Hopkinson shakes her head. “No reason? What’s an AUV even doing down here if not looking for us?”
“It would be a pretty amazing coincidence,” Alexander agrees.
Lubin reaches forward and taps the screen. The image de-zooms and continues playing where it left off. Acronyms and numbers cluster along the bottom edge of the screen, shifting and shuffling as the telemetry changes.
The AUV’s floating a few meters from the shore of Impossible Lake, just above the surface. One arm extends, dips a finger across the halocline, pulls back as if startled.
“Look at that,” Nolan says. “It’s scared of hypersaline.”
The little robot moves a few meters into the hazy distance, and tries again.
“And it wasn’t aware of you any of this time?” Lubin asks.
Alexander shakes his head. “Not until later. Like Laney said, it was too busy checking out the site.”
“You got footage of that?” Nolan again, like she doesn’t have a care in the world. Like she isn’t living on borrowed time.
“Just a few seconds, back at the start. Real muddy, it doesn’t show much. We didn’t want to get too close, for obvious reasons.”
“Yet you sonared it repeatedly,” Lubin remarks.
Chen shrugs. “Seemed like the lesser of two evils. We had to get some track on what it was doing. Better than letting it see us.”
“And if it triangulated on your pings?”
“We kept moving. Gapped the pings nice and wide. The most it could’ve known was that something was scanning the water column, and we’ve got a couple of things out there that do that anyway.” Chen gestures at the screen, a little defensively. “It’s all there in the track.”
Lubin grunts.
“Okay, here’s where it happens,” Alexander says. “About thirty seconds from now.”
The AUV is fading in the haze, apparently heading towards one of the few streetlights that actually pokes above the surface of Impossible Lake. Just before it disappears entirely, a black mass eclipses the view; some ragged outcrop intruding from the left. No circles of light play across that surface, even though the sub is obviously mere meters away; Chen and Alexander are running dark, hiding behind the local topography. The view on the screen tilts and bobs as their sub maneuvers around the rocks: dark shadows on darker ones, barely visible in the dim light backscattered around corners.
Alexander leans forward. “Here it comes…”
Light ahead and to the right; the far end of the outcropping cuts the edges of that brightening haze like a jumble of black shattered glass. The sub throttles back, moves forward more cautiously now, edges into the light—
—and nearly collides with the AUV coming the other way.
Two of the telemetry acronyms turn bright red and start flashing. There’s no sound in the playback, but Clarke can imagine sirens in the sub’s cockpit. For an instant, the AUV just sits there; Clarke swears she sees its stereocam irises go wide. Then it spins away—to continue its survey or to run like hell, depending on how smart it is.
They’ll never know. Because that’s when something shoots into view from below camera range, an elongate streak like a jet of gray ink. It hits the AUV in mid-spin, splashes out and wraps around it, shrinks down around its prey like an elastic spiderweb. The AUV pulls against the restraints but the trailing ends of the mesh are still connected to the sub by a springy, filamentous tether.
Clarke has never seen a cannon net in operation before. It’s pretty cool.
“So that’s it,” Alexander says as the image freezes. “We’re just lucky we ran into it before we’d used up the net on one of your monster fish.”
“We’re lucky I thought to use the net, too,” Chen adds. “Who’da thunk it would come in so handy?” She frowns, and adds, “wish I knew what tipped the little beast off, though.”
“You were moving,” Lubin tells her.
“Yeah, of course. To keep it from getting a fix on our sonar signals, like you said.”
“It followed your engine noise.”
A little of the cockiness drains from Chen’s posture.
“So we’ve got it,” Clarke says. “Right now.”
“Debbie’s taking it apart now,” Lubin says. “It wasn’t booby-trapped, at least. She says we can probably get into its memory if there isn’t any serious crypto.”
Hopkinson looks a bit more cheerful. “Seriously? We can just give it amnesia and send it on its way?”
It sounds too good to be true. Lubin’s look confirms it.
“What?” Hopkinson says. “We fake the data stream, it goes back home and tells its mom there’s nothing down here but mud and starfishies. What’s the problem?”
“How often do we go out there?” Lubin asks her.
“What, to the Lake? Maybe once or twice a week, not counting all the times we went out to set the place up.”
“That’s a very sparse schedule.”
“It’s all we need, until the seismic data’s in.”
The dread in Clarke’s stomach—belayed a few moments ago, when the conversation turned to the hope of false memory—comes back like a tide, twice as cold as before. “Shit,” she whispers. “You’re talking about the odds.”
Lubin nods. “There’s virtually no chance we’d just happen to be in the area the very first time that thing came calling.”
“So this isn’t the first time. It’s been down there before,” Clarke says.
“Several times at least, I’d guess. It may have been to Impossible Lake more often than we have.” Lubin looks around at the others. “Someone’s already on to us. If we send this thing back with no record of the site, we’ll simply be telling them that we know that.”
“Fuck,” Nolan says in a shaky voice. “We’re sockeye. Five years. We’re complete sockeye.”
For once, Clarke’s inclined to agree with her.
“Not necessarily,” Lubin says. “I don’t think they’ve found us yet.”
“Gullshit. You said yourself, months ago, years even—”
“They haven’t found us.” Lubin speaks with that level, overly-controlled voice that speaks of thinning patience. Nolan immediately shuts up.
“What they have found,” Lubin continues after a moment, “is a grid of lights, seismic recorders, and survey sticks. For all they know it’s the remains of some aborted mining operation.” Chen opens her mouth: Lubin raises a palm, pre-empting her. “Personally I don’t believe that. If they’ve got reason to look for us in this vicinity, they’ll most likely assume that we’re behind anything they discover.
“But at most, the Lake only tells them that they’re somewhere in the ballpark.” Lubin smiles faintly. “That they are; we’re only twenty kilometers away. Twenty pitch-black kilometers through the most extreme topography on the planet. If that’s all they have to go on, they’ll never find us.”
“Until they send something down to just sit quiet and wait for us,” Hopkinson says, unconvinced. “Then follow us back.”
“Maybe they already have,” Clarke suggests.
“No alarms,” Chen reminds her.
Clarke remembers: there are transponders in every hab, every drone and vehicle down here. They talk nicely enough to each other, but they’ll scream to wake the dead should sonar touch anything that doesn’t know the local dialect. Clarke hasn’t thought about them for years; they hail from the early days of exile, when fear of discovery lay like a leaden hand on everyone’s mind. But in all this time the only enemies they’ve found have been each other.