Charles Sheffield - The Spheres of Heaven

“Perhaps you are right.” After one moment of resistance, Gressel allowed itself to be carried. The Angel gloomily added, “ A long farewell to all our greatness . We perforce accept assistance, and admit the maxim: better safe than sorry .”

So far as Bony was concerned, safe was a debatable term. The deep sea remained calm enough, but something was happening above the surface. Dense clouds must have covered the blue sun, because the deeper waters had become so dark that Bony could no longer see the ocean floor. He grabbed Liddy by the hand and the two of them followed the faint suit lights of the Pipe-Rilla through abyssal gloom.

And then those suit lights, though not shrinking in size, began to fade in brightness. After a few baffled seconds Bony realized what was happening. The waves on the surface could not damage him at this depth, but they could stir bottom sediments. Their whole party was moving through a thickening cloud of gray silt.

In that moment of understanding, the scene ahead of Bony lit in brilliant blue-white. Everything — lank sea-grasses, Pipe-Rilla, Angel, darting Tinkers, and pale mud cloud — became etched in light. There was a moment of startling clarity, which was as suddenly gone.

A lightning bolt — a major one — had hit the surface of the sea. The thunder came at once, shatteringly loud. The strike must have been directly above them.

But now Bony, blinded by the flash, could see nothing at all. Holding on to Liddy he allowed himself to coast to a halt. He had lost all sense of direction. The only hope was to follow Vow-of-Silence and the other aliens back to the Finder . But he could not see them, unless another bolt of lightning came to his assistance.

How many people stood and waited, hoping for a close lightning strike? Bony felt Liddy’s arms around him. Even through the suits he could feel her trembling.

Come on, lightning bolt. Do your thing. Hit!

The response after five more seconds was a weak, far-off flicker, the puny glow of a lightning bolt several miles away. By its brief light Bony saw Vow-of-Silence, standing motionless with the Angel cradled in her forearms. Every Tinker component had vanished, he hoped to safety.

Once more it was too dark to see anything. Bony and Liddy stayed where they were, hoping that Vow-of-Silence was doing the same. Bony had a new worry. Suppose that the storm continued into the night and true darkness came to Limbo? He and Liddy would run out of air in eight more hours. He didn’t know how it would be for the Pipe-Rilla, but long before morning the humans had to be back on board a ship.

Another lightning bolt came, hardly brighter than the last one. But this time a curious afterglow replaced the return of stygian darkness. It continued and brightened, and by its light Bony could once more make out the figures of the Pipe-Rilla and the Angel. He was about to head toward them when he heard Liddy gasp, “Bony! Look there. Up to the right.”

His attention had been on the way ahead. Now he tilted his head back and followed Liddy’s pointing arm. At once he saw the source of the new light.

It came not from the syncopated stutter of lightning bolts, nor from the faded gleam of Limbo’s sun. The source of illumination was a ship. All lights blazing, it surged over them, about a hundred meters to their right. It was below the surface of the sea, and it must be gigantic because the forward surge of its great blunt hull produced a bow wave powerful enough to throw Bony helplessly backward and turn him upside down.

But it was not the pressure wave that made Bony gasp, nor was it fear of a war vessel alien and dangerous. He blinked in disbelief because he thought he knew that outline. That was no dinky space yacht, like the Mood Indigo , nor an alien flying machine like the one that he and Liddy had spotted on their trip ashore. Unless his eyes were deceiving him, that was a Class Five cruiser — a human design, symbol of former human military might, powerful and close to impregnable — driving its three-hundred-meter, eighty-plus-thousand-ton, thousand-crew bulk through the alien seas of Limbo.

And then, almost before Bony could bring himself back to an upright position, the monstrous ship was cruising on and vanishing into the fog of silt. The vessel was on a descending path. If it continued unchecked, ten more minutes would bring it to a halt on the seabed. A cruiser would surely survive that impact, and the little group on the seabed would be safer there than anywhere on Limbo.

Unless …

Bony could imagine a worse possibility. Suppose that the new ship’s course was to the south or west? The coastal shelf ended a few kilometers in that direction. The cruiser might then be destined for a different fate: a descent into an unknown and unplumbed ocean. At sufficient depth and pressure, even the cruiser’s solid hull would collapse like an imploding soap bubble.

Friday Indigo had said not a word to anyone, but he knew exactly what he must do. It had been obvious as soon as he learned that other Stellar Group members were present on Limbo.

The Tinkers and Pipe-Rillas, damn their alien guts, had met the Limbics before he had. They had ruined his chances for first contact with a new intelligent species.

But you didn’t have to be a genius to draw a few other conclusions. First, no matter what that moron Rombelle might think, the Limbics were in a primitive, pre-technology stage of development. Second, the bubble-brain Limbics were marine creatures, who did not and could not occupy the land area of their planet. Third, on Rombelle and Liddy Morse’s visit to the surface they had seen a working flying machine. Fourth, the Stellar Group members were stuck at the bottom of the sea. They had not explored the land.

Put it all together, and the answer stared you in the face: another intelligent species existed on Limbo. Its members lived not in the sea, but on dry land. They possessed technology, advanced enough to build an aircraft, and the plane’s home base must be reasonably close since Rombelle had also reported seeing the shadow pass above him on his first excursion from the Mood Indigo . Finally, and most important, no one from the Stellar Group had been in touch with the land-dwellers . First contact with them would be a truly historic event — not a useless contact with some shapeless underwater objects who spoke in gobbledygook and were made of glop.

Hey, the presence of another Stellar Group ship on Limbo might even be a blessing. It meant that Friday could go off and look for the land-dwellers alone, without having to drag along the dead weight of Bony Rombelle and Liddy Morse. For the past few days he had regretted bringing them with him at all. Sure, the sex with Liddy was nice, but hardly worth the hassle of dealing with incompetents.

The Mood Indigo lifted easily from the seabed as Friday applied power to the auxiliary thrustors. Flying the ship underwater proved to be no harder than doing so in space — easier, in a way, because water resistance damped any slight over- or under-thrust. Friday raised the ship ten meters, then spent a few minutes trimming the balance and experimenting with lateral and vertical motion. As soon as he had the hang of it he would approach the shore. He was delighted to find that he could move the ship in any direction, at the same time rising or falling in the water exactly as he chose.

At first he headed due north, so that anyone watching would assume he was taking the ship back to its original position on the seabed. Only when he was kilometers away from the stranded Pipe-Rilla ship and could not see it using any of his instruments did he curve his course east, in the direction of the land.