Rahel felt a little funny, swimming from jellyfish to jellyfish and lifting up their skirts to see who was pregnant. Considering stellar jellies weren’t sexed in any Terran sense, any of the adults could have—and should have—been able to carry eggs as long as they’d had enough genetic exchange to ensure a viable clutch. The fact that barely one in ten appeared to be carrying seemed unreasonable. Rahel paused, letting the jellies swell and throb away from her as she chewed the inside of her jaw.
Season? she wondered. Food? Hell, maybe the population was too in-bred, and something in the stellar jelly’s genetics could recognize when it had a bum deal going. She pushed herself down below the lowest tendrils and blew a frustrated sigh. It could be anything from lighting to water temperature to a drop in ambient salinity, and she wasn’t going to figure out which while floating around under here. It might have helped, of course, if Sadena had ever allowed a full-scale study of the jellyfish before now. But no—he hadn’t wanted to disturb his resort’s primary source of tourist trade, even for the sake of science. And now both his resort and the stellar jellyfish might have to pay for that selfishness.
“I don’t know if it makes any difference, but I’m roasting up here.”
Rahel glanced skyward at the sound of Nils’s voice, grinning a little despite herself. Somehow, he managed to make everything sound like some kind of personal attack on his time. It must have been a lawyerly skill. “All right, I hear you.” She slipped the bandolier of completed samples off her shoulder while she wriggled up through the milling jellies. “You still got me on your sensor screen?”
“You’re a lot more solid than the jellyfish—you’re hard to miss.”
“You’ve got a sample pack coming up directly above my position.” She extended her arm up over her head and pressed the sample belt’s thumb tab. A brilliant yellow balloon blossomed at the shoulder seam, tugging the bandolier out of her hand and upward as if pulled by a string. She watched it disappear into a blur against the surface light. “Log those as Urieclass="underline" Odarkan Sea, Sample Series #2. Then put them in my equipment pack and don’t touch them again. Got it?”
“And here I was planning to line them all up on the seats and play scientist with them until you got back.”
Rahel eased back down past the jellyfish barrier again. “Don’t get smart with me, Oberjen.”
“I can’t help it,” he replied drily. “I’m a lawyer—it’s my job to be smart.” He went on more seriously before she could contradict him. “We’ve got your samples. Are you sure you don’t want to come up for a suit check before you start the next series?”
No, she wasn’t sure. The whole thought of doing work in Paval’s sector felt like walking on someone’s grave. “What good would surfacing do?” she asked aloud. “I checked the suit six times on the hop coming out here, and we don’t know what we’re looking for anyway. My O2’s good—” She sneaked a look at the reading, just to make sure. “And I know to expect trouble.” She tossed hands up in a shrug even though there was no one in sight to appreciate it. “I think we’re as safe as we get.” And wasn’t that a depressing thought? “Just make sure you take care of those samples.”
“You take care of yours.”
She nodded, the way she always did when Saiah bothered to tell her the obvious. “Yes, mother.” Then she pushed off against the water behind her, and started her first swim-by of the sector.
Rahel worked her way slowly back and forth across the levels, the lantern at her waist carving a fat tube through the dim waters ahead of her. Flashes like flitting coins winked on and off in the slashing light, little fish-things stealing glances at the new intruder; diaphanous ripples of tissue danced in slow blindness away from disturbances they could barely sense with their primitive jellyfish nerves. As Rahel bottled sample after sample on her way toward the sea floor, the O2 monitor at the edge of her mask seemed to swell in size and importance. She found her attention caught by it every time she looked up from capping a flask, and her breath stopped with each glance—it must be some anomaly in the levels that made her look so suddenly.
Of course, the gauge sat placidly at the 21 percent she’d originally set it for. The only thing fluctuating here was her blood pressure. And her attention to the job at hand. Jamming the latest bottle back into its holster loop, she aimed herself downward with a disgusted sigh.
What looked like gnarled, scattered fragments of crab shell misted into being below her, impossibly huge, as big and broken as boulders, with edges blurred by time and moss. Rahel widened the beam on her lantern, and the fur of pearly velvet on each rock ruffled in response to her movements through the water. She pulled herself to a clumsy stop.
“Oh….”
“What?” Nils’s voice cracked nervously in her ear. She could almost picture him scrabbling to peer over the edge of the skate as if that would somehow help him. “Rahel, what is it? What?”
“Nothing, Nils! Calm down.” She drifted off to one side of the rocky heap, shining her light all down its length, kicking gently to verify its width and height. “It’s just…” Amazingly tiny little creatures reached up from the rocks to stroke the water with pink feather dusters, as unlike the huge, graceful adults as a zygote was unlike a human. Rahel lowered her mask to within bare centimeters of the polyp mat, and still she could only just make out the individual branches of their bodies. Occasional one-celled ephyrae twitched away from the budding stalks like specks of dust on independent breezes.
“1 just came across the polyps,” she finally remembered to say. She uncapped a sample flask while she talked, trying hard not to catch many newly shed ephyrae. “The Odarkan’s coastal shelf drops off here, and most of the polyps have set up shop on a broken spur of rock about..” Her light searched for an end out in front of her. “…I don’t know. Maybe a hundred meters. I can’t see where it lets off.”
“According to Jynn’s topo map, the actual lip only goes another fifty-seven meters before meeting up with the shoreline again.” There was a pause marked by a terse, muffled exchange while Nils checked something with Jynn. “A lot of that fifty-seven is deeper than your current position, too. The Odarkan apparently doesn’t have much in the way of shallows.”
Rahel twisted to turn her light over the edge of the lip. “Yeah, it drops off pretty steeply here. I can’t tell how—” She froze with the lantern aimed between her feet. “What the hell…?”
“Rahel, don’t do this to me.”
The rock a dozen meters below looked as though it had been shaved. Remnant podetiams clung to the surface like gooey white blisters, but no carpet of stalks combed the water for microbes, no flecks of bright color revealed budding polyps crowned with umbrella platters of ephyrae. Above the line of destruction, another hand-span worth of polyps dangled limply, still attached to their gripping feet, but obviously not still alive. “Something’s the matter down here.”
“With you?” Nils asked testily. “Or with the jellyfish?”
Rahel wasn’t sure if she appreciated his concern, or was just annoyed by it. “The jellyfish,” she said as she lowered herself over the drop-off and started downward. “The polyps, at least. About ten meters below my current position, we’ve got a massive die-off. I’m not going down that far,” she was quick to add. “But I want to get a better look at the environment while I pull some water samples from that depth. I’ve got a reach-stick that’ll go three meters.”