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...
Finally, Pele shook her head, then changed her dance and began another chant, at first in harmony with her sister’s, then when Kai noticed what she was doing and stopped chanting and changed her dance, Pele led.
Ronan and Murel couldn’t hear what she said above the roaring of the waters and the rumble and crash of the mountain, but the gestures she used were repeated by Rory and the others trying to help. These gestures had lots of calming motions, and the sort that a guard would use to say “Stop.” Her hands flowed around her. She covered her face, then seemed to cover her head and cower, and then made beseeching gestures, hands out, palms up and cupped.
Through the jungle a wave of lava flowed toward them, far more daunting than the walls of water they had faced before.
Everyone except Pele and three of her sisters broke ranks and ran for the water. The four girls continued dancing.
Ronan flopped ashore on his front flippers and shook himself hard to dry.
What are you doing, Ro? You’re going to be seal steaks in another two seconds.
I’m going to drag them out here, is what. Wait.
But Murel didn’t wait. There was only one of him and four girls, so she too flopped ashore and dried off and then ran forward into the searing heat, grabbing at arms. The girls, as if entranced by the flames, jerked away and kept dancing.
“Are you nuts? This volcano doesn’t know you. It won’t-” She started to tell them that it wouldn’t listen.
But then, suddenly, the lava wave sank and drained into two channels that flowed away down either side of the compound and off into the sea, leaving char and cooling red-black lava behind.
Ronan and Murel turned back to the sea to help those trying to stay afloat, but as they were changing, Pele and her sisters dashed past them and jumped in. I guess they figured there was no sense in trying the volcano’s patience for too long, Murel said.
Yeah, especially since “patient” is not usually a word used to describe volcanoes.
The twins swam back out to help support the swimmers. Some of the first to hit the water were flagging now. Zuzu perched with her back paws on Adrienne’s shoulders, her front paws on top of her mistress’s head. The Piaf ’s first mate dog-paddled beyond the rocks, which was about as far as any of them had gone in their efforts to evade the lava.
Already the bath-warm water was growing uncomfortably hot, just from the lava flowing into it on the side of the ocean. If a more direct stream came at them, this would not be far enough to avoid being boiled alive. Ronan and Murel, with Sky’s help, began herding the swimmers farther out to sea. They didn’t want them to be in range of the volcanic area where the city-ship was moored, but if the refugees from the land were in sight of the sursurvu, Kushtaka’s people could find them and help keep them afloat more easily. Unfortunately, what had seemed not terribly far to the seal twins was impossible for full-time humans.
People kept sinking beneath the waves, and Ronan and Murel kept diving to push them back to the surface again.
After doing this several times, they stayed underwater and waited for people to sink, then pushed them up in assembly-line fashion. Soon they grew tired. If Kushtaka’s people are helping, they’re keeping a low profile, Ronan observed sourly.
Maybe they’re waiting until people have nearly drowned so many times they’ll think they’re imagining being saved by otters again. I think I sense a myth budding here.
Providing anyone survives to spread it, Ronan said, turning toward the surface again while scanning for bodies on their way down. He saw none. He noticed some swimmer’s feet, but no one sinking, and as he watched, two pairs of feet vanished. Maybe they have arrived, after all. Maybe they’re just doing it differently than before. Look, sis!
They surfaced together and saw flitters skimming the water, human crew members leaning out of hatches to scoop up grasping swimmers.
They must have another installation near here, maybe a moon, and sent ships from there, Ronan said. The rescuers are wearing Corps uniforms.
Not all of them, Murel said, as three flitters lifted off and three more bearing Federation insignia hovered over the water. Those are Federation. Maybe they were coming to investigate Marmie’s disappearance…
Or maybe they were coming to try her for her supposed crimes. Look, there she is, he said, pointing at a figure whose dark curls were sleeked to her head like Sky’s fur, while in the water nearby bobbed the apparently two-headed creature that was Adrienne and Zuzu.
With the rest of them gone, we can concentrate on helping Marmie and Adrienne remain free, Murel said grimly. As relays of flitters picked up swimmers and disappeared into the red- and fuchsia-fired clouds with them, the twins dived beneath the waves and swam for the legs and feet they had pinpointed as belonging to Adrienne and Marmie.
Sky streaked past them. Hah! Otters are good cat savers. I will save Zuzu. She is used to it now.
But just as they were within nudging distance of the women and the cat, the legs were pulled to the surface.
Ronan and Murel rose and popped their heads out of the water in time to see the women disappear through the hatch of a Company Corps flitter. Nearby, Sky had an ungrateful Zuzu by the scruff of her neck while she churned her sopping paws and snarled at him. Oaf! Buffoon! Untooth me!
Sky, bewildered and hurt at this display of feline ingratitude, dropped her into the water. Murel dived to catch the cat on her back and suffered scratches for her efforts. The cat surfaced under her own power and cat-paddled with perfect aplomb.
They’ve spotted us! Ronan said when the flitter continued hovering and a uniformed body reappeared at the hatch.
“There you are, you scamps,” said Rick O’Shay, grinning down at them. “I don’t know how we’re to lift you great lunks of sea life up from there now, but I suppose you’ll do grand on your own. Follow us to the mainland. We’ve a few things to sort out there.”
CHAPTER 22
THE TWINS DESPERATELY wanted to sleep throughout the tedious legal proceedings but didn’t dare.
“I feel as though I’ve been awake for weeks,” Murel said. They sat on concrete benches inside the thoroughly dank common room in the main prison. The alien waterspout had thrown the bureaucracy of the prison into such disarray that they were ill prepared for the inspections of the illustrious Federation Council members and Marmion’s influential friends in the company. Since Colonel Cally and his superiors and allies had arrived just before the deluge to bring final charges and sentencing down upon Marmie and the others arrested in her name, everyone involved except those back on Petaybee was represented. The twins had the considerable responsibility of representing their planet and people in the proceedings.
They were, of course, in human form, wearing prison tunics over their dry suits. They listened to the Kanaka witnesses testify to the state of their planet before Marmie and the twins had come to rescue them. Sky came out the hero as the Kanakas said that Marmie’s “aumakua, the ship’s otter” had located them in the underground passages and revealed their hiding places to the rescuers. They told of their callous abandonment by the Custer and its crew and begged to be allowed to resettle to Petaybee, where they had gone of their own free will. Some Federation officials had tried to tell other officials that the Kanakas were actually under contract to the Federation and had no free will, but Marmie’s very unhappy and very powerful allies, rounded up by Johnny Green and the other hijackers, were having none of that.