“But this Ilmataran is not a human. The Sholen are quite likely to ignore him.”
“Are you sure?” he demanded.
That silenced her for a moment, but then the Ilmataran scratched out a new message. “[Ilmataran] head grasping six arm not [human].”
“I didn’t get that one.”
Alicia skimmed through Graves’s notes. “Aha! Head grasping is a metaphor. We’ll call it understanding or knowledge. It wants to know about the Sholen. We must help it, Robert. It is only fair, after it has taught us so much.”
“So the contact rules are completely out the window now? I do see one problem: how are you going to get a Sholen for him to taste? Can’t just invite one of them over.”
“He can visit Hitode.”
“How? I mean, I’m sure he could swim that far, but how do you tell him where to go? They don’t use grid squares, and we don’t know how they even give directions.”
“Why not just take him there? He can hold onto the equipment racks on the sub. We can approach to just outside hydrophone range and send the Ilmataran in alone. In fact…” her tone changed. “He could give us a lot of useful information. The Sholen will never suspect a thing.”
In the end, Rob had to agree. He could possibly out-argue Alicia, but not Alicia and her Ilmataran buddy with the wide flukes. Eventually they decided that Alicia would accompany Josef and the Ilmataran while Rob stayed behind to look after the Coquille.
“And watch out for him, he’s a smooth talker,” he told Alicia as she opened the sub’s bottom hatch. “If you go running off with some Ilmataran pickup artist I’m not going to catch you on the rebound.”
“ ‘He’ is a scientist and a gentleman,” she said. “Unlike some people I might name. Good-bye, Robert.”
“Be careful.”
Broadtail tries to restrain his fear as he rides on the back of the moving shelter. It swims at great speed, never pausing for rest, as if it is driven by the flow of a vent. The thing comes to a stop and Builder 2 emerges. The two of them swim forward together, keeping close to the bottom and moving in sprints from stone to stone as if hunting. Eventually the Builder tells him “Swim there at long shelter,” and jabs one limb ahead. “I lie still lie here.”
So Broadtail goes forward alone, unsure of what waits before him. He begins to hear odd noises and then tastes odd flavors in the water. The temperature is higher than it ought to be. He stops and listens. Ahead is another odd silent space, which he recognizes as a Builder shelter. This one is a dozen times bigger than the one he remembers back at the ruins. Nearby is a hard object that hums and gives off a vigorous hot flow.
And now he hears things moving about. They are emerging from the shelter and swimming in his direction. He risks a ping. Seven of them, larger than Builders. They have tails, and swim with sideways strokes of their whole bodies—much more smoothly than the Builders.
Are they hunting him? He remembers Builder 2 saying that these creatures only fight Builders—but he doesn’t want to learn if that is correct. He scuttles along the bottom and hides to avoid pursuit, then swims back to Builder 2. They return to the moving shelter as quickly as possible. Broadtail and Builder 2 take turns pulling each other. Broadtail can swim faster, even towing a passenger, but Builder 2 has incredible stamina and takes over when Broadtail tires.
They reach the moving shelter, but Broadtail hears something in the distance. It sounds like the six-limbed creatures swimming, but with a steady hum overlaid on the sound. Almost like the things that push the moving shelter along. He wonders if he should tell the Builders. Then he wonders how. Finally he scrambles down to the belly of the shelter and bangs on the door. “The six-legged things are coming,” he taps.
“Josef, I think we are in trouble,” said Alicia. “Broadtail says things with six legs are approaching. I think he means Sholen.”
Josef muttered something in Russian. “Must have gotten impellers working. Time for evasive maneuvers.”
Alicia expected something fast and exciting, but in point of fact Josef’s maneuvers consisted of just a few turns and some long periods of sitting motionless, drifting with the current.
“Warm current here,” he said at one point. “Comes from rift. Edges have sharp change in salinity and density. Good for fooling sonar.”
They drifted with the current for a few moments, then dropped back down into colder water and settled among some rocks.
“Stay silent and listen,” he said, and flipped on the hydrophone. There was no sign of the Sholen.
“Do you think we lost them?”
“Maybe.” His impassive face suddenly looked worried. “Oh. Sholen will hunt for us a while, fail, and then go back to following our original course.”
“That will take them to the Coquille!” said Alicia. “They will find Robert! They could hurt him. We have to go, now!”
“No. Send a message.”
“How—” She caught his meaning then and practically leaped to the hatch. A little tapping brought an answering click. With Graves’s lexicon on her pad, she composed a message in number-taps. It was excruciatingly slow, like a nightmare in which horrible pursuers were chasing her and she had to accomplish some long delicate task before they caught her.
She finished tapping it out, then repeated the whole thing for good measure. The Ilmataran replied with a long series of taps.
“Oh, go on and stop chattering!” she said. Maybe Broadtail realized the urgency of the message, or maybe her tone of anxiety somehow carried through water and the communication barrier, because the Ilmataran swam off at top speed before she could finish translating his message.
While Alicia and Josef took Broadtail off to show him Hitode Station, Rob stayed behind to look after the Coquille. He was taking a well-deserved nap in his hammock when somebody started banging on the hatch down below. It wasn’t latched—why couldn’t Josef just open the damned thing? In the next second Rob’s mind followed a horrifying course of reasoning that convinced him that Alicia must be injured, Josef was carrying her, probably someone’s APOS was broken and they were buddy-breathing…
He jumped down to the main floor and opened the hatch. A single Ilmataran pincer broke the surface of the water, then quickly withdrew.
Rob banged on the edge of the hatchway with his screwdriver, warning the Ilmataran to stay outside. He got into his drysuit and rushed through the checkout procedure, then dropped into the water to talk face to face—or face to blank faceless head, in this case. The broad-tailed Ilmataran was there alone. No sign of the sub or Alicia and Josef.
“Many swim to you,” Broadtail tapped on Rob’s faceplate. “Many [humans]?”
“Six legs.”
“Crap,” Rob muttered inside his helmet. How did they know? Maybe they’d tracked him somehow? Maybe a drone had come across them by chance. It hardly mattered. The sub. Was it nearby? “Shelter swims to me?”
“Shelter swims eight [units].”
“[You] swim to swimming shelter. I swim—” Rob tried to think of a rendezvous point he could communicate to the Ilmataran. “Twenty [units] downcurrent.”
“I grasp sounds.”
With the Ilmataran going off to carry his message, Rob climbed back up into the Coquille and started grabbing everything he could carry. First-aid kit, spare argon, all the food (they were down to just sixty bars). Tools. Tape! He slid six rolls onto his forearms like bracelets. All his other loot he bundled into a plastic sheet and stuffed down the hatch.
His computer started flashing a warning onto his faceplate. The hydrophone outside was picking up motor sounds. A drone. The Sholen were scouting out the site before moving in.