A Darkling Sea

by James Cambias

  “JOSEF, I think we are in trouble,” said Alicia. “Broadtail says things with six legs are approaching. I think he means Sholen.”

  Josef muttered something in Russian. “Must have gotten impellers working. Time for evasive maneuvers.”

  Alicia expected something fast and exciting, but in point of fact Josef’s maneuvers consisted of just a few turns and some long periods of sitting motionless, drifting with the current.

  “Warm current here,” he said at one point. “Comes from rift. Edges have sharp change in salinity and density. Good for fooling sonar.”

  They drifted with the current for a few moments, then dropped back down into colder water and settled among some rocks.

  “Stay silent and listen,” he said, and flipped on the hydrophone. There was no sign of the Sholen.

  “Do you think we lost them?”

  “Maybe.” His impassive face suddenly looked worried. “Oh. Sholen will hunt for us a while, fail, and then go back to following our original course.”

  “That will take them to the Coquille!” said Alicia. “They will find Robert! They could hurt him. We have to go, now!”

  “No. Send a message.”

  “How—” She caught his meaning then and practically leaped to the hatch. A little tapping brought an answering click. With Graves’s lexicon on her pad, she composed a message in number-taps. It was excruciatingly slow, like a nightmare in which horrible pursuers were chasing her and she had to accomplish some long delicate task before they caught her.

  She finished tapping it out, then repeated the whole thing for good measure. The Ilmataran replied with a long series of taps.

  “Oh, go on and stop chattering!” she said. Maybe Broadtail realized the urgency of the message, or maybe her tone of anxiety somehow carried through water and the communication barrier, because the Ilmataran swam off at top speed before she could finish translating his message.

  WHILE Alicia and Josef took Broadtail off to show him Hitode Station, Rob stayed behind to look after the Coquille. He was taking a well- deserved nap in his hammock when somebody started banging on the hatch down below. It wasn’t latched—why couldn’t Josef just open the damned thing? In the next second Rob’s mind followed a horrifying course of reasoning that convinced him that Alicia must be injured, Josef was carrying her, probably someone’s APOS was broken and they were buddy-breathing . . .

  He jumped down to the main floor and opened the hatch. A single Ilmataran pincer broke the surface of the water, then quickly withdrew.

  Rob banged on the edge of the hatchway with his screwdriver, warning the Ilmataran to stay outside. He got into his drysuit and rushed through the checkout procedure, then dropped into the water to talk face to face—or face to blank faceless head, in this case. The broad-tailed Ilmataran was there alone. No sign of the sub or Alicia and Josef.

  “Many swim to you,” Broadtail tapped on Rob’s faceplate. “Many [humans]?”

  “Six legs.”

  “Crap,” Rob muttered inside his helmet. How did they know? Maybe they’d tracked him somehow? Maybe a drone had come across them by chance. It hardly mattered. The sub. Was it nearby? “Shelter swims to me?”

  “Shelter swims eight [units].”

  “[You] swim to swimming shelter. I swim—” Rob tried to think of a rendezvous point he could communicate to the Ilmataran. “Twenty [units] downcurrent.”

  “I grasp sounds.”

  With the Ilmataran going off to carry his message, Rob climbed back up into the Coquille and started grabbing everything he could carry. First-aid kit, spare argon, all the food (they were down to just sixty bars). Tools. Tape! He slid six rolls onto his forearms like bracelets. All his other loot he bundled into a plastic sheet and stuffed down the hatch.

  His computer started flashing a warning onto his faceplate. The hydrophone outside was picking up motor sounds. A drone. The Sholen were scouting out the site before moving in.

  Rob gave the Coquille’s computer some final commands and then dropped out after his bundle. His hydrophone could hear the drone now. He oriented himself to follow the current, then turned off all his external sound pickups and closed his eyes. After his last encounter he’d devoted an afternoon to creating countermeasures for the drones, and now he was going to find out how well they worked.

  The Coquille’s external floods began flicking on and off, dazzling brightness to pitch darkness at a rate exactly timed to mess with the drone camera’s compensation interval. The shelter’s speakers also began blaring a random playlist of swimming noise samples and sonar pings, with fake Doppler shifts and intensity curves to mess with the drone’s sonar and hydrophones.

  It wouldn’t work forever, but it might keep the drone from tracking him, and moving downcurrent would keep the Sholen from finding him with chemical sniffers.

  Teach them to mess with the one guy who knew more about drones than anyone for thirty light-years in any direction.

  ELEVEN

  AN hour after fleeing the shelter Rob crouched behind a rock on the seafloor, trying not to go insane from sensory deprivation. The sound of his APOS and the feel of sweat running down the small of his back were the only things to remind him the material world existed at all.

  His hydrophone was cranked up to maximum sensitivity, and he strained his ears to catch any sound that might be Sholen or the drone approaching. Somewhere down in the reptile part of his brain Rob’s fight-or-flight reflex revved into overdrive. They could be all around him, they could be just about to creep over the rock!

  When he tried to be more rational, it wasn’t much help. Instead of worrying about monsters hiding in the dark, he had the very real fear that the sub wasn’t going to come for him. Alicia and Josef had been caught, or couldn’t understand Broadtail’s message, or had gone to the wrong rendezvous point. He was all alone in the dark with no food, and would have to find his way back to Hitode through the alien ocean alone—or die cold and suffocating under miles of water and ice.

  Suddenly Rob felt the water around him move, and heard a very faint scrabbling. His thoughts turned from fear of capture or starvation to dread of something big and spiky about to tear him apart.

  He couldn’t stand it anymore. He flicked on his lamp. Even dimmed all the way down it was still like a searchlight after the absolute blackness of the ocean. The familiar ghostly gray and brown sea-bottom landscape reappeared.

  Something tapped his helmet and Rob screamed aloud, making his own ears ring inside the helmet. He scrambled away from the rock and turned, grabbing for his utility knife as he did so.

  There was a huge spiky alien monster perched atop the rock, but it was a familiar one and Rob gave a loud sigh of relief. With his knife blade he tapped out the number that Graves had identified as a greeting.

  Broadtail crawled off the rock and raised one deadly pincer. With the barbed tip he tapped out his own greeting on Rob’s helmet.

  Rob wanted to ask how the Ilmataran had found him, but they still hadn’t figured out “how” yet. So he tried to get as close as he could. “[Interrogative] Broadtail swim toward [Rob].”

  “[Unknown], yes.”

  That wasn’t much help. Rob tried to come up with a question he knew how to ask. Finally he tried “[Interrogative] Broadtail [Rob] here,” hoping the Ilmataran might fill in the missing verb himself.

  “Broadtail [unknown] [Rob] two cables.”

  “[Interrogative],” Rob replied and then repeated the unknown number.

  Broadtail took a long time to reply; evidently he was just as frustrated as Rob. Finally he tapped out the number again, then ran his feelers over Rob’s helmet, then swam some distance away and swished them loudly in the water before returning and repeating the number.

  “You tasted me,” said Rob aloud to himself. “You tasted me from a couple of hundred yards away. That’s awesome!” He added the number to their growing lexicon and replied to Broadtail. “[Human] not taste.”

  Broadtail replied with another unkn
own number, which Rob tentatively put down as an expression of sympathy. Just then the Ilmataran stiffened. “Silent,” he tapped, and then crawled to the top of the big rock and stood still.

  Rob switched off his lamp and listened to the hydrophone. After about a minute he picked up an approaching hum. He couldn’t tell if it was the sub or the Sholen, but just knowing that a friend was nearby made the suspense a lot easier to bear.

  HIS joy at getting picked up was a little tempered by the fact that there wasn’t actually room inside the sub for three people. Josef and Alicia stayed strapped into the sub’s two seats, while Rob crouched atop the access hatch in back.

  “They removed the power unit and oxygen tanks from the Coquille,” said Josef. “I suspect they may have left alarms as well.”

  “Well, that’s it,” said Rob. “I guess we give up now.”

  “Not necessarily,” Josef pointed out. “Is possible to die.”

  “Josef, how long can the submarine keep us alive?” asked Alicia.

  “You’re not seriously thinking of camping out in here until the Sholen leave, are you?”

  Josef ignored Rob, and ticked off his fingers as he spoke.

  “Oxygen: as long as we have power, two years. Argon: perhaps two months before reserve is gone. Drinking water: like oxygen. Food: we starve to death a month after emergency bars run out.”

  “How much food do we have?” she asked. “I have six bars in my bag.”

  “I have two,” said Josef.

  “I’ve got two in my pockets and I grabbed two boxes. Plus there are two boxes hidden in the ruins,” said Rob.

  “Hoarding, Robert?” asked Alicia a little sharply. “Not exactly,” he said. “I figured you’d want to hold out until we were completely out of food and getting hungry, so I stashed some extra to make sure we could actually survive long enough to get back to Hitode and surrender.”

  “Practical,” said Josef after a moment.

  “Very well,” said Alicia. “We have fifty-eight bars. If we each have just two a day that stretches our time to ten days. Let us leave the last day for surrendering if we must. What can we accomplish in nine days?”

  “Don’t you ever just give up?” asked Rob.

  “No.”

  “Other than senseless, suicidal attacks against Hitode, I can think of nothing,” said Josef.

  “Robert?”

  “I know what you’re going to say. Do science, right? We’ve got nine days, so you’re going to collect more data.”

  “It is the only logical course of action,” she said.

  “No, the logical course of action is to make sure we can survive. There’s no way we can live in our suits for ten days straight. Even if we could all fit in here, which we can’t”—Rob thumped the four-foot ceiling above the access hatch for emphasis—“we’ll be half dead from fatigue and stress long before the food runs out. And I don’t know if we really can live on two bars a day. We’ve been doing that and we’re all getting pretty skinny.”

  “You wish to surrender, then. To save yourself a week of discomfort.”

  “No, goddamnit. I think we should see if the Ilmatarans can help us.”

  “That is . . . an interesting idea,” said Alicia after a moment’s silence. “Do you think they will help us?”

  “I don’t know,” said Rob. “We can find out. You know— gather some data.”

  THEY waited another couple of hours before circling around to the Ilmataran settlement, to give the Sholen plenty of time to leave. With no sub, the Sholen didn’t have a lot of “loiter time” on their missions—it was all swim out, do the job, get back to Hitode.

  Wary of drones, the three of them left the sub a few hundred meters away and swam upcurrent to the settlement where Henri had been dissected.

  Broadtail met them only a few dozen meters from the sub. He swam toward Rob like a torpedo and clasped him firmly in his pincers. “Ilmataran many food ping humans.”

  “Right,” said Rob. He tapped out “Humans reaching for Ilmataran.”

  “Ilmataran grasps limb. Humans swim.”

  He led the three of them toward the settlement. Rob had glimpsed it before when the Ilmatarans had brought Henri here a prisoner, but he’d never really had a chance to look at the place.

  The heart of the whole operation was the vent. It was capped by a low dome of fitted stone, representing God only knew how much Ilmataran labor. Neat covered channels of carefully cut stone radiated out from the dome, branching and rebranching like some kind of neolithic demonstration of fractal geometry. In a few places, where it was evidently important to keep up the pressure or span a chasm, they used pipes made of hollowed stone segments.

  One of the oddities of Ilmatar that had puzzled the first human explorers was the absence of any large mineral deposits at the sea-bottom vents. Only at the oldest and smallest vents could drones photograph “chimneys” reminiscent of the ones on Earth and Europa. Solving the mystery took so long because the answer, paradoxically, was right in front of everyone: the Ilmatarans themselves. Very few of Ilmatar’s sea-bottom vents got the chance to build up ramparts of mineral deposits because any active vent was quickly occupied by Ilmatarans and channeled into a productive network of pipes and tunnels. Just like so much of Earth, the Ilmataran landscape was the product of intelligent brains and hands.

  Atop the channels were tiny vent holes, each with its own plug of shell or bone. Around each hole were dozens of chemosynthesizing organisms, rooted on movable stones. The Ilmatarans planted their crops where the water temperature was right. Nearest the vent itself were the most impressive growths— like giant ostrich feathers two or three meters high, some of them splitting into twin plumes halfway up. Rob could also see what looked like long threads waving in the flow, flat stones supporting shaggy microorganism colonies, some things with broad spiky fans like palmetto leaves, fleshy cylinders that completely surrounded the outflow from a hole, masses of stuff like black macaroni, and long flat strands almost exactly like fronds of kelp.

  But the chemosynthetic “plants” were just part of the amazing food factory powered by the vent. Above the crops, the water was cloudy where free-floating microorganisms fed on the warm chemical-rich water. Small swimmers darted in and out of the cloud, and larger swimmers pursued them. The Ilmatarans had nets set up to catch some of these. Traps made of bone and fiber were staked at intervals around the property to catch bottom- crawlers. Rob could also see beds of sessile organisms kind of like half-buried ammonites, and some larger swimmers tethered to stakes.

  Downcurrent from the main vent complex were the buildings. They were not quite as neatly built as the vent cap dome. The walls were sloping piles of smaller stones, roofed by heavy slabs like prehistoric tombs. There were no windows. Each building was fed by a ventwater channel, so the walls supported a lush growth of weeds and microbial mats.

  At the upcurrent edge of the working area was the garbage midden, with its own screen of nets to catch scavengers. Ilmatarans liked their garbage, and placed it where the tasty organic molecules would wash off it and enrich the farm. The garbage pile was huge, far bigger than the farm itself. Over time it had been shaped and tweaked to control the flow of current, bringing just enough to circulate the water, but not enough to wash away valuable nutrients from the vent.

  The trash pile sprawled over a couple of square kilometers, heaped up at least ten meters above the seafloor. Rob felt his hair prickle a bit as he got another glimpse of the scale of Ilmataran history. How long would it take a single little village to build up a trash pile that size? Centuries? Millennia?

  The place was quite busy. Half a dozen Ilmatarans were harvesting some of the crops growing on the pipe system, a couple of others were tending the drift nets and traps. By one of the main buildings a couple of young adults were mending nets, and another pair were twisting fibers into rope.

  The sea bottom was crawling with scavengers. Half of them looked like juvenile Ilmatarans. As Rob passed the line of trap
s at the edge of the property, he saw that a majority of the animals in the traps were juveniles. It was with some relief that he saw an adult throwing them away when emptying the trap.

  Broadtail stopped at the main house. “Humans moving toward Ilmataran structure,” he tapped out, and led them inside. The door was a very heavy affair made of rigid bone segments lashed with tough plant fiber. The outside surface was armored with overlapping plates of shell. It occurred to Rob that this wasn’t just a house, it was a fortress. Who did the Ilmatarans have to fight?

  Inside Rob felt a pang of claustrophobia. The corridor was narrow and twisted randomly, and every surface was thick with weed and bacterial mats, making it very hard to see. His sonar gadget was nearly useless in the close quarters. All he could do was follow Broadtail and keep reminding himself that this wasn’t going to end the way Henri’s visit had.

  Eventually they reached a large room, which Rob recognized. The video feed from Henri’s suit had shown it quite clearly as he’d been dissected. Rob trusted Broadtail, but he felt for the utility knife on his thigh just in case.

  TIZHOS met with Irona when he returned with the Guardians. His account of the raid—one could hardly call it a battle—made her more depressed than ever. “We sabotaged the temporary shelter, but they left aboard the submarine. It cannot support them for long. They must give up or die now,” he said.

  “I worry about what may happen if they do die,” she said, not caring how she sounded.

  “Other humans may wish to avoid death themselves. They may urge cooperation.”

  “I fear we have destroyed any chance to achieve a consensus with the humans. During your mission against the last shelter I spoke with Vikram Sen. Even he now acts angry and uncooperative, when before he seemed willing to work with us.”