“You are now banned from Waterfalls,” Aden replied. “Surrender your men, and you will be restored to guest status. Fail to surrender your engineers, and your ships are forfeit, your entire crew criminals. Aden out.”

  “Dammit!” Abel pounded the dash, and pressed another button. “Aurora, I need to talk to Gorey, immediately!”

  “I’ve secured the prisoner Copeland,” Aurora replied in a subdued voice. “Send Ben to the cargo hold and land, Abel. We can straighten this out, I promise. But first we have to turn them over.”

  Beside him, Ben hastily selected a camera in the hold. Aurora held a knife to Cope’s throat. The engineer held his hands up. Kaz and Cortez leveled guns at each other.

  “I’ll give myself up,” Ben volunteered. “Don’t let them hurt Cope.” He rose from his chair and headed for the hold.

  “I’ll go along,” Eli offered. “As their advocate on site. Abel, you’ve got to contact Hunter Burke and Guy Fairweather on Mahina. And Gorey. I can’t believe he’d be party to this.”

  “That’ll take hours!” Abel argued.

  “Yeah. It will.” Eli pressed his shoulder. “Land the ship.”

  Dr. Tyler stood, arms crossed, watching Aurora and Kaz take the engineer hostage, Dr. Yang spell-bound by her side. They were preparing for the intake of new refugees, and instead this happened.

  Tyler quite liked young Copeland. From the first he treated her as a person instead of a nuisance. He knighted her with an ice wand. Though harried beyond belief, the engineer always put appropriate priority on her requests from medical. The tableau before her made no sense whatsoever.

  “Eli!” she cried, as the botanist and the cheerful junior engineer started down the thrumming steel stairs from the catwalk, hands raised in surrender. “What is happening?”

  “Aden of Waterfalls demands we surrender our engineers to Diego of Hermitage,” he replied. “Or Waterfalls will retract their sponsorship of us. We’d have no home port here. I’m going along as their spokesman.”

  “No one else!” Aurora argued. “Just… The two.”

  “Aurora, what the hell?” Tyler demanded, alarmed. “And you, Kaz! How could you possibly take part in this?” She’d heard tales of the prison in Hermitage, bad ones. She added in a murmur to Dr. Yang beside her, “Necrotic bakkra. Do you have countermeasures?”

  His eyebrows raised. “That’s not just a story?”

  “Not from what I’ve heard,” she returned grimly. She turned and beckoned Eli to her.

  Ben continued across the floor to Cope. “I surrender. Get that knife off his neck. We’ll go quietly. Won’t we, Cope?”

  How gallantly foolish, Dr. Tyler feared, worrying her lip. She shoved Eli toward the med bay. “Hurry!”

  “I obeyed orders from my captain,” Cope argued. “We retrieved valuable machinery from the ocean floor that would have been lost forever. A tragedy for the entire Aloha system, not just Denali. And now the Denali steal back from us, and call us the criminals?”

  “Easy, buddy,” Ben urged. “We cool our heels in Hermitage for a while, and the captain will get us back. No one’s leaving the planet without us.”

  Eli emerged from med bay, far more somber and thrusting ampules into his pockets. He nodded to Tyler in thanks. She joined him to retrieve proper face masks and air tanks for the three transferring to Koala.

  “I said Eli stays here!” Aurora repeated, securing Copeland’s wrists first.

  “I refuse to do that,” Eli returned. “I will not allow our crewmen out of my sight.”

  Was it Tyler’s imagination, or did Aurora sound increasingly uncomfortable with her role in this?

  “I’ll do that,” Kaz declared. “I will watch the Hermitage and ensure your people are treated fairly.”

  “I am supposed to accompany them,” Aurora countered.

  “Then we shall be five,” Eli insisted.

  “We shall not!” Aurora cried, frustrated.

  Eli simply proceeded to step into the airlock with masks and tanks for five, unbudging. Glaring at him, Aurora brought along her hostages. Young Kaz wore a stone face as he helped affix masks and tank harnesses to the bound engineers. Tyler and Dr. Yang drifted along to watch and foil Cortez’s aim, lest she attempt anything rash.

  As the door began to hiss closed, Kaz grabbed Aurora’s shoulders, and kicked her out with a boot applied to her butt. Tyler grabbed her and pulled her aside. Dr. Yang gave her a shot. “Flaccidone,” he explained.

  Tyler smirked back. The drug was a powerful muscle relaxant.

  “Counter-hostage,” she explained to Aurora. “And you will tell us everything about what’s going on, you shameless weasel.”

  But the other four were gone.

  35

  Sass held onto the broomstick for dear life, as the current claimed her and tumbled her. The stream tried to suck her breath mask off her face. She clamped that with the other hand. Instinct made her hold her breath, and squeeze her eyes shut. Both were silly. She opened her eyes onto a confusing orange cauldron. The pull of the water was so strong that she had no sense of which direction was down. But the lighter orange of the sky rolled past a couple times, interspersed with dark shades.

  With a presence of mind owed to recent long hours on the ocean floor, she hauled her stout boots to point downstream. Those were the part of her best equipped to withstand impacts and fend her off the rocks.

  She seemed to be rotating around something smooth and hose-like. She prayed it wasn’t a snake. With no hands free, she clamped a knee around it. Almost immediately, her efforts were rewarded by that knee smashing into a boulder. Screw that. She was attempting to catch it under her arm-pit when suddenly the sun blinked out.

  The churning maelstrom spit her into the air. What direction was down was now obvious. She flailed while she fell. She caught just a glimpse upward of the dyed-orange sunlight before she hit the underground lake below the waterfall in a flat-footed pencil dive.

  Plunging meters deep, she almost lost her mask. But her feet hit the bottom. She spring-boarded back to the surface with all the power one leg could muster. Her bashed left knee contributed a lackluster performance.

  Nevertheless, she bobbed to the surface. The heavy shower zone pelted her. A few strong kicks propelled her free of that. Fortunately this waterfall formed no whirlpool below it. She still felt the insistent tug of a current, but she was a strong enough swimmer to kick herself to quieter waters even with both hands full.

  The other end of her broom bore no passenger. She was in an underground cavern. The glaring Denali sun, even filtered through a narrow hole and orange water, still cast a circle of light. As her eyes adjusted, Sass caught sight of the man she was trying to save, bobbing face-down across the current less than 10 meters away.

  She tucked the broom under her arm and let go of the mask, in no present danger of losing it. A dozen swift sidestrokes brought her to the guy, whom she quickly rolled face-up. His breath mask was gone, possibly to the same cause as the gash across his forehead. She transferred her own onto him. In the process of shifting behind him, her boot hit the ground. She could stand. That made things easier.

  As well as she could around his prodigious backpack, she got her arms around his diaphragm and thrust, hard, trying to empty his lungs. The drowning danger was obvious. Less so, one of the killing features of Denali’s atmosphere was an extremely high argon content. Heavier than oxygen, the stuff pooled low in the lungs to drown a human just as surely as water did. As Sass had noticed when they first found Nanomage, though, argon didn’t seem to trouble her nanites.

  Being dead makes me hard to kill. She firmly ordered herself to shut up about that for the millionth time.

  On the third sharp bear-hug, the man coughed, splattering the face mask. She gave him one more, and he seemed to rouse. Unfortunately, Sass began to feel the familiar wooziness of hypoxia sneaking upon her.

  She pulled him around to face her, and grabbed the mask. She had to dunk it first for cleaning because he’d advanced to the vomiting phase, returning all the stream water he’d swallowed. With a couple sharp out-breaths, Sass forced argon out of her own lungs, then enjoyed a half dozen deep breaths of better air. Then she handed the face mask back to him just about the time he began looking frantic for it.

  “Empty your lungs first,” she reminded him.

  Sheepishly, he yanked up the mask to blow out, then gulped clean air in relief, off of her bottles. Then he seemed overtaken with panic, trying to get his backpack off. Sass helped, unsure why this made him frantic. He pulled out a spare face mask and tried to plug it in. Much easier for her behind him, Sass completed the hookup, then swapped masks.

  “Sass Collier, captain of the Thrive spaceship out of Mahina,” she introduced herself, finally taking a moment to take in the boy before her. She doubted he was even 18. His bakkra colors were indeterminate as to his guild. Aside from a few intact farm domes, most survivors in Denali Prime had worn a mix of hunter bakkra and the sort that seemed to like volcanic ash, an olive drab melange that reminded Sass of military camouflage. On Earth, at least – camouflage on Mahina would be mushroom-colored, were there any point to wearing it.

  “Teke,” he replied. “Technician with AML – the Advanced Materials Lab. Something broke our comms line to the bunker. I came back to repair the line.” He held up his cable.

  “Is that what that is,” Sass murmured, her ‘snake’ exposed. She gazed up the 3-meter peach waterfall in its beam of orange glow. The cable still stretched above them. “So Teke. You know any way out of here?”

  “Sure,” the teenager replied. “Climb the cable.”

  Sass shot him a look of disbelief.

  He grinned. “Or there’s a staircase.”

  “You’ve done this before,” she accused with pointed finger.

  “Love it!” he agreed, white teeth flashing. “This way.” He started splashing back across the current. He lost the bottom and had to swim a few strokes, but soon found footing again on the other side.

  Sass paused to try her comms, to tell everyone she was OK. But she wasn’t surprised to find they didn’t work. She hastened to catch up to Teke as he sloshed ahead, now only waist deep in darker waters.

  The cavern was growing dim indeed by the time they waded up a steep rock. Teke waited to help her down onto a dry shelf. “Fish around my backpack for a light?” he requested.

  Sass envied the Denali that, how easily they called on each other for help. With no real belongings, they likewise dispensed with personal boundaries regarding them. “What shape?” she asked, as nothing tubular came to hand upon groping through the top layers.

  “Ball, size of a mango,” he replied.

  “Got it.” Sass had already felt that one, but skipped over it. Unable to find an ‘on’ switch, she simply handed the fruit-sized orb to him. He smacked it sharply on his knee, and a wide beam came on, of bluish light.

  “Are you a hunter, Teke?”

  “Technician,” he corrected plaintively. “Why does everyone ask me that? Plan to be an engineer. Here we are.” His light displayed a glass brick wall which bisected a couple round pools about the size of the diving exit Sass used at Neptune.

  “I carved those with skyship fuel,” her guide confided. “Awesome stuff!” He started stripping off his backpack, then his sodden clothes, and all but one of his air tanks. These he dropped into the left-hand pool. “Gear,” he explained, dunking his backpack under the glass brick partition. Apparently it extended partway below the water surface.

  “And we dive under the wall in this other pool?” Sass guessed, pulling off her own gear. He nodded. “Teke, do the grownups know about this bio-lock?”

  “‘Grownups’?” he asked, faintly offended. “My boss would kill me. But it’s fine. The left pool is 50% peroxide. The right is 10%. I’ve got gargle and stuff on the other side. Bakkra detector, too. I’m not breaking bio-containment. You met Cora yet? She’s my boss.” His face betrayed great sorrow at this fact.

  “What about the cable?” Sass asked, just as he got the dratted backpack tucked under the submerged wall.

  “Dammit.”

  She jumped in and retrieved it for him. While she was there, she quickly dunked her own belongings to the far side. Poor Teke stood frozen in horror, waiting to see what would happen to a human immersed in strong hydrogen peroxide solution. Even the 10% version was painful.

  Sass hopped out of the pool, took in his expression, and muttered, “I’m tougher than I look.” To her surprise, her bashed knee didn’t even hurt. She glanced down at it. Black and blue, but no skin broken, at least not anymore. A flex test showed its springiness on the mend.

  Teke accepted the backpack and squatted, scenically naked, to fish out wire-cutters and clip the cable. Then he shrugged and pragmatically decided to just bring the backpack with him via the weaker pool. He gazed at Sass searchingly. “I wouldn’t leave my eyes open.”

  “No,” she agreed. That would cause damage. But not beyond healing. She really didn’t want to have this conversation with a teenager. She needed communications re-established with Clay before her lover decided to dive down a waterfall after her, alone and searching. “Can we speed this up?”

  He gazed at her another moment, head cocked, then nodded. He slipped through the peroxide bath and out the other side as quickly as he could. Unencumbered, Sass beat him out the other side into pitch dark. The peroxide did indeed sting when she opened her eyes. Fortunately, he soon flopped out beside her and turned on a shower. This one was pure water. Within a couple minutes they performed all the basic ablutions and rinsed their gear. As usual, Sass’s comm tablet didn’t pass the bakkra test.

  Neither did Teke. He eyed her nervously as he downed the booby prize medication to clear the digestive tract, then spritzed stuff into his ears, nose, and mouth.

  “Are there no communications down here in a bio-lock?”

  “This isn’t an official bio-lock,” Teke admitted, scrubbing his toes with the tarry soap. “Actually, if my boss finds out about it…”

  “You and Cora don’t get along well,” Sass observed. “Have you worked for her long?”

  “Hell, no,” Teke grumbled. “Just a short internship before university.”

  “There was a university in Denali Prime?” the captain asked, surprised.

  Teke paused. “Was?”

  “This past month, we’ve been rescuing survivors all over Denali Prime,” Sass clarified. “No one ever mentioned the university. Where was it?”

  She handed him her small tablet, showing the official Neptune map. The device could hardly contaminate him any further. For all Sass knew, maybe the tar soap would help the tablet, but she doubted it. Bakkra seemed to have an affinity for Mahina screens. The ‘soft’ measures at the native bio-locks couldn’t get rid of them. Ben and Cope’s liquid nitrogen cooler worked a treat.

  Sass instantly regretted showing him the map, as the color drained from the youth’s face. His finger rested on the giant hole where Ben rendered his scrap steel. “That was the university,” he murmured. “Eight of my cohort came here. The rest…”

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “We’ve been here for weeks. We saved nearly 10,000 people. We were leaving. But no one ever came to check out the stream. I had a feeling about this place.”

  He handed her back the tablet. He’d pulled out a spare antenna from the top that she’d never noticed before. “Our comm frequencies are at 2.4 GHz.”

  Sure enough, Sass soon reached someone in the Waterworks Department, who transferred her to Scholar Cora. “Cora! This is Sass. I’m fine, and so is the boy I fell in with, Teke. We cut the cable. You should be able to –”

  “Where are you?” Cora demanded.

  Sass turned the tablet toward Teke, presently on the throne getting rid of that emetic and everything else in his GI tract. “Bottom level cavern bio-lock,” he supplied dully.

  “What?” Cora shrieked. “Teke, damn you –!”

  “Stop!” Sass cut in. “Cora, please tell Clay immediately that we are safe and out of the river!”

  “Fine!” And she hung up.

  “Don’t worry,” Teke offered. “She’ll be down here to scream at me any minute now.”

  36

  When Ben agreed to this, he imagined something like a holding cell, a blank room, perhaps the indignity of an open-view toilet and being deprived of his freedom. No doubt the food would suck.

  The fact that they never entered mountaintop Hermitage was a bad sign. Instead they were directed into an elevator shed, do not pass bio-lock, do not shed face mask, nor meet with anyone resembling police or a court of law. Local hunters escorted them off the Koala, their bakkra featuring deep blue spots unknown in Waterfalls, each ringed with a pale yellow oval that made them look like creepy eyes scattered across squat heavy muscle.

  The elevator door opened onto a dark cavern. Kaz sucked in his breath with a sharp hiss. Ben glanced behind at him. His faint ocher markings, freshly instilled since they left the Thrive, seemed to throb instead of the more typical scarlet flash of anger, irritation, halitosis, and anything else that irked a hunter.

  Afraid? Ben sure was.

  The guards manhandled Ben and Cope to a heavy black barred gate. They lit truncheons – shock sticks? – and poked them through the bars. The smattering of unfortunates huddled on the wet stone floor shrank back to the walls. The inmates wore breath masks, but no tanks. Each prisoner’s faceplate attached to the wall by an air hose. The panel these plugged into allowed for as many as 20 prisoners to plug in with only a couple meters of hose apiece for a tether – no room to lie down.

  The gate opened, and they were dragged to an otherwise unoccupied air panel. Cope’s mask was plugged in first, then Ben’s. The guards yanked their air tank harnesses off, then freed their hands.

  The captors drew back to the gate with Kaz and Eli. Then suddenly the guards yanked off their monitors’ tanks and unplugged their hoses as well, and shoved them forward into the prison. The gate clanged shut behind them.

 

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