Jeff Carlson - The Frozen Sky

Awkwardly, she scrambled to make up for it. “These sims are amazing,” she said.

“Well, here’s where everything goes wrong,” Metzler said.

Was he annoyed with her?

Probe 112 repeated the ’Hello’ gesture, then showed the undersides of two arms, undulating its pedicellaria.

It didn’t have the effect they’d intended.

Tom lifted his underside to show his beak, a hostile gesture. He screeched into the catacombs behind him, alerting his companions. As soon as they answered, he turned and called in the probe’s direction. Most likely he was scanning for other strangers. Possibly he was shouting threats at the probe not to come any closer.

“What if we’re putting Tom in danger by talking to him?” Vonnie said. “The other sunfish might not like it.”

“Jesus, you’re strange,” Ash said. From the way her hazel eyes searched Vonnie’s face, she was only half kidding. “I know you have a huge crush on those monsters. Now you’re more on their side than ours?”

“None of us want him to get hurt.”

“It’s a chance we have to take,” Frerotte said. “If we’re going to talk to them, we have to start somewhere.”

Tom finished screeching into the dark. He leapt away from 112, escaping it but not the camouflaged spies, who recorded his flight. First he rejoined his quartet. Then they formed up with the rest of the pack.

At the same time, Probes 112 and 113 fled.

When the sunfish returned in force, the probes were gone. The sunfish clung to the rock. They did not pursue. Instead, they screamed at the empty tunnel.

“What are they doing?” Ash said.

“That looks territorial,” Vonnie said. “They’re claiming this space.”

“We thought so, too,” Metzler said. “Their sonar would carry after the probes for a long way, maybe as far as three kilometers. Watch what they do next.”

The sunfish quit screeching. They returned to the tunnel where they’d built their wall. Then they assembled in a pack and began screeching again, using the rock to amplify their shrill voices back on themselves.

Ash put her hands over her ears. “They’ll go deaf!”

“They’re worried the probes will try to flank them,” Vonnie said. “Remember, they’re always exposed on all sides, up and down. So they’re repeating the warning.”

“It seems more intense than that,” Metzler said. “What if it’s an affirmation ritual? They could be promising each other to defend the colony or memorizing a new voice key. Look at their modulation. They’re not just screaming. There’s a carefully refined harmony.”

“Why did Tom run from the probe?”

“We’re not sure. They must find loners or survivors from other packs sometimes.”

“They probably eat them, too,” Ash said.

“Maybe not. Survivors from another area could lead them to new food supplies or thermals. There’s also a biological imperative. Accepting newcomers into the pack would be good genetics. They need the diversity.”

“Maybe the probe said the wrong thing,” Ash said.

“I don’t think so. It was docile. It responded to Tom’s overture.”

“You did great,” Vonnie said, bumping his shoulder.

“Pärnits programmed its secondary movements,” Metzler said. “Maybe something in those gestures was too abrupt or he used the wrong arms.”

The subtext of that comment wasn’t difficult to interpret. Metzler had undercut his rival for Vonnie’s affections, opening a divide between the two men, which was exactly what she didn’t want.

“This encounter went better than anything else we’ve done,” she said. “You guys are spectacular.”

“We probably should have told the probe to stay,” Metzler said. “The sunfish would never accept a loner without assessing him as a group. That would also reduce their odds of sustaining casualties. If it’s a trap, if he’s sick or feeble, they’d smash him.”

“Are we sure the probe had the right sound?” Ash said.

With help from their gene smiths, Vonnie and Ash had grafted synthetic blubber and skin onto the probes’ exteriors. Naked metal wouldn’t sound like a living creature, nor smell like one. Metzler was certain that the hundreds of tube feet commingled with the sunfishes’ pedicellaria were a sensitive scent-and-taste organ. Even in areas where there was no atmosphere, the sunfish must be attuned to each other’s smell, the mineral content in the rock, toxins, moisture, and the tracks of anything that had passed before them.

“The probe’s skin wasn’t the problem,” Metzler said.

“What about its density?” Vonnie said. “We can’t make a probe as light as a sunfish unless we dump most of the hardware. If we—”

An alert chimed on the display. Frerotte rose to his feet, ducking through the hatch into data/comm.

“What’s up?” Ash said.

“Our probes are on the move,” Metzler said. “The sunfish just reentered the catacombs.”

“Contact in three minutes,” Frerotte called. “Pärnits and O’Neal are coming online. Koebsch is signed in, too. They need us in one.”

“Got it.” Metzler looked at Vonnie and said, “Can you redesign the probes if we have to?”

“Yes.” She stood up, eager to join Frerotte in data/comm. “We’d need to leave most of the data gathering to the spies. That’s worked pretty well so far, but it’ll be an issue if the probes move out of range. What if we’re lucky enough to be invited into the sunfishes’ homes?”

“We can send down ten thousand spies,” Ash said. “In another year, they’ll be everywhere.”

“That doesn’t help us now.”

As the three of them walked toward the hatch together, Vonnie caught Metzler’s elbow, letting Ash move ahead of them. She drew Metzler away from the hatch. Then she reached her arms around his neck and kissed him.

He ran his hands down Vonnie’s ribs to her waist. She pressed herself against him. Her lips parted, and she chuckled at the simple pleasure of touching each other.

Her laughter was a low, wanting sound. It invited more. His hands slid to the small of her back.

Frerotte shouted, “Ben! Fifteen seconds!”

“Oh, hell,” Vonnie said as they broke their embrace. Metzler looked into her eyes, checking to see if she was okay. She nodded. Then he moved past.

Vonnie lingered behind, hugging her arms across her breasts to fill the void he’d left. Her mouth worked with a grin that she couldn’t control.

A kiss was an odd thing. In most cultures, kissing had come to have many meanings — affection, sympathy, friendship — but it had originated as a trick of reproduction. By sharing saliva, the man transferred testosterone to the woman, increasing her boldness and her arousal. The emotional component was harder to decipher. There were undertones of devotion and ownership.

The sunfish will have their own tricks, Vonnie thought, trying to cool off. She’d been celibate since leaving Earth. Her body ached and burned.

She must have moved differently as she stepped through the hatch into data/comm, because Ash looked at her sharply. Vonnie grinned again without meaning to.

“Sign in,” Frerotte said.

Frerotte, Metzler, and Ash stood in virtual stations, each of them enveloped in a shaft of holo imagery. Frerotte had prepped a fourth station. Vonnie walked into it, donning mesh gloves as she activated her temp files and preferences with a voice key. “Vonderach,” she said.

Her display included a group feed for most of the crew. A few people were too busy with their own projects to join in. Everyone else wanted to observe their next encounter.

Probes 112 and 113 had squirmed into a new section of catacombs above the tunnel where they’d met Tom. The rock was less dense here. It had bubbled. Most of the openings were scrawny, lopsided pockets. The probes’ line-of-sight never stretched more than twenty meters, although their radar signals bounced as far as three hundred meters before the catacombs slumped over a precipice, creating a blind spot.