Dunes over Danvar - Страница 3

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At one hundred and fifty he felt the press and he dropped his first tank. He watched it disappear behind him, glowing bright red in his visor with orange at the edges. With his twin tanks, he was good down past two hundred meters and could still make it back without a spare. If he was careful with his breathing, two fifty was doable. Beyond that and he’d have to rely on the spares—and he’d be well past his deep.

Peary stretched out and tried to slow his breathing even more, felt his muscles strain, and his mind too. He tried to keep himself going straight vertical, and focused on keeping the sand closest to his upper body as loose as possible. The pushback was strong; he could feel the tightness around his neck, and his lungs had to work to push outward with each breath. And to think that people—mere human divers—had gone down half a mile or more? Or so the rumors went.

Then he could see it. Not through his visor, but in his mind’s eye. His own body trapped in the sand. He immediately pushed that thought away, because that was the thought that would kill you. He’d almost coffined like that before, at a much shallower depth. A lapse like that and everything around him would turn hard as stonesand and his next breath would never come. Even with the tank and whatever precious oxygen remained in it, his lungs would never expand again, because the sand would crush in on him and thwart his inhale. So he put his thoughts on Marisa, and he pictured himself telling her he loved her and how much he appreciated her.

Past two hundred meters. The death zone. Hard to tell now because the reading in his visor was starting to fade. Losing all contact with the surface. He stopped and looked around, concentrated on keeping the sand soft around himself. He looked down, and when he calmed himself, he saw the first dot of orange, and then red, and it surprised him. As if this whole dive had been an exercise and he’d never really hoped to find anything. He moved again. The dot grew until he knew he was looking at a something. Angular. Solid and manmade. Straight lines heading down and away from a point that was changing from orange to red and then a deeper red. The lines moving away disappeared into greens and shades of blue.

He pushed down, the sand behind him becoming harder than stone, the pushback growing with each meter. And then the yellow appeared. Two forms, clinging to the red structure with orange where the two colors met. And he knew what they were, the two shapes in yellow.

They were men. Divers just like him.

And they were dead.

Chapter Five

Two of Bolger’s divers were down under the sand. Down there with large jars and water skins, searching for the underground spring or river that once wetted the trees whose tops now served as leaning posts for the rest of the crew. Everyone just waited in the sun and drained their own canteens so that they would be empty and prepared for more. Water was the other truth of the world, water and sand. Only, a man could live without sand.

The Poet licked his lips, even though he knew better. Waste of water, and it made them dry out faster. His daddy used to smack him when he licked his lips out in the dunes under the relentless sun. He would say, “Go on and cut your wrists, boy, it’ll be faster!”

The sand near where the divers had disappeared didn’t stir, and all the men were watching, waiting for one of the divers to break the surface, to hold up those precious containers of liquid life. Someone told an awful joke, and everyone laughed, even the other divers, even though the joke was about how divers dying down there was just something to be expected.

That’s when the first man died. He was in mid-laugh when it happened. He was a diver too, laughing about divers dying, and a spear went through his throat and pinned him to the gnarly gray-black treetop that arrogantly dared poke its way up through the sand.

Then the arrows and spears rained down and one nearly took off the top of the Poet’s head, too. Knocked him right down into the sand, and he saw the blood flow down, mixing with the silica and grit. His own blood, red and thick.

He glanced up and men were falling everywhere, most dead and some wounded, and other men were streaming down the dunes toward them. Brigands. Screaming in the voice of war. At a glance they looked like they could be Brock’s men, but the Poet couldn’t tell with blood running into his eyes. The two divers poked up then, at just the wrong time, and the Poet saw them killed right quick. They always thought they’d die down under the sand, or up on top in a bar somewhere, but they died half in and half out, with sand up to their waists.

Without hesitation, the Poet reached under his robe and activated his suit. He’d learned to dive as a boy, hiding from his father in the box town outside of Low-Pub. And he was good, too—a natural, they said. He never dove deep and he never took salvage, but he could move sand like no one’s business. But that was before his daddy taught him about the fundamental worthlessness of a diver, about how being a diver was like being a dog, only without the intrinsic values of loyalty and obedience that came with the canine species. So the Poet had given up diving, though he kept up his skills by going out a couple of times a year—out into the Thousand Dunes, to make sure he could survive.

Now he took a big gulp of air and made himself sink until the sand swallowed him whole. He struggled with the robe on, but what could he do? He worked his way under the sand and over to his gear bag, and when he knew he was near it he thrust his hand up above the surface and groped around until he felt his hand hit the bag.

Open the bag. Reach in for the visor. Now goggles. Got it.

He dove again, the sand ripping at the gash on his scalp, and when he was ten meters down he stopped and softened up the sand enough that he could pull on his goggles and visor. He went through the process of trying to clear the gunk from around his eyes, but he knew the best he could do was remove enough to allow him to see colors through the visor.

His lungs were straining now, driving him to want to exhale. He hardened the sand by his feet and pushed off toward the north, kicking for all he had. He would need to clear the nearest dune before he could risk surfacing for a split second to grab a breath. He pushed and kicked and he could feel his head growing lighter and the blood pulsing in his temples and neck. Counting down, he supposed, to his death. He wasn’t a young man anymore. He was already operating beyond his abilities, he thought. Yet he kicked and kicked, and when he thought he couldn’t go another stroke, he kicked again.

He guided himself by the colors. When it looked to him like he’d cleared the nearest dune and was on the backside, he pushed again. Angling upward, toward the purple, he moved his body skyward as his every cell screamed for him to exhale and then suck in anything—anything at all. He broke the surface in a burst of energy and rolled onto his back, gasping and straining for air. One second. Two seconds. And then he turned back to his stomach. He forced himself to not just lie there, and when the first dollop of blood hit the sand in front of his face, he sucked in all the air he could and dove again. He calmed himself. This time he moved more slowly, kicking his feet against the sand that he hardened behind himself and pulling himself forward with each stroke. His muscles were screaming, but he put that pain out of his mind. After a one-hundred count, he pushed up toward the purple again, letting only a portion of his face break the surface this time. He sucked in air and grit and dove again.

In this way, he pushed farther north, farther into the wastes.

Chapter Six

Peary did a cursory hand search around the bodies. Both dead men were in dive suits, coffined in the sand. He tested the first man’s tank and tried to take a breath through the regulator, but the tank was dry. Both of the bodies clung to some kind of metallic superstructure that came to a point at the top, with long antennae pointing up from there toward the surface. Down a ways he could see where horizontal shafts of steel extended outward from this main tower where he’d found the bodies.

The dead men were only a few feet apart, so whatever had happened, it looked like they had died together. Maybe there was some peace for them in that, but Peary wouldn’t know. He was, as always, alone.

He softened the sand as best as he could, but it was tough going at that depth. He did the calculations in his mind and he realized he didn’t have enough juice to make it back to the top if he tried to drag both divers’ bodies with him, even if he could physically do it, which he doubted. One diver was clutching some kind of case in his hands, and had obviously been trying to get the salvaged materials back up to the surface when something had happened. It was a pretty common story with divers. Coffining happened most often either when a diver panicked, or was trying to move heavy salvage.

Instinctively, Peary reached his hand down the man’s leg to see if the man was carrying a dive knife—something that might have his name on it so that the body could be identified. He couldn’t find the knife, but he did find out what had contributed to the man’s death.

There was a long, steel cable wrapped tightly around the man’s leg. He felt farther down and found the cable’s other end was wound almost in a knot around the heavy metal of the structure. He pulled hard a few times to try to free the diver’s leg, but the man was stuck and there was no extricating him.