The Bright Black Sea (116 page)

'Where does all this light come from?' asked Min, as
she and Vinden followed us up. 'It seems to come from every
direction. Or none at all. It's almost like the sky just
glows.'

The light was a milky white, and the sky, for the
most part was a very pale, hazy blue to blue-green which shaded
into to a faint yellow in some directions. It was slightly brighter
in one direction, which may've cast a vague shadow.

'It's a phenomena of the Tenth Star. You see, though
it's star-like at its core, its upper stratums are very luminous –
coldly florescent. So what you have is this vast sphere emitting a
cool, very bright white light which is diffused by the atmosphere
throughout the Pela in spite of the countless islands and tens of
millions of kilometers of atmosphere between us and the light
source. The closer you get to the inner edge, the brighter and
warmer the Pela gets, but it's never dark. Night is unimagined here
– even on planet sized rocks, it never gets darker than twilight on
the outward facing side,' said Vinden, adding, 'Enough gawking,
let's get to work. We need to anchor the ship.'

It wasn't my ship, or even my former ship, so I just
waited for orders. Min glanced to Vynnia, who took charge. She
directed some of the crew to use two of cables that had helped
secure the
Indomitable
, as our anchor lines and directed Sar
aboard the ship to use the cargo crane to carry the cables and two
crew members over to the vine covered cliff to tie us up. Given no
direct orders, I watched the proceedings, hands in my pockets, from
the majestic height of a (former) tramp ship captain without
comment.

After Vinden's crew had secured the ship, Vinden had
Sar use the crane to punch a hole in the vines, sending up a swarm
of small, angry birds darting out from the vines. As they flirted
angrily around us, I realized they were very familiar.

'Bachelor birds!' I exclaimed.

Vinden laughed. 'Aye. And angry ones at that! Don't
annoy them any more. These aren't our tame ones.'

'What?' asked Ben Ton standing next to me.

'The birds.' I waved at them. 'We've had them living
aboard the
Starry Shore
forever. This must be where they
came from. Don't annoy them, they're fearless and will use their
beaks as little swords,' I added, pulling the visor of my cap low
over my eyes, just in case they decided I was to blame.

'They seem mad already,' he replied, following
suit.

Once Sar had punched a doorway-sized hole through the
vines and the bachelor birds had settled down a bit, we trooped out
across the gap behind Vinden and Min along the crane arm to gather
near the ragged hole the crane had torn.

'We'll need torches,' Tenry called back, sending the
last person in line back to the airlock to fetch some.

The vine mat was all of three meters thick, the inner
vines leafless. Beyond, was a cool, dark, and dank cavern that
smelled of decaying vegetation with a sharp, acid undercurrent, lit
only by specks of light filtering through the curtain of vines –
just enough to make out the shadowed hints of a large cavern. We
passed the torches forward.

'There,' Vinden said, pointing with his torch.
'There's the ledge.with the walkway. It leads to the quay and base.
Take a couple of men, Ten, and cut your way out through the vines
from that point. We'll set up some hand lines to it once you're
through to serve as an access bridge. And, by the way, you'd best
assume any snake you come across is poisonous and deal with it
promptly.'

'Right,' said Tenry, adding under his breath, 'Better
late than never, I suppose.'

I followed him into the cavern, and, clinging to the
vines, we made our way towards the ledge, looking for snakes with
every handhold. Several of Vinden's men followed us – the ones who
weren't leery of snakes, I suppose. The ledge was paved with a two
meter wide, rusted metal grating that allowed us to stand using our
magnetic soled boots. We set out to carefully hack our way through
the thick vine mat with plasma machetes. You need to be thoughtful
when using plasma machetes – armored clothing provides some
protection from a careless blow, but the hot, plasma edge to the
blade can take a hand or head off rather effortlessly. A vine, the
size of a tree trunk, blocked the entrance, which had to be cut
through, warm work even with our plasma machetes. We had our
jackets off before we reached the milky light of the Pela.

Once we emerged into the sunlight, they shot two
lines across from the airlock and as soon as we secured them in the
vines, the rest of the crew started across, hand over hand, in a
holiday mood, even the guards, once everyone had cleared the
ship.

Vinden took the lead followed by Min, Vynnia, and the
rest of us into the darkness of the cave. We hadn't gone far before
we reached a gateway of sorts – a concrete blockhouse in the
shadows that rose up into the tangled vines over head. Vinden
cleared some foliage from a hidden panel and pressing his palm on
the palm reader, caused a series of lamps lining the cavern wall
along the path to flicker to life. From beyond a bend we could see
a yellow glow flooding the far end of the cavern, etching its many
cracks and crevasses in deep black shadows. With the sudden
appearance of the lights the cavern's inhabitants squealed as one
and took to the air in a thick swirling stream, flying just over
our heads in a noisy maelstrom of dark, crow-like shapes with claws
at the ends of their short wings. Thousands of 'em, it seemed.

'Dark-wraiths,' said Vinden over our startled curses.
'Harmless.'

He'd hardly finished speaking when we heard a loud,
angry hiss from out of the shadows in the rocks alongside the
blockhouse. Looking up I saw illuminated in the beams of half a
dozen torches, a rather vast snake, its green feathers shimmering
in the torch light, its crocodile head and a wide mouth open and
showing its sharp teeth. It hissed again and looked down at us with
dark eyes. It didn't look happy. Everyone reached for their
weapons.

'Let it be!' commanded Vinden sharply. 'It's just a
sentry snake. Harmless if you leave it be.'

'Will it leave us be?' someone asked, but before
Vinden could answer, the snake shot out over our heads to join the
circling flock of dark-wraiths, its undulating four meter long
feathered body changing thickness as it puffed out its feathers and
collapsing them flat like ten thousand little wings, to shoot
itself forward, intent on devouring all the dark-wraiths that
didn't get out of its way fast enough.

'Stay clear of its nest and it'll steer clear of you.
They're often domesticated to keep villages free of small pests,'
said Vinden, and pushed on around the bend towards the source of
the lights.

The wide passage grew into a large grotto as we
rounded the bend. The walkway widened into a broad quay, littered
with piles of crates and machinery secured under cargo nets. Tied
up alongside the quay was a battered, and rusting ship, similar in
shape and size, to the
Indomitable
. It was surrounded by two
slightly smaller vessels that I took to be freighters, each having
only one deckhouse aft along with stubby wings, steering vanes, and
propellers with a flat, wide open deck stretching to an armored
bow. In addition, there were scores of small boats tied up about
the grotto harbor – fat, tubular vessels, that sported a propeller
and steering vanes on one end, along with a sheltered section aft
than housed the motor, with the rest of the boat mostly an open
cage, crossed by some bars for structural support and seating.

Beyond the quay and harbor, the grotto stretched out
and up into shadows. Three half rings of low concrete buildings
rose above the quay, dimly illuminated by a series of flood lights,
and beyond, in the deepening shadows, lumps of machinery and
perhaps more supplies secured to the rugged and steep hills that
arched overhead. It became clear as we examined the base that this
was not a cave, as such, but a hollow, created where two islands
awkwardly met and became entangled. I could trace, in the dim lit
light, the wide seam of old vines arching overhead and below the
harbor where the two islands met. These vines were likely many
meters thick, since no chinks of light penetrated through the
ancient tangle.

Vinden paused briefly on the quay, looking about
while the shrill cries of the dark-wraiths, and their faint echoes
broke the tomb-like silence of the grotto. The only movement, the
swirling dark-wraiths and the pursuing sentry snake.

'Everything looks in order. The barracks are hidden
up in that crevasse,' he said, pointing to a high, narrow valley at
the far end of the grotto where the two islands came together.

Tenry, standing next to me glanced around, taking in
the dark-wraith guano covered boxes, the battered, rusty ships and
the dead and deserted base. 'He's remarkably optimistic,' he
whispered.

'I'm afraid so,' I replied, equally quietly, as we
joined the line of spacers behind Vinden, who had started off
across the quay towards the dark seam beyond the ring of
buildings.

We marched up through the rows of plain, flat-topped,
concrete boxes that served as barracks, workshops and warehouses,
along a metal grated walkway. All their doors were closed and
sealed, the walkway littered with twigs, leaves and other, less
identifiable debris, that were stirred up in a swirl of air as we
trooped by, joining the floating debris drifting in the slight air
currents. Except for the flying circus of the dark-wraiths and the
sentry snake swirling overhead, it all was definitely very
tomb-like.

The metal walkway ended with the ring of buildings.
Fortunately, our course followed the vine seam so that we could
continue on, pulling ourselves carefully along with our hands, like
a line of swimmers along the bottom of a dim lit sea. Leaving the
harbor base behind, we had to rely on the darting beams of our
torches to find our way up into the shadows, as the seam narrowed
into a rock lined crevasse where the two islands met. Vinden was
going slowly now, looking for something in the rocky wall. He
finally stopped, and finding a rock that moved, pushed it up and
out of his way revealing the faint glow of a palm reader. As he
placed his palm on the panel, he turned to us and said, 'We felt it
best to hide the barracks in case the base was discovered.' As he
spoke, a doorway in the rocks before him opened inwards and lights
flickered and sprang out through the open door.

The door opened to a large, brightly lit room carved
out of living rock. We glided in behind Vinden and latching on to
the metal floor to stand once more and take in the large room
carved out of stone. Tall racks of sleeper-pods lined two sides of
the room – the remaining loyal forces of the old order, some three
hundred strong. Crates under netting filled the back of the room,
and in the corner, a small power room with two micro-reactors and
generators. Here everything was in pristine order. We stood
silently around Vinden while he took all this in. He may have even
shed a tear, as he seemed to wipe one from his eye, at least as
seen from behind.

I, on the other hand, couldn't help but feel a dart
of dismay as I looked around. We were to bring down an empire with
this? In vids and books, perhaps... but for real? I looked back to
Vinden as he shook himself clear of his sentimentality, and sprang
into action. He stalked over to the first stack of sleeper-pods and
directed some of his men to pull out the bottom one. They settled
it on the floor, trailing its power cord.

He stood for a few moments longer, looking down on
the pod, its clear top thinly veiled in dust.

'Step closer and have a look. I've a few words to say
before I revive Captain DarQue,' he said indicating to his two
helpers to open the lid of the pod.

We obediently shuffled closer and looked down on the
sleeping DarQue. He was a tall, slender man with a lean, high cheek
boned face, who was dressed in a uniform of dark, emerald green
with gold trimmings that accented his slimness. His hair was also a
dark green and very long, half way down his back from what we could
see. Looking closer, I realized it wasn't hair. Not exactly.

'Captain DarQue is a Cim, a human native of the Pela.
People like us who can, seemingly trace our roots back to the Neb
and Terra, are know as the Dar. As you can see, the Cim have
feathers replacing hair like all of the unique fauna of the Pela.
Since we have no firsthand account of the Dars arriving in the
Pela, we've no way of knowing if the Cim were here when we arrived.
Even stranger is the fact that their DNA is almost identical to
ours. The small differences account for their feather-hair and
their more articulated feet that enable them to comfortably live in
the zero-gravity conditions of the smaller islands far better than
we Dars. The two races are unable to cross breed, so we remain two
distinct races. The Cim account for nine out of twelve people in
Cimmadar, a ratio common in the Pela we know.

'I want to impress upon you that you're to treat the
Cim just as you would anyone else. In Cimmadar, the Cim and the Dar
people have lived side by side since the founding legends and they
are critically important to our success. Moreover, I strongly
advise you to treat everyone you meet with courtesy, since we, Cim
and Dar alike, are, by nature and necessity, fierce, proud people
who have rather direct ideas of justice. You'll find no finer
friends nor deadlier enemies than in the peoples of the Pela. Be
advised that affronts to honor are often settled by duels. I've
downloaded the Cimmadar language to your com links and most of our
customs. But until you've completely absorbed that info, be careful
of what you say and how you act. DarQue, I'm sure, will see that
his people give you some leeway, as outsiders, but only for so long
and only up to a point,' he paused and looked around grimly.
'You're no longer in the Unity, nor even in the drifts. You're in
the most primitive place you've ever known. I can only give you so
much protection.'