Chapter 12: Sunken Secrets

“Ok Sleethe,” Lena said as she secured the rebreather’s strap around her head, ensuring that the device was firmly anchored to her face. “Here’s what we’re gonna do. You’re going to swim me down to the Broker facility, and we’re going to assess the situation. Pay close attention to what I’m doing, because when I give the signal, you have to get me back to the surface as soon as possible. Understand? I only have about six minutes of oxygen with this thing, so we’ll probably need to make several trips. I don’t know how long this will take, or even if we’ll be able to get inside at all.”

He nodded, and Lena could only hope that her translator had done a good enough job. She was standing waist-deep in the water on the shore of the lake, steeling herself for the possibly ill-advised and potentially dangerous dive that she was about to attempt.

Based on everything that she knew about diving, which admittedly was not a whole lot, the cold and the pressure would not do her any lasting damage as long as she was careful about how long she spent down there. She had no wetsuit, and so there was nothing to be done about the temperature. Any clothing that she wore to keep warm would have the opposite effect as it became waterlogged. At about sixty feet the pressure shouldn’t be too bad, she wouldn’t get the bends, as far as she knew. She had to hope that six minutes would be enough time to get anything done, assuming that the Broker structure wasn’t completely sealed off and inaccessible. It would surely have security features to keep any nosy Krell out, but would they still be active after being abandoned for hundreds of years?

“Let’s go Sleethe.”

She climbed up onto his back and sat on him as he swam her out onto the lake, the shore slowly fading from view as it was enveloped by mist. Before long there was nothing in sight besides the flat water on all sides, like she was in the middle of a wide ocean. She brought up the hologram of the sonar scan and tracked their progress, giving Sleethe directions until they were right on top of it.

For the time being she had elected to bring nothing but her wrist computer, even foregoing shorts for the fear that they would become soaked with water and weigh her down. After their escapades on the shore earlier in the day, she hardly felt exposed anymore. Hopefully the flashlight would work underwater...

She patted Sleethe on the back, and he slowed, floating in the water like a living island as she slid off him. The water at this depth was still fairly warm, but she knew how quickly the temperature would plummet, and she wasn’t looking forward to it. Why was she doing this? Her job was to document the flora and fauna that inhabited the planet, to take measurements of its environment and to study the native culture. Nobody had told her that she had to risk her life in pursuit of Broker secrets. Why not give it up and go back to the temple?

Nope, she couldn’t stand living with the curiosity, it would drive her mad.

“Alright big guy, let’s go for a swim.”

Sleethe wrapped his powerful arm around her midsection, holding her like someone might carry a small dog, and then plunged into the lake. In mere seconds the warmth of the surface was far behind her, cold water surrounding her as the sunlight faded. She could scarcely open her eyes, the rushing water hitting her in the face with the force of a showerhead, Sleethe’s undulating movements rocking her as he swam into the dark depths.

Her ears popped as they descended, as if she was taking a shuttle ride. She was surprised by how obvious the pressure change was. She could feel it pressing down on her, even at what had appeared to be such a shallow depth. Sixty feet was now feeling a lot deeper than it had when she had been studying the sonar map in the safety of the temple. She could still breathe however, she was safe for the time being.

Sleethe released her suddenly, and after a brief moment of panic her bare feet found the frigid mud, their presence kicking up a cloud of silt and debris. She was now standing on the lakebed, sixty feet beneath the surface. Lena collected herself, remembering that every second she spent marveling at her situation or being afraid, was a second wasted. She had work to do.

She blinked as her eyes adjusted to the water. Unfortunately the goggles were an optional accessory that she had not deemed necessary when she had been rummaging through the Pinwheel’s surplus stores. She took a deep breath, trying to remind her body that she wasn’t drowning, and bounded forward as her vision came into focus. The beam of light from her wrist computer didn’t do a very good job of penetrating the murky water, but it was enough to see a couple of feet in front of her. Sleethe was hovering nearby like a living submarine, keeping an eye on her and leading her towards their destination. One and a half minutes had already passed, judging by the holographic counter on her forearm, its orange glow clearly visible. Pick up the pace, Lena.

After a few steps the structure came into view, emerging from the gloom as its white surface reflected the light. It looked like it was built from giant, white cubes with rounded edges. There were no visible windows or doors on its surface. There wasn’t much of anything in fact, the nearest face of the building was featureless besides the gunk that was clinging to it.

There were water weeds growing all over it, lichens and what looked like clusters of barnacles, it had clearly been left in disrepair for a very long period of time. Colonies of crustaceans seemed to have made their homes around its base, where the silt and mud deposited over the eons was slowly burying it. It almost looked like it was sinking into the ground, but she knew that all of this had built up over centuries.

She reached the first building and began to circle it, searching for an opening that would let her inside, referencing her sonar scan as she went. The wireframe model showed six such buildings, all in irregular sizes and linked by tubes. If the tubes were made from glass, might Sleethe be able to break into them?

One such tube came into view as she rounded the first of the featureless blocks, appearing from the wall and vanishing into the adjacent building. The silt had built up here too, the glass tube was half buried in muck, tiny crabs milling about in the forest of weeds that had sprung up around it. Unfortunately the glass wasn’t so much as cracked, it was likely made from supermaterials that humans hadn’t even discovered yet.

Lena checked her timer. Two and a half minutes had elapsed.

Sleethe disturbed the weeds as he swam nearby, hovering over the installation and turning his long snout this way and that, searching. He must know what she was trying to accomplish, scouting for an entrance from above.

Her feet were starting to get painfully cold. Walking in this mud was like wading through snow, and so she paddled a little higher. The exercise warmed her, but too much exertion would expend her oxygen supply very quickly. She couldn’t see any way inside, would all of this effort be for nothing?

Sleethe abruptly shot out of view, vanishing into the murky water as the powerful strokes of his tail disturbed a shoal of nearby fish. When he reemerged again, he was heading straight for her, and he swooped down to pluck her off the ground. He held her in his arms as he swam her up and over the installation, Lena gazing down at it as he carried her along. The third block of the structure was in the shadow of the underwater cliff that had shown up on her scan. The rock face extended up thirty or forty feet towards the surface. As Sleethe swam her lower, she noticed a pile of rubble, and her eyes lit up.

It was a rockslide! At some point part of the cliff had collapsed, raining large boulders down on the Broker base. Even at this distance she could make out where the building had buckled under the stress, but if it had torn an opening in the material, then it was buried under the subsequent buildup of mud and silt.

Apparently their advanced materials weren’t so advanced that they were immune to the slow advance of nature. It might have taken a lot longer to decay than a human structure would have, but the planet was slowly reclaiming it.

Sleethe deposited her beside the pile of rocks, and they both began to inspect it, trying to find a break in the white material where Lena might slip through. It almost looked like the building was made of putty or soft plastic, it had dented inward and sagged where the rocks had crushed it. It wasn’t made of anything that Lena could recognize. Maybe it would be worth taking some samples back with her, perhaps the UAS could study its composition and find a way to reproduce it.

Finally she located a space between two rocks where she could see inside the structure, pulling away handfuls of silt and small stones as she peered in. It looked the same inside as out, matte white walls with no discernible details. The tear looked large enough for her to get inside, but the boulders that were blocking her way must have been five or six hundred pounds apiece, there was no way for her to move them. She waved Sleethe over and he swam up beside her, immediately realizing what she was trying to accomplish. Lena took a few steps back and floated nearby as he braced his feet against the lakebed, his massive biceps bulging beneath his leathery skin as he hooked his hands under the nearest rock and strained to lift it.

Even underwater these boulders were incredibly heavy, but Sleethe was as strong as ten men, succeeding in lifting it off the pile. A stream of bubbles trailed from his nostrils as he cast it aside, its impact shaking the ground beneath Lena’s feet. It landed in the mud and sank a few inches, its considerable weight easily apparent. She watched in awe as he moved on to the next one, even larger than the first. They were stacked on top of the building’s sagging wall almost like a pyramid, the joints between them filled in with mud and silt that had accumulated there over time. They had been here long enough that some of them had barnacles and weeds clinging to their irregular surfaces.

Lena could see Sleethe’s muscles ripple beneath his armored scales as he lifted the next boulder, bracing his legs like a strongman lifting a barbell. It must have been half a ton of rock at least, but but it was soon rolling across the muddy lakebottom beside him. He dislodged three more of the rocks, and then Lena watched his head vanish into the opening, checking out the interior. If his head could fit inside, then so could she.

She began to swim over to him, but then the orange glow of her holographic counter caught her eye. Seven minutes had passed. She patted Sleethe on his scaly rump when he came into range, and gestured to her wrist. He didn’t waste a second, curling his arm around her and shooting up towards the surface of the lake like a green torpedo. Perhaps the minor incident during the first test of the rebreather had scared him.

In less than a minute her head was above the water, and she took a few moments to let her rebreather recharge and to recover from the cold. She swore that she could feel the cool blood moving from her extremities back into her core. That didn’t seem very safe. She lay flat on the calm surface of the water, ensuring that she was completely reheated before braving the frigid depths again. When she was ready to resume her expedition, she reset her timer and had Sleethe swim her back down.

Before long she was floating in front of the Broker structure again, and now there was a vaguely Lena-sized hole in the rocks where she should be able to slip through. She rested her hands on the pile of mud and stones as she gauged the size of the hole. It looked like she would fit. She poked her arms through first, then her head, using the leverage to pull the rest of her body through the opening. There was a flare of pain a she scraped her thigh on one of the boulders, the jagged rock tearing into her skin. Lena yelped into her mask as a small cloud of blood billowed from the injury, floating into the Broker facility and turning to examine the wound.

It stung, but it was superficial, no reason to abort the dive. She would have to give it a thorough clean with antiseptic and dress it when she returned to the shore, there was nothing to be done about it right now.

Sleethe must have smelled the blood in the water, because his long snout pushed between the boulders and he stared at her with a concerned expression. She gave him two thumbs up, and he withdrew again, satisfied that she wasn’t bleeding to death. Lena took a moment to work through the stinging pain, and then proceeded.

Finally, she was inside the Broker base, and there were none of the egotistical aliens around to hamper her investigations. She floated through the water, turning her head to examine the interior. It reminded her of being on the Broker spacecraft when she had flown down to the planet’s surface. Everything was matte white and silver, made from clean, geometric shapes with rounded edges. It was so synthetic, it lacked any artistic flair or decoration that would have characterized the dwellings and buildings of the other Coalition races. The first structure was perhaps thirty feet squared, a perfect cube with an equally high ceiling. The proportions were odd, how could the inhabitants make use of that space?

Unlike the spaceship however, there was furniture here. Where humans would have used chairs, the Brokers seemed to have mesh nets that hung from the ceiling on cables, like small hammocks. The Krell scholar had suggested that they were an aquatic race, was this how they took a load off? Did they swim up to these nets and sit in them? There were tables here and there too. Large, flat surfaces that were lifted off the floor with a single leg that propped them up from the center, and which looked too fragile to hold their weight.

Lena swam closer and examined them. They were as flat and as featureless as the walls, no clues there. What had been the purpose of this structure when it was in use? Habitation? Research? Espionage? The room was so bare that it was very hard to imagine what its function might have been.

She moved on to the next structure, swimming along a glass tunnel that was half buried in the mud, her torch lighting her way. She could see the weeds that were clinging to it from below, taking a photo of how their roots wound across the transparent material. She could see the undersides of the barnacle-like creatures too, their fleshy ‘foot’ clinging to the glass like that of a snail.

The next building was longer than it was wide, and it was full of alien machinery. This must be the engine room, so to speak, the structure that housed all of the systems that did ... whatever this outpost was designed to do. Lena swam about the room, carefully documenting everything with her computer’s camera. There were large glass tubes that might have been for containing live specimens, or perhaps for filtering water. There were surfaces littered with all manner of what looked to her like science or engineering equipment, tools that would fit no hand that Lena could conceive of. It was all impossible to quantify. There were weeds and mosses her and there, some creatures had managed to find their way into the breach and had made this structure their home, almost like a shipwreck.