“I’ve got a filter with me,” Nigel put in.

Was wondering when I’d hear from the kingpin. I must say this is right in line with your whole career. Under pressure you crack.

There was a gentlemanly iciness in Landon’s voice. They were, of course, both speaking for the recorded benefit of any future review board.

“Undergo a phase transition, is more the way I’d put it. Or tempering. Marvelous process, that. Lessens brittleness. Reduces internal stresses.”

Well, we’ll wait out the time for your mandatory vote. Don’t think the consensus isn’t going to factor in this escapade.

“I came with him, Ted,” Nikka said. “Do you want to shut me up, too?”

“Don’t commit yourself,” Carlos broke in. “Ted, I hope you can see that she’s in a very excited state and not really—”

I follow. Well, I could have done without this slice of shit you put on my plate, Nigel. Things are jittery back here as it is, with the Earthside news. We’re waiting for an update now and I may have to replan everything if—

“What’s the news?” Nikka asked.

Getting a spotty carrier wave. More thermonuclear strikes, looks like. Satellite warfare seems to have gone just the way everyone predicted—complete cancellation. Reports of alien craft in orbit, too. Some are landing in the oceans.

“My God,” Nikka said softly.

Yeah. And Nigel picks this moment to pull one of his—

“Bit cavalier about causality, aren’t you?” Nigel said sharply. “You already had warning signals about the Earthside situation—it’s been brewing for a week. So you thought you’d slot me away while everyone’s distracted. No accident it’s all happening at once. Only it’s not going as you’d planned, is it?”

Paranoid, Nigel, real paranoid.

“We’ll see. If I’ve any friends up there who’ll vote for me—”

After this? Don’t bet on it.

Nigel grimaced in irritation. “No point in this talk. Carlos, what’s that on the sonar? Big structure in the left quadrant.”

“Signing off,” Carlos barked. The job took precedence over all else. He banked to port in a downstream.

“That was to get him off the air,” Nigel said gently. “Needn’t shy away from everything.”

“If we hit one a those bergs—”

“Doesn’t mean we must stand off by kilometers. Might as well get in a bit of exploring while we’re waiting for the hangman.”

“Nikka, want to deploy a bag? Getting good percentages here.”

She moved back to the manuals. The floater frames and sacs were neatly arranged in the big bay that comprised most of the ship’s volume. She worked the big controls at the mouth of the bay. “Free!” An answering thump and whoosh.

Carlos nodded. Nigel moved forward to the copilot’s couch and lay in it, studying the board. A prickly sensation running through him. Carlos bent over the crescent array of controls, involved. The man had shown typical male responses during the talk with Landon. It was often that way when the conversation involved mostly men; each was bursting with something to say, waiting for the other to finish, for his own precious chance to impose his own pattern. Nigel had done that often enough to recognize the mode. But what was new to him was in fact that recognition. He had spent his life pressing forward, maneuvering the talk the way he wanted it to go. Focusing, always focusing. There were other ways to work, less wearing paths. He had learned those slowly, gradually. The fact that Carlos was showing recognizable signs meant that the man was working out for himself some sense of identity. Good. But it promised problems in the hours to come.

“Ready to tie it off?” Carlos called.

“Sealant deployed. One, two, mark.” Nikka came forward, brushing her hands on her crimson jumper.

“Mind dropping a bit to the northwest?” Nigel said mildly.

“What for? Current’s vectoring to the high quadrant.”

“Some optical spectrum from over there.”

“Huh. Okay.”

Into the murk. They fell in blackness, the obliging whine of the motors making a high keening background wail they scarcely noticed. The dark clasped them and removed all sense of direction save the press of Pocks’s muted gravity. They sought a glimmer, but in the shifting currents the craft could not hold to the course.

It was one of the fine ironies of history, Nigel thought, that this craft was in the end the result of classic, constricted warfare. Submarines had become the carriers of thermonuclear death nearly a century before. The major powers built involuted vessels which could withstand vast pressures, seek any enemy, survive, and track in utter blackness. When the Jovian moons were explored, it was natural to use such technology to penetrate the ice crust, sniff the seas below. The marriage of war and science continued, despite occasional domestic spats. So Lancer had carried a team of submersibles, in case open oceans were rare on planets, and they had to penetrate a moon.

He squinted at the blank blackness before them. He knew with a dead finality that this was as far as he was going to get. He had stalled for time but now he was tiring. A few hours, a meaningless gesture of defiance—and then a sad, sour return.

Sod that, he thought suddenly. I’m not going.

There were some things a man wouldn’t do.

Two

They searched for hours. They ate, argued, took samples, deployed sacs, and sent them rising to the vent, tugged by racks of floaters.

They spoke fitfully, without making any clear progress. Nigel had been in a deeply conflicted three-way before, and recognized some old patterns. It occurred to him that he sought these complex emotional geometries because they removed some of the pressure of demand from him, allowed him to dream and laze about, focused on his own inner states. Not a wholly welcome revelation. But coming at the tether of a life, it at least implied that he could accept this truth, too, for it was clearly too late now. Then he laughed at himself—provoking a quizzical glance from Nikka, who probably suspected why—for this also was a conveniently intellectual way of escaping the pressure of change. Self-knowledge that arrives too late loses its momentum. He laughed again.

“I’m getting a lot more of that molecular stuff,” Carlos said gruffly.

“Deeper, then,” Nigel said. “Sniff it out.”

“Dammit, I don’t take orders!”

“I was suggesting—”

“You’re always just ‘suggesting’ and ‘advising,’ aren’t you?”

“You’re quite right. I’ll say nothing.”

Carlos hesitated, still fuming. With Nigel having given way so easily, he was left with nothing more to say. He busied himself with the control board and after a while began following the direction indicated by the chem sensors. It was, after all, the obvious thing to do.

Slowly, so that at first they were unsure whether they saw it or imagined it, a faint blur of green formed in the dark. The instruments had picked it up, but only the eye gave form and substance to the mottled glow.

Abruptly, green shifted to burnt orange. Something came at them out of the blankness. It was long and spindly. Disjointed parts flexed and turned as it swept silently by. Trailing strands wove in the turbulent passing. Then it was gone.

“What the—”

“Exactly the question.”

Nikka said softly, “Self-luminous.”

“Yes. Feeding off the free radicals, I’ll wager.”

“No eyes.”

“No reason to evolve them here.”

“What do you figure—”

“Over that way.”

A dim glow. The craft gave off a high-pitched ping and crack as they descended.

“What’s that?”

“Can’t make it out.”

“Must be far away. No resolution.”

“If it’s that bright—”

“Right. Bloody luminous.”

“Not one of the things we just saw.”

“No. Bigger. A lot bigger.”