Zarah Voss's Arc

Chapter 14 of 16

Zarah reached the shore with her lungs already tight from the run. The steam had thinned to a smudge over the water. Far out, a dark shape rode the swell. She shaded her eyes and made it out. Not a shell. Not a hull. A cargo pod, boxy and scarred, held up by four fat yellow airbags. It bobbed where it had struck. The airbags had saved it from the deep. But she had no boat, no float, no way to reach it. It sat too far to wade. She would have to swim. She pressed the gill root to her throat and felt it grip. The two fern leaves fanned across her collar. She breathed in, and the air came cool and wet through the root. Good. It still worked. She waded past the break and pushed off into a hard crawl. The plate on her arm dragged at every stroke. She cursed her habit, but she did not stop to shed it. The current pulled sideways. She fought it and swam straight for the yellow bags. The pod was bigger up close than it had looked. Each airbag stood taller than her chest. She grabbed a strap between two of them and hung there, breathing through the root, letting her arms rest. The container hummed under her hand. Something inside still had power. She ran her palm along the seam. The metal was clean-cut and thick, better than her own mined plates. This was a shell, whole and rugged, built to take a fall. Then she saw the drift. The current that had fought her was carrying the pod out, not in. Every minute pushed it farther from the beach. She could not tow it against the pull by swimming. She looked at the airbags. They floated the pod. They could float her too. She climbed onto the top of the container and lay flat. Her weight pushed one corner down. She wormed to the center and found her balance. Now she rode it. But riding it did nothing if it drifted the wrong way. She dropped back into the water on the shoreward side, braced her feet against the strap, and kicked. The pod turned. Slow, but it turned. She kicked again and again, using the airbags as a raft to push against. Half an hour of kicking brought the drift to a crawl, then a creep toward the sand. Her legs burned. The gill root fed her breath after breath while her arms shook. At last the container scraped bottom. She hauled it through the shallows, one strap at a time, until an airbag rested on wet sand. Zarah dragged herself up beside it and lay gasping. She had it. A real hull, whole and strong, worth more than the box she had welded by hand. But the pod hummed, and the humming meant a lock. She would have to open it to learn what she had won.