“By . . .” Then she saw the stranded cables reaching up and out of the brilliant illumination into the upper shadows of the hangar—a gigantic LTA partly inflated there. The sub was being fitted to a Lighter-Than-Air in place of the usual armored gondola.

“But why . . .”

“Because the kelp has been strangling our subs.”

She thought back to her own survival from a doomed sub—the writhing kelp near the shore, the bubble escape, her frantic swim to the rocks and the near-miraculous dive of the observation LTA which had plucked her away from predators.

As though he read her thoughts, Thomas said: “You’ve seen it yourself. At our first briefing, you said you believed the kelp to be sentient.”

“It is.”

“Those subs did not just get tangled. They were snatched.”

She considered this. On every lost mission where they had the data, they knew that the sub had been destroyed shortly after collecting samples.

Could the kelp think we were attacking?

Her own reasoning made this possible. If the kelp is sentient . . . Yes, it would have an external sensory matrix to respond to pain. Not blind writhing, but sentient response.

Thomas spoke in a flat voice: “The kelp is not an insensitive vegetable.”

“I’ve said all along that we should be attempting to communicate with it.”

“And so we shall.”

“Then what difference does it make whether we drop in or dive in from shoreside? We’re still there.”

“We go by lagoon.”

Thomas moved closer to the work, bending to inspect a line of welds along the plaz. “Good work; good work,” he muttered. The welds were almost invisible. When the conversion was complete, the occupants would have close to three hundred and sixty degrees of visibility.

“Lagoons?” Waela asked as he stepped back.

“Yes. Isn’t that what you call those vertical tunnels of open water ?”

“Certainly, but . . .”

“We will be surrounded by the kelp, actually helpless if it wants to attack. But we will not touch it. This sub is being fitted to play back the kelplights—to record the patterns and play them back.”

Again, he was making sense.

Thomas continued to speak as he watched the work: “We can approach a perimeter of kelp without making physical contact. As you’ve seen, when we go in from shore, that’s impossible. Not sufficient room between the kelp strands.”

She nodded her head slowly. There were many unanswered questions about this plan, but she could see the pattern of it.

“Subs are too unwieldy,” he said, “but they’re all we’ve got. We must find a sufficiently large pocket of open water, drop into it and anchor. Then we dive and study the kelp.”

It sounded perilous but possible. And that idea of playing back the kelplights to the kelp: She had seen those coherent patterns herself, sometimes repetitive. Was that the way the kelp communicated?

Maybe Thomas really was chosen by Ship.