Rob took a roundabout way home to foil any trackers. He passed through the ruins, pausing in the shelter of a large standing stone to listen with the hydrophone at maximum. There were the usual noises of Ilmataran sea creatures, and a faint gurgle from the current washing through the ruins. He was safe.
From there he set his course across the open water of the basin toward the camp at Longpincer’s house. It was a long trip, but the impeller’s fuel cells had enough juice. Barely.
He had covered about a kilometer when he glimpsed something moving ahead. Passive sonar barely registered it, and he didn’t want to risk an active ping for fear it might hear and come to investigate. So he turned on his lights and had a look.
It was a Cylindrodaptes—one of the largest creatures in Ilmatar’s ocean. Its body was simply a giant tube, open at both ends, with little steering fins around the mouth and another set at the tail. According to Rob’s computer, this particular Cylindrodaptes was sixty meters long and nearly eight meters across, cruising past at a leisurely two knots.
Rob switched off his impeller and watched as it approached. The Cylindrodaptes was swimming low over the sea bottom, so Rob had a splendid view of its dorsal side as it passed. It was like watching the Hindenburg fly beneath him. The thing’s hide was pale gray, with faint ridges running its entire length. At the top of the mouth he could see a tiny bulge, about the size of a human head, which held the Cylindrodaptes’s sonar organs and brain.
Cursing himself for an idiot he switched on his camera and started to record it. This wasn’t the first footage of a Cylindrodaptes—Henri had managed that shortly after arriving on Ilmatar. But Henri’s images were all of the front end and the mouth, intended to make the beast look as scary as possible for the viewers back home. Alicia would want him to gather better data.
He turned up the gain on his hydrophone again, wondering if he could hear the Cylindrodaptes swimming. It made a very faint swooshing as it moved but was otherwise running silent.
Then Rob became aware of another sound: a rhythmic swish-swish-swish, exactly like the sound of a mackerel swimming. Only there were no mackerel in Ilmatar’s ocean. It was a drone.
He checked his sonar display. The drone was coming up from astern at ten knots. How had it tracked him? Some kind of chemical sniffer? No time to worry about that now. Rob gunned his impeller, trying to outrun the drone, cruising low and fast.
Even at full throttle the drone could keep pace with him, and Rob knew that running the impeller flat-out wouldn’tleave him with enough juice to get back to camp.
How to fool sensors? Merge, then separate. But what could he merge with? Rocks?
Rob steered back toward the Cylindrodaptes, hoping to get it between him and the drone. The robot mackerel was about twenty meters behind him as he reached the great creature rippling its way through the water. He cruised over its back, close enough to trail his fingers along its skin, then dropped down on the other side and switched off the impeller, matching speeds with the Cylindrodaptes by kicking slowly and quietly.
He heard the swish-swish-swish of the drone pass by, and for a second he felt hope, but then the drone swung around and came back, moving more slowly this time. Right now he was silhouetted against the Cylindrodaptes, and Rob hoped the drone’s brain couldn’t distinguish them. But then it gave off an active ping and sprinted toward him at close to twenty knots.
Rob twisted the impeller handle viciously, steering under the Cylindrodaptes to shelter on the other side. The drone shot past, but then turned again. It could keep this up longer than Rob could. His one advantage was that they were too far from Hitode for a laser link. The drone was autonomous, which meant there was at least a chance of his outsmarting it.
He dove again, ducking under the Cylindrodaptes and then forward along the length of the huge creature. The drone passed by and circled, homing in on the noise of his impeller. He reached the beasts’s front end as the drone began another sprint.
Then Rob simply cut his engine and waited.
The mouth of the Cylindrodaptes gaped around him, too wide for him to even touch the sides with his outstretched arms. Lining the interior of the creature’s huge body were thousands of filmy fins, beating together in wonderful spiral ripples down its length. The fins drove the beast forward and filtered nutrients from the water as it swam.
As the mouth moved past Rob could hear the drone swish by, searching for him on the far side of the Cylindrodaptes. A moment later, it passed again, circling back.
Rob kept station in the center of the Cylindrodaptes’s huge body cavity, about three meters back from the mouth. He could keep up with the creature by swimming, and the longer he waited the longer the drone would have to lose him.
After half an hour it still hadn’t found him, so Rob decided it was safe to emerge. He did risk a few seconds of light to get images of the interior, and was amused to notice a couple of fish-shaped organisms tagging along among the Cylindrodaptes’s fins. Waving farewell to his fellow parasites, Rob stopped kicking and let the beast’s interior flow push him out its back end. When no drone attacked him, he dropped to the sea bottom and let the Cylindrodaptes cruise away. Then he switched on the impeller and set a course for Longpincer’s once again.
Tizhos began searching the memory of the captive human’s computer and quickly realized what a treasure it represented. The woman had so much data stored she hadn’t had time to encrypt it all. Tizhos found hours of video and audio, and pages and pages of notes. Where to begin? The section on animals and plants included spectrographic analysis and even—Tizhos gave an audible bark of delight—fragmentary translations of native Ilmataran studies on them.
This led Tizhos to the language section. She found it very impressive how much the humans had accomplished, even allowing for the fact that the Ilmatarans did much of the work of translation. Very clever of them to use the written form as the basis for communication, rather than trying to analyze and duplicate the sounds.
She did feel frustration along with her excitement. Each discovery raised dozens of questions, and of course the humans had not had the time to investigate any of them. Tizhos found herself wishing she could join them out there, surrounded by fascinating new things.
But she could not. She prepared a rough summary of the data to give Irona, then went to eat in the common room. The Sholen foodmakers now stood next to the humans’ cooking equipment, and she constructed a meal that would relax her.
The new captive, Alicia Neogri, sat with some of the other humans. Tizhos observed them surreptitiously. The four humans shared a large fruit from the garden and ate cooked roots. Their social behavior exhibited some interesting features. The majority of humans in the station had displayed happiness that the new captive had returned unharmed. A handful, however, seemed disappointed at her capture.
Interestingly, her dinner companions all came from that second group. This seemed to contradict normal human reactions to those who broke their rules of behavior. Did this second group represent some kind of variant consensus?
That could create difficulties. At present most of the humans seemed to accept the Sholen occupation, even if they did not necessarily agree with it. They did not cause any problems. But if Alicia Neogri had high status among them, they might want to emulate her behavior by causing disruptions.