“Yeah, we’ll, I guess we’ll see,” Kalico told them. “It’s the flipping Maritime Unit. Just a bunch of scientists, right? How much trouble can they be? And trust me, Michaela Hailwood won’t buck an order. Not from me. In fact, I wonder if I shouldn’t have replaced her the last time around.”

“Kalico,” Dek called back, “if it wasn’t for her, the Maritime Unit would have died on Ashanti. That woman kept them together. Molded them from a disparate group of scientists into a family. Hell, they were so tightly knit that they all lived for the group. Like some sort of cultish commune. Played hell with the few of us who tried to have relationships.”

“How so?” Kalico asked.

“They always went back to the family. Like, ultimately, if they were involved with anyone from the crew, it always ended up as a sort of betrayal to the others. I guess, in the end, when you think about Maritime Unit, the Unreconciled, and crew, Ashanti was three different worlds.”

“They sure didn’t take to me, and I was the Supervisor.”

“So, what’s the game plan when we land?” Talina asked as the airplane dropped toward the dot of white.

“We stick together,” Kalico told her. “Watch each other’s backs. Maybe this clannish family thing has gone over the edge. If it’s us versus them, I want us on top after it all shakes out. They do have four rifles. But other than that, who knows what they could cook up.”

“If it’s really that bad?” Dek asked. “Say, they meet us at the landing pad and those rifles are aimed at us?”

“We scoot and toot,” Kalico told him. “That tells us to leave dealing with them to the marines. This is a fact-finding trip only. If there’s something else wrong, maybe they’re at each other’s throats but still listening to reason, I’m ordering the evacuation of the Pod. We’ll come pick it up with the shuttles after they’re back to the mainland.”

“For all we know, it’s a blown transistor in the radio,” Talina added. “That, or like that idiot Weisbacher, they don’t know how to fix the radio.”

“Guess we’ll find out.” Kalico was pressing her face to the window, trying see as Dek eased them into the wind on approach.

“What are those?” he asked in awe.

Kalico craned her neck, seeing the most amazing glowing cones floating just off to the east of the Pod. Elongated and internally lit, they seemed to float just above the sea, three of them, angled into the wind and trailing what looked like gossamer tentacles at the edge of a blue-green patch of something floating around the Pod.

“Never seen the like before,” Talina admitted. “Think they’re a danger?”