Maelstrom

CHAPTER 7

THIS ISN'T PETAYBEE, children," Marmie said when they told her what they intended to do. "There are no rivers or open sea on Halau-it is all underground and in utter darkness, with dangers multiplied by the damage from the meteor shower. No, I'm sorry. It is out of the question."

The twins complained to each other but knew there was no dissuading Madame once she made her decision. Nor would she hear of Ke-ola or the others going back.

"But Marmie, what if that Cally is wrong?" Murel said. "What if there are still people down there? If we just go without finding out for sure, we could be condemning them to a horrible death. And to make matters worse, they'd know they were dying because the other survivors abandoned them."

Marmie gave her a shrewd look. "They are not to know that there are survivors if they have been hiding underground all that time, n'est-ce pas?"

"It doesn't matter if they know or not, we'll know," Ronan told her. "And Ke-ola's people will know and they'll always wonder. It's no way to start a new life, thinking maybe you've left people to die a-"

"Enough!" Marmie said firmly. "Some things cannot be helped, and I trust that the adults among Ke-ola's people will understand this."

"No, they don't," Murel said just as firmly.

"In time they will."

"One last sweep, Marmie," Ronan wheedled. "It's what we came down here to do, after all. Just because we got some people safe doesn't mean we should go away without making sure there aren't more. You don't really trust that creepy Colonel

Cally to find his own arse with both hands, do you?"

"What if the meteor showers begin again?" she asked.

"The Honus will know," Ke-ola told her. He stood a little behind the twins, and it seemed he'd been talking with Leilani and Keoki, but Murel didn't think he had missed a word.

"Perhaps not in time. No, it's too risky. Your parents would never forgive me if something happened to you."

"And these people will never forgive you or us if we don't try," Murel said, hard headed as a curly coat who wanted to graze when his rider wanted to keep going.

Even if it was dark and dangerous underground and underwater, she knew they had to try to look for other survivors and dig them out.

Otters do that, Sky said suddenly, entering the minds of both twins as easily as he did when they were in seal form.

What? Murel asked.

What you are thinking. Burrowing into dark dens and tunnels, coming into water.

Otters do that all the time. Sky otters do it too.

Sorry, Ronan said. We don't have any otter-shaped space suits and helmets.

Sky stood on his hind paws and looked first one way and then another at a discarded helmet lying beside Johnny Green. Sky Otters are not large. Sky otters can curl up very tight, fit in helmet. Don't need suits. And Honus say air belowground is good. No helmet.

What do you think? Murel asked her brother.

I think otters burrow into dens all the time, even sky otters. Might be a bigger burrow than Sky's used to and I don't think he should go alone, but it's worth a try.

"Marmie," Murel said. "Sky says going down into the kind of burrows we're talking about is something otters do all the time. He's willing to let us carry him down there curled up in an activated helmet and let him loose when we get to the fresher air below. Besides, you know, we have night vision in seal form and great hearing too. We haven't needed it much so far, but our dad says we have sonar, so the dark wouldn't bother us either."

"So you think I won't let you go by yourselves, but with a two-foot-long otter to chaperone you I trust you to stay out of trouble?" Marmie asked, then made a moue. A glimmer of humor entered her previously steely glance. "Mmmm, perhaps. But I think maybe we all will go back down and watch aboveground in case you find more than even otters can handle, yes?"

"We can help," Ke-ola told the twins excitedly. "The Honus can hear you and tell us where you are. We can station ourselves above you and keep you from becoming lost."

"With so many hands, flippers, paws, and shells aligned against me, I have no choice but to surrender," Marmie said.

"Count your lucky stars," Johnny said to the twins when Marmie had turned back to tell the survivors of the plan. "She is not usually so democratic. She must have deep respect for otters."

THEY SHUTTLED PEOPLE and diggers to the flattened settlements several miles away from the one formerly occupied by Ke-ola's people. The surface was deeply pocked with giant meteor craters, and blackened and scorched by fire.

The three digger flitters now had added sensor attachments to their array that could detect subterranean water. They resembled the buglike aliens of the old vids the twins had watched on shipboard as they aligned themselves in a more or less east west line and lowered the shovels.

As many of Ke-ola's people as could fit into the available flitters came too.

Through the Honus on shipboard and the smaller Honu accompanying Ke-ola and the twins, the other Halauans hoped to help keep track of the twins' progress and know where they were when they were belowground.

Inside the transparent helmet Ronan held like a fishbowl, Sky twisted his sinuous self so he could peer out the glass, his whiskery face looking strangely distorted and misshapen, his eyes huge and darting around as he tried to make out his surroundings.

"Didn't these people have an entrance to the lower regions, like yourselves? How about lava tubes?" Murel asked Ke-ola.

"I don't think there were tubes near enough to their settlement to give them cover.

But they had canals, and an escape route, according to our people who had relatives here. But the meteors changed the landscape so much, it's hard to find the old entrance point. Digging down until we strike a channel seems like our best bet."

When one of the shovels came back to the surface dripping water, Ronan and

Murel carried Sky over to the hole and slipped down into it. Literally. The soil was first too warm for comfort, then very muddy, and the twins slipped, lost their footing, and slid down into the water, still clad in their space suits. Ronan hit a rock. Sky's helmet tumbled away from him, landing in the stream of rapidly flowing water, no doubt from an artesian well of some sort.

Before he could find it, he heard a splash.

Hah! Free! Sky's thought reached him. He caught a sense of the otter swimming away, scouting ahead of them.

When they found their footing, Ke-ola carefully handed the small Honu down to Ronan, then slid down himself.

Murel patted the Honu's shell. She couldn't work up a lot of reverence for a sea turtle the way Ke-ola and his people and even Ronan seemed to, but she liked him.

And he was very young as Honus went, and she sensed he was worried about them as well as about the other possible survivors they sought. Knowing the things

Honus knew seemed to carry a lot of responsibility with it.

Sky, water-slicked and excited, darted back again, shaking himself a bit. Good water. Deep water. Deep enough for river seals. No salt, but deep.

The twins undressed in the dark, strapped on their suits, and submerged themselves. Ke-ola and the Honu followed.

The first passage was deceptively easy. Its end was marked by a snarl of live roots that formed an almost impenetrable wall. Even Sky got stuck trying to pass through its openings.

Hah! he said. No swimming here.

Honu conveyed the problem to his fellow turtles. Go back, he said to the twins and

Ke-ola. They backed off a little ways and soon heard the hum, thump, grind, crash of the digger above them. They scrambled out of the new hole. The digger's operator and Johnny conferred, then the driver got back into the machine, drove forward a short distance, and lowered the shovel again.

"It's going to take forever if we have to keep doing this," Ronan complained.

"We could cut through the roots with a laser, I suppose," Marmie replied, "but it seems a shame to destroy the roots of some of the few organisms living on the surface of this desolate place. Besides, the laser might cut through to the far side and injure people who took refuge there."

Caution won out over speed. The twins would swim until they inevitably hit another barrier and once more had to haul out. Again they suited up, and waited inside a flitter with Sky, Ke-ola, and the Honu until the digger opened a new entrance beyond another impediment. Usually the blockage was caused by roots.

Once, the water disappeared, hissing, beneath a huge chunk of meteor. Then all of them had to turn around and splash back to the previous hole before they emerged.

It took endless hours. Although their night vision was good, the tunnels were usually cramped and there was little to see.

Murel could feel Ke-ola's spirits sinking a little more during each dark trip, though the Honu thought only, Noooo, not here. Not yet.

Often they had to wait quite a while for the digger to make its way over the cratered ground to reach the point above them.

But each time they emerged, some of Ke-ola's family were waiting at the hole's opening, peering expectantly down at them.

Marmie was among them when they climbed out of what seemed like the hundredth hole, muddy and discouraged. "I think that much as we hate to believe he could have been correct, Cally had the right of it," she said. "There don't seem to be any other survivors."

"The Honus feel that there are, Madame," Ke-ola said, although it sounded as if he had begun to believe that the Honus might actually be wrong for once.

"Very well," she said. "But one more dive only before we return to the ship.

Everyone is tired and hungry and the operators tell me the diggers need refueling and cleaning to maintain their efficiency."

This time, however, the diggers were not needed. Instead of narrowing to a root choked wall, the stream broadened and deepened.

Hmmm, I think this must be where the sonar comes in, Murel said.

I wish we'd asked more about it when we were home with Dad, Ronan said. If we were full-time seals living in the ocean, we'd have been using it already.

If we were full-time seals living in the ocean, we wouldn't be here, she pointed out.

True. I think maybe this is how it goes. There are supposed to be songs, I think.

Individual songs.

He made a noise that was somewhere between a snore and a belch and a little like a growl. Like that, he told her, and did it again, modifying and modulating the tones.

Oh, those noises! she said. Like the ones we used to make under the river ice. I never paid much attention to them before. I thought they were just what our vocal cords do when we're in seal form. Confined during their earlier childhood on

Petaybee to nearby rivers and streams where they went only for short swims, they were so familiar with the territory, they had been under the impression that their memories let them know where they were and approximately what things looked and felt like. Even during their brief time in the ocean, they'd relied mostly on vision to find their way.

But now that they wanted to learn to use their sonar properly, they found they'd been using it all along, far more than they'd previously thought. In this alien underground territory where they had no idea what was coming next, the seal sounds they made bounced back to them from shapes of various densities, rather like echoes. Once they were aware of it, they didn't need much practice interpreting the echoes. Their seal senses recognized the signals so they "heard" how deep and wide the water was, how far they were from the bottom and the walls of the passage. The solid surfaces of the canal were many body lengths away from them.

That's all? Ronan asked. A big flooded cavern. I'm disappointed. I understood we would be able to tell where the fish were and even plants and things. All I'm getting is these walls.

I don't think there are any fish down here, or anything else except more roots,

Murel answered tiredly. She would have enjoyed a nice juicy fish right then.

And then, suddenly, there was something else. Something unfamiliar. If it was a fish, it was a very large fish.

Murel sent a mental call to Sky. Come back, she said. Stay close. We are not alone.