A Darkling Sea (15 page)

The children are on the bottom, sleeping off their tiring hunt. Some of the older ones have concealed themselves, burrowing into the silt to blur the echoes off their smooth shells. The younger ones just curl into balls and sleep anywhere. Broadtail touches one little one fast asleep atop the shell of an older child. He gently shoves the little one off, then drops the net over the big one while Oneclaw grabs the trailing ropes.

The youngster comes awake frightened, and tries to flee. The net wraps around it, and its terrified struggles only get it more tangled up. When it tries to swim, it gets only a few arm lengths before the rope goes taut. Oneclaw has the other end, and is braced against some rocks. The child darts this way and that, but the old teacher keeps his grip, letting the panicked youngster wear itself out before hauling it in and trussing it tightly.

The struggle awakens the rest, and Broadtail picks out one healthy-looking one—a female by the shape of her palps—and gives chase. She is frightened and has a nice smooth shell, but he is bigger and has more reserves. She darts away but soon tires, tries a sudden burst of speed, then some violent maneuvers—but Broadtail isn’t going to get drawn into that. He hangs back, keeping her in hearing but not bothering to match her increasingly jerky moves. When she drops exhausted to the bottom, he moves up, pinging so she can’t creep away silently. She crawls a bit, but he can see she’s on the verge of collapse. When the net goes over her, she doesn’t even struggle. Broadtail tows his new student back to where Onepincer is waiting.

They capture a total of five, including one big stupid child who sleeps through the whole thing until Oneclaw starts winding a rope around its tail. One of them is malformed: what should be the big final joint of its left pincer is just a tiny nub, making the whole limb nearly useless.

“Hold that one while I pith it,” says Oneclaw, working his one good pincer under the back of the child’s headshield.

“Why not let it go?”

“I imagine it living an unhappy life,” says Oneclaw. “There are few places in the world for one with such a deformity.” With a sudden thrust he drives his single pincer into the child’s brain.

Some of the little ones gather around the corpse and begin to feed while the two schoolmasters confer about names.

“I leave that to you,” says Oneclaw. “Names are but temporary identities, as easily discarded as a shell. The number is the meat and soul. You bestow their names, but I number them.”

“As you wish. The female there: I suggest calling her Smoothshell.”

“No shell stays smooth once one leaves the cold water. I imagine her as encrusted as any pipe-farmer.”

“Perhaps. But as you say, the name is only the surface.”

“A piercing jab! Very well. A number to go with that name. I propose 13. A difficult number for some, as it is prime and thus has no interesting factors, but 13 is appropriate for a fast one like her. And it is auspicious, since it combines Food and Property. Choose another.”

“The big sleepy one. I name him Broadbody.”

“Fitting. Broadbody 27, as it seems he likes to sleep in silt. It is 3 cubed, so I expect to make him swim and swim and swim. Also, 27 is 21 plus 6, as befits one with a body as heavy as stone. And it holds out the good thought of Warm Property in 18 plus 9. What about the little male?”

“Smallbody is the obvious choice.”

“Such a small fellow needs a good number to compensate. I propose 54: Wealth. It is 3 times 18, which means much warmth, and it combines Solidity and Abundance. There is hardly a better number, excepting always 94.”

“I name the last one Sharpclaw, because I remember getting a painful jab from her.”

“She needs a number to keep her from fighting too much. I suggest 39. Boundary stones prevent conflict.”

Broadtail doesn’t say much as they head back to the school compound. Herding the children keeps him and Oneclaw busy, and he doesn’t want to offend his new employer. But, privately, he is scornful of the old schoolmaster’s reverence for numbers.

To be sure, Oneclaw isn’t the only adult to become fascinated by the ordering of words in the dictionary. Some writers go so far as to use mathematics to guide their choice of words, or encode hidden meanings in books through spacing and numerical intervals. Others grope for secret messages in ancient texts, or assign prophetic meaning to numbers found in nature.

Broadtail is a skeptic. He knows that dictionaries are composed by adults, and that different communities use different systems of numbering words. He recalls studying ancient sites and trying to tease out the meaning of archaic writings and carvings. Speech is universal—even wild children speak—but writing is a made thing, and varies as much as ways of making nets or laying pipe.

About halfway back to Oneclaw’s school, he catches an odd flavor in the water and drops back from the group to taste it better. A very odd flavor indeed—something like rock oil and something like some of the mats that grow on rocks, but much more complex than either taste. What’s especially maddening is that he is sure he remembers tasting it before, but not when or where.

That reminds him of something, and he swims hard to catch up with Oneclaw.

“Everything all right?” asks Oneclaw.

“Fine. I remember you mentioning odd sounds and flavors in the water around here. There’s a funny taste just back there. Do you know what it is?”

“Ah, yes. The ruins upcurrent are home to many strange phenomena. I hear noises, sometimes sense things moving about. I have a theory about the cause.”

“I recall you saying something about that.”

“Yes. You are an educated adult, so I assume you know all about the shape of the world. In the center, rock giving off heat. Outside that, the oceans we know. And surrounding all is the infinite ice, cold and lighter than water. But is the rock beneath our legs really solid? We know there are vents and rifts, some quite deep. There must be channels for water to return to the vents. I believe that within the rock below us there are vast tunnels and chambers filled with hot, rich ventwater.”

“It is certainly plausible. I remember reading books of speculation along those lines.”

“As do I. But I do not recall encountering anywhere the idea that those caverns may be
inhabited
!”

“Inhabited? But how? Most vents are too hot to approach. Adults die in agony in a channel full of ventwater.”

“I don’t mean adults. At least, not adults precisely like ourselves. You know about animals, yes?”

“Yes, a great many kinds.”

“And they are different in different places—some suited to coldwater, some suited to the rocks around a vent, and so forth. Now imagine creatures—maybe even creatures like ourselves— who come from the boiling world underground.”

Broadtail ponders this. “They would be very hot themselves,” he says. And then it hits him like a bolt. “Oneclaw! I remember finding a strange creature near the Bitterwater vent—large and utterly unlike anything I remember touching before. And I remember the great
heat
of its body!”

He can hear Oneclaw’s hearts race with excitement. “Is this true? You really recall such a creature? You need not lie to humor me, Broadtail.”

“No, I remember it perfectly. The scholars of the Bitterwater Company all know about it.” Broadtail feels a surge of hope. He imagines returning to Longpincer in triumph, with valuable data about the odd creatures. “Promise me that once these children are sold, we spend time seeking these strange noises and flavors. It is of tremendous importance.”

“Of course. I am making a note of it.”

TWO days after Dr. Sen recruited him, Rob was ready to leave Hitode Station. He couldn’t pack a bag or do anything obvious, but he did gather up a few essentials and tuck them into a waterproof pouch to bring along—his computer and one of the little people Alicia had made for him.

The last thing he collected before leaving was the drones. They were just too useful to leave behind. The teams going into hiding could use them to communicate, to keep an eye on the Sholen, and doubtless some things Rob hadn’t thought of. And for the same reason, it was a good idea to keep them away from the Sholen. Without drones they’d be limited to the area they could search themselves in suits. Swimming Sholen were a lot easier to spot and hide from than the drones.

He avoided the common room. There were always a couple of the Sholen soldiers there, and he didn’t like the way they sniffed the air whenever a human came in. Could they tell if he was nervous by the way he smelled? Dogs could do that, he remembered reading somewhere.

So Rob made his way through the labs and work areas on the lower level. Everything was a mess down there now. The human staff weren’t helping with the evacuation—but the scientists all hated the idea of leaving their precious specimens behind. They had worked out a bit of benign hypocrisy: all the important specimens were carefully packed up and labeled for shipment—so that if and when the Sholen finally did remove the whole base from Ilmatar, there would be at least a remote chance that someday the specimens could get to Earth.

To Rob’s surprise, the female Sholen envoy, Tizhos, was in the workshop when he got there. She had one of the fishshaped drones on the worktable, and was poking at its innards with some of the micro- scale tools.

“What’s up?” Rob asked her. He did still think of it as
his
workshop, and even though he was about to leave the station he didn’t like the idea of some alien messing the place up.

She looked up and her posture shifted—Rob couldn’t tell if it was the cramped room or some Sholen social thing. “I wish to understand the operation of these devices. They seem very cleverly made.”

“Yeah. We use them a lot. They’re pretty much off-the-shelf stuff. Plenty more just like them in Earth’s oceans, Europa, anyplace there’s liquid water.” He was careful not to mention that the primary users on Earth were navies. “Don’t you guys use them?”

“I believe past cultures on my world employed such devices. At present we prefer to employ tailored organisms, with technological implants as needed.”

“I think that some . . . organizations back on Earth tried that. People just think the idea of cyborg sharks is a little scary.”

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.

That school is where he’s trying to go right now. He does not imagine finding his own schoolmasters there, but he figures it must be a good spot to look for children. If the old school is empty, he imagines his band camping while they catch some new recruits for the gang. And if there are schoolmasters there—Strongpincer is bigger and stronger than he remembers being when he left the place. He wouldn’t mind the chance to teach a schoolmaster some things.

A sound wakes Strongpincer from his memory. It is a faint, steady hum. It is difficult to tell which direction the sound is coming from. Strongpincer pings the others to quiet down, then swims in a wide circle, listening carefully. The sound seems to be strongest off to the left, which is very strange indeed. As far as Strongpincer knows, there’s nothing that way but an expanse of empty sea bottom.

So what is the hum? It isn’t any kind of animal—it’s too steady. He listens but it never changes pitch or volume. A vent, perhaps? Possibly a pipe farm? Water through pipes can make all kinds of noises. A vent out here would be isolated, vulnerable. Easy pickings? Or abandoned, free for the taking?

He turns toward the sound, but soon realizes his bearing is changing as he homes in. The noise is
moving.
It is also getting fainter even though he and the others are swimming hard.

Strongpincer pauses for thought. A moving sound means some kind of creature, and if it can swim faster than a strong adult like himself, it must be quite large. He is content to hunt smaller prey. The three bandits give up the chase and turn back toward the current. There are swimmers to catch there, and rocks coated with edible growths. And he imagines that when they find a school of youngsters they can eat any they don’t recruit.

THE ride out from Hitode with the second Coquille was slow and unsteady. The Coquille tended to swing astern as the sub moved, which angled its flat shape downward, turning the whole thing into a giant sea anchor trying to drag the sub into the sea bottom. Josef had to pitch the sub’s nose up at about forty-five degrees and redline the motors to compensate for the drag. Changing directions meant coming to a halt, turning the sub with the thrusters, and starting off again.

The three of them had picked the ruins at the extinct Maury 19 vent as the best hiding place. Nobody back at Hitode knew where they were going, so there was no way the Sholen could learn their location without going out and searching. The Maury 19 site had lots of jumbled rock, including ancient Ilmataran cut building stones, which would hide the Coquille’s sonar signature.

Setting up the Coquille was even more difficult than moving it. As designed, it was supposed to simply hang from the submarine while a couple of divers released the catches at the side of the shipping shroud and then began inflating it with an APOS unit. The flexible-walled shelter would unfold, and presto! An underwater house!

It didn’t work that way. When Rob and Alicia released the catches and began inflation, the Coquille stayed sullenly inside the shipping shroud while precious argon bubbled uselessly into the ocean because the little pump in the APOS unit couldn’t generate enough pressure to blow up the big Kevlar-and-foam shelter unit.

So Alicia monitored the inflation level while Rob moved around the outside of the shelter, manually cranking the four support struts into their extended position. Since extending any one strut too far would jam the others, this meant Rob had to give each strut a couple of cranks with the extremely inadequate folding crank tool, swim to the next and repeat the process, over and over and over until the Coquille reached its full four-meter height. He could feel blisters developing on his hands, and every muscle in his upper body ached by the time the job was done.

Alicia spent the time fiddling with the inflation pump. Too much pressure and the gas backed up and bubbled away. Too little and the sides of the Coquille began to buckle inward. She lost several liters of argon before finding an inflation rate that matched Rob’s pace cranking open the struts.

After an hour of exhausting work the Coquille was inflated. Rob took a breather and let Alicia extend the support legs. Then Josef, who had spent the whole time aboard the sub keeping it in exactly the right position with the side thrusters, lowered the structure to the seafloor.

More work with the folding crank tool followed as Rob and Alicia got the legs adjusted to keep the shelter level. Then they could swim underneath to the access hatch and climb up into their new home.

Rob went first, out of some atavistic impulse to make sure it was all right before letting Alicia inside. He cracked the hatch and then opened it, looking around to make sure nothing had shifted and was about to fall on his head. The light control was just inside, and after working in the ocean darkness by shoulder lamps, the halogen bulbs were blinding.

The interior of the Coquille was all new and clean—shockingly so after his months living in Hitode’s high-tech squalor. All the equipment was still packed in a layer on the floor, neatly covered with shrink-wrap.

Rob cleared the hatch and winced a little as he slopped seawater onto the nice clean interior. Like getting the first scratch on a new toy. Alicia surged up next to him, squinting in the brightness.