Another skinsuit broke the surface, popping up like a balloon. Then a third, and a fourth. Hex made them sound off and report on their status. Everybody was unscathed, physically anyhow. They bobbed over the surface of the ocean, four drifting people in bright green suits.

‘The Spear has had it,’ Jul said. She downloaded to Hex a last data squirt from the dying ship.

‘We’re stranded,’ Hella said gloomily.

‘We still have weapons in our suits,’ Borno said.

Hex said, ‘If we can find anybody to shoot at.’

Jul pointed down at the ocean. ‘Pilot - what’s that?’

Something moved, just under the surface. Larger than a human, amorphous, dimly glimpsed, it seemed to be moving purposefully.

Hex could hear her mother’s voice: There are monsters in the sea. ‘My turn to be phobic,’ she murmured.

Hella said, ‘What? . . . Look. It’s breaking the surface.’

Hex glimpsed sleek flesh humping above the water. Then something like a limb protruded. Hex flinched; it was as if the limb had reached for her.

‘I can’t make out its shape,’ Borno said.

‘Maybe it has no fixed shape,’ Hella said. ‘I’ve read some creatures of the seas are like that.’

‘But it’s a toolmaker,’ Jul said calmly. She pointed. ‘It’s wearing a kind of belt.’

All this seemed utterly horrific to Hex. That limb, muscular, equipped with suckers and fine manipulators, continued to writhe in the air.

‘You know,’ Hella said, ‘I think it’s beckoning.’

‘To us?’

‘Of course to us. I think it wants us to follow it - to the land, probably.’

‘What land?’ Jul asked.

Hella sighed. ‘Some navigator you would make. Over there.’

There was a dark shading on the horizon.

Hex’s sharp pilot’s eyes picked out sparks descending from the sky. ‘We’re out of time.’

‘They’re tracking the wreckage of the ship,’ Jul said.

‘We stand and fight,’ Borno snarled.

‘Not here,’ Hex snapped. ‘Not now. Borno, we can’t win.’

‘We should follow the swimming thing,’ Hella said. ‘It might help us.’

‘You think so?’ Jul asked.

‘It’s clearly smart. And it’s trying to help us right now. Why not?’

Hex looked down with huge reluctance at the blank surface of the water, the uncharted depths beneath. ‘We don’t have a choice,’ she told her crew, and herself.

She flipped in the air and plunged head-first back into the water. Her suit’s systems whirred as it sought neutral buoyancy, and made her legs kick. Her tell-tales showed her that her crew followed her in: one, two, three.

They all struggled through the water in pursuit of the ‘swimming thing’.

IV

Hex woke. She was reasonably comfortable, even warm. But when she looked up, she peered out through a translucent bubble-wall at the roof of a cave.

She stretched, sat up.