Did they talk to each other beneath the waves?
We do.
Waela gestured at the signal switch beside the hatch.
"What's the delay?"
"They're mating the new gondola and the sub. I didn't want to call anyone away from that."
He nodded as he saw the gondola swing into place, then he depressed the switch.
Presently, a green-clad workman unsealed the inner locks and the hatch swung open. Slow procedure, but this was a dangerous area. Hatches could be locked either side - from inside when the skydoors were open. Everything groundside was designed to contain an attack.
There was a musty aroma of outside within the hangar which set Thomas' nerves on edge.
Waela preceded him across the hangar floor, striding out with that watchful swing which Colonists never put aside, head turning, gaze darting about. Her pale singlesuit fitted her body like another skin.
He had insisted they go through Stores for the new suits. As he had ordered, they were insulated against the sea's chill, eliminating the need for insulation on the gondola. Plaz was an excellent conductor unless doubled or tripled. This decision gave them a few extra centimeters in the gondola core.
Waela had disconcerted him when they picked up the suits. In shipside style, there were no separate dressing rooms. She had moved right into the try-on area with him. That habit of bodily candor still bothered him. He always found it necessary to turn his back when dressing or undressing with a female companion. Waela, on the other hand, remained frankly direct.
"Raj, did you know that you have a funny-looking mole on your butt?"
Without thinking, he had turned his head toward her just in time to see her stepping into her suit - breasts and pubis exposed. There was just the slightest hesitation in her while she continued dressing, as though she spoke only to his eyes, saying: "Of course I'm a woman. You knew that."
He found himself intensely aware that she was a woman, and there was no denying the magnetic attraction she worked on him. There also was no denying that she knew this and was amused by it in an undefinably gentle way. This knowledge in her might even have contributed to her upset when he asked her to apply sexual pressure to the new team member.
She was right, too. It was cheating.
But what if Ship is cheating us?
Doubts - always doubts. He found himself in silent agreement with some of the things Oakes had said. On the other hand, he could not fault Waela's argument: "We don't help ourselves by cheating each other."
That open candor in her attracted him as much as the chemistry of her physical presence.
But I am the goad, the devil's advocate, the challenger. I am the knight among the pawns.
And he knew he did not have much time. Ship might hand him an impossible deadline at any moment. Or Oakes and his crew might make good on their unspoken threat to cut this project off at the pockets as soon as they dared.
There was no mistaking the latent anger in Waela - it betrayed itself in her stride (a bit too emphatic) and in the way she studied him now when she thought he was not looking. But she would get to Panille and ask all of the proper questions. That was the important thing.
Thomas still felt remnants of her anger as they stepped into the glaring light and bustle at the testing apron where the new sub was cradled. She was all business as she stared up at this creation which had emerged from Thomas' commands.
It was a fat metallic teardrop, slightly elongated, its LTA attachment eyelets extending along the top in a double ridge reminiscent of the backbone of an antediluvian Earthside monster. The principle was relatively simple. Most of the external sub was carrier for the plaz globe of the gondola at the core. Only the drive motors and fuel storage were made strong against the sea's pressures. The carrier had one more important function now visible to her eyes: Vertical lines of plaz-bubble lights extended up and down its sides - each bubble four centimeters in diameter. The trigger system to light them in sequence passed through a computer/sensor feedback program. What the sensor-eyes saw in the ocean depths, these lights could play back. The kelp's patterns would be its patterns, the kelp's rhythms its rhythms.
The chief of Construction Services, Hapat Lavu, came out to meet them at the edge of the lighted area. He was a slender, driving man, completely bald. His gray eyes missed few details of his work and, despite a biting and accusatory tongue which delivered reprimands with thin-lipped fury, he was one of the best-liked Colonists. The common assessment was, "You can depend on Hap."
Dependability gained high marks groundside, and Hap Lavu was fighting for his reputation. Of all the equipment from his shops, only the subs had failed to match Pandora's demands. Sixteen had been lost without a trace; there had been survivors from four, and the wreckage of three others had been located on the bottom. All had been crushed or otherwise disabled by giant strands of kelp.
Lavu's assessment was the opinion of many: "That damn stuff can think and it's a killer."
He had become an admirer of Thomas during their short association. Thomas had taken the accepted sub-components and reworked them into this new design. The only parts of the plan Lavu distrusted involved communications and pickup. He spoke to that as he greeted Thomas: "You should have something better than the rocketsonde. They fail, y'know."
"We'll stick with it," Thomas said.
He knew what worried Lavu. The ubiquitous 'lectrokelp not only clogged the seas, but their electrical activity jammed the communications channels - sonar to radar. Hylighter exhibited similar phenomena. Was there a relationship? There was no pattern to the jamming; it was random squirts of signal activity. Because of this, they depended on high power and line-of-sight relays waterside. Even then, a cloud of hylighters rising from the sea could block transmissions.
"You'll have to surface before you can communicate," Lavu said. "Now, if you'd let me adapt the anchor cable t...."
"Too many lines to the sub," Thomas said. "We could tangle in them."
"Then pray that y'can lift above interference for the relays to take your talk-talk."
Thomas nodded agreement. The plan was to anchor the LTA in a lagoon, slip down the anchor cable in a vertical dive and stay clear of the kelp barriers.
"We'll observe, play back their light patterns and seek any new coherent patterns in the lights or their electrical activity," he had said.
It was a workable plan. Several subs had survived exploratory dives by giving a wide berth to the kelp. It was when the subs went in to take specimens that violence occurred.
Workabl.... but with unavoidable weaknesses.
Their LTA would hang at the surface, tethered on its anchor-line and awaiting the sub's return from the depths. A plan to have another LTA with a lift-gondola anchored or standing by aloft had been scratched. The winds were too unpredictable and it was argued that two LTAs anchored in the same lagoon would pose dangerous maneuvering problems. The necessary size of such an LTA made them difficult to handle in tight quarters. The standard procedure at the hangar was to winch them down after grappling the downhaul hawser. Instead, their LTA bag had been triple-reinforced with compartmented cells.
These arguments went through Thomas' mind as he studied the new submersible.
Was it worth the risk? He felt that he was challenging Ship, but the stakes were the highest.
Will You let me die here, Ship?
No answer, but Ship had said that his destiny was his own now. That was a rule of this game.
If the kelp is sentient and we can make contact, the rewards will be enormous. Intelligent vegetable! Did it WorShip? It could be the key to Ship's demands.
Ship called the kelp intelligent and that could be another twist of this game. Should he doubt?
It occurred to Thomas then that if Ship were telling the truth, the kelp might be close to immortal. Except for specimens damaged by human intrusion, they had never seen dead kelp.
Did it live forever?
"Do y'still reject a standby LTA?" Lavu asked.
"How long could you hold one in sight of us?" Thomas asked.
"Depends on the weather, as y'well know."
There was resentment in Lavu's voice. He took it personally that so many of his creations had been destroyed, all of them equipped as best he knew for underwater survival. The answer, of course, was that Pandora's planet-wide sea contained perils beyond those they knew. Lavu felt that the entire project was now a challenge to him. He did not want to quit. It was more than a concern about hardware. Lavu wanted to go out as crew.