The Queen's Daemon (T'aafhal Legacy Book 2) Page 3

  Chapter 2

  Borehole, The Icy Moon

  The small party of Earthlings had been drifting down into the inky abyss for more than an hour. The two humans—Michaels in the lead and Krenshaw bringing up the rear—kept up a constant chatter amongst themselves and those at the wellhead. Sandwiched between the men were the two bears. They both muted their radios and quietly watched the darkness pass by.

  “They do like to talk,” commented Ahnah, above Umky but within suit-to-suit range. Unlike the common radio channel, suit-to-suit was short range only, allowing the bears to talk in private.

  “Monkey's like to chatter,” Umky grunted, the she-bear scientist intruding on his thoughts.

  “And I thought you were friends with some of them.”

  “I like some of them well enough, it doesn't change what they are. Most of them aren't comfortable being alone, with only their own thoughts for company.”

  Polar bears in the wild spent much of the year alone, prowling the Arctic ice on an endless hunt for food. Males in particular spent significant time in solitude. Females were less solitary, often having cubs to take care of.

  “I don't know, some of them seem to value time alone. I've seen the Captain sitting on the bridge pensing, lost in his thoughts.”

  “Exception to every rule. Some bears yammer on like primates.”

  Both fell silent again for several minutes. If Ahnah took the crack about yammering like a primate personally, she said nothing about it. As the water pressure around them slowly increased, their suits occasionally pinged and creaked. Without exterior lights there was no sense of motion, nothing to mark their descent to the hidden sea below.

  “I wonder if this is how whales feel.”

  “What?” said Ahnah, his statement taking her by surprise.

  “When they dive deep beneath the surface, down to where light never penetrates. It's very tranquil, like being the only creature alive in the universe.”

  “You are the strangest bear,” Ahnah replied, a hint of puzzlement in her voice.

  Umky snorted. Again the pair fell silent. Minutes passed before the he-bear resumed speaking.

  “You can blame my sire, and to a lesser extent my dam.” Humans often referred to he-bears as boars and she-bears as sows, which polar bears found insulting. Humans also called a group of bears a “sleuth,” which oddly the bears found acceptable.

  “Pihoqahiak and Isbjørn?”

  “Yeah, my father was always an individualist, even for one of our species. He was the first bear recruited to serve on the Peggy Sue.”

  “How in the world did that happen? It's not like there was a north pole recruiting office.”

  “Evidently he was sought out by Jack Sutton, the ship's first captain. He found Dad out on the ice, hunting.”

  “And instead of shooting him he recruited him?”

  Umky paused for a second while he parsed her question.

  “No, it was my father who was hunting. Captain Jack just walked up behind him and introduced himself.”

  “Ballsy for a human.”

  “Especially considering Dad was hunting a group of Inuit using a modified .50 caliber sniper's rifle.”

  “Your father was hunting humans? And this Captain Jack not only talked Pihoqahiak into not killing him, but into going off in a spaceship?”

  “Dad qualified as a serial killer in human terms but that didn't deter Sutton. He asked Dad why he was hunting the Inuit.”

  “What did he say?”

  Umky chuckled.

  “He said 'they hunt us, don't they?' Evidently that was good enough for Captain Jack. The rest, as they say, is history.”

  Ahnah paused to consider her next reply carefully. This was the most personal conversation the pair had engaged in since they boarded the Peggy Sue more than a year ago. Maybe it was being in the water, encircled by ice, that made the bears feel chatty. Not that their present surroundings were anything like the polar pack ice of home.

  “I knew your mother from Farside Base. She was in the forefront of the 'bears forming families' movement. Isbjørn believed we had much to learn from humans. In fact, she was one of those who encouraged me to become a scientist.”

  “Yeah, Mom and Dad are both bears of a different kind—futurists, always looking beyond the ice flow they're on, always looking across open water to the next one. Now they are off somewhere in an ancient T'aafhal starship and I'm five klicks down a hole in the ice on a moon with no name.”

  Ahnah made a neutral sound in reply.

  LEDs blinked insistently in both bears' helmets, signaling a call from the others. They opened the channel to hear the voice of Jim Michaels.

  “I can see light from the drilling head below, we are almost at the bottom...”

  Cargo Hold, Peggy Sue

  The forward part of the ship's cargo hold was occupied by a flock of brightly colored butterflies and two pairs of humans. The members of each pair circled one another slowly. Wearing quilted armor and wire basket face masks, each held a shinai—a weapon used in kendo to represent a traditional Japanese sword during practice and competition. Occasional flurries of movement punctuated their slow dance, as one partner struck out at the other, the motion too fast to be seen clearly.

  On closer inspection it was obvious that each pair consisted of an adult and a young person, a uchidachi and a shidachi—a teacher and a student. The taller pair consisted of a man, stocky of build, 5'9'' in height, and a slender young woman roughly an inch taller. The shorter pair consisted of a woman, 5'7'', and a younger girl around the same height.

  All four were moving in accordance with suri-ashi, the shuffling, sliding way all movement is done in kendo. The students were practicing feints and counter attacks while trying to maintain the proper stance. Above the combatants butterflies fluttered, safely out of striking distance.

  “Eiii!” cried the younger girl, stamping her right foot and pressing the attack. Her teacher easily deflected the attempted blow. The crack of clashing swords, the yelling and stamping continued until the sensei, the kendo master, had enough.

  “Yame!” the woman shouted. “Stop!”

  All four stepped back from engagement distance and bowed to their partners.

  “Dorri, you are supposed to be practicing your technique while maintaining okuri-ashi.” Okuri-ashi is the most important form of ashi-sabaki or kendo footwork. It is also the most difficult. In the basic stance the right foot is in front and the left, heel slightly raised, is in back. Moving forward or backward in okuri-ashi, the back foot never passes the front foot.

  The reprimand came from Dr. Mizuki Ogawa, the ship's science officer. When it came to kendo, she was the master, skilled beyond all others on board in the art of sword play. Others among the crew had killed using railguns, X-ray lasers, and antimatter warheads; she alone had killed other beings with a katana.

  “I am sorry, sensei,” the young girl replied, “it's just that you are so fast, I will never be able to beat you.”

  “Learning budo, the way of combat, is not about mastering others, it is about mastering yourself, Dorri.” Mizuki looked at the girl with an open gaze that some people found unsettling. “I think we have had enough practice for the day.”

  Dorri drew herself up and bowed again to the older woman, thanking her.

  “Domo arigato gozaimashita.”

  Mizuki bowed in return.

  “Do not worry, you will become faster and more skillful overtime. No one becomes a master kendōka overnight.”

  “She keeps telling people that so she has people to practice with,” said the man from the other couple, “or on, as the case may be.”

  “It must have worked with you, Bobby,” the taller girl said with a smile, sultry gray eyes peering out from beneath dark seductive brows. “You are quite fast yourself.”

  “Yeah, but Mizuki has been whacking me with sticks for years, Shadi. It was either get better or stay covered with bruises.” Bobby grinned back, oblivious to any sexua
l undertone in the girl's remark.

  Mizuki's cool gaze shifted to Shadi, then to Bobby, and then back again.

  “I will show you something that might encourage your desire to learn kendo,” Mizuki said after a few moments' thought. “Bobby, please set up three mats.”

  Bobby's eyebrows went up.

  “Sure.”

  As Bobby moved to comply with Mizuki's request the Japanese kendōka turned to the two young women. Standing next to each other with their masks off, it was obvious that the two were sisters. They were the only survivors of the New Mecca settlement on the planet Paradise. Together they accounted for half those who escaped that deadly planet, the Earth Colonization Board's disastrous first attempt to establish a colony among the stars.

  Shadi, 16, and Dorri, 14, were originally from Iran, but had left Earth years ago. They lived first as refugees on the Moon, then as settlers on Paradise, and for the last year as the youngest members of the Peggy Sue's crew. They could be considered among the luckiest adolescents in the galaxy, being doted on by the ship's officers, educated by the science section's PhDs, instructed in armed and unarmed combat by the Peggy Sue's Marines, and generally having free run of the ship. On the other hand, they were the only young people on board.

  Coming of age on board a starship where everyone was in their twenties or older was problematic for the girls to say the least. Shadi in particular was starting to have trouble coming to terms with the hormones her maturing body was pumping out. In recent days, her behavior with some of the ship's male officers had started to verge on overtly flirtatious.

  “Where do you want these set up, sensei?” Bobby asked, returning with a large rolled mat on a vertical stand. It looked superficially like tatami, a type of mat used as floor covering in traditional Japanese homes.

  “Place three of them in a staggered pattern, with enough space to pass between them, and bring me my katana when you have set the targets.” Bobby set the first mat down near Mizuki and went back for another. Mizuki turned to the sisters, placing a single hand on the mat and striking a professorial pose.

  “This mat is a target used in tameshigiri, a Japanese martial art with a long history. Originally it was a way to test the cutting ability of swords. To ensure that it was a test of the sword itself, and not the man wielding it, only the most skilful swordsmen performed these tests.

  “The first targets for tameshigiri were human bodies. Specifically, the bodies of executed criminals. The bodies were carefully inspected before being cut, to check for disease. This was because swords were religious, almost mystical objects in ancient Japan, and it was believed that sickness would make a pure sword unclean. For similar reasons swords were never tested on low caste individuals or priests. It was believed that doing so could harm a blade's soul.

  “During the Meiji period test cutting on criminals became illegal, causing the cadavers to be replaced by mats made from bound rice straw with a bamboo core and soaked with water. Side by side tests found the wet mats to have almost the same characteristics as the original human targets.

  “You have practiced with the lightweight shinai, to learn proper stance and technique, and you have performed katas with the heavier bokken, which has a weight and balance as close to a real sword as possible. But neither of these forms of practice can be a substitute for actual combat, for actually using a katana against another swordsman, feeling your blade as it slices through a foe's body. The cutting of mats is as close as a swordsman can come to actually striking another human being with his weapon. To this day, tameshigiri remains the only accepted way, short of actual combat, of measuring the speed and power of a swordsman. ”

  Mizuki paused her lecture and looked at the rolled mat standing next to her. She looked back to her students, who were now paying rapt attention. Bobby approached her, a curved scabbarded sword in front of him. He stopped and bowed, offering his teacher the sheathed sword, balanced on his two open palms.

  Mizuki bowed and accepted the sword, grasping the scabbard with her right hand. She thrust the scabbard through the belt-like sash around her waist in traditional samurai style. The flock of butterflies settled expectantly on the walls and ceiling showing excited shades of yellow, green, and cyan.

  “I have shown you my teacher's katana before. It was Hiroyuki Saito's grandfather's sword and has been in their family for more than a hundred years. Their family were samurai, members of the warrior class of feudal Japan. Such swords are not just weapons, they are objects of art, and even have a sacred aspect in the Shinto religion.

  “There is much mysticism surrounding the ancient samurai, their skills and their deeds. It is said a true samurai could note the positions of his opponents with a single glance, and once this was done he could strike them down without a second look.”

  Mizuki was standing side-on to the staggered row of targets, each as big around as a man's thigh and taller than the swordswoman herself. The first stood about five feet to her right. Bobby was to her left and the two sisters were standing in front of her, about ten feet away.

  Mizuki glanced to her right and then back at the girls. Bobby stepped behind her and placed a folded strip of black cloth over her eyes. After tying the blindfold at the back of her head, he quickly moved well away. The cargo bay was dead silent.

  Mizuki exploded into motion, gliding to the right, drawing the sword at the same time. An upward cut removed the top 1/3 of the nearest target. Before the severed piece struck the deck, she moved past the second target, slicing through it with a downward diagonal stroke. The last target, on her left, received another downward stroke and toppled. All three cut pieces of heavy matting lay upon the ground as the echo of Mizuki's kiai faded. Silence returned.

  She returned the katana to its scabbard. Then she reached up and removed the blindfold. Turning, she saw the result of her attack for the first time, nodding to herself with satisfaction. She looked at her students, finding them wide eyed with mouths agape. Even Bobby looked suitably impressed and overhead the butterflies swirled in kaleidoscopic celebration of their goddess' skill.

  “You see what is possible if you take the time to master yourself, focus your will and control your body? It takes time to learn the proper form, to clear your mind of distractions, but one day you may find you have acquired some small skill with the sword, as I have.”

  Mizuki bowed once again to her students and strode from their impromptu dojo, the flock of brightly colored butterflies trailing the warrior astrophysicist, leaving Bobby and the two sisters to clean up the mess.

  * * * * *

  In the aft end of the cargo hold there was a pile of tangled pipes and equipment that was meant to receive the heavy water being collected from beneath the ice. Currently the temporary processing plant was being attended to by some of the engineer's mates and several Marines. They had all stopped to watch the martial arts demonstration taking place in the forward part of the hold.

  “Is old Russian saying,” said LCpl Dmitry “Bosco” Boskovitch, “you can tell much about a woman's mood by looking at her hands.”

  “Really?” responded Vincent “Vinny” DeSilva, as Mizuki began her pass through the standing mats.

  “Da. For example, if she is holding sword, is probably in bad mood.”

  “Did you see that?” asked PFC Hezekiah, incredulity in his tone.

  “That can't be possible,” said PFC Malachi, the first PFC's twin. “She cut through all three of those heavy mats in like under a second! And those butterflies are just freaky.”

  The two were the newest Marines on board the ship, having been recruited from the survivors of the Paradise expedition. In fact, aside from the two Iranian sisters, they were the only other survivors from among the colonists. They managed to escape from the settlement optimistically named Zion by their former leader.

  Being both large and notably lacking in technical skills, they had been placed in the care of GySgt. Roselito Acuna, with the hope that she could turn them into competent Marines. T
he Gunny immediately christened them Jumbo One and Jumbo Two, rather than constantly trip over their unusual, biblical names.

  “Believe it, Marine,” snapped the Gunny. “I've fought beside Dr. Ogawa and she's just as effective against alien bug-nasties as she is against target mats. Those butterflies are actually an alien—or maybe aliens, never too clear about that—but they are basically her pet. Besides, you just saw her slice up those mats, so by definition it is not impossible.”

  “'I try to believe in as many as six impossible things before breakfast',” quipped Sgt. Herman “Kato” Kwan. “So get with the program, boys.”

  “What?” the Jumbos replied as one.

  “Lewis Carroll, from Through the Looking-Glass,” Rosey clarified. “When you find yourself stuck on some alien world, facing creatures from your worst nightmares, just remember impossible thing number six.”

  “Number six, Gunny?”

  “'I can slay the Jabberwocky'. Now get back to work.”

  The Sunless Sea

  Lights from the four Earthlings and their equipment shown upon the dimpled and contorted bottom of the kilometers thick ice cap. It also illuminated a silver gray flower, twenty meters across, sprouting from the end of the bore-shaft, a giant blossom of engineered origami that the bears were still tugging and coercing into place—the heavy water filtering membrane. Jim was fiddling with connections at the drill head while Will was busy collecting samples from the wrinkled underbelly of the icecap.

  “I think that's about got it, Ahnah,” Umky called out from the far side of the filter array. Ahnah performed a graceful back-flip maneuver, putting extra distance between her and the array. Both bears were enjoying the aquatic environment, even encased in pressure suits.

  “Yes, I think that's as unfolded as it is going to get. Jim, we are ready to give the collector a test.”

  “Right,” replied the human engineer, “let me contact the folks at the wellhead. Wellhead, Collector.”

  “Go ahead, Collector,” came the reply from the surface.

  “Wellhead, we are ready to switch the filter pumps on to test flow rate.”