Как найти жилище дегази в сабнавтике

PAUL: This island is a godsend! Look out of the window. No predators… Fresh food…

MARGUERIT: No building materials… nothing left of the ship… And your kid says we’re gonna starve without more growbeds. Speak up, kid.

BART: It’s true, father. The natural growth rates are too slow to keep supporting us.

MARGUERIT: All I’m sayin’ is, ocean’s got us surrounded. No use hiding. Sooner or later we’ll get our feet wet.

PAUL: The rest of your life may have been a fight, Maida, but I’ve made my decision. You want to forfeit your emergency pay to take a swim, go ahead.

MARGUERIT: Believe me, I’m thinkin’ on it.

PAUL: Son, I said wait for the storm to pass. Your life’s more valuable to me than a plant patch.

BART: You stopped being in charge when the ship you were captaining sunk!

PAUL: I’ll stop being in charge when you take charge of yourself!

MARGUERIT: Say, Chief. Chief!

PAUL: What?!

MARGUERIT: Do you know how to drain those growbeds of 40 tons of storm water? Or how to conjure food from the air?

PAUL: I know how to prioritize.

MARGUERIT: I’m just sayin’, if that’s so, what’s your boy’s life worth to you today, if tomorrow you’re gonna be so hungry you start wondering what he tastes like? Let him go deal with the plants.

PAUL: Son, go deal with the plants.

[Bart Torgal has disembarked the habitat.]

PAUL: Interfere with my family again and when rescue arrives I will leave you here. Do you understand me?

MARGUERIT: No rescue coming, Chief. Not in time. And no stayin’ here, neither. This rain keeps falling, sooner or later this place’ll be buried. Only choice we got is whether to get buried with it.

MARGUERIT: You see, Chief? You brought us to this sodden planet. Told us we’d see a lush payday. Now what do we got, some 6 weeks later? A dead crew. A habitat that’s half buried. Food washed away.

PAUL: I suppose the executive decisions would be better left to someone with your extensive experience of hitting people in the face?

MARGUERIT: I know enough not to take unscheduled detours to uncharted planets. That’s something you don’t want to learn the hard way.

PAUL: Easy to judge a decision in hindsight. Harder to come up with a plan of your own.

MARGUERIT: Got one already. We take what we can carry and hunker down in a cave somewhere. I scouted a site. Couple hundred meters deep. Lots of metal deposits.

PAUL: How do you imagine we’d live?

MARGUERIT: With ready access to building materials? Like damn queens. Couple of water filters, a bioreactor, fresh fish… But Chief, we’ll eat seaweed salad and drink our own piss if that’s what it takes. All that matters is: do you got something better?

PAUL: Send the coordinates to my PDA. I’ll review your proposal.

PAUL: What is that thing?

MARGUERIT: I don’t know. I found it outside, in the sand.

PAUL: Part of another ship?

MARGUERIT: None I’ve ever seen.

BART: It’s not even scratched.

PAUL: Don’t fool around with it, it might be worth something.

MARGUERIT: Stand down, Chief, if it were going to crumble to dust it woulda done so when I picked it up.

BART: It’s glowing.

PAUL: We’re not the first people to come to this planet.

MARGUERIT: People. Maybe. Could be aliens. Could be the damn sea monsters for all we know. One thing for sure: we ain’t gonna find out by stayin’ here.

Chief’s log, five weeks since the crash. The only other survivors are my son, Bart, and Maida, the cut-price mercenary I commissioned for the journey.

After days drifting in the lifepod, rain hammering the roof, the weather cleared and we washed up here. I had Maida salvage the Degasi wreck, set Bart to finding us a stable source of food. His education is paying off sooner than I’d anticipated.

Our only problem is Maida. She says the weather’s going to turn. I say she’s finding excuses to risk our lives. I imagine she’s not gone a week in her life without a physical altercation, and she’s itching for a fight. In every judgment she makes things go from bad to worse.

If she had my experience she’d have more faith. Humans have spent millennia specializing in how to shackle nature to our will. This planet won’t cause us any new problems.

My one task now is to keep us alive, as comfortably as possible, until the insurance company arranges rescue. In this part of space that could be months, or even years.

This is the first time I’ve seen sunlight in months. After all that time in the deep I’d been dreaming of it. Now that I’m back here, I’m finding it hard to enjoy alone. Father was right: we should never have left this place. We shouldn’t have gone so deep. They do not want us down there.

Despite my best efforts ill-health is taking hold of me. The visions are getting worse.

Marguerit and father are now part of the ecosystem of this incredible planet. It’s reassuring to know that when I go, I’ll join them.

Until then… well, there’s always the view.

PAUL: Son, there is always a pecking order, and in our world, money makes the hierarchy. I pay Maida a fraction of what I pay you, and you a fraction of what I pay me.

BART: If money makes the hierarchy, why is Marguerit making the decisions?

PAUL: We NEED her. We let her think what she likes, so long as she does what she’s told.

BART: What if she doesn’t?

PAUL: For enough money, she will. People always do.

PAUL: We’re already 200m below sea level! You want to go DEEPER?!

MARGUERIT: Look around us, Chief. Water leaking through the hull. Water outside the hatch. We’re drowning. Real slow. If rescue arrives whatever shot us down, it’s going to do it again. And again. Until it’s shut off. You see an off switch around here, Chief?

PAUL: Why would it any more likely be half a kilometer down?!

MARGUERIT: Your kid found something on the scanner. There’s something down there. Something that shouldn’t be.

PAUL: You’re mad.

MARGUERIT: I’m goin’ all the same. And I’ve an idea you two are gonna follow. But if you do, be mindful: your authority stopped at sea level.

I thought it might get claustrophobic, living underwater. Father feels it is. He’d tell me it was childish, but I stare out the window and sometimes I think how lucky I am to see this world up close. Back on the island I wouldn’t have believed the creatures that live down here. The fish, they GLOW… There’s one that’s 90% eyeball… Snakes twice the length of a habitat compartment.

Certainly it’s not all friendly. Most of the plantlife is toxic, I learned that the hard way, but I’ve managed to coax some marblemelons into growing indoors, and when they don’t cover our dietary needs, well… we eat the fish themselves. It’s a bit gross, but it’s nothing they wouldn’t do.

I’ve been attempting to document my findings. Father approves. He says understanding is power. That the more we know about this planet, the more we can use it to our advantage. I’m just doing it because it’s fun. It’s not easy without proper equipment and network access, but the old fashioned way – observing, taking notes, testing theories – shows me the world in a way a spectroscopic analysis never could.

Lately I’ve been watching the crabsnakes. They ambush their prey as it tries to feed on the mushrooms they hide in. What they don’t eat settles on the seabed, which fertilizes the mushrooms, which feeds the herbivores, and so the chain continues. Co-evolution gives me the fuzzies.

Something incredible just happened.

Since we’re down here, I had this plan to build equipment and study the incredible lifeforms we’re encountering, but I didn’t have enough enameled glass. So I started looking for a natural substrate that would strengthen the glass we have, and those stalker teeth we’ve been finding fit the bill – only, well, we needed more.

That’s when Marguerit got interested. She actually listened to me – more than I can say for father – and I worked up the courage to talk about my more… tentative theories. When I told her they were attracted to metal deposits, that their teeth get dislodged when they pick them up, her eyes narrowed and she dashed out of the room.

Three hours later she came back, her pack loaded down with stalker teeth! I asked her about it. She shrugged and said my theories were good. Said she had them eating out the palm of her hand. I think she meant it literally.

She is incredible. She went out to the kelp forests, armed with just a heatblade, and went fin to fin with a pack of stalkers.

On the one hand, that is the coolest thing I have ever heard. On the other, I hope the stalkers didn’t come off worse than Marguerit did. She had a huge gash on her forearm. I don’t think things went as smoothly as she made out. And what’s the point in surviving here if we have to kill everything that makes it so wonderful?

I wish I knew more about these animals, but father won’t let me leave the habitat. Maybe with all this glass we could build a containment unit and get up close to them.

You know what Maida told me today? She wants to build a habitat 500m below sea level, more than a kilometer north-east of here. And she needs Bart and I to do it. She’s got it into her head that she can save us if she just acts recklessly enough. But I’ve hauled starwhals to Neptune. Plasteel to the Federation… this family operates nine different mining colonies across the Ariadne Arm. Maida thinks she’s better suited to lead? Her contract still says otherwise.

But… I just cannot damn tell whether it’s the stupidest idea I ever heard, or my only hope. I turned 80 years old last week. I thought I had another 80 in me, but marooned on this planet there’s no swapping out of my liver when the old one fails. Here, I’m mortal. And Maida is useful.

So it’s my responsibility to make a decision. Return to the island and hope whatever knocked the Degasi out of the sky won’t do the same to the rescue ship, or take us deeper in search of answers. And all the while be hoping old age gets me before the seamonsters do.

I’ll give Maida just one thing. She was right about these caves. There’s enough lithium there to fabricate a hundred tons of plasteel. Enough for a damn FLEET of Cyclops submarines. There was nothing anyone could have done to avoid crashing here, but I was right to order the detour. If we get off this planet they’ll be talking about the Torgal share price on the other side of the Federation.

These conniving, corporate, bourgeois, inbred, incompetent, self-absorbed jerks don’t have a damn clue!

The kid’s not so bad – he’s even useful – but I swear everything that comes out of his father’s idiot face is a narcissistic lie. He wants to stay in this cave, his problem. I’m the one doing the heavy lifting. Screw the contract. Screw the emergency pay. When seamonsters are hunting you, you don’t hide. You hunt the seamonsters. Then you build a bigger boat out of seamonster bones, and you hunt bigger monsters. Keep going until there aren’t any monsters left to hunt you.

I’m going deeper, I’m gonna find what shot us down, and I’m going to tear its damn heart out.

I’ve started the prep work. The kid’s taught me how to make enameled glass. I’ve started stockpiling metal ores to build myself a seamoth. I’ll raid the indoor growbeds before I leave.

BART: Please stop fighting and listen! We’re sick!

MARGUERIT: What?

PAUL: How?

BART: You’ve been coughing, right? Feeling itchy? Blisters?

MARGUERIT: Yeah.

PAUL: The biometrics would have warned us if we were sick.

BART: It’s something new. It’s not in the database.

MARGUERIT: Come on then, what’s it gonna do? Turn us inside out? Dissolve us into slime?

BART: It’s an alien bacteria. It’s everywhere. Every organism on this planet. It’s altering our genetic code.

PAUL: How are the creatures surviving if they’re infected?

BART: I don’t know yet.

MARGUERIT: Want me to cut some of ’em open for you? Find out what makes ’em tick?

BART: No.

PAUL: Just tell me what you need, son. Materials? Equipment?

BART: Just… can I have some quiet? I need time to think.

[Marguerit Maida has boarded the habitat.]

PAUL: What are you so happy about, Maida?

MARGUERIT: Say, kid?! I brought you something!

PAUL: Is that a LEVIATHAN outside?!

MARGUERIT: Towed it home on the back of the sub.

PAUL: You KILLED that thing?

MARGUERIT: It’s still breathing. I was about to finish the job, but I can stay and chat if you’d like? No? Then make yourself useful and pass me that hardened blade.

PAUL: Are you out of your MIND?! You brought that thing HERE?! What if it’s not as dead as it looks?! What if others come?!

MARGUERIT: You prefer it got curious and came of its own accord, or got messed up and dragged here?

PAUL: When we get off this planet I am going to drag you through every court in the damn federation!

PAUL: I have had it with you risking our lives!

MARGUERIT: Oh stow it, Chief. The kid can’t kill this disease without fish to study. I’m just bringin’ ’em home.

PAUL: Bart, tell her; tell her I’m right!

BART: You’re both wrong! Marguerit, I can’t find out how they resist the bacteria if you slaughter them all.

MARGUERIT: It ain’t always they oblige in coming in alive.

PAUL: He means you’re being reckless.

BART: Father, the outcome’s no better if we hole up in here and don’t go outside. We have to find a middle way.

PAUL: There is no compromise, not while she’s on my seabase!

MARGUERIT: YOUR seabase?!?

BART: I’m going outside.

[Bart Torgal has disembarked the habitat]

PAUL: Bart! Come in, it’s dangerous! Dammit boy, I know you can hear me!

 *Leviathan sounds*

MARGUERIT: Chief. Chief, get off the radio and put on your helmet.

PAUL: What?!?

MARGUERIT: Brace!

 *Sound of habitat rupturing and water pouring in*

Came out of nowhere. An alien kraken, bigger than a Cyclops. Tore a hole clear through the reinforced hull. I barely got my breather in time. I told her. I said others would come.

The rupture threw me clear of the habitat, and the monster turned and bore down on me. Just as its tentacles came within reach, Maida appeared out of nowhere. She had a seaglide in one hand, a jagged piece of scrap metal in the other. She meant to butcher that beast, or die trying. The last I saw her she had the metal lodged in its neck as the monster did its best to shake her, contorting off into the darkness. I’m certain she got her wish, one way or another.

Then I thought I saw a light, deep below me. I hoped maybe Bart had swum clear. I followed it. Now I wonder whether I saw anything at all. My oxygen is low. The habitat is gone. I can’t see the sky. Something surely has the scent of my blood.