"Is she in there?" Clarke says.
"You back off," Cramer tells her. "You not be giving no orders here."
"Oh, I'm not ordering anybody. It's completely up to you. You can either get out of my way, or try and stop me."
"Is that Lenie?" Lubin's voice, air-normal channel.
"Yeah," Cramer buzzes after a moment. "She be pretty—"
"Let her in," Lubin says.
It's a private party, by invitation only. Ken Lubin. Jelaine Chen and Dimitri Alexander. Avril Hopkinson.
Grace Nolan.
Lubin doesn't even look around as Clarke climbs up from the wet room. "Deal with it later. We need you in on this, Len, but we need Grace too. Either of you lays a hand on the other, I'll take my own measures."
"Understood," Nolan says evenly.
Clarke looks at her, and says nothing.
"So." Lubin returns his attention to the monitor. "Where were we?"
"I'm pretty sure it didn't see us," Chen says. "It was too preoccupied with the site itself, and that model doesn't have wraparound vision." She taps the screen twice in quick succession; the image at its center freezes and zooms.
It looks like your garden-variety squid, but with a couple of manipulator arms at the front end and no towbar at the back. An AUV of some kind. It's obviously not from around here.
Hopkinson sucks breath through clenched teeth. "That's it, then. They found us."
"Maybe not," Chen says. "You can't teleop something that deep, not in that kind of terrain. It had to be running on its own. Whoever sent it wouldn't know what it found until it got back to the surface."
"Or until it doesn't report back on schedule."
Chen shrugs. "It's a big, dangerous ocean. It doesn't come back, they chalk it up to a mudslide or a faulty nav chip. No reason to suspect we had anything to do with it."
Hopkinson shakes her head. "No reason? What's an AUV even doing down here if not looking for us?"
"It would be a pretty amazing coincidence," Alexander agrees.
Lubin reaches forward and taps the screen. The image de-zooms and continues playing where it left off. Acronyms and numbers cluster along the bottom edge of the screen, shifting and shuffling as the telemetry changes.
The AUV's floating a few meters from the shore of Impossible Lake, just above the surface. One arm extends, dips a finger across the halocline, pulls back as if startled.
"Look at that," Nolan says. "It's scared of hypersaline."
The little robot moves a few meters into the hazy distance, and tries again.
"And it wasn't aware of you any of this time?" Lubin asks.
Alexander shakes his head. "Not until later. Like Laney said, it was too busy checking out the site."
"You got footage of that?" Nolan again, like she doesn't have a care in the world. Like she isn't living on borrowed time.
"Just a few seconds, back at the start. Real muddy, it doesn't show much. We didn't want to get too close, for obvious reasons."
"Yet you sonared it repeatedly," Lubin remarks.
Chen shrugs. "Seemed like the lesser of two evils. We had to get some track on what it was doing. Better than letting it see us."
"And if it triangulated on your pings?"
"We kept moving. Gapped the pings nice and wide. The most it could've known was that something was scanning the water column, and we've got a couple of things out there that do that anyway." Chen gestures at the screen, a little defensively. "It's all there in the track."
Lubin grunts.
"Okay, here's where it happens," Alexander says. "About thirty seconds from now."
The AUV is fading in the haze, apparently heading towards one of the few streetlights that actually pokes above the surface of Impossible Lake. Just before it disappears entirely, a black mass eclipses the view; some ragged outcrop intruding from the left. No circles of light play across that surface, even though the sub is obviously mere meters away; Chen and Alexander are running dark, hiding behind the local topography. The view on the screen tilts and bobs as their sub maneuvers around the rocks: dark shadows on darker ones, barely visible in the dim light backscattered around corners.
Alexander leans forward. "Here it comes…"
Light ahead and to the right; the far end of the outcropping cuts the edges of that brightening haze like a jumble of black shattered glass. The sub throttles back, moves forward more cautiously now, edges into the light—
— and nearly collides with the AUV coming the other way.
Two of the telemetry acronyms turn bright red and start flashing. There's no sound in the playback, but Clarke can imagine sirens in the sub's cockpit. For an instant, the AUV just sits there; Clarke swears she sees its stereocam irises go wide. Then it spins away—to continue its survey or to run like hell, depending on how smart it is.
They'll never know. Because that's when something shoots into view from below camera range, an elongate streak like a jet of gray ink. It hits the AUV in mid-spin, splashes out and wraps around it, shrinks down around its prey like an elastic spiderweb. The AUV pulls against the restraints but the trailing ends of the mesh are still connected to the sub by a springy, filamentous tether.
Clarke has never seen a cannon net in operation before. It's pretty cool.
"So that's it," Alexander says as the image freezes. "We're just lucky we ran into it before we'd used up the net on one of your monster fish."
"We're lucky I thought to use the net, too," Chen adds. "Who'da thunk it would come in so handy?" She frowns, and adds, "wish I knew what tipped the little beast off, though."
"You were moving," Lubin tells her.
"Yeah, of course. To keep it from getting a fix on our sonar signals, like you said."
"It followed your engine noise."
A little of the cockiness drains from Chen's posture.
"So we've got it," Clarke says. "Right now."
"Debbie's taking it apart now," Lubin says. "It wasn't booby-trapped, at least. She says we can probably get into its memory if there isn't any serious crypto."
Hopkinson looks a bit more cheerful. "Seriously? We can just give it amnesia and send it on its way?"
It sounds too good to be true. Lubin's look confirms it.
"What?" Hopkinson says. "We fake the data stream, it goes back home and tells its mom there's nothing down here but mud and starfishies. What's the problem?"
"How often do we go out there?" Lubin asks her.
"What, to the Lake? Maybe once or twice a week, not counting all the times we went out to set the place up."
"That's a very sparse schedule."
"It's all we need, until the seismic data's in."
The dread in Clarke's stomach—belayed a few moments ago, when the conversation turned to the hope of false memory—comes back like a tide, twice as cold as before. "Shit," she whispers. "You're talking about the odds."
Lubin nods. "There's virtually no chance we'd just happen to be in the area the very first time that thing came calling."
"So this isn't the first time. It's been down there before," Clarke says.
"Several times at least, I'd guess. It may have been to Impossible Lake more often than we have." Lubin looks around at the others. "Someone's already on to us. If we send this thing back with no record of the site, we'll simply be telling them that we know that."
"Fuck," Nolan says in a shaky voice. "We're sockeye. Five years. We're complete sockeye."
For once, Clarke's inclined to agree with her.
"Not necessarily," Lubin says. "I don't think they've found us yet."
"Gullshit. You said yourself, months ago, years even—"
"They haven't found us." Lubin speaks with that level, overly-controlled voice that speaks of thinning patience. Nolan immediately shuts up.