Portal-eARC (32 page)

She knew that
Zarathustra
would almost certainly not survive another confrontation.

The shimmer again. No, wait.
Two
shimmers now. Now one.
What am I seeing…
? She tried to make sense of the vague, phantom shapes.
Could be one big creature that’s sometimes lighting one part of its body, sometimes two. Light seems to be a signaling device here, at least for some species; that’s why the one creature still has eyes. Maybe it’s also a lure. I suppose if you can see and a lot of other species can’t, you might be able to parlay that into an advantage even here. Lure wouldn’t make sense in that case, though.

The lights faded into the distance…then returned from the same direction. Like the other, it was a little closer…
Hmm. But that wasn’t the sharklike motion of the first thing. That was something approaching, then backing up. Something
curious
, I think, checking to see if what it’s seeing is a predator. It might still be dangerous, but it’s not moving the way a shark circles.

Still…“Joe,” she said, “I hate to interrupt, but I think Athena’s noise has attracted another visitor. You should probably strap in.”

“Damn. Maddie, I have to go.” Joe swung himself into the pilot’s seat, grasped the manipulator controls. “Not seeing much on the camera. What’ve you got? Not another of those things, I hope.”

“I don’t
think
so. It’s not moving at all the same. I haven’t tried doing anything to get a range on it, but if I assume the thing’s generating about the same level of brightness and that the water’s about the same level of transparent as it was last time, then it’s roughly the same size.” The distant-but-a-little-closer light seemed generally similar in shape, maybe a little misshapen, a bulge partway down. But on this scale, fish, sharks, dolphins, and submarines had similar shapes.

Suddenly the misshapen section moved, separated.
Two separate animals! One staying near the other, maybe touching the other! Mother and child?
The two shapes hovered motionless now; they were somewhat similar, both fairly long, probably a similar body plan to the huge predator. The smaller one was only a few meters long. The larger one seemed broader, not just longer but more heavily built.

She wished that she dared brighten the lights to get a look, but she didn’t want a repeat of the last encounter. Maybe these things wouldn’t react that way…but they might. And if it
was
a parent and child, the parent would likely react—like many earth animals’ parents—with extreme violence to any perceived threat.

Once more the two rejoined, retreated—though this time to just the limit of visibility—and waited.

“Talk to me, Helen.”

“I’m seeing a pattern of curiosity. Approach, wait, back off, wait. Whatever it is wants to find out what these strange noises and objects are, but wants to make sure it’s not some kind of threat. Lots of animals have similar behavior on Earth, and it’s a perfectly sensible strategy; new events and creatures have potential to benefit you, but they’re also potentially dangerous, and you have to be very careful how you approach them.”

Now the joined shape moved forward, even closer; they separated, and the smaller one darted off to the side and up—on the side, she noted, farthest from the whining rumble of
Athena
.
Now that’s interesting. I wonder what it’s up to?

The larger creature hung motionless; she could just barely make out some projections fore and aft that might be tentacles or fins.
That would be similar to the other creature, and again the same body plan we’ve found in the biosphere of our favorite alien visitors.

The smaller creature crossed back over the field of view, closer, but moving quickly, still blurred. There was a bright flash. “What the hell…?”

“What is it?”

“That flash looked like one of our rear lights.”

“The things can mimic packaged LEDs? I’m impressed.”

“Maybe…but it looked almost like a reflection.”

“Nothing says animals can’t have reflective parts. Isn’t that why things like cats have that eyeshine thing going on?” Joe asked.

“Well…yes,” she said, trying to figure out where the small creature had gone now (though “small” was relative; she was pretty sure that even the smaller one was bigger than General Hohenheim). “But I meant it looked like a flash from a
mirror
. The reflective material in cat’s eyes doesn’t really look like that.”

“Oh. Well, I—”

Helen gave a gasp of startlement as the smaller creature suddenly swam into view from the side, and halted, almost framed in the center of the rear viewport, hanging only ten meters from the end of
Zarathustra
.

She stared, her mind almost blank, and heard herself say “Oh…my…
God.
”

“What? Helen—!” Joe didn’t dare unstrap in case it was an emergency. Then he looked in the part of the monitors that covered the rear camera. “Jesus!”

Hovering in the center of the gently-glowing lights of
Zarathustra
, now drifting forward, now easing back, the creature stared at
Zarathustra
(
or…at
me?) through three large, golden eyes, each between a pair of complex tentacles. The whole creature was perhaps four meters long, the streamlined body triangular in cross-section with flaring fins that rippled to move it in its cautious approach-and-retreat.

But that wasn’t the source of Helen’s disbelief; even the fact that the creature, with its multibranching arms and large eyes and tripartite beak, gently gaping and closing as the thing focused its triple stare from one point of the strange invader of its world to another, looked eerily like the reconstructions of
Bemmius Secordii
could not have shocked Helen into near-speechless incredulity.

No.

What kept her staring raptly back at their visitor, what had Joe sitting immobile and unresponsive to Madeline’s increasingly insistent calls, was what those complex, jointed tentacle-arms were gripping.

Shining silver in the light, shaft curved in strange yet deliberate ways, yet utterly, instantly recognizable. Artificial. Metallic. Impossible.

A spear
.

Chapter 41.

“Bemmie? There’s a living
Bemmie
down there?” Jackie said, incredulously. “I don’t believe it!” She drove another securing spike down, making sure
Athena
was now thoroughly immobilized. She let the fountain of steam blow her backward, kept working her body to shake off any ice that tried to form.
Less is forming now, a lot less. Temperature is really starting to go up.

Helen gave a laugh that still sounded like a woman half in shock. “Don’t believe it. That’s not
Bemmius Secordii
, or even an adapted version.”

“Huh? What do you mean?” A.J. demanded. Jackie wiped off her faceplate and moved over to where they were starting to assemble a rig to try and break through the ice. “What else
could
it be?”

“There’s several morphological differences I’m seeing—small ones probably from your point of view, but enough so I’m pretty sure this is a very different animal; for example, the forward manipulative tendrils
bifurcate
, they don’t trifurcate twice and then bifurcate, and there’s four stages, so they have sixteen fingers instead of eighteen. If there
were
actual Bemmies living in Europa—after being bioformed to fit the environment—they died out millions of years ago. I can’t imagine such a lifeform staying stable for sixty-five million years. But I
can
easily imagine that other lifeforms, maybe domestic ones that then went feral, could eventually evolve to intelligence, and to us they’d look very similar indeed.” There was a catch in her voice. “Enough that it does, I admit, get to me. I’m…meeting Bemmie, or as close as is possible.”

“I do not understand, though,” said Horst. “How can they have metal? That is an
ocean
. No refineries, no forging, nothing of that sort. And what sort of metal could they use in that salty sea, that would not dissolve too fast to use?”

“Well,” said Joe, “I can answer the last question. According to the spectral returns I can get off our friend’s spear—a spear he’s now using to gently poke our hull,and if he starts getting near the wrong areas I’m going to have to find a way to discourage him—he’s using something that’s almost pure titanium.”

“
Titanium?
” The disbelief was echoed by multiple voices. “Joe, are you sure you’re getting the right breathing mix down there?” asked A.J., only partially in a joking tone. “Hallucinations are starting to sound like the more reasonable explanation for what you’re seeing.”

“I know it sounds crazy, but blame
your
sensors for what I’m seeing, not my air. Which other than being a lot more, er, fragant than Helen or I would like, is just fine, thanks.

“Damn. I wish there was some way to get a good high-bandwidth channel down there. I’d like—”

“Hey!” Joe said. There was the sound of
Zarathustra
’s wheels spinning in water. “Yeah, watch where you stick that thing, guy,” he muttered. He spoke up again to the others. “Our native explorer was getting awfully close to the lock. He backed off when I revved, though.”

Jackie was thinking, even as she helped A.J. move one of the supports for the icebreaking rig into place. “Titanium. Why does that seem familiar somehow?”

It was something about Ceres, she suddenly thought with certainty. Something she’d heard, something that the news had included…

And then she had it. “Helen, back on Ceres—the plants and other engineered sessile things. Didn’t the report say some of them seemed to be concentrating metal?”

“Oh…” Helen went silent for a moment, and then continued, “Ohh, now, that’s
very
clever, Bemmie. You
knew
you were preparing to colonize somewhere completely underwater, so how would you deal with that problem? Make a way to
grow
your tools, of course. Then even if a disaster happens to your infrastructure, you’re not stuck back before the Stone Age.”

A.J. scratched his head; this was a very silly-looking gesture when one was wearing a suit. “Er…I guess, yeah, that’s actually very smart, but…
titanium?
”

“It’s not at all unprecedented,” Helen said, sounding more certain. “Some varieties of Earth plants—horsetails, and I think nettles—can have upwards of eighty parts per million of titanium. Design a plant or something like it that concentrates titanium into its tissues and give that concentration some useful advantage for the plant, and the general trait will probably propagate itself for a long, long time. And when this species reached intelligence, perhaps it found these very tough species and started farming them, choosing the most tractable and performing a sort of…of
bonsai
on them, creating spear trees or something like that.”

“Spear trees. I like that,” A.J. said with a grin. “So what’s Bemmius Newguy doing?”

“
Bemmius Novus sapiens
, so to speak, has come back. He has eyes, so I wonder if he can see inside here. Sometimes I think he can see me.”

“He might,” Joe said. “I dunno if he’s going to realize that you’re a separate animal.”

“Separate or not, I’m going to try to communicate with him,” Helen said. “They use light patterns for
something
, so I’m going to see if I can get anything from him using light.”

“Just be careful. Don’t want to trigger a feeling of threat.”

“I’ll be careful, believe me. I’m going to use the spot illuminator on my helmet, not the main lights on
Zarathustra
. That shouldn’t be panic inducing.”

“Well, keep us informed,” Jackie said. “We need to concentrate on getting you out of there.”

“Yeah,” Joe said. “And soon. That seal’s really starting to go bad, and I expect a leak any minute now. Do we expect explosions?”

“Not yet, I’m afraid,” Madeline responded, trying to sound cheerful. “First we have to get far enough down that what I have left will be able to break up everything and let us remove the chunks of ice.”

“What, my super-spy wife is running out of things that go
boom
?”

“I’m afraid so, Joe. Everyone thought I’d brought a far larger supply of, to quote the military jargon, ‘energetic materials’ than we could
possibly
need and I was wasting valuable space and mass; now I wish I’d brought three times as much. As it is I’m probably going to have to improvise something.”

“So what, you’re going to bash on it with hammers?”

Jackie managed a laugh. “Basically, yes. Unfortunately, the specialized digging equipment that was supposed to be used for digging a base at Enceladus is way too big to fit through the bores we’ve made. So,we’ve rigged the heavy cutters and punch machines we got from
Odin
for machining to provide the force to drill or drive holes into the ice at intervals; then as we can break off chunks we can throw them away. Since
Athena
isn’t moving anymore, we can get the power from her—she doesn’t need any motive capability. When we get far enough down, Maddie blows the rest to pieces and we pull
Zarathustra
up. We’ve got a winch already set to do that on the line holding you.”

“Heh. You sure your name isn’t Montgomery Scott?”

“What?” She blinked. Then light dawned. “Oh, I didn’t know that was his first name.”

“Your geek powers are weak, young girl,” A.J. said in an exaggerated bass voice.

“Bah!” she sneered with a grin that relaxed the tension in her gut. “
I
am the actual captain of a
spaceship!
Even if my spaceship
is
on the ground at the moment. That gives me more geek cred than all of you except the General
combined
!”

A.J. and Joe laughed together. “Aye, Captain, that it does!”

“Far be it from me to compete in your geek wars,” Helen said, a smile in her voice as well, “but I’d point out that a super-spy who helped fight the first interplanetary ship-to-ship battle probably outranks you, too.”

“Hey, are you
trying
to deflate my ego?” demanded A.J., instantly adding, “No, don’t answer that, of course you are. But my ego is impervious to your puny attacks!”