“Probably some form of communication,” she whispered, taken by the beauty of it. Communication by patterns and colors was one of the givens on Donovan. At least, that was the case on land where people now knew that quetzals and mobbers communicated by color and pattern. There was speculation that the invertebrates and perhaps even the plants did as well.

She heard the hatch cycle behind her and turned as her second-in-command, Lee Shinwua, Shin for short, stepped out into the wind. Still looking half-starved, the man’s clothes hung on his broad-shouldered body. The stiff gusts played with his spacer-short black hair, and he squinted his nut-brown eyes into the wind, which accented their Asian cast. He was thirty-six with a PhD from ScrippsCal University. As with her origins in Apogee Station, Shinwua’s Uyghur roots wouldn’t have predisposed him to a degree in oceanography. Somehow, however, he’d managed to navigate the Corporate system, aced the exams, and landed a coveted appointment to the SCU. That he’d graduated magna cum laude, published prodigiously on deep-water resources, and cultivated the right sponsorship on the Board had wrangled him a place on Michaela’s team.

Shin stepped up beside her, squinting into the wind’s bite. “Thought you might be here. Got a problem with the main refrigeration unit. Got Tobi Ruto working on it. Looks like it’s some sort of fried circuit. We don’t have a spare. Tobi’s not sure how to fix it.”

She glanced at him. “No spare? Again?” Seemed like half the equipment they tried to fix didn’t have a spare, or if it did, it was the wrong part. For the first maritime expedition on Donovan, they were off to a rocky start. They had only been in the Pod for a week, unpacking, setting up, testing equipment, and preparing to initiate the first study of Donovan’s oceans. They had suffered one malfunction after another.

Shin shrugged. “If we have one, it’s not in the listed inventory. I guess from what Tobi tells me, it’s a common sort of part that rarely fails, and if it does, you just order one. Dharman called Corporate Mine. They don’t have one. Not sure Port Authority does, either. But they’re asking around.”

She chuckled dryly, eyes on the endless swells that rolled toward them to vanish beneath the platform and slosh against the Pod’s pilings. In Capella’s harsh light and crystalline water, she could see the reef three meters beneath the surface. Patterns of vegetation—in a mosaic of green and blue—mottled the water-worn rock. Something big, torpedo-like, jetted from under the pod to vanish from sight. Who knew what it might be?

Michaela told him, “Have Tobi call Sheyela Smith, that electrician in Port Authority. If she doesn’t have the part, she’ll know how to jury rig something to make the refrigeration work.”