The Navigatrix

And so the Captain sat in the sidecar, her splinted leg resting on the dash, piled up radios and ropes in her lap, while the Navigatrix pushed the thing as fast as it would go over the sandy, forested terrain. The trike did make a horrible screaming sound for a bit, but once they were down from the ridge and the Navigatrix could properly put it in gear, it seemed to chew up and spit out whatever chunk of metal was in its way and actually sounded almost normal.

The shocks were absolutely gone, though.

As they hit a clear stretch, the Navigatrix glanced over at the Captain, who was scowling and biting her lip hard enough to draw blood. In response, she slowed and stopped the trike, and as it stopped rattling, the Captain exhaled gratefully.

“What, you need a break already?”

“Just checking the map, Captain.” And she did pull out a paper map she’d clearly drawn herself, covered in incomprehensible scribbles. Astronavigators’ approach to terrestrial cartography was usually overcomplicated; the Navigatrix only expanded upon that tradition.

The Captain took a moment to wonder if the ropes would provide any real padding for her splinted leg, and then a flap announced the Navigatrix was taking off her cape. “Hold onto this, would you Captain?” She passed it over, neatly folded into a very tidy pillow.

And then they were off, the cape wedged under the Captain’s splint, the Navigatrix shedding water like mist, as they rattled at the highest speed they could make back to camp.

They wheezed for a few minutes, the sand and dust of the slope getting into the Captain’s mouth when she rolled her head over to examine the landscape for further threats. Finally, she heard the Navigatrix sit up.

“I don’t want to wait to see if anything comes up this tunnel, Captain.” She tossed her a medpack. “Splint up, we’ve got a trip ahead of us.”

The Captain’s knee was in a sorry state; the splint and single emergency crutch weren’t as much a miracle fix as she’d hoped.

Finally she took in the makeshift rescue basecamp; two ropes secured to trees, one tied in a complicated zig-zag pattern with winches and pulleys and such; a box of electronic equipment, scattered around; the Navigatrix’s cape and gauntlets stacked next to it.

The Navigatrix herself was farther down the slope, pushing something up the hill.

“I hope you don’t mind a bumpy ride, Captain.”

“Is that … wait, who fixed it?” Their all terrain tricycle had been thrown around in the crash, and last the Captain had seen it, it was unusable.

“The Engineer took the initiative; I wouldn’t say it’s fixed though, just functional.” It did make a pretty terrible noise as the Navigatrix turned the ignition. “But I am grateful the Stowaway didn’t make off with it.” 

The Captain sighed away her concern. “It was good thinking.”

“Just going to have to rearrange us a bit, Captain, so I can reach the oars. Can you sit up properly?”

There was no way her knee was allowing that. After too much awkward fumbling in the dark, the Captain ended up reclining, feet on the edge, head on the other woman’s knee.

“How do you plan to find the exit, exactly?”

“Well, I have two plans, you’ll be pleased to hear. The worst involves me paddling until we hit a wall, and then slowly making our way along it in hopes I catch the rope. The other is simpler–” and she was leaning over the Captain, dripping on her as she fumbled along the edge of the raft – “as long as the instructions weren’t out of date–” and then a loud velcro noise and a self satisfied snort told the Captain she’d found what she was looking for. “Watch your eyes!”

The first flare screamed to life.

She held it high as they both craned their necks to find the cavern opening – and of course, they’d ended up almost over at the far wall from it. They both sighed.

The Navigatrix wordlessly handed the flare to the Captain, and picked up the oars and started paddling.

The emergency life raft was not particularly hydrodynamic, and they weren’t even halfway across when the first flare died.

“Hand me the next one?”

“I can paddle in the dark for a little; let’s save them for getting up the rope.”

“Right.”

Assessing the climb, the Captain sighed.

That made the Navigatrix stop paddling. Silence descended again, but now in much closer proximity.

“…Navigatrix?”

“Are you angry with me, Captain?”

“I’m always angry with you.”

“I’ve always thought of you more as… grumpy.”

“Fine. I’m grumpy with you.”

A quiet snort.

“Look, do you need me to do the paddling? I’m done with this cave.”

“Oh, shush, you never let me rescue you.”

The Captain felt a gentle hand on her hair, which made her jump, which made the Navigatrix pull her hand away just as fast.

“Just – just get us out of here, Nav.”

Both headlamps swept to the far end of the cave, where an enormous fountain of water was pushing up from the floor.

“Shit–”

“RIGHT NOW, get off the floor!”

Faster than the captain had expected, the Navigatrix leapt over to the nearest stack of ruins, and started climbing up.

The water had coalesced into a roiling wave, growing taller as it pushed down the cave towards them. The Captain bit her lip as she watched her crewmate drag herself and a significant weight of equipment up steeper and steeper slopes of bricks. The noise was filling the air – and then the water was right beneath her, rising much too fast, and the Captain could only yell as it snagged her legs and started pulling her away from the tower – and then there was a POP! – somehow audible over the rush of the waves – and the liferaft had inflated.

The Captain couldn’t watch any further, though, as the pillar of blocks she was sitting on was hit by the torrent and the shock nearly knocked her off again; she was out flat on her side, arms akimbo, breathing with relief, when the water bubbled up to touch her dangling feet, and then some further thrust of the tide pushed a wave right over the top and knocked her back in the drink.

It was worse this time – her knee was screaming as she tried to kick to the surface, and there was a brutally strong undertow dragging her deeper into the black water, clogged with silt and bubbles – and then she was pushed up to the surface again and knocked against stone.

It took out her headlamp, but mercifully not her skull, and she had the wherewithal to find an edge to hold on to as the water swept her up and down, back and forth, in a now very dark cave. Where was the Navigatrix? Where was the raft? Was the Captain getting them both killed?

She thought she saw a flicker of a yellow headlamp beam, as the water started to calm and the roar of the tide in the cave started to quiet.

“Nav!” 

And, oh, what a relief, to hear in return,

“Captain! My light’s out, keep shouting and I’ll find you.”

So the Captain called “Marco!” and the Navigatrix called back “Polo!” and made a symphony of splashing noises, and the water finally calmed down, and then the squeaky rubber of the life raft bumped against the Captain’s outstretched arm, and an invisible Navigatrix pulled her up.

And for a second, or a minute, or ten, they lay on the bottom of the life raft gasping and breathing and then laughing. It wasn’t the first or the last time they were going to pull a stunt like that, and they both knew it.

“You fucking daredevil idiot,” the Captain wheezed, and the Navigatrix punched her in the arm, or near the arm,

“At least this idiot brought basic equipment with them into the cave!”

– and then they both dissolved into laughter and snorts and gasps until finally, the mania passed, and the Captain felt the Navigatrix sit up again.

The drips were louder, echoing all over the cavern. She didn’t feel like sitting up and checking, but the Captain thought the water must be meters lower than before. She was probably going to be stuck on this island till high tide again.

That is, unless she was on a particularly climbable island, and the squared off edges of the flat bit did not bode well. Ruins, ruins, everywhere on this damn moon.

“It’s like the whole damn thing is built of these horrible blocks!”

“The what? Oh-” and the Navigatrix was moving.

The Captain could hear her voice, talking to someone outside as the last pieces of disturbed gravel rattled down the cavern. Disturbingly, she didn’t hear them splash.

Caving in to curiosity, she sat up and turned her headlamp back on.

“Oh, shit.”

The water was gone – completely gone from anywhere she could see. And she was indeed resting atop a steep pile of overlarge stone bricks, stacked upon one another haphazardly, stretching hundreds of feet in the air above a sandy, silty floor. In fact, it was one of many.

In fact, it really did look like the only thing holding up a layer of sandy soil and foliage was piles and stacks of these worn out bricks. What the Captain had read as cliff walls were, closer to the bottom of the drained lake, clearly made of the same blocks.

The lake floor was sand and gravel and rubble, except for where the current of the draining water had revealed, underneath, bricks. In fact, it almost looked like the vertical piles were originally evenly spaced, as if this … cavern, had been made intentionally.

Grimacing, the Captain looked up to the ceiling – and mercifully she saw something that looked more like a natural cave. There were mineral deposits dripping down, and thin tendrils that could be roots. If there were ruins involved, they were hidden well.

Scuffling noises returned, the scrabble of gravel as it moved underfoot.

“Navigatrix?”

“Just had to secure the rope; heading your way now.”

“No, wait! Tide’s out, it could come back at any moment!”

But the Navigatrix’s headlamp was illuminating the tunnel now, growing brighter. The glare flooded the Captain’s eyes as she made it to the end of the tunnel.

“Lovely to see you, Captain!” Then the beam pointed away, at the rest of the cave, and the Captain could see her, loaded down with climbing harnesses, rolled-up raft, another rope, who knows what else. “Not what I was expecting, I have to admit.”

She started winching herself down the steep cliff side.

“Navigatrix, seriously, it’s going to flood again, just wait.”

“No – huff – I don’t think – hff – – that I’ll bother with waiting.”

She paused to salute the Captain.

The Captain pulled herself closer to the edge of the flat block she was reclining on, to better see as the Navigatrix landed on the cave floor and shook out the cramps from her legs and arms. She immediately bent down to poke at some rubble.

“Hey! No time for research!”

“There’s bones here, Captain.” She pulled out what was visibly a femur, even from a distance. “Human bones.”

“Are you – are you collecting them?”

Muffled, as she was half bent to the floor sifting through sand, the Navigatrix shouted “I promised the Engineer!”

Finally she started walking over the slimy, rubble-strewn terrain, picking her way towards the base of the Captain’s tower of blocks.

The Captain strained her ears desperately to try and catch any hint of water crashing back into the cave. The drips felt like a cacophony.

She looked down, and once again the Navigatrix was bent over something half buried in the sand.

“You are going to get very, very wet if you don’t hurry up!”

“Do you still have your scanner, Captain?”

“What?” The Captain had to pause to check. “No, no it fell first, then me.”

The Navigatrix pulled a rattling pile of rust out of the sand. “Well, I found it.” She tucked it into her pack. “Trust me, you’ll want to see it.”

“Could you please focus?”

“It’s fine, Captain, I’m sure–”

And that’s when the gurgling noise came back, but much louder.