Far in the distance, Caine heard what sounded like the hoarse hoot of a foghorn. He turned in the direction of the sound, saw nothing that might have made it. However, looking in the other direction, he noticed a constellation of large, orange water lily analogs that extended all the way to an upriver bend. Beyond that, all visual details were swallowed by the humid haze.
Xue, sitting between his charges, nodded in the same direction. “I heard it earlier, while you were all recovering items from the ship.”
“Mechanical or biological?” Caine wondered aloud.
Hirano Mizuki, whose duty suit was wet up to her small waist, shook her head. “Unquestionably biological.”
“Unquestionably?” Ben repeated.
“Well, almost unquestionably,” she amended testily. “But this call lacks any of the patterns of machine sounds, which tend to repeat or to be comprised of remixed sub-patterns.”
Qwara Betul, who was resting a moment, nodded at Mizuki. “Yes. She is right. Before I became a multimedia recordist, I worked in audio simulation. A machine, even one trying to mimic animals, can only mix, match, and modify what is in its catalog. That sound”—the distant, soft, and sonorous foghorn was back—“is an original utterance, every time. Or it is the best imitation of an animal I have ever heard.”
Caine nodded. “Okay. Well, if you have any guesses about the creature that might be making it, please share them.”
“Of course. Why?”
“Because that sound is coming from downstream. Which is the direction we are ultimately headed.”
Mizuki nodded sagely. “Logical. Rivers tend to lead to social aggregations, whether the species in question is intelligent or not. Of course if we are presently in higher altitudes, rivers will not be so reliably correlated with settlements.”
Caine started making his way toward the shuttle. “Fortunately, from what I saw as we descended, we’re not in a highland floodplain. This quasi-jungle is part of a long carpet of foliage that runs toward the northern shore of a southern continent. The longer we follow a major watercourse, the more likely we are to have the kind of encounters that Ms. Hirano mentioned.”
“And,” added Macmillan, “since we don’t have maps, nav satellites, or any other means of knowing where the blazes we are, following a river at least keeps us from walking in circles without knowing it.”
Caine smiled. “Yeah, there’s that, too.” He side-shuffled down the soggy bank, waded out to the forward hatchway; the water was now knee-level, there. As he ducked in, he almost collided with Nasr Eid, who was lugging more salvaged rations in one of the ruined packs they’d pressed into service as carry-sacks. “Nothing else of value,” he panted, his voice muffled and warped by his filter mask. “Everything is smashed in the back.”
“Where is Ms. Veriden?”
“She is a fish!” Nasr’s voice was admiring and aghast, all at once. “She fitted her duty-suit with the underwater attachments, connected a pony-tank, and dove into the engineering companionway.” He shook his head. “I would not go there. It is dark.”
“Is she using one of the glow-sticks from a signal kit?”
Eid stopped in the exit, looking back at Caine. “Perhaps. Yes. Perhaps she is.” Clearly, the thought had not crossed his mind before.
Caine moved further back along the flooded passenger aisle. Each time he waded through the shuttle, it looked more devastated than before, partly because all the compartments had been yanked open in search of useful objects, and partly because as the shuttle settled, the fuselage’s cracks and split seams were sagging ever-wider.
There was movement in the water at the rear of the passenger compartment; Caine hefted his hatchet-headed combopioneer tool slightly higher.
Dora Veriden’s head popped out of the water with a splash, her dark brown shoulder-length hair plastered to her scalp, neck, cheeks. “Shit,” she announced. “I’m done back there.”
“I recommended against going in the first place.”
“No, Captain; you recommended that you go in my place. Then we compared how many times we’ve each been on, er, underwater operations. Added to the fact that I can fit into tight spaces easier than you can.”
“Evidently, whatever caused you to decide against further dives has not diminished your propensity to argue. Find anything?”
Veriden cut an annoyed glance at Riordan but said nothing; he suspected that even she saw the irony in starting an argument over whether she was argumentative. “The engineering section is pulling itself free of the fuselage. We must have taken a hell of a whack back there. Besides, I think I’ve seen everything there is to see.”
“Any updates, forensically speaking?”
She nodded. “Yeh. I haven’t been able to find the pistols you mentioned, but the after section is a mess: gaps in the bulkheads and the deck where they could have washed out, or they could still be mixed in with the heavier debris. But I got a look at the bodies.” She shook her head. “Between the wound patterns and the tight quarters, I just can’t make a picture of a gunfight that would produce those results. If Danysh was discovered trying to tamper with the engines or the hatchway, then how did he get shot from hip to neck from about a meter’s range? And why would he tamper with the engines at all? That would have killed him, too. And if he was simply trying to close the hatch before you got on, then why did that turn into a gunfight at all? He could have acted like it was all a misunderstanding until the other two let their guard was down. Then he could have shot them. And what the hell was Mizrahi doing with a gun?”
Caine shrugged. “I wish I knew the answer to any of those questions. In large part, because they are exactly the ones I’ve been turning over in my mind since I saw those three bodies. Now, let’s get out of here before—”
“There’s one more thing you should see. And probably only you should see it, for now.” She held something out in her hand. It was a small vial of unusual manufacture, almost as if it were handmade.
“What’s this?” Riordan held it up, saw what looked like a large, cubical tissue sample lumped at the bottom.
“Don’t know,” Veriden admitted. “But it was in Danysh’s pocket.” She waded past Caine, glanced upward as the top of the fuselage groaned faintly. “We’d better get out of here.”
* * *
Ben Hwang, who seemed to be moving more easily, gestured at the collected salvage. “It’s mostly food and combopioneer tools. Have you found any of the inflatable rafts?”
Caine shrugged. “What was left of them. They were stored ventrally, for easy deployment. They didn’t handle that belly landing too well.”
“Maybe we could make use of the plastic, though,” Qwara Betul mused.
Caine nodded. “It’s a good thought, but without those rafts, we’re on foot. That means we’re going to be leaving behind a lot of potentially useful objects. First priority is food and water, and stocking up on it is going to slow us down.”
Hwang nodded. “And, dividing the ration packs ten ways, that still only gives us about five days. Less water, though: a lot of the containers didn’t handle the shaking too well.”
Salunke stared at the rear of the shuttle, where a sizable rent had caused the majority of the on-board flooding. “That hole, back near the ship’s locker. We lost a lot of stores from there.” A few of the darker orange lily pads had drifted up against the aforementioned wound in the hull; the wreck looked like it had thrown off vermilion clots before dying.
“That is probably where the extra food supplies were kept,” Xue agreed.