She saw the thick blue-green scum clinging to the side of the pool. The stuff that looked like algae. Yosh’s sample was still in Vik Lawrence’s backlog of specimens, waiting to be put under the scope and catalogued. In the days since they’d set the Pod, the pilings and the entire underbelly had collected a coating. In places it looked like it was ten centimeters thick and had started to climb up the Pod walls.

Not that it would be a problem. Ruto said he’d been able to dislodge entire colonies with a power washer where they were creeping out onto the Underwater Bay floor.

Then Michaela watched water rise around the sub’s nose as they slipped into the crystalline depths. A few bubbles trickled up around the transparency as Casey released the grapples, kicked on the motors, and sent them down and right to clear the way for Varina’s sub. As they passed from under the Pod’s shadow, the view was stunning.

Capella’s rays danced in shafts as they refracted down through the swells to illuminate a wondrous aquatic world. Here was a wealth of fascinating biota. Michaela didn’t know what else to call it. Sure, it was easy to bias the nomenclature and call the blue-green growths sprouting from the sea floor plants, but were they? Falling into terrestrial terminology and classification before actually studying the specimens, was—if Donovanian land-based life was any guide—nothing more than a spurious exercise in futility.

What she saw here was a wonderland of strange life-forms, some of it stemmed and sporting paddles, some a collection of waving green tendrils, others like a corona of stalks and pods, many of them incredibly colorful as they opened and closed. Here and there, taller specimens sent spears up that were covered with leaves or tentacles, sometimes with fan-like appendages, and even what looked like flexible arms with multi-fingered hands that fished around and tried to grab the zipping tubes as they squirted past. No matter how bizarrely different this was from Earth’s oceans, what was rapidly apparent was trilateral symmetry.

“Holy wow!” Casey gasped as a school of paper-thin creatures flashed past the transparency in a full spectrum of color. In an instant, they flipped sideways, so thin they vanished into seeming nothingness.

“We’re right behind you,” Jaim’s voice came through Michaela’s com. “We’re passing to your right and above. We’re going to start taking samples at the five-meter mark on the transect.”