The Secret of Utopia Colony

When the kids got back to the outpost, they found Ms. Rylie waiting for them at the door.

"Where have you been?" she demanded. "I’ve been worried sick about you."

She looked sick, and even while she was speaking she trembled a bit, and Arthur jumped forward and caught her as she fainted.

"You shouldn’t be out here," he said, helping her indoors, and to the couch. "Sorry we worried you. Samantha, bring her some water."

Ms. Rylie was feeling a bit better after she drank the water, but it was clear she was really sick.

"We’d better not tell her about Goro," Samantha whispered to Kiyoko. "It’ll just make her worry, and there’s nothing she can do."

"I’ll help you to bed," Samantha offered her mother.

As soon as Samantha and her mother left, Arthur went to look for Os'Surale. ‘He’s not back yet,’ he realized as he looked into the garage and saw the old hover-car was still missing. ‘Great, then he can’t know we took his sub.’ He went back inside, and found Kiyoko pacing back and forth in the living room, looking out to sea...

Arthur, Kiyoko, and Samantha were locked up in the small room for what seemed like days. Kiyoko finally stopped crying, and then fell asleep. Arthur and Samantha couldn’t sleep, so they decided to look around the room, and found there was more in the room than they had first noticed. The room looked like it had once been a storeroom of some kind, and the walls were lined with shelves. Most of the shelves were bare, but there were a few boxes left. Samantha got up to look at them.

"They’re old," she said as she carried one of the boxes to the table.

"This one is filled with old tools. Look, a hammer like Goro’s," she said pulling out a hammer. "Made in Sri Vijaya Colony, Singapore Technologies Tool Co., And look, an old wrench of some kind. "Made in Etruria Colony, Rasenna Tools Co. Well, you wanted a souvenir like Goro’s, you take the hammer. I’m taking the wrench."

"I didn’t want one the exact same as his," Arthur said, getting up to look in the box himself. "Here see this? I’m taking this."...

The kids stayed in the end of the passage, trying to see what was in the cavern, letting their eyes adjust to the bright light. There was a pile of boxes in the cavern, but nothing else. There were no people, but they could still hear the sound of machines coming from somewhere.

"Let’s go back," Kiyoko said scared that they could get caught.

"No, let’s look around a bit more." Arthur said. "There’s no one here, lets see what’s in those boxes."

Kiyoko didn’t really want to, but everyone else did, so they quickly ran over to the pile of boxes, and started looking at them.

"This looks like its all food," Samantha said. "Look, canned tofu, and vacuum-packed sausages and carrots."

"This is food too," Goro said looking at the boxes in front of him. "Īräwāmhî-seed bars, ôkônīk mushrooms, and ûzîäd, that’s a Tenko food, there’s no Human word for it."...

Later that evening, Samantha and Goro told Kiyoko and Arthur about their trip to Utopia Colony, about the channel through the reefs, the forest that now filled the dome of the old city, and the mysterious path through the forest with the pile of garbage. Once Arthur and Kiyoko had heard the story, the four kids tried to figure out what they were going to do next. Should they tell Raven about the trip to Utopia Colony? Would she be angry because they’d gone to Utopia Colony in someone else’s sub, after promising not to go in hers? They thought that she might be very angry. She might think they'd broken their promises.

"So do we tell Raven?" Samantha asked. "We wouldn’t have broken our promise and taken the Chidori to Utopia Colony, or the reefs. And we didn’t, we took the Rengilffed instead."

"You know how adults are," Arthur said. "They don’t think the same way we do."

They pulled out the map of the mines, to examine it better than they had before. The mines were much larger than they’d expected...

"How are we going to get it out of here?" Samantha asked looking around at all the crates of crystal-ferrite.

"How about we figure out how to get ourselves out of here, before we worry about the crystals," Arthur suggested.

"They can always drill a hole into the other side of the cliff to get the crystals out," Raven said.

"There was another button on the elevator," Goro mentioned. "Another level above this one."

They climbed down off the crate and walked back to the elevator, and Samantha put one of the heavy crystals in her backpack. The elevator carried them up to the level above, and they walked out into another big room, but this one was empty. Their crystallite torches lit it up well. It was some kind of launch-pad for aircraft, above them they could see where the roof had once opened to let the aircraft out...