A Darkling Sea

Twelve

Broadtail enjoys helping Builder 1 with its projects. Being at close quarters with the stranger gives him the chance to listen to it carefully. He remembers hearing Builder 1 using tools and marveling at how capable the stranger is with its little many-branched pincers.

The strangers are quite strong, too. Builder 1 can lift pipe segments and stones that would normally take a couple of apprentices with levers and pulleys to shift. Broadtail remembers Builder 1 explaining that it and the others come from a place where everything is heavier than here. Broadtail still doesn’t quite understand how that can be, but at least it explains why they are so strong.

All his conversations with Builders are like that. Some simple question or observation brings forth an answer that only opens up a vast store of new questions. Broadtail goes through reels of cord at a tremendous rate, mostly just noting things he plans to ask about in more detail.

When he hears things about the Squatters, he feels the same anger he remembers from his argument with Ridgeback. The Builders are his project, and learning from them is like discovering an entire vent complex ready for harvest—with a whole line of vents beyond it, all equally rich.

The Squatters plan to take away this harvest of discoveries? Broadtail is ready to fight them for it. He is ready to fight anyone who tries to steal the Builders from him.

Filling the building used most of the sub’s argon reserve, and there wasn’t quite enough to fill all the way down to the door. Instead Rob and Josef rigged up a floor above the water level by simply piling up stones and then laying some stiff mats provided by Longpincer on top of them. The resulting floor was dangerously springy, but they could stand with their heads grazing the roof.

They moved the hammocks and other gear into their new quarters, which Rob dubbed the Dome, and then peeled off their suits for the first time in days.

“Wait,” said Rob to Alicia as she got ready to climb into her hammock. “I’ve got something for you.” He took a sealed plastic bag from the net filled with equipment hanging above the waterline. “Here, put it on.”

She looked at him quizzically and opened the bag. “It is—a suit liner?”

“A dry suit liner,” said Rob triumphantly.

“It is wonderful!” she said, pressing her face to the clean dry cloth and inhaling. “I hate to put it on and spoil it.”

“It won’t fit anybody else.”

She unzipped her own damp liner, wrinkling her nose at the mold patches. “I am very tired of being wet,” she said.

She stripped off her damp liner, wiped clean with four antibacterial wipes, and then very slowly Alicia got dressed. It was a sensual—but entirely nonsexual—reverse-striptease, and the expression on her face as she felt the clean fabric slide onto her limbs was like a painting of a saint touched by the Holy Spirit. “Thank you, my love,” she said at last.

“Where did you find it?” asked Josef.

“I cleaned it, actually. I used a mix of clean water from the dehumidifier and some Ilmatar seawater. To get it dry I put it in the sub cabin heat exchanger, and finally aired it out over the oxygen feed in here.”

“Robert, it must have taken you hours!” she said.

“Well, most of the time I was doing other stuff while I waited for it to dry out.”

“You are mad,” she said. “Wonderfully.”“WHAT do you think?” Alicia asked Rob as she handed him a bowl of cloudy yellow liquid.

He sniffed suspiciously. “Smells kind of like mushrooms,” he said.

“Taste it.”

“You’re sure it’s safe?”

“I have tasted it and I am not dead.”

“Yet.” He lifted the bowl to his mouth and took a tiny sip. “Kind of sour. Very salty.” He sipped some more. “Not too bad. What is it—more microbe soup?”

“Yes. A fermenting organism which breaks down the complex sugars in animal exoskeletons. It grows all through the garbage midden.”

“Yummy. What’s the calorie content like?”

“Very encouraging. I can filter it down to about one kilocalorie per three milliliters.”

“That’s great—drink a couple of liters and you can skip a food bar. Is there anything to worry about?”

“The sodium content is enormous, but that is true of everything here, and it has no usable protein. No vitamins, either, of course, but we have the supplements for that.”

“Any toxins?”

“Nothing directly harmful. There is always the risk of an allergy, though I think if we cook it enough to break down any complex molecules we should be safe.”

“How did you cook this, anyway?”

“I taped the metal sample container to the wall, and put one of the immersion heaters into it. I am afraid boiling is the only way we can cook for now, except for the micro wave oven on the sub.”

“That’s pretty smart. Oh, by the way, I was wondering about something. We’ve been using the toilet on the sub, but it’s reaching its limit and we can’t dump it into the system at Hitode anymore. So either we discharge it off in the ocean somewhere, or we quit using it—and that means we’re going to be dumping our stuff in the ocean directly like we did at the Coquille. Is that safe? For the Ilmatarans, I mean. I don’t want to start some kind of space-cholera epidemic.”

“For ourselves it is entirely safe as long as you don’t dump it nearby. As for its effect on the Ilmatarans—hmm. The wastes themselves are harmless, and I’m sure the native organisms can break it all down in time. I am more concerned about our intestinal bacteria.”

“I remember there was some fuss about that before the first mission launched.”

“Yes, nobody wanted to unleash a plague on Ilmatar. Let me find the reference.” She tapped at her computer screen. “Here is the study: ‘Risk is slight… Terrestrial bacteria fail to thrive in Ilmataran conditions… not immediately fatal, though… sample showed roughly fifty percent mortality after twenty-four hours… no cell division observed…’ I think we are safe, Robert. Our bacteria evolved to live inside a human body. It is very different out there.”

“Well, that’s good news. So how much of this stuff do you think we can collect?”

“It seemed to be fairly abundant. I think we can each have one meal of local food per day. That extends our stay by—”

“Two days. Maybe three. I’m also starting to worry about life support. We’re using the spare from the sub already, and we only have one spare suit. If any of them fail, we’ve got no backups. Another failure means somebody dies.”

“Surely the food problem will become critical first.”

“Well, probably. But the thing about air is, when you need it, you need it right now. You can put off eating for an hour or two even if you’re really hungry. You can’t put off breathing.”

She sighed. “You have a point, I suppose. But what can we do? Can you manufacture another APOS unit? Can we call Earth and have them ship us one?”

“I was thinking about salvage. Josef thinks they left monitors at Coq 2, but what about the other one? As far as I know it’s still there. Dickie didn’t mention them destroying it when they caught him. We can’t use it, and it might attract too much attention if we try to move it, but what about scavenging some parts?”

“Can you do it? I mean, do you have the tools and things?”

“I think so. Everything’s pretty modular. Swim in, pull the APOS packs and the nuke, swim out. I could do it in half an hour.”

“They will be listening for the sub. We will have to use the impeller. It is quieter.”

“We? I was gonna do it by myself. We don’t know that the place isn’t guarded.”

“Robert, do not be ridiculous. Even with an impeller you cannot manage two APOS packs and a power unit. And if something goes wrong you will be alone.”

Rob opened his mouth to answer, then closed it. He could see the argument unfolding before him, leading inevitably to Alicia getting her way. So he decided to save himself the effort. “Tell you what: you can come with me if you get in my sleeping bag right now. If you want—”

She cut him off. “You are trying to make some awful pun about Coquilles and penises, aren’t you? I will sleep with you if you promise not to speak it aloud.”

Tizhos did her best, curling up next to the human with plenty of skin-on-skin contact. All his muscles felt tightly clenched, which didn’t seem right for a human in a relaxed state. She picked up a food ball and tried to feed it to him.

He jerked his head back, then shook it from side to side. “No, thank you,” he said.

Irona had instructed her to scent the air in their room with perfumes and pheromones to establish the mood. The two Sholen would certainly have an easier time bonding with the human if they themselves felt relaxed and affectionate. Tizhos had also created a platter of treats they could all share, and turned up the heat.

“I ask you to try the food,” said Irona. “You have no cause to worry—Tizhos has programmed our foodmaker to observe human dietary and culinary constraints.”

Tizhos tried to feed him again, and again Vikram Sen pulled back. Finally he took the ball from her hand with his own and nibbled it. “Your foodmaker is an impressive feat of technology, but as I told Tizhos earlier I am afraid I have nothing more to say to either of you right now.”

“You misunderstand our purpose. We do not wish to interrogate you. We merely want to renew our friendship with you.”

Tizhos handed Vikram Sen another food ball. He took it with his hand, had a bite, and put it down with the other.

Irona moved onto the cushions next to the human on the other side. He put his midlimb around Vikram Sen’s shoulders and Tizhos could feel the little human flinch.

“This does not seem to be going well,” she murmured to Irona. “He shows no sign of a favorable response.”

“We should try harder,” Irona said back to her, then switched to the human language. “Vikram Sen, please tell me why you exhibit such a lack of comfort. We wish only to make you content.”

“As I have said on a number of occasions, the only possible way you could make me happy would be to remove your soldiers and yourselves from this station and return the people you have taken. We cannot be friends until that happens.”

Tizhos handed the human an ethanol beverage and began lightly stroking his hair. If anything, his body seemed even more tense, but she persisted. References indicated that humans used such activities as a bonding ritual, in their strange, emotionless fashion. Vikram Sen sipped the drink and put it with the unfinished food balls.

“Let me feed you,” said Irona, holding a cube of delicately flavored gelatin before the human’s face.

“No, thank you,” said Vikram Sen, turning his head away.

Tizhos caught a shift in Irona’s scent. Was he becoming aroused? A good leader could establish a sexual bond with subordinates—but surely not with an alien? Apparently the scented air and psychoactives in the food could overcome that barrier. She felt a pang of worry. Irona’s hormones might get the better of his self-control. She could feel herself responding to the scents, and she knew that as leader Irona would experience a much stronger effect.

Irona rolled over, supporting himself above the human on four limbs. “Let me feed you,” he repeated, then placed the cube delicately between his own teeth.

The human struggled but Irona lowered his head. He pressed the gelatin against the human’s tightly closed lips, but Vikram Sen just turned his head aside and closed his eyes tightly. The food fell to the cushions and rolled onto the floor.

Irona kept his body pressed against Vikram Sen’s, moving from side to side in sensuous waves that turned the human’s struggles into a kind of caress. Tizhos felt almost dizzy from the powerful blend of pheromones in the air. Vikram Sen seemed more like a potential rival than an alien they wished to impress. With one small rational part of her mind she knew she should try to stop things before they got out of hand.

“Don’t resist your feelings,” said Irona. “We can love one another.” He began nuzzling the side of the human’s face.

But Vikram Sen’s responses did not match what the two Sholen had hoped for. Water flowed from his tightly closed eyes, he struggled and hit Irona ineffectually with his arms, and tried to raise his knee against the weight of the larger Sholen.

The skin glands on Irona’s underside sprinkled droplets of strong-smelling marker pheromone on the struggling human. Vikram Sen inhaled a couple of times, then shoved Irona’s head away and tumbled to the floor. He regurgitated the contents of his stomach, then got to his feet. His body trembled.

“Stay,” said Irona. “We have all evening.”

The human got the door open and shut it behind him. Tizhos could hear him shouting something in the hallway. It did not sound like words in any human language she understood.

“Tell me if you think we have succeeded in winning his loyalty,” said Irona. Without thinking the two of them began moving into a mating position.

“No,” said Tizhos after a long silence. “I do not think so.”

As they approached Coq 1 Rob was cautious to the point of clinical paranoia. The two of them cut off their impellers two hundred meters from the shelter, and began moving along the bottom in short sprints from cover to cover. As much as possible, they pushed off from the ancient walls instead of kicking, because Rob was worried that the Sholen might use some of the captured acoustic analysis software to identify the sound of a swimming human.

When they were a hundred meters away they went completely dark, and paused for up to a minute between movements. It took them half an hour to approach to where they could see the Coquille clearly.

It was dark and silent. On passive sonar it was a hole in the ocean. The only noise was a very faint sussuration from the nuclear power unit as water convected through its cooling fins. Even damped down it was still about five degrees warmer than the ocean.

Rob tapped Alicia’s helmet and made a “stop” gesture with one hand, then pointed at himself and then at the shelter. She signed “okay.”

He braced himself against the broken stone pipe they were crouched next to and pushed off as hard as he could. He felt himself shooting through the water, slowing until he had to start kicking to cover the last couple of meters.

Rob’s extended fingers touched the side of the Coquille, and he felt his way to the lower edge, then pulled himself under it until he came to the entry hatch. It opened easily enough, and Rob switched on his helmet lamp. The sudden light was startlingly bright after minutes in total dark. The motes of silt floating before his face made him jerk his head back in surprise.

He risked a look around before climbing up the little ladder inside the hatch. The Coquille had acquired a coating of gray fuzz, growing in intricate six-branched patterns like moldy snowflakes.

Just before his head broke the surface in the hatchway, Rob paused. What if Isabel’s body was still inside? He felt a sudden queasiness. The image of Isabel Rondon, all bloated and purple like a deer on the side of the highway, flashed into his head and he couldn’t dismiss it. He realized he was breathing heavily.

I have to climb this ladder, he told himself. Very deliberately he moved his right hand up to the next rung and took hold. He forced himself to let go with his left and reach up to the top rung. His head moved from water to air, and he looked around the lower level of the Coquille.

There were no corpses. He took a deep breath, then let it out in a powerful sigh as his arm muscles unclenched.

The place was a mess, though. The lab space had been trashed by the fighting when the Sholen came. The walls and floor were covered with patches of mold—real, blue-green Terrestrial mold. Rob’s queasiness returned when he realized it was growing where Isabel’s blood had spattered. Suddenly Rob had absolutely no desire to open his helmet.

He climbed back down into the cool water and turned on the laser link to signal Alicia. No response. His system couldn’t find her. Was she out of line-of-sight? He let himself drop to the sea bottom and tried again. Still nothing.

Sonar wasn’t picking up anything but ocean sounds. Suddenly there was an explosion of noise and activity among the ruins. He heard Alicia shout “Robert! Sholen! Get away!” over the hydrophone. His sonar imaged four indistinct figures struggling together among the sharp stones.

Rob clenched his teeth to avoid calling out a reply. They had her. That much was certain or she would not have given herself away by shouting. She was always very rational under stress. He moved as quickly as he dared, pulling himself along the underside of the Coquille to get it between him and the aliens. Then he pushed off toward an old broken dome.

Why weren’t they shooting? He got behind a wall and paused to listen. There was no deadly little swish of the microtorps. Not even the sound of Sholen swimming after him.

Either they were being ethical and didn’t want to kill anyone else, or they were being clever. “Put a tracer on me so I’ll lead you back to the rebel base, eh?” he said to himself. “Your advanced alien science is no match for our spunky Earthling pop culture.”

But what about Alicia? He had to leave her. She would say the same thing. If he got himself captured trying to rescue her she would be brutally sarcastic. He still couldn’t rid himself of the feeling that he was making up justifications for cowardice.

But no—taking on a bunch of armed Sholen with nothing but his utility knife would be courage of the “strap a bomb to your belt and blow up a bus” variety. Rob had vague, lapsed secular Jewish ideas about an afterlife, and martyrdom wasn’t how he planned to arrive there.

Rob took a roundabout way home to foil any trackers. He passed through the ruins, pausing in the shelter of a large standing stone to listen with the hydrophone at maximum. There were the usual noises of Ilmataran sea creatures, and a faint gurgle from the current washing through the ruins. He was safe.

From there he set his course across the open water of the basin toward the camp at Longpincer’s house. It was a long trip, but the impeller’s fuel cells had enough juice. Barely.

He had covered about a kilometer when he glimpsed something moving ahead. Passive sonar barely registered it, and he didn’t want to risk an active ping for fear it might hear and come to investigate. So he turned on his lights and had a look.

It was a Cylindrodaptes—one of the largest creatures in Ilmatar’s ocean. Its body was simply a giant tube, open at both ends, with little steering fins around the mouth and another set at the tail. According to Rob’s computer, this particular Cylindrodaptes was sixty meters long and nearly eight meters across, cruising past at a leisurely two knots.

Rob switched off his impeller and watched as it approached. The Cylindrodaptes was swimming low over the sea bottom, so Rob had a splendid view of its dorsal side as it passed. It was like watching the Hindenburg fly beneath him. The thing’s hide was pale gray, with faint ridges running its entire length. At the top of the mouth he could see a tiny bulge, about the size of a human head, which held the Cylindrodaptes’s sonar organs and brain.

Cursing himself for an idiot he switched on his camera and started to record it. This wasn’t the first footage of a Cylindrodaptes—Henri had managed that shortly after arriving on Ilmatar. But Henri’s images were all of the front end and the mouth, intended to make the beast look as scary as possible for the viewers back home. Alicia would want him to gather better data.

He turned up the gain on his hydrophone again, wondering if he could hear the Cylindrodaptes swimming. It made a very faint swooshing as it moved but was otherwise running silent.

Then Rob became aware of another sound: a rhythmic swish-swish-swish, exactly like the sound of a mackerel swimming. Only there were no mackerel in Ilmatar’s ocean. It was a drone.

He checked his sonar display. The drone was coming up from astern at ten knots. How had it tracked him? Some kind of chemical sniffer? No time to worry about that now. Rob gunned his impeller, trying to outrun the drone, cruising low and fast.

Even at full throttle the drone could keep pace with him, and Rob knew that running the impeller flat-out wouldn’tleave him with enough juice to get back to camp.

How to fool sensors? Merge, then separate. But what could he merge with? Rocks?

Rob steered back toward the Cylindrodaptes, hoping to get it between him and the drone. The robot mackerel was about twenty meters behind him as he reached the great creature rippling its way through the water. He cruised over its back, close enough to trail his fingers along its skin, then dropped down on the other side and switched off the impeller, matching speeds with the Cylindrodaptes by kicking slowly and quietly.

He heard the swish-swish-swish of the drone pass by, and for a second he felt hope, but then the drone swung around and came back, moving more slowly this time. Right now he was silhouetted against the Cylindrodaptes, and Rob hoped the drone’s brain couldn’t distinguish them. But then it gave off an active ping and sprinted toward him at close to twenty knots.

Rob twisted the impeller handle viciously, steering under the Cylindrodaptes to shelter on the other side. The drone shot past, but then turned again. It could keep this up longer than Rob could. His one advantage was that they were too far from Hitode for a laser link. The drone was autonomous, which meant there was at least a chance of his outsmarting it.

He dove again, ducking under the Cylindrodaptes and then forward along the length of the huge creature. The drone passed by and circled, homing in on the noise of his impeller. He reached the beasts’s front end as the drone began another sprint.

Then Rob simply cut his engine and waited.

The mouth of the Cylindrodaptes gaped around him, too wide for him to even touch the sides with his outstretched arms. Lining the interior of the creature’s huge body were thousands of filmy fins, beating together in wonderful spiral ripples down its length. The fins drove the beast forward and filtered nutrients from the water as it swam.

As the mouth moved past Rob could hear the drone swish by, searching for him on the far side of the Cylindrodaptes. A moment later, it passed again, circling back.

Rob kept station in the center of the Cylindrodaptes’s huge body cavity, about three meters back from the mouth. He could keep up with the creature by swimming, and the longer he waited the longer the drone would have to lose him.

After half an hour it still hadn’t found him, so Rob decided it was safe to emerge. He did risk a few seconds of light to get images of the interior, and was amused to notice a couple of fish-shaped organisms tagging along among the Cylindrodaptes’s fins. Waving farewell to his fellow parasites, Rob stopped kicking and let the beast’s interior flow push him out its back end. When no drone attacked him, he dropped to the sea bottom and let the Cylindrodaptes cruise away. Then he switched on the impeller and set a course for Longpincer’s once again.

Tizhos began searching the memory of the captive human’s computer and quickly realized what a treasure it represented. The woman had so much data stored she hadn’t had time to encrypt it all. Tizhos found hours of video and audio, and pages and pages of notes. Where to begin? The section on animals and plants included spectrographic analysis and even—Tizhos gave an audible bark of delight—fragmentary translations of native Ilmataran studies on them.

This led Tizhos to the language section. She found it very impressive how much the humans had accomplished, even allowing for the fact that the Ilmatarans did much of the work of translation. Very clever of them to use the written form as the basis for communication, rather than trying to analyze and duplicate the sounds.

She did feel frustration along with her excitement. Each discovery raised dozens of questions, and of course the humans had not had the time to investigate any of them. Tizhos found herself wishing she could join them out there, surrounded by fascinating new things.

But she could not. She prepared a rough summary of the data to give Irona, then went to eat in the common room. The Sholen foodmakers now stood next to the humans’ cooking equipment, and she constructed a meal that would relax her.

The new captive, Alicia Neogri, sat with some of the other humans. Tizhos observed them surreptitiously. The four humans shared a large fruit from the garden and ate cooked roots. Their social behavior exhibited some interesting features. The majority of humans in the station had displayed happiness that the new captive had returned unharmed. A handful, however, seemed disappointed at her capture.

Interestingly, her dinner companions all came from that second group. This seemed to contradict normal human reactions to those who broke their rules of behavior. Did this second group represent some kind of variant consensus?

That could create difficulties. At present most of the humans seemed to accept the Sholen occupation, even if they did not necessarily agree with it. They did not cause any problems. But if Alicia Neogri had high status among them, they might want to emulate her behavior by causing disruptions.

Tizhos did not want any disruptions. The station seemed too small, too isolated down here beneath kilometers of icy black water. Conflict could too easily damage something and kill everyone, Sholen and humans alike. During her time in Hitode, Tizhos more and more felt the weight of all that darkness around the station.

With reluctance, she got up from her place in the common room and went to the operations office, which Irona had turned into his private command center. “Irona, I have some interesting new information.”

“Go ahead, then.”

“Two discoveries of note. First, I have reviewed the files in the computer of the new captive. They contain a great deal of value and I would like to send a copy up to the ship at once.”

“As you wish.” She could smell Irona becoming impatient. “Among the files I discovered a large amount of material about communication with the native Ilmatarans. I believe the humans can speak with them. Their vocabulary already includes several hundred concepts.”

A sharp scent of anger. “That strikes me as horrible news. Tizhos, tell me if you think the humans have contaminated the Ilmatarans with alien ideas and information.”

“I consider it likely. Past statements by several of the humans indicate they approve strongly of sharing information with other species.” Irona’s angry scent is mixed with a faint whiff of despair at that news. Tizhos wants to comfort him. “Of course, we have no proof that they have done so.”

“Ask the female about it. And if they have indeed transmitted alien science to the Ilmatarans, we must find a way to control or reverse the contamination.”