Murel's imagination had gone to work while they talked. She could see people trapped in little narrow passages, similar to the lava tube but smaller and darker.
The passages would be choked with roots, damp underfoot and lightless once the fuel for the torches or the batteries for the flashlights wore out. The people trapped there would stand or sit or maybe only have room to squat in those tight little places. They'd listen, waiting until the meteors stopped crashing and shaking the world around them. Finally, when it seemed safe to go aboveground again, they wouldn't be able to stay. The air mixture aboveground was not safe to breathe without protective clothing or equipment. There was no shelter for them, no food.
They would discover they'd been left for dead, and soon enough they would die.
"We're going too," she said, interrupting more arguing. "Ronan and me, we'll help you find them."
"Not your job," Ke-ola said.
Leilani, Keoki, and others gave her startled looks. She moved closer to Ke-ola and said in a low voice, "Maybe not, but if those canals are filled with water, as you said, we'll be better able to help than anyone else. You know what I mean, Ke-ola."
"You don't know how things are down there. You don't know where to look. I grew up here."
"So you come too, but we're going to help."
CHAPTER 7
THIS ISN'T PETAYBEE, children," Marmie said when they told her what they intended to do. "There are no rivers or open sea on Halau-it is all underground and in utter darkness, with dangers multiplied by the damage from the meteor shower. No, I'm sorry. It is out of the question."
The twins complained to each other but knew there was no dissuading Madame once she made her decision. Nor would she hear of Ke-ola or the others going back.
"But Marmie, what if that Cally is wrong?" Murel said. "What if there are still people down there? If we just go without finding out for sure, we could be condemning them to a horrible death. And to make matters worse, they'd know they were dying because the other survivors abandoned them."
Marmie gave her a shrewd look. "They are not to know that there are survivors if they have been hiding underground all that time, n'est-ce pas?"
"It doesn't matter if they know or not, we'll know," Ronan told her. "And Ke-ola's people will know and they'll always wonder. It's no way to start a new life, thinking maybe you've left people to die a-"
"Enough!" Marmie said firmly. "Some things cannot be helped, and I trust that the adults among Ke-ola's people will understand this."
"No, they don't," Murel said just as firmly.
"In time they will."
"One last sweep, Marmie," Ronan wheedled. "It's what we came down here to do, after all. Just because we got some people safe doesn't mean we should go away without making sure there aren't more. You don't really trust that creepy Colonel
Cally to find his own arse with both hands, do you?"
"What if the meteor showers begin again?" she asked.
"The Honus will know," Ke-ola told her. He stood a little behind the twins, and it seemed he'd been talking with Leilani and Keoki, but Murel didn't think he had missed a word.
"Perhaps not in time. No, it's too risky. Your parents would never forgive me if something happened to you."
"And these people will never forgive you or us if we don't try," Murel said, hard headed as a curly coat who wanted to graze when his rider wanted to keep going.
Even if it was dark and dangerous underground and underwater, she knew they had to try to look for other survivors and dig them out.
Otters do that, Sky said suddenly, entering the minds of both twins as easily as he did when they were in seal form.
What? Murel asked.
What you are thinking. Burrowing into dark dens and tunnels, coming into water.
Otters do that all the time. Sky otters do it too.
Sorry, Ronan said. We don't have any otter-shaped space suits and helmets.
Sky stood on his hind paws and looked first one way and then another at a discarded helmet lying beside Johnny Green. Sky Otters are not large. Sky otters can curl up very tight, fit in helmet. Don't need suits. And Honus say air belowground is good. No helmet.
What do you think? Murel asked her brother.
I think otters burrow into dens all the time, even sky otters. Might be a bigger burrow than Sky's used to and I don't think he should go alone, but it's worth a try.
"Marmie," Murel said. "Sky says going down into the kind of burrows we're talking about is something otters do all the time. He's willing to let us carry him down there curled up in an activated helmet and let him loose when we get to the fresher air below. Besides, you know, we have night vision in seal form and great hearing too. We haven't needed it much so far, but our dad says we have sonar, so the dark wouldn't bother us either."
"So you think I won't let you go by yourselves, but with a two-foot-long otter to chaperone you I trust you to stay out of trouble?" Marmie asked, then made a moue. A glimmer of humor entered her previously steely glance. "Mmmm, perhaps. But I think maybe we all will go back down and watch aboveground in case you find more than even otters can handle, yes?"
"We can help," Ke-ola told the twins excitedly. "The Honus can hear you and tell us where you are. We can station ourselves above you and keep you from becoming lost."
"With so many hands, flippers, paws, and shells aligned against me, I have no choice but to surrender," Marmie said.
"Count your lucky stars," Johnny said to the twins when Marmie had turned back to tell the survivors of the plan. "She is not usually so democratic. She must have deep respect for otters."
THEY SHUTTLED PEOPLE and diggers to the flattened settlements several miles away from the one formerly occupied by Ke-ola's people. The surface was deeply pocked with giant meteor craters, and blackened and scorched by fire.
The three digger flitters now had added sensor attachments to their array that could detect subterranean water. They resembled the buglike aliens of the old vids the twins had watched on shipboard as they aligned themselves in a more or less east west line and lowered the shovels.
As many of Ke-ola's people as could fit into the available flitters came too.
Through the Honus on shipboard and the smaller Honu accompanying Ke-ola and the twins, the other Halauans hoped to help keep track of the twins' progress and know where they were when they were belowground.
Inside the transparent helmet Ronan held like a fishbowl, Sky twisted his sinuous self so he could peer out the glass, his whiskery face looking strangely distorted and misshapen, his eyes huge and darting around as he tried to make out his surroundings.
"Didn't these people have an entrance to the lower regions, like yourselves? How about lava tubes?" Murel asked Ke-ola.
"I don't think there were tubes near enough to their settlement to give them cover.
But they had canals, and an escape route, according to our people who had relatives here. But the meteors changed the landscape so much, it's hard to find the old entrance point. Digging down until we strike a channel seems like our best bet."
When one of the shovels came back to the surface dripping water, Ronan and
Murel carried Sky over to the hole and slipped down into it. Literally. The soil was first too warm for comfort, then very muddy, and the twins slipped, lost their footing, and slid down into the water, still clad in their space suits. Ronan hit a rock. Sky's helmet tumbled away from him, landing in the stream of rapidly flowing water, no doubt from an artesian well of some sort.