DESCENT

When there was still an Earth, I had been in love with the ocean at night: its vastness, its reflections, its mystique. Sometimes, when the moon was crescent, I would be drawn to wade out, to swim, to dive, to kneel in the sand at the frigid bottom. No matter how deep I went, I could sense that there was a sky somewhere above me, cool night air, and stars. So I never felt afraid.

Not like here.

The liquid is saliva warm, and the dark is oppressive. There is no sky. There is no air except the bare inch behind the plastic of my mask.

I am cut off from Soto, but I keep on forgetting that, muttering, "Soto, what settings will be optimal on these IR goggles? I can't see past my nose."

The silence comes down, heavy… heavy… and it is worse than pure silence now, because there are faint stirring sounds, the gurgle of bubbles, the shifting of things unseen.

Never in my life, until this moment, have I been severed from my computers.

As I twist dials on my goggles, trying to see more than a meter through the greenish murk, I have my implant begin a transmission toward the point where the message from the Halcyon originated.

"Hello," I mutter. "This is Takiya Naru. I am adrift in the water out here. Can you guide me in?"

I wait, unwilling to risk moving without directions. I don't want to squirm around in here like a worm on a hook.

"Hello?" I try again.

This is when Soto would chime in.

To say what?

Get out of here immediately. You are in danger.

I glance back toward the cargo hatch that conceals my ship—but it's gone. The abyss behind me is a swarm of shapes: plankton or plant matter, no sign of the protective hull, only dark water extending into the shadows on every side. I sense a subtle pull, a current sucking my drifting body downward, and I realize that, subtly, it's been dragging me unawares.

I could still try to swim against the current, fly back where there are stars. I yearn for the constellation I'd seen between my feet: Rigel, Betelgeuse…

Stars of Orion: the hunter.

"This is Takiya Naru, a hunter. Are you in need of assistance? Please respond."

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There is only static: a froth of grating sounds with snatches of human voices.

Anyone whose transmission system is this badly damaged is probably in need of help.

I have my implant point me to the source of the radio waves, and I start swimming, saving the jets on my evo-suit for emergencies. Oxygen is at 99 hours and 54 minutes, or so the glowing indicator on my retina tells me. That's enough time to take this dive slow and careful.

I count the seconds in a whisper, and every time I say 'nine,' I stop and twist in the water, staring into the green gloom behind, above, below, keeping watch for any sign of movement in the dark.

Time seems sluggish, endless. I swim, but there's no landmark to prove that I'm moving. There's only murky water, and gurgling streams of bubbles.

Over the implant, I hear the static give way to a woman singing, "and in the woods, beneath the sky, I know that I—" then more static. But I heard enough to catch the swinging cadence of it, a music style centuries out of date, sung with an uncanny, bizarre trill in the vocals.

"Of course," I murmur, "They'll have their own culture, by now."

Four centuries in isolation… They've been developing alone for as long as it took humanity to go from carriages to rocketships, or from rocketships to dust. Long enough for multiple layers of revolutions in manners, art, morals.

I listen for the snatches of humanity in the static, and hear men shouting with words that are half familiar to me, half gibberish. Someone crying—a baby? A man calling, "Hello?" "Hello?"

He doesn't respond when I answer back.

It's strange. Even a thousand years ago, the transmission systems had countermeasures against static. This mess of noise feels artificial somehow. A lie, a performance.

Suddenly a man's voice rasps through the static, "Swim downward immediately, swim down immediately…"

Something is moving. Something big.

I hit the suit jets, and the sea becomes a torrent of speed. A hulking silhouette rockets past my head, the force of its passage jolting me into a tailspin.

I thrash to straighten my trajectory, keeping my jets roaring. At this speed, my three-meter vision is worthless: I have no time to react to what looms up from the dark, and I find myself tangling and falling among scattering eels, tumbling between boiling pillars of gas. The sea floor rushes diagonally out of the murk and slams into my shoulder, and my visual range drops to zero amid sand and kicked-up mud.

I roll, coming to a halt in a tilted sitting position in the ooze. The water at this depth is hot and slimy, and I can hear the booming of my pulse as if the whole sea were a tribal drum.

The man's voice whispers, "Stay very still."

No, the booming is not my pulse. I can feel it in the water, each thump pushing my skin from an epicenter somewhere in the murk, an epicenter that is moving closer.

My brain buzzes with all the clichéd advice about how to survive predator attacks on alien worlds: Ask yourself, what kind of prey has it evolved to hunt? What kind of prey does it think you are? Act like anything else. Remember: you're the alien here.

For the moment, I hold every part of me still.

The murk is settling. A reflective stone gleams in the muck by my left glove, oblong and pale—a bone, a human femur. Not decayed by four hundred years. Fresh.

I stare beyond it, searching, and see more bones, and the shredded corpse of something else, a thing I recognize from encyclopedia pages.

A 'thinking' alien. The worst of them.

I whisper, "Soto! How can a yasod possibly be—"

I cut myself off, remembering: I am alone.