Authors: Ken Goddard
“Agreed,” Montgomery said. “Dive computer and air supply check.”
“My dive computer is functioning, and I’m showing two-eight-seven-five P-S-I.”
“And I’m reading three-zero-one-two,” Montgomery said, checking the volume of his own air supply. “Dive light on.”
“Dive light on … check,” Cellars said as he turned the 10-volt pistol-gripped dive light switch to the ‘ON’ position, and observed the beam slowly starting to intensify in brightness.
“Back-up air source and full face mask — air and com check.”
Cellars took in a deep breath of air from his backup air source mouthpiece, and then secured the full face mask over his head and took in a second deep breath.
“Air is fine,” Cellars said, pressing the communications button mounted above the mask regulator and speaking into the mask, “how do you read me?”
“I read you fine,” Montgomery said, using his own mask’s two-way radio system.
“And I can read both of you lads just fine, also,” Gladstone said. “How do you copy, Chief?”
“The Fudd-mobile is up and ready for action.”
Dawson, still using the Kiowa’s electronically enhanced and modulated radio communication system, on the theory that every extra thing Allesandra’s shadowy friends had to worry and wonder about was all to the good.
“Okay, gentlemen,” Gladstone said as the Kiowa Warrior swooped in fifty feet over the moon-lit lake and turned on its now-narrow-beamed spotlight, creating a bright six-foot diameter circle of white light on the gently rippling water surface, “time to get yourselves busy down there.”
* * *
Working from reflex, because he had no specific memories of ever having scuba-dived — especially at night — Cellars progressively released air out of his BC and cleared his ears as he and Montgomery as they slowly descended … carefully maintaining their neutral buoyancy level about four feet off the gently sloping lake bottom so as not to stir up too much silt.
Much to Cellars relief, the diffuse cone of light from the Kiowa’s overhead spotlight made it relatively easy to see about twenty feet in all directions — at least to the degree they could see at all in the dark and silt-clouded water.
Their dive computers showed they were down to thirty feet — the lake bottom starting to drop off sharply now — when they got their first glimpse of the huge metallic-looking disc that seemed to be suspended in the cold turbid water out at the edge of their vision and approximately ten-to fifteen feet away from the sloping bottom.
“You seeing what I’m seeing,” Cellars said is a soft whisper.
“Kinda hard not to,” Montgomery replied as he checked his dive computer again … and then: “Alpha-Eight-Delta-One, we are at thirty-two feet of depth, observing what appears to be a massive floating disc of unknown diameter and thickness — possibly as much as thirty meters across by eight meters in depth — because we can only see the one edge.”
“Copy that. Do you see any activity around the ship?”
Dawson, not making assumptions because he’s already seen one of these things close up,
Cellars remembered.
“Negative activity around the … ship,” Montgomery replied.
Shark!
“But we do have company at our ten o-clock,” Cellars said, seeing the familiar long, dark, and barely-visible shape suddenly appear from the left side of the disc and then flash away into the darkness.
“I see him,” Montgomery said calmly.
“How many did you see?”
Dawson again, worrying like a mother hen.
“Just one, but all the others probably know about my mental problems too, so we’d better get going,” Cellars said, and then began to kick his way further into the now much colder and darker depths.
The shark-like creature came in fast from behind — their six o’clock position — when they reached fifty feet of depth, but Montgomery had been expecting that. He whirled around with his dive light beam glaring out from his left hand and the pneumatic spear gun extended out in his right … and looked about ready to fire the sedative-tipped spear when the creature sudden veered away and disappeared back into the darkness.
“Aggressive little bastard,” Montgomery muttered. “Stay alert.”
It came back around again at sixty-eight feet, but the sides of the lake had narrowed down so much that Montgomery had no trouble tracking as it swept underneath the huge — and now light-blocking — ship some fifteen feet overhead … and it veered away again at the last second, somehow sensing when the icy-calm Delta Team Commander was about ready to lose his sense of humor … and his temper.
Don’t kill it if you can possibly help it
, Cellars had pleaded back in the warehouse.
It’s the only one we know we can negotiate with
.
The Cellars realized he was hovering at the lip of what looked like a shallow cylindrical basin approximately six feet deep and ten across.
“Better hurry up, guys. Things are starting to get real interesting up here.”
Dawson’s voice again, barely audible now.
“Okay, I’m going down in there,” Cellars said to Montgomery. “Keep a sharp eye out. I don’t think our play-mate is going to be very happy about what I’m going to do.”
“Copy that.”
The floor of the cylindrical basin was covered with a three-to-four-inch layer of fine silt, but the items that Cellars was expecting to find at the bottom were there … and it only took him a few seconds to reach down through the silt and scoop three handfuls into the wide mouth of the bag. He was starting for a fourth handful when …
“SHIT! LOOK OUT!”
Cellars ducked and twisted instinctively — barely avoiding the dark shark-like shape that flashed past his upturned chest — and then got slammed hard by the sweeping tail that nearly tore the full face mask from his head.
Almost entirely surrounded — and effectively blinded — now by the billowing accumulation of fine silt, Cellars power-kicked himself up and out of the shallow dirt and rock basin, looked around frantically, and saw Montgomery with the police baton in his gloved right hand, and blood seeping out from a long tear in the upper left shoulder of his wet suit.
“Are you okay?” Cellars asked, starting to feel the numbness in his body as he forced himself to get his breath back under control.
“Fine … just getting colder and grumpier,” the Delta Team Commander responded as he swam over and retrieved his spear gun. “You got enough of those things?”
“More than enough,” Cellars said, holding up the quarter-filled mesh sack.
“Good, then let’s get our butts out from under this damned ship — and back up to the surface — before I get any colder and grumpier, and you end up having to negotiate with their second fiddle.”
CHAPTER 37
As planned, Cellars and Montgomery surfaced about fifteen feet from the lake shoreline — in waist-deep water, directly opposite the two tree stumps he’d sat at earlier in the evening — and in the center of a twenty-five-foot circle of light that was now pure ‘red zone.’
As if to make the point clearer, Dawson now had the Kiowa’s bright-green sighting laser sweeping back and forth across the rear quarter-arc of the red circle … apparently a sufficient warning because the dark dorsal fin made one fast sweep ten feet out, and then disappeared as the two men quickly removed their masks, BC/tanks and fins, and then dragged the heavy gear to shore.
To Cellars amazement, Lisa Marcini and Dr. Elliott Sutta were standing there — ten feet from the shoreline, holding a pair of winter jackets and Kevlar assault vests — along with assault-rifle-armed MP Sergeant Harthburn who managed to look both nervous and determined.
Approximately fifty yards back and to his left, Cellars could see Byzor and Gladstone — equivalently armed — standing in cold winter gear beside a group of perhaps thirty blanket-and-jacket-wrapped figures sprawled on the snowy ground and being attended to by teams of red-cross-arm-banded medics.
Another thirty yards behind them, higher up the ridge, four large military transport helicopters rested on the snow-covered ground, their rotors slowly shutting down.
Lisa Marcini started towards Cellars, but he waved her off — pointing at a now kneeling and clearly distressed Montgomery — as he quickly unstrapped his BC from the air tank and attached regulator, did the same thing with Montgomery’s BC, and then slipped his BC back over his rubber-suited shoulders. “He needs your attention a lot more than I do right now.”
Marcini took one look at Montgomery’s ripped and bloody wet suit, then hurriedly led him away from the shore line, and got him lying on the ground as a pair of medics broke away from the crowd and started running toward the visibly-distressed Delta Team Commander.
“I was afraid you were going to need one of us professionally before this day was out,” Sutta said as he approached Cellars with the vest and jacket, “and I’m very glad to see that it wasn’t — oh, my god!”
Seeing the shocked expression on Sutta’s face, Cellars lunged to his feet, reached forward, yanked his Sig Sauer out of the vest in the pathologist’s hands, spun around … and then stared in wide-eyed amazement at the huge dark disc as it slowly rose out of the water a hundred yards from shoreline — water pouring off its hull, immediately followed by a surrounding and partially concealing fog — and came to a hovering halt a hundred feet over the now-churning lake surface.
Distracted by the dramatic image of the rising ship, Cellars didn’t see the dark figure also rise up out of the water fifteen feet from the edge of the lake … until Dawson snapped the Kiowa’s spotlight on him — and kept it there — as the creature waded ashore, walked over and sat down on one of the stumps.
Cellars was vaguely aware that Sutta had retreated back to where Marcini and the medics were working on Montgomery; but his full attention was now on the alien.
“Glad to see you made it back in one piece,” Cellars said as he walked over to the opposite stump with Montgomery’s BC in his left hand and the Sig Sauer in his right, and sat down … dropping the partially-inflated and still-dripping buoyancy compensator at his feet. “I was afraid that my dive partner might have scrambled your brains with that baton.”
“Was that necessary?” the dark figure rasped, his violet eyes glaring furiously at Cellars.
Cellars stared back at the black, rubbery-skinned creature silently for a few seconds, noticing with some satisfaction that his left eye seemed swollen and more reddish-purple than the right one.
“I was curious about how you planned on collecting all those stones, if your primary back-up plan involved blowing up your hidden sanctuary and turning it into a big silt-filled lake,” he finally said. “The sloping funnel effect — coupled with the sequential rumblings — was a clever way of getting the stones all gradually rolling down to one spot where they could be easily retrieved. Is this a standard procedure, applicable to your other sanctuaries on other planets?”
The dark figure remained ominously silent.
“And I thought the ‘dorsal fin cutting through the dark water’ was a little over the top, even for you guys; so I figured we needed to balance things out — accumulate a few more trading items on our side — before you and I start inching away from our initial negotiating positions,” Cellars said, as he reached into the big pouch of his BC with his left hand, opened the wide flap, pulled out the partially-filled mesh bag, and tossed it to the snow-covered ground midway between the two stumps. “And besides, I kind of like the idea that I can do a little ‘shape-shifting‘ myself … to make me look — and maybe even act — more like you,” he added, glancing down at his dripping black wet suit. “Kinda levels out the mental playing field at bit, if you know what I mean.”
The dark figure remained silent and passive.
“I told you — at beginning of our discussions — we consider you a very interesting human, Colin Cellars,” the creature finally said. “You have done nothing to change our opinion. Is that your friend Byzor standing over there by the Senator and the Reverend?”
“We are who we are, for better or worse,” Cellars replied with a shrug, ignoring the question. “So, how do you suggest we start this out?”
“Will Byzor join us for the exchange?”
“Not at first,” Cellars replied evenly. “As you might know, when humans play the game of chess, we like to send the pawns and knights out first — clear the board out a bit — and then let the king and queen work out the end game.”
“Which are you?” the figure asked in what Cellars sensed was a truly curious voice, “a pawn or knight.”
“I seem to like to charge forward and take off on tangents when things start getting crazy; probably has something to do with my stubborn streak,” Cellars said with a tight smile. “So the ‘knight’ job description is probably a little closer to reality than the ‘pawn’.”
“I see,” the creature replied impassively, and then paused for a moment. “Then you will be the starting point in our exchange, with the return of your memories?”
“Actually, I think I’m going to hold off on that for a bit,” Cellars said as he reached into his BC pouch again, and pulled out a zip-locked plastic bag visibly containing a pair of diamond ear rings and a diamond pendant. “Why don’t we start with Jody, and see how things go from there?”
The dark figure blinked languidly.
“We never could figure out how it was possible to store all that resurrection data of yours in a little chunk of plain old rock. We still have no idea how you get that data into a diamond matrix — much less get it back out again — but the underlying science is starting to make a little more sense. All those three-dimensional carbon–carbon bonds, just waiting to be … what? Manipulated … or teased apart a bit?”