Nae a bad night's work, he thought. Ah'm noo th‘ gowk Ah thought, a few min ago.
He allowed he deserved a pint and a dram. And perhaps a wee walk in the moonlight with Marl and Hotsco.
Feeling romantic—and thirsty—Kilgour headed for home.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
THE CREATURE EYED Sten -through its enormous compound eyes for a very long moment. Sten remained motionless, lying on his belly on the ocean's floor. Three meters above him, waves crested and crashed against a rocky island.
The animal had a three-segmented body, with hard jointed segments extending off in all directions. It looked hostile, but then, anything over a meter long with pincer-jaws usually was logged as unfriendly by Sten. Especially when it was about twenty centimeters from his face.
Eventually, some sort of sitrep was achieved by what passed for the creature's brain: You are the biggest thing in this ocean. No, you are not. There is something that is bigger than you. It is sitting just in front of you. You are a predator. You can devour anything that is in this ocean, No, you cannot. You tried to snag a morsel off this creature. Your pincers did not snag a morsel. This is not a familiar situation. You are in trouble. You should go somewhere, somewhere this creature is not.
The huge "trilobite," or so Sten had labeled him, flurried its "legs," and was gone, vanished into a floating drift of algae.
Very good. Sten resumed his final mental briefing before he charged wildly off in all directions. It wasn't that the arthopod was any danger to Sten—especially since Sten was wearing a spacesuit. But those clotting pincers snapping on his faceplate made it hard to think.
That transmission beam that had almost been missed, ‘casting from the mansion, had led the Victory farther out into the back of beyond, into barely explored space. It intersected no system or object for light-centuries.
But then there was a solar system. Three worlds, one moon, and a sun. Not a dead system, like the relay station Kyes had discovered, the relay station that had self-destructed on him. Life was just creating itself here.
Sten had kept the Victory on the solar system's fringes, terrified that one mistake would snap the thin lead, like so many others had before. Then, they would have to find another one of the luxury safehouses/way stations, and attempt to duplicate Cind's success. Or else follow that other beam far out into the unknown. It would probably take no more than a lifetime or two to find whatever pot of gold was at the end of that nearly infinite straight-line rainbow.
Preston again returned to his first skill, the com board. He had absolutely guaranteed Sten that the com beam from the mansion impacted on the second world from the sun.
Sten transferred Freston, Preston's com specialists, Hannelore La Ciotat, and himself to the Aoife, and again remoraed La Ciotat's tacship to the destroyer.
Very slowly, the Aoife closed on ‘the world. Very young, indeed. Continents slowly sinking, seas shallowing and spreading across the world. Cambrian was the description, or so Cind informed him, suggesting that he might wish to take some basic geology courses one of these centuries, hi his spare time.
They looked hard. Visually, electronically, actively, passively. It took an E-week before Freston had something. He had picked up some odd indicators from the coast of one of the small subcontinents in the southern hemisphere.iSomething was down there, something that appeared artificial, put every surface scan, from IR to scope, said the area was just one more rocky outcropping on the still-sterile land.
Freston chanced simulcasting a beam from the Aoife on the same freq as the continuous beam from the mansion, ‘cast for less than a second. He picked up some bounced radiation. It was his theory that an antenna, or more likely several of them, had been inletted into the planet's surface in that area. Capable of receiving, transmitting, or retransmitting.
Sten thought about it. The moonlet Cind had visited had been hollowed out as it was equipped with antenna, a buried shelter, power, and supplies. The Emperor was smart enough to not choose the same sort of world for each relay station—but it seemed he would be using a similar construct for all of these stations, and, for safety's sake, putting most of the station underground.
Or underwater.
Freston sneered at that—why would you bother adding the additional interference of liquid, not to mention building sediment, crustaceans with claws, and all the rest? Sten nodded— right. The station—if this is where it was—would be just at the shore.
Freston then triumphantly produced his second piece of information. He had put a tight scan on the area, a few hours after nightfall. That really gave him something. Something a searcher would have to be specifically looking for, and looking in a very small area.
The rocks held their warmth for a long time. Far longer than air. That gave Freston some interesting images, particularly when they had been computer-enhanced by an operator with imagination. Here... the lines of the buried antenna, where the material the antenna had been made of held its heat even longer than the rocks. Over here, an oblong outline, invisible without enhancement. Big. Freston thought that outline was a hangar door—the outline provided by cool air seeping through the door's edges. Over here—Preston's smile threatened to pass his ears and meet at the medulla oblongata—the door. People type.
All Sten had to do was get to that entrance, figure out how to pick the lock, and voila.
Voila, Sten said cynically. And then worry about how big a bomb is located inside. Freston tsked. He couldn't be expected to do everything, could he? Being just an underpaid captain, and all.
Sten laughed and threw him out. Then he sat down to figure out the rest of the insertion plan. Thinking about underwater gave him the rest of the scheme. He sent for La Ciotat, kissed Cind, and moved out.
The tacship entered atmosphere in a trajectory exactly like that of a meteorite. A big one, but that couldn't be helped. It splashed down just beyond the horizon, but short of the bounce-reflection of any sensor on the subcontinent. La Ciotat sent her ship toward land below the surface, muttering if she'd wanted to run a submarine, she would have been incarnated as a dolphin. Or a Rykor.
About a kilometer offshore, a reef rose to just below the surface. Sten ordered La Ciotat to bottom the tacship behind the reef.
He went out the airlock and began the long trudge toward shore. In the livies, the suit's little reaction jets would have worked splendidly in water and gravity, as they did in space, and sent him zooming like a speedboat toward his rendezvous with whatever. But even with the suit's McLean pack on full, mass was still mass. Sten chugged toward shore at the stately speed of a ferryboat, giving him plenty of time to tourist.
If the land above was barren, the sea was not. Algae in sheets. Ribbonweed thickets. Some things that looked like small crabs. Nautilus-coiled snails. And trilobites, from barely visible to... to large enough to make Sten think of big centipedes intermarried with scorpions.
As the bottom shelved, he cut power, and took her down. At three meters, he considered his situation and, until it wove away, the universe's biggest trilobite.
So far, there hadn't been any loud bangs that would indicate he had set off any of the booby traps he knew the relay station was equipped with. Very well. So they were still waiting for him. He wished he could figure out what those booby traps or booby trap could be. None could be that sensitive—the Emperor would hardly want his return slowed because a relay turned the fire on unexpectedly, and a heat sensor blew. Or a motion detector went crackers at an earth tremor. Trick stuff sometimes went off from its own cleverness. Nor, Sten thought, would the Emperor want to spend his time elaborately defusing some really sophisticated diabolism—he had heard the Emperor curse at puzzles and hurl them across rooms minutes after he had picked them up, back when...