Deluge
- Автор: Маккефри Энн, Скарборо Элизабет
- Серия: The Twins of Petaybee #3
- Язык: английский
- Жанр: Научная фантастика
Электронная книга - «Deluge». Краткое содержание книги:
Meanwhile, the powerful and avaricious Company is making another attempt to take over the world of Petaybee for its resources, and the twins parents, Yana and Sean, along with the entire planet, must fight for the independence of their sentient world once and for all...
She had made it halfway to Kilcoole when she heard the rumble of the ship’s engines and the surprised voices exclaiming just a little louder than the rumble or the wind howling around them. She turned to see the ship rise into the air, piercing the storm, showering melting ice from its surface as it climbed toward the aurora.
As if the ship’s ascent were a signal to the storm, it slackened. The wind blew off in another direction, and the snow sifted away to nothing, exposing a crowd of pointing and shouting crew members railing against the hijackers of their ship and the collusion of the planet they’d come to conquer.
Grinning beneath her balaclava, Yana watched them and took a step back. Her heavy boot plunged easily through the snow and downward. There was a slight resistance and a cracking sound where the ice should have been. She felt something give beneath her foot, and then a splash and a rushing sensation against her heavy clothing. Icy water seeped over the top of her boot, slid down her tucked-in waterproof snowsuit leg, and soaked her sock. The freezing water attacked her formerly protected flesh with only a momentary sensation of cold, then knifed into her, sending a shock all the way up her body and deep into her marrow. Trying to pull her foot out, she overbalanced and stumbled, driving her wet leg deeper into the river. Unable to maneuver her free foot, she fell backward. Damn Aidan and his fishing hole, she thought as she slid over the edge of the freshly cut hole and plunged toward the bottom of the river.
Her life didn’t flash before her. Nothing flashed before her but water and the disgusted notion that of all the people in her family, she, the one who didn’t go sealy when wet, was the one to fall into the freezing river.
Her clothing was heavy but waterproof, so for a moment or two the covered parts were somewhat protected. The balaclava rode up on her face during her plunge and blinded her, and she reached up a clublike mittened hand to dislodge the wet wool. Above her was a cloudscape of ice, eerily lit by an odd phosphorescence coming from the inner banks of the river that cast a green glow upon it. She kicked toward it, trying against all instinct not to gasp for air. All that hadn’t been knocked out of her when she fell was the single breath she’d managed to gulp in before her face submerged.
The ice did not freeze in a solid sheet underneath but in clusters separated by little dips, which she knew-from both her Corps survival training and from listening to Sean and the kids discuss seal matters-formed little air pockets. Not that air was going to help her much if her lungs froze before she found the way out. She tried not to think what life might be like if she did survive without feet, or ears, or a nose, and sternly told her inner coward to shut the frag up.
Taking in air through cold-numbed lips, she held her breath in and raised her mittens to feel along the bottom of the ice. The unevenness that held her air supply made it much more difficult to find the hole, which was hidden behind an inverted hillock.
She stuck her head up into the hole she had just made and hauled the incredible weight of one of her arms out of the water and onto the ice. She followed with the other arm. Because it had been so very cold and the hole was cut, not thawed, the ice held under her mittens, but the mittens became ice almost at once too, as did the sleeves of her coat.
She was grateful to be breathing, to see the aurora dancing in a now-clear sky as if all were right with the world. And indeed the world was doing fine. She was the one with a big problem. How to get out?
She had been able to hear the ship’s crew. Would they hear her if she cried for help? Would they help?
There should be a group of villagers coming to take charge of the soldiers any time now. Couldn’t they see the ship was gone and hurry it up a bit?
As those thoughts ran through her head she tried to call for help, but all she could produce was a feeble cough. Her voice wasn’t the only thing that was weak. Her hands were slipping, and pretty soon she’d have to fight her way back up again.
She looked up again at the frozen sky, which seemed to have grown icicles. No, those would be her lashes, probably her eyelids, crusted with ice.
Oh well, she’d heard freezing to death was not a bad way to die. Already she couldn’t feel anything except vaguely sleepy. That was how it started, she knew. You went to sleep and died, and they found your frozen corpse at breakup.
SEAN SWAM UPSTREAM for five miles in open water warmed by the geothermal current that formed something of a circulatory system for Petaybee’s northern pole. The aboveground tributary ended at a mostly frozen lake, and he had to dive under the ice, swimming through uncomfortably shallow water.
This place was a sink, hollowed out early in Petaybee’s formation, perhaps even before terraformation, by a natural volcanic event. Sean wasn’t certain exactly how it had happened. He was a biologist, not a geologist, and at the moment he was a seal who did not much care how the water came to run the way it did as long as it was there to transport him where he wished to go, without more danger than he could afford to brave.
This passage was a bit tricky, but unless it had changed, which it certainly could do without notice, it should be safe enough.
There was a high ridge in the bottom of the sink before it deepened until it sank down into its source, an underground spring, not as warm as the one at the communion cave but almost always open, even in the coldest weather, because of the magma channels flowing beneath the rock. This was also subject to change, of course. However, Petaybee seemed to have some control over where its fluids ran, and by now it surely understood what he and the others were trying to do to protect it, so he rather expected it would arrange itself to his best advantage-that is, stay as he remembered it-and he was not disappointed.
The opening to the underground waterway, a spring at the surface but a broad and deep underground river below, was exactly where it had been on his previous journey by the same route, and in case he had forgotten, inorganic-looking arrowlike clusters of bioluminescent material along the bottom marked the way. He’d run into this before on an underwater errand for the planet, and he was relieved to see that it had its considerable attention at least partially focused on his mission.
The force of the water increased as he neared the place where the spring bubbled into the pool, but he pressed forward, passing from the cave under the thin ice frosting the lake’s surface to the hole in the side of the bank where lukewarm water gushed into the lake bed. This hole was at the edge of the sink, boring into higher ground that rose overhead as he swam into the stream.
The warm water made him sleepy and sluggish, but he had to actively swim against the current to reach his goal, the lower level of the communion cave at Kilgalen. The river swept past it on its way to the sea, but there had been a good level place to land and change in the past. He blessed the dry suit Marmie had provided. For that matter, he blessed Marmie, and although he knew that she and they all had enemies, found it difficult to fathom why anyone would go to so much effort to create trouble for such a marvelous woman. She was herself one of the PTBs-and yet she had used her influence and money generously for the benefit of the planet and its people-and other planets and other people, from what he could tell-without worrying about what she’d be getting out of it. He was concerned about his kids, of course, but if he had been in their flippers, he’d have done the same.
There was plenty of room overhead and plenty of oxygen there, but he had spent so long in administrative chores he was not as accustomed to swimming hard as his children were, and his chest, back, and the joints where his flippers met his body ached with the effort.