“I’m not seeing much in the way of juveniles,” she commented aloud. “The smallest one I’ve got up here—” She rolled a look over each shoulder, “—is still about two and a half meters across. That’s almost big enough to head for open water within the next few weeks.” She was guessing a little on that timeframe—she knew it took a good three Uriel months for stellar jellies to reach migrating size, but didn’t have the slightest idea about their growth curve. “Maybe something’s inhibiting breeding before they head out.”
“Then they should be dropping larvae in the main ocean, with a corresponding rise in the stellar jelly population out there.”
And so far no one on Uriel had reported finding another stellar jellyfish breeding population. Rahel shrugged, capping her water samples and threading them back onto her belt. “We can check the water here for larvae and ephyrae, and I’ll do a head count on the ovigerous adults to see how many are carrying egg clusters.”
Paval’s breath snorted against his pick-up wherever he floated far beneath her. “I can’t speak for this year’s crop, but they seem to have done all right the last few years. We’ve got what looks like a good carpet of polyps, and—” He cut himself off with some noncommittal curious noise. “Oh, now that’s weird.”
“What?” Rahel made an impatient face in his general direction. “Talk up, Junior, or I’m leaving you here.”
He took a breath, as though planning to say something else, and instead only coughed once, shortly.
For an instant, Rahel thought Paval meant this sound as his reply. Some private ritual of disgust—at the jellyfish for doing something unexpected, or himself for fumbling his sampling gear, or even Rahel for the tireless lash of sarcasm that had finally found the end of his patience. But the next bark of sound across her skinsuit’s comm was unmistakably choked with panic, and the pain behind his strangling was impossible to ignore.
“Paval?” She tried to keep her voice calm, flailing herself into an awkward spin in search of she didn’t know what, trying to remember exactly where he went down. “Paval, where are you?”
The ocean’s heavy presence crowded her senses with blobs of blurred data. Sounds as thick and clumsy as slough mud stuffed her ears while sights made up of nothing but bubbles sheeted everything else from view. A smoky tangle of jellyfish tendrils curled and flattened against her face. “Dammit, apprentice, answer me!”
His sobs over the comm channel were no help. No matter where she twisted, his voice hung eternally over her left shoulder, distorting her perspective when his coughing broke down into whisding gasps. Rahel dumped her BCD with two frantic blinks, then kicked downward as hard as she was able.
“Ma’am, what’s the matter?” A new voice sliced across the channel, quick and high with alarm. “Can I do something?” Jynn asked frantically. “Can I help? What happened?”
Like a smear of smoke against cracked glass, a wash of body and bubbles rocketed surfaceward an unreachable distance ahead of her.
“Careful!” Rahel tried to bring her flippers down under her, pushing against the water until she could slew to a stop and struggle her way in his direction. “Paval, don’t surface too fast!” It didn’t matter—he disappeared into the glistening curtain of jellies that blotched out the sun. “Jynn, we’re coming up! Don’t let him hurt himself!”
Thirty meters in less than thirty seconds. God. Rahel kick-started her own ascent, resisting the urge to race her bubbles to the surface, worrying that Paval had made things even worse by giving himself decompression illness in his panic. How could things be worse? She didn’t even know what had happened yet. Maybe he hadn’t been down long enough. The deepest of the jellyfish tendrils wafted against her faceplate, then twitched dreamily away again in rhythm to pulsing bells far above. Rahel stretched her arms over her head to reeve a gentle passage through the gossamer forest.
She broke surface with more momentum than she thought she carried. Air crashed around her in place of water, and the kick and bob of wind-driven waves replaced the stillness of only a few meters below. Rahel caught herself, arms spread wide across the water, when she would have splashed back under again, fighting to equalize her BCD to keep her buoyant. The skate floated less than a dozen meters away. Only the back of Jynn’s lavender crew shirt showed where the pilot knelt on the bottom of the boat, bending over something that Rahel couldn’t see. She kicked off as powerfully as she could, at the same time chinning her comm and shouting, “I’m coming! Tell him I’m coming!” She didn’t even know if Jynn was still monitoring the line.
Jynn met her at the side of the skate, though, and grabbed her at belt and shoulder to haul her over the side. She splashed to the deck in a slosh of excess water. “What happened?” the pilot asked, pulling her into a sitting position. “Ma’am, what happened to him?”
“I don’t know!” Rahel struggled to her knees almost on top of Paval. He was clenched into a fetal curl, a froth of vomit pooled along the curve of his face mask as he jerked dully, weakly. She grabbed Jynn with one hand and pushed him toward the front of the skate. “Get us to shore!” Her fingers felt numb and stupid as she fumbled to unlatch her apprentice’s visor.
Water splashed across her knees, against the curve of Paval’s back when Jynn jump-started the antigravs without first priming the engines. Rahel slipped one hand under the boy’s cheek to lift his mouth clear of the rolling lake in the bottom of the boat, then snapped aside his faceplate to dump the accumulated vomit.
And recoiled from the puff of bitter stench that escaped his mask beneath her fingers.
“Oh, no…”
Rahel couldn’t hear Paval’s gasping above the rush of wind and sea, but she could see the frantic working of his jaw as he sucked down every breath, could feel the rigid quiver of every fighting muscle. His eyes, pupils dilated to unseeing black coins, glistened pinkly, and a thin stream of mucous ran from his nose. When she bent to sniff his open lips, the biting stink of rotten egg stung tears into her eyes.
“Jynn!”
She found the control of her oxygen mix in one of the skinsuit’s submenus while she pushed Paval onto his back and threw his mask apparatus aside. Her brain remembered from somewhere that a medic would have given Paval oxygen right now, and his own suit was certainly no longer a trustworthy source of that gas. Unfortunately, she could only push her O2 mix as high as 36 percent. She didn’t know if 15 percent higher than normal would be enough to matter.
“Get that hop back here!” she shouted at the pilot as she dragged her mask down below her chin and flipped it to give the air to Paval. If only there was enough water in the boat to supply oxygen for more than a few seconds. “We’ve got to get him to shore now!”
Jynn only half-turned away from his controls. The spray thrown up by their velocity had seeded bright droplets through his tightly curled black hair. “Ma’am, we can’t use the flyer!”
“The hell we can’t!” She couldn’t even mate much of her suit to the standing water—not and still keep good contact with her mask. She stretched out both legs and went down awkwardly on one elbow. “Dammit, we don’t have time to argue!”
“No, ma’am.” Jynn shook his head insistently. “I mean we can’t use it. He can’t go up, not so soon after being under. The bends could kill him!”
If the Greens hadn’t killed him already. Rahel reached blindly for the pack under the seat ahead of them and tried not to let the skate’s maneuvering shift too much of her weight across Paval’s torso while she rummaged.
The phone fell out into the water with a plop. She snatched it out of the brine before it even hit the bottom and shook it open. Beneath her, Paval shuddered weakly.