Silent Partnership Part 2
Read the Part 1 in DreamForge Magazine Issue 6
As they rose to the surface, five sharks glided through the clearing curtains of emerald light above them. They seemed to be watching the humans. Their torpedo bodies twitched here and there, maneuvering the group into smooth circles that descended around the divers like hoops being tightened about a barrel.
On the way up, Asher and Nevic rotated their positions, covering each other’s blind spots— their only defense an untested and less than half charged repeller.
By the time they reached the surface, a half dozen more sharks had joined the closing circle, and one of those was a giant.
When a wave-crest lifted their bodies, Asher worked to thrust his head above the choppy surface, but the tender was out of sight. With no sign of land, they would have to navigate by sky-signs, like the distant row of clouds advancing from what he assumed was the west. It was toward the clouds they must swim to have any hope of finding the island.
As if content to bide their time, the sharks remained passively curious. As the divers labored westward, the sharks turned their circle into an ellipse, but held close, forcing Asher and Nevic to expend a great deal of physical and nervous energy in keeping tabs on their unwelcome escorts. Both knew an attack, if and when it came, would be too swift to counter even with a working repeller. One of them would feel it before anything was seen.
“Ditch the tanks?” Nevic half asked, half suggested. “Faster if we snorkel.”
Asher shook his head. “What do you think we’re going to hit the sharks with? Don’t try hands or feet. You’ll cut them up, or wedge your arm between a row of teeth.”
“Nice,” she said, filling the word with more resignation than Asher would have thought possible. Next Nevic motioned to the repeller. Her skill with the seacom was more limited than Asher’s ability to spew mellifluous sentences at will, but the idea was clear.
“Might as well, eh? These guys are getting a bit too nosy.” Asher pressed the activator pad lightly, but the effect was instantaneous. The sharks darted away, widening their circle to the extreme limit of the divers’ field of vision. Not wide enough for the divers to be out of danger, but a far sight better than a few heartbeats before.
Slowly, above the thudding of his pulse, Asher heard a metallic, ratchet-like sound. He touched Nevic’s arm and signaled for her to be still. They listened to what became the unmistakable sound of an approaching boat. But as the sound neared, so did the sharks. Whatever discomfort the repeller had caused the predators, it was not enough to waylay their ultimate intentions.
Asher fumbled around his weight belt and then looked to Nevic’s gear, but neither of them had a locator beacon or even a flare tied to their suits.
A rising wind was chopping up the surface, and although the boat’s sound was loud beneath the water, it proved too distant to be heard above the surface.
Another short burst on the repeller returned the sharks to the limit of visibility. The unit was performing well, and the boat sound was becoming louder, nearer. But from experience, Asher knew it must still be more than a kilometer away. Forcing his head above the waves as best he could, Asher scanned a circle again and again. Then at last the sound grew no louder, and before they even had a chance to see its source, it began fading away.
“Where’s the boat’s heading, Ash?”
“I don’t know,” Asher admitted desperately. “But the clouds up there— rolling in, huge curves, kilometers long.”
“Afraid of that. Hurricane clouds. Gales coming. Best stay down, as deep as we can.”
Asher nodded, then looked at his breather gauge and let out his first sigh of relief. Their gear would hold out for hours yet with breathing catalyzers still nearly pristine. If only they did not have to dive too deep, they could hold on.
The boat sound gradually faded to silence. They had never been given a chance to see or signal the passing craft. Above, a thickening layer of clouds quickly veiled what remained of the day’s sunlight and threw the waters about them into semi-darkness.
The sharks too seemed worried about missing something in the failing light. With each jackknife twist and turn they circled ever closer, beginning to make test runs toward the divers, but still swerving away whenever Asher activated the repeller.
As yet there was too little regular sea life in the area to catch the interest of the smallest predator, and for a while the encircling horde grew by twos and threes with each passing minute. During the next half hour, the light became too poor to see more than a few meters under water, and Asher could no longer count all of the dreaded gray shapes.
He blinked condensation from his eyelids and cleared his faceplate. There were now sharks wherever he looked. And below, the ocean was a bottomless expanse, a blue-black eternity that swallowed all light. Soon, nothing was visible beyond the encircling wall of sharks.
“Getting cold,” Nevic complained with terse desperation. “Legs cramping.”
“You’ve just hit the wall. It’ll get worse before it gets better.” Asher hoped he sounded confidently hard-assed. Right now, that was his most important job, even if his own muscles felt like they were about to betray him. “More satellites,” he said conversationally. “Everyone knows we need more satellites. Storm should never be allowed to surprise us like this.”
“Everything has its budget,” Nevic replied. That she answered at all told Asher volumes. She was nowhere near the danger point of exhaustion, yet.
Asher’s mind was working, thinking of ways to stretch their strength and air, even how to conserve the half-charge on the repeller when Nevic touched his arm and her voice gentled over the seacom.
“Reef ahead.” She was pointing to a mass of shadows looming in the half-light, jutting out of the depths.
Ahead lay a reef about eight meters below the surface. As they swam nearer, the object took on the detail of a gigantic coral formation.
“Maybe that’s the one the tender dragged the cage over,” Asher observed, brightly. They were probably miles farther out to sea than that, but it was a hope he wanted Yolanda to have. “We might be able to shelter near it and have a rest. Not deep enough to worry about decompression, and we’ve got…” he glanced at the diving computer on his wrist, “another two hours before our catalyzers saturate.”
An optimistic figure, considering the cold water, but with a choice between unconsciousness induced by hypothermia and the slashing jaws of their predatory entourage, Asher saw the coral formation as welcome shelter, possibly even a place to spend the rest of his life, however short.
They dived, a movement at least one shark saw as an invitation. It torpedoed in, body rolling over to expose its awesome teeth as it closed the distance. Asher parried the charging predator with a burst from the repeller shortly before they reached the strange formation. Once there, they worked their way slowly between the coral-encrusted towers of the reef.
“Careful now,” Asher warned. “This coral looks razor sharp. Let’s not put any blood in the water.”
The underwater reef proved an inviting refuge: bronze-brown, dotted with the openings to dark tunnels, to all appearances the skeleton of a long-dead colony of giant polyps. At least, Asher hoped they were dead.
Some of the openings were large enough for two divers to enter side-by-side, and Asher had to restrain Nevic from swimming directly in. He held her away from the nearest tunnel mouth, and took it upon himself to make the first, tentative exploration.
“Hold off a moment,” Asher said, again searching for his most confident tone. “We’d better make sure there’s nothing waiting inside for an easy meal. No use trading sharks for the Xiros equivalent of giant squid.” But it wasn’t squid he was worried about. Asher knew the feeding methods of terrestrial reef anemones, and the tenants of this huge formation might be capable of indulging in human flesh.
“There’s no danger, Ash. Safe here. I can feel it.”
“What the hell gives you that idea?”
“Not sure. Can’t you feel it?” Nevic asked.
He said nothing. But though he would not admit it, Asher too definitely felt the call. There was something in the water, something telling him he was safe, beyond the danger of the sharks, of hypothermia, even of death itself. It had been the same when he rode the damaged cage to the surface yesterday. Asher’s apprehension had dissolved, and despite his conviction that the tunnels were inhabited, he felt compelled to follow Nevic as she paddled unconcernedly deeper into the formation.
“Hey, wait up.”
They were about three meters inside when the tunnel began to radiate an eerie green light. Barely visible at first, it grew brighter as they moved deeper inside. Both Asher and Nevic stopped swimming to examine the walls, but when they did so the light dimmed until they were almost in darkness again. Then, Asher’s swim-fin touched a tunnel wall and a brilliant patch of green light appeared. If they paddled or moved in any way that disturbed the water, their light returned.
“Fluorescent growth,” Nevic confirmed. “Keep moving to light the way.”
And so they did, keeping close. Flipping to his back, Asher watched the way behind for a moment, but not a single shark seemed to have braved the castle walls. He had to admit it, he was feeling completely at ease, engulfed in an inexplicable euphoria. It would have been easy to become seduced by the sensation, to become careless, but for a diver, a single careless moment could mean death and often does. He tried to reassure himself that he could see the tunnel entrance, could lead the way back out again, but the fluorescence was showing many pathways behind them, and he was uncertain which one actually led back to the sea.
When Nevic gasped over the seacom, Asher turned back to see her silhouetted by a circle of lime-green radiance. To his regret, removing the camera from the sinking cage had not been among their priorities. His dive partner was swimming through the circle of light, and beyond that into a large, glowing cavern. The underwater cave before them was teeming with aquatic life. A strange and colorful variety of fish. There was no mistaking the ovoid outline and the peripheral fins: these were hydravids. But most here were much larger than the specimen Pete Stevenson had captured on the day of his death.
“Hell,” said Asher, “I didn’t see it before, but they look so much like sunfish.” Indeed, these lively hydravids bore a striking resemblance to giant Molidae of Earth’s Atlantic Ocean. But of course, this was not Earth and the Atlantic was light years away. A few, but not many hydravids sported prehensile arms extending from where a sunfish would normally have displayed pectoral fins. All appeared to have a minor limb or two, although most were held folded back against their bodies, for now.
“Beautiful,” Nevic observed. Asher agreed silently: the fish were shimmering with undulating, opalescent colors.
As if some command had been given, all of the smaller fish streamed into adjacent tunnels, leaving only twelve large dravids alone with Asher and Nevic in the chamber. These moved together, like bricks in a wall, and rhythmically fanned their transparent fins to hover in a diamond formation. Then the visible formation of dravids began to fade, until they were almost invisible, as if the fluorescence from the wall behind was glowing right through their bodies. The divers watched, fascinated by the magnificent creatures.
“We shouldn’t get caught up in sight seeing,” said Asher. He looked to Nevic, trying to gauge her condition in the cold water.
A sudden squeal of surprise from Nevic brought Asher’s attention back around to the hydravids. Images slowly formed on the skins of the fish, crude characters at first, but unmistakably written words. All together, the formation of hydravids had made themselves into a kind of living message board.
The words were in English.
“No fear,” the words began. “We know you. We hear your thoughts upon the waves.”
Asher made Nevic read the words to him. They matched what he saw, but that correspondence, the proof that he had not gone mad, was even more disturbing than he had bargained for. Asher looked behind him, almost hoping to see his body collapsed somewhere in hypothermia, bobbing against a ceiling of coral. But here he was instead, reading the side of a fish— of a collection of fish acting in concert.
“Our thoughts,” Asher said, then, holding his tongue he continued silently, “You can read our thoughts?”
“True,” confirmed the shimmering images. “But to answer in kind is dangerous. Bring you harm.”
“What?”
“The sharks beyond this place are not the only danger.”
“Are you threatening us?”
“Yes, and not,” answered the remarkable fish. “Can you feel it?”
Neither Asher nor Nevic knew what to make of the question, but as they waited for a change in the water, for a sound or a shift in temperature, instead they grew agitated, restless, even slightly ill. It was as if a rush of adrenaline had hit their veins. Then the alien entered, forcing thoughts unyielding and unsympathetic into the minds of the two divers. The closest human experience was forcible rape, but that was not at all the intention of the dravids, who continued to hover placidly before them.
“A touch only,” the piscine aliens explained through their remarkable pigmented images. “More and we could not answer for your lives. The others, the ones who have died: we reached out to them. Learned too late.”
“And Stevenson?” Asher asked, holding his pounding head between two hands. “Was that an accident too?”
“No,” they answered without hesitation, seeming to understand his concern exactly. “He had taken a child. We slew him, but could not free the child from the cage your kind made. Do you know of the young one’s fate?”
“Dead,” Asher answered cruelly. “As dead as Pete.”
“Pete would never have taken your child,” Nevic asserted, “had he known. How were we to know?”
“We have studied you to learn these words,” the sign flashed. As they watched, some of the dravids in formation were replaced by others who came from the tunnels in the coral, leading Asher to the thought that their efforts at communication were a tiring exercise.
“Have you no way to study us without killing?” the group completed their thought.
“We cared,” Asher said. Shame flavored his thoughts. “We cared about the species, not the one. One fish? What is one fish to us?”
“Should we say the same about you?”
“You killed a good man!” Asher said angrily.
“And our child? Are you so without reason? Are we so un-alike?”
“I don’t want revenge,” Asher thought to them, unknowing to which dravid he spoke, or if his thoughts could be heard by all dravids, everywhere. “I want to understand. How have you become this? What is it that you are? What do you want from us?”
“More than can be answered. We are a people. The sea obeys us, and yet we hide within. The stones tremble at our thoughts, and yet we take on the shape of stone, color of the sea, and motion of the sea grasses. For the sharks know us and all our tricks.”
“So, kill them,” Nevic chimed in.
“We do, when we must,” the dravids answered. “When and as we can, with stone, quake, and storm, but they fear no thought of ours, hear no thought of ours. Long ago they did, and once our heroes all but slew them.”
“They evolved,” Asher offered. To him the story seemed simple. “You were able to kill all but a few, correct? Those few, the ones that remained, had become immune to you. They passed on that immunity to their spawn, and the spawn after that.”
“True,” replied the dravids. “You are not without reason, after all! Perhaps some of your kind are immune as well. How foolish if we should repeat the same mistake.”
A chill ran down Asher’s spine. Had the colorful fish before him just implied their species’ ability to launch an assault against the entire colonial population of Xiros? Such a threat was nothing that could be resolved here. He and Nevic now had a duty beyond their own survival, to return and report at all costs.
“We wish no harm to you,” Asher assured them. “Misunderstandings between us can be resolved. The one I knew as Pete Stevenson would have wanted it that way. The others too.”
“We understand. Our child was over curious. It bore the weight of its own fate, as do we all.”
“Then, you will let us return? To speak of this?” Asher asked directly.
“If you are able,” the fish replied. “We can do little against the sharks beyond distracting them. We can make you feel as if you will succeed. We can make you feel safe. That is sometimes enough.”
Suddenly Asher understood the sensations of complete safety and self-confidence he had experienced, both yesterday in the cage, and today in approaching the reef. It was a survival trick of the dravids.
“We will plead your case to our kind,” Nevic assured them.
“In commerce, there is no need for pleading,” the dravids responded. “We have given you what you want and will give more. Our price will be the stars, the world above the sea. Our price may be the deaths of many sharks, or perhaps your repellers as defense against them You will record our history; give us all that the sea does not allow.”
“You want the repeller?” asked Asher.
Impulsively, Nevic had drifted close to the array of dravids, reaching out with an open hand to gently stroke the skin of the nearest specimen. The effect was instantaneous.
The compound screen of assembled fish vanished in rippling waves of kaleidoscopic color. Together, Nevic and Asher suffered sudden spasms of nausea, doubling over as rising migraines caught at them, headaches so severe they sent the world spinning sickeningly and uncontrollably about them.
“Oh, why the hell did you do that?” Asher asked over the seacom.
“It seemed like a good way to show them we were friendly,” Nevic gagged, struggling against the pain in her head and convulsions in her stomach.
The dialogue was broken. The rapport had ended too soon. Asher had a vague feeling that the dravids regretted their reaction, but they had already broken formation and streamed apart into separate tunnels in the walls and floor of the coral chamber. The fluorescent glow of the walls began to fade, and as the waters calmed, the divers’ nausea subsided.
“All right,” said Asher. “Let’s get out of this maze and find our way back home.”
A lone, immature dravid hung before them, stirring the dimming waters to preserve a faint illumination from the walls. When it knew it had their attention, it turned toward one of the upward slanting tunnels and slowly pushed away, looking back twice to see if they were smart enough to follow.
Nevic was first to recognize the nature of their guide and, orienting herself with the tunnel, began swimming toward the offered exit. Asher followed close behind.
They had yet to reach the outside of the reef when a shrieking began in Asher’s ears. He took several seconds to recognize the sound of the dive computer warning that his catalyzers were nearing saturation. He silenced the alarm and continued to follow Nevic’s fins. Yolanda’s alarm too went off shortly before they reached the open water. Once there, they glanced hurriedly about, ready to be frightened by any shadow, while looking for sharks. None were close. At their feet, their little guide turned and disappeared back into the reef.
Together, circling, always vigilant, Asher and Nevic rose cautiously to finally break through the wind-whipped surface into gray light beneath a leaden sky. The hurricane was closing in.
They swam for only a few minutes more before exhaustion made the decision for them. As expensive as it was, they decided to ditch their gear.
Nevic went first, unsnapping her harness and twisting clear of the webbing. Asher watched as the gear bobbed all too quickly away. A glance beneath the surface and his jaws clenched shut, for he saw a shark that had narrowly missed Nevic take her breathing gear instead in a blind rush.
He said nothing, but wrestled free of his own equipment, keeping the all-but-dead repeller unit ready in his hand.
Several more sharks passed, only to change direction and follow the first, vanishing in the gloomy water. Were the dravids making good on their promise of distraction?
Asher shut down the repeller unit. It had worked well, but he was not about to allow it to discharge needlessly.
Asher’s chronometer showed 15:07: an elapsed time of six hours, twenty minutes. At best, four hours of light remained. By now they had lost direction and were struggling amid foaming wave crests. Still, Asher felt in control. He was calm and ready to let fate see him safely home. Nevic too seemed beyond panic.
The realization that somewhere a colorful fish was making him feel that way left Asher confused but thankful. How different was this than a shot of morphine to help endure severe injury? Perhaps the dravids had some things to bargain with after all.
“Ash,” said Nevic. “I’m not sure I should be telling you this now. But with the way I’m feeling… and considering the circumstances and all.”
I love you too,” Asher said between stifling breaths of the salt sea air.
The wind-tossed ocean brought Asher’s nausea back with a vengeance. He now had two priorities: to vomit, and then to die in comfort. As the hours bore on, his sense of well-being began to erode, leading him to suspect their escort had either wearied of them or been the first to feel the bite of the sharks.
Death would be a blessing, anything to end the misery from his stomach. The coldness seeping into his body seemed immaterial. Nevic was asleep, only the inbuilt buoyancy of her suit keeping her afloat. Despite his agony, Asher kept his arms around her. She was only sleeping, wasn’t she? He tried for the pulse at her throat and she murmured as his hand pressed under the neck-seal of her diving hood.
Apart from the distant flickering of lightning, they were drifting in darkness. Asher could hear no thunder above the roaring sea-spray that showered his faceplate. By now his suit was losing more heat than his body could generate, and hypothermia had begun to steal away any mobility that remained. His limbs were like sodden planks. He must wake Yolanda soon, before she went into hypothermic shock.
The lightning flashed again, closer, yet still he heard no thunder.
Asher expected to be dead before morning, becoming either flotsam on the boiling ocean or the remnants of a shark’s nocturnal feast.
Nothing mattered any more. Lightning flashed in his eyes. He lost the mouthpiece of his snorkel. He screamed into the roaring elements.
“For the love of God! How much longer?”
The end came suddenly; a flash of lightning, longer and brighter than those before, then a wave broke over Asher’s head and he swallowed the ocean. Nevic’s unconscious body slipped from his arms and ghostly voices drifted on the roaring wind. A bright light, a penetrating white light, surrounded him, and then, oblivion.
“So you’re still with us, Ash,” said a female voice from somewhere nearby. Though a cool hand pressed against his forehead, he kept his eyes firmly closed to fight the rising nausea. He didn’t succeed for long. After releasing the contents of his stomach in a wretched series of convulsions, Asher opened watering eyes and tried to take in his surroundings.
“Good morning, Mister Asher.” This time it was a man’s voice, vaguely familiar.
Asher recognized the creaks and groans of the tender, the interior of the cabin that doubled for sick bay. He recognized one of the last people he would have expected to see: Gordon Hewitt. And standing nearby was the Admiral.
“You must have swallowed half the ocean, but you’re a tough nut,” said Hewitt. “Nine hours in the sea, in a hurricane, no less. We thought the tidal surge had done for you.”
Asher tried to speak, but gasped his first thoughts aloud, “Yolanda. I lost her out there!”
“No, no you didn’t,” Hewitt assured him. “She’s fine, and in better shape than you. Asleep in the captain’s cabin for the moment.”
“I’ve got to see her,” said Asher. He tried to rise but flopped drunkenly against the soft bedding. When he opened his eyes again a familiar shock of red hair hovered over his face; unmistakable blue-green eyes smiled down at him. Admiral Tricia Freeman’s warm hands cradled his head as he began to babble. “Admiral, this guy wants to put XOR out of business, he tried to bribe me.”
“It was probably a little more subtle than that,” the Admiral agreed, “but I get the idea. With the hurricane playing havoc and the sea quakes throwing reefs up out of the water, we’ll worry about that later. Do you think you and Nevic are the only ones who ran into a little trouble today? I’ll need all hands on deck for weeks before I care a damn for the evil in men’s hearts.”
“He wanted to sabotage the repellers!”
“And you can thrash him soundly as soon as you can stand,” Freeman assured him. “But we already have him on that.”
“I wasn’t trying to get anyone killed or anything,” Hewitt interrupted, guiltily. “The repellers were just over-charged.”
“The cells would have liquefied inside,” Asher observed. “No wonder.”
“Quite simple to arrange,” Freeman added. “Ferris eventually figured it out. The boy’s not as dumb as you think, Ash. Anyway, a metal filament across the appropriate tracks blew out the crucial IC, leaving the charger otherwise serviceable. We think a dockworker, or someone dressed as one could have done it. Eh, Mister Hewitt?”
“Look,” said Hewitt, “there’s no need for any of this wrangling any longer. Those quakes provided a miracle. A gift from the gods. There’s about ten square kilometers of new island now, right offshore. I don’t know how it happened, but… And the reefs! Popping above water everywhere you turn.”
“Reefs?” Asher asked, feeling a wet hollowness to his lungs as he coughed.
“Another bone of contention between Hewitt’s people and ours,” the Admiral explained. “It’s really the reefs that have the highest concentration of xirium. Even if they had kicked us off the island to get the space they needed, once we knew they were set on harvesting the reefs, all hell would have broken loose. Ecologically speaking.”
“Now, there are endless tons of the stuff above water, drying in the sun,” Hewitt gestured excitedly. “Of no use to anyone but Subaqua. We don’t even have to worry about the sharks.” He couldn’t stop himself from grinning.
“We could have been killed without those repellers,” Asher ground out his words between clenched teeth.
Hewitt spread his hands wide. “We were going to need those repellers too. To harvest the xirium in the reefs. I didn’t want to get you guys hurt. Asher, you were always going down in those frighteningly sturdy cages. I only needed the repellers delayed until we could win out over XOR. Hell, after that the next step in the plan was to bring your repellers online as quickly as possible. We needed to show that good old entrepreneurial spirit could do in days what the ecological bureaucracy couldn’t manage in months. No offense, Admiral.”
“None taken,” said Freeman, but without the graciousness of true forgiveness.
As Hewitt talked, Asher ceased to hear him. Something had been going round in his mind about the reefs showing above water. About the newly rising land that was extending the island. He interrupted forcefully.
“How much of the reef system is above water?”
“Oh, no way to tell just yet…”
“How much, damn you?”
“Easy, Asher.” It was the Admiral. Freeman pressed a wet towel to his forehead. “A lot.”
“Compared to the whole?” Asher insisted. “Compared to the planetary whole?”
“Oh,” The Admiral frowned as understanding dawned. “Well, Subaqua is excited, I’m sure, but it’s not an extinction event, Ash, if that’s what you’re worried about. I can’t give you numbers with the storm barely over, but maybe ten to fifteen percent of the local reefs were pushed up. The storm and the upheavals were all local, Ash. It’s a big planet. It was just our little corner took a whooping.”
“It was an opening bid,” Asher said bluntly.
Blank looks stared back at him. Hewitt snuffled and rubbed at his nose.
“The hydravids are making an offer,” Asher explained, the clarity of it painful in his head, as overwhelming as the storm had been. “Damn you, they’re not just fish!”
Neither the admiral nor the entrepreneur lost their incredulous expressions.
“They’ve figured it out,” Asher continued. “How to buy the one thing they don’t have: our technology. The advantages our evolution allows. Look, if you try to harvest those reefs without their permission, you’ll come up against the thing that killed Pete and the others. You’re going to have to bargain.”
“He’s right.” It was Yolanda Nevic. She was on her feet, but pale as she tried to navigate the rocking deck. “Asher’s exactly right. The hydravids evolved with the sharks. They can’t affect them any longer, only hide from them with their color tricks and in their castle reefs. But they’ll trade some of their xirium rich castles for our protection and our skills.”
“They’ve both gone out of their minds!” said Hewitt.
For her part, Admiral Freeman was more circumspect, carefully reserving judgment while allowing Hewitt free reign to attack the delusions of the diving pair.
“I wish I were,” Asher said, sitting up, though his head pounded and his stomach rebelled. His chest felt like a collection of crystal, badly shaken. “Someone has to be concerned about the ecology of this planet, and I think it’s me. I always harbored the illusion that when we found intelligent life it would be wise and in balance with its surroundings. Well, the only balance here is one enforced by evolution, and the hydravids will sell their own homes for a chance to turn that balance upside down. Hewitt, they may even appreciate the way you think more than any of my naïve ideas!”
“But if they’ve killed other humans, deliberately…” The Admiral let her words trail. She blew a puff of breath between her lips.
“All accidental, so they say,” Nevic explained. “Attempts to communicate, to touch our thoughts. I believe them, but even so, the next time may not be accidental.”
“There is power behind it,” Asher said with unshakable certainty. “The storm, the tectonic movement. They did these things. Demonstration is always more convincing than words. If you think Nevic and I are victims of some Xiros narcosis, all you have to do is come up on deck with us. Now!”
That sensation of safety and absolute surety was with him again, and Asher new, beyond all doubt, that hydravids were near.
Above decks the afternoon light waxed and waned beneath the passing storm clouds. Substantial swells still buffeted the tender. The deck heaved beneath the dark blue, with black edged clouds scudding in the quick breeze. No rain fell as Asher made his way to the port side with the Admiral, Hewitt, and Nevic in tow.
He looked down into the rising waves, the choppy, foam-capped crests that struck the tender like a long row of hammers. But even in the discordant waters, an iridescence was visible. Something was forming, just below.
“There!” Asher pointed as a matrix of brilliant colors coalesced beneath the uncertain waters. It was another living banner, illuminated by reflected daylight. Another display put on by the hydravids and no more than a dozen yards off the port side. Not much farther away, he spotted sharp fins, zigzagging, cutting through the restless water, and closing steadily. The hydravids were risking the sharks to do this.
ALL THE WORLDS OR NOTHING, said the banner of iridescent bodies. FOR BOTH OUR PEOPLES.
The words wavered, undulating with the rise and fall of the waves, then they were gone. The colorful banner dissolved into a collection of desperate individuals rushing toward the bottom and whatever camouflage they might find.
The sharks had arrived.
“It can’t be,” said Admiral Freeman dreamily. Her soft words were carried away by the wind even before the others heard them. She repeated herself to no better effect.
“A trick!” Hewitt declared loudly, but with more self-assurance than he felt. “It’s got to be a trick, eh Asher? But a good one.”
“But what does it mean?” Yolanda Nevic asked, drawing close to Asher. She put her arm around his waist. “All the worlds or nothing. An ultimatum?”
Asher steadied himself, partly against the railing and partly by accepting Nevic’s embrace. “An ultimatum? Maybe. Nine short words to sum it all up. Now that we are here, with our hands and our machines…our starships. Now they have someone to trade with. The hydravids can fuel those ships of ours like they’ve never been fueled before. It’ll bring all the worlds within reach of both our peoples.”
He looked to the horizon where vivid lances of sunlight were slanting between the scudding clouds.
“It’s a partnership, if we’ll have it. The universe and nothing less.”
