Adelaide really hoped this didn’t turn out the way it seemed like it was going to.

The problem was that there was only one real possible “plan” — get close to the creature, run alongside it for a moment, and then leave. No one had thought of another approach, given the constraint that they had to get close to it and it was moving.

Absent some lateral thinking, the question was just whether to try or to give up and move on. And Adelaide really believed she could have turned away — this isn’t something with an abstract risk that was difficult to assess, so if the crew didn’t think they could handle it, she would have had no choice. But Captain Mattson had assured her that the Strider could handle the wake.

Although maybe she could have asked some more follow up questions. Like “When you say handle, does that include the kind of handling where some parts fall off?” or “Will the people on board, for example myself, also be able to handle it or will we all be vibrated into goo?”

As they followed, Adelaide looked back fondly upon seasickness. This was like riding a horse on a plane that was in a thunderstorm. She wasn’t even really sick — she was being bounced around too much for that. She was instead looking forward to the moments when her feet touched the ground, and trying to avoid flying into anyone who looked like they were doing something important otherwise.

They were gaining on it, but not as quickly as they should have been. They were approaching it on a diagonal, and they apparently didn’t want to run their engines as hard as they could in light of the chop. They were still faster, but the waves were getting rougher and rougher, so it wasn’t clear how much longer they’d keep making progress. And now it was closer to the surface again, which threatened to make the wake even rougher.

Suddenly, there was a huge burst of water, and Adelaide madly imagined that the thing had just self-destructed somehow. But it was still there, and it took Adelaide a minute to realize that it looked odd because it was no longer spinning. That’s what the splash had been: it had stopped spinning so suddenly that some of its scales had been propelled in different directions, along with a green sphere that Adelaide hadn’t noticed before that was sailing off to the left. To port? Whatever.

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The creature had lost some real momentum in that process. It was still moving forward, but much more slowly, having lost so much energy to the sudden displacement of water and no longer generating force through its spinning.

It was an opportunity they couldn’t miss, and Captain Mattson seized upon the sudden decrease in the creature’s momentum to gun the engines. As he accelerated, the wave from the creature’s sudden move caught up with them, and the Strider seemed to go almost vertically up. Adelaide envisioned capsizing and drowning or navigating an overturned ship from within.

But then they crested the wave, and the world was so still that Adelaide held her breath. And then they crashed down. But that was the worst of it, and they spoon got much closer than ever before. Adelaide got her clearest glimpse of the creature. There wasn’t much more to see: it really did appear to be a big oblong covered in huge scales. But, now, Adelaide could see what she assumed were its eyes - a ring purple orbs set near the front of the creature. They didn’t blink while Adelaide was looking at them.

And then it started spinning again, and the Strider turned away. Adelaide agreed that had been as close as it was reasonable to get — if that hadn’t done it, it wasn’t going to get done.

As the creature swam away, Mattson killed the engines. The water was now littered with some of the scales that had been cast off, and Adelaide’s first thought was that those would probably be worth something to somebody. Her second thought was to wonder why those creatures would intentionally stop their spinning and lose so much mass. And her third thought was to notice that she’d thought about profit before discovery, and wonder if that should upset her.

But all the thoughts were dismissed when Percy arrived, shaking his head.

Adelaide gasped. “We didn’t get it? We were so close!”

“I don’t think we were,” Percy said.

“What do you mean?”

“I just did another mapping, and the Node isn’t there,” he said as he pointed at the departing trail of the creature they’d followed. “It’s there,” he said, pointing off to the left.

Adelaide followed his finger. She knew what she was looking at, but she pulled out her binoculars to confirm.

It was another trail. Their creature wasn’t alone.