THEY THINK THEY ARE SAFE. THEY THINK THERE IS ONLY US, TRAPPED IN THIS NEW WORLD. WE BRING YOU TOOLS. WE KNOW THE WATERS. GRAY MACHINES MOVE NOW DO NOT SENSE CANNOT KNOW. CANNOT TASTE THE WATERS.

That afternoon the Skimmers carried more shipwreck debris in, hauling it awkwardly in rope cradles they had made, whole teams sharing the weight. He picked among it, sorting and thinking. Later they brought him a skipjack to eat.

He was tinkering with an antenna, making one from cables, when the light abruptly faded. As he peered upward a long shadow drifted against his raft. The underside was a jumble of planking and timbers.

It held to his raft and Warren wondered wildly if it could be from the gray ships, something made to float and find survivors. He crouched down among the motors and parts, staring upward, unable to see any Swarmers.

Something struck the water and fanned into a cascade of bubbles. It twisted and flailed and suddenly Warren saw it was a woman, swimming around the big shape, inspecting it from below. She tugged at something, found it firm, and went on. She glanced down, stopped stroking and hung there, staring. He had the sense that she was looking through the milky blocks of light and could see him. Just before she fan out of air she made a gesture, a brief, choppy signal—and darted upward, air rushing from her.

People. Other men and women who had learned to live on the sea. Remnants.

Now a Skimmer came lazily into view, then more, and Warren saw they had led these people on their large raft, led them here. Bringing together a ragtag bunch of survivors and aliens without hands, adrift in an ocean already infested by the gray machines.

They would have little to work with. Wrecks. Salvage. Maybe some ships fleeing from the mainland, where the death was still spreading. But they could fashion things.

He was pretty sure that if he spread an antenna across the raft the radio could reach the deep orbit space stations, get word to them, if anyone still lived.

He would have to build a parabolic antenna, to broadcast in a narrow cone, with no side-lobes. If he kept the transmissions short the only chance of being detected was if one of their orbital craft passed through the cone.

Even if not, there must be more humans on the sea. They would have to be careful to avoid detection.

The gray things would wait until the fighting was over on land. Then they would move. They would have to come up, ready to take the solid ground. But they would have to cross the remaining ocean first, and now it was a sea with Skimmers in it and men upon it, life that had fought and lost and endured and fought again and went on silently, peering forward and by instinct seeking other life, still waiting when the gray things began to move again—life still powerful and still asking as life always does, and still dangerous and still coming.

He finished the skipjack, waiting. Presently the silvery sky overhead broke into jewels and the woman splashed through the bubbles, stroking downward powerfully. She circled, studying. Even this deep he felt the slow roll of waves that made the structure creak.

He rose. She caught sight of him and waved. Suddenly excited he threw his hands into the air, waving madly. Shouting. Though he knew she could not hear him yet.

PART TEN

Pocks

One

Downward, into an ocean of night. The submersible was a bright, gaudy Christmas ball with spangles of running lights. It cast a wan glow on the massive shelves of carbon dioxide ice that walled the vent. Motors whirred. In the tight cabin the air chilled and pressure climbed.

Lancer’s recon analysis had located dozens of warm spots on the surface. They were cracks in the ice layers, where warming currents below had worked their way up the fracture faults of the ice continents. The mountain ranges of ice and rock moved and shifted in gravid tectonics, breaking and folding and splintering.

This moon was bigger than Ganymede. Below its icy skin, a huge volume of slush and liquid circulated. At the center, a core of rock and metal became hotter as the radioactive elements decayed. Earth itself gained most of its internal heart from decay of radium and uranium. Here the heat from below sought an exit, working at the thin spherical cap of ice, seeping upward, finding an opening here, a weakness there, and at last breaking onto the surface in short-lived victory.

When the flow came strongly, escaping liquids built volcanoes. From their crown and flanks steam rose incessantly. They created lake-speckled plains when the currents ebbed. The ground crews had chosen a quiet upwelling, so they did not have to fight strong turbulence when the submersible descended, searching.

The vent widened as they plunged. Chunks of ice drifted by in the amber spotlights. They dropped several kilometers through solutions of ammonia, carbon dioxide slush, methane crystals, and twinkling specks of debris. The moon’s spin stirred the grains of rock, keeping a fine suspension hanging like a shimmering curtain before the working lights.

They reached a zone of reasonably pure water. Carlos deployed a huge sac and ran nose into the current. It billowed and filled—strong, though only one molecule thick. Carlos showed Nikka how to attach floaters to the tail of the sac while he ran the board. He found a strong updraft. When he called out, she released the floaters and the sac self-sealed. Guided by the floaters, it rose up the vent. It would bob to the surface of the lake, be snagged ashore, and a mass spectrometer would separate out the rare deuterium. Lancer’s fusion motors could burn the deuterium, as backup to the reactions that ran in the ramscoop drive.

“Rather a lot registering on the impurity detectors,” Nigel observed.

“Whole zoo of stuff out there,” Carlos muttered. He had been quiet since their descent. His face knotted with conflicting thoughts and he kept his attention fixed on the complex half-moon control pit.

“What’s it look like?” Nikka had come forward after freeing the floaters manually.

“Chicken soup, actually. Or the Ross 128 equivalent,” Nigel said from the wall bunk where he lay.

Carlos said, “Science Section’s coming down in a few days, take deep samples.”

“Interesting. Heavy molecular stuff. Free radicals, too.”

“This water’s too cold to make free radicals spontaneously,” Nikka remarked. “No energy source.”

“Indeed.” Nigel frowned. “You’d imagine—”

Carlos. Want to talk to those passengers of yours.

“That’s the fifth time he’s called,” Carlos said.

Nigel yawned. “Poor fellow. Ask if there’s news.”

“Ted, this situation is really out of hand and I just want to do what’s—”

I know that. Hitting you all of a sudden like that, really mixing up your loyalties—I know, Carlos.

Nigel whispered, “Sounds quite judicious and forgiving. Man for all ages, is Ted.”

Nikka smiled and shushed him.

“Marvelous actor. I never appreciated that till now.”

Carlos had said little the last hour. The release of talking to a third party opened him up. He could not hide his own confusion and uncertainty, but this came through as reluctance to own up to his actions; or so Landon would interpret, Nigel guessed. Landon listened and conferred with the director of Pocks Operations. The surface crews were angry at the violation of regs and the possible danger—principally to the equipment; it was good to remember what was replaceable—in case Carlos got into a jam. But if he stayed away from the vent walls it made sense to let him go ahead, locating streams of pure water and filling the teardrop sacs. Landon conferred some more and then provisionally approved Carlos staying down. If anything changed, or Nigel’s condition deteriorated, however—