“And are you?” Rahel asked.
“Am I what?”
“Taking our side.”
Keim made a face and turned back toward the Greens. “I haven’t even said I’ll talk to them yet.”
The only difference between lawyers and reporters was their graduate degree. Rahel lifted her chin to call up toward the mechanical pilot, “I suppose it’s too much to ask that they’re nowhere near where we need to be.”
The pilot extended a small remote mike in her direction from a panel low on its subjective back. “Query error.” Its voice was finely tuned and masculine, but oddly devoid of character. Rahel wondered what it had been before it was Newborn. “Syntax not sufficient for specific data retrieval.”
Paval twisted impatiently to face the bow of the skate. “Show us the coordinates of those other boats.”
A brightly colored topo map grew into being above the skate’s dash. The overlaid location of the Green flotilla made an almost visible dent in the trench near the middle of the hologram.
Rahel grumbled. “Of course. Shit.”
The pilot remained singularly unaffected by her profanity. “Instruction: Please present activity modifications in command or query mode.”
Paval, equally frustrated, gripped the edge of his seat with both hands. “Can’t we just go around them?” The pilot apparently took that as a course change, and eased the skate into a parabola.
“Go around to where?” Rahel’s shadow swept across the floor of the boat as they swung into a wide arc around the hub of waiting Greens. “They’re sitting right on top of the jelly breeding site—there’s no ‘around’ to go to.”
“But why?” Paval rotated as though unable to move in sync with the skate, his face directed toward the protestors no matter how wide a circle their own craft made. “Don’t they understand we care about preserving this habitat as much as they do?”
A shout of recognition stuttered through the flock of Greens, and two boats—the only two fitted with outboard motors—awkwardly disengaged from the rest of the group to carve an interception course through the water. The mass of Greens was already close enough that Rahel could make out their individual faces. “Recognize any of them?” she asked Keim.
The reporter spared her only a single disgusted glance. “What? You think everybody in a conservation organization knows everybody else?”
“It was worth a try.”
“No, I don’t know them.”
Rahel kept her eyes on the two approaching craft, trying to estimate whether or not they’d catch up to the skate before it finished its swing. “They’re not inflatables,” she commented aloud. “That means they’ve got their own aircraft, probably even their own jumpship in the system. God, I hope they didn’t set down anywhere near here—the vibrations could kill those jellyfish.”
Paval pulled off his skinsuit hood in one quick, angry motion. “What of them the outboards don’t chew up!”
She’d never seen him angry before now, and, for some reason, the sudden appearance of his temper made her smile. “The outboards don’t reach deep enough. This time of day, the jellies are a good ten meters under to get away from the light.” Climbing forward to slap the pilot’s carapace, Rahel hoped it followed her gesture as she pointed toward the approaching Greens.
“So what are we going to do?” Keim asked, stylus poised above the screen of her notebook. “Run or stay?”
Rahel opened her mouth, but didn’t even manage an intake of breath before Paval was at her side, dark eyes locked on the approaching boats. “This kind of stupidity should be illegal!” he shouted, at them more than her, and apparently for their benefit. “Those hypocrites don’t even understand what it is they’re fighting for—!”
Rahel knotted one hand in her hair to keep from knocking her apprentice into the sea. “Will you just shut up?”
“Query error: Syntax—”
“Not you,” Rahel cut the pilot off with another bang on its carapace. “This is a command: Pull away from the approaching boats, but not too far.” She tried to ignore Paval’s chain of foreign curses as she frowned across the bright water at the protestors. “I don’t want them to think we’re running away.”
“Who cares what they think?” Rocking unsteadily as the skate purred into motion, Paval took two stumbling steps to his left to maintain eye contact with the closest raft full of Greens while their own boat edged forward. “They should be back at the resort, talking to all those reporters about why they think they’re better able to save the stellar jellies than we are!” He shook Rahel’s hand off his arm and shouted angrily across the water, “Ecologists are all supposed to be on the same side!”
That’s when Rahel saw the spear gun.
Hooking her arm across his chest, she yanked Paval back with all her weight, tumbling them both to the floor of the narrow skate. Keim gave a short shriek, then a loud, hollow thok! echoed flatly through the space between the seats. Rahel felt a painful thrill of relief even before her rational brain realized the sound meant a spear striking boat sides, not a spear striking flesh. “Get down!” she shouted without looking behind.
“They’re not gonna wait to find out your credentials!”
Keim scrambled to the rear of the boat in a thumping clatter, and Rahel pushed herself up with one hand, shoving Paval back down to the deck with her other. She raised her head to look over the side just as the skate jerked and heeled over almost onto its side.
Then they righted again with a smack. Rahel gripped the wet rail with both hands, too stunned to see, but knew from the salty sting of wind on her face that they were moving—and not in a forward direction.
“What happened?” Paval’s voice, so hoarse and quiet after his flash of anger, barely carried over the hum of the skate’s laboring engine.
Water, chill from a long night of darkness, gushed past Rahel’s leg and into Paval’s lap. The spear had split a hole longer than the spread of Rahel’s hand in the side of the skate, then filled most of it with the head and shaft of the weapon and a steady spatter of water. Her stomach clenched sickly at the image of one of them sitting with their back to that bulkhead. All the same, their skate probably wouldn’t have been flooding so badly if the Greens hadn’t attached the spear’s tether to the two outboards so they could drag the skate behind them in their own choppy wake.
Suddenly remembering the pilot, Rahel scrambled on her knees to the front of their craft. “Pull us loose!”
“Command noted.” Despite its stoical monotone, the Newborn was doing a wonderful impression of panicked human flight as it slewed the skate to make slack in the tow-line. “Data point: Designation of skate #6398240 is as a recreational vehicle, not as a high-performance water craft.”
“Now he tells me.” The cable snapped taut again with a thrum, and Rahel heard Paval thump into one of the seats with an angry curse.
Water sloshed wrist-high across the floor as Rahel crawled back toward the passenger seats. The space under her sitting place was empty, only a stretched fragment of fabric suggesting how her pack had gone overboard when the skate first tipped. She growled in frustration and grabbed at her seat for support. “Your phone!”
Keim, half-crammed under the farthest back seat, frowned at Rahel while she struggled to free herself.
“Find a goddammed phone!” If they couldn’t get themselves out of this, they could at least call the Startide for reinforcements. The skate bucked, and Rahel slammed up hard against the opposite rail.
“Where are they taking us?” Keim shouted back at her. But she had one arm buried up to the elbow in Paval’s field pack when she asked it, so Rahel didn’t feel any immediate need to beat her for being distracted.