And beyond, in the ri’Hoyalina, the squalesong was changing too. There had been mostly silence for a time, as the squales had paused to listen to her song, with only a few voices raised in protest or anger. But now, new voices were singing, repeating her own song, echoing it even as the multiple reflections of the deep sound channel echoed it, turning the song into a round, a canon. Aili realized they were passing the message along, reamplifying it for the benefit of squales farther away. She wasn’t sure if that meant she had convinced them, but at least it meant they were willing to ensure she was heard. Within six hours, she knew, every squale on Droplet would have heard her plea.
But what would they decide?
Not for the first time this day, Christine Vale cursed the speed of sound for being so slow.
Sure, the idea of a layer in the ocean that allowed effectively global telecommunication simply through a quirk of water density was fascinating and elegant, but why did it have to be the layer with the lowest speed of sound instead of the highest? She was used to subspace radio making it possible to speak instantaneously with people twenty par secs away. The notion of having to wait an hour and a half to know the results of an action being taken less than nine thousand kilometers away was infuriating.
Especially given what had been happening in that hour and a half. The compound floater had been eroded down to its last few segments around the base camp; indeed, the camp might have fallen already if not for Ra-Havreii. He and Y’lira had returned to the base an hour ago, making a daring run of the squales’ blockade and driving the scouter gig clear up onto dry ground—though the Efrosian engineer had insisted that any bravery in the act had been inspired by his greater fear of remaining in the water.
Since then, he had somehow figured out a way to conduct a structural integrity field through the organic shell material of the floaters, making them far more resistant to the icebreaker creatures’ attacks. But it took a great deal of power and couldn’t be maintained for long. And it had the unfortunate side effect of making the remains of the island more rigid, no longer flexing with the constant swells of the ocean. More than one segment had snapped off under its own weight when too much of it had been suspended out of the water, overstraining its connections to its neighbors beyond what the SIF could bear. The squales had seemed puzzled by the change at first, but now had modified their attacks to take advantage of it, waiting for swells and then sending the icebreakers in to strike sidelong at the bases of the suspended floater segments.
“I never imagined myself saying this,” Ra-Havreii told Vale as they and Keru watched a segment adjacent to the base rock and twist under just such a bombardment, “but the island can’t take much more of this.”
“Aili, come on,” Vale muttered through clenched teeth, knowing that whatever Lavena had attempted was already completed by now. They were out of comm range of the surviving hydrophone, without the Marsalisto relay through the interference, so there was no way to get a status report. The shuttle had ferried the captain back to Titanand had then suffered an ill-timed engine failure, the delayed result of an attack by one of the electric-tentacled dreadnought creatures; and replacement parts were slow in coming as long as the ship’s industrial replicators were in full-time probe-making mode. The shuttle was on its way back down to evacuate the base, but there was no guarantee Bolaji would make it in time. At least Vale could take comfort in the knowledge that Captain Riker was alive and safe. One way or the other, I won’t have to be the one giving orders for much longer.
“Commander, come quick!” It was Ensign Evesh, calling from the sensor shed. “You need to hear this!” she cried.
Vale jogged over to the waving Tellarite, while Ra-Havreii remained at his equipment, trying to keep the SIF from burning out just a while longer. Keru stayed on guard, watching the icebreakers closely, phaser at the ready in case defensive measures failed. The islet shuddered and heaved beneath her feet; the inertial damper field had been cut to minimum to boost the SIF. She was getting seasick.
But music was coming from Evesh’s console—a chorus of squalesong combined with Selkie, the translator rendering the latter for her ears and filtering out the echoes. “Diffraction leakage from the deep sound channel,” the sensor tech explained. Vale listened for a while and was moved; even after serving with Aili Lavena for a year and a half, she had never learned this much about her.
“But did it work?” Vale asked as the islet shuddered again. “Are they listening?”
“They must be,” Evesh said. “They’re relaying the sound forward.”
“Okay, but the sound I want to hear is the one that calls off the damn icebreakers!”
Evesh stared. “Would you recognize that if you heard it?”
Vale glared back. “Context is everything, Ensign.” The ground shuddered again. “Case in point.”
“Understood, ma’am.”
“Oh, no,” Ra-Havreii called.
“Oh, no?” Vale called back. “That’s nota sound I want to hear, Doctor!”
“Oh, no.”
“Doctor!”
“The field’s going. I can’t stop it.”
The ground heaved, knocking them both over. Keru somehow managed to keep his footing, though just barely. “Oww…don’t tell me, the dampers too?”
“The whole field assembly! I told you this would happen.”
“Then that means…” She looked up and saw the Cerenkov sparkle as the deflector dome around the base decohered and died.
“It means I should’ve stayed in my nice safe lab at Utopia Planitia. That it should come to this…dying out here in this desolate waste…”
“Hold it together, Doctor.”
“I should’ve known I’d be killed by nature!”
She grabbed him by the front of his uniform. “Would you rather be killed by a pissed-off Izarian?”