Not again! Ik thought. He peered out of the golden bubble into a cerulean sea. Overhead, but receding with each heartbeat, was the rippling mirror of the ocean's surface. Below lay the darkness of the ocean depths, into which they were sinking rapidly—trapped in the forcefield bubble that had swept them across uncounted light-years.
Li-Jared was making frantic bonging sounds. He was terrified of deep water, so this must have been his worst nightmare come true. On Ik's other side the Human, John Bandicut, looked as if he had stopped breathing. He was staring down into the twilit depths, eyes bulging with fear and concentration. He was pointing to something, stuttering incomprehensibly.
It is happening again, Ik thought. Rakh.
John Bandicut turned around to look at all the others. "Do you see it?" he shouted. "Tell me I'm not crazy! Do you see it?"
Bwong-ng-ng-ng-ng— "See what?" Li-Jared cried, lunging drunkenly from one side of the bubble to the other. "There's no bottom! All I see is water! We're all going to drown!"
But Ik saw now what Bandicut was yelling about. Lights. Below them, and very dim, but growing slowly. Ik bent down to peer through the bottom of the star-spanner bubble. The lights seemed to be globe-shaped. They looked . . .artificial. Like an undersea city.
That was what Bandicut was trying to say. They were plummeting toward something, not just sinking to the bottom of an alien sea. Ik didn't know what it was, but he recognized the hand of the Shipworld Masters in it. Someone had aimed them in this direction, and had known there would be something waiting for them in the depths of this sea. Ik found a slight trace of comfort in that knowledge.
Bandicut was trying to calm the terrified Karellian. "Li-Jared, there's something down there! Take a look for yourself!" With that, he plunged his head directly through the side of the bubble, extruding himself into the water without disturbing the bubble at all.
"Hrah—he's right—I see it, too!" Ik said, finding his voice at last. He drew a deep breath and followed Bandicut's example, sticking his head through the bubble wall. The bubble gave and stretched over his skin; he felt a sense of pressure and cold, but no water actually touched him. He held his breath and peered down.
He could see the lights more clearly now. They were definitely drawing closer. Was it really possible that they were bubbles of air? He popped his head back out of the water to take a breath.
Bandicut was looking at him, in the deepening gloom. "My guess is we want to reach those things. Is there some way we can steer?"
A voice from behind Ik said, "Are we certain that we want to?"
Ik turned to the newest member of their party: Antares, the Thespi third-female, Bandicut's acquaintance. Ik barely knew her, but she had helped them all survive their recent battle with the boojum, back on Shipworld. "I'm not sure we have any choice," he said. "It would certainly seem that this place is our intended destination."
The Thespi blinked, her golden eyes wide in the failing light. "So it would seem," she said, stroking the gemlike stones in her throat.
"We're being carried off to one side," Bandicut said, peering outside again. "I think we're going to miss those structures. You don't suppose the star-spanner forgot to allow for currents, do you?"
Ik touched the side of his head, querying his voice-stones. /Can you advise on the guidance of this travel unit?/
There was a short flurry of feedback sensation, before the voice-stones answered:
*Guidance negative. Wait for arrival.*
Bandicut's gaze had gone blank and unfocused. A moment later it returned to normal. "According to Charlie, my stones say we've been renormalized to this environment. Is that supposed to mean we can breathe water?"
"Hrrm, I would not be eager to test such a supposition," Ik said. He caught the eye of Li-Jared, who had stopped panting long enough to stare back at him, the bright blue slits across his eyes wide with fury and panic. "But according to my voice-stones, we cannot steer; we must wait for arrival."
"Arrival?" Antares muttered. "I thought we'd already arrived."
"Yes, well—" Ik rubbed his chest uncertainly. They were sliding farther and farther into the darkness of the depths. The surface was no longer visible, though a blue hue overhead pointed the way back to it. Below, the lights were pulling off to one side. Bandicut was right; they were going to miss them.
Ik felt himself instinctively trying to will the bubble back toward those globes. But it was no use. Soon the lights were level with them, far off to one side. Then they seemed to slide upward and away, as the sea continued darkening. Ik felt the air in the bubble growing thick and dense in his throat.
"Can we do nothing?" Antares murmured.
"Hold on! Look there!" said Bandicut, pointing the other way.
Below, and on the other side, more lights were coming into view. Ik tried to gauge the bubble's movement, and decided that there was at least a chance they would pass close to those lights. And what would they find?
Ik sighed through his ears, touched his forehead, and began preparing himself for whatever world they were about to enter.
* * *
Something was moving in those globes of light.
Bandicut was almost certain of it. He strained to see more clearly. The globes were growing larger, but the haze of the water obscured his view. The array had the look of a sunken city; but he hardly dared believe it.
He wondered how much longer the air would last in the star-spanner bubble.
/// Not to worry.
If it can keep us alive halfway across the galaxy,
it can probably give us a few minutes more
underwater. ///
The voice of the quarx in his head was laconic. The alien seemed almost relaxed about their sudden entry into this ocean. Perhaps, lacking a body of his own, he felt less sense of danger.
/// You think I'm too stupid to know danger? ///
Jarred by the remark, Bandicut said, /No . . .I don't think you're stupid./ But this quarx was a very different individual from the last Charlie, whose death was still terribly immediate in his mind.
As the lights drew closer, growing in number, something resembling a landscape began to emerge from their illumination. The globes were gathered in clusters, and they were attached to or suspended from a steep submarine slope that was barely visible now, in shadowy outlines behind and beneath them. Only a few dim, scattered lights were visible in the darkness further below. If they failed to connect with this cluster, they might fall forever.
"Are we going to miss them?" Li-Jared asked, as though reading his mind.
No, Bandicut thought. Yes. He couldn't tell.
"Bandie John?" Antares' eyes caught his with sharp intensity.
Was she reading his fear? Feeling it? He hardly knew her. And yet he was unsurprised to sense her empathic awareness. It felt right, somehow.
Before he could answer, though, he felt a vibration under his feet. There was a sound, like a distant murmur. "What the—?"
"Hrahh, it feels like a quake," said Ik. "A distant quake. Do you feel the current, shifting sideways? We are going to miss those structures!" Ik's sculpted blue face looked skeletal in the undersea light, as he twisted around to look at them.
"I feel it," Antares said, her eyes glinting.
Bandicut closed his eyes a moment, feeling the movement. Ik was right. If they couldn't reach those structures . . .how deep was this ocean, anyway?
He glanced at his companions, their faces dimly lit by a low-level luminosity in the bubble itself. Ik the tall Hraachee'an, his small dark eyes glittering with inner points of light. Li-Jared the simian-looking Karellian, with his narrow, vertical eyes of gold, bisected by electric-blue horizontal slits, wide with fear. Antares, so much like a human woman and yet no such thing, her face delicately angular, her eyes almost Asian-looking, her expressions inscrutable. And the two robots who had traveled so far with him from Triton, dumb machines who had somehow been transformed into sentient beings. Bandicut was grateful for all of them. But he had no wish to die here with them.
"Captain," said the robot Copernicus, "I am uncertain of the medium outside the bubble. But I detect objects or entities moving toward us."
Ik was already looking past the robot. "Someone is coming! This way!"
The bubble rocked as they all leaned to see. At first Bandicut could see nothing. And then, like spots before his eyes, he began to focus on very small figures moving through the watery gloom. Moving toward them. Swimming.
For a fleeting moment, he was afraid he was hallucinating.
/// After what you've been through,
I'm surprised anything surprises you. ///
Bandicut grunted. On Shipworld, he had seen everything from fractal beings to sentient ice floes. Why should this—
"They're coming for us," Ik said, interrupting his thought.
He could see five or six figures now—arms and legs moving rapidly. He thought they looked humanoid, but they were still too far away to tell.
Antares pressed her face to the side of the bubble. "They're bringing lines," she said, her voice muffled.
Bandicut squinted. Indeed, there were long lines trailing behind the swimming figures. They looked less humanoid as they drew closer. They had legs, yes—but with webbed feet. They moved through the water with quick, powerful strokes.
"Captain—over here," said Napoleon, on the other side.
Bandicut turned, and stifled a shout. One of the swimmers had come from a different direction. It was pressing its webbed hands and its face to the bubble wall. Then it pushed its head through the bubble and into their midst. It looked like a monstrous apparition: shiny and black, with enormous eyes and pulsing slits along the side of the head, and a mouth slightly open, revealing two rows of sharp teeth. It stared first at Bandicut, then turned to look at Li-Jared.
The Karellian squawked in alarm and backed away. Bandicut could not even find his voice.
Ik spoke up sharply. "Stand back. Don't frighten it!"
Don't frighten it? Bandicut felt twin impulses: to flee from the thing, and to kill it.
The sea creature gave a muffled cry that sounded like an animal in pain. Then it popped back out into the sea, leaving the bubble undisturbed, and Bandicut and the others gasping.
/// I've got this feeling
that these are our new hosts. ///
"Here are the others." Ik pointed to a cluster of similar creatures gathering on the other side of their bubble. The new arrivals peered in from the near darkness, without poking through.
Bandicut stared out at those toothy, bug-eyed faces. /New hosts—?/
The creatures were working with their lines now, stretching them around the bubble. It took Bandicut a moment to realize what they were doing, and by then the bubble was enclosed in a net. The undersea creatures cinched the lines tight with a jerk that sent Bandicut and the others staggering, and then the creatures began to tow the bubble through the water.