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...
When the channel narrowed again, Sean watched for more arrows, and there they were, larger and larger until the entire underground passage was filled with the bioluminescence and he could clearly see his destination.
He was almost too tired to pull himself out of the stream before he was carried backward, but gained strength from knowing it was the end of the journey for now.
He shook himself dry and, when he was fully human, put on the dry suit, with booties, gloves, and hood, and climbed up into the back end of the communion cave.
Siobhan Chugliak, the village’s shanachie, and her husband, Floyd, met him inside the cave.
“What is it, Sean?” she asked.
He told her. “The town is under siege and we’re worried the PTBs will use the central com system to monitor and trace any calls we make on the portable ones. So I’ve come to warn you myself.”
“Very good of you, I’m sure, and we’ll start a relay to all the villages, so you needn’t trouble yourself.
Come on back to the cabin with us-have a cuppa to warm up.”
“Ta very much, Siobhan. I won’t say the swim wasn’t tiring.”
“We could take you home by sled if you wish.”
“No, that’s more easily spotted, and besides, it’s downstream clear to the river on the way back. I’ll be grand.”
Over tea, he went into more detail about the arrest of Marmie and the coming of the troop ship. He had not yet drained his cup when he began to feel that he had other places to be. Floyd had already alerted the rest of the village, and six dogsled teams were dispatched to three other villages to begin the relay.
They traveled in pairs in case of mishap.
“I need to return home now, Siobhan,” he told her. Another hostess would have protested that he hadn’t finished his tea, that the scones were still in the oven and would be out at any moment, and that his hair had not yet dried from the melting of the ice on the way from cave to cabin. But Siobhan, like Clodagh, though perhaps not so strong in her skills as yet, was a shanachie and knew that such impulses were best heeded.
As soon as he reached the landing spot, he slipped from the dry suit and stowed it, reentered the water, and was on his way.
The trip back should have been as easy as he’d told Siobhan, but his sense of urgency was increasing, and he swam with the current to make faster progress.
He was back in the river in a third of the time it had taken him to leave it, but did not feel the relief he expected. Instead he swam as quickly as he could upstream. No ice impeded him here, because of the warm current from the hot spring. He turned his head toward the spring and the cave, but something pulled him back into the current and he continued to swim upstream until, as he neared the village, the ice closed in from both sides of the shore and he finally was forced to dive beneath it, knowing he’d have to claw open a hole when he wanted to emerge.
Underwater in the dark, he still knew his way using his sonar. There was the boat ramp right outside Kilcoole-he knew it by the posts sticking through the ice. But what pulled him onward was still ahead of him. His signals preceded him, bouncing, returning, telling him the lay of the river bottom, banks, the ice, and what was in between.
Up ahead, between the village and the spaceport, something large suddenly entered the water, sinking, flailing, then rising beneath the ice. Two legs, a body, something human.
A soldier who had inadvertently fallen through the ice? A villager? It didn’t matter. He had to help, of course. He had been pacing himself, but now he pushed forward, pumping his long gray body in a smooth continuous series of powerful undulations.
It would take him only a few minutes to reach the victim at this rate, but he also knew that immersion in the frigid river had a good chance of killing the hapless human, or if not that, then frostbite would likely injure him beyond even Clodagh’s ability to heal.
Suddenly above him the ice groaned and cracked and the water sloshed beneath it as if the river were being shaken. A quake? Possible, though they were less frequent once winter set in.
He drove himself forward. The body was upright in the water and seemed to have found an airhole, but with the quake, its movements changed from feeble to frantic. The ice would probably be cracking around it too, threatening it with submersion again. Sean was now swimming as hard as he could, but he didn’t see how he could possibly reach the person in time to save him.
As he passed Kilcoole, however, he suddenly became aware of a thin stream of warm sulfurous water like that from the hot spring shooting down the middle of the river. That was different!
A little farther on and the area between the ice and the flowing water was filled with steam. Ice cracked and parted with the new heat. He sent his sonar signals forth at faster intervals, so as not to lose the victim in the steam, but the noise of the breaking ice confused his senses.
He only knew he’d reached his goal when a heel connected with the top of his head.
CHAPTER 12
BIEN! MON AMI, Zuzu told her new partner in crime, we seem to have begun a four-legged underground in this place of despair. We are a two-creature Resistance. But the man will return and finish his evil work. How shall we further deter him?
We could bite him.
Other men would come and chase us, possibly kill us. And me, I am not ready to die. The universe still has need of such a cat as Zuzu. As it is, I fear we must vacate this ventilation passage tout suite before those evil men pump into it vapors of a nature most poisonous to our kinds.
But your friend who is not a cat remains caged.
Vraiment. She raised and lowered her ears and whiskers to signify that there was little she could do about such a hopeless situation.
Sky squeezed around her and looked into the room at her poor Adrienne bound so helplessly to the chair. The otter leaned against the grate with his body. Zuzu heard a creak and a crack as it gave under his weight. This door would open for the right otter.
By all means, be my guest, she said graciously. She backed away to give him room, careful to keep her back paws and tail free of the pile of scat.
The otter chittered and squeaked and shoved and heaved, and presently Zuzu heard a cracking sound and a triumphant “Hah!”
He then proceeded to use his teeth and front feet to tear an even larger hole, and slid himself into the room. Zuzu daintily followed.
“Zuzu!” Adrienne’s whisper bordered on the sort of hiss that the cat, as her esteemed companion, might have found offensive had it not been so laden with concern for her welfare. “Oh, sweetie, they mustn’t catch you here. They would kill you in some awful way just to torment me.”
Zuzu hopped onto her shoulder, purring comfort and reassurance that she could be back in that hole and out the other side before those clumsy oafs saw so much as a single hair on her curly tail. Meanwhile Sky used his big sharp otter teeth to attack the tapes binding her friend’s hands and feet.
Adrienne sagged with relief as her limbs were freed but jerked to alertness, putting her wrists and ankles together again as the door to her room rattled.
Allez, M’sieu Sky! the cat warned, and sprinted back through the opening, barely clearing the pile of poo as she raced for the exit. The otter was almost as swift as she and was halfway through the opening when the door opened and a voice cried, “Gotcha!”
Zuzu did not see what happened next because her view was blocked by a shrieking otter. When he suddenly disappeared back into the room, her tail twitched twice before she sprinted back through the pipe and out into the corridor for the brief dash to the rat hole.