Bending down to get a closer look, Ruto was amazed to see that the stuff was actually crawling. Moving slowly across the floor. Kind of like looking at the sun back on Earth. You never actually saw it move, but when you measured it against something like a scratch on the sialon, you could see an irregularity in the side of the trunk was actually creeping its way past.

So the stuff was growing out of the water; what the hell was it going to do? Take over the bay? What did it eat, anyway? It was supposed to be a bunch of single cells that would make up a sort of mat. Vik had said nothing about any tree-shaped madness growing to take over the UB.

“And it’s only been two days? What if I hadn’t made it down here in three?”

Maybe it would have been hanging from the ceiling, too?

Growling under his breath, Ruto heedlessly stomped his way across the bay floor. As he did, the trunks squished and splashed as they ruptured, pulses shooting along the various branches. Each of the stems convulsed—and the entire floor went apeshit, wiggling, jiggling and berserk.

“Crap. What a mess,” he muttered as he reached the roll of hose on its spool and looked back.

How long was it going to take to shoot all this mess back into the water, and if it floated, how was he going to flush it back into the sea?

“I don’t need this today,” he cried as he began unspooling the hose. “My little girl’s sick, and I gotta shoot a bunch of scum back into the ocean? Give me a fricking break!”

Ruto opened the valve, water shooting out from the nozzle. As he pulled out the hose and whipped pressurized streams back across the floor, clots of torn algae went with it.

That’s when he saw where the stuff had made it across the floor and was climbing the UUVs in their hangers. Not just little threads of the blue-green, but whole thick mats were wound around the propellers, the camera stalks, and buoyancy tanks. Cleaning them was going to take hours.

His heart sank, irritation rising as he turned the nozzle on the closest mat of algae. Shit on a shoe, the stuff was a good three to four centimeters thick. Blast one spot loose and flap it back on top of itself, and it seemed to stick together, making a six-or-seven-centimeter-thick layer of ever-tougher-to-dislodge biomat. And the thicker it got, the more it resisted the blast of water. When that happened, instead of a jet blowing algae loose, it broke up the stream, shooting spray back in all directions. Within minutes Ruto was dripping, splotched by little patches of algae that had splattered back to land on him.