The Ascension Factor

I'm out of fuel, in the kelp, and my foil is filtering CO2 instead of O2 to the cabin.

He looked at these facts logically, hoping that logic would stave off the hysteria that bubbled at the back of his throat. He could shuttle ballast as long as his power supply lasted, but if he had to maneuver by battery he wouldn't last long. No one responded to any of the undersea burst frequencies, and his Navcom sent back no signal. It was as though he floated in the center of a black hole. Everything that went out from his foil was swallowed up.

It must be the kelp, he reasoned. It's fouled up our communications before, even the histories tell us that.

He regretted his leniency with the kelp. It was something that made his life easier, so he had let the explosive growth of this reportedly dangerous species continue beyond his ability to control it.

Couldn't herd people and kelp at the same time, he thought, and yawned.

CO2's getting me already.

The yawn frightened him into a flurry of activity, but the oxygen level in his cabin was already low enough to slow his thinking and his hands. He found that, even under electrical power, he couldn't nose any further through the kelp. Blowing ballast did no good, either. It simply depleted his already feeble batteries.

This damned kelp is sucking the life out of me!

He stabilized the foil at fewer than twenty meters below the surface. His instruments refused to function, and visibility faded quickly as sunset tipped the scales toward night. Around him, the kelp pulled back from his foil and certain of the kelp fronds began to glow. It was the same kind of cold white glow that had filled the Greens just before he dove.

"This is some kind of Shadow sabotage," he growled. "You'll all regret this!"

Within moments he was wrapped inside a sphere of light so bright that details inside the foil became invisible to him. The glare continued to be bright even though he shut his eyes and covered them with his hands. Voices babbled like red music at the back of his mind.

A warning buzzer droned from the overhead panel and the automatic repeated: "Cabin air unsafe, don airpacks."

How long had it been warning him? He remembered, he remembered.

Light.

This was a woman's voice, someone he knew well. But it wasn't the Galli woman. The buzzer exhausted itself to an electric rattle and Flattery shook his head.

"I need air!" he gasped.

The sound of his own voice broke him free of the suffocation trance of the carbon dioxide.

Flattery clawed through a crew locker for his dive suit. He didn't bother with all of the fastenings, but tightened down the faceplate and activated the air supply. The Director's white hands trembled beyond his control, but at last he could breathe.

I've got to show them who's in charge! he thought.

His training always lurked inside, but something about adrenaline slung it free. An old Islander proverb echoed in his mind: "Stir a dasher, feed a dasher."

I am the dasher and I will strike.

Flattery repeated this to himself a few times while carefully slowing his breathing.

"What do you want?" he shouted into the faceplate. "If you kill me, you'll die. You'll all die!"

His breath fogged the plaz in front of him but it didn't diminish the cold white glare at all. In fact, as he looked closer at the beads of condensation on his faceplate he saw faces inside, hundreds of tiny faces suspended in translucence, one or more glittering inside each droplet.

Killing is your way, not ours.

That voice, inside his own head, chilled something deep in his belly. He could not mistake the familiar Moonbase accent of his shipmate Alyssa Marsh. She had been more than shipmate for a while, but hers had always been a cool intimacy. But it couldn't be Alyssa Marsh because she was. well, not dead exactly.

"What. what is going on here?"

The rasping that he heard across the cabin ceiling and around the foil could only be kelp vines. They snaked across the cabin plaz without diminishing the white radiance that pierced his eyelids, his retinas, his very being. The foil lurched, then its metallic skin shrieked as the kelp began to tear it apart. Flattery hurried to seal his dive suit. He had already armed two lasguns, but he grabbed a couple of spare air packs instead.

You may fight if you wish, Alyssa's voice told him, you will not be killed. You will not be harmed in any way.

"She had a terrible accident in the kelp" had been Flattery's official version of her body's demise. Now scenes from her life danced in the light around him. And he saw her great secret. Cool as Flattery was, it chilled him just the same.