Catherine Asaro - Nebula Awards Showcase 2013

No!

My hands were shaking badly. I almost couldn’t hit the switch to extend the sub’s single, disused radio aerial. A tiny motor whined somewhere behind me, and I waited until the motor stopped before I gently rested my headset back onto my scalp, a gentle hiss of static filling my ears.

I depressed the SEND button on the sub’s control stick.

“This is Max Leighton speaking for Deepwater 12, the United States. If anyone can hear and understand this broadcast, please respond.”

The static crackled lifelessly.

It was a vain hope. My signal couldn’t go too far. But I had to try.

“I say again, this is Thomas Leighton speaking—”

“Daddy?”

My breath caught in my throat. It had been a single word, broken by crackling interference. But it was probably the most beautiful word I’d ever heard spoken in my entire life.

“Jenna,” I said softly into my mic. “Please tell me that’s you?”

“You’re just in time,” her voice said. If I was relieved beyond words, she sounded excited to the point of bursting. But not because of me.

“Just in time for what?” I said.

“The sun!” she said. “We got here just as it was going down and had to spend the night on the surface. We opened the top hatches and the air is breathable! Very cold, but breathable. Oh Daddy, we knew it. We all knew it. I’m so glad you’re here with us.”

“Where the hell is here , Jenna, I can’t see another soul.”

“Go out on top and take a look,” was all she said.

It took me a minute to get the interior hatch to Number 6’s stubby sail open, then I climbed up the short ladder, banging side to side in the tight tunnel as the sub kept rocking. At the top hatch I paused, hands on the locking wheel. Nobody had breathed fresh air in almost two decades. Had I merely imagined my daughter’s voice? It certainly was true I’d been in better mental states. Sleep deprivation will do that to you.

But I’d certainly come too far to stop. So, what the hell?

The wheel complained, then spun, and there was a hiss as the last bit of pressure difference bled off from the inside of the sub to the outside. If I’d done it right when I came up, I’d not get the bends—no deadly nitrogen bubbles in the blood. If I’d done it wrong… too late now.

Jenna had been right. The air was brutally frigid, and moving fast. Almost a wind. But also so invigorating that I pulled myself up all the way out of the sail and rested my butt on the edge of the hatch. I looked out across the rolling sea of slushy ice—which appeared to extend for many, many miles in all directions.

I also saw the sails of the other subs. Four of them. The kids on those boats waved to me, and I waved back with both arms. If I’d been promising myself at the start of this trip that I’d skin Jenna alive when I found her, that anger had long since melted into a bewildering feeling of astonished wonderment.

Because Jenna was right. The sun certainly was coming up.

And not an apparitional, atrophied sun; as we’d all seen in the last days before going to sea.

This was the real deal.

It crested the horizon like a phoenix, a blast of yellow-orange rays shooting across the sky and into the belly of a bank of clouds to our west. The clouds lit up brilliantly, and there was a raucous cheer from the other subs—all the kids out on deck to see the miracle.

I suddenly found myself cheering too. No, howling . I was on my feet, dangerously close to toppling off the sail and into the slush below, but I couldn’t make it stop. I yelled until my voice was hoarse.

I looked around and saw all the kids standing, hips and knees rocking in time to the rhythm of their bobbing craft, eyes closed and arms stretching out to the sky, waiting… waiting…

I suddenly knew what they were waiting for. I did the same.

When the rays hit my skin—old, dark, and wrinkled—my nerves exploded with warmth. Stupendous, almost orgasmic warmth. No electric heater was capable of creating such a feeling.

I came back to myself and thought I saw my daughter waving to me from the sails of one of the other subs.

I jumped into the icy sea, and swam in great strokes.

Pulling myself out onto the back of Jenna’s sub, I ignored the smiling but reserved faces of the other teenagers and used handrails on the sail to pull myself up to Jenna’s level.

I didn’t ask if it was okay for a hug, as I’d been doing since she’d turned 13.

She had to politely tap my shoulders to get me to release her.

“Sorry,” I said, noting that water from my beard had gotten her face wet.

“It’s okay,” she said, wiping it with her palms.

“I found the clubhouse,” I said. “I was afraid that you—all of you—had gone off and done something really stupid.”

Jenna looked down.

“Are you mad that I didn’t tell you?”

“At first,” I said. “But it doesn’t matter now. This is… this is just… incredible.”

The sun had gained in the sky. The old, dark neoprene of my wet suit was growing hot and uncomfortable. I unzipped and pulled my arms and head out of the top, letting it drape around my waste. Delicious rays of light bathed my exposed, gray-haired chest. An unreasoning, almost explosive feeling of giddiness had seized me, and I had to fight to maintain my bearing as the kids on the sub—all the kids on all the subs—began laughing and shoving each other into the water, paddling about and crooning like seals.

“Have you been in contact with anyone else?” I asked.

“We kept trying the radio,” Jenna said, never moving away from my arm which had found its way protectively around her shoulders. “But you were the first person we heard.”

“I wonder how many of the satellites still work,” I said, looking up into the fantastically, outrageously blue sky. “We could rig a dish, one of the old VSAT units. I think we still have some down below…”

“We aren’t going back,” Jenna said suddenly, detaching herself.

I looked at my daughter.

“Where else can you possibly go?”

“We don’t care, dad. We’re just not going back there. We swore it amongst the group. All of us.”

“And what if the ice had still been solid? What would you have done then?” I said, a burst of sea wind suddenly giving me goosebumps.

“We don’t know.”

“You’re goddamned lucky there was a gap to get through. Air to breathe. I am not sure any of us have enough oxygen or battery power to get all the way back down. Jenna, for all I knew, you and the others were going to get yourselves killed.”

Jenna didn’t meet my gaze.

“Somebody had to do something,” she said. “We had to know if there was a chance the sun had returned. We hoped. We hoped so much . You and Jake and the others—everybody from before the freeze-up—it was like you’d all given up. Everyone determined not to die, but also determined not to live, either.”

I nodded my head, slowly.

“So what’s the plan now?” I asked.

She looked up at me, smiling again.

“Baja.”

“What?”

“The Baja Peninsula is supposed to be a couple hundred miles northeast of here. We’ll sail until we hit the shore.”

“And if you simply hit the pack ice?”

“We’ll leave the subs, and keep going.”

“Do you have any idea what you’re saying? Where’s your food, where’s your water, what kind of clothes do any of you have? What—”

“We’re not going back, daddy!”

She’d shouted it at me, her fists balled on my chest.

“Okay, okay,” I said, thinking. “But consider this. You all stand a much better chance if you have help. Now that we know the ice is clearing and the air is breathable—and that the sun is back out again, by God—we can bring the others up. All of the Deepwater crews, and the stations too. It will take time, but if we do it in an organized, methodical fashion, we’ll all stand a better chance of making land. Though I am not quite sure what we can expect to find when we get there.”