It Pours

(Starspeak)

It rained every single minute of every single hour for three Kraknor days.

The truly telling fact was the relief on all the Vorak’s faces when the rain showed signs of breaking after only three days instead of five.

I spent more time honing my pressure jets in those days than I’d ever thought possible. Moving through water was tougher than expected, and it made me revisit the various improvements I’d made to my maneuvering jets, and the psionics I used to control them.

The original version had only been possible under Coalescence, with two minds worth of reflexes to handle the chaos of propelling my body with what amounted to blowing myself up a hundred times a second.

Without Coalescence, it was only really feasible to do single bursts. More complex maneuvering required more consistent input than a single mind was prepared to give.

So a number of improvements had been made since Nai and I had first improvised our way through the jets’ field test. Tripling the number of individual jets, spreading out the pressure generated. Psionic prosthesis to help make their operation more automatic, less prone to mistakes stemming from tiny lapses in concentration.

None of those improvements had to contend with a change in medium though. Exploding gas pushed me through vacuum or atmosphere just fine, but liquid proved to be a whole new obstacle.

Water was just heavier, harder to push out of the way. I never did get the maneuvering jets performing like they did in a vacuum.

I did figure out that I could easily kill myself if I fired them too much underwater. Enough gas to displace the water around me, even a little bit, drastically reduced my body’s drag as I sank. Sinking wasn’t even really the word for it at that point. It was freefall through the ocean.

That came with its own situational advantages.

More than one boat capsized that first day, and each one dragged people underwater. Every second mattered in those situations. Being able to sink faster than the Vorak I was rescuing was a real boon.

I tried to keep a grin off my face when I came back up from the deepest dive yet. All I had to do was cease the air jets and let my life jacket drag us both back to the surface. More than a hundred feet down and back up in just a few seconds.

We were just asking for the bends, but between depressurization sickness and drowning? It wasn’t a hard question. The latest Vorak coughed violently the millisecond we broke the surface. That just meant they were still breathing. Good.

I wasn’t gentle hurling them into Nemuleki’s boat, but we had places to be. The Vorak we were rescuing now had been stuck out in open water for days now. Not a one of them complained, for one reason or another.

The whole city was caught off guard by the change in the storm’s path, but this level of unpreparedness went beyond mere surprise. Corners had been cut somewhere. Fewer people staffed than necessary. Certainly fewer supplies than prudent. Mavriste and Macoru had said Pudiligsto had a corruption problem, but was there really money to be made in compromising storm readiness?

Apparently.

Making a bad situation worse, this storm was one of the worst the region had seen in fifty years.

At a certain point all that would be left for us to do was withdraw and hunker down ourselves.

Thunder boomed far above us, the clouds were so thick we couldn’t even see the lighting behind the sound. Wind tore across the open water so quickly, even when the rain finally did break, we were still soaked by the spray just coming off the waves.

It didn’t matter so much to me and Donnie though. There were Vorak dive teams too, but we didn’t see them. The one thing that seemed to be going right was avoiding unnecessary overlap. The psionic network Jordan and I built would continue to pay off.

Donnie asked.

Opening our mouths would just see us swallowing saltwater.

I said, checking the ‘to-do’ list.

I pointed toward two large vessels rocking dangerously in the water.

And the waves were bad. Even if the rain was supposed to break here in a few hours, the wind and waves were not. Our little wannabe zodiac had tipped over multiple times in just the last hour.

Nemuleki and her Casti had fared a bit better. A higher body count kept their craft nice and weighed down while Donnie and I took on the riskier rescue work.

So, so much riskier…

It had been a while since I’d been this confused about making a call like this. On one hand, diving was just about some of the riskiest shit you could get up to, especially as an amateur. Diving in a hurricane? Rescuing scared Vorak with claws and fangs? It was just asking for an accident to happen.

But on the other hand, were we really amateurs? The whole Flotilla crew regularly did spacewalk exercises. We were well trained to handle the sensation of weightlessness, even when handed complicating factors like total darkness, sudden lurches, and worse. So we had a keen understanding of what could go wrong, when, why, and how to handle it. And that was just part of being Flotilla crew. I was me, and—even if still technically a Puppy—Donnie was one of the most experienced human Adepts alive.

I honestly couldn’t tell if Serral was going to chew us out for taking unnecessary risks, or laud our impulse to help people.

Putting a fine point on the idea though…

Both. It was definitely going to be both.

The engine on our boat began to die as it ran out of fuel again, but Donnie was at the ready to materialize new liquid. While he sat at the raft’s stern, I sat high up forward, trying to get a view of the cove and Nemuleki’s boat.

I sent,

she replied.

One twist of Adeptry later, and I had a one-use flare gun firing into the sky.

she confirmed.

Corphica answered.

Lorel observed.

I said.

They had been following the protocols given to them by the disaster chief, but in the brief hours of sleep we’d all gotten last night Nai had confided that there was likely a better way to save lives than a solid barrier stretching across as much coast as possible.

The measure did seem to disproportionately prioritize protecting the water front buildings. Water still made it over or through the barrier, flooding was still rampant more than a mile into the city. But the leaks were steady rather than violent. No waves had battered the beaches or the shops and high-rises closest to the water.

The most cynical part of my brain wondered if some wealthy property owners hadn’t thrown their weight and money around to meddle in disaster protocol. The logical part of me felt the need to remind myself I didn’t know enough about Pudiligsto or its reputation for corruption to know if that was the case though.

Stopping buildings from collapsing was unambiguously a good thing, but making it more difficult for boats to get to safety wasn’t. A lot of the Vorak we’d pulled from the water had already drowned, and if it had been easier for their boats to come in…

Whatever the case was, my job right now remained the same. Sweep this cruise liner for stragglers.

Most of its inhabitants and crew would have taken lifeboats to shore two days ago. But the powers that be managing the disaster response had detected the radio of the thing was still signaling. All signs suggested it was an automated message, but it was big boat. It alone could carry more passengers than the entire Flotilla had personnel.

So it wouldn’t surprise anyone if someone had managed to find themselves left behind after the initial evacuation.

Donnie asked.

I said.

he shared.

He sparked up the single-use radar, crippling its precision in favor of widening the range. He didn’t make it reach nearly as far as Jordan and I had under Coalescence, but it was still more than enough to engulf the whole ocean liner.

Donnie frowned.

he said.

He psionically exposed the radar’s results, revealing a strange fuzzy feedback. It made sense the the feedback wouldn’t be crystal clear, but Donnie was right to be confused. The radar was flickering and stuttering in a way that couldn’t be explained by the range tradeoff.

Donnie asked.

Whatever the source, it was interfering with more than just the radar’s feedback. Donnie’s candled radar fizzled out after barely thirty seconds, not at all the normal multiple minutes of uptime.

<…Could be,> I said.

Donnie said.

We ended up fastening our boat to the ocean liner’s anchor chain and swimming our way to the ship itself.

Both of us were keeping warm with Adept-made wetsuits the munchkins had designed in committee. Sid and Deg had sounded proud when they’d transmitted us the psionic blueprints. Knowing they were thinking about how to help out was energizing. The whole crew was on the same page, each in our own ways.

But while Donnie and I swam with roughly the same equipment, our approaches diverted when we finally reached the boat’s massive hull. For the umpteenth time in the last three days, I got a sobering reminder of how dangerous boats could be, even just floating there.

The waves still swelled and crashed, even with the ocean liner between us and the storm. So the ship’s metal bobbed up and down more than a dozen feet with each wave. Just that motion was enough for me to feel the suction pull down on me.

I Spider-Manned my way up the ship, materializing hand holds magnetized to the hull. It was slow going close to the water line, but I made better time once I was above the slamming waves.

Donnie beat me there though. We were both magnitude limited Adepts, but in Peudra’s words: ‘not all M1s are created equal’. His mass limit was slightly larger than double mine. That gave him options.

While he was still a dozen feet away from the hull, he materialized a bulky and unwieldy gadget, aiming it upward. A combination of super-tense springs and compressed air launched his grappling hook up over the ship’s railing far above us.

It wasn’t so much a ‘hook’ so much as it was an exotic magnet designed to adhere itself to the first solid surface it struck with exotic charges. But the result was the same; Donnie casually rappelling his way upward.

He was adamantly against showing my the mechanism that let the grapple gun pull him upward in addition to first firing out the hook and cable, but I had my theories about that too.

If there was any consolation for me, Donnie was forced into a ridiculous pose clinging to his grappling gun while it wound in the cable. Then again, I was basically materializing telephone pole spikes every few inches and giving myself an upper body workout.

Glass houses, Caleb.

This wasn’t the first big ship we’d boarded, so we were both ready for the wind the moment we crested the ship’s deck railing. The ship’s primary deck was almost a hundred feet above the water line, and the wind had already been bad down there.

It howled and screamed at us so violently, if we hadn’t already been using psionics, we’d be forced to just to get a word in.

The doors to the ship’s interior were all locked, but nearly half the windows were broken. Vaulting our way inside was a breeze. We split up down the port and starboard hallways, but out of the wind and rain, this was the easy part.

<[You ever been on a cruise ship like this one?]> I asked.

<[Do I look like the kind of kid who spent his summer’s on a Royal Caribbean?]>

<[Maybe,]> I said. <[What does that kid look like?]>

<[Like a spoiled brat,]> Donnie said honestly.

Yeah, that wasn’t him. Donnie had one of the biggest chips on his shoulder I’d ever seen.

I could only assume the hallways he was picking his way down were identical to mine: row after row of cabins, tacky art hanging on the walls to match the carpet. But surprisingly little water.

Combing it for survivors, we found the ship to be in remarkably good condition. This must have been one of the first boats to evacuate because half the cabins were unlocked with luggage still inside.

It was almost unbelievable that the ship hadn’t capsized. Its size and weight had to help with that, right? The boat was three times the size of the Siegfried, at least.

While I continued to ponder why the ship wasn’t gone the way of the Titanic, Donnie and I both arrived at the stern end of the hallways.

Strange.

I asked. Even if the survivors were on a deck below us, we should have picked up something with our psionic senses.

Non-specialized psionic senses mostly involved detecting ‘slough’, emotional and cognitive byproducts that remained ill-defined, but still detectable all the same. But that slough changed contextually. Different activities and states of mind yielded different qualities of emanations. Jordan was pretty sure it was possible to hide emanations altogether, but there was still a lot of research to be done on those fronts.

The one common point was unconsciousnesss; it was far harder to pick up traces of someone who wasn’t conscious.

Any survivor would have been out here multiple days now, possibly injured.

Donnie guessed.

I pointed out.

I said.

If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

I caught sight of Donnie as we both found stairs connecting the decks, but where he went deeper, I made my way back up into the wind.

Serral had made sure we learned the basics of ship design as part of familiarizing ourselves with the Flotilla’s many spaceships. And spaceship design had a lot in common with their seaworthy conceptual ancestors.

The bridge would be high up and well-fortified.

Sure enough, the only access point from the ship’s interior was secured with a thick metal hatch. Still secured, that is.

That was strange. The ship radio was still active, presumably turned back on by our survivor. But they hadn’t accessed the bridge through the interior.

Cascading the lock revealed…crap, I could probably trick my way through it. Maybe if I materialized some pressurized gas in just the right spots to move the tumblers into place…screw it. Easier to go outside and go through one of the windows.

The wind was noticeably more intense just in the time Donnie and I had been aboard. So much so that I had to magnetize my feet to the ground or risk being blown over…which made it all the more surprising that the bridge’s windows were all intact.

They weren’t visibly reinforced, but cascading the nearest one revealed a weave of microfibers running through the panes.

Take note of that one, Caleb… these windows were definitely bulletproof. The door had looped back around to seeming like the best way inside. There were two heavy hatches leading the highest deck just outside the bridge, but Adepting one of them open would leave me exposed to the harsh wind. Much easier to go back to the one indoors.

Except one of them was unlocked.

Okay…things weren’t adding up.

Even with the door unlocked, it took both hands and a foot braced against the doorframe for me to pull the hatch open. I was fighting more than just the weight of the door, the force of the wind held the door in place like a vice.

I’m going to slip and fling myself clean over the—

No sooner had the thought gone through my mind did one of my hands slip on the wet metal. I instantly lost my grip, tipping over the deck railing.

Countless hours of agility training with Nai paid off, and my hand snaked out to grasp the nearest pipe. My hand almost slipped on that too. Almost.

Donnie asked.

I said.

I went to pull myself back to the right side of the railing, and I caught myself wishing the other big ship had been the one we were dispatched to instead. It wasn’t so tall as this one; a flatter and wider cargo ship rather than a passenger cruise liner.

Looking at it now a mile south of us in the water…it looked desolate—wait those were flashlights.

My eyes fixed on the ship, trying to pick out the lights I’d just seen. It was too far away to pick out numbers, but they were all over the ship’s highest point just like I was.

I said, while I reattempted the hatch.

Instead of prying it open by hand, I took the Adept route the second time. I used a plain bar of metal to lever the door open a centimeter, then I materialized a flat balloon in the gap and started inflating it.

Sixty seconds later, the hatch was held open just enough to squeeze through. Dematerializing the balloon saw the wind slam the hatch shut behind me.

I made my way to the ship’s radio, putting some oomph into my psionic communications too. Disaster response HQ was multiple miles east of us.

I broadcast.

Tox mused.

Tox asked, trying to force me on task.

I didn’t want to take his cue, but I was concerned about the lights on the other boat.

I confirmed.

I said, scanning the radio console’s display. “One-sixty…one-sixty…one-sixty one point…four. Cool.”

I fiddled with the buttons and dials, sorting my way through the controls with process of elimination.

I said.

Fair point.

Tox admitted,

<…You’re connected.>

I asked.

Tox said, inflecting his tone to make it clear he was translating the other Vorak’s words.

I asked.

the rak said without hesitating.

he said.

I instructed.

Donnie reported.

Tox mused.

I promised.

he said, flicking me a basic map with directions.

I found Donnie looking bashful while…a sweet old Vorak grandmother lay on a cot talking in and endless stream. I’d thought he was glossing over something left up to interpretation, but the rak here fit the description to a ‘T’.

Round wire glasses, greying fur with wrinkles peeking through beneath, lace frill on their blouse’s collar and sleeves, and the first and only Vorak dress I’d ever seen.

“Uhhh…”

“[Ohthankgod,]” Donnie sighed. “Help me. I can only understand every fourth word or so.]”

“They’re not speaking Tarassin?”

“Tarasssin?” Donnie asked the grandma Vorak.

“Just little!” they exclaimed, far too cheerful for the situation. “Tauhre misc an zhul abenscai Galhadda.”

Galhadda. Wasn’t that one of the more obscure Vorak languages? Of course ‘obscure’ language on a homeworld didn’t mean much. Javanese was a language spoken by more than a hundred million people on Earth, but it didn’t even make the top ten list of languages a visiting alien would learn first.

Of course. This was a cruise ship. Tourists. The people aboard could easily be from any corner of Kraknor.

<[Shit,] okay. Uh, try communicating with them in writing. They’ll probably know more written Tarassin than spoken.>

I asked, astonished.

he said without missing a beat.

I grabbed my handbook from my wetsuit’s pocket—perks of custom gadgets like it? You got to insist on waterproof design. Handing the device to the Vorak, it lit up in response to my psionics and I fed it words to display straight from my Tarassin dictionary.

Are. You. Hurt?

The rak mumbled a few times before picking on a response to repeat over and over.

“No, no, no, not hurt good bad,” Donnie translated. “I can’t…what does that mean?”

Can. You. Move? I asked next.

A big smile and lots of nods.

That was a relief, but when I motioned to help the grandma to their feet, they waved me off apologetically.

“Testru abbi. Misc eng algash shin!”

I glanced at Donnie helplessly. We needed a way for them to write down what little Tarassin they knew…

“Old! Old me,” they finally said in Tarassin I recognized.

Ah. They were okay to be moved. Not able themselves.

“I see what you mean about them maybe being concussed,” I told Donnie. “They were hiding out in the medical ward. Injured? Did you check their head for lumps?”

“Yeah, their skull’s fine. But they were locked in here when I found them. She got left behind in the evacuation, but she’s been in the bed there for a day or two.”

“They slept through a hurricane?” I said. “[Damn, chock one up for the old folks…]”

Two thoughts picked at my brain as we devised a way to get the old Vorak to safety.

If this grandma wasn’t concussed, then I wondered if they couldn’t be senile…Donnie was right that something was off with their demeanor. And someone with compromised faculties might not see the need to follow an evacuation order…if the order had cleared the language barrier at all.

Sad as that was to think about though, I was more focused on the second idea.

If they’d been locked in the medical ward—from the outside as an inspection of the door revealed—then they weren’t the one to unlock the bridge and mess with the radio.

Someone else had been here since the ship was evacuated.

There were other hints too. Open cabin doors, but only some. Occupants of the cabins would have shut them, to protect their belongings, even in a panicked evacuation. But crewmembers opening doors to confirm they were empty wouldn’t be so arbitrary. They weren’t interrupted either, because the opened cabins were seemingly at random, not with a clear cut off like efforts were interrupted by a surge in the storm.

We wheeled grandma Vorak into the hallway on a stretcher and started making our way toward the bow.

I warned Donnie.

I said.

Donnie frowned.

Grandma, Donnie, and I all paused before venturing out onto the windy deck. Stress was actually our biggest enemy. If old Vorak were anything like old humans, then we might kill them just by moving too fast, and hiking their heartrate.

We had to psych ourselves up for the agonizing work that was about to come, but the sooner we get to it, the sooner we get through it.

It took both of us to push grandma’s gurney out onto the deck toward the anchor chain.

Thank goodness we’d at least had the good sense to park our boat on the downwind side of the boat. The massive hull shielded the craft from the worst of the wind.

Our rescue was strapped securely into the gurney, and we’d materialized a helmet to shield their head. Hopefully it would muffle the noise and keep their heart rate down too.

I asked.

Donnie said.

We had to make sure that the Gurney wasn’t hanging free—that Donnie could keep it from swaying wildly in the wind on the way down, but once he was inching his way down the side of the hull on a cable, I took the fast route.

I fired my maneuvering jets on maximum, decelerating me as I hit the water, but immediately switched them off again. I didn’t know what the record high dive was back home, but I was pretty sure this was higher because the water still hit me like a truck.

No time to shake off the impact, I kicked my way back to the surface, grabbed a breath, and dove back under to swim toward our boat. Below the surface of the water, it was easier to avoid getting tumbled by waves.

I didn’t bother trying to climb into the boat directly. Donnie and I had both become decently athletic under Nai’s training, and even we turned into clumsy uncoordinated bafoons trying to pull ourselves up the slick wet sides of an inflatable boat.

The superior method for us was to dive down a foot or two below and Adept ourselves some extra flotation, rocketing upward out of the water just far enough to roll over the edge of the boat.

“” Nemuleki called. If not for her psionic words, I’d never have caught the ones out loud. The wind was roaring now.

I breathed out.

“” she agreed. “”

Corphica nodded an acknowledgement as their boat pulled up to the anchor chain and we balanced crew complements while I disconnected from the cruise liner’s anchor chain.

Keeping one boat in position to ‘catch’ Donnie and the gurney was a lot easier with a second boat to help push against the waves. As soon as the gurney was ‘safely’ tucked between the boat’s bench seats, Donnie dematerialized the whole cable, dropping himself into the water, and popping himself up over the edge.

We paused only long enough to confirm our Vorak grandmother was still conscious—if extremely distressed—before redlining the motors and peeling away from the cruise ship.

I said, tying a map into the signal.

The water was only slightly less choppy moving with the waves rather than against them, but as we moved away from the ship, I got a proper look at the stormy sky west of us.

The eye of the hurricane couldn’t be more than fifty miles away. No wonder the wind was picking up. Black green clouds hung angrily in the stratosphere. Swirls of wind ten miles long were punctuated by lighting bolts just as long. Before our eyes was an object lesson in storm systems: you could see the clouds at the hurricane’s center turning faster the ones overhead right now. Those violent winds were barreling toward the city too.

I suddenly appreciated Tox’s grave tone from earlier.

We had been cutting it close.

But we made it.