Mosaic - Jeri Taylor [36]
He glanced up at her as he calibrated his breathing gill. "That's why I come here. I'm looking for an opening into the Olympus Mons cave system." She thought maybe she hadn't heard him correctly. "You? You're looking for the Olympus system?"
His gray eyes sought hers. "Why? Do you know about it?" She nodded. "Some day I'm going to explore the caves. I'd like to map the system."
"How did you know about the caves?"
"Someone from Starfleet once told me. How did you?"
"I read about them. Some obscure story I found in a historical database at the library."
It figured. Hobbes always had his nose in a padd-and never one anyone else would be caught dead reading.
"So," he continued, "my dad and I have been diving the quarries since last year, looking for an entrance. We've covered about seven of them. We were here a few days ago but my gill started malfunctioning and we had to leave."
"You dad lets you dive the quarries?"
"Sure."
No wonder Hobbes was so strange-he came from a strange family. No one let their children go to the quarries. What could his father have been thinking?
"Well, I hope you have enough sense not to dive alone."
"Of course not. Usually I'm with dad. Today I have you."
Something about the placid ease of his presumption rankled Kathryn. She almost said she didn't want to dive, just to punish him for jumping to the conclusion that she'd dive with him, but in time she remembered that it was exactly what she wanted to do, and there was no point in spoiling her day. For once, she managed to squelch herself before she said something she regretted. Quickly, she pulled on her thermal suit, an intricate web of nichrome filaments that would keep her body comfortably warm even in near-freezing water. They both had equipment they'd used in school, where diving had been taught along with rock climbing, tennis, and swimming. Lightweight tripolymer body suits, vented fins, and the breathing gills, which constantly extracted breathable oxygen from the surrounding water, much like the gills of a fish. Long ago, humans had used bulky oxygen tanks, and then rebreathers, which processed exhaled air, removing the carbon dioxide by mixing it with alkaline hydroxide, and then injecting the resultant oxygen with helium. These tanks would allow divers to stay underwater for up to twenty-four hours at a time.
Now, of course, they could be under for as long as they wanted, just like fish.
They checked each other's buddy lights, readjusted their gills, and then lowered themselves off the platform and into the water. The first thing she noticed was the cold. The suits they wore were light as cotton, but chemically treated to keep them warm at temperatures as low as two degrees C. Even so, Kathryn felt cool immediately. The second thing to strike her was the pristine clarity of the water. She felt she could see for a hundred meters-if there had been anything to see. No flora graced this chilly lake, no fauna inhabited its depths. There was nothing except rock and water.
The silence soothed her, as it always did when she was underwater. A sense of tranquillity enveloped her, and she swam effortlessly through the clear water, keeping her eye on the two green buddy lights on Hobbes' back, signaling that he was doing fine. He was stroking steadily downward, moving toward the periphery of the quarry, searching for an opening in the wall-a crack, a dark spot-something that might indicate the presence of a cave system beyond. They swam like that for some forty minutes, methodically searching the quarry walls, but finding nothing except impenetrable stone. They had circumnavigated the quarry twice, the second time at a significantly lower depth. Then Hobbes signaled her to surface, and gradually they floated their way to the top.
Kathryn was grateful. She was unpleasantly cold, and thirsty; she wanted to get out for a while, warm up, and have a piece of fruit. But Hobbes had other