A Darkling Sea

Eleven

An hour after fleeing the shelter Rob crouched behind a rock on the seafloor, trying not to go insane from sensory deprivation. The sound of his APOS and the feel of sweat running down the small of his back were the only things to remind him the material world existed at all.

His hydrophone was cranked up to maximum sensitivity, and he strained his ears to catch any sound that might be Sholen or the drone approaching. Somewhere down in the reptile part of his brain Rob’s fight-or-flight reflex revved into overdrive. They could be all around him, they could be just about to creep over the rock!

When he tried to be more rational, it wasn’t much help. Instead of worrying about monsters hiding in the dark, he had the very real fear that the sub wasn’t going to come for him. Alicia and Josef had been caught, or couldn’t understand Broadtail’s message, or had gone to the wrong rendezvous point. He was all alone in the dark with no food, and would have to find his way back to Hitode through the alien ocean alone—or die cold and suffocating under miles of water and ice.

Suddenly Rob felt the water around him move, and heard a very faint scrabbling. His thoughts turned from fear of capture or starvation to dread of something big and spiky about to tear him apart.

He couldn’t stand it anymore. He flicked on his lamp. Even dimmed all the way down it was still like a searchlight after the absolute blackness of the ocean. The familiar ghostly gray and brown sea-bottom landscape reappeared.

Something tapped his helmet and Rob screamed aloud, making his own ears ring inside the helmet. He scrambled away from the rock and turned, grabbing for his utility knife as he did so.

There was a huge spiky alien monster perched atop the rock, but it was a familiar one and Rob gave a loud sigh of relief. With his knife blade he tapped out the number that Graves had identified as a greeting.

Broadtail crawled off the rock and raised one deadly pincer. With the barbed tip he tapped out his own greeting on Rob’s helmet.

Rob wanted to ask how the Ilmataran had found him, but they still hadn’t figured out “how” yet. So he tried to get as close as he could. “[Interrogative] Broadtail swim toward [Rob].”“[Unknown], yes.”

That wasn’t much help. Rob tried to come up with a question he knew how to ask. Finally he tried “[Interrogative] Broadtail [Rob] here,” hoping the Ilmataran might fill in the missing verb himself.“Broadtail [unknown] [Rob] two cables.”

“[Interrogative],” Rob replied and then repeated the unknown number.

Broadtail took a long time to reply; evidently he was just as frustrated as Rob. Finally he tapped out the number again, then ran his feelers over Rob’s helmet, then swam some distance away and swished them loudly in the water before returning and repeating the number.

“You tasted me,” said Rob aloud to himself. “You tasted me from a couple of hundred yards away. That’s awesome!” He added the number to their growing lexicon and replied to Broadtail. “[Human] not taste.”

Broadtail replied with another unknown number, which Rob tentatively put down as an expression of sympathy. Just then the Ilmataran stiffened. “Silent,” he tapped, and then crawled to the top of the big rock and stood still.

Rob switched off his lamp and listened to the hydrophone. After about a minute he picked up an approaching hum. He couldn’t tell if it was the sub or the Sholen, but just knowing that a friend was nearby made the suspense a lot easier to bear.

His joy at getting picked up was a little tempered by the fact that there wasn’t actually room inside the sub for three people. Josef and Alicia stayed strapped into the sub’s two seats, while Rob crouched atop the access hatch in back.

“They removed the power unit and oxygen tanks from the Coquille,” said Josef. “I suspect they may have left alarms as well.”

“Well, that’s it,” said Rob. “I guess we give up now.”

“Not necessarily,” Josef pointed out. “Is possible to die.”

“Josef, how long can the submarine keep us alive?” asked Alicia.

“You’re not seriously thinking of camping out in here until the Sholen leave, are you?”

Josef ignored Rob, and ticked off his fingers as he spoke.

“Oxygen: as long as we have power, two years. Argon: perhaps two months before reserve is gone. Drinking water: like oxygen. Food: we starve to death a month after emergency bars run out.”

“How much food do we have?” she asked. “I have six bars in my bag.”

“I have two,” said Josef.

“I’ve got two in my pockets and I grabbed two boxes. Plus there are two boxes hidden in the ruins,” said Rob.

“Hoarding, Robert?” asked Alicia a little sharply. “Not exactly,” he said. “I figured you’d want to hold out until we were completely out of food and getting hungry, so I stashed some extra to make sure we could actually survive long enough to get back to Hitode and surrender.”

“Practical,” said Josef after a moment.

“Very well,” said Alicia. “We have fifty-eight bars. If we each have just two a day that stretches our time to ten days. Let us leave the last day for surrendering if we must. What can we accomplish in nine days?”

“Don’t you ever just give up?” asked Rob.

“No.”

“Other than senseless, suicidal attacks against Hitode, I can think of nothing,” said Josef.

“Robert?”

“I know what you’re going to say. Do science, right? We’ve got nine days, so you’re going to collect more data.”

“It is the only logical course of action,” she said.

“No, the logical course of action is to make sure we can survive. There’s no way we can live in our suits for ten days straight. Even if we could all fit in here, which we can’t”—Rob thumped the four-foot ceiling above the access hatch for emphasis—“we’ll be half dead from fatigue and stress long before the food runs out. And I don’t know if we really can live on two bars a day. We’ve been doing that and we’re all getting pretty skinny.”

“You wish to surrender, then. To save yourself a week of discomfort.”

“No, goddamnit. I think we should see if the Ilmatarans can help us.”

“That is… an interesting idea,” said Alicia after a moment’s silence. “Do you think they will help us?”

“I don’t know,” said Rob. “We can find out. You know—gather some data.”

They waited another couple of hours before circling around to the Ilmataran settlement, to give the Sholen plenty of time to leave. With no sub, the Sholen didn’t have a lot of “loiter time” on their missions—it was all swim out, do the job, get back to Hitode.

Wary of drones, the three of them left the sub a few hundred meters away and swam upcurrent to the settlement where Henri had been dissected.

Broadtail met them only a few dozen meters from the sub. He swam toward Rob like a torpedo and clasped him firmly in his pincers. “Ilmataran many food ping humans.”

“Right,” said Rob. He tapped out “Humans reaching for Ilmataran.”

“Ilmataran grasps limb. Humans swim.”

He led the three of them toward the settlement. Rob had glimpsed it before when the Ilmatarans had brought Henri here a prisoner, but he’d never really had a chance to look at the place.

The heart of the whole operation was the vent. It was capped by a low dome of fitted stone, representing God only knew how much Ilmataran labor. Neat covered channels of carefully cut stone radiated out from the dome, branching and rebranching like some kind of neolithic demonstration of fractal geometry. In a few places, where it was evidently important to keep up the pressure or span a chasm, they used pipes made of hollowed stone segments.

One of the oddities of Ilmatar that had puzzled the first human explorers was the absence of any large mineral deposits at the sea-bottom vents. Only at the oldest and smallest vents could drones photograph “chimneys” reminiscent of the ones on Earth and Europa. Solving the mystery took so long because the answer, paradoxically, was right in front of everyone: the Ilmatarans themselves. Very few of Ilmatar’s sea-bottom vents got the chance to build up ramparts of mineral deposits because any active vent was quickly occupied by Ilmatarans and channeled into a productive network of pipes and tunnels. Just like so much of Earth, the Ilmataran landscape was the product of intelligent brains and hands.

Atop the channels were tiny vent holes, each with its own plug of shell or bone. Around each hole were dozens of chemosynthesizing organisms, rooted on movable stones. The Ilmatarans planted their crops where the water temperature was right. Nearest the vent itself were the most impressive growths—like giant ostrich feathers two or three meters high, some of them splitting into twin plumes halfway up. Rob could also see what looked like long threads waving in the flow, flat stones supporting shaggy microorganism colonies, some things with broad spiky fans like palmetto leaves, fleshy cylinders that completely surrounded the outflow from a hole, masses of stuff like black macaroni, and long flat strands almost exactly like fronds of kelp.

But the chemosynthetic “plants” were just part of the amazing food factory powered by the vent. Above the crops, the water was cloudy where free-floating microorganisms fed on the warm chemical-rich water. Small swimmers darted in and out of the cloud, and larger swimmers pursued them. The Ilmatarans had nets set up to catch some of these. Traps made of bone and fiber were staked at intervals around the property to catch bottom-crawlers. Rob could also see beds of sessile organisms kind of like half-buried ammonites, and some larger swimmers tethered to stakes.

Downcurrent from the main vent complex were the buildings. They were not quite as neatly built as the vent cap dome. The walls were sloping piles of smaller stones, roofed by heavy slabs like prehistoric tombs. There were no windows. Each building was fed by a ventwater channel, so the walls supported a lush growth of weeds and microbial mats.

At the upcurrent edge of the working area was the garbage midden, with its own screen of nets to catch scavengers. Ilmatarans liked their garbage, and placed it where the tasty organic molecules would wash off it and enrich the farm. The garbage pile was huge, far bigger than the farm itself. Over time it had been shaped and tweaked to control the flow of current, bringing just enough to circulate the water, but not enough to wash away valuable nutrients from the vent.

The trash pile sprawled over a couple of square kilometers, heaped up at least ten meters above the seafloor. Rob felt his hair prickle a bit as he got another glimpse of the scale of Ilmataran history. How long would it take a single little village to build up a trash pile that size? Centuries? Millennia?

The place was quite busy. Half a dozen Ilmatarans were harvesting some of the crops growing on the pipe system, a couple of others were tending the drift nets and traps. By one of the main buildings a couple of young adults were mending nets, and another pair were twisting fibers into rope.

The sea bottom was crawling with scavengers. Half of them looked like juvenile Ilmatarans. As Rob passed the line of traps at the edge of the property, he saw that a majority of the animals in the traps were juveniles. It was with some relief that he saw an adult throwing them away when emptying the trap.

Broadtail stopped at the main house. “Humans moving toward Ilmataran structure,” he tapped out, and led them inside. The door was a very heavy affair made of rigid bone segments lashed with tough plant fiber. The outside surface was armored with overlapping plates of shell. It occurred to Rob that this wasn’t just a house, it was a fortress. Who did the Ilmatarans have to fight?

Inside Rob felt a pang of claustrophobia. The corridor was narrow and twisted randomly, and every surface was thick with weed and bacterial mats, making it very hard to see. His sonar gadget was nearly useless in the close quarters. All he could do was follow Broadtail and keep reminding himself that this wasn’t going to end the way Henri’s visit had.

Eventually they reached a large room, which Rob recognized. The video feed from Henri’s suit had shown it quite clearly as he’d been dissected. Rob trusted Broadtail, but he felt for the utility knife on his thigh just in case.

Tizhos met with Irona when he returned with the Guardians. His account of the raid—one could hardly call it a battle—made her more depressed than ever. “We sabotaged the temporary shelter, but they left aboard the submarine. It cannot support them for long. They must give up or die now,” he said.

“I worry about what may happen if they do die,” she said, not caring how she sounded.

“Other humans may wish to avoid death themselves. They may urge cooperation.”

“I fear we have destroyed any chance to achieve a consensus with the humans. During your mission against the last shelter I spoke with Vikram Sen. Even he now acts angry and uncooperative, when before he seemed willing to work with us.”

“It could cause problems if he works against us,” said Irona. “We must win his loyalty. Humans follow a hierarchy—if the leader supports us, the others will go along.”

“Tell me how you expect to win his loyalty.”

“I intend to establish a personal bond.”

Broadtail remembers feeling this anxious when presenting his work to the Bitterwater Company for the first time. Now, however, he is not worried about himself. Whatever happens, his status as discoverer of the Builders is secure. He can imagine scholars reading his work long after his death. Though he does not speak of it to others, Broadtail imagines Longpincer and the rest of the Company being known chiefly as “colleagues of the great Broadtail.” If the same thought occurs to them, nobody mentions it.

Holdhard is beside him, holding his note reels. They are his property, her inheritance as his apprentice. He wonders idly if she imagines him being known as “the teacher of the great Holdhard.”

Right now Broadtail is worried because he wishes this meeting to go well. The Builders need help and only the Bitterwater Company can provide it. Without that help, the steady flow of new learning from the Builders will cease. Broadtail does not wish for that to happen.

He listens. The chatter in the room quiets. He forces himself to feel confident and strong, and speaks. “Greetings. I’m sure you all can hear that three of the Builders are here at this meeting. Let me explain why. The Builders are here because of a horrible crime. They have enemies—other beings from beyond the ice but unlike them. These other beings I describe as Squatters.”

“ Other beings?” The room fills with commotion.

“Yes. According to the Builders, these Squatters originate within a different sphere beyond the ice. They are in conflict for some reason—I do not completely understand how or why.”

“I think we need to know,” says Longpincer.

“I agree,” says Broadtail. “But please allow me to finish. The Builders claim they are the makers of a large shelter, off in cold water along the dead vent line downcurrent of Bitterwater. They describe the Squatters arriving and forcing them to leave. Upon their taking refuge in a smaller shelter—I’m sure you all remember our visit to them—the Builders are again attacked and their shelter destroyed.”

The room is quiet. All the Bitterwater scholars are house holders. Even Broadtail still thinks of himself as one despite the loss of his property. Monsters coming out of the cold to seize one’s house is the essence of dread for all of them.

“Is this claim accurate?” asks Sharpfrill at last. “I do not wish to doubt anyone’s honesty, but perhaps you do not understand everything they tell you. Is it possible they have some kind of, oh, I don’t know, maybe an inheritance dispute with these other beings? Or something of that kind?”

“Let us ask them again,” said Broadtail. Loudly, so that all the Company could hear, he tapped out a message to Builder 1. “Squatters construct shelter, yes?”

Some discussion among them in faint swishing noises and barks. Then Builder 1 replies. “No. Shelter build action Builders shelter. Two place shelter Builder two shelter. Squatters large grasp shelter. Squatters two shelter separate.”

“His words are sharp and strong,” says Broadtail. “The shelters are the work of his people. These others force them to leave. As I recall saying, a horrible crime.”

“What do these Squatters want?” demanded Longpincer. “Where do they plan to strike next?”

“I am unsure. Let me ask.” Broadtail taps another message to Builder 1. “Squatters grasping object?”

More discussion. Builder 1 eventually replies, “Squatters grasp Builders.”

“I believe the Squatters only wish to remove the Builders,” Broadtail explains to the Company.

“Let them,” says Sharpfrill. “It is not our quarrel.” The room echoes with murmurs of agreement.

“The Builders are here now,” says Broadtail quietly. “They are Longpincer’s guests. As are we all.”

That creates a long uncomfortable silence. Everyone waits for Longpincer to say something. He takes a little while to respond, and Broadtail realizes he is enjoying the attention. Lately Broadtail is making a bigger noise. It could be awkward: though this is Longpincer’s home, it is Broadtail who brings the Builders here into the house. Longpincer could disavow them. And who could blame him? They are not adults. Longpincer would be within his rights to kill and eat them.

Longpincer elevates himself on his legs so that his words are not distorted. “They are my guests,” he says clearly. “Within my boundaries they are under my protection. Their enemies are mine.” He quotes the way it is written in old laws. Saying it that way, Longpincer is reminding his other guests of their duty. By accepting his hospitality they make themselves his allies in battle. In any vent town the vote of the community replaces ancient codes, but Bitterwater is alone, surrounded by cold water. Longpincer must take such things seriously.

Broadtail translates for the Builders. “Builders may stay here. We adults fight any Squatters who try to take you.” He feels tremendous relief. With Longpincer’s consent the Builders can remain at Bitterwater. Broadtail can study them all the time and learn everything there is to know.

“Humans stand [unknown]. Ilmatarans stabbing motions [unknown] reaching out toward humans,” said Rob. “I think that means they’re offering to protect us.”“From the Sholen? Are you certain?” said Alicia.

“No, but that’s what it sounds like. I think our broad-tailed friend talked the others into it.”

“But we have not asked them to do this—Robert, tell them it is not their fight.”

Rob tried. “Ilmataran folds pincers.”

“Ilmatarans make stabbing motions,” Broadtail replied. “Humans and Ilmatarans make stabbing motions.”

“Alicia, I think they’ve made up their minds.”

“Should we leave, then?”

“Sound like you hope we persuade you not to,” said Josef. “Stay.”

“Robert?”

“You’re the one who wants to gather more data, right? At least with them helping us maybe we can figure out how to survive longer. And we’ll be right in the middle of an Ilmataran community! So I take it we’re staying? I’ll tell him.”

He tapped out the message, then made himself as comfortable as he could in the low room while the Ilmatarans argued things out. With so many of them pinging and clicking together it sounded like some kind of bizarre concerto for harpsichord and castanets.

Broadtail was translating bits and pieces of the discussion into number code for Rob’s benefit, so that he understood at least vaguely what was happening. They were trying to decide where the humans could stay and how to protect them. Some of the Ilmatarans wanted to move them elsewhere. And then, quite suddenly, they all apparently came to an agreement because the pinging quieted down.

Broadtail tapped a new message to Rob. “Humans many food, yes?”

“No,” Rob replied. “Humans twenty food.”

This prompted one of the Ilmatarans to go to the doorway and make some loud noises. After a bit, a parade of others came in carrying bundles and jars of stuff that they set out on the floor in the center of the room.

“Eat,” Broadtail signaled.

“Oh, crud,” said Rob. “Alicia, how can we tell them we can’t eat their food?”

“Show them,” she said, and took out one of the emergency bars.

Rob spent some time going through his Ilmataran lexicon, and them tapped out “Human eat zero food.” He held up the food bar and unwrapped it. “Human eat object.”

This caused something of a commotion. Rob finally had to slip a bit of the food bar through the little self-sealing adaptive plastic port in the helmet faceplate. It was supposed to allow one to eat while outside the station—but in practice it always leaked. Icy water trickled down Rob’s neck, soaking his suit liner, but he got the morsel into his mouth. Its brief immersion in Ilmatar’s ocean gave it a flavor of over-salted egg, which wasn’t much worse than the way the bars normally tasted. The Ilmatarans crowded around, listening and feeling him as he chewed and swallowed.

Broadtail was brave enough to take a bit of the bar in his feeding tendrils. Watching him eat was almost as fascinating for Rob as his own performance had been for the Ilmatarans. The inner side of each tendril was ridged like a file, and Broadtail basically abraded his food, pulling the tendrils into his mouth to swallow what they scraped off.

“He’s eating it! Should I stop him?”

Alicia was busy calling up files on her helmet faceplate. “Yes! Tell him to stop! The sugars ought to be all right, but the fats and proteins may taste unpleasant or cause an allergic reaction.”

“Too late,” said Rob as Broadtail paused and expelled a cloud of food particles from his mouth.

“Not food,” said Broadtail after a moment.

“Builder food not Ilmataran food,” Rob tapped out.

That prompted a lot more discussion among the Ilmatarans, during which some of them apparently decided there was no sense letting all the stuff on the floor go to waste. They began stuffing themselves and passing things around. Since their sound organs were entirely separate from the feeding mouthparts, the Ilmatarans could chatter as much as they liked while eating.

“Take samples,” said Josef.

“Oh! Yes. Both of you help,” said Alicia, passing out some little sample baggies from her suit pocket.

“More data?” asked Rob as he scraped a little of what looked like caviar into a bag.

“Yes, and not just for research. There may be a few things here which we can eat.”

Thinlegs approaches Broadtail and Longpincer. “My dear colleagues. I find I must return to my own home. Longpincer, may I borrow the service of an apprentice to load my animal?”

“Of course you may,” says Longpincer. “But why must you leave now? So much is happening!”

Thinlegs reaches over with his pincers and taps on Longpincer’s shell, loud enough for Broadtail to hear. “That is why I must leave,” he spells out. “It is too much. I recall joining the Company as a diversion from the cares of managing my property. The discoveries and opinions of the members are interesting, and some of their ideas are profitable. As I say, it is a pleasant diversion. The Company are better conversationalists than my neighbors and apprentices, and you keep a good larder, Longpincer. But all that is happening now—it is simply too much! Beings from beyond the ice! Creatures capable of thinking and speaking like adults! Two varieties at war with each other! I fear that if I remain I must take a side in this fight and risk my life or my property.”

“I am sorry to hear it,” says Longpincer. “But I intend to welcome you again.”

“I am grateful. But I must go.”

Broadtail waits until Thinlegs is too far to hear them, then taps on Longpincer’s shell. “How many others are leaving?”

“I recall speaking with two—Narrowbody and Smoothshell.”

“I regret this is happening. Longpincer,” says Broadtail after a moment’s hesitation, “if the presence of the Builders creates difficulties, I can take them elsewhere. Perhaps hide them in a different set of ruins, or take them off to the shallows.”

“No. I am their host and I recall saying as much before the Company. This is the best place to keep them.”

“I must ask—can you afford this? Have you enough surplus for the Company and the Builders?”

“You need not worry. Even if my own jars are empty, I have beads to spend. Besides,” Longpincer’s tone shifts to amusement, “I remember you demonstrating these Builders cannot eat my food. Surely that is the best sort of guest to have?”

The sub could sleep two people in only moderate discomfort, but adding a third meant that someone had to stretch out on top of the underside hatch. The unlucky sleeper always woke up cold, stiff, and with a pattern of little triangles pressed into his skin by the floor grid. When they were awake, Rob and Josef spent as much time outside as possible. Alicia used the cramped space as a lab.

On their second day at the Ilmataran settlement, Rob found Alicia hard at work inside the sub. He was quiet as she prepared another sample and slid the little test strip into the analyzer.“How’s it going?”

She straightened up and stretched. “In two days I have tested sixty-five Ilmataran foodstuffs. Seven have nutritional value for us, two contain no identifiable toxins or allergens, and one even seems to be palatable.”“You mean the orange stuff you showed me this morning?

For some values of palatable, I guess.”

“What is the old American saying? Pretend it is chicken?”

“More like rotten eggs.”

“That is just the sulfur. Everything here is rich in sulfur. It is the foundation of the ecology.”

“And that means half the things we’ve tested are full of sul furic acid and carbon sulfide.”

“The orange bacterial mats have only trace amounts. And we can get rid of the hydrogen sulfide you don’t like by cooking it. That would also break down the complex carbohydrates.”

“Mmm. Fried sulfur-reducing bacterial mats. When we get back to Earth we can start a chain of Ilmataran restaurants.”

“The usable carbohydrate content is about point one kilocalorie per gram. That is a bit less than lettuce. It will help keep us alive, Robert.”

“I know. Sorry. How many more samples today?”

“I am hoping to process another twenty. Our friend Broadtail has been a great help. His people have a very sophisticated classification system based on anatomy and physiology. It is essentially Linnean without the modern genetic component.”

“How does that help?”

“It means that I can eliminate entire phyla rather quickly.

For instance, we were able to determine that all the animals have tremendous concentrations of metals from the water in their tissues. Which is a shame, because I would like to find a source of protein we can use.”

“How about eggs?”

“They are too acidic. To be honest, the best things for us here are the products of decay. All of their energetic molecules are bad for us. But the sugars and starches they use for structural materials are all right.”

“We’re garbage eaters from space.”

“Essentially. I am gaining new respect for oxygen respiration. Speaking of which, how is your work?”

“Longpincer—he’s the guy who apparently runs this whole settlement—has given us a little outbuilding. Josef and I just spent the whole morning caulking it with silicone and reactor tape. Josef’s test-filling it with one of the spare APOS packs. If it’s really airtight, we can dismount the sub’s backup unit and fill the whole building with oxygen and argon.”

“How big is the building?”

“It’ll be snug. We had to leave the bottom part flooded, so the air space is about seven cubic meters. We can put a couple of hammocks in there and any equipment we want to keep dry.”

“What about heat?”

“Well—it’s chilly. It’s washed by outflow from the vent, but by the time it gets down the pipes it’s only about ten degrees C. Still, that’s better than the ambient seawater.”

“Ten is not so bad. I have gone camping in Normandy in worse weather.”

“That’s the spirit.” He was silent for a moment. “Is this really going to work?”

“I do not know. Food is the bottleneck. With enough calories we can survive despite the cold. The ‘orange stuff’ is useful, but it isn’t concentrated enough. We will need to eat kilograms of it.”

Rob rejoined Josef outside to inspect the little outbuilding for leaks now that it was full of oxygen. The Ilmataran masonry work was really extraordinary, especially when you considered they had no metal tools to work the stone with. Underwater it was hard to swing a hammer, so most of their stone cutting had to be done by patient grinding instead of chipping and wedging.

The building was beehive-shaped, with the stones fitted together by abrading them into place. It reminded Rob of pictures he’d seen of Inca stonework in Peru. The seams were very tight, and Rob and Josef had used up four tubes of silicone sealant and a roll of reactor tape on the inside of the building. Now they hovered inches above the domed roof looking for suspicious bubbles.

After plugging another tube’s worth of leaks, both of them weresatisfied that the building was airtight. Josef maneuvered the sub over to their new home and the two of them spent half an hour getting the backup APOS system and spare argon tank moved inside. Since it was designed to run underwater anyway, Rob just put it on the floor below water level and taped the in and out hoses to the wall.

They waited for the machine to cycle the atmosphere in the building and get it to the right gas mix. Then Rob used more reactor tape to anchor the hammocks and a heater.

“Electrical work is exciting,” Josef commented, floating chest-deep in seawater while holding a cable from the sub’s powerplant.

“Tell me about it,” said Rob, wrapping another layer of reactor tape around a connection.

“I notice you are very fond of your tape.”

“Greatest stuff in the world. Superman’s duct tape.”

“When I was midshipman we would sometimes use it to tape people into bunks. One poor fellow got a strip attached to his face and lost eyebrows for a month.”

“Ouch. When I was in college all we ever did was go crawling through the steam tunnels. What time is it?”

“1622.”

“Damn. Another hour till dinner. I’m dying in here.”

“Will survive. Dinner will be emergency bars and orange stuff.”

“Makes surrender almost appealing, doesn’t it? Give up and get a decent meal. I hope Alicia can find a way to make the orange stuff taste better.”

“She is remarkable.”

“I know. I sure wouldn’t be here if she wasn’t.” Rob worked in silence for a moment. “What about you? I know you’ve got your guy back home so it’s not your hormones keeping you out here. You could be heading back to Earth and Misha—”

“Mishka.”

“Right. Why are you here?”

“Orders.”

Rob nearly dropped his flashlight. “No kidding?”

“Am still on active Navy duty, simply on loan to space agency.”

“Well, yeah, but the Russian Navy didn’t order you to hide out in the ocean of Ilmatar waging war on a bunch of aliens.”

Josef didn’t answer.

“They did?”

“Was given contingency plans,” said Josef at last.

“So you’ve got some kind of secret orders to fight the Sholen?”

“Yes. So did Dr. Sen and others—Fouchard, and Mario.”

“What about Dickie Graves?”

“Not to my knowledge. Like you, motivated by hormones, I think.”

“Alicia?”

“No. Just stubborn.”

“And it looks like you don’t know about my undercover identity as Batman, so I guess we’re even. What are these double-secret orders of yours?”

“Not very secret anymore. Resist any Sholen incursions at Terrestrial bases, using all appropriate means at my disposal.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means I am to fight them, but try not to get killed, and not commit any serious atrocities.”

“Just minor ones.”

Josef shrugged, making himself bob up and down. “We are very far from Earth and our enemies are aliens.”

“You’re scaring me, Josef. So you knew something like this was going to happen?”

“Of course. You did not?”

“Well—right after I got picked to come here we had this big briefing about the Sholen and their whole hands-off-theuniverse thing. I just figured it was all talk. You know, like governments back home talking about preserving the Moon or whatever when what they really mean is they want a cut of the helium mining.”

“When someone threatens you, is best to take them seriously. My government—and yours, and most other UNICA members—have been making plans in case of Sholen attack for some time now. That is one reason we have such a large presence here: Ilmatar lies between Earth and Shalina.”

“Kind of drawing a line in the vacuum?”

“Likely. But also there was desire to see if humans and Sholen could cooperate in studying this world. Ilmatar is ideal place for that—neither humans nor Sholen can live here unaided, and existence of Ilmatarans makes it high priority for research.”

“So we’ve got plenty of incentive to work together here, and nobody’s going to start homesteading or playing Cortez.”

“Exactly. If we cannot cooperate on Ilmatar, then we cannot cooperate at all.”

“I guess we answered that question.”

“Yes. Now question becomes whether we allow the Sholen to deny us entire universe.”

“You think they really want that? Bottle us up inside the Solar System?”

“The logic of their ideology demands it—or even harsher limits. If they chase us off Ilmatar and other bodies with native life, nothing stops us building colonies on lifeless worlds, possibly terraforming some. Soon those worlds have their own interstellar vehicles, more and more as time passes. We have more people, too—which means in time we catch up to Sholen technology. Then pass them. Right now they are; that will not last. I have seen projections: human population off Earth is growing at about five percent per year. In a century, that’s a million people. Another century and humans off Earth outnumber Sholen. They must act now or never.”

“Damn. And Henri and I set it all off.” Rob slid into the water and put his weight on the hammock to test the tape. “Maybe we should give up before this turns into a real Earth vs. the Flying Saucers situation.”

“Robert, you are too harsh with yourself. What did you and Kerlerec do, exactly? You were found by Ilmatarans.”

“Because we fucked up. If Henri hadn’t—”

“Yes, he made foolish mistake. Robert, we cannot expect to avoid mistakes always. If one mistake destroys any chance to cooperate here, then Sholen are being unreasonable.”

Rob was fastening his helmet, and when he replied to Josef it was via the laser link. “I don’t know; this all sounds so abstract. So what if it’s justified? People have died! Isabel, Dickie, at least two Sholen.”

“If you wish to be practical, we can be practical: Sholen have killed humans and we must show them consequences to that behavior. If you wish to be idealistic, we can be idealistic: we are right and they are wrong.”

“You make it sound so simple.”

“I am simple man,” said Josef.