New Siqdor

Thank you for downloading this Storyworks DBM eBook. I will always make the first book in every series available for free to subscribers, and occasional short tie-in fiction. Join my …

Storyworks Posse

New Siqdor

Zero Point Light, Book 2

Copyright 2015 Stephen J. Carter

Storyworks DBM

Smashwords Edition

Discover other titles by Stephen J. Carter:

Story Crisis, Story Climax 1

Storm Ring

Bangkok Z

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Table of Contents

1. Crossing

2. Eighty Chambers

3. Stilled

4. Dive

5. Dry Mist

6. Spheres

7. Nuke

8. Space-Mike

9. Tulvar

10. Assault

11. Hybrids

12. Echo

13. Swim

14. Immersion

15. Incubar

16. Stealth

17. Senescence

Three Days Later

Epilogue

Review

About the Author

Other Titles

Connect

1 | Crossing

Thomas guided the dinghy north along the Inuvoran coast. The river mouth that lay ahead would serve as his oblique referent for their outward journey to the seaport. He turned them through a tight quarter-arc and set a heading out into the open sea.

Carmen and Franklin sat in the dinghy’s stern watching the landward horizon. They almost expected the stilling sheet to come rolling up into view above the escarpment. But in fact it had not yet climbed the valley’s long slope, and was slowly scudding along parallel with them, hemmed in by the escarpment. Its sudden appearance in the valley had been unnerving for all of them. They had known that it would eventually blanket this region’s landmass, as it had elsewhere. But that had seemed a far-off event. They realized they were not safe anywhere along this coast.

Breaking camp and launching the dinghy had gone smoothly. Their unpromising plan was to pick up Oscar at the seaport and continue on to the storm ring. Only by getting beyond that wall of storms could they escape this coming sheet. They would sail a circuit around it, and find a way through. It wasn’t a great plan. But what choice did they have?

The ocean was not glass-smooth, its wide swells moved gently up and down with a systolic slowness. It felt as though Nebura was holding its breath. As the afternoon wore on the dream-like suspension of movement continued. Carmen was looking ahead, but the horizon was empty. She couldn’t see any sign of the seaport.

Franklin saw her expression and smiled. He turned to Thomas. How long?

Three hours, give or take.

It was not long after Seamus took over at the helm that Carmen saw the stilling sheet far behind. It was pouring out through the river mouth. She touched Franklin’s arm and he glanced back. After a long look he resolutely faced forward.

The afternoon wore on. The sun was now nowhere to be seen in the slate-grey sky. They had crossed the half-way point. The coast, and the sheet could only be seen as a part of the curvature of the horizon. It no longer seemed quite real.

The seaport finally came into view. It gained stature gradually.

But something new had claimed their attention. Thomas was the first to notice that the upper eighteen inches of the ocean’s surface had grown much clearer, almost transparent. The unnatural clarity had steadily increased. Soon they could see down about thirty feet. It was disorienting. At moments the illusion of being suspended in midair was irresistible.

It wasn’t like this when I came before, Marnie whispered.

The water was still refracting light the way it should, Franklin said, shaking his head.

Seamus occasionally turned the craft around and ramped up the propulsion’s torque just to churn the sea. The roiled surface disrupted the ocean’s oppressive glass-like illusion. They moved on towards the seaport, increasingly eager to reach their destination.

To Carmen’s eyes the horizon on all sides was a line between the lesser blue of the water and the slightly deeper blue of the sky, the reverse of what it should be. To a disinterested observer the seaport and the dinghy would have been the only apparent objects on this whole upended saucer of ocean.

* * *

They pivoted their attention to the seaport, which was now less than a mile away. And as with their dinghy, the seaport in all its parts perched as if in midair. It had a complex superstructure of airtight titanium tubes, each about two feet in diameter that served as beams and girders, holding up rank after rank of lightweight fiberalloy floors and walls. Parts of the it were open, other parts closed in, forming a complex patchwork of large hanger-like structures.

Marnie explained that the only way in was via an underwater entryway. Carmen smiled at her friend’s earlier reticence back on the mainland – Marnie had made this journey with Oscar only a couple days before, yet had barely mentioned it.

They looked up and saw Oscar walk out onto the structure’s roof. He waved and pointed down, and held his thumb up.

Marnie smiled. Soon we’ll have to dive, she said.

Being this near made the seaport seem enormous to Carmen, as though several city blocks had been airlifted in, then haphazardly rearranged. The lowest twenty percent of its height rose through the clear upper fathoms of the ocean – a circular, sloping surface, a marine glacis, as if the lower section of a gray hill was rising from the water. Every fifteen feet along its perimeter the glacis connected to large vertical, submerged titanium tubes. The understructure was clearly visible. Above the sloping surface perched the circular upper levels, which reached out about half-way to the perimeter of the hill. The submerged extremity of the seaport, deeper than thirty feet, was not visible at those opaque depths. They turned as they neared it, and started moving along parallel to its outer edge, Marnie guiding them in.

On the far side, away from the mainland, they came to the ruins of an elaborate docking assembly that joined three of the vertical tubes on the outermost perimeter, below the glacis. It was now canted up and out, and one end of the dock sloped away below. They approached to within a few yards of that and saw that the inside of the dock was hollow, and descended beneath the glacis.

This is where we dive, Marnie said.

2 | Eighty Chambers

On the bottom of the ocean, near Oceangate’s perimeter, at the end of Gate 14 stood Mick and Turok. They were inside the anteroom of a vertical column that reached up through a mile’s depth of ocean to the surface. The first elliptical chamber was above them. Biting on his breathing template and giving a quick thumbs up, Turok climbed the steps of the permanent platform, a platform submerged in the water above them. Mick watched as Turok stepped through the plasma membrane into the first chamber. Fully immersed in water and standing on the platform, Turok looked down at Mick and signaled again, pointing up. He pushed off, scissor-kicked, and slowly rose. Mick smiled and stepped up after his friend, rising through the membrane until he too stood, fully submerged, on the platform. The water was easily ten degrees cooler than the air. His spatial orientation had shifted, like crossing from weightless floor to ceiling of adjoining rooms in a space station. He imagined how strange it would feel if he turned upside down. He gently pushed off, kicked once, and found himself rising.

Mick saw that the sloping, enveloping walls were unchanged from the day before. His long scissor kicks were not strenuous, though he assumed he may feel differently after a few dozen of these chambers. They had decided to swim through ten of them before taking their first real rest stop. He looked down and saw the floor of the anteroom falling steadily away below. He looked up as he came nearer to Turok, who hovered below the membrane that separated it from the next chamber.

When Turok pointed sideways towards the wall, Mick nodded, and they swam slowly on a lateral curve. They reached the wall and paused. Mick reached out and touched it, then pulled his hand back quickly. It was like touching dry ice, at once warm and numbing cold. The tingling sensation in his fingertips dissipated after a moment. The wall, though transparent, emitted a soft phosphorescence. They could see about ten feet beyond into the ocean’s gloom. The wall neutralized within the column the ambient water pressure outside. Mick didn’t want to think about what it was like out past the wall.

Turok was gesturing back towards the center of the column. Mick pointed up with a questioning look. He preferred to stay near one side of the column’s ellipse, and proceed up through the chambers near this wall. Turok shrugged. They kicked and moved up smoothly towards the second chamber. Though the membranes neutralized what should have been the cumulative water pressure of eighty chambers, they had no effect on the pressure within a chamber. The plasma registered only as a slight tingling, but the pressure went instantly from an effective depth of zero, or sea level, at the top of one chamber, to a depth of sixty-five feet in the bottom of the next chamber up. They crossed into the second, and flinched. That was the worst of it, the repeated moment of transition. They blocked out their fear that the pressure might spike suddenly. Once they got used to it, the chambers passed in rapid succession.

Mick hoped they might come to some sort of ledge, anywhere to lie back, or just sit. After an hour they reached the nineteenth or twentieth chamber – Mick had lost count – and paused above the membrane for a longer rest. There was no ledge in the twentieth, just as there hadn’t been in any of the lower levels.

Mick was about to swim to the top of the twentieth when Turok stayed him. Turok proceeded to lie out flat, and his body nudged slowly down against the slightly denser surface of the membrane. He settled back about ½ inch, and didn’t fall through into the nineteenth. Mick mirrored Turok’s posture, and lay motionless. The slight resistance of the plasma made for a comfortable bed. The only dissonant element was the pressure, and the mild, tingling sensation the plasma left in his back and legs. Mick gradually let all his muscles relax, and he willed a sensation of repose into each of his limbs, all the way to his fingertips, then out to his toes. He breathed deeper and longer with each breath. Despite this, Mick felt a psychological need to take a deep breath from an atmosphere, to feel air on his skin. Beneath their apparent peace and repose was an echoing tension.

Mick felt a touch on his shoulder. He opened his eyes and saw Turok pointing up. Mick was surprised he had fallen asleep. He sheepishly pulled himself up, and immediately fell to mid-thigh into the chamber below. He felt again the strange pins and needles sensation as he kicked and rose through the membrane. They moved up with the accustomed, slow scissor-kicks. The chambers again passed in rapid succession. The darkness of the ocean only a few feet away, and everything about the column – all remained unchanged. It almost felt like being caught in a spatial loop, and they were passing through the same chamber over and over.

* * *

They had lost count of how many chambers they had passed through. They knew only that they were near the half-way point – the 40th chamber. They now routinely passed through each plasma membrane, and did so again. They also knew they were at a depth of about 2600 feet. The ocean beyond the column wall was still inky black. From the beginning they had been able to look up a far greater distance on the inside of the column than outside it – maybe five chambers.

Mick saw a receding series of membranes above, and another one on the side in the next chamber, strangely located on the perimeter wall. After passing through and swimming higher, they looked into a small enclosed ledge, an extrusion in the surface of the column. They hung outside it, looking in. The room beyond only extended back about eight feet, and looked to be thirty feet in width. Turok nodded towards it, his eyes bulging a little behind the bubble that covered his nose and eyes.

Mick held up his hand, motioning him to wait, then turned and slowly reached his other hand beyond the membrane’s surface. They watched as water dripped off his fingers. Absent the water’s buoyancy his hand felt very heavy. He lowered it to the floor of the room. He then withdrew his hand, and backpedaled so his feet were pointing into the room – he then glided through. His legs fell gently to the floor as he slithered in, then his waist. He lifted his knees and pulled himself in, but left his head suspended still inside the chamber. Turok, still in the column, started laughing, which brought on a coughing spasm. He quickly removed his template and punched his head through the membrane. His coughs subsided. Mick smiled. ‘You can’t laugh underwater,’ he thought. As it occurred to him that Turok was breathing inside the room, his friend somersaulted the rest of his body through. Mick pushed forward, and his head passed through, thumping none too gently to the floor.

It was a huge relief to have their arms and legs out of the water, resting on a hard surface. The room’s ambient temperature felt cool. Mick thought it odd that the room’s heaviness should feel more relaxing than the easy buoyancy of the chamber, but it definitely was. He supposed it was the stress of being submerged for so long. He looked up at the low transparent ceiling.

Turok’s chest was heaving in air. He rolled to his side and slowly sat up. He looked across at Mick and gestured a thumbs up. Mick rolled over and lay gasping after removing his template. Turok had gingerly gotten to his feet, and stood swaying drunkenly. He staggered to the side, and stood leaning against the membrane’s rim. He looked around. It felt like standing on a ledge on the side of a mile-high cliff. He lowered himself back to the floor, and sat with his back to the rear wall. Mick just crawled across to the wall, and pulled himself up. The room had hollow, echoing noises – the sound of the column itself wafting lightly in the ocean current. The loudest sound was that of their own breathing.

They gazed through the membrane to the softly glowing blue water of the column. Mick wondered how it stayed so clear when the water had sat relatively motionless for so long. By contrast, they could feel the mild buffetings of the ocean through the wall behind them. He