Here, though, it was the human divers who had to use jets and tows to be able to keep up with her, even when she was just swimming about casually. As they had discovered that day, when she really took off even their jet-pulls hadn’t been able to keep up with her.
‘I didn’t run away from them,’ Silvie said. ‘They just couldn’t keep up. And the jellyfish were just so pretty – a hundred thousand of them,’ she smiled with pleasure at the memory, ‘pink jellyfish, like flowers.’
Alex looked at her.
‘And it didn’t occur to you,’ he asked, genuinely curious, ‘that they might be poisonous?’
‘Oh, I knew they were,’ Silvie told him cheerfully. ‘I’ve read up on all the species here. But usually it’s fine – no matter how toxic a species might be, we swim amongst them perfectly safely using empathic resonance. Wildlife responds to that, normally, so they’ll tolerate you around them without any problem.’ She laughed. ‘I guess flower jellies don’t, though. Possibly they haven’t got enough brain. Oi!’ she added, as Alex raised a significant eyebrow. She poked a finger at his chest in mock-reprisal, a gesture he recognised she had learned from Shion, and he grinned. ‘I was not being stupid,’ Silvie told him. ‘It should have been safe. And anyway, it was nothing to make a fuss about.’
Alex had seen the medical report. She’d been treated for seventeen jellyfish stings which had left burn-like streaks across her skin and pumped dangerous levels of toxins into her body. One lash had come within a centimetre of her right eye.
‘And don’t,’ she said, seeing him glance at the pale and fading mark beside her eye, ‘start telling me what damage it might have done if it had hit my eye or how many more stings would have killed me. It didn’t hit my eye and it didn’t kill me, so I don’t understand what all the panic is about.’
She didn’t, either. He could see that. And he understood, too, that it would be a total waste of time attempting to explain it to her. They’d already had conversations about the human tendency to worry about what might have happened in a given situation, which Silvie found incomprehensible and pointless.
For the first time, he really understood that the lack of a flight-fight reaction coupled with an inability to imagine potential risk could be a really dangerous combination. She had swum in amongst the jellyfish without fear because she was not physically capable of feeling fear, making that decision simply as a matter of logical analysis. She could control such wildlife on her own world so logically she ought to be able to control it here. Now she knew differently and she would not swim in amongst that kind of jellyfish again. But it would not make her more anxious or careful generally. Even Shion had not been able to able to get her to understand.
Shion, sitting beside her, smiled ruefully at the captain.
‘Stonewall,’ she admitted, and Alex gave her a sympathetic nod. Then he took a moment, looking away from both of them to detach and clear his thoughts.
The view was worth looking at. Every room in the Oceana Hotel had clear-view walls looking out over the reef. It was one of the most beautiful sights on Telathor, a vast reef vivid with corals and teeming with hundreds of species of fish. Alex, though, took no notice of it. All his focus was on his own thoughts, and after a few seconds he turned back to Silvie with a calm resolution.
‘Please,’ he said, wanting to her to see how very important this was to him, ‘will you agree – for me, for my peace of mind – to carry out a safety check with all the wildlife you encounter. Check that it responds to empathic resonance before you get within dangerous proximity, yes?’
Silvie stared at him with frank admiration. This was not the anxious muddle of all the other humans who’d been panicking about things that hadn’t happened. Alex’s mind, as she’d commented before, was like a beacon in that fog. Then she chuckled a little, seeing very well that his concern was rooted not in professional responsibility but in deep, powerfully parental feelings.
‘All right,’ she agreed, with warm affection. ‘For you.’
The next day, though, he was back at the Oceana, this time in response to a call to tell him that there’d been an emergency at the Ekdovani Caves.
He was actually at the Oceana before Silvie. He’d been on the Heron asleep when the call came in and it had taken less time for a shuttle to take him directly to the waterside transit point and a sub to bring him out here than it had for Silvie to be brought back from the far side of the planet.
Alex was not feeling in the slightest bit inclined to laugh as he watched the sub bringing her back to the embassy swinging round to dock.
Again, he’d been sent full reports so he already knew what had happened.
The Ekdovani caves were the biggest and most spectacular undersea caverns on Telathor. Even their upper levels were so huge and so beautiful that they were rated one of the ‘must see’ sights on the planet. Tourist subs passed through them in a constant flow of traffic, while there was always a cluster of boats around the dive platform moored permanently overhead.
All that had been stopped for four hours so that Silvie could go and swim there. The authorities, after all, did not want tourists taking footage of a silver-haired girl swimming around without a diving suit or breathing apparatus. So they had put it out that a sub had had a chemical spill and that the caves were not safe for diving until it had been cleared up. It said so on the news, too, so people knew it had to be true. There’d been all the usual debate arising out of it as well, with concern about the long term impact such tourism might be having on one of their world’s natural wonders.
So Silvie had had the caves to herself for her visit, other than for the presence of her security escort who stayed as far away as they could and did their best to be quiet. Silvie was always aware of them – she said it was like being followed by people who hid behind trees but were constantly shouting, ‘We’re being very quiet!’ and ‘Tippy-toe!’ as they scuttled along. But she had, she said, got quite used to them and she hadn’t, at least not yet, deliberately attempted to shake them off.
Today though, that had changed. The upper levels of the caves were the smallest part of them. There was a tiny hole in the corner of one of the caverns which led into a labyrinth of cracks. Squirming through them would bring you into the dark world of the Ekdovani Deeps. No sunlight ever penetrated these tremendous caverns, three times the extent of the already magnificent upper levels. They had not, yet, even been fully explored by divers, and were not likely to be, either.
The Deeps were notoriously dangerous. They had to be open to the sea at some distant point, as tidal forces ripped back and forth through them – the same tides as were experienced in the upper caverns of course, but here, funnelled and concentrated into lethal rips. There were rip currents so strong that even drones couldn’t drive against them and were likely to be smashed against the rocks. There were vortices which churned like gigantic washing machines, hurling rocks at the ceiling and continuing the process which had carved out these great caverns to begin with. There was one particularly infamous vortex, a whirlpool known as The Devil’s Hand. When the tide was on the ebb, this vortex would form with such force that anything which came within its spin would be sucked down, it was said, like the devil grabbing you to yank you down to hell. At least four divers were known to have died in it, their bodies never recovered. Others had simply gone missing in the caverns, never to be seen again.
None of that had been in recent years, though, because the authorities had taken action after a particularly devastating incident in which eleven members of a high school scuba club had gone into the deeps and only ten had come back. After that, a strong grille had been fixed across the entrance.
It was an openable grille, though, with a high security lock, because the Deeps were occasionally visited by legitimate research teams, properly equipped and authorised.
Silvie was told, of course, that the Deeps were off limits.
‘Yes, I know they’re too dangerous for humans to swim in,’ she told Ale
x, with an air of coping patiently with the clamouring of idiots. ‘But I swim in wilder water than that all the time, back home. I had my wrist-jets and a navcom, I wouldn’t get lost. I told them just to wait for me, I’d be back in an hour or so.’
‘But you overrode the lock!’ Davie was with her, seething with exasperation and making no attempt to hide it. ‘We’ve talked about this, Silvie, again and again, you can’t just override security systems, they are there for a reason!’
‘Mr North…’ Alex could see how frightened Davie had been by what had happened, and he understood that he was having a very human reaction to that now, but he could also see that the only effect this was having on Silvie was to annoy her. ‘If you could give us a few minutes,’ he requested.
‘Oh, all right,’ said Davie, and glowered, ‘See if you can talk some sense into her!’ he said, and strode off.
Alex looked at Shion, who had followed Silvie through the airlock, and needed no empathic ability to know how she was feeling. She had been up on the dive platform when Silvie had opened the security grille and swum through it. None of her efforts to persuade Silvie not to do that, or to come back, had succeeded. Without the emotional impact of her close proximity, her words had no effect on Silvie – or at least, not enough to get her to give up what she wanted to do. Shion was feeling responsible, here, as any officer would, and she was shaken, too, by the frightening events of the last half hour.
‘Go and have a cookie,’ Alex told her, with a warmth and sympathy which would have made it clear he didn’t blame her for this, even without the overt reassurance of giving her a cookie – a treat bestowed for particular achievement in the Fourth.
Shion gave a brief, rather weary smile and went away without a word, evidently feeling that she had already said everything she could say to Silvie.
Alex smiled at the quarian, then, and gestured hospitably towards the lounge where they had sat before. ‘Cup of tea?’ he suggested.
This was technically Silvie’s house, but she accepted his offer and went with him, her manner one of mild perplexity.
‘I don’t understand why everyone is so angry,’ she admitted, as they sat down at the same table with a cup of mint tea for her and a coffee for him, just as before.
‘Well,’ he said comfortably, ‘suppose you tell me what happened.’
Silvie gave him a startled look. ‘Didn’t they tell you?’
They had. Four of the security escort had followed her through the grille and pursued her frantically as she slipped through the labyrinth ahead of them. It had only been six minutes later that one of the divers had been caught in a rip current and flung against the rocks with such force that it had broken his collar bone. Unable to swim, and gasping in pain, he would have been swept to his death if his fellow divers hadn’t managed to grab and hold him. Even so they could make little headway against the rip with his weight pulling them back. They’d been yelling emergency codes and a full scale emergency response had been launched immediately, with subs zooming in and dive teams leaping off the platform overhead.
Silvie, though, had got there first. She’d taken the injured diver from them and brought him out, meeting the emergency teams as they made their way in.
‘They told me what happened from the human perspective,’ Alex told her. ‘I’d like to try to understand it from yours.’
Silvie gave a little sigh of relief at finally finding someone reacting sensibly, when everyone else was in such a state of flap and anger that it had been really uncomfortable.
‘Well, I wanted to swim in the Deeps,’ she said. ‘I knew I’d be fine, I do swim in much wilder water than that back home and I had everything I needed to be safe. Obviously I understand that the grille is there to keep humans out because it isn’t safe for them, so I told the security guys to wait just there and I’d be back in an hour, because I know how important it is to humans to have a time for things. Only they got themselves in a panic and tried to come in after me. I told them to go back, it wasn’t safe for them, but they kept coming anyway and one of them got hurt. I was already on my way back to them because I knew they wouldn’t be safe in that passage with the rip running through. It really was very stupid of them to attempt it. So I gave the injured guy a tow and led the others out. But it was just weird – when the rescue people arrived they all seemed to think that I was the injured one and rushed me off to medics and kept asking me where I was hurt. And everyone was in this complete chaos of fuss and anger and telling me off as if I’d done something stupid. It’s just silly. I was never in any danger at all and they were the daft ones, coming in after me when they knew it wasn’t safe for them.’
Alex broke into a helpless grin.
‘That actually makes total sense,’ he observed. ‘Logically, if you leave out any understanding of the nature of security services on duty.’
He spoke with the voice of experience, as someone subjected to the protection of security services himself, and Silvie gave him an interested look.
‘Shion kept saying that they had no choice but to follow me,’ she commented. ‘But I don’t get that at all.’
‘No, it’s difficult,’ Alex conceded, and having thought for a few seconds while taking a sip of his coffee, did his best to explain, ‘In your terms, I suppose, the best way to understand it is as if security people are a breed apart – almost like adapts, though naturally occurring rather than engineered for purpose, and with their natural instincts honed by intensive training. When they are on duty their sole focus and function is to protect the person they are escorting. They would quite literally step in front of you and take a bullet if that was what was necessary to keep you safe, and that degree of self-sacrifice, superseding all our normal instincts for self-preservation, really is extraordinary. So these are not, you see, normal people in that sense. If you were swimming with a group of friends and told them to wait for you at the grille because it was too dangerous for them but they understood and accepted that it was fine for you, they’d do just that without any problem. But security people are trained to stay with you no matter what, regardless of any risk to their own safety. And they also have what I freely admit is a maddening tendency to treat the person they’re protecting as a complete idiot incapable of evaluating the smallest risk for themselves.’ He gave a wry smile. ‘Earlier today, my own security escort prevented me from buying a drink from a street vendor. It was hot, the man was making fresh fruit drinks mixed with crushed ice and I just fancied trying one. Security, however, said it hadn’t been pre-cleared. I felt that they were being ridiculous and I felt that they were insulting my intelligence, too, by not allowing me to make such a simple risk assessment for myself. They sent for a similar drink from an authorised supplier, which arrived with a certain amount of rush and fuss and completely killed all the pleasure and spontaneity of what I’d wanted to do. So I do, believe me, understand how frustrating, restrictive and demeaning it is to have a security cordon around you.’
Silvie could see that, but she was looking troubled.
‘It’s cruel,’ she said, ‘to create an adapt whose only purpose is to give their lives for others.’
Alex chuckled. ‘It’s not really like that,’ he assured her, ‘I was just trying to explain it in terms you’d understand. It’s just that some humans are born with a strong instinct to serve and protect others. They tend to be attracted to the kind of jobs which satisfy that instinct – service in the military, the police or emergency services. I have a strong instinct that way myself – my driving purpose is a desire to keep people safe, you know?’
She did know. That shone in him, and to her eyes at least was one of his most attractive qualities.
‘So you would give your life to protect someone who you were guarding?’ she asked, bewildered but trying to understand.
‘In a heartbeat,’ said Alex, with a smile. ‘That is something every member of the Fleet is committed to, as part of our oath of service. But security people, they’re not just committed t
o that principle; they’re kind of obsessive about it. You don’t end up doing personal protection for VIPs unless you are fanatical about security and ready to face any danger to protect them. It is a kind of unwritten code of honour in their world, see, that they do not, ever, abandon their charge. Bombs may be going off, bullets flying, the building on fire and collapsing, whatever, they will not leave unless it is to get the person they’re protecting out of there. So, when you went through that grille, your escort found themselves in a very difficult position. On the one hand was their knowledge of your abilities as a swimmer and their common sense, which no doubt were telling them that you would be fine and that the best thing they could do was stay where they were, and their overriding sense of duty and honour. I dare say that that would have generated powerful conflictual feelings and anxiety. But seeing you get further away from them they just couldn’t bear to let you go off on your own, even though they knew it would be dangerous to follow you. Duty and honour, you know, are extremely powerful motivators in humans.’
‘Ah,’ said Silvie. She still didn’t really understand, but she could see at least that Alex was absolutely certain that those people had followed her into the Deeps out of a sense of obligation to her. ‘But you can tell them not to do that?’
Alex rubbed his nose thoughtfully. ‘Well, no,’ he said, having considered. ‘Not really. If you agree to have a security escort then you really have to let them do their job, however frustrating and difficult it may be at times. We have to accept, see, that they always do know more than they are telling us. That’s part of their role; to protect us even from being worried by knowledge of the dangers they’re protecting us from. I would rather know, myself, on principle, but I have to admit that things are so hectic here anyway that I’m really quite glad not to have to deal with all the security aspects as well. I know that I’m in good hands, and I just have to trust them to get on with what they do.’
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