The Captain was amused to see a half-dozen racing kayaks tied up behind his and the ranger ship. He was much less amused at the idea of crossing the equator. That’s not to say he didn’t believe his ship could, but didn’t like the risk of taking his family into such danger. George shrugged. “Then don’t go.”
The Captain almost took him up on it, then decided he would regret that more than any losses doing it. So it was they found this fancy cruise liner skirting the eastern shore of the passage. At some point, the winds would catch the tops of the sails as they edged into the zone where the wind ran down the desert slope to the sea. It wasn’t just a cross wind; any sailor could handle that. It was a stiff cross wind with little room for error as the currents and wind together drove them west while they traveled north. If it worked, it would still put them very close to the rocky zone.
The ranger ship was narrower, lighter, and without the usual load of prisoners, made it just fine. The bigger ship ended up near the western shore too soon, so the sails were dropped, as were the anchors. With the winds still rather high, the captain turned the ship into the wind. “Now what?” he asked George over the dull roar of the winds. They were just a few meters from dragging bottom at the stern.
Fortis had an idea. “How hard would it be to create a kite big enough to lift a man?”
“Which man?” The Captain and George spoke in unison.
“I’ll go,” Fortis said, feeling sure he would regret it later. He remembered a popular sport on some worlds called para-sailing. Within an hour, spare sail panels were rigged to a frame with a long thin line on a reel. Fortis climbed up to the top of the bridge cabin, and easily caught the wind, suspended below this kite. It took a few minutes for him to get the feel of tipping the sails up and down, but he managed to do it reasonably well as they let out the line slowly. He was lifted with good clearance from the rather steep, craggy rise of the shore. Slowly, he drifted up the shore, until eventually he was even with the crest. He turned his neck to see what was behind him. He was stunned by what he saw from his high altitude, just down the shore a couple of kilometers or so where it turned back west. So stunned he changed his mind and signaled to be reeled back down.
He was utterly exhausted by the time he crashed gently just off the rear of the ship into the water. He had come in too far behind the ship and lost the wind. Once they fished him and his kite out of the water, he ignored the wetness in his excitement.
“George! It’s a crater. Sometime in the far past of this planet, something struck the surface right at the edge. The rocks are the debris thrown out by the impact. I caught just a glimpse of the depression with water in it. The whole thing is well below sea level, and I saw the reeds, I’m sure.”
“We thought maybe the pole was something like a crater,” George agreed.
“Probably so, maybe a vertical strike, but this one is very pronounced, the unmistakable signature of a linear impact crater.”
Meanwhile, the Captain didn’t want any more silly experiments. He broke out some long poles and had his crew stand on the rear deck. Pushing off, they were able to shift the boat northward just a bit. With a little judicious anchor lifting, they made some slow headway. Taking turns, they moved a few hundred meters before dark.
The next morning, they applied themselves again to the grueling work. The ranger ship remained where it was, unable to help. However, at some point they saw the big ship was in range, and sent a man over in a kayak.
George first ascertained what was the angle of view when the girls usually showed themselves, then explained the plan to the ranger, who promptly headed back. It was slower for him against the wind, but not out of reach for a strong rower. Meanwhile, the ship continued slipping slowly sideways along the shore. Finally, they stopped.
At dawn, it was the captain himself who manned the reel when Fortis went up with the makeshift kite. He almost missed the first time, but recovered and set himself on top of the cliff with a single step to spare. The landing was solid. Seeing that, the twins manfully joined and managed to place themselves, with help from Fortis grabbing, on the same spot. They each had water and weapons. Fortis had seen the approach from the table land down to the crater was relatively easy back of the cliff face. They had just a bit more light than the bottom of the crater. As they made their way across the rugged surface and began down the slope, the kayaks from the ranger ship set out. George worked his way along the shore in a kayak alone from the big boat, and then angled around to join the rangers’ approach.
Fortis and the twins picked their way down, while the rangers and George threaded their way through the rocks. The latter eventually found a low rock ledge where several battered rafts and reed canoes were pulled up out of the water. George and the rangers worked their way up to the lip of the depression, spread out along the rim, and caught a handful of men by surprise. The men with George carried Gauss weapons for this occasion, almost the entire ranger armory. Resistance never really formed. The men were herded together, marched down the side of the deep bowl, and simply sat down on the shore. There were reed huts all along the edge of the bowl. It was quite warm, almost swampy down inside, with almost no wind. George loudly ordered the women to stay inside their huts. His voice carried quite well across the wide bowl.
The eastern end down close to the water line showed extensive mining scars, with glints of light reflecting from exposed silica. Reed ladders and makeshift mining equipment were scattered around. From the narrower end far in the other direction, steam rose from where the water seemed to be boiling up from the ground. There were stacks of reeds up on the rim. Hot springs were not unheard of, but rare on Misty. The waters were not toxic. The bowl was a long slash in the ground, and the waters managed to cool somewhat before reaching the other end.
Finally, someone obviously older than the rest waded around to meet them. The man wore a sleeveless tunic.
“So, you finally found us.” His voice was raspy. “I’m called Charley.”
George noticed everyone was looking just a bit undernourished.
“Nice place here, Charley. I’m Judge Manley.”
“Hooo, a judge, even. Gonna kick us out, Judge? Take us out to exile on the islands? Kill us, even?”
“No, nothing like that. I’m just checking out where our rangers’ resources were going. Looks like you weren’t getting enough of the food.”
“Nah, been bad times lately. Our regular supply ship quit showing up. I suppose it didn’t help we couldn’t produce enough silica to make him happy. We’ve been hanging on by our fingernails.” He pointed at the mining scars, and a small pile of silica on the rim.
“What happened, Charley?”
“Well, to make a long story short, it took all our resources to send my boy Freddie out. He managed to hitch a ride with the supply ship on a load of silica. Took our best glider, some nice clothes and our only real weapon. There’s fish out there, and we can eat some of the shoots off the cane growing here. But we used up all our next two loads of silica paying off the risks for helping Freddie sneak into the Bradley Clan.
“Back when my granddaddy started here, the silica was all over the ground. We eventually had to start digging it out. Now, I reckon you know a few men and a bunch of girls can’t mine much silica. That stuff is stuck hard in that ground. No, we been enticing some of the prisoners off their islands for some years with the extra food we bought with the silica. Gave `em some good education, too. Taught `em all about democracy and proper organization. Let `em learn to vote. When we got behind after Freddie left, we didn’t have any way to persuade them to come work for us. Mine ain’t played out; just the miners.” He produced an odd, horse laughter, coming in gulps.
“Sorry to hear that. You’ll be sorry to hear Freddie didn’t succeed. He ended up on Johnston Island where you had a few followers among the probates. They are all dead, and so is Freddy. Crashed his glider into the sea.”
Charley dropped to his knees in the water, blubbering. George waited for him to recover. It took awhile, and the young men moved to comfort him.
By that time, Fortis had come around with the twins, walking on the east rim. They had in custody two more of the skinny men dressed like Charley. They stopped a few meters from the scene. “Looks like hot water comes in from a spring in the west, drifts across the bowl, then drains back into the ground in the deepest part of the crater here,” pointing behind him where the bank was steeper. “Probably struck the planet from the west, which stands to reason, cutting against the direction of rotation. This crater was once far deeper, so a lot of deep material was plowed up.”
Charley finally regained a measure of composure. “So what you going to do with us now?”
George looked back at him. “Your only real advantage was secrecy, and that’s gone now. And you can’t teach any more democracy nonsense” — Charley’s eyes glared at the choice of words — “but just to make sure, we are going to order all shipping to avoid this area. We’ll move prisoner operations to the ranger base over on the other side of this continent and double up on the number of islands out there for detention.”
“What about food? You gonna leave us here to starve?” Charley was angry, if powerless.
George remained utterly calm. “You could trade. Not just silica, which you could contract out easily, but the reeds. I see you have here a natural heat-treating plant. Like every other woody product on Misty, it hardens that way. Very nice.”
George rose to his feet. “I could even declare you folks a Clan, give you full rights and all.” Charley had just a hint of hope in his eyes. “But you’ll have to adopt our way of life. You’ll have to understand why we don’t tolerate democracy, capitalism, militarism, centralized government, everything that goes with it. You can join us and be a part of the community, or you can rot here in the middle of nowhere.”
“That’s blackmail!” Charley growled.
“Maybe. It’s also not democracy. You can be Sheik of Northland, or you can be starving Charley. You can train your girls to be respectable wives instead of prostitutes, marry them to men who will come and stay. We’ll send you whatever you need, but you’ll have to learn more than just a brief period of history on Terra. You’ll need to learn the whole history of mankind so you’ll understand why democracy was a lie from the first.”
George started walking away, as the others followed. Charley began blubbering again. George turned back, “We’ll send someone back in a couple of weeks to see what you think about it.”
They signaled the ranger ship to come closer and start picking them up.
Eventually the bigger ship caught a bit of helpful current and managed to pull away from the shore. They towed extra kayaks out for Fortis and the twins. The rangers ran some food back into Charley’s clan, then followed the bigger ship in the currents which took them north, then back around to the far side of the narrow sea between the two continents. This time, southbound, they made the crossing on the first try.
