Chapter 3
Scotland Beach, Florida
July 20, 2121
5:30 pm
Traveling through the Farpool was like no other trip Kloosee and Pakma had ever taken before, though they had made the trip five times now. It was hard to describe. Spinning in a great vortex, being pinned to the side of the lifeship. Blinding light, strobing and flickering and flashing until your eyes hurt. The roaring sound. The weight of centrifugal force, the smells…of your own fear, your own sweat, your own body waste coming out—
It was getting rougher every time, a jolting, jarring, shuddering ride and when it was over, you slammed to a halt and had to spend a few moments collecting yourself, cleaning yourself up, trying to regain your senses and get the blood going again, reminding yourself to breathe again.
Kloosee had the knack for how to manipulate the Farpool—really, it was a matter of where to press, where to turn and roll the lifeship, when to thrust and when to back off. Again and again, he had shown he could hit their targets in time and space with very little error.
They slammed into the eekoti waters with a blood-draining deceleration and Kloosee fought the lifeship controls to bring them out of the spin. The lifeship rolled nearly upside down before he had the thing stable and shooting out of the core of the whirlpool. As soon as they were clear, he punched up the forward jets and brought the craft to a complete stop. They drifted, settling gently toward the seabed.
“Check the pod, Pakma…hope we didn’t lose it coming through—“
Pakma tek craned around in her cockpit and examined the fittings. “She’s still attached…connections look good. I don’t pulse any exterior damage. Inside, it’s hard to tell…I’ll have to get outside and take a peek.”
“Let me find us a quiet spot first—“
Kloosee fired up the jets, massaged some kinks out of his forepaddles and hunted along the sandy seabed for a place they could tie up. The lifeship pinged ahead and all around—now something was in front of them, a few beats. It was a dark pile, dead ahead.
The pile was like nothing either of them had ever seen before. Misshapen, jumbled metal structures jutted at an angle out of the seabed. It was an irregular pile of junk but there were plenty of edges and corners the lifeship could be secured to. Kloosee jetted down and hovered just next to the pile, then settled them gently onto the bottom. He cut the jets and secured ship’s power. The instrument panel went dark.
“Glad we wore our suits this time,” he muttered, climbing out of the cockpit. “I’d be all black and bruised from the ride.” Eekoti water was always too warm for his taste, salty but clear, onk’kel’te was the word here. Not like Seomish waters at all.
The two of them wrestled the lifeship into position, then Pakma uncoiled the tie-line and secured the ship to the junk pile. Tying the line, she noticed some words on a dented metal panel: it said Chevrolet. Perhaps a warning to others, she surmised. They would have to work at deciphering the eekoti written language, though the echopods might work for translating voice. Time would tell with that.
Clad in their lifesuits, puk’lek’te was what Tamarek lu had called the new designs, they headed off toward shallower water, following the gentle rise of the seabed.. Kloosee had to laugh at the word; it meant ‘seamother limbs’. Tamarek had insisted they could venture into the Not-Water and waddle around just like seamothers on the beach.
That should be good for a few laughs.
Cruising along the seabed, which was remarkably flat, sandy and clear, Kloosee became aware of just how quiet Pakma had been. She’d been that way through the whole trip, even before, during the ride up from Omsh’pont. Something was bothering her; he could pulse turmoil inside of her…even through the lifesuit, the bubbles were jumbled and fizzing and crashing about. But she said nothing and even drifted off several beats away, like she wanted to be alone, paralleling his course.
Finally Kloosee could stand it no longer. He veered closer, pulsed her once more—the bubbles and turmoil were still there—and pulled up alongside. She made no move or any reaction to his presence. It was like she was roaming in a dream…on auto.
“Pakma, something’s bothering you…you haven’t said five words since we got here. Are you sick? Are you upset…I’m pulsing a lot of turbulence inside…I need you whole and well for the mission—“
At first, she said nothing, but drifted away again, opening up a half beat between them. Kloosee got mad and slapped his tail, sending him sharply toward her, then he crossed in front of her and she had to pull up quickly to avoid a collision.
“Watch where you’re going,” she said sharply. She went on and Kloosee hustled to stay up with her.
“What’s wrong? You’re upset…and you’re not doing a very good job of hiding it…Longsee would throw a fit…you know how he is about keeping shoo’kel.”
Pakma seemed resigned to having Kloosee right next to her. He tried nuzzling at her belly, but she slapped him away. “Don’t do that, okay?”
“What is it…did I say something wrong?”
Pakma suddenly pulled up abruptly and stopped. She hung vertically in the water, clad in the suit like a forlorn baby in its birth shroud, and glared at him. “She’s all over you, you know. I can smell her every time you come close. It’s cloying…it’s like overripe tong’pod…the really mushy kind.”
Immediately, he knew she was talking about Tulcheah, about their coupling in Omsh’pont.
“Pakma, Tulcheah and I are em’kelmates. We’ve been together for dozens of mah, since we were kids. It was nothing…just a little hello. I pulsed her sad, a little needy and did what I had to to…em’kels are like that.”
“You didn’t have to spend so much time there. I thought we were---“ But she didn’t say it. Instead, she gave an abrupt tail slap and plunged ahead, nosing along the sea bottom.
Kloosee hustled after her. “Pakma…Pakma, wait up…you know how I feel about you…the mission depends on us…we have to get along…we’re comrades here—“
Pakma shimmied and scraped along the sand, intentionally throwing up a cloud of silt in his face. “I thought we were more than that—“
“We are…we are…you know, you could join the em’kel too…Putektu’s open to anyone.”
“Sure, all you ever do is talk about Not-Water, about seamothers, waddling around like drunken puk’lek…what am I supposed to do…Not-Water’s like hell…we’re not supposed to be there. Shooki warns against it…it’s death for anyone…your em’kel just likes to stir up trouble, Kloosee, that’s all it is. And you won’t be happy until every female in Omt’or is clinging to your tail. I’m not that desperate.”
With that, Pakma scooted up toward the surface, now only ten beats above them, and breached in a spray of foam, taking a look around.
Kloosee went after her, doing likewise.
They rode the surface waves for a few minutes, now grateful for the lifesuits, though Kloosee felt awkward and constricted, the way he often did in Not-Water. Maybe it was just a reaction. Not-water was ee’kootor’kelte, the pressure was too low to sustain life, it was death and damnation. Pakma was right about that.
Not only that, but it was bright up here too. Blinding bright. Painfully bright. Kloosee breached and immediately tuned down the darkness setting of his helmet visor.
The beach was ahead. Eekoti were strolling along. Some were in the shallows, playing in the waves, splashing and laughing. Small vessels throwing off plumes of water jetted back and forth; they’d have to watch out for those.
Kloosee decided now was the time.
He reached the shallowest rise in the bottom and actuated his mobilitors, the puk’lek’te, that would give him and Pakma ground mobility. Then he reared up, placing his full weight on the limbs, standing in several feet of water and wobbled unsteadily back and forth before the stabilizers kicked in.
He waved his arm limbs back and forth. He had seen eekoti
do that. Longsee surmised it was a form of greeting. He couldn’t pulse anything. Then he pushed forward through the waves and approached the beach. Behind him, more hesitantly, Pakma was doing the same.
It was so painfully bright he had to dial down the helmet several more notches.
Kloosee kicked and splashed through the waves, trying to imitate the smaller eekoti. Longsee had recommended that: similarity and parallelism in gestures may make them more comfortable with your presence. He had recorded bulbs on the subject.
Now, Kloosee saw many eekoti scattering, running away from him, waving and screaming, flinging sand everywhere. What was going on? He turned to check Pakma; she was just clambering up onto the beach.
When he turned back, he spotted one eekoti who wasn’t fleeing. This one was taller, probably an adult. He was running toward them, waving some kind of handheld device, perhaps a welcoming gift.
Shots rang out. Loud, popping noises: one, two, three, four of them. Sharp cracks.
Kloosee felt a sharp pain in his side. He reached for the pain, and found the lifesuit had been holed, life-giving water was already spilling out, a steady stream. Then another shot came and more sharp pain. Kloosee’s limbs buckled and gave way. He fell headlong into the sand.
As he fell, he saw Pakma was in trouble too…she was staggering sideways, pitching forward and she fell as he did, heavily, awkwardly, plowing face first into the sand.
What had happened? Was it the eekoti? Was it the lifesuit?
Kloosee struggled to move, but the water was leaving him and already breathing was hard…they had backup systems but—the hole grew darker, larger and he soon disappeared into the black tunnel, slipping into unconsciousness, spinning spinning spinning and was sucked in.
Sergeant Carl Wolcott had been with Scotland Beach’s Uniformed Division for seven years, half of them with the Beach Patrol Squad. It was interesting work, interesting in the same sense his pathologist friend Wally Ng talked about dead bodies…conversation you didn’t want to have at the local coffee shops, not if you wanted people to stick around. Cops and pathologists…Carl had often joked with Wally about what it would be like to attend a pathologist convention, with all the slide shows and the jokes and the conversations in the hallways over bagels and coffee.
“Yeah, probably like a proctologist convention,” Wally always came back. “I’d pay not to attend one of those.”
Wolcott had never seen anything like it in all his years on the Beach Squad. One minute, kids were building sand castles and teenagers were necking and Moms and Dads were dipping Junior in the kiddie waves along Shelley Beach and the next moment, two wackos who looked like creatures from the Black Lagoon were waddling up out of the ocean, scaring the bejeezus out of everybody.
He’d fired several shots and the creatures…things…whatever the hell they were—had gone down fast. Now they lay writhing in the shallows and beachgoers were starting to gather.
“Stay back! Stay back…it’s still moving—get way back there!”
The crowd pulled back about fifty feet, while Wolcott crept forward, his gun still in firing position. The nearer creature was moving, it sounded like squeals or clicks or something, thrashing about in the sand and water, flinging up dirt as it writhed. The farther one was mostly in the water, smaller in size, but still--
Wolcott came up. What on God’s green earth--?
The beast—for that was what he had started calling it in his mind—was not a dolphin. It wasn’t a shark. It had legs and arms and what looked like armor plating. It had holes in the armor and water was spouting out of the holes. The beast squealed some more. And the smaller one down by the waterline actually seemed to be whimpering.
Wolcott got on the radio, ringing up Dispatch.
“Kitty, this is Beachside Two-Five…I got some kind of disturbance down here on Shelley Beach…I don’t know how to describe it…I have fired several rounds—need backup immediately…and something else: would you call Gulfside? That’s the Aquarium…we may need one of them down here…Shelley Beach, just a hundred yards west of Turtle Key Surf and Board—“
Ten minutes later, Scotland Beach PD’s Beach Patrol Squad had mustered four officers. They surrounded the beasts, laying down strips of crime scene tape to form a defensible perimeter. Two officers—Vang and Nettles—were working the crowd, trying to keep the curious back out of the way.
A small pickup from the Aquarium pulled up. A woman in blue scrubs jumped out of the passenger’s side. Wolcott recognized her. Dr. Josey Holland, Aquarium chief veterinarian. Holland was tall, gawky, long blond hair—she wore some kind of denim wrap around her scrubs. She jogged up, went right to the larger beast and knelt down.
“Careful, Doc…it’s still alive—I dropped it with two shots—“
Holland was poking and probing around its neck, or what she thought was a neck. “Barely alive…I’ve never seen a creature like this before---not a dolphin, not a porpoise…and this skin, it looks like—“
“Armor,” volunteered Wolcott. He hovered over her right shoulder, fingers tickling the handle of his revolver, just in case.
Holland made a decision. “We need to get both of them into the med pool. I’m calling Nautilus.” She pecked a few keys on her wristpad, spoke into it and added, “Hurry, will you…these creatures are dying fast…we need to get them stabilized—“
Ten minutes later, a specially outfitted flatbed truck came grinding along the beach, easing past the growing crowd, hand-waved on by several officers to the downed creatures. It was the Aquarium’s Nautilus…mounted on top of the flatbed was an open water tank, a fiberglass pool like you might find in a backyard, but big enough to hold large marine animals in a wet environment, while they were in transport.
“Come on,” Holland said, lifting the larger beast’s legs, “help me get ‘em up and in.”
Wolcott looked on doubtfully. “You want us to actually grab that thing?”
“I want us to get him and his buddy into the tank, Sergeant. They’re dying…you can see that, hell, you can hear it…hear that wheezing? He needs to get into some water—“
So Wolcott, Nettles, Vang and Joiner helped, along with some burly beachgoers, including one bearded pot-bellied fellow in a wetsuit about three sizes too small. Pot-belly wouldn’t pass for a body-builder but he seemed strong as Hercules. Single-handedly, he hoisted the limbs of the smaller creature and dragged it through the sand to the truck.
Fortunately, there was a small lift at the rear.
As soon as both creatures were safely in the tank of the Nautilus truck, Holland climbed in the cab and motioned the driver to go. Wolcott decided he’d better follow; he worked out an alternate duty shift with the other officers and ran for his motorcycle, parked up next to Lumpy’s Crab Shack by the dune fields. Seconds later, Wolcott’s police bike was pulling in behind the Nautilus, as it skidded out onto Citrus Boulevard, heading for Duncan Street and the right turn into the Aquarium lot.
Inside the cab, Holland was thinking out loud, as much to herself as to her driver, vet tech Rob Stauffer.
“We’ll have to put them in Tank B, Rob. And get the med pool going, make sure it’s up to temperature, salinity, O2, you know what to check—“
“Yes, ma’am. What are those things…some kind of orca?”
Holland just shook her head. “Hell if I know…we may have a new species here…Meier will love that. But first things first: we have to get them stabilized. Wolcott said he fired several rounds. And I saw multiple entry wounds in that skin…that’s the craziest skin I’ve ever seen. Contact Joe Earl too…he’s not a marine animal guy, but he‘s got a pathology background, he knows animal surgery…he may have some ideas.”
They turned into the Aquarium parking lot and headed for the back entrance.
Tank B was one of several holding pools that Gulfside maintained away from the public areas. It was just beyond the Penguin Pavilion and Swamptown
, behind locked doors and connected by a narrow channel to a smaller surgical pool, equipped with all the medical gear that Gulfside could afford, which wasn’t much. Holland always sighed when she saw the layout inside the med pool suite. If only we had more donors, she would say to herself, and to anyone else who would listen. A few more rich benefactors. And about a hundred million in loose change would help. Then we could really fly.
She felt sorry for the dolphins in the Dolphin Gallery and the belugas and the penguins and seals and especially, Ernie, the tiger shark, who was one of Gulfside’s more popular attractions. They deserved better. A lot better.
Holland supervised off-loading the creatures—already she had named them in her mind Ralph and Alice, thinking of the Kramdens and the Honeymooners—and immediately changed into her wet gear. She entered the medpool and laid out all her instruments, tugging up the medbot unit, with its containment tank full of nano-critters and a control panel, even a small joystick for flying through the innards of her marine animal patients. Holland wasn’t too sure about driving the small flotilla of medbots and surgicytes—she’d skipped the detailed training the manufacturer offered because Gulfside wasn’t the Georgia Aquarium or the Shedd Aquarium and money didn’t grow on trees.
Holland helped her intern Tracey Rook and her technician Rob maneuver Ralph into the pool, positioning him as best they could in the float sling, then securing the animal with straps and hooks.
Rob just shook his head, looked up quizzically. “Tursiops truncatus, do you think, Doc?”
Holland shook her head, sizing up the animal with her hands and fingers. “Doesn’t look like it to me…but this guy must be twelve, maybe fourteen feet long, weigh a ton or more.”
Tracey Rook sniffed and ran her fingers lightly over the skin. “This skin is weird…feels like chitin, like some kind of composite—“
That’s when they found the fasteners.
To Josey Holland’s ever-lasting surprise, what she had thought was a particularly tough outer skin membrane turned out to be a suit of some kind, like a wet suit. By pushing and pulling, struggling and heaving, grunting and straining, the three of them were able to pull the suit off Ralph and see what the creature really looked like.
Tracey put hands to her mouth. “My God—“
Longer and bulkier than a dolphin, Ralph had a beak, a melon, forelimbs and rear limbs, like a dolphin. He had dorsal fins, in fact two of them. Tail flukes. Medial notch in the rear flukes. But it was the hands. The forelimbs, with fingers. Six in all, a thumb and five metatarsals.
No one said a word for a full minute. They all just stared in awe.
Holland took a deep breath. “Okay… so we have a new species here…Gulfside may have a new exhibit. Now, we just have to keep him…and his mate—alive.”
Ralph was starting to thrash about in the sling, so Rob immediately pulled up the anesthetics shelf. It hung down from an articulating arm over the pool. “What do you think, Doc? Sodium pentathol with halothane?”
“I’m thinking…I’m thinking…let’s see, I make him about a ton…two thousand pounds, make it three, set the dose for that. And let’s do a separate dose cocktail of fentanyl and sevoflurane. Right there, anterior to the pectoral fin—“She indicated a spot below one of Ralph’s fins. “Hopefully there are veins nearby—“
Tracey was pulling up another piece of gear. “I’ll get URI ready.” URI was the Ultra Resonant Imager. “If I can fit the thing over top of him—“
Anesthetic was administered to both Ralph and Alice at the same time. From an exterior view, it seemed that Ralph’s injuries and wounds were more severe. “We’ll start with him,” Holland decided.
The scanning was done in silence, only briefly interrupted by a few mmm’s and wows and a lot of head scratching and throat clearing. Someone threw in a ‘What the hell is that?, too.
Holland did her dictation to URI’s recorder. “I’m seeing things I have no idea what they are…lesions in what I think is the reticulum…possible enteric vein damage…if this is the stomach area like I suspect. Extensive tissue damage to what looks like the caudate lobe of the liver, also suprarenal glands and gastroplenic ligaments—“
“Those could be shell fragments in and along the pyloric sphincter,” offered Rob, studying the images. “Severely detached mucosae—“
“And there’s no blowhole,” said Tracey. “Neither of them—they’re not mammals at all. Pure water creatures.”
“At least, we won’t have to worry about aspiration. Let’s get the big one prepped immediately. I’ll fire up the bots.”
Ralph would need surgical intervention right away.
The medbot insertion went well enough and Holland quickly warmed to the task. It’s like learning to ride a bicycle, she told herself. Except I don’t recognize anything in here…Still she was determined and she set to work grimly, cauterizing, slicing, re-sectioning, stitching and patching, using the bots and a handful of other endoscopic tools.
The surgery lasted almost two hours. When she figured she was done and Ralph was sown up and the bots had been extracted, she told Rob to lower the float sling.
“I want him completely submerged while he recovers. Leave him in the sling. And get Alice prepped too.”
The surgery on Alice was less involved; her wounds were less severe. Holland finished with her in an hour and ordered the same post-op procedures.
Two hours later, Rob stood next to Holland in the medpool, putting instruments away and securing the containment cylinder, the URI probe and the instrument trays.
“Now we wait,” Holland muttered. “We’d better get cleaned up.”
“I’m thinking this is a completely new species,” Rob said. “Think what that could mean for us.”
“Yeah, a media circus, probably. Also papers and recognition for us, for the aquarium, for everybody.”
She changed into dry clothes and went back to the pool deck alongside the medical pool. Both creatures were still heavily sedated, secured in their float slings, their wounds heavily bandaged, still connected by wire and tube to life monitors hanging in a basket overhead.
Holland sat down on the pool deck and pulled up her knees, resting her chin on them.
Who are you? she asked herself. What are you? A body similar in proportion to Tursiops, a bottlenose dolphin, but bigger. Fore and rear limbs, tail flukes, two dorsals.
And limbs with fingers. Actual prehensile digits, eerily similar to human hands. How could Evolution have developed that in a water environment…what did they do with those hands?
Her musings were interrupted by Dr. Joe Meier, the Aquarium director, who came into the med pool suite a short time later. Meier was tall, mostly bald, dorky glasses forever perched on the end of his nose. He was the picture of distracted academia, even down to the corduroy jacket with elbow patches.
Meier just stared at Ralph and Alice for a minute, shaking his head. “Incredible…just incredible…Josey, how intelligent do you think these guys might be?”
Holland sucked on the tip of her finger. Her stomach growled, reminding her she hadn’t eaten anything for dinner.
“Very, Joe. URI scan showed a brain-to-body weight ratio greater than any cetacean, greater even than you and me. We did some PET scans…even severely injured, there was a hell of lot of glucose uptake going on…oh, they’ve got brains, all right. They think and act with intention, I’m sure of that. I just don’t know what their intention is.”
Meier went over to a table in the corner. The ‘suits’ they had removed from Ralph and Alice were laid out on the table, along with scales and probes from the Lab. He poked at the ‘helmet’ of one suit, using a set of tongs to nudge it along.
“What the hell do you make of these…extra skin layers?…maybe they shed skin like my German shepherds.”
Holland got up and came over. She put on some latex gloves and fingered the ‘helmet,’ with its clear, be
ak-shaped casing and interior network of fine, almost delicate tubes.
“Look at these tubes, Joe. This isn’t skin. It’s just what it looks like…some kind of suit. External protection you put on and take off. Rob and Tracey scanned this thing from one end to the other…it’s got valves and gears and pumps and some kind of motors, things we have no idea what they are…it’s a pressure suit, something designed and worn, like astronauts wear.”
Meier looked sideways at Holland. “Josey, what are we dealing with here? Nazi frogmen from sunken U-boats? Extraterrestrials? Survivors from Atlantis?”
Holland shrugged. “I don’t know….I really don’t know. But Ralph and Alice don’t belong here, I’m sure of that. They came here, for a reason. I don’t know where they came from. And I don’t know the reason. But I hope to learn…we’ve been handed one of the greatest scientific discoveries in history…right in front of us. We have to move carefully on this, do the science the right way, document everything….”
Meier nodded. “This has to be great for the aquarium. Especially these suits…what an exhibit that’ll be…I’ll get the curators to work on it tomorrow, first thing. Just think of it: a whole new theme for next year. I can see it now—“ he put his hands up to show an imaginary marquee in the air. “—Visitors from an Alien Sea—Be a Part of History…all the donors and benefactors will wet their pants trying to get in on this…Jeez, the merchandising alone will—“
Holland cut him off. “Joe, the science has to come first. I don’t want anything to mess up the science.”
“Maybe you don’t, but let me remind you what I said at last month’s staff meeting: Gulfside is hurting financially. We need money. We need visitors. We need everything…hell, you yourself said you need more equipment in the lab…microscopes, scanners, spectrometers, all those gizmos cost money and we don’t have it. Look at ‘em, Josey…Ralph and Alice…I like the names, by the way…we can use that…. They’re a floating gold mine, better than Sea World, better than Animal Kingdom, better than Disney World. We play our cards right and we’ll be swimming in dollars. The blunt truth is we have to do something to raise our profile and draw more tourists in, or Gulfside will close.”
Holland waved him away. “Joe, I know all that. We all know that. I’m just saying we should go at this carefully, plan things, do the science right from the start. I’d like to not have a circus just yet…hell, Ralph and Alice may not even survive the night. I know nothing about where they came from, what they eat, how they live. All that’s got to be researched and documented.”
“Yes, yes, of course you’re right…nobody’s arguing that. But we’d better make use of what’s dropped into our laps here, and do that right too, or there won’t be an aquarium here next year for you to do your precious science in.”
So they both waited and watched, both hoping for good things from Ralph and Alice, each in their own ways praying that the creatures survived the night, and made a full recovery.
Josey Holland knew that the days ahead would be trying ones.