“But there’s nothing here,” Lee complained. “Where are they? Where are this world’s inhabitants, if they’re doing all that?”

Their viewpoint had been drifting across the barren, leathery ground, with its weird flowering of organic geometry. Fungus? But that would mean there would be something to decompose, surely. Kay was uncomfortably reminded of horror stories she’d read about ships beaching on unexpected islands inhabited by carnivorous seaweed or mushroom monsters. It’s a far fucking cry from “Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.”

A coastline passed smoothly beneath them, a rocky shore engulfed in the same creased and quilted encrustation, which stretched all the way to the waterline and beyond. No flotsam surged in the limp waves and the water itself was inky.

And yet. “It’s down there.” Kay heard herself say it, but she didn’t like it. “Cam, are you seaworthy?”

“Down there,” Cam echoed. At first she thought it was echoing her disquiet, but no, it was backing her hypothesis. Her stomach lurched as the trilobite began a steep descent towards the black waves.

Kay did her best to maintain a veneer of scientific unflappability, but Cam pitched sideways before it struck the water, perhaps forgetting it had passengers on board with a less cavalier approach to gravity. Everyone slid to one side of the chamber, the avatar swinging overhead. Kay received a sharp elbow to the temple from Rove and reflexively trod on Stig in retaliation. Lee yelped in pain and Julian strangled out, “Bloody hell!”

Cam shuddered tortuously, the waves battering at its carapace as it undulated and flexed under the water’s pressure. Then it adjusted its limbs, and they were coasting smoothly into deep water on an even keel again.

“Apologies,” buzzed the avatar as it swung then settled.

Its human cargo picked themselves up and Kay saw Rove dust off his jumpsuit distastefully, putting some distance between him and everyone else.

“This is less than edifying,” said Ertil’s implant. The rodent had fared better than everyone else, clinging to the floor with his claws then descending neatly after the heavier mammals had hit the wall. Below them, the transparency gave only onto darkness. Cam had dimmed their chamber’s lights to allow them to see outside. The walls now glowed with a greenish luminance, but it only lit up silty, particulate water.

“Strike a match, will you, Cam?” Kay asked.

For a moment nothing changed, and they were left with the benthic dark and the limbic sensation of descent. Then the same bioluminescence that glimmered from the walls of their quarters appeared outside, as Cam unfurled radiant ventral organs along its segmented length.