A Darkling Sea

Two

The trip back was awful. Rob couldn’t keep from replaying Henri’s death in his mind. He got back to the station hours late, exhausted and half out of his mind. As a small mercy, Rob didn’t have to tell anyone what had happened—they could watch the video.

There were consequences, of course. But because the next supply vehicle wasn’t due for another twenty months, it all happened in slow motion. Rob knew he’d be going back to Earth, and guessed that he’d never make another interstellar trip again.

Nobody blamed him, at least not exactly. At the end of his debriefing, Dr. Sen did look at Rob over his little Gandhi glasses and say, “I do think it was rather irresponsible of you both to go off like that. But I am sure you know that already.”

Sen also deleted the “Death to HK” feed from the station’s network, but someone must have saved a copy. The next day it was anonymously relayed to Rob’s computer with a final method added: “Let a group of Ilmatarans catch him and slice him up.”

Rob didn’t think it was funny at all.

He stayed in bed for about a week after Henri died. At first he was really just exhausted, and then he was depressed, and for the last couple of days he was afraid of what people would say to him. Nobody had liked Henri, but somehow Rob didn’t think they’d want to congratulate him. So he kept to his room, slipping out during night shift to stockpile food and prowl the station.

Dr. Sen and Elena Sarfatti, the medical officer, did insist on visiting him for a few minutes each day. Sen was still writing up a report on the incident and wanted Rob to explain pretty much every single minute of the time between when Henri showed him the stealth suit and his return to the station alone. That was actually more boring than painful, because the worst parts were on video and Sen didn’t need to ask about them.

Dr. Sarfatti was worse, really, because she wanted him to talk about how he felt.

“Can’t I just have the damned antidepressants?”

“Not until we explore why you feel you need them.”

“I need them because I listened to a guy get cut up by aliens!”

It usually took about half an hour of circling around the subject before she’d relent and hand over the pills. Some days it was antidepressants, some days tranquilizers, and once she bullied him into taking a memory enhancer. That was a mistake. For sixteen hours afterward every time he thought about Henri (and there wasn’t much else for him to think about, holed up in his room), he got a complete, highly detailed instant replay of the whole incident inside his head.

After a week he finally started working again, motivated chiefly by sheer boredom. He did rearrange his schedule (with Sen’s implicit consent) to minimize his contact with others. He took to working during night shift, sleeping during the day, and staying in his room until everyone else went to bed. They started leaving meals for him in the galley, ready to heat up. It was just like being in grad school.

Broadtail is tired when he gets back to Continuous Abundance. The village is much as he remembers it: a tall mound about two cables across with the main vent at the highest point. A stone dome covers the vent, and each property owner’s pipe leads off to feed a network of smaller channels. The diameter of the pipe is set by law, and interfering with flow rights is a crime and a sin.

The various properties are marked with boundary stones on the lower slopes of the mound and the flat plain beyond. All of them are covered with branching conduits, with different crops growing in different places depending on what temperature and flow speed they prefer.

His own Sandyslope property is on the broad side of the mound where the cold current from the wilderness brings silt. The flavor of the water is comforting and familiar as he passes the marker stones. On his own property, Broadtail finally relaxes. Like all landowners he is only really comfortable within his own boundaries.

As always, he rises up and gives a loud ping to check on the place. The house echoes back sturdy and—sadly—all too clean. The pipe network flows quietly, with no burbling leaks or churning at a blockage.

Broadtail’s pipes are not like the others at Continuous Abundance. He recalls using mathematical models based on the proportions of blood vessels in large animals to adjust the diameter of the branches. His crop yields are bigger than anything anyone remembers Flatbody producing by nearly an eighth part, though that is still less than most of the other tracts at Continuous Abundance.

The house is in the middle of the property, three long halls with vaulted stone roofs for protection. Pipes feed into the house, and downstream the waste-laden water supports a bloom of hardy fronds. Broadtail crosses his boundary, pinging for attention. He reaches the door and sets down his reels and supply bags, then calls again loudly for his apprentices. There is no reply.

Typical. Doubtless they are off idling with other apprentices and tenants, instead of working. Broadtail crawls out of his house again and listens. There is a clamor of many voices coming from the commonhouse in the center of the village, just next to the dome over the vent itself. A meeting? Broadtail doesn’t want to go to a meeting now. But he is a landowner. It is not proper to stay home.

The commonhouse is packed, people jammed in shell to shell. Talk and sonar clicks make it almost too noisy to move about. Broadtail squeezes into the back, working his way to his favorite spot over in the corner, where a slab of porous stone cuts down on some of the echoes. If only that lout Thicklegs 34 Sandybottom just in front of him would stop grinding his palps, Broadtail would be able to hear what the speaker is saying.

Ridgeback 58 Hardshelf is on the lectern, gripping it with all eight legs as if he’s afraid of the audience trying to drag him out. They might actually try it if he keeps ranting on. Everyone is hungry and bored—the hecklers at the back have started pinging in unison, trying to set up a standing wave and drown him out.

“Openwater is common to all! All precedents agree! Everything above the height of a person’s outstretched claws is common water. The catch in tall nets should not belong to the landowner but to the public jars.”

“Nets don’t put themselves on poles!” someone shouts. “If the tall netcatch goes to the public jars there is no reason for us to waste time building tall nets!”

“Then let the town buy some dragnets and put some children to work towing them!” Ridgeback answers. “Share out the catch among all, landowners and tenants.”

That gets a loud response. About half the people in the commonhouse are tenants—netmakers, stonecutters, openwater fishers. The craftworkers love the idea of getting catch for free, so they support Ridgeback loudly. The fishers want the right to drag nets over private lands themselves, so they’re a bit more muted. The landowners hate the whole idea, and say so. The apprentices are just making noise for the sake of noise, hoping a fight breaks out.

Broadtail hates the idea more than most. His Sandyslope property is off at the upstream end of town, exposed to the cold currents, and his pipeflow is cold and thin. His channels produce only slow-growing plants like ropevine and springbranch, and those can’t back many beads. Almost half his food is netcatch, and he has three expensive new tall nets on his land. He waits for the noise to die down and then jumps in before Ridgeback can continue. “How about letting the landowners pay a rent for the right to put up nets? Maybe an eighth of the catch?”

Some of the landowners like that, but most of them just want to be able to put up whatever they want on their own land and eat whatever they catch. The fishers don’t like the rent idea at all, because it sounds too much like the idea of charging a toll on openwater. They fight that notion at almost every meeting.

Ridgeback doesn’t like it either. “Give landowners the right to rent common water and it’s not common anymore! They can trade the rights back and forth, and buy and sell and sublease them. The waters become the property of the richest landowners instead of everyone. I imagine the waters full of nets, blocking navigation.”

That really gets the fishers going. They don’t like anything which might snag a dragnet or tangle a line. And none of the tenants like the idea of the landowners being any wealthier than they already are. Broadtail is momentarily deafened by some angry pings directed at him. When he gets his hearing back, Ridgeback is calling for a vote.

It’s a close one. The tenants are all for the proposal, of course. Many of them vote for anything Ridgeback proposes, as if by reflex. Even the fishers are grudgingly in favor—Broadtail’s warning has only convinced them that the choice is between public dragnets and a tangle of private ones, and this way they at least get a portion.

Then the landowners vote. Each gets one vote as a citizen and then another based on flow rights. Broadtail himself gets only half an extra vote because his flow share is so small, but big owners like Flatfront 6 Ventside have six. As a group, the owners have the bulk of the voting power, and can usually pass anything they wish, but this time they are divided. Big rich owners don’t care much about netcatch and like the idea of feeding tenants and apprentices at no expense to themselves. Some of them want to reassure the fishers and craftworkers that they aren’t trying to monopolize the waters. The small owners like Broadtail are solidly opposed to Ridgeback’s plan, but they just don’t have enough votes. In the end, the motion squeaks by.

The next speaker with a motion is Sevenlegs 26 Archrock, who wants to reapportion flow rights based on pressure instead of pipe size. She brings it up whenever a meeting is called, but her explanation is so complicated nobody can even tell if it’s a good idea or not. Broadtail’s too mad to stay and listen, so he crawls to the doorway, angrily pinging any adults in his way, and shoving apprentices aside.

Outside the quiet is almost shocking, as if he’s gone deaf. Some children are curled up in the pathway asleep, and Broadtail kicks them out of the way with unnecessary force.

He’s tired and hungry, and he needs some stingers to stay awake long enough to get things in order at home. Widehead 34 Foodhouse sells stingers and doesn’t ask any annoying questions. Her shop is just across the public road from the commonhouse, set on a tiny plot with no flow rights at all. The front part of the shop is actually on public land, and only the kitchen and Widehead’s own quarters are behind her boundary stones.

Broadtail goes inside and taps at the shell by the door for service. Widehead comes out promptly and pings the room. “Broadtail? Is the meeting over?”

“The important part is. Ridgeback’s foolish plan to abolish tall nets passed. I need some stingers.”

Widehead brings him a pair of stingers and Broadtail taps the sharp end of the first one with his feeding tendrils. There’s a mild pain, and then a nice tingly numbness as the neurotoxin spreads through his system. It relaxes his muscles but makes him feel much more alert and alive. He taps the second and savors the sensation, then calls for another pair.

After half a dozen stingers Broadtail finds the sound of his own pulse almost deafening. He gropes clumsily in his pouch with one foot and eventually gets out three of his beads for Widehead. He goes homeward, trying to move as quietly as he can, but of course his half-limp legs betray him with every step. Outside it sounds as if the meeting in the commonhouse is breaking up. Broadtail doesn’t linger; he’s tired and hungry and he wants to get home without talking to anyone.

He almost makes it. Nobody stops him until he’s on his own property, going to his own door. He hears a loud ping that makes his shell feel as if it’s shattering. It’s Ridgeback, standing in the public pathway beyond the marker stones. “Broadtail! Come here!”

“What?”

“I am disappointed. You usually vote with me in meetings.”

“You usually have good ideas. This one is terrible. I need my tall nets.”

“But you get your share of the public catch! You can devote your time to other things and still get food!”

“I get more from my own nets. Schoolchildren pulling a dragnet don’t catch much. They slip away, or eat the catch themselves.”

“We can put someone in charge of them.”

“Who needs to be paid. All too costly for my taste.”

“Broadtail, you are too miserly.”

“I am miserly because I have a cold barren plot and can’t afford to waste my time and wealth winning the friendship of a lot of tenants and apprentices!”

“They are useful friends. They balance the power of the big landowners.”

“And small owners like myself are ground up in between.”

“Because you have nobody to protect you. If you were my friend I would help guard your interests. And so would my other friends.”

“By banning my nets? Go away. I need to eat and rest.”

Ridgeback moves closer to Broadtail and lowers his voice. “I am preparing a motion for the next meeting which makes great changes. If you support it you can gain wealth, perhaps even more flow.”

“I do not wish for gain, only to be allowed to use what I have and be left in peace.”

“You are foolish, Broadtail. Everyone calls you the most intelligent adult in the village, yet you waste all your time digging up old stones and trying to read carvings. A landowner should concern himself with practical matters like politics.”

“Get off my property,” Broadtail pings loudly. He’s sick of Ridgeback’s big promises and schemes, and wants to go inside and run his feelers over a good book before sleeping.

“You should not speak that way to me.”

“Go!”

Ridgeback steps forward past the boundary stone and raises a pincer, and in Broadtail’s tired and stinger-addled brain an ancient instinct kicks in. Invader on my territory! He charges Ridgeback and shoves him hard. Ridgeback folds his pincers and shoves back. For a moment the two of them strain and push, their feet scrabbling for purchase on the path.

Then one of Broadtail’s feelers gets caught in Ridgeback’s pincer, and a couple of segments at the tip get snipped off. The pain makes him even madder, and he raises one of his pincers and jabs it down behind Ridgeback’s head. Ridgeback isn’t expecting this, and there’s a gap between his headshield and his back carapace. The tip of the claw neatly pierces the soft skin and plunges deep into the flesh beneath.

The two of them stand frozen for a moment. Broadtail’s shocked by what he has done. Ridgeback wiggles his feelers wildly, but the rest of his body is absolutely still. Then Broadtail pulls out his claw and Ridgeback collapses.

“Ridgeback!” Broadtail pings him and tries to pick him up, but the wound behind his head is spewing fluids like a vent and he’s not moving.

Broadtail steps back and bumps against something. It’s one of his marker stones. He listens for a moment to get his bearings and gets another shock. During the fight he must have shoved Ridgeback into the pathway. The corpse is in common territory. Killing on private property is a personal matter, but this is murder.

Broadtail doesn’t know what to do. His body does, though. It’s been far too long since Broadtail last ate or slept, and the fight used up any reserve he might have had. He staggers past the marker stone onto his land and passes out.

By an unspoken arrangement, Rob took over as maintenance tech on the drones and sensor gear, communicating with Sergei via notes in grease pencil on the door of the workshop. Since Henri had monopolized Rob’s services before dying, everybody was already used to doing their own photography and image processing anyway.Four days after he returned to work, Rob started finding little people.

The first one was on the bench in the workshop, a little figure made of swabs and tape with one cotton-tipped arm raised in a cheery wave. Rob figured it was something Sergei had put together in an idle moment, and left it on the shelf when he finished work.

The next day he found two more figures. One was a little dough girl sitting atop the micro wave in the galley, and the second was a wire dancer poised in the middle of his regular table.

Rob spent half an hour that night exploring the station to see if the little sculptures were maybe just a kind of fad. Maybe everyone was making them, just to pass the time and decorate the station. He didn’t find any others, though. In his room during the work shift he lay awake for a couple of hours, reverting mentally to age fourteen and wondering if the little figures were somehow part of a plot by everyone else to make fun of him.

On the third night there were half a dozen of them. One, cut from a strip of scrap plastic, on the sink in the bathroom nearest his room in Hab Two. The second, folded from a sheet of nori, in the galley. The third, molded from caulking compound, on the back of the chair in the workshop. Another origami figure made of foil inside the tool cabinet. And a wire angel posed above the hatch into Hab Two where he’d be sure to see it on the way back to his room.

The sixth figure was sitting on his pillow. It was a girl made of swabs and foil, with her cotton hair colored black and a tiny smile on her little cotton face. She was holding a folded note. BREAKFAST TOMORROW AT 2200?

Rob wasn’t any good at sculpting, but he was a decent freehand artist. He sacrificed a page from his personal journal and drew a little cartoon of himself surrounded by tiny figures. The caption read Sure. He stuck it on his door and went to bed. The station used a twenty-four-hour clock, and for simplicity the day began at the start of the first “day” shift. So 2200 was an hour before even the early risers would be up and about. Rob finished rebuilding the flex linkage on one of the drones at 2130, and spent the next half hour fretting about what to do. Should he go meet the mystery person? Should he shower and change?

At 2145 he decided to go ahead and meet whoever it was. If this was some elaborate plan to give him crap about Henri’s death, then whoever was doing it was an asshole and Rob could tell him that face to face.

He wound up sitting in the galley at 2150, wondering if this was all some kind of joke. But at 2200 exactly, Alicia Neogri came in and flipped on the lights.

“Why are you sitting in the dark?” she asked.

“Oh, I—”

“Lying in ambush to see who would come?” She put a littlefigure made of plastic tubing on the table. “What shall we have for breakfast?”

Figuring out what to cook at Hitode was always difficult. For a team of scientists who had grown up in a world of agricultural oversupply, with even the most obscure ingredients available at any market, being limited to what the hydroponic farm could produce was almost intolerable. Everyone brought along personal supplies, and hoarding and bartering were a way of life.

Rob, being an American, had used most of his ten-kilo personal food allotment for sugar and caffeine. But one of the few vivid food memories he had from childhood was eating scrambled eggs on a camping trip with his cousins, so on a whim he had packed a hundred grams of egg powder.“I’ve still got some powdered eggs left. We could have scrambled eggs.”

“What about an omelette? I have cheese and there are some fresh mushrooms.” When Rob looked uncertain, she laughed. “I will do the cooking.”

So Rob grated cheese and sliced mushrooms while Alicia put some synthetic oil in the pan and got it hot.

Cooks on Ilmatar had to follow an entirely different set of rules. The tremendous pressure at the bottom of the ocean affected everything. Water didn’t boil until it was hot enough to melt tin, bread didn’t rise, and foods like rice and pasta practically cooked themselves at room temperature. Added to that were the limits on what was available. The hydroponic garden produced plenty of greens, tomatoes, potatoes, and soybeans, but no grains. They had shrimp and a few catfish but no meat. Dairy products and eggs existed only in powdered form.

For bulk, the staff could always fall back on the pure glucose and synthetic lipids produced by the food assembler. You could have them separately, or combined in a kind of greasy syrup which sounded utterly nasty until you came in from a day in freezing water and wanted nothing but calories in their purest form. Without the hydroponic farm morale would suffer; without the assembler the crew of Hitode would starve.

Alicia was a good cook, at least on Ilmatar. Rob watched admiringly as she flipped the omelette out onto a plate one-handed. It was by far the best thing he’d eaten since leaving Earth.

“So what’s up?” he asked after getting a few mouthfuls into himself. “Why the little statues?”

She looked a little embarrassed. “I thought they might cheer you up,” she said. “But I didn’t want to disturb you.”

Rob tried to make sense of the situation. They weren’t friends—at least, he didn’t know her any better than anyone else at Hitode. Why was she being nice to him?

“Thanks,” he said. “It was really nice of you.”

They met again for breakfast the next day, and as they finished their toasted bean cakes, Rob cleared his throat and tried to sound casual. “You know, you don’t have to get up early. We could meet at 0100 tomorrow if that’s better for you.”

“Everyone else will be up.”

“I know.”

“It’s hard to flirt when there’s an audience,” she pointed out.

“We’re flirting?” he asked, startled. She laughed, and he joined in, trying to pass it off as a joke.

They agreed to keep having breakfast together early, but that eve ning at 1500, when most of the staff were relaxing after dinner, Rob sat with Alicia in the lounge playing cards. There were half a dozen others in the room, and aside from a few furtive glances, nobody reacted to Rob’s presence.

Encouraged, he started joining Alicia earlier and earlier in the eve ning, until they were dining together with the “second seating” in the galley at 1300. Rob realized he looked forward to spending time with her, and rearranged his work schedule to let him see more of her. In the process, he wound up spending more of his time out of his room when others were about, and he found he didn’t mind it so much after all. A week passed, and then another; Rob hardly noticed.

He was just starting to wonder if she would sleep with him when the aliens arrived.

The braking burn was brutal. Tizhos lay strapped to her bed, which for the occasion had extruded itself from what was normally the aft wall of her cabin. The fusion motors roared, and the force mashed Tizhos down into the cushions. She tried to estimate how hard—twice Shalina-normal gravity? Three times as much? How much could the ship stand before it broke apart?

The entire voyage had a distressingly thrown-together feel to it. Just to get out of orbit they’d used half a dozen strap-on boosters, and there were drop tanks attached to the drive section to allow faster transit in Otherspace. The expense of getting all that lofted into orbit on short notice was simply staggering—this one mission seemed likely to cost more than a year of interstellar probes.

Instead of popping out on a long, cleverly plotted minimumfuel rendezvous orbit, they’d drained the drop tanks for a high-speed pass dangerously close to Ilmatar’s sun, and now were using half the ship’s internal fuel for this punishing deceleration.

She watched the display projected in the center of the cabin. At the moment the ship was passing low over the cloud tops of the giant planet the humans had named Ukko. It would swing out again, matching orbits with the moon Ilmatar, and do a final burn to start circling the moon. All these extravagant maneuvers would leave the ship with just enough fuel to get back to Shalina on a four-month low-energy trajectory through Otherspace.

The motors shut down, and Tizhos unstrapped herself. She rather liked zero gravity. She called up a window, and watched the red and yellow swirls of Ukko’s atmosphere beneath the dark sky. Ilmatar was already visible as a little white crescent, rising steadily above the giant planet’s cloud tops.

According to the display, Tizhos had about two hours before she needed to strap in again. The perfect time to work on her little personal project.

She had joined the Space Working Group in order to learn about alien life. But until now, she had never left Shalina. The Ilmatar voyage was a wonderful opportunity to study two different alien species: humans and the natives of Ilmatar. The visit would be short, so Tizhos wanted to be able to gather as much information as she could in the time available. After a little thought, she had come up with a clever plan.

The humans spent a lot of time studying the Ilmatarans, so if Tizhos could spend time with one of the human researchers and examine the raw data, she could effectively study both species at once. It seemed like a very efficient way to do things. So she spent her free time practicing English and Spanish, two of the most common human languages.

She was fluent enough to read some of their scientific documents. They had an oddly conflict-based method of disseminating information. Researchers wrote up their findings in stand-alone documents, and others tried to disprove the statements in the document. Somehow, out of conflict came consensus.

Sometimes the ongoing consensus changed dramatically, and Tizhos thought it was significant that the humans used the same term, “revolution,” to describe both a shift in scientific theory and a violent social upheaval. Everything the humans did seemed to be the result of competition or rigid logic. How unlike the compassionate, nurturing consensus of the Sholen, she thought.Tizhos never spoke of it to anyone, but at times she thought it might be pleasant to be able to disagree with others.

Strongpincer and the others crouch hidden beneath an overhanging rock, listening carefully. The rock sits in a barren part of the seafloor, but it is in a good place to wait for travelers. Traders and messengers going from the Deepest Rift communities to the Three Domes hotspot pass nearby, but here it is hundreds of cables to safety in either direction. Robbers can pounce on the unwary and there is no one to help.

The gang has eight members now, all fierce fighters. Strongpincer remembers chasing away a gang of twelve, with only three others to help him. That the larger gang consisted mostly of half-grown children is something Strongpincer tries to forget.

He listens again, hoping to hear prey, and feels a surge of joy. It sounds like a whole train—three or four towfins and probably half a dozen adults. As they come closer he hears the adults clicking away to one another, not caring if the whole ocean knows where they are. This train is too big for a band of children or half-starved outcasts to attack; evidently they don’t know this is Strongpincer’s territory.

To his left, Shellcrusher starts to move, but Strongpincer halts her and says very quietly, “The last one. Pass it on.” The others are silently getting into position for a fast climb and some quick, brutal fighting.

Overhead, the first towfin passes. From the churning of its fins, it sounds like it’s hauling something big. Two of the chatty adults are trailing behind the towfin. The next one sounds smaller and lightly loaded—Strongpincer suspects a young towfin ready to be sold. Then another, with what sounds like three or four adults hanging on its line.

Strongpincer tenses. The last one is passing now. It sounds like an old towfin with ragged fins, laboring a bit to keep up with the others. Silently, Strongpincer rises from the seafloor and then begins swimming up toward the towfin using powerful strokes of his tail. When he’s half a cable away he starts pinging, to get a better idea of what he’s up against. There is one adult riding on the towfin’s back, and two nets of jars trailing behind it. The adult hears Strongpincer’s pings and calls those ahead for help.

Headcracker and Tailcutter are going for the cargo bundles; even if the merchants get away, Strongpincer and his gang get the loot. Shellcrusher and Weaklegs are in formation with Strongpincer, gaining on the towfin and the panicky adult. Halftail is lagging behind, of course.

Ahead he can hear the other towfins coming about, but they are clumsy and can’t turn fast. Where are Onefeeler and Hardshell?

He hears them ping up ahead and imagines them walking on the bottom before rising up to attack. Clever—surely Onefeeler’s idea. Sometimes Strongpincer wonders if maybe Onefeeler isn’t too clever.

The panicking adult abandons his towfin. Fool. Strongpincer gives a couple of powerful strokes with his tail and catches the wretch. A town-bred adult, that’s for sure, with his shell all covered with weed and parasites. Big, though. He probably doesn’t remember going hungry. Strongpincer grabs him from behind and tries to get a grip on his pincers, but the coward tries to curl up, folding his legs and pincers against his belly. Strongpincer doesn’t have the time to waste prying this one open, so he works a pincer point between a couple of the fellow’s back segments and forces it in until he can feel the soft membranes give way.

He looks up and pings. Onefeeler and Hardshell are fighting tail to tail against three angry adults behind the third towfin. Shellcrusher and Weaklegs are going to help. Tailcutter’s down on the bottom trying to cut open the cargo nets from the fourth towfin. Greedy fool; he could be helping get more stuff. The young towfin is bolting, dragging its rider helplessly on the towrope, and the two adults on the first ’fin decide to run for it as well, prodding their beast until it breaks into a ponderous sprint.

When they notice Shellcrusher and Weaklegs, the other three adults scatter, trying to catch up with their fleeing buddies. Shellcrusher overtakes one of them and gets her massive pincers around the poor fool’s body right where the tail joins. There’s a burst of panicked clicking and then a crack, and Shellcrusher lets the leaking body tumble down to the seafloor.

The haul is good. The two cargo nets from the last ’fin hold jars of iceshaver roe and skin bags full of smokeweed pith. The other beast has only a small net full of personal baggage and some food for the merchants. Still, the beasts themselves are certainly valuable.

Only one of the gang is hurt—Hardshell lost a feeler, but they grow back, and it won’t affect his fighting ability. Strongpincer imagines recruiting some more fighters, maybe even buying some fierce children from a school. For a big gang, there are so many possibilities. Strongpincer dives down to get some roe before Tailcutter eats the whole jar by himself.

Tizhos joined Gishora at the lander hatch as soon as the ship had established orbit about Ilmatar. Gishora was leader on this voyage, which meant that he had to do a lot of nuzzling and stroking Tizhos as part of the normal bonding. Neither of them particularly enjoyed it. Gishora was naturally somewhat shy and solitary, almost as reserved as the humans. He was in charge of this voyage only because of his unmatched knowledge of human social rules and languages.

Consequently, their contact up to now had been perfunctory and brief, enough to satisfy the formalities without really establishing a hormonal leader-follower bond.

The two of them suited up and climbed into the lander after the pilot. There was a delay of some twenty minutes before launch, and Gishora took that opportunity to have a talk with his subordinate.

“Tizhos. I have set up a private channel so we may speak frankly. Tell me if you have finished all your preparations.”

“I believe so. I made estimates of how contact could affect the Ilmatarans. My notes may lack precision—I had very little information other than the bulletin from Earth.”

“I understand. You can refine them as we learn more below. Remember that we come here to learn and understand, and to correct what may have gone wrong, not to judge.”

“Some on board seem to think otherwise,” said Tizhos.

Gishora knew who she meant. “I thought it best to bring Irona on the mission so that the Protectionist faction would not feel themselves excluded. But I think even he would agree that he can do little to help in the gathering of facts. So I have a perfectly valid reason to leave him in orbit where he can do no harm.”

“I do admit to curiosity, Gishora: Did you bring him in order to have something to threaten the humans with? If they do not cooperate with you, they will have to face Irona?”

Gishora sounded pained. “Tizhos, we have not come here to make threats or demands! Such behavior resembles what we wish to avoid. We only wish to learn all the facts of what happened and prevent future mistakes.”

“If the humans refuse to accept our help, what then?”

“In that case, you and I must do our work anyway. And, yes, I do take comfort from knowing I can call upon Irona if force seems necessary.”

For a moment, Gishora seemed dominant indeed, and Tizhos felt the warm sexual rush of agreement with a leader.

The pilot called back from the flight station. “Thrusters fire in one dozen seconds.”

“Good,” Gishora replied. “We wait prepared.”

A moment later they heard the hissing sound of the thrusters behind them, and a feeble gravity pushed them into their seats. Then they floated again. “All done,” said the pilot. “We begin braking in three dozen minutes.”

Gishora made the hull next to their seats transparent, and the two of them became absorbed in the view as the vast landscape of Ilmatar pivoted beneath them. The surface below was a smooth plain of white ice, criscrossed by lines and mottled with occasional spots and splotches of dark material. In a few places mountains of rock pierced the ice layer to rise barren and gray, casting long shadows. The moon was virtually airless, with no clouds or haze to block their view.

There! Just at the terminator line, at the intersection of two chasms in the ice, Tizhos saw a tiny flashing light. From this height she could not see the Terran base itself, but the landing strobe showed up clearly. If she peered hard, Tizhos could almost make out a faint smudge around the blinking light, where the humans had disturbed the pristine surface. A stain on the world.