“As I have said on a number of occasions, the only possible way you could make me happy would be to remove your soldiers and yourselves from this station and return the people you have taken. We cannot be friends until that happens.”
Tizhos handed the human an ethanol beverage and began lightly stroking his hair. If anything, his body seemed even more tense, but she persisted. References indicated that humans used such activities as a bonding ritual, in their strange, emotionless fashion. Vikram Sen sipped the drink and put it with the unfinished food balls.
“Let me feed you,” said Irona, holding a cube of delicately flavored gelatin before the human’s face.
“No, thank you,” said Vikram Sen, turning his head away.
Tizhos caught a shift in Irona’s scent. Was he becoming aroused? A good leader could establish a sexual bond with subordinates—but surely not with an alien? Apparently the scented air and psychoactives in the food could overcome that barrier. She felt a pang of worry. Irona’s hormones might get the better of his self-control. She could feel herself responding to the scents, and she knew that as leader Irona would experience a much stronger effect.
Irona rolled over, supporting himself above the human on four limbs. “Let me feed you,” he repeated, then placed the cube delicately between his own teeth.
The human struggled but Irona lowered his head. He pressed the gelatin against the human’s tightly closed lips, but Vikram Sen just turned his head aside and closed his eyes tightly. The food fell to the cushions and rolled onto the floor.
Irona kept his body pressed against Vikram Sen’s, moving from side to side in sensuous waves that turned the human’s struggles into a kind of caress. Tizhos felt almost dizzy from the powerful blend of pheromones in the air. Vikram Sen seemed more like a potential rival than an alien they wished to impress. With one small rational part of her mind she knew she should try to stop things before they got out of hand.
“Don’t resist your feelings,” said Irona. “We can love one another.” He began nuzzling the side of the human’s face.
But Vikram Sen’s responses did not match what the two Sholen had hoped for. Water flowed from his tightly closed eyes, he struggled and hit Irona ineffectually with his arms, and tried to raise his knee against the weight of the larger Sholen.
The skin glands on Irona’s underside sprinkled droplets of strong-smelling marker pheromone on the struggling human. Vikram Sen inhaled a couple of times, then shoved Irona’s head away and tumbled to the floor. He regurgitated the contents of his stomach, then got to his feet. His body trembled.
“Stay,” said Irona. “We have all evening.”
The human got the door open and shut it behind him. Tizhos could hear him shouting something in the hallway. It did not sound like words in any human language she understood.
“Tell me if you think we have succeeded in winning his loyalty,” said Irona. Without thinking the two of them began moving into a mating position.
“No,” said Tizhos after a long silence. “I do not think so.”
As they approached Coq 1 Rob was cautious to the point of clinical paranoia. The two of them cut off their impellers two hundred meters from the shelter, and began moving along the bottom in short sprints from cover to cover. As much as possible, they pushed off from the ancient walls instead of kicking, because Rob was worried that the Sholen might use some of the captured acoustic analysis software to identify the sound of a swimming human.
When they were a hundred meters away they went completely dark, and paused for up to a minute between movements. It took them half an hour to approach to where they could see the Coquille clearly.
It was dark and silent. On passive sonar it was a hole in the ocean. The only noise was a very faint sussuration from the nuclear power unit as water convected through its cooling fins. Even damped down it was still about five degrees warmer than the ocean.
Rob tapped Alicia’s helmet and made a “stop” gesture with one hand, then pointed at himself and then at the shelter. She signed “okay.”
He braced himself against the broken stone pipe they were crouched next to and pushed off as hard as he could. He felt himself shooting through the water, slowing until he had to start kicking to cover the last couple of meters.
Rob’s extended fingers touched the side of the Coquille, and he felt his way to the lower edge, then pulled himself under it until he came to the entry hatch. It opened easily enough, and Rob switched on his helmet lamp. The sudden light was startlingly bright after minutes in total dark. The motes of silt floating before his face made him jerk his head back in surprise.
He risked a look around before climbing up the little ladder inside the hatch. The Coquille had acquired a coating of gray fuzz, growing in intricate six-branched patterns like moldy snowflakes.
Just before his head broke the surface in the hatchway, Rob paused. What if Isabel’s body was still inside? He felt a sudden queasiness. The image of Isabel Rondon, all bloated and purple like a deer on the side of the highway, flashed into his head and he couldn’t dismiss it. He realized he was breathing heavily.
I have to climb this ladder, he told himself. Very deliberately he moved his right hand up to the next rung and took hold. He forced himself to let go with his left and reach up to the top rung. His head moved from water to air, and he looked around the lower level of the Coquille.
There were no corpses. He took a deep breath, then let it out in a powerful sigh as his arm muscles unclenched.
The place was a mess, though. The lab space had been trashed by the fighting when the Sholen came. The walls and floor were covered with patches of mold—real, blue-green Terrestrial mold. Rob’s queasiness returned when he realized it was growing where Isabel’s blood had spattered. Suddenly Rob had absolutely no desire to open his helmet.
He climbed back down into the cool water and turned on the laser link to signal Alicia. No response. His system couldn’t find her. Was she out of line-of-sight? He let himself drop to the sea bottom and tried again. Still nothing.
Sonar wasn’t picking up anything but ocean sounds. Suddenly there was an explosion of noise and activity among the ruins. He heard Alicia shout “Robert! Sholen! Get away!” over the hydrophone. His sonar imaged four indistinct figures struggling together among the sharp stones.
Rob clenched his teeth to avoid calling out a reply. They had her. That much was certain or she would not have given herself away by shouting. She was always very rational under stress. He moved as quickly as he dared, pulling himself along the underside of the Coquille to get it between him and the aliens. Then he pushed off toward an old broken dome.
Why weren’t they shooting? He got behind a wall and paused to listen. There was no deadly little swish of the microtorps. Not even the sound of Sholen swimming after him.
Either they were being ethical and didn’t want to kill anyone else, or they were being clever. “Put a tracer on me so I’ll lead you back to the rebel base, eh?” he said to himself. “Your advanced alien science is no match for our spunky Earthling pop culture.”
But what about Alicia? He had to leave her. She would say the same thing. If he got himself captured trying to rescue her she would be brutally sarcastic. He still couldn’t rid himself of the feeling that he was making up justifications for cowardice.
But no—taking on a bunch of armed Sholen with nothing but his utility knife would be courage of the “strap a bomb to your belt and blow up a bus” variety. Rob had vague, lapsed secular Jewish ideas about an afterlife, and martyrdom wasn’t how he planned to arrive there.