James Cambias - A Darkling Sea

Tizhos put down the tools she’d been using and moved aside. “Tell me if my presence interferes with your work.”

“Oh, no problem. I was just…” Rob thought frantically. “I was just going to make sure the drones are safe for shipment. I mean, we’re not going to be using them here any more, right?”

“That seems a sensible precaution.”

Rob took a seat at the worktable and started to safe the first drone. He took out the power cells, primary and backup, and made sure that all the pressure seals were open.

As he worked, he could feel Tizhos hovering, watching him. She finally spoke up. “I have a question. Please explain why you open up those valves inside the device.”

“Oh, that’s just to make sure there’s no pressure seals. Remember we’re at the bottom of an ocean here. Take a sealed system up the elevator and then to a spacecraft in orbit, and something’s going to pop.”

“I understand. Very prudent.”

“Thanks. The power cells get packed up separately, so there’s no risk of anything getting turned on accidentally, maybe generating heat and starting a fire.”

There were a total of sixteen drones, but half of them were unusable due to damage, corrosion, or incurable software problems. Rob had put those aside to scavenge for parts. He finished safing the eight active ones and packed them up, four to a case. He was extremely aware of Tizhos’s gaze as he stuffed the power cells into the cases next to the drones. It seemed painfully obvious that they weren’t made to fit, but if he left the cells behind he wouldn’t be able to use the drones himself.

“Well, if you’ll excuse me I’ll just put these away.” He hefted the two cases and was very glad of Ilmatar’s low gravity. At ten kilos each, carrying eight drones at once was quite a load.

Tizhos stepped out into the hall, but didn’t move out of his way when he got to the door. Did she know ? He was pretty sure that he couldn’t overcome a female Sholen unarmed, even without two cases of drones trying to pull his arms out of their sockets.

“Excuse me?” he said.

“Tell me why you need to move the drones. Tell me where you intend to take them.”

“Ah—this is a workshop, not a storage room. Can’t leave them in here to clutter things up.”

She considered that for a moment, and it wasn’t just exertion that made Rob’s arms tremble. Finally the Sholen stepped out of his way. “Forgive me for interfering in your work,” she said. “I wish to know about things.”

He grunted and edged his way along the narrow passage toward the moon pool. He could feel her watching him but didn’t dare look back.

Alicia was already there, looking annoyed. “What took you so long?”

“Tizhos wanted to watch me pack up the drones.”

“Josef has been waiting in the sub for an hour already.”

The two of them suited up and rolled into Ilmatar’s icy ocean. The drone cases were considerably lighter out in the water. The other three conspirators were already outside: Dickie Graves, Simeon Fouchard, and Isabel Rondon, all puttering about as if they were doing something useful. As soon as Rob and Alicia left the station the five of them swam over to where the Coquille modules were stacked.

The modules had never been used—when the Sholen got word of them they had filed a strong protest, and UNICA had decided not to press the issue then. They were still in their shipping configuration, folded into giant hockey pucks four meters across. The smooth white plastic of the shipping shroud was coated with a centimeter of silt on the downcurrent side. As Josef moved the sub into position overhead, the downblast from the steering thrusters filled the water with a cloud of particles.

Rob swam up out of the soup, then over to the sub. He found the hoist and pulled the cable free, then let himself sink down onto the stacked Coquilles. He could see nothing but silty water, brightly illuminated by four divers’ shoulder lamps. Holding the hook in one hand, he felt for the lifting point in the center of the Coquille shroud.

There! He hooked on the cable, then switched his hydrophone to broadcast. “Okay, we’re hooked on.”

They backed off to about ten meters while Josef turned on the hoist and took up the tension in the line. The Coquilles were mostly composites and plastic, so in the dense water of Ilmatar they were pretty close to neutral buoyancy. The sub bobbed a bit, then it and the Coquille began to rise until the folded shelter was hanging a good ten meters above the seafloor.

“You three: take hold!” Josef broadcast over the hydrophone. Rob and Alicia let themselves settle to the bottom as the other three grabbed the landing skids, and the sub moved off ponderously.

“So what do we do now?” Rob asked Alicia. “I understand why we can’t go help set up—this way only Josef knows where both Coqs are—but it does leave you and me with nothing to do for a couple of hours at least.”

“Robert, I hope you are not trying to interest me in any sexual adventures. This water is too cold.”

“Relax. I don’t think about that all the time.”

“You may think about it as much as you like, but I am not sure we will have many opportunities.”

“We can try to be quiet when Josef’s around.”

“We will be too busy. I want to use our time in the Coquille to get some field work done. We are not going on vacation.”

“Great,” he said. “A romantic getaway in an alien ocean and you just want to do field work.”

A splash caught his attention. Someone was leaving Hitode Station through the moon pool. Rob turned off his suit and helmet lights and motioned for Alicia to do the same. He cranked up the gain on his hydrophone.

The breathing gear sounded Sholen, but there was only one individual. The Sholen troops always worked in pairs. Was it Tizhos or Gishora?

Alicia and Rob swam quietly after the lone Sholen, staying well back and relying on sight and passive sonar. Their quarry moved away from the station heading upcurrent, stopped to examine some of the catch-nets in the rocks, then veered off toward the warm water exhaust from the power plant.

“It is Gishora,” Alicia said over their secure link. “Tizhos is bigger.”

“What’s he doing?”

“I think he is looking for specimens.”

“You mean he’s doing science? I don’t get it.”

“Why not? He has some free time; he gathers some data. It seems perfectly reasonable to me.”

Rob was glad they weren’t using a video link, so he could roll his eyes in complete privacy. “Well, let’s hope he finishes up before Josef comes back for the second Coquille.”

“I think that if his work is sufficiently interesting, he will not notice anything.”

Strongpincer leads his band through the cold water, staying low near the bottom. There are large predators out here, some of them big enough or stupid enough to tackle a group of adults. It’s also easier to navigate when he can taste the silt in the water and occasionally ping to hear the landscape.

He remembers there is a current whorl somewhere out here where young ones gather. His earliest memories are of being in a school with others, fighting over scraps left by bigger children, hiding from adults with nets. He remembers his first kill: he is very hungry and finds a trapworm egg case. A larger child tries to take it. Strongpincer attacks, ignoring the other’s jabs, dropping the eggs, going for his enemy’s underside. He grabs the base of the other’s pincers and cracks the joint in his strong grip, he hacks at gills and feeding tendrils, he gets a sharp pincer into the other’s tender mouthparts, and finally pierces the thin shell between body and tail.

When it is over, Strongpincer finds himself missing a couple of legs and a feeler, but his opponent is dead. He feasts on the remains, then calls some others to share, and from then on Strongpincer is a power in the school.