Dek rubbed the back of his neck. “Yeah, well, lot of good it will do the slime. Kalico and Shig left this morning with the A-7s. They’re going to recover the Pod. The plan is to blow the tube and what’s left of the pilings while the shuttles support the Pod by cables. Then they’re going to fly it to a rocky outcrop about an hour east of here. Kalico wants to salvage the equipment. The microscopes and such. If she can decontaminate the Pod, she’s figuring it might be turned into a remote base on one of the other continents.”

“Good luck with that,” Iji muttered, studying the gill channels that ran down the boy’s neck. “How did the slime know to grow these gills here? Why lateral to the root of the tongue and down the side of the throat? Why didn’t it choose the shoulders, or anywhere else on the body? It’s like it instinctively knew?”

Raya was fingering her scalpel, staring down at the corpse. “It took humans a couple of million years to develop the skills and technology to create life-forms. The slime did it within weeks. How do you assemble that kind of brainpower from a bunch of floating cells? This is an intelligence orders of magnitude beyond anything we’ve ever encountered.”

Dek rubbed his chin, considering. “We’re going to have to completely rethink how we’re going to go back to Donovan’s oceans. Even if we go back.”

“What about the children still in the Pod?” Vik’s eyes had a thousand-yard stare. “What the hell are they going to be? What does the slime intend to do with them?”

96

Of all the bad moods Kalico had ever descended to, this was about the worst. Never—not even in those days when she’d been alone after Turalon’s departure—had she felt this dispirited, defeated, and most of all, frustrated. Nothing in her life was working. The collapse of the Number Three, the mine shutdown, and idling of her smelter had her people at a standstill. The Maritime Unit was gone, a total loss. Nothing she could salvage.

And Dek belonged to Donovan now.

She walked down from the ramp on her A-7, smelling the stench of hot exhaust as she stepped onto Port Authority’s heat-glazed landing field. Shuttle exhaust had seared the clay to the point that landing no longer blew dust out in great clouds to settle over the shipping containers stacked seven-high on the field margins. She jammed her hat onto her head in response to Capella’s burning afternoon blaze.

As she hit dirt, Pamlico Jones was already heading her way with his skid-steer to unload the thick coils of cable that were supposed to be carrying what was left of the Pod back for salvage.