Maelstrom Read Online Free PDF Page B

are the canals or tunnels. They’re big enough for people to stand in, or even live in, and some of them interconnect. They’re real deep too. My people use the channels sometimes, even though they don’t much like being underground. I think the tunnel under this bubble went deeper than the meteor.”
    “Then all we’d have to do is dig them out,” Ronan said, thinking of all of the digger attachments for the flitters he had seen in the docking bay.
    “Yeah, if the meteor didn’t collapse the tunnel on them,” Ke-ola replied grimly. He sank to his knees, pawing at the ground with his heavy gloves.
    “Hey, you don’t have to do that,” Ronan told him, touching the shoulder of Ke-ola’s suit with his glove. “The
Piaf
has plenty of equipment to dig way deeper than you can.”
    But Ke-ola didn’t seem to be listening. Ronan decided he must be in shock. Leaving his friend to his own futile efforts, he sensibly galumphed a couple of steps back toward the others to tell them about the underground canals.
    “We heard,” Johnny said. “These transmitters in the helmets send to everybody unless you narrow the frequency. The flitters are being fitted with diggers and crews are already being mobilized.”
    Marmie knelt beside Ke-ola so that her helmet-enclosed face was close to his. “Come away now, Ke-ola, before something lands on you and burns through your suit,” she told him.
    But he ignored her too.
    Everyone else returned to the ship’s interior and waited until the equipment was ready. When they reentered the airlock, the twins followed Johnny’s and Marmie’s example and pulled off their helmets but kept their suits on as they stepped through the air lock, back into the docking bay. It was now a hive of activity as equipment was fitted and tested.
    Murel stayed close to the bulkhead and looked through the small porthole to the ground below, where Ke-ola continued to dig.
I hate to leave him like that, but it’s daft to think he’ll be able to dig down to them with just his hands.
    Of course it’s daft,
Ronan replied,
but if it was Kilcoole that was buried down there instead of Ke-ola’s village, would you wait for someone else to try to save them? I think not!
    The interior hatch to the docking bay slid open to admit a small troop of people marching double time toward the flitters.
    Watching the flitter crews climb aboard, wearing suits but only carrying helmets, made Ronan worry about another matter. “Johnny, we have to wear our suits when we go outside. If Ke-ola’s people were inside when the shower hit, they probably didn’t have their suits on,” he said worriedly. “They wouldn’t be able to breathe without the suits belowground either, would they?”
    “I don’t know. I suppose the instinct would be to get out of the way of the meteors and worry about suffocation later—or maybe they grabbed the suits as they went down and had time to put them on before they could suffer ill effects. We can hope so, at least. Ke-ola might know.”
    Ronan pulled his helmet back over his head and spoke into the microphone inside it. “Ke-ola, you told us there’s room enough for your people underground, but won’t they suffocate for lack of air if they didn’t have suits with them?”
    After a pause, Ke-ola replied, “No, they won’t. Not down there. The air’s better belowground than above.” A hopeful note had come into his voice, though Ronan could hear his heavy breathing as he continued pawing at the ground. Drawing a deeper breath, Ke-ola continued, “The air up here is okay as far as basic composition goes but it’s contaminated by a lot of space junk that gets drawn to the surface by the gravity. Underneath, the heavy root systems of the plants work to purify the air.”
    “I thought that was because of chlorophyll and photosynthesis.”
    “With the plants we brought with us, terran plants, that’s how it is. But these native plants have other properties that let them do the same