Rob gave the Coquille’s computer some final commands and then dropped out after his bundle. His hydrophone could hear the drone now. He oriented himself to follow the current, then turned off all his external sound pickups and closed his eyes. After his last encounter he’d devoted an afternoon to creating countermeasures for the drones, and now he was going to find out how well they worked.
The Coquille’s external floods began flicking on and off, dazzling brightness to pitch darkness at a rate exactly timed to mess with the drone camera’s compensation interval. The shelter’s speakers also began blaring a random playlist of swimming noise samples and sonar pings, with fake Doppler shifts and intensity curves to mess with the drone’s sonar and hydrophones.
It wouldn’t work forever, but it might keep the drone from tracking him, and moving downcurrent would keep the Sholen from finding him with chemical sniffers.
Teach them to mess with the one guy who knew more about drones than anyone for thirty light-years in any direction.
Eleven
An hour after fleeing the shelter Rob crouched behind a rock on the seafloor, trying not to go insane from sensory deprivation. The sound of his APOS and the feel of sweat running down the small of his back were the only things to remind him the material world existed at all.
His hydrophone was cranked up to maximum sensitivity, and he strained his ears to catch any sound that might be Sholen or the drone approaching. Somewhere down in the reptile part of his brain Rob’s fight-or-flight reflex revved into overdrive. They could be all around him, they could be just about to creep over the rock!
When he tried to be more rational, it wasn’t much help. Instead of worrying about monsters hiding in the dark, he had the very real fear that the sub wasn’t going to come for him. Alicia and Josef had been caught, or couldn’t understand Broadtail’s message, or had gone to the wrong rendezvous point. He was all alone in the dark with no food, and would have to find his way back to Hitode through the alien ocean alone—or die cold and suffocating under miles of water and ice.
Suddenly Rob felt the water around him move, and heard a very faint scrabbling. His thoughts turned from fear of capture or starvation to dread of something big and spiky about to tear him apart.
He couldn’t stand it anymore. He flicked on his lamp. Even dimmed all the way down it was still like a searchlight after the absolute blackness of the ocean. The familiar ghostly gray and brown sea-bottom landscape reappeared.
Something tapped his helmet and Rob screamed aloud, making his own ears ring inside the helmet. He scrambled away from the rock and turned, grabbing for his utility knife as he did so.
There was a huge spiky alien monster perched atop the rock, but it was a familiar one and Rob gave a loud sigh of relief. With his knife blade he tapped out the number that Graves had identified as a greeting.
Broadtail crawled off the rock and raised one deadly pincer. With the barbed tip he tapped out his own greeting on Rob’s helmet.
Rob wanted to ask how the Ilmataran had found him, but they still hadn’t figured out “how” yet. So he tried to get as close as he could. “[Interrogative] Broadtail swim toward [Rob].”“[Unknown], yes.”
That wasn’t much help. Rob tried to come up with a question he knew how to ask. Finally he tried “[Interrogative] Broadtail [Rob] here,” hoping the Ilmataran might fill in the missing verb himself.“Broadtail [unknown] [Rob] two cables.”
“[Interrogative],” Rob replied and then repeated the unknown number.
Broadtail took a long time to reply; evidently he was just as frustrated as Rob. Finally he tapped out the number again, then ran his feelers over Rob’s helmet, then swam some distance away and swished them loudly in the water before returning and repeating the number.
“You tasted me,” said Rob aloud to himself. “You tasted me from a couple of hundred yards away. That’s awesome!” He added the number to their growing lexicon and replied to Broadtail. “[Human] not taste.”
Broadtail replied with another unknown number, which Rob tentatively put down as an expression of sympathy. Just then the Ilmataran stiffened. “Silent,” he tapped, and then crawled to the top of the big rock and stood still.
Rob switched off his lamp and listened to the hydrophone. After about a minute he picked up an approaching hum. He couldn’t tell if it was the sub or the Sholen, but just knowing that a friend was nearby made the suspense a lot easier to bear.
His joy at getting picked up was a little tempered by the fact that there wasn’t actually room inside the sub for three people. Josef and Alicia stayed strapped into the sub’s two seats, while Rob crouched atop the access hatch in back.
“They removed the power unit and oxygen tanks from the Coquille,” said Josef. “I suspect they may have left alarms as well.”
“Well, that’s it,” said Rob. “I guess we give up now.”
“Not necessarily,” Josef pointed out. “Is possible to die.”
“Josef, how long can the submarine keep us alive?” asked Alicia.
“You’re not seriously thinking of camping out in here until the Sholen leave, are you?”
Josef ignored Rob, and ticked off his fingers as he spoke.
“Oxygen: as long as we have power, two years. Argon: perhaps two months before reserve is gone. Drinking water: like oxygen. Food: we starve to death a month after emergency bars run out.”
“How much food do we have?” she asked. “I have six bars in my bag.”
“I have two,” said Josef.
“I’ve got two in my pockets and I grabbed two boxes. Plus there are two boxes hidden in the ruins,” said Rob.
“Hoarding, Robert?” asked Alicia a little sharply. “Not exactly,” he said. “I figured you’d want to hold out until we were completely out of food and getting hungry, so I stashed some extra to make sure we could actually survive long enough to get back to Hitode and surrender.”
“Practical,” said Josef after a moment.
“Very well,” said Alicia. “We have fifty-eight bars. If we each have just two a day that stretches our time to ten days. Let us leave the last day for surrendering if we must. What can we accomplish in nine days?”
“Don’t you ever just give up?” asked Rob.
“No.”
“Other than senseless, suicidal attacks against Hitode, I can think of nothing,” said Josef.
“Robert?”
“I know what you’re going to say. Do science, right? We’ve got nine days, so you’re going to collect more data.”
“It is the only logical course of action,” she said.
“No, the logical course of action is to make sure we can survive. There’s no way we can live in our suits for ten days straight. Even if we could all fit in here, which we can’t”—Rob thumped the four-foot ceiling above the access hatch for emphasis—“we’ll be half dead from fatigue and stress long before the food runs out. And I don’t know if we really can live on two bars a day. We’ve been doing that and we’re all getting pretty skinny.”
“You wish to surrender, then. To save yourself a week of discomfort.”
“No, goddamnit. I think we should see if the Ilmatarans can help us.”
“That is… an interesting idea,” said Alicia after a moment’s silence. “Do you think they will help us?”
“I don’t know,” said Rob. “We can find out. You know—gather some data.”
They waited another couple of hours before circling around to the Ilmataran settlement, to give the Sholen plenty of time to leave. With no sub, the Sholen didn’t have a lot of “loiter time” on their missions—it was all swim out, do the job, get back to Hitode.