Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

relief.
    She rose into a crimson sky, where a misshapen sun hung low.
Beneath her the ocean looked black, oily, and huge, languid low
g-waves crossed its surface. But she could see, deep down beneath the
waters, a pale pink glow that must be the crater they had made.
    Another skinsuit broke the surface, popping up like a balloon.
Then a third, and a fourth. Hex made them sound off and report on
their status. Everybody was unscathed, physically anyhow. They bobbed
over the surface of the ocean, four drifting people in bright green
suits.
    ’The Spear has had it,’ Jul said. She downloaded to Hex a last
data squirt from the dying ship.
    ’We’re stranded,’ Hella said gloomily.
    ’We still have weapons in our suits,’ Borno said.
    Hex said, ’If we can find anybody to shoot at.’
    Jul pointed down at the ocean. ’Pilot - what’s that?’
    Something moved, just under the surface. Larger than a human,
amorphous, dimly glimpsed, it seemed to be moving purposefully.
    Hex could hear her mother’s voice: There are monsters in the sea.
’My turn to be phobic,’ she murmured.
    Hella said, ’What?… Look. It’s breaking the surface.’
    Hex glimpsed sleek flesh humping above the water. Then something
like a limb protruded. Hex flinched; it was as if the limb had
reached for her.
    ’I can’t make out its shape,’ Borno said.
    ’Maybe it has no fixed shape,’ Hella said. ’I’ve read some
creatures of the seas are like that.’
    ’But it’s a toolmaker,’ Jul said calmly. She pointed. ’It’s
wearing a kind of belt.’
    All this seemed utterly horrific to Hex. That limb, muscular,
equipped with suckers and fine manipulators, continued to writhe in
the air.
    ’You know,’ Hella said, ’I think it’s beckoning.’
    ’To us?’
    ’Of course to us. I think it wants us to follow it - to the land,
probably.’
    ’What land?’ Jul asked.
    Hella sighed. ’Some navigator you would make. Over there.’
    There was a dark shading on the horizon.
    Hex’s sharp pilot’s eyes picked out sparks descending from the
sky. ’We’re out of time.’
    ’They’re tracking the wreckage of the ship,’ Jul said.
    ’We stand and fight,’ Borno snarled.
    ’Not here,’ Hex snapped. ’Not now. Borno, we can’t win.’
    ’We should follow the swimming thing,’ Hella said. ’It might help
us.’
    ’You think so?’ Jul asked.
    ’It’s clearly smart. And it’s trying to help us right now. Why
not?’
    Hex looked down with huge reluctance at the blank surface of the
water, the uncharted depths beneath. ’We don’t have a choice,’ she
told her crew, and herself.
    She flipped in the air and plunged head-first back into the water.
Her suit’s systems whirred as it sought neutral buoyancy, and made
her legs kick. Her tell-tales showed her that her crew followed her
in: one, two, three.
    They all struggled through the water in pursuit of the ’swimming
thing’.

 
IV
     
     
    Hex woke. She was reasonably comfortable, even warm. But when she
looked up, she peered out through a translucent bubble-wall at the
roof of a cave.
    She stretched, sat up.
    By the light of a suit lamp, the others were already eating. They
sat around suit backpacks that glowed green, giving off light and
warmth. Breakfast was a slab of sticky, green, manufactured by a
backpack from the organic produce of this world’s ocean, washed down
by a visor-full of water.
    On staggering into this sea-shore cave Hex had inflated her own
suit to form this bubble-tent. If you looked carefully you could see
the suit’s seams, even one stretched-out glove. Inside, the crew had
stripped off their suits, pooled their backpacks, and slept, lying on
one stretched-out suit while blanketed by another. They had needed
time for some essential maintenance, of themselves as much as their
suits.
    In the mouth of the cave, beyond their shelter, a fire burned
fitfully, hampered by poor convection in the low gravity. Oddly the
flickering glow of the fire seemed more human than the pale green of
the suit lights, but it had been built by an utterly alien being.
    It was odd for Hex to have her crew together like this. She had
spent most of the last year with them, but for most of their time
together they were sealed up in their blisters. Now here they were,
stripped down to their heated undergarments, all crammed in. Borno,
the only man, was bulky, big-boned, hard-muscled. She imagined him
spending hours honing his body so he could take down Ghosts hand on
hand