I was able to negotiate for custody of Mr. Kuvasc’s skinsuit. It currently resides at a research facility on the mainland, and should be ready for your retrieval when you finally return to Noah’s Ark. Simply let me know. Preliminary tests reveal traces of H2S all throughout the suit’s primary gas extraction system. So far, no one is willing to speculate as to how the H2S was delivered, or whether the suit can ever be made user-safe again. I shall keep you apprised of any further developments.
I’m glad you were able to find some use for the flowers.
F.S.
Sadena may have been a bastard, but at least he could be a helpful bastard. Rahel deleted the message without sending a reply.
“Anything worth mentioning in last night’s samples?” she asked the AI as she pulled on her shoes and dug a handful of breakfast packs out of the galley.
“No statistically significant evidence of contamination or disease,” it told her. “Salinity displays an apparent tendency to increase in direct proportion to ocean depth, but I don’t have enough samples to flag this trend as significant. The presence of shed cells and larvae does not deviate significantly from the predicted model for this time of year. Insufficient evidence exists to determine ephyrae population at this time.”
Oh, well. It never hurt to hope for a miracle as long as you weren’t really counting on one. “Log it as Urieclass="underline" Odarkan Sea, Sample Series #1. I’ll bring some more to compile with it tonight.”
“OK.”
Sunlight bright enough to burn the fog off her brain met her outside the pachyderm’s hatch. Taking one of the pseudo-food bars between her teeth, she squinted so tight she could barely see to lock down the ship before leaving it. By the time she’d finished and turned to find her place on the rooftop landing field, Nils and a nosegay of pastel security were half-way between the pachyderm and the same hop Rahel and Paval had taken to the Odarkan yesterday. She took another bite of her breakfast and waited for them to get closer than shouting distance.
Nils marked the transition for her. “Where the hell have you been all morning?”
Rahel glanced over her shoulder as though to make sure the pachyderm was still there, and peeled another breakfast bar. “In the casino, Nils. I just decided to teleport up here for breakfast.” She scowled at him, dropping the ornamental innocence from her tone. “Where do you think I’ve been? Running yesterday’s samples through the AI. I camped out in the pachyderm in case I needed to clarify something.” That last part was a lie, but her reasons weren’t really the issue right now.
“You should have told me you were going,” Nils persisted, a little of the fire leaving his voice now that he had her in sight and undamaged. “When you weren’t in your suite this morning, I thought the Greens had somehow got back on planet and taken you! I had security search the hotel from top to bottom—no one had the faintest idea where to find you!”
Well, someone had. Rahel wondered if Nils or the security personnel had thought to ask Sadena, and what reasons Sadena would have for lying to them if they had. Curious guy, that Sadena. His rationale for doing anything probably didn’t mean very much to the average person.
Rahel offered Nils a breakfast bar in lieu of an apology. “Did you get my skinsuit?” she asked so they wouldn’t have to linger on a subject she wasn’t sure she wanted to pursue.
Making a face to prove he wasn’t mollified by her sacrifice, Nils plucked the bar from her fingers and sighed. “I took it from where you left it folded on your dresser.”
Not where she’d left it. When Rahel last looked, the skinsuit lay in a puddle of sand, with bits of flower and pottery shards all over the hallway floor outside. She nodded, though, a little amused by the discrepancy. “Helpful little bastard, isn’t he?”
Nils raised his eyebrows in what looked like mixed question and concern. “Excuse me?”
“Never mind. Come on.” Rahel clapped her arm across his shoulders to turn him toward the waiting hop, security closing around them to follow in their footsteps like a swarm. “We’ve got lots of work to catch up on yet.”
She’d just feel a whole lot better about the project if Sadena wasn’t putting so much charm and effort into trying to curry her favor. The more he tried to convince her that her opinion really mattered to him, the less, Rahel knew, he was actually looking forward to hearing it.
The water didn’t feel as warm and welcoming today. Bracing her knees against the keel of the skate, Rahel gripped the boarding ladder with one hand while she accepted a spare bandolier of sample jars from Nils with the other. He looked surprisingly businesslike and sturdy out here under the open sun, not at all like some stufly lawyer who wore gloves to prevent callouses and had to clip his nails to keep them short.
Rahel pushed away from the boat and slipped one bandolier crosswise over the other. The two together were barely heavy enough to register on her BCD control. “I’ll keep the comm line open,” she said, drifting back from the skate in preparation to go under. “Make sure you acknowledge my transmissions, or I’ll think you’ve fallen asleep up here.”
Nils nodded, brow wrinkled somewhat unhappily. “What should I do if I lose contact with you?”
“Sue somebody.” She smiled at his annoyed grimace, and dropped down under the water. “I’d suggest Sadena. He’s probably good for a higher out-of-court settlement than the Greens.”
Nils answered her comment with a patient sigh.
Dumping her BCD, she floated smoothly down toward the carpet of jellies with a sheen of bubbles glistening the water above her. The drift into darkness wasn’t nearly so pleasant today. Darting shadows snagged her attention with little stabs of adrenaline even though she couldn’t have told herself what she was looking for. The taste of each breath registered consciously on her brain, and every minor adjustment in the skinsuit’s gas extraction system made her lungs freeze up for a heartbeat while they waited for disaster. Even checking, checking, and rechecking her O2 levels accomplished nothing except to leach all satisfaction from this temporary privacy. She didn’t even realize she’d reached the jellyfish swarm until the first gauzy body pulsed beneath her hand.
“OK… I’m at the jellyfish interface.”
“I know,” Nils voice said, sounding closer, even, than it had when she’d talked to him on the surface. “I can see your reflection on the remote sensor.” Rahel hadn’t expected him to be clever enough to use something like the skate’s mapping system to keep track of her. “Gee, I had no idea jellyfish would look so… squishy from a distance.”
Rahel smiled and felt for a path between the bodies. “Well, squishy is what jellyfish do. I’m going to pull a whole set of samples to augment what I brought in yesterday, then drop lower to cover Paval’s sector.” She pulled her knees against her so tightly that the sample jars on her belts pressed into her stomach. “Try to make yourself useful while I’m gone.”
“Be careful.”
The honest concern in his words surprised her. “I’ll try,” she said seriously. Then she sank into their tendrils and let the milk-white world of the jellies lull the surface world from her mind.
Their silent, graceful peace crept over her more readily than she expected, but couldn’t find sufficient purchase in the jumbled texture of her worries. She meticulously collected samples from various depths and various locations, making sure to catch any particulate matter or jelly sloughings that might prove significant. Wending her way delicately in between ruffles and frills, she even went to the effort of siphoning water from within the bells of both egg-heavy and empty adults without disturbing their reproductive systems. This, then, led to an idle thought regarding how many ovigerous medusae were actually floating with this swarm, and that in turn led to an impromptu census of egg clusters glued to the bellies of the adults.