Tide of Stars

by Julia Ecklar

Illustration by Bob Eggteton

A stiff west wind punched at the balloon’s gondola from below. Rahel grabbed reflexively for the basket’s edge, forgetting for the moment that her intellect knew without doubt that the gondola couldn’t tip. It was an easy thing to forget this high up, with the wind shoving at her like an ill-trained dog and the night-dark water stretching from horizon to horizon so far below.

She closed her eyes on the glowing grids dancing across her retinas when the tactical display projected there tried to keep pace with the wild changes in her focus. Shutting out the display helped. Still, she waited for the gondola to steady before slipping a hand in front of the projection fiber and opening her eyes to reestablish her bearings.

The Odarkan Sea pooled in the darkness below them like a sheet of still, black metal. Rahel couldn’t even hear the lick and slap of gentle water movement, and the normally timid caress of this planet’s breezes wasn’t nearly enough to raise waves high enough to see from a couple hundred meters up. The only feature distinguishing this placid, land-bound sea from the sloughs around it was an ethereal thread of light stretching like sprinkles of stardust from the water’s black center toward where the mother ocean waited in the west.

Rahel realigned the overlay grid with the realtime planet surface, then double-blinked to freeze-frame the image. “Sector 23/26,” she said aloud. The computer picked out the individual jellyfish bodies among the long, glowing chain, and she counted them in rapid silence. “Medusae count: forty-two.”

Behind her, the click-tapping of pen on notebook screen told her that Paval still stood with his back against the gondola’s opposite rail, conscientiously keeping himself both out of her way, and out of the way of the pilot. “That brings our adult total to 115,” he reported softly. Rahel heard him log the number along with all the others.

As long as it makes him feel useful. She’d argued bitterly when Saiah informed her she’d have to take an apprentice on this assignment. Whoever the kid was, she’d maintained, he’d just get in the way. He’d be useless for running tests, because Rahel would have to explain every little thing to him instead of just taking the fast route and doing it herself. And he’d be bored doing nothing more than watching her collect samples and count slow-moving jellyfish. And he certainly wouldn’t learn anything, because Rahel didn’t intend to talk to him.

Saiah had a habit of listening to the opinions of everyone and their mother, though, then doing whatever he wanted. It was part of why he’d survived mentoring Rahel all those years before. “You pay ahead,” he’d told her simply. So on departure day she’d reported to the spaceport as usual, and found herself stuffed into a jumpship next to some young out-world Colonist with eyes as round and brown as a puppy’s, and a graceful lilt to his accent that would probably tell her exactly where he’d been raised if she cared enough to pay attention. It would be a long time before she forgave Saiah Innis for this.

“Even on a generous estimate,” Paval volunteered from behind her, “115 in our sample alone is a decline of nearly 62 percent since the census last year.”

Rahel didn’t comment, instead flicking the optic fiber away from her eye so that she could study the seascape below them without the computer grids interfering.

“That isn’t enough, is it?”

And here she’d set him the useless task of writing down the numbers because she thought it would keep him too busy to ask stupid questions.

She pulled the phone from her field vest pocket and punched the contact button with her thumb. “Nils?” She heard the other proctor pick up, so didn’t wait for him to acknowledge. “What’s your total?”

“I’ve just completed my last sector.” His voice over the comm unit sounded flat and thin against the background hissing of wind across his own phone’s mouthpiece. “I totaled in at 203 ”

“That brings us up to 318.”

Rahel knew the number even before Paval dutifully reported it.

“That isn’t enough.” This time the apprentice wasn’t asking her. And, no, it wasn’t enough.

Rahel turned away from the depressingly empty waters and lifted the phone to her ear again. “OK, bring it in,” she told Nils. Across the gondola from her, she could see Paval quietly close up his notebook and slip his pen into its slot. “We’ll pick up again in the morning, do another count tomorrow night.”

“What? You’re actually going to let us unpack and find our sleeping rooms?” Nils’s voice danced with feigned surprise. “But, Rahel, we’ve only been onplanet six hours! You must be getting soft in your old age.” She closed the phone and thrust it back into her pocket.

“Turn us about, then, ma’am?”

“Yes, Jynn.” She answered the pilot without really looking at him. He perched, comfortably casual, in the little swing seat half-way up the rigging. She could just make out the lighter patterns on his clothes in the weak moonlight, but couldn’t see the features of his black-as-black face at all.

“I can’t help but hear all this talk about the jellyfish, ma’am.” Jynn’s ropes creaked and swung as he adjusted the balloon’s engine to ease them back toward the resort. Rahel felt the balloon stutter faintly, but never heard the silent motor engage. “The jellies are going to be all right, aren’t they? Mr. Sadena called for Noah’s Ark in time, didn’t he?”

Paval turned his pale face up toward Jynn and opened his mouth as if to answer. Rahel spoke before her apprentice had a chance to form his first word. “That’s something we’ll have to take up with Mr. Sadena, Jynn.” She caught Paval’s eyes when he jerked a look at her, pointedly not letting him go. “Like Proctor Oberjen says, we’ve only been here six hours. We’ve still got a lot of questions to answer.”

Much to Rahel’s surprise, Paval only nodded mutely and turned to look out over the water. She could tell by the strength with which he gripped his hands together when he leaned across the rail that he didn’t agree with her decision to keep the details from the locals. But he’d listened to her, and done what she said without fighting. For a young man his age, that in itself was a miracle.

Maybe he wasn’t so stupid after all.

Even at night, the shoreline of the Odarkan Sea was a riot of organic activity. Fist-sized moths, their wings flashing whitely in the dim illumination, bumbled from treetop to tree-top, shore to shadow. Swamp lights licked brief, cold fire against knotted, moss-hung trunks while some slow, nocturnal herbivore splashed its way through the shallow waters. Two hundred meters higher up, Rahel wrinkled her nose against the sharply rotten smell that feathered up from the planteater’s footsteps.

The bugs down there must be awful, she reflected, watching the balloon’s shadow warp as it passed over the sleeping trees. She hoped they wouldn’t have to spend much ground time along the Odarkan coast. Tromping around in outbacks and jungles was one thing; tromping around in fetid, bug-choked sloughs was something else. Rahel had always been sanguine about being killed and quickly devoured by just about any predator she’d ever met. It was the process of being eaten one tiny nibble at a time that wore on her patience.

“If the flying is still making you dizzy, try focusing on objects that are farther away. They parallax more slowly and don’t disturb your eye.”

That, and having an apprentice.

“Don’t you have any background reading to do?” She wished she had some excuse to move over to the other side of the gondola.

“No, ma’am. I’ve already read everything pertinent to this safari that I could find.” He barely stood taller than her shoulder, but massed about the same, with the lean, broad-shouldered build that came on young men who’d spent much of their lives in physical labor. “There wasn’t much.”

Rahel found herself wondering, much against her will, where exactly he had come from, and what had drawn him to Noah’s Ark. “Well, call up some of my old stuff, then. It’ll save me from having to lecture you.”

“I did that before I came.” Paval angled a polite but meaningful look up at her. “There wasn’t much of that, either.”

Rahel allowed the boy a thin smile. “Is that a coward’s way of asking why I haven’t published my research?”

She was surprised by the chase of color up his pale cheeks. “It was an observation.”

“Well, damn fine observation.” She clapped him smartly on the back and earned a startled jerk of his shoulders in response. “Keep up the good work.” The next time Saiah Innis assigned her an apprentice, she was going to kill someone.

“Jynn.” Distracted briefly by the wall of darkness rising up from the approaching horizon, Rahel took one blind step backward before turning to face the balloon’s pilot. “When we get back to the hotel, can you set us down near our pachyderm so we can off-load our gear?”

She heard the shushing of the gondola’s ropes more than saw the pilot shake his head. “No, ma’am. I can set down on my assigned landing pad on top the hotel, but nowhere else. Them’s the rules.”

And, Rahel had to admit, Feles Sadena was laudably anal about enforcing his resort’s many rules. It was the only thing that had impressed her about him so far.

“The staff will have transferred your things to your suites by now, anyway, ma’am,” Jynn continued. A roar of flame and light suddenly painted his figure in shades of stark mahogany as he gassed the balloon upward a few more meters. Then he vanished again as mysteriously as he’d appeared. “With a full season staff and no guests to look after, it’s all any of us can do to keep busy. You’ll probably be getting top drawer service while you’re here.”

“We’re here because Uriel’s suffering a marine die-off Jynn. We won’t be doing much relaxing.”

“No, ma’am.” He sounded subdued, and sadder than she expected. “I guess not.”

A fragile thread of breeze met them at an angle, and Rahel turned to taste the salty freshness of its passage as Jynn tacked expertly across the wind’s light current. The second balloon, with Nils’s thin silhouette propped against the rail of its gondola like a leaned-over stick, slipped through the strait just ahead of theirs. Rahel watched it drift oceanward as silently as a dandelion puff before a tiny jet of light nudged it ever so slightly about and pointed it back in toward shore.

The walls of the strait draped shadow over Rahel’s swinging gondola when Jynn ducked them just as neatly between the coarsely wooded slopes. Clean, moving air replaced the stagnant bite of the margin sloughs, and the kiss of three dim, distant moons stitched trails of broken silver across the rippled surface of the open ocean. Rahel reminisced wistfully about the cries of diving ocean birds, the crash and sigh of tidal currents. Uriel’s tiny moons and greenhouse atmosphere had its disadvantages, as well as its pleasures, though—the people who came here paid for the temperate climates by giving up natural wildness and power. Which was perhaps just how they wanted it. Rahel found the end result charming, but rather dull.

The beach separating ocean from shore was narrow and mud-draped, as befitted a planet with no tropical storms or wave erosion to speak of. A long expanse of pale carbonate rock peeped out from a weep of gauzy fronds, following the shoreline as smoothly as a line drawn in the sand, while a glossy drizzle of seep water painted the outcrop’s face in trickling crystal. It wasn’t until Rahel glimpsed the unshielded white of their pachyderm on a high, wide ledge that she recognized this rock face as the frontispiece of the Startide Hotel. Then a weird mixture of guilt and anger coiled together inside her, and she scowled against the unwelcome taste..

Just like all of Sadena’s resorts, the Startide seemed to have grown out of the environment by its own volition. There were seven others just like it scattered all around Uriel’s surface —among the hushing grasses of the great northern plains, suspended from the tree trunks in the equatorial woodlands, clinging to the slopes of youthful mountains so tall that the snow on their creased brows created its own mini-climates. Rahel remembered reading all about Feles Sadena’s brilliant plans for this place when he first bought the planet. How he was going to minimize impact. How people would be able to come experience nature at its purest and best. How the planet’s unique environment would itself be the attraction, and therefore more precious than any manmade commodity Sadena could introduce.

Rahel had thought the man a schlockmeister from the very beginning. She hated it that Sadena’s only appreciation for what he had here was based on how much money it could bring him—hated it even more that no altruistic organization had ever succeeded in preserving an environment so thoroughly or so well. When Feles Sadena finally closed up his enterprise a hundred or so years from now, nothing on Uriel would be different for him having been here.

Well, almost nothing. Rahel thought about the stellar jellyfish, and couldn’t silence a brusque, ironic sigh. It seemed both fitting and somehow hopelessly tragic that the first casualty of Sadena’s hubris should be the very species of coelenterate that kept the Startide Hotel full of tourists.

Hot wind roared out their balloon’s out-gassing vent, and their gondola dropped with a barely perceptible lurch. Rahel clenched her hands, panic tight, around the rail. It wasn’t the height, she decided grumpily, it was the goddamned unsteady flight patterns she hated so much about these balloons. Maybe something resembling outdoor lighting on the roof of the hotel would prop up her confidence about landing, at least. She suspected nothing would alleviate the roiling in her stomach whenever a gust rocked the gondola and showed her ocean when she should have been looking at sky. If only because of the modes of transportation, this was going to be one very long safari.

“What the—?”

Jynn’s startled shout was his only warning before a blast of light lashed and curled through the humid darkness around them. Rahel ducked away from the flame, throwing out one arm to corral Paval against the railing when he turned to do the same. Below them, movement seethed across the hotel’s flat stone roof, an amorphous creature of shadows and angry voices. Then the gas driven upward by Jynn’s flame swelled the sinking balloon and stopped its descent as surely as if the craft had hit the end of some invisible tether. Rahel pushed herself upright and leaned to look over the railing.

“They’re all over my landing pad!” Jynn complained, fighting with the balloon’s controls. His straps and harnesses squeaked and jangled.

Rahel blinked hard through the renewed darkness. Shapes refused to define and let themselves be identified, but the braided stream of questions and netlink IDs sketched out clearly enough what was going on below. “Ah, shit…”

“What?” Paval appeared beside her, leaning so far out of the gondola that she had to quell an urge to grab him by the belt and haul him back in. Even from her more judicious position, Rahel saw the earnest frown that knotted his dark brows. “Who are they?”

As if Nils had heard them from a whole other balloon away, the phone in Rahel’s pocket chirped. She dug it out with an irritable sigh.

“Oh, please,” Nils groaned the moment she opened the contact. “Please tell me those aren’t what I think they are.”

Rahel scowled down at the mass of shouting people. The first waspish whiz of remote antigravs joined the babbling voices. “Well, they aren’t bellhops.”

“They’re reporters!” Paval, still folded nearly double over the gondola’s rail, had to jerk himself upright to avoid colliding with one of the fistsized minicams. It buzzed into position an arm’s length from him and activated its seeker light.

“Reporters?” Jynn had finally succeeded in hovering them just a little farther above the crowd than stones could easily be thrown. He obviously hadn’t counted on self-guided spybees.

“Either that or a Noah’s Ark fan club.” Paval swatted at two other whining remotes, to no avail. “How did they know we’d be here?”

Rahel barked a laugh, the phone resting against her shoulder. “Are you kidding? Reporters invented snitches. They can find out everywhere we go.” Although why they’d chosen here out of all the active Ark contracts was as much a mystery as anything the press did.

“Perhaps they’re here to help us.”

Rahel couldn’t help laughing at the sincerity of her apprentice’s suggestion. “You really are new to this, aren’t you?” She picked up the phone again without waiting for Paval to answer. “Nils, hit your lights. I want to get a good look at them.”

Almost immediately, a fat finger of light dashed through the darkness to splash against the roof of the hotel. Rahel felt their gondola tip gently as Paval leaned over one section of railing to activate their own powerful lamps. The crowd on the roof recoiled from the light as though they’d been doused with water, then poured back across the open landing area the moment they realized there was no danger. Their swarm of little remote bees echoed their movement.

Rachel cocked a look at Jynn. “Take us down a little closer.”

The pilot sighed unhappily, but out-gassed the balloon with a barely perceptible hiss.

There weren’t as many reporters on the pad as Rahel had first envisioned. A couple dozen, maybe, with that many again in hotel personnel trying to ring around them and keep them together—as if there were still guests in the resort who might be bothered by the shouting. The amoeboid gathering was the usual motley collection of suits, notepads, and budget-cloned faces. What did the netlinks do to get so many different representatives who all looked almost exactly alike? Rahel used to think they were all VR sims from the same length of flatscreen footage. She wasn’t sure it was worth trading her enlightenment on that point for proof as graphic as what shouted at her from below.

Crossing her arms, Rahel leaned her elbows on the rail and peered down at the jostling reporters. “You know,” she called, making a try at sounding amiable, “I could probably spit on you from here.”

An impassioned plea for attention surged through the gathering, as if her words had been the sweetest encouragement to each and every one of them. Rahel caught a few broken question fragments and a confusion of overlapping accusations, but nothing that sounded like she wanted to answer it. When a voice finally sorted itself from the general tumult, it was from a tall, brown-skinned man at the very edges of the knot.

“Proctor! I’m Cek Lencel, Instant News Service!” He tried to push past the chain of hotel security, squinting up at the balloon with one hand over his eyes. “Why is Noah’s Ark involving itself with a management problem on a planet owned by someone other than the Ark?”

Rahel opted not to dim the floods. “Why do you care?”

Lencel tipped his head in surprise. “The news netlinks care about everything.”

Yeah, right.

That comment somehow invited another eruption of shouted questions, and Rahel had to straighten up off her elbows to bellow loud enough to be heard over the noise. “Yes, Feles Sadena owns this planet. But Ark policy doesn’t limit us to trouble-shooting only in Ark habitats. If the private sector needs our engineering and research services to help manage any native environment, Noah’s Ark doesn’t think granting them that help is inappropriate.”

“Nicely said,” Nils purred approvingly across the open phone line. Just as well—it was the only piece of Noah’s Ark PR she knew by rote.

“Valhanryn Esz, Tomorrow Today. ” This time it was a woman, too bunched up against the mass of hotel folk to be picked out of the chaos. “Does that mean Noah’s Ark isn’t accepting any fiduciary compensation for your appearance here?”

“I guess it always comes down to that,” Paval remarked, quietly enough to reach Rahel’s ears but not the reporters’. He may have been an unasked for burden, but at least he caught on fast.

“That’s what I hate about you netlink guys,” Rahel answered the reporter. It took more control than she expected to keep from dropping things down onto their thick, news-gathering skulls. “No matter what I say, you’re going to make it mean whatever you want it to.”

Esz nodded blandly and buzzed her minicam closer. “So you are being paid.”

“Rahel…” Nils’s voice squeaked from the phone waiting down near her waist, “I think I should attack this subject.”

But she’d already told them, “Yes,” as flatly and noncombatively as she could. They all bent to their respective recording devices before she even started her second sentence. “Mr. Sadena is paying Noah’s Ark a consulting fee commensurate with what we’ve been paid elsewhere for similar environmental impact studies.”

“So it is not uncommon for Noah’s Ark to produce planetary reports to the specifications of private buyers?” She couldn’t even tell which bozo came up with that one.

Rahel smacked a hovering spybee away from her face. “Who told you that?”

“Well, you are accepting a great deal of money from Feles Sadena to produce a report for Feles Sadena, aren’t you?”

“The company I work for is accepting the money.” The act of sounding so gracious and patient made her teeth hurt.

“Oh, and that couldn’t possibly have any effect on how you choose to interpret the data you collect?”

She clenched her hands around the open phone. “It never has before.”

Nils groaned through the phone channel into her palm.

“Will you be working directly from Mr. Sadena’s samples and records?”

“Who will you be reporting to?”

Rahel gave up trying to sort out the voices from the crowd. “We’ll be conducting our own research—privately—and reporting back to both Mr. Sadena and the Ark as information becomes available.”

“Then will Mr. Sadena be deciding in which locations you’ll focus your search?”

She shrugged. “Why should he?”

“He has some pretty strong incentive to prove he isn’t destroying Uriel’s jellyfish, doesn’t he?”

“Look…” Rahel slapped at another roving minicam, missed, then nodded a terse thanks to Paval when he used the offline notebook to whack it out of the air. “Whatever Feles Sadena’s reasons for calling Noah’s Ark to Uriel, they don’t change the fact that our reason for being here is—”

“Monetary.” Someone different—a woman with the raw, unpolished look of a professional believer —pushed forward from the outermost edges of the crowd.

Rahel bounced the flat of one hand against the railing. “It’s not!” She already hated the young woman’s coolly crossed arms and well-cut green suit.

The reporter’s short-short hair flashed like polished silver when she shrugged. “You said Sadena’s paying you.”

“That isn’t the point.”

“That’s entirely the point.” She stalked to stand directly beneath the balloon, and Rahel suddenly realized from the ripple of attention that followed her that everyone else was eager to lap up whatever blood this young woman could draw. “As long as you’re making a profit off your so-called scientific interests, proctor, you’ve got no right to stand here and claim you’re any different than this tourist trap. Both of you exploit some aspect of Nature for your own purposes.”

Rahel wished she were on the ground, face-to-face with this self-appointed moralist, or at least in range to grab and shake her pressed lapels. “What’s your name?”

The reporter cocked her chin up with easy pride. “Eme Keim.”

“From GreeNet,” Rahel finished for her, and Keim’s only answer was a twist of her mouth that didn’t resolve into any particular expression. Rahel allowed herself a derisive snort. “Well, guess what, Eme Keim? Science takes money. Do you think Noah’s Ark can just clone credit, the way we do the animals?”

“Rahel…” Nils’s warning trickled up like smoke through the still-open communications line.

“If we had endowments from every planet in the goddammed sector, we still couldn’t pay for the time—”

“Rahel!”

“—The food, the resources, the land—”

“Rahel!”

The bark of his voice leaping the distance between balloons caught her attention, and Rahel jerked an angry glare across the dark at Nils. He scowled back, just as fiercely, as though trying to mentally convey some message through the sheer force of his stare. Rahel clapped shut the phone in her hand in petulant dismissal.

If the gesture meant anything at all to Nils, he ignored it. Slipping his own phone into a pocket, he leaned over the edge of his gondola to address the reporters. “Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen.” The group as a whole inclined heads to peer at him, and Nils smiled coolly. “I’m Proctor Nils Ob-erjen, Proctor Tovin’s associate and counsel. I would be more than happy to explain the public particulars of Noah’s Ark’s contract with Mr. Sadena to you, but not from up here. I have traveled twenty-seven light-years, spent two days in a jumpship with my colleagues, and have neither bathed nor eaten since arriving on Uriel. If you’d like to have your curiosity satisfied, kindly let us set down and tend to our creature needs first. Perhaps we can talk in the morning.”

“No.”

Nils twitched upright as though he’d been poked in the ass. Rahel would have given anything to have a clearer view of his face just then. Maybe this would teach him to trot out his juristic bullshit for the media.

“You’re not the only one to spend a lot of time and money getting here,” Valhanryn Esz told him prissily. “We’ve been standing in the cold for four hours, waiting for you to get back from your sightseeing. Now, you’re either going to answer a couple of questions, or you’re not putting down.” Her colleagues hooted and whistled their support, and she glanced around her with obvious pleasure. “That’s the deal,” she said at last to Nils. “And I’m afraid it’s not negotiable.”

Rahel snorted, and the reporters all glanced up at her as though they’d forgotten her presence. “I’ve done barter with the mazhet,” she told them, scowling. “Everything’s negotiable.” She nodded brusquely back at Jynn. “Set us down.”

The pilot’s eyes flashed white in the darkness. “Ma’am?”

“I said set us down.” Rahel grinned maliciously over the railing at the unsettled crowd below. “The only thing netlink parasites care about more than their headline grabbing is themselves. They’ll move.”

Jynn reached uncertainly for the descent controls above his shoulder. “And what if they don’t?”

“They’ll move.”

The first blast of outrushing gas gained a haphazard rumble of surly protest from below, then a more directed cry of alarm when the first reporter realized the balloon was descending rather than going away. People and spybees scattered from beneath the gondola like pigeons. Rahel heard Nils moaning something about “reckless endangerment” and “litigious barbarians,” but she had learned long ago not to take his displays of anxiety too seriously. By the time their gondola bumped to rest on the smooth pavement, only Keim still stood close enough to clap hands on the rail and nod thoughtfully.

“Force.” The GreeNet envoy very pointedly held her ground while Rahel swung one leg over the railing and started to climb down. “Very environmental. Very subtle.”

“You’ve probably heard…” Rahel turned to accept the pack of field equipment Paval passed down to her. “Subtlety isn’t my strong suit.” Her apprentice followed her in silence, avoiding eye contact with the reporters in a way that could have meant either great annoyance or embarrassment. Rahel couldn’t tell which, but suspected both were as likely.

“If I were you,” Keim suggested, “I’d work on the subtlety thing. You could have killed somebody here.”

Rahel smiled and shouldered her pack with a shrug. “You’re not part of the native environment. Why should I care?”

The Newborn robot who staffed the main lobby crouched behind the desk like a blue and silver crab. Rahel guessed it as an old construction mech, judging from the collection of arms and spare arm sockets bristling from its stumpy body. Probably a foreman or it never would have developed enough awareness to petition the courts for sentient status. Someone had done a bang-up job refitting its chassis to match the Startide’s glass and aquamarine decor, even down to replacing the lenses in its optics with varying shades of blue and turquoise crystal. The hotel designers had even granted the Newborn a certain sense of freedom by hiding its necessary monofilament track in the sweeping kelp-frond pattern of the white-and-green tile floor.

There was obviously something for everyone at the Startide Hotel—whether you were human or not.

“Well,” Rahel stopped just inside the landing pad doorway and dropped her luggage with a sigh. “I guess no one can fault Sadena for accommodating non-human personnel.”

Paval glanced up from setting down his own small roll of luggage, turning a look over one shoulder to note the Newborn at its slightly-too-short registration desk. “I wonder how well he treats his human personnel.” Then, seeming suddenly to realize how impolite that sounded, he pushed their field pack together with their gear and volunteered curtly, “I’ll go get the keys,” before Rahel could say anything to reprimand him.

Not that she’d intended to. She watched him cross the spacious lobby at a brisk trot, and wondered if Saiah had forced an apprentice on her because he thought it would be just like having another puppy. If only apprentices had such short childhoods and were so easily trained.

“Thank you so much for waiting to make sure the media didn’t rend me limb from limb.” Nils came up on her from behind, his footsteps characteristically unhurried even though he carried nothing but a pocket notebook and a single overnight valise. “Really—thank you.”

Rahel glanced back to find him completely unscathed, his valise balanced neatly atop Rahel’s equipment pack. “A lawyer as slick as you, Nils? I thought that was why the Ark sent you.”

“And with your skills at client relations, Rahel, it’s a wonder they even considered me.”

Not in the mood for Nils’s verbal sparring, Rahel leaned back against a nearby pillar and watched the fish in one of the self-sustaining tank colonies. They looked as confused and unhappy with their artificial surroundings as she.

“Anyone up for dinner in the Galaxy Ballroom?”

She looked up as Paval approached, and Nils lifted red-gold eyebrows with interest. “Are you paying?” the lawyer asked.

Smiling, Paval handed Rahel her flat plastic key with one hand, offering a similar card to Nils with his other. “I don’t think anyone working for the Ark makes enough money to afford it.” He fished in a front pocket of his field vest and withdrew a crumpled square of paper between two fingers. “Huan gave me this when I picked up the keys.”

“Huan?” Rahel twitched the paper away from her apprentice, just out from under Nils’s reaching hand. Nils returned his hand to the top of his suitcase with quiet aplomb, too well-bred to bicker.

“The Newborn running the front desk.” Paval retrieved his own bag and shrugged it over one shoulder. “He’s our concierge and guest liaison while we’re here.”

Must be easy to lavish attention on hired researchers when the rest of your resort is shut down. Rahel spread the paper flat with one hand, and didn’t even object when Nils leaned over her arm to look at it with her.

My apologies for the disturbance upon your arrival this evening.

Please help yourself to any dinner on our menu with my compliments. I will be honored to join you at my earliest convenience.

F.S.

“We’ve each been given a private suite, too,” Paval went on when Rahel grunted and pushed the note aside to Nils. “Huan said if we need anything, all we have to do is let him know. This place has everything!”

Which Rahel suspected was rather the point.

“I think I need a swordfish steak and at least a half a bottle of good Terran wine.” Nils picked up his valise and looked speculatively from side to side. “Not to mention a bellhop to take our things to our rooms so we don’t have to be bothered.”

Rahel stooped with a disgusted snort, sweeping up her bag and her field pack one in each hand. “I think you guys need to remember what we’re here for.” She glowered at both of them, but only Paval had the grace to look subdued. “Not only is Feles Sadena probably responsible for the very disaster we’re trying to avert here, but running up expense tabs with big rooms and fancy food isn’t why Noah’s Ark hires out its services to private sectors. Or weren’t you listening to all that yelling a minute ago?”

Nils made a face at her, waving Paval into silence when the apprentice opened his mouth as though to defend them. “The boy and I are quite aware that we aren’t on Uriel to enjoy ourselves. But does that make it wrong to take a little pleasure when it’s offered?”

“I’m sure that’s what everybody who comes here says.” Rahel turned away from them with a scowl and a dismissive shake of her head. “I just think maybe you ought to consider what made them have to call us here in the first place. That’s all.”

Rahel’s suite took up half the sixteenth floor. It smelled of sea sand and hyacinth. She dropped her luggage, then danced a few steps forward when the door tried to slide shut on top of her. The instant it hissed into its frame, she wished she could duck back outside again.

She didn’t want to stay in a place like this, a place where live sea plants were confined to water-filled cylinders all for the sake of decoration. A place where nudibranchs and Aequorea were depicted as often in the fiimiture carvings and artwork as any native Uriel species. What Sadena advertised throughout the Galaxy as an homage to the natural world was a sham, constructed to look and sound and feel the way wealthy tourists expected it to, not the way nature really designed it. Just like the Startide’s carefully downplayed frontispiece, and the spectactular robotic arthropod running the desk in the lobby.

Kicking her luggage to the foot of the bed, Rahel walked slowly across the opulent sleeping area, past the coffee table with its tangle of blooming plants, and tapped a hand against the floor-to-ceiling window that made up the suite’s outside wall. Whether honestly or through some trickery of remote projection, she was rewarded with a stark, nighttime vista built all of ocean, starlight, and in-rolling clouds. Already the farthest strip of sky looked like nothing but a blurry black smear where encroaching weather smothered the horizon line and smudged out the stars.

Held up against the manic complexity of Sadena’s elaborate hotel, Uriel reminded Rahel of a chicken’s egg subjected to comparison with its brighter, augmented Faberge cousin. It didn’t reassure her that the one humans would pay millions of credits to preserve was not the one still containing all the subtle chemistries necessary to create life. Somehow, work done by human hands always impressed the masses more than anything done by nature, even when man was only copying what he’d already seen. That’s why Uriel needed a series of resorts in the first place—to make sure her natural splendors weren’t “wasted” on her own non-sentient inhabitants.

And Saiah wonders why I hate these jobs.

No, come to think of it, he probably doesn’t.

The bathroom was dressed all in polished coral—taken from the oceans back home on Terra, no doubt, since Sadena found Uriel’s environment far more valuable intact that it could ever be piecemeal—and the bed was a floppy monstrosity of water and pre-warmed silk. Sweeping off the shimmering turquoise comforter, Rahel stripped both pillows of their shams and carried the bundle to the sitting area and the big clear outside window.

One end of the window, captured behind a length of velvet sofa, slid open almost as wide as Rahel’s hand—enough to let in a maddening whisper of ocean-fresh air, but not enough to let any heartbroken fool fling himself out onto the driveway. Just as well. It would have been awkward to explain how she ended up in the front lawn planters if she happened to roll over in her sleep during the night.

Stuffing both pillows and comforter onto the floor beside that crack, Rahel climbed down the immovable sofa and wrapped herself awkwardly in the shiny, slippery turquoise blob. The oceans on Uriel may have been quiet and shy, but at least she could fall asleep to their voiceless rhythms, not to the manmade silence of facile creature comforts and white, confining walls.

The next morning arrived in a haze of humid confusion. Rahel passed her flippers from one hand to the other in an attempt to get a grip on the equipment pack sliding off her shoulder, but still ended up trotting down the last of the Startide’s front steps with the pack swinging heavily from her elbow. Behind her, curses and complaints ricocheted within the wall of reporters that hotel security manfully pressed back toward the edge of the staircase. Rahel tossed the guards a mental thanks for their efforts, but didn’t slow down to actually say anything. She didn’t have time.

Rahel hated being late. There was nothing deep and psychological about it as far as she was concerned, just simple annoyance for the loss of time mixed with some self-flagellation for being too stupid to pay attention to the time. The morning spent studying details of the stellar jelly lifecycle of eggs, larvae, and breeding stalks had seemed like such a good idea when she’d sat down to it at dawn. Now—her mind sloshing about with data on spermatozoa, hydroids, and single-celled offspring —she wondered if she wouldn’t have done better to sit down here on the docks to do her reading. At least then Paval would be the one feeling foolish as he hurried to join her, and not the other way around. She shrugged her pack up over her shoulder again, and resisted the urge to break into a trot when she reached the dock at the bottom of the stairs.

Paval jerked a look back at her when the vibration of her footsteps reached him, and Rahel was surprised by the eager hope that flashed in his nervous smile. Maybe the slim, bald pilot hovering at his side was getting too friendly for Paval’s comfort. Rahel had no idea what kind of cultural taboos the boy labored under. Early morning crankiness made her toy with the idea of slowing her stride (just to see what would happen), but she resisted in favor of finding something more constructive to do with her mood. When Paval abruptly disengaged the pilot to hurry toward the skate at the end of the pier, Rahel was just as glad she hadn’t dawdled—the face that turned to watch her approach didn’t belong to a bald skate pilot after all, but, rather, to netlink ferret Eme Keim, with her androgynous clothing and too short blonde hair. The pilot, apparently, was the steel-and-teflon robot bolted to the skate’s navigation console. Rahel suddenly wasn’t sure what to expect from this morning expedition, and that spurt of uncertainty made her stomach burn.

“Proctor Tovin.” Keim said it half as greeting, half as identification as Rahel walked into easy speaking distance.

Rahel passed her by without slowing down. “Some reporter you are. What were you doing talking to him?” She waved at where Paval fidgeted with one leg already in the waiting skate. “He doesn’t know shit.”

“I’d assumed as much.” Keim fell into step behind her, unperturbed. “Mostly, I was waiting for you.”

“I don’t know shit, either.” Rahel tossed her pack at Paval. “Talk to me tomorrow.”

“I don’t know that I’ll be able to get permission again tomorrow.”

Rahel paused, one hand still on the dock piling, and turned slowly to cock a suspicious look at Keim. “Permission?” Behind her, Paval groaned.

“I know you won’t believe it, but this wasn’t even my idea.” Coming a few leisurely steps closer, Keim presented a folded slip of paper. “The memo I got this morning said I should give you this if you made trouble.”

Rahel plucked the note away from her without shifting her scowl from Keim’s pert little smile. The faintest tickle of pleasant sweetness danced counterpoint to the smell of ocean when she spread the note open against her palm. The scent dissipated before she could identify what it was supposed to remind her of.

Feles Sadena’s already-familiar script decorated the paper with hairlike grace.

Proctor Tovin—

Forgive my presumption in arranging this interview with Ms. Keim. I have paid generously for your presence on my planet, however, and so I feel I have some liberty in interpreting the particulars of your duties here.

I would very much like to see at least one of the netlink services produce a truthful report of our efforts on behalf of the stellar jellyfish. With that in mind, Ms. Keim of GreeNet has been granted permission to accompany you on today’s expedition. You do not, of course, have to answer everything she chooses to ask you, but I needn’t remind you of the benefits of positive publicity.

Thank you for your cooperation in this.

F.S.

Cooperation. He obviously didn’t know her very well.

“She showed me that, too.”

Rahel hadn’t even heard Paval move up behind her, and so shot him a sharper look than she’d really intended.

His attention, however, was focused on Keim. “Do we really have to bring her with us?” he asked quietly.

Rahel shrugged. “Did Sadena say anything about this during dinner last night?”

“He never even came to dinner last night.” She couldn’t tell if Paval’s disgust was aimed at Sadena or the reporter.

“Well, then…” Rahel made no effort to keep her own voice down, “we could always push her off the pier.”

“And she’d write all about it in her netlink upload tonight.” Keim returned Rahel’s glower with an angelic grin. A Greenie, Rahel reminded herself, and a smartass.

“Remember that skinny little redhead who came in with us?” Rahel rolled Sadena’s note into a ball between both palms. “Well, we brought him along to talk to people just like you. Why don’t you go bother him?”

“Because I’d rather talk to the people who are doing the real work,” Keim told her, stepping down into the skate beside them. The boat listed drunkenly under her added ballast, and Paval scooted hurriedly to the other side to try to even them out. “Not to the people with the pre-prepared answers who were sent to stonewall the people like me.”

As much as Nils would have accused her of not understanding politics, Rahel had to admit that she knew enough to know that pissing off both the Ark’s employer and a major netlink news correspondent in one fell swoop wasn’t a very good idea. She just wished she could shake the feeling that Nils would have found some incredibly smooth way to convince Keim she’d rather count sea gulls from the docks. She jerked loose the closest tie-off, and turned away from the reporter with a growl.

“You got extra UV block?”

Paval looked up from strapping on his flippers with sharper, shorter motions than really necessary. “Me?”

“You?” Rahel parroted, not in the mood for anyone else’s ill temper but her own. “The man without a molecule of melanin in his dermis.”

He pursed his lips and bent back to his equipment. “I’m already covered up.” This despite the fact that his cheekbones and nose already looked pinkish above the bright yellow-and-black Ark skinsuit. Or maybe that was just a trick of the strong greenhouse sun.

“Not for you—” The skate’s antigravs cut in with a kick, and their rise to a meter above the water made Rahel catch at Paval’s shoulder when she leaned over him to jerk his pack out from under his seat, “—for her.” She found a tube of UV screen jammed under a clutter of sampling vials and a flimsy on skinsuit prep. “If she sunburns while she’s out here, she’ll probably blame that on Noah’s Ark, too.”

Rahel turned to find Keim sitting awkwardly on the floor of the skate. It soothed her irritation a little to see the faint startlement in the reporter’s eyes as the skate crept silently up to speed. She held the UV block in front of Keim’s face, then sighed when the reporter didn’t immediately reach for it.

“You’ve got less than thirty minutes before me and my partner dive overboard and start getting down to that ‘real’ work you mentioned.” Rahel caught at Keim’s wrist and unceremoniously clapped her hand around the UV tube. “So if I was you, Ms. Keim, I’d start talking.”

Sunlight, bright as fire on glass, exploded across the water around them as the skate slipped northward out from under the shoreline shadow. Rahel squinted despite her sun visor, and heard Keim groan against the sudden intensity before Paval relinquished his own eye protection—for the sake of the Ark’s reputation, no doubt. She wished now that she’d thought to bring along extra visors, and couldn’t help burning with renewed annoyance at the reporter. Then they passed out of the shallows and the skate leapt into speed, leaving hotel, reporters, and frustrating hindsight doubts all behind.

Rahel hadn’t expected the hush of the skate’s low-friction sprint. She gripped the edges of her seat even though they streaked toward the Odarkan straits in a smooth, unnatural rush—no bobbing with the windy chop, no needle stings of water against her face or the exposed backs of her hands. The only wake behind them was a dotted trail of foam divots where wave crests were brave enough to brush at the stern of the boat as it raced by.

Rock clambered up from the water on either side, rising high and fast to build the ragged straits that marked the entrance to the Odarkan Sea. At the stately drift of a hot-air balloon, the throat of stone leading into the Odarkan had seemed long, and wild, and elegant. Now, it tore past too quickly to register as anything but a sketchy frame for the view of dawn-bleached mist and distant woodland. Then the fleeting sense of confinement whisked away, and the only thing Rahel could see besides the hectares of sun-splashed water was the smudge of border trees with their false rootwork of blurry swamp reflections.

“You’ve got to be making this up.” Rahel tore her gaze away from the slough’s bleak grandeur, and sighed. Keim had actually been quiet for nearly two minutes now, paging back and forth through screen after screen of scribbled notes. Rahel had rather hoped the reporter’s silence meant she couldn’t think of any more annoying questions. So much for that.

“You think I have nothing better to do than make up stories for gullible netlink Greens?” Rahel asked her, turning forward in her seat. At the front of the skate, their boxoid pilot remained fixed and unmoving as it manipulated the boat’s many controls in eerie machine silence. Paval, sitting one seat behind the pilot’s position, swore that the steel-grey construct was a Newborn. Rahel hadn’t bothered to crawl forward far enough to read the designation on its Robot Identification tag. “I can’t believe your net sent you out to report on something you obviously know nothing about,” she continued to Keim.

“I know enough,” Keim said firmly, not looking up from her notes, “to know that stellar jellyfish do not come from coral.”

Rahel growled and tugged at her forelock while Paval stated in a slow, loud voice, “Nobody said they did come from coral.”

“Stellar jellyfish make eggs.” Rahel bent forward to lean her elbows on her knees, ticking off elements of the life-cycle within a few centimeters of Keim’s humorless scowl. “The eggs hatch into larvae, which swim around until they find some nice rock to latch onto. Once they attach, they grow into polyps—”

Keim flipped her notebook and stabbed at an entry. “Which is a type of coral!”

“Which is like coral!” Paval corrected, and Rahel grumped over him, “Sort of!” before Keim could take that as some kind of justification for whatever she’d written. “After the polyps have been around for a while, they start shedding single-celled ephyrae, which eventually grow into adult jellyfish. This is such an effective system that it’s existed essentially unchanged for about 600 million years both here and on Earth. It’s partly because we’ve never had a chance to study such perfect parallel evolution in such a high-level organism that the Ark was interested in taking this job.” Keim flicked a look at her over the top of the notebook. “Jellyfish are a high-level organism?”

Rahel shrugged. “Compared to slime molds, they are.”

“So does Mr. Sadena know that Noah’s Ark has ulterior motives for being on Uriel?”

Rahel fought down a prickle of annoyance even as she saw Paval jerk his head up sharply in the seat behind Keim. “Not ulterior. Just more complex, maybe.”

“So you acknowledge that the wellbeing of the stellar jellyfish population may not be Mr. Sadena’s primary interest in engaging Noah’s Ark.”

This time it was clearly a statement. Rahel clenched her hands together into a fist.

“I can only tell you why I’m here, Ms. Keim,” Rahel answered stiffly. “If you want to know what Mr. Sadena is thinking, you’d be better off taking it up with him.” Nils would have been so proud.

“Oh, come on.” Keim dropped her notebook against her knees with a clack! “Are you actually going to look me in the face and tell me you don’t care why he really brought you in?”

What a stupid question. As if Rahel’s caring could change one damn thing the man had done to this planet. As if Sadena’s dissembling could change how much she cared even so. “I don’t care,” she told Keim simply. It wasn’t exactly the first time she’d lied to the press.

Keim made some mark in her notebook, face calm but cheeks faintly red. “Don’t care that Feles Sadena is using Noah’s Ark to whitewash his poor management of this ecology?” she asked in studied sincerity. “Or don’t care that even GreeNet doesn’t believe you’ll be allowed to tell the truth in your report, much less accomplish anything with it?”

Something about the way Keim waited with her stylus poised above the screen as though expecting some sort of straight answer made Rahel smile. “Let me tell you something,” she said, pushing up from her knees to lean back in her seat again. “No amount of money can change the facts of a scientific investigation. Whatever Sadena thinks he’s paying for, Noah’s Ark is here to find out the truth about what’s going on with this environment. Paval and I—” She waved at her apprentice over Keim’s shoulder, but the reporter showed no inclination to glance at him, “—are the first phase in what will probably end up being a very lengthy planetary study. But for right now, we’ll check out the immediate complaint, produce a report based on what we find here, and suggest a course of action to both Mr. Sadena and the Ark. If Sadena decides he doesn’t want to do any of the things we present to him, it’s not like we can force him.” She smiled thinly. “Any more than he can force us to lie about our findings.”

“Is it Noah’s Ark’s position that a human arbitrarily granted with enough money to own a planet automatically has the right to destroy it, if they choose?”

Rahel snorted and tossed a look toward the sky. “Where do you get this crap?”

“I only ask what my readers would, if they were posing the questions.”

Rahel nodded, unimpressed. “Then your readers are idiots.”

“Her readers are here.”

She and Keim twisted about together at Paval’s growled remark. “What?”

Scowling off to his left, Paval threw the pack he’d been rummaging through to the floor of the boat. “There are laws against them congregating on private property, aren’t there? Doesn’t a privately owned planet count?”

Rahel rotated to follow the irritated wave of his arm, and glimpsed an uneven clot of green undulating with the waves where the sea met the sky. “Apparently not.” She even flipped off her visor to make sure all the hoods and jackets really were in emerald, and not just distorted by the colored lenses. “Shit.”

The demonstration group was the usual motley collection of shouting and mismatched green. It was apparently traditional that members of a Green rally pull together whatever emerald, kelly, olive, or lime clothing they had lying around, swarming the point in question like leaves blown from a hundred different trees. They were the only officially organized group that managed to make the Ark’s khaki brown bush suits look like a fascist uniform. Rahel supposed that impression was intentional, which only served to irritate her more.

“Did you tell them to show up here?” she asked, turning back to Keim. “Something to make the interview a little more lively?”

“Are you kidding?” Keim didn’t seem able to take her eyes off the renegade flotilla as she folded her notebook and slipped it into a pocket of her blouse. “The kind of Greens who come all this way just to cause trouble are fruitcakes.”

Rahel snorted, and Keim shot a frown at her as though anticipating what she was planning to say. “That doesn’t invalidate what they stand for,” she insisted before Rahel could even consider a remark. “It just means not everyone in the Green is a good judge of how to best accomplish those goals.”

Considering that hard-core Greens didn’t believe humans should be allowed to set foot anywhere except their native Earth—and perhaps not even there—it was a small wonder they didn’t know how to react to the rest of their species’ antagonism. “But they’re here because of your uploads, yes?”

Keim pursed her lips and nodded, not taking her eyes from the rapidly growing green blot. “Probably.”

“My God! Don’t you even wait for facts before you—”

Rahel leaned across Keim to push Paval back into his seat before he could upset the skate’s delicate balance. “Not now!” She dropped back into her own seat, facing Keim. “Any chance they’ll listen if you tell them to back off?”

Keim looked at her as though surprised she’d even made the suggestion, then shrugged. “Most likely they’ll think I’m only taking your side because we’re in the same boat.”

“And are you?” Rahel asked.

“Am I what?”

“Taking our side.”

Keim made a face and turned back toward the Greens. “I haven’t even said I’ll talk to them yet.”

The only difference between lawyers and reporters was their graduate degree. Rahel lifted her chin to call up toward the mechanical pilot, “I suppose it’s too much to ask that they’re nowhere near where we need to be.”

The pilot extended a small remote mike in her direction from a panel low on its subjective back. “Query error.” Its voice was finely tuned and masculine, but oddly devoid of character. Rahel wondered what it had been before it was Newborn. “Syntax not sufficient for specific data retrieval.”

Paval twisted impatiently to face the bow of the skate. “Show us the coordinates of those other boats.”

A brightly colored topo map grew into being above the skate’s dash. The overlaid location of the Green flotilla made an almost visible dent in the trench near the middle of the hologram.

Rahel grumbled. “Of course. Shit.”

The pilot remained singularly unaffected by her profanity. “Instruction: Please present activity modifications in command or query mode.”

Paval, equally frustrated, gripped the edge of his seat with both hands. “Can’t we just go around them?” The pilot apparently took that as a course change, and eased the skate into a parabola.

“Go around to where?” Rahel’s shadow swept across the floor of the boat as they swung into a wide arc around the hub of waiting Greens. “They’re sitting right on top of the jelly breeding site—there’s no ‘around’ to go to.”

“But why?” Paval rotated as though unable to move in sync with the skate, his face directed toward the protestors no matter how wide a circle their own craft made. “Don’t they understand we care about preserving this habitat as much as they do?”

A shout of recognition stuttered through the flock of Greens, and two boats—the only two fitted with outboard motors—awkwardly disengaged from the rest of the group to carve an interception course through the water. The mass of Greens was already close enough that Rahel could make out their individual faces. “Recognize any of them?” she asked Keim.

The reporter spared her only a single disgusted glance. “What? You think everybody in a conservation organization knows everybody else?”

“It was worth a try.”

“No, I don’t know them.”

Rahel kept her eyes on the two approaching craft, trying to estimate whether or not they’d catch up to the skate before it finished its swing. “They’re not inflatables,” she commented aloud. “That means they’ve got their own aircraft, probably even their own jumpship in the system. God, I hope they didn’t set down anywhere near here—the vibrations could kill those jellyfish.”

Paval pulled off his skinsuit hood in one quick, angry motion. “What of them the outboards don’t chew up!”

She’d never seen him angry before now, and, for some reason, the sudden appearance of his temper made her smile. “The outboards don’t reach deep enough. This time of day, the jellies are a good ten meters under to get away from the light.” Climbing forward to slap the pilot’s carapace, Rahel hoped it followed her gesture as she pointed toward the approaching Greens.

“So what are we going to do?” Keim asked, stylus poised above the screen of her notebook. “Run or stay?”

Rahel opened her mouth, but didn’t even manage an intake of breath before Paval was at her side, dark eyes locked on the approaching boats. “This kind of stupidity should be illegal!” he shouted, at them more than her, and apparently for their benefit. “Those hypocrites don’t even understand what it is they’re fighting for—!”

Rahel knotted one hand in her hair to keep from knocking her apprentice into the sea. “Will you just shut up?”

“Query error: Syntax—”

“Not you,” Rahel cut the pilot off with another bang on its carapace. “This is a command: Pull away from the approaching boats, but not too far.” She tried to ignore Paval’s chain of foreign curses as she frowned across the bright water at the protestors. “I don’t want them to think we’re running away.”

“Who cares what they think?” Rocking unsteadily as the skate purred into motion, Paval took two stumbling steps to his left to maintain eye contact with the closest raft full of Greens while their own boat edged forward. “They should be back at the resort, talking to all those reporters about why they think they’re better able to save the stellar jellies than we are!” He shook Rahel’s hand off his arm and shouted angrily across the water, “Ecologists are all supposed to be on the same side!”

That’s when Rahel saw the spear gun.

Hooking her arm across his chest, she yanked Paval back with all her weight, tumbling them both to the floor of the narrow skate. Keim gave a short shriek, then a loud, hollow thok! echoed flatly through the space between the seats. Rahel felt a painful thrill of relief even before her rational brain realized the sound meant a spear striking boat sides, not a spear striking flesh. “Get down!” she shouted without looking behind.

“They’re not gonna wait to find out your credentials!”

Keim scrambled to the rear of the boat in a thumping clatter, and Rahel pushed herself up with one hand, shoving Paval back down to the deck with her other. She raised her head to look over the side just as the skate jerked and heeled over almost onto its side.

Then they righted again with a smack. Rahel gripped the wet rail with both hands, too stunned to see, but knew from the salty sting of wind on her face that they were moving—and not in a forward direction.

“What happened?” Paval’s voice, so hoarse and quiet after his flash of anger, barely carried over the hum of the skate’s laboring engine.

Water, chill from a long night of darkness, gushed past Rahel’s leg and into Paval’s lap. The spear had split a hole longer than the spread of Rahel’s hand in the side of the skate, then filled most of it with the head and shaft of the weapon and a steady spatter of water. Her stomach clenched sickly at the image of one of them sitting with their back to that bulkhead. All the same, their skate probably wouldn’t have been flooding so badly if the Greens hadn’t attached the spear’s tether to the two outboards so they could drag the skate behind them in their own choppy wake.

Suddenly remembering the pilot, Rahel scrambled on her knees to the front of their craft. “Pull us loose!”

“Command noted.” Despite its stoical monotone, the Newborn was doing a wonderful impression of panicked human flight as it slewed the skate to make slack in the tow-line. “Data point: Designation of skate #6398240 is as a recreational vehicle, not as a high-performance water craft.”

“Now he tells me.” The cable snapped taut again with a thrum, and Rahel heard Paval thump into one of the seats with an angry curse.

Water sloshed wrist-high across the floor as Rahel crawled back toward the passenger seats. The space under her sitting place was empty, only a stretched fragment of fabric suggesting how her pack had gone overboard when the skate first tipped. She growled in frustration and grabbed at her seat for support. “Your phone!”

Keim, half-crammed under the farthest back seat, frowned at Rahel while she struggled to free herself.

“Find a goddammed phone!” If they couldn’t get themselves out of this, they could at least call the Startide for reinforcements. The skate bucked, and Rahel slammed up hard against the opposite rail.

“Where are they taking us?” Keim shouted back at her. But she had one arm buried up to the elbow in Paval’s field pack when she asked it, so Rahel didn’t feel any immediate need to beat her for being distracted.

Not that she would have had the chance. Broken shadows flickered across the skate like tongues of cold, black flame, and the boat’s own engine noise surrounded them in a cloud of bugs and bitter stench. A length of now-slack cable lashed a wake through the tree roots and swamp beneath the skate, then leapt with a crack of surprise when the skate sheered against some obstacle Rahel couldn’t see, and overturned them all into the rancid mud.

“Data point: Mathematical models indicate that inversion of skate #6398240 is unlikely while antigravity repulsor units are still engaged.”

Rahel gritted her teeth, shoving one shoulder against the side of the overturned skate and trying not to notice that the only movement she felt was her own feet sliding backward through the mud. A lurid belch of vapor curled up from the disturbed sediment, and she stumbled upright with a cough to escape the foul smell. “You could help me, you know!”

“Request noted.” The pilot, its boxy body wedged above the water in a snarl of tree roots, was silent for nearly thirty seconds. “Data point: Reinforced appendages are prerequisite before external leverage adequate for independent motion can be achieved.”

Rahel growled and dropped her head against the skate. Keim volunteered in a slow, helpful voice, “He doesn’t have any legs.”

It had been more a smart remark and less a real suggestion, anyway. “What about the antigravs?” Lifting up on her toes, Rahel stretched across the bow of the skate to rest her weary arms. Keim sat perched atop a knee of root to the pilot’s left, lips pursed as she searched for dry patches on her clothing with which to clean her ruined notebook. Rahel couldn’t help thinking how she would feel if it had been her data lost to the slough. “Any chance you can disengage the anti-gravs from there?” she asked the pilot.

“Request noted. Unable to comply. Data point: All ship’s functions are referenced via hardwired terminal junctures.”

Which, of course, ceased to be hardwired to the pilot right about the time the lower part of its casing tore away from the skate. She didn’t even bother asking about the radio—it languished along with the antigrav controls under twenty-odd centimeters of mud, sinking deeper by the minute. Rahel kicked one of the boat’s dented sides, but didn’t even get a satisfying boom! for her effort.

The slosh and suck of shin-deep mud reached them just ahead of Paval’s disgusted groan. It was a sentiment Rahel could well appreciate right now. Every step, every movement in the brackish water broke the delicate layer of surface tension protecting their noses from the cesspool underneath. Bugs and little biting things not even big enough to see swarmed each upsurge of stench, changing their focus to breath-letting orifices and sweat-sticky skin as soon as their filthy bug brains recognized that higher lifeforms were around. In general, Rahel tried to keep an open mind about the role various lifeforms played in their environments—but if she had to snort out one more noseful of midges or spit another spiderlegged intruder into her palm, she was going to storm through this slough and personally squash every flying thing she found.

Paval lumbered into view one long, awkward step at a time. He nearly lost his balance twice when his rear foot refused to peel out of the mire and his leading foot sank deeper than he expected, but he freed himself without glancing up for help, brow furrowed, mouth clamped resolutely shut against the fuzzy cloud of buzzing around him. His effort to wipe the mud from his face had only turned him into a more severe copy of himself—dark eyes smoldered inside a negative raccoon mask of cleanness, and his hair was plastered sloppily to his skull in five uneven, finger-wide furrows. Mindful of what a mirror for her he probably made, Rahel scraped her own hands down both cheeks and flicked what mud she got back into the water.

“This was all I could find.” Paval swung his arm up between them, dangling the soaked, twisted remnant of pack into Rahel’s hands as he stumbled to a stop. Invisible midges and their more visible cousins jostled for position in his breath stream. “The rest must have gone under already.”

The pack strap felt cold and slimy in her grip. Wrapping one arm under the bottom of the bag to steady it, Rahel dug her free hand inside to paw through the muddy contents. “No phone?”

Paval coughed, temporarily shattering the cloud of bugs, and sat heavily among the roots on the other side of the pilot. “No phone.”

“Damn.”

“Not that it would matter.” He aimed a sour look at the ruined notebook in Keim’s lap. “Our phones weren’t designed for swamp duty any more than her notebook was.” Rahel watched him clap an uncounted number of bugs to death between his palms, and wondered if he was thinking about the Greens. “We’re screwed.”

“Any chance your groupies will follow us in here? Maybe try and do some more damage?”

Keim looked up from her labors, as though surprised that Rahel had asked her. “How should I know?”

“You write for them, don’t you?”

Rahel countered. “You must know something about the way they think.”

“I know how the GreeNet editors think,” Keim said. She finally gave up and refolded her notebook into her jacket pocket. “And they just happen to prefer a more radical shade of Green than I might personally wear.”

Which answered at least one question.

Paval splashed one foot scornfully in the slime of mud below him. “Whatever color they are, their boats still need water. They could never make it back here through all this muck.” Another million insects died with a sharp report. “And no one in his right mind would walk in this filth.”

Grinning, Rahel yanked shut the zipper on their ruined equipment pack and turned to hang it on the bush behind her. “I guess that tells me where we’re gonna stand.”

Paval made a sound of weary sarcasm. “Oh, great.”

“What?” Bugs and noxious gas swelled up as if from nowhere as Keim slid down from her perch with a splash. “We walk? You can’t be serious!”

Rahel shrugged. “You got any better ideas?”

“Yes! We wait right where we are.”

Rahel snorted with laughter, and Paval rocked forward to hang his head between his knees. “We wait for what?” Rahel asked the reporter. “The hotel thinks we’re out here collecting samples, and Nils knows me well enough not to expect any chitchat until we’re done. It’s not going to occur to anyone to come looking for us until well after dark. Which is about…” She made a show of squinting up at the sky through the ratty canopy of leaves. “Ten or eleven hours from now.”

“We’ll all be eaten to death before then.” Paval swatted at some crawling thing on his hand, but not quickly enough to keep it from biting him.

“Well, then—” Rahel leaned over and pulled him groaning to his feet. “A litde healthy exertion won’t make things any worse, now, will it?”

“System request.”

At first, the toneless voice surprised her. Then she looked over Paval’s shoulder and remembered the disabled pilot, still propped among the tree roots and too heavy to carry.

“Data point: This unit massed 523.6 kilograms before truncation,” it said, as if reading her thoughts in her expression. Maybe it could. “Data point: Central memory package masses less than .5 kilograms. Data point: All but memory is hardware. Request: Transport memory package back to Startide homebase for installation in rebuilt chassis.”

“Sure thing.” She nodded Paval toward the Newborn, then turned to look a question at Keim. “How about you? You coming or staying?”

“Do I have any choice?” The reporter sighed as she watched Paval pry loose an access panel and pull the Newborn’s memory free. “If only the trip could be so easy for all of us.”

Rahel wondered how easy the pilot thought trusting its brain to three strangers must be. “What are you complaining about?” She clapped an arm across Keim’s sagging shoulders and turned her in a generally westward direction. “You and the Greens say you want to rescue this planet. Well, it’s time you got up close and personal with what it is you want to save.”

Seven hours, sixteen minutes, and one lost skinsuit shoe later, they mounted the steps of the Startide Hotel.

Rahel lifted her head to squint up the long stone stairs ahead of them, but could only summon enough energy to sigh. Beside her, Paval placed his foot on the first step and said wearily, “This is going to hurt.”

As if she had a pain threshold left to worry about.

Bugs, stench, and cool suck-mud had leached out every micron of vitality she had in the last seven hours. Now, the very business of lifting her feet from one step to the next took more concentration than she usually expended on cell titers, and sandy, mud-freckled footprints followed them up the stairs as they climbed. Rahel’s eyes hurt from the endless glare off the Odarkan’s surface, her throat hurt from coughing against the stink of rotten vegetation, and her legs hurt more than she could have imagined from high-stepping through the root-tangled mud. She’d been privately thrilled to have Keim struggling along with them—the reporter had given Rahel the excuse of occasionally calling a halt to let Keim catch up and get her breath. Rahel had done this at first because she really didn’t want Keim expiring of heat stroke a million kilometers from nowhere. After a while, though, she stopped whenever her aching thighs couldn’t stand pulling up against another step, and only said she was worried about the reporter. Neither of the others questioned her, but she had a feeling she wasn’t fooling anyone.

The last hour of so of their trek, at least, had been free of the slough. They’d made better time across the narrow strand of beach, but the unbroken sun and scorching sand did its own brand of damage. Paval’s face looked swollen and shiny where the sun had singed his skin, and Rahel’s shoeless foot didn’t feel a whole lot better. Keim, damn her, was miraculously unburned. It seemed somehow unfair that the reporter would be the only one to come out of this adventure unscathed, especially since it was more than just slightly her fault that they’d ended up stranded in the first place.

Wind, roaring faintly with the echoes of surf against sand, rolled over them without actually stirring a breeze. Struck suddenly with that incongruity, Rahel stopped and looked upward for the source of the blurry sound. She recognized it for distant cheering right about the time her brain identified the swarm of reporters and spybees pouring down the long staircase to meet them. She was surprised that she couldn’t feel anything but dull annoyance at the prospect of confronting them, even with such a clear view of the jeering Greens discoloring the steps above them.

Her apprentice, however, hadn’t yet reached such an impasse. Spitting some oath in a language Rahel couldn’t identify, Paval scrambled toward the crowd of Greens at what would probably have been a run on any other day. Rahel watched him pound his way upward, his hands grabbing the steps ahead of him as if resorting to all-fours could hurry him, and found herself faintly envious of his youthful vigor. Even if he was expending it on a stupid display of male ego. Reporters scattered to let him through without so much as interrupting their shouted question.

“You probably oughta stop him,” Keim commented drily when she finally trudged up alongside Rahel. The reporter sat with a weary groan, obviously not planning to go any farther.

Up top, Paval dove into the knot of Greens amidst a crescendo of media enthusiasm, disappearing beneath the resultant tumble. A burst of irate shouting marked his arrival.

“Yeah,” Rahel sighed, glancing back at Keim. “Probably.” Then she started upward at the same pace as before, keeping tabs on the fight by the number and color of epithets raining down around her as she climbed.

Not surprisingly, hotel security beat her to the brawl. By the time Rahel reached the long plaza, a fashionably tailored contingent of turquoise-and-salmon suits had pushed themselves through the confusion of Greens and buzzing cameras, surrounding the lone spot of Noah’s Ark yellow and pushing him grudgingly toward the entrance of the Startide while the Greens formed a protective clot around one of their own. Even without the shouting and turmoil, the conflict of colors—not to mention philosophies—was enough to make her head hurt.

“Rahel?”

Just the pleasure of walking on hard, level ground nearly buckled her knees. She pretended not to notice Nils squirming toward her through the press of bodies, and tried to keep her ears, if not her eyes, locked on her apprentice.

“Proctor Tovin! Do you have anything to say about your findings so far?”

“Rahel, what is going on?” Nils appeared at her elbow, grabbing for her arm and looking her wildly up and down as though searching for some sign of damage. “My God!” He recoiled with a grimace when his hand made contact with her suit, then had to trot a few steps to catch up with her again. “You smell like a sewer! What happened?”

“Anoxic organic decomposition. I’ll explain it to you someday.”

“Proctor Tovin, is it true that you’ve requested Noah’s Ark to remove you from this safari?”

Ignoring the reporters, Rahel reached past the shoulders of two of the security guards to seize her apprentice’s collar. “I’ve got him.”

“Wait a minute, lady—”

“I said I’ve got him!” Elbowing the guard aside, she dragged Paval to her with a single imperative tug. The young man stumbled, pulled off balance by her hold on his collar, but didn’t try to break her grip. Rahel couldn’t tell if the scarlet in his cheeks was emotion or sunburn.

“Can you tell us if charges can be brought against Mr. Sadena?”

You can’t sue somebody for pissing in his own bed, she thought but didn’t say, then pushed past that reporter just like she had already had all the others. “Hell of a job you’re doing here, Nils.” She spared the other proctor a sour scowl as she worked her way out of the knot of security guards. “Have you gotten past the wine and hors d’oeuvres stage yet?”

Nils blinked at her. “What?” He looked too sincere to even be worth yelling at.

“I wouldn’t belittle Proctor Oberjen’s work if I were you, Proctor Tovin.” Valhanryn Esz, the stringer from Tomorrow Today, snapped fingers to redirect her minicam and narrowed almond eyes at Rahel. “It’s only because of his cooperation that the media hasn’t characterized your behavior as a deliberate obstruction of free speech.”

Paval stiffened next to her, and Rahel didn’t even wait to see what brilliant rejoinder he might produce. Clapping her hand over his mouth, she matched stares with Esz over Nils’s shoulder. “Obstruction?” If she had the strength for humor, she might even find the idea laughable. “Guess what, boys and girls?” she called, loudly enough that Nils winced and reporters half a staircase down pricked their ears. “Noah’s Ark isn’t on Uriel just to supply fodder for your netlink uploads. We’ve actually got a job to do—a very serious job.” She scowled at the Greens cordoned behind hotel security. “These assholes aren’t helping.” When Paval reached up to grip her wrist in both hands, she tightened her fingers on his jaw as a silent warning not to piss her off any further. He let his hands drop back to his sides.

“The Greens?” Nils twisted a look over his shoulder at the activists, frowned at the reporters, then turned a hopeless shrug on Rahel. “What have they got to do with this?” he asked blankly. “Where did they come from?”

“Out of her uploads to GreeNet.” Rahel jerked a nod down at Keim, still watching from the foot of the long staircase. “Whatever ‘free speech’ she’s been dumping on them, it just convinced them to dump us in the slough along with Sadena’s million credit skate and a busted-up Newborn.”

“Oh, my God…”

She almost enjoyed the look of pale horror on the other proctor’s face as she dropped the half-kilo memory pack into his hand. “Tell Sadena he can avoid future equipment loss by using some of his influence to keep Greens and reporters out of our hair instead of kissing up to them. And we’re going to need some pretty basic sampling equipment replaced, not to mention a little extra time built into the project.”

“Does that mean you’re not prepared to make a statement about the cause of Uriel’s ecological crisis?”

Scraping her hand up the front of Paval’s skinsuit, Rahel collected a handful of stinking mud and slapped it onto the reporter’s notebook. “That’s right—I’m not.”

“Rahel!”

Cameras and notepads flew into excited activity even as Nils hurried to interpose himself between the reporters and his colleagues. Crooking her arm around Paval’s neck, Rahel turned her back on the crowd and limped toward the hotel entrance with Paval firmly at her side, leaving Nils to sputter whatever apologies or explanations struck his fancy.

The next day, two plastically handsome young men in turquoise-and-salmon suits met Rahel at the door of her suite to escort her up to the roof of the Startide. They tried hard to make the detour chatty and inoffensive. Their smooth and well-practiced behavior, however, only convinced Rahel even more that Sadena was beginning to consider the Greens a greater risk than the feeding frenzy of reporters. By the time they joined Paval and his own escort beneath the wings of an elegantly sculpted short-range hop, Rahel could hear the Green chant of “You stay, you pay!” battling against a babble of reporter questions below. Nils, poor thing, was probably down there already, wading through the morass of human stupidity and earning his keep.

“I don’t know what’s worse,” Rahel commented aloud as she mounted the stairs into the open hatch. “A day penned up with those reporters, or another hike through the margin sloughs.”

Paval followed with a new equipment pack slung across one shoulder. “At least the reporters don’t stink or bite.”

He obviously hadn’t dealt with the press for very long.

In contrast to their two previous sojourns into the Odarkan, the hop lifted them away from the Startide’s landing field in whisper silence, with no real sense of acceleration to betray the moment when they took off. There weren’t even windows or viewscreens in the passenger cabin. No scenery to watch, no reporters to piss at, no fresh air to breathe. Rahel sat heavily on the silk brocade settee and watched Paval experiment with opening and closing the bar with one flipper.

“This place is nicer than our hotel rooms,” he said at last. Apparently, the tri-D VR cabaret impressed him.

Rahel was more worried about the immediate reality before them. “You ever done an ocean dive before?” It was something they should have talked about yesterday, but Keim’s presence had sidetracked things somewhat.

Paval glanced at her over his shoulder, then shrugged and went back to playing with the entertainment automation. “Recreational scuba, but not with these kinds of skinsuits. I’ve done a lot of EV work, though. I figure these suits can’t be very different.”

Not that Rahel would know. She tended to avoid EV at least as much as she avoided underwater time. “No rebreathers,” she told him, snapping her own flippers onto her feet. “The skinsuit extracts dissolved gases from the surrounding water to supply you with breathable atmosphere, then uses the waste gases to keep you warm, keep you buoyant, and whatever else you need to stay happy underwater.” She’d passed Ark certification in these skinsuits only a few months before, so still had a lot of the junk information memorized. That had been in an aqua tank back home, though, with less than four meters of water over her head. “Skinsuits won’t process as fast as a tank system, so you can’t get too wildly active. These things were designed so we could bob around watching animals without coming up for air, not so we could tango underwater.”

Paval nodded, then turned away from Sadena’s techno gadgets as though just realizing that Rahel was ready to get down to business. “That’s why sport divers don’t use them,” he said as he sat on an ottoman directly in front of her. “But I watched somebody in a full skinsuit once, and I’ve always wanted to try one.”

“Well, now’s your chance.” Rahel leaned forward to grab the ottoman’s skirt, dragging it and her apprentice to within touching range. “The buoyancy control device is built in, just like usual. You vent it—” She pulled Paval’s mask down over his face and tapped the upper left-hand corner, “—here. Blink twice to vent, three times to fill. One long blink stops it, either way.”

Paval raised both hands to touch the sides of his mask, then had to reach quickly to his right when the hop banked abruptly and started its descent. “Two, three, one. Got it.” The full-face visor kept Rahel from seeing his expression, but he sounded grim enough to sink a boat. A young man’s way of paying attention.

“Your BCD pressure valve is still back here.” She slapped the vent at the back of his neck, and he nodded understanding while gathering up the bandolier with his slides and sample bottles. “Be careful—the blink toggle is a lot touchier than the tongue release. You’ll lose buoyancy faster than you expect. Play around with it while you’re still up top, and don’t dive ’til you’re sure you’ve got the feel.”

And that was all they had time for. A resort employee in a fashionable short-sleeved halter cat-footed out to them from the cockpit and hurried them politely toward a cargo door in the farthest back compartment. From there, a wide open loading platform lowered them through the floor and into the bright, heady spangle of full sunlight above the rucked-up sea. The skate waiting below looked nearly shattered by the force of the hop’s repulsors.

“I think I liked the balloons better,” Rahel commented as the skate pilot ran out to meet them. Paval only grunted. She assumed that meant he was no more crazy about trying to jump from one craft to the other than she was.

“Slide down on your bottom!” the pilot shouted above the hop’s wind pollution. Rahel recognized his iron-dark features and patterned shirt from their first night counting jellies from the air. “I’ll take your gear, ma’am! You just slide on down!”

Gripping a corner cable with one hand, she eased herself awkwardly over the edge of the platform and dangled her pack into Jynn’s waiting arms. He placed it quickly but gently to one side, then positioned himself underneath her to offer support while she slid down after it.

“Is this thing gonna be here the whole time we’re under?” she asked as Jynn guided Paval down in turn. She didn’t like trying to imagine the noise and turbulence the aircraft’s constant presence might cause.

“Oh, no, ma’am.” The pilot darted a smile at her before turning back to wave off the waiting hop. “We’ll be going another few kilometers north and east of here yet. Mr. Sadena arranged it specially so we wouldn’t put you down right on top the jellyfish site.”

Instinct made Rahel grab the edge of the skate when the hop’s retreating pressure swell shoved it down into the water, then roughly released it again. “Apparently, fuel and time are not an issue as far as Mr. Sadena is concerned.” She scowled at Paval when he stumbled against her, but didn’t shake him off when he ended up clinging to her shoulder to steady himself.

“Mr. Sadena’s not the sort of man who cares too much what it costs to get his druthers,” Jynn remarked as he picked his way across the heaving deck toward the pilot’s station. He flashed Rahel a wry smile as he squeezed himself past. “But, then, I figure you noticed that already.”

Samples, Cells, and Stiffs. That was the litany Rahel had created to remind Paval, and herself, of their goals for this dive. As a mnemonic, it wasn’t the most brilliant creation, but it seemed to serve its purpose. When she asked Paval what he was going down for while Jynn piloted them the last hundred meters to their dive site, her apprentice held up his hand and ticked off three fingers without even pausing to think.

“Water samples to screen for contaminants. Cell samples from both breeding polyps and new medusae, but no eggs, no live larvae, and no live medusae. Any dead jellies—larvae or medusae—I might find floating around.” He grinned at her then, in that irritatingly youthful way that made him look ten years younger than he probably was. “At least I’ll be able to fit my corpses into a specimen jar.”

Rahel pulled her mask down to cover her unamused scowl. “That falls into the category of ‘something I’ll deal with when I get to it.’ ”

Dropping their speed, Jynn mated the boat so gently with the water that their sudden entrance into the rhythms of the Odarkan seemed almost magical to Rahel. She hadn’t realized how much she missed the heavy swaying of a boat on the breast of the water, how separated Sadena’s code of zero impact required each person to be from the living world surrounding them.

On the wake of that thought, a fierce specter of dilemma swelled inside her. Could humans learn to love a world they weren’t allowed to touch? Could humans touch a world and not disrupt the thing they claimed to cherish? Rahel had a feeling the answer sat somewhere between the Greens’ radical separatism, Noah’s Ark’s respectful intervention, and Feles Sadena’s sanitized exploitation. Yet still outside the reach of the everyday human. It wasn’t a happy thought just before this kind of sampling dive.

“OK, Junior, let’s go.”

Leaving Paval to settle his mask and pick up his gear, Rahel slipped over the side into water warmer than she’d expected. A pleased but startled shiver rippled just beneath the surface of her diving suit. The sea closed its gentle grip around her as if to soothe her fears, and suddenly her horizon became a disc of glass from elbow-to-elbow, a steady platter with her in the middle and the sky all around bobbing and dipping in every direction. She blinked on the BCD control in the upper comer of her mask, and melted below the surface on the drag of her equipment belt and body weights.

As usual, Rahel’s first underwater breath took a touch of bravery and a lot of faith. It was one thing to know that diving gear would keep you safe in an ocean environment, another thing to truly believe it. Her first breath hitched up short, and she had to forcefully clear her lungs and make herself breathe more deeply the second time around. It only partly worked. She felt the dissatisfied tightness in her lungs that said she still hadn’t filled them completely, and had to adjust her perceptions yet again to breathe what felt like a huge, languid sigh against her mask. This time her body relaxed a little with the flush of oxygenated air. Rahel tried to set a flag in her brain to remind her that even breathing couldn’t be taken for granted down here in the stellar jellies’ realm. Even that much thought threw her off rhythm, though, and forced her to pattern her breathing again.

Sunlight glanced brightly off the surface far above her. It bleached the sky gray-white, and blurred all sign of Jynn’s skate except for a dark, broken outline where the resting craft met the water. Below, beetle-green stretched as deep as the brightness would allow, then a silent, shifting mat of shadow formed a floor on which the sunlight pooled. The first ripple of light across that surface brought a smile to Rahel’s face: movement. She blinked again on her BCD, and let its functions draw her slowly downward.

“This is incredible!”

The sound of Paval’s voice in her left ear made her glance unconsciously over that shoulder. A shimmer of reflective flatworms exploded silently away from her sudden movement. Rahel relaxed to face her own subjective forward again, reminding herself with a sting of annoyance that hearing her apprentice through a suit comm told her nothing about where he was in relation to her.

“Be careful.” That seemed a safe admonition, regardless of what he was doing. A jelly—half-unseen amongst the rest of the translucent mass below her—brushed languidly against her flipper, then furled away into the jumble of others. She pulled her knees up to give it more room.

“Don’t worry—you’re clear.” Paval could apparently see her, though. He laughed as the jellies tumbled in a slow motion tangle, swelling and shrinking on dreamy puffs of motion. “Besides, their nematocysts can’t penetrate most human skin. With these suits on, there’s almost no chance they’ll sting either of us.”

“It’s not us I’m worried about.” Rahel sculled in a circle until she found her apprentice hovering far ahead on her right, his hands barely stirring the water above pearlescent bells wider across than he stood tall. The jellies rippled like a second surface in response to his soft movements. “I don’t want you tearing any tentacles or floats on your way down. Push through them gently.”

Paval nodded, his expression unreadable through his mask at such a distance. “I’ll be careful.” He sounded a tiny bit chastened, though. “I’ll be another twenty straight down. Call me if you need me.” And he melted into the mat of jellies before she could comment further on his handling.

Samples, Cells, and Stiffs, she reminded herself. There was still a lot of work to do. Tucking her knees against her chest, she wrapped her arms around the backs of her thighs and blinked the BCD to take her lower.

Jellyfish membrane oozed across her feet, her back, her shoulders. They were warm, like the water, and nearly as fluid, flowing away from her slow passage the way bubbles slipped around a falling stone. Flashes of silent, cold-bright lightning formed their only response to Rahel’s brushes with their bodies. In their gentle liquid world, this must have been the same as startled cries. She felt obscurely guilty for disturbing them. Even acknowledging that they hadn’t enough nervous system to truly notice or care didn’t make her feel any better.

The kiss of their fragile bodies lifted, drifted upward, and Rahel was suddenly beneath them. Tentacles floated around her in tangles and clouds. A long, lace-like ruffle marked the center of each delicate creature, and ghostly colors flickered up the crinkled edges almost in time with her breathing. The net of sparks that laced their bells whenever they jostled against each other made it easy to understand why tourists paid so much to watch them rise and feed every night. Absently watching little swarms of aquatic insects dart from ruffle to ruffle, Rahel wondered how many tourists had ever tried to imagine the subtlety of organisms with skin but one cell thick, much less what that said about the complexity of the rest of their world. All she could picture was Feles Sadena offering gratis dinners to anyone who found the concept of Darwinian hierarchy too stressful for patrician comfort.

Sunlight filtered past the gossamer flotilla, mottled abstract patterns across the yellow-and-black panels of Rahel’s skinsuit. Jellyfish thoughts reflected. There couldn’t have been more than thirty of the creatures, drifting with their aimless jellyfish whims, yet they made a raft nearly forty meters at its widest. Uncounted ruffles and threads of tissue sifted through the darkness below them. Tipping herself horizontal, Rahel flashed the beam of her handlamp through the water below as she worked a string of water sample bottles off her equipment belt.

“I’m not seeing much in the way of juveniles,” she commented aloud. “The smallest one I’ve got up here—” She rolled a look over each shoulder, “—is still about two and a half meters across. That’s almost big enough to head for open water within the next few weeks.” She was guessing a little on that timeframe—she knew it took a good three Uriel months for stellar jellies to reach migrating size, but didn’t have the slightest idea about their growth curve. “Maybe something’s inhibiting breeding before they head out.”

“Then they should be dropping larvae in the main ocean, with a corresponding rise in the stellar jelly population out there.”

And so far no one on Uriel had reported finding another stellar jellyfish breeding population. Rahel shrugged, capping her water samples and threading them back onto her belt. “We can check the water here for larvae and ephyrae, and I’ll do a head count on the ovigerous adults to see how many are carrying egg clusters.”

Paval’s breath snorted against his pick-up wherever he floated far beneath her. “I can’t speak for this year’s crop, but they seem to have done all right the last few years. We’ve got what looks like a good carpet of polyps, and—” He cut himself off with some noncommittal curious noise. “Oh, now that’s weird.”

“What?” Rahel made an impatient face in his general direction. “Talk up, Junior, or I’m leaving you here.”

He took a breath, as though planning to say something else, and instead only coughed once, shortly.

For an instant, Rahel thought Paval meant this sound as his reply. Some private ritual of disgust—at the jellyfish for doing something unexpected, or himself for fumbling his sampling gear, or even Rahel for the tireless lash of sarcasm that had finally found the end of his patience. But the next bark of sound across her skinsuit’s comm was unmistakably choked with panic, and the pain behind his strangling was impossible to ignore.

“Paval?” She tried to keep her voice calm, flailing herself into an awkward spin in search of she didn’t know what, trying to remember exactly where he went down. “Paval, where are you?”

The ocean’s heavy presence crowded her senses with blobs of blurred data. Sounds as thick and clumsy as slough mud stuffed her ears while sights made up of nothing but bubbles sheeted everything else from view. A smoky tangle of jellyfish tendrils curled and flattened against her face. “Dammit, apprentice, answer me!”

His sobs over the comm channel were no help. No matter where she twisted, his voice hung eternally over her left shoulder, distorting her perspective when his coughing broke down into whisding gasps. Rahel dumped her BCD with two frantic blinks, then kicked downward as hard as she was able.

“Ma’am, what’s the matter?” A new voice sliced across the channel, quick and high with alarm. “Can I do something?” Jynn asked frantically. “Can I help? What happened?”

Like a smear of smoke against cracked glass, a wash of body and bubbles rocketed surfaceward an unreachable distance ahead of her.

“Careful!” Rahel tried to bring her flippers down under her, pushing against the water until she could slew to a stop and struggle her way in his direction. “Paval, don’t surface too fast!” It didn’t matter—he disappeared into the glistening curtain of jellies that blotched out the sun. “Jynn, we’re coming up! Don’t let him hurt himself!”

Thirty meters in less than thirty seconds. God. Rahel kick-started her own ascent, resisting the urge to race her bubbles to the surface, worrying that Paval had made things even worse by giving himself decompression illness in his panic. How could things be worse? She didn’t even know what had happened yet. Maybe he hadn’t been down long enough. The deepest of the jellyfish tendrils wafted against her faceplate, then twitched dreamily away again in rhythm to pulsing bells far above. Rahel stretched her arms over her head to reeve a gentle passage through the gossamer forest.

She broke surface with more momentum than she thought she carried. Air crashed around her in place of water, and the kick and bob of wind-driven waves replaced the stillness of only a few meters below. Rahel caught herself, arms spread wide across the water, when she would have splashed back under again, fighting to equalize her BCD to keep her buoyant. The skate floated less than a dozen meters away. Only the back of Jynn’s lavender crew shirt showed where the pilot knelt on the bottom of the boat, bending over something that Rahel couldn’t see. She kicked off as powerfully as she could, at the same time chinning her comm and shouting, “I’m coming! Tell him I’m coming!” She didn’t even know if Jynn was still monitoring the line.

Jynn met her at the side of the skate, though, and grabbed her at belt and shoulder to haul her over the side. She splashed to the deck in a slosh of excess water. “What happened?” the pilot asked, pulling her into a sitting position. “Ma’am, what happened to him?”

“I don’t know!” Rahel struggled to her knees almost on top of Paval. He was clenched into a fetal curl, a froth of vomit pooled along the curve of his face mask as he jerked dully, weakly. She grabbed Jynn with one hand and pushed him toward the front of the skate. “Get us to shore!” Her fingers felt numb and stupid as she fumbled to unlatch her apprentice’s visor.

Water splashed across her knees, against the curve of Paval’s back when Jynn jump-started the antigravs without first priming the engines. Rahel slipped one hand under the boy’s cheek to lift his mouth clear of the rolling lake in the bottom of the boat, then snapped aside his faceplate to dump the accumulated vomit.

And recoiled from the puff of bitter stench that escaped his mask beneath her fingers.

“Oh, no…”

Rahel couldn’t hear Paval’s gasping above the rush of wind and sea, but she could see the frantic working of his jaw as he sucked down every breath, could feel the rigid quiver of every fighting muscle. His eyes, pupils dilated to unseeing black coins, glistened pinkly, and a thin stream of mucous ran from his nose. When she bent to sniff his open lips, the biting stink of rotten egg stung tears into her eyes.

“Jynn!”

She found the control of her oxygen mix in one of the skinsuit’s submenus while she pushed Paval onto his back and threw his mask apparatus aside. Her brain remembered from somewhere that a medic would have given Paval oxygen right now, and his own suit was certainly no longer a trustworthy source of that gas. Unfortunately, she could only push her O_2 mix as high as 36 percent. She didn’t know if 15 percent higher than normal would be enough to matter.

“Get that hop back here!” she shouted at the pilot as she dragged her mask down below her chin and flipped it to give the air to Paval. If only there was enough water in the boat to supply oxygen for more than a few seconds. “We’ve got to get him to shore now!”

Jynn only half-turned away from his controls. The spray thrown up by their velocity had seeded bright droplets through his tightly curled black hair. “Ma’am, we can’t use the flyer!”

“The hell we can’t!” She couldn’t even mate much of her suit to the standing water—not and still keep good contact with her mask. She stretched out both legs and went down awkwardly on one elbow. “Dammit, we don’t have time to argue!”

“No, ma’am.” Jynn shook his head insistently. “I mean we can’t use it. He can’t go up, not so soon after being under. The bends could kill him!”

If the Greens hadn’t killed him already. Rahel reached blindly for the pack under the seat ahead of them and tried not to let the skate’s maneuvering shift too much of her weight across Paval’s torso while she rummaged.

The phone fell out into the water with a plop. She snatched it out of the brine before it even hit the bottom and shook it open. Beneath her, Paval shuddered weakly.

The line opened after only half a ring.

“Rahel…” Nils’s sigh blended neatly with the surrounding roar. “I don’t know how you can expect me—”

“Nils, shut up! We’ve got an emergency.”

He cut himself off, and the skate passed between the straits and into a wall of shadow, slicing Rahel through with chill. “Paval?” Nils asked in a more contrite tone. He could at least put two-and-two together.

“Hydrogen sulfide.” Rahel thought she still felt the rotten sting at the back of her nose, but knew that must be her imagination. “I don’t know how bad it is—he’s still breathing.” Barely. She shifted position on top of him and forced that thought aside. “I promise you the hotel medic can’t take care of this.”

Nils’s voice seemed to rise in pitch even as it blurred beyond understanding. He must have lowered the phone away from his mouth, cradling it against his shoulder, or his lap, or his chest while he shouted to someone farther away. The skate etched a neat pivot just beyond the mouth of the strait, ejecting them from shadow into blinding sun, and bucking Rahel off Paval into the swamped skate bottom. She twisted to keep the mask still on him and still connected to her own suit. Water made suits and deck slippery, and the primitive sense of shoreline flashing by on their left made Rahel’s head ache. Picking the phone up out of the water was barely an afterthought.

“All right…” Nils, of course, had no idea they’d been interrupted. “I’ve talked to Huan. He says he can ’link the continent directly and have someone fly out for pickup. It shouldn’t take more than twenty minutes.”

From time of contact or time of launch? The answer wouldn’t change things, so Rahel didn’t ask.

“What happened, Rahel? Hydrogen sulfide? How on Earth did he get exposed to that?”

Spatters of green broke up the hurried movement of hotel turquoise down to the Startide docks. Rahel watched both Greens and reporters gather morbidly at the back of the waiting medic team, and hatred and rage burned a hole straight through her. “How do you think?”

She didn’t really care to hear Nils’s answer.

Jynn killed their velocity with a stomach-dropping growl; the skate thudded the dock so loudly a dim echo lapped back at them from off the hotel’s face. Hands grabbed her, grabbed Paval, rocked the skate and shivered the planking as they helped Rahel to the dock as much as they hindered her. When she stumbled beneath the pressure of tangled bodies, a strange, cool openness whispered across her front, and Rahel realized that Paval’s body had slipped away from hers. A shock of panic jerked her to her knees. “Wait! My mask—!”

Was connected to her skinsuit, which was no longer in the water it needed to extract oxygen. She let her mask dangle underneath her chin, both hands still gripping the wet edges. The medics swung Paval onto their litter without pausing to acknowledge her cry.

Security closed in behind them like cells reknitting a wound. Only then did Rahel remember Paval’s bandolier of sample flasks, and the potentially lifesaving water trapped inside them. She jumped to her feet and glimpsed a flash of pale, glistening skin, heard the ghost of a sobbing gasp, before litter, team, and apprentice all melted beyond her sight. It didn’t matter—Paval’s skinsuited chest was empty, his bandolier lost somewhere between the jellyfish breeding grounds and home. Rahel hadn’t even noticed it was missing before now. The dock beneath her feet seemed very hard, the sun beating down on her shoulders bright and cruelly hot.

How was she going to tell Saiah?

“Proctor Tovin, I’m sorry but…”

She turned a look behind her, almost expecting to find Huan the Robotic Bellboy hovering behind her. Certainly no human being would dare approach her now with such an empty, idiotic palliative.

The dark-haired reporter behind her swept a minicam in front of her face and asked placidly, “Is this the first apprentice you’ve had die while you were on safari?”

Rahel hit him.

First with her elbow as she finished her turn, then with her fist, and her knee, and anything else she could reach him with as he scrambled back away from her with the minicam constantly circling them and his arms laced over his head.

But it was the green-clad arm that reached out to block her from the reporter that focused her anger with the strength of a well-aimed laser. “You bastard.” The cold lucidity of her own voice made her even angrier, so she grabbed the interfering Green by the front of his emerald jerkin and shoved him to the ground. “You son of a bitch! How could you do something like this? How could any of you?”

“Rahel!” Nils, suddenly beside her, fumbled for a hold on her arm. He wasn’t serious enough, though, and she pushed him away without even turning.

“What did he ever do to you? Did he ask Sadena to set up shop here? Did he decide by himself to make the stellar jellies die?” She kicked the downed Green once, maybe twice, then arms more determined in their grabbing snaked around her and dragged her backwards down the dock. Her feet skipped between puddles and dry spots as she scrabbled for footing on the Earth-imported boards. “He was just a kid, goddamn you! Just a stupid kid!”

“Proctor Tovin, stop it!” Keim forced her way between two of the hotel security, taking hold of Rahel’s diving belt while she shoved the rest of the restrainers away. As if her grip and earnest scowl could hold Rahel more securely than physical prowess.

Rahel knocked Keim’s hand aside and stepped back before she could grab her again. “Keep out of this, hypocrite. You and your netlink headlines have done enough harm already.”

Keim pulled her chin up in surprise, and hurt glinted briefly in her eyes. In a way, it both relieved and disgusted Rahel to know she could still inflict damage with just the sound of her voice. It seemed the only power left her right now, and even that was pathetic and small. It couldn’t have stopped anything that happened today.

Rahel stooped to fling first one, then the other flipper in no particular direction, and jumped off the dock’s shore-side into sand barely deep enough to take her landing. The pain that jolted up her back as a result seemed appropriate somehow. On her left, a breeze that couldn’t cut the heavy warmth of the sun feathered in from over the ocean, and timid waves licked the farthest fringes of shore, afraid to slide even as high as her shoes.

A dead jellyfish rode in and out on the tideless waves, and, somehow, that seemed appropriate, too.

No one came looking for her, and for that she was obscurely glad. She slipped into the ocean between glossy, muddy boulders that had rolled into the water years before from a cliff face high above, and let the slow, silent lives of plankton and pelagia float her anger away. Some numbed, removed part of her realized that it took an uncounted number of hours; a haline spider had furred nearly half her left shoe with uprooted hydroids before the angle of sunlight squeezed down too low to stimulate the little insect, then abandoned her to curl into its rock igloo and wait for morning. Loathe to destroy an entire day of spider work, Rahel eased her foot out of the flexible slipper and left the shoe behind.

The evening air felt deceptively chill on her face, the rough sand inappropriately warm between her bare toes. Moisture-rich clouds smeared the sun the color of ferrous clay. Even greenhouse planets breathed and cooled during the long, dark nights, Rahel told herself. And even Noah’s Ark proctors could succumb to hypothermia. Peeling off the skinsuit mask with a sigh, she wiped salt water from her cheeks and turned to look back toward the indiscernible hotel. Out of sight, out of mind. If only that were true. The Startide and what she’d left there were all she’d been able to think about since retreating into the ocean. It had more to do with her returning than any true thoughts for her own safety.

That first step southward was so hard, she almost couldn’t take the second.

But inertia was a wonderful thing. Once her body was in motion, it was willing to stay in motion, and walking soon became no harder than floating at the bottom of the inlet had been. As long as she didn’t think too much about her destination. Not for the first time, she wished for the growl and sigh of sea waves for distraction.

“Oh, thank God.”

The Startide had only just begun to take shape among the limestone and granite of the coastal cliff face, with the stairs to the primary dock still another kilometer or more down the beach. Rahel stopped, wondering how likely a reporter would be missed so far from the main hotel, and whether there was any chance some maintenance robot would find the body before she left the planet.

“I am so glad you can’t hold your water as long as you can hold a grudge. Otherwise you might never have come home.” Nils shifted his seat on one of the drier rocks at the foot of the bluff, pulling his light daytime jacket tighter closed beneath his chin. “Are you all right?”

Just because he was a lawyer didn’t mean he couldn’t ask stupid questions. “What do you think?” Rahel moved slowly up the beach to stand in front of him, not wanting any unwelcome listeners to pick up on their voices. “How long have you been out here?”

Nils twitched a shoulder in a half-shrug, half-shiver, glancing around at the now-dark scenery as though surveying a gathering of old friends. “Oh, not that long,” he sighed with dramatic nonchalance. “Five, maybe six hours.” He looked up at her and smiled. Even his friendly smiles always managed to look priggish and thin. “Huan showed me a service tunnel just up the hill from here. It beats the hell out of going through the reporters, and I thought you might enjoy the detour.”

Because the nets want to ask me some horrible questions, and 1 don’t want to give the answers; I don’t want to have to know the answers. She didn’t even want to have to ask Nils, and he’d been sitting out here half the day waiting to tell her. She made herself look him straight in the face, but then could only squeeze her hands into fists when she knew she ought to be speaking.

Nils saved her with a nod. “Paval’s alive,” he said, very serious now despite his gentle tone. “The medical team got here just a little while after you left—” A slight smile broke through and he cocked his head in dry comment. “A record, Huan says. They brought a mobile ER unit with them, and took Paval into their ship for treatment the minute they got here. It was good you gave him oxygen so soon after his exposure, they said. You probably saved his life.”

Yes, but she shouldn’t have had to. “Where are the Greens?”

“Kicked off planet.” Nils slid to his feet with a tiny sound of discomfort, then scrubbed at his arms while starting down the beach toward the waiting hotel. “They’re talking about suing, you know.”

Rahel blinked into the darkness as she followed him, glad for his pale complexion and ivory coat. Until the moons rose, those were the only parts of Nils that she could reliably see. “Well, good for the Greens. Maybe it’ll give them something more constructive to do than attack apprentice proctors.”

“How nice that you can be so cavalier.”

“Sadena owns the planet,” Rahel pointed out. Rocks bit and pinched beneath her feet, and the occasional little something scrabbled away out of sight across the sand. She missed the taste of sea spray against her nose and tongue. “As long as he doesn’t violate Interplanetary Law, he can throw anybody off Uriel he wants to. Even us, if we’re so lucky.”

Nils stopped abruptly and turned about to stare. She nearly tripped over him in the darkness. “Not Sadena, Rahel,” Nils said in a slow, understanding voice. She wanted to hit him. “You. The Greens want to sue you for slander.” He caught hold of her elbow and kept her beside him when he started walking up beach again. “This is exactly the sort of thing I’m supposed to be here to avoid.”

Rahel snorted and pulled her arm out of his grasp. “Hell, if I’d known they were going to sue me, I’d have said a whole lot more of what I had on my mind.”

Nils rubbed at his eyes and sighed. “No, you will not.” He bit off each word with long-suffering precision. “Right now, the Greens are just posturing for the media. You haven’t really said anything destructive—nothing they can build a case on, anyway. And if you stick to your work from now on—” He angled a warning glare up at her, “—preferably by staying underwater, we can probably finish out this contract without landing half of Noah’s Ark in court.”

“Would we anyway? I mean, is it slander if it’s true?”

Nils shook his head, but obviously not in direct response to her question. “That isn’t pertinent unless you can prove it’s true.”

How come she had to prove her insults, and GreeNet got to print anything about the Ark it wanted? Deciding she wasn’t really in the mood for the answer, she continued her trudge up the beach without asking.

A bevy of shivering bellhops clustered around the entrance to the service tunnel, more than happy to converge on the proctors and usher them into the hotel. Rahel waved off Nils’s offer to see about sending dinner up to her suite, and abandoned him with the bellhops at the service lift. That he held up a hand to stop anyone from following her surprised Rahel even more than his own willingness to stay behind.

The elevator glided with the same silent perfection as everything else in Sadena’s hotel. For a change, it was nice to close her eyes and let the machinery do all the moving for her, nicer still to strip open her sandy skinsuit and drop it wherever she wanted as soon as she stepped through her suite’s sliding door. Her hair felt gluey and crusted with salt, but she stopped just shy of the bathroom to stare in shock at the living area with one hand still splayed on top her head.

Flowers. The largest, most elaborate, delicate bouquet she’d ever seen replaced the oval coffee table. A half-dozen iridescent insects floated from blossom to blossom like fairy gems in search of nectar. Rahel crept up on the construction as though it were a tiger, and used two fingers to slip a platinum card from between two glowing Lunar orchids.

My sincerest sympathies for the attack on your apprentice. Please let me know if there is anything I can do.

F.S.

Rahel decided not to bother with a shower that night. She took only long enough to put on clean clothes and throw the flowers into the hall outside her door, then collected her water samples from this morning and carried them up to the pachyderm. A night in the pachyderm’s bunk would feel good after this stuffy hotel, and, if she was lucky, the testing station AI could have all of the samples run before dawn.

The persistent beep of the pachyderm’s intership comm irritated Rahel out of sleep what felt like only minutes after she went down. In reality, the chronometer at the pilot’s station read 0816 when she finally stumbled over to slap the damn thing off, so she had to accept that it was well past sunrise outside and time to crawl back into the world of conspicuous consumption in search of answers. Leaning both elbows on the edge of the console, she keyed the comm answer sequence with a yawn.

A text-only message scrolled up the little screen in a swarm of turquoise letters that were disgustingly hard to take so soon after being asleep.

Mr. Kuvasc is doing well, although he still isn’t able to handle visitors. He sends his greetings to you, and his thanks. You handled the emergency superbly—the medics seem confident he’ll make an adequate recovery.

I was able to negotiate for custody of Mr. Kuvasc’s skinsuit. It currently resides at a research facility on the mainland, and should be ready for your retrieval when you finally return to Noah’s Ark. Simply let me know. Preliminary tests reveal traces of H_2S all throughout the suit’s primary gas extraction system. So far, no one is willing to speculate as to how the H_2S was delivered, or whether the suit can ever be made user-safe again. I shall keep you apprised of any further developments.

I’m glad you were able to find some use for the flowers.

F.S.

Sadena may have been a bastard, but at least he could be a helpful bastard. Rahel deleted the message without sending a reply.

“Anything worth mentioning in last night’s samples?” she asked the AI as she pulled on her shoes and dug a handful of breakfast packs out of the galley.

“No statistically significant evidence of contamination or disease,” it told her. “Salinity displays an apparent tendency to increase in direct proportion to ocean depth, but I don’t have enough samples to flag this trend as significant. The presence of shed cells and larvae does not deviate significantly from the predicted model for this time of year. Insufficient evidence exists to determine ephyrae population at this time.”

Oh, well. It never hurt to hope for a miracle as long as you weren’t really counting on one. “Log it as Uriel: Odarkan Sea, Sample Series #1. I’ll bring some more to compile with it tonight.”

“OK.”

Sunlight bright enough to burn the fog off her brain met her outside the pachyderm’s hatch. Taking one of the pseudo-food bars between her teeth, she squinted so tight she could barely see to lock down the ship before leaving it. By the time she’d finished and turned to find her place on the rooftop landing field, Nils and a nosegay of pastel security were half-way between the pachyderm and the same hop Rahel and Paval had taken to the Odarkan yesterday. She took another bite of her breakfast and waited for them to get closer than shouting distance.

Nils marked the transition for her. “Where the hell have you been all morning?”

Rahel glanced over her shoulder as though to make sure the pachyderm was still there, and peeled another breakfast bar. “In the casino, Nils. I just decided to teleport up here for breakfast.” She scowled at him, dropping the ornamental innocence from her tone. “Where do you think I’ve been? Running yesterday’s samples through the AI. I camped out in the pachyderm in case I needed to clarify something.” That last part was a lie, but her reasons weren’t really the issue right now.

“You should have told me you were going,” Nils persisted, a little of the fire leaving his voice now that he had her in sight and undamaged. “When you weren’t in your suite this morning, I thought the Greens had somehow got back on planet and taken you! I had security search the hotel from top to bottom—no one had the faintest idea where to find you!”

Well, someone had. Rahel wondered if Nils or the security personnel had thought to ask Sadena, and what reasons Sadena would have for lying to them if they had. Curious guy, that Sadena. His rationale for doing anything probably didn’t mean very much to the average person.

Rahel offered Nils a breakfast bar in lieu of an apology. “Did you get my skinsuit?” she asked so they wouldn’t have to linger on a subject she wasn’t sure she wanted to pursue.

Making a face to prove he wasn’t mollified by her sacrifice, Nils plucked the bar from her fingers and sighed. “I took it from where you left it folded on your dresser.”

Not where she’d left it. When Rahel last looked, the skinsuit lay in a puddle of sand, with bits of flower and pottery shards all over the hallway floor outside. She nodded, though, a little amused by the discrepancy. “Helpful little bastard, isn’t he?”

Nils raised his eyebrows in what looked like mixed question and concern. “Excuse me?”

“Never mind. Come on.” Rahel clapped her arm across his shoulders to turn him toward the waiting hop, security closing around them to follow in their footsteps like a swarm. “We’ve got lots of work to catch up on yet.”

She’d just feel a whole lot better about the project if Sadena wasn’t putting so much charm and effort into trying to curry her favor. The more he tried to convince her that her opinion really mattered to him, the less, Rahel knew, he was actually looking forward to hearing it.

The water didn’t feel as warm and welcoming today. Bracing her knees against the keel of the skate, Rahel gripped the boarding ladder with one hand while she accepted a spare bandolier of sample jars from Nils with the other. He looked surprisingly businesslike and sturdy out here under the open sun, not at all like some stufly lawyer who wore gloves to prevent callouses and had to clip his nails to keep them short.

Rahel pushed away from the boat and slipped one bandolier crosswise over the other. The two together were barely heavy enough to register on her BCD control. “I’ll keep the comm line open,” she said, drifting back from the skate in preparation to go under. “Make sure you acknowledge my transmissions, or I’ll think you’ve fallen asleep up here.”

Nils nodded, brow wrinkled somewhat unhappily. “What should I do if I lose contact with you?”

“Sue somebody.” She smiled at his annoyed grimace, and dropped down under the water. “I’d suggest Sadena. He’s probably good for a higher out-of-court settlement than the Greens.”

Nils answered her comment with a patient sigh.

Dumping her BCD, she floated smoothly down toward the carpet of jellies with a sheen of bubbles glistening the water above her. The drift into darkness wasn’t nearly so pleasant today. Darting shadows snagged her attention with little stabs of adrenaline even though she couldn’t have told herself what she was looking for. The taste of each breath registered consciously on her brain, and every minor adjustment in the skinsuit’s gas extraction system made her lungs freeze up for a heartbeat while they waited for disaster. Even checking, checking, and rechecking her O_2 levels accomplished nothing except to leach all satisfaction from this temporary privacy. She didn’t even realize she’d reached the jellyfish swarm until the first gauzy body pulsed beneath her hand.

“OK… I’m at the jellyfish interface.”

“I know,” Nils voice said, sounding closer, even, than it had when she’d talked to him on the surface. “I can see your reflection on the remote sensor.” Rahel hadn’t expected him to be clever enough to use something like the skate’s mapping system to keep track of her. “Gee, I had no idea jellyfish would look so… squishy from a distance.”

Rahel smiled and felt for a path between the bodies. “Well, squishy is what jellyfish do. I’m going to pull a whole set of samples to augment what I brought in yesterday, then drop lower to cover Paval’s sector.” She pulled her knees against her so tightly that the sample jars on her belts pressed into her stomach. “Try to make yourself useful while I’m gone.”

“Be careful.”

The honest concern in his words surprised her. “I’ll try,” she said seriously. Then she sank into their tendrils and let the milk-white world of the jellies lull the surface world from her mind.

Their silent, graceful peace crept over her more readily than she expected, but couldn’t find sufficient purchase in the jumbled texture of her worries. She meticulously collected samples from various depths and various locations, making sure to catch any particulate matter or jelly sloughings that might prove significant. Wending her way delicately in between ruffles and frills, she even went to the effort of siphoning water from within the bells of both egg-heavy and empty adults without disturbing their reproductive systems. This, then, led to an idle thought regarding how many ovigerous medusae were actually floating with this swarm, and that in turn led to an impromptu census of egg clusters glued to the bellies of the adults.

Rahel felt a little funny, swimming from jellyfish to jellyfish and lifting up their skirts to see who was pregnant. Considering stellar jellies weren’t sexed in any Terran sense, any of the adults could have—and should have—been able to carry eggs as long as they’d had enough genetic exchange to ensure a viable clutch. The fact that barely one in ten appeared to be carrying seemed unreasonable. Rahel paused, letting the jellies swell and throb away from her as she chewed the inside of her jaw.

Season? she wondered. Food? Hell, maybe the population was too in-bred, and something in the stellar jelly’s genetics could recognize when it had a bum deal going. She pushed herself down below the lowest tendrils and blew a frustrated sigh. It could be anything from lighting to water temperature to a drop in ambient salinity, and she wasn’t going to figure out which while floating around under here. It might have helped, of course, if Sadena had ever allowed a full-scale study of the jellyfish before now. But no—he hadn’t wanted to disturb his resort’s primary source of tourist trade, even for the sake of science. And now both his resort and the stellar jellyfish might have to pay for that selfishness.

“I don’t know if it makes any difference, but I’m roasting up here.”

Rahel glanced skyward at the sound of Nils’s voice, grinning a little despite herself. Somehow, he managed to make everything sound like some kind of personal attack on his time. It must have been a lawyerly skill. “All right, I hear you.” She slipped the bandolier of completed samples off her shoulder while she wriggled up through the milling jellies. “You still got me on your sensor screen?”

“You’re a lot more solid than the jellyfish—you’re hard to miss.”

“You’ve got a sample pack coming up directly above my position.” She extended her arm up over her head and pressed the sample belt’s thumb tab. A brilliant yellow balloon blossomed at the shoulder seam, tugging the bandolier out of her hand and upward as if pulled by a string. She watched it disappear into a blur against the surface light. “Log those as Uriel: Odarkan Sea, Sample Series #2. Then put them in my equipment pack and don’t touch them again. Got it?”

“And here I was planning to line them all up on the seats and play scientist with them until you got back.”

Rahel eased back down past the jellyfish barrier again. “Don’t get smart with me, Oberjen.”

“I can’t help it,” he replied drily. “I’m a lawyer—it’s my job to be smart.” He went on more seriously before she could contradict him. “We’ve got your samples. Are you sure you don’t want to come up for a suit check before you start the next series?”

No, she wasn’t sure. The whole thought of doing work in Paval’s sector felt like walking on someone’s grave. “What good would surfacing do?” she asked aloud. “I checked the suit six times on the hop coming out here, and we don’t know what we’re looking for anyway. My O_2’s good—” She sneaked a look at the reading, just to make sure. “And I know to expect trouble.” She tossed hands up in a shrug even though there was no one in sight to appreciate it. “I think we’re as safe as we get.” And wasn’t that a depressing thought? “Just make sure you take care of those samples.”

“You take care of yours.”

She nodded, the way she always did when Saiah bothered to tell her the obvious. “Yes, mother.” Then she pushed off against the water behind her, and started her first swim-by of the sector.

Rahel worked her way slowly back and forth across the levels, the lantern at her waist carving a fat tube through the dim waters ahead of her. Flashes like flitting coins winked on and off in the slashing light, little fish-things stealing glances at the new intruder; diaphanous ripples of tissue danced in slow blindness away from disturbances they could barely sense with their primitive jellyfish nerves. As Rahel bottled sample after sample on her way toward the sea floor, the O_2 monitor at the edge of her mask seemed to swell in size and importance. She found her attention caught by it every time she looked up from capping a flask, and her breath stopped with each glance—it must be some anomaly in the levels that made her look so suddenly.

Of course, the gauge sat placidly at the 21 percent she’d originally set it for. The only thing fluctuating here was her blood pressure. And her attention to the job at hand. Jamming the latest bottle back into its holster loop, she aimed herself downward with a disgusted sigh.

What looked like gnarled, scattered fragments of crab shell misted into being below her, impossibly huge, as big and broken as boulders, with edges blurred by time and moss. Rahel widened the beam on her lantern, and the fur of pearly velvet on each rock ruffled in response to her movements through the water. She pulled herself to a clumsy stop.

“Oh….”

“What?” Nils’s voice cracked nervously in her ear. She could almost picture him scrabbling to peer over the edge of the skate as if that would somehow help him. “Rahel, what is it? What?”

“Nothing, Nils! Calm down.” She drifted off to one side of the rocky heap, shining her light all down its length, kicking gently to verify its width and height. “It’s just…” Amazingly tiny little creatures reached up from the rocks to stroke the water with pink feather dusters, as unlike the huge, graceful adults as a zygote was unlike a human. Rahel lowered her mask to within bare centimeters of the polyp mat, and still she could only just make out the individual branches of their bodies. Occasional one-celled ephyrae twitched away from the budding stalks like specks of dust on independent breezes.

“1 just came across the polyps,” she finally remembered to say. She uncapped a sample flask while she talked, trying hard not to catch many newly shed ephyrae. “The Odarkan’s coastal shelf drops off here, and most of the polyps have set up shop on a broken spur of rock about..” Her light searched for an end out in front of her. “…I don’t know. Maybe a hundred meters. I can’t see where it lets off.”

“According to Jynn’s topo map, the actual lip only goes another fifty-seven meters before meeting up with the shoreline again.” There was a pause marked by a terse, muffled exchange while Nils checked something with Jynn. “A lot of that fifty-seven is deeper than your current position, too. The Odarkan apparently doesn’t have much in the way of shallows.”

Rahel twisted to turn her light over the edge of the lip. “Yeah, it drops off pretty steeply here. I can’t tell how—” She froze with the lantern aimed between her feet. “What the hell…?”

“Rahel, don’t do this to me.”

The rock a dozen meters below looked as though it had been shaved. Remnant podetiams clung to the surface like gooey white blisters, but no carpet of stalks combed the water for microbes, no flecks of bright color revealed budding polyps crowned with umbrella platters of ephyrae. Above the line of destruction, another hand-span worth of polyps dangled limply, still attached to their gripping feet, but obviously not still alive. “Something’s the matter down here.”

“With you?” Nils asked testily. “Or with the jellyfish?”

Rahel wasn’t sure if she appreciated his concern, or was just annoyed by it. “The jellyfish,” she said as she lowered herself over the drop-off and started downward. “The polyps, at least. About ten meters below my current position, we’ve got a massive die-off. I’m not going down that far,” she was quick to add. “But I want to get a better look at the environment while I pull some water samples from that depth. I’ve got a reach-stick that’ll go three meters.”

“If it’s some kind of free-floating toxin, are you sure that’ll be far enough away?”

Irritation jabbed at her, colored with embarrassment when Nils’s worry only made her glance again at the oxygen gauge near the edge of her mask. She cut off whatever sharp reply she’d meant to make when the oxygen level dropped from 18 to 11 percent in the moment that she watched.

An instant later, she’d rocketed five meters back to the top of the polyp bed.

“Well?”

She clapped hands to both sides of her mask and frantically sought out the oxygen gauge while her lungs begged her to take another breath. But not yet, not yet—not until she knew what they’d done to her. She wanted to die knowing what the bastards had done.

The O_2 gauge glowed a helpful green, telling Rahel that levels were considered optimal even before she specifically identified the reading of 21 percent. Her breath gusted out of her as though she’d been punched.

“OK.” She was surprised at how thoughtful and calm her own voiced sounded in her ears. “No, Nils.” She glanced back down through the darkness, toward the drop-off and the carpet of dying cells. “I don’t think three meters will be far enough.”

“Oh?” The lawyer sounded disgustingly eager. “Did you find something?”

Rahel pushed herself to lie even with the ledge through sheer force of will, digging her fingers into the muddy floor as if that would somehow hold her from toppling over into oblivion. “I’ve at least found the hint of something. Sadena’s got a problem with his water.”

“His water?”

She pointed, then remembered that Nils couldn’t see her and pulled her arm back to her side. “Down where the die-off occurred, my gas exchange system registered a drop in available oxygen. I thought there was something the matter with my suit, but when I got back up here, my oxygen level was back to normal.”

“Meaning what?” Nils asked, his voice sounding almost annoyed with confusion. “That there isn’t oxygen for the suit to process in the water ten meters below you?” Something that his tone said he found distinctly unlikely.

“Very good, counselor.” She rolled onto her back and sat up. “Would you like to go for double or nothing?”

“But I don’t understand.” Nils was obviously too disconcerted for recreational betting. “I thought water was always one-third oxygen—H_2O. How can you not have oxygen when you’re in the middle of an ocean full of water?”

Rahel sighed and looked up toward the surface, wondering how easy this would be to explain with forty meters of sea between them instead of a halffull bucket of water and two glass bell jars. “Because that’s not the type of oxygen I’m talking about. The oxygen in H_2O is busy being water, and you can’t get it to stop being water without running an electric current through it.” She peeked at the O_2 gauge in her mask to ward off a sudden shortness of breath. “What I’m talking about is dissolved oxygen—little bits of oxygen that aren’t hooked up to hydrogen being water. When there isn’t any of that in the water, the suit can’t extract it out. That’s why skinsuits don’t work for long in a closed system like an aquarium, or why they’re not useful in swamp studies…” Whatever point she’d meant to make evaporated from her brain, burned away by the sudden brightness of her understanding.

“That still doesn’t tell me why this water’s lacking oxygen.”

“Because of the swamp,” Rahel said excitedly. She pushed up to her knees so quickly that she nearly lifted herself into a tumble. “Uriel’s swamp water is anoxic—it doesn’t have enough dissolved oxygen in it. That’s why it’s stagnant, why not much lives in it, why it smells bad—Nils!” She clapped a hand to the top of her head. “That’s where the hydrogen sulfide came from! Paval’s suit extracted it out of the standing swamp water!”

God damn. The Greens had a slander case against her after all.

“Wait a minute.” Nils cut across her ranting impatiently. “Are you telling me you think swamp water is leaking into the Odarkan and killing the stellar jellyfish? How?”

Rahel shook her head and felt around the back of her belt for the reach-stick. “Dunno.” She looked around as though that might enlighten her while paying the stick out to its full three-meter length. “Maybe by flowing along a rift in the shelf platform. Or maybe Sadena’s pumping someplace and didn’t feel the need to tell us. However it’s getting here, though, it’s coming through in pretty large quantities.”

“And you’re sure the water’s coming from the margin sloughs?”

“Not 100 percent sure.” Rahel had to be honest about that or scientific methodology wasn’t worth a damn. She clipped a sample flask to the reach-stick, then tied a cable to the other end before lowering it over the edge into the anoxic darkness. “But there’s one real quick way to find out.”

The churlish, rotten stench of hydrogen sulfide belched up at Rahel when her reach-stick broke the surface of the margin slough’s morass. She turned her face away with a little cough, and signaled the stick to pop caps on all the specimen jars arrayed along its length. Even a cloth filter mask didn’t do much to keep out the smell, and nothing did much against the insects. Rahel spent half her time batting buzzers and noseeums away from her eyes, the other half trying to get the lids back on the sample jars so she could retreat inside the pachyderm. She’d never been more grateful for water-tight surgical gloves and hip-deep waders.

“Is nature always this smelly?”

She glanced back at Nils as she withdrew the reach-stick from the filthy water. With one hand braced against the pachyderm’s open hatchway and the other holding a filter mask against his mouth, he looked like an unwilling attendant at an autopsy. Rahel doubted she could have convinced him to step down into the swamp water even if she needed him to.

“This is about as bad as it gets,” she admitted, wading back to join him. “Methane from large ungulate farts is pretty nasty, too. But it explodes, so at least you can have fun with it.”

Nils stumbled aside to let her climb past him into the pachyderm, then keyed the door shut once she was inside. “You’ve got to be joking.”

Rahel didn’t see the point in enlightening him.

Jynn looked up from the pilot’s station when she entered, but didn’t stand or say anything, only offering a nervous wave in greeting. Rahel acknowledged him with a nod. He’d insisted on piloting the pachyderm from the Startide to the sloughs because neither Rahel nor Nils was cleared by Feles Sadena to fly within Uriel’s atmosphere. “Mr. Sadena wouldn’t want me to start ignoring his own rules now, ma’am.” The fact that Rahel’s mobile laboratory was even more rigorously non-impact than any of Sadena’s aircraft wasn’t part of the equation. “Either I’m responsible for what flies outta here and where, ma’am, or we go to Mr. Sadena and you explain to him what you want to do. It’s not my place to make the rules.”

In the end, Rahel was just as glad to have Jynn along. He proved remarkably adept at keeping the pachyderm no higher than the skin of the water—“You been down underwater, ma’am. We can’t take you no higher in the air than this.”—and having him to pilot let her pull her gear together before they arrived at the sloughs. Unlike Nils, Jynn also seemed to feel no need to understand every little step of what she did along the way.

“Computer.” Rahel stopped in front of the pachyderm’s testing station and started unclipping sample jars one at a time. The inside of the ship already stank from the wet of her footsteps, and she despaired for a moment of ever removing the smell again. “Get ready for another collection set. Log this one as Uriel: Southeast Margin Slough, Sample Series #1.” She telescoped the reach-stick, tossing it into a basin for later cleaning, then stripped off her gloves and dropped them carefully into the disposal. “I’ll want a full work-up on resident chemosynthetic bacteria using the same criteria you applied to Odarkan Sea Series #3. Run a split screen comparison of the two series, and alert me as soon as you’re done.”

She wiped the bottles while waiting for the reply, but still had three to go when the AI reported, “I can have general population figures on both series in six minutes sixteen seconds.”

“Great.” It took almost that long to pipette out the samples and slide them into the machine. “Have a good time.”

The AI clicked as it received them. “OK.”

Nils moved around in front of her as she bent to unstrap her hip boots. “What exactly will this run of tests tell us?”

“It’ll tell us whether or not the margin sloughs and the Odarkan Sea share the same bottom water. If they’ve got the same bacteria in the same populations, it’s a pretty safe bet the water’s all coming from the same place.”

“Wait a minute…” Nils offered his elbow as a brace when she stepped one boot on the toe of the other for leverage. “I thought you said nothing could live in anoxic water.”

Rahel accepted his outstretched arm. “Nothing you’d ever notice can live in anoxic water,” she amended, jerking one foot loose with a hopping stumble. “But there are various one-celled organisms that get their energy from compounds other than oxygen, so they don’t care how stagnant the water is. They live in the water in different percentages at different depths, depending on how much oxygen has already been eaten up, and what compounds are still left to munch on.” She freed her second foot, then padded barefoot away from the puddle that had gathered under the waders. “Those are the bacteria we’re looking for.”

Picking up the boots one in each hand, she slipped sideways past Nils to carry them hastily into the bathroom. She could always rinse them off later. Or, better yet, get one of Sadena’s ever-helpful hotel staff to come clean the whole inside of the pachyderm as though it were a guest room. Nils handed her the basin with the reach-stick and used glassware, and she slid it into the bottom of the shower stall with the boots.

“Ma’am?”

Rahel paused in hauling mop rags out of the cleaning supplies. At the front of the pachyderm, Jynn stood poised on the step between the pilot’s area and the rest of the ship, his dark face naked with concern. He came down to take a rag from her when she moved out to join him.

“Ma’am, I didn’t mean to be listening, but I couldn’t help but overhear.” He dropped the rag across the biggest puddle and moved it around with his foot. “Am I understanding right? If you find the same bacteria in both the jellyfish water and the swamp water, that’ll mean you’re right—that water leaking out of the swamps is what’s causing the jellyfish to die?”

Rahel nodded, kneeling to sop up the trail of footprints leading from the testing station to the door. “That’s right, Jynn.”

The plot nodded slowly. “Ma’am, is this something Mr. Sadena can fix?”

She rocked back on her heels and looked up at him. Nils, sitting in the chair at the testing station, looked back at her without offering any frowns or eyebrow lifts to try to tell her what she should say. When even the lawyers are quiet, you know you’re in trouble.

“There’s a good chance,” she finally admitted. “First we’d have to locate where anoxic water’s draining from. If it’s a point source—like an old estuary, or a fissure in the bedrock—we should be able to divert the water and aerate it before it hits the Odarkan. Add oxygen and bingo! No anoxia.”

Jynn nodded. “But if it isn’t a point source?”

“Well, that’s a little harder.” Rahel planted hands on her legs with a sigh. “If it’s coming off the entire slough shoreline, it’ll take a lot more engineering to aerate it all. You could still do it, but Sadena’s gonna need a geological investigation before he can even think about it, not to mention some estimate of the environmental impact that kind of intervention would have on the sloughs.” She shook her head. “That size project would take a hell of a lot of money.”

Jynn lowered onyx eyes as though in thought, but a polite chime from the testing station postponed any other questions he might have asked. “I have the preliminary sample results for Odarkan Series #3 and Southeastern Margin Slough Series #1.”

Rahel climbed to her feet and waved Nils out of the testing station chair. “Put it on screen.”

“OK.”

Neatly carved wedges of statistical data grew up on either side of the screen, snake lines of blue, yellow, red, and green chasing alter bits of information in an effort to pin down primary indicators. Rahel slipped into the seat, searching out the few specific microbes who would most readily tattle on their wandering brethren. Her hand stopped with its index finger pinning the Odarkan Sea’s iron reducers, her pinkie angled down to find the margin slough’s sulfates. “This can’t be right.”

Nils jerked beside her. “What?”

“Chemosynthetic bacterial concentrations are correct within 0.0015 percent.”

Rahel hit the side of the machine with her hand. “Not you.”

“Rahel, what is it?” Nils squirmed unwillingly aside as Jynn pushed in beside him. “Isn’t this what you were looking for?”

“Ma’am, does this mean we have a problem?”

Rahel snorted and tapped the top of the screen. “Hell, Jynn, we already had a problem. But see this?”

Both men leaned forward to glance at where she pointed. Jynn only nodded, but Nils asked, “What of it?”

“Basically, everything up here at the top of the display is from the highest water, water that still has some oxygen in it.” Rahel moved her hand to the lower part of the display. “Everything down here is from the bottommost water that doesn’t have any oxygen left at all. Anything that can live up here—” a single tap above, “—can’t live down here.” She rested her hand on the bottom of the screen again. “And vice versa.”

“Ma’am…” Jynn touched the display alongside her, as though feeling out the printed pages of a book. “These numbers don’t look like they match.”

Rahel sat back in her seat with a sigh. “That’s because they don’t.” Nils groaned softly behind her. “Look at the percentages of methanogens here at the bottom. These guys can only live in the most stagnant water—oxygen can’t even think about sharing the same water space. If I took a cupful of that swamp water out there and poured it into a glass of tap water, the oxygen in the tap water would wipe out the methanogens in a matter of seconds.”

“But…” Nils reached over her shoulder, tracing a line from one side of the screen to the other. “There’s 77.65 percent methanogens in the Odarkan water, and only 3.37 percent in the slough water.” He angled a look down at her, and Rahel could see the question in his frown that he wasn’t sure he was supposed to ask.

“The biggest bacterial population in the slough water is sulfur reducers—” Rahel pointed to the wedge of microbes that gifted the sloughs with their lovely aroma, “at 69.89 percent. But the Odarkan water only carries 15.02 percent sulfur reducers, and they’re both low on iron and nitrogen reducers.”

“Ma’am, it sounds like you’re saying the Odarkan Sea has even less oxygen in it than these margin swamps.”

“Nonsense.” But Nils sounded more brusque than usual, and leaned down to half look at Rahel as he talked, as though quietly requesting her approval. “It ought to be like with the glass of water—more oxygen after the slough water mixes with the Odarkan, not less.”

Yes, it should have been. A horrible trickle of thought wormed its way into her brain—so terrible, so hopeless that she wouldn’t even let her mind give it words. Picking out a random selection from both series of samples of something that looked vaguely like Terran desulfo vibritns, she said, very calmly, “Computer. I want a genetic blow-up and comparison on these two populations.”

For a gene spin, it took almost no time at all. Eleven minutes. Maybe twelve. When the spin finally popped up to supersede the population statistics on the testing station’s screen, it proved a wonderfully complex weave of structure and purpose for such a tiny, straightforward organism. Rahel walked quickly through the ladders of their chromosomes, not even taking time to marvel at their design. Her stomach tightened and her mouth grew sour with each inconsistency that passed beneath her hands.

“These bacteria aren’t related,” she finally admitted.

Nils shook his head at her, then at the genetic display. “At all?”

“Not for a couple billion generations.” Rahel wanted to look at him, wanted to make sure Jynn understood what they were talking about here. But she couldn’t pull her eyes away from the screen, with its damning statistics and mismatching bacteria. “Nils, I was wrong. The Odarkan bottom water can’t be coming from the margin sloughs.”

Nils sighed with the frustration of a man already left several steps behind in the conversation. “Then where is it coming from?”

Rahel turned her chair to face him, including Jynn by the sheer fact of his proximity. “Remember when I said someday I’d explain anoxic organic decomposition to you?” she asked the lawyer. When Nils only nodded, she waved him toward the floor. “Sit down.”

They didn’t start back to the Startide Hotel until dusk. By then, Rahel had guided Jynn all over the landlocked Odarkan before having him skim the pachyderm to a dozen different locations across Uriel’s ocean surface. It had been a long and silent day. They ran out of sample flasks while there were still places Rahel wanted to visit, Nils gave up trying to separate slides when they ran out of table space to stack them, and Rahel’s limbs felt weak and rubbery from too many hours underwater. She let Jynn turn back for lack of anything more productive to do. At least they had data enough to support whatever report Noah’s Ark finally decided to deliver, not to mention enough methano-genic bacteria to open a sizable zoo.

Jynn left them at the foot of the Startide’s great front steps. “I don’t want to take you up to the roof while I park this, ma’am. You understand.”

To a certain extent, she did. Another part of her would rather have courted the bends than have to trudge up a two-hundred-meter flight of stairs dogged by every breed of reporter known to man. She groaned and stepped awkwardly down from the pachyderm’s hatch, obscurely glad when Nils hopped out beside her. Maybe he could distract the godless hordes with legalspeak while she made a slow-motion getaway.

“Proctor Tovin, the Green has officially announced its intention to take legal action against Noah’s Ark. Do you have any comments in your—?”

“Are there any new findings today regarding allegations that Mr. Sadena—?”

“Proctor Tovin, on whose authority—•?”

“Have you heard anything about Paval?”

That last came with a hard grip on her elbow and the sudden heat of a body very close by. Rahel wheeled, jerking her arm back with a snarl, but stopped herself just before letting the hateful words boil over. Keim pulled her hand to her side as though only just realizing how intrusive she’d been.

“I just wanted you to know—I’m really sorry about what happened.” Somehow, the respectful intimacy of Keim’s voice carried over the tumult more clearly than simple shouting. “What they did has nothing to do with conservation or love of nature, and you and I both know it. I hate that they’re a part of what I stand for.”

Rahel sighed and ran a hand through salt-encrusted hair. Five steps below her, Nils was insisting on courtesy before he’d acknowledge any netlink questions. “I’ll give you a scoop.” She was impressed when Keim didn’t dive immediately for her notebook. “What happened to Paval—your Greens didn’t do it.”

The reporter’s eyes widened, and one hand splayed wide as though longing to type. “You’re sure of this?”

Rahel nodded. It seemed only fair to give GreeNet first shot at the story, since they were suing her and all. It was the closest she could come to an apology. “You’ll hear the details when I know them. But tell your bosses I was wrong.”

That was a phrase she expected to repeat often over the next few days.

The Startide’s lobby somehow looked even larger and more empty than on the day they arrived. Rahel shivered a little when a bellhop finally sealed the door behind her and Nils, and let silence clap shut around them like a vacuum. Here they were, she realized, encased inside a replica of nature that had no idea of the full power of what it tried to represent. Caught between the destructive nature of the mild, patient ocean outside and the conspicuous hubris on display in here, Rahel’s concerns suddenly felt very ridiculous and small.

“Don’t look now.”

She looked where Nils pointed, then couldn’t even reach out to take the note when Huan glided to a stop in front of them with waldo outstretched. “The guy’s good,” she allowed as Nils accepted the piece of paper and unfolded it into a square. She guessed what it said even before Nils scoffed with disgust and held it out for her.

Please do me the honor of stopping by my suite before you retire.

F.S.

Rahel took the note and crushed it between her palms.

“What are you going to tell him?” Nils asked.

She sighed and followed Huan when the Newborn pivoted to retrace its winding path across the lobby. “The truth.”

“Proctor Tovin, Proctor Oberjen. Thank you for coming by.” Feles Sadena smiled politely, lacing long cinnamon fingers over one knee and sitting back in his tastefully polished coral chair as though pleased with himself for having greeted them so well. Behind him, Jynn stood with hands behind his back, dark eyes slightly averted. “I know you must be tired after such a long day in the sun.” Without any overt signal from Sadena, a service drone glided in with a tray of steaming beverages.

Rahel neither smiled nor glanced at the waiting coffee. “Do you know anything new about Paval?”

“Yes…” Sadena pursed thin lips in gracious concern, reaching for one of the tiny cups. “Yes, of course. Mr. Kuvasc is doing extremely well.” It was apparently already brewed and sweetened to his tastes—he took a sip without waiting for the contents to cool. “He’s been asking for you.”

Rahel’s stomach squeezed with unexpected guilt, only to burn a moment later when anger flashed up to replace it. “I was finishing our work. Mr. Kuvasc understands.” And damn Sadena for trying to unbalance her with such a heartless ploy.

“Speaking of your work…” Sadena siphoned off another decorous sip. “I’m told you’ve located the cause of all my jellyfish problems.”

Rahel flicked a look at Jynn over Sadena’s shoulder, but the pilot dropped his gaze without meeting her eyes. “If your man told you about the problem,” she said, not caring that her tone made Jynn flinch as though she’d pricked him, “then maybe he also told you there’s nothing anyone can do about it.”

Sadena replaced his cup on the tray, managing to glance back at Jynn and disregard him with a single gesture. “Proctor Tovin, Jynn is merely an informant. If he didn’t believe in impossibility, he might have some more meaningful job. I, on the other hand, am a man with a great deal of money. I have found that, in the main, impossibility is highly overrated.” He sat back again in his chair and fixed her with unfeeling eyes the color of iron. “I would like you to tell me yourself how you see the situation.”

“Your ocean ecology is screwed up and there’s nothing anybody can do about it.”

Nils stirred beside her, shooting her a sharp, reproving glance. “Uriel’s oceans are becoming stagnant, Mr. Sadena,” he said, ignoring Rahel’s returning scowl. “It’s part of the planet’s natural global cycle, and right now it’s smothering the stellar jellyfish. Eventually, though, it will smother almost everything else in the water. I’m sorry.”

Sadena studied Nils with the very faintest of frowns wrinkling his high forehead. Then he tipped his head toward Rahel and asked the question with his eyes.

She thought about pacing to disguise her distaste of his attention, but made herself match his stare without flinching. It felt like sharing handclasps with a corpse. “Uriel’s a greenhouse planet,” she told him in her most businesslike tone. “That means you’ve got no polar caps, which means you’ve got no deep thermoha-line currents. You’ve got three puny natural satellites—that means no significant gravitational stresses, and that means no tides. So basically put, Mr. Sadena, Uriel’s ocean water doesn’t move around. You get a little bit of chop at the surface due to wind movement, but that only oxygenates the upper level. The rest of the ocean has to collect oxygen through diffusion. That isn’t very fast, and a lot of things can screw it up. Like when crap falls down from above—”

“Crap?” Sadena interrupted delicately.

Rahel waved her hands in ill-tempered impatience. She wasn’t interested in playing to his sensibilities. “Dead algae, dead fish, dead birds—anything organic that sinks from the ocean surface to the bottom. Once organic stuff gets down there, it rots. Rotting uses up oxygen. If you’ve got more organic stuff floating down than you have oxygen diffusing—which in Uriel’s environment isn’t too hard—your organic rot uses up all the oxygen. Without oxygen, the organic waste can’t rot, so it starts to build up. Once it builds up high enough to touch oxygenated water, it starts rotting again. After a while, it uses up all that oxygen, too, and so on, and so on.”

Sadena nodded once, a cordial acknowledgment that he was paying attention. “And you say this is happening all over the planet?”

“As near as we can tell. You noticed it in the Odarkan Sea first because that’s a much smaller body of water than the entire ocean, and because you pay special attention to the wildlife there. Who knows how many deepwater species in the main ocean you’ve lost without anybody noticing.” She could tell from Sadena’s dismissive shrug that the thought disturbed her more than it did him. “You’ll need a Geological Survey ship if you really want details on a planetary scale,” she went on, making no effort to hide her dislike of him. “But I can tell you that every bottom water sample I pulled today indicates the development of a major anoxic event.”

Glints of dispassionate thought moved in Sadena’s dark eyes as he steepled fingers beneath his chin. “But the presence of my resort,” he asked carefully, “of any of my resorts, has nothing to do with this development?”

Rahel snorted. “Even you couldn’t produce enough garbage to turn an entire ocean stagnant.”

“But at some point—” Nils moved to sit on the sofa directly across from Sadena, his hands clenched into a bundle of worried energy in his lap. “At some point, all the methane gas, and garbage, and hydrogen sulfide that’s building up at the bottom of the ocean—” He glanced at Rahel for verification, then continued talking without actually waiting for her response. “When that needs to escape, Mr. Sadena, it has nowhere to go but up. The rotten bottom water is going to rise to the surface, and all the surface water will sink down below, and Uriel’s oceans will put out a cloud of gas so poisonous you’ll have nothing left alive within three kilometers of your beaches.”

Ever since she’d explained the result of anoxic turnover to Nils, he’d been obsessed with making sure Sadena understood the details. Rahel, on the other hand, knew Sadena only needed to understand one thing. “Your ocean ecology is screwed.”

“How soon can I expect the planet-wide repercussions Proctor Oberjen describes?”

“Like I said, you need to talk to geologists about that.” Rahel tossed a shrug and guessed anyway. “Five thousand years? Five million?” In the lifetime of a planet, both were equally imminent, barely a heartbeat away.

Sadena’s little chuckle of amused relief disagreed. “Thank you for your report, Proctor Tovin. In the meantime…” He waved away the service drone, causing Jynn to dance back several steps to keep from being run over. “I believe our business here is done. Noah’s Ark’s services are no longer required on Uriel. You may, of course, make yourselves comfortable at my expense until Mr. Kuvasc is ready to travel, but you needn’t trouble yourselves with any additional—”

“But…” Jynn looked startled with himself, as though he hadn’t expected to hear himself speak. “But what about the jellyfish?” he asked in a little-boy voice.

Sadena’s hand curled about the arm of his chair, and he sighed, very softly. It was the first honest sign of emotion Rahel had seen in the man. “Jynn, I’m sorry to have kept you from your duties. You may consider yourself excused.”

“No, sir…” Jynn rounded Sadena’s chair in a few uncertain steps, darting his attention between Rahel and his employer as though unsure to which one he should appeal. “Are you just going to talk about it and call it done?” He finally settled his gaze on Rahel. “Ma’am, what about the jellyfish?”

“Jynn…” Her back hurt, her lips tasted like tears, and the skin of her face and hands felt dry enough to peel. Even if she knew how to say what the pilot wanted, she hadn’t the strength for it right now. “I’m sorry.”

“But you got brought here to do something,” he insisted. Big hands implored her for help as they reached out to her. “Can’t you take them back with you? Just some of them. Keep them, and breed them the way you do other animals. That way there’ll still be some left to bring back when the oceans get right again.”

Rahel gently shook her head. “Noah’s Ark doesn’t work that way. We aim our reproduction efforts at animals who were pushed to extinction by unnatural forces—people, usually,” she added, glaring once at Sadena. He returned her stare with impassive disinterest. “But when things die in nature…” She wished Jynn would blink and clear the tears that had gathered in his eyes. “Whole species die and get replaced all the time. They always have. If it isn’t right for humans to wipe out an animal that nature intended for survival, then it isn’t right for us to save an animal that nature meant to destroy.” When Jynn didn’t say anything for what seemed a very long time, Rahel asked softly, “Do you understand?”

He jerked to face Sadena in answer. “You could hire Noah’s Ark to do it, couldn’t you, sir? You’re always saying you can do anything with the jellyfish you want to—”

“And, indeed, I can,” Sadena cut the pilot off impatiently. He reached around Jynn for another cup of coffee, and his face darkened slightly when he realized the serving robot was no longer by his chair. “However, I am not interested in entering into any such arrangement with Noah’s Ark at this time.”

Jynn shook his head slowly. “But why?”

“Because,” Rahel caught Sadena’s eyes with her own when he glanced at her, “Mr. Sadena isn’t actually interested in preserving Uriel’s jellyfish. He never has been.”

The languid composure with which Sadena shifted to drape one knee over the other made anger rise up into Rahel’s throat so hot it was all she could do not to bite him. She suddenly understood why Paval hadn’t been able to restrain himself from beating the righteous superiority off those Green faces.

“Let me tell you something, Proctor Tovin,” Sadena offered, the voice of a man with a great wisdom to impart. “I own Uriel. I did not buy it to preserve it, I bought it to exploit it. I preserve the planet as aggressively as I do because I cannot exploit what I do not have, and because it is just bad business to let consumers believe I shit where I expect them to vacation.” Whatever passed for sensitivity drained from his face, and the cold impatience of a businessman darkened his eyes. “My interest in Noah’s Ark was never about jellyfish, Proctor Tovin. It was about publicity, and reputation, and considered self-interest. But it was never about jellyfish.”

Jynn left, very quietly, through the same door the service drone had used to come and go. For just a moment, Rahel wasn’t sure if Sadena’s show of disdain had really been aimed at her, or at his insubordinate employee. It probably didn’t matter—she doubted Sadena would see either of them again.

The sofa creaked softly as Nils leaned forward in preparation to stand. “I think that’s all we need to cover right now, Mr. Sadena,” the lawyer said politely. “I’ll be in touch with your financial division—”

“Don’t bother.”

Nils twitched a panicked look at her, but Rahel refused to take her eyes from Sadena. “I beg your pardon?” Sadena inquired.

“Noah’s Ark won’t be accepting a fee for this safari.”

“Ra-hel!” Nils scurried around the end of the sofa as if to protect her from herself, all his lawyerly instincts no doubt soaring with his blood pressure. “You can’t just renegotiate the agreement at this late a date!”

Rahel stepped to one side so she could keep eye contact with Sadena without leaning over Nils. “Read your Ark contract,” she told the lawyer. “While we’re out on safari, I’m your boss—that means I can do anything I think necessary.” She pushed Nils back into his seat with a glare. “And I’m telling you to shut up.”

Nils sank onto the cushions with his forehead in his hand.

“I’m good for the contracted amount,” Sadena assured them. He didn’t sound particularly offended, though.

Rahel almost grimaced with disgust. “I’m sure you are. But if the Ark accepts payment from you, we’re bound by all the elements of your contract—including the gag clause that says we can’t go public with the details of our relationship with you.” She shook her head grimly. “I won’t have GreeNet posting that Noah’s Ark will tailor its data to suit high-paying customers, and I won’t have you implying that we knowingly came here to whitewash your operation. You’ll pay for our expenses—including Paval’s medical care and our upkeep while we wait for him—but you won’t pay the usual consulting fees, and you won’t interfere if we choose to make our investigation here public.”

“Considering your data reveals no misconduct on my part—” Sadena spread his hands with a pleased little laugh. “In fact, you prove I’m completely justified in not spending a credit to rescue Uriel’s environment. I’m more than happy to let you spread the word as far as you’d like. It won’t affect my business over the next five thousand years.”

“And you’ll give us all this in writing?” Nils still hadn’t looked up from his lap.

“I’ll see to it immediately.” Sadena came brightly to his feet, bringing his hands together with a clap. He held them that way in front of him, as though proud of having snatched something out of the air before the rest of them. “Proctor Tovin, Proctor Oberejen—” He dipped a brisk nod toward the still despondent Nils. “Thank you very much for your services. It’s been a pleasure doing business with you.”

Rahel waited until the man had left the room before kicking a nearby end table into the closest wall.

Nils jerked his head up with a scowl. “What did you do that for?” The accusation sounded more betrayed than Rahel had expected. “You got what you wanted, didn’t you?”

She righted the end table, swallowing a little twist of disappointment when it turned out to be too broken to stand where it belonged. “If you think I got anything out of this safari I wanted,” she said as she eased the ruined furniture back down to the floor, “then you don’t have the faintest idea what I came here expecting to gain.”

Rahel left the hotel that evening by way of the lone service entrance. All three moons dotted a broken line from horizon to apex, and the everpresent rime of clouds stained the sky dull white instead of a more appropriate black or gray. Beach mud slipped under her feet, devoid of shells or bones to crunch. A clement breeze from the west lifted her hair away from her eyes, shushing like a maiden aunt who longed to assure her that everything would be all right.

No spybees buzzed for her attention this time, no reporters climbed over each other for a chance to bark their hateful questions. Nils had held court with the netlinks for nearly two hours after leaving Sadena’s private chambers. No one stayed on to the end except Keim, a small public access science service, and a token representative from one of the major nets. Natural disasters just weren’t news unless people were involved.

Rahel had left before Nils got done explaining that there wasn’t even going to be a scandal. She could imagine the disappointment for netlink executives the Galaxy over.

Darkness softened the walk to the Odarkan straits, blurring the landscape, muting the sounds. Even the tongue of rock at the top of the ridge seemed to reach out with no transition between it and the dark water it overhung. Rahel eased herself up to the very thinnest finger of that stone, then used hands and feet to feel her way down to her knees, and finally her stomach, letting her chin hang over the edge so that the view below her stretched on forever, wild and endless.

Water as still as satin, as perfect as black glass. Faintly—first in the deep waters far off to her right, then drifting slowly toward her in swirls of diamond spray—an angel’s kiss of light stitched itself beneath the Odarkan’s surface. Twinkles of simple jellyfish thoughts passed silently from bell to lash to ruffle. Knowing the patterns for moonlight dancing off the jellies’ crystalline cilia didn’t soften the throb of wonder Rahel felt at seeing them move.

How long was a year for a jellyfish? Long enough to do everything important in their quiet, jellyfish lives? Long enough that five thousand or five million or five hundred of them would support enough jellyfish memories to take the sting out of dying unfairly? And what if their years left numbered less than five? Was that long enough for anything at all?

“You’re better off than we are,” she whispered, letting the voiceless wind carry her words to the starlight ripples down below. “We know when your dance is over, but you get to think you live forever.”

Right up to the moment when the last glimmer of jellyfish thinking flickered down into the darkness of extinction.

Acknowledgments

The Author would like to thank Chris Laughery of the Pennsylvania Geological Survey and Dr. Karen Rose Cercone of Indiana University of Pennsylvania for their invaluable help with the scuba and geology details for this story. Such willing consultation as theirs gives special life to the science in science fiction.

Content

Tide of Stars
by Julia Ecklar

Acknowledgments