The second floater burst. The beam leaped across the inside of it and punched a hole through the top. Nigel felt himself falling and then the frame slowed, still dropping. Equilibrium.

I’ll call Ted he’ll.

Later. See anything? There might be a suit light. Try the tracer.

Something wrong no pickup I can see

He can’t be beyond range this soon

Look for yourself his code shows nonoperational. He doctored it before he left must be

Floating, in an absence of space and light and weight. It was like the time on the slab, disconnected from the wearing of the world. Being in the high dark emptiness of space was much like the blank absorbing blackness here. His movements were sluggish, blunted by the unseen waters. No sound. When his boots struck the piping there came not a ringing but a muffled thud. He hung loosely to the frame and waited for something to come.

Look Ted’s on the line says he’s too busy to worry about this old fart there’s news from Earth-side looks bad new assembly starting in a few minutes

They can’t leave him out there call the teams on the surface get some more subs down here and

Nikka, this is Ted. Admittedly Nigel was right about one thing looks like—I mean his Walmsley’s Rule and all that. That must be a Watcher and Operations tells me it’s showing signs of life now, probably in response to our ground teams so

Then send down some submersibles damn it

Look there’s too many things happening at once Nikka I don’t have time to hunt for that bastard right now let him stew

He did it to stall for time don’t you see that

Stupid move just makes us more pissed up here

Ted I appeal to

He’s acting like a horse’s ass over nothing. I’m through with all this shit of his! Maybe he thought he’d get some sympathy support this way but it won’t cut up here, I can tell you that in spades

He sensed the running current taking him farther away from them. This was the farthest he had ever been, the natural tether. It was better to do it this way, in pursuit.

I’m pulling you people out soon as I can and if he’s gone he’s just gone that’s it

It will take hours

Okay you can search for a while the assembly starts in ten minutes anyway but I warn you—look, if he’s patched in still he can hear this. Nigel, this is it man, the last

He ignored the barking voice. Something more immediate disturbed him.

Rippling currents. He ignited a small helmet phosphor. The bars of the frame leaped into being around him, yellow and stark.

Nothing nearby. A tug, a fresh direction—

Something glimmered. It grew. A ball of ruddy clouds. Swelling toward him, coming fast—

Things moved inside. Specks in the clouds. Drifting dots. He tried to judge size but without perspective—

The color. A smoldering red, dying embers—

He held onto the pipes of the frame as the cage jiggled and surged sideways. Where had he seen—?

The specks did not drift aimlessly. The clouds were in fact hillsides and the dots walked on them, slowly, amid swirls of dust. They were large, stately, with four smoothly articulating legs—

EMs.

But not the huge-headed beasts he knew. These were slim, tall, graceful in their grave pacing.

Not EMs, not without the radio-dish heads and the awkward carapace that housed the reworked guts.

These were what the EMs had been before.

Before the asteroid rain crushed their biosphere. Before they had to remake themselves into something the Watchers would pass as perhaps machinelike.

They were inside a vast ball, fully five kilometers across. Inside were hills, streams, dusty clouds, high forests of blue and brown. It reminded him of those childhood toys which, shaken, show a winter scene with descending snow. Only here the liquid was outside, and within moved a trapped world of air and growth. The sphere’s shell glowed, casting ruddy light inward. Above it, dark masses. Ballast? Stabilizers?

It began to dwindle, The currents were sweeping him past, taking him away. He fired his laser beam over his head, making a blue arc. One of the tall moving figures seemed to pause, to look outward.

Had they seen him? Did they know what had happened to their race back on the home world? Deformed, beaten down but still going on—

Of course they knew something. They must be the remnants of an earlier age, a time when their world sent out ships and explored the nearby stars. They had taken shelter inside this moon.

So close! He knew their descendants, could tell them that the home world hung on still. If he could make a sign, some gesture across the abyss—

The red world shrank rapidly. He waved once, forlornly, and rested heavily against the medfilter. The chance had slipped by him.

He closed his eyes and let time pass. The image of the tall, grave creatures faded slowly.

Four

Something moved.

He jerked awake. Nigel shook himself and wondered how long he had been asleep. The suit warmed him, made him comfortable even in this cold murk. He had been trying to fit the pieces together …

See anything of him?

No. Damn all, how could he get so far so fast?

He wondered why they could not pick him up on long-range sonar. Surely he could not have drifted that far away, not with them following the same currents he did.

Look at this video image from Earthside. One of those things in orbit, looks hell of a lot like a Watcher.

If he was close enough to pick up their general craft transmissions, they had to see him. Unless something was behind him, so they couldn’t pick up his image against it.

Movement again.

He clicked on a helmet phosphor. The sharp outline and colors of the floater frame leaped out at him. The medfilter, shiny aluminum pipes, floaters billowing above him …

Something beyond. Something in the shadows.

A huge wall coming at him out of the blackness.

Gray pores. Speckled bands of red and purple.

A vast oval opening in the wall of flesh, rimmed with ridges of cartilage.

It brushed against the frame. Suckers in its side clasped the support rods. Slick brown tendrils curled about the metal.

Tasting? Whatever, the motion stopped. Nigel waited. He shook the frame. The grip tightened.

It didn’t seem to want to eat him. Was it studying him somehow? Best to wait and see.

He heard nothing from Carlos and Nikka. The bulk of this thing must be blocking them.

Time ticked by. He felt the old weakness slide into him, the sign of his body going awry again. Sudden activity, without rest, had thrown his chemistry out of balance. He surveyed the huge creature that gripped the frame, and wondered if it knew he was here. Or what kind of thing he might be.

Weakly:

How we going to find him in this?

Lot of floating junk. Follow the currents, keep away from that big stuff.

He had known they had to be out here, hanging away from the strange intruding craft that spewed fumes and whined and bucked against the currents instead of following them.

The gamble was that they would not have a history of intrusions like that, that the Watcher had not sent down craft that cracked the ice and searched out life wherever it could be found, that the Watcher would wait in its rigid orbit and peer downward and know that as long as life kept inside its shell of ice it was harmless. The Watchers were patient and abiding and knew more of life than men, knew that it could arise wherever energy passed through a chemical environment and drove the processes that made a mockery of entropy, building up order.

This was the secret that Pocks had to teach: that at a moon’s core, nuclear isotopes collected and sputtered and delivered up their warmth to an ocean of elemental matter, and that was enough.