She looked around. Flecks of her crash foam fell away. Of the needleship, her crew, there was no sign in this murky soup. The Spear of Orion had been her first command, and now it was gone in seconds.
And here she was, immersed in an unknown sea. Hex’s world was largely untamed. Her people, like humans everywhere, were drawn to the sea, but you never went swimming, for the ocean was full of monsters. She didn’t even know how deep she was – or which way was up. For a moment panic bubbled, and she thrashed, wasting energy, until she forced herself to be still.
She ordered her skinsuit to use the planet’s gravity field to find the local vertical. Then, when it was oriented, she made the suit climb. She glimpsed the ocean’s scummy meniscus an instant before she broke through into the air, to her huge relief.
She rose into a crimson sky, where a misshapen sun hung low. Beneath her the ocean looked black, oily, and huge, languid low g-waves crossed its surface. But she could see, deep down beneath the waters, a pale pink glow that must be the crater they had made.
Another skinsuit broke the surface, popping up like a balloon. Then a third, and a fourth. Hex made them sound off and report on their status. Everybody was unscathed, physically anyhow. They bobbed over the surface of the ocean, four drifting people in bright green suits.
‘The Spear has had it,’ Jul said. She downloaded to Hex a last data squirt from the dying ship.
‘We’re stranded,’ Hella said gloomily.
‘We still have weapons in our suits,’ Borno said.
Hex said, ‘If we can find anybody to shoot at.’
Jul pointed down at the ocean. ‘Pilot – what’s that?’
Something moved, just under the surface. Larger than a human, amorphous, dimly glimpsed, it seemed to be moving purposefully.
Hex could hear her mother’s voice: There are monsters in the sea. ‘My turn to be phobic,’ she murmured.
Hella said, ‘What? … Look. It’s breaking the surface.’
Hex glimpsed sleek flesh humping above the water. Then something like a limb protruded. Hex flinched; it was as if the limb had reached for her.
‘I can’t make out its shape,’ Borno said.
‘Maybe it has no fixed shape,’ Hella said. ‘I’ve read some creatures of the seas are like that.’
‘But it’s a toolmaker,’ Jul said calmly. She pointed. ‘It’s wearing a kind of belt.’
All this seemed utterly horrific to Hex. That limb, muscular, equipped with suckers and fine manipulators, continued to writhe in the air.
‘You know,’ Hella said, ‘I think it’s beckoning.’
‘To us?’
‘Of course to us. I think it wants us to follow it – to the land, probably.’
‘What land?’ Jul asked.
Hella sighed. ‘Some navigator you would make. Over there.’
There was a dark shading on the horizon.
Hex’s sharp pilot’s eyes picked out sparks descending from the sky. ‘We’re out of time.’
‘They’re tracking the wreckage of the ship,’ Jul said.
‘We stand and fight,’ Borno snarled.
‘Not here,’ Hex snapped. ‘Not now. Borno, we can’t win.’
‘We should follow the swimming thing,’ Hella said. ‘It might help us.’
‘You think so?’ Jul asked.
‘It’s clearly smart. And it’s trying to help us right now. Why not?’
Hex looked down with huge reluctance at the blank surface of the water, the uncharted depths beneath. ‘We don’t have a choice,’ she told her crew, and herself.
She flipped in the air and plunged head-first back into the water. Her suit’s systems whirred as it sought neutral buoyancy, and made her legs kick. Her tell-tales showed her that her crew followed her in: one, two, three.
They all struggled through the water in pursuit of the ‘swimming thing’.
IV
Hex woke. She was reasonably comfortable, even warm. But when she looked up, she peered out through a translucent bubble-wall at the roof of a cave.
She stretched, sat up.
By the light of a suit lamp, the others were already eating. They sat around suit backpacks that glowed green, giving off light and warmth. Breakfast was a slab of sticky, green, manufactured by a backpack from the organic produce of this world’s ocean, washed down by a visor-full of water.
On staggering into this sea-shore cave Hex had inflated her own suit to form this bubble-tent. If you looked carefully you could see the suit’s seams, even one stretched-out glove. Inside, the crew had stripped off their suits, pooled their backpacks, and slept, lying on one stretched-out suit while blanketed by another. They had needed time for some essential maintenance, of themselves as much as their suits.
In the mouth of the cave, beyond their shelter, a fire burned fitfully, hampered by poor convection in the low gravity. Oddly the flickering glow of the fire seemed more human than the pale green of the suit lights, but it had been built by an utterly alien being.
It was odd for Hex to have her crew together like this. She had spent most of the last year with them, but for most of their time together they were sealed up in their blisters. Now here they were, stripped down to their heated undergarments, all crammed in. Borno, the only man, was bulky, big-boned, hard-muscled. She imagined him spending hours honing his body so he could take down Ghosts hand on hand if he had to. Hella was smaller, thin, morose and anxious, but possibly the smartest of the three. Jul looked a little overweight; maybe she had been skimping physical exercise. Of course the fact that the lower half of her body was a clunky prosthetic didn’t help.
And then there was Hex – the youngest, she uncomfortably reminded herself.
Borno groused, ‘We’re interstellar warriors and we’re reduced to this. Stuck in a cave like animals. You can’t even tell if it’s morning or night.’
‘It’s always day here, dummy,’ Hella said. She sounded tired, drained; she chewed on her food tablets without enthusiasm.
‘Lethe, you know what I mean. It’s morning somewhere…’
Restless, Hex made her way to the wall of her suit-tent. They were in the northern hemisphere, but the cave was oriented south, so she could see the twin suns, a glum red blur with that spark of bright blue crawling over its face. It was strange to think that the double star never moved from its station in the sky, as if nailed there. The ground was worn, a thin soil lying over the melted bedrock that was all that had survived a supernova torching. The air was less than a fifth Earth’s pressure: too thin for them to breathe, but enough to transport sufficient heat around the planet to keep all the water, and indeed the air itself, from freezing out on the dark side.
And on this small world, in this thin air, there was life.
Hex made out gaunt silhouettes standing on a low ridge. They looked like antennae, with dishes turned up to the sun. They were plants, something like trees – but they were colony organisms, with the leaves independent creatures, roosting on the branches like birds. The pool of shadow behind that ridge hadn’t been touched by sunlight for a million years.
‘We’ve got company,’ Hella murmured.
A puddle of slime, glistening in the low sunlight, flowed in over the cave floor. It gathered itself up into a rough pillar and let fall a belt stocked with tools of stone and metal. Unstable and oozing, it seemed to warm itself by the fire, and pseudo-pods extended to hurl a little more fuel onto the flames. Then it collapsed again and came slithering over the floor of the cave towards the humans’ shelter. It dumped organic produce by the translucent walclass="underline" what looked like seaweed, and even a fish, a triumph of convergent evolution.