Tizhos moved to lie beside him, and they cuddled and stroked one another, and after a time both could at least pretend to feel better.
Eight
At Coquille 2, Rob, Alicia, and Josef settled into a comfortable exile. Rob had been worried that the three of them crammed into the tiny habitat would soon be at each other’s throats, but in fact the biggest problem for him was loneliness.
Alicia was in a frenzy of data gathering. If and when the Sholen finally dragged her up to orbit she’d have terabytes of new information about Ilmatar and its native life. She concentrated on collection rather than analysis, which meant she spent about ten hours a day suited up, making video recordings of organisms she ran across, gathering specimens to freeze, and collecting hydrophone recordings. She went over the whole vent complex with a camera, documenting everything. Most evenings she climbed back into the habitat so tired she could barely make it into her hammock.
Josef, on the other hand, was keeping tabs on the Sholen. He didn’t dare take the sub too close to Hitode, but he did spend hours sitting in it, powered down on the sea bottom with a laser link to a drone at the extreme limit of range, listening on the hydrophone for any sound of activity at the station.
Rob looked after the habitat. Since it was brand new, that should have meant he had nothing to do except watch cartoons. But Theory, where everything works as intended, turned out to be a long way from Ilmatar. Rob had to fix systems that had been improperly installed back on Earth—or improperly designed in the first place.
The dehumidifier posed the biggest problem, especially given that it was also their main source of drinking water. It started out producing just a tiny trickle, and then quit entirely on the second day. Rob took the whole device apart and rebuilt it, and in the process discovered that the compressor wasn’t compressing. That eventually turned out to be the fault of a loose shaft on the turbine pump, which Rob secured with a generous glob of epoxy.
When the thing finally began to produce a steady trickle of water and a nice flow of warm air, Rob felt justifiably proud of himself. Human survival on Ilmatar depended on Rob Freeman.
“We have water again,” he told Josef when the lieutenant climbed up through the hatch and unfastened his helmet.
“Good,” Josef grunted. “Only one bottle left aboard Mishka. Sholen are more active today. Sounded like they are training.”
“Training for what?”
“Good question.”
Alicia came through the hatch half an hour later.
“We’ve got water,” said Rob, handing her a cup of instant tea.
“Ah, warm. I think I have located a nest of some large pelagic swimmer. There are half a dozen eggs, about a liter each. I am going to set up a camera to watch them develop. We may get to see them hatch!”
“Great. Did I mention we aren’t going to die of thirst because I fixed the water extractor?”
“Oh, yes,” she said. “When will there be enough to wash?”
“Sweetie, I do miracles every day but that’s just crazy talk. You can take a shower when the Sholen capture you, or when a relief ship gets here from Earth. Until then, you get two antiseptic wipes per day. Use them wisely.”
She shrugged. “A little dirt will not kill us. What do we have to eat?”
“Nothing but emergency food bars. If this was a proper expedition we could have brought along supplies from Hitode. There’s a little kitchen and a fridge. But since taking a big bag of food out of Hitode would have attracted some attention… we get food bars. Take your choice: chicken flavor, beef flavor, or vegetarian flavor.”
“Make soup,” said Josef. “Stretch the bars that way, too.”
“That’s not a bad idea,” said Rob. “I’ll make us a pot of beef flavor food bar soup, with water from the extractor. Which I fixed today.”
“Thank you for fixing the water extractor, Robert,” said Alicia, almost managing to keep the sarcasm out of her voice. “I don’t know what we would do without you.”
“Damn right you don’t,” he said, and began cutting up a food bar with his utility knife.
Tizhos felt uncomfortable leading a squad of Guardians, but Gishora had convinced her that he had to remain at the station. She did her best to establish the right sort of rapport with the fighters, but she only had a short time and could not overcome the tremendous differences in outlook and background that separated her from the Guardians.
She did achieve a basic level of sexual attraction, since the unit included three males and only one other female. That required her to flirt outrageously and pretend to find them attractive. Of course, they did have the appeal of youth and health, but she couldn’t really discover any common interests to share with them. All their real affection still went to Irona.
So when Tizhos set out from Hitode Station leading four Guardians to capture three humans, she hoped she could accomplish the job without any fighting. She didn’t bring along any obvious weapons of her own. Her Guardians had nothing but knives—and about twice as much mass as any human.
The humans at Hitode still refused to repair the impellers, and the fugitive humans had the submarine, so Tizhos and her team had to swim all the way out to the temporary shelter. After the grueling five-kilometer swim even the healthy young Guardians needed a long rest and some food, so they paused about two hundred meters from the rubble field that concealed the habitat.
Long before Tizhos wanted to continue, the timer clicked softly. “We must end our rest now,” she said to the Guardians. “Use your stimulants.”
All of them, herself included, swallowed a wafer laced with high-energy compounds and neurotransmitters. In a moment Tizhos felt clearheaded, energetic, and a trifle aggressive.“Come on!” she called out, and began swimming.
She passed the edge of the rubble field and switched her sonar unit to active mode. The high-pitched pings created an image of the ruined Ilmataran city around her, and about half a kilometer away she could make out a large blank area where something absorbed the sound waves instead of reflecting them. The shelter.
Her unit detected one large moving target near the void. The sound of the breathing apparatus identified it as a human. When the Sholen approached within about two hundred meters the human reacted, hurrying to the shelter entrance and saying something indistinct by hydrophone.
They’d been spotted. No point in trying to be stealthy, then. Tizhos activated her own hydrophone, at maximum volume so the humans could hear. She spoke in English. “We have arrived in order to take you back to Hitode Station. Cooperate in a peaceful way.”
She heard no reply until her party reached a hundred meters from the shelter. Then a hydrophone, tinny and shrill, broadcast: “We refuse to leave! Go away!”
Tizhos noticed the Guardian nearest her unsheathe his knife. Interesting: she had not known anyone on the expedition but herself and Gishora understood any human languages. “No need for that,” she said. “Put it away.”
He hesitated. “Their statements sound aggressive. They may have weapons.”
“Remember what we discussed. If they resist, you may use force, but only use weapons if they do.”
Thanks to the stimulants, Tizhos felt not at all tired when the squad reached the shelter. The tiny entry hatch was located underneath, so only one Sholen at a time could enter: a very bad situation, tactically.