3
Kevina Schwantz let the wind blow through her long blond hair as she sent the motor launch skimming across the waves. Having just turned thirty-five, her tall body remained thin, still malnourished after all the long years on Ashanti. Too thin to her way of thinking, but she had always been body-conscious. During her undergrad years at University of St. Petersburg, and through her PhD work at Moscow Tech, she’d had to rely on her brains, but being drop-dead gorgeous had never hurt. They’d jokingly called her “the ice-blond goddess of the Arctic.” The latter referred to where she’d done most of her dissertation and postdoctoral research.
Flying across the water, Capella’s light warm on her face, the wind in her hair, this was what she lived for. She’d argued like a woman insane to get this chance, to get out under an open sky. It had been twelve years since she’d been at the controls of a boat. A seeming eternity since she’d been on the water. And this was a whole new world.
“We don’t know what you might run into out there,” Michaela had told her, expression worried.
“Nothing on this planet is as fast as the motor launch,” she’d replied in her most reasonable voice. “Director, if I encounter anything, I’ll peg the throttles and run. It’s a simple trip out and back. And the weather’s perfect.” She’d shrugged. “And I’ve got thousands of hours in motor launches. And that was in the Arctic.”
She shot a look over her shoulder to make sure that her son, eight-year-old Felix, was in his seat. Michaela hadn’t thought to ask if she was taking the boy. And if the Director said anything, forgiveness was always easier to attain than permission. Besides Kevina had promised him. Told him for years that she’d take him on his first boat ride. To have left him behind today? It would have broken the little guy’s heart.
Felix appeared mesmerized by the water. And well he should, he’d been born on Ashanti. Had known nothing but Crew Deck until they’d set foot on the landing field at Port Authority. Since that day, Felix’s life had been one magical moment after another. Now he was taking his first boat ride, out in the open, across sparkling water. The look on her son’s face was pure rapture, and that filled her heart with a kind of joy she’d rarely known.
Behind them, the Pod, looked like an elongated white egg where it perched on its pilings. Shoal waters swirled beneath and along the length of the reef where it stretched to the south.
Capella’s light burned down from a partly cloudy sky, the golden rays reflecting on the low swells with their glassy surfaces. The horizon made a sharp line in the distance. There the sea looked like the finest of lapis lazuli where it met the lighter turquoise of the sky. A trio of aqua-blue-speckled-with-white flying creatures glided along to her right, effortlessly matching her twenty-knot speed. To Kevina’s amazement, they had four wings—two per side—with what looked like a third set consisting of two stubs that protruded from the keel-shaped belly. The beasts had three eyes and a triangular mouth consisting of three jaws that narrowed to a spear-shaped snout. The tooth-studded jaws were open as they flew, apparently to act like a funnel. She wondered if—like so many of the land creatures—the gaping mouth functioned as an air intake. And, yes, as the closest swooped past, she could see the vents at the root of the thing’s trailing tail.
“Felix! Look!” she called to her son as she raised her recorder to get video.
Felix spun from where he now was hanging over the gunwale. He had been watching the white foam splashing out from the launch’s hull. Felix fixed his soft brown eyes on the fliers, his mouth forming an O of amazement. Bracing his arms, rapt, he watched the closest of the fliers soar over their heads, then veer off with a flap of the wings. The other two followed, cutting behind the boat. One dove, snatching something from the wake that twitched and flipped in its needle mouth. With a gulp, the beautiful blue flier swallowed its prey and sailed off after its comrades.
“What was that, Mama?”
“Felix, I don’t have a clue. You and me? We’re the first human beings to ever lay eyes on one. You want to name it?”
He stepped up beside her, barely kept his balance as the launch planed over a larger set of swells. “I don’t know. Polka dots?”
“Polka dots? What kind of name is that?”
“It had those white spots on the blue.”
“Okay. That’s as good a name as any.” She wondered how Soichiro Yoshimura—their marine biologist and evolutionary theorist—would react to naming an entire order of flying creatures as “polka dots.”
“Did you see?” Felix asked soberly. “It ate something from the water.”
“I did. That’s called predation. You’ve always lived off ration. But way back in human history, we lived off prey. That means that humans hunted and killed and ate other creatures. Back in Solar System, meat is grown in factories, so we don’t have to kill things. But, when they first started Port Authority, they brought animals to kill and eat because it was easier than a factory. There were cows, chickens, and pigs.”
Felix made a face. “Yuk! That’s sick.”
“Yeah, well, Donovan made short work of the livestock.” She turned her attention to the course, keeping to ninety degrees.
The launch—a thirty-meter V hull—was powered by a five-hundred-horsepower electrical engine, and Kevina pushed the throttle up a notch. The launch leapt ahead, planing across the swells.
Felix grasped onto the grab bar, wide-eyed, as he was thrown back. Then his face burst into a wide grin and he began to whoop with joy. “Faster, Mama. Faster!”
“That’s thirty-five knots. That’s fast enough for now.”
Her attention being fixed as it was on the far horizon, she first caught movement at the edge of her vision. Focusing just ahead of the bow, she saw them. Darting images beneath the surface, like arrows that sped away at perpendicular angles from her course. Not that Kevina was the world’s best judge of speed, but if she was doing thirty-five knots, the things zipping away just below the surface had to be twice to three times as fast.
Her PhD had been in oceans system theory with a specialization in the Arctic, so she’d had considerable training in marine biology. On Earth, a sailfish might hit an incredible seventy miles an hour in a short burst of speed but couldn’t maintain it. Try as she might, she could think of no terrestrial fish or mollusk that could move as fast and far as these. Nor did this creature leave a gas trail like a hyper-cavitating torpedo would. She couldn’t wait to catch one, see for herself what magical traits it possessed.
Just over the horizon, perhaps six kilometers off the port side, Kevina could make out the triangular sails of seaskimmers. She was contemplating their nature when something erupted from the ocean’s surface not more than fifty meters to her left.
Kevina started at the proximity, at the intrusion to the perfect morning. Then she gaped. The breaching thing was big. Huge. Water ran in sheets from a midnight-blue head that had to be twenty meters across. She had a momentary glimpse of dark, water-sleek hide, and a midnight-black eye the size of a dinner plate. Some long, thin, and moon-blue creature thrashed in the giant’s three-jawed mouth. One of the torpedoes?
As the launch barreled past, Kevina thought to reach for the recorder. By the time she pulled it up and hit the record button, only foam-white turbulence and spray remained where the beast had been. It had vanished as quickly as it had appeared.
“Zambo!” Felix cried. That was kid-speak on Ashanti for “Wow!” He was staring back, unease reflected from his posture. “What was that, Mama?”
“I don’t have the first idea,” she told him, thinking of the way a great white shark came from below to nail a sun-basking seal. But this leviathan had taken a moving target. And it had been huge. A shiver tightened her spine.
What if that monster wanted to take the launch?
She tried to calculate the size of the great three-jawed mouth. Big enough to engulf a thirty-meter boat? Maybe.
The torpedo in its jaws had looked to be about ten meters in length.
Suddenly the morning, the sunlight, the smooth rolling water had taken a more ominous turn. Kevina couldn’t help herself; she clicked the throttle up a notch to send the launch flying across the swells.
She remembered Michaela Hailwood’s warning. “You’re just taking the launch out and back. Drop the sensor buoy and collect your water samples. Don’t deviate from those two things, and in particular, don’t get too close to anything that might be alive. We’ll have time for that after we develop a protocol.”
“Wish Daddy had come.” Felix interrupted her thoughts. “He would have liked to have seen that Big Mouth Thing.”
Big Mouth Thing. The shorthand would be a BMT. She couldn’t think of a better name for it.
“Daddy is putting a submarine together today. He’s going to test it this afternoon.”
Truth be told, Kevina would have liked to have had Yee come. Ever since they’d hooked up aboard Ashanti, they’d hardly ever spent time alone. Well, maybe a few stolen moments in an empty corridor, but nothing significant. And since Felix’s birth, there had been nothing that resembled “family” time.
Their relationship had just happened. If she were going to choose a mate, it wouldn’t have been Kim Yee. His training had been in sonar, remote sensing, deep-sea resource extraction and drilling. Nothing in his character was particularly outgoing, engaging, or charismatic. Yee was, well. . . . Okay, so he was boring.
But he’d been available and unattached. Outside of phenomenal sex, her affair with Derek Taglioni had been a disaster. She’d just broken up with Yoshimura, and she’d been desperate to prove to herself that she was still desirable, still the ice-blond goddess. Not just a discard. That first time, she’d practically ripped Yee’s clothes off and wrestled him to the floor. For a month, she and Yee had carried on what was clearly “convenience copulation.” And then Ashanti had popped back into regular space.
Out in the black.
Way off course.
The same day Kevina discovered she was pregnant.
The change in Yee had been immediate. He was always there. Good old boring Kim Yee. Say what you might about him, he stepped into the role of father without a second thought. Brought her food during the starving times after the Unreconciled failed to take the ship and were relegated to Deck Three. Placed her welfare and the baby’s before his own. And as the years passed, the man doted on Felix.
Kevina had been the volatile one—and more than once when she and Yee were having trouble, she’d taken up with one of the others. Sometimes with Dek, sometimes with one of the other men in Maritime Unit. A lot of mate swapping went on over the years, but she always went back to Yee. Because of Felix. Because Yee loved his son with all of his heart.
She took a deep breath, eyes on the gently rolling swells they now shot across. The planing launch slapped them with rhythmic impacts she could feel through the hull.
What did the relationship mean for her now? For Felix? For Yee?
Since moving into the Pod, they’d been constantly at work. She’d been setting up, testing, and calibrating her sensors, studying maps, plotting wind patterns, and wondering where the currents ran. He’d been endlessly working with Shinwua on his robots and UUVs.
So, if Yee had come, what would it have been like? Left to themselves, alone as a family at last, could she and he have found anything in common outside of their son?
The beeper on the GPS sounded, indicating that she’d reached her position fifty kilometers out. Throttling back, she let the launch slow, the wake lifting the stern and rocking them forward.
“We’re here?” Felix asked, looking around at the ocean.
“We’re here.” She stepped back to the buoy where it rested just forward of the fantail. “Want to help me?”
“Okay.”
She bent down to where the sleek metal tube lay in its cradle and flipped on the power pack, GPS, transmitter, and beacon. Pointing to the glowing readouts, she explained, “See the numbers? They tell us that the transmitter is communicating with both the Pod and the locational satellite Ashanti placed in orbit. It’s keyed to all of our buoys, the seatrucks, and launch. The GPS will allow the buoy to stay on station. If it gets blown, or the current tries to move it, the motors will keep it exactly where we drop it. Meanwhile it will be sending data through the satellite on temperature, current direction, wave height, wind speed, and water chemistry. All that in this one machine.”
“Zambo.”
“Help me now.” She got her arms under the curved length of the buoy and lifted. Felix helped, and together they muscled the fifty-kilo cylinder onto the gunwale and rolled it over the side to splash into the lapis-blue water.
The thing sank, bobbed up, and righted itself, the readouts glowing a bright red on their screens.
Kevina could hear the faint whine of the motors as they stabilized the buoy. She picked up her com. “Michaela? Can you hear me?”
“Roger that. We’re getting a clear reading. You’re right at 50 kilometers out. We’re calibrating now. Should take us about five minutes to fix the position and run the diagnostics.”
“That works for me.” She glanced around. “I suppose there’s worse places to be.”
“Like being the main course at a meal hosted by the Unreconciled?”
“Not even close. It’s peaceful out here. Water’s smooth as silk. Not a hint of wind. Smells like a faint perfume.” She forced any thought of the Big Mouth Thing out of her mind. “I’d forgotten the magic of sunlight on water.”
Kevina glanced over, smiled at Felix where her son was leaned over the gunwale, watching the buoy as it rose and fell in sync with the launch and the swells. As he did, she heard him humming the melody to “London Bridge is Falling Down.”
“Roger that,” Michaela replied with a laugh. “Next time, I get to go. I’ve had enough of control rooms, light panels, and air conditioning.”
“What’s this, Mama?”
She stepped over, propped herself on the gunwale, and looked down. On Earth, her first thought would have been a sort of algae. Here, who knew?
“Don’t touch it, Felix. No telling what it is.”
“It doesn’t look scary, Mama.”
“We won’t know until we study it.” She found her sample containers with their five-meter cords. One by one she lowered them over the side as far as they would go. A stiff tug on the cord pulled the mouth shut to seal them at depth. Then she pulled each jar in hand over hand.
She saw another blob of the floating algae, and out of impulse, fetched a container and scooped it up. Then she carefully labelled each sample jar, recording the time, date, and provenience.
On the other side of the launch, Felix was still hanging over the side, staring down at the water. Kevina was about to pull him back, when Michaela’s voice over the com said, “We’re reading five by five, as the old saying goes. Water temperature is thirty-two degrees Celsius. Depth at your location is two thousand three hundred meters. Wind is point two knots with an ambient air temperature of twenty-nine degrees. Swells are running point six meters from crest to trough. I’ll save the chemistry until you get back, but wow, it’s like nothing on Earth, that’s for sure.”
“Roger that. I’m headed back.”
“Good. Don’t linger. Word is that Bill Martin is feeding us lasagna tonight. Like, the real thing. Noodles, tomato sauce, garlic, parsley, spinach, and the fixings. All but cheese.”
Kevina smiled. “Wouldn’t miss that for the world. See you at the dock.”
She turned. “Kiddo, you aren’t going to believe what we’re having for supper tonight.”
He was still on his belly, rubbing his fingers together. He studied them thoughtfully, and then rubbed his hand on the fabric of his overalls.
“Felix? What’s the matter?”
; “My fingers itch.”
He wiggled back from the gunwale and offered his hands. She studied the delicate skin of his fingers, seeing nothing more than a greasy sheen. “That looks pretty good.”
Nevertheless, she used the rag to wipe them dry. “There, good as new. But you do me a favor. Don’t touch anything. It might be dangerous?”
“How do you know?”
“Well, little man, you don’t. And you don’t want to find out. I know you were fascinated by that stuff that looked like algae. What if it had started to eat the skin off of your fingers? Hmm? That would really hurt, and all it would leave behind is bloody bones.”
“Okay.”
“Good, because if it had eaten your fingers, you couldn’t have lasagna tonight. You wouldn’t be able to hold a fork. Not with just bones left.”
“What’s lazanna?”
“Lasagna. It’s wondrous and tasty like you’ve never known.”
“There’s more, Mama.”
“More lasagna?”
“Of that sticky stuff,” he told her. “It’s on the side of the boat.”
She glanced over, seeing little greenish-blue blobs sticking to the launch’s hull at the water line. More of it floated around them. Curious stuff. She wondered how it managed to survive, then figured from the color that it must have some manner of photosynthesizing. The chemistry required to use sunlight to create proteins and sugars was the same on Donovan as it was on Earth.
“Come on. Let’s go eat lasagna.” She throttled up, spun the launch around and took her heading back toward the Pod.
Felix stepped up beside her as they headed west, the launch rocketing over the low swells. Felix kept rubbing his fingers on the pantleg of his coveralls. Probably thinking of what it would be like to have acid eating his skin off. Good. It was a lesson well learned.
4
Derek Taglioni lay on bedrock, at the edge of the canyon rim. His head was reeling from the pain. What the hell? How had he come to . . . ? Yes. Mobbers, it had been mobbers. He’d been down, a couple of meters below the rim, working his way along with a geologist’s pick hammer, testing samples of ore. Had heard the chittering call of the mobbers, seen the flock coming, a remarkable swirling column of multicolored, churning flying beasts.
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