relaxed, cheerful even. Then they swam up to the surface, pausing for a little more sightseeing close to the surface. Everyone on the boat had seen it.

Mick explained about jury-rigging a holofield on Carmen's watch.

"The neutronics worked?" Turok asked.

Mick nodded, and smiled when Turok went off to check if the notebooks' systems were up. They began describing the storm ring. This time the new information met with no skepticism. They were all considering the possibility of a way through it when Turok walked back in. 'He looks disappointed,' Aleesha noted.

They looked at him, but he shook his head.

"Is this storm ring stable?" Franklin asked Mick.

"It was when we observed it," Carmen answered.

"While you observed it ..." Franklin repeated thoughtfully.

"The _Boleyn_ was visible in the holofield too, Franklin," Mick added.

Franklin glanced at Mick, and nodded. "So let's assume what you saw is happening _now_."

Carmen smiled ruefully. "I see your point."

"What point?" Thomas asked.

"With the sphere's time distortion," Carmen explained, "what the holofield showed us could be happening at some other time."

Thomas rolled his eyes. "You guys handle it." Gruffly announcing his intention to adjust their heading for the gap, he walked away.

"I doubt it's an instance of space-time curvature," Franklin resumed.

Carmen sat forward. "Why not?"

"You said you were inside the sphere for – what? ... twenty minutes?"

Mick held up his wrist. "My watch says 9:21. What time do you have?"

Franklin checked his watch. "9:43."

"It's twenty-two minutes slower inside."

"Not slower. Time is not moving inside the sphere at all."

Carmen sat back. "So tell me. Why is a place of _no_ - _time_ not a result of space-time curvature?"

"With curvature, a horizon exists between the two sides – space-time has a different value on each side." Carmen and Mick nodded. "On one side time would flow faster or slower, as you said. But I suspect even if you spent a hundred years in the sphere, when you come out it would still be zero duration here."

"I wonder what determines duration inside the sphere," Mick mused aloud.

"It could be random," Franklin said quietly.

Mick took a breath. "You mean I could go inside and be in there for ... a thousand years, by chance, and emerge out the other side a second later?"

Franklin rubbed his jaw. "Probably not."

"I don't believe it," Carmen said firmly. "It's not just random. Let's say it's a no-time bubble in space-time. What about space?"

"Well, we think of time and space as uniform, which they mostly are," Franklin said. "Time value throughout space doesn't fluctuate, it stays the same. It's the same with space. When space is a uniform medium the shape it gives to objects, throughout time, stays the same."

"So you think the sphere's space-time is uniform?"

Franklin nodded. "Yes."

"If not a curvature then what?" Carmen asked.

Franklin shrugged. "What if there are many of these spheres? You've seen two, after all. It strikes me that they're like pockets, or cells in a body. They could well have some compensating influence for the imbalances on Nebura."

"You mean, like they're part of Nebura's ecology?" Carmen asked.

Franklin smiled. "Yes."

Carmen massaged around her eyes. "I wonder where their light comes from."

"It's likely a property of the surface," the old man said. "Something that happens _inside_ the surface."

"But the surface had no inside," Carmen said. "It was paper-thin."

Franklin had poured himself another coffee, and set it down slowly on the table. "The surface itself could be the region of no-space, or infinite space, in the sphere. And don't ask me how crossing that might have changed you. I have no idea."

They brooded over that for a moment.

"You said the sphere you saw a mile off our bow," Franklin resumed, "had no upper half above the surface of the water?"

Mick nodded. "We think they rise up from some lower depth, or even from beneath Nebura's crust, and then, extinguish themselves at the surface."

"I wonder."

Mick smiled. "Tell us, Franklin."

"Maybe the sphere is still there when it rises above the surface, but the incandescence is not visible, or gets switched off."

"And then they rise through the atmosphere," Mick ventured.

Franklin took a sip from his mug. "And?"

Carmen jumped in. "And – they either break up somewhere in the atmosphere, or go out beyond it, into space."

"A sphere distorting space-time, or very likely a great number of them, replete with oxygen and nitrogen, floating through space ..."

Carmen chewed her lip, and nodded. "From Nebura's point of view it would serve no purpose," she objected. "If they dissipate in the upper atmosphere they would do their compensating act _there_ somehow."

Franklin looked up at the deck above, lost in thought.

Mick had walked over to the galley counter. He turned around to face them. "Think of this world as a living body. If the lightspheres serve as Nebura's resistance to the stilling –"

"As part of an organism, they're alive," Franklin insisted. "Is that what you think?"

Mick stood straighter, surprised by Franklin's sudden intensity.

"Because what you're suggesting," Franklin said ruefully, "is what I've been thinking these past few months. And perhaps mistakenly, I resisted it."

Mick hesitated. "It changes my approach, when I conclude something is organic."

"And so it should," the old man mused. "So it should." He shook himself and looked soberly at them. "I think I want to sleep on this. It's a nice thought, isn't it?" Smiling, he nodded goodnight and made his way out of the common room.

Mick looked out through the porthole at the darkness beyond. 'The lightspheres are alive,' he thought wonderingly.

Carmen sighed. "Talking with Franklin sometimes feels like getting lost in a labyrinth."

"Sometimes?" Mick said as he emptied his mug into the sink. They laughed quietly.

______________

Thomas poured a dollop of whisky into the mug of coffee he had set on the pilothouse counter. The ocean had a light swell. Carrying the mug up the steps of the ladder was not the easy exercise it had been in earlier weeks. Carmen had volunteered to take a shift at the helm, and sat next to him, behind the pilothouse instrument panel. Thomas's eyes raked the early morning horizon, looking for the ring of storms. The horizon looked clear. The waves were now like a mildly windy day on an inland lake – no white-caps, but not a calm day by any stretch. The surface was gradually acquiring the wide sweeping swell of ocean waves. Thomas and Carmen talked for a while, swapping theories of the storm ring and the spheres.

Thomas nodded at the horizon. "These spheres are something new. I've never seen anything like what we saw yesterday. My father never mentioned them either."

"The storm ring is likely recent, but not the spheres," Carmen said. "Maybe they only appear in the ocean."

"You think there's a link between them and the stilling?"

"It would be a big coincidence if they weren't."

Thomas shrugged. "Our immediate problem is getting through this ring. How much further?"

"About three hours. Are the others up yet?"

"Only Mick and Turok. I passed them in the lounge checking on the neutronics." She scanned the horizon. "We're far enough from the stilling for the holofield to be working. Why don't you go down for a while?"

"You don't mind?"

She shook her head. "You should be there – help plan our passage through."

"Maybe I can help with a backup plan," he replied, and stepped out.

'I wonder what that might be?' she thought.

She picked up the binoculars and looked for storm activity high in the atmosphere. If the storms really reached to the upper troposphere the ring's upper chute should be visible long before the storm's wall was. Luckily it was a cloudless sky. She looked straight ahead to the center of the horizon and slightly up, at full magnification. She could just barely see a single arced line, a ruffling of the air that followed Nebura's curvature, like a heat haze in the desert. She knew that slowly more of the ring's upper section would become visible, until it was all spread out before her – a wall of storms across the horizon.

_______________

"But it must be there!" Mick protested.

It was no longer just Mick and Turok in the common room – the entire ship's company, except for Carmen, was standing around the long table, peering at the notebook's holofield.

Turok tapped a sequence of keys and the image cube expanded out, filling about 1/3 of the room. "We've been all along the coordinates you gave me, yard by yard," Turok said. "There's nothing, no opening, no gap even a few inches wide."

Mick was shaking his head. "I don't understand it."

The others were fascinated by the swirling upheaval of extreme weather raging before them. The fact of its smooth exterior surface made it doubly so.

Mick turned to Thomas. "If there's no gap, can we just sail _through_ this thing?"

Thomas had pulled up a chair close to the holofield. He was chewing at his thumbnail as he peered inside. "Show us the full ring again," he said, turning to Turok.

Turok tapped the keyboard and the storm ring dissolved. It was replaced by an image cube representing thousands of miles of the planet's surface – the cube's top 1/3 was blank, signifying space above Nebura's atmosphere. Turok toggled in, focusing on the large but narrow band covered by the ring. Thomas walked all the way around, looking into the cube from several positions.

"Over here," he said, pointing at a part of the ring on the other side. "Is this a gap?"

Turok went in closer. A narrow gap or channel free of storms leapt into view. And even closer. The channel's two inner sides were not smooth like the storm's exterior surface, but jagged, with deep stormless cavities and fissures that reached into the sides of the breach. It looked to be about a half-mile wide, a great distance under such extreme conditions.

"Where is that?" Thomas asked.

"Four days away, to the east," Turok said.

"Well, there's my answer," Thomas said. "As long as there's a gap to use, I can't agree to take the _Boleyn_ into that hell of wind and waves."

Mick nodded. "I agree."

"Are we sure this ring is static?" Franklin asked. He was sitting in the galley area, drinking a coffee.

Mick looked at the old man.

He elaborated. "Will that gap stay where it is?"

"We don't know," Mick answered.

Franklin stood up and walked over. "Turok, can you download and play back the holofield from Carmen's watch?"

Turok smiled. "Sure."

"Will the playback work here?" Mick asked. "Not inside the sphere, I mean."

Franklin shrugged. "Why not? The holofield memory shouldn't change."

Seamus had already left to get Carmen's watch. Thomas walked over and adjusted the image cube to a specific location, closer to the coast and further north.

"There's an old seaport about fifteen miles offshore," he said to the room as he toggled in for a closer look.

"A seaport?" Turok asked. "Why so far from land?"

"It was the law." Thomas shrugged. "In those days they were cautious about foreign submersibles."

The seaport came into view, a cube-shaped structure that sat low in the water.

"Easy to miss," Mick said, leaning closer.

"There were other, less permanent buildings there. They're gone now." He paused, then said quietly, "I'm thinking this can be our fallback rendezvous point, if things don't go according to plan today."

"Wouldn't a rendezvous on the coast be better?" Mick asked.

"I'm also considering the stilling," Thomas added. "If it suddenly gets worse, which I suppose it _will_ eventually, it's hard to predict which coastal area would still be accessible." He nodded to the seaport. Its upper section looked a lot like an old drilling derrick. "It doesn't look like much, but it's reliable."

"Are there any of these submersibles still docked there, underwater I mean?" Turok asked.

Thomas shook his head. "They're long gone. Where they ended up is anybody's guess."

Mick glanced at Thomas. "Any objections to making that our fallback?"

They all nodded agreement, and the facility's co-ordinates were noted and passed around.

Turok leaned over and adjusted the image cube to show an underwater section of the ring. There was a shocked exhalation all around as a roiling deepwater channel of submerged whirlpools sprang to life before them, like a can of worms. Giorgi, who was sitting by the far end of the table, turned away from the holofield. Turok quickly returned the image to the exterior of the ring, above water.

Carmen walked in. "Which sicko here wants to see my personal holofield?"

The others smiled as she handed it over to Turok. The memory transfer was immediate. Turok keyed in playback. It was a grainier image cube, but the storm ring could clearly be seen.

"There's the gap," Carmen said, "right where it should be."

"So why isn't it there now?" Mick asked the room.

"Turok, check the playback timestamp," Franklin said.

"What? It's in the future?" Carmen asked.

The cursor was moved to the corner of the image cube, and the stardate and time appeared.

"It appears 35 minutes from now," the professor confirmed.

"So the ring _does_ change," Mick said.

The old man puffed out his cheeks. "We still have time to make it."

"I wonder how long it stays open," Mick asked as they quickly re-scanned playback.

"Could be thirty days ... or thirty seconds," Franklin said.

Thomas turned to Turok. "What's the pressure like in there?"

A gauge reading came up. "Almost fifty percent lower than outside."

"Squall conditions," Sorel said, to everyone's surprise. He had largely stayed out of the way in the weeks since leaving Nebu City.

"Yet look at how quiet it is," Thomas added.

"There shouldn't be any problem, then," Marnie added. "We can just take the _Boleyn_ through. Can't we?"

Thomas was shaking his head.

"Why not?"

"Lightning."

"A little lightning –"

"A lot of lightning," Thomas replied, a weight to his words. "Clouds in the gap are dense with ice crystals." He ran his hand across his face. "Add to that the massive ion levels. At that pressure their charge is just waiting to be tipped. A boat passing through there would draw a first lightning strike, triggering a cascade at all levels. It would be like running a gauntlet of maser fire."

"That's just great!" Sorel said. He folded his arms and leaned his chair back against the wall.

Thomas was peppered with questions. His answers got shorter and shorter. "We shouldn't try to take the _Boleyn_ through," he concluded.

Mick put his hand on Thomas's shoulder. "Do you have any inflatable craft on board?"

Thomas looked puzzled. "Yeah, a cutter and two dinghies. Why?"

"They're submersible?"

"Of course. But even if we got through the gap, we can't sail all the way to Polarica in those."

"No, we take the _Boleyn_ ," Mick said. "What we need is a way to draw the gap's fire."

As he quickly explained his plan several others hurried up on deck to unpack the cutter and dinghies.

_______________

Carmen had resumed her shift at the helm. She had watched the towering cliff-face of the storm ring grow steadily larger through the pilothouse windshield. It rose up sheer, about a mile away, and disappeared high in the sky – a weather front unlike anything she'd ever seen. She shook her head, trying to imagine the forces being exerted behind that front, an Everest of tightly-packed winds and waves. She could make out the gap quite clearly. It was hard to miss. When she had first seen it, far off on the horizon, the gap had looked like a long rip had appeared in Nebura's atmosphere. It stood out grayish white against the ring's much darker cliff-face. Seeing the gap now close-up, just the thought of entering it made her shudder. She pushed away the thought. Out where the _Boleyn_ was sailing all remained relatively calm, with mild winds and a barely perceptible swell, no whitecaps. She imagined men in wooden vessels sailing towards the glacial shelf of a prehistoric iceberg hundreds of miles long – such mariners might have felt something similar. No matter how massive, though, an iceberg was static, immovable. This storm ring was a dynamic, fluctuating wall that extended up as far as the eye could see.

Thomas and several of his men had removed, dropped over the side, and inflated the three submersible lifeboats in a matter of minutes. They had kept looking at the storm ring they were approaching until Thomas ordered them to ignore it. The two dinghies bobbed alongside the _Boleyn_ , one on each side, while the smaller cutter was pulled along in their wake. Mick and Turok would soon be leaving in the cutter. Everyone had helped with the emergency packing in case the dinghies were needed. The extremely compact engine panels had been inserted in their aft compartments on the three craft.

Carmen was looking ahead when the gap started to form. A clear vertical line had appeared in the stormwall, like the crack in a slightly open door. The line gradually opened, avalanches of water sliding down from where the high waves in the ring had been suddenly cut off. Once started the two sides moved apart quickly. After a couple minutes the gap had widened to about five hundred yards, and stopped. The cascade of water dissipated, and the winds in the channel had almost immediately died down. The channel surface grew calm.

_______________

Mick and Turok approached the gap in the cutter, a two-passenger semi-dry submersible. They were riding the long swells between waves. At first Mick thought their smaller vessel made the sea seem rougher, the swells deeper. But he soon realized the sea was in fact getting worse as they neared the stormwall. At the bottom of each wave's trough the _Boleyn_ was hidden by the wave behind them. The sheer height of the ring was staggering. No physical structure of such a height, onworld, could withstand the forces that stormwall must be under.

Mick looked back at the distant _Boleyn_ , a lonely sentinel on this ocean, which wasn't as quiet as it had been. Turok turned and looked at the friends onboard being left behind.

"We're the shuttle and they're the mother ship," Mick said.

"I'm starting to miss the sweet emptiness of space," Turok sighed.

Mick laughed, nodding. He looked at the small, detachable maser-buoy that projected from the cutter's stern. The flat-topped platform's buoyancy was controlled from the cutter's helm.

He returned his attention to the way ahead. The wall of the ring was literally formed of water, like the surface of a clear lake turned on its side – it looked to be only a few inches thick. High up, above maybe 2,000 feet, the thin water-wall was replaced by what looked more like an energy field. Nor was this surface of the ring, the stormwall, as stationary as Mick had thought, especially in the lowest 500 feet. It flexed in and out in places, small ripples traveled along its surface before spending themselves, large circular sections would turn slightly opaque, as though the wall was degrading, and billow out several feet before the process reversed itself, and fell back into the wall. They gradually got closer. They could see that the sea at the base of the wall was oddly smooth, calm. The energy of what surf existed was apparently dissipated about a hundred feet out, where waves foamed as though against a series of underwater seawalls. From there the sea formed a marine _glacis_ that sloped gently down and lapped against the stormwall. It behaved like a reef, except that it was constantly shifting about, adapting itself to the slight movements of the ring itself. They were a couple hundred yards from the ring now.

Mick nodded at Turok, who went to the craft's other end. He slipped his hand in a covered pocket, activating the side panels – they pushed out smoothly. The vessel, now octagonal in shape, no longer had a discernible bow or stern.

The strengthening wind was pushing them across the waves, slowly back away from the ring, The sky seemed to darken slightly, clouds were rushing south. The vessel lurched suddenly and spun around. The wind had shifted and was blowing from due west, which meant it was moving along the ring's outer edge. The wall served to focus and accelerate the wind. Mick looked up as the sky seemed almost to tilt, and then the wind shifted again, moving further until it was coming out of the southwest. Now they were being blown _towards_ the wall, the waves growing higher, their swell shorter. Turok looked at Mick with a worried expression. The gap was about a hundred feet away. It was time to dive.

Turok reached into another pocket and activated the stowed upper panels. All sides of the cutter rippled up, connected, and sealed, shutting out first the waves that had begun washing in over the sides, then the wind, and finally the lowering sky. It seemed preternaturally quiet inside the inflated vessel, its sealed panels glowed a soft orange around them. They strapped themselves in. The vessel still spun and climbed with each wave, several times dropping out from under them with a stomach-wrenching suddenness. Mick supposed that Thomas was likely at that moment backing the _Boleyn_ away from the area, giving himself sea-room. Turok activated the opacity control for the craft's mid-level panels and a wide underwater vista sprang to life all around them. The gap lay straight ahead.

The steep careering ride was flattening out as they got nearer to the gap. They could clearly see the underwater section of the ring, with its mass of interweaving maelstroms. The enclosed whirlpools moved slowly in a writhing dance, never colliding. The ocean had calmed as they moved through the area under the sloping glacis. Mick didn't slow as they crossed over the thin wall of the gap. The buffeting movement of the sea abruptly ended. Their ears popped, and Mick glanced over at Turok. Grinning, they returned their attention to the panels.

It was like moving through an underwater vault, so still was the underwater channel. It was darker, as if the light was being partially filtered, but not enough to eliminate visibility. They moved ahead quickly. When they reached the channel's midpoint Turok released the maser-buoy, which rose smoothly to the surface. He brought it up on the monitor and nodded. "Looks good, Mick," he said.

They left it behind, and were soon nearing the far side of the channel. The gap's opening into the expanse of ocean inside the ring that surrounded Polarica lay straight ahead. They slid past the plasma-like wall of the gap and into the bright ocean. It appeared to be a normal day here, not the storm conditions developing outside the ring, and not the stilling-calm conditions of weeks before – a normal day.

They quickly surfaced and lowered the panels. They looked about, startled by the dramatic change away from storm conditions, like someone had shut a door.

"Thomas would appreciate this," Mick said.

"Everyone would."

They proceeded to a point about a hundred yards beyond the stormwall. Turok glanced at Mick, and activated the maser-buoy. They could clearly see the buoy bobbing on the gentle swell back inside the channel. An electron beam is not visible, but they both knew it was rising a hundred feet straight up, a continuous beam. After about thirty seconds the first small lightning strikes began shooting down. Then bead lightning flashed from cloud to cloud inside the gap, and more flashes lanced out, hitting the area above the buoy. Turok reached into a side storage fold, and pulled out the pulse grenade rifle. He aimed at a cloudbank about a thousand feet up inside the gap, and fired off a pulse. It passed through the cloud, and seconds later there were flashes within the cloudbank. He shot another couple pulses. Bead lightning proliferated, bouncing between clouds, and blue jets flashed down. Turok kept firing, and the frequency of lightning strikes hitting the area above the buoy increased.

_______________

Thomas stood in the pilothouse by Franklin and Carmen watching the lightning strikes ripping down into the same area, above where the buoy had surfaced minutes earlier. Rolling peals of thunder began arriving moments later. Turok's first pulse shot, which had come out through this side of the gap, had been a surprise even though they were expecting it.

The storm out on Inuvoro's side of the storm ring was holding steady. Thomas hoped it would level off soon.

"How long do we wait?" Carmen asked, raising her voice to be heard over the thunder.

Thomas glanced at Franklin.

"The number of lightning strikes will peak," Franklin answered between thunderclaps. "After it tapers off by about half, then we should go."

She turned to Thomas. "Otherwise we'll be facing that gauntlet you were talking about."

"That's right," Thomas shouted, grinning. Carmen smiled back, a bit uncertainly.

The staccato lightning strikes were becoming much more frequent, about two strikes per second. The noise of thunder was non-stop, one blast overlapping with the next. The pulse blasts from the other side had stopped. The lightning frequency suddenly leaped up the scale. The sky high in the gap, far above the clouds, had taken on a strobe effect – lightning in the upper stratosphere was almost continuous. A cascade of strikes was pouring down into the air above the buoy. After about ten seconds it finally started tapering off. Within a minute there was only one strike every couple seconds.

Franklin glanced at Thomas. "Time to go."

Thomas started the engine and took the _Boleyn_ forward towards the gap. The others came up on deck and found their places in the two dinghies, both considerably larger, but less maneuverable, than the cutter. They had been watching the gap on the holofield. In the event of lightning hitting the _Boleyn_ , they'd push off immediately in the dinghies. The research ship crested the glacis and moved ahead quickly. Everyone but Thomas were sitting in the dinghies, bobbing along beside the ship. Thomas would only have seconds if it came to abandoning ship.

He didn't pause outside the towering stormwall. The ship crossed over. It was like passing under a long low bridge – the _Boleyn_ was immediately cast into gloom. Carmen looked up from her place in the starboard dinghy at the sudden darkness that had engulfed them. She was mesmerized by the continuing display of bead lightning strikes high above, much slower now. She held her breath, waiting for the first telltale signs of plasma discharges in the lower clouds – that would signal a stepped leader, a series of vertically displaced flashes. That would bring Thomas running for their dinghy. They had glided about fifty feet in without incident, into a twilight region that seemed larger to Carmen than the channel they had been watching on the holofield. She looked back. The gap and the morning world beyond appeared far away, seen through a filtering energy field. The _Boleyn_ sailed on. No lightning strikes rained down from above. Carmen began breathing easier.

_______________

Mick and Turok had reluctantly left the Polarica side of the ring, and were back in the gap, submerged, watching the _Boleyn's_ progress through their upper panels. Several minutes earlier the bead lightning strikes hitting above the maser buoy had stopped. The research ship had passed the buoy, and was moving on towards the inside stormwall. Mick glanced at Turok, nodding upwards.

"Yeah, let's take her up," Turok said.

As they moved towards the surface they were surprised when the light dimmed even more. They surfaced to starboard of the research ship. Turok activated the upper panels, and a small circle appeared above, revealing a soft, crystal-clear darkness, and stars. They looked up into a twilight sky of startling clarity, as it would appear from space. The clouds had entirely disappeared. The cutter's upper section rippled down to the middle section, as it was when they had set out from the _Boleyn_ , but in its expanded octagonal form.

Their shipmates in the 3-vessel convoy waved and shouted at them. Mick was relieved that the plan was working. The inner gap wall was less than half a mile ahead. They cautiously ramped up their speed. Even so, they remained strapped-in.

Mick was surprised when it began to rain. Turok was grinning, his head thrown back to receive the downpour. A look of fear suddenly crossed his face. Mick followed his gaze and saw that high up shreds of wind were ripping across from both sides of the gap. The rain was getting much heavier – but Mick suddenly knew it wasn't _rain_. Above where the clouds had been only moments earlier several jets of water had burst through – water was entering the gap from inside the two severed sides of the storm ring. The falling water would soon turn into a deluge. Mick glanced over at the _Boleyn_ and saw Thomas running for one of the dinghies, as its upper panels were rapidly being raised. Mick couldn't see to the _Boleyn's_ port side. He could only hope the other dinghy's crew had acted as swiftly. Turok moved quickly and shouted to raise their panels and dive. Mick waited precious moments until he saw the bow of Thomas's dinghy lurch forward and down, dipping below the surface. Waves had stacked up around them with terrible speed. As the cutter's side fell off a crest, their panels finally clicked and sealed shut. A ribbon of water sheeted into a flat geyser for half a second as they fell upside-down into the trough. Mick slipped the craft below surface and righted her.

"This gap is collapsing!" Turok shouted as they dove deeper.

Mick nodded grimly. "The other dinghy–"

His words were torn away as the cutter was wrenched deeper and back towards the outer wall of the storm ring. Mick tried to compensate but the cutter was toppling end over end, and it slammed through, _outside_ the gap wall into what daylight there was at a depth of sixty feet. They were hurtling sideways, careering side over side now. The floor of their miniature craft was rotating continuously, nosing its way back up in a heartbeat, and down again. The falling abruptly ended as a jarring impact shuddered up through their legs and backs, and the cutter was whirled around, rose up, and then fell back again. They had been shunted miles from the storm ring.

The toppling gradually subsided. Mick estimated they were a couple hours from the Inuvoro coastline, but at this speed the return journey would be shorter.

He reminded himself that the greater risk they faced was being blown against the cliffs that lined this northernmost stretch of Inuvoro's coast. They would be caught between wind, waves, and that unforgiving shore, and would be hurtled against the cliffs repeatedly by the pounding waves. Visibility in this roiling of currents and cross-currents was near-zero. On the surface it would have been worse, and the violence of the storm would have made these coastal waters unnavigable. Mick reasoned that the cutter, a polyhedron of inflated panels around a hollow inner core, should technically be able to sustain even the crushing impact of the coastal cliffs. What had him spooked was the prospect of crashing alongside those cliffs for miles, being sucked back out by the undertow and then hurled back in again, time after time. Mick looked appreciatively at the much heavier synthetic material in the cutter's floor panels, four times the thickness of the side and upper panels. The absence of the repeated thump of thunder was about the only consolation. The minutes rolled on with majestic inertia. They were in a void of noise and tearing movement.

For a while Mick's thoughts went to the others. He asked himself again if the second dinghy had had time to get its panels up and dive. As for the _Boleyn_ – there's no way it could have survived this. If the dinghies were washed far enough south they would miss the cliffs entirely. Twenty miles south there were sandy beaches. Mick remembered how they had left the coastal islands behind days earlier.

Mick withdrew into himself. They could do little to control their direction or speed. The crashing motion seemed to drift away for a time. A terrible impact brought him back, and he saw that several of the panels had partially inverted themselves, making that side a fretwork of beehive-like concave depressions, but in the next moment they popped back out. He saw a rock wall slide past on one side, close. Land was so near – he could reach out and touch it. The cutter was grinding along the cliff, turning like a polyhedral gear locked into its sprockets. Then the current's ebb hauled them down and away from the grinding surface, only moments later to hand them off to the returning current's inflow, back towards shore, gathering speed, and the crashing impact as before. Their gear-like rotating crawl would take them along a distance, and then the undertow would catch them again. It happened over and over. Mick felt like Sisyphus caught and held in a symbiotic hell of surf and cliff. He had reflexively braced for yet another impact against the cliffs. But it never came.

The inflow that hurled the cutter in somehow failed to impact the cliff. Instead it had carried the craft on, past the cliffs into an oppressive darkness, and the waves fell away. The current's ebb tried to pull the cutter back, but the craft reversed only a short distance. Several more surges carried them further in. There was still a little rocking to and fro, but it was dying away fast.

Mick wondered how their craft had inexplicably come to rest, even as the suffocating external blackness blended into unconsciousness.

7 | Parting

Carmen had been standing below the dinghy's rapidly closing aperture – struggling to stabilize the craft's panel spreaders – waiting for Thomas. The dinghy was at its most vulnerable when the upper panels were only partially raised. Thomas had suddenly reared up on the heaving deck and scrambled aboard the dinghy, falling inside as the aperture rippled in overhead. He slammed down into one of the carousel of seats along the lifeboat's circular gunwale, the straps closing across him. Carmen watched through the aperture as Marnie retracted the bow and stern warps, releasing the craft. She caught a glimpse of the other dinghy already away from the _Boleyn_ _'s_ side, high above them on the crest of a wave. Her breath caught when she saw they had none of their upper panels raised yet!

Carmen turned towards her seat despite the dinghy's rolling, spinning, the butterflies-in-the-gut sensation of rising up and sliding down. As the upper panels irised the last few inches and sealed, shutting out the wind and spray and noise, the dinghy suddenly upended, and she found herself spread-eagled against the upper panels that now served as the craft's deck. She looked up at the others all strapped in upside down in their seats, and crawled over above her seat, waited, then reached in between two of the panels to take hold of the seam fold. Moments later the dinghy upended again, and she hung right-side up. She let go and fell neatly into her seat. The straps crossed her waist and chest and locked in place.

Carmen couldn't shake the image of the other dinghy, its upper panels still fully open.

_______________

Mick heard a muffled crunching noise somewhere above him, like an army of geckos were whisking up and across the cutter's top panels. The noise grew louder, and he felt the craft bobbing up and down. Mick opened his eyes to blackness. He shook his head, finally recognizing the sound – the craft must be grinding along beneath a low overhang. They bobbed down, moved forward, and rose only to grind along again, which increased until they were being dragged fully pressed against the upper surface. Mick realized they were moving through an underwater tunnel. Mick reached down and depressed the buoyancy nozzle until they descended away from the overhang, then he released it. He noticed there was still a current bearing them down, and each time the craft touched the overhang again, he took them further down. They were descending steadily further. He wondered how long he had been unconscious. The minutes dragged on.

Mick lost track of time. Eventually the cutter emerged into a larger body of water, and they drifted. He again adjusted the buoyancy, and they glided up until the cutter broke surface. They sat in apparent stillness, though Mick knew they were drifting. An image flashed in his mind of being trapped in a dark sphere that extended away infinitely in all directions.

A soft hiss of sound came at him. He jerked back, then recognized it as the distant sound of the storm. The familiar noise roused him.

"Mick? You alright?" Turok whispered.

Mick hesitated. "Yeah."

The relief in Turok's voice was palpable. "Man, don't do that."

"What year is it, I wonder?"

"That is _so_ not funny, Mick."

Mick smiled. He shakily reached down, pushed back the foldout array, and after releasing his safety straps slowly stood up. He listened as the upper panels of the cutter rippled down. Though it produced no sliver of light, no movement of air, and no sound beyond what noise they themselves produced, he felt a sensation of openness above them, and on all sides. He thought he detected a slight flow of air, and it changed shape around them. The silence had a weight and heft – the slap of the silicon panels against water echoed, bouncing off surfaces above and to the sides. They drifted on. It was a relief just to be away from the storm, Mick told himself.

He heard a click, and soft phosphorescence filled the cutter. It brightened rapidly as Turok held up a cone-shaped lantern by its handle. Mick activated one of the side panels, and a slender pontoon rose up several feet. Turok stood up and secured the lantern to the stanchion. The cutter looked like a round _gondola_ , its high 'stern' lantern spilling a small pool of light across an inhospitable stretch of black water. It felt like a forgotten night sky had swiveled down and been swallowed inside a vast cavern.

"I was unconscious for a while ... back there," Mick said haltingly.

"So it's probably sometime tomorrow." Turok swung the pontoon forward. He pointed the lantern up at a 60 degree angle, and switched to spotlight mode. It was like standing behind a lighthouse beam that lanced out into the darkness.

Mick caught his breath when the ceiling slid down to meet their light. The cavern looked to be as high as an eighty or ninety floor building, and it likely gained a few floors at low tide. Turok lowered the lantern beam so it shone across the water, and the cavern's walls were thrown into high relief. The rock-face of the wall ahead glistened black and jagged. He looked back and whistled at the distance they had drifted – he could barely make out the cavern wall far behind them. The water had seemed so still after the storm, but it appeared they had never stopped moving. Turok switched to floodlight. The water's surface behind them was undisturbed. There was no evidence of the submerged entry they had come through some minutes earlier.

Mick turned his attention forward, to the mouth of a tunnel that had loomed into view. Its opening was about ten yards across, and twice the height of the cutter.

Turok looked to the craft's panels. "I suppose going back isn't an option?"

Mick shrugged. "Current's too strong."

"So forward it is."

"Let's raise the panels partway."

As Turok lifted away the crystal lantern Mick stood in the center watching the upper panels ripple up. They stood on one of the benches amidships, Turok holding up the lantern. Poking their heads through the 3-foot aperture Turok switched back to spotlight and shone the beam into the opening. The current kept moving them towards it. They could only see about thirty yards in – it led off through the rock on a surprisingly straight path, more like a lateral tunnel than a cavern. Although the distance closed faster than they expected, they saw no reason to close off the cutter aperture yet. They passed into the tunnel with plenty of clearance on both sides and above.

Turok shone the light back at the retreating opening. Watching it recede gave them a mild case of vertigo: their aversion moments earlier to entering the tunnel was now transferred to the cavern they were leaving behind. Its mouth-like blackness almost made the glossy walls of the tunnel seem welcoming.

Turok swung the light forward again and switched to floodlight. He shook his head. "No way this is a natural fissure."

"Yeah, somebody put it here."

"Why?" Turok wondered.

"Could be whoever made this used it just as we are now."

"A canal? To where?"

Mick cocked his head and listened. The sound of rushing water echoed in the distance.

Turok banked the cutter around a series of turns. After the tunnel dipped again the noise of the water got louder. They quickly ducked back inside, latching the lantern into its bracket amidships as the panels closed. The light was now a soft glow inside their submersible.

They were both aware of the cutter's limits, and knew that a serious fall in a standard 1.0 G environment would rupture several of the craft's seals. Granted, there were no sharp objects or edged surfaces inside when console boards were not out, and even the crystal lantern had an impact-absorbing transparent synthetic exterior. In fact, the cutter's only relatively hard element was its rubber-like floor, still pliable enough to yield to the broad contour of a wave. If the fall was more than a hundred and fifty feet, the lack of hard surfaces would scarcely matter – they would still be dead. They worried about waterfalls.

"Whitewater coming up," Turok announced.

The cutter started bobbing. Their speed picked up, jostling them from side to side. One side of the craft dipped and whirled them around like a discarded party hat in a drain. The stern tipped back and they hurtled forward – Mick was looking up at the floor. On the outside the flow of water against each panel's shallow concave surface added to the floor's greater mass, which dissipated some of the cutter's spin. They felt one side grind against the tunnel's wall, rotate, and rub stuttering along the other side. The passage narrowed, angling down more steeply. The cutter suddenly accelerated.

A bone-jarring impact compressed several of the side panels by several inches. They jetted away from that rolling end over end, then the craft arced upwards, bursting back into a whirlpool of rushing sound, and another jarring impact.

Over and over they grazed the tunnel's walls, bouncing off and shooting across towards the opposite wall. Each time they were deflected back and pulled yet again deep underwater. Their last dive in the channel's confined space had gone faster, and they rose up as if from a submerged catapult, this time reaching the tunnel's ceiling. More panels crumpled above them. Again the sound was cut off as the cutter fell, slipping under the surface of the rushing water.

They felt the cutter pulled down again, longer and deeper than before, into a greater underwater silence. Mick had a memory-spasm of watching university students years earlier drop a watermelon from a balcony. The catapult current took hold again and swung them around. The water seemed to loosen around the cutter as it was flung up, and they were rising at a speed that made breathing difficult. Just then the loosening water inexplicably fell away. They were submerged now in – thin air.

They felt the cutter arc further up and forward. Turok laughed a long stuttering swallow of sheer terror, as primal as the manic current behind them. The craft's floor upended as they sailed still higher, revolving slowly. A roller-coaster anticipation took hold. The fall began with a stately slowness, and the cutter's two occupants felt their stomachs scramble up into their throats.

______________

Carmen woke to raucous cries all around. She opened her eyes and saw large shadows plodding back and forth across the upper panels of the dinghy. Her neck was sore from long hours of bracing for the surges and impacts as their craft was slowly washed ashore. She vaguely remembered crossing the shallow reef that separated this lagoon from the sea beyond. It seemed that they had crossed it several times. The sea's undertow must have repeatedly pulled them back out, and then each time the main surge brought them closer to shore.

The loud squawking above her broke in on her reflections. She raised her head and looked up at the shadows that rose and fell, strutting across from panel to panel. 'It must be birds,' she thought. She reached into the pocket behind her and the upper panels irised open. As they rippled down an alarmed protest was followed by a rush of wings, and the shadows were gone. She looked up and saw the ungainly flight of three pairs of retreating wings – Nunat condors, yellow-beaked scavengers that were more abundant this far north. Carmen was mildly surprised, as they had seen little wildlife since leaving Nebu City. Not wanting to disturb the others she brought the panels down only half-way. 'They must need their sleep if that racket didn't wake them,' she thought. She pressed the release latch and the added restraining net that held her in place retracted smoothly into its panel.

The fronds of tall, graceful web-trees waved gently above the craft. When Carmen tried to stand she fell back immediately into her seat, and realized the dinghy was lying on an angle. She leaned out, pulled herself forward onto hands and knees, and stretching herself out across the half-open aperture fell awkwardly to the beach. To her surprise, the sand was warm and dry.

She half-stood, leaning one hand against the dinghy, then set off unsteadily down towards the shoreline. Wading in to her knees she splashed her face with cool saltwater. She turned and looked up along the coast.

One end of their dinghy was propped atop the trunk of a fallen web-tree, the other end rested on the sandy beach. The craft's floor panels, retaining in this inflated mode their tensile toughness, held the vessel at an awkward angle. The canopy of web-trees cast a complex dance of leafy shadows across the now partially-open dinghy. The fronds that clustered at the top of each tree blocked much of the sunlight, thus keeping the ground clear of undergrowth. Looking below the level of the canopy, or webline, she could see several hundred yards into the forest, and above that the vista extended all the way up the gentle slope to the ridge, maybe three miles inland.

Carmen looked in both directions along the shore. There was no sign of the other dinghy. Someone called out to her; she turned and saw Franklin waving. The old man rolled unceremoniously down the side of the dinghy, and she walked up from the beach towards him.

He smiled wanly. "Any sign of them?"

She shook her head. "The beach looks empty. They must have been washed into a different lagoon."

Carmen wanted to hope for the best – Seamus and Giorgi and Sorel were in the other dinghy, and four from Franklin's group as well. She turned and looked out to the submerged reef. It could only be detected by an edge of turbulence. She kept looking towards the horizon, indistinct against the fading denim-blue of the sky.

"What do you think happened?" Franklin asked.

"Last I saw they were cresting a huge wave inside the gap." She paused. "They didn't raise their panels." She quietly turned away and walked along the beach.

Franklin lowered himself to the warm sand, and rested his forearms on his upraised knees. A slight wind lifted away strands of grey hair from his forehead.

Carmen returned and sat beside him.

Franklin looked up slowly. "They didn't have time to raise them?" he asked, sounding older.

"I should have told them while we were waiting for Thomas. They could have raised their panels right there, and –" Her voice caught.

Franklin reached over and held her shoulder. "It isn't your fault, Carmen."

She wept silently. The old man looked across the calm water of the lagoon. A few minutes later she leaned away. She knew Franklin was right. That didn't stop her from wondering if there wasn't something more she could have done.

"It's possible they did raise their panels," he said, "and they went to our fallback, to the seaport."

"We need to go there," she said.

"Or they may be here, as you said – in a lagoon somewhere along this section of the coast."

She inclined her head, deciding. "We can send someone to the seaport to check it out. The rest of us can start searching here."

"Whatever the outcome, in a few days we should resume our journey."

"To Polarica? How?"

"We can sail a full circuit round the storm ring, and find a way through. Somehow."

Carmen heard the others, and they stood up. "Franklin, thanks."

"For what?"

She shrugged. "For thinking ahead."

He smiled as they turned up towards the dinghy.

Not only were their shipmates awake, they had set to work rolling the dinghy back off the log. Its upper panels had been lowered fully and its seats decompressed.

Marnie called out to her. "We should put both dinghies up here in the forest. So they're above high tide."

Carmen hesitated, and Franklin smoothly interjected. "Sounds good, Marnie. The others landed somewhere else along this coast. Or they may have gone on to the seaport. We need someone to take the dinghy back out there and check."

One of Thomas's men, Oscar, stepped forward. "If they haven't arrived yet, I'll wait for them."

"Good man!" Franklin said.

He looked around as he rested his hand on the dinghy gunwale, as if sensing what everyone was thinking: that the other dinghy, and the cutter, may not have landed anywhere at all.

"The sooner we begin, the sooner we'll find them," Carmen said in an unequivocal tone. She sent a pulse of silent gratitude to the old man, and turned quickly to Thomas. "Any ideas where they might be on this coast?"

Thomas stroked his chin, looking subdued. He had people missing, and the _Boleyn_. "All three lifeboats were in the gap, underwater, when the ring started sealing over," he said.

"I had the impression the ring was collapsing," Aleesha said.

Thomas shook his head. "That was just the gap shifting shut. We know from the holofield that the gaps open and close." He turned back to the others. "The currents were going every which way, and there was the depth factor too. There's no way of knowing for sure which way the storm carried them."

"We should look in both directions then," Carmen concluded to the group. "There's a river a few miles north of here. If either boat was blown that way, they might have been driven upriver. Let's check that tomorrow, and the coast today." She glanced towards the ridge directly behind them above the webline. "Those who go north could turn aside before the river, climb the ridge, and walk along that higher ground."

Marnie sat up inside the beached dinghy and turned to Oscar. "I'll go with you out to the seaport. That's likely where the others are," she said confidently. Carmen could see she was worried. Marnie returned her attention to the play of morning light through the web leaves overhead.

"I'll go to the ridge," Carmen said.

"I'll tag along," Franklin said, and she nodded. "As you all know," he said, turning to the others, "the stilling is headed this way. Let's keep a lookout for any small changes."

The others clearly felt better, more hopeful. They began getting ready.

Within the hour, Marnie and Oscar had set off in the dinghy. She had a four hour round trip ahead of her, plus the time she spent onsite.

*

Carmen and Franklin trudged along the beach. They were almost at the river mouth, and had yet to see any sign of the dinghy or cutter. Aleesha and Thomas had gone south.

The forest was even thinner here, and would make their climb up the ridge easier. Franklin relished having a sweeping view of the coast; he was less enthusiastic about the climb to get there. They stood on a promontory on the south side of the river, and looked across to the north shore. The morning's gentle breeze had died away, making it hard to tell where the ocean surf ended and the gentler waters of the estuary began.

Carmen turned and looked back at the ridge. "We'll have a good view from up there."

Franklin smiled in reply.

The old man and young woman picked their way back across the rocks. Moments later they were moving uphill among the trees towards the ridge.

______________

The cutter's panel sections had automatically self-adjusted during their descent, expanding to absorb the increasingly forceful impact the craft was being asked to endure. The added depth of the exterior panels expanded the cutter's volume by about thirty percent. That was likely what saved them, for as the craft came out of its high arcing trajectory, Mick and Turok felt the craft shudder as it began its descent, falling into a backwash of foam and spray. They braced for the shock of impact, but the foam at some point became water, and they were enveloped in silence again as the craft descended into the rapids at the bottom of the falls.

Their forward momentum subsided, and they felt themselves turn up. After their breakneck descent through a roaring tunnel of water, this slower, silent, underwater arc felt unreal. They rose smoothly, bobbed to the surface, and heard the noise of the falls recede. The cutter glided along, moving slower and slower.

Mick hit the strap release and stood up as Turok brought the panels down. They were soaked. Mick retrieved a towel from the sealed duffel bag and wiped his face and hair. He tossed it to Turok then lifted up the lantern. They had entered another cavern, much larger than the first. Mick shone the spotlight above them at the top of the waterfall. The cascade danced in the light of their beam like a snowmelt of liquid crystal, and emptied into the mist below. It looked like a scene from a holonovella. The roof loomed high above the waterfall and the canyon's wall on this side was a sheer cliff, though in one section it sloped down almost parallel to the pool before dipping beneath it.

A current carried the cutter along until it drifted to a stop far from the falls. They sat back down and looked in all directions with the spotlight. As in the previous cavern it was pitch-black beyond the reach of their light. There didn't appear to be any other tunnel or passageway out, though Mick knew there had to be. The water was not glass-smooth – light ripples fanned out from the falls.

Mick had wearily hung the lantern on the stern pontoon, switched to floodlight, and turned it upwards. They both lay back, and let their eyes roam along the uneven surface high above. Mick was fascinated by the play of lantern light – shifting shadows cast among the hollows and ridges.

Turok asked: "Do you think the others –?"

"They survived." Mick felt certain, though he couldn't explain it.

Mick was surprised at how crystal-clear their voices were. 'Maybe it's too big here for echoes,' he thought. 'The sound just dies away.' The broad beam of light rose from the lantern in a veiled halo. It felt warm and damp, and a weak mist had appeared on all sides, laying a sort of gauze over everything. The roof seemed distant one moment, then much closer the next. It felt like a borderland after some great cataclysm, as though no other refuge had survived.

Turok laughed uneasily. "So – what's the plan?"

Mick looked over at his friend. "I drifted off there. The plan?"

Turok stood and moved the lantern beam down so it flooded the high walls. Mick looked back towards the waterfall. It was hard to gauge the passing of time. Did they wake up hours, or days, ago?

"Do you think there's any way back up that tunnel?" Turok asked.

"None that I saw."

Turok looked disconsolately at the canyon wall.

Mick stood up. It disturbed him how they had fallen into a half-sleep. "We aren't trapped here, Turok. Water's coming in from the waterfall, so it must be moving out somewhere, maybe submerged, but it's moving out." He gestured around them. "If it wasn't, all this would be underwater."

"Even so, I still feel trapped."

Mick reached over the gunwale, scooped up a handful of water, and tasted it. "It's not from the ocean. This pool must be fed by runoff from the surface."

Turok looked at the pool. "And that means?"

"Well, fresh water falls to the water table, which must flow back to the coast."

Turok mused. "There's no route from down here to Thomas's rendezvous."

Mick shrugged. "We lost that option once we entered these caves." He paused, then added, "But a freshwater channel should take us back towards the mainland."

"OK, let's reconnoiter," Turok said, as he looked off at the nearer wall.

Mick smiled as he scooted over to the engine module and started her up. They could see only a few feet down. He glanced back at the lantern. "Try shining the light."

Turok switched it back to spot, pushed the slender pontoon further out over the water, and slanted it down. He fell back in shock as the lower depths of the canyon pool leapt up into view, half expecting some horror of the deep to come surging up. Mick was grinning as he took them in closer to the wall. Turok scrambled back up and shone the light down again. A narrow cone-shaped protrusion loomed up, its needle-point tip rising up to a depth of about forty feet. It was perfectly symmetrical. It reminded Turok of the delicate array of a communications satellite.

Mick turned, taking them along opposite the wall. Tips of other protrusions were visible far below. Turok swung the light so it angled towards the submerged cliff-face, which extended down another forty feet. A gentler formation of underwater hillocks and protrusions sloped away from the cliff into the lower depths.

Mick looked up. "It's probably not more than twice this depth overall."

"Eighty or ninety feet," Turok agreed, and rested his arms on the pontoon.

"We're looking for a submerged tunnel," Mick said.

Turok looked thoughtful. "Let's watch for a surface current." He kept the spotlight aimed at the submerged wall, then leaned forward. "Stop here."

Mick switched off the engine and looked down. Along the underwater wall lit up by the lantern there appeared an 8-foot high crevice, extending diagonally from a depth of fifteen feet at one end to about twenty-five at the other. The crevice was a deeper black than the surrounding rock. Turok shone the light back and forth.

"Only one way of finding out," Mick said. He stripped down and pulled on his wetsuit. He rummaged in the duffel bag and drew out the pull-on synth-helmet. As it sealed with the synthetic tunic he felt the bubble take up position over his face, and he opened his mouth to receive the breathing template. It would give twelve hours worth of air, probably about twelve times what he would need. He reached down and snagged a regular, high-powered flashlight, and secured it to his belt.

Turok stepped to one side and retrieved a coil of mooring line, the size of a small disc. He clipped one end to the pontoon stanchion and handed the disc to Mick.

"Don't get lost," Turok said. "I'd hate to have to haul your ass out."

Mick gave a thumbs-up, sat on the gunwale, and dropped smoothly backwards into the pool. He kicked twice and slowly descended.

The beam of light from the cutter shone flat around him. With no natural light he hadn't expected to see any plant life, but its complete absence made the water seem worse than neutral, like a marine no-man's-land. There was nothing here of life – not mineral or plant, and certainly not animal. He drifted down towards the wall, his shadow looming as he drew up beside the jagged surface, about ten feet above the jet-black crevice. He reached out, brushing his hand lightly against the rock.

His mind flashed back to his approach to the submerged sphere with Carmen. 'Did they make it to shore?' he asked himself again. As if by unspoken agreement he and Turok hadn't spoken of it, the pain of it still too raw.

Moving his bent arms in short, vertical half-strokes, he descended towards the crevice. He retrieved the flashlight from his belt and switched it on.

They had hoped this opening would contain a concealed passage. It turned out the crevice wasn't a crevice at all. It was just the glossy sheen of an intensely black section of the wall, creating the illusion of depth. He approached to within two feet of it, and could see his rippled, shadowy reflection in the obsidian surface. He reached out and touched it. He almost expected to see his finger push through. The surface was smooth, hard, and slightly pebbled.

He kicked again and descended slowly along the false crevice, its opaque blackness never varying, and came to the edge where it met the normal rock. The two sections were distinct, but along the line of separation there was no buckling or wrinkling.

He clicked off the flashlight, and the surfaces around him receded in the cutter's diffused floodlight. He kicked gently and rose back towards the hovering shadow of their vessel.

They moved on in silence. Turok had the helm as Mick manned the pontoon light. The splash of water against the panel hull seemed louder, as though each runnel of droplets could be heard falling back into the pool. They eventually reached the far end of the canyon, the furthest point from the tunnel and falls. Mick thought he saw a fugitive ripple on the other side, a short distance away. As he shone the light on it Turok idled the engine. They exchanged a glance.

Turok re-engaged the engine, a flick of anticipation now in his handling of the cutter.

Mick swung the light down. "Another crevice," he said.

"I think I'll join you," Turok announced. "This old tub won't be going anywhere."

Mick shrugged. Not bothering with a synth-helmet, Turok snagged a pair of goggles and a template from the duffel bag. Mick switched the lantern back to floodlight, disconnected the line from the stanchion and swung the light back out over the water. Turok took the line and hooked it to his own belt, so they were connected. Mick joined him on the gunwale, and they tipped over backwards into the pool.

As they approached the formation Mick saw it was longer and narrower than the earlier one. More importantly, it turned out to be not just a glossy black coloration in the rock-face – it was a real crevice. They hovered just outside it; the current was weak, but noticeable. Turok took out his template, adjusted it and popped it back in his mouth. Biting down again, a rush of air surged against the back of his throat. He nodded at Mick, who had taken the flashlight from his belt.

The lantern back in the cutter floodlit the area down to a considerable depth, but the interior of the crevice was dark. Mick shone the beam in, revealing a surprisingly large, elliptical tunnel. From their vantage hovering outside they could see about thirty feet in, where the tunnel appeared to dip down. They kicked twice and glided forward into the shadowed cavity. After advancing a short way a cocoon of darkness enveloped them. The narrow beam that was cast by Mick's flashlight made the darkness beyond just seem more impenetrable. The tunnel walls had the same glossy black surface as the false crevice. Mick switched the flashlight to wide beam, and the sudden expanded light made the space around them leap back, as though the tunnel had suddenly convulsed and grown around them.

Turok's hand brushed Mick's shoulder as they approached where the tunnel dipped, and they looked back. The opening into the floodlit, submerged canyon behind looked like the top of a well, a slightly shifting shape high above. They crested the dip, and paused again. The tunnel ahead extended a great distance down, on a gentle gradient, and it was smaller, narrower.

They paused about a hundred feet from what looked like a T-junction. Mick glanced at Turok, and signaled they should go forward just short of the end, then turn back. Turok gave a thumbs-up. They moved on slowly. It occurred to Mick that they hadn't felt any of the moderate current he had noticed at the opening. The water also seemed a bit cooler. The lateral tunnel ahead looked much larger, about the size of a double-track railway tunnel. The pressure of the current notched up a little as they got nearer – the lateral tunnel was gently tugging them forward.

They stopped thirty feet from the junction. The current wasn't strong, but up closer Mick was sure it could easily pull them in. Even so, he wanted a closer look. They were still connected by the line. Turok motioned for Mick to stay put, and pointed to the line disc on Mick's belt. Mick held his palm open – _take_ _it_ _slow_. He kicked to the sloping bottom of the tunnel, braced himself there, and started feeding out slack line.

Turok swam ahead, and stopped a short way from the end. His hand was on the wall, the line taut behind him. Mick watched, puzzled, as Turok removed the template from his mouth, and held out his arm. A trail of bubbles from the plate moved off quickly around the corner. He kicked gently away from the wall, and held out the template so it pointed directly into the lateral tunnel. The bubbles slid off into the slipstream – the new tunnel's current was shooting by fairly fast. It was unsettling to see, yet from Mick's vantage it looked not much worse than the tunnel before the waterfall.

Turok turned and swam back. Mick took up the slack. Moments later they set off on their return to the canyon and their waiting cutter.

______________

Thomas and Aleesha had spent much of the morning crossing one scrabble beach after another. When they reached the far end of the eighth lagoon south of their landfall they turned around. They had not found either of the other craft in any of the concealed inner bays and inlets.

Aleesha shaded her eyes and looked out across the reef. "Such an empty ocean."

Thomas swept his raptor gaze along the horizon. "The shoreline looks emptier at low tide like this."

"It's a shame losing the _Boleyn_."

"My father loved that old boat," he allowed, sighing. But we survived, that's what matters."

They came over a slight rise and retraced their steps along the shoreline of the fifth lagoon. Aleesha gazed up at the gray sky as they walked. Absent of clouds, it seemed heavier, lower.

Aleesha dug her hands in her pockets. "Maybe they went even further south."

Thomas shrugged. "The storm would likely wash them up somewhere along this stretch. Unless an undertow or deeper current carried them back out."

"There's my L-tree," she said, pointing ahead. A webtree whose trunk emerged from the side of a hillock, had grown parallel to the ground and then turned straight up, forming an 'L'. Aleesha had left her bright blue headband tied to its trunk. She raced ahead.

Thomas smiled, watching the young woman's long hair tossing behind her. He saw her pause a few yards from the tree, her attention taken by something out on the tidal flats. She fell suddenly to her knees. He looked out across the water.

Partially submerged in the tidal loam about fifteen yards out, revealed now by the retreating tide, was a shoulder and an outstretched arm. Pale and rigid in death, the limbs still reached towards shore, and the head lolled to one side, half-turned away from them. It was unmistakably Giorgi's body.

He quickly covered the rest of the distance. He looked up towards Aleesha, still kneeling near her webtree, and walked down to the shore. He stepped in. Aleesha looked up, and called out in panic. "Thomas, no!"

Thomas sank almost immediately to mid-thigh, and struggled to move back. Within seconds Aleesha was at his side. She took hold of his flailing arm and fell back, one of her legs falling into the mud.

She told Thomas, waist-deep in the tidal loam, to stop struggling. "Spread yourself out sideways." She heaved back, and Thomas's right leg came partially free. She scrambled back a few inches, clawing painfully at a larger rock, as Thomas dug into the low bank of gravel and wet clay. He pulled himself back, and his other leg popped half-way out of the loam. He fell over onto his side, and slid his legs along the surface. A popping noise of the loam's suction followed as his legs painfully came free. Aleesha half-stood, her hands on her knees, as Thomas lay panting on his side, then sat up. His legs and arms were caked with grey mud.

The shock of seeing their crewmate's sprawled and twisted body, half-buried in the loam, made it hard to think clearly. Thomas felt Aleesha's hands on his shoulders, and his head dropped forward a few inches. He couldn't take it in – all of his people in the second dinghy, taken by the storm.

Tears welled in Aleesha's eyes as she looked out at Giorgi's outstretched pale arm. His mouth hung open. The rest of his body was still immersed in the grey loam. 'You're no longer a _walking ghost_ ,' she thought. She slowly turned and walked up the beach to her webtree. She laid her hands on its trunk and closed her eyes, as if drawing strength from it. She breathed deep for several beats. She turned and looked back, took hold of her elbows and sat on the sand in lotus. Her tears flowed freely. 'Giorgi and Sorel are gone,' she told herself. 'And four of Thomas's friends.'

Only when the hazy outline of the sun was much lower in the sky did she realize how much time had passed. Her face had dried, and she made her way slowly back to the shore. Thomas was walking towards her.

Without speaking of it, they understood that they couldn't retrieve the body, not without putting themselves in grave risk. Aleesha took a last look, lifting her shoulders in a heavy intake of breath. It occurred to her that if the next high tide loosened the body from the mud, it would wash ashore somewhere else. She turned away and fell in beside Thomas.

As they moved off towards base camp she looked back at her L tree and her blue hair band still tied to its trunk.

*

It was mid-afternoon when Carmen and Franklin emerged above the tree line on their climb towards the ridge. They walked in silence, the haze-hidden sun behind them.

Their trek through the hillside forest brought them to a dip in the land, leading into a small glade. There was very little undergrowth in the shadow of the canopy of leaves. They came to a stream.

The watercourse was strangely sluggish where the sloping hillside should have had it flowing fast. The water hardly moved in places. Carmen ran a stick along the surface – it left a wake in the water that took several seconds to dissipate. Over those physics-defying slow areas there moved small whirlpools of vapor. Carmen knelt by the stream.

"It's the stilling," Franklin said, at her side.

They watched the whirlpools, which reminded him of dry mist, a quantum hypothesis he had worked on years earlier. They skittered back and forth, _in_ the water but not _of_ it. The water's viscous appearance diminished slightly after one of the insubstantial whirlpools passed. Franklin pointed to one – it had bright particles dispersed throughout. He cocked his head, considering.

"Have you heard of quantum _techne_?" he asked.

Carmen leaned forward. "That whirlpool ..."

"Is an atom," he said.

She looked up, and saw he wasn't joking.

"Vastly expanded, obviously," he added.

She countered by responding just as literally. "Franklin, no atom expanded to the scale of matter could exist in our space." She smiled at how that sounded.

He held her gaze. "What do you think your spheres are?"

The old man stood up and walked on.

______________

Emerging from the crevice back into the underwater section of the canyon, Mick looked up at the floodlit outline of the cutter above – an octagonal shadow within a much wider circle of light. They broke surface and rolled onto the craft's stern tumbrel, which swiveled them smoothly into the craft.

They sat looking into the darkness beyond the light's perimeter. It was disorienting to emerge from the confined space of the tunnel into the lantern's illusion of vast space.

They joked to fill the gap made by the prospect of leaving the cutter behind.

"We have a choice," Mick had said.

"Stay here in this lightless canyon of lost hopes and shattered dreams," Turok said.

"A home away from home."

"Or descend deeper into the belly of the beast."

"No contest," Mick added.

"The beast it is!" Turok exclaimed.

It appeared the crevice and submerged tunnel were the only way out of this underground cavity, except of course for the falls lost to sight on the far side.

Turok cast a long look back. "The water drains out of here down through that other tunnel. We must be way below sea level by now."

"That tunnel descends to the northwest," Mick said.

"To the ocean?"

"Must be."

"But wouldn't the tide move the current towards us?"

Mick nodded. "So either I'm wrong on the direction, or –"

"Or that tunnel reaches _below_ the ocean floor."

That realization brought home to them just how deep their descent was taking them. They set about preparing to abandon the cutter. Mick took a mooring line and tied off one end into a wide loop. He slipped that under a flat boulder on the ledge-like shore, and cinched it tight. Turok gathered their equipment and stored it in four synthetic storage bags. He tossed all four bags overboard, and slid in after them. He attached the cords from two of the bags to his belt, popped the template in his mouth, switched the crystal lantern to forward flood, and adjusted the bags' buoyancy. He followed them down and vanished into the crevice. The canyon was plunged into relative darkness.

Mick tied off the two remaining bags, and by the beam of the small flashlight took a last look at the moored cutter. He exhaled a long breath into the template and let himself submerge. At the crevice he paused a moment and switched off the flashlight. He let himself feel the oppressive weight of this large cavity they were leaving, pitch-black and empty, and gladly turned into the crevice. He pulled ahead and handed to Turok the end of the disc line, and so connected the two of them.

Within minutes they approached the T-junction. Mick was well aware the current in the transverse tunnel might rip away their gear, despite their security lines, or it might later accelerate enough to hurl them against any obstructions in the tunnel. But they had little choice.

As they covered the last yards Mick made some final adjustments to the bag, slid the flashlight band over his wrist, and shortened the disc line. They spent a moment treading water, steeling themselves. Mick looked over at Turok and nodded, then kicked out into the faster tunnel, Turok following right behind. The disc line connecting them snapped taut as Mick was whipped ahead. As both bags impacted the wall Mick was wrenched sideways. His back slammed hard, almost knocking away the flashlight, and behind him Turok's forward momentum was slowed for a heartbeat before shooting off again. Their speed picked up as the tunnel descended at a steeper angle; they quickly learned they could only guide themselves by pushing away from the walls with their feet. The tunnel widened out and continued on, moving steadily further down. They maneuvered into mid-channel and were able to stay clear of the walls much of the time. On several occasions they almost became entangled in their lines – Mick seriously considered cutting the disc line at one point, though getting separated would not have improved matters. He was suddenly spun around and for a moment was completely disoriented, not knowing which way was forward, or where Turok was. He shone the flashlight forward and aft.

The force of the current was pushing Mick up, and he saw the tunnel had turned up a few degrees. He changed his angle to match its slow rise. A feeling of spaciousness caused him to look up, and he saw that above him the water had a _surface_ again. He pressed the buoyancy nozzle and rose with the bags. When he broke surface he still didn't see Turok, but he did see the floodlight beam wash across the ceiling from behind. He turned and saw Turok about a hundred yards back. He sighed with relief. The current had slowed, though they were still being driven forward and down again.

The underwater tunnel had opened out into an expansive underground river. It felt good just no longer being submerged. He again checked behind, Turok was closing the gap. Looking ahead he saw that the open river continued, and widened out more, in the flashlight beam. He corrected his first observation – the regularity of the shoreline made this look more like a large canal than a river. Despite the tunnel's recent rise the current showed this waterway had resumed its descent. He waited. The surface gradually slowed; Turok was getting nearer, and waved. Within moments he caught up, and they set about tying the four bags together side by side, forming a makeshift raft. Turok lashed the lantern upright on one of the bags, and set it to the 360-degree flood mode. The watercourse that bore them along was about a quarter-mile wide. The channel roof loomed several hundred feet above. The embankment extended up a short distance on both sides. They lay half-on the raft of bags, their legs trailing in the water.

"We made it!" Turok said, breaking the silence, sounding mildly surprised.

"I almost cut away the disc line," Mick announced.

Turok looked horrified for a moment, and then burst into laughter. Mick joined in, and the sound of it carried up, chasing away the silence of the channel.

They floated along, a small bubble of light moving through the darkness. The channel sporadically meandered to one side a few degrees, and then swung over to the opposite side, back and forth. Time passed as languidly as did the watercourse. The darkness, the flow of the water that bore them along, and their descent – it all continued.

After what must have been several hours, Mick raised his head and looked around. He thought he saw the floodlight catch something in its beam on the shore. He switched to spotlight and swiveled back. Turok pulled himself fully forward on the bags, and watched the shore. The banks had displayed shale rock with unvarying regularity leading down to the water's edge. The shoreline was now a flat, horizontal surface, more like a wharf of interlocking slabs. Mick panned the beam slowly ahead. A long rectangular structure leapt into view. They looked further up the watercourse, and saw that the passageway the channel moved through expanded yet again. The channel was now as arrow-straight as the light beam itself. Turok whistled under his breath.

More buildings were visible far in the distance. They were entering the environs of a subterranean city, buried in silence and darkness.

Mick suspected that even the watercourse's current, which never seemed to vary by much, had been engineered long ago. The miles scudded by. The landscape they were passing through, apart from the appearance of grey, dead-looking buildings, remained bland and featureless. The buildings did become more numerous, clustering in certain areas, then thinning out again. The first double story buildings marked a shift. The shoreline ahead became in fact the sides of the buildings themselves, rising straight up from the waterline, or overhanging it. Soon after that multistory buildings appeared. In the sections of lower buildings they could see far beyond the shoreline, and caught brief glimpses of a vista of buildings rising away in terraces. The sides of the passageway retreated even further, and the overhanging roof of rock lifted upward, becoming as smooth and featureless as everything else around them.

Several hours had passed since they encountered the first buildings. The current was barely enough to move them forward, which for the moment was not such a disappointment. The truth was – they felt a reluctance to move deeper into what was evidently an underground city, and their compacted provisions wouldn't give out for another couple weeks. Ahead they could see an enormous bridge, as white as glacier ice, above the dark water. It towered above the watercourse atop eight slender pillars, only a yard thick at their widest point. The bridge itself was easily wide enough to hold a dozen lanes. They floated along, becalmed, and kicked to move slowly towards the bridge. A desultory current came along behind as they got back into the center of the watercourse. Their speed picked up.

Mick flopped over and looked up at the bridge's underside. He was fascinated by its construction. The pillars' grace held the eye, standing like eight wineglasses set in a row, their stems rising high above the channel. Above the pillars the bridge proper appeared to be one uninterrupted synthetic surface. Passing beneath Mick saw that the bridge's surface in fact consisted of large molded sections, twenty feet square. Their floodlight raised a soft glow in the nearest pillars as they floated silently underneath.

Mick switched the lantern to spot and full power. He swiveled it to shine directly along the length of the bridge, and they saw that its far end continued above the shoreline on that side, and _into_ the cavern wall.

"It must connect to another part of the city," Mick said, "in another cavern."

"Or another city," Turok replied.

They slipped by within a few yards of a jet-white pillar. Beyond the bridge the environs of the built-up area angled off to the side. They were finally approaching a turn after hours of floating down this arrow straight marine avenue. They emerged from under the bridge, and looked ahead to the bend in the watercourse. The current picked up as the channel narrowed a bit more.

"The current will likely carry us around the bend," Mick said.

"And it might not."

As they neared the turn the current surprised them. It continued on straight ahead, narrowing suddenly about half a mile away. They drifted in a smooth arc around the bend, then returned back onto a straight course towards the built-up area visible in the distance.

The buildings they had seen until then did not prepare them for what they saw next. The structures ahead echoed the delicacy and flowing lines of the bridge. Terrace upon terrace, buildings whose surfaces glowed in the ambient light of their lantern, rose in graceful curves and flowing parabolas, receding to a horizon that no longer felt subterranean.

They looked up. The roof hadn't changed, but perhaps because of this strangely effulgent vista ahead, it _had_ lost the quality of pressing down, of holding back the vast quantity of rock above them. They felt their hearts lift as their eyes surveyed the underground city spread out before them.

**8 |Watyra**

Using a slow dolphin kick they moved parallel to the channel shore until a dock was reached close to water level. They stood up and hauled the raft up on shore.

"Ghost town," Turok muttered.

They set off towards the nearest building carrying the lantern and one small rucksack, a couple of meal-packets stuffed inside. Mick had feared they might be brought low not by any external threat, but by a simple lack of supplies. He hoped this city might take care of the latter concern. The ground they walked on had a pale incandescence. At first he thought it was a trick of their crystal lantern light, but he soon enough realized they'd activated some sort of sympathetic response in the ground and buildings. Looking back he saw that the ground they had covered, now outside their circle of light, retained the crystal's light.

"You're right," Turok said, when Mick drew his attention to it. "It's like the ground stores the light it receives." He shook his head. "But that's crazy."

Mick knelt down, setting the lantern on the ground. He took up a handful of dirt, and let it slide from one hand to the other close to the lantern. Particles glittered brightly, and their light danced across to others, which caught and glowed even brighter. It was like holding materialized, granular light in his hands.

Mick had a sudden idea. "Mind if I turn off the light?"

Turok looked about to object, and Mick reached over and switched off the lantern.

Turok was surprised when they weren't plunged into darkness. The ambient radiance from surrounding surfaces was about sixty percent of what the crystal lantern put out. The ground at their feet and along the short route they had walked, and the walls of the nearest buildings, all shone with a muted fluorescence. Yet ahead of them, beyond the perimeter of their former circle of radiance, it was still dark. However, it was no longer the impenetrable blackness of a subterranean cavern – it was akin to being above ground at night under a quarter moon.

"It almost seems like some mutated form of photosynthesis," Mick said. "But instead of producing oxygen, it makes light."

"I wonder how long it'll last?"

Mick stood, brushing his hands, and gestured at the structures that loomed around them. "Let's go inside."

They set off towards the nearby double doors of a building smaller than the others. The doors whooshed open smoothly as they approached. Mick peered within, and the interior lights winked on.

"Maybe it's more of your photosynthesis," Turok offered.

"If it is, then it's being boosted somehow. No way one small lantern ..." He shook his head.

Turok shrugged. "Let's save that worry for later."

They stepped across the threshold. The interior walls of the lobby did not glow as the outside walls did. Instead there was a narrow, softly incandescent panel inset in the ceiling that ran the length of the lobby. It had winked on the instant the exterior doors had opened.

Turok strode towards what looked like a bank of elevators. Again the doors slid noiselessly open as he drew near. He held the doors, and they both turned to look around the silent, deserted, and now well-lit lobby. They stepped in and the doors slid closed. If they were to look away, it would be hard to tell exactly where the doors were, so flawless was the seal. Nor was there a floor directory on any of the walls. It was like they had materialized inside a perfectly enclosed cube.

Moments later, to their relief, the wall opened. The ceiling light panels were already on, so Mick muted the lantern. He stepped out hesitantly, looking up and down the hall.

Turok nodded at the reception desk. "Everyone's stepped out for a permanent lunch." He went over to the counter. "But no smell."

Mick glanced at him questioningly.

"No smell of decay," Turok said, turning around. "No smell of anything."

"No one's been here in decades."

Mick turned and walked to a swing door behind the counter. He pushed through and found himself in a smaller, windowless room with four workstations. He sat behind one desk as Turok came in. He waved his hand in front of what looked like the monitor's eye. Nothing.

"Maybe it's voice-activated," Turok said, waiting for a response on the screen.

Mick reached for the mouse, it pulsed once, and the monitor blinked on.

"You have the touch."

A geometric pattern appeared, which seemed to serve as the desktop. Four icons appeared in a row at the center. He chose one at random and clicked on it. The monitor image had been abruptly replaced by a funnel-shaped pattern spiraling up in expanding circles. It was mesmerizing. The instant Mick's eyes saw the pattern they seemed to lock in place – he couldn't seem to tear his concentration away. He felt himself slipping back, falling ...

Mick was looking up as a concerned face came into focus. Turok was looking down at him, framed by the ceiling above. Mick sat up slowly.

"What happened?"

"You were sitting there, and then you froze," Turok said. "I pulled you away fast."

"Thanks." Mick shook his head to clear it. "I blacked out."

Turok rested his palm against the wall behind Mick's head. "Mick, you were as rigid as this wall. Even your skin felt different, dry and chalky."

"Hmm. That doesn't sound like a seizure."

"What was that spiral pattern?"

Mick shrugged, and stood up slowly. "It just seemed to draw me in." Leaning against the wall, he looked down at the innocent monitor. "How long has it been?"

"About twenty minutes."

"Probably a security retinal scan, keyed to trigger a synaptic reaction."

"I guess we can forget about accessing their system."

Mick ran his hand along his jaw. "We'll have to find a back door, or a public one."

Turok rolled his eyes. "Or – we could just leave it alone."

"Yeah, for now. Let's go." Mick got up and pushed through the door back into the reception area. The elevator door still stood open.

The monitor had not looked exceptional. It was just one of four in that room. The same security protocol would be on every system access point in the building. Or the city even.

Mick stepped out past the counter and looked down the hall. "There are double doors at that end. Want to check it out?"

Turok shrugged, and they set off. They passed several closed rooms on each side. Turok tried opening several, pressing his palm against their touchpads, with no result. There was no touchpad on the double doors. As Mick stepped in front of them they separated. They looked into a room with one large oblong table in the center, and along two sides of the room were floor-to-ceiling wallscreens, an opaque grey. As they crossed the threshold the screens' blank opacity vanished, and they found themselves standing on what appeared to be the viewing deck of a space station in high Nebura orbit. The system star was dipping below the horizon and the evening's first stars had just appeared. After many days in confined, dark spaces it was comforting just to look out on such a vista of open, light, expansive space. They breathed easier for a few moments.

Mick placed his finger on a touchpad a short distance from the doorway, near the corner away from the screens. The wallscreen image dissolved and was replaced by the actual cityscape below them, penumbral and lifeless, or rather what could be seen of it. A relatively narrow swathe of light cut through the darkness from the nearby canal up to this building. The buildings all along that short route they had walked gave off a soft exterior light. It was like a sword in the dark, with them standing at its point.

Turok glanced at the lantern which they had set on the table with the backpack. "What do you say, Mick? You want to light up the neighborhood?"

Mick's eyes followed Turok's. "Sure. But not from here."

Mick picked up the lantern and they left the room. Turning into an enclosed stairwell they climbed two flights of stairs to another door, palmed it and emerged onto the roof. Mick walked across to a low, square-topped ventilation outlet. He placed the lantern on top, switched it to maximum flood, and pointed the wide, low beam straight up. A flattened light-cone flooded a wide radius of the city around them. They stepped away from the lantern a few paces.

The roof of rock was set in brilliant relief, and a softer glow filtered down over the buildings and streets below. The underground city had suddenly sprung out of what must have been decades of all-enveloping darkness. Within moments, however, it was no longer the lantern lighting up somnambulant buildings. The buildings and streets themselves had begun emitting a soft luminescence.

They left the lantern where it was, flooding the cavern's upper reaches with harsh light, and walked over to the ledge. Mick looked out over the city. The ambient light in the cavern seemed to be increasing. He leaned against the molded railing, giving his full attention to the transformation occurring around him. More buildings and throughways were becoming visible.

"We'll soon need a source of food and water," Turok said.

"Yeah."

"But it looks like the city will provide light, if we stay here," Turok added.

"Unless of course the power is programmed to shut off."

"Now there's a pleasant thought." Turok chuffed out his lips. "We need a plan."

Mick smiled. "For that we need information."

"About the city."

"About this planet, period."

"Any place with maps," Turok said. "Maps of the tunnels, routes to the surface if any."

"And the people who built this place."

"If we can find a store or supply depot with a deep-space outfitters section, that'll give us most of what we need."

"Somehow we have to get insystem," Mick said. "One without homicidal security measures."

"Public insystem access." Turok pushed away from the railing.

Mick had returned his attention to the cavern roof. "There's something about this self-generating light." He glanced over at the lantern. "I think we might be in for a surprise."

Turok gave him a puzzled look.

Mick walked over and moved the lantern to roof's surface. "I want to check something. Mind if I turn it off?"

Turok shrugged. Mick pressed a button and the cone of hard light above them vanished. Turok expected the city to form a night skyline, dark above, artificial light below. But it didn't. His eyes were immediately drawn up to where the cavern roof should have been. Instead the surface above them had acquired a soft, light blue effulgence all its own, creating the illusion of a sky-like depth of field. It looked for all the world like an ordinary early evening under an autumn sky. The only dissonant element was the absence of a source for the cavern's extraordinary light. He looked down and saw that the buildings too were giving off their own soft light, softer than the light in the sky.

Turok whistled under his breath. They turned to leave.

Moments later, standing out in front of the building Turok couldn't take his eyes off the sky.

"How long will it last?" he asked.

Mick shrugged. "I left the lantern on for exactly nine minutes."

"It must have triggered a generating system."

"Some sort of cascade," Mick agreed, gesturing to the buildings and sky. "The stored energy is being released now as light."

"Artificial daylight," Turok said sourly. "So this fine bright day could vanish in a heartbeat."

______________

Franklin and Carmen supported Seamus's unconscious body between them as they walked back along the beach towards base camp.

Franklin trudged on brooding over the turn events had taken. He and Carmen had been walking along the ridge, taking turns scanning the horizon with the binoculars for any sign of the cutter or dinghy – with no success. Staying on the ridge they had ventured a half-mile up river, and then retraced their steps. They were following along the promontory towards their original beach landing location when they first saw the wreckage of the _Boleyn_.

Carmen had stopped and raised the binoculars.

Franklin narrowed his eyes as he followed her line of sight. He had already accepted in his own mind that the research ship was lost, but it was still disturbing to see naked evidence of that fact. A couple hundred yards out was a large section of her bow. The ship's hull had been built with several cylindrical air pockets, dispersed at several points along the hull's lateral seams, like ribs in a skeleton. They increased the craft's buoyancy to such a degree that even a gaping hole below the waterline should not have sunk her. But those air pockets couldn't prevent the boat from being shattered into fragments by the force of a storm. The separate pieces had evidently washed ashore in several locations. This bow section was one of many such fragments. He had expected this, yet something tickled at the back of his mind.

It was then he saw Seamus. The bow had turned half around, one end lodged between rocks not far offshore. The young man was hanging on that side of the wreckage, his arm hooked behind a stanchion. Franklin's shoulders slumped. Seamus had been in the second dinghy, which meant that the other dinghy, like the _Boleyn_ herself, had been destroyed in the storm. Seamus must have been thrown free when it broke apart, drifted into the path of the _Boleyn's_ wreckage, and grabbed hold.

Quickly stripping off tunic and boots, Franklin waded out, moving easily through the calm water. He gave a shout towards shore when he discovered that Seamus was still alive – unconscious but alive. If the young man hadn't wedged his arm behind the bow's stanchion he would have dropped away when he lost consciousness. Doing that saved his life. Franklin carefully floated Seamus behind him as he returned to the beach. They were able to revive him briefly, and soon after he fell into a ragged sleep. A gash in his thigh looked worrying. After loosely binding the cut, which the salt water had kept fairly clean, they roused him enough to walk with their help, his arms slung over their shoulders.

They arrived at the camp in early evening, and Franklin saw that Marnie had returned from the seaport in the remaining dinghy. The others had deflated its lower section, flipped it upside-down, and then re-inflated all but one of the upper panels, forming an igloo-shaped tent. He called out, and Aleesha appeared in the dinghy's open hatchway. She took one glance at Seamus and ducked back in to retrieve the first-aid. Thomas ran up and helped them carry Seamus inside. After deftly cleaning the cut, Carmen waited as the patch's analgesic foam settled into place, doing its work of binding and sealing the wound.

Seamus was left to sleep peacefully on the floor, his head propped on one of the smaller storage bags. It was late afternoon when Franklin and Carmen emerged to join the others sitting silently on the ground outside.

______________

Mick and Turok had felt ready to return to the first building and the comfortable lounge they had discovered on the top floor, but decided to scout around for a while. Mick knew the sooner they got insystem the better. Two of the taller buildings that stood to one side of theirs had a large mezzanine level – it bridged over, forming an open, public area. They had entered the building's lobby, the ceiling light panels winking on, and the escalators noiselessly started moving. They were soon walking along the mezzanine level. On the far side in the second building they hit pay dirt.

They stood outside a large open café, a low-ceilinged room filled with star-like clusters of system stations, each with an 18-inch holofield cube back-projected against an opaque background in the center of each cluster. There were about thirty of the clusters. All the holofields were on, pale grayish light hovering slightly beyond and above each station keyboard. Turok smiled at the sign above the windows – _Cyberia_.

Mick gave a whoop and strode to the nearest station. He dumped the backpack on a nearby café table and sat down before the keyboard.

Mick looked up at Turok, frowning. "I'll logon, you watch me. If I freeze –"

"I'll haul you out of there," Turok said, smiling.

Mick reached for the mouse, glancing quickly around the room. "These stations probably can't access sensitive data-sites."

Turok stood stolidly to Mick's side, looking away from the cube within the cluster.

Mick wasn't feeling as confident as he sounded. He clicked on one of the icons suspended in the holofield before him. It sprang to life, the cube of light expanding down and out, enveloped him. As it did so it elongated to a more opaque, oblong shape. Mick had kept up a running commentary throughout, and it abruptly ended. Turok could see his friend inside the pulsing cocoon, and was about to reach through and pull him out when Mick held up his palm. He did a thumbs-up.

"You okay?" Turok asked through the holo surface.

Mick touched the mouse. "Now I am," he said. "This is supposed to happen, I think." His voice was a little distorted, but otherwise sounded normal.

Turok nodded. "Take it slow."

Mick clicked the mouse again, and the holo surface went fully opaque. It was like looking at the compressed surface of a cloud.

"It's okay, Turok," Mick's voice said.

A few seconds later, as Turok looked on, the holo surface returned to its original transparency. Mick was not just inside the expanded, projected holofield, he was now _part_ of it. Turok could see Mick inside, but nothing else of what constituted the terrain of that space. Clearly, though, it was visible to Mick, who had started tapping away on the keyboard. Mick turned and grinned. Turok went to sit at a nearby table, one of many such ordinary tables set out among the clusters of holostations.

After about twenty minutes, the oblong-shaped holofield retracted. Turok heard a barely audible popping noise. Mick rose from his chair in the module and walked over to join Turok.

"Well?"

"At first I could see you fine," Mick replied, "but then this fog rolled in."

"Yeah, that much I saw."

"I was inside the field terrain, no image lag or overlap. The best I've ever seen, in fact."

"Did it have the same spiral as the other monitor, a holo version of that?"

"No. The icons were holo thumb-cells. I clicked on the one for Nebura and it brought up standard definer codes. I chose 'History' and it slipped me right through to the next level. I passed hundreds of sub-cells. What caught my eye were 'Kalaali Settlement' and 'Siqdori Invasion', and others going back 200 years." Mick stood up and walked back to the holostation.

"Recent history?" Turok asked.

Mick looked into the six neutral cubes of pale light that formed the center of the cluster of six stations. "A sub-cell named 'Surface Evacuation'," he said, turning around. "From what I could see, Turok, everyone left, more or less. Most went to other worlds, many to underground cities." He nodded to the café entrance. "This city, Watyra, was the main one."

Turok leaned forward. "Why? Why evacuate?"

Mick sat on the edge of the module. "They had the same two global problems as now. A new disease and a slowing environment."

"What happened to those who didn't leave?"

"It didn't say. The record is incomplete."

"I'll be joining you next time," Turok replied.

Mick looked down, distracted.

"What is it?"

Mick shrugged. "Every day ... I wonder if they made it."

Turok took a deep breath. "It's the same for me."

They rose and made their way back to the first building.

______________

Nebura swung away from the sun, and night fell over Inuvoro's western coast. In an isolated lagoon six hundred miles south of Polarica the small group sat around a dying fire.

Carmen and Franklin had described to their shipmates how they found and rescued Seamus, who at that moment was sleeping soundly behind them inside the dinghy-tent. Then Thomas and Aleesha tersely told of finding Giorgi's body. Franklin stood up and walked off towards the beach. Carmen was about to get up to follow him when Marnie touched her arm. They exchanged a glance, and Carmen reluctantly sat back down.

Everyone knew there would be no additional survivors of the second dinghy.

Seamus stood in the dinghy's doorway, and cleared his throat. He approached the fire and sat down slowly.

"What about Mick and Turok?" he asked.

Carmen explained about Oscar waiting at the rendezvous point, the seaport. "If they show up there, he'll fire off a flare, and a second one after sundown."

"Good," Seamus said.

"We'll continue our search tomorrow," she said to everyone. "And let's go further."

Thomas stoked the fire. "We can focus our search on the area south of here, beyond where Giorgi ... And also up the river."

"Two search parties, same as today," Carmen concluded. She turned towards Seamus. "We'll need someone to stay here and watch the dinghy."

He looked about to protest. "We _do_ need this dinghy, I guess."

As the others sat around the fire, talking quietly, Carmen's thoughts returned to the small skittering whirlpools she and Franklin had seen in the stream that day. She worried that the stilling might arrive sooner than Franklin expected.

______________

Emerging onto the up ramp from an underground garage the two high-powered scooters banked smoothly onto one of Watyra's feeder roads, and after a couple blocks swung down towards the channel side road.

At Cyberia Mick had learned that a bank of access elevators in the city's northwest sector rose straight from Watyra through Nebura's crust to a large ocean-floor transshipment facility for submarine traffic – _Oceangate_.

He and Turok spent much of the next day in Cyberia. Finding out about Oceangate was surprise enough. Then they learned of a cargo conduit from there to a seaport on the ocean surface. Turok had terminated his session and pounded on the panel of Mick's holostation.

"The seaport is the same one Thomas set as our Plan B rendezvous!" he said eagerly.

Not really expecting to find a clear route to the surface, and their lost shipmates, they hadn't hesitated. Laughing at their surreal good luck, they had packed one of the bags from the cutter, and set off for the access elevators.

Watyra was roughly circular in shape, resembling a stemless mushroom. While it still suggested depth and distance, the roof's perimeter – Watyra's horizon – had a slight wrinkle, like a fold or desert heat ripple. It didn't unseat the illusion, however.

It took about twenty minutes to drive to the city's outskirts. Mick idly wondered how the Watyrans had accommodated population growth. 'Urban sprawl was one option they didn't have,' he thought. Unless the original Watyra, the inhabited part, had started out smaller, concentrated in one part of this cavern, and then gradually spread out. Or maybe they built other underground cities as the need for more space had developed. He had so many unanswered questions. He'd like nothing more than to spend weeks insystem, specifically in the 'History' sub-cells. The era of Kalaali settlement, when the original settlers arrived, must have occurred much earlier than two centuries before.

They took a series of ramps to the freeway's lowest level, and stopped at the top of a ramp that fed down into the tunnel which, according to the schematic, led to the Oceangate elevators. Turok glanced over at Mick, and grinned as they set off, accelerating together down the ramp. Mick watched as his friend rode into the dark mouth of the tunnel, and followed seconds later. This two-mile straightaway led directly to both the passenger and cargo-handling areas, with no turn-offs to any other destinations. He noticed that many of the tunnel lights were not working. It was unnerving to leave a well-lit section of road, his scooter moving like a bullet of light through a shaft of claustrophobic darkness.

Mick wondered why the Watyrans had placed the elevators so far from the city. Nothing in the text sidebars on any of the maps had answered that question. Either it was so self-evident that Watyran authorities had seen no need to mention it, or the reason was not generally known. But secrecy works best when those who lack specific knowledge aren't aware of that lack. Mick assumed it had to be the former.

The end of the tunnel came within sight, but it was pitch black. The last working tunnel light was about a hundred yards from a large, high-ceilinged area adjacent to a circular carousel of loading bays. Mick's headlight had not triggered any cascade reaction since entering the tunnel. Turok, still ahead of him, rode a full circuit around the loading carousel and parked in one of the bays. Mick pulled in beside him as Turok lifted the crystal lantern out of his bike's basket. He turned it on, adjusting to forward flood.

Double doors at the back of the bay, like the buildings in Watyra, weren't locked. Once inside none of the interior lights self-activated. Enclosed in the center, beyond the walls of the cargo-handling core, lay the hub of elevators.

Without a power source Mick wondered if the elevators would even work. He was trying to remember if the schematic had shown any stairs leading to Oceangate, though a five-mile climb would take _days_. It hadn't occurred to them back in Watyra that power might be a problem.

Making their way in from the loading bays they soon reached the enormous elevator doors. They walked slowly across, their steps loud in the large, empty space. They made a quick circuit around the pentagonal hub. A single, wide elevator door was on each of its sides. Stopping opposite one of them, Turok walked right up and stood bare inches from the door, waiting. He turned and shrugged, glancing back at Mick.

Mick was scanning the walls all around the door. "There must be a way to trigger the power. We could spend days trying to find it."

Turok glanced at his watch. "Unless ... "

Mick looked at him expectantly.

"This section's power is controlled from up on the ocean floor, in Oceangate." Turok nodded towards the ceiling. "There's only one way I can think of to override their control. Release an evacuation protocol insystem."

"Would that really work?"

Turok reached into the small backpack and retrieved a palmtop. "I sent the protocol to Oceangate." He held it up. "It'll only be released if I send a formatted message."

Mick was impressed, but then he saw the _what_ _-_ _if_. "It will feed back to Watyra."

"Yes. And Watyra likely has post-evac systems in place. It might seal up the city."

"Or worse."

"I figured this would be a last resort."

"Is there any way to keep the evac orders restricted to Oceangate?"

Turok shook his head. "Crisis orders are meant to be system-wide. That's the point."

Mick smiled. "Not if it's a drill."

Turok hesitated.

"Can you change the protocol from here, make it obviously a drill?" Mick asked.

"Uh – no." Turok smiled as he activated the palmtop's mini-holofield. "What I can do, though, is make Oceangate _think_ it's a drill."

"How?"

Turok tapped in a series of commands. "There, done."

"Don't tell me," Mick said. "I think I'd rather not know."

"And now here goes the message." Turok tapped a single keystroke. He closed the lid of the device, and looked up.

**9 |The Column**

For several seconds nothing happened. All along the tunnel carousel the lights flickered on. Then the large doors in front of them slid silently open. The elevator's lights were not yet on – it was like looking into a cave. Then they too winked on, revealing the elevator's vault-like interior.

The chamber was about twenty feet on each side. Again, as in the Watyran building's elevator, there was no control panel. The doors closed behind them as quietly as they had opened. The lower half of the chamber gave off a fairly strong luminescence, but not uncomfortably so. The top half of the chamber, from waist-level to the ceiling, pulsed brighter for a moment, and then dimmed by half. Suddenly the upper section and ceiling went transparent, and they could see the sheer, smooth rock face of the walls of the vertical shaft. The walls of rock outside began sliding by. Except for the evidence of their eyes, it was mildly disorienting to feel very little sensation of movement.

They still found it hard to believe just how far away the surface was – four miles up to the ocean bottom and Oceangate. And from there another full mile to the surface of the ocean.

Mick turned on the crystal lantern, set to high spot, and the shaft leapt higher, extending through the Neburan rock as far as the beam reached. As they ascended the walls of the shaft rushed past in a ceaseless flow. Beyond the light's limit was utter blackness above. They stood there looking up, transfixed by their passage through successive strata of Neburan rock.

Minutes later Turok turned it off. They sat on the floor by the wall. It was like riding in the softly-lit gondola of a large, open-air balloon as it rose into the night. Only a few minutes had passed, though it felt longer. Mick leaned his head against the wall and continued looking up. He was fascinated by the blurring of the walls outside. Suddenly up ahead he thought he saw a sort of expansiveness, an opening out. He again turned on the lantern. The end of the beam shone off into an emptiness, a space with no walls. Mick scrambled up as their chamber suddenly pulsed out into a seeming void. Mick placed one hand against the transparent wall and adjusted the lantern from up to forward flood. It pierced out into the blackness. He switched it to high spot and down. They were startled to see a rolling terrain of dark buildings, reaching far off into the distance.

Turok was not looking at the city. "What's holding us up on this vertical path?" he asked in a small voice.

Mick shook his head. "Some kind of beam. Magnetic phase, maybe."

"Whatever." Turok smiled weakly, and sat back down.

Mick looked out again over the city. He was intrigued that this second subterranean city appeared to have been abandoned much longer than Watyra. The buildings were shorter, smaller, and there was no visible channel or other body of water. Yet it was clearly a much larger cavern. Then he realized what the biggest difference was. He shone the beam towards the ceiling of rock that overarched the city.

"This cavern looks natural."

Turok looked up. "You're right." He paused a moment. "And I bet they didn't have an artificial sky here."

They had almost reached the cavern's ceiling. They could see no opening in the uneven surface above them. Turok groaned again, and closed his eyes. "Tell me when we're back inside the tunnel."

Then Mick saw the shaft's opening directly above. Six seconds later they passed through. "We're in."

Turok opened his eyes, and sighed. "I much prefer this," he said, "though I guess, technically, we're rushing blindly through a hole in the rock." He stood up.

"Yes, this feels much safer," Mick agreed. They laughed.

Mick glanced at his watch. He could scarcely believe they had left the transshipment carousel only ten minutes earlier. He looked up into the enclosing darkness. They were ascending about one floor's height every second – he estimated another twelve minutes or so to reach Oceangate.

They were pensive, keenly aware how far they had come. Mick tried to visualize any of the subsurface worlds he had heard of, where settlement patterns had pushed world development deeper within the planet with each successive wave of migration, in several cases to as deep as 0.8 miles, 4,200 feet, harboring as many as 250 levels. As terraforming techniques had been introduced and gradually improved, however, subsurface settlement – never a popular solution to hostile atmospheric environments – was abandoned. Mick tried to visualize that – 1200-plus levels of hive-like humanity – on this world. The image this called up left him dizzy.

When another ten minutes had passed Mick stood up. He could see a faint smudge of light high above. It could only be Oceangate. A freeze-frost had begun coating the upper part of the elevator. It went opaque for several seconds, then returned to the neutral off-white interior it had had when they boarded. They couldn't tell if the elevator had stopped. The interior luminescence of the chamber's lower section brightened, and a chime sounded. The wall unobtrusively slid back. They peered out at a curving corridor, higher and more spacious than the carousel four miles below. They stepped out of the chamber and hesitantly looked around. It felt like they had been inside for an hour. The doors closed behind them. They walked along the hallway, and came to a set of escalators. They rode up into a large, open, high-ceilinged space of what could only be the arrivals and departures terminal of Oceangate.

It reminded Mick of an orbiting spaceport, where wide gates led from a hub to docking berths for the feeder ships that ferried cargo and personnel to and from the starships berthed nearby. In Oceangate's case, Mick assumed the gates served large submersible craft. It was humbling to think that traffic through this terminal had once been heavy enough to require such enormous, elaborate facilities, which also meant there must be other cities like Watyra, deeply subaqueous and subterranean, dispersed across this world. His curiosity about Nebura continued to grow.

They didn't have a definite location for the conduit to the ocean's surface. They hadn't even found much detail about what form it took. They imagined an elevator similar to Watyra's, ascending from here into the interior of the seaport. They walked across to the largest viewing area. The transparent synthetic material of the windows was about eight inches thick, reaching to the ceiling. They were a uniform, impenetrable black. Mick shone the lantern's spotlight through one of them, and it reached about forty or fifty feet out into the ocean gloom. At an ocean depth of a mile visibility was low, but they could see that the scale of Oceangate was less like a starship spaceport than a 21st century Earthside _airport_ , even smaller in fact. Just within range of the lantern light they could see the nose section of a submersible. The craft, probably a twelve-seater plus cargo, was lying on its side on the tarmac. There was a lateral gash in its partly visible fuselage. At the next berth a tail section could be seen. What they could see of it appeared intact. They suspected there must be many other vessels outside the range of the lantern, in much the same condition. The berths, where the caterpillar-like, extendable corridors would snake out to meet the docking craft, were about thirty feet above the tarmac, made of some hardened foam-like material. Alongside the berth were large hydraulic support cradles to hold the docking submersibles in place.

They decided to walk a full circuit of the hub. They also wanted to check the other viewing lounges that fronted each gate corridor, and perhaps make it down to the end of a few of the gates. Turok was hankering to see if any of the submersibles had survived better than this one.

______________

Carmen and Franklin were walking along the escarpment above the river; the ocean was some distance behind them. The vista inland had a much closer horizon with no nearby buildings. From their current height they could see how the river banked in a feint to one side then made its way back. The promontory they stood on fronted the river on the side nearer their base camp; further along on the other side stood an even higher, narrower promontory, breaking their view into two halves. The region beyond the other promontory fell away in a series of low hills, eventually reaching a flat plain where the river widened out.

They first saw it on the inland horizon, hovering over the river – the stilling sheet.

Franklin involuntarily stepped back. It was a mobile glacier-like front of pent-up energy, spreading and descending towards the coast. So far it had remained with the river.

Quite separate from the sheet, and descending rapidly in their direction, were swirling waves of motion – birds without number. Flocks of birds were passing above them. The nearest flock banked over the far side of the river, heading north away from the sheet.

Carmen turned and walked woodenly back from the edge, joining Franklin.

"It's coming," she said, "slow and steady."

The old man continued watching its progress, his expression one of resigned curiosity. It had arrived sooner than he'd expected.

"What does it do to the land, really?" she asked.

He leaned back and looked straight up. "It intensifies the slowing." He swiveled down to look at the horizon. "Even molecular oscillation slows."

"We need to evacuate – today," she resolved out loud, then asked: "How slow?"

"The affected areas retain enough molecular momentum so they continue as – matter."

Carmen laughed nervously. "Franklin, you say the most ... Aren't you scared?"

"I'm terrified," he said, looking at her. "Who wouldn't be?"

"How long do we have?" she asked.

"This river and the coastal upland may hold it for a while, but likely it'll reach here in a matter of hours." He turned and took a last look. "I agree. We need to go."

"We can be offshore within the hour," she said.

He nodded wearily as they quickly set off towards base camp.

_______________

Knowing they couldn't explore the facility to its full extent, Mick and Turok focused on looking for the conduit and inspecting the submersibles. Even so, for two hours they walked through empty, echoing hallways, pausing in several of the observation lounges to check down random gate corridors, returning repeatedly to the hub. Mick never forgot he was passing through the scattered evidence of a far more dynamic era of Kalaal history. There had not been wholesale destruction on Nebura, however. The people had simply left, and the material layers of technology, buildings, roads, and the like had so far resisted deterioration.

Mick knew that the residents of Nebu City – and hundreds of other surface cities across the planet – must be the descendants of those Kalaal who had chosen to stay behind, or even scattered Siqdori from the war who had been _left_ behind. After only a few generations their numbers were minimal, and declining.

Turok was disappointed that few of the submersibles had been intact, and even fewer still remained in their mooring cradles. They entered the observation lounge and Mick shone the lantern out the window. The nose of a submersible hove into view. The fuselage was intact, and rested exactly where it should be – in the berth's cradle. Turok admitted he hoped to find one intact enough to explore inside. What he hadn't admitted was his even wilder hope that one might be salvageable. He had walked ahead and was peering through the windows at the sleek craft about thirty feet away. Several thick cables, which must have worked loose from the superstructure above the berth, were lying across the tail section. The craft had a ghostly look in the beam of his flashlight. Mick caught up to him and swung the strong beam of the lantern along the submersible's length. It looked to be in surprisingly good shape.

Turok nodded at the tail of the craft. "I bet ship's systems registered the presence of those cables, and sealed itself off as a safety measure."

"That could be what saved it. Whatever happened to all the others didn't seem to affect this one."

Turok grinned. "Passenger access is still hooked in. Let's check her out."

They made their way down to the gate boarding area. At the pressure-lock door they peered through. The access corridor had been flooded long ago – the round portal just aft of the submersible's bulkhead could be seen sixty feet away. The water inside the access corridor, though stagnant, didn't have the turbid look of the ocean outside. To Mick it looked lighter, less opaque somehow.

"Why would they flood the corridor?" Turok asked.

"Security. With dozens of access corridors up and down all these gates, the only failsafe would be to flood each corridor when they're not in use."

Turok stepped back and looked again at the thick doorway, scanning the wall all around. His eyes settled on a 12-inch diameter half-circle on the floor nearby, abutting the wall.

Turok knelt down and ran his hand over the wall, pausing over a slight thumb-sized nodule. When he pressed it the half-circle on the floor lowered slightly and slid into the wall, revealing a small dark pocket below the floor.

In the bottom was a crank wheel, which apparently had to be turned manually. He reached in and gave it one revolution. Nothing happened, so he turned it again. After eight full turns it stopped. He stood up and shook his head. They heard a slight popping from inside the access tunnel. They looked in again, but nothing seemed to be happening.

"Sounds like the tunnel is being drained," Turok said, "but not very quickly."

Agreeing to return later to check it out, they set off to have a quick look at the remaining eight gate corridors they had yet to explore. Back in the rotunda they skipped several gates, choosing one where many of the lights had not come on, on the assumption that a power outage must have a source that might prove useful. They soon noticed that this gate apparently had no submersible access corridors like those that lined all the others. After walking for about five minutes they were sure they had passed beyond the quarter mile length of the other gates. At ten minutes the corridor turned off at a slight angle, and soon after they came to a series of viewing portholes.

Turok angled the lantern spot through to the end of the gate. The corridor turned sharply about a hundred feet ahead. A catwalk of white, horizontal, tubular beams with diagonal supports loomed out of the surrounding ocean darkness. At the end above that was an elliptical column, faintly glowing, housed within a thick, transparent outer shell. The column made its way straight up into the ocean darkness. The catwalk-like facility ended about fifty feet up – above that the transparent skin of the column disappeared into the inky depths.

Turok turned to Mick. "I think we just found the conduit."

The glow of the transparent column was too faint to be visible for any distance. Above the white tubular structure the column looked to be empty, except that clearly it was filled with water.

The lights were out in the last short section of the gate corridor beyond the sharp turn ahead. The lantern cast a harsh glare over the open latticework of tubular beams ahead, which lay behind a thick, transparent wall that closed off the end of the corridor. They slowed as they neared the enormous wall. It arced out before them in a smooth convex surface. Beyond that the tubular structure rose a height of three floors, just within the lantern's range.

The transparent, ellipsoidal column did not touch the rounded end of their corridor at any point. There appeared to be no means of access between the two.

Mick looked through the convex wall to a round white surface fifty feet up, with a transparent wall. "The column must rise up from that deck."

As they approached the side wall a large section of the floor slid back, revealing an escalator down, which soundlessly started moving. They boarded and rode it down, then walked across and boarded an identical escalator that apparently rose to the deck. They emerged on deck, shocked into silence.

The ceiling of the deck resembled the surface of a pool – suspended upside-down. Like the apex of an ancient temple, a series of stepped levels led up literally _into_ this upside-down surface. The uppermost three levels were immersed in this inverted surface of water. They started up. Half-way up they reached a wider step, a landing, and circling round they looked out past the latticework to the column's transparent skin and the ocean beyond. They continued up, walking almost to the top, and paused.

"It's like a plasma field," Mick said, visualizing the radiant corona of an atom's wall.

An energy surface at the subatomic level was one thing, but this was just ordinary water. Mick looked over as Turok pulled from his pocket a floppy piece of yellow synthetic, a balloon, which he started inflating. Mick raised his eyebrows.

Turok held up a finger as a bright yellow elastic globe expanded in front of him, and tied it off. He walked up a few more steps so he stood just under the water. Then he held up the balloon and gently passed it into the water, then let it go. Mick watched as the yellow globe rose. Within seconds it had risen about sixty feet through the chamber, and then stopped. Turok turned around and smiled. "It hardly expanded at all. The water pressure up there appears to be at a normal atmospheric level, for surface depth."

"How is that possible?"

Turok shrugged. "Maybe there's another surface like this one, up where the balloon is. Another plasma field ... then another, sixty feet above that."

"And another, and so on all the way up!"

Turok descended a few steps.

Mick continued watching the small yellow balloon. "So, hypothetically we could swim up 5200 feet to the surface."

Turok laughed. "Hypothetically."

"Does it strike you as kind of elaborate?"

"What, as a way of having access to the surface?"

Mick nodded.

"Well, a water-filled column like this wouldn't drift much. Plus that material," Turok said, nodding to the elliptical tunnel's wall, its thick outer skin, "is pliable enough that the column could bend itself into a pretzel and still not be stressed."

"And it solves the water pressure problem, if people had to escape without pressure suits ..."

"Of course we'd have to use oxygen templates."

Mick grinned. "We would."

"There must be eighty sections like this one," Mick said. "Maybe three minutes to transit each one, we're looking at almost three hours."

They looked again at the small yellow balloon bobbing sixty feet above. Mick tried to imagine this mile-high column, enclosing a stack of such plasma skeins, one atop the other, maintaining water pressure only slightly more than 1.0 atmospheres all the way from the ocean floor up 5200 feet.

*

They stood at the tunnel access doorway to the submersible berthed outside, looking into a corridor now fully drained of water. Turok activated the pocket in the floor and pressed the only other nozzle there. The round doorway irised open. There was no sudden flooding of air into the tunnel though it felt a good ten degrees cooler when they walked inside. The chill of the ocean at this depth could not entirely be kept at bay. The corridor walls were flexible enough for the tunnel to be retractable, joining its far end to any of a range of differently-sized submersibles. The material that formed the walls was lighter than the thick acrylic synth-glass in the lounge windows, or the fiber-acrylic of Oceangate's walls. The tunnel seemed a sturdy, reliable structure suited to its purpose – even so, the impenetrable blackness of the water outside felt heavier, closer here. When they reached the sub Turok palmed a touchpad beside the craft's entry hatch. The door lifted up, and this time there was a rush of air from the tunnel into the ship's interior. Lights inside winked on.

They entered. It was strangely reminiscent of their Arc-4 shuttle, and felt more spacious. The shuttle's jaunts outside the _Surprise_ mother ship usually covered greater absolute distances than this vessel, yet the submersible, in its environment, had been used for relatively long, transoceanic journeys. Its layout prioritized passenger transit. The ship's cockpit was forward of the cargo section, sleeper compartments were on two levels aft of the cockpit, with a dining area amidships. The kitchen and other support rooms were adjacent to the cargo hold. There were oblong portholes all along the passenger sections, and a bank of larger observation windows in the lounge opened out the sides and much of the lower deck.

It was a comfortable ship, but by no means luxurious, especially considering that transoceanic passages had likely taken several days. There were enough sleeping compartments to accommodate about forty passengers. After a quick tour of much of the ship, Mick focused his attention on the bridge, while Turok had spent a good half-hour in the engine room. Mick called down and Turok came up. Standing in the lounge by the observation window they looked down at the tunnel they had entered through. The bulk of Oceangate loomed above them, its top floors not visible in the cocoon of blackness that enveloped the facility. They turned and sank down gratefully into two easy chairs. Although the light from Oceangate flooded all the gate berths that fanned out from the facility's hub, the exterior of this side of the ship was in shadow. Turok set the lantern on a low table, and directed its beam through the window. The plasphalt tarmac sprang more clearly into view. A few hundred feet out that ended and the ocean floor could be seen rolling away in a series of smooth hills as far as the light could reach.

Mick gestured to the ship. "Does your sub have another voyage in her?"

Turok made a pained smile. "Maybe." He had been feeling guardedly optimistic over the surprisingly well-preserved submersible. "All systems look okay, except there are no crystals." Turok looked up through the window, his eyes drawn to the indistinct disc-like horizon above Oceangate created by the facility's lights. He knew Mick thought this station an inhospitable environment, yet he enjoyed being so near the water. Watyra, the underground city, was less to his liking. He returned to the moment. "We'll need to find their version of a garage and hunt up some new crystals."

"Those buildings down in Watyra – I've never seen a power system come back online so fast."

"Yes, it seems very reliable. Oh, I couldn't check the drive train, but there's no reason for it to have decayed."

"Nothing has decayed here."

"True. But then Watyra is so far down it's sheltered within rock. Oceangate may be different." Turok looked out into the water that pressed against the window. "It's been sitting here at the bottom of the ocean for generations."

"Their materials and energy systems seem as anywhere in Alliance space."

"Better, I'd say."

"All this is Kalaali," Mick added pensively, gesturing at the ship and Oceangate behind them. "Watyra too, and the other cities like it were all part of the Kalaal civilization."

They looked again to the disc-like horizon of darkness.

"This is our best shot, isn't it? Long term, I mean," Turok said quietly. "Hopefully we meet up with the others. Touch wood." He rapped the small table between them. "Return here, and sail this well-preserved tub to Polarica."

"Yes," Mick agreed. "And once there, with Franklin's help, we can try to launch a beacon."

Turok smiled. "Sometimes I feel like we're chauffeuring that old guy from one scientific opportunity to another!"

Mick laughed.

They looked again out the window.

Their concern for the others kept returning. "If they didn't make it," Mick said, a sudden fear in his voice, "we'll have no way of getting to shore to search."

"It's out of our hands, Mick. We go. And we hope for the best."

With that, they set off, each retreating into his own thoughts.

Mick couldn't shake the feeling they were courting the abyss. 'So be it,' he declared silently. 'I can't think of a better reason to do so.'

**10 |Tulvar**

Levrok stood high on a parapet that overlooked the Elaric Sea, which rolled away south to the Polar Ocean, and Inuvoro.

Levrok had landed on Nebura twenty-one years earlier. For years he had carried out research on his ancestors' failed Siqdori insurrection. The Kalaal defense had been effective. During those years of study, as the details of Siqdori humiliation had emerged, he re-lived that earlier time in his imagination. Bouts of shame and rage alternated with despair. Inevitably, he had abandoned his studies, except for one disputed area of the historical record: weaponization of the planet's spheres. He became obsessed with resurrecting the weapon system that had brought the Kalaal victory, a weapon the Alliance had since proscribed.

After walking the parapet's full length, he turned and began retracing his steps, idly glancing out over the noticeably calmer sea-surface below.

_New_ _Siqdor_ would begin _here_ , on Polarica. That would be the natural next step, once progress on the weapons system resumed. Back in Nebu City they had encountered worrisome obstacles, serious enough to put his plans in jeopardy. When he learned of Dr. Franklin Varo's presence in the city he had made the first of several offers, all declined. Nonetheless, eventually the professor was put to work, for the greater glory of New Siqdor, and beyond.

Levrok paused again, his hands behind his back. He had planned on bringing the good professor here. 'And most likely burying him here too,' he thought, and laughed quietly. He spat over the parapet. As fortune had it, Varo hadn't been needed after all. The development of the tulvar biotechnology had moved forward quickly once they realized what the spheres in fact were. Who would have suspected they were living atomic organisms? That was the one contribution the good doctor had made, though he had tried to conceal it. Levrok smiled as he took a last look at the sea spread out below him.

Turning, he stepped into a tunnel in the side of the mountainside. He emerged moments later on a wide platform that overlooked an enormous cavern. It gave him a frisson of martial pride to look out over the precisely ordered rows of open incubation pods. Within each pod there nestled a blackly gleaming globe – a _tulvar sphere_. In their thousands they would become the perfect machine of conquest. Indeed, they would swallow worlds.

There was still so much to do. He turned and strode towards the elevator.

## Review

I'm thrilled you read _Storm Ring_. If you enjoyed it please consider posting a short review at your preferred online eBook retailer. Just use a few sentences to mention one or two things you enjoyed in this book. Thanks!

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Stephen J. Carter
About the Author

Stephen J. Carter is a Canadian writer living in Chiang Mai, Thailand. He spends his time travelling in the real worlds of Thailand and Malaysia when he's not travelling in story worlds of the imagination.
**Other Titles**

I have two completed series, _Storyworks Monthly_ and _Crisis Climax_ , and two ongoing series, _Zero Point Light_ and _Z Inferno_. I hope to write the first novels in two new series in 2017, one in the paranormal genre and another in military SF, and both with dystopian elements.

STORYWORKS MONTHLY (Short Fiction)

Storyworks Monthly 1, 2, 3

ZERO POINT LIGHT (SF)

Storm Ring

New Siqdor

Z INFERNO (Horror)

Bangkok Z

Infection Day, Parts 1, 2, 3

Toey's Burden, Part 1

CRISIS CLIMAX (Writing Skills)

Story Crisis, Story Climax 1 (Using Film Structure to Outline Your Novel)

Story Crisis, Story Climax 2 (What Story Arc in Film Can Teach Novelists)

The Holographic Self
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**Preview: New Siqdor**

1 | Crossing

Thomas guided the dinghy north along the Inuvoran coast. The river mouth that lay ahead would serve as his oblique referent for their outward journey to the seaport. He turned them through a tight quarter-arc and set a heading out into the open sea.

Carmen and Franklin sat in the dinghy's stern watching the landward horizon. They almost expected the stilling sheet to come rolling up into view above the escarpment. But in fact it had not yet climbed the valley's long slope, and was slowly scudding along parallel with them, hemmed in by the escarpment. Its sudden appearance in the valley had been unnerving for all of them. They had known that it would eventually blanket this region's landmass, as it had elsewhere. But that had seemed a far-off event. They realized they were not safe anywhere along this coast.

Breaking camp and launching the dinghy had gone smoothly. Their unpromising plan was to pick up Oscar at the seaport and continue on to the storm ring. Only by getting beyond that wall of storms could they escape this coming sheet. They would sail a circuit around it, and find a way through. It wasn't a great plan. But what choice did they have?

The ocean was not glass-smooth, its wide swells moved gently up and down with a systolic slowness. It felt as though Nebura was holding its breath. As the afternoon wore on the dream-like suspension of movement continued. Carmen was looking ahead, but the horizon was empty. She couldn't see any sign of the seaport.

Franklin saw her expression and smiled. He turned to Thomas. "How long?"

"Three hours, give or take."

It was not long after Seamus took over at the helm that Carmen saw the stilling sheet far behind. It was pouring out through the river mouth. She touched Franklin's arm and he glanced back. After a long look he resolutely faced forward.

The afternoon wore on. The sun was now nowhere to be seen in the slate-grey sky. They had crossed the half-way point. The coast, and the sheet could only be seen as a part of the curvature of the horizon. It no longer seemed quite real.

The seaport finally came into view. It gained stature gradually.

But something new had claimed their attention. Thomas was the first to notice that the upper eighteen inches of the ocean's surface had grown much clearer, almost transparent. The unnatural clarity had steadily increased. Soon they could see down about thirty feet. It was disorienting. At moments the illusion of being suspended in midair was irresistible.

"It wasn't like this when I came before," Marnie whispered.

"The water was still refracting light the way it should," Franklin said, shaking his head.

Seamus occasionally turned the craft around and ramped up the propulsion's torque just to churn the sea. The roiled surface disrupted the ocean's oppressive glass-like illusion. They moved on towards the seaport, increasingly eager to reach their destination.

To Carmen's eyes the horizon on all sides was a line between the lesser blue of the water and the slightly deeper blue of the sky, the reverse of what it should be. To a disinterested observer the seaport and the dinghy would have been the only apparent objects on this whole upended saucer of ocean.

*

They pivoted their attention to the seaport, which was now less than a mile away. And as with their dinghy, the seaport in all its parts perched as if in midair. It had a complex superstructure of airtight titanium tubes, each about two feet in diameter that served as beams and girders, holding up rank after rank of lightweight fiberalloy floors and walls. Parts of the it were open, other parts closed in, forming a complex patchwork of large hanger-like structures.

Marnie explained that the only way in was via an underwater entryway. Carmen smiled at her friend's earlier reticence back on the mainland – Marnie had made this journey with Oscar only a couple days before, yet had barely mentioned it.

They looked up and saw Oscar walk out onto the structure's roof. He waved and pointed down, and held his thumb up.

Marnie smiled. "Soon we'll have to dive," she said.

Being this near made the seaport seem enormous to Carmen, as though several city blocks had been airlifted in, then haphazardly rearranged. The lowest twenty percent of its height rose through the clear upper fathoms of the ocean – a circular, sloping surface, a marine _glacis_ , as if the lower section of a gray hill was rising from the water. Every fifteen feet along its perimeter the glacis connected to large vertical, submerged titanium tubes. The understructure was clearly visible. Above the sloping surface perched the circular upper levels, which reached out about half-way to the perimeter of the hill. The submerged extremity of the seaport, deeper than thirty feet, was not visible at those opaque depths. They turned as they neared it, and started moving along parallel to its outer edge, Marnie guiding them in.

On the far side, away from the mainland, they came to the ruins of an elaborate docking assembly that joined three of the vertical tubes on the outermost perimeter, below the glacis. It was now canted up and out, and one end of the dock sloped away below. They approached to within a few yards of that and saw that the inside of the dock was hollow, and descended beneath the glacis.

"This is where we dive," Marnie said.

2 | Eighty Chambers

On the bottom of the ocean, near Oceangate's perimeter, at the end of Gate 14 stood Mick and Turok. They were inside the anteroom of a vertical column that reached up through a mile's depth of ocean to the surface. The first elliptical chamber was above them. Biting on his breathing template and giving a quick thumbs up, Turok climbed the steps of the permanent platform, a platform _submerged_ in the water above them. Mick watched as Turok stepped through the plasma membrane into the first chamber. Fully immersed in water and standing on the platform, Turok looked down at Mick and signaled again, pointing up. He pushed off, scissor-kicked, and slowly rose. Mick smiled and stepped up after his friend, rising through the membrane until he too stood, fully submerged, on the platform. The water was easily ten degrees cooler than the air. His spatial orientation had shifted, like crossing from weightless floor to ceiling of adjoining rooms in a space station. He imagined how strange it would feel if he turned upside down. He gently pushed off, kicked once, and found himself rising.

Mick saw that the sloping, enveloping walls were unchanged from the day before. His long scissor kicks were not strenuous, though he assumed he may feel differently after a few dozen of these chambers. They had decided to swim through ten of them before taking their first real rest stop. He looked down and saw the floor of the anteroom falling steadily away below. He looked up as he came nearer to Turok, who hovered below the membrane that separated it from the next chamber.

When Turok pointed sideways towards the wall, Mick nodded, and they swam slowly on a lateral curve. They reached the wall and paused. Mick reached out and touched it, then pulled his hand back quickly. It was like touching dry ice, at once warm and numbing cold. The tingling sensation in his fingertips dissipated after a moment. The wall, though transparent, emitted a soft phosphorescence. They could see about ten feet beyond into the ocean's gloom. The wall neutralized within the column the ambient water pressure outside. Mick didn't want to think about what it was like out past the wall.

Turok was gesturing back towards the center of the column. Mick pointed up with a questioning look. He preferred to stay near one side of the column's ellipse, and proceed up through the chambers near this wall. Turok shrugged. They kicked and moved up smoothly towards the second chamber. Though the membranes neutralized what should have been the cumulative water pressure of eighty chambers, they had no effect on the pressure _within_ a chamber. The plasma registered only as a slight tingling, but the pressure went instantly from an effective depth of zero, or sea level, at the top of one chamber, to a depth of sixty-five feet in the bottom of the next chamber up. They crossed into the second, and flinched. That was the worst of it, the repeated moment of transition. They blocked out their fear that the pressure might spike suddenly. Once they got used to it, the chambers passed in rapid succession.

Mick hoped they might come to some sort of ledge, anywhere to lie back, or just sit. After an hour they reached the nineteenth or twentieth chamber – Mick had lost count – and paused above the membrane for a longer rest. There was no ledge in the twentieth, just as there hadn't been in any of the lower levels.

Mick was about to swim to the top of the twentieth when Turok stayed him. Turok proceeded to lie out flat, and his body nudged slowly down against the slightly denser surface of the membrane. He settled back about ½ inch, and didn't fall through into the nineteenth. Mick mirrored Turok's posture, and lay motionless. The slight resistance of the plasma made for a comfortable bed. The only dissonant element was the pressure, and the mild, tingling sensation the plasma left in his back and legs. Mick gradually let all his muscles relax, and he willed a sensation of repose into each of his limbs, all the way to his fingertips, then out to his toes. He breathed deeper and longer with each breath. Despite this, Mick felt a psychological need to take a deep breath from an atmosphere, to feel air on his skin. Beneath their apparent peace and repose was an echoing tension.

Mick felt a touch on his shoulder. He opened his eyes and saw Turok pointing up. Mick was surprised he had fallen asleep. He sheepishly pulled himself up, and immediately fell to mid-thigh into the chamber below. He felt again the strange pins and needles sensation as he kicked and rose through the membrane. They moved up with the accustomed, slow scissor-kicks. The chambers again passed in rapid succession. The darkness of the ocean only a few feet away, and everything about the column – all remained unchanged. It almost felt like being caught in a spatial loop, and they were passing through the same chamber over and over.

*

They had lost count of how many chambers they had passed through. They knew only that they were near the half-way point – the 40th chamber. They now routinely passed through each plasma membrane, and did so again. They also knew they were at a depth of about 2600 feet. The ocean beyond the column wall was still inky black. From the beginning they had been able to look up a far greater distance on the inside of the column than outside it – maybe five chambers.

Mick saw a receding series of membranes above, and another one on the side in the next chamber, strangely located on the perimeter wall. After passing through and swimming higher, they looked into a small enclosed ledge, an extrusion in the surface of the column. They hung outside it, looking in. The room beyond only extended back about eight feet, and looked to be thirty feet in width. Turok nodded towards it, his eyes bulging a little behind the bubble that covered his nose and eyes.

Mick held up his hand, motioning him to wait, then turned and slowly reached his other hand beyond the membrane's surface. They watched as water dripped off his fingers. Absent the water's buoyancy his hand felt very heavy. He lowered it to the floor of the room. He then withdrew his hand, and backpedaled so his feet were pointing into the room – he then glided through. His legs fell gently to the floor as he slithered in, then his waist. He lifted his knees and pulled himself in, but left his head suspended still inside the chamber. Turok, still in the column, started laughing, which brought on a coughing spasm. He quickly removed his template and punched his head through the membrane. His coughs subsided. Mick smiled. 'You can't laugh underwater,' he thought. As it occurred to him that Turok was breathing inside the room, his friend somersaulted the rest of his body through. Mick pushed forward, and his head passed through, thumping none too gently to the floor.

It was a huge relief to have their arms and legs out of the water, resting on a hard surface. The room's ambient temperature felt cool. Mick thought it odd that the room's _heaviness_ should feel more relaxing than the easy buoyancy of the chamber, but it definitely was. He supposed it was the stress of being submerged for so long. He looked up at the low transparent ceiling.

Turok's chest was heaving in air. He rolled to his side and slowly sat up. He looked across at Mick and gestured a thumbs up. Mick rolled over and lay gasping after removing his template. Turok had gingerly gotten to his feet, and stood swaying drunkenly. He staggered to the side, and stood leaning against the membrane's rim. He looked around. It felt like standing on a ledge on the side of a mile-high cliff. He lowered himself back to the floor, and sat with his back to the rear wall. Mick just crawled across to the wall, and pulled himself up. The room had hollow, echoing noises – the sound of the column itself wafting lightly in the ocean current. The loudest sound was their own breathing.

They gazed through the membrane to the softly glowing blue water of the column. Mick wondered how it stayed so clear when the water had sat relatively motionless for so long. By contrast, they could feel the mild buffetings of the ocean through the wall behind them. He had to remind himself this was an artificial environment, a huge artifact of Kalaal technology.

They finally stood up. Looking up and down a distance of five chambers, with darkness outside, was like being suspended in a tunnel of light with no end. Turok tapped Mick's shoulder. They were too tired to talk. Turok re-inserted his template and stepped smoothly through the window of water, did a scissor-kick and rose quickly away. Mick took a last look at the ledge, and followed.

3 | Stilled

On the ocean surface Thomas activated the dinghy's upper panels, which rippled up and sealed shut. After adjusting several to transparent mode, he decreased the craft's buoyancy and they slipped beneath the ocean's surface. They had strapped in, and were all turned towards the bow panel as the water surged by in a cascade of bubbles. The outer dock of the seaport remained in view to one side as they descended.

Quickly dropping thirty feet opposite the startlingly distinct glacis, they approached the darker lower depths. They were back in normal refractive water; the illusion of being suspended in midair was gone. Ambient light had also diminished. They continued diving.

Carmen thought they had descended about a hundred feet when the bottom of the dock hove into view. Another twenty feet below that Thomas guided the submersible dinghy forward under the foundation of the ancillary mooring structure. The dock at this level was connected to lower levels of the facility. They moved forward under the seaport proper. It was like diving under the hull of a liquefied ruthenium tanker, the facility's undersurface slowly passing by above them. A short distance in from its perimeter the undersurface rose in a shallow parabolic arc. Following along parallel, Thomas guided them gradually up.

"Like a surface satellite dish," Carmen observed.

After several minutes they stared in amazement at the huge, transparent vertical shaft that extended down into the ocean depths as far as they could see. Following Marnie's directions Thomas slowed and turned the dinghy, moving parallel to the wall. It was soon clear the wall formed a large, oblong, enclosed interior, a transparent tube the size of a small stadium across.

Marnie indicated they needed to dive deeper.

Thomas nodded and adjusted the dinghy's pitch down, and they began descending in a gentle spiral slope, parallel to the wall. They slid down just outside the column, and didn't notice when, perpendicular to the angle of their descent, the lower membrane of the topmost chamber slid past. They were moving down outside the next chamber when suddenly the wall directly beside them disappeared. Thomas leveled out and they peered into the column's brighter interior. They could see that across on its other side the wall was still intact. More than half the circumference of the transparent wall was no longer there. The edges of the wall's synthetic material, about two inches thick, waved slowly above them. The open, apparently damaged portion of the wall extended down about thirty feet, where the full circumference of the wall resumed.

Thomas asked Marnie how far down it went, and she explained that they hadn't gone deeper than this. This was the way in. By agreement, he resumed their spiral dive, descending another 200 feet, passing by three more chambers, where he knew he was nearing the limits of the dinghy's dive rating. On one side was the open ocean: at this depth it was as dark as a cave. On the other side was the gently glowing column. The contrast was startling. He tilted them up into a steep ascent; 200 feet later he banked the dinghy and they passed through the damaged part of the wall. They were inside.

For a brief moment Carmen could see down into the chambers below, inside the bright world of the column. She gasped at how the column dropped away such a huge distance.

They were in fact still passing through ocean water inside the damaged section of the column. The dinghy rose and breached the lower membrane of the chamber above – the highest, the eightieth. Looking up, they could see its surface emptied out inside the seaport.

_______________

Mick and Turok had been swimming for almost four hours. Their strokes had slowed since leaving the pocket ledge. They knew it was mid-afternoon – and wondered what they'd find at the surface, if the seaport would still be intact. At the start each chamber had taken about three minutes to swim through; now it was taking twice that. Mick thought they were in about the sixty-fifth chamber – just under a thousand feet to the surface. They had paused and were resting again on a membrane.

One chamber looked identical to the one below it, and the one above it. It felt to Mick like a linear storm ring, minus the storm. He grunted at the notion of swimming literally in circles. He breathed more deeply, flooding his aching leg muscles with oxygen. He decided they would just have to rest after each chamber.

Mick felt Turok tap him on the shoulder. He looked up and saw his friend swimming away above him. Mick rolled over and pulled himself up with several long arm-strokes. He followed Turok, who was powering ahead with strong scissor-kicks. His friend apparently didn't share his doubts.

_______________

Carmen watched as the seaport's parabolic undersurface out beyond the column wall slid by. Thomas guided the dinghy up to the pool surface inside, and sunlight flooded in. They broke surface, and saw Oscar waiting on the dock. They glided to a berth there as Thomas lowered the craft's upper panels. Oscar reported that he had not seen Mick and Turok. They had hoped for different news, but not really expected it.

As he led the others away, peppering them with questions, Carmen and Marnie veered off to the stairs. As they climbed to an observation platform they looked down at the strangely isolated deck below. A permanent, opaque wall extended around one-third of the pool, reaching from the dock area to the ceiling not far above them. The remaining two-thirds had a retractable section of the same transparent synthetic material as formed the column wall. This movable wall was in the open, although about ten feet of it still projected out from the rear wall. It appeared there were additional lower decks that accessed tunnels to the seaport's exterior docks.

They stood on the platform, a short distance beneath and outside little outside the the aperture in the ceiling that the interior column once connected to. For Carmen it was a relief to be moving across a solid surface again. The surreal clarity of the water during their crossing had brought on a nervous exhaustion in all of them, and simply walking about seemed to dissipate its effects. They paused to look over into the clear water of the column pool. Seamus had climbed up and gone ahead to the roof.

Marnie ran a finger along the railing. "They can still show up." Carmen inhaled deeply.

Marnie held the railing and stretched back. "I thought we'd outrun the stilling."

"The _Boleyn_ brought us so far north," Carmen said. "But not far enough."

They heard another set of doors noisily closing higher up, so they turned and started up. Passing through two sets of fire-doors they stepped up into a stairwell bright with sunlight. A last flight of steps took them onto the roof itself. Carmen braced herself for the ocean's transparent upper surface. Returning into the day's brightness was momentarily blinding. Something seemed different.

There was a helipad on the opposite side, beyond the outline of the now-closed aperture. It reminded Carmen of holofield scenarios she had toured of Earthside carriers. Except this carrier was as wide as it was long. Most platforms out in space were of course much larger, but for an onworld, ocean platform, this was impressive. Carmen couldn't shake the feeling something was _off_.

They saw Seamus near the roof's perimeter, standing very still. They came up beside him and looked out over the low wall.

Carmen and Marnie staggered back, calling out involuntarily. They looked out over an upended sky, a cloudless circumambient sky spread out in all directions above and _below_ the seaport. It seemed to Carmen as though the structure had transported itself to some zero-g skyworld – a world of sky all around. They leaned over, their hands on their knees. Carmen saw that Seamus had his eyes closed.

She understood that this could only be due to the accelerating stilling – the ocean's smoothness had intensified to such a point that it now formed a perfect and uniform reflecting surface. The real sky above was flawlessly reflected in the water below.

_______________

Mick and Turok had been resting at the bottom of every second chamber. Mick's worry over their exhaustion had receded. They both got their second wind. As his state of mind eased, his enthusiasm and interest revived. They were lying on a membrane from which they could just make out a slight difference in the distance above them. Mick felt sure it was only three, at most four, chambers to the surface. More importantly, the inky opacity of the ocean beyond the column wall had finally begun to lighten. They were at a depth of almost two hundred feet. Turok again swiveled his arms and hands, lifting his upper body away from the membrane, then kicked lightly and was off again. Mick sighed inwardly and followed.

The ambient light outside the column seemed to increase with each scissor-kick, a welcome change. Mick was puzzled by what then came into view. It was like walking along a path through a park lit by moonlight. Outside the column the ocean on all sides was visible for maybe a hundred feet, but in the next chamber comparable visibility doubled. The world beyond the column had suddenly broadened out with alarming speed. Moreover, directly above they could make out what looked like a bright terminus to their column. Surrounding that, however, was a much larger and perfectly circular, anti-corona of darkness. Outside that was the surface of the ocean itself, gradually increasing in brightness, though still dimmer than the top of their column. Mick suddenly realized they were looking at the undersurface of the seaport. Approaching the membrane they were surprised to see a large hole in the wall in the next chamber, opening up the column all along one side. As they passed through the water was suddenly much warmer, and the water pressure was almost unbearable. Ocean water had obviously filled the damaged chamber long before. Visibility was worse than in the column water. After rising about twenty feet the wall's damaged section was within arm's reach.

Turok paused in this opening in the column, and seemed ready to venture out into the ocean. Mick shook his head. Visibility and light outside the column was still much poorer – they were too tired to respond if anything went wrong. Turok shrugged and turned back. Mick looked at an angle up through the wall to the wide ring of the seaport's dark undersurface. The dim radiance of the ocean outside increased with each lethargic kick. The top of the column appeared small compared to the ocean surrounding it. They kicked and rose, as if in slow motion, passing above the torn wall and then thankfully through the next membrane, back into a more bearable pressure.

They continued up, now fully inside the bowl-shaped undersurface. It hung over them, a lowering presence that cast its shadow over the column. As they moved up deeper inside, the column wall turned black around them, as it now abutted hard against the connecting seaport shaft. They could see the surface, at the end of a long black tunnel. Mick was sorely tempted to return to the wall breach, and then rise to the ocean surface outside. He wasn't in the mood for surprises, and surfacing into the seaport's core more than qualified. But the breach was two chambers down, and the outer perimeter of the seaport had looked even further away ... and there was the pressure too. He was suddenly too tired even to contemplate it. They just needed to make a last push.

At that moment they breached the last membrane, and the pressure held them. They decided by mutual agreement to rest, just for a bit. The interior surface above seemed to recede.

_______________

Seamus sat hunched over, his bent legs up against his chest. His lolling head rested on his folded arms, which rested on his knees. Carmen walked slowly back out to the roof's edge. If she looked straight down over the side, the ocean's reflected sky turned back into water, although it no longer looked much like water. It looked like the gelatinous stream they had seen on the mainland. The sky, in a tight ring about the seaport, pressed down. Behind them Seamus groaned.

Marnie spoke in a low growl. "I have to admit, I'm with Seamus on this."

Carmen was suddenly laughing, and once she'd started, couldn't stop. Marnie looked at her friend, and caught herself giggling. They both fell back a step, leaned on each other, their laughter peeling out into the empty sky.

They looked up, and stepped apart wiping away the tears. They looked over the wall into the pristinely _stilled_ ocean.

"It looks permanent, doesn't it?" Marnie said, a hitch in her voice.

"Yeah." Carmen turned and scanned the low dome of sky. "At least now we won't easily miss Mick and Turok, if they show up out here."

"They would rather stick out, wouldn't they?" Marnie said, holding back another peal of laughter.

Carmen looked out towards the horizon.

Thomas's voice suddenly called out from below. "It's Mick and Turok! We can see them!"

"See them where?" Carmen said, turning to Marnie and Seamus. She strode towards the stairs.

Moments later Carmen, as she walked down the length of dock where Thomas and Franklin stood, saw that the water there was as unnaturally stationary as the ocean outside. However, the conditions here, the angle and light, didn't create the illusion of a perfect reflection.

They came up beside Franklin and Thomas and looked into the pool. Mick and Turok were about forty feet straight down, treading water. A splash nearby brought their heads up. Aleesha was swimming parallel to the side of the pool. She waved at them, took a deep breath, and dove.

Carmen laughed. "Great idea!"

She pulled off her tunic down to a T-shirt, tucked her hair back, removed the satchel from her belt, and dove cleanly into the pool.

She opened her eyes and saw Mick swimming up, a deep lethargy in his movements. Both he and Turok were barely treading water. Aleesha was moving down rapidly towards the nearer figure, Turok, who was slowly waving at them. Aleesha had stopped and hooked her arm under Turok's. Carmen swam past, and pulled up beside Mick. His mouth widened in a close-mouthed grin, his eyes half-closed as his hands shunted vaguely towards hers. She grabbed hold, and paused a moment, feeling a welcome lightness at this reunion. She nodded to the surface, and he blinked both eyes slowly, once. He was about to pop the template from his mouth, but she motioned for him to relax, to breathe deep. Holding him loosely from behind, she kicked and they rose together through the transparent water. They broke surface about three yards away from the dock, to loud shouts of welcome.

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