Time

And a golden droplet erupted from the surface of Cruithne.

They stood and watched, as if stunned, in the ticking calm and fluorescent light of the zero G deck. Emma could see how the droplet’s shape deformed as it rose from Cruithne’s shallow gravity well, oscillating like a jellyfish, and complex waves crisscrossed its surface, gleaming in sunlight. Emma glimpsed movement inside the translucent golden surface: small, strong shapes, darting in shoals, blurred and gray.

It was quite beautiful, a soundless ballet of water and light, utterly unexpected.

And it was growing, blossoming like a flower, heading toward O’Neill.

There was a jolt, a groan of torn metal. Red emergency lamps started to flash, and a harsh buzzing klaxon roared rhythmically.

“Master alarm,” Malenfant shouted. He was clutching Michael against his chest. “Everybody grab something.”

Emma looked around. The deck was spinning around her. She reached for a strut, but it was too far away.

“Emma!”

The open-mesh floor swept up to meet her.

“… Earth. Tell those fucking squid we’re from Earth. God damn it, Cornelius.”

“I told them. I just don’t think they believe us.”

Emma found herself lying on a mesh partition, loosely restrained by a couple of strips of bandage around her waist and legs. Michael’s face was hovering over her like a moon, small and round, split by white teeth, bright eyes. He seemed to be mopping the side of her face—

“Owl”

— -where something stung. She could smell the sharp stink of antiseptic ointment.

Am I in my office? What happened?

Here came Malenfant. Michael backed away.

She remembered it all: I’m in the spacecraft, in deepest space, not where I should be. Reality seemed to swim around her.

Malenfant braced on a strut and peered down at her. “You okay?”

She touched the side of her face. She felt open flesh, warm blood, a couple of elasticated bandages taped in place, slippery ointment. She lifted her head, and pain banged through her temples. “Shit.”

She tried looking around. The lights were dim, maybe half-strength. The master alarm lamp was still flashing — its pulsing hurt her eyes — but at least the siren was switched off.

There were starbursts in her eyes, explosions of pain in her head. The colors were washed out; she felt numb, her hearing dulled. She was like a ghost, she thought, only partially here.

Malenfant reached down and removed the loose ties around her waist. She felt herself drifting up from the partition. “You’ve been out for fifteen minutes. You were a hazard to shipping so we tied you up. Michael has been nursing you.” He glanced at the boy. “Good kid, when his head is in one piece.”

“Unlike mine right now. What happened, Malenfant?”

“They shot at us.”

“Who?”

“The squid. The damn squid. They fired a ball of water at us, hit the starboard solar panel. Ripped it clean off.” Which explained the dimmed power. “Took some work with the attitude thrusters to kill the spin, bring us under control.”

She heard the subdued pride in his voice. It was Malenfant’s first deep-space emergency, and he’d come through it; he was proud of himself. Even in the depths of peril there was a little boy buried deep in there, a boy who had always wanted to be a spaceman, under all the sublimation and rationalization of adulthood.

“So where does that leave us?”

He shrugged. “Things got more complicated. We can’t make it home on one panel and the nuke reactor. Maybe we can get more photovoltaic material from the surface, rig something up —”

“Or maybe not.”

He eyed her. “Right now we’re a long way from home, Emma. Come see the view.”

Michael, with his sharper eyes, had been the first to see, on Cruithne’s surface, the drops of gold.

The habitats were snuggled into the cups of deep craters, squeezed into ridges, lying in shadows and sunlight. It was as if the asteroid’s black, dusty surface had been splashed by a spray from some furnace: a spray of heavy, languid, hemispherical drops of gold. And sections of the asteroid were coated in what looked like foil: sheets extending from the droplets that clung to Cruithne’s wrinkled surface or hanging suspended in space from great ramshackle frames.

Malenfant pointed at the Cruithne image. “I think that must be the original Nautilus.” It was a bubble bigger than the rest, more irregularly shaped, nestled into a crater. The droplet’s meniscus was bound together by a geodesic netting, and the whole thing was tethered to the asteroid’s dusty surface by cables. There was a stack of clumpy machinery near the bubble, abandoned; perhaps that had once been the rest of the ship.

“I guess those sheets spread over the surface are solar arrays,” she said.

Cornelius nodded. “Manufactured from asteroid materials.”

“I don’t see any connections between the bubbles.”

Malenfant shrugged, distracted. “Maybe the squid tunnel through the asteroid. Inside the bubbles you’d be radiation-shielded by the water; that wouldn’t apply on the surface… How have they tethered those new bubbles to the regolith? I don’t see the netting we used on the Nautilus.”

“They don’t have any metals,” Cornelius said. “Because we didn’t show them how to extract metals. Only organic products, including plastics. I guess they just found a way to tether without metal cables and pitons.”

They watched the asteroid turn, slowly, a barbecue potato on an invisible spit, bringing more of the bubble habitats into view.

She said, “There are so many”

“Yes.” Cornelius sounded awed. “To have covered so much of the asteroid in a few months… and we don’t know how far they’ve spread through the interior. They must be spreading exponentially.”

“Breeding,” Malenfant said.

“Obviously,” Cornelius snapped impatiently. “But the point is they must be keeping most of each spawned batch alive. Remember what Dan Ystebo told us about the first generation: the four smart cephalopods among the dozens of dumb ones?”

“So,” Emma said, “if most of the squid now are being kept alive—”

“They must be mostly smart.” Cornelius looked frightened.

“No wonder they need to keep building new habitats,” Malenfant said.

“But it isn’t enough,” Cornelius said. “Pretty soon they’re going to run out of asteroid.”

“Then what?”

“They are stranded on this rock in the sky. I guess they’ll turn on each other. There will be wars.”

“How long?” Malenfant said. “How long have we got before they eat up the asteroid?”

Cornelius shrugged. “Months at most.”

Malenfant grunted. “Then the hell with it. We can stay here for twenty days. If we haven’t got what we wanted and got out of here by then, we’re going to be dead anyhow.”

In a softscreen, Emma saw, something swam.

It was small, sleek, compact. It slid easily back and forth, its arms stretched before it, its carapace pulsing with languid colours. It had a cruel grace that frightened Emma. Its hide shimmered with patterns, complex, obviously information-packed.

“You’re talking to them,” Emma said to Cornelius.

“We’re trying.”

Malenfant growled. “We’re going way beyond the squid sign-language translator software Dan gave us. We need Dan himself. But he’s two hundred light-seconds away. And nobody is talking to us anyhow.”

Cornelius looked harassed. “Some of them think we’re from Earth. Some don’t think Earth even exists. Some think we’re here to trick them somehow.”

“You think the squid tried to kill us?”

“No,” Malenfant snapped. “If they’re smart enough to see us coming, to fire water bombs at us, they are smart enough to have destroyed us if they wanted to. They intended to disable us.”

“And they succeeded. But why?”

“Because they want something from us.” Malenfant grinned. “Why else? And that’s our angle. If we have something they want, we can trade.”

Cornelius snapped, “I can’t believe you’re seriously suggesting we negotiate.”

Malenfant, drifting in the air, spread his hands. “We’re trying to save our mission. We’re trying to save our lives. What can we do but talk?”

Emma said, “Have you figured out what it is they want?”

“That,” Cornelius said, “is the bad news.”

“Earth,” Reid Malenfant said.

“They know Earth, if it exists, is huge. Giant oceans, lots of room to breed. They want to be shown the way there. They want at least some of them to be released there, to breed, to build.”

Cornelius said tightly, “We ought to scrape those slugs off the face of this rock. They’re in our way.”

“They aren’t slugs,” Emma said evenly. “We put them here. And besides, we didn’t come here to fight a war.”

“We can’t give them Earth. They breed like an explosion. They already chewed their way through this asteroid, starting from nothing. They’d fill the world’s oceans in a decade. And they are smart, and getting smarter.”

Malenfant rubbed his eyes, looking tired. “We may not be able to stop them for long anyhow. Their eyes are better than ours, remember? It won’t be hard for them to develop astronomy. And they saw us coming; whatever we tell them, maybe they can track back and figure out where we came from.” He looked at Emma. “What a mess. I’m starting to think we should have stuck to robots.” He was kneading his temple, evidently thinking hard

Emma had to smile. Here they were in a disabled ship, approaching an asteroid occupied by a hostile force — and Reid Malenfant was still looking for the angle.

Malenfant snapped his fingers. “Okay. We stall them. Cornelius, I take it these guys aren’t going anywhere without metal-working technology. They already know how to make rocket fuel. With metal they can achieve electronics, computers maybe. Spaceflight.”

“So—”