"You said that you're pretty sure. You don't know?"

"Well, they don't know for sure," said Jane, "and they're not very excited about our doing experiments on them. Now that you've joined us, though, maybe you'll be able to figure out what's going on with them. We sort of play it all by ear. The whaley boys and the Colonel run things. Cielle, you didn't tell him all this?"

"He was pretty beat," Nuñez said. "I tried to get him settled in as soon as I could."

Nate wanted to protest the "settled in" comment. After all, he was a prisoner here, but these people didn't behave at all like captors. They immediately impressed him as having the same dynamic that he'd seen in research teams, a "we're all in this together, let's make the best of it" attitude. He didn't want to yell at these people. Still, it made him a little uncomfortable that she was so forthcoming with information. When your kidnappers showed you their faces, they were giving you the message that you weren't going home.

Nuñez set a plate down in front of him. It had a salad of mixed seaweeds, carrots, and mushrooms, a piece of cooked fish, which looked like halibut, and what appeared to be rice.

"Eat up," she said. "A couple of nutrition drinks aren't going to get you back up to speed. We do eat a lot of raw fish, even on the blue, but you need some carbs until you adjust to this diet. There's plenty of rice when you finish that."

"Thanks." Nate dug in while the others, all but Cal, excused themselves to work in other parts of the ship. The older man had obviously been charged with Nate's second orientation lecture.

Cal scratched his beard, looked around at the pilots, then leaned over to Nate and spoke in a lowered voice. "They're very promiscuous. You know how dolphin females will mate with all the males in the pod so no one can be assured of who the father of her calf is? They think it keeps the males from murdering her calf when it's born."

"That's the theory," Nate said.

"They're sort of like that, and back at base you have a big pod to deal with. You start down that path… well, you've got a lot of whaley boys to sex up."

"I didn't sex her up," Nate hissed, spraying rice out over the table. "I'm not sexing up any whaley boys… er, girls —»

"Whatever. Look, they're very close. Here on the ship they don't have separate quarters — they share one big cabin. Sex is very casual with them, but they understand that we're a little more hung up about it. Some of them seem to affect human shyness. We generally don't mix sexually with them. It's not forbidden, but it's… you know, frowned upon. It's only natural for a guy to be curious —»

Nate put down his fork. "Cal, I did not have sex with anyone — I mean, anything."

"Right. And be careful around the males. Especially if you're in the water with them. They'll bung-hole you just to watch you twitch."

"Jeez."

"I'm just telling you for your own good."

"Thanks, but I'm not going to be around long enough to worry about it." Might as well throw it in their faces, Nate thought.

The older man laughed, almost shooting coffee out his nose. When he recovered, he said, "Well, I hope you mean you plan on dying soon, because no one ever leaves."

Nate leaned into Cal's face. "Doesn't it bother you, that you're a prisoner?"

"There's not one of us here who wouldn't be dead if the whaley boys hadn't picked us up."

"Not me."

"Especially you. You were always twelve hours from dead since we started watching you. Certainly it had to occur to you how much easier it would have been just to kill you?"

Nate just stared for a second. Actually, it had occurred to him, and he didn't see the logic in keeping him alive if all they wanted to do was stop his research. He wasn't going to make that argument verbally, but still…

"Don't overthink it, Nate. If you ever doubted that life was an adventure, it definitely is now."

"Right," Nate said. "But before you ask me where I'd rather be, let me remind you that there's a sphincter in the bottom of my sink."

"You haven't seen the shower, then? Just you wait."

After he ate, Cal loaned him a copy of Treasure Island to read, but when Nate returned to his cabin, he could barely concentrate on the book at all. Funny what you learn about yourself in a short conversation. One, that he would rather have been accused of having sex with another species than with another male (even of another species). Interesting prejudice. Two, that he actually was grateful, not only to be alive, but grateful to be having completely new experiences every moment, even as a prisoner. Three, that learning was still a high, but he burned to share it with someone. And finally, that he was feeling a little jealous, a little less special, now that he knew that Emily 7 was having sex with all the male whaley boys on board. That fickle little slut.

He dozed off with Robert Louis Stevenson on his chest and the sound of killer whales calling in the distance.

Outside, the pod of twenty killer whales, most the sons or daughters of the matriarch female, were calling frantically to each other as they worried away at a huge bait ball of herring. Biologists had long speculated on the incredibly complex vocabulary of the killer whale, identifying specific linguistic groups that even «spoke» the same dialect, but they had never been able to put meaning to the calls other than to identify them as "feeding," "distress," or «social» noises. However, had they had the benefit of translation, this is what they would have heard:

"Hey, Kevin, fish!"

"Fish! I love fish!"

"Look, Kevin, fish!"

"Mmmm, fish."

"You, Kevin, take a run down that trench, fake left, go right, hit the bait ball, nothing but fish!"

"Did someone say 'fish'?"

"Yeah, fish. Over here, Kevin."

"Mmmmm, fish."

And it went on like that. Actually, orcas aren't quite as complex as scientists imagine. Most killer whales are just four tons of doofus dressed up like a police car.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Picking the Lock to

Davy Jones's Locker

" 'Bite me'?" Libby Quinn said, reading the tail.

The whale tail slowly twisted in space, pixel by pixel, as the computer extrapolated the new angle. Margaret Painborne sat at the computer. Clay and Libby stood behind her. Kona was working across the room on Quinn's reassembled machine.

" 'Bite me'?" Clay repeated. "That can't be right." He thought about what Nate had said about seeing a tail just like this and shivered.

Margaret hit a few keys on the keyboard, then swiveled in Clay's chair. "This some kind of joke, Clay?"

"Not mine. That was raw footage, Margaret." As attractive as Clay found Libby, he found Margaret equally scary. Maybe the latter because of the former. It was complex. "The tail image before you shifted it is exactly what I saw when I was down there."

"You've all been saying how sophisticated their communication ability was," said Kona, trying to sound scientific but essentially just pissing everyone off.

"How?" said Libby. "Even if you wanted to, how would you paint a whale's flukes like that?"

Margaret and Clay just shook their heads.

"Rust-Oleum," suggested Kona, and they all turned and glared at him. "Don't give me the stink-eye. You'd need the waterproof, huh?"

"Did you finish inputting those pages?" Clay said.

"Yah, mon."

"Well, save them and go rake something or mow something or something."

"Save as a binary," Margaret added quickly, but Kona had already saved the file, and the screen was clear.

Margaret wheeled her chair across the office, her gray hair trailing out behind her like the Flying Sorceress of Clerical Island. She pushed Kona aside. "Crap," she said.