What does it want? Leviathan asked itself again and again. Why is it here?
Dorn floated through the hatch from the sleeping area, flexing his prosthetic hand slowly.
“Max, you may be right,” the cyborg said. “My arm needs lubrication. I think the perfluorocarbon is reacting with the joints.”
Standing before the control console, Yeager shook his head. “Those joints are sealed, aren’t they? The gunk can’t get into them. Besides, perfluorocarbon is pretty much nonreactive, that’s why we chose to use it.”
“Then what is making my arm feel so stiff?”
“Pressure,” Yeager said, tapping the data screen on the right side of the console. “Look at that pressure curve. We’re getting damned near our design depth limit.”
Dorn made a sound that might have been a grunt. “Eight hundred and thirty-eight kilometers deep. We still have a long way to go.”
Corvus emerged from the sleep area, a dejected frown on his unbalanced face.
“Your headache?” Deirdre asked.
“Sleeping didn’t help,” he said. “If anything, it’s worse now than before.”
Taking up his place at the control console, Dorn said, “We are all suffering from the increased pressure. This will get worse as we go deeper.”
“I’m all right,” Corvus said, trying to grin.
“Dee?” the cyborg asked. “How do you feel?”
“I’m all right,” she echoed. In truth, Deirdre’s chest pain seemed worse than before. Not a lot worse, she told herself. It’s bearable. I can stand it.
“Max,” asked Dorn, “how is your back?”
Yeager grimaced slightly. “I wouldn’t want to play handball right now, but it’s okay … just kind of stiff.”
“Like my arm,” Dorn said.
“We could both use a lube job,” Yeager muttered.
The four of them stood at their posts. Deirdre slipped her feet into the deck loops in front of the sensor display console, Corvus took his place on Dorn’s other side at the DBS station. Yeager floated slightly behind Dorn, scanning the systems status board.
“All systems in the green,” he said to no one in particular. “No, wait. One of the thruster jets just went yellow. Self-repair initiated automatically.”
Anchoring his feet before the control console, Dorn scanned the displays. “Our medical readouts are all within acceptable limits,” he announced.
Yeager quipped, “Acceptable to who?”
“Whom,” Deirdre corrected.
Yeager shot her a mock scowl.
Looking back at her screens, Deirdre blurted, “One of the leviathans is approaching us!”
Corvus twisted around to look at the sensor screens. “Yeah! Look at it!”
Dorn had the same image on his center screen. “It’s flashing signals at us.”
“How do you know it’s signaling at us?” Yeager demanded.
“Nobody else around,” said Corvus. “The other critter isn’t in sight.”
“I think it’s trying to tell us something,” said Deirdre.
Leviathan felt maddeningly frustrated. It had swum back to the alien and clearly signed that it would allow the strange little creature to feed off it. But the alien made no response.
It was as if the alien were blind and senseless, as if it were as stupid as the fish that swam dumbly unaware of anything except feeding and reproducing.
No, wait. Leviathan’s sensor members saw that the alien was signaling back. Perhaps it isn’t stupid after all, Leviathan thought, merely unutterably slow.
But the alien’s signals meant nothing. It seemed to be repeating Leviathan’s own message, a dull-witted repetition that seemed to be mere mimicry, not true intelligence.
Or is this the way it communicates? Leviathan asked itself. Through mimicry? Could that be possible?
It wasn’t mimicking anything we showed it when it displayed that it wanted to feed off us, Leviathan remembered. That wasn’t mimicry. It was more like a request. Or perhaps a demand?
Play its game, Leviathan thought. Meet mimicry with mimicry. But go one step farther.
“It’s coming awfully close,” Deirdre said, trying to keep her voice calm, keep the fear out of it.
The huge creature was moving nearer, so close that the ship’s cameras could no longer display the beast in its entirety. So close that she could feel their ship dipping and jouncing in the currents surging around them from the huge creature’s motion. Her sensor screens showed its mountainous flank gliding closer and closer, row upon row of flippers working tirelessly, hundreds of unblinking eyes staring at her, bright splashes of color flickering along its hide.
“It’s signaling again,” Corvus called out, needlessly.
Deirdre adjusted the display to remove all color and once again the intricate line drawings appeared, like the blueprints of some vast alien building, huge and bewildering.
“What’s it trying to say to us?” Dorn asked.
“Earthling go home,” said Yeager.
“I’ve got the computer slowing down the imagery,” Deirdre said. “It flashes its pictures so fast I can hardly tell one image from another.”
Her central screen began to display the leviathan’s pictures at a slowed pace.
“Earthling go home,” Yeager repeated.
“No! Look!” Corvus wrenched himself free from his foot loops and surged over to Deirdre. Slipping one hand across her shoulders, he pointed with the other. “Look! That’s the image we sent out before!”
Deirdre nodded. The leviathan was repeating the picture they had displayed, the image showing the DBS probe emerging from their vessel.
“That’s when they took off,” Yeager commented.
“But now one of them’s come back,” said Deirdre.
As they watched, the screen displaying the drawings along the leviathan’s flank showed the DBS probe connecting with its hide.
“It’s telling us it’ll let us probe it!” Corvus yelped. In the sound-deepening perflourocarbon his yelp sounded more like the coughing grunt of a stalking lion.
Corvus launched himself back to the DBS console as he cried, “Dorn, reel out the probe! Do it now, before he changes his mind!”
It’s not a
She stayed silent as she watched her screens. The thin fiber-optic line of the DBS probe snaked out toward the huge, all-encompassing flank of the leviathan.
“This is it!” Corvus said.
Turning from her screens, Deirdre saw that Andy had already settled the optronic sensor circlet on his shaved head. It looked a little too loose for him, ridiculous, almost, pushing down on his ears. But the expression on his face was taut concentration, eyes wide, mouth a thin slash of a line, hands hovering over his keyboard.
“This is it,” he repeated, in a grim murmur.
Deirdre realized that Andy’s entire life was bound up in this moment. His reason for existence was about to come to fruition.
