Maelstrom

CHAPTER 4

RIGHT, THEN," JOHNNY said through his helmet's mic. "Perhaps we'll try it without the flitters for now." He signaled the bay's control room and gave the order that the flitters should be recalibrated for heavy g.

Meanwhile, Ronan followed Ke-ola. Once he was out of the Piaf's controlled environment, he found it hard work to pick up his feet and put them down again. It was as if he were wading through hip-high snow in heavy boots.

"Use the antigrav setting on your boots," Johnny instructed. "Two ought to do it."

Johnny tapped the control panel on the wrist of his suit. The twins had never had to wear such heavy protection before.

I'm glad the controls aren't actually on the boots, Murel said, following Johnny's example. I don't think I could see my feet real clearly with the helmet in the way.

Yeah, Ronan agreed, activating his own boots' antigrav function. But-hey, that's a lot better!

Dust and smoke rose from the dozens of meteors smoldering in craters like malign red eggs in nests of molten rock. The steam and smoke from them formed a gray brown sludge that hung in the heavy air.

Ke-ola swarmed down the ladder ahead of Ronan. He ran like a charging rhino toward the meteor that had landed on the residence enclosure.

"Poor kid," Johnny said. "We probably won't even find bodies if they were under those things when they hit."

"Well, surely not everyone perished," Marmie said optimistically. "If these meteor showers happen often, the inhabitants must have developed some sort of defense."

"Ke-ola would know about that kind of thing, wouldn't he?" Murel asked.

The three of them were on the ground by then. Ronan trudged over to the crater where Ke-ola was. The larger boy was circling it, examining the edges carefully.

"They might be under there," he said slowly, nodding to the meteor.

"You mean crushed under the meteor?" Ronan asked as delicately as possible.

"Maybe not. They might have had time to take cover in one of the root canals before this one hit. There were trapdoors inside the habitats. Believe it or not, we're in the planet's green belt here. The meteors usually hit the equatorial belt, which is a big desert where nobody lives. I remember the elders saying how the showers were changing the orbit of the asteroid belt and shifting the planet on its axis, so maybe they started hitting here because of it. Anyway, usually, when they're not all burned up like now, there are some scrubby trees and other plants that grow here-only part of them grows on the surface, though."

"So how would those keep people from being…you know?"

Ke-ola's breath huffed through the mic into Ronan's helmet, and with deliberate patience he explained. "Because there are so few nutrients or water in the surface soil, they have these roots that are maybe ten times as deep as they are tall. Where old ones have burrowed into the ground and then died and the roots rotted away-a long time ago-there are the canals or tunnels. They're big enough for people to stand in, or even live in, and some of them interconnect. They're real deep too. My people use the channels sometimes, even though they don't much like being underground. I think the tunnel under this bubble went deeper than the meteor."

"Then all we'd have to do is dig them out," Ronan said, thinking of all of the digger attachments for the flitters he had seen in the docking bay.

"Yeah, if the meteor didn't collapse the tunnel on them," Ke-ola replied grimly. He sank to his knees, pawing at the ground with his heavy gloves.

"Hey, you don't have to do that," Ronan told him, touching the shoulder of Ke ola's suit with his glove. "The Piaf has plenty of equipment to dig way deeper than you can."

But Ke-ola didn't seem to be listening. Ronan decided he must be in shock.

Leaving his friend to his own futile efforts, he sensibly galumphed a couple of steps back toward the others to tell them about the underground canals.

"We heard," Johnny said. "These transmitters in the helmets send to everybody unless you narrow the frequency. The flitters are being fitted with diggers and crews are already being mobilized."

Marmie knelt beside Ke-ola so that her helmet-enclosed face was close to his.

"Come away now, Ke-ola, before something lands on you and burns through your suit," she told him.

But he ignored her too.

Everyone else returned to the ship's interior and waited until the equipment was ready. When they reentered the airlock, the twins followed Johnny's and Marmie's example and pulled off their helmets but kept their suits on as they stepped through the air lock, back into the docking bay. It was now a hive of activity as equipment was fitted and tested.

Murel stayed close to the bulkhead and looked through the small porthole to the ground below, where Ke-ola continued to dig. I hate to leave him like that, but it's daft to think he'll be able to dig down to them with just his hands.

Of course it's daft, Ronan replied, but if it was Kilcoole that was buried down there instead of Ke-ola's village, would you wait for someone else to try to save them? I think not!

The interior hatch to the docking bay slid open to admit a small troop of people marching double time toward the flitters.

Watching the flitter crews climb aboard, wearing suits but only carrying helmets, made Ronan worry about another matter. "Johnny, we have to wear our suits when we go outside. If Ke-ola's people were inside when the shower hit, they probably didn't have their suits on," he said worriedly. "They wouldn't be able to breathe without the suits belowground either, would they?"

"I don't know. I suppose the instinct would be to get out of the way of the meteors and worry about suffocation later-or maybe they grabbed the suits as they went down and had time to put them on before they could suffer ill effects. We can hope so, at least. Ke-ola might know."

Ronan pulled his helmet back over his head and spoke into the microphone inside it. "Ke-ola, you told us there's room enough for your people underground, but won't they suffocate for lack of air if they didn't have suits with them?"

After a pause, Ke-ola replied, "No, they won't. Not down there. The air's better belowground than above." A hopeful note had come into his voice, though Ronan could hear his heavy breathing as he continued pawing at the ground. Drawing a deeper breath, Ke-ola continued, "The air up here is okay as far as basic composition goes but it's contaminated by a lot of space junk that gets drawn to the surface by the gravity. Underneath, the heavy root systems of the plants work to purify the air."

"I thought that was because of chlorophyll and photosynthesis."

"With the plants we brought with us, terran plants, that's how it is. But these native plants have other properties that let them do the same thing with their root systems.

Also, the planet's water is underground. Something to do with the gravity again."

As Ke-ola spoke, Ronan looked up and saw that the shovel-bearing flitters with belted tracks for surface travel were being flown toward the air lock.

Johnny and Marmie were pulling their helmets back on and heading toward the flitters.

"Okay, Ke-ola," Ronan said into the mic. "The diggers are ready. We're on our way."

Murel squatted down so Sky could jump off her shoulders. She didn't look back, not wanting to encourage him to follow.

Once the diggers and their technicians were offloaded, Johnny, Marmie, and the twins took a flitter to the surface. It dropped quickly and flew low, laboring under the pull of the heavy gravity, but it worked. Another digger that had been ahead of them pulled up to Ke-ola, and after a brief exchange with the driver, Ke-ola crawled into the machine's cab beside him.

"Madame Algemeine, what are you doing with that machinery?" Colonel Cally's miniaturized face demanded from the comscreen on the flitter's instrument panel.

Marmie had had about enough of the colonel, as her expression showed, but she replied sweetly, "I thought I'd use the meteor craters as the entrance for a new mining operation, Colonel. I do hate to let a good disaster go to waste."

"I'm sure even a lady of your position would find that difficult to explain to the council," Cally said pompously, and then realized-slowly-that he was being had.

"I would hope so, if that were the case. But vraiment, we undertake now a rescue operation. Ke-ola believes that he knows where some of his people may be trapped underground. If you have digging equipment and muscle to spare, I'm sure we'd all be grateful for your help."

"Actually," he said smoothly, "if you are investigating this area for survivors, perhaps we should look elsewhere and see if we can find other spots where people may have taken cover. Halau held three quite large settlements, you know, and they've become larger as time has gone by. These people bred like rabbits-not that I think anything is wrong with that. Their size and this world's heavy gravity made them very strong, well suited for a variety of jobs involving heavy manual labor."

"Your concern is touching," Marmie said. "Don't let us keep you from your noble rescue efforts."

Murel was seeing red that had nothing to do with meteor fire. "He's awful, Marmie! You should report him. He doesn't care about Ke-ola's people at all."

"Get real, sis," Ronan said aloud. "If the company cared anything for them, do you think they'd have settled them here? I mean, no offense, Marmie, 'cause I know you're on the council and all, but this place is a hole, even without the meteors."

"I do realize that, dear," she said. "Unfortunately, there are so many of these displacement worlds that not even I know about all of them. Since learning about

Petaybee, I have made an effort to discover where Intergal has settled as many of the so-called inconvenient people as I can. Most of them were far less fortunate than your people and did not land on so hospitable a world as Petaybee. I'm afraid the colonel's attitude is a mirror of that of his employers. Intergal does not wish for the inhabitants of these places to be happy or comfortable, because they want to draw upon these populations for military personnel, laborers, or other less desirable career opportunities within their ranks. Appealing to the Federation does little good. There are a few who are genuinely concerned and high-minded, such as Far ringer Ball, but many are also major shareholders in Intergal and more deeply interested in the bottom line than in the welfare of the people involved in achieving the company's fiscal goals."

"That's terrible!" Murel said.

"It is indeed," Marmie agreed. "Remind me at a more auspicious time to give you my lecture on the uses and abuses of power."